Wairarapa: an historical excursion r781wg26q

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Foreword by Sir Alister McIntosh (page vii)
I Maori Wairarapa (page 1)
II Offshore navigators (page 16)
III Exploration by beach and ridge (page 23)
IV Occupation to 1853 (page 45)
V Purchase (page 80)
VI Over the range to the bush inns (page 108)
VII Crown and settlers' title (page 122)
VIII Four villages (page 137)
IX Beyond the tenth commandment (page 173)
X Maori and pakeha (page 191)
XI Provincial growth and politics (page 235)
XII From Alfredton to Eketahuna (page 251)
XIII The last bush frontier (page 267)
XIV Town, county and politics (page 303)
XV The pastoral perimeter (page 321)
XVI Subdivision by fiat or family choice (page 364)
XVII Wairarapa Moana (page 377)
XVIII Local Government (page 387)
XIX Communications (page 407)
XX Primary industries (page 446)
XXI Education (page 482)
XXII Occasionally when not working (page 499)
XXIII At the bell (page 517)
Appendices
I The origin of Trust lands (page 521)
II Tables (page 532)
Abbreviations (page 538)
A note on sources (page 539)
Bibliography (page 540)
Acknowledgements (page 579)
Index (page 585)

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VVATRARAPA. ] iN \ INK AY : AN HISTORICAL EXCURSION

A.G. BAGNALL

MASTERTON HEDLEY’S BOOKSHOP LTD. FOR

THE MASTERTON TRUST LANDS TRUST

Copyright A. G. Bagnall, 1976

il

First printed 1976_

National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication data BAGNALL, Austin Graham, 1912-

Wairarapa : an historical excursion / A. G. Bagnall, — Masterton : Hedley’s Bookshop for the Masterton

Trust Lands Trust, 1976. ~~xvi, 605 p., [52] p. of plates : ill. (part col.), facsims, maps, ports ; 24 cm.

“A note on sources,” including “Notes and _ refer-

ences’ : p. 540-578. — Index. — Hbk 993.14 3

1. Wairarapa—History. I. Title.

Set in Linotype Baskerville 10 point on 12 and printed by Wright and Carman Ltd, Trentham, New Zealand

|

TO ALL WAIRARAPA PIONEERS

WHETHER OF THE KUMARA, THE MERINO

7 THE AXE OR THE MIND and

: TO THE INSTITUTIONS WHOSE RESOURCES HAVE GIVEN SUBSTANCE TO THIS PORTRAYAL

notably THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF NEW ZEALAND THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF NEW ZEALAND

foreword , BY SIR ALISTER McINTOSH, KCMG

Every region in New Zealand has its own particular charm and significance, especially for those who have lived their lives there, or even part of their lives and, more especially still, for those whose forbears pioneered its settlement. No region can claim a surer place in the minds and hearts of its people than Wairarapa with its innumerable tales of endurance and courage and its triumphant record of solid achievement. Wairarapa is a distinct, a separate region—cut off by high mountains from the Capital yet close enough to feel a special affinity with Wellington its principal trade outlet. But because it was cut off, Wairarapa had from the beginning its separate development, and that meant a development of special characteristics which have particular significance for the men, women and children of the district. It was a happy inspiration that led the Masterton Trust Lands Trust to commission Graham Bagnall to write the definitive history of the region which he has done in a most scholarly manner, and produced, not only for the people of the district but for all New Zealanders, a comprehensive and thorough piece of readable research from Maori days to the present time.

Because the detail has been so well selected, the story becomes a fascinating one, especially in its treatment of the various journeys of exploration around the coast and through the interior; and its unravelling of the early land transactions and the beginnings of settlement.

One can say of the history of the development of Wairarapa that it is all here in this book—the establishment of the New Zealand wool industry and the tangled stories of the early competition for pastoral licences and the histories of the main runs; the stages in the development of the five towns from their origins as small farm villages; the story of the isolation of the early settlers in the small clearings of the bush

and scrub-covered terrain; the grim account of the demanding toil involved in substituting grass for trees. One cannot fail to be moved by the tales of human endurance and superhuman endeavour to be found in the histories of the bush settlements beginning with the cruel hardships of the Scandinavians in the 1870’s.

Play is made nowadays of the phrase ‘the real New Zealanders’. To my mind, one only needs to read the story of these Wairarapa bush frontiers of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s to appreciate the real meaning of that term. The book brings the story to modern times and illustrates vil

Vil FOREWORD the significant contribution to New Zealand’s development made by

Wairarapa. Its exports, as the author reminds us, are said to be primary produce and young adults. What greater contribution can any region make. Mr. Bagnall obviously knows his ancestral territory as is

shown by his intimate knowledge of the topography of the whole region. His research is thorough and exhaustive and the detail which is essential for any first rate local history is all there. Indeed this history is never likely to be superseded.

The Trust Lands Trust is to be congratulated and warmly thanked for its commissioning of this splendid book commemorating both the centenary of the Trust and also that of Masterton in a manner worthy of the occasion.

Alister McIntosh

Contents ,

Chapter Page

Foreword by Sir Alister McIntosh Vil

I Maori Wairarapa I

II Offshore navigators 16 III Exploration by beach and ridge 23 IV Occupation to 1853 45

V_ Purchase 80 VI Over the range to the bush inns 108

VII Crown and settlers’ title 122

VIII Four villages 137 IX Beyond the tenth commandment 173

X Maori and pakeha 191

XI Provincial growth and politics 235 XII From Alfredton to Eketahuna 2951

XIII The last bush frontier 267 XIV Town, county and politics 303

XV_ The pastoral perimeter 321

XVI Subdivision by fiat or family choice 364

XVII Wairarapa Moana 377 XVIII Local Government 387 XIX Communications 407 XX Primary industries 446

XXII Education 482 XXII Occasionally when not working 499 XXIII At the bell 317 1X

X CONTENTS Page

Appendices

II Tables 932

I The origin of Trust lands 921 Wairarapa runholders, 1889 932

sentation 533 County Council Chairmen 939 Parliamentary and Provincial Council repre-

District Mayors 936

Abbreviations 538 A note on sources 939

Notes and references 539 Acknowledgements 979

Index 585

Illustrations . COLOUR PLATES Frontispiece

‘Mania [i.e. Manaia] station Wairarapa’. A. Chapman, watercolour, Alexander Turnbull Library following page

1. ‘Cutting on the Rimutaka Ist Septr 1854’. John Pearse, watercolour, 96 Alexander Turnbull Library 2. ‘Plain of the Ruamahanga opening into Palliser Bay near Welling- 112 ton’. Lithograph from drawing by S. C. Brees in ‘Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand’ by E. J. Wakefield

3. ‘Palliser Bay’ [Te Kopi]. S. C. Brees, watercolour, Alexander 176 Turnbull Library

4. ‘Races held in the Wairarapa “Waidrop”’ Plains’ in 1852’. John 192 Pearse, watercolour, Alexander Turnbull Library

BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS following page

1. The Mukamukaiti, Palliser Bay; a feature on the path to 64 Wairarapa, two kilometres west of the Mukamukanui and the pre1855 rock barrier Palliser Bay looking across to Te Kopi, Whatarangi, Te Humenga and towards Cape Palliser

2. Lake Onoke outlet (1947) looking over the tableland (once Raniera’s reserve) and Lake Onoke to the Wharepapa and Rimutaka range

‘Palliser Bay & the sand bar of the Wairarapa’. (S. C. Brees, Pictorial illustrations of New Zealand, 1847)

3. From near Black Rocks looking past the Mangatoetoe stream and Nga-Ra-o-Kupe to Cape Palliser

Looking south from the White Rock Landing Reserve to the Mataoperu sandhill and the spurs of Mts. Barton and Manga-

toetoe above the Waitetuma stream

4. White Rock station, the white rock, Taungatara, and the Aorangi Mts. from Kaukau Point Oroi terraces and village site following page

5. Watercolour (untitled) by Wm. Mein Smith. Mouth of Waite- 80 tuma stream, Cape Palliser

6. ‘Reach in the River Ruamahanga Wairarapa’, watercolour by

Wm. Fox, 1843. View downstream, possibly in vicinity of

Morrison’s Road

7. ‘Tauanui J. Tully Esq’®. Pencil sketch, Wm. Mein Smith, Jan. 1849 8. ‘Whare Kaka’. Pencil sketch, Wm. Mein Smith (about Jan. 1849) ‘Pihautea C. R. Bidwill Esq’®’. Pencil sketch, Wm. Mein Smith (about Jan. 1849) following page

9. ‘Hakeke Mr Morrison’. Pencil sketch, Wm. Mein Smith 144 (about Jan. 1849) 10. ‘Oteraia Mr Gillies’. Pencil sketch, Wm. Mein Smith (about Jan. 1849) XI

X11 ILLUSTRATIONS following page

11. ‘Tuitarata Mr McMaster’. Pencil sketch, Wm. Mein Smith 144 (about Jan. 1849) 12-13. ‘Tracing shewing Blocks of Native Land over which the Native Title has been extinguished June 1871 Wairarapa & East Coast Districts...’ Anon. but signed Henry Jackson Chief Surveyor. Ms. 14. Watercolour (untitled) by Wm. Mein Smith. Oterei boat harbour, Te Awaite station. 1855

15. ‘Whareama, East Coast. 1862’ by J. T. Stewart. Watercolour showing surveyors’ camp and ferry house at mouth Akitio kainga. Pencil sketch by E. de C. Pharazyn. 1850

16. ‘Mr Russells Station Kawa Kawa’. Pencil sketch, Wm. Mein Smith, 1855

‘Near Kawakawa Nov" 1855’. Pencil sketch, Wm. Mein Smith, 1855

following page

17. Deed dated Ist September 1845 leasing Maramamau to C. R. 208 Bidwill, signed by Bidwill, Wi Kingi, Manihera and others

18. ‘Corduroy road to Wairarapa’ by John Pearse, 1852. The section depicted was on the flat before the Pakuratahi ford (near today’s road bridge) where stood Hodder’s Golden Fleece Hotel (the first enlarged building) as drawn by Wm. Mein Smith about 1857 (reproduction below)

19. Plan of Masterton showing suburban sections with names of owners. After J. Hughes, May 1856

20-21. Windy Peak (Kokakotangireka) with a section of the canoes of Kupe ‘Sketch map of the Runs in the Wairarapa & East Coast District. F, D. Bell Commr. of Crown Lands July 1855’

22. Papawai about 1912 showing meeting house and Mahupuku memorial Tablelands meeting house, Kehemene, Martinborough

23. Group with Tamahau Mahupuku in centre, front row; others present include Hoani te Rangitekaiwaho, Kingi Ngatuere and H. P. Tunuiorangi Signing of agreement to transfer Maori rights to Lake Wairarapa

to Crown, January 1896. Judge Butler at table with Tamahau Mahapuku, Whatahoro and others present 24. Tauherenikau Hotel and bridge, about 1875 Approaches to Featherston, about 1875

following page

25. Two views of Queen Street Masterton about 1884 looking north, 304 showing Perry’s butcher shop, Kay’s canvas store, the Theatre Royal and on left the Post Office and Wairarapa Star 26. Masterton. Watercolour by J. Aubrey, about 1891 The three storeyed building is Chamberlains’ mill 27. Queen Street, Masterton, about 1904, showing Post Office

Masterton Railway Station (building depicted, 1880-1964)

about 1910 28. Greytown victim of the Waiohine, 1875/76, J. Bragge

following page

29. Greytown Fire Brigade, about 1900 320

W.F.C.A. Queen Street, Masterton, about 1900 30. Stewart Bros. (formerly Hooker’s) sawmill, Belvedere Rd., Carterton, about 1880 31. Booth’s sawmill line, Carterton, about 1890 32. Eketahuna, watercolour, by J. Aubrey, about 1891

ILLUSTRATIONS x1 following page

33. The loop of Drake’s Elbow, Rimutaka Road, looking across 400 Abbott’s Creek

Five Mile Avenue on the 40 Mile Bush road between Hamua and Konin1i

34.‘Siberia’ Summit Station and tunnel entrance ; with wind break 35. Eastern face of the Puketoi scarp as seen from near Pori Road Southern face of Puketoi showing Mt. Marchant

36-37. Map of Alfredton Road District about 1894, reproduced to show characteristic soil and vegetational description of new blocks at the time (e.g. Mt. Baker to west of Pioneer Assn’s subdivision and southern Puketoi) 38. Pongaroa about 1910 with Mt. Akaroa in background Toogood’s flaxmill at Fernyhurst (about 1905)

39. Manihera Rangitekaiwaho, Ritimona Te Korou and Whatahoro (J. A. Jury) 40. C.R. Bidwill, C. J. Pharazyn, Wm. Mein Smith Henry Bunny, Joseph Masters, George Beetham W. C. Buchanan, I. E. Featherston, A. W. Hogg following page

41. Group of Maori shearers at Eparaima woolshed 464

42-43. Old-time dairy factory buildings: Greytown, Ahiaruhe, Carring-

ton, Kokotau, Eketahuna, Waihakeke, Elmdale, Kaituna,

Belvedere, Lower Valley, Parkvale, Taratahi 44, Crossing mouth of Akitio (about 1900) Ploughing on Hitchings’ Flat, Waikaraka following page

45. Tupurupuru homestead and woolshed (about 1895) 480 Group at Homewood sports (1904) 46. Whangaimoana homestead Brancepeth homestead (about 1910) 47. The methods of the past. Crushing plant Akitio County 48. Liberal Party picnic Dalefield, about 1904, showing R. J. Seddon,

J. Ward, T. Carroll, J. D. Heagarty, J. T. M. Hornsby, A. W. Hogg

MAPS

(additional to those included above) Line blocks and sketch maps page

1. Cape Palliser-Matakitaki (section of map about 1897) 15

2. Wellington Province, showing Hawke’s Bay and Castlepoint pur- 79

chases. M. Fitzgerald, 1853 3. Small Farm Regulations 1853 158 4. Deferred payment land purchase certificate 1895

5. ‘Why is Dr Featherston so sheepish?’ Leaflet of 1857 distributed by supporters of Dr. R. P. Welch, opposition candidate for the Superintendency

6. Masterton Reform Special Settlement Association Block (1894); 299 north and west of Pongaroa with names of those who drew sections in ballot

7. Road Board district boundaries 1875 and county boundaries 581 1876-1889

8-10. North, Central and South Wairarapa showing major runs, special 582-4 settlement association blocks, etc.

Part Wellington Province, about 1895 end papers

PICTORIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Waikaraka photographs, in a collection recently presented to the

Alexander Turnbull Library, are from the camera of the late George Moore, junior (nos. 38b, 41, 44b & 45b).

I am particularly indebted to the Chief Librarian, Alexander Turnbull Library, for permission to reproduce ten hitherto unpublished Mein Smith

drawings.

Colour plates, frontispiece and jacket, Alexander Turnbull Library

Plates 1-4 Mr. F. G. Fitzgerald, Days Bay, Eastbourne Plates 5, 7-11, 14

& 16 Mein Smith in Alexander Turnbull Library

Plate 6 Mr W. Jeavons Baillie, Alexander Turnbull Library Plate 12-13 Mr A. G. Bagnall by courtesy Mr. R. A. L. Batley

Plate 15a (Whareama mouth) Wanganui Museum Plates 15b, 17, 18,

22-24, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33b, 34,

38a, 39a, 40, 41, 42b, 44b,

45b, 47 Alexander Turnbull Library

Plate 19 (Masterton map) Mr R. M. Daniell, Masterton

Plate 20a Mrs A. G. Bagnall

Plates 20b (Bell map), 36—7 (Alfredton Road District map) & Farrelly deferred payment certificate (p. 234) National Archives Plates 25, 30, 31, 33a, 39c (Whatahoro) & 45a National Museum Plates 27 & 46a Mr. T. H. Daniell & Masterton Trust Lands Trust

Plate 39b (Ritimona) Wairarapa Arts Centre Plate 35a Mr. S. D. Blakemore, Masterton Plate 35b Mr. J. R. Nelson, Alfredton Plates 42-3 Mr R. E. Hambly, Taradale Plate 44a Misses J. and M. Smith, Akitio

Plate 48 Mr. A. G. Bagnall

X1V

Preface The completion of this work is the end of a task which began over 29 years ago, although often interrupted by other commitments such as the published outlines of Greytown, Masterton and Carterton history

which were prepared to mark the towns’ centennials. The original intention was to concentrate on the pastoral background of the region. A draft was prepared which has been supplanted where not absorbed by the present narrative. More recently, it was heartening to accept an invitation from the Masterton Trust Lands Trust to complete the work under their sponsorship.

Any historical work must reflect the interest and point of view of the writer. A fairly cursory perusal of the contents will show a preoccupation with land settlement, which, after all, is fundamental to any New Zealand regional history. Treatment of this topic has extended beyond the lower valley and East Coast to the north Wairarapa and the eastern sector of the Wellington Land District, which has a geographical

and historical unity. Masterton’s role as the district centre during the second half of the last century as well as the main dispersal point for the moves north will be apparent, as too, will be the active interest of many persons south of the Opaki in the newer territories. Conversely, little attempt has been made to go into detail on subsequent north Wairarapa history, except for a few examples and tables under selected headings.

Readers with a traditional view of the supposedly commemorative purpose of local history may be surprised at the apparent frankness with which some pioneers walk through these pages. Many gave years of their lives to demanding public services to which sacrifice appropriate tribute is paid. At the same time it must be remembered that the great, the humble, the worthy and the domestically upright worked very hard, above all, to better their own condition and that of their families. Most

struggled towards a goal within a strict ethical code and the law, so far as they understood it, but they had not come 12,000 miles either to

conserve the landscape or to be unduly hesitant, in most cases, in acquiring as much of it as possible from its original occupiers or any

faltering neighbour. It can be argued that the owners of the great estates were, in effect trustees for the land they grazed irrespective of

the precise form of their legal title. As such they are accountable, within the standards of their time, as well as, in most cases, deserving salutation for their contribution to the later prosperity of the region XV

XVI PREFACE and of New Zealand. ‘The author has failed in his purpose if it is not apparent that a dispassionate presentation of the facts of history 1s matched by an understanding of the courage, energy and sacrifice of the men and women involved, apart from their not infrequent sheer ill-fortune.

The information supporting the text is documentary rather than traditional. The author concedes possible mistakes in interpretation, even errors in transcription; he has tried repeatedly to match tradition to fact but maintains firmly that what is in the narrative, except for reservations mentioned, is what the record reveals, however annoyingly

incomplete or occasionally inconsequential. The main sources and references are listed at the end, although these are best regarded as a few pointers in a massive underlay of detail. Apart from the regrettably few private letters and station diaries which have survived, the most reliable sources for the region’s childhood are official papers, chiefly the papers of the Colonial Secretary New Munster, the Wellington Provincial Government, the Commissioner of Crown Lands and the Deeds Division. It is only for the comparatively recent past that adequate

sources remain in Wairarapa itself to enable a reliable history to be prepared. This situation is an excuse for the author’s involvement as a non-resident, although with some ancestral links. The available source material, apart from the uncertainties of the published historical record to date, has led to a fuller treatment of the 19th century. Limitations of space—and 550 pages are more than enough—as well

as choice of topic have caused much to be omitted which readers might search for; themes of interest to the writer such as the original vegetational pattern, the impact of the exotic fauna and flora, something about the Tararua Range and its foothills the author’s first love, have been held over. Even The Pastoral Perimeter is little more than a sketchy series of outlines which it may later be possible to expand upon in another work. There are, nevertheless, grounds for hope that the meagre information supplied may throw light on hitherto forgotten bypaths.

I,

Maon Wairarapa

Ir HAS TAKEN 130 years, a few thousand toilers and some millions of

animals to transform Wairarapa’s face to the predominantly pastoral aspect of today. Even the five towns do not obtrude excessively on the region’s dedication of its two million acres to primary industry, despite some encroachment on the surrounding countryside. Nevertheless, our European pride in what has been achieved and the much more private satisfaction of those few whose forbears for two, three or four generations have laboured to secure these visible tokens of change must bow in recognition of the endurance of the region’s Polynesian predecessors. There is reasonably firm archaeological evidence that the Maori has been on the coast for some 800 years at least.

Traditional history in areas less subject to change than Wairarapa talks its way back, with decreasing certainty, to the arrival of the fleet canoes and through an almost audible screen to the muted echoes of their precursors. Beyond the three or four hundred years of Negatikahungunu and Rangitane history we move shakily towards the tribes of Ngaitara, Ngatimamoe to Waitaha and the moa-hunter or ‘archaic’

period of the archaeologists to distinguish it from the more recent ‘classic’ era of the pre-European Maori. Patient excavation, study and comparison will undoubtedly enlarge our knowledge of the way in which

the true founders survived but we can now hope to learn little more of their traditional history. Any outline must take account of four or five time sequences of occupation, each of varying degree of historical probability. In the beginning were the centuries of the archaic period represented now by only a few surface features, artifacts and fortuitously located burials. These are perhaps linked to the eponymous ancestors and tribal heroes such as Kupe, Toi, Tara and Hau whose herculean Journeys survive in part through the place names which they supposedly bestowed, a significant and fascinating mythology, some of even more probable legend. Then follow the scarcely less complex centuries of

permanent occupation by tribes who took root to leave us the more credible body of traditional lore which we associate with classic Maori occupation culminating in the intriguing record of the invasions, wars

and treaties incidental to the coming of Rangitane and their Neatikahungunu relatives. Finally, there is the relatively short interval of chaos when invaders from the north and west disturbed the established ] HwW—2

2 MAORI WAIRARAPA life sufficiently to enforce retreat to the Mahia Peninsula; nearly a decade of exile was followed by the coming of Christianity, the arrival

of Europeans over the range, a peace-making with former enemies, almost as the first intrusive pakehas were moving round the coast from Port Nicholson.

One of the region’s few claims to any nationally unique remnants of

Maori material culture is to be found in the regular pattern of stone walls in eastern Palliser Bay. ‘These now weathered structures, which

extend from the Whatarangi Stream along the coast to the Black Rocks before Cape Palliser were referred to briefly some 70 years ago

by Percy Smith and others but no significant comment on them has been made by any of the numerous travellers in some of whose tracks we follow. Smith regarded the walls as forming the boundaries of cultivations, a conclusion with which recent investigators in part agree. Although most have collapsed from their original height to a series of rough lines of stones, often covered with muehlenbeckia, their most striking feature remains—an interrupted but recurring pattern of regular, equidistant lines normally running at right angles to the coast towards the sea and to be found at intervals over many miles of shoreline. The late G. L. Adkin made a careful study of them and, more recently, his work has been considerably extended by the researches of an archaeological team from the University of Otago. As one drives towards Cape Palliser from the rash of cottages at Putangirua the first wall is just to

the south of the mouth of the Whatarangi Stream, an ‘unusually massive’ feature as Adkin saw it in contrast to others lying parallel to the shore. At Te Humenga, the prominent terrace and tableland point before Nga Wi, is an area of some twelve acres of remains while further on, towards the mouth of the Pararaki, on the right bank, are a number which contain circular conical stone heaps covering midden refuse. Beyond further smaller groups of walls between the Pararaki and the Waiwhero one comes to the last and perhaps the largest group on the Waiwhero’s right bank. Adkin suggested that the walls were the

handiwork of the Waitaha’ although it is better to think of them as the monuments of an era rather than of a tribe.

Also of interest to an early observer in 1906 were heaps of stones in the Omoekau or Whangaimoana valley. The track to Whatarangi passed along the terrace above the stream where grew ‘a fine grove of old karaka trees planted many generations ago’. The valley bottom and the terrace were in places covered with ‘immense stone mounds

and . . . long lines of various sized stones half or almost wholly

embedded in the earth’. The writer’s informant told him that ‘these neat rows and extensive ridges’ were originally formed by the Negaitara

and that they were also to be seen near the ferry house and on the western side of the lake on the terrace under Te Tarata.

On more certain ground are the conclusions from radiocarbon

PREHISTORIC CULTIVATIONS 3 dating tests of some of the organic matter at the base of the walls. A careful selection of small fragments of twigs and other remains clearly placed there by the builders shows that the oldest site near the Pararaki, dates approximately from 1141 A.D. (plus or minus 56

years, the range of tolerance demanded by the technical process). Another test from material at Te Humenga gives a date of 1173 A.D. within the same compensating boundary of 56 years either way.? The investigators Mr B. F. and Mrs H. M. Leach, conclude that evidence such as ‘soil enrichment, soil profile alterations, acreage involved [and the] size of the enclosures would indicate that sweet potato (kumara) was cultivated as the climate would not have encouraged yam or taro’. To the layman one query remains. A true impression of Palliser Bay cannot be gained from a drive round on a pleasant summer afternoon. The characteristic burned pasture of middle and late summer would indicate too inhospitable a climate and soil while a succession of winter southerlies would surely have driven the keenest Polynesian around to the Lake and the Ruamahanga. Work in the last 20 years has given

evidence of a much warmer and wetter climate over part of New Zealand for the period roughly between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. If we can suppose that the Palliser littoral was more genial during this era in which the dating techniques place the occupation of the gardens the interpretation becomes more meaningful. The long time which has passed since the Palliser flats were cultivated is therefore as likely to be due to the onset of a less hospitable climate as much as to tribal succession.

We have to thank the bold adventurers who roamed the unoccupied wastes of Te Ika a Maui unchallenged for many of the region’s wellknown place-names. Kupe, like Cook, confined his attention to the coast. His traditionally classic voyage over a thousand years ago brought him, as many know, to these islands in company with Ngake in pursuit of the pet wheke or octupus of an enemy, Muturangi. After a stay at Hokianga, and doubtless other places, Kupe’s Matahoroua canoe sails into Wairarapa history at Rangiwhakaoma (Castle Point). Regrettably, many of their named landfalls have not been recorded or the association and meaning of some surviving has been lost. We nevertheless recall the headland beyond Nga Potiki at White Rock, Rakauwhakamatuku and

the Mataoperu sandhill leading to it while on turning the headland of Matakitaki we know that Kupe was struck by the sight of Mt. Tapuaenuku rising out of the sea to the south and gazed (matakitaki) at it for a long time. Just to the west of the Mangatoetoe stream, Kupe and Ngake, while camping on the flat, had an argument as to who could complete a canoe sail in the quickest time. Kupe finished his by midnight but Ngake took until dawn. Somewhat surprisingly, these special achievements, whether or not used on Matahoroua, may be seen to this day as the rock face above the flat, Nga-ra-o-Kupe or Kupe’s sail.? An

4 MAORI WAIRARAPA even greater puzzle is how the canoes of Kupe, at some point enlarged to three in number, were somehow hauled from the upper Ruamahanga to their final resting place as guardians of the lower valley.

It is understandable that there should be a difference of opinion as to the meaning of Wairarapa when there are at least two versions in explanation of the name, Taupo, the lake. The older attribution, which we prefer despite its apparent imperfection as a full explanation, 1s again, as a gift of Kupe, who from his canoe at sea, looked round over

his shoulder without turning his body, which sideways motion is apparently expressed by the word rarapa. Although this meaning is not

recorded in Williams’ Maori dictionary it has the authority of Te Whatahoro. Kupe’s daughter said to him, ‘me waiho to moana ko te rarapatanga o ou whatu’—‘Let us remain here at this lake you have descried, your anchor stone.’ Kupe replied, ‘e pai ana. Me waiho ko Wairarapa’—‘Good, let it remain Wairarapa’. There was said to be a stream Vairarapa at either Raiatea or Tahiti. The alternative version

is from that great Rangitikei traveller Hau or Haunui who, when returning via the Rimutaka summit, saw the lake beneath him and its

spreading valley which he named Wai (water) Rarapa (gazing).* Hau, a son of Popoto, the second in command of the Kurahaupo canoe

of the great fleet, had undertaken a lengthy journey in pursuit of an errant wife, Hine-i-Rakahanga and is credited with having conferred many names in the southern part of the North Island. The Rimutaka Range takes its name from his having sat down (remutaka) to survey the prospect from its summit. On his journey north, at the first river he found a whare or maimai covered with nikau leaves which led him to call it the Tauwharenikau. At the next river halt he imagined he could see his wife’s face in the water, the woman he had turned into stone, and shed a tear in recollection, that fell into the water, hence Waiohine. He hesitated to cross the next river—why is uncertain as the pakehas 500 years later said that if one could cross the Waiohine

there would be no problems at the Waingawa. In the event, his hesitation, according to one version, was recorded in the name Wai-awanga (water of hesitation), now corrupted to Waingawa. The name Ruamahanga, according to a lower valley version of Hau’s expedition was given merely because, from the point at which it joined the lake he could look back and see his landmark Rangitumau standing up to the sky—which seems a better explanation of the Kopuaranga summit than of the name of the river. Another version of the Wairarapa naming gives Hau, the famous lady Wairaka as wife, a daughter of Kupe whom,

by a powerful incantation he converted to stone. He was so happy about the result of this piece of unpleasantness that he proceeded cheer-

fully on his way calling the next stopping place Wairarapa, the river of joyfulness.© We still recommend Kupe’s version particularly as he apparently hauled his canoe ashore at the lake mouth. After a time it

ARRIVAL OF NGATIKAHUNGUNU 5 sank into the sand to form a trench from which it had to be hauled, hence the name Orua-pae-roa, the pit or trench of the long paenga (a place where anything is laid across).

We have trouble in breaking through from the world of myth to the higher probability of legend and eventually to a tradition where a

number of versions have a common hard core of significantly consistent ) genealogy and events. When Rangitane moved into the region or separated from their Negati-Ira relatives is one degree more certain than the latter tribe’s acquisition of the mantle of the Ngatimamoe who followed Waitaha. Smith wrote of the settlement in Wairarapa of an early group of Ngati-Ira led by Rakaunui about the period 1475 to 1500° if we accept each step on a genealogical tree as being roughly 25

years. It is only certain that when we come to the Ngatikahungunu occupation some 250 to 300 years ago, that we find from the joint tradition an increasingly rich ore of probability, still streaked with impurities. More patient and knowledgeable students than the present writer will doubtless be able to give a carefully assessed and coherent account of tribal history in the region during the recent past. All that

can be done now is to outline some of the events and figures and, somewhat selectively, to retail incidents which seem to give the character of change in those confused eras of conflict.

The early history of the Ngatikahungunu tribe, the descendants of

Kahungunu of the Takitimu canoe, is beyond our scope. The first settlers in Heretaunga (Hawke’s Bay) under Taraia and Rakaihikuroa

probably arrived there from Poverty Bay early in the 15th century. Here they remained for nearly a century, or, to a period some 12 generations back, which would bring us to about 1650 A.D. when fighting broke out near Te Mata at a pa called Oruarei. The argument, very much a family affair, was between the chief Rakaiwerohia and his

sister Hineiterangi. Rakaiwerohia, who was killed in the fight, had married a sister of a noted Rangitane chief Te Rerewa, the reason why the surviving followers brought Rakaiwerohia’s son, Te Rangitawhanga to their Rangitane relatives in Wairarapa. This decision clearly implies some already established but unexplained contact between the two peoples. There are differing versions of this momentous journey. The authority from whom Percy Smith got his information states that the migrating Ngatikahungunu came in five canoes which formed part of

the exchange shortly to be described. Another version, and, to the writer the preferred narrative, by Tamahau Mahupuku’ states that only one canoe was brought from Heretaunga most of the party proceeding overland.

The elders who accompanied Te Rangitawhanga included Tutimiha, Tuponga, Poari, Nuku, Rakairangi and others whose names occur in the various narratives. When they reached Te Upokokirikiri at the lake

outlet they lived there for ‘a long time’ with Rangitane but reached

6 MAORI WAIRARAPA the decision that they would like some land themselves. They offered

Te Rerewa their patu, mere and garments in exchange for some territory but Te Rerewa declined these gifts saying: “You will not get my kainga in exchange for these things but if it was a little chip of a

canoe of your ancestor Rakaitauweka then .. ” Ngatikahungunu took the hint and went across to the mouth of the Pahaoa and up it to Te Kopuru on the Wainuioru where there was a suitable totara bush in which they began to cut out the canoes. Three were completed Te Araatawake, Te Whaitoruuri and Pokaikaha. To these was added Whakaingarangi which they had brought with them from Ahurir. When completed the canoes were given to Rerewa and other Rangitane chiefs who responded by handing over separate blocks within carefully specified boundaries between the Ngawakaakupe block and the Aorangi mountains as well as all the southern end of the valley from Okorewa

across to Turakirae and up the Rimutaka range to the Otauira and east to the Ruamahanga.

The point of the exchange was that Te Rerewa had decided to migrate to the South Island as some of his now distant relatives had done before him. As he was moving off from the shores of his ancestral lands he addressed Te Rangitawhanga from the canoe. “You watch the

whawhakou [Eugenia maire] tree; if it bear much fruit it will be a year of famine, no birds, no rats; that is a sign of the Wairarapa district—and when you see the waters of the lake flow to its source it will be a year of plenty,’ meaning that the lake would be full and there would be many eels. However, Te Rerewa warned: ‘If you cause trouble with Rangitane I will come back but if Rangitane does so, I will not come back’ meaning that he would not seek revenge. The traditional spot, Te Whare-o-Keno, where this momentous agreement reached its climax is said to be the little stream or valley running from the plateau

into Lake Onoke about a quarter of a mile north of the Lake Ferry hotel.

Te Rerewa’s advice, needless to say, did not prevent trouble. Te Aotureke, a Kahungunu, was killed and a Rangitane chief, Te Rangikaumoana or Rakaimoana, was accused. To obtain revenge a ‘pure’ Ngatikahungunu war party was formed thus excluding Te Rangita-

whanga who was part Rangitane. Their objective was Okahu an eastern valley pa, the assault, as befits a milestone in tribal history, being recorded in varying narratives. Okahu was occupied by a part Rangitane, part Kahungunu force which was itself divided. Some of the Rangitane wanted to set fire to it but their Ngatikahungunu relatives said: “No, let us leave our end of the pa open so we can have plenty of

room to fight’. Rakaimoana, because some of the people wanted to admit the enemy, fled during the night and made his way across the Ruamahanga to a hill Parenuiokauaka where he sat covered with

CHIEFS MANAWATU AND TIKAWENGA 7 manuka and saw his pa burning. When the pa was taken one of the prisoners was Turangatahi, father-in-law of Rakaimoana. He was led out of the pa and being a stout man Ngatikahungunu wished to kill him. However his life was saved when the chiefs Poari and others placed

a fighting girdle and garments of the high-born woman Tuponga on

him. In consideration for his life being spared Turangatahi gave to Negatikahungunu the Paeroa, Uhiroa and other blocks which were known as the gifts for the Tuponga garment.

This was not the end of it for after the fight Ngatikahungunu found that Rakaimoana was innocent of the death of Aotureke which was the responsibility of two men Kaiwaka and Humingi against whom there

had to be a further taua. As a Kahungunu chief ran his spear through Humingi he shouted ‘my man is Te Humingi, my kainga is Pukenur’.

So strong was the tradition and the feeling for the block that many generations later when a descendant was given a horse as rent for Turanganui by Kelly he called it Pukenui. In the space available it is not possible to go over the details of all these gifts which were recalled by the old people in the Land Court and on the marae with loving reverence. At a later stage of the transfer Rangitane went round

the blocks particularly on Ngawakaakupe to point out to the new owners every boundary post (renewed normally from one generation to another), every bird snaring tree, weka road, fern digging and eel weir. From the summit of Windy Peak (Kokakotangireka) where today Maori land joins Claremont, Ruawaka, Tablelands and Pukeatua, all the boundaries were visible. Individual patches of bush were named for the new owners and to illustrate this meticulous regard for tradition a particular boundary hole, Te Parua-a-Nuku, which was dug at the time, the Chiefs Tamahau and Heremaia, in 1879 sought for and found. There are numerous other stories of the Ngatikahungunu migration

including some about the chief Manawatu, a descendant of Rakaihikuroa, who apparently flourished about the mid 18th century. By this time the northern people were well established among Rangitane, for the conflicts repeatedly involve allies and relatives by marriage. Manawatu lived for a period at Waiparapara near Hurunuiorangi. Not untypical of the events was an invitation to the chief to intervene in a local dispute. A well-known chief, Tikawenga, owner of part of the Okurupatu block between the upper Ruamahanga and the Wangaehu was friendly with one Kumuaterangi who went south to Tauwharenikau from Okurupatu and was killed there by Rakauwakairi and the

Ngatimoe hapu. When Tikawenga heard of this he gathered his warriors and invited Manawatu to assist him to avenge the death of Kumuaterangi. They went to Hupenui, just to the west of Greytown, where they found Ngatimoe and friends collecting tawa berries. The unsuspecting were attacked and killed after which the avenging taua

8 MAORI WAIRARAPA moved on to Kuratawhiti where a second party put up a more resolute defence. As the narrative explains the next step was for the toa of the

attacking party to engage in single combat with a leader of their opponents. Tikawenga seems to have been something of a politician for he managed to pass this honour over to Manawatu whose duellist was

Tamahau. Tamahau was killed and ‘when their leader was killed the tangata whenua dispersed’ to be pursued as far as Tauwharenikau, the allies killing them by the way. Manawatu generously handed the bodies over to Tikawenga who took them up to the pa at Waiharaika. Here, in a formal ceremony, Tikawenga handed over the surrounding

territory to Manawatu as payment for his part in the operation. Tamahau’s body suffered the ultimate indignity at a place called Te Rua-a-Tamahau, on the Maungaraki.® From the reference to the dispersal of the Tangata whenua it would seem that Rangitane were inviting Manawatu, as a Kahungunu, to assist in defeating the last of their predecessors.

Some of the uncertainties of existence were underlined at Matapihi about the same time. A witness at the same hearing in explaining the origin of the name Kaitekateka mentioned that a hapu known as the

Ngatikahuru, then occupying Matapihi, were, for some reason at loggerheads with Rangitane who, with allies, sought to take the pa. When the war party approached the Ruamahanga Ngatikahuru were preparing to catch eels and the chief Te Wakaariki suggested that they should wait in ambush for the people who were netting the river. The people in the pa were chanting a song, partly as a message to one of their chiefs Matuaata who was outside, as also was a leader of the Rangitane. In the morning Matuaata and others came down to draw the nets whereupon the Rangitane rushed them. Matuaata was killed and his daughter captured but his wife fled up to the pa which, meanwhile had been occupied by another detachment of invaders when the Ngatikahuru had rushed out to assist their relations at the river bank. However it is pleasing to record that Ngatikahuru turned the tables sufficiently on Rangitane to pursue them although at this point the latter cast off their sandals and stood their ground.®

Ngatuere, at the tender age of 114, was still able to recall in great detail some of the incidents of Manawatu’s arrival from Heretaunga. When he reached Te Takutai, near Whareama, a chief Hopu or Hapu gave him a patu which was the key to the ownership of Maungaraki and Te Weraiti. ‘E patu 1 te koko o Maungaraki me Weraiti’. At the pa of Te Wakatakahia, by the Tauweru he found no one; the people

had left as they also had from Taumata Koko at Te Whiti. An ancestor of Ngatuere’s was killed by Manawatu’s son but was able to warn the inhabitants of Te Waiparapara. Ngatuere’s explanation of

why the Manawatu party did not occupy Te Whiti permanently is

TE WERENGA AND TE HIHA 9 relevant for much of the years of Maori occupation—the people ‘shifted about to different places; nobody lived constantly at one place in those days’.?°

Other traditional evidence of a successive movement south comes from the story of Ina and Matangi, two men who, after visiting Wai-

rarapa returned to Heretaunga taking with them a friend of the chief Te Werenga who lived at the mouth of the lake. Te Werenga, foreseeing trouble, was concerned about the welfare of his friend for whose safety

the two visitors gave guarantees. On their way north the man was in fact killed and his companions, fearing for their own lives, when Te Werenga heard of how they had let him down, persuaded the Ngaitahu

hapu to return with them. This support was secured by Ina and Matangi telling the Heretaunga people that Wairarapa was a region where the birds were so numerous that the noise of their flight reverber-

ated like thunder in comparison with Heretaunga which was a place without food—‘a kainga kore kai’. For some unknown reason after migrating south the Ngaitahu settled ‘near the source of the Ruamahanga’ in which there can have been little joy. However, Te Werenga, learning of their arrival, set off to attack them, vowing vengeance, but thanks to the good offices of another chief peace was made and by invitation the newcomers were able to continue south to the prized lands about the lake, an opening which probably stemmed from their

relationship to Te Werenga. They nevertheless brought odium on them- ’ selves by excessive greediness. Te Werenga told his wife to make it clear

that they should move on and in some shame the hapu set off to join relatives on Maungaraki. However at Huangarua they were lucky to meet up with Kaiparuparu, another migrant, and were able to settle

on land given to another chief, also a member of Kaiparuparu’s immigrant party.”

| Another gentleman who distrubed the peace of the lower valley during this era was Te Hiha, by one genealogy the father of Te Werenga and apparently a Rangitane relative of Ngatikahungunu newcomers to whom he had made a gift of land. Not all his tribesmen

approved and consequently attacked him at Matiti, near where the Ruamahanga then flowed into the lake. Te Hiha was forced to seek refuge among relatives at Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Port Nicholson) to which inlet the mana of the Wairarapa people then extended. On his return to the valley he went to a pa, Te Haruru-o-Hakeke which caused further conflict.17 His son Rakato returned to Heretaunga where a chief Ruatahi in his turn, showed interest in the new lands to the south and

later came in person to attack the residents of Orongorongo and Turakirae. All these traditions of migration and dispute with subsequent peacemaking point to the probability that the incursions of Ngatikahungunu

10 MAORI WAIRARAPA were spread over several generations. The well-known gift by Te Rerewa

was perhaps only a climax to a long drawn-out series of exchanges and conquests.

The relatively untroubled existence of the Wairarapa Maori in the second half of the 18th century was to be rudely disturbed in the 1820s.

In that period the normally gradual pressure of the northern inhabitants upon the tribesmen further south was greatly accelerated. Ngapuhi,

from their European contacts were the first to acquire muskets, followed by their neighbours which enabled them to dominate the hitherto

more balanced pattern of inter-tribal warfare. In 1819-20 the first of the great heke of destruction, led by Patuone and Tuwhare with Te Rauparaha as a wayside partner, reached Cook Strait. An anonymous but dramatic narrative, in outline, about the fortunes of this expedition was recorded by John White. After spreading havoc through the lower western half of the island the party came by canoe to the lake outlet from where, under the guidance of Kahungunu prisoners they went some

miles up the Ruamahanga to attack a pa, ostensibly to avenge some killing by Wairarapa further west. The narrator paid a tribute to their victims in the lower valley. “Those slaves were very brave and had great

ferocity in man killing. The expedition took a number of prisoners including some women who were tied together with flax thongs but later managed to cut their bonds with cockle shells and escape. At the time of the invasions Ngatikahungunu occupied virtually the

entire Rimutaka peninsula. They had a large pa near what is now Upper Hutt and in partnership with their Ngati-Ira relatives dwelt in fishing villages on the eastern shores of Port Nicholson. The ruthless steps taken by the invaders to avoid starvation depopulated these settlements and threw the Wairarapa Maori back to their eastern lands. Barely two years after the first visitation the Ngatiwhatua incursion known as Amiowhenua flung them into further disorder. The northerners, on their

way south through Hawke’s Bay, found the famous Horehore pa at Takapau too difficult a nut to crack but at the gorge turned south through the 40 Mile Bush, little more than 20 years before a party of New Zealand Company surveyors were to follow a similar path. Unlike their pakeha successors they worked their way through Pahiatua ‘killing and eating all they came across’. This area was still occupied by Rangi-

tane whose survivors retreated into the forest of Puketoi and Tararua

until their return to the Mangatainoka clearings many years later. The only set confrontation in Wairarapa recorded in any detail was at Hakikino where the outlines of the pa can still be seen today, at the end of the Hakikino road off the Kourarau-Westmere highway. A strong

Wairarapa contingent under Te Hopu and Te Potangoroa took up station but Ngatiwhatua sought to capture the stronghold by deceit, offering presents as token of their good intentions. Te Potangoroa, the

PRELUDES TO FLIGHT TO NUKUTAURUA 11 chief of the Castlepoint area, saw through this subterfuge but Te Hopu, in good faith, walked out of the pa to the ovens of Ngatiwhatua who, unable to break the resolution of the defenders, marched on.?®

More serious than the short-lived onslaughts of the musketeers were the continual offensives of new neighbours to the west. The five tribes,

Ngatiawa, Ngatitoa, Ngatiraukawa, Ngatitama and Ngatimutunga, under , the leadership of Wharepouri, Taringakuri and others pushed Wairarapa back to its own lake and rivers. Kakahimakatea (Battery Hill) was the site of an earlier intertribal conflict** and although it is named as the location of an encounter in the 1820s only in a newspaper article of 1906*° (1826 is the suggested date) it may have been the spot where occurred the slaughter so graphically described to Ensign Best by his Ngatiawa guides. The pa at the turn of the century still showed the lines of the stockade and three feet high remains of heavy totara posts.

Situated on a small but highly defensible peninsula between Lake Onoke and an extensive swamp, now drained, to the west, it was a strongly palisaded double-terraced pa with a deep trench cut across the neck of the spur. Even today, although many once obvious traces have gone, the strength of the position is apparent to anyone prepared to climb to its ramparts from the road immediately below.

The preludes to the Nukutaurua migration were two simultaneous engagements at Te Tarata and Wharepapa when the Ngatikahungunu were victorious only to be utterly defeated shortly afterwards at Pehikatea. Percy Smith, from information supplied by Manihera Maaka has

given an outline of the events after Ngatitama moved into the Western Lake area in the late 1820s following earlier conflicts with Ngatikahungunu. A temporary peace had been made and the Wairarapa

people were co-operating by collecting raupo for the houses which Negatitama were erecting within their new pa, Te Tarata. This was on the northern side of the flat promontory between the Kiriwai inlet and the lake where, in the not too distant past, sunken post holes and kumara pits were still visible. Despite this show of friendliness Paenga-

ruru, the invaders’ chief, decided that the time was ripe to strike a blow at Ngatikahungunu by overwhelming them in a surprise attack. He sent a messenger to Otaki to summon assistance for the purpose but Ngatitama’s treacherous plans were overheard by an old man in the wharepuni who feigned sleep. He warned his fellows who, in their turn, sent urgent pleas for help as far north as Castlepoint. Reinforcements, all outwardly friendly, arrived for both parties and a contingent which included Hinemauruuru the wife of Tutepakihirangi was de-

spatched by a roundabout route to surprise the other section af Ngatitama over the spur in their pa above the Wharepapa. At Te Tarata

it was the Ngatikahungunu plan which succeeded, the tables were turned and only a few of the invaders escaped one of whom met a

12 MAORI WAIRARAPA survivor from the similarly worsted group of Ngatitama at Wharepapa.

Despite these victories which may not have been as clear-cut as the Ngatikahungunu tradition might lead us to believe, the Wairarapa people knew that Ngatitama would quickly call on the strength of their

Ngatimutunga and Ngatiawa allies and thought it prudent to retreat inland to a stronger defensive position. This was Pehikatea, somewhat

confusingly described as ‘a high hill . . . situated a few miles from Greytown’. The Port Nicholson-Horowhenua allies indeed rushed round

to seek utu for the defeat and assaulted Pehikatea before Wairarapa had completed its defences. Tutepakihirangi and other chiefs escaped although it is said that all the women and children in the pa were captured. The victors must have pursued survivors around the coast or across country for among the trophies they collected was the celebrated canoe Ra-makiri subsequently presented to Te Rauparaha. Most of the hapu of Ngatikahungunu now decided to continue their retreat north to Nukutaurua on the Mahia Peninsula. In earlier years their relatives in northern Hawke’s Bay, helped by the powerful Ngapuhi chief Te Wera, had given a good account of themselves against Ngatiraukawa and Ngatituwharetoa invaders from the centre of the island so a general retreat to this family enclave, to which some had already gone, seemed

a prudent decision. How many left the region is uncertain but one authority, Eruera Rangitakaiwaho, recalled the names of individual hapu some or all of whose members had remained behind. But, as he said ‘the people entirely abandoned the land and the mana was taken by Ngatiawa and Ngatitama’.’®

Although the date of their return is well documented, understandably, their departure is much less so. Percy Smith dated Pehikatea as about 1834. Ngatuere, at the time a youth of 60, if we can believe the estimates of his age, said in his Te Whiti South evidence that it was after Pehikatea that ‘we fled to Nukutaurua’?’ and in speaking of this distraught period said that they ‘constantly fled from place to place in fear .. .. As Ngatiawa had taken all their canoes the retreat had to be by land. Further evidence of the duration of their absence was given by Te Ropiha in the Matapihi hearing when he said that he

was at Nukutaurua for eight years, which if the date of 1834, is provisionally accepted would be correct within two years of the known date of their return."®

A chief who comes into prominence at this point is Nuku or Nukupewapewa, so named from the peculiar lines of his moko. A fascinating

larger than life portrait of Nuku comes to us from Te Whatahoro— and Nuku was allegedly a foot taller than any other man as indicated by his mark in ochre a foot higher on the wall of a cave on Ngawakaakupe. He was also depicted for posterity on a carved post at Papawai. However a close reading of Whatahoro’s narrative as transcribed by

NUKUPEWAPEWA 13 Best and as twice published by Downes who was given it by the Maori historian gives us reason to infer that there has been some confusion between the original Nuku who features in the events following the gift of the land by Rangitane eight generations before and the chief Nuku who took part in the Nukutaurua migration.* The section of

the narrative which outlines Nuku’s education as a leader, fighting

chief and tohunga, we suggest, belongs to the record of the earlier man, as does the story of his strong pa called Nga Mahanga on the Ruamahanga opposite what was to be Wall’s Riverside station and about two miles from Glenmorven. This position, almost entirely surrounded by

river bank cliffs, was extremely strong with an underground passage from within the pa to the top of an aka ladder down the cliff face. Also closer to this age of miracles was his capture of the impregnable Maungaraki—or Maunga-a-rake to give the name its correct form— pa, by a neat anticipation of a hang-glider, a huge raupo kite by means of which a man was dropped at night into the pa to open the gate and admit Nuku and his men; and in the same earlier time sequence was his capture of Oruhi pa with Te Hiha whom we have already met. However we are more firmly back in the 19th century and in accord with other traditions when we read that Nuku was unhappy about his people’s abandonment of Wairarapa, particularly when he heard that the western invaders were now in permanent occupation. Nuku persuaded

some of the exiles to return and prospect the situation. In company with followers and the well-known Heretaunga chief Te Hapuku he penetrated as far south as Maungaraki from where the party saw the smoke of numerous fires. Hapuku asked Nuku ‘Where will you get enough water to extinguish these fires?’ to which the latter replied: ‘If you are afraid, I myself will . . .. Hapuku, whom we know to have been no coward, allegedly withdrew to be replaced by Hoeroa and 25 others. Various accounts agree that Nuku’s party attacked Negatiawa at a place called Tauwharerata, near Featherston, inflicting a major defeat. The chief, Te Wharepouri, a few years later to be well known to Colonel Wakefield’s pakehas, was lucky to escape but his wife Te Uamairangi and his daughter Te Kakape were captured. The Wairarapa Maoris now decided that it would be best to make peace, and, again, there are several versions of the precise steps. Te Uamairangi * The essentials of the story are in Elsdon Best’s notebook 15 (p. 210-14) under title: ‘Episodes in the Life of the Wairarapa Chief Nuku-pewapewa. Given by Te Whatahoro’ with a note ‘From T. W. Downes 14/8/1912’. The first published account of the chief by Downes was in the 1912 issue of the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute which he introduced with the phrase ‘Looking through a fine collection of manuscript waiata with the grey-haired owner .. .’ whom he does not identify either on that or the second occasion of its publication in the Journal of the Polynesian Society in September 1916. Whatahoro was living in Wanganui when he met Downes.!9

14 MAORI WAIRARAPA was sent back to her husband and Te Wharepouri was able to persuade

his friends, including Taringakuri, that peace would now be in the best interests of all. He was anxious to ensure his daughter’s return,

but at no great cost and hoped at the outset to ransom her for a mere pounamu but the chief Tutepakihirangi, leader of the exiles, declined and would only consent to the girl’s departure on condition that Wairarapa was restored to its owners.”° The various parties, including the chief himself having been converted to Christianity—Te Kakape’s

baptismal name was Ripeka—the path of honour was smoother. Te Wharepouri travelled north to conclude the negotiations and in turn a distinguished escort journeyed all the way to Port Nicholson to deliver the girl to her father. The names of those who participated have been recorded. In February 1840, when the missionary William Williams was visiting

Whangawehi, a few miles from Mahia, he met Tutepakihirangi and his people. The chief, who seems to have been the only man whose over-

lordship of the Wairarapa was generally recognised during the 19th

century, made his position clear: ‘It is by receiving the word of God that I shall go back to my own place, for it turns enemies into friends and makes people live in peace.’*! He told Williams about Wairarapa which ‘if not already in possession of our countrymen (the Europeans) a portion may be secured for his people’. If only Colonel Wakefield had woken up in time !! The chief was finding his dependent

position an embarrassment. ‘I am living here a stranger and have not enough to eat, because I have not land to cultivate.’ One’s curiosity about Nuku and his disappearance is answered by Whatahoro. About this time Nuku was drowned when a canoe upset off Whakaki near

Nuhaka as Tutepakihirangi himself was to die three years later in Wairarapa Moana. Meanwhile he had to think of his people. When he

called on Williams at Turanganui (Gisborne) six months later he explained in more detail that his 400 followers (obviously most of the lower valley people as tradition claims) were expecting to return in November. He apparently had been to Wellington, perhaps with Kakape, seen Colonel Wakefield and explained his plans. He was clear that the district had not been occupied by the Company but said, surprisingly, that it had ‘been purchased by the Society as a security for them.’”? It would be of great interest to confirm details of the Church Missionary Society's reputedly tentative interest. However Ngatikahungunu of Wairarapa were at last on their way home. Evidence points to the summer of 1840/41 as the period of their return. They remained for a while at

Te Kopi before moving round to Okorewa and then inland to their old haunts. Their progression up the Ruamahanga would have been about the same time as Clifford, Fox and others were about to hunt them out to discuss quite a different economic and social situation.

WHAREPOURIS MARK 15 To mark the peace a sandstone pillar was erected on the beach just north of Whakataki, Te Wharepouri and a number of the Wairarapa hapu being associated with the memorial.*

“ | FaNOL _ va M* Bartory one ere wee pT TIO an i "asia: ! Waimehea eT mi ‘es 4°6.0,0Wavunehea Str 5 “ 8200 ’ O , O v | 7 NS “¥ 5 2 ac "HFlat ~~. Ant + \ a p 3/5, 0 Ov \ 7, | ™ ee, Jt yh) ‘| 2020’ . | ~\ \ - 627. \fc. Wainhero Str 46‘ 3Rae-o-tu-te-Mahut 7 ¢ Whare Mangutoetoe 6) “Ss Hawa Riiwu \ seo] ‘a | C. L.AES. ] Flat \S& .S] 4|So\WL J) & XLANOING KawaSS Kewwa NR. e ~ — “ fe (i . MATAKITAK I\ Pang Phere e Pp , RONG ~~ a a ty % ke Waivio; wore ~ x , - Fefeng ;*y s ae$39" 4855 0°0 . |/ 26 Slye,“ oO Pen Seeztal PukestuaHill.7 Se al dub, SESs: A Wag Ny ara keott \ \ —_ Py , Rocks a eo SY BS /weermoves eset?

ei caCap? er oe | ge Meg OY Pe ° Ste 7 Por er3ee, “t Mato VN" s%

Cape Palliser—Matakitak1

The region’s southeastern corner

From Lands & Survey Dept. map of Wairarapa South County ca. 1897 sheet 3

* The late R. J. Barton in 1927 made representations to the Scenery Preservation

Board and the Hon. Sir Maui Pomare about the preservation of the mark. Although at that stage broken in two and in some danger from work on the Whakataki-Mataikona Road its original dimensions were given as a five feet high stone twelve inches by four inches. Arrangements were made to fence the plinth, which may have been removed by interested Maoris or pakeha

vandals for the 1940 marker is merely a memorial.

II Offshore Navigators First EuropeAN impressions of Wairarapa, however inadequate, stem from the fleeting, often distant glimpses of the coast by the classical circumnavigators. The harbourless East Coast, below Hawke Bay, presents a formidable barrier to coastal landings from sailing vessels. Its uncharted rocks and iron surf are reasons enough to explain the failure of any known discoverer to effect a landing before 1830.

By February 1770 Captain James Cook had been four months in New Zealand waters and before refitting in Queen Charlotte Sound had practically circumnavigated the North Island. His first examination of the Wairarapa coast was incidental to his proving to sceptical officers

that Cook Strait was in fact a passage between two islands one of which they had by then nearly encompassed. On February 7th the Endeavour cleared the Sound and stood away to the eastward. Cook saw ahead that the land ‘ends in a point and is the southernmost land of Aeheinomouwe which I have named Cape Pailisser in honour of my worthy friend Capt Pallisser . . .’.?

In order that there might be no doubt about the nature of his discovery he decided to follow the coast in the expectation of once more

seeing Cape Turnagain and at 9 a.m. on the 8th they were abreast of Cape Palliser ‘where we found the land trend away NE towards Cape Turn-again . . ”. That afternoon, although the 9th by Cook’s diurnal reckoning in terms of which the navigational day was from midday to midday, ‘three Canoes came off to the ship wherein were between 30 &

40 of the Natives who had been pulling after us some time’; Cook inferred from the signs of the Maoris that they knew of the vessel being upon the coast for ‘they were no sooner on board than they asked for

nails: but when nails were given them they asked Tupia what they were which was plain that they had never seen any before, yet they not only knowed how to ask for them but knowed what use to apply them to .. .. Cook correctly deduced that their ‘connections must extend as far North as Cape Kidnappers .. .’. After a short stay the canoes were ‘dismiss’d with proper presents’ and the Endeavour continued on her course until 11 a.m. the next morning

when a clearance in the haze permitted a view of Cape Turnagain some 20 miles to the north east. ‘I then called the officers upon deck and asked them if they were now satisfied that this land was an Island 16

COOK’S SECOND VOYAGE 17 to which they answer’d in the affirmative.’ Cook thereupon turned back to the southward. |

At noon the following day, the 11th, he noted in his journal some “4 leagues’ distant ‘a remarkable hillock which stands close to the Sea’. This headland was, of course Castle Point so named on the chart and

Sydney Parkinson, the botanical draughtsman of Joseph Banks noted in his posthumously published journal that ‘We passed two points of land to which we gave the names of Castle Point and Flat Point’.? On the 12th Cook was again off Cape Palliser and better able to see its

true character: ‘. . . sufficient to be seen in clear weather 12 or 14 Leagues off and is of a broken and hilly surface; between the foot of the high land and the Sea is a border of low flat land off which lies some rocks that appear above water. Between this Cape and Cape Turnagain the land near the shore is in many places low and flat and appear’d green and pleasant, but inland are many hills.’* Parkinson more picturesquely noted that through the haze ‘we discovered many extensive

lawns, with some high hills, the tops of which were mostly flat .. .’.* Cook observed that from Palliser to Cape Terawhiti ‘the land is tollerable high makeing in Table points and the Shore forms two Bays, at

least it appear’d so for we were always too far off this part of the Coast to be particular’. In elaboration of Cook’s comments Beaglehole has noted that Cook’s uncertainty is reflected in his contemporary charts. Two ‘show Palliser Bay, the outline of the eastern side conjecturally dotted, and an indica-

tion of the outer entrance to Port Nicholson . .. but [that in a third] there is a break in the coast, but it seems to come in Palliser Bay’.° More positively, in view of their closeness to it, the small bay at the mouth of Whawhanui is correctly shown.

The second voyage, in the Resolution and Adventure, brought Cook

to the Wairarapa coast once more, in 1773. Immediately after their arrival in New Zealand waters off Cape Kidnappers in October the vessels were separated by a furious gale and did not meet again on the voyage. Cook in the Resolution passed Cape Palliser on 25 October at the height of the storm but was understandably too preoccupied to make any further observations before his arrival at Ship Cove in search of the Adventure. He was able, however, to amplify his earlier speculations

about the two bays at the southern end of the North Island for on 3 November he noted that the shore between Terawhiti and Palliser ‘forms two deep Bays or inlets both of which extend in north inclining

to the west although as Beaglehole points out, Palliser, if anything inclines to the east.

After a three weeks wait and refit the Resolution on 25 November finally left Ship Cove, Cook having buried a message for Furneaux at the foot of a tree. That night, the 26th by ship time, he was again off

Cape Palliser and was on this occasion better able to appraise its HW—3

18 OFFSHORE NAVIGATORS features. ‘I had now an oppertunity to make some observations on the Bay which lies on the West side of Cape Pallisser . . . the bay does not appear to run so far inland to the Northward as I at first thought, the deception being caused by the land in the bottom of it being low, it

however is not less than 5 Leagues deep and full as wide at the Entrance, the two points being NWBW and SEBE from each other, it seems to lie wholely exposed to the Southerly and SW winds, it is however probable that there may be places in the bottom of the Bay better sheltered. .. ..’? Seventy years later the small coastal craft servicing

the newly established pastoral runs would find in Te Kopi a partial confirmation of Cook’s inference. A member of his company young George Forster who with his father John R. Forster formed part of the scientific staff, was bolder in forecast than Cook and more hopeful of the hidden mysteries of Palliser Bay: “We stood close in shore under Cape Terra-Wittee, and fired several guns to give the Adventure notice of our approach, in case she had lain in one of the adjacent harbours. Between the Capes Terra-Wittee and Palliser, we discovered a very deep bay, of which the shores had every where a gentle slope, and especially towards the bottom, where the hills were removed to such a distance, that we could but just discern them. If there is sufficient depth of water for ships in this bay, and of that we had no room to doubt, it appears to be a most convenient spot for an European settlement. There is a great stretch of land fit for cultivation, and easily defensible; there is likewise plenty of wood, and almost certain indications of a considerable river; and lastly the country does not seem to be very

populous, so that there would be little danger of quarrels with the natives. . . .® It is probable that Dumont D’Urville, fifty years later before his attempt to effect a landing in the bay, had read both Cook and Forster’s comments very attentively.

The Adventure, meanwhile, was maintaining its solitary battle with the storm. On the early November day on which Cook passed Palliser on his way into Ship Cove Furneaux was off the Cape where he ‘was visited by a number of the Natives in their Canoes with a great quantity of Cray fish which we bought of them for nails and Otaheite Cloath’.® The next day a strong north westerly blew them away from the coast the vessel being driven as far north as Tolaga Bay before finally returning to Queen Charlotte Sound to miss the Resolution by less than a week.

Cook himself had not finished with New Zealand. Four years later,

on his third and fateful voyage, in February 1777, he was again in Queen Charlotte Sound. On this occasion he asked the chief “Tiarooa’ ‘how many Ships he had seen or hea(r)d of being in Queen Charlotte’s

Sound or in any part or its neighbourhood’. The chief mentioned a vessel which had ‘put into a Port’ near Cape Terawhiti the captain of which kept ‘a Woman of the Country’ by whom he had a son still alive.

BELLINGSHAUSEN & DUMONT D URVILLE 19

It was also alleged that venereal disease was introduced by the crew. Cook closely cross-examined the chief to eliminate any confusion with the visits of De Surville and Marion du Fresne but the Maoris were insistent that the details of the visit were well known.*°

This story is the origin of the tradition of the ship of ‘Rongotute’, a subject of fascination to many writers on New Zealand discovery to this day. Beaglehole considered that the legend was ‘not really very persuasive’ and thought it to be in the best tradition of Maori romancing. His careful analysis pinpoints the contradictions in the contemporary Queen Charlotte Sound version. Apart from the supposed age of the

son of the captain, Cook had failed to mention the incident in his journal for 1773 and his editor quoted the Maoris’ strong affirmation at the time of his first enquiry in 1770 that “These people declared to us this morning that they never either saw or heard of a Ship like ours

being upon this coast before . . .. An animal supposely left in the country by the crew Beaglehole thought could be classed ‘with the phoenix or the hippogriff’.

With due respect this is not an entirely satisfactory dismissal of the

question for the more circumstantial version in which we are still | interested is centred in Palliser Bay and not in the Sounds.

The story is particularly pertinent to our history in that, more commonly, the vessel is said to have been wrecked, the location of its misfortune being Cape Palliser. Elsdon Best in a note on the subject in 1912 from information supplied by Iraia te Whaiti pointed out that this version was first collected during the Amiowhenua invasion of 1820. The Wairarapa Maoris supposedly told their ‘visitors’ that a ‘vessel known to them as the ship of Rongotute’ had been wrecked long before, and the crew killed and eaten after which a fatal epidemic had broken out. Best asked the Wairarapa sage, Te Whatahoro, whose standing as an authority was particularly high at the time, whether his elders had ever spoken of the occurrence. ‘Whatahoro’ (J. A. Jury) said that the

disaster occurred at Te Kawakawa (Palliser) after the first visit of Cook and that Rongotute was the name by which the ship’s captain had been known. A local chief, Whakataha-ki-te-rangi obtained a toma-

hawk from the wreck which he mounted on a whale bone handle and named Te Whata-o-te-rangi. The Palliser Maoris obtained many articles from the survivors including red blankets which they called tahurangi.

The same survivors, before their position was resolved by the final solution, made some bread or damper from flour which astonished their captors who attempted to repeat the performance from the contents of

a cask which drifted ashore with the result that it turned to stone. Whatahoro said that he had heard that three survivors had put to sea in a boat and ‘gone up the east coast’.™

The attraction of a good-sized mystery of this kind, particularly when linked to stray pieces of flotsam such as the Spanish helmet dredged up

20 OFFSHORE NAVIGATORS in Wellington harbour, is almost overpowering. More significant, however, than the healthy scepticism of Cook’s great editor is the fact that

even in the 18th century vessels capable of reaching New Zealand shores did not vanish without their owners and sponsors registering some

concern. When the distinguished French navigator, La Perouse, dis-

appeared in the Pacific after sailing for the Solomons from Port Jackson in 1788 he prompted a search which was not resolved until Peter Dillon found remains of the wreck in Vanikoro nearly forty years later. A search for Rongotute and his vessel, whether British, French or Spanish would have been similarly the secondary goal in the voyages

of later navigators. Until we can confirm the Wairarapa tradition by some identifiable relic or by the still possible discovery of some ship which did not return to base Rongotute and his vessel must stand in question.

A fleeting reference to the district’s southern sea wall comes forty years later. The Russian navigators, Bellingshausen and Lazarev on a voyage of discovery in the Vostok and Mirnyi sailed through the strait after the now almost customary visit to Queen Charlotte Sound on their way to the North Pacific. On 9 June 1820 they noted the inlet of Port Nicholson and ‘Beyond the high central headland (Cape Turakirae) and Cape Palliser lies another bay. These shores appeared suitable for agricultural land and for European settlements’—almost an echo of Forster. ‘On the central headland a big fire was burning; probably the inhabitants wanted us to visit them.’? It was perhaps as well that the crew were unable to test the nature of the invitation for it is probable that the fires were lit by warriors of the invading Ngapuhi expedition under Tuwhare which decimated the population of the Port Nicholson area.

The French navigator of the same decade, Dumont D’Urville, is best known for his survey of the Nelson coast line and for the first daring passage of French Pass. From Cape Campbell he set a course towards the ‘vast bay lying between Toura Kira Cape and Kawakawa’. D’Urville had more facility with the Maori language than Cook plus of course the still slender but increasing knowledge of the intervening fifty years and this is our first contemporary record of the Maori names of these headlands.

At noon on 29 January 1827 they were only two miles from Turakirae and steered towards Palliser Bay which seemed most enticing—no rocks, no obvious dangers, clear lofty hills with a belt of level ground along the shore—How blind can one be!—Shortly afterwards a canoe manned by six men which had possibly put off from Whanganui-a-Tara

drew alongside. Two chiefs “Tehi-Noui’ and ‘Koki-Hore’ elected to remain on board. When some four or five miles into the Bay D’Urville

realised his exposed situation and anchored for the night. From the masthead. Lake Onoke was clearly visible over the sand-spit.

DUMONT D URVILLE 21 Immediately after anchoring, the commander with his lieutenants Quoy and Guilbert embarked in the whale boat to effect a landing taking Koki-Hore as spokesman. The presence, indeed the willingness of

the chief to land on the Wairarapa shore shows that this part of the coast must have been in effective occupation by the Ngatiawa or Negati- ; mutunga and not the Kahungunu who had not long been in charge at the southern part of the island.

Fifty feet from the shore he was disappointed to see the terrific surf breaking in front of him. Hugging the coast line they rowed along

for some three miles without seeing any break or indentation where they could land. The beach everywhere consisted of ‘fairly big pebbles with very steep but low cliffs at the back. Beyond stretched hills broken by little valleys, in which nothing grows but bracken or low bushes.’ The point at which the Astrolabe anchored would probably be between Corner Creek and the Wharekauhau to the west of Lake Onoke. The

shingle actually ends a short distance south of Corner Creek from where a coarse black sand extends eastward across the spit to beyond Whangaimoana.

D’Urville was chagrined to learn that he was unable to land. ‘It was very galling to find, that, in spite of my efforts, access to this curious coast was denied me. For a moment I was tempted to try to reach the shore by flinging myself into the breakers which crashed furiously and my two companions were inclined to imitate me.’ Wisely he decided to abandon the attempt and they left the shore ‘from a spot due north of our anchorage, where the bed of a torrent had made a most extraordinary cleft in the cliff. To record the uselessness of our efforts, we gave this miserable basin the name of Baie Inutile’ (Useless Bay) .% The scarred cliff could be the creek bed named on an early map, Te Mahanga, near Corner Creek. A study of D’Urville’s chart of Cook Strait shows that his anchorage was to the south west of Lake Onoke

which is dotted in as a lagoon. A coasting of three miles along the beach line to a point due north of the Astrolabe would place them off Te Mahanga. It is clear that they did not traverse further east towards Te Kopi and Whatarangi. Enormous fires which had earlier been seen some distance inland increased that night and appeared to be more distant than they at first judged. This activity suggested the presence of a volcano—that afternoon when offshore he thought that ‘all the soil seemed to bear marks of volcanic action’. However more correctly he concluded that the fires came from extensive burns lit by the Maoris which continued for days. The fires ‘sprang up and disappeared several times during the night’, and the next day there still remained a heavy pall of smoke. No great knowledge of the Wairarapa landscape in February is needed to surmise how the fern, tussock and scrubland of the lower valley would burn in a dry month.

22 OFFSHORE NAVIGATORS On the 30th the Astrolabe coasted southwards two or three miles off shore towards Cape Palliser which was rounded at midday. He com-

mented on its back-drop of mountains ‘massed pell mell . .. and separated by the precipitous gorges’. He saw also the coastal strip of flat which ‘runs along by the sea fairly regularly and seems quite suitable for human habitation’. They noticed one fire under the headland ‘and another five or six miles to the north’.

From the now disconsolate Maoris on board who realised that they were being carried north into hostile territory D’Urville learned that the Maori name of Flat Point was “Tehouka-Kore’ and on 1st February hove

to off Castle Point. ‘The land in the neighbourhood still looks quite pleasant’ but there seemed to be no possible anchorage for a vessel of the size of the Astrolabe.1® That night a westerly breeze propelled them past the last Wairarapa fires towards Cape Turnagain.

In the thirteen years to elapse before the New Zealand Company’s shiploads of hopefuls arrived around the corner in Port Nicholson there was an increasing number of whaling ships on the coast. Firm records

of any interest in the Wairarapa are meagre except for the brief call by an American whaler, the Antarctic, captained by Benjamin Morrell junr. On 13 January 1830, when off Flat Point, ‘we received a visit from about fifty natives, who insisted upon some of us going on shore. Their articles of traffic were fish and fishing gear, curiosities and women. The two first were immediately purchased, but the latter did not come to a good market.’ Captain Morrell was accompanied by his wife who published her own account of the voyages in which she participated but makes no mention of this Flat Point landing.’® An interesting feature of the visit is the number of Maoris still on the coast at a time when, by some traditions, the first Ngatikahungunu emigrants were setting out for the Mahia Peninsula. In the next chapter we outline the various journeys of exploration around the coast and through the interior. It is clear that the development of shore-whaling stations in Hawke’s Bay within the

next decade, with the founding of Wellington led to a considerable coastal voyaging by whale boats. One such vessel landed at the Whareama mouth in November 1844 when Weld and his party were there.

The information given to Weld by its crew that a vessel could enter the river with any wind except a south easterly or on the second and following days after a north easter would indicate a considerable degree of familiarity with the coast and its rivers at a time when no Europeans lived in the area at all.?’

Il .

Exploration by Beach and Ridge

ACTIVE EXPLORATION of the district followed only from the establishment

of the New Zealand Company’s settlements in Port Nicholson. The known records do not tell of any European who travelled into or through the Wairarapa before 1840. To the Company’s agents, hurriedly trading

for millions of acres in September and October 1839, before the first colonists trod on their heels, the primary requisite was a good harbour. The contours of the hinterland were of secondary importance, particularly when purchase deeds could be made as all-embracing as those prepared in the high hopes of Colonel Wakefield’s expansive spring.

In the jubilation which followed the signing of the Wellington purchase deed at the end of October, Wharepouri the Ngatiawa chief who, with Te Puni, had taken a leading part in the sale, told the Wakefields

of the Wairarapa. A flat and fertile district to the eastward called ‘Wairarapa’ (E. J. Wakefield’s accuracy on this point was not to be followed by his countrymen for some years) Wharepouri declared tapu for Colonel Wakefield. This ‘flat and fertile district to the eastward’ the chief swore by his head no one else should have until Wakefield had

been to see it. Wharepouri’s title to the valley rested on uncertain eround, principally his status as an ally in the fight against Negatikahungunu at Te Tarata. But with the true owners still gathering strength to return after making their peace with him as the surviving challenger, the valley to him was unoccupied and his for the selling. Barrett confirmed the description although it was not clear that he had visited the district and added that a fresh-water ‘stream’ ran through it into Palliser Bay.*

More important bait, meanwhile lured the Tory through Cook Strait to Kapiti and Taranaki. True, Wairarapa was not forgotten, but it was temporarily submerged in the proximity of more handy territories and boundaries. Its correct spelling, as we implied, even goes underground not to emerge for some years. Wharepouri’s claims, if not his offer, would seem to be discounted by the second deed of purchase signed at Kapiti on 25 October by Te Rauparaha, Te Hiko and others of even more tenuous title. The northern boundary of this purchase was defined with a geometrical rigidity which completely disregarded topography or tribal rights. It was a straight line across the island from the southern 23

24 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE head at the mouth of the Mokau river to Flat Point to include “Tehukakore, Warehama, Rangacawa, Wainerap and Turakairai’.*? Barrett, probably recalling the earlier discussion with Wharepouri about the region, had ensured the inclusion of these barbarous corruptions of district place-names. Two or three days, however, were to pass before the Wainerap of the Kapiti deed became Wyderop, the mecca

for pastureless stock-owners loitering on the bush-covered hills of Wellington. Perhaps too, this mutilated form of the name Wairarapa was entirely lost on the Kahungunu who might be pardoned for refusing

to recognise their own territories in the deed, supposing the unlikely possibility that its contents ever became known to them. Wharepouri’s public act of tapu, particularly in view of his part in the peace-making at Castlepoint, may have been little more than a boastful challenge, for the timorous conduct of his fellow tribesmen was not that of unquestioned lords of Wairarapa soil.

This was apparent from the conduct of the Maori escort which accompanied Charles Heaphy, the active and inspired surveyor-draughtsman of the Company who with the German naturalist Ernst Dieffenbach, made in September 1839 the first thrust into the Rimutaka towards the

east. In search of the even then rare huia they struck in from Lowry Bay to camp near the source of the Orongorongo River. Heaphy recalled that their native guides were very much afraid of the Wairarapa people (as were Ensign Best’s a year later) and spent an uneasy night crouching over the fire, guns in hand, to defend, if necessary, their presence on this disputed border. Next day, from the top of the range, they ‘had a fine view of Palliser Bay and the Wairarapa Lakes’.®

That their fears were not groundless was demonstrated some five months later when the last act of violence in this regional feud occurred. A Ngatiawa chief, Puakawa, was killed while working peacefully in his

potato garden at Point Howard and a woman and child were taken prisoner. The incident appeared sufficiently serious to cause Colonel Wakefield to issue a stand of arms to the men on the beach but no further threat developed. It nevertheless may have reinforced his natural reluctance to have anything to do with the Wairarapa.

The first known European to walk past the Mukamuka rocks was William Deans who in a letter to his family on 30 October 1840 reported on a journey to ‘Widerup or Palliser Bay’ in the week before. ‘It is their property, never having been sold. Would you believe it, no colonist but myself has been there. A month hence I will visit it again in company

with 50 or 60 natives who are going to hunt wild pigs... . If it turns out as well as I expect . . . I think I will obtain a license and squat there .. .. The chief Te Puni with the same irresponsible insouciance * The correct forms: Whareama, Rangiwhakaoma (Castle Point), Wairarapa, Turakirae.

ENSIGN BEST 25 as his fellow tribesman, Wharepouri, now called Deans “Tangata Widerup’ or proprietor-designate of the district. There was no legal basis on which Deans could obtain a pastoral licence and his suggestion for this and other reasons was not followed up. Deans, until his departure

with his brother John to Riccarton three years later, found the growing of cabbages and potatoes at Okiwi (now Eastbourne) more practicable. The escort of pig-hunters which Deans expected on his second visit, as it transpired, accompanied the next known traveller from Port Nicholson, Ensign Abel Dottin William Best, in December. Best had arrived in Wellington on 2 June 1840 in charge of a detachment of some thirty men of the 80th Regiment. Hobson and Shortland’s purpose in sending this force was to over-awe or, if necessary, quell the Company’s ‘insurgents’ who, seemingly in disregard of the prerogatives of the Crown, had

ventured to impose their own code of laws and justice. This confrontation having been avoided by protestations and demonstrations of

loyalty from the Company leaders Best was hard put to it to find rewarding occupation in the uncongenial settlement apart from the assiduous cultivation of his garden on Thorndon flat and a pioneer visit

to Ohariu. He nevertheless established a friendship with the chiefs Muturoa and his brother Wairarapa who invited him to inspect a district where they enjoyed a precarious interest.

On 8th December 1840 the expedition in three canoes under Muturoa’s guidance left ‘a little bay just outside the inner head’ (possibly Breaker Bay). Because of rising wind and sea the Maoris decided to land at Orongorongo ‘one of the stations of the Mauries of Pepitea’ where on the beach Best occupied one of the ‘few miserable huts . . . with nothing more than a roof and one side’.* To kill time Best with some young men of the party wandered the river in search of game. One wood pigeon was the bag nor was Best impressed with the valley which he described as bounded by ‘steep scrubby hills’ an indica-

tion that heavy forest did not extend down to the mouth of the river.

When proceeding upstream and again the following day, up the Wainuiomata, Best’s wish to penetrate further was rejected by his escorts ‘on account of the Nattakahoons’. Indeed the theme song of his five day

visit was the pervading fear by Ngatiawa of a surprise attack by the Kahungunu, clearly why his escorts took him no further north than Alsop’s Bay on Lake Wairarapa.

The weather on the morning of the 11th being more ‘moderate’ they

were able to continue round Turakirae (not named by Best) by a ‘track’ the first few miles of which he found ‘very bad over stones and

rocks’ but appreciated Muturoa’s reason for not travelling in strong wind: *. .. even the little wind we had today brought down showers of earth and sand and occasionally large stones.’ Their evening camp was at the Wharepapa where, failing any hut, they lay in the open under the protection of the bush. Next morning, the 12th, Best was able to turn

26 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE

up into the valley proper, the party’s main preoccupation being a protracted pig hunt which continued for the next two days, broken only by the necessity of camping and taking defensive action against false alarms of attack. Their halting place ‘some miles up the valley’ was close to the remains of an old pa ‘which had been erected at the time the Nattakahoons were driven from the valley’ (probably Kakahimakatea on Battery Hill). ‘At every turn one or other of the Mauries pointed out the place where some of his relations had fought their last where according to his account they were entombed amidst heaps of slaughtered Nattakahoons.’

Sunday the 13th was a rest day from hunting but the consumption of pigs, eels, pigeons, ducks, kakas, eggs and berries and fruits gave some quality and flavour to potatoes, bread biscuit and tea. Best records

that the day before ‘Apuni’ (i.e. Epuni) had come ‘to his potato Grounds on the opposite side of the river’ (probably the Manganui as they were unlikely to have progressed as far as the Waiorongomai) an indication that the invaders were sufficiently confident to establish cultivations some distance up the western side of the lake. That night occurred their major false alarm and on the 14th pig hunting continued. Best climbed a hill, probably High Manganui, and took bearings on two distant hills ‘whose bases were below the horizon . . . opposite sides of the apparently narrowest part of the valley’ (probably Rangitumau and a northern eminence of the Maungaraki). Proof of how little distance they had travelled is given in his statement that ‘I saw much beautiful land and an immense Lake which reached miles up the valley’—evidence that he had not hitherto been alongside Lake Wairarapa.

His time was running out and on the 15th they turned for the journey home. Best says that he ‘visited the mouth of the river which took me some four miles out of my way’ although he later caught up with the party. From this comment and the reference in his descriptive

note to the ‘mouth of the river’ being a dangerous place ‘. . . only navigable for small vessels or boats’ it is clear that he trudged the sand-

spit which he refers to as a bank dividing the blackish lagoon from the sea. He pointed out that the Maoris preferred to beach their canoes at the western edge of the lagoon and drag them over the bank rather than enter the mouth—a practice which the Europeans of the next decade could have followed with a lower casualty rate.

The last day of the journey, the 16th, was a heavy slog from the Orongorongo to ‘Okivie’ where they picked up a canoe to Petone arriving ‘wet and starved with hunger and cold after a twelve hours walk’. On his return to Wellington next day he was ‘pestered by people anxious to know what I had seen’ among whom were Revans, the Editor

of the New Zealand Gazette, and Mein Smith. Best claimed that the first published report in the paper on 19 December grossly exaggerated

his description. Under the disguise of a ‘competent judge’ who had

STOKES AND CHILD 27 recently visited ‘Wyderop’ there were said to be ‘500,000 acres’ (corrected

a week later at Best’s insistence to 50,000 acres) ‘of available land there, being level, of good soil and moderately wooded, well supplied with water and in many parts well clothed with excellent grass’. It was

appropriately suggested that before a final decision was taken as to ‘what direction or directions the surveys are to be vigorously pursued in conformity with the arrangements made with Sir George Gipps . . . the

land about us ought to be visited, and previous to the holders of land

orders being called on to make any more selections, the intended boundaries of the District made public.’ The Colonel, however, was not to be rushed.

The two journeys of 1840 might be regarded merely as a tentative unofficial reconnaissance for the more formal expeditions of 1841 and 1842. The first to be summarised included the pioneer European cross-

ing of the Rimutaka Range. Robert Stokes, New Zealand Company surveyor, with a companion, J. W. Child,* two carriers of provisions and two Maori guides, left Petone on 25 November 1841. Two days later they waded the ‘Heretaonga’ or Hutt River for the 26th and last time and slept on the banks of the Pakuratahi after crossing what is now known as the Mangaroa Hill. On the 28th they left the stream ascended to the summit of the range and dropped into the watershed of the Otauira. From the summit the ‘highest peak’ of the Tararua range (Mt. Alpha as they would see it) bore 347 degrees or 13 degrees west of north.

Next evening, while the men were preparing camp, Stokes and Child ascended a hill on the north west side of the valley from where they obtained a favourable impression of the open plains beyond. The land appeared for the most part to be covered with a coarse grass while on the banks of the river and in different parts of the valley were large groves and belts of trees. They continued southward by the western side

of the lake which, Stokes reported, burst through to the sea twice a year after the principal rains. He learned also of the small harbour on the eastern side at ‘Te Kopi which would be suitable for a whale fishery. Returning by Cape Turakirae and the coast he was back in Wellington on 6 December. Although the first steamer (H.M.S. Driver) to visit Wellington was not to arrive for four years Stokes, with typical Company optimism, pointed out that within six hours steaming of Wellington and

a day and a half by land from Petone lay a level tract of upwards of three hundred square miles. Their guides had also shown them a small

valley three miles nearer the lake than the Otauira from which they claimed there was another path leading to the Pakuratahi.® * Child, apparently a person of some means, selected a number of possible country sections but decided not long after that there was no good reason why he should remain. He arrived back in England in time to present some unflattering evidence on the Company to the 1844 House of Commons Committee on New Zealand.

28 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE Growing curiosity in Wellington about the district was reflected in a

letter written from the settlement while Stokes was on his journey. Messrs Hanson and Von Alzdorf in advocating its occupation, forecasted accurately that ‘It is probable that the Wairarapa will be first occupied as a grazing district and gradually settled through the purchases of land by those who have stock stations there. .. .”®

Stokes had made a pioneer crossing of the range at a crucial saddle

and had given an accurate picture of the possibilities of the lower valley. He estimated that a month would be needed to explore the whole district. To carry out this task the Company, a year later, mounted

a numerically impressive expedition. Assistant surveyor Charles H. Kettle, later to be better known as the surveyor of the site of the Otago settlement, with cadet Arthur Wills, were in charge of a dozen Maori and pakeha escorts and baggage carriers. The principal guide, a little curiously, was the Negatiraukawa chief ‘Eahu’ from Ohau. The large party left Kare Kare on the Manawatu River, by whaleboat on 5 May

1842, in the short winter days, to make a slow and not unexciting passage of the Gorge a week later.’? On the 13th they turned south at the ‘Moawango’ [Mangahao] junction and proceeded through totara, rimu and tawa for some three miles to a camp in a potato garden. On the 14th they rejoined the Mangahao, travelling apparently on its east

bank for some hours to another potato garden where an old chief ‘Ta Kawa’ and four or five Maoris welcomed them. Takawa, who, by a surprising coincidence had been taken as an infant from his Negatikahungunu parents by Te Ahu and subsequently given his freedom, touched Kettle’s heart by expressing ‘his desire for white men to settle here’ and his offer to guide them south through the forest. Their camp was probably not far from Ballance for next day they crossed a low ridge into the watershed of the Mangatainoka. Kettle ascertained that the Mangatainoka joined the Tiraumea which had its source in the Puketoi ‘and flowing in a tortuous course through a large tract of fine country’ reached the Manawatu. At noon on the 15th they

struck the Makakahi, south of present day Pahiatua, crossed it and camped that night in an old hut in the bush. ‘Our route today has laid through a fine level country with magnificent timber and very little underwood.’ The night was stormy and a fresh in the Mangatainoka delayed their crossing. However that evening they reached an open clearing of about thirty acres, which although not named was probably Te Hawera (Hamua). In the morning, the 17th, Takawa, their local guide, returned having given them directions for the next stage. Some thirty minutes walking brought them again to the Mangatainoka where they searched unavailingly for the turn-off to the Tokomaru track which was reported to enter the valley at this point. Better fortune met their efforts the following day and soon after striking the track they crossed the Mangatainoka

KETTLE AND WILLS 29 for the last time to make a good thirteen miles through bush consisting largely of totara and rimu. At breakfast on the 19th they consumed the last of their provisions so it became important to reach some kainga on the Ruamahanga. A two mile walk brought them to three successive

ranges of small hills and a little before midday they crossed the Makakahi for the last time. The track now led for some miles up the ‘Mangawhinaw’ stream beyond which was a longish ascent of a steep hill from

the top of which they had a glimpse of the plains to the south. On reaching the foot of this hill (Mount Bruce) they were able to establish

that the Ruamahanga River had its source in the Tararua Mts. and not in the Puketoi range as had been reported. They crossed the river and after an unavailing search for the track camped at dark, their meal being five pigeons which Kettle had fortunately shot during the day.

On the 20th, now well out on the Opaki Plain, five miles of fern and grass brought them to a narrow belt of totara from the southern side of which they saw a pa two miles further on. Although not identified in Kettle’s narrative the sketch map of the journey gives it as ‘Pa Tupuaharuru’,® and there are other references to the village of Tapuaeharuru in this area, which was the first site in the Waipoua to be reoccupied, certainly before Te Ore Ore and probably a little before Kaikokirikiri

itself. The customary greetings and discharge of muskets presaged a substantial meal followed by lengthy speechifying by their hosts. There was difficulty, the following morning, in recruiting assistance from the inhabitants on account of the day being Sunday. However, loaded with potatoes, the party set off about 11 a.m. and crossed the Waipoua an hour later after which they again entered the bush before emerging on to a mile wide belt of grassland, the Kohangawareware plain, although not named. At this point the party would appear to have been some three or four miles to the west of the site of Masterton. They encountered

the usual difficulty in hunting for the obscure signs of the track until, despairing of success, they camped on the southern bush edge to see by the light of the fire that they were, in fact, on the path.

A waterless camp provoked an early start next morning the 22nd through the mile wide strip of bush on the north bank of the Waingawa, the western extremity of the Kuripuni bush, which was unford-

able on account of melting snow. A shelter was accordingly erected because of threatening rain and the Maori escort collected a modest bag of 23 pigeons. Despite these inroads on the Wairarapa avian population

it was necessary to send back to the village on the Opaki Plain for a further supply of potatoes.

They were able to cross the Waingawa and continued on 25 May over fern land the surface of which was covered with sharp stones ‘which were very trying to the feet of the Natives’. After some two miles they re-entered the bush camping about 4 p.m. ‘when, as usual, it

began to rain’. The narrative mentions crossing three streams the

30 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE ‘Mangatarera ten yards wide; another about the same size, called Puawango, and a third, the Pukaiti .. .. The Puawango would appear to be the Kaipatangata but the Pukaiti, fairly obviously on the Matarawa Plain, is more difficult to pin down. Their path on the 26th led them across a heavily timbered plain on which the ground underfoot was much rooted by wild pigs. At noon they came to the Waiohine which after some hesitation on the part of the Maori escort was crossed safely by the pole method. Kettle’s description, the first known to the author of what was to become the classic method of river crossing, explains how several of the party walked in to the river firmly gripping a long pole: ‘Those that are not so strong as the rest have a good support and they all act with a combined force against the stream.’ Although the water

was up to their armpits all was well. Kettle had been in wet clothes for three days and was pleased to find that the advance party had managed to sustain an immense fire around which they stood drying blankets and their wet garments.

The following morning, 27th, they continued what present day trampers would call ‘bush bashing’ in heavy rain but being weakened by the efforts of earlier days they decided to camp in bush after crossing a further two miles of plain. A bark hut and even the fire were prepared with difficulty. “The surface of the fern land we have passed over to-day is covered with large stones; beneath them there is a fine soil capable of producing almost anything.’

They were cheered on the 28th to find that the weather had improved and only a mile’s travel brought them to the Tauwharenikau which was crossed without difficulty. Kettle now turned towards the hills hoping to discover ‘an opening into the Hutt, should any exist’. They followed up a small stream which he records as the ‘Mangatawai’

but retreated there being ‘no communication, but a number of gullies

meeting .. .. A further mile and a half over the fern land brought them to the Otauira up which they proceeded for a short distance before

camping for the night. The last of their provisions were consumed at breakfast and had Stoke’s information regarding his crossing eighteen months before been available to them they should have managed the pass, particularly as ‘from the broken twigs we saw’ it was evident that some one had been up not long before. However rain, together with an unsuccessful reconnaissance by Te Ahu and another Maori, bred doubt. They sat out the 30th in their wet camp in continuing downpour care-

fully rationing Te Ahu’s last twelve potatoes but in the face of persisting bad weather on the 31st determined to press on over. It was twelve days since they had enjoyed the comparative luxury of tea, sugar or flour and their weak condition made it imperative that a way out be found. They climbed a continually ascending bush ridge in mist and retreated from ‘a great height’ back towards the lake. An improvement in the weather that afternoon gave them a view from a bare hill

KETTLE AND WILLS 31 on the N.W. side of the valley from which Kettle saw that they were about two miles below the head of the lake. The party had obviously

drifted south along the main divide instead of turning into the Pakuratahi.

After their final camp that night in the Wairarapa valley watershed , Te Ahu’s confidence returned as he recalled the route as the one from which ‘he went over into the Hutt from this place about twenty years ago’.* However it was essential to obtain some food and after a hard day’s hunt they succeeded in killing four pigs. An early start on the 2nd soon brought them to ‘the old track of Te Ahu’s party’. It is an interesting light on the skill of Maori path finders that this route should still be recognisable to the guide after twenty years the indicators being merely broken twigs. On the summit Te Ahu drew their attention ‘to a

remarkable object at some distance from us .. . the top of a high precipice, down which he told us a small waterfall flowed, whose course

he and his party had followed up, and by that means crossed the mountains’. Kettle took a bearing and with improved morale started off

‘with renewed vigor’. It is difficult with any certainty to work out his route which would be in the vicinity of the old Summit Station. ‘Ascending and descending several hills, we at length came to the stream’ but despite following its course for some time were unable to reach the

top of the precipice and in deference to the wishes of their guide were obliged to camp early.

On the 3rd they succeeded in reaching the summit ‘the dangerous part being about 200 feet high. This place is called by the Natives “Ko te horo”.’ It was still necessary to cross several hills, presumably a northward traverse along the summit ridge after which Te Ahu was to their great joy able to recognise the Pakuratahi a mere half hour below them. Kettle was increasingly concerned about the health of his party, one man, Alexander Grant being in a particularly alarming condition while a number of the others were unwell because, Kettle thought they had washed down unsalted pork with large gulps of cold water. The Pakuratahi required wading and sidling and a further miserable camp followed but on the 5th late in the morning they found the turn off for the Hutt to reach its banks by three that afternoon. It is extremely dificult for anyone who today crosses the Rimutaka Hill by a sealed road and almost flies over the new Pakuratahi bridge to imagine the difficulty of route-finding when the entire country was buried under heavy bush. The wanderings of surveyors on the Pakuratahi flats in the late 1850s give some point to the problems of Kettle and Wills.

The morning of the 6th June was encouragingly fine but in their weakened condition it took a further two days to get down the valley. * Te Ahu, as a Ngatiraukawa chief, would have probably been a member of Te Rauparaha’s invading legions of 1821 or 1822.

32 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE At 11 a.m. on the 8th they reached Mason’s house at Taita and a square

meal for all 14, over a month after leaving the Manawatu. Valuable information had been collected about the district. The expedition, however, was undoubtedly the most cumbersome which had ever undertaken a major journey in New Zealand. To state that the average party of one or two missionaries with a smal] Maori escort could have done it in half the time is nevertheless not to belittle the achievements and difficulties of the first party to traverse the valley and the modest achieve-

ments of the only major exploring expedition mounted by the New Zealand Company in the region. Wills mentions making sketches at different points en route but these have still to be found if they survived. A sketch map in Whitehead’s Treatise on practical surveying (London, 1848), although included merely as an example of what a typical colonial surveyor might have to undertake, is nevertheless clearly based on the journey of his fellow New Zealand Company employees. However Whitehead shows seven successive camps between the Mangahao and the Waiohine, a much more rapid advance than the party was able to make. In the accompanying text (p. 63) he estimated the week’s

rations for one man as 10 Ibs of flour, 10 lbs of salted meat, half a pound of tea and one and a half of ‘moist sugar’, a scale of supply which Kettle’s party would have welcomed.

Wakefield, in sending Kettle’s report to London in July with those of Brees and others, drew attention to the ‘fine district’ of the Ruamahanga which had been explored. The existence of this ‘immense tract

of land . . . amply refutes the reports that our neighbourhood was deficient in extensive districts’ and justified his choice of Port Nicholson

as the Company centre.® A Wellington merchant commented at the same time that ‘Unless the Wydrop, or some other grazing district is speedily opened up, many of the cottagers and labourers who have contrived to purchase a cow or two, will be obliged to part with them from

the impossibility of finding food .. ..1° Wakefield three months later referred to the importation of several large cargoes of livestock which made it imperative for their owners to form stations. However, if some months were to pass before any activity in the district was reported, the most important problem was still one of direct access. The journeys of Stokes and Kettle, together, were inconclusive. Samuel Charles Brees, in March 1842, had succeeded Mein

Smith as the Company’s Chief Surveyor. To Brees, Mein Smith and Fox we owe our known visual impressions of the district in its first decade. Captain Smith’s rather deliberate and thorough methods of

solving the Company’s difficulties of survey and title were not to Colonel Wakefield’s liking which led to his replacement by Brees who,

personally, was much more difficult than Smith.1? Mein Smith’s knowledge of the Wairarapa stems only from 1845 when in partnership

with Samuel Revans he took up Huangarua Station when Brees and

S. C. BREES 33 family were leaving New Zealand in disgust. In his three years of Company service, however, Brees made two important journeys and in outline decided upon the Rimutaka Hill route. His surviving draw-

ings, published and unpublished, give us much of the character of

the district as it appeared to its first European travellers. With

instructions from Wakefield to judge ‘the practicability of carrying a road’ (to the Wairarapa Valley) and to ascertain its character generally he left Wellington on 3 February 1843 with six field men, the Chief

Taringa Kuri and four Maoris as guides. Among the fieldmen were Hugh and John Cameron, while at the Hutt the party was further augmented by Richard Barton and Edward Chetham. One of the Maoris was ‘Peter’ who had accompanied Stokes. Despite the size of the party and the burden of nine days’ rations progress was rapid. They followed the Hutt River for five miles above the Mangaroa junction before turning up the left bank of the Pakuratahi for a further six or seven miles to a large tributary coming in on the north side, the Mohowa or Mohoroa, into which Kettle and Wills had descended, at least as drawn in Whitehead’s map. The spur between the Mohoroa and the Pakuratahi was taken to the summit and the low pass of Te Horo which was reached in 12 hours travelling time. Brees stated that ‘Mr. Kettle passed from the Wairarapa by this pass but approached

and left it by a different route. A stream appeared below called the Otiwera by which we descended and entered the valley at about two miles from the head of the lake.’ This does not entirely remove the

uncertainties of Kettle and Wills’ approach from the east but it is probable that the Mohoroa is the stream above which the present day Rimutaka road approaches the summit and is simply called the Rimutaka

Stream. It has to be remembered that it was not for another six years

that the route over the Mangaroa Hill was worked out; the first explorers ascended the Hutt river to a point much closer to the Hutt-

Pakuratahi Forks before turning east. If this is kept in mind some five miles of walking up the Pakuratahi would bring them not far from

the Mohoroa junction with the Pakuratahi a short distance below the road bridge.

In his report of 16 February’? Brees gave a general description of the valley and said explicitly that “There is quite sufficient land fit for arable purposes to suit settlers’. While passing down the western side of the lake they met a party of Ngatikahungunu at whose invitation they crossed the Rumahanga to the “Turamow’ [Tauanui] pa. They

returned to Wellington by the coast noting the terrific surf. Brees’ unqualified choice for the road line was by the Mohoroa and the summit

pass although his ostensible reason for rejecting the coastal approach was the tidal hazard of the Mukamuka rocks to be removed twelve years later. Some slight additional detail is included in an accompanying sketch map, which does not show Lake Onoke at all. HWw—4

34 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE Brees, meanwhile, had in July travelled ‘a short distance beyond Cape Palliser, as part of a rough survey of Fitzroy and Palliser Bays in which he was assisted by F. J. Tiffen. The country exceeded the expectations of

it which he had formed at the period of his first trip. “The eastern side of the lake appears to consist of a number of terraces which are mostly free of bush .. . I found the statement of there being a harbour at Te Kopi to be erroneous, although there certainly is some refuge . . .’**

Other parties also visited the valley during the year. Perhaps the most notable, at least as far as its membership was concerned, was that of Charles Clifford, Wm. Vavasour, Wm. Fox, Arthur Whitehead, Wm. Molesworth and Henry Petre, the two latter joining the party in the Hutt. The expedition’s main purpose was to prospect for grazing. Petre quickly sickened of the wet bush swagging and returned home. Whitehead was also taken ill about the same time but after turning back, gamely caught up and rejoined the party the following day. And no small company it was. In addition to those named there were nine men to carry provisions and blankets, each swag being over 60 Ibs, and two Maoris. It is not necessary to go into details of the expedition’s movements which, indeed, involved much heavy purposeless travelling

in the bush and swamps of the middle basin in the Morrison’s Bush area. Cohesion was not its strong point. The party became separated soon after arriving in the valley via Brees’s Pakuratahi-Summit route. They stayed in a whare erected by the latter with ‘an inscription upon it [which] informed us that Messrs Duke & Scott had preceded us by about a week.’ ‘Carimo’ the chief guide with two packmen first took

a different route from the others when approaching the Waichine while the next day Vavasour and the remaining packmen attempted to circumnavigate rather than cross a difficult swamp. Fox, Clifford and Whitehead without tents or food spent a more rigorous ten days than

had been expected. Circling slowly round within the Ruamahanga watershed they returned southward to the head of the lake. Clifford alone favoured a return by the coast but the party inconsistently stayed

together to return by the Rimutaka. The now familiar outpost of Mason’s farm was reached on 15 May, nineteen days after they had left Wellington. Vavasour’s section did not return until three days later via the coast which route was also followed by the guide and his two packmen clearly the most perspicacious Europeans of the whole group.’® One of the carriers, much later, was to be a runholder himself. George Green Buck remembered their being ‘lost in the high fern and

bush at Tauherenikau for 15 days’. They were nearly starving but fortunately made contact with some Maoris in a pa near the lake who gave them food and ultimately brought them round to Wellington by canoe.?®

There would now seem to be little reason to delay further effective occupation. Surveyors on repeated journeys had commented favourably

JOSEPH GREENWOOD 39 and potential runholders had noted the untrampled grass and fern. It was up to the Principal Agent to ease the path.

One of the first to look critically at the East Coast as a possible pastoral reservoir was Joseph Greenwood. The younger brother of

James D. Greenwood whom he had joined at Lowry Bay in March , 1841, Joseph in September 1843 a few months before the two men abandoned the eastern shores of Port Nicholson for Banks Peninsula and

Purau, made a lightning journey around the coast past Castlepoint to Owahanga and back. By so doing he anticipated H. S. Harrison and J. Thomas’s East Coast journey some months later. That his journey was entirely unknown to us until the recent discovery of his diary justifies some detail about his epic dash.

Joseph simply records in his diary that on 11 September 1843 he left Lowry Bay about 8 a.m. ‘with a Native’ and went to ‘Moka Moka, Paliser Bay’ where they stopped for the night. The following day they continued to the ‘Wydrop Lake where we had to wait till about 5 P.M. before the Natives saw the Fire that we made. I then went forward to the Fishery ... & slept with Mr. Wade .. ” (whose arrival is discussed

in the next chapter). Next morning, after three of Wade’s Boats had left for Wellington, the founder of Te Kopi station managed to recruit a Maori guide, ‘Rotapuka’, for Greenwood who immediately continued round to Kawakawa and on to Whawhanui ‘with a White Rock in the

middle that forms the Harbour’. He slept on the beach under a log— Barton, of course, was still some fifteen months in the future—and at 7 a.m. on the 14th was off again past Huariki ‘another small Harbour . . . suitable for Boats’, meeting a number of Maoris from Pahaoa which was his stopping place ‘a small River with a Rock in the midst of the channel’. Only rain prevented his proceeding further but on the 15th they made Wharaurangi within three hours and about 11 a.m. ‘passed Kaiwhata, the commencement of the Grazing district; it extends 6 or 8 miles & 2 to 3 miles wide. It is mostly high tableland. We stoped

at a Hutt at Waikaraka, about the middle of the Grazing land. I could

not get the Native forward.’*7 Greenwood had done very well to push his Maori escort on at the pace already covered but whether it was he who originally described the pastoral country or an informant back in Wellington we are uncertain. On the 16th the two men arrived at the Whareama mouth too late to cross at low tide because Joseph as he recorded in his picturesque basic English had ‘spent seven hours looking at the Land’. A strong wind, on the advice of three Maoris

also waiting to cross, demanded caution but despite Greenwood’s determination to proceed the following morning they could not manage it on foot. A raft was therefore constructed but ‘even then the Natives would not go until low water. I very much regret losing so much time

here, had I known I could have explored the River .. . Rain commenced soon after they were over; Joseph had a fall and ‘How we

36 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE

got over the Hill at Rangawakaoma, I cannot tell, for it is almost perpendicular & it was pouring down with Rain’. Once over they found a hut and bedded down for the night, and a fine spring morning on the

18th saw them at ‘Waimemia’ in two hours. ‘As there was a Boat going to the Wydrop my Native would not go any further, he said he was too lame’ ‘E Pehi (Epi) [Tutepakihirangi] was going with the Boat’ but the guide Rotapuka was apparently persuaded not to join him

for he accompanied Greenwood on a short stage to ‘Papatua’ but awaited the paheka’s return at that point.

The 19th saw Greenwood at his furthest north, the Owahanga River mouth. At Mataikona, where the Maoris were building a large Chapel, ‘the Natives . . . wish me to come & settle amongst them; they say if I go to the Whareama, they will go thither. They are very anxious to have Englishmen among them’. That evening they returned to Waimimia

Pa and the following morning were preparing to embark in Epi’s boat when it commenced to blow so a return on foot was the only alternative

which Greenwood’s impatience could tolerate. He therefore pushed on ahead of his lame escort who was instructed to build another raft for the crossing while Greenwood examined the country inland. ‘After wandering about till nearly dark I thought it was time to return, as I had to find my way across the country from the hills to the Beach. I found it impossible to get on as I could wish for the Fearn was above my Breast & I heard there was no Road. I tried to set fire to the Fern but as there was no wind it would not burn. Just with the last glimpse of daylight I determined which way to steer & had afterwards to be guided by the Stars... (by) nearly 12 o’clock I got to the River & then all my trouble in fighting

my way through the Fern, Swamps, Bush & over hills to the consolation of finding that my Native had got across the [Whareama]

River & taken my blankets.’ “The sweat was rolling off me... Fatigue . . . made me determined. I was just going into the water when he told me it was too deep. Finding it impossible to get across . . . I made a good fire but although I was as close to it as I could bear, there was by this time such a strong cold wind that I could not possibly keep myself warm. I was in my shirt sleeves. I anxiously waited for daylight but when daylight came I had to wait for low water’. However, about 10 a.m. he managed it ‘but was so fatigued that I could scarcely keep my eyes open or my head up.

After getting a little of something to eat (for I could not eat much) we proceeded slowly along. I often wished that I had laid down in the Fern instead of coming to the River but it was

fortunate that I did not for the Fires that I lighted had burnt wonderfully during the night when the wind got up & I could travel over the hills with much more pleasure than I did last night.

WILLIAMS AND COLENSO 37 I came on the top of the Table Land from Waikaraka to Kaiwata to see the Land. It is not so good as the Pahtea [Waimate Plains| but with ... Sheep upon it I am satisfied in 2 or 3 years it would be good Grazing Land.’

When nearly at Kaiwhata they saw a small boat offshore which they thought to be the one with Pehi aboard. Hopes of a lift were dashed for despite the fire which they lit on two hills near the beach their signals were ignored. The Maori guide, taking strength from disappoint-

ment, wanted to push straight through the night to Te Kopi but in the event was glad to stop at Waikikino about 9 p.m. Next morning soon brought them to Wharaurangi after a stretch of bad travelling where Joseph was accused of having burnt a canoe in his efforts to clear vegetation but after an hour they continued to Pahaoa where highwater made it impossible to cross until dark. A hot night in a whare ‘like an Oven’—was followed by a slight altercation over utu for reclaiming Joseph’s knife which he had left on the north side of

the river. The result was, for Joseph, a late start at 8 a.m. and in heavy: rain towards midnight they made Kawakawa. Wade’s whaling station at 11 next morning must have seemed an outpost of civilisation but he nevertheless pushed on to ‘Wydrop (Towtally’s Pah)’—{Upokokirikiri]—for the night.

After the distances covered, the miles from the lake outfall to Lowry Bay did not seem impossible within one walking day although it was sunset before he reached Rhodes’s cattle station near Parangarehu in

Fitzroy Bay and when they took to the hills ‘it was so dark that we could not find our way . . . Despite these difficulties at 2 a.m. he was once more at Lowry Bay.

The next visitors to examine part of the Wairarapa coast line, Archdeacon Wm. Williams and William Colenso, were to land thankfully,

in the little harbour of Castle Point six weeks after Greenwood’s

pedestrian foray. Already some weeks out from the Bay of Islands in the missionary schooner Columbine, visits had been paid to Auckland, Te Araroa and Uawa before the Archdeacon decided that he would continue to Wellington. However, the contrary winds of Cook Strait buffeted them for an uncomfortable fortnight between the entrance to

Port Nicholson, an interrupted attempt to land near Palliser and a rash decision four miles off Castle Point to attempt to reach the little

harbour in the ship’s boat. The Columbine was driven off and the heavily laden boat with one of its four oars a casualty was lucky to creep in through the entrance to what Colenso ever afterwards knew as Deliverance Cove.?®

When the party recovered they proceeded slowly northward while awaiting the arrival of the baggage already landed at the Cape. The first stopping place of Colenso and Williams was the kainga of

38 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE Poroutawhao some eight or nine miles north of Castlepoint. In view of Joseph Greenwood’s proven difficulty with Maori names this would undoubtedly be his stopping place of ‘Papatua’ two months before, where

Colenso preached to the thirty inhabitants. The chapel, too, which Greenwood had seen rising under the hands of the converts of Mataikona was being erected at the prompting of a young Maori teacher

whom Williams had sent south from Turanganui. Here they were obliged to wait until, on 29 November, the Maori bearers from Port Nicholson arrived with the missing bundles and all was well for the next stage. Colenso noted that Akitio was almost a Christian village where the Sunday halt was put to appropriate exhortation. On 9 December Colenso crossed the Waimata stream beyond our immediate concern but before he reached the Bay of Islands on foot two months later was to have examined the site of his future station at Ahuriri and

to have made his second journey through the Waikaremoana and Urewera country. The nine journeys which he made up and down the coast between 1845 and 1852 were to bring him within frequent contact with the Maori owners of the beaches rivers and hills and are noted later.*

The two journeys of another traveller Henry Shafto Harrison (1810-

1892) who covered much of the interior of the North Island before settling in Wanganui should be noted. Harrison, allegedly in May 1843

or 1844the date is relevant in determining priorities—walked from the Manawatu Gorge across country to the mouth of Mataikona, an expedition about which we would like to know more. Later, in October

1844, in company with Captain Joseph Thomas an official surveyor he broke new ground by crossing from the Wangaehu over what we know as the Hinakura hill into the Pahaoa. The two men left Wellington

on 9 October 1844, visited Upokokirikiri and on their way up the valley passed a Maori assemblage having ‘a crying match with some of their friends from Otago’ but nevertheless were able to detach a guide and reached a cattle station where they stopped for the night. Although

not identified this would probably have been the establishment of Wallace and Vallance (Tauanui) for next day, the 13th, it was only a mile further to Wharekaka where they again halted. Their way the following morning was for some eight miles across ‘a beautiful grassy * In discussing in Colenso (p. 162) the sequence of European travellers on the coast reference was made to F. W. C. Sturm’s alleged journey from Ahuriri to Wellington in 1840, on which some doubt was cast. The year, however was probably 1845 not 1840 for Frederick Weld in his journal for 23 March of that year records that ‘A German person from the Table Cape passed this evening he denies the existence of any direct path from this valley to the Ahuridi . . . My visitor had been 3 weeks from Table Cape and described the journey on the other side of the Ultima Thule of our Warri Homa Expedition as something terrible fern 7 feet high and so on’. There was some Justification for Joseph Greenwood’s recourse to flint and tinder.

HARRISON AND THOMAS 39 plain’ to a ‘small settlement called Wangaroa [Huangarua] situated on a

river of the same name at the foot of the hill’. There was a further

delay while they obtained a guide but on the 15th, proceeding almost due east, the first four miles were up the banks of the Huangarua then

on to some hills to a parting of the ways into the Wangaehu; ‘quitting . this we turned off to the S.E., and again descended the hills which in this part are very high’. They noted a good deal of grass despite the broken nature of the country and descended ‘to the settlement and river which lay beneath us’. Although there was a ‘large pa and potato erounds’ it was deserted but a welcome night’s resting place. “Ihe whole day long’, the 16th, they waded down the bed of the Pahaoa arriving at the shore by 3 p.m. Here there was ‘a small settlement and some natives.’

The coastal walk north was in the footsteps of others, passing through

‘Ko-ouranghi [Wharaurangi] a settlement situated on a small plain’, Kaiwhata, the Whareama mouth (‘water very cold and took us at low

water up to our necks’) and Castlepoint where was the wreck of a small schooner ‘lost some time back’.

Two miles north they were jostled by some 16 or 17 Maoris ‘who

snatched at our things . . . many pretended to be our friends’. To reclaim their goods they returned to the Chief ‘Wellington’ (Te Wereta)

‘a great missionary; he pretended to be terribly enraged, and after keeping us till noon, he returned some things charging us four shirts and one pound of tobacco’. They were possibly in no mood to be impressed by the Owahanga Maoris on the north bank ‘a rascally ragged looking set . . . [nevertheless] not so bad as they looked... for they gave us plenty of excellent pork.’ At Akitio—‘a fine bay . and anchorage’. The men reached Ahuriri a few weeks later from - where Thomas, in a letter to Colonel Wakefield, amplified impressions of the coast. They had made a survey of the Castle Point harbour and enclosed two sketches of the Castle. The Whareama, they thought, might

afford communication with the upper part of the Wairarapa and a small craft could enter and load within the entrance. Castle Point would shelter two or three small craft; the country around was bare of trees. Thomas doubted that there was ‘any communication’ with the interior.”°

Frederick Weld’s expedition to the Whareama a few weeks later may not have broken much new ground except between the Tauweru and the Whareama but his keen eye and vivid style in depicting what he saw warrants quotation.

On 18 November 1844 Clifford, Weld and Vavasour, with a Maori retinue, left Wharekaka under the guidance of the chief Te Korou of Kaikokirikiri. Te Korou, who claimed the Whareama basin, was eager to have white men on his land while the three men after an anxious winter amidst the floods of the Ruamahanga were in search of accessible winter pasturage. Weld’s diary record of the journey has survived while

40 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE a narrative of the expedition was published in his biography by Lady Lovat from a family letter written a month later. Until the Whareama itself was reached five days after their departure both versions are innocent of place-names and, for Weld, somewhat vague on topography. It seems probable that they crossed the Huangarua on to the Pukengaki and Ahiaruhe country before fording the Ruamahanga near Waihakeke and passing over the Taratahi to Kaikokinkiri.

Their path on departure led for the first few miles over a nearly level and grassy plain to a small kainga at the foot of the hills, hitherto Weld’s furthest north. When they ascended an opening in the ridge ‘all was new and unexplored’. In the grassy hills with sufficient

wood for shelter and fuel the air was scented by aniseed plants which Weld said possessed remarkable fattening qualities for cattle. When they left the village Maori girls presented them with a bouquet of flowers including ‘an extraordinary looking orchid’. That night after a longish day they caught up with the main body at some bark huts in a clump of bush by the hillside, and were introduced to Te Korou’s wife ‘a jolly, motherly looking dame, wrapt in a mat, and comparatively clean, and very good-natured in appearance.’ Te Korou and his family were later baptised by Colenso. (see p. 202).

Next morning they continued on over hills and through patches of

bush to a halt at midday on the bank of the Ruamahanga. Despite Maori reluctance to ford because of a fresh in the river the crossing, knee-deep, was made without mishap although with amusing sidelights ‘Our party was about fifty or sixty strong . . . accompanied by a large

retinue of cur dogs and pet pigs. The latter were carried away by the stream one after another, whilst the old women shouted to them in the most plaintive manner from the bank. Finally, six large pigs were carried down a rapid below the ford, when suddenly a young native leapt in after them, and a most exciting chase followed. After a time the Maori reached them, and with great difficulty succeeded in getting them all ashore. I never witnessed a finer feat in swimming.’

The large party now left the river and after crossing ‘a fine grassy plain’ [later Borlase’s run] camped by a patch of bush.

The Taratahi Plain next morning, the 20th, had Weld agog—‘We saw much that was important to the sheep-farmer and grazier . . .

Our route lay through a succession of the most beautiful plains covered with luxuriant herbiage, well-watered and sheltered by belts

of forests . . . These plains would be of great value if any means could be devised of getting the produce to market .. .2 Towards evening they approached a large pa, not named, but clearly Kaikokirikiri where the traditional greetings were punctuated by the wastage of much powder and shot.

The appropriate hu: that evening made those of the contingent who were proceeding to the coast with the pakehas the more reluctant to

F, A. WELD 41 leave next morning. After much trouble and delay they were able to depart although Weld suspected that they were misdirected by their disappointed hosts. Apart from knowing that they were heading towards the coast through heavy bush, flooded streams and over numerous hills

Weld was uncertain about his location. A long day of such travelling brought the party to a dubious camp ‘behind which rose a steep hill from whose summit we heard that a view of the land of promise .. . could be obtained’.?? Clifford and Weld could not wait so dashed up

the hill and were rewarded by a glorious view of fine plains and meandering river. “The only doubt was, whether the plains were wet.’

Next day, the 23rd, they walked seven miles down the bed of a stream, probably the Mangapokia, ‘then turned off, and a mile more brought us in sight of the plains of Ware-homa. A great disappointment awaited us there.’ The level land was ankle-deep in water, covered with reeds and filled with pig ruts. One wonders how they managed to see the pig ruts if the ground was covered but Te Korou had misled them and in Weld’s most fallible opinion ‘Ware-homa would always be too marshy for a sheep-station’. It is probable that they were deceived by

an exceptional flood but clearly Weld did not wish to exchange one precarious flood plain for another. They continued on to the ‘seaward boundary of the plains’ passing through blazing fern to the sea-coast on the south bank of the river from where they came to a village of two or three huts where the night was spent.

The Castle beckoned them north and next morning after an argument over the ferry tariff and a crossing in the ‘most rickety canoe imaginable’

they went on without Te Korou with whom there seems to have been

some slight disagreement at this point. Weld liked Castlepoint. ‘Rangiwhakaoma settlement is composed of scattered warris the principal

group being in a small carraca bush nr. the centre of the bay... situated in a small grassy plain among the hills .. . a more beautiful place for small craft could not be imagined. This Cove presents perhaps the finest specimen of seaside rocks I have yet seen when viewed from

its N.E. extremity ... The Natives ... are the most Civil people I have yet met with in this Country they had given us pork potatoes & crawfish refrained from begging accepted our proffered payment for the pig.’?*

After a hasty journey up to Mataikona they returned south along the coast despite a strong wind blowing sand into their faces. ‘The Maories could hardly be made to advance and the men lagged terribly’—

Like Joseph Greenwood 18 months before they were excited at the ‘large open tract of country called Wai Carracca—Clifford and I ascended a low hill by the shore & saw some 12 miles by 5 of open land chiefly covered . . . with grass & toitoi;’ and before leaving the following day a last look confirmed their opinion that the tableland would afford excellent pasturage. Proceeding south past Kaiwhata and

42 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE Flat Point they came to Wharaurangi, the kainga of Te Wereta about whom the Maoris had talked so much. In the sizable settlement of some

15 scattered huts the most remarkable feature was the house of Te Wereta himself, probably erected only recently after the reoccupation of the coast. Some 50 feet long by 20 wide and six high in the centre, its roof was thatched with grass and an outer layer of toitoi. The interior was ‘ornamentably reeded and all the lashings were perfectly symetrical .. . the porch . . . the most worthy of attention—the beams are painted in black, red and white in twisted patterns the side walls are lined with red & black laths half seen through a fret work of white bark. The reeds of the front . . . were interspersed with others mottled

with smoke which had a very good effect—The peak of the roof is surrounded by a figure a la Maori imbedded in feathers—Altogether it is the most perfect specimen of native taste that I have seen on this coast—and indeed the variety of colours tastefully blended have a very good effect much the same as that produced by the illumination of a MS.” Despite the favourable impression created by the house their reception was not welcoming although Weld’s provisional judgment of

the lord of the beaches was not as damning as the one he later recorded. Te Wereta was now merely ‘a regular Jew [and] Seems a Scamp.’*4

The route south to Pahaoa had features of interest. They passed some

good camping places and a few deserted huts under a ‘remarkably perforated & hollow rock’ [Honeycomb Rock south of Glenburn]. They

learned that the day before they had passed a spot well worth visiting—‘The Maoris say that on a hummock or mound like hill stretching into the sea . . . are two springs bubbling close to each other

one of fresh and the other of salt water, & that in the latter are a small kind of scafish. The Maori traditions say that it is fatal to visit them which was perhaps the reason why our people said nothing about it till we had passed onwards...’ They were at the Pahaoa potato fields by midday whose occupants

supported the wishes of their own Maori escort that it would be advisable on account of the flooded river to return by the coast rather

than by the inland route. The trio nevertheless were firm in their intention to cut across country and set off up the bed of the Pahaoa crossing and recrossing until dusk when ‘wet to the breast and pretty well

tired’ they camped on a likely bank. Late spring in the Pahaoa, still a regional beauty spot, despite its discomforts made it as attractive to

Weld as it can be today to a disinterested stranger. The size of the Hodder with reminders of the Moselle and the Rhine—it must have been carrying some water—‘the beauty of the scenery .. . the graceful sweep of the pointed hills where wood & rock continually reminded

me of the Moselle (though the N.Z. one far more rich in noble timber) ...’

GRINDELL, STURGEON & SMITH 43 Somewhere about present day Hinakura they encountered a Maori in a potato garden who boiled up in a goashore an acceptable mixture with wild cabbage. They pressed on hoping to surmount the ridge and get back south across the plain to Wharekaka that night but like many

later travellers underestimated the scale of the hills. They could see the Huangarua and Lake Wairarapa but ‘all around were hills upon hills

heaped in interminable confusion’ with their lines of route laid out before them and the night was spent in a gully above the Huangarua. Nine days after leaving the station two hours hard walk down the plain at four miles an hour brought Clifford and Weld home first, Vavasour and the men coming in one after the other. It had been an exhilarating break from the cares of negotiating leases, and surviving floods and scab, the eager enjoyment and strength of this 21 year old youth leaping from the pages of his diary.

The last expedition to note was also by three young men but cf quite different background, resources and future: James Stephen Grindell, Robert Sturgeon and an American—Smith. Sturgeon, a dapper ex watchmaker had been a flax trader at Waitohu, Horowhenua. Grindell (1823-1900) comes much into the early years of this narrative. ‘Long

Jim’ or ‘Maori Jim’ as he was variously known, was the son of an army captain who ran away from school to sea but jumped ship at Sydney having been ill-treated by his master. He came to New Zealand about 1840 as a member of a Captain Peacock’s crew of smugglers but finally plumbed for shore-life with a Maori girl-friend from whom he acquired his undoubted facility in the Maori language. For a time he worked in the employ of W. B. White of Muhunoa, from where with the two companions mentioned he had obviously set out on this fatal journey.”> The young men, thinking to improve their chances across the

ranges, hazarded the Tokomaru track to the Mangahao and thence continued south on the route followed by Kettle and Wills to Kaikokirikiri. The story of the trip was written by Grindell in old-age, 55 years after the events which he described with great prolixity.2® It was early winter—May 1844; Grindell gives the date as 1843 but the correct

year is given in a list of deceased estates in charge of R. R. Strang.?? Sturgeon’s ‘colonial residence’ is given as ‘Waito’ and his county as Middlesex. They had run out of supplies and on their fifth night out on the edge of the Opaki plain were forced to subsist on uneaten scraps of fern-root from pig rootings. Next day, hungry and bootless, they

struggled over the plain to another lean camp before reaching the fortunately friendly shelter of Kaikokirikiri. There they remained some days to recruit their strength before moving south to the coast, Grindell foot-shod in Maori sandals. Under the guidance of one Te Ihu Maoa or ‘Bones’ they crossed the Waingawa and then the Karamu and Wai-

koukou Plains to reach the Nga-awa-parera ford on the Rumahanga below Hurunuiorangi.

44 EXPLORATION BY BEACH AND RIDGE

On the insistence of Te Ihu they attempted to ford that evening with the aid of an improvised flax rope but desisted when, according to

Grindell, Te Ihu, who was on the bank, let the rope go. They then camped by two toitoi shelters but because of a violent storm and an argument between Smith and Bones about sleeping space rested little. At daybreak Bones returned to his village in high dudgeon and after a breakfast of ‘turnip tops’ they again attempted the ford.

The order into the stream was Grindell, Sturgeon and Smith but the river was high and they were apparently too inexperienced to have learned to use the pole technique of mutual support. About the middle of the river, Sturgeon the shortest was knocked against Smith who panicked and hit his companion violently in the face. Grindell, fifty years after the event, was able to describe graphically this one

indelible incident of the fatal journey. The struggle lasted but a moment. Smith lost his balance and was bowled down the torrent and

quickly out of sight. Sturgeon for a short time buoyed up by the bundle of blankets on his back struggled longer but unavailingly until he too disappeared. Exhausted, Grindell fought his way back to the bank. ‘Surely I was alone!’

He tried to return towards Kaikokirikiri but met a more helpful Maori, Panapa, who gave him some food. There was time to gather strength for another attempt. They went upstream, this time about a quarter of a mile, to the Parikawhiti or Cliff Crossing where under Panapa’s firm guidance they both waded over successfully. Next day Grindell stopped at Huangarua village and finally reached Wharekaka to find Weld not long in residence where he received welcome shelter and food. Such was the tragic and spectacular arrival in the district of one who for some five or six years was to be its most colourful resident. There were doubtless other travellers who are unknown to us but we pass on now to the long, slow one-way journeys of occupation.

IV .

Occupation to 1859

Ir 1s cLEAR from what has been said earlier about the return of Tutepakihirangi’s 400 exiles to the promised land early in 1841 that this was concurrent with the first period of Company exploration. Hindsight might tempt us to suggest that had Colonel Wakefield got his priorties a little clearer, passengers from the Aurora, Oriental and Bengal Merchant could have trudged into Palliser Bay within a year or more of their arrival to settle unchallenged amid the copses and flax bushes of the Lower Valley. Had they done so, the history of Wairarapa, indeed of Wellington itself would have taken a different course. The district was virtually unoccupied; its conquerors—one or two of them, Wharepouri and Te Puni—had ‘tapued’ it for their new friends; while Tutepakihirangi, as reported by Williams, seemed almost

surprised that a year after the arrival of the pakeha the district was unclaimed.

Justice and commonsense, however, remind us that Just as in Tara-

naki to which the bulk of Ngatiawa did not return until 1848, any attempt to occupy Wairarapa without some settlement with its rightful owners would have caused some serious problems before too long. It was even more important that the ‘capitalists’ and peasants flung by E. G. Wakefield on the beaches of Port Nicholson should suffer a doubtless painful period of colonial apprenticeship before standing on their own feet beyond the isthmus of Kiriwai. It seems a desperately lame con-

clusion, nevertheless, to have to admit that the delayed period of European incursion was in their own best interests but the inference is unavoidable. It was even more important that the attempt, some years later, to secure the district as the site for the Canterbury Settlement, outlined in the next chapter, was also a failure. Apart from the tremendous stimulus to the development of New Zealand as a whole caused by the establishment of Canterbury in the South Island the available land in Wairarapa was too limited for the purpose. It was of equal importance

that the vital pastoral industry being tested under local conditions should be allowed to work itself out for an experimental period of at least five to ten years. That the trials succeeded was to have national consequences of far greater significance than another Nelson or New Plymouth along the shores of Lake Wairarapa. Despite all these factors and the anxiety of the pastoralists to move 45

46 OCCUPATION TO 1853 into the region the first pioneers were not sheepmen but whalers and short-lived flax gatherers.

The first known European who tried to make some profit from the

Wairarapa was the merchant and whaling master John Wade, the son of a Tasmanian convict who by good conduct had risen to the position of Chief Constable of Van Dieman’s Land and the owner of a considerable farm. Wade had brought to the village of Wellington three months after its birth, a cargo of cattle, horses and whaling gear in the barque Integrity.. Vigorous and energetic he was courageous enough to suffer setbacks such as the loss of his Kaiwharawhara-built schooner Mary Anne Wade on her trial run as well as the virtual wiping

out of his Wairarapa flax cutting team a year later. His drive and capital resources were of great value to the young settlement while his . encouragement of shore whaling undoubtedly assisted trade at a critical

stage. Between 1842 and 1845 his money and men were busy from Korohiwa opposite Mana Island to Kaikoura and elsewhere. It was almost characteristic of Wade that after all the varied activity, enterprises and frustrations of his New Zealand ventures he should have sought to make a fresh start in California. Unlike other compatriots he stayed on after the gold rush, qualified for the U.S. Bar and had been modestly successful before his death in 1885.?

In a letter to the Superintendent of the Southern Division in January

1846 he claimed that it was ‘notorious that I was the first settler in Wellington to establish a station in the Wairarapa and bring that valuable district into notice’.* By the term ‘station’ he clearly meant a whaling station but according to a contemporary it was the ship master, Calder (later the Port Nicholson pilot), who in 1841 had entered the lake from the sea, traversed part of the valley and reported in Wellington the fine open country he had seen.* As we have noted, other travellers were equally concerned but a special association could have made the

information given by one sea captain to another more meaningful. Wade was doubtless an early visitor although the first actual reference

to his activities is in June 1843 when it was reported that ‘Mr. John Wade’s party at Palliser Bay, have captured two whales, one of which turned out ten tuns of oil, a rare occurrence we believe on the coast... .7° Four months earlier, in February, it had been noted, without any specific

reference to the Wairarapa, that ‘Mr. Wade commenced shipping his hands yesterday, for the forthcoming whaling season. . . 2¢ In September the crew of a whale boat which had arrived in Wellington Harbour from the Wairarapa succeeded in rescuing four drunken sailors from drowning.’ Catches were disappointing for in October the press

learned that ‘our enterprising townsman Mr John Wade purposes establishing a depot for Flax in Palisser Bay, in lieu of his whaling station which has not turned out so successful as could have been desired. Mr. Wade is sanguine of being able to obtain a large quantity

WHALING AND FLAX CUTTING 47 of Phormium Tenax from the . . . Wairarapa.’* The New Zealand whaling returns, tabulated in December 1843, confirm the modest success of the Te Kopi enterprise. Out of a national total of 1,265 tons obtained by the efforts of 734 men, Wade’s Wairarapa station of 35 men in four

boats had garnered 23 tons. It was calculated that the average annual earnings of a shore whaler would not have been more than £30. At its peak, however, the 35 to 40 men at Te Kopi in charge of John Bell must have represented a minor invasion. Several of the men recruited by Wade for work at Kaikoura were later associated with the merchant’s activities in Palliser Bay. The Fyffe-Wade whaling agreement of 1843 includes in its list of hands, John Bell, headsman, aged 27, Leonard Dark, carpenter, aged 50 and Thomas Howell, cooper, aged 24.° The precise location of the station has exercised historians. The mapped site and that hitherto accepted by the writer was just to the north of the Putangirua Stream before it is crossed on the way to Cape Palliser. However there is evidence that the buildings were not much more than

a mile from the Whatarangi homestead and, indeed to secure such minimal shelter as the little bay afforded, the anchorage must have been further south than the Putangirua. An unidentified Brees drawing is almost certainly Te Kopi in its first year.

The 23 tons of oil must have been some drops of comfort, for disaster struck the flax enterprise at its inception. While entering the ‘Wyderop’ River to establish a flax collecting depot the boat upset. Seven pakehas and two Maoris, practically all Wade’s team, were drowned, the European casualties being Pratt, the Harveys father & son, a sawyer R. Wilson, “Tom the Cooper’ and Thomas Howell, noted above,

who was an American. Most of the bodies when recovered were not recognisable. They were brought to the pa (Okorewa or Upokokirikiri) and burial was arranged by Bell. There was only one survivor of this the Wairarapa’s first and most serious drowning accident.?° There is some indirect evidence that the whaling station kept going at reduced strength

during the 1844 season although no catches were reported for that year. Colenso and others were noting the decline of Te Kopi itself despite the upsurge of shipping. By July 1844 it had become in press reports the ‘old whaling station’. When the Industry, caught in a south easterly, lost her sails trying to beat out of Palliser Bay she ran for the ‘old whaling station’ where she anchored and rode out the gale with perfect safety. Te Kopi, it was asserted, was vulnerable only from the south west.*? Whaling became merely a remunerative ‘extra’ for sailors and shepherds as for example in May 1846 when a sperm and a black whale were washed ashore at Parangarehu. Gillies secured the sperm and the Ngatiawa the black; and two years later Thomas Brown in the

Wairarapa trader Clap-Match hooked a right whale and a humpback ‘at Wairarapa’.’?

Wade’s disaster was a reminder that the foibles of Wairarapa Moana

48 OCCUPATION TO 1853 (both of them) and the linking Ruamahanga were to be mastered only by study and care. Calder, when he returned to his boat which he had left moored to a stump at the edge of the lake found it ‘one mile from the water’. In his absence the lower lake had burst through the sand barrier and drained to the tidal level. H. S. Tiffen on his second

visit at the end of 1843 endeavoured to make its character better known. He emphasised that the entrance with its very strong current was unsafe, the level of Onoke being six feet lower than during his first visit. He took soundings up stream. ‘Within ten feet of the bar I found the Ruamahanga River, the depth of which at this point was 30 feet. Proceeding up the river my next depth was 20 feet and opposite Pa Pokokirikiri nine feet’—possibly he thought, not the true course, for his

next sounding was fifteen which depth was maintained ‘as far as the Wairarapa River’ from 100 to 200 yards wide and deep enough close to

its banks for a schooner of fifty tons to discharge. Tiffen had crossed the upper lake at its lower end where it was then about half a mile wide and twelve feet deep. He thought that a road could very easily be made between the harbour of Te Kopi ‘and the commencement of the inland water communication’. He travelled three miles up the Turanganui and gave what must have seemed a mouth-watering description of its six-feet-deep soil and returned by the Waiorongomai stream and saddle to the Orongorongo (by its little easterly tributary the Te Ori Ori) and upstream to the low saddle over the summit ridge into the Wainuiomata headwaters. His lyrical enthusiasm for his newly discovered route must have shaken and confused the supporters of Brees’ Rimutaka

Hill approach—A road could be made from the Lowry Bay swamp to the Wairarapa ‘without crossing a single hill’ and ‘in no part need it be steeper than the new Karori Road’.** More importantly he confirmed that the chiefs Te Raro, Te Terira, E Hiko and Manihera were anxious to have white people among them.

It was the impressions of earlier travellers including Tiffen himself

in September 1843, three months earlier, that led to the appointing of a deputation to wait on William Wakefield stressing the inadequacy of existing Company land on which the settlers could depasture their flocks and herds. The third of four resolutions reminded the Principal Agent that the Wairarapa Valley ‘was not only of immense extent but

the outlet or readiest means of communication with the other large surrounding districts, and affords the greatest advantages, for immediate occupation, alike for the agricultural and pastoral settler, of any district * The author who has tramped every yard of Tiffen’s route can confirm the surprisingly short climb from the Orongorongo Valley to the Wainuiomata divide but as railway as well as roading engineers were to decide during the next 70 years, apart from the winding inconsequentiality of the route, the Waiorongomai saddle and the harbour ridge itself are no mean obstacles.

SQUATTING PROSPECTS 49 yet described in New Zealand . . .. The company’s representative was urged to adopt, forthwith, measures necessary to render the district approachable and open for sale.*°

Colonel Wakefield said that he had long been impressed with the

importance of the Wairarapa. Considerable progress had been made with the road on which 25 men were engaged. ‘For the present he did not think he had authority for doing more.’** However he did mention the plea to London.

It was against the background of these representations that the Gazette ran a lengthy editorial on Tiffen’s January 1844 report. “The Wairarapa must be opened for settlement . . . To the Wairarapa we

look for the means of concentration, and of increasing rapidly the population in the neighbourhood of Port Nicholson.?’ The visit of Governor FitzRoy a few days later helped a little to clear the air. True, that his views on the causes of the Wairau massacre were unpalatable to most while his public rebuke to the bumptious E. J. Wakefield (who like his uncle had never been to the Wairarapa) had offended a few— fewer perhaps than the Wakefields liked to believe, and leading settlers who had had the privilege of a private interview thought that there would be good grounds for accommodation on the major issues worrying the settlement. FitzRoy made no promises about the Wairarapa or about little else and Commissioner Spain was still slowly working through his public and painful examination of Colonel Wakefield’s purchases. The groundswell of hope which had small foundation beyond the mere fact

of an official visit, shortly afterwards was reinforced by word that the House of Commons, however briefly, was about to cast a favourable eye on the Company and in terms of the Pennington award many more acres were to be made available to it.

In February 1844, when some of the advance pack of squatters were making final plans for leasing and the acquisition of stock, the press was still hoping that Wakefield would make arrangements for purchase. Occupation in any case was going ahead. At the end of March there was a lament that the road to the Wairarapa could not be opened ‘before the termination of the summer’ as promised. Stockholders ‘despairing of passing into the Wairarapa by the Company’s road ... have been arranging to drive their stock forthwith round the sea coast .. .’. As Chapman later said ‘. . . the settlers took the affair into their own hands’.*® But they did so under the official displeasure of the Government. Matthew Richmond on 30 March issued a proclamation?®

which stated that while the Governor had in terms of the Pennington award waived the Crown’s right of pre-emption of Maori land in favour of the New Zealand Company in certain designated areas ‘any bargains

made by private individuals with the Aborigines, for the purpose of acquiring land, whether by purchase, lease or otherwise .. . will not be sanctioned or recognised by the Government. I therefore hereby warn HW—s

50 OCCUPATION TO 1853 all persons from entering into any such negotiations . . . which can only end in the loss and disappointment of the parties concerned... .’ Many men obviously felt that anything was better than the frustration and loss bred from waiting round Port Nicholson for Wakefield or the Government to do something. Somewhat equivocally Wakefield had belatedly indicated his readiness to spend money on cutting through the Mukamuka rocks. The only significant disappointment would be on the part of those who failed to act in time. The race was on. William Deans with brother John had settled for Riccarton and Joseph Greenwood had doubtless been persuaded by brother James that Banks Peninsula was more promising than the Wairarapa. But there were many still left who had spent some weeks of 1843 in looking behind the Palliser shingle and the great sand bar.

Traditionally and by such documentary evidence as has so far come to light the honours for effective occupation are shared by the proprietors of Wharekaka and Pihautea, or, to give the latter its earlier form of name—Kopungarara. A fugitive attempt may have been made by a Captain Duke. Brees who was still in the country at the time and in a position to know what was going on says, flatly, ‘Mr. Duke was the first who settled there. He took forty head of cattle round to the district, by the coast, in the month of April, 1844, as a squatter.’*° But neither Duke nor his cattle have ever been more than wraith-like phantoms in the historian’s documents so far uncovered. Brees or Tiffen see his name as graffiti on a Maori shelter on the Rimutaka track; the April 1845 list of stations has as No. 6 ‘Mr. Duke—unoccupied, fit for cattle’?! an indication that the shadow on the plain had undergone further transformation. His strongest claim to reality is from Weld’s incidental but

quite positive reference in a journal entry for 5 March 1845 about the bitterns haunting the river-side swamps of Wharekaka. ‘Duke’s herd-boy used to be terribly afraid of them devoutly believing it to be an Avator of his Satanic Majesty’s.’

There is perhaps a link with Duke in Chapman’s false impression that Alfred Ludlam, the keen Hutt farmer and horticulturist, was the first. Some of Ludlam’s stock was later grazed on terms by other men and we may postulate that Duke as agent for Ludlam had attempted occupation but for one reason or another had not persisted with his intention. Who were they, who in those first years laid the foundations of what they hoped would be a landed estate as well as of a national industry? What were their backgrounds and occupations? Much as we know about many, specific occupation, economic and _ social status cannot be given for all with any certainty. But enough facts have survived to permit a classification of most. The founding 45, all of whom

were or had been on the ground by 1850, had a surprisingly varied background. Only the Wharekaka Catholics (four) might be put in the lesser landed gentry and they moved on; the two surgeons (Feather-

THE FIRST RUNHOLDERS D1 ston and Fitzherbert) were merely owners and didn’t have to throw any fleeces into the wash-pool. Most numerous were the labourers (ten) some of whose descendants have survived on the chosen acres through six generations. Of comparable strength are the descendants of the one

bullock-driver, the one shoemaker and two of the three clerks, the one army officer, one grieve, and the one veterinary surgeon. Surprisingly, the labourers, if justice were done, would be a larger group were it not for the incursion of a spurious category—farmer-settlers, men who in addition to some precious if limited farming experience had managed to acquire a few pounds more than their fellows. Descendants of two of

the six in this category are still on pre-Adamite selections. By this standard our five surveyors disappoint. The unknown we have reduced to four. Captain Smith’s rank and qualifications are beyond question but Captains Duke and Kelly are possibly in a vague courtesy land of pseudo-captaincies while Donald and John Drummond (not relatives)

lived too short a time to be categorised with any certainty. The important fact is that, probably to a greater extent than in either Canterbury or Otago, the founding fathers took their strength from themselves and not from any inherited resource. Their education in many cases was limited although no more than two or three could fail to write their own names.

So it is back to the founding quintet—Clifford, Vavasour, Petre, Weld and Bidwill. Charles Clifford (1813-1893) like his partners, Vavasour, Petre and Weld was of an English Catholic family of position

and resources. He arrived in October 1842 on the George Fife to acquire some valuable bush experience on his section at Porirua. He soon began to look further for some more open and spacious arena. His experiences with Fox’s 1843 exploration party might have turned him away from the Wairarapa but in March 1844 he went again to the valley with Fox, Vavasour, Petre and Bidwill expressly to select some open country and negotiate a lease. William Swainson junr. was interpreter. Clifford, in a letter to Wakefield written immediately after their return described the coastal route and its difficulties in detail—it was a

copy of this letter that the Colonel sent to London—while 41 years later Swainson recalled the leasing negotiations in a letter to W. E. Bidwill.??

The party, after an hour’s sail from Wellington, were landed with their horses at Okiwi from where they rode south along the hills through

the station of Capt. W. B. Rhodes to the coast at Fitzroy Bay. Round over sand, shingle and river mouths to Cape Turakirae and Palliser Bay itself they reached the barrier of the Mukamuka rocks where Clifford assessed what minimal work he thought necessary to render the

bluffs passable for stock at half tide. There was good feed ‘all along the coast’ but after passing Orongorongo, not yet occupied by Dan Riddiford, there was no place at which it would be worth settling until

52 OCCUPATION TO 1853 one reached ‘the hills this side of the Lake’. After spending two or three days at Upokokirikiri they were accompanied up the lake into the Ruamahanga by a Maori party under the chief Manihera Rangitekai-

waho. Some ten or twelve miles up the river they ‘disembarked at a beautiful spot on the right hand side, [the true left or east bank] where through an opening in the woods the grassy plain came down to the water's edge . . . [here] the ground is gently undulating & covered with short sweet grass admirably adapted for sheep pasture’. This clearly was

to be the chosen site of Wharekaka station. Swainson mentions that Manihera ‘who had the sole direction of the negotiations on the part of

the natives took . . . [Bidwill] by way of Wharekaka Plain, as far as the Dry River, through the bush to Kopungarara’.?* The boundaries of

the two runs and in both cases rents at the rate of £12 per annum were agreed upon. Swainson recalled that Vavasour ‘who was apt to take strange freaks into his head’ remained at the lake outlet to eat dried eels and while there met Purvis Russell who had come round for the same purpose as the others and, presumably, not very much later, arranged for the lease of Whangaimoana.

A hasty return to Wellington, the assembling of the initial mob of sheep and Bidwill, the first of the group to set out, was on his way with Swainson and a boy to assist with the 350 precious merinos. Bidwill (1820-1884) a Devon man of education and some family background had

emigrated to Australia and had come on to New Zealand on the recommendation of his brother J. C. Bidwill whose initial visit had been crowned with the honour of being the first European to ascend Ngauruhoe. Charles Robert Bidwill had arrived in Nelson in March 1843 on the Posthumous with 1,600 merinos. Many of the sheep had died

from drinking salt water while temporarily on Fifeshire Island which setback depressed prices at the resulting sale. Those which he was able

to dispose of fetched only from 15s. to 17s. each so he crossed to Wellington with the balance and was able to arrange with Alfred Ludlam to hold the mob at the latter’s Hutt farm until he decided upon the move to the Wairarapa.

Bidwill’s first day’s journey was to Okiwi and on next morning to Fitzroy Bay past Clifford’s sheep already on the trail. Blankets and provision were carried on two pack mares Gypsy and S pitfire and though restricted to the barest necessities included ‘a net in which to fold the sheep at night’.** Short stages were necessary not only because there

was no track for long sections of the route but because of the limited quantity of feed. The fishing villages of Parangarehu and Uawa (Orongo-

rongo) were temporarily deserted but the cavalcade some days later reached the Mukamuka rocks. Col. Wakefield, heeding Clifford’s SUSPES-

tions, had arranged for some work to be done on the rocky passage but

Swainson claimed that the party so engaged achieved little. Even at low water it was necessary to stand in the sea and pass the sheep from

WHAREKAKA PIONEERS 53 hand to hand round the worst obstruction—‘A work of time but which was accompanied with less trouble than we expected and without any loss.’

That night they camped beside the lake in heavy rain and next

morning found that the river had broken through to the sea which for some days stopped all further progress. They therefore moved back to feed at the Western Lake corner where the flock was left under Swainson’s care while Bidwill returned to the Hutt for cattle which he had contracted to graze on behalf of Ludlam and Coutts Crawford. While Swainson was waiting, the Wharekaka flock guided by Petre and Vavasour with the help of young Frederick Aloysius Weld, caught up with him. Weld had been only a few weeks in the country having arrived at New Plymouth in the Theresa on 18 March but had quickly agreed with his cousin Clifford that sheep-farming appeared to offer

the best prospects for a young man in his position. Throwing in his lot with the others he immediately offered his services to help in getting

the sheep round to the run. Some weeks were to elapse before he formally became the fourth partner but it was characteristic of Weld that it was he and not the others who endured the Wharekaka years and took the initiative three years later in the move to Flaxbourne. That he was the nephew of a Cardinal and had received a broader European education than the English universities of the time might have given him could have been irrelevant to survival around the shores

of Wairarapa Moana. Added, however, to his persistence, courage, spirit and what can only be described as a broadly based sense of honour, integrity and sense of duty it was understandable that his destiny

should have taken him beyond sheep to the New Zealand premiership and various Colonial Governorships. All these responsibilities were very

much in an unseen future when on 1 May 1844 he set out with Henry Petre to catch up with the flock in charge of a shepherd beyond Okiwi where Vavasour also joined them. Weld made time to keep a journal

and later was able to elaborate on the staccato brevity of its initial pages. He recalled the magnificent autumn morning of their adventure against the back-drop of a snow-clad Tararua range—obviously an early winter dusting—and the rich evergreen forest on the hills to their left. Heavy stores had been sent round to Te Kopi by whale-boat but the rough nature of the hill ‘track’ and the weakness of the sheep still feeling the effects of their voyage meant that the Kohangapiripiri lagoon was

their first night’s camp. Although they appear to have made more rapid progress than Bidwill’s party they were not so fortunate in negotiating the rocks losing some sheep which were washed off their feet

in the heavy seas.”° His journal for 2nd May notes ‘My first night in the bush’ and for the next ‘Slept with Petre in a wata at Orong Rong.’ For the 6th “Ware blown away in the night’ an incident with more or less amusing consequences which he enlarged upon in his recollections.

54 OCCUPATION TO 1853 On the 11th ‘Crossed the Jake with the sheep they being the first that

ever entered the Wairarapa.—Vavasour and I staid at Habou Kirri Kirri and Te Kopi from this date till May 29 living on potatoes and dried eels & trying to get the natives to start in a canoe for Warekaka.’

The negotiations for moving the sheep over and for transport to the station was a bargain of some importance, for, as Weld pointed out, it would fix the price for all such dealings in the future. He asserted that, in the end, they had to give twice as much as an English ferryman would have asked.

Petre returned home while Vavasour and Weld remained to see about getting the stores up from Te Kopi the shepherd and boy having gone on with the sheep. Weld himself arrived at Wharekaka on the 30th to

find ‘a large barn like house . . . perforated on every side with open door & window .. . situated on a low damp bit of swamp & open to the rain on all sides’. The next period, even in the journal, Weld recorded

as “The days of starvation’. The stores did not arrive and survival depended on what game Weld could shoot, leavened with unsalted potatoes. He realised by now that nothing would be left of the provisions which had been sent by sea so walked up the valley to supplement

the exhausted commissariat with ducks and pigeons. The bark house, succinctly described in the diary, had been built by Maoris for the sum of £25 and despite its unclosed vents which admitted all weathers was

the ‘wharenu’ of the district its 30 feet of length and 12 in breadth not being matched elsewhere. The low situation even offered some compensation for in the spring rainy season they were able to build up an island of stones in the middle of the floor to serve as a fireplace to which their canoe could be anchored!*

Vavasour and the relief party with the Te Kopi stores eventually did arrive but only when Weld was down to three or four charges of powder. After a luxurious meal the station was truly established. There were, of course, still the mosquitoes: ‘No pen can describe, or mind conceive, the horrors of them. They put out the wick in a tin of fat... they got into our mouths while we were eating; they filled the air with their hateful humming .. . never have I known anything approaching,

even remotely, the horror of the mosquito season in the Warekaka Valley... .’?6 But what of Swainson whom we left waiting for Bidwill somewhere

about the Wharepapa Stream? Bidwill duly returned, the crossing of the lake was effected and the little party followed their predecessors up the valley. Swainson said that there was ‘next to no native track and in trying to avoid places where we could see Weld had been in difficulties we got into worse, especially in finding crossing places to the * The homestead was at the end of the East Pukio road about one mile west towards the Ruamahanga from the Historic Places Trust noticeboard.

BIDWILL AND WELD 39 swampy gullies and creeks for the two pack mares. . .’.2” Their first camp for the sheep was a little further up the plain than Weld’s whare but Bidwill and Swainson were glad to share the comforts of the joint establishment until the first Kopungarara mansion on the banks of

the Rumahanga had been erected. As a preliminary the Bidwill camp was moved up to the edge of the bush and Dry River from where the

Maoris cut a road through it to the eastern bank. At this stage Swainson recalled that one of the chief worries was the Ludlam-Crawford cattle which having been bred on the Miramar Peninsula preferred hills to level country and each morning would be at the top of the first ridge of hills opposite their camp. Initially the men erected two huts one for cooking and the other for living. Progress must have seemed slow for it as on Ist February 1845 that Weld accompanied Bidwill to his station where he was shown the intended site for Bidwill’s new house —‘He Bidwill has bought about 50 acres of land for a house & is now

completely safe from interference... . A rather hopeful statement in view of the protracted difficulties in securing title to the full extent of Pihautea. However, Weld, almost exactly a year later, walked up to Bidwills with Capt. Smith and ‘had the honour of helping to eat the first breakfast ever served in his new slab house’?® which was sited on

the neighbouring mound of Pihautea built in part from hand sawn timber, a modest refuge 12’ x 24 in size.2® By 1847 his original flock had increased to only 420 sheep but he was grazing 195 cattle. Swainson, in recalling the difficulties which both runholders had in securing food in the first six months said that little or nothing could be obtained from the Maoris who at that time had no village or cultivation in the middle of the valley north of Turanganui.

Some Maoris now came down and settled at a pa which Weld said was ‘about a mile away’—possibly Otaraia although the latter was not built until March 1846. They began planting potatoes and both Weld and Bidwill cleared and planted their own gardens Weld claiming that his turnips were the first European vegetables to be grown and eaten in the Wairarapa. Winter floods were severe but prospects brightened in the spring when the unsatisfactory shepherd ‘E’ upon whose character and failings Weld enlarges was persuaded to leave. His repeated inadequacies as a colonist were terminated by the payment of his passage home by a ‘kind friend’. Bidwill had an equally unfortunate experience

with a scion of a noted Wellington family, but at this period had a greater knowledge of stock and farming than the lords of Wharekaka. Weld was very lucky to obtain the services of a Scottish border manager,

Thomas Caverhill who had arrived in Wellington on the Medusa two months before he himself had reached the colony. Caverhill’s first step was to take the sheep on to higher ground where they immediately began to improve. Weld’s enthusiasm took fresh strength and he threw himself

once more into the work of the run, sleeping out at night to guard the

96 OCCUPATION TO 1853 flock from predators. The owners nevertheless felt that the flat, floodthreatened situation could be improved upon and in November they mounted the Whareama expedition under the guidance of the chief Te Korou. (See p. 42-5) There were still basic problems of tenure. The initial hasty leases had to be renegotiated, a far from clear-cut matter, with consequences affecting the future of all their fellow squatters. In December they agreed to pay £12 per annum for a run ‘on both sides of the brook that runs across the valley [the Dry River?] & the like sum for the Warrikaka Station as the plain between must necessarily be in our hands .. .’. The value of the run had doubled in eight months! However, at the station whare itself the Maoris indicated the eastern boundary as a ‘wood behind the house—thus cutting off much the best part of our present run... .. This was quite unacceptable ‘and we told them flatly that we should leave the valley at once, sheep & all’. The argument arose because of the differing interests of the powerful wife of Ngairo, E Meri, backed by Simon Peter, and those of Manihera the runholder’s sponsor. An anxious debate of many hours led to a change of heart by Simon Peter but the final decision was still delayed and both Bidwill and Kelly were threatened with greatly restricted boundaries. However acceptance was given; there was a break in the sky for the shearing under Donald’s skilled guidance had gone off ‘with great éclat’, while the Maoris, to emphasise their territorial rights, chose to clear a patch of bush at their back door for cultivation. Weld was struck by the resulting mid-summer conflagration, the crashing of heavy trees ‘one or two blazing to the top & shooting forth showers of sparks’ which reminded him of a fireworks display at home.*°

The next station of which we have any detailed knowledge is Tauanui, taken up in early May 1844 by Ellerslie and R. D. Wallace, brothers of J. H. Wallace. R. D. Wallace later took up Tautane station

in Hawke’s Bay; J. H. Wallace (1816-1891) became a prominent Wellington merchant and minor writer having had the uncommon experience in early Wellington of being trained as a bookseller. However, it is through the papers of C. A. Vallance, the Wallaces’ man on the spot, that we obtain not merely some knowledge of the establishment

of one particular run but also are given an unrivalled telescopic view of the toils, struggles and compensations of the Wairarapa pioneers of

1844-45. R. D. Wallace in May induced three Maoris, whose very names hover now in almost illegible obscurity, to lease the block between

the Rahoruru in the south and the Pukepapa to the north. The rent was the customary £12 per annum, the first instalment of which was not to be paid until the first twelve months had elapsed. A common practice, indeed, seems to have been to present the chief with a horse,

a costly and much coveted present as a token of good faith and to defer cash payment. Wallace invited Vallance who had been only a few months in the Colony to go into partnership with him and to act as

WALLACE AND VALLANCE 57 manager while Wallace in Wellington continued his job as a bank clerk. Charles Augustus Vallance (1819-1882), after the experiences outlined in the next few pages returned to Wellington leasing Watts Peninsula for a few years from 1854 and also land at Oteranga near Cape Tera-

whiti before finally taking up Kahumingi station in 1858. He married , the widow of Donald Drummond who was drowned crossing the Lake in 1850.

Some time in April 1844 Vallance had gone round to Te Kopi in the

Industry and after he and Wallace had ‘established’ the station the latter returned. It is clear from correspondence that their chief expectation was to provide grazing for the stock of Wellington owners as Bidwill was doing. There are references to negotiations with Gillies, Tankersley, McMaster and others, many of whom soon afterwards made their own footing in the district. The operation, like others, involved the growing number of small schooners and whale boats hazarding Palliser Bay—-Worser’s (Heberley), Machattie’s, Cimino’s and John Bell’s. Their cargo consisted of the simple basic supplies—one hundred of flour, a keg of butter and another of salt, tools for Vallance’s main task of erecting a cottage and stockyards, a box of caps, a bell for the cow, horseshoe nails and a tinder box. Formal indentures were necessary

for the employment of the two hands who feature during the station’s brief period of Wallace ownership. It is perhaps more understandable to us today that Joseph Grimaldi at 4s. weekly should not have lasted the three months of his engagement perhaps because his wife was restless in Wellington and that Stephen Charles Hartley, much later to be given a small place in history as the discoverer of Papaioea Clearing (Palmer-

ston North) but now, because of his knowledge of Maori, useful to Vallance in a surprising variety of ways, should also have been dissatisfied. Vallance felt that he did not render the firm physical support expected and Wallace wrote testily “You mention in your letter about his leaving when his time is up—for god’s sake let him leave for he is not worth his salt’.2? Wallace feared rivals in the grazing enterprise: ‘I am told Tankersley intends coming down to Wairarapa and that two or three dozen are coming if so the place will not be worth a damn.’ Gillies, of course, was an early invader and Tankersley, for a brief period, ran a small farm at Tankersley’s Creek between the Wangaehu and the

Paharakeke, near Pirinoa, before returning to Brooklyn and then, in the mid fifties, settling finally at Masterton.

By January 1845 Wallace and Vallance had their own boat in charge

of Leonard Dark, hoping that small consignments for Clifford and Bidwill would help to meet its cost. In February, however, Wallace became dispirited and began his attempts to sell—‘there are too many

engaged in the cattle trade at Wairarapa now, and we have not the slightest chance of carrying on without a loss’;?? he mentioned that Samuel Revans was looking for a place and ‘had a notion for our(s)’

38 OCCUPATION TO 1853 but then Captain Smith and their future manager Donald Drummond were reported on their way followed by Gillies, Tiffen, Northwood and Williamson. Most of the pioneers, in fact, seemed to have looked at Tauanui only to reject it. Paradoxically there is no reference to the visit of the trio who took it over, Charlton, Allom and Tully, New Zealand Company surveyors jobless after the dismissals of the preceding August. Wallace was perhaps unlucky but certainly too hasty. The Hutt-Porirua war, like other much greater conflicts, was about to create a small boom from which more patient pioneers and relative newcomers would reap some harvest. On Tauanuz itself Vallance with the vigour of his youth

lived a full life which comes through to us in the bald recital of a typical day—

*.. . I have now been here ... 7 months and like the country very well. I had a damper at first in poor Norman’s death but... I was obliged to turn my thoughts to myself and determine what was the best to be done picture me to yourself turned Cattle breeder and Farmer living in the Bush about 3 days journey from port Nick entirely among the Natives (who are a beastly set I mean the men the women are very good natured and some of them very good looking You may

imagine I was not very hard to please after being 4 months at sea) however I sometimes have to go to port Nick on business and that afford(s) a little change but I am always glad to get home again where I have enough to do to amuse myself I rise at day light send the man to bring the cows in milk them, feed the pigs, poultry, dogs by that time breakfast is ready which consists of pork or ham eggs Coffee

and butter etc After breakfast I ride over the hills to see the Cattle are all right perhaps ride over to one of my neighbours the nearest is about 4 miles have a chat, talk about the price of stock what pretty native girls have been down latterly, have a smoke and ride back to dinner—pork greens potatoes pankakes & coffee sometimes duck or pigeons, return home see what the men are about, go in the bush fell some timber for I am busy now building pigstyes, cowshed and other outhouses sometimes take the dogs and go pig hunting or garden a little and then to tea or as we call it supper which is ditto repeated after which sit over the fire smoke my pipe and drink my coffee talk about what I want done on the morrow and get to bed as happy as a lord where I soon forget all the toils of the day in the embraces of [a]

very pretty native girl who is living with me... I suppose I must tell something about the country it is a very fine climate neither too

hot or cold very hilly but there is abundance of fine land which might soon be got from the Natives if we had any other Governor than

the Old Woman we got. I would not advise any one to come out at present till we see what the Government at Home mean to do.. .”*°

It was a long way from Whitechapel Rd., London and his friend Charley to the clear blue skies of the Wairarapa facing across the Ruamahanga and the lake to the bush-covered Rimutaka rising in the

THE STATIONS IN 1849 59 setting sun. With it all laid on, it would be carping and dishonest for us to do other than condone in historic envy even if there are some unanswerable questions.

By June 1845 the transfer to the three young surveyors was complete

for we find them advertising under date June 7 for cattle to depasture at 10s. per head per annum—calves bred on the station not charged for in their first six months. The note was under the name of H. Charlton

& Co. After Vallance left Tauanui he was at Okiwi on Ellerslie Wallace’s small farm for a year. He then went in June or July 1847 to manage the cattle station of his former neighbour to the south, Joseph

Kelly. Kelly, one of the first wave who was well established by June 1844, ran his farm more as a dairy, 1844 version, than as a pastoral run. Vallance’s terms as manager were that he should have the produce of the dairy as well as one third the annual increase of the cattle, plus half the proceeds from grazing, Vallance paying half the lease and half the expenses of house-keeping.**

By the end of April 1845, barely a year after the initial occupation, some twelve stations were listed in a Wellington Independent table:

‘1. Mr. Russell’s old station now unoccupied and house used as an inn. This would refer to the Traveller’s Rest about half a mile upstream on the north bank of the Turanganui from Kelly’s house. T. P. Russell

joined later, firstly by his bother H.R., and then by Robert and John Purvis had leased the block south of the Turanganui between the lake

and the sea and presumably about this time erected a cottage at Whangaimoana leaving James Grindell to take over the earlier home and become the Wairarapa’s first hotel-keeper. ‘2. Mr. Kelly’s—occupied as a cattle station.’

‘3. Messrs Allom, Charlton and Tully . .. intended to be occupied by sheep, which statement would imply that the young men had not found many takers for their offer nine months earlier to graze cattle on terms. ‘4. Messrs M’Masters and Gillis [sic|—occupied as a cattle station.’ A significant partnership before Tuhitarata, the original run, was subdivided and Gillies took over Otaraia to the north. ‘D9. Messrs Clifford and Vavasour—sheep station.’ It will be noted that, as elsewhere, Wharekaka quite properly, was shown as owned by Clifford or Clifford and Vavasour, whose financial interests were doubtless greater.

‘6. Mr. Duke—unoccupied, fit for cattle.” In amplication of earlier comment it would seem likely that, by a process of elimination, Otaraia was the location of Duke’s enterprise. ‘7. Mr. Russell—sheep station’ Whangaimoana.

‘8. Mr. Ingles—Intended to be occupied by sheep expected shortly from Sydney.’ We have so far no solution to the identity of Ingles who

60 OCCUPATION TO 1853 did not take up any run. He is not to be confused with A. St. Clair Inglis who six years later walked through the district and sketched the mouth of the Orongorongo before taking up Springhill (Onga Onga). ‘9, Mr. Bidwell [sic]|—sheep, cattle and horses.’

‘10. Capt. Smith—sheep and cattle. Surprisingly we do not have an exact date for the final occupation of Smith and Revans but it was probably early 1845 in view of Wallace’s reference to their interest in Tauanui. Both partners may have lacked first hand farming experience, which gap they quickly and effectively remedied but they had undergone a complex and chastening apprenticeship in agricultural economics. In partnership with Waitt and Tyser, Revans had stocked a run in Nelson on which Donald Drummond was placed as manager. However this short-lived enterprise appears to have brought only the reward of litigation with his partners and others but some of the stock may have been transferred, as were the services of its manager, to Huangarua.*° ‘11. Messrs Tiffin [sic] and Northwood—to be occupied by sheep expected shortly from Sydney.’ Tiffen, whose droving journey we look at briefly was about to capitalise on his thorough examination of the

lower valley by the taking up of Ahiaruhe, for only some eighteen months the northernmost stretch of occupied grazing land. ‘12. Mr. Barton—round Palliser head, a sheep station’, will be likewise outlined later.

The same note stated that there were from forty to fifty Europeans now occupied in the Wairarapa. Settlement was obviously a fact. The district’s first exports, apart from whale oil, were somewhat unusual. The Caledonia, London-bound in May 1845, carried in addition to Mr. & Mrs. Brees and their four children, 48 maire logs and one case of bird skins on behalf of Messrs Clifford and Vavasour.** But shooting was only temporarily more profitable than shearing. In January 1846

the Wairarapa clip was reported to be under way. Half a ton of wool had been brought round from Russell’s and a week later Bell’s whale boat brought a further ton and Taylor’s 25 cwt.?7 Taylor in October 1845 had advertised his ‘two superior Boats constantly running to the above place [Wairarapa] and certainly for the next year or so his is the name which most frequently recurs. Wool provided a steady summer cargo and as late as May, Taylor brought round ten cwt of wool and twelve of butter, the latter commodity almost certainly from Kelly’s dairy. Early in December it was reported that 70 bales were awaiting shipment at the mouth of the lake and it was expected that more than 19 tons would be received from the Wairarapa that season.*® Impressions of the journey by sea, with luck a more rapid and certainly a more hazardous alternative to the long drag round the coast discussed

later, survive more graphically in Weld’s diary than elsewhere. One mid-winter morning in 1845 he left Wellington in the whale-boat for

NORTHWOOD AND TIFFEN 61 Te Kopi. There was firstly the long row out of the harbour, then the minor excitement of ‘speaking a schooner in the narrows’ and on through large shoals of kahawai ‘just like mackerel in the English channel’. The

day was fine but what little breeze that offered was unfavourable

and they had not long passed Orongorongo when night came on. ‘I ; found myself standing at the steer bar in the midst of Palliser Bay with a bright moon affording me no other prospect than our little boat, its three rowers and the dark waves round us.’*® Ironically eighteen months later, in high summer, it was a different story. While once more on their way to Te Kopi it was ‘man overboard’ the crew member being almost a casualty after which there was a most difficult landing in the surf of a

small cove at the river mouth. On their return a week later they lay at anchor for 27 hours from midday until 3 p.m. the following afternoon to the windward of Orongorongo, without food, the sea washing over them and ‘obliged constantly to move to allow the boat to be baled’.*°

Ahiaruhe, taken up by T. H. Northwood and the New Zealand Company surveyor H. S. Tiffen, was a judicious selection. For obvious reasons most stock movements were controlled by pedestrians rather than horsemen and the brief diary notes kept by Tiffen of his relatively quick fourteen day journey round the coast and up to Ahiaruhe in the late winter of 1845 may be taken as typical. The party of which C. J. Pharazyn (and possibly other prospective runholders) was a member left Wellington on 23 August with 762 ewes (all within six weeks of lamb-

ing), and made the Waiwhetu stream the first day, the sheep being ferried across without incident. Next morning they ‘crossed the hill to Lowry Bay’ by Jackson’s track to the top of the Point Howard spur the point itself a tidal hazard normally being avoided,*! a section ‘which we have since found to be the worst part of the driving’. It was therefore a long day merely to Okiwi where the night was spent after negotiating other rocky points and losing a ewe which had eaten tutu. After leaving Okiwi (near Houhere Terrace, Eastbourne) there was one more tidal point to negotiate before the track ascended to the summit of the hills ‘up a bad gully’ and down the spur to the second salt-water lagoon

Kohangatera the mouth of the Gollans stream which, when open, Tiffen considered hazardous for sheep to cross on account of the force of the current. From Parangarehu the idling walk to Orongorongo for once was easy, neither of the two rivers being difficult to cross although frequently unfordable after rain. Round Turakirae to Waimarama (now the location of Barney’s Whare) the road was ‘very rough and stony’ and on to Mukamukanui the same rough route continued with the first of the bad cliffs to ascend. The next day, the eighth from Wellington they passed 450 sheep round the main rocks noting that at one of the points a gap had been cut—that authorised by the Company—but as it was seven or eight feet above the level of the beach stones had to be

62 OCCUPATION TO 1853 piled up to make a track by which the sheep could reach it. “We passed

with the greatest ease and reached Waripapa’ and the balance of the mob was similarly handled next day. The ferrying of the ewes across the lake seems to have been without incident and the only difficult section going up the valley was between Tauanui and Tuhitarata where the track led through high fern and two belts of bush. On September 6

the party reached Ahiaruhe with 758 sheep, two having died, one missing and one injured animal left behind.*?

Before next landing with Pharazyn from the Susannah Ann at Whatarangi a little more in detail should be said about the FitzroyPalliser approach to the Wairarapa. Bidwill, Swainson, Weld, Clifford, Vavasour and a dozen others quickly learned how to play the hazards

of the beaches to their advantage but weather, tide, the absence of Maori ferrymen and shortage of food all contributed to make the journey a little more varied than its historical sequel on foot today. For ten years,

from 1844 to 1854, it was the most speedy, bush-free approach to the district for pedestrian or horseman. Even after the completion of the Rimutaka road in mid 1856 the coast continued to be much used not merely as a stock route but as the preferred access to Wellington from the Lower Valley.

Of all its many travellers Alfred Matthews whose father Charles took up Watorongomai in 1850, has left us the most clear impression of the 35 long miles from Waiwhetu to Upokokirikiri. When the Lowry Bay sector, so obnoxious to Tiffen, was behind, the next danger was a very human hazard in the person of the lord of Okiwi, William Brown, who lived with his wife Nan from about 1841 until his death in 1885 under

the hill at the south end of what is now Eastbourne borough. Soon after the occupation of the Wairarapa he was granted a bush licence and erected stock yards and some sort of holding paddock for stock whose owners chose to risk an overnight stay. It was a condition of his licence that he ferry travellers across the harbour but there is virtually no record that he ever provided this service which from 1845 to 1850 runholders had a stronger chance of getting from George Day to the north in Days Bay. Alfred Matthews remembered him as ‘one of the ugliest men I have ever known [who] kept up a flow of bad language from morning till night’. Matthews senior and junior often were obliged to spend a night in Brown’s modest dwelling thatched with toi toi, clay

kitchen floor and ‘very good’ bedroom despite its proximity to the habitues of the house an ‘aromatic goat, a sheep and two or three mangy dogs’. Although his licence was not renewed after the death of a

soldier following a drunken brawl in the house in 1852, drovers and others stil] found it convenient to halt.

Beyond the last tidal point to the south of Muritai the track as Tiffen

mentioned led up a gully called by Matthews, Karaka Gully, to the ridge known over a century ago as Rhodes’ Hill because, until 1848, the

THE COASTAL HIGHWAY 63 coastal spurs north of Pencarrow were owned and leased by Captain W. B. Rhodes as a cattle run. Rhodes’ first manager was Wm. Foulds who was followed by W. H. Donald. Donald it was who carried the Rhodes flag in 1848 to the then northern-most station in the Wairarapa,

Manaia. For nearly a century Rhodes’ Hill has been known as Mount . Cameron named for the Cameron family of Gollans Valley. From Fitzroy Bay and Parangarehu Matthews recalled that the track went over

the Para saddle into the Wainuiomata ‘to avoid obstruction along the coast’.42 From Wainuiomata to Pakaraka an unidentified locality, probably this side of the Waimarama, was a good open road but further on a cutting had been made on the face of the hill, to avoid a tidal hazard known as Russell’s Folly, before the Littlke Mukamuka. Matthews states that the name commemorates the lack of wisdom shown by Russell— possibly G. Russell rather than H.R., T.P. or J.P.—who insisted in taking a mob of sheep round the cliff when the tide was in and consequently

losing many in the surf. There were variations on the route in the Fitzroy Bay area, Weld for example mentioning in October 1846 that he had tried a new path which ‘headed’ the lagoons to the eastern end of the bay and crossing the Para saddle to the ford just below the bush edge thus saving half a mile; correspondingly many followed the coastal spur from Rhodes’ Hill direct to the Pencarrow Beacon thus crossing the outfall of both lagoons.

Beyond Russell’s Folly the next spot at which there was trouble was at the Mukamukaiti where travellers had to rush round the rocks as the sea receded and then wait in a small inlet until the ‘force of the drawback’ left the way clear. The grassy terrace between the Mukamukaiti and the Mukamukanui would have been a pleasant interlude but beyond the larger stream was the third and most critica] obstacle. The rocks on the main point could normally be passed only at 4 ebb to about } flood tide. At the foot of one of the rocks was a deep hole into which, according to Matthews, unobservant travellers sometimes stumbled. One such victim was the Rev. R. Cole, who shared with Colenso some responsibility for the souls of Ngatikahungunu. ‘Parson Cole’, once allowed his horse to subside into this trap which an appropriate christening gesture confirmed it for many years as Cole’s Hole. On the Wairarapa side of the final cliff was a small area ‘Captain McDonald’s Flat’. McDonald may

have been A. C. McDonald, the manager of the Union Bank who accompanied Judge Chapman to the Wairarapa in 1847 but his identity

is only less certain than the reason for the name. On some notable occasion the entire terrace broke away from the hill and slipped some distance before it lodged behind the lower rocks where part of it was washed away. Almost immediately below this precarious flat the seas swept up to within a few yards of the track which after the earthquake was raised to some 20 to 25 feet above it. The severe effects of the earthquake of February 1855 were felt throughout the valley but the

64 OCCUPATION TO 1853 raising of the Palliser coastline by no less than four feet at this spot removed in one convulsion the route’s major nightmare. In addition to the pushing up of the terrace some millions of tons of slips poured down into the sea. Sections of the range above the coast,

in the words of an eye-witness, were ‘absolutely torn to pieces’. The visual evidence of the destruction remained for nearly a century but for some 20 years no vegetation grew and ‘great rents several feet wide were visible’. A cave at the Kiriwai back-water where settlers used to store wool and stores was completely buried. The backwater itself, hitherto a deep channel up which laden schooners could sail readily, was turned into a lagoon. On the eastern side of the lake at Whatarangi there was no upheaval but the accompanying tidal wave washed away the Te Kopi whares as well as many bales of wool. Providentially, the return wave cast the bales ashore.**

For some years after European settlement the Maori villages at the mouth of the Orongorongo and Mukamukanui as well as Parangarehu were occupied seasonally by Ngatiawa. At the Orongorongo occupation was on both banks although the main village after Riddiford negotiated his lease in 1846 was on the western terrace. Weld when passing through one dry December day accidentally set alight to the grass and ‘the heat

having parched everything the whole valley was shortly in a flame’. Despite their best efforts they could not prevent the huts which had so often sheltered them catching fire.#® The Maori who were naturally incensed about the matter later claimed that the fire had burned seven canoes. That same night Weld’s party slept at the Mukamukanui until midnight when they were able to pass the rocks on the low tide and ‘then lay down till morning in the first gully we came to’. Matthews senior was involved in an amusing incident at the same spot. An old Maori at the Mukamukanui village, with the customary gratuity in mind, once offered to assist the runholder in getting his cattle round the

- rocks but Matthews politely declined not expecting any particular difficulty. However ‘again and again on reaching the first rock the calves broke back’. Much annoyed he rushed forward to see what the trouble was when the head of his rejected guide appeared over a rock.

‘Being a choleric and impetuous man he dashed at the native and brought a stick . . . thwack upon his skull.’ On his return to the village for a satchel he had forgotten the Maoris greeted him cordially and considered that their companion had received only his just deserts.*¢ Weld’s most miserable journey was in October 1846. After an early breakfast at Orongorongo brisk walking brought them to the lake outlet

in three and a half hours. But not only was there no canoe to take them over; the opposite shore appeared devoid of life. The lake was open, the water rushing like a milrace through the channel and without any kai on their backs they looked wistfully across to the deserted pa. A tremendous southerly of hail and wind suddenly assailed them. Soaked

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V

Purchase CANTERBURY ON THE RUAMAHANGA?

THE REACTIONS of Colonel Wakefield to the deputation which in

September 1843 pressed upon him the desirability of opening up Wairarapa was characteristically somewhat equivocal. He was too busy justifying the Company’s uncertain purchases in the Wellington area to William Spain, Chairman of, or more simply himself the ‘Court of the Special Commission’ to give much thought to the Wairarapa. Spain, after his appointment by the British Government, had taken nearly a

year to reach New Zealand and did not commence his Wellington sittings until mid 1842. His protracted investigations confirmed welljustified suspicions about the validity of the Company’s negotiations as well as the adequacy of its payment. The inescapable facts nevertheless were that, however dubious the title to the Jand on which the settlements had been established, some thousands of generally hard-working and certainly clamant settlers were in residence and in equity something had to be done to strike a balance.

In reporting to London, therefore, on the wish of some settlers to move to Wairarapa Wakefield said that ‘Numerous applications for purchase of land, and for licences for depasturing cattle there, have been made to me, and I have no doubt that either by means of an inland settlement formed upon a similar system as this, with a small town, or by selling the land here and in England simultaneously the resources of the Company might be very sensibly increased.’ He thought

that ‘nothing could be effected towards this end’ until a road was opened up.? Three months later, in forwarding a sketch of the district drawn by Wm. Fox, he showed a more positive interest, pointing out that the ‘upper part is very available and presents an expanse in which I propose to take a large block for the Company .. .”

FitzRoy, after his visit to Wellington and in response to a direction from the Colonial Office, instructed Spain in February 1844 ‘to superintend and assist the Agent of the New Zealand Company in effecting

. . . [the Wairarapa purchase] ... to the extent of not more than one hundred and fifty thousand acres of available land, without regard to figure or continuity of blocks . . . and of not more than two hundred and fifty thousand acres . . . in other places within the limits claimed 80

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