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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.

You Tararua trampers and young fellow foot-slogging holiday cruisers, can you beat that record? Bear in mind there was not a wheel in all the land, page 22 page 23
Waitangi Bay and township, Chatham Island, in 1868. The redoubt captured by Te Kooti is on the edge of the cliff above the beach. (From a sketch by S. Percy Smith).

Waitangi Bay and township, Chatham Island, in 1868. The redoubt captured by Te Kooti is on the edge of the cliff above the beach. (From a sketch by S. Percy Smith).

in those parts at any rate, to give a kindly lift, not a store at which to replenish supplies between New Plymouth and the West Coast again, towards the end of the tramp. The few Maori villages, the two or three missions, and the bush with its birds were the only sources of food supply, besides the little that could be carried. That touch of primitive self-dependent life was an excellent bit of hard training, for the young surveyors especially; the bush and camp lore acquired then stood to them well when they entered on their professional duties in the field of the wilds.