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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 5 (September 1, 1933)

Blazing the Buller Trail

Blazing the Buller Trail.

Mackay was a pathfinder in the literal sense of the word. He penetrated the most forbidding regions, sometimes alone, usually with two or three Maoris. In 1860 he blazed the track through the bush down the Buller Valley along which the present motor route goes, and on to the Grey River. This alone was a tremendous task. Mackay told me about this experience, at Auckland in 1906. He and his three Maoris were once forty-eight hours with only one weka to eat between the four of them.

That was one momentous phase of James Mackay's adventures and services in the vast untrimmed places of the land. He was transferred to the North Island when the Waikato War began, for special Government duty, and his life there, from 1863 to the middle Seventies, was full of incident, a record that would fill a book.

“I once had the experience,” he told me, “of sitting waiting for ten minutes while the Maoris debated whether they would shoot me or not.” Whenever there was trouble in the Maori districts, in the nervous years following on the wars, the Government sent Mackay to deal with it. Sir Donald Maclean, the greatest of our Native Ministers, had the greatest faith in “Hemi Maki,” as the Maoris called him; he was a man after Maclean's own heart.

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Facsimile Of A Letter Of The Olden Times. Prompted by the article, “The Royal Mail,” in the May issue of the “N. Z. Railways Magazine,” Mr. H. McArtney (of the H. M. Sauce Co.) sent in specimens of letters received in New Zealand in 1844 and 1848, before adhesive stamps were in use. The handwriting is so fine that it averages about a dozen lines to the inch. The script of one of the letters would fill about eight columns of a daily newspaper.

Facsimile Of A Letter Of The Olden Times.
Prompted by the article, “The Royal Mail,” in the May issue of the “N. Z. Railways Magazine,” Mr. H. McArtney (of the H. M. Sauce Co.) sent in specimens of letters received in New Zealand in 1844 and 1848, before adhesive stamps were in use. The handwriting is so fine that it averages about a dozen lines to the inch. The script of one of the letters would fill about eight columns of a daily newspaper.