2. What were the musket wars?

The Musket Wars were a series of around 3000 battles and raids fought in New Zealand and the Chatham Islands among tribal groups between 1807 and 1845, in which muskets were used. The wars were brutal and ruthless in which villages were burned, and prisoners enslaved, tortured, or killed and eaten after battle.

These wars decimated the Maori population, possibly from 120,000 to 70,000, leaving a harmed and struggling society. Conflict left lands between Whangarei and the Auckland isthmus, in northern Taranaki, and in Hawke's Bay, largely uninhabited. These wars set the pattern of tribal land ownership in 1840. These new owners, being those who had won the long and bloody Musket Wars, were able to sell land to the new settler government – and their descendants were able to claim compensation for these sales 170 years later.