Torpedo Boat and Bushrangers

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 208, 3 September 1938, Page 3 (Supplement)

Torpedo Boat and Bushrangers

LYING on the grass-grown roadside behind the,beach in the beautiful bay of Purau, on the Lyttelton Harbour, is the steel skeleton of a vessel resembling a submarine, which must have puzzled many'a passer-by. Much of it has gone and what remains has been torn apart, yet the central conning-tower still shows, with its littleknown tale of a past which, under different circumstances, might well have been an historic one. In the days when defence was taken seriously in the colony this vessel was a torpedo boat, used in the scheme of defence to be brought into force if any foe attempted to capture Canterbury's chief port from the sea. The low-lying little craft, which was a cros« between a steel monitor of the American Civil War type and a submarine, could not submerge, but showed about as much above the waterline as a motor launch. Her armament consisted of a torpedo tube, mounted aft, which meant that she had to be aimed bows-on to the enemy to hit her target.

By D. G. Dyne

The boat was housed in a shed above a slipway in Magazine Bay, a small bay next to the favourite bathing resort of Corsair Bay. Next to the shed was a magazine and above it, on the point, was one of the guns of Fort Jervois. After, a peaceful life, without having ever fired a shot in anger, the little torpedo boat was left to rust away 011 the beach across the harbour, in the beautiful green valley with its idyllic vale of stately and pretty trees between the Lyttelton colony of Diamond Harbour and the old fort on Ripa Island. The bay itself is rich in local history, being originally called Rhodes Bay after the old Canterbury family of Rhodes who settled there before the First Four Ships came out from England. The peak on the left, where -the road climbs over to Port Levy, still bears the name of Rhodes Memorial, though the Maoris called it the Home of the Fairies. After the Rhodes family shifted to the plains the Greenwoods settled in the bay and were here captured by a trio of the notorious bushrangers known, as

"Blue Cap" and his gang. The bushrangers held up the household at pistol point and helped themselves to all they fancied, escaping safely. Later they were captured and paid the full penalty. Before the present railway to I>ittle River, on the south side of Banks Peninsula, was laid, travellers to the peninsula went by ferry across the harbour to Purau and rode or walked over the hills behind the bay. It is on record that as many as 40 horses at once were seen travelling from the ferry to French Akaroa other bays of the rugged promontory in those halcyon days.

The one-time quarantine station at Pile Bay lies to the left of the bay and the wooden ribs of an old sailing ship wrecked here show in the cove between the old fort and Purau. The white fencesurrounded grave of an old Maori chief stands out in a paddock on the flat, and close by is the communal shearers' whare, resembling a schoolliouse, where the shearers reside in the season, and over all rests the peaceful air of clean,, green pastures, fragrant trees and tussock-covered hillsides, with quiet homesteads nestling here and there in the valley.