Sailing ships and sawmilling

About 200 years ago, we saw the first Europeans anchor their sailing ships in the harbour below our ridge.

At first they came to fell our adolescent descendants, their tall branchless trunks ideal spars for their ships. They called these adolescent kauri ‘rickers’, their name for spars. We watched local Maori trade kauri spars and provisions for European goods, and later for muskets. As the numbers of Europeans increased, they turned their attention to bigger kauri trees.

Courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library (copyright) The forest around us now rang to the sound of axe and crosscut saw. From our ridge, we watched as sawmilling settlements sprang up along the harbour and the waterways that fed into it. We watched as bullock teams dragged felled logs to the waterways.

We watched as the bushmen built dams across the waterways, then released the pent-up water to flush the logs down to the harbour. We watched as fleets of sailing ships and small coastal scows, many of them locally built from kauri timber, loaded cargoes of logs. Smoke filled the air as the kauri bushmen set fire to the debris left behind. We watched as patch after patch of our descendants fell. Over the next 100 years, the generations of kauri that once would have grown up to replace us, disappeared. Soon only two of us were left, giant kauri standing tall on the ridge.