Page:Rambles on the Golden Coast of New Zealand.djvu/17



HE first mention made of the West Coast of the Middle Island of New Zealand was early in the year 1770; when Captain Cook, after reaching the North Island of New Zealand, where he first cast anchor in the Bay of Tauranga on the 8th of October 1769, subsequently followed down the eastern coasts of the Northern and Southern Islands. Without discovering the channel by which the islands are separated, he is reported to have turned the South Cape, and traced the western shores back to Cook Strait, giving his own name to the great mountain visible on the West Coast, and giving the name of Cape Farewell to the north-west extremity of the Middle Island, from whence he took his departure for England on the 31st March 1770. Between 1769 and 1777, Cook visited New Zealand five times. From the time of Cook’s visits, for nearly a hundred years, the history of the West Coast was a blank. It was occupied during that time, as far as can be ascertained, by a limited number of Maoris. In a compendium of official documents relative to Native affairs in the South Island, compiled in 1873 by Mr Alexander Mackay, Native Commissioner, much valuable information has been furnished respecting the doings of the Natives in this part of the country, long before white men trod the soil. From this compilation principally, and from scraps of information given me by the Native Chief Tainui,—or who is better known in recent political history as Ihaia Tainui, late member of the General Assembly for the Southern Maori District,—in leisure moments in the Assembly Library during the Sessions of 1879 and 1880, I am enabled to give a few jottings of what the Coast was before the golden days. The difficulty of obtaining, from any Native in New Zealand, information about the ancestors of other than his own family, has often been remarked, but as Mr Mackay has noted, the account which the members of a tribe are able to give of the early wanderings of their ancestors and of their wars with other tribes, subsequent to their first settlement in New Zealand, is generally fairly within the limits of probability, and may be considered to rest on authority equally worthy of credit as much of the early histories of European