A HIDING PLACE OF TE RAUPARAHA'S.

King Country Chronicle, Volume I, Issue 6, 30 November 1906, Page 3

A HIDING PLACE OF TE RAUPARAHA'S.

[By W. T. Morpeth.]

" You follow along the beach at low water for about a mile and a half, till you come to a place where the cliffs are overhanging. There you will find the whares up above the sea on a ledge of the cliff, and nearly buried by the sand."

Such were the directious given me by Malcolm Shera, a stalwart, hardbit pioneer; who, with his Maori wife and two children, unassisted by Governments or Banks, untrammelled by Land Boards, untroubled by Receivers, practically cut off from, mankind, has for the last twelve years wrought with Nature, and found sustenance, and built a home in the lovely valley Nukuhakari; the most inaccessible, but the richest and most fertile spot in all the wide mysterious King Country. The tide was still half in, but, impatient of delay, I started on my quest. Sure enough, after a tiresome scramble over huge boulders, and round waterworn papa fragments, I perceived upon rounding a point, that the cliffs towering above me were no longer perpendicular, but suddenly leaned heavily outwards, massive and terrible. There, too, eighty feet up from the sea, was a slanting ledge, the far end falling away into the cliff, while the end nearer to where I stood widened out, gathering into a little round hillock

crowned with ice plant, and descended somewhat abruptly to a level platform of rock. This again dropped by a sheer fall of twelve or fourteen feet to a roundish ledge, which fell away by an easy slope of eight or ten feet to the level of the beach. The rocky platform which I have endeavoured to describe can be reached with ease when the tide is out, and I now remembered my friend's injunction to wait till low water. Either I must scale the perpendicular face of rock, or wait a full two hours till the tide receded. A false step meant a fall backwards, and possibly a broken neck. Somewhat dubiously I surveyed the wall, but a close examination showed me a number of water-worn grooves, which promised a somewhat precarious foothold. Egged on by a native intolerance of delay, and also, perhaps, by a certain love of risk inherent in most New Zealanders, I flung my hook up in front of me, and clambering up to the lower ledge, arid holding on, as the saying is, by my eyebrows, succeeded in working my way up foot by foot till I gained the top. My way now lay up a rather steep slope of blue clay, but a nearer view of the ledge did not at all reassure me. For not only did it seem a widly impossible place for any sane person to build a whare, but I could not see where the occupants could get their water. Surely, I thought, the place must be further round. Still, to make sure, I ascended the slope, cutting my steps as I went, perfectly convinced that I was simply wasting time. This impression lasted a moment or two after reaching the top, when suddenly I perceived the object of my search. One whare is more than half buried, and all that iremains to indicate the position of the other, is about a foot or so of totara post projecting above the surface. Though about ninety years old, this post is still sound, except where it is eaten by insects, or ' honeycombed" (Maori, tataraki). The framework of the other appears to have been built of kauri, puriri, and akeake, with purlins of kohekohe, and even of kawakawa. It is thatched with toe-toe, and lined inside, very neatly, with kakaho, the toe-toe stems, and though damp and brown with age, the remains are in a remarkably good state of preservation. The wall on the sea side has been crushed in; there is about four feet of wet, sandy deposit inside, and about three feet of the roof are still uncap tured by the ever-encroaching sand. Here the terrible Te Rauparaha, for once defeated, concealed himself, with a small following, from his foes. A splendid savage, crafty, resourceful, indomitable; treacherous, a conqueror and leader of men, this island Napoleon, for more than a quarter of a century, scourged the West Coast and terrorised its quaking inhabitants, from Kawhia harbour to Pencarrow Heads. By what particular arrow of outrageous fortune Te Rauparaha, or " Robuller," as the white sailors called him, was compelled to seek seclusion on this sea-girt cliff, this deponent knows not, but the locality is in keeping with the character of the man, and the accounts of his daring exploits. The coast is rocky and inhospitable, the surf breaks all day on jagged rocks and huge boulders, and the surroundings are wild and rugged in the extreme. The only approach is from the north, and then only at low water with safety. There is a view of the spur down which a war party would approach from the Waikato, and of a short section of the beach along which a taua would travel. Three miles or so .away rugged, bush-clad Moeatoa rises sheer out of the sea, massive, buttressed, broad-shouldered; at its iron base the surf boils and thunders all day long. A stern and forbidding sea-board stretches away further northward, gradually, becoming more and more indistinct, but emerging from the haze to determine abruptly at Albatross Point, clear and straight like the bow of a man-o'-war. A mile out to sea is a fairly large reef of rock, which'the combers come curling over, but never cover. Round a projecting point to the south a gull comes circling but catching sight of me swerves suddenly, and with shrill cries disappears over-head.

The food of the refugees consisted probably of pawa, mussels, crawfish, crabs and fish, and, no doubt, by occasional stealthy excursions into the bush, which fringes the sandy beach at Nukuhakari, they would augment their scanty larder and vary their diet by a welcome kit of paratawhiti. From the cliff overhead there falls a tiny trickle of water. The name of one whare is Te Urunga-Paraoa, significant enough when I explain that it means " to use the greenstone mere (or hand-club) for a pillow!" The second whare was called Titi-Matarua. From such a hardy, virile fighting stock are ye descended, ye careless, happy brown-skins of these calm, in glorious days.