The East Cape War, sometimes also called the East Coast War, refers to a series of conflicts that were fought in the North Island of New Zealand from about 13 April 1865 to June 1868. There were at least three separate unrelated campaigns fought in the area during a period of relative peace between the main clashes of the New Zealand land wars, between the end of the Invasion of the Waikato, and beginning of Te Kooti's War. Although separate, they have all come to be known together as the East Cape War.
All of these conflicts stem from a common cause, the arrival of the Pai Marire Movement or Hau Hauism from the Taranaki region around 1865. Originally Pai Marire was a peaceful religion, a combination of Christianity and traditional Māori beliefs, but it quickly evolved into a violent and vehemently anti-European (Pākehā) movement. The arrival of the Hau Hau in the East Cape effectively destabilized the whole region causing great alarm among the settlers and also seriously disrupting Māori society because of its disregard for traditional tribal structures. During this period the New Zealand Government was inadvertently helping Pai Marire recruitment by the confiscation of rebel Māori land,amounting to 3% of New Zealand's land, a policy that understandably generated enormous resentment among rebel Māori who had land confiscated.
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Read more about East Cape War: Early Actions, Waerenga A Hika, Ngāti Kahungunu Civil War, Napier, Tauranga Again, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words east, cape and/or war:
“Though all the East did quake to hear
Of Alexander’s dreadful name,
And all the West likewise did fear
To hear of Julius Caesar’s fame,”
—Robert Southwell (1561?–1595)
“A solitary traveler whom we saw perambulating in the distance loomed like a giant. He appeared to walk slouchingly, as if held up from above by straps under his shoulders, as much as supported by the plain below. Men and boys would have appeared alike at a little distance, there being no object by which to measure them. Indeed, to an inlander, the Cape landscape is a constant mirage.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)