The Elizabeth affair

The voyage of the Elizabeth grew out of the Ngāti Toa campaigns against Ngāi Tahu. Around 1828 Ngāti Toa attacked Ngāi Tahu at Kaikōura, then came to Kaiapoi saying they wished to trade for greenstone. Te Pēhi Kupe, the senior Ngāti Toa chief, and other chiefs went into the pā, the fortified village, and were killed. Accounts differ. Te Rauparaha’s biography says the chiefs went in to trade, and that after their deaths Ngāti Toa attacked the pā without success, and about 100 Ngāi Tahu prisoners were killed. Ngāi Tahu accounts say Kaiapoi already knew of the killings at Kaikōura, and that a Ngāpuhi man staying in the pā overheard Ngāti Toa planning an attack for the next morning. The Te Ara biography of Tama-i-hara-nui (Te Maiharanui) records a Ngāi Tahu tradition that he was warned of treachery, and says the chiefs died in a quarrel over greenstone. For Ngāti Toa, Te Pēhi Kupe's death, and the insult done to his remains, demanded revenge. Tama-i-hara-nui led Ngāi Tahu in the northern South Island and, as hereditary spiritual leader of the tribe, was held in the greatest respect.

Te Rauparaha planned his response from Kāpiti. He agreed to hire the brig Elizabeth from its master, John Stewart, paying with 50 tons of dressed flax. He sailed from Kāpiti with about 100 warriors on 29 October 1830. Ngāi Tahu had killed a business partner of Stewart's in 1824, but NZHistory judges his motive to have been mainly commercial. The warriors stayed out of sight when the brig anchored off Takapūneke, the chief's settlement and trading place in Akaroa Harbour. Stewart repeatedly sent word to the chief, then at the Wairewa flax grounds, that a ship wanted to exchange guns for flax. When he came on board with his wife, Te Whē, and daughter, Ngā Roimata, the hidden warriors came out and took them. The war party then went ashore and attacked Takapūneke. NZHistory puts the dead at several hundred, with dozens taken as slaves; a Christchurch City Council figure, lower than most, is 150.

Accounts of what followed differ, and the Te Ara biography sets several side by side. Some say that on the voyage the chief killed his daughter, or put her overboard, so that she would not be enslaved; some say Te Whē dived overboard. He was held in irons. The Elizabeth reached Kāpiti on 11 November 1830, and Stewart kept him aboard until late December, when he gave up hope of more flax and handed him over to Ngāti Toa. Most accounts agree that he was tortured and killed by wives of the chiefs killed at Kaiapoi; the Ngāi Tahu history in Te Ara names the wife of Te Pēhi. The biography adds that he died with considerable courage. Sources disagree on where: the biography says Ōtaki, NZHistory says Kāpiti.

Stewart's part caused alarm. Missionaries feared it showed Māori the worst of European contact, and New South Wales governor Ralph Darling had him charged in Sydney as an accomplice in murder. The Ngāi Tahu witnesses were classed as 'heathens', barred from the oath and ruled 'incompetent', and Stewart and his crew went unpunished. Because no Europeans had died, most settlers took little notice, but humanitarian bodies like the Church Missionary Society pressed harder for Britain to step in, and in 1832 James Busby was appointed British Resident. The fighting continued. Ngāti Toa took Kaiapoi after a three-month siege and then Ōnawe, before southern Ngāi Tahu, armed through their own trade, pushed back. By 1839 the tribes had made peace and Ngāi Tahu captives on Kāpiti were freed. Takapūneke was abandoned after the attack, and in 2002 it was declared a wāhi tapu, a place sacred to Māori.