TE PAE O REHUA It was a relief to come at last to the sound of breakers and the beach stretching from Cape Maria van Diemen to Te Pae-o-Rehua, the high western edge of Te Rerenga Wairua. Puckey and his party found the climb up from the beach hard and dangerous going. I kept well clear of the sheer drop down to the rocks and breakers, some hundreds of feet below and found the going quite good. From the top of Te Pae-o-Rehua, where the wireless masts stand today, the spirits took the plunge, down Te Waiora-a-Tane to the final jagged scarp of Te Reinga itself, almost a thousand feet below. Puckey describes this last, rocky projection of the coast: Here there is a hole through a rock, into which the spirits are said to go: after this, they ascend again, and thence descend by the aka (root) to the Reinga, which is a branch of a tree, projecting out of the rock, inclining downwards, with part of it broken off by the violence of the wind but said to have been broken off by the number of spirits which went down by the aka some years ago, when great numbers were killed in a fight. The fight referred to was the second battle between Hongi and Murupaenga of the Ngati-Whatua (Kaipara) tribe, when Hongi and his Ngapuhi with their muskets took terrible vengeance for Murupaenga's earlier victory at Oripiro.

TE AKA, ROOT OF THE SPIRIT WORLD It was rumoured—and the rumours are still believed by some people—that Puckey had chopped away Te Aka, the root to the spirit-world. This act would not be out of character. All the early missionaries, except the unfrocked Kendall and the unpopular Richard Taylor attacked in the most direct manner, any manifestation of so-called heathenism, burning carved houses, desecrating tapu places, if only to demonstrate to the Maori that the mana (the power and prestige) of the Christian religion was greater than that of the heathen. Mathews and Puckey, the two missionaries