In 1832 a Waikato army came south into Taranaki and drove Te Āti Awa in front of it until there was nowhere left, and the remnant of the tribe went into the pā at Nga-Motu, at the Sugar Loaves, where New Plymouth is now.
Living with them were eight British trader-whalers.
The published histories name them. Love. Barrett. Bosworth. Oliver. Bundy, who everybody called Piri. And William Keenan.
They had landed at Nga-Motu three years before and stayed, and by the time the war reached them they were not visitors any more. The leaders among them were John "Jacky" Love and Richard "Dicky" Barrett, two of the best-known names in the early history of the country, and the Māori leader of the besieged was Te Wharepouri, with Te Puni and Ngātata beside him.
Between them they had three small cannon.
The siege was pressed with great vigour. There were skirmishes and there were many killed on both sides, and at one point a ship came into the roadstead out of Port Jackson, which is Sydney, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to reach it.
Somebody inside proposed a surrender.
It was prevented by Love and Barrett.
They held. And afterwards, in the migration south that followed the Taranaki wars, one of the Māori accounts of it says something that tells you exactly what those eight men had become:
> "The white men were with us all this time, and, stripped to their skins, had fought with us at > Puke-namu."
Stripped to their skins. Not standing behind a wall with a musket. In it, the way everybody else was in it.
The record does not tidy him up, and neither will this.
In the same account there is a line, written plainly, that during the fighting Keenan inadvertently partook of some human flesh, greatly to his regret.
That was the warfare of that place and time and it is in the published history, not the family legend. It is set down here because leaving it out would be the one thing this whole folder refuses to do. It is not a scandal and it is not a story. It is a line in a record and it stays a line in a record.
After the wars he went south with them.
In about 1836, John Love, Richard Barrett and William Keenan crossed Cook Strait to the whaling station at Te Awaiti on Tory Channel, which John Guard and Joseph Thoms had left. Barrett built a big wooden house up on the hill, the one Charles Heaphy would later paint, and Love and Keenan settled the flat land below it on the east side of the bay.
They cut thousands of barrel-staves at Endeavour Inlet. It was a working life and a hard one.
Somewhere in there he met Takune Hika Mapu.
Their children were born at Te Awaiti, in the houses down by the Whiti Rocks. John in 1837. William Henry in 1839. James in 1843. Then Catherine, Annie, Joseph, Maria. Seven that the record holds.
And then, in 1839, John Love died.
William Keenan took over the try-pots.
Try-pots are the great iron cauldrons where whale blubber is rendered down. They are the heart of a whaling station and they are not a thing you carry off; you inherit them or you are given them, and somebody has to decide you are the one.
The try-pots stayed in the Keenan family for over seventy-six years, until just after 1915.
Three generations of one family working the same iron pots in the same bay. Hika Mapu's children, their children, their children.
He died at Te Awaiti and they buried him there on the first of October 1880.
The death was registered at Picton. And this is what the register says.
> Name: William Keenan. > Occupation: Whaler. > Age: 74. > Cause of death: Cancer of the mouth, 3 years. No medical attendant. > Born: Sydney, New South Wales. > Wife: A Maori. > Living issue: 2 males, 3 females. > Parents: not known.
Read the fifth line again.
Wife: A Maori.
Her name was Takune Hika Mapu. It means the sacred fire ceremony. She was baptised Katarina by somebody who wrote it in a church book. Fifty years later a government surveyor would record her as the sole owner of forty thousand three hundred and seven acres of the Chatham Islands, Plan Number 1436, with her succession recorded in the Native Land Court.
She was the granddaughter of a woman of rank. Her grand-uncle was paramount chief of all Ngāti Mutunga. Her aunt married Te Rauparaha. Her half-brother's canoe was the first to reach Whare Kauri.
A Maori.
There was a box on the form and that is what went in it.
He had lived in the country for about fifty years. He had fought beside her people at Nga-Motu with three cannon and no shoes. He had made seven children with her in a bay they both knew every rock of. He had cancer in his mouth for three years with no doctor and she nursed him through it, and at the end of it a clerk in Picton wrote down two words.
Parents: not known.
He is a man with no known parents, an argued birthplace, a job, and a wife with no name.
And the reason we can say who she was, and who her mother was, and her mother's sister, and her grand-uncle, and the exact acreage of the land she held, is that her descendants kept writing it down. Sixty-four pages by hand. Sixty feet of it at Waikawa on paper brought from Sydney.
The Crown recorded her as two words. Her family recorded her as a person.
That is the whole argument for doing any of this.
Where this comes from
The Nga-Motu account is quoted in the family folio from published New Zealand histories, Polack Volume II page 304, and S. Percy Smith's Taranaki histories, read on device 18 July 2026 and recorded in `BATTLE_OF_NGA-MOTU_1832__William_Keenan__read_2026-07-18.md`. The siege of Nga-Motu is documented New Zealand history, not family legend. Richard Barrett, John Love, Te Wharepouri and Te Puni are all documented figures.
The death certificate details are read from a clean photograph of the New Zealand Register of Deaths entry, registered at Picton, certified true copy issued 1984, recorded in `KEENAN_FAMILY__dates_deathcert_migration__read_2026-07-18.md`. The quoted register lines are that document's own wording.
The children's birth dates, the move to Te Awaiti in about 1836, the Heaphy paintings and the try-pots passing to Keenan in 1839 and staying in the family over seventy-six years are from the same batch of photographs of the manuscript.
One real contradiction, recorded and not resolved. The death certificate says he was born in Sydney, New South Wales. The family's own manuscript says County Cork, Ireland, and writes "(Ire)" against his name on the tap-root chart. Both are on the record. Neither has been chosen.
One honest line, kept on every story in this folder. This is the whakapapa Karen holds and it names her people. How her own descent joins Hika Mapu's line has not yet been traced on paper. Nothing here depends on it.
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