Auckland Museum

This guide traces the eighty-foot war canoe Te Toki a Tapiri, carved from a single totara tree in the 1830s for chief Waaka Tarakau, through an unlikely chain of gifts, a horse trade, and the 1863 raids on Waikato communities during the New Zealand Wars. The canoe passed through the hands of several iwi before soldiers seized it and stripped it of its stern post. Look closely at the hull's carving for the scars that chain of owners left behind.