Kimble [Kimball] Bent An Unusual European Who Deserted The British Army And Joined The Hau Hau #37

Kimble [Kimball] Bent

From Hukatere the pakeha-Maori and his girl wife went to Taiporohenui, Bent's old home in the war days.

There he lived for a year or so, blanketed like a Maori, and working in the cultivations.

Here, too, in the long nights he was much with the old men of the kainga, and from such learned men as Hupini and Pokau, true tohungas, or priests, and soothsayers, he learned much of the strange occultism of the Maori.

He saw singular ceremonies, the rites of the makutu, the black art.

He learned scores of karakias, incantations useful in Maori eyes for all sorts of purposes, all conditions of war and peacetime.

Some of these were makutu spells by which the wizard could slay an enemy, by witchcraft and the power of the evil eye.

Many a case of death from makutu came under Bent's observation during his life among the Maoris.

Old Hupini, says the pakeha-Maori, undoubtedly killed men with his makutu, a combination of three factors, projection of the will force, the malignant exercise of hypnotic influence, and sheer imagination and fright on the part of the person makutu'd.

Many Maoris believe that the witchcraft can be wrought by an adept or tohunga by taking some of the hair or clothing or even remains of the food of the person intended to be slain and pronouncing the appropriate powerful karakias and curses over it.

The enemy's hau, his life-essence, his vital force, then lies in the hollow of the tohunga's hand.

A tohunga can take the hau of a man's footprints and thereby makutu him, he can even makutu an enemy's horse so that it will fall sick and not be able to travel.

Amongst the prayers and ceremonies which old Hupini taught Bent were the karakia for combating the evil spell of the makutu and for restoring a bewitched and ailing person to health and safety, to the Land of Light and Life, the Ao-marama.

One of these rites Bent describes in true Maori fashion,

A person is taken seriously ill, it is the makutu.

The wise man is called in, he divines that the illness is caused by another tohunga's witchcraft.

At daylight in the morning, the sick man is carried to the water-side.

The wise man then takes three small sticks or twigs (rito), fern-sticks will do, and sets them up by the side of the river or the pool.

One of these sacred wands represents the invalid, one the tribe to which he belongs, and one the mischief-working wizard (te tangata nana te makutu).

A charm is said over them, and then two rito are taken away, leaving only one, that for the wizard, the “wand of darkness.”

An incantation, beginning:

“Toko i te po, te po nui, te po roa”

(“Staff of the night, the great night, the long night”),

etc. is repeated over this wand.

When this is said the priest conducts the sick person to the edge of the water and sprinkles water over his body, repeating as he does so a charm to expel the makutu spirits from his body, ending with a curse upon the malevolent wizard, ” Eat that tohunga makutu, let him be utterly eaten and destroyed.”

When this is ended the patient is taken back to his house.

He is told that the wise man has, by virtue of his very strong charms, seen the rival tohunga makutu, and that it will not be long before that evil man dies.

The curse falls, the wizard is himself makutu'd, and the invalid, perhaps, recovers.

About the year 1881 Bent, now able to venture into the towns of the pakeha again in safety, left Taranaki, and travelled to Auckland and up to the Waikato.

Then he went on to the west coast, and spent some months amongst the Maoris of the Ngati-Mahuta tribe, living in the historic old settlement Maketu, on the shores of Kawhia Harbour, close to the legendary landing-place of the Tainui canoe, the Waikato Maoris' pilgrim ship.

Tawhiao, the Maori King, was then living at Kawhia, and he asked Bent to remain with him and be his pakeha and interpreter.

The white man was now, however, wearying to be back in his old home, Taranaki.

“Tawhiao,” says Bent, “insisted on me remaining with his tribe, but I repeated a Maori incantation which I had been taught by the tohungas in Taranaki, a karakia used as a charm by strangers (tangata tauhou) who may desire to leave the place where they are staying on a visit and proceed to a new pa, and who fear obstruction.

The charm begins:

“‘Ka u, ka u, ki tenei tauhou,
Ki tenei whenua tauhou.’

“When the old king heard me repeat the incantation he exclaimed,

“‘Ha, so you are a tohunga’

“‘Yes, I am,’ I replied.

“Then the old man said,

‘Kua tuwhera te rori mou’

(‘The road is open to you.’)

He permitted me to return to Taranaki, and sent four of his men to escort me through the King Country to Waitara.”

The last quarter-century of Kimble Bent's life has not carried many adventures.

Living amongst the Maoris, he acquired some reputation as a “medicine-man.”

During his wildlife in Maoridom, he had become expert in the rude pharmacopoeia of the bush, and learned to extract potent medicines from the plants of the forest.

Native herbs and tree-bark and leaves, prepared in various ways, are exceedingly valuable remedies.

The knowledge of these herbal remedies, gained from many a tohunga and wise woman of the bush tribes, the white man now turned to practical account.

His fame as a doctor reached Parihaka, the village of Te Whiti, the Prophet of the Mountain.

Image Source

The prophet's people sent for the white medicine-man to come and heal the sick.

He spent a week in Parihaka, and returned to his Taiporohenui hut with more money in his pocket than he had possessed since he left his old home-town of Eastport to see life in England.

“And I was luckier than most pakeha doctors,” says the old man, “for none of my patients died”

. . . . .

And so the tale of “Tu-nui-a-moa” is told, and we take our leave of the old pakeha-Maori, Kimble Bent, sailor, soldier, outlaw, Hauhau slave, cartridge-maker, pa-builder, canoe-carver, medicine man, and what not, sitting smoking his pipe in the midst of his Maori friends.

He is still living with the natives, working in their food-gardens, fishing with them, house-building for them.

A grey old man, of a mild and quiet eye, who might easily be taken for some highly respectable shopkeeper who had spent all his life in city bounds.

Yet no man probably has lived a wilder life, using the term in the sense of an intimate acquaintance with primaeval, passionate savagery, and with the ever near face of death.

He is the sole living white eye-witness of the secret Hauhau war-rites, the only white man who has survived to tell of those terrible deeds in the bush, to tell the story of the last Taranaki war from the inner side, the Maori side.

Bent has reached the age of seventy-three, and now the old man's thoughts go to his boyhood's home in the far-off State of Maine, and he sometimes expresses a wish to reach his homeland again.

“If I could only get a berth on some American sailing-vessel bound for New York or Boston, I'd even now try to work my passage home,” he says.

“I'd like to die in my mother's land.” But that can never be.

He is forever beyond the pale, and he will die as he has lived, a pakeha-Maori.

Titokowaru died at his village near Manaia, on the Waimate Plains—the scene of his olden battles against the whites, towards the end of 1889.

To the end, he was a sturdy enemy of the Europeans, and though he did not actually fight against them after 1869, he was the leader in many obstructive movements against the white settlement, surveying, and road-making.

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

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-love-story-of-hine-moa-the-maiden-of-rotorua