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Eruera Maihi Patuone was the eldest son of the Ngāti Hao chief Tapua, of Hokianga, and one of the most influential rangatira (chiefs) of his time. He was a signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi and gave his greenstone mere (weapon) to Governor Hobson as a gift for Queen Victoria.
This is a half length studio portrait of Eruera Maihi Patuone as an elderly man. He has a white beard, a moko, and is holding a taiaha against his shoulder. He is wearing dark clothing, including a dark jacket draped around his shoulders.
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 page 40.
This extract was authored by Michael Fitzgerald.
The late intervention of [Eruera Maihi] Patuone and his brother Tāmati Wāka Nene at Waitangi on 5 February 1840 is considered a critical moment in the Treaty debates that swayed opinion among the majority of rangatira in favour of signing. Wāka Nene delivered a forceful and compelling speech, reminding the chiefs that it was now too late to turn back time and turn away Pākehā and the benefits they brought. He argued they needed the governor to control the growing and increasingly demanding and unruly Pākehā population. The elder Patuone supported his younger brother in calling on the assembled rangatira to sign the Treaty and accept the governor as a guiding matua and parent, and as a peacemaker between their peoples.
During the 1845 Northern War Patuone, Wāka Nene and Mohi Tāwhai remained steadfast in their support of the colonial government, despite their own reservations about the government’s intentions and their sympathy with the concerns of Hōne Heke, Kawiti and other northern leaders. Patuone remained loyal to the government but ideologically opposed to war, while his brother Wāka Nene reluctantly took the field against Heke and Kawiti, probably when he thought Heke had encroached upon his mana as his senior and elder kinsman. Consequently, Wāka Nene led the only so-called British victory over Māori forces during the war. After the war, Governor Grey asked Wāka Nene to stand as one of his esquires during his investiture as a Knight Commander of the Bath in 1848.
In [this studio portrait], made two decades after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Eruera Maihi Patuone cuts a confident and dignified figure. He appears remarkably comfortable and well fitted out in his gentleman’s attire; indeed, Patuone was a rangatira and a gentleman by any measure. He lived out his latter days peacefully in a kāinga named after his deceased wife Rīria (Lydia) at Waiwharariki, Takapuna, and was celebrated as a statesman, diplomat and peacemaker. Both he and his brother lived to become icons of New Zealand’s formative nation-building years. Wāka Nene died in 1871, and Patuone died a year later, by which time he was thought to be well over 100 years old.