Henry Williams and the Herald: Their First Visit to Tauranga Moana

Pilot Bay in the 1800s

Image: John Kinder, Mt Maunganui, Tauranga, 1874, 1937/15/46, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi O Tamaki

On 26th June 2026 the Karuwhā Trust held three events here in Tauranga Moana to commemorate CMS missionary Henry Williams’ first visit. 200 years ago, he arrived on the Herald, a 55-ton schooner captained by Gilbert Mair (senior) [1]. The two of them had helped construct the ship, launched in January 1826, on the beach at Paihia and the prime purpose for its voyage south was to obtain a better food supply for their fellow workers in the north.

Over the next two years Henry and others made at least four visits to Tauranga in the Herald, trading for potatoes.  While here, they were able to broker some peace and bring the good news of the Gospel to this area. They promised to send others to establish a mission station, which did come about in 1835. There were also other voyages undertaken to the Bay of Plenty in the 1830s, but these were in other vessels, as the Herald was unfortunately wrecked (but without loss of life) on the Hokianga bar in 1828. 

 

Dr Samuel Carpenter giving his Karuwhā Trust Lecture 26 June 2026.

Image: Karuwhā Trust

The three events held in June 2026 were very well attended.  The venue for the afternoon lecture by Dr Samuel Carpenter was relocated from the Elms Chapel to the nearby Vintage Car Club rooms to accommodate the demand for ticket sales. This was followed by a short walk to the old mission station and a guided tour for those who were interested in the Te Papa Mission site and its story.

Earlier in the day there had been a mihimihi and karakia at the Mission and Military Cemetery (formerly Otamataha Pā).  In the evening approximately 500 people attended the symposium presided over by Dr Joe Williams at Holy Trinity, where Dr Alistair Reece and others spoke.

Karuwhā Trust Symposium at Holy Trinity, 26 June 2026.

Image: Karuwhā Trust

There have been several previous articles on this website [2] dealing with Henry Williams and his various voyages.  Here I record a few other aspects of his life that I picked up from Dr Carpenter’s lecture and a podcast of an interview with Dr Alistair Reece. 

Henry was born in Gosport, Hampshire, in the United Kingdom in 1792 and rose to the rank of captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Following this he became an ordained priest and married Marianne Coldham. In 1823 they were shoulder-tapped by the Church Mission Society to come and help lead the fledgling mission in NZ. They were quite strong and assertive in leadership and the CMS in Pahia began to make headway with the first conversions and baptism of two local Māori in 1830. Henry was strong on the learning of te reo by missionaries and their wives and was very involved in the preparation and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. He and his brother William were largely responsible for the translation of the New Testament.

Henry Williams and te Kawenata Hou

Left image: Frontispiece, The Early Journals of Henry Williams. Pegasus Press Christchurch. Right image: Title page, first edition New Testament | Kawenata Hou.  https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/1st-Edition-New-Testament-Maori-1837/32152870474/bd

Henry and Marianne had 11 children. One son established Te Aute College, another was a parliamentarian, and a third was appointed a magistrate in the Native Land Court. Two daughters married other missionaries — Octavius Hadfield of Kapiti and Christopher Pearson Davies.  The latter was another connection with The Elms Te Papa. C. P. Davies and his family lived and worked there for seven years.

Notes

[1] The shipwright, not the soldier. See https://wdc.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/4929

[2] These are all by Dr Trevor Bentley and can be found at
https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-karere-messenger-and-paihia.html
https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-active-and-rev-henry-williams-1832.html
https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2021/09/arama-karaka-pi-and-taeopa.html
https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2019/04/during-morning-walks-over-mount.html
https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2019/06/early-european-vessels-and-visitors-to.html
https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-schooner-trent-and-major-thomas.html

Sources

Karuwhā Trust information online: https://www.karuwha.org.nz/
Dr Samuel Carpenter: I am Henry, lecture and article, 26/6/2026
Dr Alistair Reese podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3mu9FvxYCQRMc5ZECo66a4
Voyages of the Herald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herald_(1826_ship)
Wendy Davies, descendant of Henry William and Christopher Pearson Davies

2025 - A Good Year for Local Histories

 

A few of this year’s local histories

Two hundred or so contemporary tales of past and present, a selection of Tommy ‘Kapai’ Wilson’s newspaper columns written for the Bay of Plenty Times since 2004, and put into a handsome volume entitled Paperboy Writer, starts this review of the efforts of local writers to evoke the history of Tauranga Moana and its surrounds.  Paperboy Writer was published in November 2024, but this review stretches a couple of points, in time and space, in order to make a larger one:  the astonishing variety of history books concerning the Bay of Plenty – east and west - that came out in 2025.  All of those described here are in the Tauranga Library: ask at the Reference Room if you can’t find a borrowing copy.

‘Variety’, in this discussion, takes a number of forms.  There is not only a breadth of approach and tone, ranging from Tommy Wilson’s (mostly) cheerful nostalgia to the balanced formality of Trevor Bentley’s prose in Te Kaewa, The Wanderers [1] and the almost lyrical intertwining of te reo and English in Tame Iti’s compelling autobiography.  We are also offered some very fresh approaches to the way history can be written – Sarah Ell’s excursions into imagined thoughts of The Elms’ inhabitants, for instance; or the very practical, informative, and carefully ordered and illustrated lists that form the backbone of Hatu Hone – 120 years of St John’s in Tauranga.

There are hidden gems to be found as well.  Robert Craig Scott’s prodigious efforts to track and trace the changes in neighbourhoods that have now become Tauranga’s suburbs are hugely useful to those researching past lives in close and often unexpected detail.  Bob published the second edition of Mount Maunganui, A History of the Land and Early Settlers from 1864 in November of this year.  As if this was not enough, he also managed to produce the ninth volume of his series: Otumoetai, A History following confiscation in 1864.  Although my editorial eye regrets the lack of macrons in the text, I was well impressed that Bob had found a first-person account, an article from the Bay of Plenty Times of 8 June 1882 and quoted in full on p. 138, that illustrated the poignancies of settlement in transition:

… most of the other trees were planted by the natives.  Mr Matheson has erected a dairy under the willow trees.  On the side of the house is a very old titoki tree.  The natives left this Pa at the outbreak of the late Maori war and burnt all their whares before leaving.  Since then, the old Catholic Church has been left to go to ruin.

 The titoki tree can be identified in the photos Bob provides and – as visitors to the Otūmoetai Historic Reserve can see for themselves – still stands [2].  Bob has done for his beloved suburbs what I would love to see done for Te Puna: setting out the land use changes at a level of detail that makes present recognition easy and delightful.

Communities are another theme that gets varied treatment from our 2025 authors.  Raewyn Otto, née Phare, has significantly revised and augmented the photocopied booklet she produced to mark the 75^th anniversary of the establishment of her faith community.  Celebrating 100 years: The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Tauranga 1925-2025 is now a large-format hardcover volume, lavishly illustrated in full colour, assembling personal testimony, autobiographical accounts of the church’s families – the Ashtons, the Goldstones, the Maunders and more – their poetry, a short story, their performances of The Road to Bethlehem; and enough institutional history to help us understand how a modern-day church establishes itself in a society where the faith traditions that came with nineteenth-century settlers were already well in place.

Kathy Wills’ Tales of Old Katikati, third edition, is another reworking, based on original author Elsie G Lockington’s reminiscences and stories of people she clearly knew very well.  Its sixty pages have a conversational quality, often loaded with personal and place names; it is occasionally vague as to detail, although Elsie makes it clear what the impacts of dreadful events, such as the influenza epidemic of 1915, can be on a tight-knit town and country society.  The tone is invariably polite.  It is, however, worth reading to the very end where, at a safe distance, the third-generation editor lets us know that even Elsie had personal opinions.

Someone looking for a more comprehensive – I would go so far as to say definitive – history of Katikati will find it in Katikati, From First Peoples to the Present Day/Ngā Reanga Tangata ki Katikati, co-authored by Francis Young, Sandra Haigh, Pauline McCowan and Chris Bedford and produced in time for the 150^th anniversary of the arrival of the Ulster settlers in September 2025.  That well-worked aspect of Katikati’s history is, however, deliberately downplayed in favour of settlement patterns since 1300 CE and Katikati’s development since 1940.  “We had to make choices,” the authors say in their preface, “to keep the book manageable; not everyone may agree with those.”  This solid and readable book has the same self-confidence that is shown in the small rural settlement it describes.

One significant element stands out in reviewing the books mentioned in this article: the choice and quality of the images used.  Francis Young had a busy year.  He and Di Logan put together an astonishing book, Pictures from the Ulster Plantation: Katikati 1898-1900, of the very lovely photographs of Emily Surtees.  Her album records the homes and people of the Ulster families that George Vesey Stewart somehow persuaded and energetically led to live on the other side of the world. These evocative images have been carefully selected, even more carefully digitally enhanced, and are laid out in such a way that each monochrome page is beautiful in itself.

Quite another, just as compelling, approach is taken by Sally Pratt with her publication, Tauranga: Just scratching the surface.  As every successful publisher knows, you can judge a book by its cover: Sally’s lively account of interesting and exciting episodes of our town’s past is accessible, impressively researched, packed with Tauranga’s more unusual stories and a quantity of spectacular illustrations, almost all of them colourised using AI and up-to-the-minute digital publishing technology.  This is the perfect way to interest a younger reader – a highly pictorial presentation showing the layers of history in our place, with enough text to explain how streets and shorelines change, and who was involved in changing them.

No review of the histories published this year would be complete without acknowledging the two mainstream books shown above.

Sarah Ell gave a talk to Tauranga Historical earlier this year.  The Spirit of a Place celebrates the status of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s significant heritage sites, and Sarah explained how she steered a careful course through her chapters.  She set herself to meet the demands of the expected readership of her book: serious scholars, heritage enthusiasts, and of course the tourists who flock to The Elms from the cruise ships and elsewhere, seeking something that will mark a memorable experience rather than - maybe as well as – explain the background to a distinguished building and the family that made it their home for so long.  Glossy, with sensitive photographs and even more sensitive side-stories, the book is a triumph by any standard, and the writing of a quality that shows even a well-trodden tale has fresh insights to uncover.

Tame Iti’s autobiography, Mana, is a quality publication of a very different kind. Beautifully designed, with lots of white space on its matt-paper pages, it has a congenial font that helps make the considerable amount of te reo, although not invariably translated, adequately understandable in context.  The overall tone of the book, as might be expected of its subject, is one of drama in both the narrative and the images.    It is also sober and reflective, the story of an examined life, one we are privileged to see too. 

What a vintage year 2025 has proved to be for us here in the Bay of Plenty.  Local history really does enrich our lives and the way we deal with our present day.  We must be grateful to all our local historians who take the time, and expend prodigious effort, to help us understand how things were and are now.  Tame Iti’s approach, in connection with the Waitangi Tribunal’s hearings of the Tūhoe claims, sums it up:

…we came up with a way to convey that history.  Instead of a lecture about colonization and confiscation, we would paint the picture of the experience of our tīpuna.  We reminded ourselves: Imagine being in that space.  What are we thinking? [3]

 [1] We published a description of Te Kaewa/The Wanderers on this blog on Tuesday 28 October

[2] I am indebted to Harley Couper of the Reference team at Tauranga Library for helping me to find this on the 3D Tauranga Web Viewer, https://www.tauranga.govt.nz/council/maps

[3] Tame Iti, Mana, p.201

Author and images: Beth Bowden

Historiography in Te Puna

It’s popular right now for historians to emphasise the “story” aspect of history.  Neat, straightforward, direct.  Everyone has a story.  Historians who are serious about their profession know, however, that every story has a story.  This is one.

Title page of Keepers of the Faith

A somewhat battered copy of the book compiled to commemorate the centennial of St Joseph’s Church, Hatu Hohepa, in Te Puna, titled  Keepers of the Faith, has come to the Te Puna Archive. [1]  Its provenance is reasonably clear: it was initially acquired by the Te Puna Community Library, had apparently sustained water damage, in which state was withdrawn from the library’s holdings and came into the possession of the Gravits (Peter Gravit was for a time a member of the Community Library Committee).

Peter and Jen Rolleston authored the book.  Peter died in 2007, [2] but Jen is still very much with us, and was very willing to talk about the way this very local history was brought together.  As a direct consequence of the work she, Ellen Nicholas and Peter did to research the Pirirākau Claim: WAI 227, Peter Farrelly of the Parish Council approached them on behalf of the Church Centennial Committee for a publication to support the celebrations attendant on the little wooden church’s one hundredth anniversary.  The first service there was held on 1 January 1900.

Compared to the work required to support WAI 227, this job seemed, and was, Jen says, relatively straightforward.  It took between six and nine months to write; photographs were readily available, and the community it described were all people known to each other, or whose memory was still well alive among them.  Most people came forward with their recollections of the church and its place in the Te Puna landscape.

Jen Rolleston

Compared to the gaps and contradictions that had to be resolved for the raupatu claim, Jen told me, getting material for the St Joseph’s book was far easier.  “People had papers, photos and bits and pieces about the church in all sorts of places – for instance, [co-builder with Werahiko Borell] Hone Bidois’s papers were put together in a box held in the Tuhakaraina homestead.”  Hone was the grand-uncle of Martin Tuhakaraina, Chairman of the Centennial Committee. 

Despite these advantages, writing a local history is not always easy.  Jen called it “interesting” when I asked her if it was fun to do.  Peter, who, she said, “Put his heart and soul into the WAI 227 claim”, was a serious historian whose work entailed deep analysis and careful assessment of the evidence.  “It’s hard for us to really understand how things were then,” Jen muses.  “We think we know but we don’t really.”  Nevertheless, the experience gained by the team from the raupatu claim – Peter doing the narrative, Jen and Ellen ferreting out the information needed to fill the gaps – has clearly shaped Keeping the Faith.  It’s a book that, quite deliberately, has almost no conflict.  But it does have a clear historical arc, situating the story of St Joseph’s into a wider context, and balancing the secular forces of history with a moving account of a miracle, set out in an (ahistorical) Appendix.

A careful reader of this local history can, however, detect the threads of tension through the stories.  This is one of the great skills of good local historians: to let past voices speak so that people can, later, make their own minds up.  This short book, citing primary sources, oral accounts and memoirs, is foundational for deeper, more scholarly explorations of the way spirituality and institutional religion contend with and complement each other. [3]  It also offers very practical insights into the life and work of missionary fathers: the St Joseph’s complement were mostly from Holland, speaking te reo with a noticeable Duch accent, authoritative, hands-on and pragmatic.  The Convent school, which ran from 1958 until 1980, was staffed by the Sisters of St Joseph of Cluny in Ireland, [4] another missionary order. Furthermore, the function of evangelism itself is illustrated: once the Church determined that there were no new converts to be gained, the priests were withdrawn and the school was closed. The Little Sisters of Carmel, under the chaplaincy of the combative Father Jordan, lived in it as a retreat for the next decade, until “the effects of a Priest shortage had a direct and dramatic impact upon the Parish”.[5] The response to this crisis came directly from the devout within the Te Puna Catholic community. The book includes an account from the Guardian of the Sacred Sacrament, Rosina Borell.

I am happy to confirm that – quite aside from the rough dealings that resulted in the return of St Joseph’s bell to that church [6] - another conflict reported in Keeping the Faith [7] has also been resolved.  Father Jordan’s cottage, controversially located, in 1982, “squarely in front of the Church, almost completely obscuring [it] from the road frontage”, was at some stage moved to another position, behind the church, and in the background of this photo.

St Joseph’s site, looking southeast

Although Jen cannot remember when, exactly, her book was thus rendered out-of-date, we agree that the cottage’s removal was probably tactfully managed by the Centennial Committee to make way for the welcoming waharoa that bears the plaque and blessings made in the new millennium, January 2000.

References

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[1] Kindly deposited as part of the Gravit Collection, 7 March 2024.

[2] See Elisha Rolleston’s essay for Te Mahi Rangahau, https://temahirangahau.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/peter-rolleston/ also published on the Tauranga Historical Society blog, 7 June 2022, https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2022/06/peter-rolleston-1949-2007.html

[3] See, for instance, Cameron, G B: That you might stand here on the roof of the clouds.” The development of Pirirakau theology from encounter to the end of conflict, 1839-1881, Master of Theology thesis, University of Otago, 2015

[4] http://sjc.ie/

[5] Rolleston, P and J: Keeping the Faith, p.55, quoting Rosina Borell

[6] Ibid, p.36

[7] Ibid, pp.48-49