Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Some tanning and marking due to age. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Before the Quake – a phrase that is heard in Hawke’s Bay again and again. Before the Quake this was all sea. Before the Quake when the trams ran’. ‘Before the Quake when the ships moored here” when this creek was a river’… ‘when the streets were narrow when this suburb was reclaimed from the swamp when we picnicked on the beach that was here. Long long before the Quake the land on which Napier and Hastings are built was below the sea. The edge of the bay known as Paritu to the Maori and named Hawke Bay in 1769 by Captain James Cook hugged the hills and the island called Mataruahou stood several kilometres off-shore. From the mountain tops shards of rock fragmented by erosive forces were carried to the coast by the streams and rivers. Worn smooth by the hundreds of years this journey might take these stones were piled up by the surf to form two bridges linking Mataruahou to the mainland. When the first Europeans arrived to settle in the early 1840’s this bridge was the coastline bordering a vast salt-water lagoon the fertile Heretaunga Plains and the swampland between which was the one in the process of becoming the other. Yet the hill was still island enough to be named Scinde Island by the first settlers. (LL)