Te Horeta Ngati Whanaunga 1821 1853

edmondsallan - Hello - We are still resting in Thames and discussing
" TE HORETA " and the Ngati Whanaunga in this area . If you have just clicked the button for desk top action , you are welcome to join us .Help yourself to the food & drink !!
Ngati Maru tradition states that Te Horeta and Te Hinaki were guests of Hongi at the Bay of Islands on their return to New Zealand. It is said that Hongi placed a bucket of milk before them as a test, and when they refused to take this strange food, took their rejection as an omen for his projected attacks on Maru-tuahu. He lined up his muskets, naming one for each of the battles in which Nga Puhi had been defeated by Ngati Paoa, Ngati Maru and Ngati Whanaunga. Te Hinaki and Te Horeta were thus warned that they were about to pay for the battle of Wai-whariki. When Hongi Hika led the massed Bay of Islands tribes against Mau-inaina and Te Totara, the pa of Ngati Paoa and Ngati Maru at present day Panmure and Thames, the local tribes, including Ngati Whanaunga, withdrew into Waikato. No record remains of Te Horeta's role in these two major battles. It is known that he was in Waikato for the marriage of Te Wherowhero to Ngawaero, probably in late 1821. It may have been in these wars that he earned the sobriquet Te Taniwha. On one occasion he dived from a high bank into a river, and, avoiding the spears of his foes, climbed from the water into the bow of an enemy canoe and drove off the defenders. Te Horeta's people, watching from the pa, thought the feat to be that of a taniwha. ( I wonder ?????? )
Records are silent concerning Te Horeta's activities in the later 1820s. There is some evidence that at this time his people took refuge from marauding war parties at Haowhenua, on Little Barrier Island. From 1830 his principal residence appears to have been Kauaeranga. He was visited there by various missionaries. In January 1834, in his speech of welcome to William Yate, Te Horeta asked his people the rhetorical question: 'what have the missionaries come for'? His answer, as recorded by Yate, was that 'they have come to break our clubs and establish peace here'.
In the late 1830s Te Horeta was patron to William Webster, an American who established himself as a trader at Herekino Bay, Coromandel Harbour, with other stations at Waiomio and Kauaeranga. Webster, known as Wepiha to local Maori, married a Ngati Whanaunga woman. I have a file on this " Webster " Further on when I am into the Pakeha ancestry , we might put him on the machine . To the growing number of European timber workers and traders in the area the Ngati Whanaunga leader was known as 'old Hooknose'. Te Horeta welcomed the visit of Major Thomas Bunbury in April--May 1840, and on 4 May 1840 signed the copy of the Treaty of Waitangi taken by Bunbury to Coromandel Harbour.
Probably in the mid 1840s Ngati Whanaunga began gum-digging in the Colville area. While this provided an alternative economic activity for Te Horeta's people, it also renewed an old dispute between Ngati Whanaunga and Ngati Mahanga over land at Ahirau and Otautu. When Ngati Whanaunga diggers established houses at Otautu, Te Waka of Te Uringahu and Ngati Mahanga went there with a war party and set fire to them. Ngati Whanaunga then pulled down a boundary marker of Te Waka, west of the Tauwhare range. Te Waka then went to Mekemeke and in an act of ritualised warfare fired his guns into the ground. After further acts of provocation on both sides peace initiatives were begun, with Te Horeta eventually agreeing to retain Ahirau, and Te Waka, Otautu and Tauwhare. It was in Te Horeta's territories that gold was first discovered in New Zealand, in 1852, in the Kapanga River, near Coromandel Harbour. Intense interest followed the discovery, and a meeting was arranged by the government in November 1852 to negotiate access with the Maori owners of the land. Te Horeta and other influential Maori leaders met with the lieutenant governor of New Ulster, Colonel R. H. Wynyard, Bishop G. A. Selwyn and Chief Justice William Martin. By this time Te Horeta was 'bowed and enfeebled by age', being probably in his 90s. He willingly consented to his land being mined by the transient Pakeha, whom he compared to wandering albatross 'seeking food merely'.
Te Horeta Te Taniwha died at Coromandel Harbour on 21 November 1853. He had been baptised by the Anglican missionary Thomas Lanfear some four to six weeks before his death. Te Horeta had a second wife, Tuhi of Ngati Naunau, and he was succeeded by their son, Kitahi Te Taniwha. On his deathbed he dictated a letter to a European friend in Auckland, asking him to guard the interests of both Europeans and Maori so that they could dwell together in peace. - well I think we have rested enough & talked about " Te Horeta " a Ngati Whanaunga
chief and his life . What say we head to Auckland - Orakei - nz. While we are travelling , I'll have a word with " Old faithfull " to find something for us to look at from the rather thick file on Auckland .nz. Till we meet again - Regards - edmondsallan