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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 181-182.
This extract was authored by Rebecca Rice.
The defeat of 1700 British troops by a force of 250 Māori at Pukehinahina was a shock for the British. The soldier-artist Horatio Gordon Robley knew how to exploit the value of being on the spot and quickly made sketches of the abandoned pā, which were despatched to the coastal steamer Alexandra, then in Tauranga Harbour and about to leave for Auckland, with instructions that they be forwarded to a British newspaper. Three months later, the sketches appeared as wood engravings in the Illustrated London News, accompanied by an extensive account of the disastrous engagement . . .
His drawing provides details of the innovative design of the earthworks of this fighting pā, constructed by Māori in response to the longer firing range of the British military. There is also no attempt to render the scene heroic.1 Instead, he captures the sense of confusion and aimlessness in the aftermath of battle. Māori lie dead in trenches, rifles and kit-bags litter the ground, and bodies are carried off by stretcher-bearers as sentries keep guard.
However, the engraving made after his watercolour sketch has been sanitised for a British audience – the dead and dying have been removed from the battlefield and the soldiers, once confused, are now armed, standing on guard. It seems that Robley’s image, which showed Māori lying dead in the trenches, did not support the myth promoted in the news, which suggested that the gallant British had fallen into an ambush set by Māori, who had contrived to ‘outwit the commanders and [to] massacre officers and men with little or no loss to themselves’.2
1 Leonard Bell, Colonial Constructs: European images of Māori 1840–1914 (Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1992), pp. 112–113.
2 ‘New Zealand’, Illustrated London News, vol. 45, no. 1269 (23 July 1864), p. 81.