Now when the natives became generally armed with the musket they at once abandoned the hills, and, to save themselves the great labour and inconvenience occasioned by the necessity of continually carrying provisions, fuel, and water to these precipitous hill-castles--which would be also, as a matter of necessity, at some inconvenient distance from at least some part of the extensive cultivations--descended to the low lands, and there, in the centre of the cultivations, erected a new kind of fortification adapted to the capabilities of the new weapon. _This_ was their destruction. For they built their oven-like houses in mere swamps, where the water, even in summer, sprang with the pressure of the foot, and where in winter the houses were often completely flooded. There, lying on the spongy soil, on beds of rushes which rotted under them--in little low dens of houses, or kennels, heated like ovens at night and dripping with damp in the day--full of noxious exhalations from the damp soil, and impossible to ventilate--they were cut off by disease in a manner absolutely frightful. No advice would they take: they could not _see_ the enemy which killed them, and therefore could not believe the Europeans who pointed out the cause of their destruction. This change of residence was universal, and everywhere followed by the same consequences, more or less marked: the strongest men were cut off and but few children were reared. And even now, after the dreadful experience they have had, and all the continual remonstrances of their pakeha friends, they take but very little more precaution in choosing sites for their houses than at first; and when a native village or a native house happens to be in a dry healthy situation, it is often more the effect of accident than design. Twenty years ago a _hapu_, in number just forty persons, removed their _kainga_ from a dry healthy position to the edge of a _raupo_ swamp. I happened to be at the place a short time after the removal, and with me there was a medical gentleman who was travelling through the country. In creeping into one of the houses (the chief's) through the low door, I was obliged to put both my hands to the ground; they both sank into the swampy soil, making holes which immediately filled with water. The chief and his family were lying on the ground on rushes, and a fire was burning, which made the little den, not in the highest place more than five feet high, feel like an oven. I called the attention of my friend to the state of this place called a "house." He merely said, "_men_ cannot live here." Eight years from that day the whole _hapu_ were extinct; but, as I remember, two persons were shot for bewitching them and causing their deaths.