An Isle of Mystery.

There is something of mystic gloom, as well as much arboreal beauty, about that tree-clad island Papaitonga, sitting green and lone on the blue face of the Trembling Waters. We pulled across to it one day from the boatshed that stands on the reedy shore close to the historic carved pataka, “Te Takinga,” and an olden Wanganui war-canoe. The island is perhaps 30 feet high, with a steep winding track, nearly obscured by the vegetation, leading up to its centre. There is a sense of an enchanted isle, a place of ghosts and wizardry. The bush overhangs the water; it is starred in the season of flowers with the pure white blossoms of the clematis and the pouhuehue, and the climbing rata vine crimsons a tree clump here and there. In the deeper shades there is a soft twilight, even in broad day. Karaka groves grow thickly, and there are dense shrubberies of mahoe, and clumps of high flax and cabbage-trees. At a turn in the path, in the gloom of the tapu grove, an eerie thing confronted one—a human skull, stuck up on a short pole, grinning as if in menace, a silent warning. In a little open space on the summit of the island, an olden war-canoe, carved and painted, rears itself above the trees; one end is sunk firmly in the ground and stoutly braced. It is a stately memento mori, tapu to the shades of the tribal dead. It was brought here from the Wanganui River, and set up by Sir Walter Buller in 1894. It perpetuates the memory of a chieftainess named Te Riunga, an ancestress of Major Kemp te Rangihiwinui. She was one of the Muaupoko people who were slain when Te Rauparaha and his Ngati-Toa captured the island. The canoe (or, rather, the end of a totara canoe of great size) was known as “Te Koanga-o-Rehua.”

Sitting here on this thrice-tapu island, with a Ngati-Raukawa companion from the little village of Muhunoa, a mile or so away, one heard some thrilling tales of Papaitonga's past. Papaitonga, like Horowhenua, and in fact all this country from Paekakariki to Manawatu and Rangitikei, was owned by the Muaupoko and Rangitane, and some kindred tribes. The Muaupoko had a stronghold on this islet; a stockade, or tuwatawata, encircled it. There were many canoes on the lake; when danger threatened, the people withdrew to the island, taking all their dugouts with them.