As slow our ship her foamy track Against the wind was cleaving, Her trembling pennant still looked back To that dear isle ‘twas leaving. So loth we part from all we love, From all the links that bind us; So turn our hearts, where’er we rove, To those we’ve left behind us. THE LAST CANOE VOYAGE. Of a picturesque quality, too, was “Te Kohi’s” passage to Auckland down the Waikato River. It had been arranged with Mahuta, the King of Waikato—son of Tawhiao—that Sir John should be taken down the river from Ngaruawahia to Waahi, near Huntly, by Maori canoe, passing the scenes once familiar to him in his before-the-war journeyings and reviving memories of the primitive old days. Ngaruawahia in his era in the Waikato was the capital of the Maori King, and no craft but dug-out canoes floated on the great river. It was a glorious summer morning when Sir John Gorst and his daughter and their party embarked at the green delta in a fine, roomy, white-pine canoe, the “Tangi-te-Kiwi,” 70 feet in length, with a crew of fifteen Maori paddlers, for the voyage down the Waikato to Waahi. The sun drove away the early mists, and the bush-clad range of the Hakarimata “stood up and took the morning,” high above the willows that fringed the low banks of the shining river. Down the long curving reaches the big waka swept with the powerful current aiding the paddles, and the canoe captain, old Hori te Ngongo, standing amidships, gave the time to his crew with voice and gesture, now and again breaking into a high chanted song of the ancient days. One of Hori’s songs was peculiarly appropriate, for it had been composed in 1863 with special reference to Gorst and the Mangatawhiri River, the frontier line of those days. Thus chanted old Hori, the kai-hau-tu, in a long-drawn high song to which the paddlers kept time as they dipped and lifted their blades: Koia e Te Kohi, Purua i Mangatawhiri, Kia puta ai ona pokohiwi, Kia whato tou E hi na wa! In this waiata the Commissioner of Waikato was requested to “plug up” the boundary river between pakeha and Maori lands and make it a close frontier, and thus prevent the King’s followers passing below its mouth to trade in Auckland, so that presently, for want of European clothing, their naked bodies might be seen protruding from their scanty native garments.