glorious victory. This bloody event must have happened about one hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago, for its hero, Taonga, was the direct ancestor of Te Onetopi (Toby), the chief of Ruapuki, who is still alive, an old man of about eighty years of age, and the narrator named four chiefs between Taonga and Te Onetopi, which places the occurrence six generations back. What was the number of the slain cannot now be determined, though the tradition indicates a large one, but it was probably a hundred or two at the most.
The Maoris appear to have been somewhat of a migratory habit, wandering over the country as the search for food supplies or the lust of bloodshed led them. Tribe after tribe came from the north looking for fresh fields of conquest, and the last of these were the Ngitahu, from whom with a small admixture of the Ngatimamoa, their immediate predecessors, the present remnant of the natives of Otago are descended. As to what led to the withdrawal of the original inhabitants of the site of Dunedin from its neighbourhood tradition is silent. But that they did so is undoubted, for the old whalers tell us that there were no natives living here when they first visited the Otago Heads. It is possible that the advent of the whalers themselves upon the scene may have led to the withdrawal of the last of the Maori residents of Dunedin, by attracting them to the various points along the coast where whaling stations were located. The allurements of the many luxuries brought by the pakehas in the shape of iron tools, blankets, and tobacco, must have proved a strong magnet to draw the vagrant Maori, and one of sufficient potency to lead them even to sink their intertribal differences. According to Mr. Haberfield, a hale and intelligent old man, now resident at Moeraki, whose reminiscences would doubtless form an interesting chapter of our early history, there was a population of between two and three thousand natives at Otago Heads in the early part of 1836, when he first arrived there, but there were none of them who resided up the harbour. Round the coast at Purakanui there was another settlement, numbering some 500 souls; and Mr. Haberfield says he has seen as many as a dozen large double canoes at one time off Otago Heads. Contact with the white man quickly proved disastrous to the Maori, who succumbed to the influences of incipient
