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The Island of the Long Cloud was really two very large land masses, and composed of many powerful chieftain-ruled principalities—much like Japan to the far northeast. As long as the islands and their patchwork of Maori tribal kingdoms remained isolated from the outer world, things continued the same century after century in its warlike, clannish society.

But technological advances in Western Europe empowered Europeans to begin an unstoppable conquest and colonization of the whole earth. The Island of the Long Cloud, along with the greater islands in the north and a thousand miles to the east, were in time to experience a first, epochal visit by white-skinned “Europeans.”

The visitors came on strangely configured Great Canoes, that piled sail upon sail upon sail into a mountain of sails, all used to propel the canoe forward in any kind of sea or weather. What was more interesting than the unnecessary waste of sails, to the thinking of the Maori, was the arms of the warriors aboard. Maori were always fighting. They loved warfare—though they had taken thought never to make it so fierce that everyone was killed on the losing side and all the houses of the pa were destroyed.

What would be the good of that? They reasoned. Kill their chief warriors, maybe even their chieftain or king, and that would be enough victory for anyone to enjoy. The following year, war could be made again by the opposing villages or kingdoms, without much harm to either contestant. War dancing was very important. Looking fierce, acting fierce, were highly valued postures in the war dances—but indiscriminate slaughter of the enemy was unthinkable.

After all, they were all Maori on the Island Kingdom of the Long Cloud.

The Europeans changed the whole thing from the start with their stupifying armanents. The Maori found that the Europeans could launch many ships, fitted out with monstrous, thundering, fire-spitting pipes that shot giant balls of stone or iron.

Nothing, no wooden, bone-plated shield or chief's flagship hull however thick, could stop such projectiles. Terrifying the Maori because the pipes could thunder and spit in the darkness of night as well as in the day, they destroyed everything in their path.

The Maori also found out that the European white people also possessed clever hand-held pipes of various sizes that thundered and shot small balls of metal that pierced every kind of armor the Maori possessed. These balls of metal were pointed like spears and sometimes flew right through a man’s body as though it were made of air.

Often they killed a man outright, before he could even fall and strike the ground, which was hard to do even with an expert spear thrust.

That was how deadly the Europeans’ weapons were. Equipped with such things, the Europeans thought nothing of slaughtering whole tribes and villages if anyone opposed their coming in and taking away the people’s lands and goods.

Before the Maori could put aside their age-old differences and rivalries, the Europeans had gained so much ground that they could not be thrown back into the sea. Fighting against superior weapons, the Maori were slaughtered, and the last of the tribes made peace with the white people. Some tribes freely sold their lands to the white people and refused to fight for them any more. Having much money with them, the white people gladly bought up tribal lands in this way, sparing them the trouble of going to war for them. Yet if war broke out, they won and the land fell to them anyway.

According to the treaty they were obliged to sign, the Maori received a portion of their country in the northern island—that was all. Everything else became the possession of the invading white people.

It was a dark day for the Maori, who understood war, but not this kind of unconditional warfare, where one side took everything, or virtually everything away from the defeated side.

In the later days of the wars against the Europeans, it was likely that one side would surrender before others were ready to do so and sell off their lands, and so it was that the tribe of Chief Te Hapuku had a falling out with the tribe of Chief Karaitiana, because Chief Karaitiana decided to fight no more and lose his people and lands for nothing, while Chief Te Hapuku wanted to fight on, just to see if that was the better way.

Chief Te Hapuku never forgave Chief Karaitiana for giving up so soon, before he lost all his warriors and had only women and children left in his pa. He attacked Chief Karaitiana, and in the bloody war they lose many warriors on both sides, gaining nothing from the conflict, which weakened them before the white people.

As for Chief Te Hapuku, he went back to war against the white people and was defeated so badly that he lost all his sons, and most of the sons of the women of his pa also lost theirs, so that it was a mournful place in his remaining years after he was thrust by the victorious white people upon the Maori reservation land allotted to him. The loneliness, added to his crushing defeat, greatly embittered the chief, and he would have nothing to do with his former friend, ally, and fellow chief, Karaitiana.

Twenty five years passed and Te Hapuku lay dying on his bed in his pa at Te Aute Lake.

Sir George Grey, a white chief who though Premier of New Zealand had tied himself in friendship to Karaitiana, heard of Te Hapuku’s imminent death. He told Karaitiana, and the old chief mourned to think that they had warred against each other in their youth and never had renewed their Maori vows of kinship since they disputed concerning the sale of the rich country between Seventy-Mile Bush and Napier.