John Webster, the grand old man of Opononi, Hokianga, was one of those adventurqus Scotsmen who sought their fortunes in the wildest parts of the earth, and distinguished themselves as pioneers of enterprise, self-reliance and cool courage. Into his early years in Australia, New Zealand and the South Sea Islands were crowded incidents of peril and combat, narrow escapes, and strange experiences such as fell to few men even in those stirring times. As a cattle drover on the “Great Overland” in Australia, a fighter ih the Maori Wars, and a rover among the cannibal islands in the Pacific, he faced hardships and hazards and enjoyed free-lance life gloriously. He saw California in the roaring goldrush days of 1850; he was concerned in a romatitic tropic islands Republic scheme somewhat resembling Rajah Brooke's enterprise in Borneo. Mr. Webster was a great comrade of the famous “Pakeha-Maori,” Judge Waning; the two men of many adventures lived near each other at Hokianga.

John Webster, born in Montrose, Scotland, in 1818, was a man of eighty when I first met him, yet like many another old colonial hand who had seen much of wild and hard conditions in his time, he still relished the joys of life, he was always ready to see what fortune lay just round the corner. It was in 1898, when there was a little Maori rebellion in the North—it was Hone Toia's armed rising at Waima—and the Government had sent a military force of 120 to deal with the trouble. John Webster had come to Rawene to offer his help and his influence with the Mahurehure tribe in the effort to prevent bloodshed. His niana was considerable; he had been the friend of the fathers and grand-fathers of the restless young riflemen of Waima.

So he arid one of his sons saddled up and joined Colonel Newall's column on the march over the hills to the valley of discontent. I had talked with the veteran when we met at Rawene, and we rode together to Waima (my mission was to report events for the Auckland “Star” and the Press Association, a job of work that kept me in the Hokianga country for a fortnight). The quiet-mannered compact-framed little Scots settler with the wise old eyes that always held a glint of humour, was one of the most wonderful men I ever met. I listened enthralled to the story he told of the last cruise of the schooner Wanderer about which I had asked him at Rawene. It was a slow journey, that muddy march to Waima, and I heard much of the story of his life; much, too, later on in his beautiful old home at Opononi.

The Maoris were in cover in the bush somewhere ahead, on the hill of the Puku-o-te-Hau, so we heard, but not a Maori was to be seen. “Will they tire on us?” was the question everyone asked, or thought. “Absurd,” said some knowing ones. Wise old John Webster did not say much, but he did not dismiss the idea as ridiculous. “You never know,” he said to me, “these Mahurehure have always been a touchy people; they still have the old warrior spirit, and they resent any injustice.”

Then he returned to the story of the Wanderer, and he was describing the fight for life that red morning when the savages killed Ben Boyd, its owner, and attacked the schooner—then in Webster's charge—when there was an interruption that quite dramatically fitted the moment—

Bang! A thunderous crash it made— then another, loaded with ball, too, made a noise like a young cannon. That Maori had put heavy charges of powder into his old tupara. It was Wiremu Makara; I saw him next day at Waima when he surrendered; a thorough-going old warrior with a perpetual grin. He had been stationed there in the fern above the road to give the signal to Hone Toia's seventy men when the pakeha column had marched into the ambush.

All this, of course, we did not know ac the time.

“Now we're in for it!” said John Webster to me, quietly, and I declare he was smiling in his cool, wise old way. Well, the Maoris were not likely to fire at their old friend—but you never know. And what of the hapless riflemen with us, targets for the hidden Maoris? Not a sign of them but those bangs at us from the fern above the road-cutting. The next few moments would tell.

But not another shot was fired. A mounted Maori messenger, at peril of his life—for many a rifle was pointed at him by “rattled” recruits in Newall's column—came galloping along, Hone Toia's messenger. He was shouting to the hidden Maoris not to fire. “No fighting—no fighting! Hone Hcke is here! Don't fire!”

Indeed it was only the arrival just in the nick of time, of Mr. Hone Heke, the Ngapuhi member of Parliament, that prevented a battle in the bush that day. There was more than a touch of comic-opera in that march to

However, that is not my present story. John Webster said no more of the Wanderer that day; there were other more pressing matters for us all; but after all the raruraru was over (excellent Maori word that, it covers ail manner of bobbery, trouble, business, discussion), and Hone Toia and his fellow-leaders of the little rebellion were in the arms of the Law at Rawene, I had another quieter talk about the wonderful days when all the world was young and new. That was in the old adventurer's home in the’ shade of the Opononi groves, behind the sea-wall with its guns poking their iron muzzles through the square embrasures.

It was a delicious nest of warmth and sweetness, Opononi by the sea, winch had been Webster's home since the ‘Sixties. The garden, sheltered by tall and spreading pohutukawa trees, was filled with trees and plants from many lands. Bananas ripened there, under the Hokianga sun, in that garden cf repose within the fort-like beachfront wall. Those old ship's guns in the embrasures, the yellow sands, the murmurous wash of the tide, brought a touch of the sea-warrior's life and a salty suggestion of Kingsley's “Last Buccaneer.” A proper retreat for an old adventurer, and a writer, too— Robert Louis Stevenson would have delighted in such a home, with its parapeted garden plantation bathed in the golden light and the sound of the trampling surf at the Heads borne on the western breeze. As you walked up to the broad verandah, you would have seen tuatara lizards, those spiney relics of a lost world, blinking from great sea-shells of the tropic islands. Those guns gave the proper spirit to the place. If you were a Governor, maybe, or a Naval commander, John Webster himself would load and fire a round or two of blank in your honour.

Here, in hospitable old Opononi, let us begin at the beginning. John Webster told me how he was half a sailor already by the time he, at the age of twenty, landed from the ship Portland at Sydney, in the last month of 1838. The “first sight and sound he met on stepping ashore in the new land were the shuffling steps of the convict gangs and their leg chains; they worked on the roads in irons. That convict life and atmosphere filled him with dislike, or something stronger, for Australia. Still, he determined to see something of the great back country and the free adventurous life there. After some adventures—the first was being bailed up by bushrangers and robbed—he joined an expedition at the Murrumbidgee to take a large mob of cattle through the vast all but unknown territory to Adelaide. In August, 1839, the party began their long droving journey, driving a thousand head of cattle. The leader was Mr. Howe. There were innumerable little skirmishes With the natives, and the twenty men of the expedition suffered greatly from thirst. One of the whites was speared and killed by the blackfellows, and three hundred head of cattle were lost, mostly speared. But the expedition got through, a really wonderful exploit in such a country under the most unkindly circumstances. That was young Webster's first great adventure, rough and hard beyond description, but a glorious life to the youngster who had begun his working career in, a merchant's office in Scotland.

John's brother, William Webster, had already come to New Zealand, and our young cattle-drover determined to join him in a more promising and congenial land than Australia. In 1841 he took ship to the Bay of Islands, and walked across the island by the bush track to Hokianga. There he took up his quarters with William at Wairere, and the two brothers carried on a trade with the Maoris. It was there that he first met Sir John Logan Campbell (then Dr. Campbell), who had gone there from Auckland to procure a cargo of kauri spars to fill a barque commanded by Captain Oaldy for England. Presently John went up to Herekino trading; there he saw much of the primitive Maori life, in more secluded surroundings than in busy Hokianga.

In 1845, John Webster and his friend, F. E. Maning, from Onoke, Hokianga, and another white freelance from Hokianga, William Munro. joined Tamati Waka's force, which took the field against Hone Heke in the Bay of Islands war. There was much skirmishing around Lake Omapere and the neighbouring hills. Webster was armed with a rifle and a supply of 200 cartridges when he entered joyfully into the guerilla warfare. He described to me the chivalrous game of war as he witnessed and shared in it there.

“When either side wished to spend a day fighting,” Webster narrated in his reminiscences, “they went to the challenge hill Taumata-Karamu, near Omapcrc's shores, and fired off a musket. The challenge was always accepted. One morning William Munro and I, and some of Nene's men, went to the challenging hill and were soon in the thick of it. On the side facing Heke's pa some trenches had been dug. I got into one of them. The near bullets were spitting past us as we lay in the holes, exposing our heads only.

“As a compact had been made between Nene and Heke that they were to cease fighting at sundown, and

Webster was by this time a man of experience in Maori business. He had learned the native tongue, and he was well skilled in trading, and in buying kauri timber and kauri gum. He assisted his friend Dr. Campbell in Auckland in the Maori trade, and then, when the great gold-diggings rush in California created a demand for foodstuffs, he sailed as supercargo in the barque Noble, carrying a cargo of flour and potatoes for San Francisco. It was in 1850, when all the sailormen were singing: —

“There's plenty of gold, so I've been told,

“On the banks of the Sacramento.”

Life in the raw, new gold-city was lively in the extreme and often extremely perilous. Dr, Campbell was with Webster in the Noble. The two saw the great fire which swept San Francisco. They remained more than a year in California, in business, and acquired some of its teeming wealth for themselves.

Then, in 1851, Webster, having had enough of commerce for a while, was attracted by “the bright eyes of Danger” once more, and joined the schooner yacht Wanderer for a cruise which proved the greatest adventure of his roving life.

The Wanderer, a beautiful topsail schooner of 240 tons—about the size of that handsome little New Zealand craft the Hula, the last topsail schooner in these sea;—was owned by Mr. Benjamin Boyd, a rich Australian settler who was a man of wealth and of considerable celebrity in Britain, a cultured and daring fellow, always ready for a new adventure. Webster and he were congenial spirits. They had met in New Zealand and warmly renewed the friendship in San Francisco, and Webster welcomed the invitation to give up prosaic trading and sail for the South Seas.

The Wanderer was just the vessel to take his fancy. She was built for pleasure cruising; she belonged to the Koyal Yacht Squadron and had been cruising in the Mediterranean before Boyd bought her and took her out to Sydney. She was quite a little man-o'-war; she had ten brass guns mounted on the main deck and a 12-pounder gun called a “long Tom,” mounted on a swivel aft. Plenty of ammunition, round shot and grape, was carried for these guns; and besides the

In May, 1851, the Wanderer was at Honolulu, and by October she was cruising in the Western Pacific, visiting the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. From San Christoval, Boyd sailed for the great mountainous island called Guadalcanar; it was one of the southern islands of the Solomons. Its lofty ranges, everywhere densely covered with forest, rose into cloudy peaks. One of the danger islands where the mountain tribes were always at war with the shore dwellers, and where the “man-a-beach” usually sent, or tried to send an arrow into any white target within range; the white man in his turn had musket or pistol always ready. It was seldom safe to venture on shore. But the white men, for all the warning? they received, were sometimes caught off their guard, and the owner of the Wanderer was one of them.

The Wanderer lay at anchor in a sheltered inlet of Guadalcanar now marked on the chart as Wanderer Bay. Early on the morping of October 15, 1851, Mr. Boyd had a dinghy lowered and with a Kanaka sailor went on shore to shoot pigeons; he had been on shore with his gun on the previous day. There was some sporting rivalry between him and Webster, and he got up early to anticipate his friend: When Webster went on deck he saw his friend half way to the shore, and he hailed him. Boyd had taken a powder-flask and sholbelt which Webster had left handy on the cabin table intending to go on shore himself that morning. Boyd, laughing, held up the flask and belt, and called out that he would lie back to breakfast with some birds. “That,” said Webster, “was the last I ever saw of my friend Ben Boyd.”

The Wanderer's owner went round a wooded point, intending to go up a valley near the landing. Shortly afterward's those on board the schooner heard two shots fired at short intervals. They thought Boyd was using his double-barrel gun on the pigeons. But nothing more was heard.

Then, to their horror, the yacht's people saw a flotilla of war-canoes sweep round the point and dash towards them under the impulse of scores of paddles. The canoes were packed with savages yelling their fighting cries, and there was a hideous bellow and roar from conch-shells, the war-trumpets of the Solomons.