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By Ian Knight
The Maori humans of recent Zealand have been skilled box engineers even sooner than they got here into clash with Europeans within the nineteenth Century. struggle among rival teams was once endemic in Maori society, and it was once universal perform to guard villages with surrounding entrenchments and wood palisades, often called pas. As touch with the eu global elevated, the Maori spoke back via adopting firearms into their conventional armory. It was once now not till 1845, even if, with the 1st battling among the Maori and the British, that it turned transparent simply how powerful and complex the Maori fortifications have been. For the easiest a part of twenty years, the Maori held off the dominant and technologically more advantageous British forces, via adapting and constructing their defenses based on each new development within the British artillery. The advanced community of trenches and sheltered 'bomb-proof' dug outs, designed to withstand additional British attacks, proved so potent they had a robust impact at the trench war platforms of global conflict I. This booklet explores the evolution and layout of Maori fortifications, and charts the process a clash that may eventually see the British holiday the Maori pas, resulting in a sour guerrilla bush conflict.
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Example text
The subsequent campaign established a pattern that was to be repeated, with variations, over and over again during the next 30 years. Heke and his ally, the Ngatihine chief Kawiti, built a number of pa; the British attacked them using conventional tactics, usually opening with a preliminary artillery bombardment then mounting a direct assault. These assaults were usually driven off before the Maori, having achieved their objectives, abandoned their 30 pa. In the end a decisive element in the conflict was provided by Heke’s rivalry with a powerful war-chief of his own tribe, Tamati Waka Nene, who had objected to the attack on Kororareka.
In these pit’s the men could sleep safe from the shot of the big guns of the soldiers. 9 9 F. E. Maning, Old New Zealand, Auckland 1863. 38 The defences of Ohaeawai were to prove as formidable as they looked, for they withstood one of the few determined frontal assaults made upon Maori entrenchments in the course of the fighting. Perhaps the most impressive complex built during the wars of the 1840s, and one which has deservedly remained famous as a classic example of Maori engineering skills, was Kawiti’s pa at Ruapekapeka, described with considerable professional appreciation by the man who attacked it, Colonel Henry Despard; The pa itself was an oblong square, with projecting works on each face, and at two of the angles, so as to form a flanking fire in every direction.
Although Pratt was criticized for the cautious nature of his advance – Pratt’s Sap was the largest engineering work built in New Zealand by British troops during the wars – he had undeniably achieved his objective, and it is unlikely that Te Arei would have fallen with less loss of British life by any other means. Equally, the garrison would undoubtedly have abandoned it eventually however it had been attacked, denying Pratt, like most British commanders before and after him, the satisfaction of a tangible success.