“marched to the Surrey redoubt; it was very hot as we skirted the swamps and many men fainted from the heat. We placed a detachment in the redoubt, slept in the open outside it, and marched at 5.30 A.M. next day eight miles to the Esk redoubt on high ground in open fern-covered country. Here I left Briggs and a detachment and took my company down to the Miranda redoubt, four miles farther on, situated at the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the estuary of the Thames and defended by a small river on the north side. Here I had command of two hundred men, one half being Waikato militia. We enlarged the redoubt and made a road down to the landing-place (previously all stores were dragged up the face of the cliff and the Commissariat suffered heavy losses). We made a floating bridge over the small river, sunk a well for drinking water, and built a small redoubt on the approach from the south in which a strong piquet was posted at night. Boats being unable to come in at low water we made a causeway across the mud flats to a deep-water landing-place.... We were annoyed at first by spies and small parties of the enemy at night, so I sent out scouring parties and destroyed their villages, bringing in large quantities of beautiful peaches, potatoes, and other vegetables.” At the end of January, General Cameron had accumulated enough stores at Ngaruawahia to warrant his advancing farther to the southward. He therefore worked up the right bank of the Waipa, building and garrisoning redoubts as he advanced, and in a few days reached the village of Te Rore, where for nearly three weeks he was brought to a halt--not by the enemy, but by the eternal difficulty of supply and transport. Shoals in the rivers made water-carriage uncertain, and though the crews of the little steamers, the flat-bottomed row-boats, and the other craft specially built for the expedition did their best, this mode of transport was always liable to break down. By land things were no better. In the plain between the Waikato and Waipa rivers there were hardly any roads, and the native paths, winding through forests of tree ferns, were so narrow that men could only march in single file. These paths crossed innumerable creeks running in deep watercourses, impassable for guns or waggons till roads had been cut down the steep banks and bridges thrown over the streams. The difficulty of keeping supplied even the small number of men--less than 2500--who were concentrated at Te Rore was enormous, for though Cameron’s headquarters were only eighty miles from his base at Auckland, every box of “stores had to be shifted twelve or fourteen times on account of changes of land and water carriage.”[201] To relieve this strain Cameron cut a road through the bush to Raglan, a port twenty miles distant on the west coast, and thus gained a second or subsidiary base, but as a set-off to this advantage a considerable number of men were necessarily withdrawn