The Flagstaff War began in New Zealand

Shortly before dawn on 11 March 1845, several hundred Ngapuhi fighters led by Hone Heke and Te Ruki Kawiti moved on Kororareka (now Russell) in the Bay of Islands. Kawiti staged a diversion at the town’s southern edge while Heke seized the blockhouse on Maiki Hill and cut down the British flagstaff for the fourth and final time.

The pole was more than a symbol. To Heke, a leading signatory of the Treaty of Waitangi five years earlier, it stood for a Crown overstepping its authority and for trade losses after the capital moved to Auckland.

The town was sacked and its defenders evacuated by ship the next day. That single morning opened the Flagstaff War (also called the Northern War), fought until January 1846 and remembered as the first serious armed challenge to the Crown after Waitangi, and an opening chapter of the wider New Zealand Wars.