Poverty Bay, New Zealand 🌍

Poverty Bay (#nz57)

From The Turanga Journals - 1845 Letters and Journals

WILLIAM WILLIAMS TO SYDNEY WILLIAMS Poverty Bay 10 May 1845

Among the natives in the whole of this district, things are going on just as they used to do. Very different from what has occurred at the Bay of Islands. How sad it is that the natives should have been induced to take such steps as will surely cause their own injury. And how distressing is the case of numbers of small settlers, who having laid out all their little property on their farms in the hope of getting a livelihood, are now reduced to beggary. We have had a visit from James Hamlin again who came for his fathers cow, with which he succeeded better this time, and got it safe to Wairoa. Very little has been done to the house since you left. Cooper is now putting up a windmill which promises to succeed better than the last. It is after the principle of one which you perhaps saw at Matata, only it is a little better workmanship. If it succeeds the natives will be able to have mills like it as it is very simple. The natives are likely to have sugar to eat with their flour. It is easily made from beet root by first pressing out the juice & then boiling it down till it is of the consistence of molasses. But to turn to something of more importance. The events which have been passing at the Bay show strongly the importance of regarding this world as not our home. We have here no abiding city. And I hope that you may so feel the force of this that you will always seek to have an interest in that city which hath firm foundations whose builder & maker is God.

Associated people

• William B Cooper