Then we pass into river after river, proceeding up each some miles, to the townships, or stations, where we have to call, then descending into the harbour again, only to go on to the entrance of yet another river. The scenery is very varied, and there is much in it to attract our regard. Sometimes we pass below lofty bluffs, by wild rocky shores and islets, sometimes along great stretches of mud-bank or mangrove swamp.
The land on all sides is a primitive wilderness for the most part. Range after range sweeps and rolls away, while ravines and gullies and basins open upon the rivers, with tumbling creeks or graceful cascades pouring through them. One might suppose that some giant of yore had ploughed out this country and left it. A newly-ploughed field must seem, to an ant's vision, something like the contour of this to ours.
The land is richly wooded. Here and there we see the heavy bush, mammoth trees soaring up, overhung with creepers and ferns; but the heavy bush is chiefly at some distance from the waterside. What we see most of here is the light bush; dense thickets of shrubs, and smaller trees, resembling our remembrance of the denes and copses of England, or Epping and the New Forest.
To us new-chums it seems absurd to call this bush "light," but we can see that it is so by comparison with the primeval forest, where the tree-trunks run from ten to forty feet in girth. Once upon a time, when they numbered millions, the Maoris inhabited these shores pretty thickly. They preferred to be near the water, as settlers do now, for the same reason of convenience in communication, and also because fish was a chief article of their diet. All the land near the rivers has been at some time under their cultivation, and the light bush has grown up upon it since.
So late as fifty years ago, the Ngatewhatua tribe, who were lords of the Kaipara, were very numerous; but were then nearly exterminated in a war with the Ngapuhi of the north. Still, numerous as they may have been then, they could not have held the immense tracts here under cultivation. That must date from a more remote period. But the places where their villages stood, in the early part of this century, are now buried under such a wealth of scrub and shrubbery, as to show very clearly how rich is the soil and how fruitful the climate.