{"story":["Tarawera, 24 kilometres south-east of Rotorua, is a mountain with several large domes and a broad, flat top. Neither Māori nor the Europeans who arrived in the 1800s realised that it was an active volcano. In the 1880s tourists were drawn to the thermal region to see the Pink and White Terraces on the shores of Lake Rotomahana, whose tiers of delicately tinted silica and cascading hot pools were considered one of the wonders of the world. Visitors were ferried across Lake Tarawera from Te Wairoa, a village that had grown up on the tourist trade, with a flour mill, houses, a hotel and a schoolhouse. The principal guide was Sophia Hinerangi, known as Guide Sophia, who had guided at the terraces for some 16 years. Well educated and bilingual, she arranged the tour parties, gave visitors information and settled their accounts.","Eleven days before the eruption, Sophia noticed an unusual rise in the lake's waters and then saw a phantom war canoe. A party of European tourists on the lake reported seeing it too, although no such canoe had been on the lake in living memory. The Tūhourangi tohunga (priest) Tūhoto Ariki interpreted the sighting as a warning: he feared the terraces were being exploited as a tourist attraction without due regard to ancestral values. Hot spring activity had increased in the days before, but otherwise there were no warning signs.","At Te Wairoa people were woken after midnight on 10 June 1886 by a series of increasingly violent earthquakes. Around 2 a.m. a fissure through Ruawāhia Dome on Mt Tarawera erupted, and by 2.30 a.m. the summit craters were throwing up fountains of glowing lava and an ash cloud up to 10 kilometres high, lit by intense lightning. At 3.20 a.m. craters were blasted open on the south-west side of the mountain, through Lake Rotomahana and the Waimangu area, and a 17-kilometre rift spewed steam, mud and ash. Rising magma mixed with groundwater and lake water, and the resulting steam explosions blasted the land out as huge volumes of hot mud. The eruptions were over by about 6 a.m. They were heard as far south as Blenheim, and Aucklanders thought the noise was distant cannon fire. At Te Wairoa many people took shelter in the Hinemihi meeting house and McCrae's Hotel, where the roof and upper floor gradually gave way under the weight of wet mud. Sophia's whare (house), with its high-pitched roof and strong walls, did not collapse; her Te Ara biography says she sheltered 62 people there.","Men from Rotorua and Ōhinemutu formed rescue parties, though falling ash made the day as dark as night. They found that the settlements of Te Tapahoro, Moura, Te Ariki, Totarariki and Waingongongo had been completely destroyed or buried by hot mud. At Te Wairoa 15 people were dead. Tūhoto Ariki was dug out of his buried house alive four days after the eruption, but died several weeks later. The death toll is uncertain. The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand says it was generally accepted that 147 Māori and six Europeans died; NZHistory says up to 150 people, nearly all of them Māori, died; and Te Ara's entry on historic volcanic activity says the official toll was around 150, but that between 108 and 120 people were more likely killed. Thick mud and ash blanketed hundreds of square kilometres, and the Pink and White Terraces had vanished.","Te Arawa kin gave the survivors shelter, clothing, land and food. Most found refuge at Whakarewarewa, Ngāpuna, Waitangi, Matatā and Coromandel, where descendants still live. Because the government acquired the devastated area soon after the eruption, the people of Tūhourangi could not return to their Tarawera homeland when it recovered in the early 1900s. Sophia Hinerangi moved to Whakarewarewa, where she continued her guiding career; she died there in 1911. The terraces' site became a 100-metre-deep crater, which within 15 years had filled with water to form a new Lake Rotomahana, much larger than the old one. In 2011 some of the Pink Terraces were apparently discovered by sonar on the lake bed. Te Wairoa, excavated to show the settlement that tourism had built, is known today as the Buried Village."],"sources":[{"title":"Eruption of Mt Tarawera","url":"https://nzhistory.govt.nz/eruption-mt-tarawera","publisher":"NZHistory, Manatū Taonga"},{"title":"The eruption of Mt Tarawera - roadside stories","url":"https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/video/eruption-mt-tarawera-roadside-stories","publisher":"NZHistory, Manatū Taonga"},{"title":"Historic volcanic activity – Tarawera","url":"https://teara.govt.nz/en/historic-volcanic-activity/page-2","publisher":"Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand"},{"title":"Te Arawa – The Tarawera eruption","url":"https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-arawa/page-5","publisher":"Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand"},{"title":"Hinerangi, Sophia","url":"https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2h37/hinerangi-sophia","publisher":"Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand"},{"title":"Tarawera, Phantom Canoe (1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand)","url":"https://teara.govt.nz/en/1966/tarawera-phantom-canoe","publisher":"Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand"},{"title":"Disasters and Mishaps – Eruptions (1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand)","url":"https://teara.govt.nz/en/1966/disasters-and-mishaps-eruptions","publisher":"Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand"}]}