In 1826 a man from Kāpiti Island sat still in a room in London while an Englishman looked at his face and tried to copy it.
His name was Te Pehi Kupe. He was Ngāti Toa. And he outranked Te Rauparaha.
The manuscript is blunt about it in a way that a family history usually is not. With these ancestors in his genealogy Te Pehi Kupe was considered higher in rank than Te Rauparaha, and also a leading chief among the Te Ātiawa tribes. He was Te Rauparaha's senior in years and in his superior birth.
That is not a small thing to write down about the most famous name your family has.
The painter's name was John Sylvester. He would have set the man in a chair and turned the light so it fell across him, the way painters do.
Think about what he was actually looking at.
A moko is not decoration. It is not a picture of anything. It is a man's whakapapa carried on his own face, cut in with a chisel, line by line, over years. It says who he came from. It is the most personal document a person can own because it is not a document at all, it is him.
Te Pehi Kupe carried his entire line into England on his face, in 1826, and sat down in front of a man who had no idea what he was reading.
And the Englishman copied it anyway. Carefully. Line by line, without knowing what a single one of them meant. Which means that somewhere in a collection there is a piece of canvas that holds a Ngāti Toa whakapapa, written in a language the man holding the brush could not read, and it is still there.
He did not go to England to be painted. He went for muskets.
He came back through Sydney and bought them there, and the manuscript records that he returned in time to join the expedition, which is a very quiet way of saying he made it home for the war.
Before that he had taken Kāpiti Island. He is the one who actually took it, with his Te Ātiawa allies of Ngāti Haumia and some Ngāti Kōata, and only after he had taken it could Te Rauparaha cross over from the mainland to the safety of the island.
And here the man who wrote this manuscript does the thing that makes the whole document worth trusting.
He writes that when Te Pehi decided to attack Kāpiti, Te Rauparaha is known to have cherished the hope that Te Pehi might fall in the assault, and by his death rid him of a powerful rival in the councils of the tribe.
That is a descendant of Ngāti Toa writing down that Ngāti Toa's great leader hoped his own senior chief would die in a battle. He did not soften it and he did not leave it out.
Two years after the portrait, at Kaiapohia, Kai Tahu killed him.
The compiler's own hand, written beside the picture: Killed by Kaiapoi at Kaiapohia in 1828. Refer Folio (C).
So the face was gone in 1828 and the painting was not.
He is the only ancestor in the whole of this reading who has a picture, and he is from 1826. Every other photograph the family holds is a Huntley or a Timms or a Keenan from the last hundred and fifty years. This one is older than the camera.
The last thing.
His great-grandmother was a woman called Kahutaiki, of the Ngāti Haumia hapū. And Ngāti Haumia is written, on another page of the same manuscript, beside a canoe ancestor of Hika Mapu.
Which means that when the compiler wrote that the Ngāti Toa people are close relations to this family, and put Te Pehi Kupe on the same chart as his own line, he was not being generous. He was being accurate.
The exact rung of the ladder between them has never been drawn. Kin is stated. The rung is not.
Both of those are true at once, and the honest version is better than the tidy one, because the honest version is the one that will still be standing in a hundred years.
Where this comes from
Pages 28, 29, 49 and 163 of the sixty-four page whakapapa manuscript held by Karen Philips, and a printed and published table of Ngāti Toa descent bound into the same folio, read from the original photographs, 20 and 21 August 2026.
The portrait is reproduced in the manuscript with its printed caption: Te Pehi Kupe painted in England in 1826 by John Sylvester. Ngāti Toa. The quoted passages about his rank, about the muskets, and about Te Rauparaha's hope are the compiler's own words.
The printed table gives his descent as Te Maunu and Kahutaiki, then Pikauterangi, then Pi Toitoi, then Te Pehi Kupe, then his son Te Hiko o te Rangi.
A caution kept on purpose. There are two women called Kahutaiki in this record and they must never be joined. One is Te Pehi's great-grandmother, the sixth wife of Te Maunu. The other is Te Rauparaha's eighth wife and Hika Mapu's aunt. Different husbands, different generations, different children. The printed table proves they are two women. Anyone retelling this should keep them apart.
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