Tua Marina River, scene of the Wairau Massacre

This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024).
This extract was authored by Matiu Baker.

This photograph by the Burton Brothers offers a scenic view of a river gently winding through a pastoral landscape populated with exotic willow and poplar trees. There is little to suggest any great significance to this site until one registers the caption inscribed on the negative: ‘Tua Marina River – scene of the Wairau Massacre’. The New Zealand Company’s dealings took a dramatic turn here in 1843, when Captain Arthur Wakefield, the brother of Edward Gibbon and William and the company’s principal agent in Nelson, pre-empted Spain’s inquiry into the disputed Wairau region of the upper South Island, sending company surveyors to survey the Wairau block. Ngāti Toa carefully removed the surveyors’ property, escorted them from the land and burnt their makeshift buildings. Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata appealed to the Spain Commission to investigate their claim with urgency.

Wakefield was outraged. Impatiently, and unwisely, he saw an opportunity to prosecute the matter. On 17 June 1843 he and the Nelson police magistrate Henry Thompson led an envoy of 47 armed ‘special constables’ – mostly settler-farmers – to Wairau to execute a warrant for Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata’s arrest on charges of arson. An intemperate Thompson pressed the two rangatira to submit to the warrant, even producing the manacles with which they would be restrained. Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata’s repeated refusal prompted a fit of rage from Thompson: ‘his eyes rolled about [in his head] and he stamped his foot’.1

Thompson called on his men to join him in a show of force, but, tragically, as they crossed the Tuamarina (originally Tuamarino) river one of his party accidentally discharged his weapon, triggering an exchange of gunfire that left dead and wounded on both sides. Among the dead was Te Rongo, recently married to Te Rangihaeata following the death of her husband Te Whāiti, Te Rangihaeata’s first cousin (and the New Zealand Company interpreter).2 In the aftermath Arthur Wakefield, realising his men were ill-equipped to fight seasoned Māori warriors, ordered them to down weapons in submission. Some of Thompson’s party quietly slipped away into the surrounding bush, while the remaining men were rounded up and disarmed. An enraged Te Rangihaeata demanded utu for Te Rongo, and executed the remaining men, including Wakefield and Thompson. In all, 22 settlers and four Māori were killed that day.

The Wairau conflict shook the colony. Settlers at Nelson and Wellington in particular were left feeling vulnerable and exposed to further attack; they were also hot for revenge styled as justice, a hope misplaced when Governor FitzRoy interviewed Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata at Waikanae in February 1844. Te Rauparaha simply but frankly recounted the events that led up to the conflict and their attempts to de-escalate it. FitzRoy condemned the killing of unarmed men, but conceded: ‘Englishmen were very greatly to blame, and as they brought on and began the fight, and as you were hurried into crime by their misconduct, I will not avenge their deaths.’3

1 Te Rauparaha, quoted in ‘Narrative of the proceedings at Waikanae, a considerable body of natives (including the chiefs Rauparaha and Rangihaeata) being present’, New Zealand Gazette and Wellington Spectator, 2 March 1844, p. 2.
2 Te Whāiti’s premature death in 1842 placed an obligation of responsibility on his whānau to ensure the continued well-being of his widow Te Rongo and their children. Te Rangihaeata assumed that duty of care for Te Whāiti’s family by taking Te Rongo (Te Rongopāmamao) as his wife. Her death at Wairau placed upon him a further obligation to seek utu for her death.
3 ‘Narrative of the proceedings at Waikanae’.