Siege of Ngatapa

The siege of Ngatapa was an engagement that took place from 31 December 1868 to 5 January 1869 during Te Kooti's War in the East Coast region of New Zealand.

Te Kooti's War was part of the New Zealand Wars, a series of conflicts between the British, the local authorities and their Māori allies on one side, and several Māori iwi (tribes) on the other, that took place from 1843 to 1872. Like some of the later clashes in this period, Te Kooti's War had a religious basis. Te Kooti was the leader of the Ringatū religion and gathered a following of disenfranchised Māori who like himself had been exiled to the Chatham Islands in 1866 by the government. After two years of captivity, they escaped to the mainland, landing on the East Coast in July 1868. Pursued by the local militia, Te Kooti and his followers moved inland. He mounted a raid in November in Poverty Bay which resulted in the murders of several local settlers and a series of skirmishes with Māori aligned with the government—known as kūpapa—followed.

Te Kooti and his 300 followers, along with their families and a number of prisoners, retreated to the hillfort—or pā—at Ngatapa (Māori: Ngātapa). An initial attack made on 4 December by warriors of the Ngāti Porou iwi, led by Ropata Wahawaha, was fended off. At the end of the month, the Armed Constabulary—a regular paramilitary force—commanded by Colonel George Whitmore, along with Ropata's Ngāti Porou warriors, surrounded the pā. After being encircled and cut off from their water supply for almost a week, Te Kooti and his men escaped down a cliff face that their attackers believed to be inaccessible. Many of Te Kooti's followers were subsequently captured and executed by the Ngāti Porou and some Māori members of the Armed Constabulary with the cognisance of Whitmore, a massacre that has in modern times been condemned as an abuse of law and human rights.