Solomon's Song by Bryce Courtenay

Maggie, has taught you well how to please a wahine.’ Her lips brush his face lightly and then she rises and picks up her feathered cloak from beside his rush bed and he watches as she moves silently out into the moonlit compound.
    ‘Thank you,’ Hawk calls softly after her. ‘Thank you, Hinetitama.’

Unknown

Chapter Two
    HINETITAMA
    1881-1885
    At twenty-one Tommo’s half-caste daughter is a great beauty with skin the colour of wild honey and hair dark as a raven’s wing. She is small, no more than five feet and one inch, but despite her diminutive frame she has a contralto voice of great power and of a most serene beauty. But from all these gifts from a generous God must be subtracted a spirit headstrong and wilful and a nature as wild as her father Tommo’s once was.
    Hawk has kept his promise to Tommo that his daughter will be raised to maturity within the household of Chief Tamihana but when she is six years old Hawk’s dear friend and Hinetitama’s Maori guardian dies and Tommo’s daughter is cared for by Chief Mahuta Tawhiao, with the old chief’s daughter given responsibility for the young child’s daily care.
    When Tamihana knew he was coming to the end of his life he wrote to Hawk. The letter is unusual because the old chief, in a missive so serious, appended a note mentioning women’s matters, in particular those of a child.
    Though Chief Tamihana could well have instructed the letter be sent to Hawk in Tasmania, he wanted his old friend to read it on Maori land while he and his ancestors could look over his shoulder. Hawk was to receive it on his next annual trip to New Zealand to see Hinetitama and to supervise the purchase of more land. The letter, intended for posterity, had been carefully scripted while the note was in the old chief’s mission-taught handwriting.
    April 1866
    My friend Black Hawk,
    We shall no longer sit together by the evening fire or eat again from the same pot. I have now seen sixty summers and it is time for me to join my ancestors.
    I am writing this letter to you, Black Maori, so that you will hold my life on the page and be its custodian and then, perhaps some day, history will judge me for what I tried to do and failed.
    I have had a long life for a Maori man, who does not often see his hair turn white, and who is usually dead while his seed is still strong in his loins. In my time too many of our brace young men have died for some foolish tribal war fought out of false pride or from seeking retribution for some imagined insult.
    When I was a boy my father sent me to the missionaries to learn the white man’s language and his ways. ‘You must see if they have lessons for us,’ he instructed.
    I studied hard and learned to read and write and spent much time with the pakeha’s Bible. I learned that it was a good book from a merciful God and I found it so myself. But I was soon to discover that it was the white man’s Sunday book only and all the remaining days of the week the pakeha felt free to disobey the commandments of his own God.
    It was then that I first realised that the pakeha’s word could not be trusted, not even on Sunday, for it was not founded in his mana. That his God was good only for births and burials and his word was as worthless as a broken pot.
    I knew then that the Treaty of Waitangi was like the white man’s word, and that the Maori would never have justice under the pakeha Queen Victoria or the laws she makes.
    When I came to my manhood the Maori people had killed more of their own kind than the pakeha. They had taken the white man’s gun and turned it on their own. We hate killed more than twenty thousand of our people while the pakeha stood by and watched the Maori die, thinking that soon there would be no Maori to come up against them and they could take all our land for their spotted cows.
    And so I grew to be a man and I became the peacemaker among the tribes and then the kingmaker, joining all the Maori under King Potatau te Wherowhero