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

Edward Clementson, Castaway and Flax Agent, 1833-1838

Tauranga’s Early Traders Part IV
 

Like the South Shields collier Mary shown here in two views, Clementson’s vessels Elizabeth and Bee were British built brigs – vessels generally defined as square sailed, 2 masted vessels, often with one or more try sails between foremast and bowsprit and a fore-and-aft spanker boom sail off the main mast.

Edward Clementson enters New Zealand history in 1830 as a 23-year-old ship’s mate on Captain John Stewart’s 236-ton English brig Elizabeth, which sailed from Sydney to New Zealand in search of a cargo of muka or dressed flax.¹   In return for a promised shipload of this commodity, Stewart transported 100 of Te Rauparaha’s Ngati Toa warriors from Kapiti to Banks Peninsula. There, they surprised and slaughtered many Ngai Tahu people at Takapuneke and captured their leading rangatira Te Maiharanui and his wife. Both were later tortured and killed at Kapiti. The Elizabeth’s crew was reported by Ngai Tahu survivors to have actively participated in the attack. John Stewart was subsequently arrested and sent to trial in Sydney where the charges were dismissed. Although Clementson had led the party of three sailors who seized and chained Te Maiharanui and was described in NSW official documents as one of the two principal offenders, he was not prosecuted.²

By 1832, Edward Clementson was in command of the brig Bee, sharing with the first mate responsibilities for the deck crew, ship’s cargo and navigation. Despite its assorted crews and skippers (including Clementson), the 135-ton, square-rigged sealer-trader was sailed repeatedly and successfully between Hobart and New Zealand, and along the latter’s uncharted, unlighted, inshore “cannibal coast”, for more than 20 years.³

Between Abel Tasman’s visit in 1642 and the Treaty in 1840, Maori throughout New Zealand launched 111 recorded taua ito (blood vengeance) and taua muru (ritualised plundering) raids against ships, ships boats and shore parties, almost all retaliatory in accordance with tikanga Maori or customary law. Given these turbulent times, the Bee had a remarkably long period of service, particularly as most voyages were made during the Sealers War (1810-1822) and the most intensive years of the intertribal Musket Wars (1818 -1839).⁴ 

The journalist-historian James Cowan said of the Bee’s voyages during this era:

Under one owner and another, and a succession of hard-case skippers, this busy Bee knocked about New Zealand and its off-shore islands wherever there was a cargo of flax to be picked up from the Maoris in exchange for muskets and gunpowder, or a load of oil and bone from its shore-whalers, or a lot of skins from the seal-hunting gangs. In her spare time she went whaling, like many other South Sea traders of that day.⁵  

In 1833, a time served convict from Hobart town named William Cuthbert, also known as Lincoln Bill, managed to raise enough capital from creditors to charter the Bee and a cargo of “trade” intended for barter with coastal iwi. On boarding the vessel, he directed the Bee’s new captain, William Stewart to sail for New Zealand ostensibly ‘to trade for flax and pigs, oil and “general fixings”, which at that time included smoke-dried tattooed heads; trade term, “baked heads”.  Cuthbert first ordered Stewart to proceed to Tasmania’s Maria Island where he took aboard three escaped convicts from the penal settlement and their captive policeman escort.⁶     

William Stewart was a master mariner and navigator of some repute and Stewart Island is named after him. Clementson, who remained on the Bee in the role of first mate quarrelled with Cuthbert who planned to sail the brig to Peru where he hoped to sell the vessel and its cargo. In due course, the brig reached the New Zealand coast at Tauranga. Here, Cuthbert ordered Clementson ashore at pistol point on one of its beaches “with barely more than the clothes he wore”.⁷

In 1833 Edward Clementson was abandoned on one of Tauranga’s beaches by the Bee’s piratical master William Cuthbert

The Bee’s crew set sail for the Pacific Islands where Cuthbert later dumped the police constable and the three Maria Island convicts. For some months, he and his crew, which mostly comprised time expired convicts like himself, commenced an island hopping, drunken debauch with Polynesian women from various islands between, and including, Tahiti and Hawaii, on their way to Peru. However at Honolulu Harbour, William Cuthbert disappeared, perhaps forewarned that the Sydney authorities had declared the brig a pirated vessel, though the Maketu based trader Phillip Tapsell was later informed that the pirate had been hanged.⁸ The Bee was eventually returned to Sydney and sold for the benefit of Cuthbert’s creditors.

There were no missionaries resident in Tauranga in 1833 and Clementson was fortunate not to have been captured by Ngapuhi or Te Arawa, whose allied waka fleets often entered the harbour and occupied its shores that year to make war on local iwi. Clementson found refuge among Ngai Te Rangi’s trader Pakeha-Maori at Otumoetai Pa, where he was soon recruited as a flax buying agent by the Maketu based trader Phillip Tapsell. Led by Tapsell, Clementson and several Maori guides set out from Maketu to Rotorua, then on to Matamata Pa, the base from which the castaway Englishman was to conduct his trade. The journey and reception at Matamata must have been a strange experience for Clementson, a veteran seaman recently turned landlubber. Tapsell told his biographer, the Maketu Postmaster, Mr E. Little in 1869:

For a part of the way our journey was very severe, over a succession of steep mountains, the sides of which were like precipices, and though the forest of Patatere [sic], which was so dense, and obstructed with undergrowth and supplejack, that our passage through it was toilsome beyond measure. Matamata was at that time a very beautiful place, and provisions of all kind very abundant, A great feast was prepared on the arrival of our party from Maketu. Pigs were killed and roasted, baskets of eels prepared, and stacks of potatoes sufficient for a hundred men; in addition to which a large number of live pigs were sent for our party to kill for ourselves.⁹ 

When Tapsell had negotiated terms of trade with Te Waharoa and other leading rangatira, he and his guides returned to Maketu, leaving Clementson among Matamata’s Ngati Haua people.¹⁰   

Tapsell had already placed traders at Matamata Pa to exchange muskets, munitions and general trade goods for dressed flax. Appointed chief trading agent by Tapsell, Clementson appears to have been readily accepted by his fellows, while he adopted their Pakeha-Maori lifestyle and became fluent in Maori. When the Anglican missionaries Williams, Fairburn, Brown and Morgan ascended the Waihou for the first time in 1833, they were welcomed at Matamata by Te Waharoa. Williams noted that Ngati Haua’s traders were "very civil" Nevertheless, that evening when the missionaries and their christianised Maori porters commenced a hymn, Clementson and his three companions countered from within their whare with a voluminous version of Old King Cole.¹¹

This sketch by Henry Williams of missionaries crossing a swamp is based on his arduous traverse of the Matamata’s great Mangapouri swamp with Revs Fairburn, Brown and Morgan in 1833. The same swamp was traversed by Clementson’s great cross-Kaimai flax trains from 1833.

As arranged by Tapsell and Te Waharoa, for the next several years Clementson's consignments of flax were back packed or pikaued through the great korari or flax swamp known as Mangapouri (Dark Stream) and across the Waihou River, seperating Matamata and the Kaimai Range. They were then laboriously transported up the 1,600-foot range by long lines of women, older children and slaves who camped overnight on the broad summit plateau. Descending the ancient and deeply rutted Wairere track the following day, the porters crossed the Te Puna Peninsula to the Wairoa River mouth. There, they were met by the Otumoetai based Farrow brothers who supervised the consignments’ loading aboard vessels bound for Bay of Islands and those contracted to the Sydney merchant Richard Jones.

While Clementson’s consignments were intermittent, they were considerable. In a letter written to Henry Williams in on 11 September 1835, Alfred Brown who was visiting Tauranga reported: "Mr Clementson is just going to transport upwards of fifty tons of flax to Tauranga in two thousand back-loads. All this has been scraped by the natives since I have been here".¹²

A trader bartering with Maori for baskets of dressed flax and a pig during the 1830s

Despite his actions during the Elizabeth affair, Clementson established and remained on good terms with Tapsell, his fellow traders at Matamata Pa and the Bay of Islands missionaries during their temporary visits to Tauranga between 1833 and 1838. When Clementson learned that Te Waharoa was planning to attack Maketu Pa in early 1836, he twice sent one of his traders to warn Tapsell.¹³ When Rev John Wilson visited Tauranga on the little missionary cutter Kukupa in 1836, the year intertribal warfare in the region reached its apogee, Clementson sent him a bodyguard - a ferocious bull-dog cross, incongruously named Breezy.¹⁴  

Later that year, when Clementson and James Farrow visited the Bay of Islands, they joined the missionaries in supporting a petition to King William IV, by settlers, exasperated at the absence of law and order.¹⁵ Fortunately for Clementson, when he once cursed Te Waharoa “native fashion”, a curse associated with evil and death, a timely intervention by Alfred Brown saved his life. The utu (payment or compensation) demanded by Te Waharoa, and known to have been paid by Brown, while unstated, will have been substantial.¹⁶   

 

Te Waharoa died in 1838 and his Pakeha-Maori Edward Clementson, died soon after, during a voyage from Tauranga to Matata. His trader contemporary James Farrow who survived the voyage informed Phillip Tapsell:

 

       He [Farrow], his wife, Clementson and a young man named Jenkins had set out … with a view of meeting with Mr White [resident trader at Matata and later, a prolific boatbuilder], and when off the place, were overtaken by a gale of wind. It would have been easy for them to have run under the lee of Whale Island where they could have had smooth water, and there have waited till the storm subsided, but their young companion being inexperienced and very confident, was strongly desirous that they should at once land at Matata, which he was of the opinion they could easily do.

 

Yielding to this opinion, they pulled for the mainland, on approaching which, they found a very heavy surf breaking on the bar. Appearances were so threatening, that when near the entrance to the river, they laid on their oars to deliberate on the best course to pursue. They consulted so long that before they were aware, the boat drifted into the breakers and was capsized. Jenkins not being able to swim, went down like a shot. Clementson was a good swimmer, but was so encumbered by heavy boots and buttoned up to the throat with a pea jacket, that after a few strokes, he sank also.¹⁷  

 

James Farrow, who was also a good swimmer, almost succumbed to exhaustion, but encouraged by his Maori wife who swam by his side, he eventually reached the shore and safety.

 

References

¹ NZ pre-1846, Person page 791, Early NZ history, nzearlyhistory.com, http://www.nzearlyhistory.com › p791 

² Ogilvie, Gordon, Banks Peninsula, Cradle of Canterbury, GP Books, Wellington, 1990: 155. McNab, Robert, Historical Records of New Zealand, Vol. II, Government Printer, Wellington, 1914: 594.

³ Daily Southern Cross, 4 August 1869: 6. 

⁴ Bentley, Trevor, Pakeha Slaves, Maori Masters, New Holland, Auckland, 2019: 22-23, 25-26.

⁵ Cowan, James, ‘Rovers of the Brig “Bee’ – The Story of a Lawless Cruise in the Old Pacific’, in The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Vol. 13, Issue 3, 1938: 17-20.

⁶ Daily Southern Cross, 4 August 1869: 6. 

⁷ Auckland Star, 8 December 1928: 1. (Supplement). Cowan, JPS, Vol. 13: 18.

⁸ Daily Southern Cross, 4 August 1869: 6.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid. 

¹¹ Vennell, C.W; Brown and the Elms, D.H. Maxwell, Tauranga, 1984: 12.

¹² Gifford, W.H. and H.B. Williams, A Centennial History of Tauranga, The Tauranga Centennial Committee and A.H. and A.W. Reed, Dunedin, 1940, Capper Reprint, 1976: 209.

¹³ Tapsell, P; ‘Reminiscences, 1777?-1873’. Ref. ½-005486, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ: 155-156.

 

¹⁴ Wilson, J.A; Missionary Life and Work in New Zealand, 1889: 56.

 

¹⁵ Polack, J.S; New Zealand, Vol II, Richard Bentley, London, 1838, Capper Reprint, 1974: 188.  

 

¹⁶ L.W. ‘Te Waharoa of NgatiHaua’, in The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol 71, No. 4 1962: 368.

 

¹⁷ Tapsell, P.  ‘Reminiscences’,155-156.

 

Illustrations

John Scott, The South Shields Collier Brig ‘Mary’ 1885, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org ›wiki › Brig

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

Henry Williams, ‘Passing through a swamp in New Zealand’, PUBL-0031-1836-1. Alexander Turnbull library, Wellington, NZ.

John Williams, ‘A European male, thought to be Joel Polack bargaining with three Maori males’, [1845-1846]. A-079-017. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ>