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The tattooed Maori guide’s ancestors defied the might of the British Empire. What sort of reception would Dan Snow get?
We stood in grass up to our knees amid dandelions that covered the hilltop. As on so many other battlefields, Nature has restored a simple beauty to terrain gouged by man’s violence. But even the wildflowers cannot disguise the trenches, bunkers and other scars in the earth.
I’m familiar with them, the telltale signs of industrial warfare. I could be standing in northern France, Ukraine or even Vietnam.
But looking across at my guide, Hone Mihaka, a leading member of the Nga Puhi iwi, or tribe, dressed in traditional garb, a taiaha or long spear-like wooden staff in his hand, his dark skin covered in ta moko tattoos, it is clear that I am a long way from the well-known battlefields of Europe or Asia.
Instead, I am on the land of his ancestors. The hill is Ruapekapeka, on the North Island of Aotearoa, the “land of the long white cloud”, more commonly known as New Zealand.
Mihaka is an oral historian who spent his youth sitting at the feet of his elders learning the tribe’s history. He can recite the names and fates of generations of his ancestors stretching far back into the mythical past.
One of these men, Hone Heke, took on the might of the British Empire after he felt that British settlers had reneged on their treaty obligations. Symbolically, he chopped down the flagstaff that stood overlooking the Bay of Islands at Kororareka. I can well believe that the two men are related; I would not put such an act pass Mihaka if he were angry.
Flagpole chopping was a heinous crime and a vicious war followed in which the Maori warriors scored some notable successes over British troops. One of them took place on this hilltop at Ruapekapeka. It was here that Mihaka told me about a remarkable clash. The Maori pioneered the kind of defences in 1845 that would not have looked out of place on a First World War battlefield. They used bunkers, tunnels and foxholes. They even hung flax on the stockade to absorb bullets. When the Maori eventually withdrew and the British entered the complex they were so impressed that they made a model of it that was later pored over by engineers in the UK. Maori tenacity earned them an honourable peace with the British.
For two days Mihaka escorted me around the pa, or hillfort, sites that his tribe used to inhabit and the battlefields on which they fought. Our conversation flitted between history, politics and hopes for a more prosperous and fulfilling future for his people.
At lunch he took me to his house, where he extended a powhiri, or formal invitation, to join him for food. Speeches, songs and prayers flowed from him and his wife, while all I could manage was a few words of thanks. He called me a “strange heron” brought from Britain by the wind gods.
In the afternoons I staggered, befuddled from overeating, after Mihaka as he bounded up hill after hill. He never flagged and, every minute, had another story demonstrating the wisdom, technological sophistication and martial prowess of his ancestors. He chanted prayers at burial sites to show due respect to the spirits of fallen warriors. I followed him into one ramshackle Anglican churchyard after he had gone through the necessary ritual. St Michael’s is a small timber church with a peeling corrugated-iron roof that stands on an Anglo-Maori battlefield. After the fighting, dead British troops were thrown into a mass grave alongside their Maori enemy.
I stood at the centre of the churchyard, leaning on a wrought-iron fence surrounding the pit and looked at the weathered stubs of headstones. When Mihaka left he invited me to return to share his house and his food and join him and his cousins as they fished from their waka, or canoe. I told him, truthfully, that the fishing alone would make the long flight worthwhile.