On April 2, 1863, the headquarters and eight companies under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Chapman sailed from Portsmouth in the ship _Elizabeth Anne Bright_, followed on the 12th by the two service companies under Brevet-Colonel G. J. Carey in the ship _Norwood_.[186] The depôt companies were stationed at Buttevant. After a prosperous and, for a sailing-ship, a rapid voyage of ninety-one days, the _Elizabeth Anne Bright_ on the 4th of July reached Auckland, where three weeks later the _Norwood_ arrived also. When the leading ship dropped anchor, the Royal Irish learned that war had broken out with the natives, and that the battalion was to take the field at once. Before describing the part played by the XVIIIth in the campaign a short account must be given of the Maoris, the enemy at whose hands the second battalion was to receive its baptism of fire. According to native traditions, New Zealand was peopled many centuries ago by an adventurous race (said by ethnologists to be of Malay stock) who, swarming off from the Melanesian archipelago, crossed the Southern Pacific in war canoes and landed in New Zealand, which they named the Land of the Long White Cloud. Either the country was uninhabited or the aborigines were easily conquered, for no trace of their presence is found in Maori folklore. The newcomers first occupied the coasts, and then gradually spread over the whole of the North and South islands, forming clans which recognised no central authority and held all land within their borders as the property not of individuals but of the tribe. Between the tribes there was incessant strife, which hardened the Maoris into a nation of fighting men, skilled not only in every wile of savage warfare but also, as we shall see, in the art of fortifying their strongholds.