ROUND THE MOUNTAIN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16003, 20 February 1914, Page 6

ROUND THE MOUNTAIN

SOME TARANAKI BY-PATHS

(Written for the Otago Daily Times.) By James Cowan. The saying that the best place to see the mountains is from below is particularly true of Mount Egmont, or, as the Maoris call it, Taranaki or Puke-o-Naki. Climbing, you quickly lose the grace and magnificent symmetry by the lone peak's outline descending in so splenaid a sweep on every side to the circling woodlands and grassy plains, the perfection of beauty in line and form. A fleeting glimpse of the silver spearhead of I'aranaiu is unforgetable, but truly to appreciate the nobility, the regal aloofness, of the mountain one should ride or drive around its spreading base, 'preferably from Stratford or Eltham or Hawera to New Plymouth by way of the western or seaside road, which curves round with the half-moon of the ironsanded coast. This thoroughfare, good alike in summer or winter—far different from the inland bush roads,—leads through Manaia and Opunake, story-townships of the military settler days, passes within a few miles of i Parihaka, once the showvillage of the Maori prophets, but shorn of its olden glory since Te Whiti died. On the left hand green fields and eyesoothing green clumps of trees, native and pakeha, and then the blue and dancing sea; on the right the farms and halfcleared and stumped lands that merge into the dark, thick forests of rata and pine, and then ascending in a grand coneswell, massy but of delicious beauty of curve, out of the purple-hazed woods that swathe its vast hips and waist as in a soft made mantle, up and up into a boll-tent form of purest white, burning white these summer days against the blue dome of the sky. From the Stratford side, on the east, and from the southern townships also, the projecting knob of Rangitoto, which the European map-makers have named Fantham's Peak, deforms the absolute symmetry of this solitary Alp, but riding on around the western road the traveller sees this obtruding hump gradually sink into the parent mountain and the bright-helmed father of Taranaki, the source ana lite of its streams and its fertility, stands out against the heavens shapely and unblemished of form, the snow-mountfiin ol an artist's dream.

Puke-haupapa, or Snowy Mount, was the most ancient Maori-Polynesian name for Egrnont, given to it by the first of the brown sea-adventurers who came sailing down the heaving waters of the North Tarauaki Bight, seeking new homes and more spacious lands than those of Tahiti and liangiatea. Later came the name Puke-o-Naki, which commemorated a female ancestor and chief tainess; the " Puke" here is not a geographical term, but rather refers to womanly curves, the charms of Venus. Tara-a-Naki was a subsequent variant, which in there days has been shortened to Taranaki. Some imaginative writers have translated "Taranaki'' as "Naked Spear." " Tara" certainly is capable of being interpreted as " spear.-point'' or " barb," but u«» Maori story connotes nothing of this kind. The name originated in tfie aboriginals' primitive fashion of comparing the graceful slope of the great mountain to the physical beauties of his loved one or his chief - tainess. We have its like in the Song of Solomon. The name is also an illustration of the ancient customs of " fcapa"-ing or naming conspicuous objecte in the landscape after some part of the new owner's body, in token of annexation and occupation.

One of the most beautiful pictures of the peak is from the little Maori villago of Hokorima, which is about eight miles from Hawera by way of Nownanby township. I have this mountain view clearly in my mind's eye now : the grassy fields, the kainga of Titokowaru's ■warrior hapu, the tree-groves, and the space between two spires of foliage filled in as in a theatre drop-scene by the lovely white-topped cone lifting 8000 ft into the glowing sky. So high, so serene, so utterly removed from the lower world was that mountain summit that it seemed the very Tikitfiki-o-Rangi, or the Toi-o-Rangi of which the grey old men of the brown race tell, the " Pinnacle ot Heaven," the twelfth or highest heaven of all, the seat and throne of 10, the ancient of Days. It was on the green turfy marae in front of old Tauke's house that we sat and talked about the Mountain and its poetry and legendry, of which this Kaumatua of the Ngarnahino tribe is full. Tauke told of the wonderful past of Taranaki, and of the flight of the mountain from the Ruapehu Plains hitherward, tearing out the bed of what is now the Wanganui River as he. came pursued by the fiery bolts of the Ton-gariro-Rnapehu volcanic group—a Naturemyth which preserves a chapter of the geological history of New Zealand. Ho told, too, of the Tahurangi, the fairy people of the Mountain, whose forms aro never seen, but whose faint, mysterious music is sometimes heard by Maori bushmen and bird-hunteTS; the wispy mists which are seen rising from the mountain slopes on summer mornings such as this are called the camp-fire smokes of the Tahurangi. Other folk-talk of the olden Puke-haupapa we heard from Tauke, and songs ancient and modern, all reflecting tho Native lovo for, even adoration of, tho Mountain that symbolised their " Mann " and their national existence. Taranaki is the " Matua," tho parent of tho tribes that livo around its spreading base. This patriotic and poetic fancy is

easy to understand, for a lone and soaring height like this evokes worship from any primitive people, as from many a pakeha Nature-lover. " What is yon Mountain standing there above us?' 1 chanted the captain of tne war parties in Tauke's fighting days of SO years ago as ho lined his men up for the haka on this very spot before leading them off on the foresttrail against the pakeha soldiers. In ono thundering voice came the response in chorus, with thigh-smack and footstamp : " "fis Tarnnaki—yes, 'tis Taramiki! 0 draw near to us, Taranaki, that wo' may cmbace thee, embrace thee!' And again they yelled, " Taranaki—ah Taranaki! Thou shalt not be cast away, cast away to the pakeha!" All through the war, in the days of blood and lire, the Taranaki men invoked Taranaki Mountain, the emblem of their nationality, their silent guardian, and their reluge-place. Tauke, sitting there this morning on his sunny lawn, with a coloured blanket girt about his waist, his old white head bare, his spectacles on his nose, poring over the ecstatic visions of the Dreamer in " Whakekitenga," or Revelations, in a 50-year-old copy of the Scriptures, looked the mystic that he is. is a venerable man, weli on in the eighties; of noble descent in Maoridom, the seer and priest—Hauhau priest of Hokorima village, and the last of the Tohungas of Ngaruahine. He is the instructor of the local " whare-maire,' 1 the school of legend and tradition, genealogical recitals and ancient religion; for the Taranaki Maoris are conservative and still in large measure inimical in heart to the white man's faith and ways. His own religion is a curious mixture of ancient and present-day beliefs, and he is a good sample of the fanatic warriors whom Titokowaru on this coast and Te Kooti on the east led in desperate battle against the pakeha. Like" Mahomet and the Crusaders, Cromwell's Roundheads and the African dervishes, he is priest and soldier in one. .Nearly 60 years ago he was one of the Taranaki chiefs who went to the " uplifting " of Te Wherowhero, or Potatau, as the first Maori King, in the Waikato, and he was at Ngaruawahia, at the royal camp whero the Waikato and VVaipa Rivers meet, when the Taranaki war began in 1860. Hurrying back to his native district, he fought at the battle of Waireka, across on the other side of the mountain, where the Taranaki settlers for the first time met their Maori neighbours in fight. He was, too, Church of England lay-reader to his tribe at Waireka, for the Maori was devout m war as well as in peace. Then, in 1864, he became a Hauhau, and he was one of crazy band of heroes and fanatics who charged upon the British redoubt at Sentry Hill, or !e iVlorere —the railway from Havvera to New Plymouth passes just ■alongside the spot to-day,—and who were repulsed, leaving 40 or 50 of their desperate band dead on the ferny field. Tauke tells me that he used his " tupara," his double-barrelled gun, in that affair of half a century ago, and he shows his mutilated hand; a bullet struck it, and Tauke was a disabled man for some months thereafter. Eight of his Ngaruahine relatives fell in that 'mad assault upon a parapeted redoubt in open day. Later, Tauke fought all through the Hauhau wars up to 1869, and he was one of the bush-fighters who inflicted such a disastrous defeat upon the colonial forces at the Ngutu-o-te-Mami, when Von Tempsky was killed. That sad and storied spot is not far away; Tauke lives within sight of more than one of his olden battles against the white man. Now the ancient fanatic fire has died down, and Tauke contemplates calmly the changes in the countryside wrought by the pakeha's hand, for they are the will of the " Atua," and he buries himself again in the Prophets and Revelations, which he knows by heart so thoroughly, though, that he scarcely requires his treasured Bible ,now.

Old man Tauke tells me that he once wrote a " book" of Taranaki traditions and legends for Sir George Grey. This was a large note-book filled with local history and folk-stories, which he had heard irom the lips of liis elders in the days before the war. Sir George Grey, he thinks, took it away with him to South Africa; no doubt it is one of the MSS. now in the library at Capetown, the New Zealand books and documents which rightly we should have in this dominion. It was one of Tauke's elder relatives who gave Gxey the story of the Turi and the peopling of Taranaki published in "Polynesian Mythology." The old man is a storehouse of legends of the iuivt Canoe. " Look around you on these plains," hesays, " the Plains of Waimate, and see the groves of karaka trees which grow so plentiluliy. It was my ancestor Turi, from the island of Rangiatea, from far over the'great ocean, who brought those karaka trees here! Yes, pakeha, he ' grassed' those lands with karaka ; he brought the seed-berries of the karaka here from afar off, and planted them just as you white men brought the gTass-seed when you came!"

Now turn we to another scene, the which is reached by a pleasant road that leads us down by the Wai-ngongoro River, " snoring away there," as the Natives say, between its high part-wooded banks and passing the little bush-belted reserve sacred to the memory of Von Tempsky and his comrades, the site of Ngutu-o-te-Manu stockade. White dairy-farmers are settled over these beautiful plains now, ana even the Maori is beginning to milk cows and supply the creameries, for there is no one to take up Te Whiti's sacred mat of phophecy and feather-badge of passive opposition to the white man's ways. Old battlefields are everywhere, from Hokorima down to the sea. That way, seawards, lay our track after bidding goodbye to Tauke. We presently picked up Mr William Wil-. liams—a veteran Coast settler, whose death was announced in the Taranaki papers only a few days ago—and riding down over the beautiful farming lands we came by a steep cliffy descent in the black-sand beach at the mouth of the Kapuni River, with the historic island-like rock-pa of Waimate rising straightly over us. Tethering our horses with flax-bushes that grew by the hill-foot, we clambered to the top of the famous old fort, by the worn and ancient footholds in the sandstone rock cut out by the Maori centuries ago. Old William Williams, for all his 70 years, came up that precipitous ascent like a schoolboy; and there, seated on the trenched and pitted flat top of the pa, a citadel guarded on one side by the sea and on the other by a swampy lagoon—the Waimate, or "Waters of Death, from which the pa and the plains take their name, —we tried to picture this romantic spot as it was in 1834, when H.M.S. Alligator shelled the pa and its occupants, and the British forces for the first time met the Maori in battle. That was when the Alligator was recovering from the Ngati-Ruanui the two white captives, Mils Guard and her little baby and son, Jack Guard —" Old Jack," as he is called, is still alive at Port Underwood, on the Marlborough coast —who had been taken after the wreck of Captain Guard's whaling barque Harriet further up the coast, near Cape Egmont. There was murderous work on the beach below us here, and after the pa had been shelled and captured it was set on fire; the high hillfort on the opposite side of the river mouth, 0 Rangituapeka, was also taken. The hill-forts were crowded with houses, and the food stores were full of potatoes and kuroara, The Alligator's cannonade, it is recorded, lasted for three hours; the warship was assisted by the New South Wales Government schooner_ Isabella, and even after the Natives hoisted a white flag of truce the shelling was continued. Our talk of pakeha-Maoxi conflict is brought up to more recent times when Mr Williams, a tough and hardy specimen of the old "colonial band," tells of his adventures in the Hauhau war. He landed in New Zealand as a child in 1840, and Taranaki was his first New Zealand home. At Wanganui he learned the Maori tongue, and later he became interpreter to the forces i nthe campaigns against the rebel Natives, Titokowaru's cannibal "Tekau-ma-rau." He was in the Wanganui Cavalry for some time, and in 1868 and 1869 he had innumerable escapes from Maori bullet and tomahawk, when scouting, despatchcarrying, foraging, stock-driving-, and fighting m rogular engagements. Of one Maori warrior in particular, the locally-celebrated Katene Tu-whakaruru, who was a thorough fire-eater, fighting sometimes on one side and sometimes on tho other, he had many' yarns to tell. Ono concerned a skirmish near the banks of the Waitotara, down towards Wanganui, in 1869. William Williams was a volunteer and guide with Colonel Whltmore at this time. Katene

was a- very active scout and fighting-man on the Hauhau side, a " tiro toa," a "real warrior," and he used to ride a white horse, which many of his white _ f oemen had endeavoured to capture. This horee Katene had trained in thorough calavry fashion to stand quietly while he dismounted and fired over his neck. After this skirmish the white column was retiring, but Williams waited for his favouriteantagonist, the man on the white horse, whose identity he did not then know. He had already exchanged about 20 shots with him' that day. Presently Katene appeared over the brow of a knolL Williams knelt down, took deliberate aim with his carbine, and fired. His enemy felL Two Maoris picked him up, but he fell again, and then he was carried off into the bush. '

Years afterwards, in the days of peace, Mr Williams was one of the Native Commissioners for the West Coast appointed by Sir George Grey, and to assist him Katene was appointed as assessor. The two veterans were talking over the fighting times one day, and comparing their adventures, when Williams asked Katene about the man on the white horse, with whom he had had more than one caTbine duel, and who he had at last shot on the Waitotara.

"I am that man !" said Katene. Mlt was this body of mine that stopped your bullet." Then, stripping off his coat and shirt, the old "toa'' showed where Willianms's ball had struck his powerful chest and had been deflected by a rib. He was truly a battle-scarred warrior, for on his body he bore eight or nine bullet wounds.

Sitting thus on the coast-guarding story-place, our backs against the tall flaxbushes, our tobacco-smoke curling up into the lazy air, we talked of many curious Fenimore-Cooper adventures in the frontier land; " a pair of friends, though I was young, and Matthew seventy-two." Down below us there in the sedge-bordered lagoon we saw the great stones that had been hurled from this very pa-top hen a Waikato war-party was beaten jack by the Ngati-Ruanui some 90 years ago. Wai J mate was practically impregnable to native weapons, or even to muskets, though it could not stand against the Alligator's artillery. A beautiful picture this, the blue and swelling ocean out yonder, the snowy snrf advancing and retreating along the black ironsand beach, the bold outlines of the ancient hill-pas, and then the gentle up-«well of the coast farm lands, grassy and cattle-sprinkled, here and there a comfortable-looking homestead, and, in the background, lording it magnificently over the goodly plains, the snowy Mountain, the " Matua" of the land. MoTe tales we hear from the old soldieT-settler, of how, long after the war, in 1878 or 1879, he took his carbine once more, and with a few Maori companions, followed up the trail of Hiroki the murderer, who was wanted for the slaying of one M'Lean, a member of a Plains survey party. Hereabouts, near the Kaupokonui stream — where the largest dairy factory in New Zealand! now stands—one of his Maoris fired at and wounded Hiroki, who, however, escaped to Parihaka, where he was given shelter and protection by Te Whiti and his followers. Williams did not give up the chase, but, with one native' companion—after leaving their guns at Oeo to avoid irritation —rode right in to Parihaka, the home and citadel of the unfriendly Maoris, and asked that Hiroki should be surrendered. There they had a very narrow escape of losing their lives, as the result of their rashness, for they were surrounded by a ferocious armed band, a " taua maru," in revenge for the wounding of Hiroki, and it was only through the intervention of some visiting chiefs, Ngati-Awa men from the Wellington district, that their hoTses were restored to them and they were permitted to leave, amidst the brandishing of guns and tomahawks and yells of hatred and derision. Hiroki lived in Parihaka, always armed, until John Bryce's celebrated " raid," when Te Whiti and Tohu were taken prisoners; he was arrested then and shortly thereafter hanged, as " utu" for the murder of M'Lean.

The sun is westering now, and the snowa on the Mountain are beginning to take on the golden glow of the departing day, and the wooded lower parts of the " Matua" are bathed in a deepening hazy blue, soft and swimming in the afternoon light. So we mount again, and riding up to the coast road say good-bye to the old colonial hand and Tide on Opunake-wards. A storied land this, as well as a beautiful one, for there are everywhere reminders of the battle-days that made it possible lor white farmers to farm all these Maori lands. At Manaia we see the old A.G. redoubt, with its tall wooden watch-tower, the last of the military posts built to hold the Plains. In the middle of Manaia township is a monument to the colonial soldiers who fell in the engagements round these parts. Further on, at Opunake, on a fine outswell by the coast, there is the old redoubt on a commanding cliff. Here horse and man find a square meal and a good night's rest, and the morning bright and early fipds both on the road around the Mountain foot to Parihaka, where the Prophet of the Mountain once_ made history and worried Native Ministers with his oracular deliverances and mystic revelations, in the days before his potato was cooked. But Kaati, Parihaka is a long story in itself.