[Illustration: Hongi's last "word" to his people] Fifteen months later, as he lay upon his death mats at Whangaroa, feasting his glazing eyes upon the array of clubs, battleaxes, muskets, and _tupara_ set around the bed, he called to him his relatives, his dearest friends, and his fighting-chiefs, and spoke to them this word:-- "Children, and you who have carried my arms to victory, this is my word to you. I promised long ago to be kind to the _mihonari_, and I have kept my promise. It is not my fault if they have not been well treated by others. Do as I have done. Let them dwell in peace; for they do no harm, and some good. "Hear ye this word also. The ends of the world draw together, and men of a strong race come ever over the sea to this our land. Let these likewise dwell in peace. Trade with them. Give them your daughters in marriage. Good shall come of it. "But, if there come over the sea men in red coats, who neither sow nor reap, but ever carry arms in their hands, beware of them. Their trade is war and they are paid to kill. Make you war upon them and drive them out. Otherwise evil will come of it. "Children, and you, my old comrades, be brave and strong in your country's cause. Let not the land of your ancestors pass into the hands of the Pakeha. Behold! I have spoken." With that the mighty chief Hongi drew the corner of his mat across his face and passed through the gates to the waters of Reinga. So died Hongi Ika, aged fifty-five, or thereabouts, who had made his influence felt from his youth until his death, and whose words and acts deeply swayed the fortunes of his country. Paradoxical as it may sound, these combined with the spread of Christianity to render colonisation possible, while they helped to foment the discontent with which Hongi's successors viewed the coming of armed forces, and the gradual absorption of their land by the Pakeha. In the first place, Hongi protected the missionaries. In the second place, during his wars and the wars they induced, more than twenty thousand Maori fell in the score of years occupied in civil strife. Concerned with their own wars, and with numbers thinned, the Maori left the white settlers time and opportunity to increase, whereby they grew daily better able to resist the power of the brown men when this was at last sternly directed against them. In the third place, Hongi's dying advice was without the shadow of a doubt the part cause of Honi Heke's outbreak at Kororareka fifteen years later, and of the strife which immediately followed it. After the death of Hongi the leading spirits among the warriors in the neighbourhood of the Bay of Islands were the chiefs Pomare and Kawiti--the latter a thorn in the colonials' flesh for many a long year; while the Waikato tribe boasted a leader of no ordinary parts in Te Wherowhero, whose descendant, the Honourable Mahuta Tawhiao Potatau te Wherowhero, sits to-day in the Legislative Council of the Dominion of New Zealand.