CHARLESTON
Tauranga; Tasman named it Clyppygen Hoeck or Klippingen Hoek, meaning “rocky point” or “rocky corner” when, on 14th December, 1642, he made abreast of it his first anchorage in New Zealand. Fortunately for us, Cook re-named it about a century and a-quarter later, giving it its present but not attractive name.
Within a short distance to sea from Kawau Point was the Giant’s Tooth, a remarkable rock pillar, now no more, it having collapsed long ago in a storm. Slightly north of the Cape lie the Steeples or Black Reef, well-known to the sealers of 1836 and later. On these three islets, called Trois Clochers by D’Urville, Thoms and Green occupied a sealing-station during the ’thirties and ’forties, and thence Thoms sailed his schooner, the Three Brothers, over the Buller bar in 1844. They camped upon the islands in preference to the main land because of the cannibalistic tendencies of the natives.
On the Cape in 1825, the vessel Rifleman of 400 tons, wool-laden and bound from Hobart Town to England, was lost. Brunner and Heaphy in 1846 saw there the remains of a vessel of about that tonnage, and learnt from the Maoris that bales of wool had come ashore some twenty years previously, also that the crew had been hunted, captured, and “disposed of.”
Mr. W. T. L. Travers, in a paper published in 1872, says: “Niho and Takerei proceeded down the coast as far as Hokitika River, killing and taking prisoners nearly all the existing inhabitants.” This refers to the Ngatitoa trek from Massacre Bay about 1833, at which time the only people on the coast were a few Maoris. It is believed that a detachment of this party remained at the Buller and spread to Tauranga Bay. The Rev. C. L. Reay writing from Massacre Bay on 25th May, 1846 (the year that Brunner and Heaphy first explored the coast) referring to Cape Foulwind and Tauranga Bay, says, “that part of the coast was deemed most savage, insomuch that sealers have for weeks lodged on the Black Reef, not venturing to land lest they should be destroyed. Now Mr. Heaphy reports that not only did they most hospitably
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