Waikato River: Mississipi of the Maori
In 1859, the Austrian geologist and explorer Ferdinand von Hochstetter declared, 'It is only with the Danube or the Rhine that I can compare the mighty river we have just entered'.
After sailing farther up the wide Waikato, Hochstetter had to summon up a third great river of the world to convey his awe. He styled it 'the Mississippi of the Maori'.
The longest river in New Zealand - four hundred and twenty-five kilometres from headwaters to sea - the Waikato flows out of the ruggedly volcanic heart of the North Island and drops three hundred and thirty-three metres in its journey.
For the Maori it was a precious highway and an even more precious reservoir of food. The hills overlooking the river made superb sites for fortified villages.
Other villages sat along the banks where the kumara flourished in silt and sand deposited by the river. The water swarmed with small fishing and hunting canoes and large canoes constructed for war.
Generations of Maori knew the Waikato as a capricious and venerated accomplice in survival; generations were buried within sight and sound of the river means' flowing water', but the name of the river in full was Waikato-taniwha-rau, 'the flowing water of a hundred water monsters'.
This was another way of saying that the river ruled Maori lives. Water monsters may not literally have menaced every bend and backwater of the great river, but there was certainly a powerful chief who had best not be challenged.
The Waikato River
Up to the twentieth century, the Waikato roamed where it willed.
The New Zealand painter Charles Blomfield, observing it in the eighteen seventies, recorded that in flood it presented 'a most beautiful appearance ... tops of cabbage trees, flax and ferns just showed above the water, with here and there the roof of a Maori whare.
Behind this, bush and trees of all kinds, through the branches of which you might row a boat, in many instances for three or four miles. In some places the river appeared ten miles wide'.
After the cruel confiscations that followed the war, Maoris returning from sanctuary in the King Country had to buy back ancestral riverside lands if they had the money, and make their way in the white man's world while the river rolled past.
It was Maori belief that mist on a sacred mountain could disclose visions of the future. In the early eighteen-sixties, Maoris dwelling by the river are said to have gazed with astonishment as the sun's early rays played through the mist on the tapu summit of Maungaroa.
They saw battles, a steamboat and European towns.
Soon after, the battles began.
Not one steamer but three sailed up the Waikato, with gunboats spitting shells among Maori warriors.
More vessels followed and armed colonists disembarked. The towns came when conquest was complete.
The Mississippi of the Maori was soon as British as the Thames.
The Path of the Waikato River
After the cruel confiscations that followed the war, Maoris returning from sanctuary in the King Country had to buy back ancestral riverside lands if they had the money, and make their way in the white man's world while the river rolled past.
A century and a quarter later the Waikato remains precious.
Without the energy it provides, New Zealand's cities would dim and industry would falter. The torrent has been tamed, its currents channelled, yet the river still dominates.
The Waikato begins its long surge to the sea as a dribble of melting ice and snow on the slopes of steamy Mount Ruapehu high on the Volcanic Plateau.
It meanders through the Rangipo Desert and grows into the body of water that most New Zealanders know best as the Tongariro, but which Maori still call the Waikato.
Pushing through a forest of mountain beech, it feeds the inland sea of Lake Taupo at its southern end and leaves the lake again at its northern end.
From Lake Taupo, the Waikato hurtles down the Huka Falls and races - hydro-electric needs permitting - through the Aratiatia Rapids.
Here steam rises above its banks. The land is noisy'" geysers.
Submarine thermal springs warm river; hot streams feed it. Dark pine forests grown on pumice wastes rise tall on the hills.
For next one hundred and fifty kilometres seven great hydro-electric power stations trap the river's bulk in valley after valley - the first of them, Arapuni built in 1929; the remainder since the Second World War.
