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

Accessing the Otūmoetai Beachfront Path, The Wairoa River’s Outer Ford - Some Early Māori and Pākehā Crossers

The Wairoa River entrance at low water showing Kaiarero (Tilby) Point on the north-west corner of Fergusson Park

Living in early Tauranga, a place of many peninsulas, rivers, estuaries and fords, often meant getting your feet wet and muddy depending on where you crossed - and now and again in the case of a misstep when travelling on foot or horseback, a complete soaking or drowning. Before the 1870s, overland travellers from the north wishing to access the Otūmoetai Peninsula and beachfront path to Otūmoetai Pā and Te Papa mission stationwere confronted with a final watery challenge - a crossing of the Wairoa River, which contributes about 50% of the total freshwater inflow to Tauranga Harbour.

On 3 July 1838, travelling English botanist John Carne Bidwill 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’. to the Otūmoetai beachfront path.¹ The outer crossing from Te Puna’s Oikimoke Point, which followed a narrow zig-zag causeway with quicksands on either side, had a sinister history, with fatalities among both Māori and Pākehā who mistimed the crossing or strayed from the path.

In March 1832, the chief Titore Tākiri’s predatory Ngāpuhi amphibious expedition from the Bay of Islands entered Tauranga Harbour. Initially camping on Rangiwaea Island, the invaders crossed to the Te Puna side of the Wairoa River. When a daring group of Ngāpuhi musketeers attempted the outer crossing at low water, they became caught fast in quick sands off what is now Tilby Point, on the north-west corner of the Matua foreshore (Fergusson Park). All attempts by their comrades to extricate them failed and they remained trapped with their heads barely above the tides. When the sufferers called out for sustenance during the stillness of the nights, the Otūmoetai defenders from the pa, called to them contemptuously Kaiarero! (Eat your tongues!), by which name the point is known to Ngāi Te Rangi to this day.²

Wairoa Swamp

This watercolour was painted by an unknown soldier. He was present at the siege of Maketū, the battles of Pukehinahina (Gate Pā) and Te Ranga in in 1864, and the subsequent occupation of the Tauranga District. Titled ‘Wiroa Swamp’, the sketch shows the old Matua-Otūmoetai Swamp, which was later drained to become today’s Fergusson Park. Kaiarero (Tilby) Point is in the foreground with Te Puna across the Wairoa River entrance at high water. From Kaiarero Point, north bound travellers left the Otūmoetai beachfront path and depending on the tide, walked, rode or were ferried by canoe directly across to Te Puna’s Oikimoke Point.                                  

Miss Eliza Jones, 1858

Eliza Stack née Jones in later years

In June 1858 the Anglican missionary John Kinder accompanied Miss Eliza Jones, a well travelled,  adventurous young woman, from Auckland to Tauranga in the schooner Hope. Having lost her Welsh parents at an early age, Jones who had been born and raised in Edinburgh, came out to New Zealand with her brother Humphrey, an officer in the Britsh Army in 1857. After enduring an appalling ten-day, rough weather voyage in a dirty, cramped cabin, half suffocated, amidst dogs, poultry, potatoes and three additional fellow passengers, Jones resolved never to repeat the experience and later returned to Auckland on horseback.

Arriving at Tauranga on 9 July 1858, Jones lived at the Te Papa Mission Station with the Volkner family and later with the Chapmans at the Maketū station. Her enjoyable and memorable sojourn which included picnics, local explorations, and a visit to the Rotorua themal district soon came to an end. On 25 October, she departed overland to Auckland by way of the Kaimai Ranges’ Wairere Track accompanied by Rev Karl Volkner. The Maori travellers and porters accompanying the party travelled on foot while Volkner rode a horse and Miss Jones rode Archdeacon Brown’s pony Robin Hood, sitting side saddle, with a starched bonnet and thick veil to ward off the ‘venomous bites’ of mosquitoes.³ She recorded:

It was sad parting from my dear friends at Te Papa, who had been so kind to me, and to whom I was indebted for one of the most notable experiences of my life. The whole party together with the [Maori] school children, came to the beach to see me off [from where they crossed the Waikareao Estuary by boat]. The horses were already waiting for us on the Otumoetai side, and a few minutes after saying good-bye I was mounted on Robinhood and cantering along the beach with Mr Volkner, to catch up our Maoris who had gone on with the baggage and provisions. We found them waiting for us at Te Puna, a broad estuary which could only be crossed at low water, and under the guidance of some-one who knew the fords.

As soon as the tide permitted, we commenced what proved to be a most disagreeable undertaking. We had to traverse a wide extent of sand and mud flats, crossed by many water channels, varying from two to four feet in depth. The sides were steep, and getting in and out was very unpleasant. The shortness of my pony's legs caused him to drop into the water with such a sudden jerk every time that he nearly pitched me over his head, and I was very thankful when the last channel was crossed and we got back to dry land. The danger when crossing this estuary is being caught by the tide. The channels are only fordable at dead low tide, and as it takes some time to get over them all, it proved nervous work till it was done.⁴

Near the end of her return journey to Auckland in October-November 1858, 29-year-old Miss Jones stayed at the Kohanga mission station on the Lower Waikato River. There she met for the first time James Stack, a young missionary who was then assisting the missionary-linguist Dr Robert Maunsell. On the 28 January 1881, Eliza Rachel Jane Jones and James West Stack were married by Bishop Selwyn at Auckland; they had seven children.

Eliza Stack and her party were fortunate to have crossed the Wairoa safely. The river’s outer crossing continued to take the lives of the tardy, the reckless and the unlucky into the 1870s. Under the heading A Horseman Lost, the New Zealand Herald reported on 14 August 1871:

A man named E. G. Hall, attached as foreman to the party engaged in the erection of the telegraph to Katikati, was on Tuesday reported to the police by Mr. Floyd, as missing. He had started to cross the Wairoa at the ford on horseback. The horse was caught on the Te Puna side of the river with saddle and bridle on, but the rider has not since been seen. He was believed to be drowned while crossing that very dangerous ford. Mr. Hall was seen riding east Mr. McSweeny’s place beyond Otumoetai, going towards the Wairoa, between one and two o'clock in the afternoon, with a heavy bag over his shoulders and long boots on ... [A] native coming down from Te Puna to the Wairoa river to fish for eels, met and caught the horse just as he came out of the wnter on the Te Puna side, with a saddle and bridle on, but no rider, so it must have been almost immediately after the catastrophe.

Only those who have crossed this ford can properly describe its dangerous character. The ford is at the mouth of the river, which there is very wide; and the track - if it may be so called - is on a narrow strip of solid sand, on each side of which are numerous quicksands. The water, at the lowest tide, is over the saddle flaps, and the route for more than half-a-mile goes in a zig-zag direction, only known to those who have to cross frequently, and very unsafe for an unpractised traveller. It is said that a Maori and his horse once disappeared altogether in one of the quicksands. The search party returned again on the evening of the 6th instant, without having found the remains Mr Hall. It is said that he was the bearer of a considerable sum of money, wherewith to pay the men employed at the telegraph camp.⁵

Wairoa Village

Painted by the same unknown soldier, the original handwriting on the front reads ‘Wiroa vilace.’ Looking across the Wairoa River from the Matua side to Te Puna, the watercolour shows the Wairoa River at high water with Wairoa Pā and kainga in the background. In the foreground is a waka tētē (utility canoe) for ferrying travellers across to Te Puna.

Travellers crossing to Te Puna from the Otūmoetai Peninsula were able to avoid the treacherous outer crossing by bypassing Kaiarero Point. Wading over Wairoa Bay (today’s Matua Saltmarsh Reserve) which could be safely crossed at half tide, they made their way to Bethlehem, where, depending on the state of the tide, they waded or were canoed across the Wairoa at its safer upper ford - crossed in later times by three successive bridges.⁶

In 1874, with travel across the Wairoa River increasing, the government built a one-way bridge of kauri timber. It replaced the ferry service operated by Te Puna’s Ngāti Kahu who were transporting travellers across in waka and row boats. The wooden structure was replaced in 1913 by a single laned concrete bridge. The two-laned State Highway 2 bridge that motorists use today was opened in February 1968.⁷

References

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

² Rorke, Jinty, Fergusson Park and the Tilby Point Farm: The Maori History, Tauranga City Council, 1997: 1.

³ Matheson, A.H; The Wairere Track: Ancient Highway of the Maori and Missionary, The Elms Trust, Tauranga, 1975: 56-58.

⁴ Stack, J.W; Early Maoriland Adventures of J.W. Stack, A.H. Reed (ed.), A.H. and A.W Reed, Dunedin, 1935: 48.

⁵ New Zealand Herald, 14 August 1871: 2.

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

⁷ Neal, Justine, ‘The Wairoa River Bridge’, Tauranga Historical Society, 3 September 2021. https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-wairoa-river-bridge.html

Images

Photographer, White’s Aviation, ‘Aerial view of Matua Peninsula, Otūmoetai, with Mauao and Mount Maunganui in the background’. Photo 00-Whites Aviation 52741 (473i), 17 March 1960.  Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Photo 00-434.

Artist unknown, ‘Wairoa Swamp’, Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries. Art 21-042.

Photographer unknown: ‘Portrait of Mrs James West Stack’. Williams, Nigel (Canon), 1901-1980: Photographs of Maori chiefs and others. Ref: PA2-2782. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Artist unknown, ‘Wairoa Pa’, Te Ao Mārama, Tauranga City Libraries. Art 21-043.

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

Enemy at the Gates 1820, 1828

The Intertribal Musket War’s Impact on Tauranga

A Ngāpuhi musket haka or haka peruperu

During the 1820s and 1830s, the Matua-Otūmoetai foreshore boomed and echoed ominously to the roar of haka, as besieging enemy tribesmen from several iwi leapt and stamped in frustrated fury below Otūmoetai, a previously unconquerable pā tūwatawata (palisaded fortress). During the summer months of 1820, the foreshore became the scene of one of the most famous peace-making incidents of the intertribal Musket Wars.

In that year, Tauranga was invaded by a Ngāpuhi musket taua of 600-700 warriors aboard 50 waka taua.¹ The expedition was initiated by the rangatira Te Morenga, who was seeking further utu for the killing, cooking and devouring of his niece Tawaputa at Tauranga in 1806. Deploying his contingent of shock troops ahead of his force (35 toa armed with the only flintlock muskets in their possession), Te Morenga oversaw the destruction by gunfire of the Ngāi Te Rangi defenders of [Mount] Maunganui Pā, who twice charged their ranks with traditional short and long weapons of stone, bone and wood. ‘For three days the grisly aftermath of the battle [fought at Waikorire-Pilot Bay] continued as the bodies of those slain were committed to the hāngī and eaten’.²

Te Morenga and his triumphant taua next turned their attention to Otūmoetai Pā. Initially bypassing the fortress, the Ngāpuhi fleet encamped on Matakana Island for several days, before sweeping en masse one morning into the Matua inlet near the Wairoa River outlet. The toa disembarked and camped on the long-abandoned pā site of Matuaiwi, a knoll overhanging the Wairoa River, about a mile and a half from the great Otūmoetai pā. Like successive enemy taua before them, they too attempted to storm Ngāi Te Rangi’s central fortress without success.³

Te Morenga’s moko Mataora (face tattoo).
Eight years after the kidnapping of his niece and sister by convict pirates in 1806, Te Morenga sketched this image of his own moko Mataora for John Nicholas, who was friend and assistant to the leading missionary Samuel Marsden

Te Waru, Ngāi Te Rangi’s paramount chief, set out alone one day to reconnoitre the Ngāpuhi camp. Advancing carefully through the ngaio trees along the foreshore, he saw Te Morenga, who was resting in the shade, also alone and unguarded. Springing upon the Ngāpuhi, Te Waru disarmed him, bound his hands and drove his prisoner into Otūmoetai Pā. There he untied Te Morenga, restored his weapons and instructed him to treat him in the same manner. When Te Morenga drove the disarmed and bound Te Waru into the Matuaiwi encampment, he, with some difficulty, persuaded his warriors not to kill his prisoner. Invited to make peace with Ngāpuhi, an extended kōrero ensued during which Te Waru accepted the offer. Soon after, Te Morenga and Ngāpuhi fleet departed for the Bay of Islands. The peace was to last until 1831, when the tohunga Te Haramiti’s Ngāti Kuri and Ngāpuhi predatory raiders were defeated by Ngāi Te Rangi and allied iwi on Motiti Island.⁴

In 1828, Otamataha Pā on the Te Papa Peninsula was stormed in a night attack by a Ngāti Maru musket taua under the rangatira Te Rohu, during which most of the Ngāti Tapu inhabitants were slaughtered. Te Rohu’s waka fleet then crossed to the Otūmoetai foreshore and pā, where they met with counterfire from the now musket armed defenders. The besiegers withdrew when one of Te Rohu’s wives persuaded him that the utu he had attained from Ngāi Te Rangi during the storming of Otamataha Pā was sufficient.⁵

A pōwhiri or welcoming ceremony on the harbourside bench beyond the palisades of Otūmoetai Pā. The palisades proved impervious to musket and cannon fire when Tītore Tākiri of Ngāpuhi launched an amphibious artillery campaign against the Tauranga people in 1832

On 17 July 1842, Ensign Abel Best visited Otūmoetai Pa at a time when it was still subject to attacks by Te Arawa contingents from Rotorua. Impressed by its defences, he recorded:

Part of the Pa is on the sea beach and part on the top of a cliff or steep bank 40 feet high. By its position naturally strong it is rendered more secure by a strong palisade and on the land side & flanks it is further protected by a deep and wide Ditch having a Stockade on its exterior side. Moreover, the level of the exterior plain is somewhat lower than that of the Pa. Were it well defended its intricacy alone would render it formidable but at present there are not men in it to defend one fifth of its great extent. Nowhere have I seen so great a number of fine Canoes the care with which they preserve their fishing nets was also worthy of remark every net being placed on a little elevated platform and then securely thatched over.⁶

During the Musket Wars, the Ngāi Te Rangi hapu occupying the Otūmoetai Pā site were able to defend their fortress and drive off besieging Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Maru and Te Arawa  taua. The wars set in motion more than 40 heke or tribal migrations, but Ngāi Te Rangi were never driven from their lands. Otūmoetai Pā’s steep escarpments, defensive ditches and palisades were unassailable, the defenders too well led, provisioned and resolute.

Endnotes

¹ Crosby, Ron, The Musket Wars: A History of Inter-Iwi Conflict, Reed, Auckland, 1999: 71-72.

² Ibid: 72

³ Gifford, W.H. and H, Bradley Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga, Capper Press Christchurch, 1976: 18.

⁴ Ibid: 18-19.

⁵ Wilson, J.A. The Story of Te Waharoa, Whitcombe and Tombs, Wellington, 1907: 17.

⁶ Best Able, The Journal of Ensign Best, 1837-1843, Nancy M. Taylor (ed.), R.E. Owen, Wellington, 1966: 371-372.

Illustrations

Artist unknown, ‘New Zealand war-dance’, in Grant, James, British Battles on Land and Sea, Vol. III, Casell, Petter and Gilpin, London, Paris and New York, 1880: 259.

Te Morenga, self portrait in Nicholas, John, Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand, Performed in the Years 1814 and 1815, James Black, London, 1817: 216. Alexander Turnbull Library Ref. A-080-061

Joseph Merrett, A meeting of visitors Mounganui. Tauraga in the distance. [1843?], E-216-f-119, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington

Ena Thompson, horticulturalist, writer and independent woman

A Chinese Gooseberries label advertising E. R. Thompson’s ‘Tropical Acres’ farm in Ōtūmoetai
Tauranga Heritage Collection, 0020/87, Tauranga Museum

My introduction to horticulturalist, writer and independent woman, Ena Thompson, came through a pair of print blocks and several corresponding advertising labels that are part of the Tauranga Museum collection. These ‘Tropical Acres’ labels were used on the end of trays carrying Chinese gooseberries grown, packed and transported from Ena’s family orchard in Ōtūmoetai in the 1950s.

Ena Thompson with her father John Shaw Thompson outside their Ōtūmoetai home early to mid-1920s. Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries, Pae Korokī, Photo 04-681

John and Isabella Thompson, 11-year-old Ena and her younger brother Alwyn arrived in Tauranga in 1920 to settle on a 53-acre farm at the top of the Ōtūmoetai ridge that was purchased from Walter Bent.[i] Their home, a white weatherboard villa, was part of the deal and still stands in Longwood Lane.[ii] Less than twenty years earlier their farm had been part of a 180-acre property owned by Edward Howell and was known as ‘Willowbank Orchard’. The orchard was widely recognized for its ‘wonderful variety of fruits’ including peaches, nectarines, plums, and apples.[iii]

Thompson house, Longwood Lane, Ōtūmoetai, painted by family friend Ethel Macmillan
Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries, Pae Korokī, Ams 80/11/55

While Ena’s father was a farmer’s son, at heart he was a journalist and editor. John continued to manage and own newspapers while orcharding, although this may have been a financial necessity as parts of the farm, then called ‘Viewpoint’, were sold in 1923 and 1936.[iv]  By the late 1920s, John was spending extended time away from Tauranga and in May 1929 was taken to court for failing to register the orchard as a commercial entity – the charge was later dropped.[v] The 30s and 40s were plagued with health issues for the Thompson family and during this period Ena managed the orchard. Her love of the country and farming is recorded in papers given to the Tauranga City Libraries archive in 1992. In her unpublished manuscript which was a ‘fictional’ account of running an orchard Ena wrote:

“The countryman learns to listen for country sounds which mark the day and measure the hours; the tui which calls at a certain hour each morning, an owl at dusk, the tame thrushes which cheep – cheep in the same spots day by day, the little mother-thrush which returns the second season and looks in the self-same spot for food for her nestlings. These are his friends, and such sounds chime and charm the hour on his clocks.”[vi]

As the farm shrank Ena diversified and it is for her venture into Chinese gooseberries (kiwifruit) that she is best known. In 1951 she contracted a Wellington firm to test the impact of cool storage on gooseberries and their findings led to Ena becoming the first person to send the chilled fruit to markets around New Zealand paving the way for overseas export. [vii]

A report completed by Townsend & Paul Ltd. in 1951 that showed the ‘Effect of Temperature on Chinese Gooseberries in Cool Store’

By the 1960s Ena’s focus was on flowers, growing daffodils and irises for the Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch markets. At the same time the remaining orchard was subdivided, and sections were sold one by one. Ena was also engaged in a legal battle with the Tauranga County Council who wanted land for development on Hinewa and Ōtūmoetai Roads – an area that was known locally as Thompson’s Corner. As the city encroached and the last sections were sold, life in the country ended. Life was different but not quiet. Having many interests and friends beyond horticulture, Ena remained an active member of many Tauranga communities.

The corner of Ōtūmoetai Road and Hinewa Road can be seen towards the centre of this photograph. Longwood Lane is yet to be formed. The house that is circled is likely to have been Alwyn’s home next door to the family home that is obscured by trees. This photo was taken by Alf Rendell. He identified it as having been taken in 1950
Alf Rendell Collection RA031

References

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[i] Tauranga was known to the family. John’s father, Robert Thompson, settled in Tauranga in 1866. He purchased land in Gate Pa and, as part of the Militia, received confiscated land. He eventually settled in Opotiki, becoming a major land holder in that district.

[ii] 8 June 1920, Bay of Plenty Times.

[iii] 16 February 1806, Bay of Plenty Times. Howell advertised the sale of his farm in 1907 stating that it would be subdivided to suit purchases.

[iv] Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Ms Ams 215. John started up the Thames Courier in 1933 and was the owner editor until it folded in 1942. John’s son, Alwyn, was employed as the paper’s advertising salesman. 30 July 1923 and 11 January 1936, Bay of Plenty Times.

[v] 8 May 1929, Bay of Plenty Times.

[vi] Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Ms Ams 215.

[vii] Te Ao Mārama - Tauranga City Libraries Ms Ams 215.