There was an old man standing on a boundary line, and the whole of the Waikato was coming toward him.
His name was Puanaki. He was paramount chief of all the Ngāti Mutunga people, and he was old enough by then that nobody would have thought less of him for what he was about to be asked to do.
Te Rauparaha had come south out of Kāwhia with his Ngāti Toa, and with Ngāti Rārua and Ngāti Kōata beside him. He had not come to conquer anybody. He had come because the bones of the old Ngāti Toa chiefs were still lying in the north, and Waikato were close to them, and he could not sleep with that. The manuscript says it plainly. He feared they would find the burial sites and use the bones of his ancestors for fish hooks and other degrading purposes. So he was gathering warriors to go back and lift them and carry them somewhere safe.
Puanaki took them in. Some of his own people had married into Ngāti Toa, so they were not strangers, they were relations, and in this family that has always been the whole of the argument.
Then Waikato appeared on the boundary.
They were led by Pōtatau Te Wherowhero of Ngāti Mahuta, paramount chief of most of the Waikato confederation, and one day he would be the first Māori King. He sent word ahead, and the word was reasonable, and that is what made it hard.
We only want Ngāti Toa. Hand them over and this ends here.
Puanaki was an old man with an army in front of him and a way out being offered to him, and he looked at the people sheltering behind him, and he said no.
The words the manuscript keeps are these. He decided that his tribe would stand alongside their relations of the Ngāti Toa and fight as one army.
They were clever about it. They sent one party forward to meet Waikato in the open, and they kept the rest of the warriors lying down in the scrub where nobody could see them.
Hika Mapu's family were in that fight. Her cousin Te Rōpū of Ngāti Mutunga was in the forward party, and so was her uncle Te Rauparaha.
Te Rauparaha gave the signal to run.
It was a lie. It was meant to be a lie. But Te Rōpū did not know that, and he was young and he was brave in the wrong direction, and he shouted at the old warrior to stop running and turn and fight.
His own relative wrote that down. He did not tidy it. He could have left it out and nobody would ever have known there was a shout on that field, and instead he wrote that Te Rauparaha was too battle wise to these comments and kept going, and led the whole pursuing Waikato army straight into the scrub where the fresh men were waiting.
They came out of the ground. Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Rārua, Ngāti Kōata, all of them fresh, and Waikato had been running and were out of breath, and it was over quickly.
And here is where the story stops being a battle and becomes something else.
Waikato broke. They would have been hunted down until every last one was captured or killed. It had gone that far.
Except one man had been left behind in the retreat.
Te Wherowhero stood alone on an open piece of field and would not move. He called out to them. He challenged them, one after another, to come and get him. The account of this is written by a man whose own people were on the other side, and he does not stint it. He writes that Te Wherowhero was hard pressed at times and fought like a true rangatira, and that many took up his challenge and paid dearly for their temerity.
The pursuit stopped. A whole army stopped, because of one man standing in a field.
One of the ones who walked out to him was Puanaki.
He got close enough. He swung the taiaha and it grazed the forehead of the man who would be King, and that is as near as anybody came all day. And Te Wherowhero came back with his own, and the blow took out one of Puanaki's eyes.
The manuscript calls him one of the lucky ones.
He was. He was lucky because he lived.
And then they let Te Wherowhero go. He was allowed to depart northwards, and he rejoined what was left of his Waikato troops, and they went home.
He had walked out into the open expecting to die and he had saved his people by doing it, and the men who had every reason to kill him stood there and watched him walk away north with the light behind him.
Puanaki is Hika Mapu's grand-uncle.
He was uncle to two sisters. One of them, Kahutaiki, married Te Rauparaha and became his eighth wife. The other, Haumarewa, became the mother of Takune Hika Mapu, who would own forty thousand acres of the Chatham Islands in her own name and marry an Irishman out of County Cork.
So when the old man stood on that boundary and refused to hand his relations over, the relations he was refusing to hand over were the family he already had, and the family that had not been born yet, and every one of them since.
He kept them with one word and it cost him an eye.
Where this comes from
Pages 24, 25 and 26 of the sixty-four page whakapapa manuscript held by Karen Philips, compiled and signed by a member of the Henare whānau and addressed to George Henare. Read from the original photographs, 20 August 2026.
The quoted phrases are the compiler's own words. "Stand alongside their relations of the Ngāti Toa and fight as one army." "Too battle wise to these comments." "Fought like a true rangatira." "Paid dearly for their temerity." "Which ripped out one of Puanaki's eyes." "One of the lucky ones."
Pōtatau Te Wherowhero is a documented figure of New Zealand history and became the first Māori King in 1858. The relationships between Puanaki, Haumarewa, Kahutaiki and Hika Mapu are drawn on page 170 of the same manuscript, where Puanaki is written PURNAKI and is shown as the brother of Te Puia, who is the mother of both sisters.
This is the whakapapa Karen holds and it names her people. The exact line joining her own Huntley and Kere descent to Hika Mapu's line is the one thing still being traced, and it is being traced honestly. Nothing in this story depends on it.
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