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Scene of the crime: As rebellion swept across the eastern North Island in the late 1860s, a man fighting for the famous Māori leader Te Kooti became the first — and last — New Zealander executed for treason. Was his hanging just, or was he an expedient fall guy?
As the hangman pulled a hood over his face, Hamiora Pere uttered a long, quavering wail. At 8.30am precisely on November 16, 1869, the sheriff at the Terrace Gaol in Wellington had handed Pere over to the executioner, who had pinioned Pere’s hands and arms before walking the condemned Māori man toward the gallows.
As Pere wept and moaned quietly, the Rev. Stock offered him the “consolations of the religion in his native language”, the Evening Post newspaper reported, the vicar’s words seemingly calming the panicking man.
But once upon the gallows’ drop, with the noose around his neck and the hood pulled into place, Pere again became unmanned by what was about to happen.
What had brought him to this sorry place was treason, a crime transplanted to the colony of New Zealand from English law. It meant Pere had “levied war against her Majesty the Queen, her Crown and dignity etc”. The punishment under English law was still, even in Victorian times, a medieval one: the guilty were to be hanged, drawn and quartered, though a judge had rule only the first penalty need stand for Pere.
A month earlier, at trials at Wellington’s Supreme Court, he had been among four Māori found guilty of treason. All had been capture near Ngātapa, an ancient hill pā inland from Tūranganui-a-Kiwa/Poverty Bay, and they were lucky to still be alive.
For a few weeks or so in late 1868, Ngātapa had been held by hundreds of men, women and children led by Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruk, the famous Rongowhakaata military leader, against a combine force of colonial militia and Ngāti Porou fighters loyal to the government.
Just after the new year, this combined government force led by Lieutenant Colonel George Whitmore had successfully stormed into the pā on the second attempt. Fleeing capture, Te Kooti and his followers had escaped down cliffs, though some 270 of his group were soon caught, and as many as half then murdered by the colonial forces on the orders of Whitmore.
Among those spared summary death, Pere and four others — Matene Te Karo, Hetariki Te Oikau, Rewi Tamanui Totitoti and Wi Tamararo — were shipped to Wellington for what amounted to show trials.
In separate hearings, four, including Pere, were found guilty of treason, though one among their number, Tamararo, had the treason charge dropped but was convicted of murder. All were bound to be hanged before fate, suicide and the colony’s Governor intervened.
In the weeks following the trials Te Karo, Te Oikau and Totitoti had their death sentences for treason commuted to penal servitude, while the murderer Tamararo cheated the executioner by committing suicide. Only Pere was to hang for treason. The question on November 16, 1869 — and the question still — was why only him?
Te Kooti did not want the war that swept up Hamiora Pere, but for the six months leading up to the defeat at Ngātahi it seemed he might just win it.
In 1868, Te Kooti and hundreds of well-armed followers arrived in Poverty Bay after escaping from the Chatham Islands where Te Kooti had been exiled after accusations of spying for the enemy while fighting on the government’s side in an 1865 campaign against the Māori religious movement Pai Mārire.
On returning to Poverty Bay on July 10, Te Kooti, now the prophet of his own religious movement Ringatū, intended to travel to Waikato to challenge the Māori King Tāwhiao as the spiritual leader of all Māori. However, he was blocked from leaving the bay by the Tūranga (later renamed Gisborne) area’s government representative, the magistrate Reginald Biggs. He demanded Te Kooti and his followers disarm. Te Kooti refused.
On July 20, colonial forces, including Māori loyal to the Crown, confronted the rebellious Te Kooti and his followers inland from the bay at Pāparatū but were defeated, triggering a guerrilla campaign by Te Kooti that would cost the lives of hundreds.
Two more quick victories followed for Te Kooti during the next few weeks before he set himself up at Puketapu pā, a base of operations where Hamiora Pere, who claimed to be of Te Kooti’s people (others said he was not) joined Te Kooti’s force, the Supreme Court would later be told.
As winter turned to spring, and after rejecting a government attempt to negotiate peace, Te Kooti made the decision to attack and reclaim Pākeha-controlled land in Poverty Bay, declaring “God would give the Tūranganui country, and all the best places of the Europeans” back to him and his people.
On November 10, Te Kooti ’s forces attacked Matawhero, near Tūranga, killing some 54 people, including Biggs and more than 20 Maori, before ordering the execution of captured prisoners, including women and children. Further killings of the unarmed, including seven chiefs, took place two days later at Ōweta pā. Through violence and terror, Te Kooti now controlled Poverty Bay. It would not last.
With further government troops on the way, Te Kooti withdrew in early December 1868 to Ngātapa pā, a redoubt thought to be impregnable until government forces managed to get inside the pā’s outer defences on January 5.
Te Kooti and his defenders fled down cliffs using vines. He would escape into Tūhoe country and live to fight on. But for hundreds of his followers the defeat was a death sentence.
It took just a day to try and convict Hamiora Pere. Before the hearing on September 28, 1869, he had been charged with murder and treason. However by the time he entered the dock at the Supreme Court — Pere and Wi Tamararo were the first to be tried under the new Disturbed Districts Act 1869 which expedited trials and reduced juries — only the second charge still stood.
The Crown argued that Pere had voluntarily joined Te Kooti’s forces and had, when armed with a musket, been seen leaving as part of kokiri (war parties) sent to attack settlements, including those at Matawhero and Ōweta. Pere had also, witnesses attested, been in the presence of Te Kooti when the leader ordered the killing of “government people” at Ōweta and when killings at other places were discussed. Yet the evidence was murky. While two eyewitnesses said Tamararo, who was found guilty of murder the day before Pere’s trial and committed suicide a day later, had killed while on Te Kooti’s kokiri, no witnesses called at the trial had seen Pere kill anyone.
Indeed he had not wanted to be there all. His defence lawyer argued Pere had been conscripted into Te Kooti’s forces under duress — a claim supported by the Crown’s witness, Marta Te Owai, one of Te Kooti’s wives — and had not fought willingly. Press-ganged though he had been, Pere argued he been defending his land and people, and did recognise Crown sovereignty over his actions.
The jury was not convinced. In less than 15 minutes it returned with its verdict: Pere was guilty of treason, just like the three others, Matene Te Karo, Hetariki Te Oikau and Rewi Tamanui Totitoti, who had fought in Te Kooti rebellion.
All five prisoners captured at Ngātapa and transported to Wellington for trial, including the convicted murderer Tamararo, had been found guilty and condemned to hang — but only one would, Pere.
In a surprise move on November 2, the Governor Sir George Bowen commuted Te Karo, Te Oikau and Totitoti’s death sentences for treason to imprisonment, citing mitigating circumstances for each. Tamararo, who was certainly bound to be hanged for murder, was by then dead already.
What made Pere beyond redemption? Nearly 150 years on from his execution, the Waitangi Tribunal was of the view, with Tamararo dead, the Crown may well have believed that someone still had to hang. In a 2004 report on treaty claims by Poverty Bay iwi, the Tribunal concluded all five men were given what were likely “show trials” and that Pere, while guilty of treason, was “hanged for reasons other than those contained in the evidence” against him.
“There was no reason why Hamiora Pere was singled out to be executed,” the counsel for the Te Whananua Kai iwi argued during Tribunal hearings, “other than to set an example. Such a reason was not just.”
The Tribunal’s final view on the Pere case concluded, “The Crown needed someone to be hanged for the Matawhero atrocity. We are concerned … that this was decisive [in the decision to hang Pere alone].”
The unnamed but insightful writer for Wellington’s Evening Post newspaper who witnessed Pere’s hanging reported that after the gallows’ drop fell — “without noise or effort” — the condemned man’s chest and shoulders heaved. After about two minutes, his body hung motionless.
“Death in all forms is responsive to the living, but a judicial execution is peculiarly so,” the reporter wrote. “The preparations, the pinioning, the waiting with strained attention for the fatal minute, the solemn service for the dead recited over a living man, the executioner busy about his ghastly work with nervous fingers, and the swinging round of an inert mass, which a moment before was a man. All are peculiarly horrible and would cause almost any man, however guilty the victim may have been, to wish he could undo the judicial tragedy”.
Perhaps no more so than in the Crown’s expedient execution of Hamiora Pere.
