1821: Musket Wars Auckland

September 5, 2019

By AHNZ

Musket Wars Auckland: This is where you go to die. The Kill Box.

Once a rich urban paradise, the Auckland isthmus Maori settlers prospered. A blend of peoples built fertile gardens and terraced their hilly cultivations. “Tamaki-makau-rau” (as revisionist historians have started calling it) became highly populated then it became a wasteland.

“Reverend Samuel Marsden and Captain Richard Cruise, separately observed how few people were living at Tamaki and how many hill pa were uninhabited, with terraces and cultivations reverting to bracken and manuka.”- Mt Albert Then and Now, Dunsford (2016)

Then, on 6 September 1821, Hongi Hika and his combined army exits the Bay of Islands on the southern warpath. Having just visited England to visit the King, Hika collected via Sydney gunpowder, ball ammunition, swords, daggers, and some 500 more guns on credit. Hika, King of New Zealand, as he was announced as to King George, wipes out thousands around Auckland including women and children. Deaths in this one action during the intertribal Musket Wars may have outnumbered all deaths in 25 years of the Maori Wars.¹

“Dumont D’Urville returned to the Bay of Islands in March 1827 on the Astrolabe…expecting to see Tuai, and others from Ngare Raumati. He could not understand why no one came to greet the ship as it anchored off Pāroa. Looking through his telescope at Tuai’s village, he realised to his dismay “that the place had been abandoned and all its huts were more or less in ruins. We concluded that the pa of Kahou-Wera [Kahuwera], formerly occupied by a very active population, had ceased to exist”- Jones and Jenkins; JPS (2017)

“..the depopulation of the country been going on, till district after district has become void of its inhabitants, and the population is, even now, but a remnant of what it was in the memory of some European residents”- James Busby to Colonial Secretary of New South Wales, Great Britain Parliamentary Papers (1837)²

Auckland, after the Musket Wars, was as as vacant as an SJW. As uninhabited as a Statist’s skull hole. Another two generations would pass before anyone would come along with the might to hold this ground again. Even they, the British Empire, would have to fight to hold it more than once.

—
1 End of the New Zealand Wars; New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage; Wikipedia

2 Ref. NZ Electronic Text Collection

Ref. Scene from Iron Man II: The Kill Box
Ref.  The Murder Olympics
Ref. The Musket Junkie Wars

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