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Te Horeta was probably involved in the many wars in which Ngati Whanaunga and the Maru-tuahu tribes participated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By about 1790 he had a daughter, Te Tahuri, who was of marriageable age. The name of Te Tahuri's mother is not known, but she had connections with Waikato and Ngati Whatua. Through these ties Te Horeta was drawn into a series of battles, in one of which Te Tahuri and her husband were killed. He was probably also involved in the wars of Ngati Paoa against Te Kawerau, a tribe of the Auckland isthmus. In the mid 1790s, after the murder of a Ngati Whanaunga leader, Ngati Paoa, Ngati Maru and Ngati Whanaunga embarked on a campaign against Nga Puhi of the Bay of Islands. The Maru-tuahu tribes twice invaded the Bay of Islands, first attacking the people of Te Rawhiti, and then inflicting a heavy defeat on Nga Puhi in their heartland at Puketona, in a battle known as Wai-whariki. Some years later, about 1819, Korokoro of Te Rawhiti, allied with Te Haupa of Ngati Paoa, led a war party against the Coromandel tribes to avenge these defeats. They attacked various Ngati Maru pa as well as those in the Colville area, in the north-west of the Coromandel Peninsula, and Te Horeta's people at Waiau further south. Korokoro's party had returned to the Bay of Islands by January 1820.
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