The Taita Post.

As this place is always called “Taitai,” which, according to Mr. Buck, a surveyor, of Hutt, is its correct name, our early settlers must have formed their own ideas of how it should be spelt. The name of Nainai appears to have suffered in a similar way.

The Wellington Spectator of the 28th February, 1846, remarks, “The stockade and barracks to be erected in the Hutt district will be 90 ft. square, and will be composed of trees 12 in. in diameter placed closely together and loopholed all round; the stockade is to be splinter-proof. When completed it will be capable of accommodating eighty men and two officers. The site fixed upon for the stockade is near Mr. Mason's house, or rather beyond the present encampment. It is intended to have it completed in a month's time.”

The post was, however, established a considerable distance above Mr. Mason's place, its site being on the western side of the present hotel at Taita. A local paper remarked in May, 1846, after the attack on Boulcott's Farm (see New Zealand Journal of the 10th October, 1846), “After getting rid of the Maoris on the Hutt, His Excellency decided on building a blockhouse, and maintaining a post of a hundred men somewhere about Mason's section, considerably in advance of the picquets surprised by the natives (i.e., Boulcott's Farm). Instead of this being done, the Superintendent and his coadjutors objected to the amount of the tenders for building the blockhouse, and, the Governor yielding to them, the soldiers fell back to Boulcott's barn, where they were attacked.”

Shortly after the above appeared we find the following in a local paper (see New Zealand Journal, 21st November, 1846): “The troops and the native allies in the Hutt have been forming an entrenched camp at Taita in the shape of two squares connected at an angle of each, and having a communication from one to the other.”

It would appear, however, that a number of Militia were stationed at Taita when the attack on Boulcott's Farm took place, 16th May, 1846.

In Captain Collinson's report we find several statements concerning this post: “The flat part of the Hutt Valley is about eight miles long and two broad, covered with forest. About two miles up it the New Zealand Company's road crosses the river; here a small stockade called Fort Richmond had been erected some time before, and was occupied by a party of 58th under Lieutenant Rush. Two miles farther on was a settler's house called Boulcott's, in a clearing of some twenty acres, and two miles farther was another house called the Taita.” (See Plate I.)

Collinson tells us that Maori depredations caused the Governor to take action: “He proclaimed martial law, and (under the usual fiction of considering the natives as rebels) he sent a herald to inform them of it, and at the same time ordered the Taita farm to be occupied by a company of the 96th…. In March, 1846, there were three detachments occupying this little valley, fifty men at Fort Richmond, fifty men at Boulcott's,