The Northern War

Ngāpuhi had done well out of early contact with Europeans, and leaders such as Hōne Heke Pōkai and Tāmati Wāka Nene, both Christians, supported the Treaty of Waitangi; Heke was the first to sign it. Optimism soon soured. The capital moved from the Bay of Islands to Auckland in 1841, and customs duties, shipping levies, a ban on felling kauri and Crown control of land sales cut into Māori trade and income. The public execution of Maketū in 1842 told Heke that chiefly authority now sat beneath the Crown's. His protest focused on the flagstaff on Maiki hill above Kororāreka. Heke had given the pole so that the flag of the United Tribes could fly there, and its replacement by the Union Jack seemed to deny Māori equal standing with the government. Heke's second in command, Te Haratua, led the men who first cut it down at daybreak on 8 July 1844; it fell again on 10 and 19 January 1845. Governor Robert FitzRoy called it 'a mere stick', but one of 'very great importance' because the British flag flew from it.

Shortly before dawn on 11 March 1845 Heke, Te Ruki Kawiti and Pūmuka led several hundred fighters against the town. While Kawiti made a diversion, Heke took the blockhouse and cut the staff down a fourth time; after a powder magazine exploded the defenders withdrew to the ships, and Kororāreka was looted and burned. The war was never simply Māori against British. Nene, Eruera Maihi Patuone, Mohi Tawhai and Makoare Te Taonui led other Ngāpuhi hapū (sub-tribes) on the Crown's side. In late April Lieutenant-Colonel William Hulme reached the Bay with about 460 soldiers, marines and volunteers, destroyed the neutral chief Pōmare's pā (fortified village) at Ōtuihu, and on 8 May attacked Heke's new pā at Puketutu beside Lake Ōmāpere. After hours of fighting he called the attack off. Te Ara gives 13 British dead and about twice as many Māori; NZHistory gives 15 British and 28 Māori, and notes that some reports claimed up to 200. On 12 June, at Te Ahuahu, Nene's men held Heke's own pā against him, and Heke was shot in the thigh.

Colonel Henry Despard then brought 615 men and five cannon against Kawiti's new pā at Ōhaeawai, held by little more than 100 fighters. After a week of shelling he sent 250 men at the palisade on 1 July 1845, against Nene's advice. Within minutes, NZHistory records, 40 were dead and 70 wounded; Te Ara puts the British dead at 41. Behind a flax-screened outer fence that soaked up musket balls, the defenders had trenches and covered bunkers that kept them safe from artillery, and they later left the pā at a time of their choosing. FitzRoy opened peace talks, but he was replaced in November by George Grey, who persuaded his superiors to send more men. Some 1300 soldiers and 400 Māori allies hauled 30 tonnes of guns and supplies nearly 30 km to Ruapekapeka, 'the bat's nest', where Heke and Kawiti had perhaps 500 men. On Sunday 11 January 1846, after a heavy bombardment, scouts found the pā almost empty and troops rushed in; fighting carried on in the bush behind it. NZHistory counts a dozen British dead and rather more Māori; Te Ara says about 12 British and up to 20 Māori.

How Ruapekapeka ended is still argued over. A long-told story held that Christian defenders were at Sunday prayers outside the walls when the British walked in. NZHistory and Te Ara both doubt it: little was left inside, so the withdrawal looks planned, and the pā had already forced the British to drag heavy guns through hard country to take a position of no strategic value. Despard and Grey proclaimed a 'brilliant success'. Within weeks the Ngāpuhi factions agreed at Kawakawa to stop fighting each other. Grey pardoned the 'rebels', took no land and did not put the flagstaff back up, and it stayed down for the rest of Heke's life. The historian James Belich argues that Grey won the propaganda war while Heke and Kawiti won on the battlefield; others think that goes too far. Heke met Grey only in 1848 and gave him his greenstone mere, which his biographer Freda Kawharu reads as accepting Grey's right to be in New Zealand while expecting the Queen's representative to honour the treaty. Grey had largely set aside what the two chiefs had fought for: a share in government and control of their own lands.