ADVENTURE TRAIL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 302, 21 December 1935, Page 10

ADVENTURE TRAIL.

A SCOT'S WANDERINGS.

WOUNDED IN MAORI WARS

A SOLDIER OF FORTUNE

(By J.C.),

There are all the makings of a book of the true adventure outlined in an inquiry for information which has just reached me from England. There is the

"high-spirited" middy who cracks his bully of an officer on the jaw aud is dismissed his ship, and plays such pranks that his stern fatlier ships him off to the'colonies with a £5 note; who tries everything from gold-digging t.~ soldie.ring, with the dramatic finis-1 ,f a warrior's death.

The inquiring relative i<s Mrs. H. R. Phipps, who writes from Bratton Lodge, Wincanton, Somerset, as follows: "I have been reading the 'New Zealand Ware' with much interest in the liope of finding some mention of aii uncle of mine .who fought in them. lam writing in the hope that you may possibly have some note of him; he was hardly old enough or important enough to have attracted much attention. 1 I will tell you all 1 know of him at that time. I should be grateful for any information, however slight. "My uncle, Alexander H. Campbell, more commonly known as Alister (the Gaelic form), was born in IS4G. He was the second son and fourth child. He was put into the navy at the age of 12 and joined a ship straight away, as they did i;i those days. The ship was for the West Indies. While out there Alister and four other midshipmen overstayed their leave on shore and missed the boat at the jetty They swam out to the ship. At tht inquiry, the lieutenant refused to believe the explanation Alister offered for being- late, and said: 'You're a- liar, sir. . Upon which my uncle hit him one on the point of the jaw and floored him.- This did not help his cause, and the four or fiva of them were confined between decks. At that time, the hottest of the year, it was a terrible punishment; even the men went crazy if they were confined too long. After several days of it Alister and two others crept out in the 'dead of night and bagged a ship's boat, intending to row round the harbour for a breath of air. They had reckoned without the currents which are very dangerous in. those seas. They were swept out to sea in an open boa:t w'ithont provisions: After several days they .were .picked up by a French man-of-war and returned to their ship. They were court-martialled and dismissedthe service.- - ! :■'

"My grandfather was the umpteenth hereditary chieftain and thought a great deal of his family name and honour, and it was a terrible blow. He went out to the West Indies and inquired into all the circumstances. It • transpired that the lieutenant was a bully of the worst description, and on the facts of the case being put before the Admiralty, they offered to take all the boys back. The others accepted and one : became an admiral, but my uncle would have none of it. My grandfather kept him at home for a time, and he attended a boys school, but he was always in one scrape or another. Among other things, he tied up all the clappers of the church bells, so that when Sunday nWning came they could not ring them. His mischief was always of that sort, just high-spirited daring, but calculated to embroil his father with outsiders. At last his father could stand it no longer. He bought him a passage to Australia and gave him £5 in his pocket and told him that he never wished to see him again. ,"He disappeared from his family's knowledge for 10 years, ISG2-3 to 1872. During that time lie was heard of by various side winds from people who became interested in him and wrote to his people without his knowledge. One was a goldminer whose life he had saved from robbers on the road. Australian mining townships were familiar to him.

"In 1872 my grandmother was dying and my grandfather set the police to flrfd the missing son. He was located in Natal, having just arrived there, working his passage from Australia oJJ his way to the diamond fields. There was a younger brother already at the fields and when the police informed the father that his son's ship was expected to arrive at Natal he wired to his younger son to meet it. Arthur posted to Natal as fast as-he could get and a man was pointed out to him in an eating-house. He was using the name of Keir, his mother's maiden name. After talking for two hours Arthur ventured to tell Alister t?aat he thought tliey irast be brothers. I have his diary •irith the account of his arrival at Dutoitspan with his brother and of his voyage to the coast to take a boat for home. He came home with a bad wound in his thigh. The bone had been splintered by a rifle bullet. He said he had got it in the Maori wars; that a friend and he had tossed as to who should stand up to draw a sniper's fire. He had lost the toss, had taken it in the thigh and his friend had got the sniper. The wound was still giving trouble, bits of splintered bone still coming away. I imagine that his part in the Maori wars would probably have been in the later years. The family doctor called and lanced the leg, removing several bits of bone, bandaged him up and said. 'Now you lie there and keep quiet till it's healed.' (No chloroform.) When the old man got down to the front door, my uncle was standing there to laugh at him. He had climbed down the ivy. That was the sort of boy he was.

"An old cousin suggests that he may have been fighting with the natives against us. I think it more likely that he was fighting with one of the native contingents. He had plenty of cause to be bitter against his family, but that wouldn't make him bitter against his country. Unless, of course, he got it into his head that we were ill-treating tho natives.- His most outstanding characteristic was foolhardy bravery. Later Lord Wolseley wrote to my grandfather that he was the bravest man he had ever known, and marvellous patience and affection with and for children. Besides the wound in his thigh I believe he lost a finger in the Maori wars.

"He later won fame for a time as the man who in the Turko-Russian war held Shipka Pass with a handful of men all through one night, having, learned only two Turkish sentences —one 'Fire' and the other 'Come on. s He was killed in 1878 at the taking of Sekukuni's kraal (South Africa), and his body was (probably) stolen by the Swazi witchdoctors for strong medicine to make their own warriors brave.

Mrs. Piiipps says she has promised to write a short life of her uncle for the family, and s-lie would be glad to discover anything about hi-s "sojourn in New Zealand. It may be that he joined the Armed Constabulary -in -the- last