Story of a Pioneer.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVI, Issue 10, 8 March 1911, Page 7

Story of a Pioneer.

THE LATE MR. C. W. HU RS THOU SE—SOLDIER, SUR VE YOR, EXPLORE R, ROAD-B UILDER. AN ADVENTUROUS AND USEFUL LIFE. (See Illustrations.)

By Our Wellington Correspondent.

IRIHANA the KAIRURI > the ■ ■ I Maoris called him—“ Wilson, ylt the Man who Rules lines” — the surveyor. As “Wirihana,” too, lie was known to his brother surveyors of Taranaki and the King Country, and other outdoor men of the old brigade, the pioneers with rifle, theodolite and axe. Wilson, his “middle” name, was picked upon by his old friends and sometime enemies, the Maoris, as the easiest of his three names to pronounce, and as “Wirihana” he was noted all through Taranaki and the King Country, where he was a conspicuous and not unpicturesque figure, and typical of the hard-living, strenuous back-blocks —a tall, straight, square-shouldered, long-legged bushman, surveyor, and roadmaker. Careless of dress, and appearances, full of dry and drawling humour. “A keerless man in his talk" was \\ iri liana, but, like the Jim Bludso whose adventures he liked to recite, “an awk wai’d cuss in a row.” He was a product of the real pioneering days, rear'd amidst wars and alarms, familiar wito the bush from his boyhood, taking every adventure, whether fighting Maoris oi wrestling with the many mishaps iml dangers of exploring work in the great bush, as just part of the day's work. This was the late Mr Charles Wilson Hnrsthouse, ex-Chief Engineer of the New Zealand; Roads Department, who died at his home at the Lower Hutt last Saturday at the age of seventy years. Time was when Mr Hursthouse was a splendid specimen of the physique developed by the constant hard exercise that is part of the bush surveyor’s life. But in late years the pace had told upon him, and he was but a ghost of his old hearty-looking self . when I last shook hands with him on Lambton Quay. He had been in Wellington for the past ten or eleven years in the responsible position of Engineer for the roads and bridges of the colony, first under the Lands and Survey Department, and then in a separate Department, the Roads, and; he only retired on his pension at the end of March, 1909, after a half century spent in the service of his country. Like the late Mr George J. Roberts, Chief Surveyor of Westland —another hard-working back-country surveyor and explorer—his life in leisured retirement was pathetically short. Some Early Adventures. “Wirihana” Hursthouse was just 19 when he fired his first shot at a Maori enemy. He and his family had many friends amongst the Maoris who lived in and around New Plymouth in the early days of that settlement, but when the Taranaki war of 1800 broke out all the kindly old relations were at an end. The sturdy English stock that founded New Plymouth—the Hursthouses, the ■ Carringtons, the Smiths, the Atkinsons, the Richmonds, and their fellow-settlers —were not to be driven out by the Maoris; and they stuck to their ground and fought the brown man hard year after year. Hursthouse was born in England, at Norwich, date 1841 —but he had been brought up in Taranaki, and be was a tough-muscled, athletic young fellow, fit for any sort of fighting, when war broke out in 1800. One of his adventures, shortly before the war, was a long trip by foot and canoe through the l/ art of the North Island, in company with his cousin. Mr. S. Percy Smith (ex-Surveyor-General), and one or two other young Taranaki men. They went by the coast to the Mokau, paddled up that rapid-whitened river as far as they could go, and then walked across to Lake Taupo and Rotorua district, thence returning by waV of the Tongafiro and Ruapehu mountain group, and down to Wanganui and the West Const, and so back home.

after an absence of four months. It wai a wonderful bit of rough bush travelling, performed just before the celebrated scientist Hoehstellcr penetrated to the laupo and Rotorua country, then in its pristine Maori state. I hree or four years prior to this expedition Hursthouse had been a cadet in the Provincial Government Survey Department at New Plymouth. At the beginning ot 1860 he was an assistant surveyor, and he was the ‘‘Kai ruri” chosen to carry out the fust survey of the disputed block of land at Waitara, over which the Ten Years Maori war began. On February 20 hr went out to start th” survey, with Mr. Robert Parris, Chief Commissioner of Native A flairs, and Mr. Octavias Carrington, Chief Surveyor, but before lie could get any work done he was stopped by the Maoris. Later, he completed the survey under the protect io of a military covering party. Then the fighting began. The Maoris took to their palisaded and rifle-pitted strongholds, and New Plymouth town was a big fort! fled camp. Fighting the Maoris. One of the first shots in the fust battle of the Taranaki war was fired by young Hursthouse, who had dropped his surveying instruments for gun and bayonet. This was at Waireka, the first engage ment fought by the New' Zealand volunteer forces, and in which the young set tiers greatly distinguished themselves. Waireka was fought a short distance to the south of New Plymouth town, near the coast. Later ho was in the battle of Mahoetahi, out in the direction of Waitara, where the Waikato warriors, who had come down to the assistance of Ngati-Awa, wore completely defeated, and Wot ini Taiporutu and more than forty of his fine lighting mon killed. The Imperial troops and the Taranaki volunteers fought side by side in this sharp little battle. Th rough 1860, ami again in 1863-64, Mr. Hnrsthouse was in numerous skirmishes, finishing with a smart, fight at Gilbert’s farm. During 1864-65 and *66 he was engaged in con st ructing roads in the vicinity of New Plymouth and in surveying and allotting land to military settlers at various places along the coast that curves out from Mt. Egmont. This work was fro quently one of great danger; in those troublous times the pioneer surveyor never knew when he might not get a volley from a party of Hauhaus in ambusli,; and the work required great alert ness ami considerable pluck. In 1866 Mr. Hurst house received a commission as ensign in No. 9 Company Military Settlers. Later, in Titokowaru’s war of 1868, when the disastrous engagement of Te Ngutu-o te-manu was fought, he was asked to take second in command of a company of Volunteer Militia Scouts for the prevention of surprises of settlers by the Maoris. For this he was promoted to be Lieutenant. Thirteen years , later, after the Parihaka affair, he received the appointment of Captain in the New Zee land Militia Surveying for the Railways. Amongst the im|>ortant survey work which Mr. Hnrsthouse carried on in the seventies and eighties were some railway surveys that are interesting to recall. In 1871 he made a preliminary survey for a railway line from the Patea district round the mast by Cape Egmont io New Plymouth. That was to be a coast rail way, but it Has not arrived yet. As a matter of fart, it was knocked on the head by the present line, across the conn try at the back of Mt. Egmont. Mr. Hnrsthouse helped to construct part of this line. In 1873 4. with a large number of Maoris, be built the road through the thick forest from Sentry Hill southwards to where the town of Stratfor!

now stands, where the work from the Hawera end was met; and in 1875 he constructed the Sentry Hill-Stratford railway section Ijater on Mr. Hursthonse was one of the pioneer surveyors and road-makers in the Main Trunk Kailway line through the King Country, and there he did some most useful work for the colony. With the Troops at Parihaka. Long before Te Whiti, the celebrated Prophet of Parihaka, became a power in the land, Mr. Hursthouse was friendly with him—had in faet known him before the Maori war of 1800 begin. So the surveyor became a very useful man to the Government when the trouble began, which culminated in Mr John Bryce’s famous march on Parihaka in 1881 with 1700 troops. He was a very good Maori linguist, and it was on one occasion when he was acting as interpreter at an interview between Te Whiti and Governor Gordon’s A.D.C. that the prophet used the famous expression : “Kua Maoa Te Taewa ” —“ The potato is cooked ” —meaning that the trouble had gone too far now to be settled by the Governor’s intervention. At the arrest of Te Whiti and Tohu Hiroki in 1881, Mr. Hursthouse was the interpreter to the military forces. Imprisoned by a King Country Prophet. ft was a couple of years later—lBB3— that Mr. Hursthonse met with an unpleasant adventure in the King Country, where he was engaged in making an exploration survey for the Auckland-Well-ington railway. This was capture and ill-treatment by a fanatical Hauhau called Mahuki, or Manu-kura (i“ Red Bird”), who had assumed the role of a prophet, and gathered around himself a band of rowdy Kingites, ready for any deed of hostility to the whites. The King Country had been closed to all pakehas for years, and it was only through the friendliness of the celebrated chief, Wahanui that the Main Trunk ■survey was permitted. 1 remember seeing Mahuki in the old King Country days a lank cadaverous black-bearded fellow, with the eyes of a madman. (He died insane in Auckland many years later, when serving a sentence for another turbulent act.) You may see the place where he bailed up Hursthouse from the railway line, a shott distance to the Auckland side of To Kuit.i, the presentday metropolis of the King Country, ft is close to the native village of Te Kumi. Mahuki ami his band of armed fanatics encountered Hursthouse and •his assistant surveyor, Newsham, pulled them ofl their horses, tied them up, and threw them into an old and dirty hut at a near-by settlement. there they were kept tied up with bullock chains to a post, and their hands bound till they got them free, for a couple of days, more than half-starvedi, and suffering much from the cold. They were at last rescued bv the notorious Te Kooti—who had been pardoned a short time previously by Mr John Bryce, Native Minister. and was anxious now to show his friendship for the whites. He and his people hospitably treated the much-knocked-about surveyors. Retribution quickly fell upon the Prophet. He and his howling fanatics raided the frontier township of Alexandria, on the Waipa River, just below Pirongia Mountain, threatening to burn it down; but they Were smartly arrested by the Armed Constabulary and Te Awamutu Cavalry Volunteers, and in due course expiated their offence in Mt. Eden Gaol. Tn the early eighties, too. “Wirihana” had a narrow escape from drowning on the Mokau bar. He was taking soundings there for the Government prior to the establishment of steam communication with that important King Country waterway, when the rollers capsized the little craft he was using. He and his companions would have lost their lives had it not been for Wetere te Rerenga,

the noted Mokau chief—he who was “wanted by the Government for his share in the White Cliffs massacre of 1869—who put off in a canoe from the shore and picked up the white men drowning in the surf. Such were a few of the events in the typical colonial's life. They are events which can never occur again, for the times have changed. Blockhouses and redoubts are no longer needed to guard the frontier settlers—there is no longer a frontier as there was when first I knew Wirihana Hursthouse. The days when the surveyor and the bush settler had to go armed to their daily work are far behind us. But they produced a grand, fearless stamp of men, of whom the veteran surveyor and road builder just passed away was one. He was a thorough bushman, was Wirihana Hursthouse; I have bright recollections of his resource in that line when we were together once on a rough exploring trip through the heart of the North Taranaki bush, from the King Country south to Stratford. That was twenty years ago. It was all dense forest country then, a roadless wilderness. Now it is becoming a well-settled, rieh farming district. And when we travel through those parts by road or comfortable train, and note what the pioneers have wrought, I think we should remember Wilson Hursthouse, for it is he, and men like him, who have made this new land of ours fit to live in.