CAPE PALLISER.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18148, 11 August 1924, Page 10

CAPE PALLISER.

.7 OLD-TIME WRECKS. Oapo. Palliser, in the vicinity it now seems only too apparent that the Ripple came to grief, has seen the end of three ships within the last: forty years, : but; fortunately only with the loss of j two lives. The ;last ship to leave her bones in the vicinity .was the fine barque Benavon, which stranded near the Cape in dirty weather in November, 1903', and became a total loss. Seven years earlier the' schooner Delnura was carried oil to Barton's Point, near White Rock station; through the wind | f Ailing and the current taking charge of the vessel. No. lives were lost in. either of these wrecks, but 'away back in November, 1888, two men out of her j crew of six were lost when the schooner Lizzie Guy crashed on to Te Kau Kau Point in a 'south-easterly gale. . The last case of a foundering on this part I I of the "East Coast seems to have been that, or the schooner Hoanga twenty years back, which was lost with all hands somewhere 'between Castlepoint and Kidnappers. - ' It was in the old saiiling ehips that Cape Palliser and Palliser Bay earned their , worst repute (writes "T.D.H.", in the ''Dominion"). Captain Cook gave' to the Cape its present name after his patron Sir Hugh Palliser, who was. Ms first captain in the Navy, and greaitly helped him in his career. The bay, however, used to have another name; on the' old maps where it was labelled "Useless Bay,'' which excellently describes it from a sailor's 1 point of view. Palliser Bay was a very 1 good place indeed for a sailing vessel ! to avoid, for if the wind shifts to the J south it is extremely difficult to get | out of, and there is absolutely no I shelter aad bad holding for ah anchor, i On September 14th it will be twenty; years • back since the American ship i Addenda was wrecked in the bay. two : miles west of Onoko Lake. The weather on that occasion was officially described by the Marine Department as a hurricane, which in nautical parlance

! means a wind with a velocity of over j 75 miles an hour, whereas a gale begins at 38 miles an hour. It was the I same southerly blister which liad the : day - before stranded the barquentine La Bella at Ohiro Bay and presented j VVellingtonians with the spectacle of a shipwreck at their doorsteps. I The crew of the ship Zuleika which finished her career in a southerly gale |in Palliser Bay in' April, 1897, were I not so fortunate as that of the' Adj denda, for ;out, of th 6 ship's company i of twenty-one, no fewer than twelve lives were lost. About the earliest shipwreck in New Zealand of which tradition remains,' - occurred in Palliser Bay. The. details ate lost" in the mists of time, and all we know of it i is the Maori story of the Ship of' Rongotute. The iucky people on that! occasion: were those who were drowned, i as the survivors escaped the water! only to .'teach the fire, or, rather, the oven: though, according .to a version of the occurrence collected by Mr filsdon Uesti the meal - disagreed very much i with the Maoris. The date of' this shipwreck is a matter'of specula-i tionr Some-writers place it before': lasman, and others after Cook, and \ the late Sir Percy " Smith once threw ! i cut a suggestion that it might liave ! been the ond ;of a vessel called the j t.oquille, which left Scotland with : emigrants for Jjew. Zealand at the ' cn<l 6f the eighteenth century and ' was, never- heard of more. j