south-west counties--had begun to
prosper and to line the coast with their little homesteads standing
among peach orchards, grassy fields, and sometimes a garden gay with
the flowers of old Devon. Upon this quiet little realm the Maoris
swept down, and the labour of twenty years went up in smoke. The open
country was abandoned; the settlers took refuge in their town, New
Plymouth. Some 600 of their women and children were shipped off to
Nelson; about twice as many more who could not be induced to leave
stayed huddled up in the little town, and the necessity of keeping a
strong force in the place to defend them from a sudden dash by
the Maoris hampered the conduct of the campaign. Martial law was
proclaimed--destined not to be withdrawn for five years. After a time
the town was protected by redoubts and a line of entrenchment. Crowded
and ill-drained, it became as unhealthy as uncomfortable. Whereas for
sixteen months before the war there had not been a funeral in the
district, they were now seen almost daily. On the alarm of some
fancied Maori attack, noisy panics would break out, and the shrieks of
women and cries of children embarrassed husbands and brothers on whom
they called for help, and whose duty as militiamen took them to their
posts. The militia of settlers, numbering between four and five
hundred, were soon but a minor portion of the defenders of the
settlement. When fighting was seen to be inevitable, the Government
sent for aid to Australia, and drew thence all the Imperial soldiers
that could be spared. The Colony of Victoria, generous in the
emergency, lent New Zealand the colonial sloop-of-war _Victoria_, and
allowed the vessel not only to transport troops across the Tasman Sea,
but to serve for many months off the Taranaki coast, asking payment
for nothing except her steaming coal. By the end of the year there
were some 3,000 Europeans in arms at the scene of operations, and they
probably outnumbered several times over the fluctuating forces of the
natives. The fighting was limited to the strip of sea-coast bounded by
the Waitara on the north and the Tataramaika plain on the south, with
the town of New Plymouth lying about midway between. The coast was
open and surf-beaten, the land seamed by ravines or "gulleys," down
which the rainfall of Egmont streamed to the shore. Near the sea
the soil was--except in the settlers' clearings--covered with tough
bracken from two to six feet high, and with other trou