Nicholas Young Discovered New Zealand

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 172, 17 April 1937, Page 11

Nicholas Young Discovered New Zealand

FROM A LOOKOUT ALOFT Bloodshed Marked Cook’s Landing at Poverty Bay

•(By Stephi

:n Gebard.)

Stately and unhurried, a barque came sailing over the sea’s horizon. In lonely majesty she moved across the illimitable leagues of ocean, and beside her marched the endless procession of the waves, and above her arched the empty immensity of the sky. Her tall spars dipped and swayed; her great sails bellied to the breeze; her bluff bows thrust aside importunately jostling billows. Out of the east, dark against the amber and gold of the sunrise came the first ship to New Zealand.

In the foretop, ship’s boy Nicholas Young sat perilously perched astride the royal yard, scanning the curving rim of the sea. All morning he sat there. When the ship heeled, he looked straight down at blue-black water, veined and mottled silver with foam, slipping away astern. The deck seemed very distant, separated from him by the full height of mast and topmast, and by a maze of intricate rigging. Down there, the moving figures of men showed tiny, and he felt at sight of them a sense of loneliness and detachment as though he sat among the clouds, alone with the birds of the air.

On the vessel was a stir of expectation, for by many signs—sea lions and land birds and drifting coastal wrack —it was plain that land w r as near. But not until the sun stood high in the zenith was it seen. It was Nicholas Young who sighted it—a faint but unmistakable blue shadow traced against the rim of the sky, the outline of hills unseen before by any English eyes. So faint it was, he glanced away to ease his sight, then stared a second time to make sure. His long-drawn shout of “Land, oho!” thrilled the ship’s company. Hen came thronging on deck, to clamber aloft and see for themselves, and keen-eyed, blue-coated Captain Cook emerged from his cabin to call for a compass-bearing. Cook at Poverty Bay. Before dusk fell on that memorable Friday of October 6, 1769, the moun-tain-tops of New Zealand could be plainly discerned from the Endeavour’s deck. How far distant they were, Cook could not guess, but when sighted they must have been all of a hundred miles away. The breeze fell light, and all next morning the ship drifted in slowly toward the land. “In the afternoon when a breeze sprung up we were still distant seven or eight leagues,” Cook recorded. “The land appeared still larger, as it was more distinctly seen, with four or five ranges of hills rising one over the other, and a chain of mountains above all, which appeared to be of an enormous height. About 5 o’clock we saw the opening of a bay which seemed to run pretty far inland, upon which we hauled our wind and stood in for it. We also saw smoke ascending in various places on shore. When night came on, however, we kept plying off and on till daylight, when we found ourselves to leeward of the bay. “We could now perceive that the hills were clothed with wood, and that some of the trees in the valleys were very large. By noon we fetched in. . . .” Nicholas Young stared wide-eyed as the ship moved in. Two canoes paddled across the bay ahead. Houses could be seen on the shore, and what appeared to be a stockyard or a deer-park, but was in reality a fortress of refuge in war. While the sails were brailed up by the merry seamen and the ship brought to an anchor, the officers and leaders of the expedition studied the shore with interest and speculation. White cliffs, like the cliffs of England, caused perhaps a pang of nostalgia. The Floating Island. Now the Endeavour had not spent two days crawling in toward the coast all unobserved. From several points on the coast she was sighted, and was at first taken to be a floating island. As she sailed into the bay, the Natives of the little village, at the Turanganui River mouth, gathered at the top of the beach, watching with curiosity and amazement. They saw the great anchor fall from the cat-head, heard the cable rattle out. They watched the seamen busy aloft, furling and gasketting the sails. With awe and amazement, they observed that the faces of these strangers were pale beyond imagining. But when the boats put off and pulled across the water toward them, panic seized them, and they fled into the friendly forest. But from hilltop and tree-trunk unseen eyes watched ifftently every movement made by the white strangers. Cook landed from his pinnace on the

tion of that strange sharp sound, Te Maro, feet planted firmly in the wet sand, poised his spear to hurl it at the nearest boat-boy. Then something happened that had never been known in Maoriland before. First Shots in Maoriland. For at the loud report, Te Maro dropped his spear and collapsed limp on the sand, in a spreading red pool, and his astounded companions, pausing to consider this phenomenon, saw with horror that he was dead. Yet no man stood within a hundred paces, except the four terrified boys. And there was no mark on his body 'but an insignificant round mark over his heart. They started to carry him up the beach from the water’s edge, but as the reality of it penetrated, panic overcame them, and dropping the body they fled headlong for the bush. Behind them the boat-boys still pulled frenziedly seaward, while the blue-coated captain and his companions returned to stare with more curiosity than regret at Te Maro’s corpse. Such was the white man’s advent. It presaged much of what was to follow. In later years the sound of shots was a commonplace in that quiet tideway that is still called, as Cook named it, Poverty Bay. But go there now and you will find it greatly changed. There are no shots fired there now, unless it be to scare the blackbird from the orchard or bag the fleeting bunny in the copse. Where Te Maro fell, the fishing boats tie up beside the quay. Where Cook saw native whares has grown the prosperous town of Gisborne, with its streets and shops and tall buildings, something of which the Maori never dreamed, and yet accepted as commonplace by the Maori people of to-day. Where the bush trees fringed the river shore, the modern traveller must walk along the paved waterfront between the freezing works and the mooring basin; and where Cook set foot ashore he will find a granite obelisk. All that remains of the day of discovery is an ancient, rusty cannon that once leered through the Endeavour’s port but now gapes useless at the headland called, after the boy who sighted New Zealand, Yocng Nick’s Head. But if you sail, as once I sailed, in a ship without an engine, steering by the winds of heaven, you will see Poverty Bay as Cook saw it, under the foot-rope of a questing jib, or as “young Nick” saw it, from a swaying masthead. White cliffs like the cliffs of England, with the waves breaking at their feet. Green hills piling, range upon range, far inland, to the high mountains of the Huiarau.

(Next Wednesday: The Heresy of Kereopa te Ran.)

e east bank of the Turanganui River ■ mouth. Seeing some Natives across the ’ stream, he rowed across in the small p yawl, and leaving it in charge of four j boys—was young Nicholas one?— • walked with Mr. Banks and Dr. Sol- : ander toward a number of huts sev- ? eral hundred yards from the water- ’ side. But long before he reached them , the natives plunged into the bush. As : they did so, there was a shout from ) the men left with the pinnace, and the sharp report of a musket for the first 1 time woke the echoes in the woods of : Ao-tea-Roa. Temerity of Te Maro. Now there was at this time, in the pa at Turanganui, a Ngati Oneone man named Te Maro, and he was famous for his indomitable courage. A fight to him was what it is to an Irishman or a bull-terrier, the spice of existence. As he saw the yawl pull back to the eastern bank, and the four lads devote their attention to the receding figures of their commander and his companions, there crept into his brain an idea in keeping with his warlike nature. He turned to his three companions, and, pointing to the boys on the yawl, whispered tersely “Patu! Kill!” No further word was needed. Lance in hand, the four warriors rushed from the bush across the narrow stretch of shingle that separated them from the water’s edge. A warning shout from the coxswain of the pinnace put the lads on guard, and they pushed out into the stream. Close behind them pounded along the bank Maro and his men, when a sharp report startled them, and something hummed past overhead. They stopped, glanced round, but there was nothing to be seen, and the men of the other boat were a hundred yards away. So once again they turned to the attack. The heavy yawl was not yet clear of the shallows. Undeterred by a repeti-