David Hunter Rogers was born in Edinburgh in 1865. He came to Dunedin in 1870 when his parents migrated from Scotland by a memorable voyage on a windjammer, and from the ages of 15 to 35 he gained considerable experience in the mercantile marine, but working on shore, as an accountant for the Union Steam Ship Company!

As a young man he would have undoubtedly been been told many stories by the old windjammer sailors, and these influenced him greatly in later life. He joined a shipping company because he loved the speedy windjammers, but as a shipping company's accountant it broke his heart to sit at board meetings and show why they should no longer be used.

In 1894 he married Eliza Jane Nimmo, a school teacher aged 29, and they had 2 children. Later he was an accountant/secretary for various Otago companies, and as the aches and pains of an ageing body in a cold, damp came to him, the verses he published under the pseudonym of Taiwa ('potato' dialect Maori) show a romantic yen for the life of those windjammer sailors:- of high adventure in tropic climes, and a sudden painless death in the prime of life.

He became ill at the age of 60, resigned his secretaryships of the St John's Ambulance, Navy League, DIC, etc, made a visit to London with his wife and daughter, and in 1933 he died at his hilltop home 12 Pacific St, Dunedin, aged 68. His wife died in 1946.

Neil Colquhoun's arrangement of his "John Smith AB" is best known in NZ folk circles.
John Smith A. B.