OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 May 1941, Page 6

OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

CENTENARY (To the Editor.) Sir, —Those readers of your widelycirculated journal having pioneer family interest in the recently-celebrated hundredth anniversary of the arrival in Port Nicholson of the emigrant ship Lord William Bentinck, might find some additional crumbs of comfort in the following particulars I have ascertained over a number of years as far as this particular branch of research is concerned: Leaving Gravesend on January 8, 1841, under the command of Captain James Crow, the ship Lord William Bentinck was brought to an anchorage in Port Nicholson on May 24 of the , same year. ship’s surgeon was a Doctor Reeves, whose hands must have been fairly full throughout the entire long passage to New Zealand, in attending to the physical welfare of no fewer than 103 juvenile passengers under the age of 14 years. Of that number 52 were under seven years of age. The whole ship’s complement of passengers was 242, of which number but 39 were married couples and 24 single males and 15 spinsters above the age of fourteen. There were five births and nine deaths of children during the voyage out. Whether its passengers disembarked at Petone or at the Thorndon end of the harbouu, at the present moment I am not definitely sure, but having previously mentioned, in your columns, that several of the crew took French leave of. the ship when it reached its destination, and made for the bush, the Petone foreshores would seem to have offered them their best opportunity. However, this matter can later be cleared up satisfactorily from other sources of information. Among centenary celebrations of one kind and another closely related to Wairarapa settlement at about, that time, that of the advent of Methodism in the Port Nicholson, area recalls the proud fact, in early Masterton history, that one of this denomination (in the revered person of the late Mr Henry Jones) established a school of religious instruction for families in this district as far back as the year 1856, at which particular period Wellington, (since called the Empire City) was described by angry Aucklanders as a mere “fishing village” on the borders of Cook Strait: while our own town of Masterton might as well then have been said to be “a discontented section of its inhabitants” who had sought the first opportunity of escaping its horrors of civilisation by building “a better order of society” here, “in the heart of the bush.”—l am. etc.. N.J.B. Masterton, May 28.