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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 65

Note C., p. 30

Note C., p. 30.

I may here briefly mention, for the information of many, the boundaries of the " parish"(!) or ecclesiastical district assigned to me by Bishop Selwyn in—if only to show the amount of heavy travelling I necessarily had in those days. From the River Waikari on the N. to Cape Palliser and Port Nicholson S., (more than 2½° of longitude,) including also the Maori villages in Cook's Straits,—Ohariu, Ohaua, &c.; and from Taupo Lake on the W. to the E. sea-coast, including the River Manawatu to the Gorge, and thence through the forests to Wairarapa. My long distant journeys occupied me about 7 months every year, exclusive of those made to the villages nearer me—say, within 50 miles; the long half-yearly journey (in which I visited all the distant S. and W. Maori villages, going by the sea-coast and returning through the forests of the interior,—or vice versa,) usually took from 76 to 84 days, dependent on the weather; and all on foot, without roads or paths, and not unfrequently (at first) without even tracks, or guides;—travelling by compass, in the interior, and by the coast line, over rocks and tidal beaches; often having page 70 there to wait at headlands and cliffs for the tide to ebb, and not unfrequently sadly delayed and put out at the mouths of the rivers! Let any one who may doubt, or who is ambitious of knowing something of that kind of travelling in the past, let him just try a run, with a load on his back, over the rocks from the mouth of the river at Manawarakau to Pauanui (near Pourerere); or, over the rocks from Akitio to Owahanga; or the tramp by the strict coast-line all the way from Cape Palliser to Wellington; those places being still pretty much as they were in a state of Nature.