Consequently, I have written no more than this preface. The book itself I have scarcely changed and offer it as one might a picture, compact of its area, showing the Gulf in the 1960s as I knew and dearly loved it. Going back has been a refreshment to mind and eye and I have not looked in vain for the qualities I remember best. The clarity of light, seen from any island hilltop, is no less brilliant. There are still the small lovely details to savour, the splendour of cliff, the great sweep of sea-washed beach to marvel at. Neither has the separate feeling engendered by every one of the islands lessened; a geographic community they may be, but each relishes and preserves its own special character — autonomy rather than interaction predominates. The future, as is common everywhere in the sombre decade of the eighties, has its dark places, but surviving is a necessary skill for island dwellers and I firmly believe it is a talent that succeeding generations will find the means to bequeath in good measure to those who follow after.
SHIRLEY MADDOCK
December 1982
CHAPTER ONE
First Sighting
For a gull’s eye view of the Hauraki islands, you might climb to the summit of one of the volcanic cones pocking the isthmus where Auckland sprawls between the harbours of Manukau and Waitemata. The German geologist, Ferdinand von Hochstetter, who arrived in New Zealand in 1858, counted sixty-three, but some of them are pimple small. Try Mount Eden or Mount Hobson. Then you see the nearer islands beyond the twin humps of Rangitoto; the others lie sketched on the more distant horizon. Or you could go for a fly with Fred Ladd, in one of the three amphibians that make up the Gulf’s own airline. Captain Ladd and his fellow pilots have become a permanency on the northern skyline and their courses, far from fixed as the planets, show their flexibility in a six-fingered signpost at the entrance to the harbour airport pointing to Waiheke, Bay of Islands, Pakatoa, Kawau, Great Barrier and, at the bottom, to Anywhere.
There may be a few people who know the Gulf better than Fred Ladd but no one is better known there than he is; in a very special way he has made it his own. In the New Year Honours of 1963 he was awarded the M.B.E. and his citation reads “For Services to the People of the Gulf”.
“I don’t know if I much like the idea of being put in a book,” said Fred tilting back his chair. “That’s what happens to people when they’re finished. I don’t think anyone wants to know how I eat my porridge and what I do when I’m not flying.”
“What do you do when you’re not flying?”
And all you get for reply is a great loud laugh.
Fred Ladd was born at Warkworth, a small country town near the Mahurangi harbour on the north-east coast, which makes him almost a Gulf man by birth, and he always wanted to fly. He started with gliders at Hamilton in 1931 and during the last war he served in the Pacific with 30 Squadron flying Grumman Avengers. After the war he did a further stint with the Royal New Zealand Air Force in Fiji, he was a Senior Group Pilot for the National Airways Corporation based on Dunedin, and then he was off again to Fiji, where he worked with Harold Gatty, once Wiley Post’s navigator, and flew Dominies, Drovers and Herons round the Fiji Islands.
The service in the Hauraki islands began in 1954. In those days, there was just one Widgeon, one mechanic, one pilot, who was Fred, and Mabel who, throughout the airline’s life, has combined the roles of traffic manager, office manager, schedule arranger and ground hostess with that of being Fred’s very dear wife.
Captain Ladd inaugurated the company simply by flying from island to island, landing on any convenient beach and announcing to the sometimes startled inhabitants who he was and that he was starting an air service. For the first three years he took a buffeting and many were the friends and colleagues who shook their heads at Fred and told him he must surely fail. The islands, with their isolated communities of farmers and fishermen, could support themselves but hardly a private airline as well.
“It was three years before our nose started to come up. We’d go anywhere, do joy rides on the beaches Saturday and Sunday, fly people over the harbour bridge; we even had the last sandwich man in Auckland parading up and down Queen Street. We still do the joyrides, but in 1955 we carried about 1700 passengers and last year it was nearly 19,000.
“These are all the places we land” and Fred waved his hand at a huge map of the Gulf and the Bay of Islands covering one wall of his office. Nearly all the islands and the adjacent coastline bristled with pins. “Ran out of pins — I know plenty more landing places than that.”
Then he exclaimed, “But you can’t start working on the Gulf if you haven’t had a look from a Widgeon. I’ve got to take up a bloke to get some pictures; you can come too.”
The reception office was full of people. One flight was about to go off to Waiheke and another to Great Barrier. Fred was swamped in greetings; he congratulated an old woman who was making her first flight and signed an autograph for a little girl with no front teeth.
“Hasn’t she got lovely gums?” he told her mother.
The office is down one end of the wharf and we walked down to where the aircraft take off. Fred bounds rather than walks, a tallish, long-legged man with close-cropped white hair, bright brown eyes, and a truly missionary zeal for getting people off the ground.
“It shakes up all the atoms in your system. If I don’t feel too good, I go for a fly and then I’m fine. I told a parson once that he shows people the way to heaven but I get them there.”
In the ten years the airline has been in existence, not only has it ferried people to and from the islands on business and pleasure, it has brought in countless ambulance cases — a fisherman injured with a harpoon, a climber who lost his footing on a cliff or a woman whose baby decided to come too soon.
“Have you ever had a baby born on the plane?” I asked.
“Not yet,” replied Fred. “It’s a bit crowded in a Widgeon but I’ve often wondered why they wait out there nine months and a day before they sing out.”
“Which one do I take?” he asked Brian Cox, his chief engineer.
“Help yourself, Fred. It’s your pick.”
“That one,” said Fred.
The photographer climbed in first, enveloped in a baggy flying suit and goggled and helmeted like a World War I flyer.
“He takes the box seat, up in the nose. You can sit on the flight deck with me.”
The aircraft have four seats in the cabin and the flight deck is the seat beside the pilot.
“Fasten your wings on,” Fred told me. “That’s my co-pilot out there.” And he waved at a black shag sitting on a buoy.
He pulled down a lever and the port engine coughed into life.
“First jet turning on,” he cried.
We were moving. The fat little wheels trundled gampishly down towards the water.
“Down the ramp and into the damp,” as we splashed into the tide.
The second engine followed the first into action, the aircraft plunged through the light blue chop, the shag flew shrieking off over the breakwater, a wave slapped against the window, Fred grasped the throttle and with a joyful shout declaimed his taking-off chant that has become a watchword up and down the Gulf.
“And the magic words — and we’re away in a shower of spray!”
The plane lifted, wet globules ran gleaming down the floats, the harbour tilted and slipped away beneath us as we slid over masts and cranes, ocean liners and tugboats, the skeletal shape of the bridge away to the west of us, the neat backyards and clothes lines and peach trees of the North Shore straight ahead.
“Have to let the boy get his pictures now,” said Fred and swooped off over the bridge and the yachts lying at anchor at Westhaven.
The cameraman blazed away from his gusty perch in the nose, looking as if he should have had a Vickers machine gun, not a camera.
“Now we’ll try it the other way,” and Captain Ladd banked and turned towards the east.
Ahead, shining in the sun, were all our islands.
Fifty miles away in t
he morning haze were the rugged battlements of Great Barrier and the dim, bluish mound of Little Barrier. Over the top of North Head was the bone white tower of the light on Tiri Tiri, beyond it Kawau, then east to Rakino and the little Noises, south-east to the long golden lengths of Waiheke and Ponui, last to the clouded peaks of the Moehau Ranges. Nearer to the inner harbour were Motutapu and Motuihe, Brown’s Island with its lopped off crater and, almost beneath us, at the Auckland entrance to the Gulf but not quite of it, a geological new chum spewed up in a great eruption some eight hundred years ago — Rangitoto.
* * *
The Hauraki Gulf lies between the thin northern claw of the New Zealand mainland and the Coromandel Peninsula and the islands are scattered like stones across 1850 square miles of the Southern Pacific. Some are as big as a pre-war Balkan kingdom, others a wind-bitten rock no more than a resting place for a gannet. There are about forty of them, more, if you count the gannet perches. Waiheke and Great Barrier are the largest but they have little in common except their size. This quality of separate identity is repeated throughout the Gulf and on all the islands are the imprints left behind by the peoples who lived there once and yielded their place to others. There were the Moa-Hunters of the 12th century, the thriving Maori communities of the 17th and 18th centuries, with their palisaded forts and swift canoes, their plantations and raupo villages, and then, towards the end of the 18th and the start of the 19th centuries, came the first Europeans, to hunt the whale, to cut the kauri, to preach the Gospel and to look for gold.
New Zealand is not a worn, ancient land like its neighbour Australia. The Auckland isthmus and the islands have been heaved up in volcanic eruptions and successive Ice Ages have formed and then destroyed again river systems, valleys and mountains. Except for Rangitoto, they settled in their rocky strata and solidified greywacke mud about half a million years ago. We shall start a little later than that, when men stood upright and birds flew and fishes swam. Our quarter of the world was the last to be drawn into the map, our ocean the last to be penetrated, first by Tasman and then by Cook. They followed in the wake of the canoes of Kupe and Toi who ventured south from Hawaiki about 1150 A.D. at much the time when Henry II and Thomas a Becket were having it out in England.
In 1642 Tasman made landfall off the west coast of the South Island and in the distant peaks of the Southern Alps saw “a great land uplifted high”; but, when the men who lived there, “yellowish brown and rough of voice and build,” had killed four of his sailors at Golden Bay, the expedition confined itself to safer off-shore observation. The nearest they came to the Hauraki Gulf was close to the rocky islets of the Three Kings, where Tasman claimed giants had waved huge clubs at them from the mountain tops, shouting at the intruders, who took this as an excellent reason for sailing away from what they believed to be the shores of the unknown Southern Continent.
For 117 years, New Zealand and Australia were left in primaeval solitude, their outlines barely sketched upon the map. Then on August 28, 1768, Captain James Cook put out from Plymouth in a refitted Whitby coal-barque called Endeavour. He was bound for Tahiti to observe the transit of the planet Venus, as it passed between the earth and the sun, and he carried secret orders from the Lords of the Admiralty whose seal he was not to break until the mission at Tahiti was completed. The orders commanded him to proceed further south “until you arrive in the latitude of 40°, unless you sooner fall in with the Southern Continent.” In Cook’s company were Daniel Solander the naturalist, Charles Green an astronomer and Joseph Banks, a rich and talented young man who brought with him a small company of artists, servants and secretaries and a considerable reputation as a botanist. They came to Hauraki in the late spring of 1769, when memories of Tahiti were fresh in their minds. The Maoris were not so amiable as the Tahitians had been, nor were they beguiled with trifles and trinkets. They preferred practical things like nails and axes and weapons of war and, just as the Englishmen watched the coastline with the palisaded forts on the headlands, the native “hippahs” or villages, the inhabitants were as closely watching them. When Endeavour dropped anchor, canoe-loads of “Indians”, as Cook and Banks invariably called them, paddled out to inspect the strangers. They imagined that the white men were goblins, whose eyes were set in the backs of their heads, since they always rowed stem first into shore.
At Whitianga, on the ocean shore of Coromandel, where the transit of Mercury was observed and harbour named on the chart for the planet, the explorers had more success in their relations with the Maoris. Banks noted in his journal, “The ladies are as great coquettes as any European and the young ones as skittish as unbroken fillies.”
A little boy called Te Heretu was often on board Endeavour and, when he was very old, he still treasured a nail that Cook had given him and his memories of the great navigator. “There was one supreme man on that ship and we knew that he was the lord of the whole by his perfect and noble demeanour. He seldom spoke but some of the goblins spoke much. But this man did not utter many words, all that he did was to handle our mats or hold our spears and touch the hair of our heads. A noble man. A Rangatira cannot be lost in the crowd.”
Cook set his crew to gathering wild vegetables and filling the water casks and then they continued their careful progress north.
On November 18 they named and rounded Cape Colville, at the very tip of the Coromandel Peninsula. The day before, Banks wrote, “Little wind and that foul. We passed many islands but only one town all day, and indeed no people.” Then, the next day, “Fine weather and fair wind repayed us for yesterday’s tossing. The country appears pleasant and well wooded. At eight in the morning we were abreast of a remarkable bare point jutting far into the sea. On it stood many people who seemed to take but little notice of us and talked together with much earnestness.”
For the week that followed, Endeavour sailed up the Coromandel shore of the Hauraki Gulf, in waters no European ship had entered before. The chain of islands which lie at the entrance to Coromandel Harbour Cook named the Eastward Isles. In the ship’s pinnace, he, Banks and Solander explored the muddy expanse of the Waihou River and, there at the headwaters of the Gulf, they found a large native settlement and immense forests of white pine or kahikatea. They named the river and all the Gulf, the Firth of Thames. The wind had turned now to a stiff sou’-wester and, as Endeavour tacked up and down before the seaward coasts of Ponui and Waiheke, Cook wrote, “These islands, together with the mainland, seem to form some good harbours. Opposite under the western shore lie some others and it appears probable that these form some good harbours likewise.” The sou’-wester kept the Waitemata hidden from Cook, just as the same wind was later to deny him passage into the great harbour of Sydney.
Endeavour continued north and Cook named the two largest islands at the furthest extremity of the Gulf, Great Barrier (Aotea) and Little Barrier (Hauturu). Closer into shore, he christened Bream Head but with the wind still against him he missed Whangarei harbour. Of the mainland shore of the Gulf he wrote, “The land between Cape Rodney and Bream Head which is ten leagues, is low and wooded in tufts. Between the sea and the wide headlands are white sandbanks. We saw no inhabitants but fires in the night gave proof that the country is not uninhabited.”
For those watchful people on the shore, whose fires were the only sign of their existence, it marked the end of their solitude in the furthest, loneliest corner of the world.
* * *
Cook’s first voyage south had made it clear that the long-dreamed-of Unknown Continent did not exist and, of all his discoveries, New Zealand’s annexation to the Crown caused the least interest. A penal settlement was as quickly foreseen as it was quickly established in New South Wales but no such plans were made for New Zealand. Soon there were other voyages inspired by the scientific zeal of the 18th century and romantic dreams of Arcadia in the southern seas. The French came next; in fact, de Surville was making his way down one coast of New Zealand while Cook continued up the other. Then, in 1772, Marion du Fresne, after
a long visit to the Bay of Islands, was killed there with several of his companions. The Maoris’ ferocious reputation travelled abroad and the virgin forests of kauri and kahikatea were left to their native owners.
But not for long. Once the wretched colony at Sydney Town struggled into being, a few trading schooners ventured across the Tasman after timber and flax, whalers and sealers from North America began to work off the coasts of both the North and the South Islands and in 1794 Captain Dell, master of the Fancy, took out a load of spars from Coromandel. The Northern European forests of Baltic Pine were being cut out and the Admiralty was looking further afield for fresh supplies, even as far as New Zealand. In 1800 came the Plumier and the Royal Admiral. There is even a Hauraki legend that Nelson’s battleships at Trafalgar were sparred with Coromandel kauri. The infant trade took a sharp knock in 1809 when at Whangaroa the Boyd was burned and the crew massacred, but, as the 19th century moved towards the end of the first quarter, a motley crew of Europeans were living on the New Zealand shore.
In 1815 a Church of England mission station was established in the Bay of Islands at Rangihoua. On Christmas morning 1814, Samuel Marsden, snugly buttoned in a long black overcoat, his round white head crowned with a stove-pipe hat, had preached New Zealand’s first Christian sermon.
“Lo, I bring you tidings of great joy,” he told his congregation of naked savages who listened with close, if uncomprehending, attention and bobbed up and down in perfect unison with their European visitors.
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