WHEN MEN WALKED

Otago Witness, Issue 3596, 13 February 1923, Page 21

WHEN MEN WALKED

INTERESTING REMINISCENCES. The feat of the old man who recently walked from Wellington to Auckland has brought back to the minds of many old colonists stories of long tramps through the country in the very early days of the dominion’s history (says our Auckland corspondent) A special case was mentioned in which Mr Justice Chapman’s father, with the aid of Maori camp followers, tramped all the way from Auckland to New Plymouth to meet a prominent man from Wellington who came up the coast to New Plymouth to meet him there somewhere in the fifties. The narrator of the story thought his father had told him that the two officials then walked to Wellington, preferring to go that way instead of taking passage in a 20-ton schooner, which had the reputation of being an unreliable seaboat and a very slow sailer, in which one of them had previously had a very bad trip. Men do not tramp very long distances nowadays was the opinion expressed by a number of descendants of early colonists who happened to meet together in one of the social rooms of an hotel where they were staying. One said that he had often heard his father say that his grandfather, who was one of the first white settlers near Cambridge, used to walk to Auckland and back once a year to attend to business matters. Another who was in the city in order to make arrangements for a world tour, said that his father, who started business in southern Taranaki in ’6B, “used to walk to Wanganui and back once a month to bank his money and to buy goods—the trip there and back being about 100 miles. Sir George Grey took long journeys on foot and generally liked one white companion with him as well as his Maori followers, was what another man said his father had often told him. The Rev. Mr Whiteley, who was killed at the V(’hite Cliffs in ’69, thought nothing of walking hundreds of miles in the course of his work. The great Bishop Sehvyn day after day covered long distances, and had the gift of being a sound sleeper so that he got up fresh every morning ready for any new task, for none was too hard for him. Perhaps one of the most interesting records of early New Zealand was the mail service between New Plymouth and Auckland in the early fifties, when a fortnightly servioe was established between the two places. Maoris did a good deal of the work, and so conscientiously was it oarried out that these men, who adopted the peculiar jogtrot of the early Maoris, covered a distance of five miles in an hour, and, this average they maintained by working in shifts during the daylight hours. It is quite true, however, that about 20 miles was the extent of any one man’s journey; but the time-table was faithfully kept.