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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) on pages 356-357.
This extract was authored by Rebecca Rice.
A ceremonial process of burial is suggested by Horatio Robley’s watercolour of Te Papa cemetery, known today as Mission Cemetery, at the northern end of Te Papa Peninsula at Tauranga. Here, the mounds covering the dead are fresh, and one large and four small crosses have been erected at the burial site, which is demarcated by a picket fence. The words ‘Rest in peace’ can be made out on plaques in the foreground. A version of this view published in the Illustrated London News described the cemetery:
Two weeping willows, and a cabbage-tree with a clump of aloes, mark the spot where the British soldiers and sailors are interred in thirty-two graves . . . Lieutenant-Colonel Booth, of the 43rd Regiment, is buried on the left hand, close to the aloes; his men are buried to the right of him. The six officers and sergeant-major of that regiment lie in the centre line of graves. The naval officers and seamen are buried in the line of graves farthest from the spectator, being arranged in their order of seniority, beginning from the left hand side of this view. These graves had all been prepared by the 2nd of May, when the funeral took place. The coffins were, on that day, borne in procession . . .1
1 ‘The war in New Zealand’, Illustrated London News, 30 July 1864, p. 129.