Later in the day we round the North Cape, and go sailing on down the coast, with light and rather baffling winds that eventually bring us to port on the following evening.
Among our passengers are several old colonists, who are returning from a visit "home." In the colonies Great Britain is always spoken of as "home," even by colonial-born people. Talk about the raptures at returning to "my own, my native land!" that is nothing to the transports of joy that now infect our colonists. They laugh, they sing, they dance about the decks, they chatter "sixteen to the dozen," and display every eccentricity of unbounded delight and satisfaction.
Probably a good deal of this is put on for the edification of us new chums, but there is no question that most of it is an expression of real feeling. All through the voyage these good people have been in great force, relating numberless yarns of their past experiences, more or less truthful in detail. But now their self-importance is overwhelming and superior to all considerations. Every headland, bay, or island that we pass is expatiated upon, and its especial story told, in which, I note, the narrator generally seems to have been the most prominent figure himself. No one is allowed to remain below, even for meals, scarcely for sleeping; he or she must be up on deck to hear strange-sounding names applied to every place we sight.
Cape Kara-Kara is a name to us and nothing more. Whangaroa Heads, that guard the harbour of that name, with its settlements and saw-mills, is but little better, though some few, who have been industriously reading up, remember Whangaroa as the scene of the ghastly massacre of the crew of the _Boyd_, half a century ago. Capes Wiwiki and Brett we have no previous acquaintance with, though we have heard of the Bay of Islands, over whose wide entrance they are the twin sentinels. And then in slow succession we sight the Poor Knights Islands, Bream Head, the Hen and Chickens, the Barrier Islands--Great and Little, Cape Colville, Rodney Point, and the Kawau, Sir George Grey's island home.
And now, on the afternoon of the second day, we are running closer and closer to the shore; islands and islets are becoming more numerous, and the seas are getting narrower. Right ahead a conical mountain top is perceived, Tiri-Tiri is close to, and it is high time the pilot came aboard. That mountain top is Rangitoto, an extinct volcanic cone upon a small island that protects the entrance to Auckland Harbour. Presently we shall see the similar elevations of Mount Eden and Mount Hobson, that look down on Auckland from the mainland.