PORT NICHOLSON (WELLINGTON HARBOUR)

Port Nicholson is a large natural harbour at the southern extremity of the North Island and on the north-eastern shore of Cook Strait. It has a maximum length of over 7 miles and a width of 5¾ miles. The harbour is land-locked with an entrance of just over a mile from shore to shore and as it is surrounded by hills over 1,000 ft high, it provides sheltered anchorage in a region where wind velocities may exceed 100 m.p.h. The depth of water over the great bulk of the harbour exceeds 10 fathoms. At the western side of the entrance to the harbour, Barrett Reef has proved a navigational hazard. One of the most remarkable groundings on this reef was that of the Wanganella in February 1947. For the unusual period of a fortnight the weather remained fine and the seas calm, thus permitting the successful salvage of the vessel. Other wrecks on Barrett Reef were the Earl of Salt Esk, 1875, Hunter, 1876, and Norma, 1927. The greatest number of wrecks have been on Pencarrow Head on the western side of the entrance. Of some 55 wrecks in Wellington Harbour since 1841, 30 have been at the heads and only four on the obvious navigational hazard of Barrett Reef. The reef was named after Richard (Dicky) Barrett, sealer, whaler, trader, interpreter, agent of the New Zealand Company, publican, and notable early citizen of Wellington.

Discovery

According to Maori tradition, the discoverer of Wellington Harbour was the voyager Kupe who entered it and camped at what is now Seatoun. The names of Matiu and Makaro (Somes and Ward Islands) commemorate the occasion. There is no record that Kupe named the harbour itself. The traditional Maori name for the harbour is Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara, the Great Harbour of Tara. The elder son of Whatonga, Tara became the eponymous ancestor of the Ngati Tara tribe which was the first to settle permanently in the Wellington Harbour area. The first European to discover the harbour was Captain Cook in the course of his second voyage, on 2 November 1773, but he did not enter it on account of unfavourable winds. Again, in 1827, d'Urville mentioned the existence of the harbour but he, too, found conditions unfavourable for an entry. But in the previous year Captain Herd, who was in command of a preliminary expedition for the First New Zealand Company, with the ship Rosanna and the cutter Lambton (Captain T. Barnett), entered the harbour which he charted. He named it Port Nicholson after Captain John Nicholson, the then harbourmaster at Sydney, New South Wales.

Place Names

Although the European history of orderly settlement on the shores of Port Nicholson commences with the appearance of the New Zealand Company in early 1840, sealers, whalers, and traders were established in the region for more than a decade prior to that date. The settlement's link with the New Zealand Company is commemorated in many names of shore features – Somes Island for a Deputy Governor of the New Zealand Company; Lambton Harbour and the reclaimed Lambton Quay after John George Lambton, later, Earl of Durham; Thorndon after the residence of Lord Petre in England; Point Jerningham after E. J. Wakefield, only son of E. G. Wakefield; Chaffers Passage after E. M. Chaffers, captain of the Tory; and Lowry Bay after the mate of the Tory.

Geology

The geology of Wellington is complex, and that of the harbour no less so. The western half of the harbour is a continuation of the Hutt Valley and is a fault angle depression in the downthrown eastern side of the Wellington Fault. The eastern side of the harbour appears to be the continuation of a buried north-south valley system with Somes Island as a remnant of the ridge between the fault angle depression and the valley. The outlet of the shallower water-bearing beds of the Lower Hutt Valley Artesian System, lies in the area between Somes and Ward Islands. The deeper beds of the Artesian System, which has a total thickness of 1,000 ft at the western Petone foreshore, in all likelihood continue seawards under the harbour and may well lie at depth in the Rongotai-Kilbirnie isthmus. The very straight line of the western side of the harbour has long been recognised as having been formed by movement on the Wellington Fault which probably lies not far off the rocky points dividing the shallow embayments of the line of the Hutt Road. In the Lambton Quay area the Lambton Fault, a splinter of the Wellington Fault, formed the cliffs which lay behind what was a narrow shingle beach when the first settlers arrived in the area. The whole of the land seawards of Lambton Quay and Wakefield Street has been reclaimed from the harbour.

The large movement on the Wairarapa Fault which occurred in 1855 lifted the Wellington Harbour area some 6 ft and the small town of Wellington was severely damaged. Plans for the construction of a shipping basin in the saltmarsh estuary of the Basin Reserve were abandoned; the area between Kilbirnie, Lyall Bay, Rongotai, and Miramar, which contained numerous lagoons and salt marshes in a sand-dune area, was largely drained and the beach on which the Hutt Road is built became much wider. Petone was uplifted, and flooding of the Hutt Valley decreased.

On the northern shores of Wellington Harbour and on the site of the present borough of Petone was Britannia, the first European settlement in this district. East of the Hutt River, in the Gracefield area of the City of Lower Hutt, are extensive areas of reclaimed land. This work has been done largely by the Wellington Harbour Board which was given sole reclamation rights over an area of 140 acres of harbour by an Act of Parliament.

by Thomas Ludovic Grant-Taylor, M.SC., New Zealand Geological Survey, Lower Hutt.

• The Great Harbour of Tara, Adkin, G. L. (1959).