The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period: Volume I (1845–64)
Chapter 30: The Defence of Pukekohe East Church Stockade
Chapter 30: The Defence of Pukekohe East Church Stockade
LOOKING DUE EAST from the higher part of Pukekohe Town one will see on the skyline, a mile and a half air-line distant, an isolated dot of white. In the late afternoon the speck of a building becomes a heliograph when the westering sun strikes flashes from its windows across the valley. This is the little Presbyterian church of Pukekohe East, a monument to-day to the pluckiest defence in the South Auckland War of 1863. Stockaded and occupied as a garrison-house by the settlers of the place, it was the scene of an attack by a strong war-party of Kingite Maoris, against whom it was held successfully by only seventeen men until reinforcements arrived.
The Pukekohe East church, two miles from Pukekohe Railway-station by the road, stands in a commanding position on the eastern and highest rim of a saucer-shaped valley, the crater basin of an ancient volcano, about half a mile across at its greatest axis, east and west. The lower lip, facing Pukekohe Town, has been eroded through to the level of the old crater-floor, and a small stream, rising in the bushy slopes below the church and flowing through a swampy valley, issues from this break. The trench, 6 feet wide and 3 or 4 feet deep, which surrounded the church is still plainly to be traced; a regular grassy depression about 1 foot deep remains, and the small flanking bastions are well marked. Splintered bullet-holes can be seen in the building and in a gravestone on the edge of the hill. The church is a plain little building with tiny porch and belfry; it was built in 1862 of totara and rimu. In dimensions it is only 30 feet by 15 feet. Unlike the Mauku Church of St. Bride's, the building itself was not loopholed, but was defended by a surrounding stockade in which openings were cut for rifle-fire.
Ground-plan of Pukekohe East Church Stockade, 1863
The south-east angle (front), facing the road and covering the right flank and the entrance, was defended by Joseph Scott and James Easton.
The stockade was built at a distance of 10 feet from the church all round; outside it was the trench, the earth from which was thrown up against the timbers. The stockade consisted of tree-trunks, small logs from the bush, averaging about 6 inches in diameter, and not set upright, as was the usual way, but laid horizontally on one another and spiked to posts. This wall was to have been 7 feet high all round, but it had not been completed when the place was attacked, and was not more than 5 feet high in most places, and gave poor head cover. The stockade was to page 275 have been reinforced with a front of thick slabs set upright outside and spiked to the logs, but this work had only partly been carried out when the Maoris delivered their assault. The timbers for the walls were hauled from the bush across the road in front of the church on the east and south sides, and some of the material (slabs) was brought from Mr. Comrie's homestead, where it had been cut for a new house. Rifle loopholes were cut in the upper and lower logs, about 10 inches in length, vertical, by 3 or 4 inches in width. In places the logs did not fit very closely, and Maori bullets came through the interstices. The taller men had to stoop to avoid the enemy's fire; the top logs of the stockade had not been spiked on when the attack came. The defence work, as measured by the trench depression in the ground to-day, was 21 paces long by 13 paces wide at the flanking bastions.
On the 31st August Lieutenant Lusk found the stockade in an incomplete state, and made the Volunteers strengthen the foot of the log wall by piling up the earth from the trench. The garrison neglected, however, to clear the bush to a safe distance from the stockade.
The Pukekohe East Presbyterian Church
This historic little church still bears marks of the Maori attack in 1863. There are two bullet-holes in the front of the porch (one of these, however, appears too small and clean cut for the large-calibre bullets of the “sixties”), and there is one inside in the rear wall, above the pulpit, besides several splintered bullet-holes in the ceiling. The shingled roof has been replaced by iron, but the original ceiling lining remains. Outside in the rear wall, high up, there is another bullet-hole. This was drilled by a shot fired from a rimu tree which stood on the steep side of the gully below the church. A Maori was shot down from the upper branches of this tree during the fight. In the burying-ground the oldest memorial is one which made a target for a bullet fired from the rimu tree. This gravestone bears an inscription to the memory of “Betsy, the beloved wife of William Hodge, who died July 3rd, 1862, aged 24 years.” In the back of the tombstone there is a large splintered bullet-hole. The stone is just outside the south-west corner of the stockade line.
Between 9 and 10 o'clock on Monday morning, the 14th September, while some of the men were cleaning their rifles and others engaged in the cooking-shed a few yards in front of the stockade gateway, a single shot was fired from the bush on the page 277 right front. The puriri forest almost surrounded the stockade; on the side first attacked it was within 40 or 50 yards of the defences; some isolated trees were nearer, and at most parts the bush was not 100 yards away, and logs and stumps gave cover for attackers. The first shot was followed by a charge. In an instant scores of figures leapt out from the trees, fired heavily on the stockade and on the riflemen running for shelter, and rushed down on the log fence, darting from stump to stump, some firing the remaining barrel and reloading, others reserving their fire for close quarters. With the warriors was a woman, armed with a single-barrel gun, a cartridge-belt buckled about her waist. The little clearing, so quiet a few moments before, was filled with the bellowing of heavily loaded tupara and the sharp crack of rifles. High about the other sounds rose the screaming voice of the Maori amazon as she exhorted her warrior comrades, “Riria! Riria!” (“Fight away! Fight away!”)
The defenders of the stockade numbered seventeen. They were Sergeant Perry, Privates Joseph Scott, Elijah Roose, William Hodge, George Easton, James Easton, and three generations of the McDonald family (Alexander McDonald, his son James McDonald, and grandson James), besides nine volunteers enrolled as special constables. The young boy, James McDonald, pluckily helped by carrying out ammunition from the church to the riflemen. There were three other members of the garrison J. Comrie, J. B. Roose, and T. Hawke, but they were absent when the attack was made. Comrie and Roose, who had been on leave to see their families, were returning on horseback from Drury when they saw the church was attacked, and they galloped back to Drury for reinforcements.
Sergeant Perry's first order to his little force was “Fix bayonets!” He ordered them on no account to fire a volley. The reason was that while the defenders were reloading their muzzle-loading Enfields the Maoris might charge in. Each man ran to a loop-hole, and in a moment the outer wall was bristling with bayonets projecting through the rifle-slits. Independent firing began, and for the next six hours the settlers and their comrades the special constables fought a battle against many times their number of brown skirmishers, who kept up an extraordinarily heavy fire from behind trees, logs, and stumps, and from the tree-tops, and others from the shelter of a house (Easton's), about 100 yards away, above the gully on the defenders' right flank. Every tree along the ragged edge of the bush on the front and the flanks covered its musketeer. Most of the Maoris, after the first rush, took cover on the right front, where some of the ancient puriri survive to-day.
From a drawing by A. H. Messenger]
The Attack on the Pukekohe East Church Stockade. (14th September, 1863)
Captain Joseph S. Scott
Captain Scott (No. 3 Company, Pukekohe Rifles, 1872), of Epsom, Auckland, is one of the three survivors of the Pukekohe East Church Stockade defence. At the time of the attack he was a private in the newly formed Forest Rifle Volunteers, Pukekohe Company, numbering twenty-three all told.
Soon after the first dash of the Maoris had been stayed, the attackers, as they fell back to take cover, seized the defenders' dinner of meat and potatoes, which was cooking in iron pots in the shed in front of the stockade. It was a perilous enterprise, within a few yards of the log wall, and several warriors fell dead or wounded, but the natives succeeded in carrying off the pots, and feasted on their contents in the gully below the right front of the church.
Hour after hour the firing continued in the smoke-filled clearing. The powder-grimed garrison, with smarting eyes and parched throats, stuck manfully to their posts, firing with care, for their ammunition was running short. It was only the sight of the bayonets projecting from the loopholes that prevented the Maoris from charging over the unfinished stockade. The angle holding page 281 the narrow gateway on the right front of the stockade was defended by two men, Joseph Scott and James Easton. They had the hottest work of all, for most of the attackers were concentrated on that section of the front. Both were good shots and did not waste cartridges.
Many Maoris fell; the dead and wounded were swiftly removed by means of supplejacks fastened round the ankles by men who crawled up on their hands and knees; the fallen one would be seen disappearing over the face of the hill into the valley, or hauled by unseen hands into the cover of the bush.
On the south-east face, just on the road-boundary of the church-grounds, not more than 20 yards from the stockade, stood a large puriri tree. Some of the Maoris climbed the tree, and from the cover of the thick flax-like growth of wharawhara, or astelia, in the forks of the main branches, fired over the log wall. One at least of these snipers was shot. Another of the attackers, firing at the garrison from the roof of Easton's house under cover of the wide slab chimney, received a bullet as he incautiously exposed his head and shoulders for a moment, and came tumbling to the ground.
Some of the Maoris came up so close that they threw sticks over the wall and challenged the defenders to come out in the open. One warrior took cover behind a puriri stump just outside the stockade, so close up that he was unable to move to load his gun and had to crouch down low under the loopholes. The woman Rangi-rumaki gave inspiration to the attack with her loud cries of encouragement—“Riria, riria, riria!”—but even her example and her war-shouts could not prevail upon her men to hurl themselves upon the sharp steel that glinted in the rifle-flash from each fire-aperture.
The first reinforcements were joyfully greeted by the outnumbered little garrison about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, when Lieutenant Grierson and thirty-two men of the 70th Regiment arrived from the Ramarama post. Grierson had heard the firing at 10.30 a.m. Skirmishing with the besiegers at the edge of the bush, they advanced at the double across the clearing and joined the defenders in the stockade. It was the salvation of the garrison, whose ammunition-supply was very low; some men had only a round apiece remaining. The strengthened force now was able to keep the Maoris close to their cover.
A detachment of the 1st Waikato Militia, under Captain Moir, with three carts containing ammunition, reached the stockade from Drury in the afternoon, and there was a sharp encounter with the Maoris in the clearing. One of the Militia was shot in the knee and wounded by a tomahawk-cut in the head. About 4 o'clock in the afternoon the sound of British bugles was heard in the bush, and 150 soldiers of the 18th Royal Irish and the 65th charged page 282 across the clearing and engaged the Maoris, who were then within 40 yards of the stockade. The troops were led by Captain Inman and Captain Saltmarshe; the latter received a severe wound in the mouth. The fighting that followed, lasting for about an hour, was chiefly on the right front and flank of the church. Many of the Maoris held the cover in the hollow immediately below the church-ground on the south side, and stood their ground there until several had been killed. Five natives were buried here, on Easton's land; the spot is in a field sloping steeply to the gully, just outside the churchyard fence on the south, a few yards from the road. The British loss was three killed or mortally wounded, and eight wounded. Not a man of the stockade-defenders was struck by a bullet; the one casualty was a slight wound inflicted by a flying splinter of wood. The garrison's only loss was a good dinner, which had gone into the Kingites' stomachs. The little church showed many a scar and splinter of battle; the upper parts were well riddled with bullets, and many of the window-panes were either perforated or broken.
A curious incident of this combat was narrated by some of the defenders. A native pigeon, dazed by the firing and the smoke of battle, and frightened out of the bush by the yells and shooting of the Maoris, flew on to the high-pitched roof of the church and remained there for some time, unhurt by the bullets that whistled about it. The beautiful kereru perched in such a precarious sanctuary seemed a harbinger of hope and an omen of success to the hard-pressed settlers. The story is one of those legends of the past of which it is difficult now to obtain confirmation. Captain Joseph Scott says that he did not himself see the pigeon; it would be difficult for most of the defenders to see anything on the ridging from within the stockade, owing to the narrow space between the log wall and the church. However, he considers the incident is probably authentic. The Hon. Major B. Harris, M.L.C., who was on active service in the district at the time, though not a member of the Pukekohe church garrison says, “I believe it is true that a bush-pigeon settled on the roof of the church during the firing, and was regarded by the defenders as a mascot, or a bird of good omen.”
Paerata Bluff and Burtt's Farm
A fortified pa of the Ngati-Tamaoho Tribe, named Te Maunu-a-Tu (“The War-god's Lure”), stood on the western end of the Paerata ridge in ancient days.
On the day following the engagement a detachment of Militia, from Drury, arrived to garrison the church and relieve the volunteers and special constables. Sergeant Perry, in recognition of his capable leadership in the defence, was given a commission as ensign in the 2nd Regiment, Waikato Militia.
The Attack on Burtt's Farm, Paerata
In the meantime ten or a dozen Maoris were firing into the page 286 doors and windows of the house. Mrs. Watson, in her terror, got under the bed for safety, while one of the daughters ran through the thickly planted garden at the side unobserved by the Maoris, and under cover of the bush raced down across the slopes and up the opposite hill to the home of the nearest neighbour, Mr. James Hamilton, half a mile away to the east, near Tuhimata. Mr. Hamilton and his employee, Alexander Goulan, had already heard the firing, and had armed themselves with Enfield rifles and bayonets (they were Militiamen), and were coming to the rescue. Taking advantage of the bush cover, they opened fire on the Maoris, who were peppering the house briskly with their guns. Keeping well concealed and firing rapidly, they drove the Kingites off from the house into the puriri bush. Imagining that they were attacked by a considerable number of pakehas, the Maoris retreated, and the relieving-party met Mr Watson and his man, who had been cut off from the home, and entered the house to find the invalid woman very frightened but unhurt.
A party of troopers (Mounted Artillery), under Lieutenant Rait, presently galloped up from Drury, followed by forty infantry-men; but the Maoris by this time had retreated into the forest. The courage and prompt action of Hamilton and Goulan deserved all the praise bestowed by the military, for they had not hesitated a moment to come to the rescue, against great odds, and by their skill in using the cover around the house they succeeded in concealing the weakness of their party.
Burtt's Farm people were escorted into Drury, Mr. Watson carrying his mortally wounded son. The boy died in the military hospital. After their departure the Maoris returned and sacked the house. A few days later the body of Hugh McLean was found in the swamp, shot through the heart; his rifle had been carried off.
Burtt's Farm now was made the headquarters for a time of a Flying Column (or Movable Column) formed, under the command of Colonel Nixon, for the purpose of scouring the tracks in the bush between the Great South Road and the Waikato River. It was also used by Jackson's Forest Rangers as a convenient field base in scouting-work around the district.
The following account of the attack on Burtt's Farm is contained in a letter (7th May, 1922) from Mr. John Watson, of Riversdale Road, Avondale, Auckland; he was one of the two boys who escaped from the Maoris and ran for help to Drury. Mr. Watson is the last survivor of the family. After confirming the narrative given in this chapter, he wrote:—
“The Paerata farm, belonging to Mr. James Burtt, consisted of 900 acres. The road going over the Paerata Hill cut the farm in two page 287 sections, the homestead on one side and the bluff on the other. There was a very high rata tree growing on the bluff side of the road, towering above the rest of the trees in the clump of bush there; it could be seen for miles around. My father was on Paerata farm in 1859; the rest of us went out in 1861. At that time there was no one living within three miles except Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Samuel Luke. The latter lived down in the valley behind the Paerata farm; he was very fortunate, for he and his wife left for Drury two or three days before the raid in September, 1863. The Maoris camped in his house the night before they attacked us, or the night after.
“As you correctly state, Hugh McLean and I were ploughing on the bluff when the attack was made. The morning was beautifully fine and calm. About 10 o'clock we heard firing in the direction of Pukekohe East Church Stockade. It was not five minutes later when firing commenced at our house. We at once unharnessed our horses and turned them adrift. Then we made for the house as fast as we could run. Instead of keeping the direct road which led through thick scrub and tea-tree we made a half-circle round the bush and came out in the open in front of the house. It was well we did so, for otherwise we would have been tomahawked, as four or five of the Maoris came from the road we always used except this time. When we were about 400 yards from the house we saw five or six natives come up the rise from where we afterwards were told they attacked my father and brother and the man Knight. McLean opened fire on them. He had a rifle. I had nothing unfortunately; I left mine at home that morning. The firing brought out of the scrub the Maoris who were lying in wait for McLean and me, and we had five more on the other side closing in on us like the letter V. Their fire became too hot for us, and we had to retreat. There was no cover for us to take shelter in. I took the road to Drury, and McLean turned to the right, in an easterly direction. There was a redoubt with troops about two miles from Drury that could be seen from our side; it would be between two and three miles across country, more than two miles nearer than Drury, but it was through fern hills and swamps. Undoubtedly it was for this redoubt McLean was making. I preferred to keep the road to Drury; I was afraid of the swamps after winter rains. As we took different directions one half the Maoris followed McLean, the others followed me and kept up a running fire. I had some narrow escapes, but I got out of their range when I was half-way to Drury. McLean, after getting about half-way to the redoubt on the south road, got stuck in a swamp, where he was evidently shot at close quarters.
“Our retreat drew at least ten of the Maoris from the attack on the house, and enabled my father and Knight to join Mr. Hamilton and Alex. Goulan, who stuck to their posts until a detachment of Mounted Artillery arrived. As soon as I arrived at the camp at Drury and reported they were in their saddles and off, but when they got to the farm the Maoris disappeared.
“When my brother—the one who was with my father and the man Knight—was shot by the Maoris he took cover in a thicket of scrub. He was able to tell us before he died that he heard the natives passing quite near him, but they did not find him. That was how he escaped being tomahawked.”
Regarding his sister's share in the events of that perilous morning, Mr. Watson said:—
“There were two girls in the house, my sisters. When the firing commenced, Mary Ann—she was the one that had the most pluck to do anything—rushed out of the house to let a watch-dog off the chain, but the dog was so furious about the firing she could not undo the strap. page 288 She had to return to the house for a knife to cut the strap. While she was doing so she was fired on, but escaped. The dog then rushed into the bush. He was a savage one to strangers: it took the Maoris some time before they got him killed. In the meantime Mary Ann made off as fast as she could run for Mr. Hamilton's. When about half-way she met Hamilton and his man, who had hurried off when they heard the firing. As to Mr. Hamilton arming my sister with a rifle [as shown in Von Tempsky's sketch], I do not remember hearing about that, nor do I think it was possible for him to do so, because it is not likely he and Goulan would take more arms than they could use. If Von Tempsky sketched her carrying a rifle he could have done it when he was billeted in the house. He with Captain Jackson and Captain Heaphy—afterwards Major Heaphy, v.c.—put up in the house at night for three weeks. The Forest Rangers had no tents. Colonel Nixon and the Flying Column were camped on the road on the top of the hill. It is quite likely that Von Tempsky sketched her for amusement. Everyone connected with the attack is dead but myself—my sisters and all. Before Von Tempsky came to New Zealand he was in the California gold rush, and at night I have heard him telling the other officers of the wonderful adventures he had.”