No settlement in New Zealand can claim a past as colourful and chequered as that of Kororareka in the Bay of Islands, later to become Russell. In the 1830s it was such a wild place that it earned the name ‘hell-hole of the Pacific’. Whalers, sealers, escaped convicts, seamen and adventurers descended on the little Maori village. Drunkenness, debauchery, grog shops and the oldest profession proliferated. At one stage the town was said to be harbouring ‘a greater number of rogues than any other spot of equal size in the universe’. New Zealand’s first duel with pistols was fought on the beach, and our first police force was established there. Punishment such as tarring and feathering was meted out to wrongdoers. The missionaries were shocked. Charles Darwin visited the town in the Beagle and hated the place.
Later, from the ashes of the town after it had been destroyed by a British warship rose the gentle tourist trap of modern day Russell. Richard Wolfe’s new book reminds us that the early period of European settlement was often a torrid and eventful time.
'The Bay of Islands village of Kororareka had the reputation of the "hell-hole of the Pacific" in the early years of New Zealand settlement.
Wolfe examines the reasons for this in a most entertaining study. His populist style belies sound scholarship and extensive use of primary historical sources.
. . . Wolfe never strays far from his theme but is still able to outline broader historical issues, such as the signing of the treaty, the influence of missionaries and British Government functionaries, the establishment of nearby Russell as the nation's capital, and the eventual growth of Auckland at the Bay of Islands' expense and transfer of the capital there.
Most interesting, though, is his description of the sacking of Kororareka by Maori warriors, the subsequent bombardment of the town by the guns of a British warship in the harbour and the massive explosion and fire as the town's ammunition magazine exploded. This makes gripping reading.'
Mike Crean, The Press, April 2005.
