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

Bishop George Selwyn, Archdeacon Alfred Brown and the Flying Fish

Among the small missionary schooners like the Herald, Karere and Kukupa that sailed through Tauranga Harbour’s Maunganui entrance during the 1830s and 40s, was the 17 ton Flying Fish. Built at the Bay of Islands for use as an Anglican missionary vessel, it should not be confused with the Pacific Island’s trading schooner Flying Fish, 35 tons, which under Captain Webster, frequently arrived at, and departed Auckland during this decade).¹

Two men at work on Flying Fish at her berth at Orakei, Auckland, circa. 1844-1847

After Bishop Samuel Marsden’s death in 1838, the Church Missionary Society in New Zealand was led by the Rev. Henry Williams. A former Royal Navy Lieutenant, Williams who had built built the Flying Fish, wrote that the need for a Bishop was very great. George Augustus Selwyn was selected for the position in 1841, with responsibilities that included oversight of the Church of England’s work in New Zealand, as well as among the islands of Melanesia.² Selwyn’s first missionary vessel for use in New Zealand waters was the Flying Fish. A swift and most seaworthy vessel, from 1842 he often referred to it as ‘my yacht’, ‘my little schooner’, and greatly enjoyed taking a turn at the tiller.³ Later remodeled with a deck and cabin, the little schooner proved an ideal craft for visiting New Zealand’s North and South Island mission stations, accessible only by sea and often through challenging harbour entrances.

Bishop George Augustus Selwyn

Selwyn had a close relationship with Tauranga’s leading missionary Alfred Brown. In 1843 and 1844 Brown was encouraged in his arduous overland evangelising work when Selwyn trekked from Auckland to visit him at Matamata and Maungatautari, with an earlier visit to Brown at Te Papa in December 1842. He also showed his faith in Brown’s efforts by appointing him Archdeacon of Tauranga on 20th September 1844. Selwyn was to show his confidence in the new Archdeacon still further, as there is on record a letter written by Brown, on 29th February 1848, declining the appointment to a Bishopric which had been offered him by Selwyn.⁴  

On 9 March 1845, Selwyn recorded that the Flying Fish had made the quickest passage ever recorded for a vessel sailing between Wellington and Auckland. ⁵ Ably skippered by Captain Champion, the Flying Fish was also known as the ‘college schooner’, as it regularly transported missionaries and Maori ‘college boys’ to and from Thames, Tauranga and other Bay of Plenty mission stations to Selwyn’s St Johns College at Kohimarama, Auckland. During mid-1845, Brown was conveyed by the Flying Fish to Tauranga on an urgent visit to see his wife Charlotte and dying invalid son Marsh who had previously been cared for at St. John’s College.

Archdeacon Alfred Nesbitt Brown

Alfred Brown and William Williams, who arrived overland from the Turanga (Poverty Bay) mission station, sailed to Auckland on the Flying Fish for a meeting of Anglican archdeacons, held on 2 and 3 September 1847. Williams briefly recorded a swift overnight voyage to the College anchorage.

At once we set sail with a light wind & crossed the firth of the Thames. Passed the Island of Pakihi at daylight grounding for a short time on a sandspit. Beat up to Auckland with a strong westerly breeze and at four oclock we landed… ⁶

Captain Champion and the Flying Fish made additional voyages to Tauranga’s Te Papa mission station during the 1840s. On 26 September 1846, the schooner returned to St John’s College with flax, potatoes, maize and timber from Tauranga.⁷ In the same year, Selwyn sailed to Tauranga to conduct a confirmation service for some of Brown’s Māori converts at Te Papa^.8

Selwyn’s arduous, extended voyages to New Zealand’s scattered CMS coastal mission stations proved, at times, long and lonely experiences. At the Bay of Islands on 9 March 1845, he recorded:

 

I am sitting in my little cabin, in the schooner Flying Fish of seventeen tons burden; with no other companions than my sailing master, Champion, late boatswain of the Government brig Victoria, and my crew of three New Zealanders.⁹

Captain Champion at the tiller of the Flying Fish

Selwyn did not remain in his cabin for long. On 11 March the ‘rebel’ chiefs Hone Heke Pokai and Te Ruki Kawiti’s warriors attacked Kororareka (Russell) in the first battle of the Flagstaff War. Selwyn, Champion and their Māori crew took some of the terrified settler refugees aboard the Flying Fish, and joined the rescue fleet that transported them safely to Auckland. Initially offered a much larger vessel for his voyages that year, Selwyn, by now an accomplished sailor and commander, declined the offer. Replying by letter to his would-be benefactor he wrote:

In answer to your noble offer of a schooner similar to that given to the Bishop of Newfoundland, I must tell you, that any thing above twenty tons is considered large in our harbours, the greater number of our coasting vessels being about that size; and, if managed by steady men, they perform their voyages with great safety.¹⁰

Bishop George Selwyn continued to sail the sea-battered Flying Fish around his coastal diocese until 1848, when the schooner’s leaks began topping the cabin floor. The final straw it was reported, occurred when he stepped out of bed one morning ‘into a salt water bath’.¹¹  In July 1848, Selwyn took command of the larger 20-ton Undine, another Bay of Islands-built schooner. Whether this vessel also became a familiar sight on the waters of Tauranga Harbour during this era is currently under investigation.

References

¹ ‘Old Mission Ships’, New Zealand Herald, 27 July 1935: 15. 

² Selwyn, George Augustus, Te Ara, New Zealand biographies

https://teara.govt.nz › biographies › selwyn-george-aug...

³ Tucker, H. W; Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of George Augustus Selwyn. Bishop of New Zealand, William Wells Gardiner, London, 1879: 148.

Tucker, 1879: 148.

⁴ Waikato Independent, 11 May 1939: 3

⁵ Tucker, 1879: 187.

⁶ Porter, Francis, (ed.), The Turanga Journals 1840-1850” Letters and Journals of William and Jane Williams, Missionaries to Poverty Bay. Victoria University Press, 1Wellington, 1974: 442.

⁷ New Zealander, 26 September 1842: 2.

⁸ Williams, 1974: 370.

⁹ Tucker 1879: 187.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Williams, 1974: 464.

Illustrations

1 Hutton, Thomas Biddulph, 1824-1886. (56) The Flying Fish. Hutton, Thomas Biddulph (Rev), 1824-1886: [Three sketchbooks of New Zealand scenes and people. 1844-1847]. Ref: E-111-1-071. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

2 Mason & Co (Photographers). George Augustus Selwyn. Engraved by W. Hale, 1878-1879 from a photograph by Messrs Mason & Co. [London, 1889]. Curteis, George Herbert, 1824-1894: Bishop Selwyn of New Zealand and of Lichfield ... (London, Kegan Paul, 1889). Ref: PUBL-0148-front. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

3 Hemus & Hanna (Firm). Hemus & Hanna (Auckland) fl 1879-1882: Portrait of Archdeacon A N Brown. Ref: PA3-0103. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

4 Hutton, Thomas Biddulph, 1824-1886. (70) Champion at the tiller. Flying Fish. Hutton, Thomas Biddulph (Rev), 1824-1886: [Three sketchbooks of New Zealand scenes and people. 1844-1847]. Ref: E-111-1-085. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Peter Dillon, Maungatapu Pa and the Jess, 1835, 1838

Tauranga’s Early Traders - Part III

There were many courageous and adventurous spirits among the sea captains and sailors who settled as traders in Maori communities around Tauranga Harbour from the late 1820s. One of the most remarkable was the red-headed, Irish Catholic, sea captain and adventurer Peter Dillon, who traded at Maungatapu Pa during 1835 and 1838. Described as a man of charm and wit, but prone to anger and violence, Dillon had been made a Chevalier (Knight) of the Legion of Honour by the French government in 1829. The honour recognised his role in discovering the fate of the La Perouse expedition which had been wrecked in the Santa Cruz (Solomon) Islands after departing Sydney in 1788. Given the title French Consul for the South Seas, Dillon was also awarded a pension of 4,000 francs (£160) a year and presented to King Louis X of France.¹

 

Peter Dillon, sea captain, explorer, chevalier, trader and author, 1788- 1847

Born to Irish parents in 1788, Dillon later joined the Royal Navy and claimed to have ‘had the honour to serve at the battle of Trafalgar’ on 21 October 1805 at the age of 17. After leaving the Navy, Dillon found his way to Calcutta in India where he began his career as a South Seas trading skipper for hire. Between 1808 and 1813, he visited Polynesia in East India Company ships like the Hunter to trade for sandalwood. At Sydney in 1814, Dillon was hired by Rev. Samuel Marsden to sail the missionary vessel Active to the Bay of Islands on an exploratory expedition. Among his other commands were the Sydney trading vessels Phatisalam (1821), his own vessels Calder (1825) and the St Patrick (1827), the ship on which he first located items from La Perouse’s long-lost ships La Bousolle and L’Astrolabe.²

After living in Paris and enjoying celebrity status for several years, Dillon returned to Sydney in October 1834. Wishing to take advantage of the New Zealand flax trade, he purchased the 77-ton British built schooner Jess. As an owner, Dillon was freed from many former duties by his captain Mr C. Wilson; one Sydney newspaper noting, that, ‘as a concession to his position as Chevalier of the Legion of Honor he no longer knocked the crew about himself’.³

Maungatapu headland and Pa
Maungatapu Pa is located at the harbour end of the promontory on the left side of the photo, with the Matapihi Peninsula across the channel. Part of half tide Rangataua-Welcome Bay is in the foreground with Mauao-Mount Maunganui in the background

At Tauranga’s Maungatapu Pa during 1835, Dillon and his ‘trade’ were welcomed and protected by Kiharoa, Te Mutu and Taupari, leading rangatira of the Ngati He clan of Ngai Te Rangi. A formidable headland fortress, located on the inner harbour between the Waimapu Estuary and Rangataua-Welcome Bay, the pa featured sheer cliffs on three sides above the harbour, topped by palisades, with a great outer ditch and stockade on the landward side.⁴ During the 1830s the pa was besieged by successive seaborne expeditions of Ngapuhi, Ngati Maru and Arawa. Described by the Otumoetai-based trader Joseph Isaac Montifiore as ‘the bravest and strongest’ of the Tauranga hapu’, Ngati He employed the muskets and munitions obtained from resident traders like Dillon to repulse every attempt by enemy tribesmen to storm their fortress.⁵

At the site chosen for the Te Papa mission station in 1834, Dillon found two empty raupo whare, one of which, much to the annoyance of the Anglicans, he requisitioned and shipped to Maungatapu as his home and trading base. An impressive figure at 6 foot 4 inches (193 cm) and heavily built, Dillon’s direct, assertive manner, soon afforded him status as a Pakeha rangatira and man of mana. As Tauranga iwi were fully armed with muskets by 1835, Dillon was obliged to locate markets further afield. Historian L.W. Melvin describes Dillon as a veteran trader who immediately ‘made it known that he had much powder and many muskets to trade for flax, and then sat back and waited as the news penetrated inland as far as the Waikato’.⁶  When Rev Alfred Brown visited Matamata Pa in July 1835, he noted that the leading Ngati Haua rangatira Te Waharoa had crossed the Kaimai Range to Tauranga earlier that month and, having conferred with Dillon at Maungatapu, was:

[U]nable to talk on any other subject other than the great riches of Peter Dillon who has arrived at Tauranga. Peter styles himself French Consul, but is occupied in the rather unconsul-like work of purchasing flax, pigs and potatoes for muskets and powder. It seems that he has prevailed upon the Natives to take down one of the houses which they built for the Missionaries at the Papa, and removed it for his accommodation to the Pa at Maungatapu – his present seat.⁷

Like this sturdy schooner sailing off the Isle of Wight in 1833, Dillon’s Jess was British-built

Dillon delivered to Te Waharoa, within the space of about seven months, three additional consignments of flintlock muskets and munitions. At Maungatapu, Dillon accumulated cargoes of flax, pork and potatoes which the Jess’s skipper collected at pre-arranged times and disposed of, either at the Bay of Islands or Sydney before returning to Tauranga with further ‘trade’. At one point, the Chevalier’s ambitions placed the lucrative cross-Kaimai trade in jeopardy. After he promised to send a Pakeha trading agent to the Ngati Koroki people at Maungatautari in the Waikato, a party of their people set out, laden with flax for Maungatapu. As their path would take them through Matamata and Ngati Haua lands, Te Waharoa denied these competitor’s access. Both iwi prepared for war, which was only averted when Rev. Alfred Brown intervened.⁸  

Dillon returned to Tauranga on the Jess to trade for flax during February-March 1838. By this time intertribal warfare and introduced diseases had reduced the population of Maungatapu Pa to just 300.⁹ Rev William Wade who visited Tauranga while travelling overland between Thames and Rotorua in 1838, noted: ‘While on my visit to the Papa [Te Papa mission station], the "Jess," Capt. Dillon was at anchor in the harbour, having on board an interesting Tonga chief, named Tubou Toutai, and nine natives of the Fiji Islands’.¹⁰

Boarding the Jess with the Te Papa missionaries, Wade was informed by Dillon that while sailing between Fiji and Tauranga he had encountered and rescued ‘eight men and a little boy, who had been driven out to sea by contrary winds and were in distress’. Now ‘entirely destitute of covering, and suffering greatly from change of climate’, the missionaries provided the Fijians with blankets.¹¹ 

While at Te Papa in 1838, Wade recorded a description of the harbour as seen and sailed that year by the vessels of the traders, the Te Papa missionaries and Dillon’s Jess.

The harbours of Tauranga and Katikati may be regarded as parts of one inland sea, which is divided off from the main by a narrow, indented island [Matakana], fifteen or sixteen miles in length…There is often a dangerous sea between Tauranga and Katikati, occasioned by the conflux of rivers and meeting of tides; but the harbour of Tauranga itself is pretty quiet and secure. The eastern head of the Tauranga entrance is formed by Maunganui (great mountain), a steep and solitary hill, rising abruptly from a level tongue of land, and serving as a landmark to vessels off the coast. The entrance itself is narrow, and the harbour shoaly. The general appearance of the country, as you enter, is that of an uninteresting flat; and we found the land around the Papa so extremely destitute of wood, that our supply of fuel and fencing was usually brought by canoes from other parts and purchased from the natives.¹²

Mount Maunganui and Te Papa Mission Tauranga, March 1839

A view of Mount Maunganui, the harbour entrance and Te Papa mission station as seen by Rev Richard Taylor one year after Dillon’s last trading visit in 1838. Matakana and Karewa Islands are shown at far left with Tuhua-Mayor Island and Hopukiore-Mount Drury on the right

When the Jess returned to Sydney on 14 April 1838 with a cargo of flax and oil, the authorities sent the nine Fijians home on another vessel. Dillon now aged 50, returned to Europe after selling the Jess which continued to be sailed out of Sydney into the 1840s.¹³ In Europe he sought, without success, appointment to an official position in New Zealand or the Pacific Islands, and turned to writing before dying in Paris in 1847.

A staunch Roman Catholic, Dillon’s vocal criticism of the Anglican missionaries, and his theft of their whare at Te Papa in 1835, may have been forgiven, but it was not forgotten. In a sermon at St Andrews Church Cambridge in the Waikato, more than a century later, Vicar C.W. Chandler referred to ‘unscrupulous traders such as Peter Dillon of Tauranga… whose desire to make money out of bloodshed, made the task of … pioneering missionaries like A.N. Brown even harder than it should have been’.¹⁴

At the Bay of Islands on the vessel Research in 1827, Dillon had been asked by the dying Ngapuhi musket general Hongi Hika to take his daughter as a wife. ‘The Chevalier, notwithstanding the charms of the lady, declined the proposal and proceeded on his voyage’.¹⁵ Dillon was not usually so reticent. He and his crews often sailed with Polynesian women on board as temporary wives. In 1839 the Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang reported seeing one of the Irishman’s daughters aged 11 or 12, ‘barefooted’, ‘bareheaded’, and ‘clad in a New Zealand mat’ on the banks of the Kauakaua River.¹⁶   New Zealand’s pre-Treaty traders were notoriously prolific breeders, some fathering as many as 40 children and the chevalier may well have left descendants in Tauranga.¹⁷ 

Image Credits

Pardon, Daniel, Travel Diary -1827. Dillon the Adventurer Who Located La Perouse, https://www.tahiti-infos.com/Carnet-de-voyage-1827-Dillon-l-aventurier-qui-localisa-La-Perouse

Welcome Bay, Tauranga. Postcard published by F. Duncan & Co, Auckland, Collection of Justine Neal, courtesy of The Tauranga Historical Society.

William Clark. A British topsail schooner inward bound off the Needles, Isle of Wight, with a cutter and other shipping in the distance, 1833, Public Domain

Taylor, Richard, ‘View of Maunga nui & Papa Mission Tauranga. Mar. 1839’. Auckland War Memorial Museum. Ref. PD-1961-14-p171-1

Endnotes

¹ The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 5 August 1939: 10. J. W. Davidson, ‘Peter Dillon and the South Seas’, History Today, Vol. 6, No. 5, May 1956:  307-17.

² Ibid. McCauley, Debbie, Peter Dillon, WordPress.com, https://debbiemccauleyauthor.wordpress.com › biogra...

³ Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 13 May 1933: 5.

⁴ Jones, T. M; ‘HMS Pandora in the Bay of Plenty, 1852’, Extracts from the Journal of Lieutenant T.M. Jones, RN, Part II: 72-73, in Historical Review: Journal of the Whakatane and District Historical Society Inc. Vol. XVIII, No.2: 72.

⁵ Sydney Herald, 17 July 1937: 2.

⁶ Melvin, L.W; ‘Te Waharoa of the Ngatihaua’, in The Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol. 71, No. 4, 1962: 368, 371 (361-378).

⁷ Journals of Alfred Brown, 27-28 July 1835 cited in McCauley, Debbie, Peter Dillon, WordPress.com

⁸ Vennell, C. W; Such Things Were: The Storyof Cambridge, NZ, Reed, Dunedin, 1939: 34.

⁹ Wade, William, A Journey in the North Island of New Zealand, Hobart, George Rolwegan, 1842: 135.

¹⁰ Ibid

¹¹ Ibid: 134, 138.

¹² Ibid: 134-137.

¹³ Tegg's New South Wales Pocket Almanac and Remembrancer, 1841: 6.

¹⁴ Waikato Independent, 19 December 1939: 4.

¹⁵ Woolls, W.A. A Short Account of the Character and Labours of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, B. Isaacs, Parramatta 1844: 76.

¹⁶ Dunmore Lang, John, New Zealand in 1839, Smith, Elder and Co, London, 1839: 58.

¹⁷ Bentley, Trevor, Pakeha Maori: The Extraordinary Story of the Europeans Who Lived as Maori in Early New Zealand, Panguin, Auckland, 1999: 204-205.