The Hutt Valley campaign was an armed conflict in the lower North Island of New Zealand between indigenous Māori and British settlers and military forces in 1846. The campaign was among the earliest of the 19th century New Zealand Wars that were fought over issues of land and sovereignty. It was preceded by the Wairau affray (June 1843) and followed by the Wanganui campaign (April–July 1847) and was triggered by much the same pressures—the careless land purchasing practices of the New Zealand Company, armed government support for settler land claims, and complex intertribal tensions between local Māori. The three conflicts also shared many of the same combatants.
The campaign's most notable clashes were the Māori dawn raid on an imperial stockade at Boulcott's Farm in the Hutt Valley on 16 May 1846 in which eight British soldiers and at least two Māori died, and the Battle of Battle Hill from 6–13 August as British troops, local militia and kūpapa Māori pursued a Ngāti Toa force led by chief Te Rangihaeata through steep and dense bushland. Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha was taken into custody during the campaign; he was detained without charge in Auckland for two years.
A 2003 report by the Waitangi Tribunal concluded the New Zealand Company's 1839 land purchases were invalid and that the Crown committed a number of breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi in subsequent dealings with Māori in the area.
Background to war
Tensions rose in the mid-1840s as settlers and Māori were left to deal with the consequences of haphazard and often dubious land purchases by the New Zealand Company. The boundaries of purchased land and Māori reserves were often only vaguely indicated, creating confusion and conflict. The company's purchasing agents seldom questioned the right of vendors to sell the land, whose possession even Māori disputed among themselves and Māori who lived in the Hutt Valley under customary rights were forcefully evicted by the government with little or no compensation for their homes and extensive cultivations.
New Zealand Company land dealings
The Heretaunga (Hutt Valley) area had been lightly and sporadically populated until the 1830s by a number of small tribes (or hapu), which were driven out during successive waves of migration from northern invaders, ultimately leaving the area in the control of Te Rauparaha of Ngāti Toa, who in turn had granted rights of occupation to Ngāti Rangatahi.
Ngāti Mutunga had established ahi kā, or a long historical association with the area and was therefore in a position to sell land, but had departed by September 1839, when the New Zealand Company vessel Tory arrived at Port Nicholson to purchase land for its settlements.
Unaware of these complexities, and disregarding advice that Te Rauparaha had conquered all the land around Cook Strait and was widely accepted by those who lived on the land as the final owner, the New Zealand Company distributed payment to six chiefs for vast, but poorly defined expanses of land in the Port Nicholson (Wellington) area. Among the recipients was Ngāti Tama chief Te Kaeaea (also known as Taringa Kuri, or "Dog's Ear"), then living at Kaiwharawhara in subservience to Te Rauparaha. Ngāti Rangatahi, although it had been in the Heretaunga district seasonally since the early 1830s, was offered nothing, although its territory was included in the purchase. Te Rauparaha, who also saw himself as the owner by right of conquest, objected strongly to the purchases.
New Zealand Company settlers began arriving at Port Nicholson from January 1840 in numbers that shocked Māori, who soon found Pākehā trampling over their homes, gardens and cemeteries, and in places sticking survey pegs in the ground. Taringa Kuri and his Ngati Tama people moved to the Hutt Valley because of incursions on their cultivation land at Kaiwharawhara by settlers and their cattle, while in Porirua Te Rauparaha's nephew and fellow Ngāti Toa chief Te Rangihaeata menaced surveyors and settlers who attempted to take possession of land there.
Spain commission
In January 1841 Secretary of State for War and the Colonies Lord John Russell appointed lawyer William Spain as Land Claims Commissioner to investigate and determine the validity of the New Zealand Company purchases. Spain arrived in Auckland in December and began his hearings into the Port Nicholson dealings in May 1842.
The New Zealand Company frustrated Spain's efforts to make a full investigation of its entitlement to land and in June 1843 it pushed ahead with surveying of the disputed Wairau Plains in the South Island, despite requests by Te Rauparaha and Te Rangihaeata to halt pending Spain's decision on the legality of the purchase.