anuary, 1866, however, after General Cameron had by resignation
escaped from a disagreeable position, but while the withdrawal of the
troops was still incomplete, his successor, General Chute, showed that
under officers of determination and energy British soldiers are by no
means feeble folk even in the intricacies of the New Zealand bush.
Setting out from the Weraroa aforesaid on January 3rd with three
companies of regulars, a force of militia, and 300 Maoris under the
chief Kepa, or Kemp, he began to march northward through the forest to
New Plymouth. At first following the coast he captured various _pas_
by the way, including a strong position at Otapawa, which was fairly
stormed in the face of a stout defence, during which both sides
suffered more than a little. There, when one of the buttons on Chute's
coat was cut off by a bullet, he merely snapped out the remark, "The
niggers seem to have found me out." Both the coolness and the words
used were characteristic of the hard but capable soldier. Further on
the route Kemp in one day of running skirmishes took seven villages.
Arriving at the southern side of Mount Egmont, the General decided to
march round its inland flank through a country then almost unknown
except to a few missionaries. Encumbered with pack-horses, who were
checked by every flooded stream, the expedition took seven days to
accomplish the sixty miles of the journey. But they did it, and met
no worse foes than continual rain, short commons, deep mud, and the
gloomy silence of the saturated forest, which then spread without
a break over a country now almost entirely taken up by thriving
dairy-farmers. Turning south again from New Plymouth by the
coast-road, Chute had to fight but once in completing a march right
round Mount Egmont, and thenceforward, except on its southern verge,
long-distracted Taranaki saw no more campaigning.

Other districts were less fortunate. By the early part of 1865 the
Hau-Hau craze was at work on the east as well as the west coast. It
was in the country round the Wanganui River to the west, and in the
part of the east coast, between Tauranga on the Bay of Plenty and
Hawkes Bay, that the new mischief gave the most trouble. The task of
coping with it devolved on the New Zealand Militia, and the warriors
of certain friendly tribes, headed by the chiefs called by the
Europeans Ropata and Kemp. In this loose and desultory but exceedingly
arduous warfare, the irregulars and friend