The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 7 (October 1, 1935)
Taranaki's Young Adventurers
Taranaki's Young Adventurers.
A year before the great geologist-explorers Hochstetler and von Haast travelled through the heart of the North Island as far as Taupo and the thermal regions, young Percy Smith and a party of four other Taranaki lads made an even more arduous and adventurous journey. His companions were Charles Wilson Hursthouse, his fellow-cadet in the Survey Office in New Plymouth (who became, forty years afterwards, Chief Engineer of Roads and Bridges for the Dominion), F. Murray, J. McKellar, and H. Standish—all family names of note in Taranaki's history. They set out from New Plymouth at the beginning of 1858 on a trip of pleasure and exploration through the interior, a tour that lasted two months, and in the course of which they walked 500 miles, canoed fifty and rode on horseback 60 miles. The distances do not seem great in this easy motoring age, but it was a solid test of fitness and endurance of body and spirit in the early times. They carried their swags of food and blankets (weighing forty pounds each when they set out); they took a gun for shooting birds for food, but no other arms or munitions except that staple article of currency among the Maoris, tobacco.
They left New Plymouth on January 4, 1858, beginning a hard but glorious excursion by walking up the Coast to Mokau Heads, and paddling and poling up that rapid-whitened forest waterway in a canoe hired from the Maoris. They tramped from Motu-Karamu, nearly fifty miles up the river, through the ranges and valleys and swamps to the south end of Lake Taupo. There, at Mr. Grace's mission at Pukawa, and at the chief Iwikau Te Heuheu's pa close by, the young trampers were hospitably welcomed. “A good old man” was Smith's description of the chief in his narrative of the journey. From the Taupo country the party walked to Rotomahana and Tarawera; a memory of that wonder-region pilgrimage is a sketch from Percy Smith's pencil—one of many historic little drawings—of Rotomahana lake with its two pretty islets; places of primitive Maori life that vanished in the thunder of a bursting world in 1886. Returning to Taupo, the hard-faring tourists trudged through the Tongariro-Ruapehu country and down to the Rangitikei and Wanganui, and so on up the Coast—the last stage on horseback, to their vast satisfaction —to their homes.