Another new book from Trevor Bentley

 

Between 1864 and the early 1900s, Tauranga Harbour was not merely a backdrop to the district’s maritime history; it was the engine of it. Every local and visiting waka, schooner, cutter, barque, scow and steamer entering the harbour brought with them people, cargo, news and hope. During Tauranga’s Anglo-Māori War years (1864-1872), British battleship-troop carriers brought military occupation, violence, colonial officials, dispossession and despair.

While Tauranga’s early history is one of ships, it is also a history of the people who built them, sailed them, loaded them, anxiously watched them disappear over the horizon and joyously welcomed their return. This eight-part study casts light on Pākehā and Māori ship builders, their owners and their captains, on British and Māori fighting men, immigrant-settlers, merchants, labourers and visiting travellers, missionaries and officials.

The book restores their stories to the harbour and invites readers to see Tauranga not simply as a place on land but as a place defined by water - by tides, sandbanks, reefs, channels, and the vessels that once threaded among them. It is a reminder that our harbour has always been a gateway, a theatre of cross-cultural encounters, a workplace, a saltwater highway, a hazardous seaway and a home.

Racing from Tauranga to Auckland with cargoes of perishable goods, the Tauranga owned schooners Hope and Fortune arrived within a few hours of each other on 2 February 1866.

As many readers know, Trevor is a member of the society and an active contributor to this blog. His books and blogs explore Tauranga’s as well as New Zealand’s social, maritime and military history with a special focus on the Pākehā and Māori men and women who crossed cultures voluntarily and as captives. Dr. Bentley is the author of ten previous history books.

Book details

Early Maritime Tauranga: A History of Vessels, Visitors, Residents and Events, Volume II, 1864-1900s.

Author: Trevor Bentley

ISBN: 978-0-473-77735-7

Soft cover, 486 pages

RRP $39.99

Publisher: Kererū History Books.
https://www.kereruhistorynz.co.nz/

Image credit

Dawson, Montague. ‘The Orange Schooners,' from Ramsey, L.G.G. Montague Dawson, R.S.M.A., F.R.S.A., The Greatest Sea Painter in the World, F. Lewis, Leigh-on-Sea, England, 1970: 43, no. 179, plate 39.

The Otūmoetai Beachfront Pathway- Three Later Walkers

 The Otūmoetai harbourside path with Te Puna’s Oikimoke Point in the distance

The Otūmoetai beachfront pathway was traversed for centuries by resident Māori iwi as well as iwi from outside the region with peaceful or warlike intentions. During the 1800s, a succession of European missionaries, traders, sailors, scientists and colonial officials also walked the pathway, after first crossing the Wairoa River from the Te Puna Peninsula to the west or the Waikareao Estuary from the Te Papa Peninsula to the east.

Reverend John Wilson

Rev. John Wilson, 1836

After ten years’ service in the Royal Navy, John Alexander Wilson was employed by the Anglican Church Missionary Society as a catechist. He was posted to their missions in New Zealand, arriving at the Bay of Islands with his wife and children in 1833.

By 1835 mission stations had been established beyond the Bay of Islands including Mangapouri (Hamlin and Stack), Matamata (Alfred Brown), Rotorua (Thomas Chapman) and at Te Papa, Tauranga, by John Wilson. However, as the intertribal fighting in the Tauranga region escalated, Wilson and the missionaries Alfred Brown and James Stack at Te Papa sent their families aboard the missionary brig Columbine for safety on 31^st March 1836. They remained at the Bay of Islands and did not return to Tauranga until the following year.[1]

In 1836, Wilson and the Rev. Thomas Chapman set out from the Bay of Islands in the hope of ending the intertribal war in the Bay of Plenty. The missionaries first visited the Ngati Haua iwi at Matamata, before crossing the Kaimai Range to meet with Tauranga iwi who were jointly planning an attack on the Te Arawa people at Maketu and Rotorua. Alone at Te Papa during July 1836, Wilson describes crossing the Waikareao Estuary by boat, before undertaking the (one hour) beachfront walk to and from Otūmoetai Pa.

9th. --Mr. Chapman left to-day for Rotorua. I walked some distance with him. On my return had a visit from one of the head chiefs of Tauranga, old Taharangi. He was very pleasant but sorry to see me left alone and grieved that everyone had left the station. Flooring my back room--found it hard work planing boards and getting them to fit, I being a very unskilful carpenter.

Sunday, 10th. --A few people came to morning service at the settlement [the Te Papa Mission Station]. Spoke from Matt xiii. 13 to 16. Felt deeply the fulfilment of the prophecy here quoted by our Lord as applicable to the present state of the Māori people. They appear alike uninfluenced by the love or the terror of God.

“At Otumoetai only sixty natives were present at service. Walked solitarily homewards, if a desolate house can be called home. And as I sauntered along the shore [the Otūmoetai harbour front walkway], the loneliness of the mission station, surrounded on two sides by water, without a habitation near, or native, save one [Taharangi, the elderly rangatira who protected the mission station], open and exposed to the enemy, gave rise to sad forebodings. But soon the thought flashed into my mind that it was for the Lord, and my gloom was gone.”[2]

Intertribal warfare in fact escalated during the remainder of 1836. Following the storming of Maketu and Te Tumu Pa and the slaughter of their inhabitants, and the plundering of the Rotorua mission station, Wilson and Chapman temporarily abandoned the region and retraced their steps over the Kaimai range.

Rev. Richard Taylor, 1839

Rev. Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor (1805–1873) was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1829. He was later appointed a missionary with the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and settled at the Bay of Islands in 1839. He took part in Treaty discussions at Waitangi in February 1840 and in later years he evangelised at Whanganui and Taupo with considerable success.^[3]

In 1839, Taylor had only been in New Zealand for a few days before he set out from the Bay of Islands with missionary William Williams on the cutter Aquila for the East Coast. They called at Tauranga during the voyage where they met the missionaries Alfred Brown, his wife Charlotte and John Morgan. Like the Rev William Colenso, Taylor was a keen student of natural history and the life and customs of Māori. He also kept a diary in which he detailed all that he saw and experienced. [4]

Monday 25 March – “I walked with Mr Morgan to the pa at Otutumoiti [Otūmoetai] which is a very populous one and much like the other distant about 3 miles [Maungatapu?]. I called upon a Mr Bidewell residing there [John Carne Bidwill, botanist and explorer]. He is supposed to be sent to spy the land by the New Zealand Association. He is a very gentlemanly and well-informed person. He returned with us to dinner and then accompanied us to see the mount [either Mount Drury or Maunganui]”. [5]

Taylor, Williams and their Māori crew remained for a week at the Te Papa Mission Station awaiting favourable winds, before they and the Aquila exited the harbour entrance to continue the voyage to the East Coast.

Joseph Cochrane, 1855

Joseph Cochrane

Like the traders James Farrow and John Lees Faulkner, the former Londonderry auctioneer Joseph Cochrane also located his store near the busy Otūmoetai pathway and foreshore. On passing Joseph Cochrane’s new store, from 1855, people travelling the beachfront would stop to converse with the trader - described by his peers as ‘a cheerful, intelligent kind and generous hearted man’. The store was a large building from which Cochrane supplied other traders along the Bay of Plenty coast. Located by his patron and protector Hori Ngatai on land, between the Faulkner's land at Okorore and Otūmoetai Pa, Cochrane regularly forded the Waikareao Estuary to stay and converse with his good friends Rev Karl Volkner and his wife Emma at the Te Papa Mission Station.⁶

On one occasion when Archdeacon Brown was away from the Te Papa Mission Station, Cochrane crossed the Waikareao Estuary and saw Rev Volkner and his Māori schoolboys engaged in clearing a patch of scrub near the cemetery. Wishing to assist, Cochrane set fire to the heaps of cut scrub, but when the wind suddenly changed and the fire threatened to spread, someone, hoping to preserve the wooden grave markers, pulled them up and threw them into the estuary. As the estuary entrance was rendered tapu by this act, Māori fisherman and traders were unable to enter or exit in their waka and sailing boats. To redress this offence and transgression of tikanga (customary law), a Māori taua muru (ritual plundering party), approached the mission station, but withdrew when Rev Volkner, a former Prussian Army soldier, confronted them with his rifle. [7]

Another Māori muru party later crossed the Waikareao Estuary to Cochrane’s premises seeking redress, but as he had considerable mana, being Hori Ngatai’s Pakeha, Cochrane’s store was not plundered. Nevertheless, utu (redress) was still required as without satisfaction the affected Māori traders and fishermen would be rendered huka kore or people of no consequence. To the satisfaction of the offended parties, utu was achieved when Cochrane’s wheat theshing machine was ritually struck and damaged with a tomahawk, an act considered tika - a perfectly correct response to the considerable inconvenience he had caused them. [8]

[Editorial note: Readers may be interested in part one of this article, The Otūmoetai Beachfront Pathway – Four Early Walkers, published here on Sunday 23 March 2025.]

References

[1] McClymont, W.G; The Exploration of New Zealand, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1940: 33.

[2]  Wilson, J.A; Mission Life and Work in New Zealand, 1833 to 1885, Star Office, Auckland, 1889: 41-42.

[3] Taylor, Richard – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography – Te Ara, https://teara.govt.nz › biographies › taylor-richard

[4] Taylor, Richard, unpublished journal, cited in Matheson, A. H; ‘Early Tauranga visitors’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society (Inc.), No. 51, August 1974: 21

[5]  Ibid, 26.

[6] Bay of Plenty Times, 23 October 1875: 2. Fletcher, Kathleen, Early Flax Traders Around Tauranga’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society, No. 59, September 1976: 26.

[7] Bay of Plenty Times, 16 September 1884: 2. Matheson, A. H. ‘Otumoetai Pa and the Early Days in Tauranga’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society (Inc.), August - September 1975, No. 54: 17-18.

[8] Ibid.

Images

Photographer, Sgroey,‘Otumoetai Beach’, 9 April 2022,https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ot%C5%ABmoetai_Beach.jpg

Wilson, John Alexander, Missionary Life and Work in New Zealand, 1833-1862, C. J. Wilson (ed.), Star Office, Auckland, 1899, title page.

Reverend Richard Taylor. Bates, Arthur Palmer, 1926-2002: Photographs of Reverend Richard Taylor and associations. Ref: 1/2-C-14302-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22607779

Hopkins, Wanda, ‘One of the Right Sort’ Kae Lewis (ed.), The New Zealand Goldrush Journal, Vol. 4, 2020. Kae Lewis, https://www.kaelewis.com › cochrane › hopkins

The Otūmoetai Beachfront Pathway - Four Early Walkers

A map of the Otūmoetai Peninsula by the late Tauranga historian Alistair Matheson

Otūmoetai Peninsula’s beachfront path has been a major thoroughfare for Māori visitors and residents for centuries.  Walkers traversed a level and pleasant path of approximately two miles – often through groves of ngaio trees - from the Wairoa River entrance to the Waikareao Estuary entrance, just as they do today. Tauranga is a region of peninsulas and estuaries and accessing the peninsula path was not always an easy task.

Before the 1860s and the Tauranga War (1864) and Bush War (1867), Māori and Pākehā overlanders walking south through Waihi and Katikati or over the Kaimai Ranges from the Waikato would, from the Te Puna Peninsula, walk or canoe across the Wairoa River to access the walkway. Travellers trekking northwards from locations like Lake Taupō and the East Coast/Western Bay of Plenty, would first visit the Te Papa mission station before crossing the Waikareao Estuary to access the path.

Travellers in both directions often overnighted at Otūmoetai Pā, the district's Māori and Pākehā-Māori commercial hub. Also known as ‘The Capital of Tauranga’ before the 1860s, the pā was located approximately half-way along the path from the long abandoned Matuaiwi Pā. Early Pākehā travellers who trod the beachfront path included Rev. Henry Williams (1828-1832), Bishop Pompallier (1840 and 1841), Treaty of Waitangi official Thomas Bunbury (1840) and Captain Byron Drury of HMS Pandora, who surveyed the harbour in November 1852. The recollections of four additional walkers are described below.

John Carne Bidwill, Botanist,  1838.

On 3 July 1838, travelling English botanist John Carne Bidwell and his party of Māori porters crossed the Kaimai range to the Te Puna peninsula, from where he was carried at low tide ‘half a mile’ over the Wairoa Rivers dangerous outer crossing ‘on the shoulders of one of the natives’. During his walk to Otūmoetai Pā, he said:  ‘a mob of slaves and boys began to twitch my clothes and gun as I passed along, and make all kinds of impertinent remarks; however, I walked on as fast as I could... and after about a mile got rid of all but the most determined of my persecutors’.¹

From Otūmoetai Pā, Bidwill observed a visiting taua (Maori war party) ‘perfectly friendly with the Tawranga tribe’, leave the fortress for the Waikareao crossing at first light ‘as did they not leave at the time of low water, they would have about a dozen miles further to march’. He also noted that when any allied war parties traversed the Otūmoetai walkway, Tauranga’s resident traders, including those along the path like James Farrow and later, John Lees Faulkner, ‘took all possible precautions to prevent robbery, even to the locking of their stockades, and securing in them such bulky articles as canoes and boats, which would otherwise have been very probably taken away or destroyed’.² Unfortunately, no images of John Carne Bidwill have survived.

Lady Mary Ann Martin, 1846

Lady Mary Ann Martin, c1860s

Another early beachfront traveller was the intrepid semi-invalid, Lady Mary Ann Martin, author of Our Māoris (1884), a New Zealand best seller in its day. During October 1846, she accompanied her husband William - New Zealand’s first Chief Justice, on a journey from Auckland to Rotorua via Tauranga. During their crossing of the Kaimai Range by way of the Wairere Track, Mary Ann  Martin was carried by Māori bearers while lying on a stretcher. She recorded that after, finding herself in a vertical position on several occasions during the ascent, with sheer drops below, she instructed her bearers to tie her to the stretcher:

By one p.m. we had passed through the forest, and came out on a wide plain, from which we saw the sea and coast, stretching far away, and a mountain at the entrance of the harbour standing out against the blue sky; but our fatigues were not over: we knocked about till dark in a whale-boat on a rough sea, and when we landed the first sight that greeted us was a raging fire in the pah [Otūmoetai]. My bearers put me down on the beach, and rushed off to help extinguish the flames.

A kind Maori woman, whose English husband was away, received us into her house, and gave us bread and coffee, and when, after stumbling along [the walkway] in the dark to the crossing-place and shouting across [the Waikareao Estuary to the Te Papa Mission Station] in vain for a boat, we returned to her, she brought out a pile of new blankets and made a bed for us on the floor. About midnight, however, our host, Archdeacon Brown, arrived, and soon after we reached his comfortable Mission-house. After ten nights in the bush, an English bedroom seemed a great luxury.

I stayed for three weeks at Tauranga, while my husband went on to the hot springs. The house was all of native workmanship; the outer walls were of raupo, and the inner walls and ceilings reeded after the best Maori pattern. The windows of the bedroom were overhung with roses^.3

The house where Lady Martin and her husband found temporary refuge, was that of the trader and shipwright John Lees Faulkner - the ‘kind Maori woman’ being his wife Ruawahine. Their house, store and shipyard were located on her land at Okorore, a one acre property located about a half mile east of Otūmoetai Pā on what is today’s Beach Road. The Martins and their Maori porters were returned to the Te Puna Peninsula on Rev Alfred Brown’s whaleboat, from where they retraced their route to Auckland. The Faulkner house has been relocated at Tauranga’s Historic Village).⁴

An Anonymous Walker, 1859

Appearing in the newspaper New Zealander in April 1859 - one month before Ferdinand Von Hochstetter and Ernest Dieffenbach’s scientific expedition visited Tauranga – the following article was written by an unidentified overland traveller.

Leaving the Mission Station and proceeding westward for Otumoiti village, you have to be ferried over the other boat channel [the Waikareao Estuary], and, in making for the village, cross a sandy plain on which is a large, but for the present deserted, native settlement. At Otumoiti there is a considerable settlement, and the Roman Catholic Church, of native structure, is elaborately decorated in the most artistic native manner.

On the beach are the house and stores of Mr. Faulkner, who has resided here for many years, and from whom and Mrs. Faulkner the travellers receive'd a hearty welcome. A short distance further on is the store of Mr. Farrow, and on the opposite side of the harbour is the residence of Captain Sellers (of the cutter “Comet,") who trades along the East Coast. No other Europeans, that we are aware, are regular residents at Tauranga at present; but it is to be hoped that their numbers will soon have an increase, and that they will have the " White Swan" steaming into this noble harbour, and affording them the means of speedy communication with Auckland.⁵

Ferdinand Von Hochstetter, 1859

Ferdinand Von Hochstetter

A noted geologist and writer, Von Hochstetter was appointed to the Austrian round the world scientific expedition in 1857. Arriving at Auckland on the frigate Novara  in December 1858, he, the naturalist Ernest Dieffenbach (who had previously visited Tauranga in 1841), and his scientific party visited many central North Island locations including Taupō and Rotorua. Returning overland to Auckland via Maketu and Tauranga, Von Hochstetter and his companions were welcomed at the Te Papa Mission Station by the Rev Karl Volkner and his wife Emma. Departing after a two day stay he recorded on 12 May 1859:

Kind Mrs. Voelkner had baked some fresh bread and prepared an excellent roast-pork for our benefit on the road; and thus most liberally provided with food, we again parted from a Mission house, the kind and hospitable inhabitants of which I shall never forget. We crossed the Waikareao Creek in a boat, and thence passed over a sandy plain through a deserted Pah in a north-westerly direction along the shores of the harbour, which presents the character of a shallow estuary with, many inlets and studded with numerous islands, separated from the sea only by a row of sandhills, and extends, at an average breadth of two to three miles, in a N.W. direction, as far as the Katikati river, a distance of 15 miles.

After a short hour's walk we reached the Otumoetai Pah (others spell it Otumoiti), one of the principal settlements on Tauranga Harbour, at the same time the seat of a Roman Catholic mission. The church of the place is of a very neat construction; there are also some Europeans settled here. On the beach lay a number of beautiful war-canoes; and next to them a schooner, belonging to the Maoris, which they had bought for £500, leaving it afterwards to rot and decay.

From Otumoetai we came over excellent, fertile alluvial plains to the Wairoa Bay. The Bay is very shallow, and the sandy rather than muddy ground so firm, that, although the tide had already half set in, we could without danger wade through to Peterehema (Bethlehem)... How very different everything here will look in after-years, when a European City shall rise on the Tauranga Harbour, and the beautiful country round about be dotted with flourishing farms.⁶

References

¹ Bidwill, John, Rambles in New Zealand, W.S. Orr and Co. London, 1841: Capper Reprint 1974:  79-81.

² Ibid.

³Martin, Mary Ann, Our Maoris, E. and J. B. Young, London, 1884: 98-99.

⁴ Matheson, A. H; ‘Otumoetai Pa and the Early Days in Tauranga’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society (Inc.), August - September 1975, No. 54: 14.

⁵ New Zealander, 2 April 1859: 3.

⁶ Von Hochstetter, Ferdinand, New Zealand: Its Physical Geography, Geology and Natural History, J.G. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1867: 445-446.

Images

Matheson, Alistair, ‘Otumoetai Pa and the Early traders in Tauranga, Part II’, Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society (Inc.), August-September 1975, No.54. OT (2) 3.

Bartlett & Co. (Auckland): Lady Mary Ann Martin (1817-1884) PA2-0195. National Library, Wellington New Zealand

Dauthage, Adolf, 1825-1883. Dauthage, Adolf, 1825-1883 :Ferdinand R. Hochstetter 1859, aged 28.. Haast, Julius von: In memoriam. Ferdinand R. Hochstetter. Dunedin, J. McKay, 1884. Ref: PUBL-0135-front. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23162756

The Bickers Family (Fencible) Cottage — Third Avenue Tauranga

Front of the Bickers cottage with some younger family members, c. 1890s

Henry Bickers and Maria (née Proud) came to New Zealand from the goldfields of Victoria, Australia in response to a call for more troops in the 1860s. He was a corporal at the Battle of Pukehinahina and was afterwards allotted 60 acres of land and a town section of one acre. However, it took about seven years for that to come into their possession and they had Henry John (always known as “Our Henry”) in 1866 whilst still housed in the Panmure Barracks, Auckland. By 1869 they had moved to a whare on the corner of Elizabeth and Grey streets in Tauranga, and their first daughter (also Maria) was born there in 1869. One evening Maria (senior) was told to go to the blockhouse at the Monmouth Redoubt for their safety but she refused. Hearing movements outside, after dark, she spent an uncomfortable night in the ditch with little ones. In the light of morning, it was discovered they had been hiding from the family goat.

In 1871 their long-awaited cottage arrived by boat from Onehunga in four parts and was assembled in Third Avenue, close to where the Inland Revenue building is now. The kitchen was a rectangular room at the back and a bedroom led off this. The two front rooms, a sitting room and a bedroom for the parents, were separated by an entrance hallway. A verandah across the front completed their new home, but as the family grew extra accommodation was built at the back. In 1872 Elizabeth (Lizzie) arrived, Emma in 1874, then William in 1877, and lastly Alice on a cool winter’s day in 1879.

Henry had been a plumber but by now had taken up painting and paperhanging. He was ill for three years before his death in 1885, when their youngest child was only six years of age. Maria continued living in the cottage and managing to make ends meet, providing for her family of six, by using her many domestic skills to earn an income.

Rear view of the home, probably in the mid-20th century

“Our Henry” married an Auckland girl and they settled on part of the land. Maria junior became an apprentice dressmaker and later stitched garments for my great-great-grandmother Euphemia Maxwell and her daughters Alice and Edith at The Elms. Elizabeth and Emma became governesses and William a journalist with the Bay of Plenty Times. Eventually granddaughter Una Pennell (Emma’s girl) inherited the cottage and it was occupied by their family until 1960 after which it was sold to the Intellectually Handicapped Children Society as a ‘sheltered workshop’.

Finally in 1970 the site was to be redeveloped as a medical centre and arrangements were made by Les Dickson with my grandfather Duff Maxwell for it to be relocated to The Elms. As a 12-year-old I remember it arriving there on a large transporter. The veranda had been removed but was not reinstated and sometime later members of the Elms Trust built a very small kitchenette onto the back. It continues to be a valuable resource and is currently used for Devonshire teas, and other occasions and meetings involving the serving of food. This lovely old building was repainted a few years ago in what is hoped to be closer to its original colours.

Present day cottage at The Elms (Te Papa)
Photographed by Bob Tulloch

My sincere thanks to Alison Howarth, a Bickers descendant and Tauranga Historical Society member, for this story. She lent me copies of a series of articles written by a cousin Colleen Sullivan for the BOP Times in 1977 and also the old images of the Bickers-Pennell Family homestead.

A 1st Waikato Private recalls the Battle of Te Ranga (June 21 1864)

 From Tauranga City Library’s archives

A monthly blog about interesting items in our collection

A new account of the massacre at Te Ranga in June of 1864 has recently come to light in Tauranga. Charles Alfred Crabbe, who lived on Cameron Road near the corner of Sixth Avenue at the end of the 19^th century, left behind a collection of papers which made its way into the library archives almost 100 years later. Within this collection are the memoirs of his father, a Private George Alfred Crabbe, who served with the 1^st Waikato Regiment during the New Zealand Wars. Crabbe the senior’s manuscript is now close to 150 years old, and the passage of time has taken with it some of these pages. In an effort to preserve further loss, the manuscript spent several months with a professional archives conservator between 2020 and 2021, before being digitised and returned. It is now part of Ms 112/3 where it remains mixed into other historic notes by his son, Charles Crabbe. 

Private George Crabbe of the 1^st Waikato Regiment offers us a detailed, first-person account of his experiences and perspective during the New Zealand Wars in the 1860’s.  Despite the first seven pages of the manuscript being lost to time, we see the regiment's arrival at Tauranga and follow their movements, battles, and daily life as they engage in military operations. Private Crabbe details key engagements, beginning (for us) with the Battle of Te Ranga, and moving on to skirmishes in Maketū and Ōpōtiki. Crabbe's account of the Battle at Te Ranga is provided below. 

As the Private recounts the challenges of engagements with Māori forces, his manuscript reveals the British and colonial forces' efforts to assert control over Māori land, often using scorched earth tactics. Crabbe paints a stark picture of the harsh realities of the New Zealand Wars, acknowledging the resilience and bravery of Māori, while being simultaneously oblivious to the horror inflicted at the hands of the colonials. 

George Crabbe details the strategies used to fortify positions and the grim outcomes of battles, noting the significant loss of life among Māori defenders. He recounts the pursuit of Te Kooti, who had recently escaped from imprisonment on the Chatham Islands and was leading a determined resistance movement against colonial forces and their Te Arawa allies. Private Crabbe’s account documents Te Kooti's strategic acumen and the mobilization of his followers, which posed a substantial challenge to the colonial military.

Private Crabbe provides a distinctly Pākehā settler perspective which is disturbing, yet illuminating. All who resist colonisation are "Hauhaus”, rebels and perpetrators of dreadful acts. None are depicted as free people defending their homes and livelihoods. Similarly, the scorched earth burning of kāinga is recounted without empathy or embarrassment, but simply as dispassionate strategic particulars. To younger generations, the days when history serves as a nation's singular mythic fable are fading. Today, we squint our eyes a little, read between the lines, uncover a more nuanced version of events, and examine the context. The complexities of history require us to acknowledge not just one perspective but the voices and experiences of all.

History, after all, doesn't disappear; it accumulates. Every time we pull out our wallets or consider our children's future, we are face to face with the long tail of history.

Crabbes account of the Battle at Te Ranga

The General left for his Head Quarters at Auckland, and the command of the district devolved on Colonel Greer of the 68th. During Col. Greer's time we were kept continually at drill, besides during our ordinary duties of guards and piquets. Our regiment had not had such an opportunity up to this time of becoming proficient in drill & on account of its various companies having been stationed at different posts. During the middle of June reports were brought in by the Defence Force which was engaged keeping a good look out that the Maoris were showing in force in the neighborhood and late at night on the 16th of the month, the reconnoitering party reported that a large number of Maoris were near the river Wairarapa transporting supplies. This news resulted in an order being given after tattoo for a march out in the morning.

The expedition consisted of a small party of Artillery with one Armstrong gun, and portions of the 68th, 43rd, and 1st Waikato Regiments, and the Mounted Defence Force; the whole under the commanding officer Colonel Greer. When the party had proceeded about a mile and a half beyond the Gate Pah, the videttes were fired upon, but our men soon drove in the Māori piquets to the Te Ranga trenches, where the Maoris had made extensive earthworks.

The Artillery with their gun were placed on the rise in front of the Māori trenches. Two companies of the 43rd flanked the right in heavy fern on the slope of a gully. The Mounted Defence to dismount and flanked the left until relieved by a company 68th; while the remaining portions of the 68th. and 43rd. supported our party of the 1st. Waikatos formed the attacking party. The Armstrong gun was shortly removed to flank the trenches on the left.

 While firing was going on here a dog belonging to the Artillery, was wounded by a bullet. He howled fearfully, and such is a soldier's nature, ever ready to extract amusement from any passing event, that the dog fixed the attention of our men in every part of the field for several minutes.

The firing was kept up for about 3 hours when a general advance was sounded, and a splendid charge was made without a waver, against the trenches in the teeth of a galling fire, although we of the 1st. Waikatos had been placed behind the Imperial companies for their support, yet such was the eagerness of the Waikatos that we were up and into the trenches pell mell along with the Imperials. The affair was soon over, the Maoris being completely routed; but they fought bravely and offered a stubborn resistance for the time with their inferior weapons, mostly old fowling-pieces, spears and long-handled tomahawks.

The Maoris lost heavily in the assault. About 120 or 130 were found dead in and about the trenches besides those that were shot in the swamps when retreating. The loss of our side was only 10 killed and something over 30 wounded. The latter were brought back to our camp, early in the afternoon.

The following day a strong party went out to the scene of the previous day's conflict for the purpose of burying the enemy's dead. Our slain were brought into camp and the day following received decent burial in the cemetery near the mission station, by the side of those who had lost their lives at the storming of the Gate Pā. I think we had buried 125 Maoris in the Te Ranga trenches, (and this number, with those 15 afterwards found in the swamps) would bring the total Maori loss up to quite 180.

Archdeacon Brown read the burial service in the Maori language over the bodies of the Maories, and he delivered an address to us over the grave, speaking in high terms of their bravery, and the humanity of the chief Rawiri, who was among the slain. This chief was laid by himself wrapped in a blanket at the head and corner of the trench. The rest of the Maoris who were buried in one common grave, were almost naked, some few in the Maori fighting garb, a small mat around the loins.

George Alfred Crabbe, 1^st Waikatos, in Te Ao Mārama Tauranga City Libraries Ms 112/3

By Tauranga City Libraries Heritage and Research Team: Harley Couper

Sources: 

• MS 112/3 - Scrapbook compiled by Crabbe family
• The Crabbe Store (Tauranga Historical Society)
• Pukehinahina Survivor (Tauranga Historical Society)

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This archival collection has been digitised and is available to view on Pae Korokī. For more information about this and other items in our collection, visit Pae Korokī or email the Heritage & Research Team: Research@tauranga.govt.nz

A Tauranga Fisherman - Captain Gilbert Mair and the Rurima Islands

Tauranga’s offshore fishermen once experienced record catches off a little-known group of rocks located near Matata. Known as the Rurima Islands or Rurima Rocks, they are located approximately 9 km (5.6 miles) west of Moutohora Island and 10 km (6.2 miles) northwest from the mouth of the Rangitaiki River. Rurima is the largest, with the smaller two being Moutoki and Tokata Islands. These uninhabited islands once supported large numbers of land and sea birds, tuatara and native rats.¹ 

Map showing the locations of some of the Bay of Plenty’s offshore islands including the Rurimas

The first European known to have fished the Rurimas was Captain Gilbert Mair NZC, who is best known for his military achievements during the Anglo-Maori Land Wars (1860-1872). He participated in the Waikato War, the East Coast anti-Hauhau campaigns, the Tauranga Wars of 1864 and 1867 and the pursuit of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and the prophet-general’s Ringatu ‘rebel’ guerilla fighters (1870-1872). Given his leadership of colonial forces and the pro-government Maori Flying Column, as well as displays of personal courage in numerous actions, Mair’s NZ Military Cross was hard earned and richly deserved.² 

 

Captain Mair (far left) with his Arawa Flying Column in July 1870 at Rotorua’s Lake Rotokakahi (Green Lake)

Captain Mair was also an avid fisherman when off duty. Often based at Tauranga during his military duties during the 1860s, and civil duties in the Tauranga Magistrates’ Court during the 1870s, the veteran was able to indulge his passion. During offshore excursions, Mair was at the tiller, steering the 35-foot whaleboat he kept at Tauranga. The 2-ton craft was powered by sails and six Maori and/or Pakeha oarsmen-fisherman who regularly shared their record catches from the Rurimas with Tauranga Moana’s local iwi. In 1873, Mair took his whaleboat out to Karewa Island off the Tauranga Harbour entrance to collect tuatara for the British Museum.³

 

Mair with a dinghy load of dogfish

Fluent in Maori and with successive Maori wives and relatives, Mair acquired a detailed knowledge of Maori fishing methods and locations in the Bay of Plenty, including its offshore islands. He put this knowledge to practical use in later years and the Rurima Islands off the settlement of Matata became a favourite location.

In 1872 Captain Mair took his whaleboat and six Tauranga oarsmen to the islands on a fishing excursion and reported:

In four or five fathoms water, with six lines, we had a whale-boat half full in an hour. The first fish hauled in were followed to the surface by swarms of snapper, kahawai, kingfish, barracoota and maomao, and then we simply bobbed for them as you would for minnows in a brook until my arms ached with the exertion of lifting them over the boat's side.⁴

 

At nearby Maketu in 1885, Mair witnessed the remarkable hauling in of a great fishing net, 95 chains in length (1.1875 miles), constructed and deployed by the Arawa people.

 

The fish caught consisted mainly of kahawai, schnapper, trevalley, gurnard, moki, tarakihi, parore, kingfish, tutahuna, kapeta, pepeke, mangopare, mangotara (several kinds of smaller shark), the latter a small blue shark, much prized for its fine oil, also about twenty "takiari," which attains a length of 12 to 14 feet, and has been known to attack swimming horses, cattle, dogs, and human beings. There were also uncounted numbers of smaller fish, such as koheriheri, or koheru (horse mackerel), kutorotoro (sand fish), and some new species.⁵

The Rurima Islands with Moutohora Island beyond

Born in 1843, Mair retained his lifelong enthusiasm for fishing. Just eighteen months before his death at the age of 80 at Tauranga in 1923, a visitor to the town’s waterfront reported how he saw there a man who:

[C]hip, chip, chipped at the paint on a dinghy hull. He was of medium height, well built, and had the smooth cheek and freshness of complexion of a boy. His movements were decisive, and vigorous, and in judging his age one would have hazarded fifty years at the outside.

Yet it was Captain Gilbert Mair, over eighty years of age, enjoying himself in helping to get back into commission his friend’s fishing dinghy. That is more than eighteen months ago at Tauranga, and … I tried to link him up with his fighting days.

Captain Gilbert Mair straightened his back … and instead ‘of hair-breadth scapes in the imminent deadly breach’, he gave me office stories of the days when he worked in the Government Lands Department.⁶

The Rurima Islands as seen from above Whakatane

Today, the Rurima islands are an uninhabited nature reserve owned by the Ngati Awa iwi, and Moutoki Island remains an outpost for tuatara. ‘The Rocks’ continue to hold fish all year round but, while good catches can still be made in shallow water with the help of burley, the great shoals of Rurima’s golden age of fishing are long gone. The islands are now best known for snorkeling, diving and kayaking.⁷ 

Captain Gilbert Mair NZC. in 1921

The last words in this article belong to Captain Mair who in 1922, expressed a concern that many of Tauranga’s offshore fishermen share to this day:

 

Having resided in the Bay of Plenty off and on since 1864, and watched the countless shoals of fish which cover the sea from Mercury Bay to Cape Runaway in the spring for months, I perpetually wonder why our fish supply should be so precariously uncertain and expensive.⁸

References

¹ Bay of Plenty Regional Council, https://www.boprc.govt.nz/media/796325/islands-karewa-tuhua-mayor-moutoki-rurima-motunau-plate-motuhora-whale-motuhaku-schooner-rock.pdf

^{2 Mair, Gilbert – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1m4/mair-gilbert}

³ Tinne, Ernest J; The Wonderland of the Antipodes, Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, London, 1873: 84.

 

⁴ Mair, Gilbert, Notes on Rurima Rocks. Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 1872: 151. 

 

⁵ Mair, Captain Gilbert, Reminiscences and Maori Stories, Brett, Auckland, 1923: 22.

⁶ Manawatu Standard, 3 December 1923: 5.

⁷ Bay Of Plenty Regional Council, https://www.boprc.govt.nz/media/796325/islands-karewa-tuhua-mayor-moutoki-rurima-motunau-plate-motuhora-whale-motuhaku-schooner-rock.pdf

⁸ Mair, 1923: 22.

Illustrations

Bay of Plenty map,  SunLive https://www.sunlive.co.nz/news/281986-all-safe-following-capsize-near-rurima-island.html

Mundy, Daniel Louis, Captain Gilbert Mair and his Arawa Flying Column at Kaiteriria Pā and camp, Rotokakahi, Ref: Mundy Album No 2, PH-ALB-86-p93-1. Auckland Museum, Auckland, New Zealand. https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collection/object/am_library-photography-14314

Photographer unknown. Gilbert Mair in a rowboat, Whangarei. Ref: PAColl-7985-85. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. https://natlib.govt.nz/records/22335614

Photographer unknown, Rurima Islands, Wai 46 # A3, Te Rangahau Whenua Raupatu O Ngati Awa Report to Department of Conservation, 25 July 1992: 15.

Photograph by ‘Avenue’. Rurima Island and the rest of the Rurima Rocks viewed from Kaputerangi Pa above Whakatane, 19 November 2009, CC. Wikipedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rurima_Rocks_zoom.jpg

Mair, Captain Gilbert, Reminiscences and Maori Stories, Brett, Auckland, 1923: 3