“Where Quiet Waters Gently Room"

Ladies' Mirror, 1 December 1924, Page 18

“ Where Quiet Waters Gently Room"

cA (Camera Study of Springs, cAuckland by J. Q. Holland

Porirua to Kapiti was a great rendezvous for whalers in the thirties. These men are generally painted as a wild lot, but one at least of the stations seems to have been a model of discipline. This was Captain Tommy Evan's on a tiny islet off Kapiti. "His boat," wrote Wakefield, after a visit in 1839, "might have been taken for a fancy gig from a man-of-war or yacht. . . . The crew were generally in a sort of uniform— or blue worsted shirts with white binding on the seams, white trousers, and sou'-westers. A mat was in the stern sheets; the holes were care-

fully covered with matting; the narpoons, lances, mast, and the very whiff, were protected by covers of canvas painted green. When she clashed alongside a vessel at anchor, the oars were shipped, and the steer oar was drawn in and received by the after-oarsman as the headsman left the boat. She was then shoved off. with a line from her bow thwart to the vessel, each man remaining in his place in regular man-o'-war style." It is interesting to think of things being done in this spick and span style away at the ends of the earth in the days before ever the

King's writ ran as a regular thing. Seven years after Mr. Wakefield wrote came the fighting around Porirua, and the arrest of the notorious old Te Rauparaha at Plimmerton by a landing party under Midshipman McKillop, the story of which has been so interestingly told in Mr. James Cowan's recent book "The New Zealand Wars and the Pioneering Period." It was then that the old Porirua Barracks were erected on the sand spit by Plimmerton, the ruined walls of which still stand. Another relic of the troublous clays before Maori and pakeha had come to understand one another is the old blockhouse still standing at the Upper Hutt. This was built in

1861, and garrisoned from time to time by the Upper Hutt Militia, mostly bushmen and sawyers. Some American moving picture people took most careful photographs and measurements of it a few months ago, but the average Wellingtonian does not know it is there. For those who wish to inspect this loop-holed relic of the days that were I may explain that it is only about a quarter of a mile off the main road, which is left by the Wallaceville Road at Quinn's Post, and the first turning to the right then taken. A little distance down this by-road the blockhouse will be seen standing among the trees, still in a very fair state of preservation.