The Maoris always made their plantations in the bush, frequently at a considerable distance from their kaingas, and these, after the potatoes had been planted, would only be occasionally visited by their owners, who, to protect them, would get the chief or tohunga to tapu the plantation; and this being done, the produce would be quite safe from the depredations of others.
About the year 1870 some six brace of pheasants were turned loose in the Waikato district, and the principal chief put his tapu on them for seven years. These birds increased and throve in a manner truly wonderful. Not a Maori dare touch one, although long before the period of protection had expired the birds had not only spread all over the Waikato district, but also over all the adjoining ones. And they carried their protection with them, for notwithstanding the fact that they had become somewhat of a nuisance to the Arawa tribe, who were not in any way subordinate to the Waikato chief, yet they respected his tapu, and would have starved sooner than eaten them.
It was by making use of this tapu that the wonderful head of game and fish at present in New Zealand has been reared and acclimatised.
Should a chief die within his whare, that hut and everything it contained at once became tapu and was lost to use; for as soon as his body had been removed, the door was at once blocked up, and the hut with its contents allowed to moulder away, no one daring to touch, much less remove, one single article. Tapu, therefore, in a manner of speaking, was the antipoise of the law of muru, for if the enforcement of the latter rendered the portable property of an individual or tribe precarious, yet tapu made his title indissoluble; so the two laws or customs got on very well together, and may exist to the present day.
I cannot leave my friends the Maoris without speaking about their awful cruelty in torturing and killing their prisoners, and in the foul massacres of helpless women and children.
Yet even in this there may be something said in their favour, especially should you compare them, savages as they were, with the human monsters that every Christian European country has produced, when they would be found no more cruel or bloodthirsty.