[4] On 13 February 1831 Burns departed Sydney on the schooner Darling, captain William Stewart,[5][6] with various items of trade including clothing, leather goods, muskets, gunpowder, tobacco and pipes, ironmongery, hardware and rum.

[8] In the preceding decades the Ngā Puhi from the Bay of Islands had obtained muskets and made devastating attacks on their southern neighbours.

[9] The Māhia peninsula became a place of refuge for various Māori that felt threatened at an intensification of tribal warfare, decimation, enslavement and migration.

[11] Burns married the chief's daughter, Amotawa and lived as a Pākehā Māori with mana and benefits in business transactions.

After 11 months a vessel arrived with orders to close the trading station but Burns refused to leave with the ship as Amotawa was about to give birth.

The canoe was hauled out of the water and the local Māori, likely the Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, carried the property for nearly 13 miles (21 km) to Poverty Bay.

A day later Burns proceeded 12 miles (19 km) inland to a stronghold of the Rongowhakaata at Manutuke on the Waipaoa River where there were two strong defensive pā named Umukapua and Orakaiapu.

During an inland flax-buying trip with some of the members of his tribe, a party of Ngāi Te Rangi attacked, killed and ate the group with the exception of Barnet Burns.

Burns says he witnessed about 60 of the prisoners being killed and eaten; the flesh being cooked in a hāngī or smoked for transportation to fellow tribal members.

[17] The schooner Prince of Denmark arrived at Poverty Bay and Burns was then engaged by the captain to continue as a flax trader at £3 a month.

[7] While at Uawa in about April 1833, Barnet Burns learned that three Englishmen were being held captive on the Waiapu River, near East Cape, the easternmost point of the North Island of New Zealand.

A whaling vessel, Elizabeth, commanded by captain Black, had stopped at East Cape for provisions and during her stay three of the crew had run away.

He bid farewell to his wife and children and Burns accompanied the ship to Sydney via Cloudy Bay and Queen Charlotte Sound.

[19] [20] Soon after the Bardaster arrived at Sydney on 2 November 1834, Barnet Burns arranged to transfer his grant of land at Tambourine Bay to Captain John Thomas Chalmers.

On 1 June 1835 Barnet Burns married Bridget Cain at the Christ Church Greyfriars opposite St Paul's Cathedral but little else is known about this union.

The tattooed Englishman was brought before the Police Magistrate at Union Hall, London but Burns was soon "discharged and, out of spirits, taken to water".

[7] Burns proposed the establishment of a small colony of artisans and tradesmen under his protection, and offered to supply the British government and merchants with timber and flax.

Barnet Burns had styled himself as Pahe-a-Range (or Pahe-a-Rangi) [25]and in May 1836 he appeared at the Chichester Mechanics' Institution, where his lectures were described as "one incongruous jumble of impudence, of ignorance, of low wit, and bare-faced presumption".

Despite Burns's shortcomings, the reporter stated that "those who go to a lecture to obtain information, without caring by what means it is conveyed, could, notwithstanding the rambling and unconnected nature of his address, gather sufficient to remunerate them for the money and time expended in attending it.

An unsuccessful appearance before the Académie des sciences at the Institut de France in Paris resulted in the academicians being annoyed at being deceived by Burns, who had apparently claimed to be King of Zealand.

On 22 September 1838 Barnet Burns married a French workwoman named Anne Mélanie Boval at the town hall of the 7th arrondissement of Paris.

His wife in France, Anne (née Boval) understood that in 1840 Barnet Burns had travelled as an interpreter for an English expedition to New Zealand.

[30][31] and it appears that he worked with the Wesleyan missionaries[32] The census undertaken in Britain in June 1841 lists Barnet Burns's occupation as mariner which suggests that he had recently sailed.

Finally, Arthur Thomson mentions that: "One unemployed tattooed Pakeha Maori visited England, and acted the part of a New Zealand savage in several provincial theatres.

Here he married an Englishwoman who accompanied him to New Zealand, but she eloped with a Yankee sailor, because the tattooed actor's old Maori wife met him and obtained an influence over him the white woman could not combat.

The United Kingdom Census 1841 recorded the occupants of every UK household on the night of 6 June 1841 when Barnet Burns, mariner, and Rosina Crowther, pedlar, were lodging at Vincent Street, Sculcoates, Kingston upon Hull.

The broadside continues to advertise that "he will also exhibit the real head of a New Zealand Chief, his opponent in battle, and describe the operation of tattooing, &c." Burns was to be accompanied by Mrs Crowther who would "perform several favourite Airs upon The Musical Glasses at Intervals during the Evening."

On 18 June 1841, Barnet Burns appeared at the Hull Zoological Gardens to participate in a Grand Gala in commemoration of the Battle of Waterloo, which occurred 26 years previously.

[44][45] One of New Zealand's early colonists, Jerningham Wakefield was unimpressed by one of Burns's lectures describing how the lecturer dressed "with sandals and strings of beads on his legs and wrists, a leopard-skin petticoat, a necklace of pig's tusks, and a crown of blue feathers a foot long, – sings NZ ditties to a tune!, and talks gibberish, which he translates into romantic poetry."

His obituary stated that Barnet Burns was better known as Pahe-a-Range, the New Zealand Chief, that he had suffered a long and painful illness and that he left behind a widow and two children to lament their loss.