Tauranga Harbour and camp at 64th & 43rd regiments

This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024) on page 175.
This extract was authored by Rebecca Rice.

During the New Zealand Wars newspapers in Britain were fed a steady stream of illustrations and accounts from military and naval artists and photographers in New Zealand, providing their readers with up-to-date news from the colonial front. By the middle of 1864 it was acknowledged that ‘with the urgent demands upon our space occasioned by the war in America, the war in Denmark, and other interesting transactions nearer home’ it was not possible to make use of all the material provided. In July 1864, however, the Illustrated London News revisited a watercolour sketch sent by Colonel George Carey, noting that ‘the news brought by the last mail has rendered [it] more valuable than when we received it two months ago’.1

The sketch in question was this view of Tauranga Harbour made in February 1864, just months before the battle at Pukehinahina (Gate pā), showing imperial troops on site and ready for action. It was published in the same issue of the Illustrated London News as Horatio Gordon Robley’s view in Breach of Gate Pa, offering background context for an account of the battle. Mauao Mount Maunganui looms on the distant horizon, and white tents – the headquarters of the 68th Regiment and part of the 43rd, along with detachments of the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers and Waikato Militia – can be seen pitched at the Church Missionary Society village of Te Papa above the bay.

Carey made sketches of various sites during his service in New Zealand. His view of Tauranga was praised as being ‘accurate, attractive, and lifelike’, and a newspaperman in Auckland suggested that it would afford the British public the ‘opportunity of beholding one of the finest natural havens and one of the greatest future cities of the north island of New Zealand’.2

1 ‘The war in New Zealand’, Illustrated London News, vol. 45, no. 1269 (23 July 1864), pp. 91–92.
2 Ibid., p. 92.