SUCH THINGS WERE

Waikato Independent, Volume XXXIX, Issue 3552, 11 May 1939, Page 3

SUCH THINGS WERE

The Story of Cambridge from Earliest Recorded Times.

By C. W. VENNELL

CHAPTER VIII.

(Continued).

In 1843 and 1844, Brown was encouraged in his arduous work by visits from Bishop Selwyn to Matamata and Maungatautari. On the first occasion Selwyn confirmed several of the Maungatautari converts who came to Matamata to meet him. In December, 1844, after meeting the Bishop at Otawhao, Brown accompanied him to Maungatautari, where Selwyn spent the Christmas season enquiring into the cases of several baptised natives who were reported to have lapsed from their profession of faith. Brown had been having a worrying time from 1843 onwards, in this regard, but the Bishop had shown his faith in the missionary’s efforts by appointing him Archdeacon of Tauranga on 20th September, 1844. He was to show his great confidence in the new Archdeacon still further, before many years had passed. There is on record a letter written by Brown on 29th February, 1848, declining the appointment to a Bishopric which had been offered him by Selwyn.* Maungatautari must have been one of Brown’s most promising districts, in a territory which extended from the Bay of Plenty in the north to beyond Lake Taupo in the south; and from thp Cambridge district east as far as Opotiki. As well as Brown’s own visits to this district, the natives themselves made more frequent visits to Tauranga. They took with them pigs and flax, and in exchange they bought, not muskets and powder, but bibles and prayer-books. So great was the demand that the supply of books soon ran out, In those days stocks could not be replenished simply by cabling home an urgent order. Mails were infrequent and came by devious ways. Letters and parcels, when they did arrive, often bore a date twelve, or even eighteen months old.

Just how keen some natives, at any rate, were to obtain books is illustrated by a story which Brown records, of a hoary-headed old chief named Karoro. The latter came to his tent one night at Te Wera a te Atua and confessed that he had been the means of keeping his two sons from joining the church. He now wanted three testaments for himself and for them. The missionary had had a most disappointing day, for reasons which will be revealed in due course, and he decided to put the chief’s enthusiasm to a severe test. He told Ivaroro therefore that if he would walk back to Tauranga with him, he could have his three testaments. Brown would not have been surprised if that had been the last he ever heard of the matter, but at daybreak next morning, as he was preparing to set out for Matamata, Karoro made his appearance. He seemed ill-equipped for travelling. It was a bleak morning, and the old chief was wearing only “a rough mat girded round his loins with a leather belt,” and carried a native spear in his hand. Brown goes on to say that they had not gone very far when the storm gathered strength. “The old chief, whose fine grey locks were streaming from his bare head in the wind, turned round to me and observed: ‘I have often, while a native priest, checked the wind and the rain,’ and then added with an arch look, ‘lt would puzzle me to stop this storm.’ He walked admirably throughout the day, accomplishing a distance of twenty miles. On one of our party remarking how firmly he trod for so old a man, he replied: ‘lt is the heart which gives strength’.” Four days later Karoro left Tauranga on his lonely fifty-mile tramp back to Maungatautari. He was highly delighted with the gift of the testaments for himself and his sons. “I do not think,” wrote Brown on 18th September, 1846, “that our friends in England, who are whisking about on railroads at the rate of thirty miles an hour, are in a proper position to judge of the labour which Karoro has undergone to procure three testaments. To me it is a cheering fact, and nerves one’s energies for fresh exertions . . . that a chief verging on sixty years of age is willing, in ordgr to procure for himself and _ family the gift of three testaments, to undertake a journey of a hundred miles through country where, hi consequence of swamps and woods and hills, it requires considerable exertion to perform two miles and a half in an hour,”

While Brown was toiling among the tribes of his huge territory, other missionaries began to arrive in the interior of the island, to carry on the good work so bravely pioneered. The first mission station at Otawhao (Te Awamutu) was established by the Rev. B. Y. Ashwell in 1839. He was succeded by the Rev. John Morganj who had previously been at Matamata with Brown. He had been sent there to assist the latter six months after the station was first established. The station at Mangapouri had been abandoned some time before, for the same reason as Matamata, and Mr Hamlin had gone down the river to join Robert Maunsell at the Waikato IleadsJ The Roman Catholics and Methodists also beg an to extend their civilising influence to the then untamed Waikato in the 1830’s. In November, 1834, the Rev. W. Woon, of the latter church, took up the work at Kawhia. He was soon followed'by the Rev. John Whitely and the Rev. James Wallis, the latter making Raglan his headquarters.! Early in 1840, Bishop Pompallier, who had landed at ITokianga two years previously, paid a visit to Tauranga, and from there made an inland journey to Matamata and the Waikato. The details of his journey** suggest that he must have crossed over the Cambridge district. More fortunate than Brown, however, he was cai lied in a litter across the hills and swamps, instead oi walking. He promised the natives to send a priest to live among them, his choice falling on Father Viard, who had accompanied him. and Reflections of an Old New Zealander, E. Maxwell, 1935. tThe Old Frontier, James Cowan, F.R.G.S., 1922. History of the English Church in New Zealand, H. T. Purchas, M.A., 1914. tThe History of Methodism in New Zealand, the Rev. William Morley, D.D., 1900. **The Church in New Zealand, J. J. Wilson, 1910. (To be Continued).