The Kaipara is a name applied rather indiscriminately to a river, a harbour, and to a tract of country. The Kaipara river is that on which Helensville stands. It waters an extensive valley, and, flowing north-westerly, falls into the Kaipara Harbour, some miles below Helensville. It is tidal to a short distance above the settlement.
The harbour is a vast inlet of the sea, almost land-locked, since its entrance, the Heads, is only about three or four miles wide. Opening from the harbour are sundry great estuaries, resembling the sea-lochs of Western Scotland. They are the Kaipara, the Hoteo, the Oruawharo, the Otamatea, the Wairau, the Arapaoa, and the Wairoa. Several of these have branches. Thus the Pahi, to which we are going, branches out of the Arapaoa. They are fed by creeks—that is to say, by freshwater rivers, as one would call them at home. The tidal estuaries are here called rivers; and the freshwater streams, of whatever size, creeks.
All these waters have the generic name of the Kaipara. The united water-frontage is said to be over a thousand miles; and nearly two million acres of land lying round are comprised within the so-called Kaipara district. Ships of heavy tonnage can get up to Tokatoka on the Wairoa, to Te Pahi and Te Otamatea, and within a short distance of Helensville, these places being, respectively, from twenty-five to thirty-five miles from the Heads. Smaller vessels can, of course, go anywhere. The Wairoa creek is navigable for schooners and cutters for more than eighty miles, as well as its tributaries, the Kaihu, Kopura, Tauraroa, and Maungakahia.
We have come into a district admirably adapted for pioneer settlement. For nature has supplied water-ways in every direction, and thus the first great difficulty in opening up a new country, the want of roads, is obviated. Here, indeed, as we shall find, no one walks to his township, or rides to see a neighbour, he jumps into his boat and rows or sails wherever he wants to go.
As the Lily steams down the Kaipara, we get a better idea of the bush than our previous day's coach-ride had given us. There is no more of the brown and shaggy gum-land, but, instead of it, such glorious woods and jungles and thickets of strange beautiful vegetation. Mile after mile it is the same, the dense evergreen forest stretching away over the ranges as far as one can see. Here it is the light bush, woods of young trees that have grown over what were once the sites of Maori cultivation; there it is the heavy bush, the real primeval forest.
One great feature of the Kaipara tidal estuary is the quantity of mangroves. Immense tracts are covered with water at high tide, and are left bare at low tide. These mud-banks are covered with mangroves in many places, forming great stretches of uniform thicket. The mangrove is here a tree growing to a height of twenty or thirty feet, branching thickly, and bearing a dark, luxuriant foliage. At high water, the mangrove swamps present the appearance of thickets growing out of the water. When the tide recedes, their gnarled and twisted stems are laid bare, often covered with clinging oysters. Below, in the mud, are boundless stores of pipi (cockles), and other shell-fish and eels.
The channel of the river is broad and deep, but often, to save some bend, the Lily ploughs her way along natural lanes and arcades among the mangroves. It is a novel experience to us to glide along the still reaches among these fluviatile greenwoods. We are embosomed in a submerged forest, whose trees are uniform in height and kind. All round us, like a hedge, is the glossy green foliage, sometimes brushing our boat on either side. And we scare up multitudes of water fowl, unused to such invasion of their solitudes. Wild duck, teal, grey snipe, shags, and many kinds that no one on board knows the names of, start from under our very bows. Not gay plumaged birds, though, for the most part; only now and then a pair of kingfishers, flashing green and orange as they fly, or the purple beauty of a pukeko, scuttling away into the depths of the swamp.
By-and-by we emerge into the expanse of the harbour. Once out in it we could almost imagine ourselves at sea, for, from the low deck of the Lily, we only see the higher grounds and hill-tops round, looking like islands in the distance, as we cannot descry the continuity of shore. And now we have leisure to make closer acquaintance with the boat that carries us.
The Lily is a queer craft. Though old and rickety, she gets through a considerable amount of work, and is sufficiently seaworthy to fight a squall, when that overtakes her in the harbour. Not that a gale is by any means a light affair, in this wide stretch of water. When one is blowing, as it sometimes does for two or three days at a time, the Lily lies snugly at anchor in some sheltered cove, and settlers have to wait as patiently as may be for their mails or goods. She knows her deficiencies, and will not face stormy weather, if she can help it.
Three times a week she visits certain of the Kaipara settlements, returning from them on alternate days. The arrangement is such that each township gets—or is supposed to get—one weekly visit from her. She is a boat with a character, or without it, which means about the same thing in the present instance. She has also a skipper, who is something of a character in his way.