PORT OF ROMANCE

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 122, 25 May 1928, Page 8

PORT OF ROMANCE

EARLY SCENES ON THE WATERFRONT — WOOD REPLACED BY CONCRETE. EW parts of Auckland have seen so much \ change in fifty-eight years as the waterfront. The geography of the harbour has been altered by man-made.works such as deflecting Vmfr) currents, dredging channels, reclamations, anc * extensive wharves such as the greatest optimist of those days never expected to behold. Prior to the constituting of the first Harbour Board in 1871, cargo handling was mostly a matter of manpower —and luck. The only wharf having any claim at all to the title was known as the Queen Street wharf, a long, rickety wooden structure crossed by three T's. The teredo and other marine borers had so eaten away such piles as were not copper sheathed, that its frequenters expected every day to be Tonnages were yM small in earlier clays, but in force of numbers the traffic on the Waitemata was nearly equal to what it is now. At the Queen Street wharf lay the big clipper ships of the Shaw, Savill and Albion and New Zealand Shipping Co.'s fleets, with their anchors dropped well out in the stream, to ease the strain on the wharf in strong winds. Out in the stream there were sometimes two or three lofty wool clippers, or perhaps one of the locallyowned vessels of the Circular Saw Line, handsome barques that made regular trips to Australia, the Orient, and the Pacific Coast of America.

Beside the deep sea vessels, there was a fine fleet of cutters and schooners and a few st >amers bringing passengers and produce from coastal ports. For

these there were a number of small jetties, of which Wynyard Pier was the largest. Maori canoes, too, from Motutapu and Waiheke, and tHe tiny villages along the shores of the outer harbour, came regularly into port with their loads of kumara, potatoes and live pigs. With their craft tied to the wooden breastwork just about where Customs Street is now, the menfolk would sell their wares to the passers-by, and, with the money so earned, dispatch their wahines to buy supplies in the town. From the Pacific Islands, too, came the yacht-like schooners and topsail schooners, with fruit, copra, and sometimes pearls, or even live turtles to be converted into soup fbr the local epicures. Often these vessels were still rank with the smell of imprisoned kanakas, kidnapped for labour on Fijian plantations, or perhaps a close examination would reveal fresh tomahawk scars on the bulwarks, or barbed arrowheads bedded in the sides, results of desperate encounters with vengeful islanders.

Crazy and even dangerous as those old wooden wharves were, they were beloved of Aucklanders with a love that iron and concrete can never inspire. They were the favourite Sunday promenade, and the whole town would gather to admire a particularly fine figurehead or gaze at a vessel that had made a fast passage out. The departure of a big clipper ship was often a musical treat of a high order. Tramping steadily round the capstan as they hauled in on the cable, the crew would join together in some rousing chantey, twenty deep voices raised in harmony. Then tier upon tier of white canvas would be unfurled to the breeze, with often a different song for each sail, until the voices would grow faint and the ship would fade out of sight down the harbour — fading also down the years, now, until only a

memory remains, while on the waterfront the grim efficiency of steel and concrete replaces the glorions uncertainty of wood, and steam replaces sail.