The steamer moored to the wharf, and our traveller ashore, he will, if curiosity inclines him, find no trouble in picking up a narrator of old times. He will hear, possibly with surprise, that the channel up which he has just sailed marks the site of early Westport; that where the broad yellow sands spread out at low tide, bush and scrub and verdant sward once grew, and cottages nestled in bright gardens; that there in consecrated ground the dead lay in peace, and lovers wandered ’mid leafy shadows. He will be shown where streets and wharfs once stood, and busy commerce had habitation, and will hear how, suddenly,
“A wind woke from sleep
And, or ever that evening ended, a great wave
Like a wave that is born of an earthquake grew,
And smote them.”
And how, not only once but many times, the trouble came upon them, and they were sore beleaguered: the pitiless breakers in front of them, the flooded river sapping away its crumbling banks on one side, the marshy, uninhabitable, scarce explored bush on all others. He will hear of habitations being carried bodily out to sea, of whole streets demolished with the swoop of one turbulent tide, of a long continuing tussle with adverse elements, and will wonder if ’tis possible, under any circumstances, for a British born community to own itself beaten. Westport has at least survived its troubles, and many of the earliest residents, who endured all this toil and turmoil, still cling stedfastly to the spot where they so long wrestled with misfortune.
Running out from the upper portion of the town is the Westport and Ngakawau railway, constructed expressly to open up the coal traffic. This line traverses a country whence much wealth has been wrested. About midway on the line, the Westport Coal Company’s mine, and others, have been successfully opened, from which large quantities of coal are now being shipped. Towering above all adjacent elevations stand the Mount Rochfort ranges, the most striking feature in the scenery of the district. The railway line traverses its base, and as the train rolls along the flat and somewhat swampy country in the direction of Waimangaroa, the traveller will mark that the lower slopes of the range are blurred and blotched with traces of digging work, and there will be pointed out to him, if curiously inclined, the sites of Caledonian, Giles, Rochfort, Deadman’s, and other terraces, whereon, scarce twelve years ago, tunnelling and sluicing claims were in full swing, and in mining parlance good gold was getting. The Terrace men were for a time a power in themselves; strong in numbers, sturdy in union, they carried the sway in local politics. Many a tale could be told of candidates’ adventures and misadventures among them. And so too in all other matters of local import, what they found to do they did with all their might. To-day the scene is changed: a few stray waifs cling to the old spot and fossick out a living, lured ever by the hope that some day a good lead will be again struck and bygone glories and attendant prosperity again revived, and the hope is not all visionary. Mining
