WAIRAU TRAGEDY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 June 1939, Page 3

WAIRAU TRAGEDY

NINETY=SIXTH ANNIVERSARY MR H. BENTLEY’S ASSOCIATION WITH PARTY. SEAMAN ABOARD VICTORIA. (Specially Written for ‘'Times-Age” by N.J.8.) But four years removed from its centenary, the story of the Wairau tragedy of June 17, 1848, is of special if indirect interest to Masterton people by reason of one of its early pioneer settlers, in the person of the late MiHenry Bentley, having been an able seaman of the brigantine Victoria. This boat, a Government auxiliary warship, convoyed to Wairau Bar, to apprehend the notorious warrior chief Te Rauparaha, the ill-starred expedition of Nelson settlers under the leadership of the gallant Captain Arthur Wakefield, R.N. A few hours later they were the victims of a misunderstanding of native ways and dignity at the cost of the lives of some 22 of their number, chiefly those of its principal outstanding men, including the then most popular of all the great Wakefield family of “Empire building” fame. Before proceeding further with my brief survey of the Wairau tragedy as regards its actual scene of conflict at the Tuamarina Valley, I would like to mention that, as a then junior member of the old “Wairarapa Daily Times” staff, I wrote the up-to-year 1898 reminiscences (among others) of the late Mr Bentley who, as it were, is still aboard the brig Victoria, off Wairau Bar, awaiting the return of Captain Wakefield and his men; until its sequel is later on continued. Mr Bentley, in the first instance, came out to New Zealand as an A.B. aboard the good ship Lord William Bentinck (444 tons) which brought to our shores some 242 passengers all told (132 male and 110 female) under the skilful navigation of Captain Crow (his ship’s surgeon being Dr Reeves) after a long passage from Gravesend to Port Nicholson, which commenced on January 5, 1841, and ended on May 22 of the same year.

Liking the look of New Zealand, Mr Bentley and four sailor companions decided to “go on the land” as it were; but he, at least, was a bit unfortunate in being brought before the Customs officers of those days, and given the option of “picking oakum” or being transferred to the Government vessel already named. Making the best of a bad job, our stout-hearted sailor-pioneer of Masterton in later years to come, still was aboard the Victoria, off Wairau Bar, expecting a very brave naval officer and his men to come back with their mission successfully accomplished, as was always expected of Englishmen in any part of the globe. No single one -of them, among the leaders, ever trod the holystoned decks of the Victoria or any stout-timbered ship again. And now, by way of personal regret of my own, what a chance I missed when interviewing our old-time pioneer townsman, by taking greater interest in his “less exciting” experiences, than in such a one as this, which not only lost to the glory of early New Zealand settlement so worthy a member of the great Wakefield family, but, subsequently, had its repercussion in long years of bitter conflict between these and our Maori “landed aristocrats” defending what they h/d every right to consider a paramount “war-waged title” to territory. The European claim was based on the purchase of half a million acres for an old, obsolete, and useless ship’s cannon (Captain Blenkinsopp’s) which I last saw in Seymour Square, Blenheim, on exhibition as a testimonial to early European land predatoriness.

My 1919 pilgrimage to Tuamarina, the scene of this ancient anniversary, and shortly after an overland trek, from Upper Hutt to Otaki, to Te Rauparaha’s grave, left me a little perplexed as to which side of the historic land dispute I should range myself, as it were.

Of recent years, at least, the word “massacre” as far the Wairau conflict is concerned, is never used, and, having used the softer sounding word tragedy myself, with a little reluctance in dealing with the subject in the course of an article giving the Nelson and Marlborough papers the benefit of a few archive researches in Wellington Library basements in particular, I rather like the term for other reasons as well, chief of which is my regard for many friends I have made among our Maori friends of the Wairarapa and elsewhere.

Mr Bentley for a few years longei' remained a valued member of the Victoria’s crew, until he earned a firstclass discharge. He regretted the death of Captain Wakefield and his party so much that he joined the militia of those days and, as a member af the valorous Armed Constabulary, he soon found himself in close contact, once more, with Te Rauparaha’s military forces, on the West Coast of the North Island, and saw the last chapter written in this great warrior’s rebel career. Te Rauparaha was sent, as a captive, to Kawau Island, Sir George Grey’s then place of retirement from the gubernatorial and other cares of high office in New Zealand. This brought to its close Mr Bentley’s further participation in marine and in military life. He thus came to pursue a life of peace in which he passed through all the customary strange vicissitudes of fortune unseparable from pioneering days. His grave is in the Masterton cemetery. The story of the Wairau tragedy is a story of colossal misunderstanding, and the utter futility of a ’‘show of arms” without the process of trained power to use them.

Picture this small posse of theatri-cally-accoutred Nelsonians having, by pure misadventure (the accidental discharge of a musket) to face the welldisciplined Maori iwi or platoon acting as Te Rauparaha’s bodyguard, under the majestic restraint of that astute warrior’s six-foot-six-statured nephew, Te Rangihaeata, who was then all for annihilating the few white men who accompanied Captain Wakefield from the other side of the canoelined Tuamarina Stream. The ill-ad-vised and impetuous Nelson magistrate (Thompson) had ordered Chief Constable Maling to “manacle his uncle” like a common felon and not the conqueror of all Marlborough Province. He was the only one to decide, in the absence of Land Commissioner Spain in Wanganui, who was shortly expected to arrive in Nelson to go carefully into the case, whether these unwitting intruders upon tribal territory were right or wrong in claiming the sovereignty over so vast a strip of country, that neither their labours or their cash had paid the slightest price.

Save for brave Gunner Howard, R.N., the sole bodyguard of his beloved Captain Arthur Wakefield, practically all the rest of the original punitive expedition had (such was

their loss of ordinary every-day English valour) fled from the scene of conflict. The brave Captain deserted, he called upon the few remaining trusty gentlemen of his party to surrender arms, and themselves, to the rebel chieftains, in a vain hope of enabling some of the fleeing and terrorstricken Nelson surveyors, and others, from being later captured and slaughtered. He was later killed with his bravest, mostly by Te Rangihaeta’s mere which so oft had been used to same purpose, but in not such ignoble cause! At the recent Church of England Men’s Society meeting was a visitor, the son of a noted early Wesleyan Maori Missioner in the Hokianga District, who had met and spoken to the hero of the Wairau tragedy—the Rev Samuel Ironsides, of the Cloudy Bay Native Mission Station, who, alone (and with but the help of one or other of his almost vanished for the time being native converts) had had the melancholy experience of burying as many of the Wairau victims as he could come across in the scrub-infest-ed locality. In their one collective graveplot, over which the massive hillslope monument at Tuamarina is to their eversacred memory reared, they now lie close adjacent to the little Ironside Memorial Church edifice erected to his also sacred memory. Like the gentle rippling stream of Tuamarina, Life is never still; but its memories roll on!