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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 9 (December 1, 1934)

The First Prince in Maori Land

The First Prince in Maori Land.

A Royal soldier will be with us anon, for a very thorough look at our beauty places, a quick-transit tour of several thousands of miles by rail and motor car. The Duke of Gloucester will travel New Zealand in a fashion very different from that adopted by our first Royal visitor, the Sailor Prince, Alfred Duke of Edinburgh. Horseback and canoe were the only means of travel when he was escorted through the Rotorua country. He had no trains de luxe, no swift automobiles. He had no stalwart bodyguard of the tallest policemen that ever trod a parade ground. The Maoris were his guardians.

It was in December of 1870 that the Duke of Edinburgh travelled to the Lakes and the thermal regions. It was an adventurous and often perilous period. It was only in February of that year that Te Kooti and his warriors were headed off from Ohinemutu and defeated by the plucky and energetic Captain Gilbert Mair, and practically the whole able-bodied strength of the Arawa tribe was under arms for the Government. The road from Tauranga through the Oropi Gorge had not then been made, and there was no road from Waikato or the Upper Thames except Maori war tracks through the bush. Wheeled vehicles would have been useless because there were no highways for them. The only road fit for horseback that gave access to the Lakes from the coast was a new road from Maketu that the Arawa had made for the special purpose of the Duke's visit, when he was expected in 1869. From Maketu to Ohinemutu was a distance of about forty miles.

Along this road the Sailor Prince and his staff from H.M.S. “Galatea” and other ships—Lord Charles Beresford, then a lively young midshipman, was one of the party—rode in to Rotorua attended by a strong body of Captain Mair's Maoris, under arms for the Queen. The Governor, Sir Geo. Bowen, who accompanied the Duke, said of these warriors that His Royal Highness was as safe among the Arawa in their own country as he would be among the Gordons in Aberdeenshire.