P. & o. and Orient Cruises
With the Compliments of the
New Zealand Government Railways.
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EPUB ISBN: 978-0-908329-02-1
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The original publication details are as follows:
Title: The North Island main trunk railway : a descriptive and historical story
Author: Cowan, James
Published: Govt. Printer, Wellington, N.Z., 1928
Romance of the Rail.
Through the Heart of New Zealand.
THE NORTH ISLAND
MAIN TRUNK RAILWAY.
A DESCRIPTIVE AND HISTORICAL STORY.
BY J4MES CO WAT.
Issued by the Publicity Branch, New Zealand Railways,
Wellington, N.Z.,
1928.
W. A. G. Skinner, Government Printer, Wellington, N.Z.
3
INTRODUCTORY.
The North Island Main Trunk Line.
There are more boldly spectacular railway routes than the journey through the North Island of New Zealand, but for variety of landscape interest, for alternate pictures of settled beauty and the breaking-in of new country, of river and mountain and forest, for unusual glimpses of the pioneer settlers’ achievement in a wild land, there is probably none that equals the North Island Main Trunk Railway. This section of the New Zealand Government Railways, connecting the cities of Auckland and Wellington by a line 426 miles in length, penetrates the greater part of the North Island’s length. It takes the traveller into the heart of the Island ; it is the avenue and the gateway to some very wonderful regions that were practically unknown until the laying of the iron road.
Conjoined to this variety of physiographic beauty, there is a very definite human interest, the historic, romantic element that constitutes quite half the charm of the world’s travel regions. New Zealand is a young country as years go ; but it has lived its life swiftly, and the transformation of the land from a condition of savage freedom, through stress of war and wild adventure to a settled wealthy peace has been covered in the span of a single life-time. So in learning something of the often thrilling story of these inland parts we are bringing to mind episodes of a past not yet remote, of dramatic events that occurred but the other day, so quickly does the work of nation-building march in a country like this.
The linking-up by rail of the two largest cities of the Dominion, the former and present capitals, was a long and costly task, carried on in stages as financial and technical resources offered, complicated by great physical difficulties as the gorge-riven mountain heart of the Island was approached. It is a bare twenty years since the last gap in the line was filled and the high central plateau of forest and canons was traversed by through trains. The story of the great engineering works that devolved on the builders of the line in the central zone makes quite an epic of scientific industry in itself that can be sketched but lightly here.
CONTENTS.
Page
Introductory 3
From Auckland Southward— The Plain of Tamaki-makau-rau—Land of Plenty, and Peril— Volcanic Cones—Field Base in Waikato War 5
South Auckland Storyland— Papakura and Pukekohe—Memories of the Maori WarFortified Churches—The Queen’s Redoubt 7
Along Waikato’s Banks — Old-time Paddle-steamers—Stories of the Waikato War—The Great Southward March—General Cameron’s Army—Gunboat and Maori Cannoneers—Rangiriri and the Forlorn Hope— Waikato’s Wide Waters 10
On Classic Ground— Sacred Taupiri Mountain—The Tangi over King Tawhiao— Grand Ceremonials—“ The Place of Many Wailings”—The Maori Canoe—Memories of Ngaruawahia—The Conquest of the Waikato—Meaning of the name Ngaruawahia 15
The Waikato-Waipa Plain — Old Military Settlements—Land of Comfort and Wealth - The Maori as a Fort-builder—Great System of Entrenchments— Te Awamutu and its Historic Church —Crossing the Puniu, the Frontier River 19
The King Country and its Transformation 24
Maps of the North Island Main Trunk Railway 25
Half-tone Illustrations 30 A Frontier of Volcanic Cones— Story Mountains of the Border—Love Myths of the Mountains - The Haunts of the Fairies—Otorohanga and its Stories—The Limestone Cave Country—Old Kingite Camps—Te Kuiti and its Carved House—The Poro-o-Tarao Tunnel 41
A Frontier of Volcanic Cones — Story Mountains of the Border—Love Myths of the Mountains The Haunts of the Fairies—Otorohanga and its Stories—The Limestone Cave Country—Old Kingite Camps—Te Kuiti and its Carved House—The Poro-o-Tarao Tunnel 41
In the Wanganui Watershed — Down the Ongarue Valley—Story of the Line-making—In the Land of Pumice 45
The Heart of the Island— Taumarunui and its Story—The First White Settler —The Last “Political Murder” 46
Canyon, Forest, and Tussock Land — From Taumarunui across the Central Plateau—The Land of Sawmills - Looping the Loop at Raurimu Spiral - The Tongariro National Park—Mountain Pictures 48
The Rangitikei Valley— From Waiouru Southward —The Hautapu River—Taihape— The Gorges of the Rangitikei River—Big Engineering Works 51
The Manawatu Country— Palmerston North—Beautiful Pastoral Lands—The Tararua Mountains—Farming and Flax-growing—Lake Horowhenua and its Isles of Refuge—Otakiand its Historic Maori Church — Kapiti Island —By Coast and Hill to Wellington—Porirua Harbour and its Stories - The Old Military Road—The Approach to Wellington City 52
Building of the Main Trunk 57
New Zealand. Wonderland of the Pacific 59
Marvellous Scenery and Sport 60
Tunnels of the Main Trunk 61
Principal Viaducts and Bridges 62
New Zealand Overseas Agencies 63
Tourist Routes 64
Raurimu Spiral 65
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Romance of the Rail.
From Auckland Southward.
The Plain of Tamaki-makau-rau.
■ >itkl'H E train traveller leaving Auckland City by the Main Trunk line quickly finds himself out in the I widespread residential districts that leisurely cover I practically the whole isthmus between the twin JL harbours of the Waitemata and the Manukau.
5® As one leaves the city levels there are glimpses of the ■“ ' glistening expanse of the Waitemata Harbour, here a calm steel mirror, there a river of blue oil, great reclamation works on its southern side, green rounded hill cones and clustering white buildings along the North Shore ; steam liners and white sails ; and the dark blue of the outer waters, the Hauraki Gulf; the white cliffs of Motutapu and Motuihi topped by dark groves and verdurous slopes ; far beyond the whaleback and ram-bow ranges of the outer wardens, islands and shadows of islands. Old Rangitoto—that perfectly circular mountain island of lava—dominates all; its blue-peaked crater rim cuts the sky beyond the soft-green foreland of the North Head.
In the foreground are the pretty homes and gardens of the suburban dwellers, and the gentle undulations of the Remuera and Orakei slopes, terminating in pohutukawafringed headlands. Those soft slants of Ohinerau, the place of a Hundred Maidens, going down in delectable lines from Remuera’s little mountain—-called Mount Hobson after New Zealand’s first Governor—are a perfect picture of peace, wealth, and beauty to-day, with the homes of modem comfort and luxury, shaded by plenteous treegroves and with gardens of subtropic blaze and loveliness. It is curious to learn, as one does from the old records, that all these Remuera and Ohinerau slopes where Auckland’s wealthiest homes now stand were bought from the Maori chiefs of the Ngati-Whatua tribe some eighty years ago for £2OO.
Commanding all this garden and orchard land is Remuera Mount, one of the smaller volcanic cones of the Auckland plains ; we see it on our left just after we pass the busy railway-station and workshops at Newmarket. It was the view from this little mountain-top that Sir John Logan Campbell, the “ Father of Auckland," found so entrancing in 1840, as he gazed over this all but unpeopled isthmus,
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Romance of the Rail.
with its wonderfully dovetailed sea and land, that he described it as the most beautiful panorama in the wide world, and Auckland’s site as a second Corinth.
A little farther on, as we pass Ellerslie, with its splendid racecourse, its flower-gardens and lawns, we see on our right the noble hill-park of Maunga-kiekie, which is for ever associated with Logan Campbell’s name. It is variously called, besides its Maori name (which means “ mountain of the climbing plant ’’ Astelia Banksii), Onetree Hill and Campbell Park. The conical hill that crowns this great recreation-ground of 400 acres, Auckland’s grandest park endowment, is the last resting-place of the pioneer citizen who gave it to the people, and who was buried on its summit in 1912. A statue of the fine old man stands at the entrance to the park, but the green mountain itself is his greatest and all-sufficing monument.
Materialism—the quest of unromantic road-metal—has disfigured some of the old volcanic cones of the isthmus. Fortunately, Maunga-kiekie, with its three terraced craters and its trenched and pitted pinnacle that was once a great Maori citadel, has escaped the spoilers, but most of the other graceful little mountains, including Mount Eden, have suffered from the roadmakers’ quarrying-works.
Land of Plenty—and Peril.
Now we are well out on the plains of rich volcanic soil, with here and there an ancient lava-flow, that the Maoris of old called Tamaki-makau-rau, or “ Tamaki of a Hundred Lovers.” This was debatable land, contested by many tribes, who fought for these food-teeming lands of warmth and fertility, and for the bays and estuaries and creeks that yielded a continuous harvest of delicious fish and shellfish—the kai-mataitai, or food of the salt sea. It was, however, a land of peril, for it was traversed by war-parties from north and from south, and the inhabitants had ever to be on their guard. They lived in terraced and trenched and stockaded villages on the hilltops ; this Tamaki-makau-rau Plain was anciently a bristling series of mountain-castles, with plantations around the mountain-bases and in the sheltered hollows of the lower craters.
Away on our left, rising like a massive monument to the warrior might of the vanished race, is the lofty round mountain Maungarei, called by the pakehas Mount Wellington. It commands the tidal river Tamaki, which comes sweeping up round its base, and it must have been a formidable fortress in the pre-European era, when its serried
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Romance of the Rail.
terraces, one rising above the other to its scarped summit, were occupied by stockaded dwellings and storehouses. Near its base were the large palisaded towns of the NgatiPaoa tribe captured by Hongi Hika and his Ngapuhi musketeers a little over a century ago.
The stone walls, constructed of rough blocks of blue-grey lava from the tossed-about volcanic-rock streams, are a feature peculiar to these Tamaki-Manukau levels.
First Field Base in Waikato War.
Now the spreading city and suburbs shade off into the country, and beyond Otahuhu and Papatoetoe we are fairly out in the small-farm area. Otahuhu, where the Tamaki tidal river and the shallows of the Manukau almost touch each other, is an olden canoe-portage of the Maoris ; here they could cross from east coast to west. Here, too, is historic pakeha soldiering camp-ground. Otahuhu was the first field base of the British and Colonial troops in the Waikato War ; here Auckland’s citizens were mobilized for service against the Maoris, and there was a great canvas camp, besides a stockade in which defaulters broke blue-metal for the military roads, did pack drill, and—if they were British
“ Tommies ” —took their doses of the “ cat ” at the triangles for offences against discipline. The railway runs parallel with the Great South Road, along which thousands of soldiers marched in 1863 and 1864, with rumbling guns and miles of transport-carts.
The headwaters of the Manukau Harbour gleam here and there to the right ; soft-blue in the distance on the other hand to the east are the rumpled ranges of the Wairoa and Hunua.
South Auckland Storyland.
PAPAKURA (20 miles) —the name refers to the rich red soil of the plain is an inviting rural place, with its well - grassed fields, its large areas of root crops and fruit-groves, its old-settled air. The churches here were fortified in the war days, there were redoubts by the roadside, and there was skirmishing in the bush yonder up to the left a few miles from the township. Sixty-odd years ago all this plain, like the ranges yonder, was practically one great forest, with a few clearings in which the pioneer settlers had their homesteads, and where Maori communities lived and
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Romance of the Rail.
cultivated. Hereabouts begins the storyland of South Auckland, this theatre of soldiering in the era when war against the Maori was on the grand scale under Imperial Generals.
Drury— the Tauranga or “ landing-place ” of the Maoris—was a place of importance in 1863-64. Here was the most advanced place at which stores and munitions of war waterborne from Onehunga could be landed, at the head of the Manukau’s southernmost creek, just over the low ridge on our right.
The Great South Road is henceforth on our left for many miles until we reach the Waikato. The road was cut through the dense bush, with here and there a clearing where settlers had taken up holdings before the war. The forest here was largely puriri, a handsome tree of spreading oak-like habit; remnants exist in many parts, shading the farmsteads. That road led over the Pukewhau range of hills, through the site of the present high-set village of Bombay—it was Williamson’s Clearing in those days—and down to the Queen’s Redoubt at Pokeno, General Cameron’s advanced field base.
The Queen’s Redoubt and Encampment, Pokenc From a sketch made in 1863 by Lieut. H. S. Hates, 65th Regiment.
Romance of the Rail.
Our rail-line keeps to the plain six or eight miles to the west of the up-and-down road, which was built before the present town of Pukekohe (31 miles) was founded. Where this busy centre of the South Auckland farming country now stands was a swampy forest of white-pine and puriri; the earlier settlers preferred the good slopes on the east and the undulating country on the west, about Mauku and Patumahoe. Maori and settler made life interesting for each other hereabouts towards the end of 1863.
Historic Church of Pukekohe.
From Pukekohe Town we can see, less than two miles eastward, on the high rim of an old crateral valley, the little white-painted Presbyterian church of Pukekohe East, which was a stockaded garrison-house in the war days ; it was the scene of a thrilling fight between a little band of armed settlers —-there were only twenty-three of them—-and about two hundred Maoris. British reinforcements came in briskly with the bayonet and relieved the hard-pressed defenders. On the other side of the line, over yonder at Mauku, a pretty church which is still standing was fortified with stockade and loopholes, and there were two little bush battles near by.
Up yonder on the switchback hills, culminating in the Razorback Ridge, the old military road was a highway of peril. Convoys and road parties were always in danger of ambuscade by the bush-roving bands of Maoris, and forest skirmishes cost some lives. The tattooed bushmen made a useful haul one day when they charged out on a party of the 40th Regiment who had stacked their arms while they worked with axe and saw widening the road-clearing. The Maoris shot a couple of soldiers and carried off twenty-three rifles and the pouches of ammunition. In another affair they killed five soldiers. After this sort of thing large covering parties marched with the transport carters who hauled huge quantities of stores to the Army base at Queen’s Redoubt.
We see the grassed-over parapets and the wide trenches of that big camp-ground close to the present Pokeno Station (40 miles). The redoubt was 100 yards square, with rounded bastions at each angle ; a farmhouse now stands in the middle of the entrenchment. A short distance to the north of this olden camp is the Pokeno military cemetery, where there is a stone memorial, with a carving of stacked rifles, in honour of the officers and men who fell in this war area in 1863.
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Romance of the Rail.
Along Waikato’s Banks.
THAT slow-running, muddy creek we cross just as the glimmering Waikato River comes in sight is the Mangatawhiri, a name of much significance in the early “sixties.” Power-launches now ply up and down the curving stream, taking stores to the farmers up-river, bringing down their cream to the dairy factory. Maori canoes and British cargoboats made lively business here in 1863, and British regiments went marching over the Royal Engineers bridge; for this was the frontier then. This inconspicuous creek was the border-line between pakeha and Maori before the great invasion. The crossing of the Mangatawhiri by Cameron’s forces, in July, 1863, was the signal for fighting. The building of redoubts on the northern hom of the Koheroa Range, just over there on our left, was quickly followed by a battle on the summit of the clay ridge, where British bayonets put the Maori trench-fighters to the rightabout.
A few minutes’ traversing of a swampy flat brings us alongside the broad stream of the Waikato, New Zealand s most historic and most commercially useful river.
Old-time Paddle-steamers.
Mercer (43 miles), named after a Royal Artillery captain who fell mortally wounded in the storming of Rangiriri, was originally called by whites Point Russell after the Auckland politician who was Minister of Defence in 1863. The Maoris have adopted the name in part, and to-day call it Te Paina (“ The Point ”). Mercer is a shipping-port as well as railwaystation. River steamers trade down to the Heads and upstream as far as Cambridge, sixty miles away. In the days when it was the head of the iron way, travellers to the Waikato took passage here for Ngaruawahia and farther up by the paddle-steamers that went steadily flapping their way up against the strong river. Some of these eariy-days steamboats traded up as far as Alexandra, on the Waipa River. Preceding this peaceful passage era was the military period, 1863-66 —the three years during which British regiments occupied the conquered Waikato.
A relic of those times stands near the river-bank to-day —one of the two iron turrets or cupolas of the armoured gunboat “ Pioneer.” This circular turret, with its apertures for rifle-fire and its embrasure for a gun, now forms the foundation of Mercer’s memorial to its soldiers who fell in the Great War.
Romance of the Rail.
Just beyond Mercer as we go southward the Teoteo Range, a high ridge of clay, drops abruptly to the slow Whangamarino Creek, which here joins the Waikato on its right (east) side. Above us there, commanding the Whangamarino and the main river, there was a British redoubt. Here a Royal Artillery officer was stationed with two field-guns.
Typical Ruse of Maori Warfare.
A story is told of an Irish soldier’s adventure here one night towards the end of 1863. Jack Murphy was on sentry duty outside the redoubt, when he heard a Maori pig grunting, and presently observed a big porker rooting in the fern. The pig gradually came nearer, and to the soldier it seemed an unusually large one a big bush boar, he thought. Getting uneasy, he challenged, and, remembering stories of Maori tricks, he fired. He missed the pig, which next moment threw off its hide and leaped at him with a longhandled tomahawk. It was a naked warrior, who had adopted this old pigskin ruse of creeping up on an unsuspecting sentry. Murphy had no time to reload his muzzleloading long Enfield. He tried to parry the blow, but the blade caught his left hand. The camp turned out, but the Maori had disappeared, and Murphy was yelling for some one to bring a lantern and find his thumb. The pig with the tomahawk had cut it clean off.
Varied Life and Colour of War,
What scenes of life and colour, what warlike commotion, on these Waikato banks when Cameron’s army began the great invasion of Maori land! Regiments of the line—the great-bearded veterans of the 65th, the 40th, the 14th, the 18th Royal Irish—-in their blue campaigning dress ; the Waikato Militia regiments; the smart mounted Royal Artillery—a corps which was more than once used as cavalry, and again as a dismounted storming party; Colonel Nixon’s Colonial Defence Force Cavalry, mostly members of South Auckland settler families ; Jackson’s and Von Tempsky’s Forest Rangers, armed with Terry carbine, revolver, and bowie-knife, with their coloured-blanket rolls and their semipiratical roving air; miles of commissariat and munitions carts, all crossing this Whangamarino Stream by a bridge supported on barrels. On the broad river a picture of even greater action and thrill: the little steamer “ Avon ” —the first steam-vessel that ever floated on the Waikato—and the gunboat " Pioneer,” with steady beat of their churning
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Romance of the Rail.
paddle-wheels; scores of Maori canoes, paddled by halfstripped warriors—“ friendlies ” these, allies of the Queen’s troops —-and laden with stores for the front; long boats of the Water Transport Corps, rowed by sailormen trying a landsman's life for a change ; paddling - chants from the canoe-captains, and now and again a snatch of sailor song from the boatmen, that mingled with the yells of the bullockdrivers on the right bank. Many a man of that army found a grave in the mystery land ahead of him ; many a steamerload of wounded came down the river as the slow campaign went on.
Gunboat and Maori Cannoneers.
Our rail-line bears inland to the left, keeping Meremere on our right. We have a glimpse across a swamp of the long ridge above the Waikato where the strong entrenchments of 1863 were constructed, and where there were at one time about two thousand Maori warriors in garrison. In the Meremere fortifications the Kingites had three pieces of artillery mounted to dispute with the Queen’s troops the river right-of-way. These were old ship's guns, brought from the west coast with great labour. One was a 12-pounder swivel gun, another a 6- or 8-pounder carronade. These were emplaced in well-protected embrasures in the clay entrenchments near the river-bank. Higher up there was a 24-pounder in the upper line of pits.
The Maori gunners had been instructed by a white man, an ex-gunner in the East India Company’s service, who was in the Waikato when the war began and was detained by the Kingites until he had shown them how to work the old muzzle-loading pieces. One Maori became particularly expert in gunnery, and he made some good practice with the 24-pounder when the armoured gunboat “ Pioneer,” a stemwheel steamer 300 ft. long, built at Sydney for the New Zealand Government, came steaming up the river. There were several artillery engagements between the Maori fortress and the “ Pioneer,” and the gunners on Whangamarino Hill took a hand too. Once the Maoris plumped : 7 lb. steelyard-weight into a cask of beef on the gunboat’s deck. They had no shot or shell, but made shift with weights taken from traders’ stores, old iron, anything that would cram into the guns. Musketry, too : the “ Pioneer ” anchored within easy rifle-shot of the trenches, and men in her turrets and on the lower deck made practice at the puffs of smoke on the pitted ridge; the Maori bullets rattled harmlessly on the iron sides of the gunboat.
Romance of the Rail.
Rangiriri and the Forlorn Hope.
The river fleet enabled Cameron to turn the Maoris' flank and gave him command of the Waikato. The Maoris evacuated their defence lines at Meremere and retreated in canoes up the Whangamarino and across the flooded swamps where the rail-line now runs to the wide stretches of Lake Waikare and contiguous lagoons on our left as we go southward. Then they garrisoned Rangiriri, and there the heaviest fighting of the Lower Waikato campaign occurred.
Fifty-five miles south of Auckland, we can see from our railway-carriage windows the grassy and pine-wooded ridge of Rangiriri, with a raupo-reed-fringed shallow lagoon in the foreground on our right. This swampy lake, Kopuwera, is a sanctuary for native wild-fowl. A little farther on is Rangiriri Railway-station, from which a road a mile in length leads to the willow-fringed river at a small township on the right bank of the Waikato. The battlefield of the 20th November, 1863, is half a mile or so north of the settlement. On the riverside is the military cemetery where the British sailors and soldiers who fell in the battle were buried. The Government tends the sacred ground carefully, and the memorials and the general well-kept appearance of the burying-place attest a fine reverence for the Empire’s warriors of old time.
When General Cameron with nearly a thousand men attacked the Rangiriri fortifications on the 20th November, 1863, his infantry captured the outer lines of defence at the point of the bayonet. These entrenchments extended from water to water —-from the lagoon on the east to the Waikato River on the west. They completely barred the way along this ridge until the soldiers turned them. But the strong central redoubt, the tihi, or citadel, of the earthworks, resisted all efforts to take it by assault or escalade. It was a rectangular work with steep escarpments 17 ft. high, and it was defended by two hundred Maoris, the most determined of the Kingite warriors. The others retreated across the lagoons when the outer trenches were carried.
With extraordinary recklessness for so experienced a general—-a veteran of the Crimea War—Cameron launched three successive frontal attacks against this impregnable work, after shelling the place with his Armstrong guns. One attack after another was beaten back. The soldiers’ ladders were too short to reach to the top of the parapet. A detachment of the Royal Artillery, armed with revolvers and swords, was ordered, late in the afternoon, to storm the fort. Captain Mercer led thirty-six of his men in the assault,
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Romance of the Rail.
but they were hurled back, and Mercer fell mortally wounded, shot through the mouth. Then the Royal Navy men—detachments from H.M. ships “ Eclipse,” " Pioneer,” and “ Miranda ” —numbering ninety charged the earthworks, but were repulsed with heavy loss. Darkness compelled the General to cease the waste of brave men’s lives. Forty-two officers and men were killed or died of wounds and seventyone were wounded.
Next day the Maori garrison surrendered. They had lost nearly fifty, including several women. To the number of 183 they were sent to Auckland and imprisoned on a harbour hulk. Later they were sent to Kawau Island, in the Hauraki Gulf, at the suggestion of the Governor, Sir George Grey, who owned the island. One calm night they all escaped to the mainland in boats and in canoes sent by their sympathizers, the Ngapuhi tribe, and gradually they found their way back to the Waikato, but by that time the war was over.
The bang of the double-barrel gun is still a familiar sound around Rangiriri, but nowadays it is the wild duck and not the pakeha that makes the target.
The low clay hills of these parts of the Waikato are not inviting to the settler, but they grow fruit exceedingly well, and there are Government tree-plantations and vineyards. This clay country continues till we pass the coal-mining town of Huntly (65 miles) and approach the grand gorge of the Waikato at Taupiri.
It is at Huntly, a busy scene of industry with its pitheads, its great stores of coal, and its mingled mining and rural life, that the railway passenger has opportunity of viewing the splendid Waikato River free of obstructive hills.
Waikato’s Wide Waters.
The strong river flowing so smoothly between its low banks fringed with weeping-willows is a living embodiment of quiet force and power. Far away on its upper course it is a stream of fierce tremendous turmoil and water-strife. Here it has steadied down into a wide placid current a quarter of a mile wide ; lower down it broadens out to half a mile, and its surface is broken with some large islands, and it floats good-sized steamers that work up as far as Hamilton and Cambridge towns. Coal for the old-time river fleet was broken out of outcrops near where Huntly Town stands to-day. and Cameron’s gunboats found here convenient fuel-supplies.
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Romance of the Rail.
Across the shining waterway, just before we reach the town, an assemblage of pakeha and Maori buildings on the west bank catches the eye ; and there is the typical nativedesign meeting-house, with its low-slanting eaves and its frontal carvings ; in front of it is a tall flagstaff. This is the Maori “ royal ” town of Waahi, the headquarters of the Kingite Waikatos and their hereditary head, Rata Mahuta, the great-grandson of the first Maori king, the venerable Potatau te Wherowhero, friend of Sir George Grey. Upstream ten miles we shall see the place, Ngaruawahia, where that arcient warrior chief was made King by the assembled tribes in 1858.
On Classic Ground.
TAUPIRI {7O miles) is the most charmed spot of Maori poetry and legendry in all Waikato, as it is also the most beautiful spot of mingled mountain and river and woodland landscape. Here the hills on either side of the river become mountains and closely approach each other the graceful conical mount of Taupiri, very nearly 1,000 ft. high, on the east and the high spurs of the Hakarimata Range on the west. This is the grand gateway to mid-Waikato. Ages ago the Waikato River, which formerly flowed across the plains to the southern part of the Hauraki Gulf, found its way through here by an earthquake-rift in the hills, and wrought a wide and deep passage for itself at the base of the ranges. It comes down here in a glorious glimmerglass reach from the rivers-meet at Ngaruawahia ; then as it reaches Taupiri-foot it takes a magnificent sweep to the north-west. Our train runs close beside the blue shimmering waterway, brimming to its willowed banks.
We pass immediately below a steep foothill of Taupiri, a high green mound with sides trenched in the lines of an ancient fort, its summit covered with white-painted buryingenclosures. This is the most venerated place in Waikato, the sacred resting-place of the chiefs and many of their people. Here repose the remains of the Waikato Kings. Before the Waikato War all travellers along the bank where our train now runs were forbidden to tread on this sacred soil, which was tapu to the water’s edge. They were compelled to cross the river by canoe to the west side until they had passed the sacred spot, when they could recross. Horsemen in those days had to swim their horses behind the canoe.
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Romance of the Rail.
Over yonder, on an alluvial flat between the river and the Hakarimata Range, there are time-stained relics of an old mission station, the Rev. B. Y. Ashwell’s establishment in the “ fifties ” and early “ sixties.” This station, an oasis of civilization in the wilderness, gave hospitable welcome to many a canoe party of white travellers in the days when Waikato was wholly Maori land. Over there, too, near the soft-green acacia grove that marks the mission-site, was the large Native town called Kaitotehe, which was made the subject of a drawing by the artist G. F. Angas, who came exploring these parts in 1844.
Sacred Taupiri Mountain.
But it is about Taupiri Mountain, its wooded head and gullies mistily blue, that the legends of this storyland chiefly gather. The beautiful name means a lover’s embrace —" the close-clinging loved one.” Taupiri, in an ancient nature-myth, is the wife of Pirongia Mountain farther south yonder, and their daughter is Kawa Mountain, a shapely hill of volcanic origin which we shall see as we enter the King Country. The sacred mana of Waikato is symbolized and centred in Taupiri.
It is a maunga-hikonga-uira, a lightning-peak of omen. If lightning were seen flashing downward immediately above the mountain, the spectacle was taken to portend the death of some notable man or woman of the tribe, or some other impending misfortune. Another peak of lightning omen is Pirongia Mountain. Thunderstorms and earthquakes were phenomena of dread portent, and the rolling of thunder along the ranges and the quivering of the earth were supposed to accompany the deaths of high chiefs. This belief was embodied in a grand dirge we heard here at Taupiri in 1894, when three thousand Maoris gathered for the great tangihanga, or funeral ceremonies, over King Tawhiao, the son of Potatau, the first Maori King. This was the last of the great ceremonies of this kind carried out with all the ancient forms and observances. I made this translation of the death-song chanted by a thousand voices as the King’s body was borne to the marae, or meeting-place, to the accompaniment of a great war-dance and volleys of rifle-fire and the explosion of dynamite charges like minuteguns on the summit of the burial-hill: —
I hear the thunder crashing,
Rumbling o'er me in the sky,
Heaven's sign for the mighty dead ;
The Taniwha leaps forth from his cave. A 1 I A 1 I A 1 I HA.. ‘A I
Alas ! Alas ! Alas ! My grief !
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Romance of the Rail.
From Mokau unto Tamaki
The earthquake shakes the land ;
The moon has disappeared ;
The stars fall from the sky.
'Tis Waikato arising from the deep.
Alas ! Alas ! Alas ! My woe !
The thrilling refrain of each verse, “ Aue, aue, aue! Te mamae i au ! ” was chanted with a heart-piercing intensity of feeling, and the great chorus rang far across the river. " Taniwha ” (literally water-monster, or dragon), in this chant means a high chief; “ W aikalo-taniuha-rau ,” or “ Waikato of a hundred dragons,” a favourite proverbial expression for the river and the tribe, refers to the many powerful warrior chiefs of the clan.
Recollections of those classic ceremonials on the old camping-ground between Taupiri Station and the river bring up poetic memories, too, of this sacred plain of Tangirau, the Place of Many Wailings, at the mountain’s foot. An ancient lament preserves the name :
I saw the lightning glare
Above the peak of Taupiri;
There the thousands of thy people sleep-
They sleep upon the plain of Tangirau.
Big Canoes of Natives.
Memories, also, of the grand canoeing days. Happily the long dug-out canoe that fits in so well with these riverscapes is still numerous in Waikato’s waters. I remember seeing fully fifty canoes of all kinds and sizes moored in the backwater of the Mangawhara, which wanders into the Waikato at Taupiri, and alongside the bank in the main stream. This was at the great ” wake ” over King Tawhiao’s body. Canoes 60 ft. or 70 ft. long, with a beam amidships of 4 ft. or 5 ft., are still to be seen here. Away down the rivei at Waahi lies the historic “ Tahere-tikitiki,” a specimen of the decorated war-canoe, quite 80 ft. in length. We used to see her manned by fifty men, kneeling two abreast, in great paddling races.
What pictures there must have been in the days when scores of war-canoes came sweeping along this great curve of waterway, the captains’ chants ringing like battle-songs as the dripping blades flashed in the sun and dipped and flashed again ! Sometimes when a number of the larger canoes are manned for races at the great annual holiday at Ngaruawahia,
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Inset i]
Romance of the Rail.
we may endeavour to recapture some idea of the perfect frenzy of old time that possessed the rival crews in a real war-canoe contest.
The shining river is still a line of demarcation, to a certain extent, between pakeha and Maori. Our train passes the military camp-ground at Hopuhopu, the chief training-place for the Territorials of the Auckland district. This is a permanent camp on a large scale, with an adequate area of land for manoeuvres and gunnery. On the opposite side of the smooth Waikato, polished as glass under this summer sun, are Maori cultivations, and we see now and again a brightly-garbed woman weeding her kumara-patch, now and again a single figure in the stem of a little kopapa plying a leisurely hoi, the broad-bladed paddle, making across-stream or up for the town and shops at Ngaruawahia.
Memories of Ngaruawahia.
Now we go with a long whistle across the deep blue-green Waikato where it flows in swiftly from the left. On our right a bright - green tongue of land, shaded with tall old English trees, and beyond the tongue-tip another river, a slower, darker, stream, gliding silently in to the main river. Just over that river, up climb the sudden ranges, blue and wooded in the distance ; tall bush to the skyline. This waters-meet is Ngaruawahia, the delta and heart of Waikato.
The dark, slow river is the Waipa, one time a gunboat waterway like the Waikato, now a channel of navigation for power-launches, timber-craft, flax-carriers —a handy river road through a well-settled countryside where the dairy-cow is queen. This is the land of fat cattle and sheep and butterfat. The greatest dairy company in the world operates here and throughout the Waikato ; its turnover runs into several millions a year.
The junction here once reminded Bishop Selwyn of the confluence of the Rhone with the Saone at Lyons—" the quiet Saone,” he wrote, “ answering to the Waipa, the Rhone to the Waikato ” And, as if Waipa s sedative current had steadied down its big brother for good, the Waikato from here to the sea is a pattern of smooth, easy, courteous deportment to all who embark on its waters. The fume and fury of its far-away upper waters is as a tale that has long ago been told and the pages closed.
The sound of the bugle and all the martial turmoil of a great camp livened Ngaruawahia back in the " sixties,” after the patriot Kingites had fallen back from this their thatched-
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Romance of the Rail.
!vhare capital and the British flag had replaced the Maori red-bordered national colour on the tall flagstaff in front of Tawhiao’s council-house. This was the busiest place on the Waikato. A fleet of paddle-wheelers went steaming up the two rivers. Two more armoured iron gunboats came up—the " Rangiriri ” and the “ Koheroa ” with bulwarks and 'midships-tower pierced for rifle-fire and guns at embrasures on the lower deck. There is a relic of the flotilla on this riverside esplanade to-day, one of the two iron roundhouses or turrets of the “ Pioneer.” This was handed over to the town of Ngaruawahia as an historic monument on the annual regatta-day in 1927 by the late Hon. Richard Bollard, then Minister of Internal Affairs, on behalf of the Government. The gun-cupola fittingly links up the storied little town with the fighting-days of its foundation.
The name Ngaruawahia is often misinterpreted. It does not mean “ Meeting of the Waters ” ; which is rather a pity, because a Maori translation of such a term would fit it exactly. It means “ The food-stores broken open,” a name which holds a tradition bearing upon the Maori custom of placing the housed-over pits of kumara (sweet potatoes) at the disposal of the guests on occasion of ceremonial visits.
The Waikato Waipa Plain.
NOW we are fairly on the mid-Waikato plain, the most favoured land of mixed-farming enterprise, famed in the markets alike for its fat stock and its dairy-produce. Ngaruawahia is at the apex of a great triangle, the base of which extends from the ranges of Maungatautari, faint blue in the distance yonder to the south-east, away westward to Mount Pirongia and the Upper Valley of the Waipa.
The provincial metropolis of this wealthy well-settled territory is Hamilton, built on both sides of the Waikato, where the river comes down in dark, strong volume between high banks clothed from waterline to top in foliage and flowers, or terraced in green lawns and park spaces. The Main Trunk line does not pass through Hamilton itself, but through Frankton Junction (85 miles), a mile from the heart of the town and from the river, where the branch line to the Thames Valley and Rotorua crosses the river by a lofty bridge. Hamilton is worth a stop-over on the train-journey for the sake of seeing the most beautifully - placed large inland town in the Dominion. It is a town of many garden graces as well as of big business. Beautiful homes stand
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Romance of the Rail.
among their groves and flowers on the sometimes cliff-like banks and the terraces above the noble river, sweeping down with the smooth unruffled face that disguises a power irresistible.
Military Settlements of Waikato.
Like every other town in the central Waikato country, it is an old military settlement, dating back to 1864. Each township from here to Kihikihi and Cambridge, on the old frontier-line, grew up around a central redoubt, a rallyingplace in case of alarm. There were frequent alarms and threatened raids in the more southern townships such as Alexandra (now Pirongia) and Kihikihi, and some of the settlers’ families took refuge in the redoubts until the state of tension was over.
The forces which first settled Hamilton and other districts in the great area of land confiscated from the defeated Maoris consisted of three regiments of military settlers recruited in New Zealand and Australia and called the Waikato Militia. Each man was allocated a free section of farming - land and a town section. Privates were given 50 acres of rural land and a town acre, and other ranks in proportion ; captains received 300 acres and field officers 400 acres. It was the Fourth Regiment of Waikato Militia that founded Hamilton. The place was originally a Maori village called Kirikiriroa, meaning a long stretch of gravel (at the riverside).
The first company of the settlers who established a permanent garrison here numbered 118 men of the Fourth, under Captain William Steele. They landed here from the colonial gunboat “ Rangiriri ” on 24th August, 1564. The first camp was on the eastern bank of the Waikato, near where the eastern end of the present traffic-bridge is. The other regiments allotted Waikato land were the Second, who were settled at Alexandra, on the Waipa River, and at Kihikihi ; the Third, who founded the town of Cambridge. The First were sent to Tauranga. Jackson's and Von Tempsky’s Forest Rangers were also given land in the Waipa country. In all, the Government introduced about three thousand military settlers and their families into this conquered Waikato-Waipa region, and that was the nucleus of civilization in the rich, well-tended, and beautiful Central Waikato country of to-day. The town that grew up on both sides of the river was named in memory of Captain Hamilton, of H.M.S. “ Esk,” who was killed in the assault of the Gate Pa, Tauranga, on the 29th April, 1864.
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Romance of the Rail.
Striking due southward now, the rails cross the long levels of the Rukuhia (literally, “ Diving ”), once a vast quaking marsh with numerous small lagoons, haunt of wild-fowl and eels. When the line was constructed in the “ eighties ’’ the engineers had a most troublesome problem to solve in the Rukuhia. Enormous quantities of ballasting-material were poured into the swamp in order to obtain a firm foundation for the rails, but the huge bog swallowed everything up and asked for more. It was believed a great subterranean lake existed beneath the surface of peat. Many months were occupied in satisfying the demand of this seemingly bottomless marsh for gravel and shingle.
The Maori Defence Works.
General Cameron’s campaigning - grounds of 1864 are traversed again as we approach Te Awamutu (100 miles). A little way to our right (west), when we pass the shallow Lake Ngaroto, is the site of the greatest system of entrenchments constructed by the Maoris in the wars. This is Paterangi, on a commanding hill, now closely farmed, about midway between our rail-line and the Waipa River. The defence lines were so strong and so skilfully constructed that Cameron’s force was baffled for several weeks. After his experience at Rangiriri the General would not risk another frontal assault; so, after some artillery practice and rifle sniping, Cameron made a strategic movement by night to the Maoris’ rear. Crossing the Mangapiko River—that dark, slow stream we presently meet on our southward course — he marched a column through Te Awamutu village and mission-station and captured Rangiaowhia, the great source of food-supply of the garrison. The pretty village there was the scene of a lively fight, and there was another between it and Te Awamutu on the following day, when the British troops routed the Maoris at the point of the bayonet.
Paterangi being now untenable, the garrison deserted it, and the next fight was the final event of the Waikato War, the siege of Orakau. One of the Imperial officers who inspected the earthworks at Paterangi after the evacuation declared that the system of redoubts and trenches was stronger than the famous Redan at the Crimea.
A Mission Church of Bishop Selwyn.
Te Awamutu Town (the name signifies the head of canoenavigation) is, like Hamilton, a mile away from the Main Trunk line. The traveller who has the time might well stop
Romance of the Rail.
over here and see something of this little metropolis of the Waipa district, and of the beautiful farming-lands around it, the garden country of the Waikato. It is quite a model town for its size, well proportioned to the needs of the good agricultural region of which it is the business centre. The pride of the place is the pretty English church, in its oldfashioned burying-ground by the side of the willow-walled Manga-o-Hoi Stream. It is an historic building, one of the first of Bishop Selwyn’s Maori mission churches, dating back to 1854, when the Rev. John Morgan was the missionary of the Waipa country. Maoris worshipped here before the war and the conquest, when Te Awamutu was an oasis of civilization in these parts. At the old mission station, in its great groves across the road, Sir John Gorst had his headquarters in the early “ sixties,” when he was Government Commissioner in the Waikato, until the Kingites summarily suppressed his little pro-Government newspaper, the Pihoihoi Mokemoke, and evicted him from the Maori country. Rewi Maniapoto and his fellow-chiefs had a short way with propaganda they considered objectionable. A current story was that they used the lead type to mould into bullets, which they fired at the troops. The fact is, however, that they took scrupulous care to return the printing-press and type to the Government; it was packed up and sent down the Waipa and Waikato by canoe.
The antique design of the spired church, built of pit-sawn timber, and the picturesque churchyard attract admiration. There are historic memories : the soldiers who fell in the battle of Orakau and other engagements here were buried in this ground.
Crossing the Frontier River,
A mile south of Te Awamutu Station the railway crosses the Puniu River. An insignificant stream this, almost hidden by weeping-willows. Unless you keep a lookout for it you may cross without noticing it. But it is worth a glance and more, for it was, and still is, a river of great political importance. This quiet river, meandering down westward to join the Waipa, is the northern boundary of the Rohepotae, or King Country. It was the olden line of demarcation between the Waikato and Ngati-Maniapoto tribes ; it was made the southern limit of fighting and landconfiscation when the Government conquered the Waikato ; it was for twenty years after the war the frontier beyond which the Queen’s writ did not run ; and the frontier where
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Romance of the Rail.
trespass by white men was more than once punished with bullet and tomahawk. In 1884, a year before the first sod of the railway-line south of the river was turned, Puniu was proclaimed the northern boundary - line of the Rohepotae no-license district, a huge " dry ” territory that takes in the whole King Country. The pact made between the Government and the Maori chiefs of that day still holds good. It was agreed that no intoxicating liquor should be sold in the King Country, and so you must not forget that you may not legally buy a drink anywhere between Te Awamutu and Taihape—a matter of 166 miles —on the Main Trunk, or Pipiriki if you go down the Wanganui River, or Urenui if you go by the coast road to Taranaki.
The “ Rohepotae,” the Maori name for this territory, means literally a circular boundary like the rim of a hat. It was first applied to the country in the early " eighties ” when the great Wahanui and his fellow-chiefs resolved that no sales or leases of land to the white man should be made within the district from the Puniu and Kawhia Harbour southward to the White Cliffs (Taranaki) and the Upper Wanganui. The term “ King Country ” was given in the “ sixties,” after the defeated Waikato and their allies under King Tawhiao had retired to the south side of the Puniu.
An Old-time King Country Village : Te Kumi, on the Manga-o-Kewa River, near Te Kuiti. [From a picture in 188.
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Romance of the Rail.
Tawhiao’s headquarters for many years was Tokangamutu (the present Te Kuiti) ; then Hikurangi, a beautiful spur of Pirongia Mountain ; Te Kopua ; and, lastly, Whatiwhatihoe, on the Waipa River.
It was seventeen years before the King and his men laid down their guns in token of final peacemaking. It was not until 1888 that the Waikato in a body at last left the King Country borders, where they had lived on their allies’ land, and returned in a flotilla of canoes, a picturesque tribeflitting, to what was left to them of their olden homes on the west side of the Lower Waikato.
Transformation of the “King Country.”
The face of the King Country to-day is wonderfully transformed. Once upon a time, when we used to ride for many miles on the south side of the Puniu without seeing home of man, or any cultivation, only at far intervals a Maori settlement, the great countryside of hill and valley, plain, swamp and forest was a wide-extending waste. As we rode over such places as the Manukarere Plains we set mobs of wild horses madly galloping, and we startled many a fernrooting wild pig. Every hill, large and small, was terraced and trenched in the lines of a fortified hold. Everywhere there were potato-pits in the fern, reminder of the day when all these delectable parts of the land were cultivated by a large population. A great silence was over the land ; it lay in the transition stage ; the Maoris had dwindled and the people were concentrated mostly about the large settlements like Te Kuiti and Otorohanga. Over yonder on the Waipa banks at Otewa the old rebel chieftain Te Kooti had his headquarters, a well-tended place with large areas of food crops. Here and there a patriarchal chief like grand old Hauauru (the “ West Wind ”), of Araikotore, encouraged his clan to grow wheat and oats beside the universal potato. But it was many a year before the white farmer got a footing in the Rohepotae. The railway preceded settlement; this Main Trunk line had reached Te Kuiti from the north before pakeha farming began across the border.
Now the contrast. The hundreds of thousands of acres that forty years ago had not one white settler are supporting a large farming population and scores of town and village communities. Dairying, cattle - raising, wool and mutton growing bring the country wealth. The white population many times outnumbers the Maori.
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['Continued on page 41
Maps of the North Island Main Trunk Railway.
Section i.—South Auckland and Lower Waikato.
This map shows the route of the North Island Main Trunk Railway from Auckland southward for about sixty miles. This portion of the line traverses the beautiful Tamaki Plain country, between the Hauraki and the Manukau, and passes through the most fertile part of the farming-lands as far as the Waikato River. The route is then for many miles through alternate swampy and clay-hill country, parallel with the Waikato. The historic interest of the territory through which the rails go is described in the accompanying narrative. The Rangiriri district, and especially the large shallow Lake Waikare, here shown, is a great resort of sportsmen for wild duck during the shooting season.
Before the road and railway were made the Waikato River was the great highway into the interior. This waterway, so useful to the Maoris in their fighting and trading eras, was also the means of their defeat by the British forces, for it enabled the gunboats to go up and shell their fortifications and flank their positions, and it was the route by which army supplies were sent to the Upper Waikato. The armoured and gun-armed paddle-steamers could go up nearly ninety miles from the sea. The Waikato is about two hundred miles in length from its source in Lake Taupo. As it broadens out on its lower course it becomes shallower.
Inset 2]
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Section 2.—The Waikato-Waipa Plains and the King Country.
This section of the line shows the route through the heart of the Waikato and the northern part of the King Country. On the left (west) are the harbours of Whaingaroa (Raglan), Aotea. and Kawhia, and the Tasman Sea. Between the railway and the sea are ranges of mountains, culminating in the peak of Pirongia, 3.000 ft. high The main line crosses the Waikato River at Ngaruawahia (the junction of the Waikato and the Waipa), and strikes across the plain southward ■ the Waikato is crossed at Hamilton by the branch railway to Rotorua and the Thames. The country traversed by the section of the line here shown is the richest farming-country in the interior of the North Island. All this territory was Maori countrybefore 1804 ; in that year the British and Colonial Army, commanded by General Cameron, captured the Maori fortifications, and the Government confiscated the Native land east of the Waikato aru Waipa as far south as the Puniu River, near Te Awamutu Ihe conquered land was occupied by military settlers, and the Maoris kept to the south of the Puniu and a boundary drawn thence cast and west. This Waikato frontier remained sharply defined for nearly twenty years after the war. It was not until about thirty years ago that white settlement began in the great region south of Te Awamutu.
26
Section 3. —The Southern King Country and the Central Plateau.
The most rugged and most beautiful section of the Main Trunk line is here mapped. It covers the route from the Poro-o-Tarao Tunnel, through the range that divides the Waipa and Mokau Valleys from the Wanganui River system, across the high central plain and through the forest and tussock land to the south-east side of Mount Ruapehu. The upper portion of the route is down the valley of the Ongarue, passing at Okahukura the branch line which is being constructed to link up with Taranaki. At Taumarunui, the junction of the Wanganui and Ongarue, travellers who intend going down the Wanganui River embark on the motor-launch. The line from Taumarunui climbs to the great plateau from which the mountains of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe, and Ruapehu rise. At Waimarino (National Park Station) there is a good view' of the volcanoes of the Tongariro National Park, and from here the motor-road goes to the main Park Camp, and to Tokaanu, Taupo, and Rotorua. The whole of the country from Taumarunui to Ohakune and Rangataua was once a dense forest, but sawmillers and settlers have cleared the greater part of it. Some beautiful belts of timber have been preserved for scenic and climatic purposes.
2?
Section 4. —Northern Part of Wellington Provincial District.
From the highest part of the Main Trunk line, the tussock-grass country south and east of Mount Ruapehu, the railway here descends into the fertile Rangitikei Valley and out on to the beautiful agricultural and pastoral lands of the Manawatu. As on the central plateau, with its many ravines, the northern part of this section is remarkable for the skilful manner in which the railway engineers surmounted the obstacles presented by a land of many ridges and many deep rivergulches. Sheep-farming is the principal industry of the higher parts ; then as the country becomes kindlier dairy-farming is the occupation of most of the settlers. Great numbers of cattle and sheep are raised here, and the country produces millions’ value annually in the form of wool, mutton and lamb, beef, butter and cheese. Palmerston North, the centre of a beautiful expanse of very productive land, is the largest inland town in New Zealand. To the east are the Ruahine and Tararua Ranges ; the latter chain of mountains more closely approaches the sea as the train goes south. On the southern part of this section there is a good deal of low-lying land, and here on the great partly-reclaimed swamps the traveller will see something of the flax growing and milling industry.
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Section 5. —Manawatu and West Coast to Wellington.
The mountainous character of the Wellington Provincial District on the west here confines settlement and farming to a narrow belt between the Tararua Range and the Tasman Sea. These mountains, ranging up to 5,000 ft. in height, are covered with snow on the loftier parts in winter; in summer they aie a great recreation-ground for hill-tramping Wellington people. Numerous rivers rise in the rugged hill country, and flow east, west, and south. All these streams are stocked with trout, and the Otaki, Waikanae, and Upper Hutt waters are favourite resorts of anglers. The coast landscapes from Paekakariki to Porirua, as described in the text, are historically interesting as well as beautiful. There is some fine cliff scenery just after passing Paekakariki. The country as one approaches Wellington is a great contrast to the gentle plains of Tamaki, and here the much-broken up-and-down nature of the land has restricted settlement, and Wellington and its suburbs are places where the rail and road engineers have had to contend with many difficult problems. A great work now in progress is a long-tunnel line between Tawa Flat and Wellington Harbour, which is designed to shorten and improve the railway route from the Porirua Valley side to the city.
A Glimpse of Residential Auckland.
The Battle of Rangiriri.
The top picture (from a drawing by Major Charles Heaphy, V.C., in the possession of Dr. P. Marshall) shows an episode in the Battle of Rangiriri, on the Waikato River, 20th November, 1863. The Royal Navy storming-party, attempting to scale the high clay walls of the Maoris’ redoubt, was driven back with loss. Repeated assaults failed, but the garrison surrendered next day.
The lower picture, which appeared in the Illustrated London News of that time, shows the Rangiriri Pa on the day following the battle, after the Maori defenders had marched out as prisoners. Unlike most other Maori fortifications, there was no palisading here ; the defences across the neck of land between lake and river were all earthworks. The surrender of Rangiriri assured the conquest of the Waikato Valley by the British Forces.
3i
Huge Span of Hapuawhenua Curved Steel Viadi
An Historic Canoe Pj
This photograph, taken on the Waikato River at the Huntly l anding, on 4th Apri large Maori meeting at Waahi, the Waikato Kingite headquarters, and Mahuta the " K manned by thirty paddlers, for the pakeha visitors. The chief guests of honour were Native Minister. Another in the party was the late Captain Gilbert Mair, N.Z.C.
ct, 932 ft. in Length, 147 ft. above Bed of Stream.
ARTY ON THE WAIKATO
I, 1898, shows several famous figures in New Zealand’s history. The occasion was a ving ” sent the “ Tahere-tikitiki,” a beautiful specimen of the waka-taua or war-canoe, the late Right Hon, R. J. Seddon, Prime Minister, and the Hon. Sir James Carroll,
A Canoe Parade on the Waikato River at Ngaruawahia.
The Gorge of the Wanganui River at Kakahi.
35
Big Engineering of Main Trunk.
The top picture shows the construction of the Makatote Viaduct {B6O ft. in length, 260 ft. above the stream). The other photograph gives a glimpse of the Raurimu Spiral as it was twenty years ago.
36
The Railways of the North Island traverse very Pleasant Farm-lands.
37
Deeply-cut Bed of the Rangitikei River, near Mangaweka.
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4°
Continued from page 24]
Romance of the Rail.
A Frontier of Volcanic Cones.
Story Mountains of the Border.
ANCIENT volcanic cones that seem to form a line of sentries along this Aukati line, the old frontier, are a conspicuous landscape feature of the King Country border. Between the Maungatautari Range on the east and Pirongia’s forested peak, 3,000 ft. high, on the west, there is a series of cones and ranges of obvious volcanic origin, now clothed in fem and bush. The railway-line runs between two of these heights a few miles south of the Puniu. On the left hand (east) is the gracefully moulded Kawa Hill; on the right rises Kakepuku Mountain, 1,400 ft. high, a long-extinct volcano. Just after passing between these romantically shaped mountains the rails cross the reclaimed farm-lands that once were great marshes, the Kawa Swamp, a famous place among the older Maoris for tuna, or eels, and wild duck.
Kakepuku is a typical volcanic cone, of bold simplicity of outline, sweeping steeply down in classic lines of rest from a saucer-like crater summit. Its isolation from other heights gives it a character and dignity of its own, and it is not strange that the ancient Maori endowed it with god-like attributes and built poetic legends about it. Its sides are deeply scored with ravines, and remnants of the forests fill its higher gullies. Its neighbour, Kawa, is a wonderful little mountain, presenting on the side facing our railway and the rich pasture levels of the reclaimed swamp, a deep, ferny hollow, the ancient crater, and on the other flank, the eastern, a sym-metrical-rounded breast carved by the ancient fort-builders in scarp after scarp of defensive works.
Love Myths of the Mountains.
In the folk-lore of the Maori these mountains are husband and wife. The Maori personified such boldly cut hills, and so Kakepuku, with its steep upthrust of shape is the male and rounded Kawa is the gently reclining female. To the south again is a minor mountain, the Puketarata Range on our left. This, say the old storytellers, is the rejected lover of Kawa. Here is the eternal triangle ; and there was another lover, too, a volcano called Karewa, which once stood where the Kawa swampy lagoons shone like silver plates among the raupo reeds and flax. It is the legend of the Tongariro volcanic heights over again. Karewa fought Kakepuku for the love of Kawa, but was defeated with
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Romance of the Rail.
furious volleys of lava and huge fiery rocks, and was compelled to flee. He retreated westward to Kawhia and into its ocean, and there he stands to this day, lone Karewa, called also Gannet Island, in the Tasman Sea, off Kawhia Heads. So Kakepuku won fair Kawa, and remains the overlord of this Waipa Valley.
A stirring tradition, too long to give here in full, tells of the siege of the fortified pa that once stood on Kawa’s tattooed nipple of a hill. Tarao, the chief of the pa, realizing that the fort must be captured, had a tunnel dug by which he and his people escaped one night under the very feet of their besiegers into the safety of the near forest, and so over the hills and far away. The ancient Maori was as skilful a digger as any modem warrior.
Fairy folklore is associated with some of these mountains of the border. High up on Kakepuku there is a deep dingle of a valley, thickly wooded, which was in local belief a haunt of the fairy tribe, the patu-paiarehe. This part of the mountain, towards the summit, where there are the remains of two ancient trenched forts on the rim of the crater, is a State scenic reserve.
Pirongia Mountain yonder is the chief home of the fairies. Their favoured abode is Hihikiwi, the forested crest of the range. The people say that albinos—we used to see an albino woman at the Puniu—are the offspring of fairy men and Maori women.
Otorohanga and its Stories.
Otorohanga (114 miles), a pakeha-Maori township on the Waipa River, at about the old-time head of canoenavigation, has a rather curious scrap of history and folkbelief embodied in its name. It means a small portion of food caused by supernatural means to last for a long journey. The story is that a warrior chief setting out from here for Taupo in ancient days had only a little provision (0) for the long route march, but by his prayer-charms he stretched it out ( torohanga) so that it sufficed him until he reached his destination —a kind of Maori version of the widow’s cruse of oil.
At Otorohanga we used to see the thatched whare in which Robert Barlow captured Winiata, the murderer. This was an incident of 1882 which greatly excited the King Country Maoris. Winiata had killed a white man at
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Epsom, near Auckland, and had taken refuge in the Kingcountry. There he lived for some years with a Government reward of £5OO on his head. Barlow, a herculean half-caste, undertook to capture him and deliver him up to justice. He pretended to be a pig-buyer, and in this house he made Winiata drunk. It is said he got a Waikato chemist to put an opiate in the rum bottle. He tied him across a led horse, after taking a revolver from him, and in the night rode away with him to Kihikihi, a distance of some twenty miles. Early in the morning he handed his prisoner over to the police in the Kihikihi Redoubt after a desperate struggle on the road in the township, for Winiata had recovered his senses. The murderer was convicted and hanged, and Barlow received his reward. It was a really daring deed, for Winiata was protected by Kingites, and there were many who would have shot Barlow had they overtaken him on that night ride to the border. Barlow bought a farm at Mangere with the money, but he did not live long to enjoy its possession. A big powerful man, he wasted away and died, and all the Maoris believed that he had been bewitched — makutu’d —by some King Country tohunga in revenge for the capture of Winiata.
Wonderful Cave Country.
Here we are in the heart of the always wonderful lime-stone-cavern country. As you travel southward or westward you see boldly beautiful, often fantastic, landscape formations. Some of these limestone cliffs, bluffs, and ruined castles were turned to military account by the olden Maori. Near Mahoenui there is a limestone bridge spanning a deep narrow canon, with a crystal-clear stream flowing along a smooth white channel; and at each end of this wonderful bridge there is an ancient fort, all bush-grown now. About Te Kuiti, Oparure, the Manga-o-Kewa, Piopio, the valley of the Mokau, and the country between these places and Marokopa and Kawhia, on the Tasman Sea coast, there are innumerable places where openings to mysterious caves are seen, and exploration of these is revealing new wonders every year. Travellers to-day are able to see the principal caves with speed and comfort. From the railway-line at Hangatiki one goes by automobile in a few minutes to the Waitomo, the first-discovered of these caverns, with its fairy hall of glow-worms. Near it are the Ruakuri and Aranui Caves.
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Old Kingite Camps.
Te Kuiti (126 miles), the principal town in the King Country, is a scene of busy pakeha-Maori life, a town with large business premises and with many attractive homes set on the surrounding gentle hills. Predominantly a farmingcountry centre, it is also a place of some picturesque Native life. These Ngati-Maniapoto people are now blending with the white population, and a very handsome blend indeed is the King Country half-caste and quarter-caste. Many of those tall, dark-eyed, chin-tattooed women of the Rohepotae are veritable daughters of the gods. The name of the town is historic ; it is a contraction of “Te Kuititanga," meaning “ the narrowing-in,” in allusion to the conquest of the more northern parts of the Maori country in 1864. The original settlement there was Tokangamutu, a short distance to the south of the present town, on the banks of the Manga-o-kewa, a tributary of the Waipa. Here was King Tawhiao’s headquarters for many years after the war, and here also for some time lived Te Kooti, the celebrated rebel chieftain.
The large carved meeting-house that now stands in the town (on our right just after leaving the railway-station) was originally built for Te Kooti in 1878, and it was his sacred prayer-house for some time. Wood - carvers from many tribes combined in the work of making the figures of famous ancestors. A curious little carving shows the chief Maniapoto in his stalactite cave, Te Ana-uriuri, near Te Kuiti. The name of the large tribal house, “Te Tokanga-nui-a-Noho,” is a story in itself. It means “ The large food-basket of the stay-at-homes.”
The Tunnel in the Bush.
For twenty miles we climb steadily, passing farms in various stages of cultivation, and here and there a sawmill, into the rough hilly country of the ranges that separate the Waipa and Mokau head-streams from those of the Wanganui River system. At Poro-o-Tarao (altitude, 1,128 ft., 146 miles from Auckland) we pass through the dividing range by a tunnel nearly three-quarters of a mile in length and emerge on the mountain-side that looks down on the upper Ongarue Valley. From here it is a downhill run of nearly thirty miles to Taumarunui, a descent of 650 ft.
The story of the making of this tunnel illustrates the curious methods of railway - construction adopted in New Zealand forty years ago. This job of piercing the Poro-o-Tarao Range was carried out years before the rails had
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reached the place. The plan was that it should be ready by the time the line was laid up to it from the north ; but it was finished and lay useless for some years while the rails crept slowly up to it. The work was done by contract, and the firm that carried it through had an almost insuperable task. Poro-o-Tarao was an unpeopled wilderness ; there were no roads, and there was no access by water. A township of workers was established at its north end, and brickworks were set up ; all other material had to be carted from the head of the line at the Puniu or from Te Kuiti, to which point canoes could come from the Waipa when the rivers were high. The carters had to make their own roads. At some of the steep hills, such as the notorious “ Gentle Annie,” a little to the south of Te Kuiti, block and tackle and windlass were rigged up at the hilltop, so that when the teams could not haul their loads up the slippery slant the ropes could be hooked on and the windlass manned to help the horses. Winter haulage over this wild country was a business of tremendous difficulty. But the work went on, and the tunnel was completed before the trains ran south of Te Kuiti. It had its uses for some years as a road for horsemen and pack-animals bound for the southern parts of the King Country. We used to ride through it, and it was an uncomfortable experience to get a packhorse bogged in the stiff clay half-way through the black dripping hole in the hill.
The name Poro-o-Tarao is a reminder of the fact that the long-ago warrior chief Tarao, who was mentioned in the story about Kawa Hill (page 42), once climbed this range on his way southward. He did not bring his tunnel-digging genius into play here. “ Poro ” means butt end : posterior. The name preserves a little jest of the chief’s followers as they climbed the steep range in single file after him.
In the Wanganui Watershed.
NOW we descend into pumice land, on the banks of the hurrying Ongarue. In ages past this was a region of fiery furnaces. The rocky ranges on the east side of the valley are cast in significantly volcanic outlines. Vast showers of pumice sand were rained over the land, most probably from the craters about Lake Taupo, and as we travel towards Taumarunui we see whole cliffs of this pumice, washed down from the hills, and glittering like chalk in the sun. To the west the soil is better. That way goes the main road to the
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Ohura, the Tangarakau, and Whangamomona, the highway that emerges at Stratford, Taranaki. The branch railway by this route, that presently will link up the Main Trunk line with Taranaki, leaves our railroad at Okahukura, seven miles north of Taumarunui.
Running easily down this upper valley of the Ongarue one marks the sites of the old-time camps where a thousand men toiled on the railroad-building. It was a typical scene of nation-making, the breaking-in of the great wilderness to the uses of man. Navvies and rock-cutters from far parts of the world were gathered here, and their temporary 7 townships of slab whares and canvas livened the bush clearings and the ferny river-terraces. Some of these line-makers’ camps bore romantic names reminiscent of America’s Great West—“ Carson City,” “ Angel’s Rest,” and so on—labelled in charcoal on a hut-front. Another legend was conspicuous in nearly every camp ; “ Hop-beer Sold Here.” The King Country hop-beer of that era carried, from all reports, a most potent and agreeable “ kick.”
Down below on the Ongarue brink there were some heavy cuttings in the rhyolite rock, and the roar of rackarock and dynamite explosions was frequent. Some of the co-operative workers had easier jobs, as when a stretch of pumice was encountered. One of these pumice cuttings at the Taringamutu revealed a bed of that soft volcanic deposit 40 ft. deep, the wash-down of the ancient showers from the pumicecoated hills. Crystal-clear streams come in, nearly all on the east (our left hand) ; one of these is the beautiful Maramataha, flowing down with many a little rapid from the Maraeroa Plateau ; all these streams carry rainbow trout. The Ongarue is broken here and there by rapids and spraywashed rocky islets. From below the Onehunga Rapids, close by our rail-line, canoes can be taken right down to the mouth of the Wanganui, 150 miles away.
The Heart of the Island.
TAUMARUNUI (175 miles) was not so long ago the most remote, most secluded corner of the North Island, the very wildest quarter of the King Country. Geographically and politically it was as important a place in Maoridom as it is to-day in the chain of our inland communications. It was a meeting-place of tribes ; it was a great council-place and war-route in other days, and a starting-point for long expeditions to the outer world by river and bush trail. Surrounded by wooded ranges, this quiet spot at the meeting
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of the waters is well described by its name, which means “ Great shelter,” or “ Place of abundant shade.” It remained untroubled by the restless tide of pakeha trade longer than other parts of the interior. In 1900, before the iron rail from the north had reached it, it was a Maori kainga of the olden time, with but one solitary white man, Alexander Bell, who had settled here in 1874 and married a chief’s daughter.
Mr. Bell was the people’s trader and interpreter and general agent in any transactions with the pakeha. He had been soldier and sailor, and this quiet bush retreat seemed to him the most desirable nook in the world after his long wanderings. When I first met him in Taumarunui’s thatched-wAare days, he lived in a neat little cottage of pit-sawn timber by an orchard on the Ongarue banks yonder, and he had a little trading-store. At the time of writing he was still living in a greatly transformed Taumarunui, lamenting the change which had come over the Maori valley.
The rise of Taumarunui from the Maori kainga stage to a modern well-furnished town has been more rapid than that of any other King Country centre. The alluvial flat at the junction of the Wanganui and Ongarue, where once we heard the tui’s song as we wakened in our camp beneath the rimuwooded hillside, and where potato and maize cultivations spread over the levels, each little field enclosed by pig-proof fence of closely-wattled manuka, is now covered with the dwellings and business places and churches, gardens, and lawns of a busy and wealthy provincial town. Here travellers bound down the Wanganui River leave the railway and embark on shallow-draught craft, preferably a long Maori canoe with plank topsides or washboards, propelled by an oil-engine-driven screw. This solid dug-out canoe is the safest type of hull for the upper parts of this river of many rapids. The voyage from here to Pipiriki is eighty miles, and to Wanganui Town 139 miles.
The Last “ Political Murder.”
Just to the east of the town, on the Matapuna Flat, is the place where the chief Ngatai and a party of seven Taumarunui men intercepted and shot a white man named William Moffatt in the year 1880. This was the last of what may be termed political murders in the Maori country. The deed was rather in the nature of an execution than murder. Moffatt had lived with the Maoris in this district during the wars and had made a coarse gunpowder for them. His
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presence was not desired there when he attempted to return from the south in 1880. It was believed he was a landbuying agent and intended prospecting lor gold. Wahanui, Rewi, and Taonui, the head chiefs of the Kingite party, sent instructions that he was to be killed if he attempted to evade the interdict against white trespassers in the Rohepotae, and as he persisted in coming to Taumarunui in spite of warnings he was shot. The Government made inquiries into the affair, but as the Kingite party was a law unto itself in the interior, and as it was made clear that it was on political grounds that the wandering pakeha was killed, the act was condoned. The Government of that day could scarcely do anything else without entering on another little war.
Canon, Forest, and Tussock Land.
ENGINES are changed at Taumarunui Station, and a powerful locomotive takes our train up into the forest country and the long winding pull to the Waimarino tableland, the western end of the great central plateau. We are in the land of heavy timber and large sawmills, and numerous clearings won by pioneer settlers from the heart of the great bush. Here, covering the headwaters of the Wanganui, in a much-dissected region where a coating of pumice from the ancient volcanoes overlies the soil everywhere, there are the largest tracts of totara and rimu (redpine) timber in the Island. Much of this grand timber has been cut out, and grassy fields replace the dense rain forests.
It is needful that this bush-clearing should be carried on with a wise regard for the forest needs of the future and for the protection of the river-sources and river-navigation. Climatic and water-conservation reserves have been made in various places, and some fine areas of bush have rightly been preserved along our railway route from Taumarunui onward. This is the only part of the Main Trunk line on which the traveller gains some idea of the noble forest that once covered the interior of the Island, and it is essential from every point of view that no more within sight of the line should be destroyed.
This Upper Wanganui region was famous among the Maoris for the size and quality of its timber, and especially of the totara. The many large canoes used on the river right down to Wanganui Heads were usually procured near
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Taumarunui, at such places as the Pungapunga River, where the people were expert in bushwork and canoe-making.
Some of the station-names here are fragrant of the forest. Piriaka refers to the “ clinging bush-vine ” (the place where “ the woodbine twineth Raurimu is “ Red-pine leaf.”
Looping the Loop at Raurimu.
With the ascent from the riverside to the tableland above Raurimu the traveller’s interest is diverted to the highly skilful engineering work entailed in the construction of the line. In thirty miles run from the Taumarunui Flat the train climbs 2,160 ft. to Waimarino (National Park) station. The steepest part is the range that rises immediately above Raurimu Station. To surmount this an ingenious spiral was designed ; this was the work of Mr. Holmes, Inspecting Engineer of the Public Works Department (later Engineer-in-Chief). The line is run in an ascending spiral, a complete circle and two loops, with two tunnels. The fashion in which this mountain railway ties knots in itself is rather puzzling on first experience. The photograph on page 36 and the diagram on the back cover indicate the construction of the spiral.
The Tongariro National Park
On this high breezy plateau of Waimarino we enter the charmed region of grand volcanic mountain landscapes, the most wonderful region in the North Island. We get our first views of the sacred mountains of old, the Tongariro Range, its active volcano Ngauruhoe (7,515 ft.), and the perpetually ice-capped giant Ruapehu (9,175 ft.), the highest point of the Island, and its only glaciated peak. At an altitude of 2,636 ft. we reach the boundary of the Tongariro National Park, a noble scenic sanctuary of nearly 150,000 acres, containing the three famous mountains and several lakes, large areas of forest, and great expanses of subalpine meadow spangled with flowers in the spring and summer. From National Park Station a motor-road runs to the heart of the Park, Whakapapa Cottage Camp, thirteen miles from the railway. For a full description of the Park the visitor should read the book issued by the Tongariro National Park Board. Here it is sufficient to indicate the noble pictures which the smoking and icy mountains present to the rail traveller, especially on some fine summer morning as one emerges from the forest and opens out the first prospect across the Waimarino Plain. Ngauruhoe, with its
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perfect symmetrical cone lifting steeply 3,000 ft. from the rocky plateau, is the first feature to capture the eye ; the curl of yellow or white steam, or often black smoke, from its crater indicates its never-dying fires far below. As we go eastward, Ruapehu’s snowy peaks make glorious pictures through the gaps in the forest or between the hill-spurs. There is a point where, if the atmospheric conditions be favourable, you may see Ruapehu filling the end of a narrow bush canon, eastward, and looking quickly in the opposite direction, see Mount Egmont’s blue and white cone seventy miles away in the west. This is when you cross the Makatote Stream by the greatest railway-bridge in the Island, a steel structure bedded in concrete, 864 ft. long, spanning a gorge 260 ft. deep. The swift rivers flowing from the west and south slopes of Ruapehu through the dense forest have cut deep gorges in the ash and pumice and rock of the plateau, and these sharply eroded channels are very beautiful with their fringing of bush and ferns. These rifts were the reverse of beautiful to the railway engineers, who found themselves blocked every few miles by a huge gulch, necessitating a costly bridge of steel and concrete. The Manga-nui-o-te-Ao (“ the great river of the land ”) is one of these alpine torrents ; it is a large river by the time it joins the Wanganui, seven miles above Pipiriki. The Hapuawhenua Stream is crossed by a viaduct, remarkable not so much for its great length (nearly 1,000 ft.) as for its shape ; it is curved laterally in crescent form. The train traveller will notice a short very broad-leafed cabbage-tree which grows plentifully along the line-side. This is the toi (both vowels pronounced long), Cordyline indivisa, commonly called the mountain cabbagetree.
Ohakune town and Rangataua sawmilling village are places from which Mount Ruapehu is frequently climbed. The summit of the mountain is only about twelve miles airline distant. As we go eastward and emerge from the shelter of the part-wooded hills on to the tussock plain there are some very splendid pictures of the lone volcanic alp in its garment of snow and ice. It is rather strange to remember that that ice-pinnacled peak holds a hot lake on its summit, a lake which sometimes becomes a geyser on a grand scale. The Whangaehu River, a highly mineralized stream which we cross, has its source just below this crater-lake, and it is the subterranean soakage from the sulphurous tarn that gives it its peculiar colour and taste.
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The Rangitikei Valley.
WAIOURU (“ River of the west ”), 242 miles from Auckland, and 185 from Wellington, a bleak, windswept tussock region in the midst of a wide country devoted to sheep-grazing on large runs, is the highest point on the Main Trunk line, 2,660 ft. As we descend by a winding route towards the great upper valley of the Rangitikei the landscape becomes more varied, with forest and hill and stream, and settlement is less scattered. A bright little river, the Hautapu, keeps close company with the rails for some miles as it cascades down to join the Rangitikei. Of historic interest there is little in this part of the country, but the story of pioneering endeavour is plainly written on the face of the land. Taihape (266 miles), which we presently reach, was a few years ago a typical bush township, walled in by a vast dark curtain of heavy timber; oftenflooded rivers surged through deep ravines. Now it is a brisk modem town of big business and considerable wealth, and the forest around it has given place to well - grassed farms. The deeply cut valley of the Upper Rangitikei is now seen on our left; the sharply carved white cliffs are in high contrast to the wooded and grassed country. There is a fine sweeping bend of precipice, a great natural amphitheatre, with the rapid-whitened river coursing along the ravine 200 ft. below the line. The Rangitikei has done some mighty rock-carving in its day. The green terrace below our line on which the Town of Mangaweka stands —it was called “ Three Log Whare ” in the days of its rough infancy—indicates the level of the strong river at one period of its history. This much-broken country through which we wind on our way to the plains is a great wool- and mutton-pro-ducing land ; dairy-farming, too, brings the monthly cheque to many a family. Big engineering works are features in this region of sudden ravines and steep ridges. The principal one is the Makohine Viaduct, a bridge of steel latticework towers set on concrete piers; it is 750 ft. in length and 240 ft. above the stream in the gorge. The towns of Hunterville, Marion (the junction with other railway-lines), and Feilding, each marking a distinct stage in provincial progress, break the journey through a very kindly, wealthy, pleasant countryside. Many a comfortable country house rests among its gardens and orchards and shelter-trees, in the midst of best of pasture land.
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Romance of the Rail.
The Manawatu Country.
PALMERSTON NORTH (339 miles from Auckland, and 87 miles from Wellington), the largest inland town in New Zealand a spacious and beautiful provincial centre — is fast attaining the dignity of a city. The only fault one has to find with this wide-spreading place of fine buildings and shady parks and bright flower-gardens is its inappropriate and meaningless name. “ Manawatu ’’ has often been suggested as the fitting name for the town, and it would become it exceedingly well. As the metropolis of the wealthy farming district of the Manawatu Plains, it could bear no more convenient and euphonious name.
There is much topographical and historical interest in the district traversed on the eighty-seven-miles run from Palmerston North to Wellington. The southern peaks of the Ruahine Range of mountains and the northern part of the Tararua Ranges are in sight on the left. Through a deep gorge between their terminals comes the Manawatu River, which we presently cross. The Manawatu, widebedded and running in several streams, is an example of a once useful waterway ruined by deforestation along its banks. When the settlers first came into this bush-covered country the Manawatu was navigable by large canoes from its mouth right up through the gorge by which it breaks out from the Hawke’s Bay plain.
Farming on these alluvial levels becomes more intensive as we run southward, with the part forested Tararua Ranges now more close and looming bold and blue. By way of variety the great flax-growing swampy plain of Makerua, where the cultivation and milling of the native phormium tenax engage capital and labour on a large scale.
This Manawatu section of the North Island railways was originally constructed and managed by a company formed in Wellington. The memory of one prominent commercial pioneer is preserved in the name of Levin, the principal town of the lower Manawatu country. Before the railway was built, traffic up the coast was by coach, and the route ran for many miles along the ocean-beach between Paekakariki and the mouth of the Manawatu. The numerous rivers and streams were forded at their mouths.
The Tararua Mountains take their name from a central prominent height which was termed Tararua by the Maoris because of the double peaks (“ Tara ” is a sharp mountaintop, and " rua ” means two). The loftiest point is Mount Hector, 5,016 ft. ; the highest peaks of the blue sierra in sight run up to about 4,000 ft. The winter snows and the
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mists resting on the summits of the mountains are poetically described by the Maoris as the hina or “ white hair ” of the Tararua. Up yonder in the recesses of the range, opposite the railside township of Shannon, are the Mangahao hydro-electric-power works. The mountain-streams supply the electric current which lights the Manawatu towns and homesteads, and drives the milking plants and factories and mills of a wide countryside.
Historic Isles of Horowhenua.
As the train speeds into Levin a glimmering water-sheet is seen on the seaward side of the town. This is Lake Horowhenua, a shallow islet-dotted freshwater lagoon, two miles and a quarter long, and a mile wide. Most of the small islands which it contains were artificial—the work of members of the Muaupoko tribe a century ago. Here they had hoped to be safe from the famous warrior Rauparaha (the “ Maori Napoleon ”) and his musketeers ; but those little places of refuge proved to be isles of death. After his conquest of Horowhenua the fierce Rauparaha shut up scores of captives on the islet of Namu-iti, near the north end of the lake, and killed some from day to day, as required for food. To the old-time settlers that islet was known as “ Rauparaha’s stockyard.”
From Ohau Railway-station, three miles south of Levin, a smaller but more beautiful lake, called Papaitonga, or Waiwiri, is reached. Here is an artificial islet of similar origin to the forts in the larger lake. This is Papa-wharangi, a lovely little dot of an island, thickly clothed with karaka trees, fern trees, and flax. The larger island, Papaitonga, is a wooded hill rounding up from the calm waters, and it is tapu through and through. Musical Maori names these — Papai-tonga (“ The Beauty of the South) ”; Waiwiri ("Trembling Waters” or “Winding Waters”).
From Rauparaha’s Day.
Otaki is the most historical place on the coast. The rail - line keeps to the east side of the " pakeha - Maori ” town. Here a large section of the Ngati-Raukawa tribe has lived for about a century, ever since the great fighting migration southward from the Waikato.
There are carved houses in the old settlements, and there is a particularly interesting church, the old Maori whare karakia, called " Rangiatea.” The name is a poem and a history in itself, for it embodies a memory of the
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ancient home of the race in the Eastern Pacific. Rangiatea is synonymous with Ra’iatea Island, near Tahiti; and the name was given to a sacred altar of the Tainui migration. The church, built nearly eighty years ago, has a European exterior, but the interior is Maori architecture adapted to church needs. Mastlike round totara pillars, 40 ft. high, support the massive ridge-pole. These whole tree trunks were cut at Ohau by Maori artisans and floated by river and sea to Otaki. The ridge-pole and rafters are painted in Native scroll patterns. Opposite the church stands a monument to the great Rauparaha; he died here in 1849, an d was buried on Kapiti Island.
There is a Maori college of historic association near “ Rangiatea." It dates back to the days of Bishop Octavius Hadfield, one-time Primate of New Zealand. Hadfield settled here in 1839 as a young missionary, and acquired great influence among the Maoris. The land for the Native school was given by the Ngati-Raukawa tribe. Selected boys from Rarotonga and other South Sea islands as well as Maoris are educated here.
Waikanae (“ Mullet River ”), the next station, is a pretty place, with its mingling of indigenous vegetation and exotic trees and flowers. The steep-wooded foothills of the Tararua Range rise close to the line.
Another pretty place on this part-wooded littoral between mountains and sea is Paraparaumu—a name, by the way, very much mangled in European pronunciation. Many Wellington people have summer-time bungalows and camps here.
Kapiti Island.
Hereabouts, as the west coast is closely approached, the traveller has glimpses of a high hump-backed island looming blue over the nearer changing scenes of green pastures and native-tree groves. At Paekakariki and thence to Pukerua there is an uninterrupted view of the island. This is famous Kapiti, once a Maori fortress isle, now a State sanctuary for native birds. The island, about six miles in length, with an average width of a mile and a half, has an area of about 5,000 acres, nearly half of which is covered by native forest.
One time a piratical cannibal stronghold of Te Rauparaha, later an early-days whaling station, Kapiti is the centre of a hundred dramatic stories. The summit (1,780 ft.) of the island is Titeremoana (a good name ; it means " Look out over the Ocean ”) ; it was the olden Maoris’ sentry peak, where they watched for invading war-canoe fleets.
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By Coast and Hill to Wellington.
So on from Paekakariki. through a senes of short tunnels in the rocky cliffs high above the surf-beaten rough shingle beach. “ Pae-kakariki ” means a perch or snare used for catching the green parrakeet. The top of the steep range above was called of old Te Pae-o-te-rangi, The Pillow of Heaven ” —say, sky-top. , ,
That rough country inland, the eastern masses of the forested Tararuas— Kapakapanui and Wainui and sister peaks—was the scene in 1846 of Te Rangihaeata s retreat northward, pursued by the Government forces after the Hutt and Porirua campaign. ,
The outer and inner shores of Porirua are stoned ground. We pass through the seaside township of Phmmerton, a great holiday resort for city and inland lt was named after Mr. John Plimmer, one of Wellington s earliest pioneers. Here stood Taupo Village, where wily old Rauparaha, who had secretly been assisting his nephew le Rangihaeata, against the whites, was skilfully captured m 1846, under Governor Grey’s direction. He was kept a prisoner for two years in British ships-of-war. The exact spot where Rauparaha was captured is quite close to the present railway-station at Plimmerton. The Natives point out a little grassy space bordered by ngaio trees between the station and the beach as the place where Rauparaha s whare stood, and where he was surprised and seized at early dawn by a party of British bluejackets.
Out yonder is the long flat-topped island of Mana, one time an eyrie and retreat of warrior bands under Rangihaeata. Nowadays it is a sheep-run. . , .
That quiet salt-water bay going far inland on our left is Paua-taha-nui (which has been corrupted to Pahautanui). It was the scene of lively skirmishing between Rangihaeata s war-canoes and bush-ambushed bands and the British naval patrol parties who manned H.M.S. “ Calliope s little gunboat. . . , , -
On the green flat on our right, as we cross the sea-arm, sheep graze around the crumbling ruins of an old-time brick fort, built in the year of Wellington’s one and only war. This was Fort Paremata, garrisoned by British redcoats.
Porirua Harbour, which we skirt on our right, was lively enough, too, in 1846, with all the martial business of defence and offence against a too-mobile foe. That little war, a kind of romantic dream to-day, was a serious enough matter when Wellington Town was but six years old, a forest wilderness in its rear and on its flanks.
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Romance of the Rail.
Between Porirua and Wellington Harbour the route is parallel with the military road cut through the forest and over the range by the 58th Regiment and some friendly Maoris. A line of stockades protected this pioneer road. There was one, Elliott’s Stockade, on the shore of Porirua, near the head of the harbour. There was another, Lieut. Leigh’s post, on Tawa Flat, close to our line, and there was Lieut. Middleton’s stockade higher up. The suburban hilltown of Johnsonville was originally a bush clearing, where a small blockhouse of rough slabs, loopholed for musket-fire, with a loft reached by a ladder, was built in 1846. The various stockades garrisoned by the 58th Regiment (the “ Black Cuffs ”) were built in this way : a trench was dug, and large split trees and small whole trees were set in close together and the earth firmly filled in round them. Firingapertures were cut in this bristling wall of timber. At Khandallah, on the Wellington-ward slopes, there was a small sentry - post, a position popularly called “ Mount Misery.” This spot, Sentry-box Hill, now abbreviated to Box Hill, is near the west side of the line, at the little church, near Khandallah Station.
Now the sight of Port Nicholson’s lake-like expanse, ringed about with steep hills, and houses and shipping, recalls us from the past. Kipling once saw Wellington and something of the back-country, as his poem, “ The Flowers,” reminds us—
Broom behind the windy town, pollen o’ the pine—
Bellbird in the leafy deep where the ratas twine.
For miles the outer hills and gullies where the bush has been cut away are golden with gorse and with the broom that took the poet’s eye.
Through the last short tunnels Wellington City opens out below, and on our right, with its miles of curving seafront lined with wharves and shipping, and its houses climbing in tiers to the skyline 400 ft. and 500 ft. above the sea. A complete contrast this angular semi-mountainous landscape to Auckland’s softly rounded beauty, yet a landscape of charm and variety that gains in interest as one explores the city and its surroundings. The first daylight view of Wellington from the railway is a quick revelation of the unusual in seaport scenery. Of a softer quality of beauty is the picture it makes on some calm summer night, when from the ghttering lights on the waters of Oriental Bay to the heights of Brooklyn and Kelburn the successive terraces of the city are picked out in the lines of a thousand steadily blazing golden stars.
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Romance of the Rail.
The Building of the Main Trunk.
Pioneer Surveys of Maori Country.
A CONTRACT was made with John Brogden and Sons in 1872 for the construction of the line from Auckland to Mercer. This first section of what was to become the North Island Main Trunk line was linked up with the Waikato River service, carried on by paddle-steamers, and for some years the combined rail and river route carried all the traffic to Ngaruawahia, Hamilton, Cambridge, and Alexandra.
It was proposed in some quarters that the river should carry all the traffic between Mercer and Ngaruawahia, and that the railway should be constructed from the latter point southward. However, the advocates of through-railway communication carried their point.
In the “ seventies ” there was still considerable fear of a renewed Maori war, and the Government, besides maintaining a large force of Armed Constabulary, enrolled a body of Engineer Volunteer Militia to work on the railway-con-struction line on the mid-Waikato section. This force, organized on military lines, worked very well, and also did sufficient drill to ensure its usefulness in soldiering emergency.
Legislation in 1882 authorized borrowing for the construction of the railway from Te Awamutu southward, and exploration for the most satisfactory routes was begun through the great Native-owned territory of the Rohepotae, as it presently came to be called. To the physical difficulties of a practically unknown region were added the strong objections of the Kingite Maoris to the pakeha advance into their country. The Government—through the Native Minister, the Hon. John Bryce, and his successor, the Hon. John Ballance—succeeded in arranging with the Native chiefs for a passage for the iron rail, and the Maoris made a free gift of a chain width of land along the whole route, and also of land for stations.
Preliminary surveys were made by several parties of engineers towards Taranaki and also through the heart of the Island via Taumarunui. Mr. Charles Wilson Hursthouse and others made reconnaissances of the suggested WaikatoTaranaki connection, and Mr. R. W. Holmes, Mr. Morgan Carkeek, and Mr. John Rochfort also carried out surveys. The pioneer of the central route —the present line through the Taumarunui-Ruapehu country—was Mr. Rochfort, who
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Romance of the Rail.
had already made his name as an explorer in the South Island ; it was he who discovered the great Coalbrookdale coal-measures near Westport.
Rochfort had trouble with the obstructive Maoris near the Upper Wanganui—only a very short time previously a white man was shot at Taumarunui for trespassing on this forbidden land—and at Karioi (on the present line, below Ruapehu) he was told that if he persisted in advancing (he was working from Marton northward and westward to Taumarunui) he would be shot.
One of his chainmen was the noted Tom Adamson, a big “ pakeha-Maori ” who had been a Government scout in the war days ; he always marched barefoot and adopted Maori ways. He had a Native wife, and he was bargaining for tribal lands. The Maoris objected to Adamson continuing with the party, so Rochfort carried on without him, and henceforth received help from the local Maoris. He cut a line through the great forest where the railway now runs, and established camps along the route, and for many years afterwards his patakas, or high-legged storehouses, were to be seen here and there in little bush clearings, marking the sites of his pioneer camps on the adventurous traverse of the central plateau.
Mr. Hursthouse’s seizure and imprisonment by the fanatic Mahuki near Te Kuiti in March, 1883, delayed his surveys, but not for long, and in 1884 all the preliminary reconnaissances were complete, and Parliament approved of the proposed route from Te Awamutu to Marton.
The turning of the first sods at the northern end on the Puniu banks, on the 15th April, 1885, was the next stage in the Main Trunk’s progress. The leading figures in this ceremony near Te Awamutu were Sir Robert Stout (then Mr, Stout), Premier of the colony, and the chiefs Wahanui, Rewi, and Taonui.
The work went on from both ends at varying rates of speed and under varying systems. The co-operative plan of line-construction superseded the old private-contract methods.
In 1885 there was a gap of about 200 miles between the two ends of the line. The filling-in of this gap took twentythree years. It was in 1908 that the final link was completed. The Right Hon. Sir Joseph Ward, then Prime Minister, officially opened the line for through traffic. It was at the time of the visit of the United States Fleet under Admiral Sperry to Auckland.
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Romance of the Rail.
New Zealand, Wonderland of the Pacific.
DIFFERENT from other islands of the Pacific, the main Islands of New Zealand are of the continental type, very interesting to visiting scientists as well as to other tourists. Indeed, the country is the remnant of a very much greater land mass which extended northward.
Including outlying isles and the Ross Dependency, the Dominion now stretches from the tropics to Antarctica, but the main islands (North, South, and Stewart) lie in the mild temperate region between the parallels of 34° and 48 s °uth latitude (a stretch of 1,000 miles) and the meridians of 106 and 179° east longitude—about 1.200 miles to the east of Australia. The area of New Zealand proper (103,285 square miles) exceeds that of Great Britain by more than 13,000 miles.
Abel Tasman, who sailed around these islands in 1642, was the first known European to see this territory. Next came the famous Captain Cook in 1769 and subsequent years. His voyages prepared the way for the British colonization of “ The Brighter Britain of the South, but organized settlement did not make a successful beginning until 1840.^
In the short space of eighty-eight years New Zealand has grown into a prosperous, progressive country, developing on modem lines of efficiency. Mildness of climate, fertility of soil, and other natural advantages assure a high standard of comfort for a much larger population than the present total (about 1,440,000 in 1028). _
About 94 per cent, of the population of the Dominion proper is of British origin. The proportion of the native race (Maori), including half-castes, is about 5 per cent. There is no racial problem whatever. Peace between the new settlers and the Natives was firmly established half a century ago. The great majority of the Maoris live in the upper part of the North Island, where they have their own settlements.
The clean air of the Pacific, a liberal share of sunshine (an annual average exceeding 2,000 hours), and other factors —including a vigorous public-health policy —have given New Zealand the world’s premiership in health. The annual death-rate is usually bdow 9 per 1,000 of population. The average expectation of life at age o is 61 years for males and 63J years for females.
Farming is the mainstay of the Dominion s prosperity. New Zealand is pre-eminently a pastoral country, a wellknown exporter of dairy-produce, frozen lamb and mutton, and wool.
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Romance of the Rail.
There has also been some creditable development in various manufacturing industries.
A remarkable advance has been made during recent years with the provision of electric power for urban and rural areas. Very favourable conditions are enabling the Government to supply hydro-electric power cheaply for domestic and industrial uses.
Marvellous Scenery and Sport.
TO nature-lovers of the world at large New Zealand offers a complete change of scene. Here is a larger thermal wonderland than America’s Yellowstone Park ; here is “ The World’s Wonder Walk ” (the track from Lake Te Anau to Milford Sound), which offers more stupendous spectacles than the Yosemite Valley; here are lakes of heavenly blue, reflecting the crystal crowns of green-mantled mountains ; here are evergreen forests, with subtropical wealth of growth, without snakes, dangerous animals, or any menace to health ; here are fiords which surpass Norway’s inlets in beauty and majesty ; here are noble rivers which wind through fairylands ; here is an inspiring alpine region with easily accessible glaciers larger than Switzerland’s ; here Nature has worked to give the most impressive scenic contrasts.
“ The Sportsman’s Paradise ” was a title given to New Zealand by a visitor long ago. Here are caught the world’s largest rainbow and brown trout (scaling up to 20 lb.), and there are also quinnat and Atlantic salmon in southern waters. The season license fees for trout range from £1 to £6 (the charge for overseas visitors in the Taupo district, renowned for its big “ rainbows ”).
The northern waters —from the Bay of Plenty to the North Cape—give the world’s best deep-sea angling, according to Mr. Zane Grey. Here huge swordfish, mako shark, and thresher shark are " played ” excitingly with rod and reel.
Red deer are numerous in many parts of the North and South Islands. Wapiti and moose herds have been established in the Fiordland of the South Island.
The most favourable times for sport are: Trout, beginning of October ; swordfish, beginning of January ; salmon, beginning of February; deer and wapiti, beginning of March ; feathered game, beginning of May.
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Romance of the Rail.
Transport and Accommodation.
Modem passenger lines run regularly from the United Kingdom, America, and Australia to New Zealand. The trip from England to New Zealand, across the Atlantic, America, and the Pacific takes about thirty days. Fortnightly trans-Pacific services are maintained alternately between Vancouver and Auckland, via Honolulu and Suva (Fiji), and between San Francisco and Wellington, via Papeete (Tahiti) and Rarotonga. The run by either route is eighteen days.
Several of the highest hotel tariffs are a few shillings above £1 a day, but the usual charge for the best accommodation in town or country houses does not exceed £l.
Tunnels of the Main Trunk.
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Romance of the Rail.
Principal Viaducts and Bridges of the Main Trunk.
• Notable viaducts from an engineering point of view.
By Authority: W. A. G. Skinner, Government Printer, Wellington.—X92B
[lO,OOO/1/28 —14243
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New Zealand Agencies Overseas.
GREAT BRITAIN AND EUROPE— The High Commissioner for New Zealand, 415 The Strand, LONDON W.C. 2.
CANADA—
Mr. W. A. James, 1017 Metropolitan Buildings, VANCOUVER
UNITED STATES
Mr. W. Stephenson Smith, 31 1 California Street, SAN FRANCISCO.
SOUTH AFRICA—
JOHANNESBURG : Mr. B. R. Avery, 8 Natal Bank Chambers (Second Floor).
DURBAN : Mr. H. Middlebrook,
27A Union Castle Buildings. Box 1822
INDIA—
CALCUTTA : Mr. Thos. C. Buddie,
Manager, New Zealand Insurance Company, 26 Dalhousie Square West.
zo i-;ainousie oquare west. AUSTRALIA—
MELBOURNE : Mr. H. J. Manson, Dominion Chambers, 59 William Street.
SYDNEY : Mr. W. R. Blow,
London Bank Chambers, 20 Martin Place. BRISBANE : Mr. T. E. Dewar,
King House, Queen Street. ADELAIDE : Mr. Victor H. Ryan,
. mi. viuui n. xyyeiii, Director of South Australia Intelligence and Tourist Bureau.
PERTH : Mr. A. S. McClintock ;
McClintock and Company, Ltd., Queen’s Buildings, 285 Murray Street.
INFORMATION regarding New Zealand can also be obtained from the following :
The Offices of Messrs. Thos. Cook and Son.
The agents of the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand.
The representatives of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.
The representatives of the Canadian National Railways.
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Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/books/ALMA1928-9917503913502836-The-North-Island-main-trunk-rail
Bibliographic details
APA: Cowan, James. (1928). The North Island main trunk railway : a descriptive and historical story. Govt. Printer.
Chicago: Cowan, James. The North Island main trunk railway : a descriptive and historical story. Wellington, N.Z.: Govt. Printer, 1928.
MLA: Cowan, James. The North Island main trunk railway : a descriptive and historical story. Govt. Printer, 1928.
Word Count
18,466
The North Island main trunk railway : a descriptive and historical story Cowan, James, Govt. Printer, Wellington, N.Z., 1928
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