Undaunted by this terrible sight, the reserves dashed up to encourage their dismayed comrades, but to no purpose. The Maori, momentarily inactive from sheer astonishment, recovered and poured a disastrous fire upon the mob of struggling men, twenty-seven of whom were killed and sixty-six wounded.
It is useless to try to explain away this unhappy incident. It is enough to say that the men of the 43rd Regiment two months later atoned for their behaviour, and wiped out their defeat by utterly routing the Maori at Te Ranga, where the position was not at all unlike that at the Gate _Pa_.
Despite the fact that there were now arrayed against them some ten thousand British regulars, and five thousand colonial troops, the Maori made no overtures of surrender--save for a few at Tauranga. Instead, they withdrew from the Waikato plain, as well as from those parts occupied by the soldiers, and joined forces with the Whanganui rebels in the fastnesses of the latter's country, where they were able to indulge in their favourite bush-fighting and guerilla warfare. Here, too, their resistance was strengthened by the growth of a shocking superstition, which bred in them a fanatical hate, and lent to their methods a brutality never previously exhibited in their conflicts with the Pakeha.
Another development which strongly influenced the remainder of the war occurred about the time when the operations at Tauranga were brought to a close. Until the early part of 1864 the Colonial Forces had played a subordinate part in the war--not from choice--though their conduct had been invariably deserving of the highest praise. The time was now at hand when they were to become principals instead of supernumeraries, and by their own strenuous efforts bring about the end of a struggle which General Cameron had more than once frankly despaired of finishing.
"The nature of the country forbids the idea of a decisive blow being struck in the Whanganui district," he once wrote to Sir George Grey, "and if Her Majesty's troops are to be detained in the colony until one is struck, I confess I see no prospect of their leaving New Zealand."
No doubt General Cameron was right in considering the country indicated as probably the most difficult in New Zealand in which to engage in military operations; but, even in the more accessible Waikato plains, he had not conducted the war with that dash which the colonists knew to be necessary for the speedy subjugation of the natives. Even the Maori considered him slow and, notwithstanding his personal courage, contemptuously styled him "the sea-gull with the broken wing," because of his tendency to avoid the bush and encamp upon or near the shore. Lastly, his Fabian policy had cost the colony an enormous sum, and the British Government, irritated by the expense of its generous response to the colony's appeal for aid, now demanded £40 per head per annum for all soldiers kept in New Zealand at the request of the Colonial Government, after the 1st of January, 1865. The answer of the colony to this was to beg the Home Government to remove the Imperial troops to the last man, declaring the colony ready and able to undertake its own defence.