REBEL OF THE SIXTIES.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 May 1922, Page 11

REBEL OF THE SIXTIES.

KIMBLE BENT AND THE PATEA. (By W.K.H. in Auckland Star.) An adventurous trip of 100 miles down the Patea River in a flat-bottomed boat by four Eltham young men, chronicled in your columns last week, brings to mind the story of that rebel and pakeha-Maori, Kimble Bent, who for years had his home up the Patea River, where amongst the wild and rugged hills he thought himself safe from capture. Bent died at the Wairoa Hospital about seven years ago at a great age. His story is soon told. He belonged to the old 57th Regiment, joining it as long ago as 1859. He came to New Zealand in 1863, and was in Taranaki the following year. At a small place between Patea and Hawera Bent was sentenced to receive 25 strokes of the lash for disobeying orders, showing how the severity of the Home rules had at that time been allowed to enter this young free country. From the moment Kimble Bent'bared his back he was a rebel and an outcast, and the very first chrnce he got he deserted to the Maoris and lived with them for many decades, adopting their rough mode of living and becoming one of their number. He could never be captured, and his chief hiding-place was up the Patea River, which we now kno.w to be one of the most inaccessible spots that anyone could imagine, being full of natural hiding-places that only the most skilled could find out. When public feeling against him died down a good deal, for he greatly aifled the Maori in his warfare against the pakeha, he came out of his hiding-place and made it known that he wished to visit civilisation again, and no serious objection was made by the authorities to his doing so. While in hiding he fashioned a canoe of very fine design with the old-fasn-ioned Maori stone axes of a bygone age of a century before, and in this canoe lie paddled down the river to the Patea wharf a picturesque if a somewhat pathetic figure, chanting as he sailed a Maori dirge which was now more familiar to him than the words of his own European tongue, which he had almost forgotten. Arrived at Patea wharf he seemed to be engaged a good deal with his own thoughts, and sat in his boat -for a long period, as was the custom of the old-time Maoris, whose ways he had thoroughly imbibed. He was viewed with a good deal of suspicion by his white brethren, and the feeling must have been mutual, for he could not be induced to say much about himself. One of the first things that he asked for was Abernethy biscuits, and when he had eaten one he said it was the sweetest morsel he had tasted for years. He looked a wild man, and there was a. wild look in his eyes when he remembered that for some years a price had been put on his head as a deserter and a rebel, and he was not happy when he came back to civilisation, for he felt completely out of his element. He had lived too long amongst savage people, and had acted such a strange part that he could not in a day reconcile himself to a . civilised way of doing things. He soon paddled back, taking advantage of the incoming tide to help him, to his usual haunts up the river, where it was said he discarded for ever his old blanket and flax loin cloth for a suit which had been given to him by one of the sailors from one of the steamers at the Patea wharf. He was not a lovable character, and had witnessed and taken part in many cannibalistic feasts, and this was an example of how easy it is for a person to slip away from a civilised to an uncivilised life. The old Taranaki settlers hated Bent, among other reasons being the fact that he was a gre’at friend and adviser of that old rebel and unfair fighter Titokowaru, whose dark deeds and treachery stain the blackest page in Taranaki’s history. Probably the youths who recently sailed down the Patea River and were hardly able to find a flat piece of ground whereon to pitch their tents for the night knew little of Kimble Bent’s history, but from those picturesque heights the old rebel must have basked in the sunlight to hide his own dark thoughts and to feel that, arch rebel though he was, still a human being who could enjoy the best of God’s good gifts.