Where Big Webster Lived.

Many years ago, on a summer boating cruise about the islands at the entrance to Coromandel, I searched out the site of the long-vanished pakeha-Maori village of Herekino. It is on Beeson's Island, that long, hilly island which forms the western warden of Waiau Harbour and all but meets a long arm of the mainland. The island, now a sheep run, has many a grove of great pohutukawa, and some of these glorious old trees shade the deserted beach of Herekino. The old-time kainga is gone: gone too is the shipbuilding yard at the island-tip where cutters and schooners were built long before a shipwright set up business on the shores of the Waitemata. But a beautiful spring of clear cool water bubbles up close to the white beach as it did in the days when Big Webster was the King of Waiau. The narrow channel between the point and the mainland is called the Little Passage; a few strokes of the dinghy oars takes one across it. Campbell's description in his book “Poenamo” of Coromandel and Beeson's Island and Herekino when he arrived there in 1840, mentions this tiny strait of water, “a narrow passage between the island and the mainland, so narrow that I was often afterwards navigated across it on the back of a Maori wahine when none of the male sex was at hand.”

Here in the pretty bay of Herekino lived and reigned the King of Waiau, William Webster, a tall Yankee, an ex-whaleship-carpenter, called Big Webster by the pakehas and Wepiha by the Maoris. His royal power consisted of the goods in his trading-store or “whare-hoko”; his mana was high all around the Hauraki. Webster's name became celebrated in after years in connection with a huge claim (made through the United States Government) against the New Zealand Government for compensation for disallowed land purchase made before 1840, a claim that failed.