"MOKAU" JONES

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 113, 5 February 1918, Page 3

"MOKAU" JONES

THE RIVER AND ITS PIONEER STORY OF A WELL-KNOWN LITIGANT (By "Orakau," in the Auckland "Star.") Tho news of' tho death at New Plymouth of JJr. Joshua Jones brings up many memories of the pertinacious old Welshman and liis interminable litigation over hii backblocks lands, and of tho lively early (lays of settlers' enterprise in tho Hnuhau country about the Mokau River mouth. "Mokau" Jones was the nickname that distinguished him a. full quarter of a century ago, and it stuck to him through all his wearisome pilgrimages from law court to law court, in New Zealand and in the Old Country, a heart-breaking succession of suits and pleas and oountfcrpleas that ruined the plucky old colonial hand and left him in his seventies with a pathetic sense of life's lost endeavour. If ever there was a man who had reason to curse the law's iniquities and tho law's delays it was Joshua Jones. His series of suits for possession of the Mokau Native land to which ho claimed title outdid in length, if not in costliness, an almost as famous case over Samoan plantations —Frank Cornwall and his wife Manaema versus a big Auckland firm, a "suit which ran its tedious course from Apia to Auckland, from Auckland to 'Wellington, and then to the Privy Council in England and back again, over and over again. It was about in the middle 'sixties, the story goes, that Joshua Jones, through a fortuitous —or anfortiiitous, according to the point of view—series of happeuings on tho Victorian gold diggings, conceived the idea of trying his fortunes in New Zealand. On the Baliarat fields ho met a party of Maovi gold-seekers who were down on theii luck, and the story is that ;.e befriended them, and thus, though not foreseeing it, kid the foundation of a long friendship with the. Maori peoplo. The brown diggers came from the West Coast of the North Island. _ Many an adventurous Maori went a-diggmg for gold those days—some even went off to California —and some of the Natives of I the north had schooners, at least one of which voyaged as far as Sydney. It was some years later that young Jones made the acqyaintance m Sydney of Wetere te Rerehga, the head chief of the Mokau country. TVatero had a small schooner, called the Pariniiiihi—"Lofty Cliffs"—the Maori name of the celebrated White Cliffs on the North Taranaki coast. The little fore-aud-after had taken a cargo of wheat and other produce to "Poihakene — Port Jackson —and there the enterprising Watere met the man ivho was to make the name of Mokau a synonym for protractnd land-title legislation even half a world away. Joshua Jones was told of the vast areas of land lying.waste about tho Mokau Heads, and lie was watmly invited by Wetere and other chiefs to settle among them and open up their bar port to pakelia trade. It was not until about 1879 that the way lay clear for the long-lookcd-for opening of tho Mokau, as the result of a Maori meeting at Waitara, where Sir George Grey met Epiha and other big men of shawl kilt and blue tattoo and spent a fair round sum of Government money in the "sweetening" operations necessary in tho pakeha-Maori diplomacy of those days.

About Wetero to Rerenga. Wetere te Rerenga, as it happened, lav under a ban in the seventies, tie was the man who was popularly credited with having planned and executed the wiping-out of the constabulary post at Puke-aruhe, the outermost frontier redoubt of Taranaki-the affair usually , referred to as the "White Cliffs massacre. That was in 1869. More than thirty .years afterwards I met at a little ciiff-top settlement near Mokau Heads, an old Maori, whom I asked, rather incautiously, if h®. Jj a " ,°®f n anywhere near the Whits Cliffs at the time 'of the redoubt-taking. In an instant the grim old fellow's eyes took on a curious speculative glare. lie was thinking, "Now, I w/mder what this pakeha is after ?" His hard warrior features presently relaxed in a told grin, but he said not a word in reply. At the Mokau kainga I found that this same blanketed veteran was the man who had used a tomahawk to give the last dispatch to at least ono white man in the redoubt. But Wetore was generally regarded as the leader of the murder-party, and until the general amnesty was proclaimed in 1883 he was practically an outlaw from white settlements, ' with a price on his head. He.actually visited Wellington while still under the ban on a political mission, and there is a legend that lie had to be secretly hurried out of the town by the West Coast coach t-o avoid arrest on a charge of murder. But it was a political murder, and this set the White Cliffs tragedy in a different light. Certainly Wetere and the Ngati-Maniapoto unci Ngati-Tama tribes regarded it as a necessary act of war, this extinguishing of the Government fires on the history-haunted Pukearuhe. AVetere was really an- enlightened, energetic fellow, with a genius for leadership and for tribal organisation. In his days at Mokau Heads the local Maoris were inspired to habits of regular and profitable industry. They grew wheat on a level fringo of good land between the cliffs and the bushclad ranges ; they had a flour mill at the Heads, driven % a little stream— the old mill stones are there in the grass to-day, trailed over by Isabella grapevines. They had famous groves of poaches and other fruits; they.traded peach-fattened pigs to the pnkehas at Waitara and New Plymouth. They had a fleet of big sea-going canoes, in which they caught shark andschnapper and hapitku in tons outside the bar; those were the days when the first fish caught in each canoe had to be cast on a. certain sacred spot 011 the beach near the north head as a thankoffering to the gods of the fishery. It is not many years since this custom was abandoned. Mokau always had abundance of food, and Wetere prided himself on his well-stocked stores of "kai" and the comforts of the kainga which enabled the/tribe to show a respectable fpee to visitors. He kept the tribe together, kept them drilled in habits of regular work and self-respcct-ing independence. Mokau was a centre of Maori life and activity in the 'seventies and 'eighties; one of the most remote part* of Maoridom and a headquarters of Kingito nationalism. Many a pakeha. though, had to thank Wetero for kindnesses, and at least t.wo owed their lives to him—Wilson Hursthnuse, surveyor (later he camn to ho well known as the Dominion's Chief Engineer for Roads and Bridges), and a companion: thev were capsizcd on Mokau bar while taking soundings, in n dangerous sea, and would have been drowned but for Wetere and several of his men, who put off in n canoe and saved them at the risk of their own That was the man who took "Moknn" Jones under his protective mana in the 'ate seventies, and it was he who really lifted the Kingite ban which had kev>t pnMin traders and settlers out of the Mokau. From the Heads Up, Since those history-making years, when \tlio full flavour of wild Maori life was still enjoyed by the tribes beyond the frontier, and when tomahawk had not yet given place to the Q,neon's writ in the Kohepotao, tho Mokau Heads country has- become a highway between the two provinces, Taranaki

and Auckland, and the chin-tattooed daughter of tho soil joy-rides in her motor-car over tho routes that her bare-legged grandfather trudgeu with double-barrelled gun on hhouldor and tomahawk iu belt. But tako the river for it and you are back in the real old Mokau of Wctero's and Joshua Jones's era. Four of us—two pnltelias and two Maoris—once took a canoe right up from the sea to the head of navigation near Totoro, and in tho four days' inland voyage we bad niore than a taste of the savage, untnmmed old Mokau. ... The Mokau, as we found, was still almost wholly in its wild state so far as the navigation and the forest surroundings were concerned. There were only two breaks in the vast and glorious bush t''at walled the river in and that stretched its green arms over our headß until in many a narrow run they mot in a riotous tangle ot foliage —a solitary deserted sawmill a tew miles up the amber-coloured winding waterway, and a dingy Utile coalmma settlement twenty miles from the sea. At that coalmine we naw a Maorined old white man with a curious story. He had lived with the Natives since the mid-'sixties, ar.d had seen many a strange happening in tins ''eavt of tho Kingitc country. Then on wo toiled, into waters where never a steamer had floated —up and over our first rapid, where ono of our poles slipped as wo were laboriously working up over tho snag-mado fall of bottle-glass-green water, and wo came flying down the "talicko" again stern first.

"All Mokau Jones," Between the rapids—they occurred about every half mile—we steadily plunged our paddles, with big Hauraki sitting placidly right astern with his steering paddle. Between times lie told legends of the rivei now and again contradicted by dour Piko, the bow paddle—explained place-names, and talked about "Mokau" Jones. "Whoso land is this?" one of us pakehas would ask, taking occasion for a brief spell from shoulder-aching task of helping to drive the heavy thirty-foot river canoe upstream, and wavinp a paddle vaguely along tho lofty forested banks. ".Oil, all Mokau Jones's, I think," Hauraki would say. 'Everywhere Mokau Jones's, perhaps, but he can't get it from the lawyers. Too many lawyers—too much for Mokau Jones" "Aye," Piko would break his warrior silence to echo'; "too many lawyers, too much Gov'mint; Mokau Jones he go lose, my word!" A kind of chivalrous symnathy for Mr, Jones, and a corresponding antipathy for the law and its devious ways seemed to be general along the Mokau.