FAMOUS FISHING WATERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 46, 24 February 1927, Page 6

FAMOUS FISHING WATERS.

IN THE OLD MAORI DAY.

FOOD SUPPLIES FROM THE SEA. PICTURES IN A STORYLAND. (By J.C.) The •"Tai-Tamahine," the Maoris call the seas about the Bay of Islands where H.M.s. Renown and her Royal passengers came to a quiet anchorage to-day. "The Sea of Girls" the phrase means (in full "te tai-hoenga-tamahine"), the waters where the girls ina,v safely paddle their canoes, in contrast to the surging seas of the "tai - tamatane," the West Coast. These waters of the Children's Coast were, of old, more important to the people than the land. The trlblesfolk drew most of their food supplies from the salt

sea. Even to-day, indeed, the fisli-teem-ing waters hold a value superior to that of the shore. At any rate we hear more about the ocean harvest than we do of the land product. It is the fish of this region of lots o' time that are earning world-fame for the Tai-Tamahine, the far-stretcliing firths and bays and coves of lovelv Tokerau.

Cook, in 17C9, was amazed at the exceeding abundance of fish, at the quarter-mile-long nets of the Maori, at the number of '"towns" that he saw on the bay shores. There are not so many towns to-day perhaps, but the pakeha fishermen's camps are making populous the bays and beaches, where once the "Indians" of Cook's journal hauled their great flax-made seines. (

Bay of Islands —bay of beauty, bay of memories: Bay and island, and creek, grand old pohutukawa trees bending over beach and oyster-rock; rock" 1 * crag and terraced hilltop; quiet homes of pakeha and Maori in inlet and rivercrook; seaside villages that blend antique charm with something of modern comfort; a place where land, roads and tracks take a secondary place, for the best highway is the sea.

Eussell lies dozing there; really we don't want to see it (lo anything else. We are content to hear tales of the days when hundreds of whaleship sailors swaggered along its lialf-moon_ of grey gravel beach. An old settler of the North once told me that he had seen twenty whaling vessels lying off Kororareka, put in to "refresh," —to get supplies of the four chief items of whalemen's need in those times, to wit, water, wood, fresh provisions, and temporary Maori wives for all hands.

Whalefish to Swordfish.

I went on board, many years ago, one of the last of those old-time South Sea whaling craft, the American barque Gayhead, from New Bedford. The rowdy days of Kororareka were far behind us then; the white-painted Gayhead looked but a ghost of the ancient blubber-hunting argosy., the roughest and the most heroic of all seaeraft. The one raffish feature about her was her crew. Many of them were from the Azores, where the American whaleships often called on their zig-zag way out to the Pacific; they were part Portuguese and part darkey, with a dash it struck me, of tlie Moorish pirate. They fitted the job; certainly they were the most active fellows I ever saw in a whalcboat, not excepting even the Kanaka. They that long, slender, carvel-built; boat with its 30-foot steer oar as an accomplished jockey handles his horse. But those deep-sea warriors have gone, and the expert sword fisher of to-day shows us how the modern salt sea harvest fields are on. The hunter of the swordfish, and the mako-taniwha and its fellow sharks, the great reremai. the ururoa and the mango- | pare, gets well out to sea. But going out from Russell you reach locally famous grounds for hook and line long before you come to the open Pacific. There are the Black Rocks, on the large island Moturoa; there is submerged W hale I lock, off a conspicuous red cliff on one of the archipelago of islands; there is the Xinepin Pock (the Tikitiki of the Maoris), a high black pinnacle, a remarkable landmark lying half a mil<» from an island quaintly spelled "Oalakek" on the chart; it is the Maori Motu-Harakeke (island of the native flax). Here spread about the gulf from bold Cape. AViwiki to the inner harbourage entrance are islands of all shapes and sizes. The Renown's people will pass close to Motu-arohia, that place of tragedy in the very earliest days of contact between pakcha and Maori. Here lay the ships of the "Wiwi" nation in 1772, the French expedition under Marion du Fresne, who came to grief over fish—netting fish at the tapu U-ach of Manawa-ora yonder. In the punitive measures which followed the French bombarded the. Maori villages on Motuarohia. And those were not the first cannon shots fired in these Tokcrau waters, not by a long way! Headlands of the Placid Sea

The ancient name Ivororareka (with the accent on the "ra"), still is heard in Russell. It certainly sounds more poetical than the pakeha name, though it means nothing more romantic than "sweet penguin.'' The gulf is Tokerau. meaning "north wind," a name identical with the Tokelau or Union group of islands in mid-Pacific, lately come under New Zealand's administration. The shores and rocky peaks are thick with ancient trenched and terraced forts, many of them set in many castlelike eyres, where their hawk-eyed warriors could watch against enemies' war-canoes for many leagues around. There is a certain likeness between these stronghold-studded headlands of this Tokerau coast -and some parts of the Scottish highland shores and the outer isles as described and pictured in such books as Miss C. Gorden Cumming's, "In the Hebrides." Here in the years of Hongi Ilika and Titore and Hone Heke, the Maoris liapus lived in their stockaded and fosse-defended holds, overlooking the sea, with their sentries on look-out duty over the gates, and their long war canoes, like Highlanders galleys, lying on the sands below. The shores of the many beaches and elbow cape-juts, all fringed with pohutukawa trees, are as rich in ruined forts as the Hebrides are in the wavewashed. crumbling castles of the McLeods and the McNeills and Clan Ranald. From Maiki Hill. There is no motor car road to the top of Flagstaff Hill, 300 feet above Russell, and if the Duke visits it in j his living trip to Russell from the outer anchorage, lie will have to do it oil foot. May be it will be an easier task than playing a 4001b sword fish. But this hill, the historic Maiki, is worth

the climbing: for the far look-out it gives over the in-and-out coastline and the cyclades of islands. There are loftier places around the shores of the Bay but none that give quite the charm of a quiet hour on this old battle hill. The traces of the trenches that once surrounded the flagstaff in the wardays of 1545, are still there; the vegetation around is much as it was in Hone Heke's time. The eye ranges far over the Tai-Tamahine, the Placid Sea, with swathes of water like blue oil, and again burnished like a silver plate.

Every ridge, every crescent, beach, every rock, has its story. Down below is a curious islet which in itself is a story land iu miniature. It is that little rocky island at the far end of Russell beach, locally called Mill Island. In the early days, when the isle was somewhat larger, a windmill for grinding flour from the Maori-grown wheat stood on its flat top, fifty or sixty feet above the water. On the charts the roek is called Observatory Island, a name given when the survey of this coast was made by the officers of H.M.s. Acheron, in 1549-50. The Maori name is Kairaro. One of the ship's guns used in the defence of Kororareka against the Maoris in lS4.j was used as an anchor to guy down one of the stays that supported the windmill on its precarious perch. And at the other end of t lie beach is the Whalers' Spring, the Waipara of the Maoris, where the oldtimers sometimes had head-punching matches to decide the order of precedence in filling the ships' water-casks. A century ago it supplied the scores of ships that anchored of! Kororareka; and you may fill your yacht or launch water-breakers there to-day, if you like, for Waipara's rill never fails.