Chapter 1
Private Michael McCann dug up the scoria with a pickaxe and Private Finbar Kelly smashed the lumps to pieces with a sledgehammer. He shut his eyes with each blow to protect them from the flying shards. The birdsong of the morning had died with the noise of two thousand workers hacking a road through dense bush, over steep hills and through swamps. The sun beat down relentlessly from a cloudless azure sky. Cicadas grated incessantly in the heat of the day. It was hard, sweaty labour to be sure, but less of a strain for McCann, by Kelly’s reckoning. Kelly was tall and lean, whereas his mate was a stocky, barrel-chested young bullock of a man, built closer to the ground, with short limbs and a thick neck. He’d been brought up in a cob hut and he seemed like a creature of the earth.
McCann had been a tenant farmer in Ireland but Kelly was not of peasant stock, nor was he of landowner or merchant class. He had worked as a clerk for an Irish manufacturer, but he’d lost his job when the factory closed down. Kelly and McCann both aspired to be landowners, not as landlords in Ireland – that would be impossible – but as farmers in New Zealand, with a military land grant when they finished their service in the British Imperial Army. When the recruiting sergeant came to town, Kelly and McCann both turned up at the same time and, agreeing the time was right for a grand adventure with good prospects at the end of it, they signed up together. However, their military service thus far fell well short of their expectations of action and adventure.
“This is prisoners’ work,” Kelly said.” I didn’t join the army to smash rocks and build roads.”
“Right,” McCann agreed. “Give us some good honest fighting.”
“Well it’s grand to hear the voices of the home country,” said an older Irishman on a horse drawn cart, “even if they’re only whining and complaining.”
“And who are you?” said Kelly.
“Patrick Quinn’s the name. I’m what you might call a merchant, from County Armagh, late of Auckland town, bringing this here load of banjos for the work,” by which he meant the big round shovels for shifting the dirt. “Keep working boys,” he said. “You’ll be glad of the road when it comes to moving supplies and big guns.”
“A shopkeeper, from Armagh,” McCann said. “Private Kelly here has a sweetheart back in Armagh, name of Annie Gallagher.”
“I knew a Thomas Gallagher of Armagh,” Quinn said. “Maybe her father or an uncle.”
“Not that I know of,” said Kelly. “Gallagher’s a common name in Armagh.”
“Aye, well, I’m a shopkeeper all right,” said Quinn, “and before that a soldier like yourselves.”
“Serving here in New Zealand?” Kelly asked.
“Aye boys, fighting the Māori in the North in ’45 and ’46 under Colonel Despard.” The merchant climbed awkwardly off the cart and limped to the back. His jacket caught on the rail of the cart and lifted to reveal a revolver tucked in his belt, an Adam’s five-shot of the type carried by officers.
The Quartermaster arrived with his checklist and Quinn said, “Here, give us a hand to unload these shovels, boys, just the shovels, mind, not the boxes.” Having checked the inventory, the Quartermaster went back to his station.
“It was a musket ball in the leg that finished my soldiering days,” Quinn said. “We were attacking the Ruapekapeka Pā, rooting old Kawiti out of his Bats’ Nest, where he’d been digging in for six months. We could have done with a road there, I can tell you. We dragged thirty tons of heavy artillery uphill through thick bush at the rate of a mile a day.”
“And you took the pā,” said Kelly. “I’ve heard of it. The last battle in the north and a victory for the British.”
“Ruapekepeka wasn’t much of a victory, really,” Quinn said. “We bombarded the pā with cannon fire for ten days and breached the palisades. When we stormed the pā most of the Māori had left for the day, for Sunday prayers, so they say. They were a Christian village, except for Kawiti himself and only he was still in the pā. We caught them unawares outside behind the pā and we killed a few but most of them escaped into the bush, including Kawiti. A few of our men were killed chasing after them into the bush. So we captured a deserted pā in the middle of the bush miles from nowhere. For what? What sort of a victory was that?”
“Now, Ōhaeawai, there was a battle,” Quinn said. He sat on the cart and lit a meerschaum pipe of tobacco. Through a cloud of smoke he regarded the pair of young soldiers, who sat on the ground, in the meagre shade of the cart, and drank the warm water in their canteens. They were glad of a break from their back breaking labour and listened to the old soldier’s tales.
“The Ōhaeawai pā was like the one at Ruapekapeka but the Ōhaeawai battle was six months before. We set up all the cannon on the hills surrounding the pā and pounded it every day for a week with six pound, twelve pound, thirty-two pound round shot. We moved the guns closer and closer. We couldn’t miss. The poor devils in the pā must have thought all hell had come down on them. At the end of the week we moved in to finish off the survivors, 250 of us handpicked for the job. About fifty paces from the pā we were cut down in a fierce volley of shots. In ten minutes half our number lay dead or dying on the ground and the rest of us retreated for our lives.”
“How did the Māoris survive the shelling?” McCann asked.
“They were all huddled safely in underground bunkers and tunnels. Then they were waiting for us in trenches, stepping up and firing under the palisades – two rings of fences, the outer one to slow us down and fire on us. A few days later we took the pā because the Māori just abandoned it and disappeared. In that fortress were defences the likes of which we’d never seen. Despard drove us into the traps, not just once but twice. The old fool refused to believe the Māori could have built it themselves without European military engineers. Governor Fitzroy reported it was a victory but we were soundly beaten by a bunch of so called savages we outnumbered six to one. The Māori are masters of garrison warfare and a fearsome enemy. Don’t expect an easy time of it in the Waikato.”
“And what of our new governor and our new general?” Kelly said. “Do you think they’re up to the job?”
“It was Governor Grey, just arrived in the country, ordered the attack on Ruapekapeka after he got reinforcements from Sydney,” Quinn said. “Grey is a cunning devil and I believe General Cameron is a good soldier and he’ll do his master’s bidding. Grey’s determined to “smash the Kīngitanga rebels”. He’s going after the Māori King, the new one, Tāwhiao, and that trouble maker Rewi Maniapoto, who went down to the Taranaki with his Kingite warriors to help fight the British. Cameron’s of the same mind. He says the Māori can’t set up a king of their own race. They have to acknowledge the Queen as their sovereign. They signed the Treaty.”
“I hear we’re all under threat from the Kingites,” said McCann. “They’re planning to attack Auckland. If we can put down the Kingite rebels…”
“Why would they want to attack Auckland?” Quinn interrupted. “They’d be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. They’re coming and going in and out of Auckland every day in their canoes and ships with goods for trading: flax, produce from farms and orchards, animals, grain, not just wheat but flour from their own mills. They’re even exporting to Australia and America.”
“What are they getting from the trade?” Kelly asked.
“Benefits of our civilization: tools, the machinery of agriculture and the machinery of war. Muskets are in great demand and so is flax, for rope, for ships’ rigging. It’s one musket for a ton of dressed flax. The wāhine are busy stripping flax with mussel shells all the day long. The northern tribes got muskets and decimated the Waikato tribes in the twenties and thirties, so of course the Waikatos were keen to gain the upper hand in the arms race. They trade for other goods too like cloth and liquor. Māori and settlers both been prospering from trade. And we been under the protection of Te Wherowhero and Tāmihana. No other tribes would attack us. Auckland is a peaceful town, or at least it was till it filled up with more and more of the drunken rabble of Her Majesty’s Imperial troops.”
“Then why is Grey saying the Māoris plan to attack Auckland?” said Kelly sceptically.
“He’s put the rumours about and the report to London to get more troops for the invasion.”
“But why?” Kelly persisted, “if we have peace?”
“Land, boys!” the merchant exclaimed. “Men will fight over women and land. This one’s all about the getting of land. They’ve got it and we want it. All that fertile Waikato land. We’ve got more and more land-hungry settlers and the Kingites are refusing to sell more land, and the so called rebels will pay with their lives and their land.”
The Commander of the Imperial Engineers, doing his rounds, didn’t like the tone of what he was overhearing and told Quinn to move along and deliver the boxes to the Quartermaster’s stores. More to the point, Privates Kelly and McCann had been slacking and shirking long enough and were tersely ordered back to work.
Quinn tapped the pottle from his pipe on the cart wheel and hoisted himself onto the seat. “Keep building that road, boys,” he said as he set off to complete his delivery, “and good luck with the good, honest fighting. But how do you feel about dishonest fighting?”
Kelly got to his feet and stretched his lanky legs, raising his right leg to the side to unstick his scrotum from his groin, and he and McCann resumed their digging and smashing. At the end of the day, Kelly’s hands were blistered and his face was burnt because the pork pie hat of his uniform gave it scant protection from the sun. Back in the barracks in Ōtāhuhu, Kelly was mulling over what Quinn had said about the invasion. “What do you think he meant by dishonest fighting?” he asked McCann.
“I don’t know,” was the reply. “Let the governors and the generals worry about the politics. We’re just soldiers taking orders and doing our jobs.”
Kelly sat on his cot and, bending down awkwardly with his aching back, he liberated his feet malodorously from his boots.
“Well, that that takes me back,” McCann remarked, “back to the pig shite in the sty.”
Kelly drew pencil and paper from his kit bag and, ignoring McCann’s nostalgia for the croft, settled down to write a letter to his Annie. He said he was missing her, of course, and missing the old country but this New Zealand was a fine new country with great prospects and he still hoped to send for her if he could make a life for himself here, hopefully as a farmer, with a military land grant after his time as a soldier. Or he could return home if that didn’t work out. He wrote a letter also for McCann, who, like many of the foot soldiers, could neither read nor write.