A sudden gust tangles someone’s pennant in the halyards. A man must go aloft to free it and up he goes in a bosun’s chair with a sea shanty chorus below pulling on the winch with a roar of heaves and panting ho’s. Then with a comet tail of foam streaking behind they are off in pursuit of the field, caught like the rest in the joyous pageant of a hundred bright summer afternoons.
By four o’clock the races are decided. The officials in their spick and spans of trousered creams and yachting caps have checked their points and awarded the prizes and the yachts are home in the bay. At sunset a gun goes off, just a rifle (I should have liked a brass cannon with round black balls and a matchstick loader), and the pennants on the mastheads all come whistling down. Then the veterans of the Ladies’ Race emerge transformed from their cabins, the men a little drab beside them in dark reefer jackets, and dinghy after dinghy makes decorous passage for the shore, as if they were bound for Chapel, not for a party on the lawn.
It is a cheerful crush, augmented by wives and girlfriends who stayed ashore all day to save their hairsets and latecomers flown up by amphibian. They lend half an ear to the speeches bravely uttered from the tiny space in the centre of them.
“We thank the Navy who have as ever, joined us here today (applause)
“We thank the Committee without whose wonderful work (“Hear, hear!” from the back)
“We could never . . . (applause)
“I would also like . . .
“And let us not forget . . .
“The tradition of Britain ruling the waves . . .
“And our own traditions here at Kawau . . .
“And we haven’t lost a sailor yet!” (laughter and applause.)
The speeches accomplished, ranks are broken and the party can begin. Fragments of conversation are detached and lost again in the buzz.
“Well, it’s not exactly Cowes, old boy, but we do our best.”
“So Mother took the children and I got the last berth on the boat.”
“As long as they brought the gin I said not to worry . . .”
“I said I wasn’t complaining but it seemed only fair . . .”
“He was a boy I met at Squadron Weekend last year but now he’s here with his fiancée.”
“Right across our bows — I could have shot the bastards . . .”
“No thanks. Well, perhaps just a very small one . . .”
“Blew that year, sticks snapping like matches . . .”
And dinner is announced. A wave of small talk sweeps us inside, the feathery skirts of the women following their partners through the crowd to attack the groaning buffet.
There is dancing at the Mansion House for those who want; those who don’t, go back to the boats.
Someone always falls in. This year it was a visitor from the North of England in a velvet dress who jumped too late or too soon and plunged into a wave up to her thighs. “I knew I shouldn’t have worn my velvets,” she gamely cries as she is hauled dripping aboard.
The launch cabin has a little piano and we sing. Launches and yachts like noisy glow-worms are all about us. Someone else falls in, someone twists on the deck of a keeler, someone sings to a small guitar. Runnels of light flicker from boat to boat, riding lights swing like Chinese lanterns from the masts, there is the line of lights along the wharf, the lights from the hotel. The light from the moon.
CHAPTER NINE
Birthday Celebration
The biggest sailing occasion of our year falls a month before, on January 29th, when thousands of big and little craft throng the harbour for the Anniversary Day Regatta, a tradition begun in 1840 when Auckland was proclaimed.
“Our Regatta still the Biggest in the World” said a reassuring headline on the eve of Anniversary Day, 1965. The weather is traditionally wet, fine, rough, calm, hot or cold and is unlikely to be the same two years running. In 1964 it was a cloudless calm and most of the boats had to sit and look at one another, their spinnakers like burst balloons. In 1965 it was dun grey and gusty but it attracted the greatest number of entries ever — a round thousand.
All about the waterfront, from the nearer islands, from the Tamaki estuary, from the east coast and the Coromandel, the boats set off. The biggest anchorages in the harbour are at Westhaven and Okahu Bay. Families and well-wishers swarm through the thickets of empty boat cradles, yellow slickered crewmen shinny up the masts and the air resounds with the rasp and rumble of hulls bumping down the ramp to the water. Cars jampack the length of the waterfront drive and parties who must be landbound picnic on the grassy banks and watch as the boats, big and small, get out on the water and rocking-horse prance in the grey-green chop.
The first regatta was a much smaller turnout. It took place on September 18, 1840, when the Anna Watson and the Platina dropped anchor in the Waitemata, the government having at last made up their mind about the capital. Governor Hobson, Felton Mathew the Surveyor-General and Mrs Mathew and the rest of the official party landed on the muddy shore, a salute was fired, a flag displayed, the Queen’s Health drunk and the proclamation was celebrated in the afternoon with a regatta. A six-oared gig from the Anna Watson beat a five-oared gig belonging to Mr Mathew, two whaleboats competed for a purse of five guineas and local Maoris raced in a pair of war canoes.
The next anniversary fell only six months later as the colonists had decided a summer holiday was better than one in the spring, so they changed to the date when Hobson had arrived in the Bay of Islands, which had been in much more holiday weather. The day was marked on shore with horse-races, duck-shoots, and chasing greasy pigs. The Regatta was a spectacle for the town to watch and a busmen’s holiday for the schooners and cutters of the Gulf. The classes were for cargo boats, watermen’s boats, whaleboats, sailboats and gigs. The most dramatic contest was between the magnificent Maori war canoes. Five canoes, all more than seventy feet long, lashed through a five mile course and the victor, Wharepuhunga, a Waikato boat with the chief Te Whero Whero at the helm, crossed the line amid thundering salvos from American and British warships lying in the bay.
In 1880 a prize of 100 guineas went to the winner of the schooner race round Tiri Tiri Island, a forty mile course. These ocean-going topsail schooners built in the Gulf were 200 tons or more. They traded round the coast and to the Pacific Islands. On that year, a dozen of them chanced to be in port. No one who saw it ever forgot the splendour of the sight as they ran for home down the Rangitoto Channel and round North Head in a great surging spread of canvas. There was Ryno, Zior, Caledonia and Borealis, Fleetwing and Transit; Sybil was the winner and a boat who was tipped the favourite with the likely name of Mazeppa came in last, tailing the fleet all the way.
The big cutters raced round Tiri Tiri too, Rangatira wresting the lead from Sovereign of the Seas, and both vessels carried such a weight of sail that their decks were awash.
The Cinderellas of the fleet were the scows, perhaps their name and qualifications, round-bilged and square-bilged, gave them a drudging sound, but they came into their own on Regatta Day. They were bred and built on the Mahurangi coast, ribbed with pohutukawa and planked with kauri. An old scowman, N.E. Eaddy, writes about them in his book ’Neath Swaying Spars. He was working on a timber scow which burst into port early on the morning of the Regatta. The crew worked like demons to get their load of kauri ashore and their extra sails and rig aboard. Time was running out. They had half the timber unloaded and had shipped the 25 gallon keg of beer, when they could delay no longer. “The skipper bawled his order, ‘Let go the for’ard shipline! Give her the headsails!’ and round the scow swung with a great whirl of white water under her lee bow and straining gear she scampered off to the bay.”
His flagship would have been an ocean clipper; ours was the cruiser Royalist, her grey hull rather dowdy against the paint-box colours of the boats, but she did her best with bunting. Ferry boats sagging with sightseers puffed about the outer limits of the course and all along the bays circles of little boats raced clock and anti-clock, the bright qui
lls of their sails cut sharply on the leaden backdrop of the sky.
We anchored under North Head to wait for the keelers.
“Look at the scow,” someone said. It was a scow all right but a work-boat no longer, rigged for cruising with a fine spread of cocoa brown sail. Then came the gutboat, the rusty little tub that dumps the waterfront rubbish, with a brave-nosed picnic party on board and an attendant cloud of seagulls at their stern.
The keelers lined up at the start, the gun went off and they were away for Motuihe with a convoy of launches following. The keelers of the Waitemata are descended from the trading cutters which once dominated events on Anniversary Day. Two brilliant families of boat builders, the Logans and the Baileys, launched a long line of superb craft many of which are still champions.
We were aboard Haunui and Harry Julian, her skipper, knew them all. He has a fleet of tugboats and barges founded by his father and he has been a waterfront man all his life. He named the boats like old friends. Moana was the oldest, built in 1894, then there was Ariki, the only gaff rig left on the harbour, the exquisite Iorangi and Rawhiti, built in 1905, and the pride of Sydney harbour for forty years until she sailed home again across the Tasman. Then came the younger ones, the huge length of Kahurangi, Ta A’roa on her maiden race and Ranger, fleetest foot of all, with Lou Tercel her owner and skipper sitting squarely at the helm.
Up to Motuihe, then sharp about and back again, then beat up the Channel into the wind and fly back for North Head and the Upper Harbour. All the spinnakers are up now for the last run and, with ropes whipcracking, the company of keelers are astern, around us and then winging ahead into a harbour flecked with a thousand goosefeather sails and veined with the marbling of their wake, past the ghostly anchorage of the Anna Watson and the Platina and home at last to the finish.
CHAPTER TEN
The Eastern Shore
At Algies’ Bay in the Mahurangi I once picked up a feather from a peacock’s tail. I have never found out if it belonged to a descendant of the birds on Sir George Grey’s lawns or if a peacock could have flown the four miles of water between Kawau and the shore.
The Mahurangi was bush country — rimu, rewarewa, puriri, rata and a few fine stands of kauri. They were mainly Ngatitai Maoris living here, who, after Hongi’s musket wars, were greatly reduced in numbers and influence. Long before the Treaty of Waitangi, solitary traders established themselves on the coast to barter for timber. The main body of European settlement began in the late 1850s when the colonial government baited the hook for intending immigrants with forty-acre grants of land. The newcomers felled the bush and raised stock in the clearings; they sold firewood, split shingles and some of them dug kauri gum. Someone else started, without much success, a shark oil factory and there were the Nova Scotians who built boats. The boat builders of the Mahurangi were descended from Scottish families who had gone to Canada in search of political and religious freedom. They sailed their own vessels to this more distant hemisphere of the New World and, even though Scotland was a hundred years behind many of them, they still spoke the Gaelic. The land they came to was a roadless waste of forest and fern; such tracks as there were oozed with the bottomless mire that is Northland mud and they and the other settlers were as dependent on sea communication as any of the islands.
* * *
The city of Auckland, when it crosses the harbour bridge, spreads a wide net of new suburbs before you escape to the country; a patchwork of orchards and vineyards and poultry farms, with homemade placards offering fresh eggs, dressed ducks, Triumble pumpkins and strawberries in season. Albany has a rather English-looking pub with a clock that has stood at five to eleven ever since I can remember and a tiny pseudo-Tudor Memorial Library. Then another spurt takes you through green fields with grazing cattle, lofty stands of aspens and the deadly name of Dairy Flat.
The main route north follows the crown of the hills and metal side roads go off to the coast. They were bullock tracks once down to the river landings where the scows tied up and the drovers’ pubs at Riverhead and Silverdale are still there, furbished up with new paint and beer gardens. At holiday times, the lanes are clogged with cars shackled to boats and caravans. One snail trail takes the detour for the Whangaparaoa Peninsula and thousands more head for the camping grounds, motels and the two mile beach at the hustling town of Orewa, with signs that welcome you to the Hibiscus Coast and say which day Lions and Rotarians sit down to lunch. Along the front are tennis courts, a skating rink, Talent Quests in the Sound Shell and trampolines for 1/- a go.
I like to stop on the summit of the Puhoi hill, with the puffball spinneys of kowhai and puriri on the steep slopes. You look down to the sweeping parabolas of the Waiwera and the Puhoi Rivers and the battalion of islands drawn up along this reach of the Gulf. Beyond the Puhoi valley the road climbs again and moves further from the sea. It is lonely country, bleak on a grey day, with dark clumps of pine on the inland ridges; you pass a farmhouse with a high brick wall round a tidy garden and then an old, old homestead with a gnomishly pointed roof, sitting among elderly quince trees and apples and massive japonica bushes. You look across fold upon fold of hills to the wide half-moon of ocean speckled with islands. This is the Mahurangi which Hobson considered, with the Waitemata, a likely spot for a capital.
The first road north followed a Maori track wide enough for bullocks. The new road cuts corners with viaducts and leaves out the town of Warkworth altogether. Warkworth, pop. 1150, set on the pleasant banks of the Mahurangi River, seems to find this no great loss. You come to it between trees and suburban gardens. A hill to the right has four white churches on it and on another slightly further off is the cottage hospital. Warkworth does not straggle down a long main street, it meanders in a dog’s leg until it crosses a bridge over the river. There is the pillared porch of the Masonic Hall, the Library and a flat-faced Town Hall that hires out as a cinema. The plaster head of a ghostly bullock looks across from Stubbs, Family Butcher, to the Warkworth Hotel, a handsome verandahed old building, painted a fading rose, and in front of it a pepper tree, a tremendous Norfolk pine and, more often than not, an old black cat.
It was a hot, dawdling sort of morning and about a quarter of Warkworth’s eleven hundred and fifty people were shopping or talking on the corner or being pushed about in their prams. I had come to see Tudor Collins and his matchless collection of photographs of the kauri bush, of which the finest are in The New Story of the Kauri written by his old friend, A.H. Reed.
“Well, come in then. Come in, the day’s nearly gone. I was up at five this morning in the garden and it was beautiful.”
He stood on the doorstep with a wide grin that matched his Santa Clausian build. “You never saw runner beans like the ones I’ve got” and I never saw such zinnias either, that blazed up the path.
“The sitting room’s too tidy; this is my room, no one touches anything but me” and I could see why. Shelves ran all round the room, above the curtain pelmets, along the walls; they were stacked with boxes of negatives, piles of photographs and so was the long dining table.
“I started taking pictures when I was fifteen, though I’d gone to work before that. I paid £8.10.0 for my first camera” and he laughed as he recalled his troubles developing pictures in a kerosene tin because of the freshwater crayfish who had a taste for emulsion and nibbled his negatives.
“We were a big family. My eldest brother Bert went into the bush when he was thirteen, and when I was old enough I went and worked with him. He fired me off a gang once when I was taking pictures of tripping a dam when I should have been working.”
“We’d better have some tea” said Tudor after a while.
“You ought to try damper in a camp oven,” he said as he handed buttered currant buns and sugared his pudding-basin-sized cup.
He talked about the bush, about the dams they built up the creeks to shoot the logs down to the beach, about the bullock teams and the bushmen.
“They loved the work, you know, but they love
d the trees, too. It was their job to fell them — people had to have houses and buildings and wharfs. But so much was burned and wasted. I remember going back to the bush at Tairua with my brother Reg. We looked at the hills covered with scrub and just a few rickers straggling up. All those great trees, with their gunbarrel trunks and their crowns of leaves, we had cut them all down.”
“Do you know where the word ‘ricker’ came from?” he asked. “It was in the days when the men o’war used to come and cut the kauri, and they’d look at a tree and say, ‘It’ll do for a rigger, but it’s too small for a spar.’ So a small tree became a ricker.
“Now” and he put a pile of photographs back on the floor. “You ought to go next door to the newspaper office and talk to Stan Moore and Jack Keys. And when you get to Leigh, there are the Greenwoods, the Wyatts and Sam Brown at Pakiri — his people used to own Little Barrier Island. I have to go to Auckland for a few days, but I’ll think of some others. Keep in touch.”
Then he called out down the path. “Remember, it’s the early start. Five o’clock in the morning, that’s the time to get the best from the day.”
The Otamatea and Rodney Times had gone to press the day before, so the office was quiet. Mr Keys and Mr Moore, to whom Tudor had commended me, were both out and I talked to Mrs Cook, who has carried on the business of running the paper since her husband died and quietly confounded all those who said it was not a job for women. She gave me some back numbers of the Times, Mr Key’s History of the Mahurangi and a booklet called Warkworth the Kowhai Town.
It was hot and I sat on the hotel verandah. A spruce old man sat down on the bench and after a while pointed to the Norfolk. “Hundred years old, that tree is. The first publican here planted it when his son was born, Southgate was the name, and the son was captain of the Kapanui that used to run up the coast here.”
We admired the tree, then he looked at his watch and he said he had better get along and strolled off towards the bar.
Islands of the Gulf Page 11