Strange Days on Lake Rotomahana: The End of the Pink and White Terraces

by Terry Bag

From White Fungus issue 7

 

Famed for their rare romantic beauty, the Pink and White Terraces

of Lake Rotomahana, were promoted to 19th century travellers as

the “8th Wonder of the World” in the earliest days of New Zealand

tourism. Overdressed in their Victorian finery, a parade of wealthy

foreign visitors arrived by schooner, stagecoach, whaleboat and

canoe to visit these naturally formed terraced pools in the heart

of the North Island’s hot lakes district. Their vivid descriptions,

a handful of paintings, and a shoebox of photographic postcards

are now all that remain of this geological wonder, lost to the world

forever in a single night of violent volcanic destruction.

 

British settlement after 1840 brought a wave of change for the Te Arawa

people of the North Island’s thermal region. The remote geography

of the volcanic plateau initially protected the Tuhourangi and

Ngati Rangitihi tribes from the full impact of European incursion.

But visitors soon found their way to the shores of Lake Rotomahana,

in search of the fabled Pink and White terraces.

 

Rotomahana was a small steaming lake adjoining Lake Tarawera, rich

in waterfowl, no more than a kilometre and a half long. At two places,

volcanic terraces of coral-like silica stepped elegantly down to the

lake’s edge, created from the trickling waters of hot mineral springs

cascading into the lake for over a thousand years. The terraces provided

hot pools for bathing and a wonderous spectacle. New Zealand’s tourism

industry was born here.

 

Te Tarata, the expansive ‘White Terrace’, translated loosely from the

Maori as “Tatooed rock”. In geological terms, it was a white siliceous sinter

apron. It fanned out like the tiers of a giant wedding cake, from a deep

azure blue bubbling geyser pool 30 metres above the lake. Te Tarata co-

vered a stretch of seven and a half acres with pooled terraces of varied

sizes, described by one visitor, Lieutenant Henry Bates (a Scottish sheep

farmer)in 1860 as “almost too beautiful for this world”. 

 

Herbert Meade, a visiting English naval officer, said that “to convey an

idea of its beauty is impossible”. Others tried. Bishop Selwyn in 1843

likened it to a “frozen waterfall” and Stephenson Percy Smith, Govern-

ment Surveyor, to an “immense surf 60 feet high just after it had broken”.

Its multi-patterned and coloured crystaline surface that shone white in

the sun, was described by one international traveller as “a collection of

all the precious stones in the world”, and to another as “a raised fretwork

of stone, as fine as chased silver.”

 

Colonial surgeon, Dr. John Johnson described Te Tarata’s oval basins as

“adorned by stalactites of a dazzling brightness, reminding one of those

ornamental fountains, so often seen in Italian cities”. They were “filled

nearly to the brim with water of an opaline colour, which was continually

in a course of change, from streams of water pouring into them from a

higher step”. 

 

                    

 

Visitors ascended the terraces as if climbing a giant staircase. Dr.

Johnson wrote: “The steps commenced, almost imperceptible at

first but gradually increasing in height and breadth as we ascended…

We had taken off our shoes as the water flows to a greater or less

depth over the whole surface, and found the temperature most

agreeable.”

 

Otukapuarangi, the smaller, but some say more beautiful ‘Pink Terrace’,

translated loosley from the Maori as “Fountain of the clouded sky”.

At its summit also was a deep pool and geyser, but its surface was

smoother and its buttresses steeper to climb. Painter Charles Blom-

field wrote of the pink terrace in 1876: “The colour is the chief attrac-

tion. With the morning sun shining brightly on it, it is almost white,

but when the sun gets round and you get more shadow, the lovely

salmon colour is very marked…The over-hanging lips of the basins

are exceedingly beautiful and graceful.”

 

When Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope visited the Terraces in

1874 he observed the special quality of the bathing in the Pink

Terrace’s basins. “When you strike your chest against it, it is soft

to the touch, you press yourself against it and it is smooth, you

lie upon it and, though it is firm it gives to you,” he wrote. “You

go from one bath to another, trying the warmth of each. The water

trickles from the one above to the one below, coming from the

vast boiling pool at the top, and the lower are therefore less hot

than the higher. The baths are…like vast open shells, the walls of

which are concave, and the lips oranmented in a thousand forms…

I have never heard of bathing like this in the world.”

 

Trollope speculated as to future tourist development of the ter-

races, suggesting that the modesty of Victorian bathing could

be overcome by reserving the pink terraces for the ladies and

the white terraces for the men.

 

In the mid-19th Century only the privileged could afford to visit

the remote terraces of Rotomahana.  The most frequent visitors

were overseas tourists and officers of the British regiment. All

served to promote the legend of the terraces’ wonderous beauty

and form, such that by the 1880s the hot lakes district had become

an integral part of the ‘grand tour’ of the colonies for British high

society.

 

Two chiefly Tuhourangi families guarded and cared for Lake

Rotomahanaand its thermal attractions. The Rangiheuea family

had several dwelling places within the vicinity, notably at Te

Ariki, and were its principal custodians. Chief Rangiheuea spent

winters on the lake at two small flax and brush-covered islands

populated with reed huts. Local Maori understood the hot springs’

medicinal properties and visited the islands to bathe in its healing

waters.

 

The other caretakers were Chief Te Keepa Te Rangipuawhe’s people.

Te Keepa was the senior chief of the district. Based latterly at Te

Wairoa on Lake Tarawera, they provided guides and water trans-

port, and performed haka, for the visiting tourists. Custody was

periodically challenged and disputed by Tuhourangi’s neighbour-

ing couisins, Ngati Rangitihi. All were of Te Arawa, tracing their

descent from the same ancestral canoe.

 

Te Arawa occupied a band of territory covering the central Bay

of Plenty from south of Lake Taupo to the coastal town of Maketu,

an important flax producing town and trading post. A fleet of Te

Arawa coastal vessels operated cargo services between Auckland

and the coast in the 1850s. Secure in their roadless country, the

inland tribes were still firmly under the control of their own chiefs.

 

Rotomahana was one of the smallest in a chain of volcanic lakes

which included Rotorua, Rotoiti, Rotoma and Tarawera. The

warm and fast flowing Kaiwaka stream, full of bird life – teal,

duck, and oyster catcher – emptied into Tarawera from the tiny

Rotomahana. The stream was subject to an annual cull in Sum-

mer, but ‘tapu’ to hunters the rest of the year. In the breeding

season, a fence was errected at the mouth of the stream to avoid

the wild fowl from being disturbed by canoes, and visitors to

the terraces traditionally crossed this short distance overland

by foot.

 

The lake itself was warm and swampy, in places boiling, with the

occasional spout from a geyser (or puia) rising from beneath its

surface. Besides the terraces, other unusual craters, puias and

fumeroles dotted its surroundings, and encrusted silica ‘pave-

ments’ flanked its shores. The hillsides were covered in fern brush,

the lake with raupo and reeds. Beyond Rotomahana (the ‘Hot Lake’)

was the even smaller Rotomakariri (the ‘Cold Lake’). Above the

lakes towered the vast black hump of Mount Tarawera.

 

Tarawera mountain’s three pinnacles – Ruawahia (‘split’ or ‘cloven

hole’), Wahanga (‘bursting open’) and Tarawera (‘burnt cliffs’)

were formed by the extrusion of rhyolite domes and pyroclastic

debris over thousands of years. There was no oral record of

volcanic eruption, but the names of its peaks suggest some dim

ancentral memory. Te Arawa mythology told of an ancient and

fierce cannibal spirit Tama-o-Hoi, subdued and locked in the

bowels of the mountain by a tohunga or ‘high priest’ of the Arawa

canoe who was credited with bringing volcanic fire to the hot lakes

district. In geological terms, the imperfectly cooled mass of lava

that still lay in the heart of Mount Tarawera, gave rise to the

thermal wonders at its feet.

 

Tarawera was, and still is, considered ‘tapu’ and highly sacred for

the local people. The mountain’s burial grounds were the final

repository for the bones of their tupuna, and only with difficulty

did Europeans first obtain permission to ascend.  Neither food nor

tobacco was to be consumed on its slopes. While being surveyed

for the government by S. Percy Smith (a pipe smoker) in 1873,

the mountain was enveloped by mist and his party was forced to

turn back twice, before he respected the mountain’s tapu by leaving

his tobacco behind. On another occasion some young local men

collected the honey of wild bees on the mountain. Guide Sophia

Hinerangi later recounted that all who ate it perished in the 1886

eruption, while those Tuhourangi who had refused, including herself,

did not.

 

In 1843, Pioneer Missionary Seymour Spencer, from Mendon,llinois,

arrived in the area, with his Philidelphia-born wife, Ellen. They found-

ed first the mission station of Kariri – or ‘Galilee’ – on Lake Tarawera,

and later Te Wairoa as a “model Maori village” in a fertile valley two

miles away, also by the banks of the lake. Te Wairoa would become the

gateway for travellers on their way to see the Terraces.

 

At Te Wairoa the Spencers established a pastoral domain of religious

and economic instruction for the local Tuhourangi people. The town

boasted one of the first water powered flour mills, its machinery and

millstones imported in 1860 to grind the wheat cultivated in Spencer’s

missionfields. Chief Te Keepa Te Rangipuawhe converted to Church

of England and lived in the village, in a European-style home.

 

The Reverend Spencer directed the building of a chapel called Te Mu,

at a point overlooking the town, the lake and the mountain.  It was

sawn from local matai timber felled and hauled across a swamp

to the shores of the lake where it was floated by raft to the Kariri

headland, then overland by horse-drawn cart. Visitors to the Spen-

cers’ settlements in their heydey commented on the “neatness of

the cultivation”, and remarked at the “stout” fences, gates and

gravelled paths.

 

Among the earliest European visitors was Governor George Grey

who visited the Terraces in 1849 and was hosted by Reverend

Spencer and his wife. Grey had been knighted for his services as

first Governor of the colony in 1847, and in 1848 had assumed

the office of Governor-in-Chief as part of newly established con-

stitutional arrangements. Grey was respected by many Maori

as an even-handed protector of their interests in the face of the

colonial settlers, and he used his role to challenge provincial

governments that clamoured for concessions of land. Yet, he

was intolerant of native aspirations for political independence

and governed as something of a “despot”.

 

Grey proposed to erect a hospital in the hot lakes district,

probably at Ohinemutu due to “the efficacy of the waters for

obstinate rheumatic afflictions”. Reverend Spencer’s wife

Ellen noted the healing capacities of the local Maori were

much faster than that of Europeans, and native visitors to

the area sought comfort for their illnesses at Lake Rotomahana.

 

Grey was apparently the first, but not the last, to leave his

mark on the terraces during this visit, planting his signature

on the lip of one of its basins. Grey was known for leaving

his intials – G.G. – as a message of his presence to Maori and

Pakeha constituents in the areas he travelled. It is elsewhere

recorded that his initials appeared “on a huge block of pumice

stone standing upright on the solitary path between Rotoma-

hana and Taupo”.

 

In the early 1850s, rivalry between Tuhourangi and Ngati

Rangitihi, who both laid claim to Lake Rotomahana, came to

a head. Tuhorangi disputed Ngati Rangitihi’s right to offer

land to a flax trader named Abraham Warbrick who wished

to set up a trading station. Warbrick was assaulted, ducked

in the lake and evicted from the land by Chief Rangiheuea’s

people. A challenge and a series of battles ensued.

 

Peace was not sealed between the two tribes until 1855, with

Tuhourangi reconfirming their authority, although Ngati

Rangitihi remained in the area. Warbrick’s association also

continued. He married into Ngati Rangitihi, and his sons

later pursued the tribe’s claim in the Native Land Court. 

Their mother was Ruhia Karauna, daughter of chief Paerau,

killed in battle at Te Ariki pa in 1853. Both mother and

maternal grandfather were laid to rest in burial caves on

the shoulder of Wahanga peak on Mount Tarawera.

 

Alfred Warbrick, the middle son, claimed to have been given

his first bath in the warm water basins of the white terraces

(although evidence shows he was in fact born many miles away).

He later became known as a guide in the area, renowned for his

daring deeds, and once spent 12 minutes rowing about on a

geyser lakelet taking soundings, only to witness his brother

Joseph perish at the very same geyser just three weeks later.

 

By 1859, the Colonial Government was beginning to take an

active interest in the geological wonders of their newly claimed

domain. In that year, Austrian geologist Dr. Ferdinand Hoch-

setter visited Rotomahana to survey its surrounds on the Govern-

ment’s behalf. He’d been told of its wonders by George Grey, now

stationed in South Africa as Governor of the Cape colony, and

Hochsetter had been assigned to map the lake and the whole

volcanic region, one of the few to do so before 1886. The terraces,

Hochsetter reported, “baffled description”. The people of Te Wairoa

were now exploiting the commercial opportunities that the terraces

provided more systematically. In 1860 Lieutenant Bates described

being “much impressed at the march of civilisation as shown by a

board which stood at the entrance to the settlement and with large

words inscribed the rates the natives required for travelling as guides

to Rotomahana. ” Visitors remained dependent on the hospitality of

local Maori until the first hotels were established in the mid-1870s. 

 

Yet, once more commerce was to be interrupted by war. With Grey’s

departure as Governor, political activism among settler communities

had grown and there was increased pressure upon Maori individuals

to sell communally owned land. Disputed land sales and the fear of ever-

encroaching settlement led to united Maori opposition under a new

pan-tribal monarch, Tawhaio of Tainui – the Maori ‘King’. Governor

Thomas Gore Browne voiced the opinion that Maori needed “a sharp

lesson”, and by the early 1860s the situation had ignited into civil war.

Over the next decade, Government campaigns against the ‘Kingites’

were countered by guerilla attacks from within the Waikato heart-land

or ’King’ country.

 

Historical enmities ensured that Te Arawa sided with the Colonial

Government against those rival tribes who took up battle on the side

of the Maori King. Chief Te Keepa of Tuhourangi fought for the Colo-

nial ‘Kupapa’ army, where he rose to the position of Major.

 

The uniform and equipment of the Arawa army was influenced by

the Scottish atire of their colonial commander Gilbert Mair. The

kilts of Mair’s Arawa soldiers was more suited to movement through

the bush than conventional garb. Warriors cut a striking figure in red-

banded cap, blue jumper, bright tartan shawl worn kilt-wise, a tower

percussion musket, belt and bandolier.

 

At the height of the conflict, missionary Spencer evacuated Te Wairoa

with his family and settled in the coastal town of Maketu. Changed for-

ever by the war, many Tuhourangi drifted away from the Reverend’s

evangelical anglican teachings and the chapel that Spencer had built

fell into disrepair, as did the flour mill. In the midst of these skirmishes

Queen Victoria’s son, Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrived “to see the

wonders of the Hot Lakes district and the Rotomahana Terraces.” He was

escorted there by Mair’s kilted Arawa brigade, under the charge of Major

Frederick Gascoigne. The tapu on the water birds of Kaiwaka stream was

lifted for the royal visit, and the Duke was offered tribute by being poled

by canoe up the sacred stream to the lake.

 

Gascoigne describes the Royal party: “The visitors enjoyed themselves

thoroughly, swimming in the hot pools and seeing Maori war-dances

and hakas; and copying my shawl costume went about in kilts with

bare legs…The Duke was well-tatooed on the arms, breast and legs

with coloured flowers, birds anddragons, in the Japanese style, but

Lord Charles Beresford was the most elaborately tattooed man I have

ever seen. He had coloured designs, besides the usual nautical emblems,

anchors, ships and dolphins, all over his body. He was of medium height,

very powerfully built, and of good figure. On parting the Duke gave me

a signed photograph of himself in memory of his visit, and expressed

himself as greatly pleased with the arrangements for his comfort, protec-

tion and amusement.” The Duke of Edinburgh left his signature elsewhere,

following the example of Governor Grey and others, by making his mark

on the terraces themselves.

 
Around this time, there arrived at the terraces a middle aged woman

named Sophia Hinerangi. Originally from the far north, Sophia was

to marry into the Tuhorangi and become one of Rotomahana’s principal

tour guides. Sophia was the daughter of a Ngati Ruanui mother and a

blacksmith father from Aberdeen. She had grown up in the Bay of

Islands where an earlier marriage was said to have born her 14

children. Her second marriage to Hori Taiawhio, with whom she

came to Te Wairoa, bore a further three. Historian Jennifer Curnow,

describes Sophia as “Well-educated and bilingual, she arranged the

tour parties, supplied visitors with information, settled accounts,

organised the other workers and was ‘guide, philosopher and friend

to thousands of tourists who were fortunate enough to obtain

her services.” Guide Sophia appeared to possess spiritual powers

of matakite or “second sight”. In the early 1880s when a local stream

on Tarawera rose rapidly to unprecedented heights, alarming people

of the threat of flood, Sophia saw a giant ngarara or “lizard” struggling

up the stream. No one else saw the vision, but many believed her.

 

Government land confiscations following the war were indiscriminate,

and often depended on the land’s cultivation value. Some tribes that

had sided with the Government lost large blocks, while some of the

more bellicose tribes lost little or nothing. Native Land Courts sat

regularly around the country to establish title, but it was often a pre-

paration for purchase by the Crown. Maori men had had the right

to vote in the governing constitution since 1867, but large portions

of the central North Island remained isolated and independent. Chief

Te Keepa stood unsuccessfully for the ‘Eastern Maori’ seat in the House

of Representatives in the elections of 1875 and 1884. But Tuhourangi

maintained firm control of their lands, and with the war’s end tourism

at the terraces settled into a regular pattern. 

 

Travellers to the terraces in the 1880s usually arrived by steamboat at

Tauranga and took the bridle track inland at Maketu 70kms to Te Wai-

roa, stopping overnight at Ohinemutu on the shores of Lake Rotorua.

By 1879 Ohinemutu boasted three hotels. From Te Wairoa, visitors

were escorted by whaleboat across Lake Tarawera, to the tiny settle-

ment of Moura, where they stopped to purchase cherries, potatoes

and koura (fresh water crayfish) for lunch, before beaching at Te Ariki,

where they alighted and passed over a narrow strip of land to avoid

disturbing bird life in the Kaiwaka stream. At Rotomahana a canoe was

once more taken to reach the Terraces.

 

Organised guiding was a profitable profession. The boat journey to

Rotomahana cost two pounds, permission to take photographs or

make sketches, another five. The young men of Tuhourangi were

rostered on whaleboats, up to twelve at a time, to ferry the tourists

across Lake Tarawera. From guiding and boat fees alone, it is estim-

ated that the tribe had an annual income of 6,000 pounds. The

commercial proficiency of the Tuhourangi was not welcomed by

all comers. Charles Spencer, who published an illustrated guide of

the area in 1885 wrote: “The natives have ceased to grind or cultivate

the golden grain, preferring to cultivate the acquaintance of the Pakeha,

and see what amount of gold they can grind out of him instead.”

 

The Tuhourangi of this period were said to be so affluent that they had

replaced the shells in the eyes of the carved figures on their meeting

house with gold sovereigns – a story unsubstantiated by photographic

evidence. In any case, the 250-odd Maori population of Te Wairoa

lived well on a diet of pork, bacon, beef, bread, sugar and butter.

Families pooled money to buy alcohol for social occasions. All was

purchased from a local Tuhorangi-operated store.

 

By the 1880s Te Wairoa had two tourist hotels, the Rotomahana

(formerly the Cascade) Hotel, a solid two-storey “well-managed

hostelry” run by Joseph McRae, and the Terraces Hotel, a non-

alcoholic establishment, run by a Mr. and Mrs. Humphreys “on

temperance lines”. Up the road was the Snow Temperance Hall,

established in memory of a late American anti-drink crusader

whose work was now carried on in the town by the local school-

master, Charles Haszard, and several leading men of the tribe.

 

In 1881, Government passed the Thermal Springs Act, laying

claim over a portion of ‘Sulphur Point’ near Ohinemutu as the

site for a santatorium to promote and exploit the region’s thermal

attractions. New roads were being carved through the area to

enable better access for travellers. The number of visitors to

Rotomahana was doubling every few months, and plans were

afoot to build a hotel adjoining the Pink Terraces.

 

In 1884 artist Charles Blomfield negotiated a special fee of five

guineas to paint the terraces over an extended period. On an

earlier visit in 1875 the painter had encountered some hostility

when he had ventured to the terraces on his own, and so this

time arranged for a meeting with the affected tribal represent-

atives to agree on a lump-sum payment beforehand. He brought

with him six-year old daughter Mary, and his own boat.

 

The insistences of Tamihana, of the Ariki village, for further

payment as a guide, were doused when the authority of Te Keepa,

head chief of the district, was invoked. Tamihana was the grandson

of Chief Rangiheuea. He and his young daughter, as well and his

aged grandfather, who Blomfield described as “an old tattooed

warrior of a hundred summers”, spent time with the Blomfields,

watching Charles paint, while the children skipped fearlessly

among the geysers and hot basins, “making mud pies” and

“hunting for petrified ferns and birds’ feathers in the hot water.”

 

Blomfield and his daughter spent six weeks at the lake, enjoying

a view of the terraces that few visitors had or would experience

again. He recalled: “On a moonlit night I would take the boat,

and leaving my little Mary fast asleep in the tent, pull slowly

around the lake. It was a most uncanny experience, the myster-

ious shroud of vapour, the absolute solitude, the strange weird

sounds on every hand, hissing, gurgling, moaning, sighing seemed

like some unknown world, while every few yards a wild duck

would rise from the water with a startled cry, and vanish into

the gloom.”

 

He observed the tourists come and go, “every weekday, from ten

to thirty of them, mostly moneyed people from all parts of the

world. They would arrive at the White Terrace about eleven a.m.,

view the sights there… and have lunch at a little boiling spring

where they ate potatoes and koura cooked in boiling water, cross

over to the Pink Terrace, bathe there and go straight back”. Blomfield

noted with dismay that the locals now charged two shillings and six-

pence for visitors to be canoed down the Kaikawa hot stream back

to Lake Tarawera.

 

In the weeks before Mount Tarawera erupted on 10 June 1886,

a series strange events took place. Eleven days prior, on the

morning of 31 May, Guide Sophia and a party of tourists arrived

at the usual embarkation point on the edge of Lake Tarawera to

find the creek dried up and the whaleboats stuck in the mud.

In Sophia’s account, as they stood there the water came up with

a crying sound all along the shores of the lake, floating the boats

again, then rushed away again as quickly. When the lake level rose

once more, the expedition proceeded, but guide, boatmen and

tourists were unnerved.

 

In Massy’s 1902 account, aboard the boat that day were six Maori

crewmen, Father Kelliher, a priest from Auckland, Dr. T. S. Ralph,

from Melbourne, Mr. William Quick, also from Auckland, Mr. and Mrs.

Sise and their daughter, from Dundein and three local Maori women.

There are a number of accounts of the boat trip. Mrs. Sise wrote in

a letter to her son: “After sailing for some time we saw in the distance

a large boat, looking glorious in the mist and sunlight. It was full of

Maoris, some standing up, and it was near enough to see the sun

glittering on their panels. The boat was hailed but returned no answer.

We thought so little of it at the time that Dr. Ralph did not even turn

to look at the canoe and until our return to Wairoa in the evening

we never gave it another thought. Then to our surprise we found the

Maoris in great excitement and heard from McRae and other Europ-

eans that no such boat had ever been on the lake.”

 

William Quick later confirmed to Alf Warbrick that such a canoe had

come “about half a mile from us and then it disappeared”.

 

“It was to all appearances a war canoe of olden time, with a crew of

paddlers,” he recounted. “It had the projecting bow piece and the

high sternpost that were fitted in large canoes of the waka-taua or

war canoe type”. Another boat on the lake that morning also con-

firmed the sighting of a boat with the appearance of a war canoe.

Josiah Martin, one of the passengers, sketched what he saw,

although the drawing is now lost. Father Kelliher also sketched

the canoe, from which a painting was later made.

 

The strangest account is that of Guide Sophia: “We thought it

was someone going to catch kouras… but as we looked the

canoe got larger and shot out into the lake and then from one

man the number increased to five, they were all paddling fast,

fast, but to our horror they appeared to have dogs’ heads on

the bodies of men. Then the canoe got larger still, it looked like

a war canoe and then we saw 13 in it, all paddling faster and

faster. Whilst we were watching, astonished and terrified (for

the boatmen had stopped rowing) the canoe got smaller and

then with the last remaining man disappeared into the waters

of the lake.”

 

In a separate account she said: “We had not gone very far over

the lake when we saw another canoe in the distance being vigor-

ously paddled but never moving. Several said they could see it,

but as I looked earnestly the men who paddled changed to dogs

and then the whole thing vanished”.

 

When reported to Chief Rangiheuea, who was wintering over at

Puai Island, the old chief is described as replying: “if that is true

there is going to be a big war and many chiefs and people will be

killed”.

 

Back at Te Wairoa, people were told of the waka wairua, or “phan-

tom canoe”. An old tohunga named Tuhoto, a relative of Ngati

Rangitihi guide Alf Warbrick said to be more than 100 years old

and “a medium between the natural and the spiritual world” de-

clared the vision to be an omen. “It is a sign and a warning that

all this region will be overwhelmed,” records Warbrick.

 

Tuhuto was regarded with fear and awe because of the enormous

power of his personal tapu. He had recently visited friends in a

village near the mountain, and on his return an apparently healthy

child of the village had sickened and died. At the tangi, the child’s

mother had cursed Tuhoto, and some say that he conjured up the

ancestral spirit of the mountain in his indignation. 

 

At the terraces that day, and again the following week, Sophia noted

unusual thermal activity. On her last visit to on 7 June, she described

the unusually high level of the lake and recorded seeing the geyser

Whatapoho (‘a pain in the stomach’) sending out flames and smoke.

“I think this is my last day at Lake Rotomahana”, she is reported as

saying. The evening of 9 June 1886 was clear enough in Te Wairoa

for Charles Hazard and two visiting surveyors to engage in some

amateur star-gazing. They watched the occultation of the planet

Mars – whereby Mars was eclipsed by the moon. They retired at 11pm.

 

Alfred Warbrick was in the area that night, out shooting pigeons in

the Makatiti forest. He was awaiting his family’s titles to come again

before the Native Land Court, then sitting at Taheke. Chief Rangiheuea,

was spendingthe night on Puai Island in the middle of Lake Rotoma-

hana with ten others, laid on the hot earth to keep out the cold and

the rheumatism.

 

At Te Wairoa, Sophia and her family were asleep in their home, a long

narrow whare with an unusually steep-pitched roof. The tohunga

Tuhoto lay in his small whare nearby, apparently sleeping also, but

some say chanting “karakia” to unleash the punishing spirits of his

ancestors.

 

Just after midnight, all were awoken by a prolonged and increasing

series of booming earthquakes that could be felt all the way to the

Bay of Plenty coast. The eruption began at the Wahanga dome at

1.30am. Those that had been shaken from their beds witnessed

a rising black cloud above the mountain, cut by lightening and

expelling electrical balls of fire. violent earthquake at 2.10 im-

ediately preceded an eruption column which rose over nine kilo-

eters bove the mountain, followed at 2.30 by basalt scoria eruptions

that ripped a fissure down the length f the mountain with a noise

described by those as far away as the coast at Maketu “as if all

creation was eing blown up”. Witnesses saw seven or more distinct

columns of fire spread out into black clouds that lowed red from

the reflection of the firey pits below. At 3.30 eruptions at Lake

Rotomahana uncapped the large geothermal system in that area,

and the release of pressure allowed its waters to flash into steam,

causing high speed blasts of hot rock that swept horizontally out-

wards for ten kilometers from the lake, pulverising the village of

Te Ariki, while cold mud rained vertically out of the eruption cloud

to bury Te Wairoa and the surrounding countryside to as far as

Ohinemutu. Thick volcanic ash spread for many miles further.

 

Sophia Hinerangi’s solid steep roofed whare proved a safe haven

in the storm of rocks and mud that followed and many of the towns-

people gathered there for the night, once the roofs of every other

building in the town, including the hotels, had collapsed beneath

the weight of mud and ash. Sophia later claimed that her whare

had been “tapued “.

 

More than 150 people were killed and buried in the violent

events of that night. The eruption was all but over by 5.30

in the morning, although dawn did not break until well into

the afternoon. The devastation it revealed was unprecedented.

 

Geologists describe Tarawera’s eruption as “unusual on a world

scale”. Surveyor S. Percy Smith, found that the new level of what

was once Lake Rotomahana was 250 feet lower than the former

lake bed. The whole and Its surroundings had been scooped out,

leaving in its place a line of craters, mud geysers and fumeroles.

 

Alf Warbrick and former Te Arawa commander, Captain Gilbert Mair,

now a judge of the Native Land Court, were among those who ex-

plored Tarawera to discover the terrain so vastly changed.  Where

the lakeside settlement of Moura once stood, a layer of mud seventy

five feet thick had blotted out the houses and the 39 people who lived in

them. A large grove of karaka trees that had marked the village site was

seen floating a mile out in Lake Tarawera. At the place where Te Ariki

stood, houses and people were buried beneath 250 feet of mud. The tall,

dense Tikitapu bush had been stripped and flattened as if by gale force winds.

 

Alf Warbrick hauled a whaleboat across the devastated terrain from Rotorua

and lowered it 250 feet onto lake Tarawera to survey the damage. In his

recovery expeditions he unearthed the whare of his old relative Tuhoto who

emerged shaken but alive after four days of burial. Despite his protests, Tuhoto

was removed from his dwelling, his long hair was cut, and he was taken to the

sanatorium at Rotorua where he died two weeks later. 

 

Warbrick never accepted that the terraces had been completely destroyed.

In the years that followed he initiated public debate about their fate and

spearheaded calls to “uncover the terraces”. But the terraces had been vapourised.

In the next seven years, Lake Rotomahana refilled naturally with spring water to

several times its original breadth and depth.

 

Warbrick went on to become the accepted guide for visitors eager to view the

“post-eruption wonderland”. In 1903 the Department of Tourist and Health

Resorts inaugurated a ‘Round Trip’ tourist excursion traversing the scene of

the eruption, with Warbrick as their guide.

 

Sophia Hinerangi continued her guiding career at Whakarewrewa thermal

reserve, near the new government-developed tourism town of Rotorua.

In later years she encouraged younger women to take up tourist guiding

which remained a lucrative form of employment for the now exiled

Tuhourangi people. She died at Whakarewarewa in 1911.

 

Over the following century, New Zealand tourism grew to become the

country’s single biggest source of foreign earnings.

 

 

Links:

Tarawera, a documentary about the Mt Tarawera erruption.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

—