A hot grey sky is sweating drops of rain as I push my kayak into a stream at the head of the harbour, near Rangiahua. A flood has been through recently, leaving the shallow waterway strewn with uprooted poplars and willows, but soon enough I’m through the obstacle course and into the river proper, gliding past whitebaiting stands and duckshooting blinds tucked under trees and behind screens of vegetation. Startled geese take wing, honking their displeasure, while ducklings race in front of me, going hell for leather, eventually tiring and diving out of sight.

Trees give way to reeds and rushes as harbour salt starts to exert its influence. I scoop a handful of water and drink, but it still tastes fresh, the outgoing tide offering no resistance to the forest-fed river. A kilometre on, the reeds bow out and I’m among mangroves, the saltwater specialists. Now the water tastes brackish, the harbour pushing back against its feeder streams.

On early maps the Hokianga is called a river, not a harbour. And so it was—a river carving its way to the sea through mountainous terrain—until around 12,000 years ago, when oceans gorged on ice melt rose, flooded the valley and formed the country’s fourth-largest harbour. This is the road I’m taking: the river road, paddling in the wake of history.

I have been eyeing the heavy cumulus overhead, hoping I might dodge the weather bullet, but it hits me fair and square and drenches me all the way to Horeke, the northernmost settlement on the harbour.

I beach the kayak, peel off a layer of wet clothing and seek the shelter of the tavern. It’s Friday afternoon, but there are only three at the bar. I apologise for dripping onto the timber floor, but Ken Maddren says to think nothing of it and pulls me a pint.

Ken’s son Peter and his wife, Laurel, have owned and run the pub for 14 years. It has given them an income and a quiet rural setting in which to raise their family, but changing social habits and licensing laws—the sale of alcohol in supermarkets, people drinking at home—mean pubs are no longer the communal watering holes, or the commercial ventures, they once were. Horeke’s tavern is now open only three days out of seven.

Ken tells me a pub has stood on this site since the 1820s, when Horeke rang to the sound of shipwrights’ hammers and crosscut saws. “In those days the pub would only have stocked rum and grog off the ships,” he says. But its existence would have been essential. The Australian-owned shipbuilding company would have lost its workers if it couldn’t keep their thirsts slaked.

It is nearly slack water when I don my clammy gear, tip the water out of the kayak and slide it back into the channel. The wind has died and the air is cool after the rain. Mangungu, with its cluster of Wesleyan mission buildings, passes to port, and I feel again the tug of history’s tide. On February 12, 1840, a thousand Maori gathered here for a signing of the treaty—a larger turnout than six days earlier at Waitangi. Eight hours of korero preceded the signing. Some chiefs, politically seasoned by a decade of trade in timber, flax, potatoes and muskets, were suspicious of British motives. They had seen the treatment meted out to Aborigines across the Tasman and were not impressed. “How do the Pakeha behave to the blacks of Port Jackson?” asked Makoare Te Taonui. “They treat them like dogs.”

Te Taonui was a shrewd businessman as well as one of Hokianga’s most influential chiefs. He faced the dilemma all Maori faced at the time: how to embrace the realities of the new world breaking upon them without losing the mana of the old. Te Taonui recognised that land ownership was the key. “We are not willing to give up our land,” he told Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson. “The land is like a parent to us. We
obtain all things from it. The land is our chieftainship. We will not give it up.”

The Queen did not want the land, Hobson assured Te Taonui, only the sovereignty. But in the end Maori lost both.