TOM ADAMSON, N.Z.C.

Waikato Argus, Volume XXXV, Issue 5508, 14 January 1914, Page 1 (Supplement)

TOM ADAMSON, N.Z.C.

THE STORY OF A SCOUT. ] There was something of Fenimore Cooper's backwoods hero, Leatherstocking, and of Captain Mayne Reid's picturesque fellows of the Indian war trail in the physical and moral make-up of Mr Tom Adamson, the New Zealand Cross holder, who died recently, at Wanganui, as reported in a Press Association telegram. Adamson was a true frontiersman, a rough and thoroughgoing son of the bush. He was an uneducated man, but was endowed with a great deal of native shrewdness, and for the rugged basework of nation-making and savage-subjug-ating his like and type could scarcely be bettered. Men of the veteran bushman's Bort are always restless under the tame and rather stodgy conditions of town life, and they are happiest when they can kick off their city-going clothes and revert to the primitive life of whare and tent. Tom Adamson was the hero of innumerable stories of bush life, some amusing, some rather grim, as told by the old hands of the Constabulary and the Field Force. He is described by his one-time comrades as a man with a thorough contempt of danger, but ; n spite of his reckless ways on active service he very seldom met with any hurt from his Hauhau enemies. Physically he fitted perfectly the wild part he often played in the Hauhau-hunted woods of the West and East Coasts and the Urewera Country. Ho was over six feet high, as straight as a lancewood, and extremely powerful. Very few men—Captain H W. Northcroft is spoken of as one of the few—were his equals in swag-carrying for long distances through the trackless bush, and for endurance under the severe conditions of marching in an unrnaded and often foodless hostile country. In the bush or on the march he very seldom wore boots, and he was almost as barbaric a figure as any Maori lighting man in the expeditions of 1869 and 1870, with a "rapaki" or waist-shawl in place of trousers—which were only an encumberance in the bush—a big sheath knife at his hip, a shorthanded tomahawk, stuck in his belt, and a Maori flax kit with his rations and Maori "loot" strapped across his broad shoulders with green flax leaves. That was Tom Adamson on the warpath, as described by thqse who campaigned with him in the forest pursuits of Titikowaru and Te Kooti. To his last days the old Hauhau hunter hated boots, and even when he was a well-off sheep-run-holder he would sometimes be seen striding along the track to Taihape with his footgear slung over his shoulder. Adamson's young days were spent on the banks of the Wanganui, and there he became as expert a canoehandler and forester as any of the Maoris of the old generation. In all kinds of bushcraft in after years he even surpassed the natives. He became the favourite "pakeha-Maori" of Major Kemp, or Kepa te Rangihirinui, the Wanganui chief, who fought under General Chute and Whitmore and McDonald from 1805 to 1871, against the rebels, who were also his ancient tribal enemies. He accompanied Kepa to the Waitotara early in 1869, when the friendly Maoris combined with the Europeans in a final campaign against Titokowaru, and his victorious "TekauHauhaus and cannibals, who had killed Von Tempsky at at Te Ngutu-o-te-manu, and had eaten the body of a white soldier there, and another after the defeat of Whitmore at the Moturoa stockade. After Titokowaru's flight from Tauranga-ika, and the "licking" he got at Otautau and Whakamara, a flying column was formed to follow the rebelß up through the South Taranaki bush. There were sixty or seventy Europeans, armed constabulary and scouts, and about double that number of Wanganui Maoris, and they took to the dense forest in the lightest marching order, hard on the trail of the retieating Ilauhaus. Ahead of the column went the scouts, or the Corps of Guides, as they were officially called, eight or nine of them, including Adamson, under Christopher Maling. They carried their lives in their hands literally, as with carbines at the "trail" or the "ready," and keen eyes peering into the dark bush ahead or on either flank, they tiled along through the supplejacktangled bush, and clambered up rocky cliffs with their firearms slung behind them, or plunged into the many creeks that intersected the line of march. Adamson, kilted and barefooted, stood this arduous nine days' Hauhau chase better than most of his companions. He made a first-rate scout, and his methods in the bush, if sharp and somewhat ruthless, were the fighting ways that most appealed to the Maoris. The Wanganui a decapitated all the men they killed on the expedition, smoke-dried the heads and carried their trophies into camp at Taiporowhenui, where Whitmore paid them rewards of £lO per head for chiefs killed, and £5 for "ordinary men." This rather barbaric retaliation put the fear of the Government into the Hauhaus, and they fought no more. One incident of that bush pursuit at the back of Whakamara—a Hauhau village where Adamson and his comrades destroyed a great and storied Niu, or rebel pole of worship and

fanatic dance—is thus described by Mr Maling in a recent letter from England to a New Zealand acquaintance, narrating some events in the old fighting days: after a bit of a skirmish, we came upon a Maori who shammed to be dead. Tom Adamson, the big scout, happened to be with me. He made some remark—l think it was 'Wahia (Split him!"—just to test the bona.fides of the corpse. The beggar was up in an instant and made a blow at Tom with his tomahawk. I had just time to catch hold of his back hair andjjerk him backwards, and thenf Adamson snatched the tomahawk from him, and a second or two later there was one rebel less." That Maori's M|Lit may be added, was among smoke-preserved by the WanganuisM and brought, jnto Colonel Whitmore'jJ camp. Whitmore, it should be exß plained, did not actually offer tbfl reward for heads, but for Hauhaß captured or killed. But Kepa ml understood him, and in order t)fl there might be no mistake, J brought in his kits full of grisly, fl tooed, dried heads, much after fl fashion of Mayne Reid's Indian SCi 9j hunters. That same year, 1869, saw AdaW son and his fellow scouts skirmishiH up through the great forest gulchS of the Urewera Country, the country for campaigning that ever any troops encountered in New Zealand,. He marched with Colonel Whitmore's column from the Kawgaroa into the Urewera mountains by way of Ahikereru and the Okahu Gorge, right into the heart of that almost unknown territory of savage mountaineers. Ah the scouts under their old chief Maling advanced along a deep wooded valley between Ahike- ■ rem and Ruatahuna, they were am- A buscaded bya party of Hauhaus, who m put a volley into them at such close range that Maling's face was burnt by the powder and he got five bullet holes in his clothes. Adamson was severely wounded and so was one of his mates, Ryan, and another, a big Maori known as "Taranaki Jim" was shot dead. The force halted, buried .J the Maori, and lit a fire over his" grave, as if a meal had been cooked here, an old native device for preventing the enemy from discovering the corpse and digging it up. The march to Ruatahuna was continued, but Adamson had to leave the Guide on acount of his wound. He did not remain long idle, however, for a tew months later he was busy with carbine and tomahawk in the field with his old "Rangatira," Major, then Captain, Kepa. At the Maraetahi fight, at the back of Opotiki, he and his Maori comrades charged and tured Kereopa's village, and with hit own hand he executed some of the prisoners taken. The Wanganui war party killed about a score of Te Kooti's men in that sharp affair. Later Adamson campaigned around Lake Taupo, and in the after days of peace he was decorated with the New Zealand Cross, as well as the war medal, for his exceptionally courageous scouting exploits and skirmishing. , There is a whole bookful of yarns and anecdotes in Adsmson's life, handed on from mouth to mouth amongst the old A.C. men and scouts and bush settlers. A concluding incident, which occurred after the close of the wars, sufficiently indicates the old bushman's determined and downright character. His Maori wife, a Wanganui chieftainess and a relative of Kemp's, was forcibly detained by her tribe in one of their villages; they had just then some quarrel with the "pakeha Maori." Adamson, immediately word of this was brought to him, loadded his revovler, jumped on his horse and galloped to the settlement. He levelled his "gun" at the group of sullen Maoris who met him in front of the village meeting house, and informed them, in brief but exceedingly emphatic terms, that he would shoot the lot of them, unless they gave him up his "wahine" at once. He got the lady straightway, and rode off with her, expressing very freely his opinions of "Maori bounce." Adamson was a man who believed in and did not hesitate to practice "direct action" methods.