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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 7 (October 1, 1935)

[section]

No colonist of New Zealand lived a more useful pioneer life than Stephenson Percy Smith, who began his career as a surveyor in bush-clad Taranaki and ended his long public service as Surveyor-General. He came out from England with his parents when a child; he was an explorer of the interior of the North Island before he reached his twenties; he was acting for the Government in diplomatic Maori negotiations while still a very young man; he served in that pioneer battle-corps of the Empire's volunteers, the Taranaki Rifles, and he carried out survey duty under fire in the Hauhau War in South Taranaki. A survey party in his day was often a kind of military outpost. Mr. Smith was often entrusted by the Government with special State duties for which his Maori knowledge, his cool, judicial mind and his scientific tastes qualified him. He was our great pioneer Maori-Polynesian historian and ethnologist, blazing the way of knowledge as he has so often blazed the trail in the Maori forest. He was a man greatly beloved for his spirit of kindly helpfulness, and honoured for his great labours in the cause of a fuller knowledge of our Maori race and its origins.

S. Percy Smith, F.R.G.S. (Born in Norfolk, England, 1840; died in New Plymouth, 1922).

S. Percy Smith, F.R.G.S. (Born in Norfolk, England, 1840; died in New Plymouth, 1922).

Some of New Zealand's pioneer surveyors and explorers began their hard self-reliant life at an age when very many modern youths are still at college. Scientific education is so severe and complex in its requirements in these days that the period of instruction is necessarily prolonged.

But the professional man of our early settlement era had to set to at his practical work early and pick up his theory and his book science in his spare time. The surveyor and engineer, who played so important a part in the making of the nation, was early tested in the hard school of exploration and camp life in a perfectly wild land. The late Sir Arthur Dudley Dobson, the discoverer of Arthur's Pass, was barely twenty-two when he undertook the truly herculean task of surveying a great area of the Westland Coast and interior.

Stephenson Percy Smith was carrying out Government surveys in the all but unknown lands of the Northern Wairoa and Kaipara—unknown to all but the Kauri timber getters and traders—and parleying with Maori tribes when he was only twenty. Charles Wilson Hursthouse was about the same age when he began the Government survey of the Waitara block that led to the first Taranaki War. Such sturdy youthful pioneers developed very early the qualities of independence and the command of men.