Kimble]Kimball] Bent An Unusual European Who Deserted The British A...

We left Kimble being returned to his original captor and learning his future fortune.

Soon Bent was on the tramp again.

His chief, Tito, set off one morning, taking his white man with him, for a fortified village called Otapawa, where the Hauhaus were preparing to offer strong resistance to the British troops.

Otapawa was about four miles away by a narrow and winding forest track.

A small river, the Mangemange, had to be forded on the way, and here Bent had a taste of some of the minor adventures of the bush.

Bent being a rather small man and Tito a big, powerful fellow, the Maori good-naturedly took his pakeha on his back to pikau [piggy-back] him across the stream.

Bent was rather heavier than Tito had imagined, and after balancing to and fro precariously on a slippery place in the deepest part of the ford, the Maori's feet suddenly went from under him, and he and his protege were capsized in the middle of the creek.

Tito, however, kept a tight grip of the white man, and, though the stream was running swiftly, they managed to struggle out to the opposite bank in safety, and after drying their clothes as well as they could continued their bush journey.

About midday the Hauhau chief and his companion emerged from the solitude’s of the forest to find themselves in the Otapawa clearing.

A hill about three hundred feet high rose like an island from the great rimu

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and rata

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woods that compassed it on every side; at the back ran the Tangahoé River.

At the foot of the hill, there was some cultivation, a steep winding path led to the top, here were a ditch and a bristling double stockade of tall tree-trunks set solidly in the ground, connected by cross-rails lashed with forest vines, within was the Hauhau village.

The only access to the interior of the stockade was through a low and narrow gateway, painted red.

A shawl-clad figure with a gun rose from a squatting position just outside the pa gate as the two travellers walked out from the shade of the forest and began the ascent of the mound.

A loud cry of astonishment and warning brought out the villagers, one after the other, bobbing their heads as they ran through the gateway.

Then the shout was raised, as they recognised Bent's companion,

“Aue Here comes Tito with a pakeha A pakeha”

Waving shawls and blankets and weapons, the people cried their greetings to the chief, and the white man and his protector walked in between two lines of wondering men and women and children, who pressed in close behind the new-comers as they passed into the palisaded pa.

A long, low-eaved, thatched house stood near the middle of the pa, somewhat apart from the smaller whares. [houses]

Into this building Tito and Bent were taken, and finely woven flax mats, patterned in black and white, were spread out for them.

Tito rose and addressed the crowd.

He explained, with a good deal of pride, as Bent imagined, how he had become possessed of a live white man, a somewhat unusual acquisition amongst the Maoris in that unrestful period, for the impatient Hauhau was, as a rule, too fond of trying his new tomahawk on a pakeha skull to keep a prisoner long.

The korero [talk] over, food was brought in in freshly plaited baskets of green flax, boiled pork, dried shark (a present from a seaside tribe), boiled taro and kumara, quite a bountiful meal for a war-time bush camp.

Up to this time the deserter's adventures had been, if not exactly tragic, at least of a severely unpleasant turn.

Now, however, they took a humorous twist, humorous from an onlooker's view, though to the white man himself it seemed rather the final pannikin full in the bucket of his misfortunes.

A woman was brought into the whare.

She walked over and seated herself on the flax whariki [mat] by Bent's side.

The white man turned and looked at her in some surprise.

Her vision still haunts the memory of the old adventurer as that of a particularly ugly woman.

She was not old, probably not above twenty-five, but she was blind in one eye, her lips were of negroid thickness, such “blubber” lips as seen here and there among Maori tribes tell their tale of an ancient Melanesian strain in the blood of the Polynesian immigrants.

She was tattooed on the chin, and there was a deeply chiselled blue line on the inner cuticle of her lower lip.

Her hair hung around her face in a tangled mop. “Well,” said Bent to himself, “she is no beauty.”

The woman spoke some words of greeting to Bent, but he steadily gazed on the floor and said nothing.

Then a Maori sitting nearby, who could speak a little English, said, “This woman wants to marry you”

“Oh, Lord” exclaimed Bent. “What for? I don't want to get married.”

An old man, whose name was Peneta, and who was draped from shoulder to ankles in a red blanket, walked up to the white man and, halting in front of him, pointed to the one-eyed woman.

“Pakeha,” he said, with a quiet grimness in his tone, “this is my niece, Te Rawanga. You must marry her (me moe korua). If you refuse, you will die. That is all.”

This was translated to Bent.

Here was a dilemma, indeed! Bent had nothing to say.

He looked at the woman by his side, and she smiled at him as coquettishly as her one good eye allowed. He looked, and the more he looked the less he liked her.

Then he glanced at the dour old uncle, and cast his helpless eyes around the crowded meeting-house.

The men were glum and scowling, one or two of the young girls seemed to perceive the humour of the situation, for they giggled, and then hid their faces in their shawls.

Bent eyed his prospective uncle-in-law again.

The old man was impatient. He said again, “Take my niece as your wife.”

“Ae,” assented the white man, who could see no hope of escape. “I'll take her.”

So the young soldier was mated, to the satisfaction of everyone but himself. “She wasn't my fancy, to put it mildly,” he says. “But I suppose it was her last chance, and the old man would have tomahawked me if I hadn't taken her.”

Mrs Bent's wedding-furnishings, which she bundled a little later, with a determined air, into the corner of the communal house assigned to the white man, were spartan and primitive in the extreme.

They consisted solely of a large plaited whariki (sleeping-mat) and a wooden pillow, which, to the white man, seemed alarmingly like some weapon of chastisement.

Matrimony amongst the Hauhaus was simplicity itself.

Info From

The first of the below posts has a list of the previous posts of Maori Myths and Legends

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/how-war-was-declared-between-tainui-and-arawa

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-1

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-hatupatu-and-his-brothers

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/hatupatu-and-his-brothers-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-the-emigration-of-turi-an-ancestor-of-wanganui

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-continuing-legend-of-turi

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/turi-seeks-patea

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-manaia-and-why-he-emigrated-to-new-zealand