Captain Cook - Shaw Savill & Albion Line - Travel Poster, circa 1931

Shaw Savill & Albion Line Travel Poster, circa 1931

Poster depicting Captain James Cook with  Mt Egmont/Taranaki in background. The caption reads "Mt Egmont sighted by Captain Cook in 1770" (click on image for larger view).

Of course, local Maori had sighted Taranaki, their name for the mountain, quite some time before, thank you very much!

Presumably the shipping line was playing to the British pride in their explorers like Cook having sailed the deep blue seas and painted the map red with territory for the British Empire. Now (in 1931), the upwardly mobile - those still standing after two years of the Great Depression - could go see for themselves what Cook wrote about in his superb journals.

Personal note: Kuaka slogged his way to the top of Taranaki some years ago, got a mild case of altitude sickness - mild headache - for his troubles, and some great photos of the Shark's tooth & the crater - which have been "misplaced", naturally, in the intervening years.

Whanganui River - The Rhine of Maoriland - Travel Poster, circa 1930

Shaw Savill Shipping Line travel poster for the Whanganui River, circa 1930

Billed as "The Rhine of Maoriland" by the tourist moguls, the Whanganui river was a much traveled waterway reached by steamer from the western coastline of the North Island into the interior, up into edges of the King Country. The steamer varied in size as the river became shallower and narrower, with a houseboat providing one of the tourist accommodations part way up the river. By the time the travel poster above was produced around 1930, the days of water borne tourism were numbered with roads opening up the interior, tourists could now be transported more readily by motor coach.

The following scenic postcards date from the early 1900s, capturing some of the images of Maori life on the river. The wahine with a camera motif was a trademark for a series of cards produced for the tourist trade as well as for pakeha New Zealanders to mail "Home" to show just how exotic was this place they had emigrated to.

 

Whanganui River near Atene, postcard, 1910c

 

Whanganui River scene, circa 1910, postcard