degrade the marine environment and urban development restricted access, Tauranga Moana and the nearby coastline provided them with bountiful supplies of kaimoana. For example, Tai Taikato of Ngati He told the Tribunal that every year when he was a young man his whanau spent a month at Mauao diving for kina. However, Mr Taikato stated that, as the settlement of neighbouring lands progressed, Ngati He lost access to the coastal environment and became confined to land at Maungatapu. Rangiwhakaehu Walker of Ngai Te Ahi recalled collecting pipi, tuangi, and titiko in the Waimapu and Waikareao Estuaries but stated that because of pollution there was now no kaimoana that could be taken from these places.⁸

Islands in the Tauranga area, particularly Matakana, also provided a home well-supplied with resources for several Ngai Te Rangi hapu. Archaeologist Douglas Sutton told the Tribunal that the volcanic part of Matakana Island has magnificent horticultural soil and has been continuously and intensively occupied for more than 670 years.⁹ Archaeological evidence suggests that the Tauranga Moana area generally was one of the most densely settled parts of New Zealand before Europeans arrived.¹⁰ In 1826, one visitor to Tauranga estimated that 2500 people were living on the shores of the harbour. Another estimated the population of the whole district at 6000 in 1831.¹¹ Because early population estimates such as these were only the impression of visitors to the area, they need to be treated with a degree of scepticism. However, all Pakeha who visited Tauranga before 1840 agreed that, relative to other areas, the Tauranga district sustained a large Maori population.¹²

2.1 The ‘Musket Wars’

Whatever the size of the early nineteenth-century Maori population in Tauranga, by 1840 it appears to have suffered a substantial decrease. In part, this was due to introduced diseases, but probably more devastating to Tauranga Maori were the intertribal wars in which they were involved from 1818. As a result of the use of firearms, these conflicts almost certainly caused much greater loss of life than had previous fighting.¹³ We heard a great deal of evidence about these wars, and while these accounts differed on points of detail, the differences are not material to the issues before us in this inquiry. It is the outcomes of the wars which are of concern to us here: while the two decades after the fighting ended were generally peaceful, the alliances and enmities formed in the ‘musket wars’ had a profound effect on the war between the Crown and Maori in the 1860s. Our brief narrative of the wars relies primarily on

8. Document j28, pp 3, 6

9. Document j43

10. Document d7, pp 20–22

11. Document a2, p 4; doc d7, p 22

12. Document d7, pp 20–24

13. Evelyn Stokes, A History of Tauranga County (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1980), pp 70–71; doc j2, p 56