Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
There is a vessel from Kororareka with coal and manganese, or kauri-gum; there are others from Mahurangi with lime, from Whangarei with fat cattle, from Tauranga with potatoes, from Poverty Bay with wool, from the Wairoa with butter and cheese, from Port Lyttelton with flour, or raw-hides for the Panmure tannery, from Dunedin with grain or colonial ale, and so on and so on.
The Wairoa creek is navigable for schooners and cutters for more than eighty miles, as well as its tributaries, the Kaihu, Kopura, Tauraroa, and Maungakahia. We have come into a district admirably adapted for pioneer settlement. For nature has supplied water-ways in every direction, and thus the first great difficulty in opening up a new country, the want of roads, is obviated.
A shanty here, is a name applied to almost any kind of nondescript erection, which would not come under the designation of wharè, or be honoured by the ambitious title of house. Rough edifices of planking are the common form. We went up to Tokatoka on the Wairoa, and there we purchased enough sawn timber for our purpose, for about twelve or fifteen pounds.
We bought several boatloads of battens rough outside boards split up, and the like for next to nothing, at the Wairoa saw-mills, and got them down to our place. Then we had to hump them up to the ground; no light work, for a load had to be carried often nearly a mile uphill. We purchased a keg or two of nails, and finally fixed up the fence.
When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point, feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at some other world's end. All these pictures are taken in the calm weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of spray, often fifty feet high.
Ships of heavy tonnage can get up to Tokatoka on the Wairoa, to Te Pahi and Te Otamatea, and within a short distance of Helensville, these places being, respectively, from twenty-five to thirty-five miles from the Heads. Smaller vessels can, of course, go anywhere.
They are all hot, dirty, and disagreeable. I also see a stockyard, and within it four quarters of fresh beef, likewise hot, dirty, and disagreeable. There would seem to be a difficulty somewhere. Can I assist in removing it?" He was answered by a burly giant of a bushman, a Wairoa man, who had scant knowledge of our dandy.
It was in June, which you know is winter-time in New Zealand, in the year 1885, that the people of Wairoa, a beautiful place where some missionaries had settled that they might teach the Maoris, were awakened at midnight by a heavy shock of earthquake, accompanied by a fearful roar, which made them rush out of their houses in terror. The sight which greeted them was grand but awful.
All along the beach boats lay drawn up, and the number of people walking about made the place seem quite populous. Of course, everybody was there from our own river, and from Paparoa and Matakohe besides. There were people, too, from the Wairoa settlements, from the Oruawharo, even from Maungaturoto and distant Mangawai.
The Wairoa man was regarding him in blank astonishment. Clearly, Dandy Jack was an entirely new species of the genus homo to him. Thus spake the bull-fighter, with elaborate affectation of languor and softness "Look here, old fellow! You don't understand what a bull is. I'll tell you. It's a thing that some people look at from the safe side of the fence, and that other people take by the horns."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking