AUCKLAND PIONEERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 262, 5 November 1931, Page 20

AUCKLAND PIONEERS.

THOMAS AND RICHARD DUDER

OLD-TIME MEMORIES. DAYS OF HOBSON AND SELWYN.

(By ERNEST L. EYRE.)

While recently . conversing with Mr. Richard Duder, a well-known Devonport business man and for many years a racehorse-owner and breeder, I garnered interesting reminiscences of his father, Mr. Thomas Duder, who was born, in 1803, of prosperous farmers —descendants of an old-established family—at Kings Kerswell, a small, curiouslyspired, ancient Devonshire coastal town. When a young man he left the picturesque district, the nursery of many famed ocean-adventurers, and journeyed on outlaw-infested roads to London, where one morning, while amusedly watching members of the "Quality" pursuing their favourite pastime of seizing a man, stripping him, and shooting him, wrapped in newspapers, through a wooden funnel leading from one lane to another, he was himself kidnapped by a press gang. With scant ceremony he was bundled on board of the Belleroplion (the ship-of-the-line that brought Napoleon to England, in 1815, while en route to St. Helena), and taken to sea, where naturally enough, the .life, although an enforced one, strongiy appealed to the fearless Devon lad. Later he'joined, of his own volition, the warship Buffalo, which in 1837 conveyed convicts to Hobart, Tasmania, and- he afterwards related harrowing tales of that hellvoyage.

Arrival in New Zealand. The transport visited the Waitemata at Christmas, 1838, when the shores for miles were afire with pohutukawa blossoms, and in August, 1840, the Admiralty commissioned the captain to obtain kauri spars andd masts from Mercury Bay, on our East Coast. One afternoon, when all the members of the ship's company, except a single watch, were ashore bush-felling, a strong, nor'easterly gale suddenly' arose, the Buffalo's cable broke, and she became totally wrecked on the beach! Happily, however, those left on board were saved, and the officers and crew eventually reached Auckland, where some of Duder's enterprising mates dragged, -with Herculean labour a leaky craft through a mudflat, pulled it on rollers up the gully where now runs Queen Street, and converted it into the settlement's first inn! As the infant town comprised only fifteen buildings, the old boat, even in those hard-drinking days, served its purpose admirably. In October, 1841, Tom Duder was appointed commander of Auckland's first revenue cutter, in which he frequently carried dispatches from Governor Hobson to various native chiefs who, although engaged in perennial tribal warfare, acknowledged the Govelement s authority, and never attacked him. An old chief, Taraia, with whom the seaman became so friendly that he was offered by him a gift of extensive areas of his land on the Hauraki Gulf's eastern shores, once ordered the slaughter, in the presence of Duder, and despite his horrified protests, of a Maori boy, who was promptly cooked and eaten. On another night, when the cutter's skipper was visiting the cannibal's "hapu," a crying girl-child so disturbed the chief's slumbers that he grasped her by the legs, and flung her through the darkness into a flooded ereek, where she was drowned! Several months later, while Government communications were being taken by Duder and his crew up the _Waihou River, Thames, to warring natives, the revenue cutter ran into the midst of down-coming canoes filled with Victorious Maori braves and large flax baskets laden with cut-up human bodies all prepared for a feast!

Hobson Befriends Duder. Tom Duder —his son informs me— often took Governor Hobson, the best friend he ever had in his chequered career, on official trips in his boat, and he told the sailor that he would have him appointed signalman on the flagstaff (Mount Victoria) with accompanying permission to graze stock there, but before he could fulfil his promise the sensitive, cultured administrator died prematurely ,of paralysis, brought on by overwork, worry and unmerited insults, on ■ September 10, 1842. His successor, nevertheless, granted Duder the position, which he retained from 1843 until his death on August 15, 1875.. He yas married in 1845, and a house was built for Tirm and his family on the mount. Six years ago, Mr. Dick Duder, out of respect for the memory of Governor Hobson, went to considerable expense to have his neglected grave, in the Symonds Street cemetery, cleared of weeds, and renovated.

The Great Selwyn. Bishop Selwyn, .an active, powerful man, was also a frequent voyager in the cutter. He once sailed with Duder. to Mercury Bay, whence the pair travelled overland toward the Thames, then a native village. The cleric calculated the distance by counting his steps, and changing, at every mile, a pebble from one coat pocket to another. When half a mile from their destination, however, their two native guides collapsed, and, as Duder refused (deeming it infra dig) to carry them into the "hapu," Selwyn made two trips, and actually conveyed the exhausted men there on his broad back! He averred that he did so in order* to convince the Maoris generally of British superiority. The Duchess of Argyle and the Jane Gifford arrived in October, 1842, in Mechanics' Bay with the first direct British immigrants, and the sailor from Devon was instructed to purchase from the Maoris, for their sustenance, various kinds of produce, a commission which, with Bishop Selwyn'e assistance, he successfully executed. He and the churchman, both experienced hunters of wild pigs, then ventured into the bushregions°where these animals abounded, and procured many suckers to swell the new-comers' food supply. On several occasions they narrowly escaped injury from the tusks of savage boars.

In 1847, wlien Tom Duder lived on Flagstaff Hill, he obtained his drinking water from a Melrose paddock, and, knowing this, a "ticket-of-leave" Botany Bay convict, named Burns, who lived with the Shoal Bay Maoris, waited in the scrub on three occasions with the intention of murdering him. However, Duder —who had acted more than once the good Samaritan to his would-be slayer—discovered another spring in a different locality, and thus unconsciously frustrated the dastardly scheme. Burns, a really evil character, then stole a tomahawk from the signal-man's place, and went to the home of the naval paymaster, Lieutenant Snow (who was mistakenly supposed to have Government money with him), and killed him and his

wife and daughter, his other girl luckily having been left with friends in town. To conceal his deed, the murderer burned down Snow's raupo-cottage, which stood a trifle to the east of the present Mays Street, and close to the waterfront. The blood-stained tomahawk wm found by searchers, but the slayer's cunning plot to involve his benefactor in trouble unexpectedly failed, and. Burns was captured while endeavouring to escape from Auckland in a Sydney-bound barque, which was detained at Rangitoto by head winds; a fortuitous happening that resulted, on June 15, 1848, in his execution, by hanging, on what was afterwards known as Hangman's Rock, near the scene of his crime.

The Perilous Past,, "I vividly remember," said Mr. Richard Duder, who was born in 1851, "how my father's cannibal friend, the Maori chief Taraia, arrived at Devonport in '58 with 60 tattooed warriors in decorated war ,canoes. They stayed for a fortnight in a two-storeyed wooden bam, now nonexistent, at the back of our Lower Church Street house, where we lived after '53, and which, although halfruined, is of historical interest because an old-time New Zealand Governor was once our guest there for a week! We killed a bullock, half a dozen fowls and seven pigs, and stripped our orchard trees to satisfy the voracious appetites of the uninvited, "magnificently proportioned Maoris. Mother bitterly complained to Dad of their presence, but he reminded her that they'd often showered, in their communal fashion, hospitality upon him when visiting their villages. Probably he was powerless to turn them away. "The Dad, who was assigned the duty of patrolling Devonport at night with a rifle, had made arrangements to hoist, in case of such an eventuality, his younger children through a skylight on to the roof. One night some Maoris endeavoured to break open the back door, and father lunged at the foremost intruder with a cutlass, which would have run him through but for the thick, knotted blanket that he wore. The natives' intentions were, nevertheless, quite friendly. They only desired to borrow candles to light the hut where- they were playing cards!