Taranaki Stories
Showing stories tagged as ship.
by Rhonda Bartle on 14 December 2009
There's a cairn down at Ngamotu Beach that tells a tragic tale. It marks the final resting place of settler William Marshall, who arrived on the William Bryan in March 1841 and was dead by October. Though few facts survive about him, some of his story can be told from what has been left behind.
Emigration Fever
They called it emigration fever and William Marshall came...
by Rhonda Bartle on 14 December 2009
Ivy McWhirter has lived in the same house in New Plymouth for more than 60 years, yet it is only by a strange twist of fate that she was born in New Zealand at all.
When he was just 17, her father Wilhelm Klausen Lemberg decided to sail to America to seek his fortune. Along with three other young men, all of whom like Wilhelm had lost their mothers, he went down to the nearest dockyard to...
by Sorrel Hoskin on 11 December 2009
The arrival of the first immigrant ship the William Bryan in late March 1841 brought new labour: 42 married and 22 single adults and 70 children, and a few unexpected guests - a plague of rats, which immediately made themselves at home and were from then on to become a recurring problem for the new settlers.
There were no horses or bullocks so the new arrivals dragged their luggage along the...
by Sorrel Hoskin on 11 December 2009
Early morning on the 11 January 1841, Frederic Carrington stood on the deck of the ship Brougham and surveyed the rugged Taranaki coast for the first time. It was a new year and a new start for the surveyor who had been given the task of finding a suitable place for a settlement to be named New Plymouth.
The chief surveyor for the Plymouth Company was impressed by what he saw:
"The...
by Pat Radford on 11 December 2009
Until the late 1900s women were generally expected to marry. If they didn't, they were labelled a spinster, a word that is often used to describe a rather sad, lonely woman left unfulfilled by life.
Leonora Kelly is described in the cemetery records as spinster, but she chose to become a nurse rather than to marry, and the tale of her Taranaki nursing career demonstrates that her life was...
by Virginia Winder on 10 December 2009
In the early part of the 20th century, James John Patterson milked Taranaki's dairy industry for all it was worth.
The man more commonly known as JJ Patterson embraced the idea of sharemilking wholeheartedly and gave many Taranaki families the kickstart they needed to buy their own farms.
In 1901, the same time the Boer War was raging in South Africa, JJ moved into dairy farming. Prior to...