were also destroyed.⁷ By June 1867, after an inland reconnaissance, Captain Goldsmith of the First Waikato Regiment reported that ‘not one openly hostile is on our Frontier’.⁸ The immediate threat posed by the Hauhaus had been diffused.

Many of the military settlers from the First Waikato Regiment, to whom 12 months’ worth of free rations and an allotment of land in the district had been given in return for their services, had left by the end of 1867. Their lots were sold, according to the Tauranga Record in November 1867, at ‘fabulously low prices’. This, of course, affected the local economy. It was reported that ‘the stores are without purchasers, some are abandoned and the beach is deserted’.⁹ There were a number of reasons for the abandonment of the district by the military settlers. The military settlement scheme itself was badly conceived. Insufficient amounts of land were allocated, more often than not, to men without enough capital or the appropriate experience to make a living from their holdings.

The unsettled state of the district and the fear of ‘Hauhauism’ would have merely highlighted the failure of the settlement scheme. As a result, there was minimal growth in the population, as without the protection that a military settlement afforded, there could be little hope of attracting settlers to the district.¹⁰ Indeed, in 1870, out of 257 settlers in the Tauranga district, 246 were military settlers.¹¹ It was around this that A. F. Halcombe declared that the military settlements were ‘entire failures’. This was Halcombe’s conclusion after producing a report for the government in 1871 on the viability of opening up the district. In this report, Halcombe reviewed the current situation and identified deterrents to settlement:

The causes of such failure are not far to seek. Primarily, the original grantees were not, as a whole, men likely to succeed as farmers. In the next place, they never had a chance of occupying their lands, Maori hostility and the want of inland communication being quite sufficient to prevent successful settlement. As the natural

⁷ Stokes, The Allocation of Reserves, vol. 1, ch. 6. A map of engagements in the Tauranga Bush Campaign may be found in Stokes, Te Raupatu, vol. 1, p. 122.

⁸ Captain Goldsmith to Defence Minister Haultain, 20 June 1867, Le 1 1867/120, NA, cited in Stokes, The Allocation of Reserves, vol. 1, p. 84.

⁹ W. H. Gifford and H. B. Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga, Tauranga, 1940, cited in Stokes, Te Raupatu, vol. 1, p. 177.

¹⁰ Stokes, Te Raupatu, vol. 1, p. 179.

¹¹ Stokes, Te Raupatu, vol. 1, p. 178.