Page:Tales-of-Banks-Peninsula Jacobson 2ed 1893 cropped.pdf/279

Mr. Thomas White, though he must be over 80 years of age, is very hale and hearty, and lives with his son, Mr. George Wright, in their pleasant home at the head of Holmes’ Bay. Like many of our pioneers, he is an old sailor, and also a whaler, end in his long acquaintance with the Peninsula has seen it advance from a Maori populated resort of occasional whalers, to the pleasant home of 5000 Europeans. Mr. White is an American, having been born at Rhode Island. He became an orphan at a very early age, his father being killed in one of the Mexican wars, and his mother dying, and his youthful days were spent under the roof of a friend of his dead parents. Rhode Island, as many people know, is a great place for shipping, and at 14 Mr. White went to sea. He learnt the ropes in several uneventful voyages, the only part of which he seems to care to dwell upon being a quarrel with the mate of a whaler at Rio Janeiro, which ended in his being left at that port, whence he shipped to England, arriving on the Thames on the very day of King William the Fourth’s coronation. He shipped in a London whaler called the Timour, and in her he spent three years, one of his shipmates being our own Billy Simpson, formerly living in the Akaroa hospital. The first part of New Zealand he visited was the Bay of Islands, to which place he came from England in a whaler called the Achilles. He left her at this place, and went to Sydney in the Sir William Wallace. In Sydney he joined another whaling brig, called the Genii, and spent thirteen months in her on the New Zealand coast. His next vessel was the Caroline, belonging to Johnny Jones, of Otago, and on her being sold in Sydney he came to Wakaouiti in a brig commanded by Captain James Bruce, as a passenger. This vessel landed