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

A Dinosaur from Karewa

W.B. Tegetmeier, 1879
From an etching by Hubert Herkomer, Image courtesy of The Friends of Charles Darwin

In 1869, William Tegetmeier, naturalist, prolific writer on pigeons, and experimenter with his friend Charles Darwin on how beehive cells became hexagonal, reported in the Daily Southern Cross on New Zealand’s Tuatara, known then as a ‘Tuatera’ or Navara lizard.

Naturalist Ernst Dieffenbach, employed by the New Zealand Company, to assess sites suitable for settlement, arrived in Wellington on the Tory in May 1839. During his travels around the country, he learned about a large and interesting lizard which had once been common in the islands around New Zealand. It could grow to over two feet in length and lived in holes, often in sandhills, near the shore, but had become scarce due to being eaten for food and killed by pigs. Unable to find a ‘Tuatera,’ Dieffenbach offered a reward. After his year-long contract finished and within days of departing, he obtained a specimen, caught on the small, rocky islet of Karewa. (The island’s conical peak can be seen from Tauranga, on the outside of Matakana Island). Dieffenbach must have taken the ‘Tuatera’ to Britain, for he kept it alive in captivity for some time, then presented it to the British Museum. It is unclear whether it died with him, or in the museum, where it was preserved.

Albert Gunther by Lucy Gee (Mrs H. Coxeter), watercolour, 1900
NPG 4965 © National Portrait Gallery, London

German-born Albert Günther, keeper of the Zoological Department at the Museum, studied the ‘Tuatera’s anatomy. (This was probably not Dieffenbach’s specimen, as today, tuatara from the North Brothers Island in Cook Strait, bear Günther’s name – Sphenodon guntheri, whereas those from Karewa Island are now Sphenodon punctatus. It has been debated as to whether these are two distinct species, or a variant of the same).

Tuataras, adult and juveline, Karewa Island, c1920-1930s
Black-and-white positive lantern slide, taken by Bernard Sladden
Image courtesy of Tauranga City Libraries, Bernard Sladden Collection, Ref. bs-188

Günther noted peculiar dentition, as the teeth appeared as prominences of the jawbone; singular fishlike vertebrae and abdominal ribs, as well as those attached to the spine, which he believed would assist with the ventral plate for climbing from holes and through sandhills, as its limbs were short, with feeble claws. The highly developed bony skull and birdlike ribs indicated very low and very high vertebrate organisation, which Günther considered significant, as New Zealand had scanty development of reptilian life. The scientific name Hatteria punctata and order Rhynchocephalia was given, forming a distinct group between lizards and crocodiles.

At the same time as Tegetmeier’s report, the Illustrated London News reported the arrival of a young live ‘Tuatera’ at Regent’s Park Zoological Gardens; the first in any zoo and believed not previously seen in Europe. It was thought extremely rare; little was known about the species, which seemed to belong to the Agama family of lizards (a genus of small to moderate-sized, long-tailed insectivorous old-world lizards found in Africa). ‘The ‘Tuatera’s remarkable anatomical peculiarities were to be made known in a paper at the next Zoological Society’s scientific meeting. (Günther’s landmark paper was the first to establish the Tuatara was not a lizard).

Karewa Island, c1920-1930s
Hand-coloured black-and-white positive lantern slide, taken by Bernard Sladden
Image courtesy of Tauranga City Libraries, Bernard Sladden Collection, Ref. bs-166

Meanwhile, two living specimens of Hatteria punctata collected from Karewa Island, had been donated to the Auckland Institute by H T Clarke, presumed to be Henry Tacey Clarke (1825-1902) son of missionary George Clarke. He served in the military, spoke fluent Maori, was a registered interpreter, a Native Land Court Judge, and Commissioner of Tauranga Land. Brett Payne mentions him in his March 2019 Tauranga Historical Society blog.

An anonymous writer, who recorded ‘A North Island Trip’ in the Cromwell Argus in 1880, mentioned that in 1873 he had visited Karewa Island, ‘home of the giant lizard,’ to obtain specimens of the species.

In May 1876, the Evening Post recorded considerable public interest from the latest addition to the Colonial Museum in Wellington; thirteen living tuataras, brought by Mr. Louis B. Wilson from the Brothers Islands. Some were almost two feet in length, described as ‘having an exceedingly sinister aspect, strongly resembling crocodiles with spiky backs and extensive smiles. However, they are quite harmless and very gentle, the thirteen living peacefully together; quite a happy family amongst their artificial rockwork, grazing pastorally on the worms, with which they are liberally supplied.’ People were startled by their sudden movement after seeing them completely motionless.

Tuatara and Toanui (Flesh-footed shearwater), Karewa Island, c1920-1930s
Black-and-white positive lantern slide, taken by Bernard Sladden
Image courtesy of Tauranga City Libraries, Bernard Sladden Collection, Ref. bs-187

Keeping live tuataras at the museum in Wellington was a tradition kept for many years. When I was researching at Te Papa Archives for my book ‘A Path Through the Trees’ on Mary Sutherland, I learned that Augustus Hamilton (Museum Director 1903-1913) wrote on his desk calendar when ‘the old lizard died,’ and Mary Sutherland was present in May 1937 when Roger Walpole, assistant at the museum, somehow cracked his ribs while feeling the tuatara.

Today, Southland Museum has a purpose-built tuatarium, which started in 1961, with tuataras (Sphenodon guntheri) from the Northern Brother Island. It runs a successful breeding programme and when numbers reached one hundred and five, a decision was made to release some on islands in the Marlborough Sounds.

Photographing a tuatara with a Popular Pressman half-plate camera, c1920-1930s
Black-and-white positive lantern slide, taken by Bernard Sladden
Image courtesy of Tauranga City Libraries, Bernard Sladden Collection, Ref. bs-733

This article would not be complete without mentioning Bernard Sladden. In 1932, he was appointed Honorary Inspector under the 1908 Scenery Preservation Act, with responsibility for Bay of Plenty offshore Islands. His wonderful photographs of tuatara would probably have been taken on Karewa Island.
    
Researching this story, led me to wonder why tuataras were sent to museums. The answer turned out to be simple. New Zealand’s first zoo was established in 1906 by Wellington City Council near Newtown Park. Auckland Zoo began in 1922 at Western Springs, with a lion, a hyena, a panther and monkeys, purchased from a private zoo in Onehunga, which was closed.

References

William Bernharrdt Tegetmeier, Wikipedia
Dieffenbach, Johan Karl Ernst (1811-1855) on JSTOR
Albert Günther, Wikipedia
Papers Past
Daily Southern Cross, 4 August 1868, 13 February 1869
Otago Witness, 13 February 1869
Evening Post, 12 May 1876
Cromwell Argus, 19 October 1880
Press, 16 February 1869
High Trees and the Te Papa Peninsula 1860-1910, by Brett Payne. March 2019 Tauranga Historical Society Blogspot
Bernard Sladden – The Man and the Books, by Max Avery, Historical Review, Vol.68, No 1, p29 Sphenodon punctatus, Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology