WON FROM THE SEA

Hokitika Guardian, 7 February 1931, Page 2

WON FROM THE SEA

O—< RECLAMATION OF LAND. EARLY HISTORY OF NAPIER. Some interesting early history of Napier is given in a special diamond jubilee number of the Napier Daily Telegraph issued on January 31. Possibly no city in New Zealand (it states) has had to rely upon the reclamation of submerged lands for the expansion of its residential areas so largely as Napier has bad to do. Practically the whole of Napier South is land that patient years of constant work have won back from the waters which, it is said, once surrounded Scinde Island.

Artifioally reaches completeness in the existence of Napier South. The area contains hundreds’ of acres where rows of fresh-looking houses, green parks, and clean streets have replaced wide wastes of unrelieved swamp where, apparently, worthless mud and water supported nothing more useful that dank, mosquito-infested weed.

To trace the story of reclamation in and around Napier involves the task ('1 probing hack into the most obscure times of almost forgotten (lays. A survey of the city its it stands to-da v brings to the gaze hardly a ti’at’e ot What stood c'.i the site of Napier before its settlement by the earliest pioneers, It is scarcely credible that less than two score years ago it was possible- to row a boat along Wellesley road, that pestilential swamps spread their rank weeds and stagnant waters to where Hastings Street and Dickens street now run that one of the most momentous problems of early Napier was the task of dealing effectively with the danger of disease from the objectionable odour rising off a lagoon hounded by the railway line spit—Little Suit or Little Beach, it was railed—and Hastings street; and the area between Tennyson and Emerson streets was, on account of the bogginess of the ground, useful for nothing but giving the sparseness of food to goats, poultiv, pigs, and conglomerate flocks ol other domestic stock.

SEA REACHING HAVELOCK. Records assert that tbe whole of the Heretaunga Plains once formed a gigantic arm of the sea, extending so far that breakers spent their force against the hills at- Havelock North or lulled to wavelets in the gullies and glens bevong Fernhill and Paki Paki. The hills which now form the most popular residential section of Napier were then an island, afterwards named Scinde Island.

! Steadily, though imperceptibly, tbe !enormous gulf was filled. Its shores i crept tiimotiefeabiy forward towards the open sen and were built up year by j year by the deposits of streams which : ran dowfi From the hills and emptied into tiie gigalitie hasiii. Earthquakes, i too, probably contributed with sudden and stupendous upheavals to the filling nnd levelling of the vast area. It is a truism then, that the reclamation done by man since tbe settlement of Napier is merely an infinitely small addition to the tremendus activities of tbe oldest worker. Nature. Even the land that carries the main road and the railway at Hastings was built by the master craftsman. One of Nature’s agencies, the Tuki Tuki River, it was that built that moving strip of shingle. Huge quantities of shingle were being brought down to the sea by this stream, and a breaswork of stone which joined Scinde Island with the mainland was gradually constructed.

When settlement started in Napier, the Ahuriri lagoon—it was called MacDonald’s Cove at that time—formed the last stretch which had not been reclaimed by Nature. Given centuries more of time, Nature would probably have packed the area behind the shingle breastwork with solid ground, but the completion of tbe contract was hastened by man’s arrival. NEEDS OF HEALTH. Necessity fostered the enterprise responsible for the reclamation of those areas which Nature’s age-long activities had not reached. It was not long before the space easily accessible on Scindle Island was fully occupied, and new arrivals had to look further afield to establish their homes and their businesses. Good health, too, demanded that the swampy areas which skirted the island should be at least treated, if not filled in completely. Large sections of those swamps were never reached by tidal waters, which could not force their way through the glutinous mass of tangled weed before the commencement of the ebb, and tbe area

became the breeding-place of mosquitoes, carriers of plague and disease. The reclamation of a triangular area, bounded by Hastings street, Dickins street, and the railway line from the | Todd street crossing to the present station site, was one of the first works to be undertaken. Upon this inner lagoon, shut off from the main body of the swamp by the railway embankment, was built ail area which eventually accommodated Bower, Vautier, , Raffles, Munroe, and Station streets

and other thoroughfares. A line of trees, which came to he known as the Munroe street bluegums, was planted to guard against fever. Blighted by the smoke and fumes of factories, these trees gradually dwindled, the last of them being felled in 1924, by which time reclamation had spread on the northern side of the railway, and the danger of fever, if not entirely removed, had been minimised.