Te Ruki Kawiti
Almost twenty years later, in 1825, he was at the Battle of Te Ika-a-ranga-nui when it was Ngāpuhi's turn to slaughter Ngāti Whātua in an act of utu, or revenge.
He took a number of Ngāti Whātua captive and refused to hand them over to Hongi Hika, preferring instead to return them to their own people to whom he was related.
[3] Kawiti initially refused to sign the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840, believing that it would inevitably lead to further European encroachment and the loss of Māori land.
[2] Heke and Te Ruki Kawiti worked out the plan to draw the Colonial forces into battle, with the opening provocations focusing on the flagstaff on Maiki Hill at the north end Kororāreka.
[2] When in March 1845 Heke cut down the flag pole at Kororāreka for the fourth time, thereby initiating the Flagstaff War, Kawiti, now in his seventies, created a diversion by attacking the town.
[6] The Māori warriors followed their chief and would fight in separate groups;[7] however Kawiti and Heke coordinated their tactics at each battle.
The conduct of the Flagstaff War appears to follow a strategy of drawing the Colonial forces into attacking a fortified pā, from which the warriors could fight from a strong defensive position that was secure from cannon fire.
[8] In April 1845, during the time that the colonial forces were gathering in the Bay of Islands, the warriors of Heke and Nene fought many skirmishes on the small hill named Taumata-Karamu that was between the two pās and on open country between Ōkaihau and Te Ahuahu.
[11] The first major engagement of the Flagstaff War was the attack on Heke's Pā at Puketutu in May 1845 by the colonial forces led by Lt Col William Hulme.
However, there are no detailed accounts of the action; Hugh Carleton (1874) mentions Heke committed the error (against the advice of Pene Taui) of attacking Walker [Tāmati Wāka Nene], who had advanced to Pukenui.
On this account of the early engagements of the Flagstaff War, Kawiti appears to have made the better strategic decisions as to which battles to fight and which not to.
Partly this was due to the elasticity of the flax covering the palisade but the main fault was a failure to concentrate the cannon fire on one area of the defences.
[2][13] After the battle Kawiti and his warriors, carrying their dead, travelled some four miles north-west to Waiomio, the ancestral home of the Ngāti Hine.
At the conclusion of the Flagstaff War, the Hokianga and the Bay of Islands region was nominally under British influence; the fact that the government's flag was not re-erected was symbolically very significant.
Such significance was not lost on Henry Williams, who, writing to E. G. Marsh on 28 May 1846, stated that "the flag-staff in the Bay is still prostrate, and the natives here rule.
[28][29] Maihi Paraone Kawiti, as a signal to Governor Thomas Gore Browne that he did not follow his father's path, arranged for the fifth flagpole to be erected at Kororāreka; this occurred in January 1858 with the flag being named Whakakotahitanga, "being at one with the Queen.
"[28] As a further symbolic act, the 400 Ngāpuhi warriors involved in preparing and erecting the flagpole were selected from the ‘rebel’ forces of Kawiti and Heke – that is, Ngāpuhi from the hapū of Tāmati Wāka Nene (who had fought as allies of the British forces during the Flagstaff War), observed, but did not participate in the erection of the fifth flagpole.
The restoration of the flagpole was presented by Maihi Paraone Kawiti as a voluntary act on the part of the Ngāpuhi that had cut it down in 1845, and they would not allow any other to render any assistance in this work.
