CHAPTER I THE ISLANDS AND THEIR CITIES The poet who wrote the hexameter quoted on the title-page meant it to be the first line of a Latin epic. The epic was not written—in Latin at any rate,—and the poet’s change of purpose had consequences of moment to literature. But I have always been glad that the line quoted was rescued from the fire, for it fits our islands very well. They are, indeed, on the bounds of the watery world. Beyond their southern outposts the seaman meets nothing till he sees the iceblink of the Antarctic. From the day of its annexation, so disliked by Downing Street, to the passing of those experimental laws so frowned upon by orthodox economists, our colony has contrived to attract interest and cause controversy. A great deal has been written about New Zealand; indeed, the books and pamphlets upon it form a respectable little library. Yet is the picture which the average European reader forms in his mind anything like the islands? I doubt it. The patriotic [2]but misleading name, “The Britain of the South,” is responsible for impressions that are scarcely correct, while the map of the world on Mercator’s Projection is another offender. New Zealand is not very like Great Britain, though spots can be found there—mainly in the province of Canterbury and in North Otago—where Englishmen or Scotsmen might almost think themselves at home. But even this likeness, pleasant as it is at moments, does not often extend beyond the foreground, at any rate as far as likeness to England is concerned. It is usually an effect produced by the transplanting of English trees and flowers, cultivation of English crops and grasses, acclimatisation of English birds and beasts, and the copying more or less closely of the English houses and dress of to-day. It is a likeness that is the work of the colonists themselves. They have made it, and are very proud of it. The resemblance to Scotland is not quite the same thing. It sometimes does extend to the natural features of the country. In the eastern half of the South Island particularly, there are landscapes where the Scot’s memory, one fancies, must often be carried back to the Selkirks, the peaks of Arran, or the Highland lochs of his native land. Always, however, it is Scotland under a different sky. The New Zealanders live, on the average, twelve degrees nearer the equator than do dwellers in the old country, and though the chill of the Southern Ocean makes the change of climate less than the difference of latitude would lead one to expect, it is still considerable. The skies are bluer and higher, the air [3]clearer, and the sun much hotter than in the British Isles. The heavens are a spacious dome alive with light and wind. Ample as the rainfall is, and it is ample almost everywhere, the islands, except in the south-west, strike the traveller as a sunny as well as a bracing country. This is due to the ocean breezes and the strength of the sunshine. The average number of wet days in the year is 151; but even a wet day is seldom without sunshine, it may be for some hours, it will be at least a few gleams. Such a thing as a dry day without a ray of brilliance is virtually unknown over four-fifths of the colony. I once had the felicity of living in London during twenty-two successive days in which there was neither a drop of rain nor an hour of sunshine. If such a period were to afflict New Zealand, the inhabitants would assuredly imagine that Doomsday was at hand. “Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun,” is a text which might be adopted as a motto for the islands. “PARADISE,” LAKE WAKATIPU In the matter of climate the islanders are certainly the spoilt children of Nature; and this is not because the wind does not blow or the rain fall in their country, but because of what Bishop Selwyn called “the elastic air and perpetual motion” which breed cheerfulness and energy all the year round. Of all European climates it resembles most closely, perhaps, that of the coasts of France and Spain fronting on the Bay of Biscay. Round New Zealand are the same blue, sparkling, and uneasy seas, and the same westerly winds, [4]often wet and sometimes rising into strong gales. And where France and Spain join you may see in the Pyrenees very much such a barrier of unbroken mountains as the far-reaching, snowy chains that form the backbone of the islands of the south. Further, though mountainous, ours is an oceanic country, and this prevents the climate from being marked by great extremes. It is temperate in the most exact sense of the word. The difference between the mean of the hottest month and the mean of the coldest month is not more than fifteen degrees in most of the settlements. Christchurch is an exception, and even in Christchurch it is only twenty degrees. In Wellington the mean for the whole year is almost precisely the same as in St. Louis in the United States. But the annual mean is often a deceitful guide. St. Louis is sixteen degrees warmer in summer and seventeen degrees colder in winter than Wellington; and that makes all the difference when comfort is concerned. Wellington is slightly cooler than London in midsummer, and considerably warmer in winter. Finally, in the matter of wind, the European must not let himself be misled by the playful exaggerations in certain current New Zealand stories. It is not the case that the experienced citizen of Wellington clutches convulsively at his hat whenever he turns a street-corner in any city of the world; nor is it true that the teeth of sheep in the Canterbury mountain valleys are worn down in their efforts to hold on to the long tussock grass, so as to save themselves from being blown away [5]by the north-west gales. Taken as a whole, our land is neither more nor less windy than the coasts of the English Channel between Dover and the Isle of Wight. I write with the advantage of having had many years’ experience of both climates. TE-WENGA On the map of the world New Zealand has the look of a slim insular strip, a Lilliputian satellite of the broad continent of Australia. It is, however, twelve hundred miles from the continent, and there are no island stations between to act as links; the Tasman Sea is an unbroken and often stormy stretch of water. Indeed, New Zealand is as close to Polynesia as to Australia, for the gap between Cape Maria Van Diemen and Niue or Savage Island is also about twelve hundred miles across. In result, then, the colony cannot be termed a member of any group or division, political or scientific. It is a lonely oceanic archipelago, remote from the great centres of the earth, but with a character, attractions, and a busy life of its own. Though so small on the map, it does not strike those who see it as a little country. Its scenery is marked by height and steepness; its mountain ranges and bold sea-cliffs impress the new-comer by size and wildness. The clear air, too, enables the eye to travel far; and where the gazer can hold many miles of country in view—country stretching away, as a rule, to lofty backgrounds—the adjective “small” does not easily occur to the mind. Countries like Holland and Belgium seem as small as they are; that is because they are flat, and thickly sown with cities and villages. In them man is everything,[6] and Nature appears tamed and subservient. But New Zealand submits to man slowly, sometimes not at all. There the rapid rivers, long deep lakes, steep hill-sides, and mountain-chains rising near to or above the snow-line are features of a scenery varying from romantic softness to rough grandeur. Indeed the first impression given by the coast, when seen from the deck of an approaching ship, is that of the remnant of some huge drowned continent that long ago may have spread over degrees of longitude where now the Southern Ocean is a weary waste. DIAMOND LAKE Nor, again, is this impression of largeness created by immense tracts of level monotony, as in so many continental views. There is none of the tiresome sameness that besets the railway passenger on the road from The Hague to Moscow—the succession of flat fields, sandy heaths, black pine woods, and dead marshes. For the keynote of our scenery is variety. Few countries in the world yield so rapid a series of sharp contrasts—contrasts between warm north and cool south; between brisk, clear east and moist, mild west; between the leafy, genial charm of the coastal bays and the snows and rocky walls of the dorsal ridges. The very mountains differ in character. Here are Alps with long white crests and bony shoulders emerging from forests of beech; there rise volcanoes, symmetrical cones, streaked with snow, and in some instances incessantly sending up steam or vapour from their summits. Most striking of all the differences, perhaps, is the complete change from the deep and [7]ancient forests which formerly covered half the islands, to the long stretches of green grass or fern land where, before the coming of the settlers, you could ride for miles and pass never a tree. Of course many of these natural features are changing under the masterful hands of the British colonist. Forests are being cut down and burned, plains and open valleys ploughed up and sown, swamps drained, and their picturesque tangle of broad-bladed flax, giant reeds, and sharp-edged grasses remorselessly cleared away. Thousands of miles of hedges, chiefly of gorse, now seam the open country with green or golden lines, and divide the surface into more or less rectangular fields; and broom and sweetbriar, detested weeds as they are, brighten many a slope with gold or rose-colour in spring-time. Plantations of exotic trees grow in number and height yearly, and show a curious blending of the flora of England, California, and Australia. Most British trees and bushes thrive exceedingly, though some of them, as the ash, the spruce, the holly, and the whitethorn, find the summers too hot and the winters not frosty enough in many localities. More than in trees, hedgerows, or corn-crops, the handiwork of the colonist is seen in the ever-widening areas sown with English grasses. Everything has to give way to grass. The consuming passion of the New Zealand settler is to make grass grow where it did not grow before, or where it did grow before, to put better grass in its place. So trees, ferns, flax, and rushes have to pass away; with them have to go the wiry [8]native tussock and tall, blanched snow-grass. Already thirteen million acres are sown with one or other mixture of cock’s-foot, timothy, clover, rye-grass, fescue—for the New Zealand farmer is knowing in grasses; and every year scores of thousands of acres are added to the area thus artificially grassed. Can you wonder? The carrying power of acres improved in this way is about nine times that of land left in native pasture; while as for forest and fern land, they, before man attacked them, could carry next to no cattle or sheep at all. In the progress of settlement New Zealand is sacrificing much beauty in the districts once clad in forest. Outside these, however, quite half the archipelago was already open land when the whites came, and in this division the work of the settler has been almost entirely improvement. Forty years ago it needed all the gold of the sunshine and all the tonic quality of the air to make the wide tracts of stunted bracken in the north, and even wider expanses of sparse yellowish tussock in the south, look anything but cheerless, empty, and half-barren. The pages of many early travellers testify to this and tell of an effect of depression now quite absent. Further, for fifteen years past the process of settling the soil has not been confined to breaking in the wilderness and enlarging the frontiers of cultivated and peopled land. This good work is indeed going on. But hand in hand with it there goes on a process of subdivision by which fresh homes rise yearly in districts already accounted settled; the farmstead chimneys send up their smoke ever nearer [9]to each other; and the loneliness and consequent dulness that once half spoiled country life is being brightened. Very few New Zealanders now need live without neighbours within an easy ride, if not walk. ON THE BEALEY RIVER Like the province of the Netherlands the name of which it bears, New Zealand is a green land where water meets the eye everywhere. There the resemblance ends. The dull grey tones of the atmosphere of old Zealand, the deep, unchanging green of its pastures, the dead level and slow current of its shallow and turbid waters, are conspicuously absent at the Antipodes. When the New Zealander thinks of water his thoughts go naturally to an ocean, blue and restless, and to rivers sometimes swollen and clouded, sometimes clear and shrunken, but always rapid. Even the mountain lakes, though they have their days of peace, are more often ruffled by breezes or lashed by gales. In a word, water means water in motion; and among the sounds most familiar to a New Zealander’s ears are the hoarse brawling of torrents, grinding and bearing seaward the loose shingle of the mountains, and the deep roar of the surf of the Pacific, borne miles inland through the long still nights when the winds have ceased from troubling. It is no mere accident, then, that rowing and sailing are among the chief pastimes of the well-watered islands, or that the islanders have become ship-owners on a considerable scale. Young countries do not always carry much of their own trade; but, thanks to the energy and astute management of their union Steamship Company, New [10]Zealanders not only control their own coasting trade, but virtually the whole of the traffic between their own shores, Australia, and the South Sea Islands. The inter-colonial trade is substantial, amounting to between ￡5,000,000 and ￡6,000,000 a year. Much larger, of course, is the trade with the mother country; for our colony, with some success, does her best to shoulder a way in at the open but somewhat crowded door of London. Of her total oversea trade of about ￡37,000,000 a year, more than two-thirds is carried on with England and Scotland. Here again the colonial ship-owner has a share of the carrying business, for the best known of the four ocean steamship companies in its service is identified with the Dominion, and bears its name. With variety of scenery and climate there comes, of course, an equal variety of products. The colony is eleven hundred miles long, and lies nearly due north and south. The latitudes, moreover, through which it extends, namely, those from 34° to 47°, are well suited to diversity. So you get a range from the oranges and olives of the north to the oats and rye of colder Southland. Minerals, too, are found of more than one kind. At first the early settlers seemed none too quick in appreciating the advantages offered them by so varied a country. They pinned their faith to wool and wheat only, adding gold, after a time, to their larger exports. But experience showed that though wool and wheat yielded large profits, these profits fluctuated, as they still do. So the growers had to look round and seek [11]for fresh outlets and industries. Thirty years ago, when their colony was first beginning to attract some sort of notice in the world’s markets, they still depended on wool, gold, cereals, hides, and tallow. Cereals they have now almost ceased to export, though they grow enough for home consumption; they have found other things that pay better. They produce twice as much gold as they did then, and grow more wool than ever. Indeed that important animal, the New Zealand sheep, is still the mainstay of his country. Last year’s export of wool brought in nearly ￡7,700,000. But to the three or four industries enumerated the colonists have added seven or eight more, each respectable in size and profitable in the return it yields. To gold their miners have added coal, the output of which is now two million tons a year. Another mineral—or sort of mineral—is the fossil resin of the giant Kauri pine, of which the markets of Europe and North America absorb more than half-a-million pounds’ worth yearly. Freezing and cold storage have become main allies of the New Zealand farmer, whose export of frozen mutton and lamb now approaches in value ￡4,000,000. Almost as remarkable is the effect of refrigerating on dairying in the islands. Hundreds of co-operative butter factories and creameries have been built during the last twenty years. It is not too much to say that they have transformed the face of whole provinces. It is possible to grow wool on a large scale with but the sparsest population, as the interior of Australia shows; but it is not possible to grow butter or cheese without multiplying [12]homes and planting families fairly thickly on the land. In New Zealand even the growing of meat and wool is now chiefly done on moderate-sized land-holdings. The average size of our flocks is but a thousand head. But it is dairying that is par excellence the industry of the small man. It was so from the first, and every decade shows a tendency to closer subdivision of the land devoted to producing butter and cheese. Within the last few years, again, yet another industry has seemed to be on the road to more scientific organisation. This is the manufacture of hemp from the fibre of the native flax. One cannot call this a new thing, for the colonists tried it on a fairly large scale more than thirty years ago; but their enterprise seemed again and again doomed to disappointment, for New Zealand hemp proved for a long while but a tricky and uncertain article of commerce. It was and is a kind of understudy of manilla, holding a place somewhere between that and sisal. For many years, however, it seemed unable to get a firm footing in the markets, and when the price of manilla fell was apt to be neglected altogether. During the last decade, however, the flax millers have decidedly improved its quality, and a demand for it has sprung up in countries outside Great Britain. It is said that Americans use it in lieu of hair, and that the Japanese can imitate silk with it. Certainly the Germans, Dutch, and French buy it, to spin into binder-twine, or, may be, to “blend” with other fibres. To the ordinary stranger from Europe, the most interesting of our industries are those that bear least [13]likeness to the manufactures and agriculture of an old country. To him there is a savour of the strange and new in kauri-gum digging, gold-mining, timber-cutting, and saw-milling, and even the conversion of bushes of flax into bales of hemp. But if I were asked to choose two industries before others to describe with some minuteness, I think I should select the growing, freezing, and export of meat, and the application of the factory system to the making and export of butter and cheese. Though my countrymen have no monopoly of these they have from the first shown marked activity in organising and exploiting them. In one chief branch of refrigeration their produce stands first in quality, if not in quantity. I refer to the supply of mutton and lamb to the English market. In this they have to compete with the larger flocks of Australia and the Argentine, as well as, indirectly, with the huge herds and gigantic trade combinations of the United States. Of the competitors whose products meet at Smithfield, they are the most distant, and in their command of capital the least powerful. Moreover, they are without the advantage—if advantage it be—of cheap labour. Yet their meat has for many years commanded the best prices paid for frozen mutton and lamb in London, and the demand, far from being unequal to the supply, has been chiefly limited by the difficulty of increasing our flocks fast enough to keep pace with it. In the contest for English favour, our farmers, though handicapped in the manner mentioned above, started with three advantages—healthy flocks and herds, a genial [14]climate, and an educated people. The climate enables their sheep and cattle to remain out all the year round. Except in the Southern Alps, they suffer very little loss from weather. The sunny air helps them to keep disease down, and, as already said, the best artificial grasses flourish in our islands as they flourish in very few countries. The standard of education makes labour, albeit highly paid, skilful and trustworthy. The farm-workers and meat-factory hands are clean, efficient, and fully alive to the need for sanitary precautions. The horrors described in Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle” are impossible in New Zealand for many reasons. Of these, the first is that the men employed in meat factories would not tolerate their existence. There are thirty-seven establishments in the colony for meat freezing and preserving, employing over three thousand hands and paying nearly ￡300,000 a year in wages. The value of their output is about ￡5,000,000 a year, and the bulk of it is exported to the port of London. The weight of meat sent to the United Kingdom last year was two hundred and thirty-seven million pounds avoirdupois. Then there are about three hundred and twenty dairy-butter or cheese factories, without counting a larger outer circle of skimming stations. To these the dairy-farmers send their milk, getting it back after skimming. That completes their share of the work; expert factory hands and managers do the rest. As for meat-freezing, from beginning to end the industry is scientifically managed and carefully supervised. At its inception, a quarter of a century ago, [15]the flocks of the colony were healthy and of good strains of blood. But they were bred chiefly to grow wool, and mainly showed a basis of Merino crossed with Lincoln or Leicester. Nowadays the Romney Marsh blood predominates in the stud flocks, especially in the North Island. Lincoln, Leicester, Merino, Border Leicester, Shropshire, and South Down follow in order. For five-and-twenty years our breeders have brought their skill to bear on crossing, with a view to producing the best meat for the freezing factory, without ruining the quality of their wool. They still face the cost and trouble of importing stud sheep from England, though their own selected animals have brought them good prices in South America, Australia, and South Africa. Flocks and herds alike are subjected to regular inspection by the veterinary officers of the Department of Agriculture; and though the slaughter-yards and factories of the freezing companies are models of order, speed, and cleanliness, the Government expert is there too, and nothing may be sold thence without his certificate, for every carcase must bear the official mark. From the factory to the steamer, from one end of the earth to the other, the frozen carcases are vigilantly watched, and the temperature of the air they are stored in is regulated with painful care. As much trouble is taken to keep freezing chambers cold as to keep a king’s palace warm. The shipping companies are as jealously anxious about the condition of their meat cargoes as they are for the contentment of their passengers and the safety of their ships. At the London Docks the [16]meat is once more examined by a New Zealand official, and finally at Smithfield, as the carcases are delivered there in the small hours of the morning, they are scanned for the last time by a veterinary expert from the Antipodes. Moreover, since our meat goes now to other British ports as well as to London, and since, too, nearly half of what is discharged in the Thames no longer finds its way to Smithfield, our inspectors have to follow our meat into the provinces and report upon the condition in which it reaches such towns as Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Manchester. Furthermore, they do their best to track it a stage farther and ascertain its fate at the hands of the unsentimental retail trader. Most New Zealand meat is now honestly sold as what it is. Some of the best of it, however, is still palmed off on the consumer as British. On the other hand, South American mutton is sometimes passed off as New Zealand. The housewife who buys “Canterbury Lamb” because she likes all things Kentish is not yet altogether extinct. For all this the clumsily-drawn English law, which makes conviction so difficult, must be held mainly responsible. New Zealand butter, too, suffers at the hands of English manipulators. It is what Tooley Street calls a dry butter—that is to say, it contains on an average not more than some eleven per cent of moisture. This renders it a favourite for mixing with milk and for selling as “milk-blended” butter, a process at which makers in the colony can only look on wrathfully but helplessly. Otherwise they have little to complain about, for their butter has for years past [17]brought them prices almost as high as those of good Danish, while during the butter famine of the first few months of 1908 as much as 150 shillings a hundredweight was paid for parcels of it. Before shipment in the colony, butter and cheese are graded by public inspectors. Every box bears the Government stamp. In practice the verdict of the grader is accepted by the English purchasers. Relatively the amount of frozen beef which we export is not large; but our climate and pastures are too well suited for beef-growing to make it likely that the discrepancy will continue. Probably frozen beef will give place to chilled; that is to say, improvements in the art of chilling will enable our beef to be carried at a temperature of, let us say, 30° Fahrenheit, instead of 12°. It will then arrive in England soft and fit for immediate use: thawing will not be needed, and a higher price will be obtained. But, however far behind New Zealand may as yet lag in the beef trade, enough has been done in other branches of refrigeration to show how scientific, well-organised, and efficient colonial industry is becoming, and how very far the farmers and graziers of the islands are from working in the rough and hand-to-mouth fashion that settlers in new countries are supposed to affect. WELLINGTON The purpose of this sketch, however, is not to dilate upon the growth of our commerce and industry, remarkable as that is in a country so isolated and a population only now touching a million. My object, rather, is to give something of an outline of the archipelago itself, of the people who live there between the [18]mountains and the sea, and of the life and society that a new-comer may expect to see. Mainly, then, the most striking peculiarities of the islands, as a land undergoing the process of occupation, are the decentralised character of this occupation, and the large areas, almost unpeopled, that still remain in a country relatively small in size. New Zealand was originally not so much a colony as a group of little settlements bound together none too comfortably. Its nine provinces, with their clashing interests and intense jealousies, were politically abolished more than thirty years ago; but some of the local feeling which they stood for and suffered for still remains, and will remain as long as mountain ranges and straits of the sea divide New Zealand. Troublesome as its divisions are to politicians, merchants, ship-owners, councils of defence, and many other persons and interests, they nevertheless have their advantages. They breed emulation, competition, civic patriotism; and the local life, parochial as it looks to observers from larger communities, is at least far better than the stagnation of provinces drained of vitality by an enormous metropolis. For in New Zealand you have four chief towns, large enough to be dignified with the name of cities, as well as twice as many brisk and aspiring seaports, each the centre and outlet of a respectable tract of advancing country. All these have to be thought of when any general scheme for opening up, defending, or educating the country is in question. Our University, to give one example, is an examining body, with five affiliated colleges; but [19]these colleges lie in towns far apart, hundreds of miles from each other. The ocean steamship companies before mentioned have to carry merchandise to and from six or eight ports. Singers and actors have to travel to at least as many towns to find audiences. Wellington, the capital, is still not the largest of the four chief towns, rapid as its progress has been during the last generation. Auckland, with 90,000 people, is the largest, as it is the most beautiful; Wellington, with 70,000, holds but the second place. Decentralised as New Zealand is, large as its rural population is, and pleasant as its country life can be, still its four chief towns hold between them more than a quarter of its people, and cannot therefore be passed over in a sentence. Europeans are apt to be impatient of colonial towns, seeing in them collections of buildings neither large enough to be imposing nor old enough to be mellowed into beauty or quaintness. And it is true that in our four cities you have towns without architectural or historic interest, and in size only about equal to Hastings, Oxford, Coventry, and York. Yet these towns, standing where seventy years ago nothing stood, have other features of interest beside their newness. Cities are, after all, chiefly important as places in which civilised men and women can live decently and comfortably, and do their daily work under conditions which are healthy and neither degrading nor disagreeable. The first business of a city is to be useful, and its second to be healthy. Certainly it should not be hideous; but our cities are not hideous. What if [20]the streets tend to straight rigidity, while the dwelling-houses are mostly of wood, and the brick and stone business edifices embody modern commercialism! The European visitor will note these features; but he will note also the spirit of cleanliness, order, and convenience everywhere active among a people as alert and sturdy as they are well fed and comfortably clad. The unconcealed pride of the colonist in material progress may sometimes jar a little on the tourist in search of the odd, barbaric, or picturesque. But the colonist, after all, is building up a civilised nation. Art, important as it is, cannot be the foundation of a young state. DUNEDIN In the towns, then, you see bustling streets where electric tramways run out into roomy suburbs, and where motor-cars have already ceased to be a novelty. You notice that the towns are even better drained than paved, and that the water supply everywhere is as good as it ought to be in so well-watered a country. The visitor can send telegrams for sixpence and letters for a penny, and finds the State telephone system as convenient as it is cheap. If the hotels do not display American magnificence they do not charge American prices, for they give you comfort and civility for twelve-and-sixpence a day. Theatres and concert-halls are commodious, if not imposing; and, thanks to travelling companies and to famous artists passing through on their way to or from Australia, there is usually a good play to be seen or good music to be heard. Indeed, if there be an art which New Zealanders [21]can be said to love, it is music. Their choral societies and glee clubs are many, and they have at least one choir much above the average. Nor are they indifferent to the sister art of painting, a foundation for which is laid in their State schools, where all children have to learn to draw. Good art schools have been founded in the larger towns, and in some of the smaller. Societies are buying and collecting pictures for their galleries. At the International Exhibition held in Christchurch in 1906-7 the fine display of British art, for which our people had to thank the English Government, was welcomed with the enthusiasm it deserved. The picture galleries were thronged from beginning to end of the Exhibition, and the many thousands of pounds spent in purchases gave material evidence of the capacity of New Zealanders to appreciate good art when they have the chance of seeing it. The same may be said of literature. To say that they all love books would be absurd; but of what nation can that be said? What can truly be affirmed is that all of them read newspapers; that most of them read books of some sort; and that all their books are not novels. Booksellers tell you that the demand for cheap editions of well-known authors is astonishing in so small a population. They try to write books, too, and do not always fail; and a small anthology—it would have to be very slender—might be filled with genuine New Zealand poetry. Domett’s reputation is established. Arthur Adams, Arnold Wall, and Miss Mackay, when at their best, are poets, and good poets. [22] Of course, however, it is in the newspapers that we have the plainest evidence of the average public taste. It is a land of newspapers, town and country, daily and weekly, small or of substantial size. To say that the best of these equals the best of the English provincial papers is not, I fear, true. The islands contain no daily newspaper which a journalist can honestly call equal to the Manchester Guardian or the Birmingham Post; but many of the papers are good, and some of them are extraordinarily good for towns the largest of which contains, with its suburbs, but 90,000 people. No one journal towers above the others. If I were asked to choose a morning, an evening, and a weekly paper, I should perhaps name the Otago Daily Times, the Wellington Evening Post, and the Christchurch Weekly Press; but the Auckland Weekly News has the best illustrations, and I could understand a good judge making a different selection. The most characteristic of the papers are illustrated weekly editions of the chief dailies. These good though not original products of island journalism are pretty close imitations of their Victorian prototype, The Australasian. The influence of the Press is considerable, though not perhaps as great as might be looked for from the numbers and success of the newspapers. Moreover, and this is really curious, they influence the public less in the politics of the colony than in several other fields. In a book on New Zealand published ten years ago, I wrote in my haste the words, “There is no Colonial literature.” What I meant to express, and doubtless [23]ought to have said, is that there is no body of writing by New Zealanders at once substantial and distinguished enough to be considered a literature. I did not mean to suggest that, amongst the considerable mass of published matter for which my countrymen are responsible, there is nothing of good literary quality. It would not have been true to say this ten years ago, and it would be still less true to say it now. Amongst the large body of conscientious work published in the colony itself during the last quarter of a century there is some very good writing indeed. A certain amount of it deserves to be better known outside our borders than it is. Putting manner aside for the moment, and dealing only with matter, it is, I think, true to say that any thorough student of New Zealand as it is to-day, or has been since 1880, must for authentic information mainly go to works published in the colony itself. I have some right to speak, for I have been reading about New Zealand for forty years, and all my reading has not been desultory. Slight as is this book, for instance, and partly based as it is on personal recollection and knowledge gleaned orally, still I could not have written it without very careful study of many colonial writings. In scanning my list of later authorities consulted, I am surprised to find what very few exceptions there are to the rule that they are printed at the other end of the world. To begin with, the weekly newspapers of the Dominion are mines of information to any one who knows how to work them. So are the Blue-books, and that bible of the student of nature and [24]tradition in our islands, the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute. Then there is the Journal of the Polynesian Society; after which comes a long list of official publications. First among them rank Kirk’s Forest Flora and Mr. Percy Smith’s Eruption of Tarawera. The best general sketch of Maori manners, customs, and beliefs, is that of Edward Tregear; far the best book on Maori art is A. Hamilton’s. Quite lately Mr. M’Nab, the present Minister of Lands, has made a very valuable contribution to the early chronicles of South New Zealand, in his Muri-huku, for which generations of students will be grateful. Mr. Carrick’s gossip—also about our South—and Mr. Ross’s mountaineering articles must not be passed over. Furthermore, there is an illustrated manual of our plants by Laing and Blackwell, which is something more than a manual, for it is full of reading which is enjoyable merely as reading. And there is a manual of our animal life in which the work of Hutton, Drummond, and Potts is blended with excellent results. Dr. Cockayne’s botanic articles, Mr. Shand’s papers on the Chathams, and Mr. Buick’s local Histories of Marlborough and Manawatu deserve also to be noted. Much of Mr. James Cowan’s writing for the Government Tourist Department is well above the average of that class of work. NAPIER Society in the towns is made up of a mingling of what in England would be called the middle and upper-middle classes. In some circles the latter preponderate, in others the former. New Zealanders occasionally [25]boast that in their country class distinctions are unknown; but though this is true politically—for there are no privileged classes and no lower orders—the line is drawn in matters social, and sometimes in odd and amusing ways. The townsfolk inside the line are financiers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, manufacturers, clergymen, newspaper owners, the higher officials, and the larger sort of agents and contractors. Here and there, rari nantes, are to be encountered men who paint or write, or are musicians, or professors, or teachers of colleges or secondary schools. Most of the older and some of the younger are British-born, but the differences between them and the native-born are not very apparent, though shades of difference can be detected. Money, birth, official position, and ability are passports there, much as in other countries; though it is only fair to say that money is not all-powerful, and that ability, if not brilliant, has a slightly better chance than in older societies. On the surface the urban middle class in the colony differs but little from people of the same sort in the larger provincial cities of the mother country. Indeed the likeness is remarkable, albeit in the colony there is no aristocracy, no smart set, no Army, Navy, or dominant Church; while underneath there is no multitude of hungry and hard-driven poor for the rich to shrink from or regard as dangerous. Yet, except for the comparative absence of frock-coats and tall silk hats, and for the somewhat easier and less suspicious manner, the middle class remain a British middle class still. It is, then, pleasant to think that, if they retain English [26]prejudices, they have also the traditional virtues of the English official and man of business. THE BATHING POOL To a social student, however, the most interesting and, on the whole, most cheering aspect of town life is supplied by the work-people. They are worth watching as they go to their shops and factories between eight and nine in the morning, or when, after five in the afternoon, they pour into the streets with their work done and something of the day yet left to call their own. The clean, well-ventilated work-rooms are worth a visit certainly. But it is the men and women, youths and girls themselves who, to any one acquainted with factory hands in the Old World, seem the best worth attention. Everywhere you note a decent average of health, strength, and contentment. The men do not look stunted or deadened, the women pinched or sallow, the children weedy or underfed. Most of them seem bright and self-confident, with colour in their faces and plenty of flesh on their frames, uniting something of English solidity with a good deal of American alertness. Seventy thousand hands—the number employed in our factories and workshops—may seem few enough. But forty years ago they could not muster seven thousand, and the proportional increase during the last twelve years has been very rapid. To what extent their healthy and comfortable condition is due to the much-discussed labour laws of New Zealand is a moot point which need not be discussed here. What is certain is that for many years past the artisans and labourers of the colony have increased in numbers, [27]while earning higher wages and working shorter hours than formerly. At the same time the employers as a body have prospered as they never prospered before, and this prosperity shows as yet no sign of abatement. That what is called the labour problem has been solved in New Zealand no sensible man would pretend. But at least the more wasteful and ruinous forms of industrial conflicts have for many years been few and (with two exceptions) very brief, a blessing none too common in civilised communities. As a testimony to the condition of the New Zealand worker I can hardly do better than quote the opinion of the well-known English labour leader, Mr. Keir Hardie. Whatever my readers may think of his opinions—and some of them may not be among his warm admirers—they will admit that he is precisely the last man in the Empire likely to give an overflattering picture of the lot of the labourer anywhere. His business is to voice the grievances of his class, not to conceal or suppress them. Now, Mr. Hardie, after a tour round the Empire, deliberately picks out New Zealand as the most desirable country for a British emigrant workman. The standard of comfort there appears to him to be higher than elsewhere, and he recognises that the public conscience is sensitive to the fair claims of labour. CHAPTER II COUNTRY LIFE When all is said, however, it is not the cities which interest most the ordinary visitors to New Zealand. They may have a charm which it is no exaggeration to call loveliness, as Auckland has; or be finely seated on hill-sides overlooking noble harbours, as Wellington and Dunedin are. They may have sweetly redeeming features, like the river banks, public and private gardens, and the vistas of hills and distant mountains seen in flat Christchurch. They may be pleasant altogether both in themselves and their landscape, as Nelson is. But after all they are towns, and modern towns, whose best qualities are that they are wholesome and that their raw newness is passing away. It is to the country and the country life that travellers naturally turn for escape into something with a spice of novelty and maybe a touch of romance. Nor need they be disappointed. Country life in the islands varies with the locality and the year. It is not always bright, any more than is the New Zealand sky. It is not always prosperous, any more [29]than you can claim that the seasons are always favourable. But, on the whole, I do not hesitate to say, that to a healthy capable farmer or rural worker the colony offers the most inviting life in the world. In the first place, the life is cheerful and healthy; in the next place, the work, though laborious at times, need not be killing; and then the solitude, that deadly accompaniment of early colonial life, has now ceased to be continuous except in a few scattered outposts. Moreover—and this is important—there is money in it. The incompetent or inexperienced farmer may, of course, lose his capital, just as a drunken or stupid labourer may fail to save out of his wages. But year in, year out, the farmer who knows his business and sticks to it can and does make money, improve his property, and see his position grow safer and his anxieties less. Good farmers can make profits quite apart from the very considerable increment which comes to the value of land as population spreads. Whatever may be said of this rise in price as a matter of public policy, it fills the pockets of individuals in a manner highly satisfactory to many of the present generation. NELSON One of the most cheerful features in New Zealand country life, perhaps, is the extent to which those who own the land are taking root in the soil. Far the greater part of the settled country is in the hands of men and families who live on the land, and may go on living there as long as they please; no one can oust them. They are either freeholders, or tenants of the State or public bodies. Such tenants hold their lands [30]on terms so easy that their position as working farmers is as good as or better than that of freeholders. As prospective sellers of land they may not be so well placed; but that is another story. Anyway, rural New Zealand is becoming filled with capable independent farmers, with farms of all sizes from the estate of four thousand or five thousand acres to the peasant holding of fifty or one hundred. Colonists still think in large areas when they define the degrees of land-holding and ownership. ON THE BEACH AT NGUNGURU And here a New Zealander, endeavouring to make a general sketch that may place realities clearly before the English eye, is confronted with the difficulty, almost impossibility, of helping the European to conceive a thinly peopled territory. Suppose, for a moment, what the British Islands would be like if they were populated on the New Zealand scale—that is to say, if they held about a million souls, of whom fifty thousand were brown and the rest white. The brown would be English-speaking and half civilised, and the whites just workaday Britons of the middle and labouring classes, better fed, a little taller and rather more tanned by sun and wind. That at first sight does not seem to imply any revolutionary change. But imagine yourself standing on the deck of a steamer running up the English Channel past the coast as it would look if nineteen-twentieths of the British population, and all traces of them and the historic past of their country, had been swept away. The cliff edges of Cornwall and hills of Devon would be covered with thick forest, and perhaps a few people [31]might cluster round single piers in sheltered inlets like Falmouth and Plymouth. The Chalk Downs of Wiltshire and Hampshire would be held by a score or two of sheep-farmers, tenants of the Crown, running their flocks over enormous areas of scanty grass. Fertile strips like the vale of Blackmore would be occupied by independent farmers with from three hundred to two thousand acres of grass and crops round their homesteads. Southampton would be the largest town in the British Islands, a flourishing and busy seaport, containing with its suburbs not less than 90,000 people. Its inhabitants would proudly point to the railway system, of which they were the terminus, and by which they were connected with Liverpool, the second city of the United Kingdom, holding with Birkenhead about 70,000 souls. Journeying from Southampton to Liverpool on a single line of rails, the traveller would note a comfortable race of small farmers established in the valley of the Thames, and would hear of similar conditions about the Wye and the Severn. But he would be struck by the almost empty look of the wide pastoral stretches in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and would find axemen struggling with Nature in the forest of Arden, where dense thickets would still cover the whole of Warwickshire and spread over into the neighbouring counties. Arrived at Liverpool after a twelve hours’ journey, he might wish to visit Dublin or Glasgow, the only two other considerable towns in the British Islands; the one about as large as York now is, the other the size of Northampton. He would be informed by the [32]Government tourist agent in Liverpool that his easiest way to Glasgow would be by sea to a landing-place in the Solway Firth, where he would find the southern terminus of the Scotch railways. He would discover that England and Scotland were not yet linked by rail, though that great step in progress was confidently looked for within a few months. AT THE FOOT OF LAKE TE-ANAU By all this I do not mean to suggest that there are no spots in New Zealand where the modern side of rural English life is already closely reproduced. On an earlier page I have said that there are. Our country life differs widely as you pass from district to district, and is marked by as much variety as is almost everything else in the islands. On the east coast of the South Island, between Southland and the Kaikouras, mixed farming is scientifically carried on with no small expenditure of skill and capital. The same can be said of certain districts on the west coast of the Wellington Province, and in the province of Hawkes Bay, within a moderate distance of the town of Napier. Elsewhere, with certain exceptions, farming is of a rougher and more primitive-looking sort than anything seen in the mother country, though it does not follow that a comparatively rough, unkempt appearance denotes lack of skill or agricultural knowledge. It may mean, and usually does mean, that the land is in the earlier stages of settlement, and that the holders have not yet had time to think much of appearances. Then outside the class of small or middle-sized farms come the large holdings of the islands, which are like nothing at all in the [33]United Kingdom. They are of two kinds, freehold and Crown lands held under pastoral licences. Generally speaking, the freeholds are much the more valuable, have much more arable land, and will, in days to come, carry many more people. The pastoral Crown tenants have, by the pressure of land laws and the demands of settlement, been more and more restricted to the wilder and more barren areas of the islands. They still hold more than ten million acres; but this country chiefly lies in the mountainous interior, covering steep faces where the plough will never go, and narrow terraces and cold, stony valleys where the snow lies deep in winter. On these sheep stations life changes more slowly than elsewhere. If you wish to form an idea of what pastoral life “up-country” was forty years ago, you can still do so by spending a month or two at one of these mountain homesteads. There you may possibly have the owner and the owner’s family for society, but are rather more likely to be yourself furnishing a solitary manager with not unwelcome company. Round about the homestead you will still see the traditional features of colonial station life, the long wool-shed with high-pitched roof of shingles or corrugated iron, and the sheep-yards which, to the eye of the new chum, seem such an unmeaning labyrinth. Not far off will stand the men’s huts, a little larger than of yore, and more likely nowadays to be frame cottages than to be slab whares with the sleeping-bunks and low, wide chimneys of days gone by. In out-of-the-way spots the station [34]store may still occasionally be found, with its atmosphere made odorous by hob-nailed boots, moleskin trousers, brown sugar, flannel shirts, tea, tar, and black tobacco. For the Truck Act does not apply to sheep stations, and there are still places far enough away from a township to make the station store a convenience to the men. THE WAIKATO AT NGARUAWAHIA At such places the homestead is still probably nothing more than a modest cottage, roomy, but built of wood, and owing any attractiveness it has to its broad verandah, perhaps festooned with creepers, and to the garden and orchard which are now seldom absent. In the last generation the harder and coarser specimens of the pioneers often affected to hold gardens and garden-stuffs cheap, and to despise planting and adornment of any kind, summing them up as “fancy work.” This was not always mere stinginess or brute indifference to everything that did not directly pay, though it sometimes was. There can be no doubt that absentee owners or mortgagee companies were often mean enough in these things. But the spirit that grudged every hour of labour bestowed on anything except the raising of wool, mutton, or corn, was often the outcome of nothing worse than absorption in a ceaseless and unsparing battle with Nature and the fluctuations of markets. The first generation of settlers had to wrestle hard to keep their foothold; and, naturally, the men who usually survived through bad times were those who concentrated themselves most intensely on the struggle for success and existence. But time mellows everything. [35]The struggle for life has still to be sustained in New Zealand. It is easier than of yore, however; and the continued prosperity of the last twelve or thirteen years has enabled settlers to bestow thought and money on the lighter and pleasanter side. Homesteads are brighter places than they were: they may not be artistic, but even the most remote are nearly always comfortable. More than comfort the working settler does not ask for. Then in estimating how far New Zealand country life may be enjoyable and satisfying we must remember that it is mainly a life out of doors. On farms and stations of all sorts and sizes the men spend many hours daily in the open, sometimes near the homestead, sometimes miles away from it. To them, therefore, climate is of more importance than room-space, and sunshine than furniture. If we except a handful of mountaineers, the country worker in New Zealand is either never snowbound at all, or, at the worst, is hampered by a snowstorm once a year. Many showery days there are, and now and again the bursts of wind and rain are wild enough to force ploughmen to quit work, or shepherds to seek cover; but apart from a few tempests there is nothing to keep country-folk indoors. It is never either too hot or too cold for out-door work, while for at least one day in three in an average year it is a positive pleasure to breathe the air and live under the pleasant skies. The contrast between the station of the back-ranges and the country place of the wealthy freeholder is the [36]contrast between the first generation of colonial life and the third. The lord of 40,000 acres may be a rural settler or a rich man with interests in town as well as country. In either case his house is something far more costly than the old wooden bungalow. It is defended by plantations and approached by a curving carriage drive. When the proprietor arrives at his front door he is as likely to step out of a motor-car as to dismount from horseback. Within, you may find an airy billiard-room; without, smooth-shaven tennis lawns, and perhaps a bowling-green. The family and their guests wear evening dress at dinner, where the wine will be expensive and may even be good. In the smoking-room, cigars have displaced the briar-root pipes of our fathers. The stables are higher and more spacious than were the dwellings of the men of the early days. Neat grooms and trained gardeners are seen in the place of the “rouse-abouts” of yore. Dip and wool-shed are discreetly hidden from view; and a conservatory rises where meat once hung on the gallows. For a colony whose days are not threescore years and ten, ours has made some creditable headway in gardening. The good and bad points of our climate alike encourage us to cultivate the art. The combination of an ample rainfall with lavish sunshine helps the gardener’s skill. On the other hand, the winds—those gales from north-west and south-west, varied by the teasing persistency of the steadier north-easter, plague of spring afternoons—make the planting of hedgerows [37]and shelter clumps an inevitable self-defence. So while, on the one hand, the colonist hews and burns and drains away the natural vegetation of forest and swamp, on the other, in the character of planter and gardener, he does something to make amends. The colours of England and New Zealand glow side by side in the flowers round his grass plots, while Australia and North America furnish sombre break-winds, and contribute some oddities of foliage and a share of colour. In seaside gardens the Norfolk Island pine takes the place held by the cedar of Lebanon on English lawns. The mimosa and jackarandah of Australia persist in flowering in the frosty days of our early spring. On the verandahs, jessamine and Virginia creeper intertwine with the clematis and passion-flower of the bush. The palm-lily—insulted with the nickname of cabbage-tree—is hardy enough to flourish anywhere despite its semi-tropical look; but the nikau, our true palm, requires shelter from bitter or violent winds. The toé-toé (a reed with golden plumes), the glossy native flax (a lily with leaves like the blade of a classic Roman sword), and two shrubs, the matipo and karaka, are less timid, so more serviceable. The crimson parrot’s-beak and veronicas—white, pink, and purple—are easily and commonly grown; and though the manuka does not rival the English whitethorn in popularity, the pohutu-kawa, most striking of flowering trees, surpasses the ruddy may and pink chestnut of the old country. Some English garden-charms cannot be transplanted. The thick sward and living green of soft [38]lawns, the moss and mellowing lichens that steal slowly over bark and walls, the quaintness that belongs to old-fashioned landscape gardening, the venerable aspect of aged trees,—these cannot be looked for in gardens the eldest of which scarcely count half a century. But a climate in which arum lilies run wild in the hedgerows, and in which bougainvilleas, camellias, azaleas, oleanders, and even (in the north) the stephanotis, bloom in the open air, gives to skill great opportunities. Then the lover of ferns—and they have many lovers in New Zealand—has there a whole realm to call his own. Not that every fern will grow in every garden. Among distinct varieties numbering scores, there are many that naturally cling to the peace and moisture of deep gullies and overshadowing jungle. There, indeed, is found a wealth of them—ferns with trunks as thick as trees, and ferns with fronds as fine as hair or as delicate as lace; and there are filmy ferns, and such as cling to and twine round their greater brethren, and pendant ferns that droop from crevices and drape the faces of cliffs. To these add ferns that climb aloft as parasites on branches and among foliage, or that creep upon the ground, after the manner of lycopodium, or coat fallen forest trees like mosses. The tree-ferns are large enough to be hewn down with axes, and to spread their fronds as wide as the state umbrellas of Asiatic kings. Thirty feet is no uncommon span for the shade they cast, and their height has been known to reach fifty feet. They are to other ferns as the wandering albatross is to lesser sea-birds. The black-trunked[39] are the tallest, while the silver-fronded, whose wings seem as though frosted on the underside, are the most beautiful. In places they stand together in dense groves. Attempt to penetrate these and you find a dusky entanglement where your feet sink into tinder and dead, brown litter. But look down upon a grove from above, and your eyes view a canopy of green intricacies, a waving covering of soft, wing-like fronds, and fresh, curving plumes. TREE FERNS The change in country life now going on so rapidly has not meant merely more comfort for the employer: the position of the men also has altered for the better. While the land-owner’s house and surroundings show a measure of refinement, and even something that may at the other end of the earth pass for luxury, the station hands are far better cared for than was the case a generation or two ago. The interior of the “men’s huts” no longer reminds you of the foc’sle of a merchantship. Seek out the men’s quarters on one of the better managed estates, and it may easily happen that you will now find a substantial, well-built cottage with a broad verandah round two sides. Inside you are shown a commodious dining-room, and a reading-room supplied with newspapers and even books. To each man is assigned a separate bedroom, clean and airy, and a big bathroom is supplemented by decent lavatory arrangements. The food was always abundant—in the roughest days the estate owners never grudged their men plenty of “tucker.” But it is now much more varied and better cooked, and therefore wholesome.[40] To some extent this improvement in the country labourer’s lot is due to legal enactment and government inspection. But it is only fair to say that in some of the most notable instances it comes from spontaneous action by employers themselves. New Zealand has developed a public conscience during the last twenty years in matters relating to the treatment of labour, and by this development the country employers have been touched as much as any section of the community. They were never an unkindly race, and it may now be fairly claimed that they compare favourably with any similar class of employers within the Empire. At the other end of the rural scale to the establishment of the great land-owner we see the home of the bush settler—the pioneer of to-day. Perhaps the Crown has leased a block of virgin forest to him; perhaps he is one of the tenants of a Maori tribe, holding on a twenty-one or forty-two years’ lease; perhaps he has contrived to pick up a freehold in the rough. At any rate he and his mate are on the ground armed with saw and axe for their long attack upon Nature; and as you note the muscles of their bared arms, and the swell of the chests expanding under their light singlets, you are quite ready to believe that Nature will come out of the contest in a damaged condition. It is their business to hack and grub, hew and burn, blacken and deface. The sooner they can set the fire running through tracts of fern or piles of felled bush the sooner will they be able to scatter broadcast the contents of certain bags of [41]grass seed now carefully stowed away in their shanty under cover of tarpaulins. Sworn enemies are they of tall bracken and stately pines. To their eyes nothing can equal in beauty a landscape of black, fire-scorched stumps and charred logs—if only on the soil between these they may behold the green shoots of young grass thrusting ten million blades upward. What matter the ugliness and wreckage of the first stages of settlement, if, after many years, a tidy farm and smiling homestead are to be the outcome? In the meantime, while under-scrubbing and bush-felling are going on, the axemen build for themselves a slab hut with shingled roof. The furniture probably exemplifies the great art of “doing without.” The legs of their table are posts driven into the clay floor: to other posts are nailed the sacking on which their blankets are spread. A couple of sea chests hold their clothes and odds and ends. A sheepskin or two do duty for rugs. Tallow candles, or maybe kerosene, furnish light. A very few well-thumbed books, and a pack or two of more than well-thumbed cards, provide amusement. Not that there are many hours in the week for amusement. When cooking is done, washing and mending have to be taken in hand. Flannel and blue dungaree require washing after a while, and even garments of canvas and moleskin must be repaired sooner or later. A camp oven, a frying-pan, and a big teapot form the front rank of their cooking utensils, and fuel, at least, is abundant. Baking-powder helps them to make bread. Bush pork, wild birds, and fish may vary a diet in which mutton and [42]sardines figure monotonously. After a while a few vegetables are grown behind the hut, and the settlers find time to milk a cow. Soon afterwards, perhaps, occurs the chief event of pioneer life—the coming of a wife on to the scene. With her arrival is the beginning of a civilised life indoors, though her earlier years as a housekeeper may be an era of odd shifts and desperate expedients. A bush household is lucky if it is near enough to a metalled road to enable stores to be brought within fairly easy reach. More probably such necessaries as flour, groceries, tools, and grass seed—anything, in short, from a grindstone to a bag of sugar—have to be brought by pack-horse along a bush-track where road-metal is an unattainable luxury, and which may not unfairly be described as a succession of mud-holes divided by logs. Along such a thoroughfare many a rain-soaked pioneer has guided in days past the mud-plastered pack-horse which has carried the first beginnings of his fortunes. For what sustains the average settler through the early struggles of pioneering in the wilderness is chiefly the example of those who have done the same thing before, have lived as hard a life or harder, and have emerged as substantial farmers and leading settlers, respected throughout their district. Success has crowned the achievement so many thousand times in the past that the back-country settler of to-day, as he fells his bush and toils along his muddy track, may well be sustained by hope and by visions of macadamised coach roads running past well-grassed, well-stocked sheep or dairy farms in days to come. A MAORI VILLAGE [43] Predominant as the white man is in New Zealand, the brown man is too interesting and important to be forgotten even in a rough and hasty sketch. The Maori do not dwell in towns: they are an element of our country life. They now number no more than a twentieth of our people; but whereas a generation ago they were regarded as a doomed race, whose end, perhaps, was not very far distant, their disappearance is now regarded as by no means certain. I doubt, indeed, whether it is even probable. Until the end of the nineteenth century official returns appeared to show that the race was steadily and indeed rapidly diminishing. More recent and more accurate figures, however, seem to prove either that the Maori have regained vitality, or that past estimates of their numbers were too low. I am inclined to think that the explanation is found in both these reasons. In past decades our Census officers never claimed to be able to reckon the strength of the Maori with absolute accuracy, chiefly because the Natives would give them little or no help in their work. It is not quite so difficult now as formerly to enumerate the members of the tribes. Furthermore, there is reason to hope that the health of the race is improving and that its spirit is reviving. The first shock with our civilisation and our overwhelming strength is over. The Maori, beaten in war with us, were not disgraced: though their defeat disheartened them, it did not lead their conquerors to despise them. Again, though they have been deprived of some of their land, and have sold a great part of the rest, the [44]tribes are still great landlords. They hold the fee-simple of nearly seven million acres of land, much of it fertile. This is a large estate for about fifty thousand men, women, and children. Moreover, it is a valuable estate. I daresay its selling price might be rated at a higher figure than the value of the whole of New Zealand when we annexed it. Some of this great property is leased to white tenants; most of it is still retained by the native tribes. So long as they can continue to hold land on a considerable scale they will always have a chance, and may be sure of respectful treatment. At the worst they have had, and still have, three powerful allies. The Government of the colony may sometimes have erred against them, but in the main it has stood between them and the baser and greedier sort of whites. Maori children are educated free of cost. Most of them can now at least read and write English. Quite as useful is the work of the Department of Public Health. If I am not mistaken, it has been the main cause of the lowered Maori death-rate of the last ten years. Then the clergy of more than one Church have always been the Maori’s friends. Weak—too weak—as their hands have been, their voices have been raised again and again on the native’s behalf. Thirdly, the leaders of the temperance movement—one of the most powerful influences in our public life—have done all they can to save the Maori of the interior from the curse of drink. Allies, then, have been fighting for the Maori. Moreover, they are citizens with a vote at the polls and a voice in Parliament. [45]Were one political party disposed to bully the natives, the other might be tempted to befriend them. But the better sort of white has no desire to bully. He may not admit that the brown man is socially his equal; but there is neither hatred nor loathing between the races. A PATAKA In a word, the outlook for the Maori, though still doubtful, is by no means desperate. They will own land; they will collect substantial rents from white tenants; they will be educated; they will retain the franchise. At last they are beginning to learn the laws of sanitation and the uses of ventilation and hospitals. The doctors of the Health Department have persuaded them to pull down hundreds of dirty old huts, are caring for their infants, and are awaking a wholesome distrust of the trickeries of those mischievous conjuror-quacks, the tohungas. Some of these good physicians—Dr. Pomaré, for instance—are themselves Maori. More of his stamp are wanted; also more Maori lawyers like Mr. Apirana Ngata, M.P. Much will turn upon the ability of the race to master co-operative farming. That there is hope of this is shown by the success of the Ngatiporou tribesmen, who in recent years have cleared and sown sixty thousand acres of land, and now own eighty-three thousand sheep, more than three thousand cattle, and more than eight thousand pigs. Only let the sanitary lesson be learned and the industrial problem solved, and the qualities of the Maori may be trusted to do the rest. Their muscular strength and courage, their courtesy and vein of humour, their [46]poetic power and artistic sense, are gifts that make it desirable that the race should survive and win a permanent place among civilised men. Watching the tendencies of New Zealand life and laws to-day, one is tempted to look ahead and think of what country life in the islands may become in a generation or so, soon after the colony has celebrated its hundredth anniversary. It should be a pleasant life, even pleasanter than that of our own time; for more gaps will have been filled up and more angles rubbed off. Limiting laws and graduated taxes will have made an end of the great estates: a land-owner with more than ￡120,000 of real property will probably be unknown. Many land-owners will be richer than that, but it will be because a part of their money is invested in personalty. But in peacefully making an end of latifundia the law-makers will not have succeeded—even if that were their design—in handing over the land to peasants: there will be no sweeping revolution. Much of the soil will still be held by large and substantial farmers,—eight or ten thousand in number, perhaps,—educated men married to wives of some culture and refinement. The process of subdivision will have swelled the numbers and increased the influence of land-holders. The unpopularity which attached itself to the enormous estates will pass away with them. Some of the farming gentlemen of the future will be descendants of members of the English upper and upper-middle classes. Others will be the grandsons of [47]hard-headed Scotch shepherds, English rural labourers, small tenants, or successful men of commerce. Whatever their origin, however, education, intermarriage, and common habits of life will tend to level them into a homogeneous class. Dressed in tweed suits, wide-awake hats, and gaiters, riding good horses or driving in powerful motors, and with their alert, bony faces browned and reddened by sun and wind, they will look and will be a healthy, self-confident, intelligent race. Despite overmuch tea and tobacco, their nerves will seldom be highly strung; the blessed sunshine and the air of the sea and the mountains will save them from that. Moreover, colonial cookery will be better than it has been, and diet more varied. Nor will our farmers trouble the doctors much or poison themselves with patent drugs. Owning anything from half a square mile to six or seven square miles of land, they will be immensely proud of their stake in the country and cheerfully convinced of their value as the backbone of the community. They will not be a vicious lot; early marriage and life in the open air will prevent that. Nor will drunkenness be fashionable, though there will be gambling and probably far too much horse-racing. Varying in size from three or four hundred to four or five thousand acres, their properties, with stock and improvements, may be worth anything from five or six thousand to seventy or eighty thousand pounds, but amongst themselves the smaller and larger owners will meet on terms of easy equality. They will gradually form an educated rural gentry with which the wealthier [48]townspeople will be very proud and eager to mix. A few of them, whose land is rich, may lease it out in small allotments, and try to become squires on a modified English pattern. But most of them will work their land themselves, living on it, riding over it daily, directing their men, and, if need be, lending a hand themselves. That will be their salvation, bringing them as it will into daily contact with practical things and working humanity. Conservative, of course, they will be, and in theory opposed to Socialism, yet assenting from time to time to Socialistic measures when persuaded of their immediate usefulness. Thus they will keep a keen eye on the State railways, steamships, and Department of Agriculture, and develop the machinery of these in their own interests. A few of the richer of them from time to time may find that life in Europe so pleases them—or their wives—that they will sell out and cut adrift from the colony; but there will be no class of absentee owners—growling, heavily taxed, and unpopular. Our working gentlemen will stick to the country, and will be hotly, sometimes boisterously, patriotic, however much they may at moments abuse governments and labour laws. Most of them will be freeholders. Allied with them will be State pastoral tenants—holding smaller runs than now—to be found in the mountains, on the pumice plateau, or where the clay is hungry. Socially these tenants will be indistinguishable from the freeholders. Solitude will be a thing of the past; for roads will [49]be excellent, motors common, and every homestead will have its telephone. And just as kerosene lamps and wax candles superseded the tallow dips of the early settlers, so in turn will electric light reign, not here and there merely, but almost everywhere. Their main recreations will be shooting, fishing, motor-driving, riding, and sailing; for games—save polo—and pure athletics will be left to boys and to men placed lower in the social scale. They will read books, but are scarcely likely to care much about art, classing painting and music rather with such things as wood-carving and embroidery—as women’s work, something for men to look at rather than produce. But they will be gardeners, and their wives will pay the arts a certain homage. The furniture of their houses may seem scanty in European eyes, but will not lack a simple elegance. In their gardens, however, those of them who have money to spare will spend more freely, and on brightening these with colour and sheltering them with soft masses of foliage no mean amount of taste and skill will be lavished. These gardens will be the scenes of much of the most enjoyable social intercourse to be had in the country. Perhaps—who knows?—some painter, happy in a share of Watteau’s light grace or Fragonard’s eye for decorative effect in foliage, may find in the New Zealand garden festivals, with their music, converse, and games, and their framework of beauty, subjects worthy of art. COROMANDEL Socially and financially beneath these country gentlemen, though politically their equals, and in intelligence [50]often not inferior to them, will come the more numerous, rougher and poorer races of small farmers and country labourers. Here will be seen harder lives and a heavier physique—men whose thews and sinews will make Imperial recruiting officers sigh wistfully. Holding anything from twenty or thirty up to two or three hundred acres, the small farmers will have their times of stress and anxiety, when they will be hard put to it to weather a bad season combined with low prices. But their practical skill, strength, and industry, and their ability, at a pinch, to do without all but bare necessaries, will usually pull them through. Moreover, they too will be educated, and no mere race of dull-witted boors. At the worst they will always be able to take to wage-earning for a time, and the smaller of them will commonly pass part of each year in working for others. Sometimes their sons will be labourers, and members of trade unions, and this close contact with organised labour and Socialism will have curious political results. As a class they will be much courted by politicians, and will distrust the rich, especially the rich of the towns. Their main and growing grievance will be the difficulty of putting their sons on the land. For themselves they will be able to live cheaply, and in good years save money; for customs tariffs will be more and more modified to suit them. Some of their children will migrate to the towns; others will become managers, overseers, shepherds, drovers. They will have their share of sport, and from among them will come most of the best athletes of the country, professional[51] and other. Nowhere will be seen a cringing tenantry, hat-touching peasantry, or underfed farm labourers. The country labourers, thoroughly organised, well paid, and active, will yet be not altogether ill-humoured in politics; for, by comparison with the lot of their class in other parts of the world, theirs will be a life of hope, comfort, and confidence. CHAPTER III SPORT AND ATHLETICS Sport in the islands resembles their climate and scenery. To name the distinguishing feature I have once more to employ the well-worn word, variety. Even if we limit the term to the pursuit of game, there is enough of that to enable an idle man to pass his time all the year round. In the autumn there is deer-shooting of the best, and in the early winter the sportsman may turn to wild ducks and swamp-hen. Then wild goats have begun to infest certain high ranges, especially the backbone of the province of Wellington and the mountains in central Otago. In stalking them the hunter may have to exhibit no small share of the coolness of head and stoutness of limb which are brought to play in Europe in the chase of the chamois, ibex, and moufflon. In addition to sureness of foot, the goats have already developed an activity and cunning unknown to their tame ancestors. They will lie or stand motionless and unnoticed among the bewildering rocks, letting the stalker seek for them in vain; and when roused they bound away at a speed [53]that is no mean test of rifle-shooting, particularly when the marksman is hot and panting with fatigue. And when brought to a stand against rocks, or among the roots of mountain beeches, or on the stones of a river-bed, they will show fight and charge dogs and even men. The twisted or wrinkled horns of an old he-goat are not despicable weapons. As the reward of many hours’ hard clambering, varied by wading through ice-cold torrents, and spiced, it may be, with some danger, the goat hunter may secure a long pair of curving horns, or in mid-winter a thick, warm pelt, sometimes, though rarely, pure white. Moreover, he may feel that he is ridding the mountain pastures of an unlicensed competitor of that sacred quadruped, the sheep. Goats are by no means welcome on sheep-runs. Colonel Craddock, it is true, complains that it is not easy to regard them as wild, inasmuch as their coats retain the familiar colours of the domestic animals. He wishes they would change to some distinctive hue. This feeling is perhaps akin to the soldier’s dislike to shooting at men who retain the plain clothes of civilians instead of donning uniform—a repugnance experienced now and then by some of our fighting men in South Africa. Rabbits, of course, as a national scourge, are to be shot at any time, and though on the whole now held in check, are in some districts still only too abundant. Occasionally when elaborate plans are being laid for poisoning a tract of infested country, the owner of the land may wish no interference, and the man with a gun [54]may be warned off as a disturber of a peace intended to lull the rabbit into security. But, speaking generally, any one who wishes to shoot these vermin may find country where he can do so to his heart’s content, and pose the while as a public benefactor. The largest game in the colony are the wild cattle. These, like the goats and pigs, are descendants of tame and respectable farm animals. On many mountain sheep-runs, annual cattle hunts are organised to thin their numbers, for the young bulls become dangerous to lonely shepherds and musterers, and do great damage to fences. Moreover, the wild herds eat their full share of grass, as their fat condition when shot often shows. Generations of life in the hills, fern, and bush have had their effect on runaway breeds. The pigs especially have put on an almost aristocratic air of lean savagery. Their heads and flanks are thinner, their shoulders higher and more muscular, their tusks have become formidable, and their nimbleness on steep hill-sides almost astonishing. A quick dog, or even an athletic man on foot, may keep pace with a boar on the upward track; but when going headlong downhill the pig leaves everything behind. The ivory tusks of an old boar will protrude three or four inches from his jaw, and woe to the dog or horse that feels their razor-edge and cruel sidelong rip. The hide, too, has become inches thick in places, where it would, I should think, be insensible to a hot branding iron. At any rate, the spear or sheath knife that is to pierce it must be held in clever as well as strong hands. Even a rifle-bullet,[55] if striking obliquely, will glance off from the shield on the shoulder of a tough old boar. Wild pigs are among the sheep-farmer’s enemies. Boars and sows alike prey on his young lambs in spring-time, and every year do thousands of pounds’ worth of mischief in certain out-of-the-way country. So here again the sportsman may plume himself upon making war upon a public nuisance. In bygone days these destructive brutes could be found in numbers prowling over open grassy downs, where riders could chase them spear in hand, and where sheep-dogs could bring them to bay. They were killed without exception or mercy for age or sex; and the spectacle of pigs a few weeks old being speared or knifed along with their mothers was not exhilarating. But they were pests, and contracts were often let for clearing a certain piece of country of them. As evidence of their slaughter the contractors had to bring in their long, tufted tails. These the station manager counted with care, for the contract money was at the rate of so much a tail. I have known ninepence to be the reigning price. Nowadays, however, the pigs are chiefly to be found in remote forests, dense manuka scrub, or tall bracken, and if caught in the open it is when they have stolen out by moonlight on a raid upon lambs. The thick fern not only affords them cover but food: “the wild boar out of the wood doth root it up,” and finds in it a clean, sweet diet. Many a combat at close quarters takes place every year in the North Island, in fern from three to six feet high, when some avenging farmer makes an [56]end of the ravager of his flocks. Numbers of the pigs are shot; but shooting, though a practical way of ridding a countryside of them, lacks, of course, the excitement and spice of danger that belong to the chase on foot with heavy knife or straight short sword. Here the hunter trusts both for success and safety to his dogs, who, when cunning and well-trained, will catch a boar by the ears and hold him till he has been stabbed. Ordinary sheep-dogs will not often do this; a cattle-dog, or a strong mongrel with a dash of mastiff or bulldog, is less likely to be shaken off. Good collies, moreover, are valuable animals. Not that sheep-dogs fail in eagerness for the chase; they will often stray off to track pigs on their own account. And any one who has seen and heard them when the boar, brought to bay against some tree trunk, rock, or high bank, makes short mad rushes at his tormentors, will understand how fully the average dog shares the hunter’s zest. CATHEDRAL PEAKS Another though much rarer plague to the flock-owner are the wild dogs. These also prey by night and lie close by day, and if they were numerous the lot of farmers near rough, unoccupied stretches of country would be anxious indeed; for the wild dogs not only kill enough for a meal, but go on worrying and tearing sheep, either for their blood, or for the excitement and pleasure of killing. When three or four of them form a small pack and hunt together, the damage they can do in a few nights is such that the persecuted farmer counts the cost in ten-pound notes. They are often too fast and savage to be stopped by a shepherd’s dogs, and [57]accurate rifle-shooting by moonlight—to say nothing of moonless nights—is not the easiest of accomplishments. Failing a lucky shot, poison is perhaps the most efficacious remedy. Happily these dogs—which are not sprung from the fat, harmless little native curs which the Maori once used to fondle and eat—are almost confined to a few remote tracts. Any notorious pack soon gets short shrift, so there need be no fear of any distinct race of wild hounds establishing itself in the wilderness. Another hostis humani generis, against which every man’s hand or gun may be turned at any season, is the kea. A wild parrot, known to science as Nestor notabilis, the kea nevertheless shows how fierce and hawk-like a parrot can become. His sharp, curving beak, and dark-green plumage, brightened by patches of red under the wings, are parrot-like enough. But see him in his home among the High Alps of the South Island, and he resembles anything rather than the grey African domestic who talks in cages. Nor does he suggest the white cockatoos that may be watched passing in flights above rivers and forest glades in the Australian bush. Unlike his cousin the kaka, who is a forest bird, the kea nests on steep rocky faces or lofty cliffs, between two and five thousand feet above sea-level. If he descends thence to visit the trees of the mountain valleys, it is usually in search of food; though Thomas Potts, the naturalist, says that keas will fly from the western flanks of the Alps to the bluffs on the sea-coast and rest there. One envies them that flight, for it must give them in mid-air [58]an unequalled bird’s-eye view of some of the noblest scenery in the island. Before the coming of the settlers these bold mountaineers supported a harmless life on honey, seeds, insects, and such apologies for fruits as our sub-alpine forests afford. But as sheep spread into the higher pastures of the backbone ranges, the kea discovered the attractions of flesh, and especially of mutton fat. Beginning, probably, by picking up scraps of meat in the station slaughter-yards, he learned to prey on dead sheep, and, finally, to attack living animals. His favourite titbit being kidney fat, he perches on the unhappy sheep and thrusts his merciless beak through the wool into their backs. Strangely enough, it seems to take more than one assault of the kind to kill a sheep; but though forty years have passed since the kea began to practise his trick, the victims do not yet seem to have learned to roll over on their backs and thereby rid themselves of their persecutors. Even the light active sheep of the mountains are, it would seem, more stupid than birds of prey. Ingenious persons have suggested that the kea was led to peck at the sheep’s fleecy backs through their likeness to those odd grey masses of mossy vegetation, called “vegetable sheep,” which dot so many New Zealand mountain slopes, and which birds investigate in search of insects. THE REES VALLEY AND RICHARDSON RANGE Shepherds and station hands wage war on the kea, sometimes encouraged thereto by a bounty; for there are run-holders and local councils who will give one, two, or three shillings for each bird killed. Let a pair of [59]keas be seen near a shepherd’s hut, and the master runs for his gun, while his wife will imitate the bird’s long whining note to attract them downwards; for, venturesome and rapacious as the kea is, he is just as confiding and sociable as the gentler kaka, and can be lured by the same devices. Stoats and weasels, too, harass him on their own account. Thus the bird’s numbers are kept down, and the damage they do to flocks is not on the whole as great as of yore. Indeed, some sceptics doubt the whole story, while other flippant persons suggest that the kea’s ravages are chiefly in evidence when the Government is about to re-assess the rents of the Alpine runs. Against these sneers, however, may be quoted a large, indeed overwhelming, mass of testimony from the pastoral people of the back-country. This evidence seems to show that most keas do not molest sheep. The evil work is done by a few reprobate birds—two or three pairs out of a large flock, perhaps—which the shepherds nickname “butchers.” Only this year I was told of a flock of hoggets which, when penned up in a sheep-yard, were attacked by a couple of beaked marauders, who in a single night killed or wounded scores of them as they stood packed together and helpless. No laws, therefore, protect the kea, nor does any public opinion shield him from the gun in any month. His only defences are inaccessible mountain cliffs and the wild weather of winter and spring-time in the Southern Alps. Acclimatisation has made some woeful mistakes in New Zealand, for is it not responsible for the rabbit [60]and the house-sparrow, the stoat and the weasel? On the other hand, it has many striking successes to boast of in the shape of birds, beasts, and fishes, which commerce and industry would never have brought to the islands in the regular way of business. Of these, one may select the deer among beasts, the trout among fishes, and the pheasant, quail, and starling among birds. Many colonists, it is true, would include skylarks, blackbirds, and thrushes among the good works for which acclimatising societies have to be thanked; but of late years these songsters have been compassed about with a great cloud of hostile witnesses who bear vehement testimony against them as pestilent thieves. No such complaints, however, are made against the red-deer, the handsomest wild animals yet introduced into New Zealand. Indeed, several provinces compete for the honour of having been their first New Zealand home. As a matter of fact, it would appear that as long ago as 1861 a stag and two hinds, the gift of Lord Petre, were turned out on the Nelson hills. Next year another small shipment reached Wellington safely, and were liberated in the Wairarapa. These came from the Royal Park at Windsor, and were secured by the courtesy of the Prince Consort. In 1871 some Scottish red-deer were turned loose in the Otago mountains near Lakes Wanaka and Hawea. In all these districts the deer have spread and thriven mightily, and it is possible that the herds of the colony now number altogether as many as ten thousand. Otago sportsmen boast of the unadulterated Scottish blood of [61]their stags, whose fine heads are certainly worthy of any ancestry. In the Wairarapa the remarkable size of the deer is attributed to the strain of German blood in the animals imported from the Royal Park. As yet, however, the finest head secured in the colony was not carried by a deer belonging to any of the three largest and best-known shooting-grounds of the islands. It was obtained in 1907 from a stag shot by Mr. George Gerard in the Rakaia Gorge in Canterbury. The Rakaia Gorge herd only dates from 1897, and is still small, but astonishing stories are told of some of its heads. At any rate the antlers of Mr. Gerard’s stag have been repeatedly measured. One of them is forty-seven inches long, the other forty-two inches and a half. Deer-stalking in New Zealand can scarcely be recommended as an easy diversion for rich and elderly London gentlemen. It is not sport for the fat and scant-of-breath who may be suffering from sedentary living and a plethora of public banquets. New Zealand hills are steep, new Zealand forests and scrubs are dense or matted. Even the open country of the mountains requires lungs of leather and sinews of wire. The hunter when unlucky cannot solace his evenings with gay human society or with the best cookery to be found in a luxurious, civilised country. If he be an old bush-hand, skilful at camping-out, he may make himself fairly comfortable in a rough way, but that is all. Nor are such things as big drives, or slaughter on a large scale, to be had at any price. Shooting licences are cheap—they can be had from the secretary of an [62]acclimatisation society for from one to three pounds; but the number of stags a man is permitted to shoot in any one district varies from two to six. To get these, weeks of physical labour and self-denial may be required. On the other hand, trustworthy guides may be engaged, and colonial hospitality may vary the rigours of camp life. Then, too, may be counted the delights of a mountain life, the scenery of which excels Scotland, while the freshness of the upland air is brilliant and exhilarating in a fashion that Britons can scarcely imagine. And to counterbalance loneliness, the hunter has the sensation of undisturbed independence and freedom from the trammels of convention, as he looks round him in a true wilderness which the hand of man has not yet gashed or fouled. Wild-fowl shooting ranges from tame butchery of trustful native pigeons and parrots to the pursuit of the nimble godwit, and of that wary bird and strong flyer, the grey duck. The godwit is so interesting a bird to science that one almost wonders that ornithologists do not petition Parliament to have it declared tapu. They tell us that in the Southern winter it migrates oversea and makes no less a journey than that from New Zealand to Northern Siberia by way of Formosa and the Sea of Okhotsk. Even if this distance is covered in easy stages during three months’ time, it seems a great feat of bird instinct, and makes one regret that the godwit so often returns to our tidal inlets only to fall a prey to some keen sportsmen indifferent to its migratory achievements. [63] The only excuse for molesting the wood-pigeon is that he is very good to eat. The kaka parrot, too, another woodlander, makes a capital stew. Neither victim offers the slightest difficulty to the gunner—I cannot say sportsman. Indeed the kaka will flutter round the slayer as he stands with his foot on the wing of a wounded bird, a cruel but effective decoy-trick. Another native bird easy to hit on the wing is the queer-looking pukeko, a big rail with bright-red beak and rich-blue plumage. The pukeko, however, though he flies so heavily, can run fast and hide cleverly. Moreover, in addition to being good for the table, he is a plague to the owners of standing corn. In order to reach the half-ripe ears he beats down the tops of a number of stalks, and so constructs a light platform on which he stands and moves about, looking like a feathered stilt-walker, and feasting the while to his heart’s content. Grain-growers, therefore, show him no mercy, and follow him into his native swamps, where the tall flax bushes, toé-toé, and giant bulrushes furnish even so large a bird with ample cover. When, however, a dog puts him up, and he takes to the air, he is the easiest of marks, for any one capable of hitting a flying haystack can hit a pukeko. Very different are the wild ducks. They soon learn the fear of man and the fowling-piece. They are, moreover, carefully protected both by law and by public opinion among sportsmen. So they are still to be found in numbers on lakes and lagoons by the sea-coast as well as in the sequestered interior. Large flocks of [64]them, for example, haunt Lake Ellesmere, a wide brackish stretch of shallow water not many miles from the city of Christchurch. But in such localities all the arts of the English duck-hunter have to be employed, and artificial cover, decoys, and first-rate markmanship must be brought into play. The grey duck, the shoveller, and teal, both black and red, all give good sport. Strong of flight and well defended by thick, close-fitting suits of feathers, they need quick, straight shooting. A long shot at a scared grey duck, as, taking the alarm, he makes off down the wind, is no bad test of eye and hand. In return, they are as excellent game-birds dead as living. This last is more than can be said for the handsomest game-bird of the country, the so-called paradise duck. Its plumage, so oddly contrasting in the dark male and reddish white-headed female, makes it the most easily recognised of wild-fowl. It also has developed a well-founded suspiciousness of man and his traps, and so manages to survive and occupy mountain lakes and valleys in considerable flocks. Unlike the grey species which are found beyond the Tasman Sea, the smaller and more delicately framed blue duck is peculiar to the islands. It is neither shy nor common, and, as it does no harm to any sort of crop, law and public opinion might, one would think, combine to save it from the gun and leave it to swim unmolested among the boulders and rocks of its cold streams and dripping mountain gorges. Nature did not furnish New Zealand much better with fresh-water fish than with quadrupeds: her allowance[65] of both was curiously scanty. A worthless little bull-trout was the most common fish, and that white men found uneatable, though the Maoris made of it a staple article of diet. Large eels, indeed, are found in both lakes and rivers, and where they live in clear, clean, running water, are good food enough; but the excellent whitebait and smelts which go up the tidal rivers can scarcely be termed dwellers in fresh water; and for the rest, the fresh waters used to yield nothing but small crayfish. Here our acclimatisers had a fair field before them, and their efforts to stock it have been on the whole successful, though the success has been chequered. For fifty years they have striven to introduce the salmon, taking much care and thought, and spending many thousands of pounds on repeated experiments; but the salmon will not thrive in the southern rivers. The young, when hatched out and turned adrift, make their way down to the sea, but never return themselves. Many legends are current of their misadventures in salt water. They are said, for instance, to be pursued and devoured by the big barracouta, so well known to deep-sea fishermen in the southern ocean. But every explanation of the disappearance of the young salmon still lacks proof. The fact is undoubted, but its cause may be classed with certain other fishy mysteries of our coast. Why, for instance, does that delectable creature the frost-fish cast itself up on our beaches in the coldest weather, committing suicide for the pleasure of our gourmets? Why does that cream-coloured playfellow of our [66]coasters, Pelorus Jack, dart out to frolic round the bows of steamships as they run through the French Pass? AT THE HEAD OF LAKE WAKATIPU But if our acclimatisers have failed with salmon, fortune has been kind to their efforts with trout. Forty years ago there was no such fish in the islands. Now from north to south the rivers and lakes are well stocked, while certain waters may be said with literal truth to swarm with them. Here, they are the brown trout so well known to anglers at home; there, they are the rainbow kind, equally good for sport. At present the chief local peculiarity of both breeds seems to be the size to which they frequently attain. They are large enough in the rivers; and in many lakes they show a size and weight which could throw into the shade old English stories of giant pike. Fish of from fifteen to twenty-five pounds in weight are frequently captured by anglers. Above the higher of these figures, catches with the rod are rare. Indeed, the giant trout of the southern lakes will not look at a fly. Perhaps the best sport in lakes anywhere is to be had with the minnow. Trolling from steam-launches is a favourite amusement at Roto-rua. It seems generally agreed that in the rivers trout tend to decrease in size as they increase in numbers. The size, however, still remains large enough to make an English angler’s mouth water. So it has come about that the fame of New Zealand fishing has gone abroad into many lands, and that men come with rod and line from far and near to try our waters. Fishing in these is not always child’s play. [67]Most of the streams are swift and chilling; the wader wants boots of the stoutest, and, in default of guidance, must trust to his own wits to protect him among rapids, sharp rocks, and deep swirling pools. He may, of course, obtain sport in spots where everything is made easy for the visitor, as in the waters near Roto-rua. Or he may cast a fly in the willow-bordered, shingly rivers of Canterbury, among fields and hedgerows as orderly and comfortable-looking as anything in the south of England. But much of the best fishing in the islands is rougher and more solitary work, and, big as the baskets to be obtained are, the sport requires enthusiasm as well as skill. Moreover, rules have to be observed. Licences are cheap enough, but the acclimatisation societies are wisely despotic, and regulate many things, from the methods of catching to the privilege of sale. In the main, the satisfactory results speak for themselves, though of course a certain amount of poaching and illegal catching goes on. In certain mountain lakes, by the way, one rule—that against spearing—has to be relaxed; otherwise the huge trout would prey upon their small brethren to such an extent as to stop all increase. So occasionally an exciting night’s sport may be enjoyed from a boat in one or other of the Alpine lakes. The boatmen prepare a huge torch of sacking or sugar-bags wound round a pole and saturated with tar or kerosene. Then the boat is rowed gently into six or eight feet of water, and the flaring torch held steadily over the surface. Soon the big trout come swarming to the light, diving under [68]the boat, knocking against the bow, and leaping and splashing. The spearman standing erect makes thrust after thrust, now transfixing his prey, now missing his aim, or it may be, before the night’s work is done, losing his footing and falling headlong into the lake, amid a roar of laughter from boat and shore. NORTH FIORD, LAKE TE-ANAU The merest sketch of sports and amusements in New Zealand demands more space for the horse than I can afford to give. My countrymen are not, as is sometimes supposed, a nation of riders, any more than they are a nation of marksmen; but the proportion of men who can shoot and ride is far greater among them than in older countries. The horse is still a means of locomotion and a necessity of life everywhere outside the towns, while even among townsmen a respectable minority of riders can be found. How far the rapid increase of motors and cycles of all kinds is likely to displace the horse is a matter for speculation. At present, perhaps, the machine is more likely to interfere with the carriage-horse than the saddle-horse. Nor will I hazard an opinion as to the place that might be held by New Zealanders in a competition between riding nations. Australians, I fancy, consider their stockmen and steeplechase-riders superior to anything of the kind in our islands. And in a certain kind of riding—that through open bush after cattle, amongst standing and fallen timber—I can scarcely imagine any horsemen in the world surpassing the best Australian stock-riders. On the other hand, in a hilly country, and on wet, slippery ground, New Zealanders and New Zealand [69]horses show cat-like qualities, which would puzzle Australians, whose experience has been gathered chiefly on dry plains and easy downs. Comparisons apart, the Dominion certainly rears clever riders and good horses. A meet of New Zealand harriers would not be despised even by Leicestershire fox-hunters. To begin with, the hare of the Antipodes, like so many other European animals there, has gained in size and strength, and therefore in pace. The horses, if rather lighter than English, have plenty of speed and staying-power, and their owners are a hard-riding lot. Gorse fences, though not, perhaps, so formidable as they look at first sight, afford stiff jumping. And if a spice of danger be desired, the riders who put their horses at them may always speculate upon the chances of encountering hidden wire. The legend that New Zealand horses jump wire almost as a matter of course has only a foundation of fact; some of them do, many of them do not. Nor are the somewhat wild stories of meets where unkempt horses with flowing manes and tails and coats never touched by brush or curry-comb, are bestridden by riders as untidy, to be taken for gospel now. Very few of those who follow the harriers in New Zealand at all resemble dog-fanciers bestriding mustangs. True, they do not dress in the faultless fashion of those English masters of fox-hounds whose portraits flame on the walls of the Royal Academy. Some at least of them do their own grooming. Yet, speaking generally, the impression left is neat and workmanlike, and is none the worse for a certain [70]simplicity and even a touch of roughness. The meets are pleasant gatherings, all the more so because they are neither overcrowded, nor are there too many of them. Much the same may be said of the polo matches, where good riding and good ponies are to be seen. Twenty years ago trained ponies could be bought in the islands for ￡25 apiece. Now they, in common with all horseflesh, are a good deal more costly. However, sport in New Zealand, though more expensive than of yore, is still comparatively cheap, and that, and the absence of crowds, are among its chief attractions. As in other countries, there are tens of thousands of men and women who never ride a horse, but who find in horse-racing—or in attending race-meetings—an absorbing amusement. The number of race-meetings held in both islands is very great. Flat-racing, hurdle-racing, steeplechasing, and trotting,—all these can assemble their votaries in thousands. Sportsmen and others think little of traversing hundreds of miles of land or sea to attend one of the larger meetings. Ladies muster at these almost as strongly as men. As for the smaller meetings up-country, they, of course, are social gatherings of the easiest and most cheerful sort. In bygone years they not seldom degenerated towards evening into uproarious affairs. Nowadays, however, race-meetings, small and large, are marked by a sobriety which, to a former generation, might have seemed wasteful and depressing. To a stranger the chief features of the races appear to be their number, [71]the size of the stakes, the average quality of the horses, and the working of the totalisator. This last, a betting machine, is in use wherever the law will allow it, and is a source of profit both to the Government and the racing clubs. The Government taxes its receipts, and the clubs retain ten per cent of them; hence the handsome stakes offered by the jockey club committees. The sum that passes through these machines in the course of the year is enormous, and represents, in the opinion of many, a national weakness and evil. In defence of the totalisator it is argued that the individual wagers which it registers are small, and that it has almost put an end to a more ruinous and disastrous form of betting, that with bookmakers. It is certainly a popular institution with an odd flavour of democracy about it, for it has levelled down betting and at the same time extended it. Indeed, it almost seems to exhaust the gambling element in New Zealand life; for, as compared with other nations, my countrymen are not especially addicted to throwing away their money on games of chance. Passing from what is commonly called sport to athletic games, we tread safer ground. One of these games, football, is quite as popular as horse-racing—indeed, among boys and lads more popular; and whatever may be its future, football has up to the present time been a clean, honest, genuine game, free from professionalism and excessive gambling. The influence of the New Zealand Rugby union, with its net-work of federations and clubs, has been and still is a power for [72]good; and though it is true that the famous and successful visit of the “All Black” team to Great Britain has lately been parodied by a professional tour in England and Wales, there is still hope that professionalism may be held at bay. For, as yet, the passion for football, which is perhaps the main peculiarity of New Zealand athletics, is a simple love of the game, and of the struggles and triumphs attending it. The average New Zealand lad and young man looks for nothing but a good hard tussle in which his side may win and he, if luck wills it, may distinguish himself. As yet, money-making scarcely enters into his thoughts. The day may come in New Zealand, as it has in England, when bands of skilled mercenaries, recruited from far and near, may play in the name of cities and districts, the population of which turns out to bet pounds or pence on their paid dexterity. But, as yet, a football match in the colony is just a whole-hearted struggle between manly youths whose zeal for their club and town is not based on the receipt of a weekly stipend. CHRISTCHURCH Why cricket should lag so far behind football seems at first sight puzzling; for few countries would seem better suited to the most scientific of out-door games than the east and centre of New Zealand, with their sunny but not tropical climate, and their fresh sward of good green grass. Two reasons, probably, account for the disparity. To begin with, cricket, at any rate first-class cricket, takes up far more time than football. Its matches last for days; even practice at the nets consumes hours. Athletics in New Zealand are the [73]exercise and recreation of men who have to work for a livelihood. The idle amateur and the trained professional are equally rare: you see neither the professional who plays to live, nor the gentleman who lives to play. The shorter hours of the ordinary working day, helped by the longer measure of daylight allowed by nature, enable a much larger class than in England to give a limited amount of time to athletics. But the time is limited, and first-class cricket therefore, with its heavy demands on the attention of its votaries, suffers accordingly. Cricket, again, is a summer game, and in summer the middle or poorer classes have a far larger variety of amusements to turn to than in winter. Sailing, rowing, cycling, lawn tennis, fishing, picnics by the sea or in the forest, mountain-climbing, and tramps in the wilderness, all compete with cricket to a much greater degree than with football. Indeed the horse and the gun are well-nigh the only dangerous rivals that football has, and they are confined to a much more limited class. So while New Zealand stands at the head of the list of countries that play the Rugby game, our cricketers could at the best furnish an eleven able to play a moderately strong English county. The game does, indeed, make headway, but is eclipsed both by the pre-eminent local success of football, and by the triumphs of cricket in Australia and South Africa. Meanwhile, cricket matches in New Zealand, if not Olympian contests, are at any rate pleasant games. One is not sure whether the less strenuous sort of cricket, when played in bright weather among surroundings[74] where good-fellowship and sociability take the place of the excitement of yelling thousands, is not, after all, the better side of a noble game. CANOE HURDLE RACE WAIHI BAY, WHANGAROA HARBOUR As rowing men know, New Zealand has produced more than one sculler of repute, and at this moment Webb, of the Wanganui River, holds the title of champion of the world. With this development of sculling, there is a curiously contrasted lack of especial excellence in other forms of rowing. Indeed one is inclined to predict that aquatic skill in the islands will, in days to come, display itself rather in sailing. The South Pacific is an unquiet ocean, and long stretches of our coast are iron-bound cliffs or monotonous beaches. But to say nothing of half-a-hundred large lakes, there are at least three coastal regions which seem made for yachting. The most striking of these, but one better adapted for steam yachts than for sailing or small open craft, is at the butt-end of the South Island, and includes the fiords of the south-west coast and the harbours of eastern Stewart Island. Between the two Bluff Harbour lies handy as the yachtsman’s headquarters. The second of the three chief yachting grounds of the colony has been placed by nature on the southern side of Cook’s Strait among a multitude of channels, islands, and sheltered bays, accessible alike from Wellington, Nelson, or Picton, and affording a delightful change and refuge from bleak, wind-smitten Cook’s Strait. The best, because the most easily enjoyed of the three, is the Hauraki Gulf, studded with islands, fringed with pleasant beaches and inviting [75]coves, and commanded by the most convenient of harbours in the shape of the Waitemata. Nor, charming and spacious as the gulf is, need the Auckland yachtsmen limit themselves to it. Unless entirely wedded to smooth water, they can run northward past the Little Barrier Island and visit that fine succession of beautiful inlets, Whangarei, the Bay of Islands, and Whangaroa. All lie within easy reach, and all are so extensive and so picturesquely diversified with cliffs, spurs, bays, and islets, that any yachtsman able to navigate a cutter with reasonable skill should ask for nothing better than a summer cruise to and about them. CHAPTER IV IN THE FOREST In one of the rambling myths of the Maori we are told how the hero Rata, wishing to build a canoe, went into the forest and felled a tree. In the old days of stone axes, tree-felling was not the work of an hour, but the toil of days. Great, therefore, was Rata’s vexation when, on returning to the scene of his labours, he found that the tree had been set up again by magic, and was standing without a trace of injury. Much perplexed, the woodcutter thereupon sought out a famous goddess or priestess, who told him that the restoration was the work of the Hakaturi, or wood-fairies, whom he must propitiate with certain ceremonies and incantations. Rata therefore once more cut the tree down, and having done so, hid himself close by. Presently from the thickets there issued a company of small bow-legged people, who, surrounding the fallen tree, began to chant to it somewhat as follows:— Ah! ’tis Rata; he is felling Tané’s forest, our green dwelling. Yet we cry, and lo, upspring [77] Chips and splinters quivering. Leap together—life will hold you! Cling together—strength will fold you! Yes—the tree-god’s ribs are bound Now by living bark around. Yes—the trembling wood is seen, Standing straight and growing green. THE RETURN OF THE WAR CANOE And, surely enough, as they sang, the severed trunk rose and reunited, and every flake and chip of bark and wood flew together straightway. Then Rata, calling out to them, followed the injunctions given him. They talked with him, and in the end he was told to go away and return next morning. When he came back, lo! in the sunshine lay a new war-canoe, glorious with black and red painting, and tufts of large white feathers, and with cunning spirals on prow and tall stern-post, carved as no human hand could carve them. In this canoe he sailed over the sea to attack and destroy the murderer of his father. Lovers of the New Zealand forest, who have to live in an age when axe and fire are doing their deadly work so fast, must regret that the fairies, defenders of trees, have now passed away. Of yore when the Maori were about to fell a tree they made propitiatory offerings to Tané and his elves, at any rate when the tree was one of size. For, so Tregear tells us, they distinguished between the aristocracy of the forest and the common multitude. Totara and rimu were rangatira, or gentlemen to whom sacrifice must be offered, while underbrush might be hacked and slashed [78]without apology. So it would seem that when Cowley was writing the lines— Hail, old patrician trees so great and good; Hail, ye plebeian underwood! he was echoing a class distinction already hit upon by the fancy of tattooed savages in an undiscovered island. Now all things are being levelled. Great Tané is dead, and the children of the tree-god have few friends. Perhaps some uncommercial botanist or misliked rhymester may venture on a word for them; or some much-badgered official may mark out a reserve in fear and trembling. Canon Stack, who knew the Maori of the South Island so well, says that half a century ago the belief in fairies was devout, and that he often conversed with men who were certain that they had seen them. One narrator in particular had caught sight of a band of them at work amid the curling mists of a lofty hill-top where they were building a stockaded village. So evident was the faith of the man in the vision he described that Canon Stack was forced to think that he had seen the forms of human builders reflected on the mountain-mist, after the fashion of the spectre of the Brocken. OKAHUMOKO BAY, WHANGAROA For myself, I could not have the heart to apply scientific analysis to our Maori fairy-tales, all too brief and scanty as they are. It is, doubtless, interesting to speculate on the possible connections of these with the existence of shadowy tribes who may have inhabited parts of New Zealand in the distant centuries, and been [79]driven into inaccessible mountains and entangled woods by the Maori invader. To me, however, the legends seem to indicate a belief, not in one supernatural race, but in several. In Europe, of course, the Northern traditions described beings of every sort of shape, from giants and two-headed ogres to minute elves almost too small to be seen. And in the same continent, under clearer skies, were the classic myths of nymphs and woodland deities, human in shape, but of a beauty exceeding that of mankind. So Keats could dream of enchanting things that happened Upon a time before the fa?ry broods Drove nymph and satyr from the prosperous woods, Before King Oberon’s bright diadem, Sceptre and mantle clasped with dewy gem, Frightened away the dryads and the fauns From rushes green and brakes and cowslipp’d lawns. In much the same way do the Maori stories vary. One tells us of giant hunters attended by two-headed dogs. Another seems to indicate a tiny race of wood elves or goblins. Elsewhere the Maori story-teller explains that fairies were much like human beings, but white-skinned, and with red or yellow hair, nearly resembling the Pakeha. They haunted the sea-shore and the recesses of the hill-forests, whither they would decoy the incautious Maori by their singing. The sound of their cheerful songs was sweet and clear, and in the night-time the traveller would hear their voices among the trees, now on this side, now on that; or the notes would seem to rise near at hand, and then recede and [80]fall, dying away on the distant hill-sides. Their women were beautiful, and more than one Maori ancestral chief possessed himself of a fairy wife. On the other hand, the fairies would carry off the women and maidens of the Maori, or even, sometimes, little children, who were never seen again, though their voices were heard by sorrowing mothers calling in the air over the tree-tops. MAORI FISHING PARTY Sir George Grey was the first, I think, to write down any of the Maori fairy-tales; at any rate, two of the best of them are found in his book. One concerns the adventure of the chief Kahukura, who, walking one evening on the sea-shore in the far north of the North Island, saw strange footprints and canoe marks on the sands. Clearly fishermen had been there; but their landing and departure must have taken place in the night, and there was something about the marks they had left that was puzzling and uncanny. Kahukura went his way pondering, and “held fast in his heart what he had seen.” So after nightfall back he came to the spot, and after a while the shore was covered with fairies. Canoes were paddled to land dragging nets full of mackerel, and all were busy in securing the fish. Kahukura mingled with the throng, and was as busy as any, picking up fish and running a string of flax through their gills. Like many Maori chiefs, he was a light-complexioned man, so fair that in the starlight the fairies took him for one of themselves. Morning approached, and the fishermen were anxious to finish their work; but Kahukura contrived [81]by dropping and scattering fish to impede and delay them until dawn. With the first streaks of daylight the fairies discovered that a man was among them, and fled in confusion by sea and land, leaving their large seine net lying on the shore. It is true that the net was made of rushes; but the pattern and knotting were so perfect and ingenious that the Maori copied them, and that is how they learned to make fishing-nets. Another chief, Te Kanawa, fell in with the fairies high up on a wooded mountain near the river Waikato. This encounter also, we are assured, took place long ago, before the coming of white men. Te Kanawa had been hunting the wingless kiwi, and, surprised by night, had to encamp in the forest. He made his bed of fern among the buttresses at the foot of a large pukatea-tree, and, protected by these and his fire, hoped to pass the night comfortably. Soon, however, he heard voices and footsteps, and fairies began to circle round about, talking and laughing, and peeping over the buttresses of the pukatea at the handsome young chief. Their women openly commented on his good looks, jesting with each other at their eagerness to examine him. Te Kanawa, however, was exceedingly terrified, and thought of nothing but of how he might propitiate his inquisitive admirers and save himself from some injury at their hands. So he took from his neck his hei-tiki, or charm of greenstone, and from his ears his shark’s-tooth ornaments, and hung them upon a wand which he held out as an [82]offering to the fairy folk. At once these turned to examine the gifts with deep interest. According to one version of the story they made patterns of them, cut out of wood and leaves. According to another, they, by enchantment, took away the shadows or resemblances of the prized objects. In either case they were satisfied to leave the tangible ornaments with their owner, and disappeared, allowing Te Kanawa to make his way homeward. That he did with all possible speed, at the first glimpse of daylight, awe-struck but gratified by the good nature of the elves. CARVED HOUSE, OHINEMUTU A third story introduces us to a husband whose young wife had been carried off and wedded by a fairy chief. For a while she lived with her captor in one of the villages of the fairies into which no living man has ever penetrated, though hunters in the forest have sometimes seen barriers of intertwined wild vines, which are the outer defences of an elfin pa. The bereaved husband at last bethought himself of consulting a famous tohunga, who, by powerful incantations, turned the captured wife’s thoughts back to her human husband, and restored the strength of her love for him. She fled, therefore, from her fairy dwelling, met her husband, who was lurking in the neighbourhood, and together they regained their old home. Thither, of course, the fairies followed them in hot pursuit. But the art of the tohunga was equal to the danger. He had caused the escaped wife and the outside of her house to be streaked and plastered with red ochre. [83]He had also instructed the people of the village to cook food on a grand scale, so that the air should be heavy with the smell of the cooking at the time of the raid of the fairies. The sight of red ochre and the smell of cooked food are so loathsome to the fairy people that they cannot endure to encounter them. So the baffled pursuers halted, fell back and vanished, and the wife remained peacefully with her husband, living a happy Maori life. The Maori might well worship Tané, the tree-god, who held up the sky with his feet and so let in light upon the sons of earth. For the forest supplied them with much more than wood for their stockades, canoes, and utensils. It sheltered the birds which made such an important part of the food of the Maori, living as they did in a land without four-footed beasts. Tame as the birds were, the fowlers, on their side, were without bows and arrows, and knew nothing of the blow-gun, which would have been just the weapon for our jungles. They had to depend mainly on snaring and spearing, and upon the aid of decoys. Though the snaring was ingenious enough, it was the spearing that needed especial skill and was altogether the more extraordinary. The spears were made of the tawa-tree, and while they were but an inch in thickness, were thirty feet long or even longer. One tree could only supply two of these slim weapons, which, after metals became known to the Maori, were tipped with iron. When not in use they were lashed or hung in a tree. Taking one in hand the fowler would climb up to a platform [84]prepared in some tree, the flowers or berries of which were likely to attract wild parrots or pigeons. Then the spear was pushed upwards, resting against branches. All the fowler’s art was next exerted to draw down the birds by his decoys to a perch near the spear-point. That accomplished, a quick silent stab did the rest. Many living white men have seen this dexterous feat performed, though it must be almost a thing of the past now. As soon as the Maori began to obtain guns, and that is ninety years ago, they endeavoured to shoot birds with them. Having a well-founded distrust of their marksmanship, they would repeat as closely as possible the tactics they had found useful in spearing. Climbing silently and adroitly into the trees and as near their pigeon or kaka as possible, they waited until the muzzle of the gun was within a foot or two of the game, and then blew the unfortunate bird from the branch. Major Cruise witnessed this singular performance in the year 1820. Birds were among the delicacies which the Maori preserved for future use, storing them in tightly-bound calabashes, where they were covered with melted fat. Their favourite choice for this process was a kind of puffin or petrel, the mutton-bird, which goes inland to breed, and nests in underground burrows. A BUSH ROAD Though no great traveller, I have seen beautiful landscapes in fourteen or fifteen countries, and yet hold to it that certain views of our forest spreading round lakes and over hills and valleys, peaceful and unspoiled, [85]are sights as lovely as are to be found. Whence comes their complete beauty? Of course, there are the fine contours of mountain and vale, cliff and shore. And the abundance of water, swirling in torrents, leaping in waterfalls, or winding in lakes or sea-gulfs, aids greatly. But to me the magic of the forest—I speak of it where you find it still unspoiled—comes first from its prodigal life and continual variety. Why, asks a naturalist, do so many of us wax enthusiastic over parasites and sentimental over lianas? Because, I suppose, these are among the most striking signs of the astonishing vitality and profusion which clothe almost every yard of ground and foot of bark, and, gaining foothold on the trees, invade the air itself. Nature there is not trimmed and supervised, weeded out, swept and garnished, as in European woods. She lets herself go, expelling nothing that can manage to find standing room or breathing space. Every rule of human forestry and gardening appears to be broken, and the result is an easy triumph for what seems waste and rank carelessness. Trees tottering with age still dispute the soil with superabundant saplings, or, falling, lean upon and are held up by undecaying neighbours. Dead trunks cumber the ground, while mosses, ferns, and bushes half conceal them. Creepers cover matted thickets, veiling their flanks and netting them into masses upon which a man may sit, and a boy be irresistibly tempted to walk. Aloft, one tree may grow upon another, and itself bear the burden of a third. Parasites twine round parasites, dangle in purposeless ropes, or [86]form loops and swings in mid-air. Some are bare, lithe and smooth-stemmed; others trail curtains of leaves and pale flowers. Trees of a dozen species thrust their branches into each other, till it is a puzzle to tell which foliage belongs to this stem, which to that; and flax-like arboreal colonists fill up forks and dress bole and limbs fantastically. Adventurous vines ramble through the interspaces, linking trunk to trunk and complicating the fine confusion. All around is a multitudinous, incessant struggle for life; but it goes on in silence, and the impression left is not regret, but a memory of beauty. The columnar dignity of the great trees contrasts with the press and struggle of the undergrowth, with the airy lace-work of fern fronds, and the shafted grace of the stiffer palm-trees. From the moss and wandering lycopodium underfoot, to the victorious climber flowering eighty feet overhead, all is life, varied endlessly and put forth without stint. Of course there is death at work around you, too; but who notes the dying amid such a riot of energy? The earth itself smells moist and fresh. What seems an odour blended of resin, sappy wood, damp leaves, and brown tinder, hangs in the air. But the leafy roof is lofty enough, and the air cool and pure enough, to save you from the sweltering oppressiveness of an equatorial jungle. The dim entanglement is a quiet world, shut within itself and full of shadows. Yet, in bright weather, rays of sunshine shoot here and there against brown and grey bark, and clots of golden light, dripping through the foliage, dance on vivid mosses and the root-enlacement of the earth. [87] “The forest rears on lifted arms Its leafy dome whence verdurous light Shakes through the shady depths and warms Proud trunk and stealthy parasite. There where those cruel coils enclasp The trees they strangle in their grasp.” When the sky is overcast the evergreen realm darkens. In one mood you think it invitingly still and mysterious; in another, its tints fade to a common dulness, and gloom fills its recesses. Pattering raindrops chill enthusiasm. The mazy paradise is filled with “the terror of unending trees.” The silence grows unnatural, the rustle of a chance bird startles. Anything from a python to a jaguar might be hidden in labyrinths that look so tropical. In truth there is nothing there larger than a wingless and timid bird; nothing more dangerous than a rat poaching among the branches in quest of eggs; nothing more annoying than a few sandflies. The European’s eye instinctively wanders over the foliage in search of likenesses to the flora of northern lands. He may think he detects a darker willow in the tawa, a brighter and taller yew in the matai, a giant box in the rata, a browner laburnum in the kowhai, a slender deodar in the rimu, and, by the sea, a scarlet-flowering ilex in the pohutu-kawa. The sub-alpine beech forests are indeed European, inferior though our small-leaved beeches are to the English. You see in them wide-spreading branches, an absence of underbrush and luxuriant climbers, and a steady repetition of the [88]same sort and condition of tree, all recalling Europe. Elsewhere there is little that does this. In the guide-books you constantly encounter the word “pine,” but you will look round in vain for anything like the firs of Scotland, the maritime pines of Gascony, or the black and monotonous woods of Prussia. The nikau-palm, tree-fern, and palm-lily, the serpentine and leafy parasites, and such extraordinary foliage as that of the lance-wood, rewa-rewa, and two or three kinds of panax, add a hundred distinctive details to the broad impression of difference. AMONG THE KAURI I suppose that most New Zealanders, if asked to name the finest trees of their forest, would declare for the kauri and the totara. Some might add the puriri to these. But then the average New Zealander is a practical person and is apt to estimate a forest-tree in terms of sawn timber. Not that a full-grown kauri is other than a great and very interesting tree. Its spreading branches and dark crown of glossy-green leaves, lifted above its fellows of the woodland, like Saul’s head above the people, catch and hold the eye at once. And the great column of its trunk impresses you like the pillar of an Egyptian temple, not by classic grace, but by a rotund bulk, sheer size and weight speaking of massive antiquity. It is not their height that makes even the greatest of the kauri tribe remarkable, for one hundred and fifty feet is nothing extraordinary. But their picked giants measure sixty-six feet in circumference, with a diameter that, at least in one case, has reached twenty-four. [89]Moreover, the smooth grey trunks rise eighty or even a hundred feet without the interruption of a single branch. And when you come to the branches, they are as large as trees: some have been measured and found to be four feet through. Then, though the foliage is none too dense, each leaf is of a fair size. From their lofty roof above your head to the subsoil below your feet, all is odorous of resin. Leaves and twigs smell of it; it forms lumps in the forks, oozes from the trunk and mixes with the earth—the swelling humus composed of flakes of decayed bark dropped through the slow centuries. There are still kauri pines in plenty that must have been vigorous saplings when William the Norman was afforesting south-western Hampshire. The giants just spoken of are survivors from ages far more remote. For they may have been tall trees when cedars were being hewn on Lebanon for King Solomon’s temple. And then the kauri has a pathetic interest: it is doomed. At the present rate of consumption the supply will not last ten years. Commercially it is too valuable to be allowed to live undisturbed, and too slow of growth to make it worth the while of a money-making generation to grow it. Even the young “rickers” are callously slashed and burned away. Who regards a stem that may be valuable a quarter of a century hence, or a seedling that will not be worth money during the first half of the twentieth century? So the kauri, like the African elephant, the whale, and the bison, seems likely to become a rare [90]survival. It will be kept to be looked at in a few State reserves. Then men may remember that once upon a time virtually all the town of Auckland was built of kauri timber, and that Von Hochstetter, riding through a freshly burned kauri “bush,” found the air charged with a smell as of frankincense and myrrh. Nor is the totara other than a king of the woods, albeit a lesser monarch than the giant. Its brown shaggy trunk looks best, to my thinking, when wrapped in a rough overcoat of lichens, air-lilies, climbing ferns, lianas, and embracing rootlets. Such a tree, from waist to crown, is often a world of shaggy greenery, where its own bristling, bushy foliage may be lit up by the crimson of the florid rata, or the starry whiteness of other climbers. The beauty of the totara is not external only. Its brown wood is handsome, and a polished piece of knotty or mottled totara almost vies with mottled kauri in the cabinet-maker’s esteem. For utility no wood in the islands, perhaps, surpasses that of the puriri, the teak of the country. One is tempted to say that it should be made a penal offence to burn a tree at once so serviceable and so difficult to replace. A tall puriri, too, with its fresh-green leaves and rose-tinted flowers, is a cheering sight, especially when you see, as you sometimes do, healthy specimens which have somehow managed to survive the cutting down and burning of the other forest trees, and stand in fields from which the bush has been cleared away. POHUTUKAWA IN BLOOM, WHANGAROA HARBOUR Yet none of the three trees named seems to me to [91]equal in beauty or distinction certain other chieftains of the forest. Surely the cedar-like rimu—silv? filia nobilis,—with its delicate drooping foliage and air of slender grace, and the more compact titoki with polished curving leaves and black-and-crimson berries, are not easily to be matched. And surpassing even these in brilliance and strangeness are a whole group of the iron-heart family, ratas with flowers blood-red or white, and their cousin the “spray-sprinkled” pohutu-kawa. The last-named, like the kauri, puriri, tawari, and tarairi, is a northerner, and does not love the South Island, though a stray specimen or two have been found in Banks’ Peninsula. But the rata, though shunning the dry mid-eastern coast of the South Island, ventures much nearer the Antarctic. The variety named lucida grows in Stewart Island, and forms a kind of jungle in the Auckland Isles, where, beaten on its knees by the furious gales, it goes down, so to speak, on all fours, and, lifting only its crown, spreads in bent thickets in a climate as wet and stormy as that of the moors of Cumberland. The rata of the south would, but for its flowers, be an ordinary tree enough, very hard, very slow in growing, and carrying leaves somewhat like those of the English box-tree. But when in flower in the later summer, it crowns the western forests with glory, and lights up mountain passes and slopes with sheets of crimson. The splendour of the flower comes not from its petals, but from what Kirk the botanist calls “the fiery crimson filaments of its innumerable stamens,” standing [92]as they do in red crests, or hanging downward in feathery fringes. To win full admiration the rata must be seen where it spreads in profusion, staining cliffs, sprinkling the dark-green tree-tops with blood, and anon seeming in the distance to be massed in cushions of soft red. Trees have been found bearing golden flowers, but such are very rare. The rata lucida does not climb other trees. Another and even brighter species, the florid rata, is a climbing plant, and so are two white-flowered kinds named albiflora and scandens, both beautiful in their way, but lacking the distinction of the blood-hued species, for white is only too common a colour in our forest flora. The florid rata, on the other hand, is perhaps the most brilliant of the tribe. Winding its way up to the light, it climbs to the green roof of the forest, and there flaunts a bold scarlet like the crest of some gay bird of the Tropics. It is a snake-like vine, and, vine like, yields a pale rose-tinted drink, which with a little make-believe may be likened to rough cider. Rata wine, however, is not crushed from grapes, but drawn from the vine-stem. Mr. Laing states that as much as a gallon and a half of liquid has dripped from a piece of the stem four feet long, after it had been cut and kept dry for three weeks. But the most famous rata is neither the vine nor the tree of the south. It is the tree-killing tree of the North Island, the species named robusta. Its flowers are richer than the southerner’s, and whereas the latter is not often more than fifty feet high, robusta is [93]sometimes twice as tall as that. And it is as strong as tall, for its hard, heavy logs of reddish wood will lie on the ground year after year without decaying. But its fame comes from its extraordinary fashion of growing. Strong and erect as it is, and able to grow from the ground in the ordinary way, it prefers to begin life as an epiphyte, springing from seed dropped in a fork or hollow of a high tree. At any rate the tallest and finest specimens begin as seedlings in these airy nests. Thence without delay they send down roots to earth, one perhaps on one side of the tree trunk, one on the other. These in their turn, after fixing themselves in the ground, send out cross-roots to clasp each other—transverse pieces looking like the rungs of a rope-ladder. In time oblique rootlets make with these a complete net-work. Gradually all meet and solidify, forming a hollow pipe of living wood. This encloses the unhappy tree and in the end presses it to death. Many and many a grey perished stick has been found in the interior of the triumphant destroyer. In one tree only does the constrictor meet more than its match. In the puriri it finds a growth harder and stouter than itself. Iron is met by steel. The grey smooth trunk goes on expanding, indifferent to the rata’s grasp, and even forcing its gripping roots apart; and the pleasant green of the puriri’s leaves shows freshly among the darker foliage of the strangler. The rata itself, on gaining size and height, does not escape the responsibilities of arboreal life. Its own [94]forks and hollows form starting-points for the growth of another handsome tree-inhabitant, the large or shining broadleaf. Beginning sometimes thirty feet from the ground, this last will grow as much as thirty feet higher, and develop a stem fourteen inches thick. Not satisfied with sending down roots outside the trunk of its supporter it will use the interior of a hollow tree as a channel through which to reach earth. The foliage which the broadleaf puts forth quite eclipses the leaves of most of the trees upon which it rides, but it does not seem to kill these last, if it kills them at all, as quickly as the iron-hearted rata. NIKAU PALMS Our wild flowers, say the naturalists, show few brilliant hues. Our fuschias are poor, our violets white, our gentians pallid—save those of the Auckland isles. Our clematis is white or creamy, and our passion-flower faint yellow and green. Again and again we are told that our flowers, numerous as they are, seldom light up the sombre greens of the forest. This complaint may be pushed much too far. It is true that pale flowers are found in the islands belonging to families which in other countries have brightly coloured members. Though, for instance, three or four of our orchids are beautiful, and one falls in a cascade of sweet-scented blooms, most of the species are disappointing. But the array of our more brilliant flowers is very far from contemptible. Over and above the gorgeous ratas and their spray-sprinkled cousins are to be reckoned the golden-and-russet kowhai, the crimson parrot’s-beak, veronicas wine-hued or purple, the red mistletoe, the yellow [95]tarata, and the rosy variety of the manuka. The stalks of the flax-lily make a brave show of red and yellow. The centre of the mountain-lily’s cup is shining gold. And when speaking of colour we may fairly take count of the golden glint or pinkish tinge of the toé-toé plumes, the lilac hue of the palm-flower, the orange-coloured fruit of the karaka, and the purples of the tutu and wineberry. Nor do flowers lack beauty because they are white,—witness the ribbon-wood loaded with masses of blooms, fine as those of the double cherry, and honey-scented to boot; witness the tawari, the hinau, the rangiora, the daisy-tree, the whau, and half a score more. For myself, I would not change the purity of our starry clematis for the most splendid parasite of the Tropics. Certainly the pallid-greenish and chocolate hues of some of our flowers are strange; they seem tinged with moonlight and meant for the night hours, and in the dusky jungle carry away one’s thoughts to “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “Les Fleurs du Mal.” For a bit of New Zealand colour you may turn to Colenso’s description of a certain morning in early October when he found himself on a high hill-top in face of Mount Ruapehu. Snow had fallen in the night and the volcano was mantled heavily therewith. The forest and native village on the hill on which Colenso stood were sprinkled with white, and, though the rising sun was shining brightly, a few big flakes continued to flutter down. Outside the village a grove of kowhai was covered with golden-and-russet blossoms, all the [96]more noticeable because the young leaves were only on the way. Suddenly from the evergreen forest a flock of kakas descended on the kowhais, chattering hoarsely. The great parrots, walking out on the underside of the boughs to the very end of the branches, began to tear open the flowers, piercing them at the side of their base and licking out the honey with their brush-tipped tongues. Brown-skinned Maori boys climbing the trees brought to the naturalist specimens of the blossoms thus opened by the big beaks. The combination of the golden-brown flowers and green forest; the rough-voiced parrots, olive-brown and splashed with red, swaying on the slender branch-tips; and the sunlight gleaming on the white snow, made, with the towering volcano in the background, a picture as brilliant as curious. Whatever the dim flowers, purple fruit, and glossy leaves of many of our plants might lead the imaginative to expect, the number that are poisonous is very small. Only two examples are conspicuous, and but one does any damage to speak of. Of the noxious pair the karaka, a handsome shrub, is a favourite garden plant, thanks to its large polished leaves and the deep orange colour of its fruit. It has been a favourite, too, with the Maori from time immemorial. They plant it near their villages, and they claim to have brought it in their canoes from Polynesia. Botanists shake their heads over this assertion, however, the explanation of which is somewhat similar to a famous statement by a certain undergraduate on the crux of the Baconian controversy. [97]“The plays of Shakespeare,” said this young gentleman, “were not written by him, but by another fellow of the same name.” It seems that there is a Polynesian karaka in the islands where the Maori once dwelt, but that it is no relation of the New Zealand shrub. The affection of the Maori for the latter was based on something more practical than an ancestral association. They were extremely fond of the kernel of its fruit. When raw, this is exceedingly bitter and disagreeable—fortunately so, for it contains then a powerful poison. Somehow the Maori discovered that by long baking or persistent steaming the kernels could be freed from this, and they used to subject them to the process in a most patient and elaborate fashion. Now and then some unlucky person—usually a child—would chew a raw kernel and then the result was extraordinary. The poison distorted the limbs and then left them quite rigid, in unnatural postures. To avoid this the Maori would lash the arms and legs of the unfortunate sufferer in a natural position, and then bury him up to his shoulders in earth. Colenso once saw a case in which this strong step had not been taken, or had failed. At any rate the victim of karaka poison, a well-grown boy, was lying with limbs stiff and immovable, one arm thrust out in front, one leg twisted backwards; he could neither feed himself nor beat off the swarm of sandflies that were pestering him. White children must be more cautious than the Maori, for though the karaka shines in half the gardens of the North Island, one never hears of any harm coming from it. The other plant with noxious [98]properties is the tutu, and this in times past did much damage among live-stock, sheep especially. Much smaller than the karaka, it is still an attractive-looking bush, with soft leaves and purple-black clusters of berries. Both berries and shoots contain a poison, powerful enough to interest chemists as well as botanists. Sheep which eat greedily of it, especially when tired and fasting after a journey, may die in a few hours. It kills horned cattle also, though horses do not seem to suffer from it. Its chief recorded achievement was to cause the death of a circus elephant many years ago, a result which followed in a few hours after a hearty meal upon a mixture of tutu and other vegetation. So powerful is the poison that a chemist who handles the shoots of the plant for an hour or two with his fingers will suffer nausea, pain, and a burning sensation of the skin. An extremely minute internal dose makes the nausea very violent indeed. Of course, so dangerous a plant does not get much quarter from the settlers, and for this and other reasons the losses caused by tutu among our flocks and herds are far less than was the case forty or fifty years ago. Strangely enough the Maoris could make a wine from the juice of the berries, which was said to be harmless and palatable, though I venture to doubt it. White men are said to have tried the liquor, though I have never met any of these daring drinkers. Though the most dangerous plant in the islands, it does not seem to have caused any recorded death among white people for more than forty years. ON THE PELORUS RIVER Our flora has oddities as well as beauties. Some of [99]its best-known members belong to the lily tribe. Several of these are as different from each other and as unlike the ordinary man’s notion of a lily as could well be. One of the commonest is a lily like a palm-tree, and another equally abundant is a lily like a tall flax. A third is a tree-dweller, a luxuriant mass of drooping blades, resembling sword-grass. A fourth is a black-stemmed wild vine, a coiling and twining parasite of the forest, familiarly named supplejack, which resembles nothing so much as a family of black snakes climbing about playfully in the foliage. Another, even more troublesome creeper, is no lily but a handsome bramble, known as the bush-lawyer, equipped with ingenious hooks of a most dilatory kind. When among trees, the lawyer sticks his claws into the nearest bark and mounts boldly aloft; but when growing in an open glade, he collapses into a sort of huddled bush, and cannot even propagate his species, though, oddly enough, in such cases, he grows hooks even more abundantly than when climbing. Members of very different families, the pen-wiper plant and the vegetable sheep are excellently described by their names. That is more than can be said for many of our forest trees. One of these, the aké, has leaves so viscous that in sandy or dusty spots these become too thickly coated with dirt to allow the tree to grow to any size. As a variation the para-para tree has normal leaves, but the skin of its fruit is so sticky that not only insects but small birds have been found glued thereto. A rather common trick of our trees is to change the form of their leaves as they grow old. The slim, [100]straight lance-wood, for instance, will for many years be clothed with long, narrow, leathery-looking leaves, armed with hooks, growing from the stem and pointing stiffly downwards. So long, narrow, and rigid are they that the whole plant stands like an inverted umbrella stripped of its covering. Later in life the leaves lose both their hooks and their odd shape, and the lance-wood ceases to look like a survival from the days of the pterodactyl. At no time can it look much stranger than two species of dracophyllum, the nei-nei and the grass-tree. Save for the extremities, the limbs of these are naked. They reserve their energies for tufts at the tips. In one species these are like long wisps of grass; in the other they curve back like a pine-apple’s, and from among them springs a large red flower having the shape of a toy tree. Even the nei-nei is eclipsed by the tanekaha, or celery pine, which contrives to be a very handsome tree without bearing any leaves whatever; their place is taken by branchlets, thickened and fan-shaped. The raukawa has leaves scented so sweetly that the Maori women used to rub their skins with them as a perfume. Another more eccentric plant is scentless by day, but smells agreeably at night-time. Indeed, both by day and night the air of the forest is pleasant to the nostrils. A disagreeable exception among our plants is the coprosma, emphatically called f?tidissima, concerning which bushmen, entangled in its thickets, have used language which might turn bullock-drivers green with envy. AUCKLAND The navigators who discovered or traded with our [101]islands while they were still a No Man’s Land have recorded their admiration of the timber of our forests. The tall sticks of kauri and kahikatea, with their scores of feet of clean straight wood, roused the sailors’ enthusiasm. It seemed to them that they had chanced upon the finest spars in the world. And for two generations after Captain Cook, trees picked out in the Auckland bush, and roughly trimmed there, were carried across on the decks of trading schooners to Sydney, and there used by Australian shipbuilders. In the year 1819 the British Government sent a store-ship, the Dromedary, to the Bay of Islands for a cargo of kauri spars. They were to be suitable for top-masts, so to be from seventy-four to eighty-four feet long and from twenty-one to twenty-three inches thick. After much chaffering with the native chiefs the spars were cut and shipped, and we owe to the expedition an interesting book by an officer on board the Dromedary. Our export of timber has always been mainly from Auckland, and for many years has been chiefly of kauri logs or sawn timber. There has been some export of white pine to Australia for making butter-boxes; but the kauri has been the mainstay of the timber trade oversea. Other woods are cut and sawn in large quantities, but the timber is consumed within the colony. How large the consumption is may be seen from the number of saw-mills at work—411—and their annual output, which was 432,000,000 superficial feet last year. Add to this a considerable amount cut for firewood, fences, and rough carpentering, which [102]does not pass through the mills. And then, great as is the total quantity made use of, the amount destroyed and wasted is also great. Accidental fires, sometimes caused by gross carelessness, ravage thousands of acres. “A swagger will burn down a forest to light his pipe,” said Sir Julius Vogel, and the epigram was doubtless true of some of the swag-carrying tribe. But the average swagger is a decent enough labourer on the march in search of work, and not to be classed with the irreclaimable vagrant called tramp in Britain. In any case the swagger was never the sole or main offender where forest fires were concerned. It would be correct to say that gum-diggers sometimes burn down a forest in trying to clear an acre of scrub. But bush fires start up from twenty different causes. Sparks from a saw-mill often light up a blaze which may end in consuming the mill and its surroundings. I have heard of a dogmatic settler who was so positive that his grass would not burn that he threw a lighted match into a tuft of it by way of demonstration. A puff of wind found the little flame, and before it was extinguished it had consumed four hundred acres of yellow but valuable pasture. And then there is the great area deliberately cut and burned to make way for grass. Here the defender of tree-life is faced with a more difficult problem. The men who are doing the melancholy work of destruction are doing also the work of colonisation. As a class they are, perhaps, the most interesting and deserving in colonial life. They are acting lawfully and in good [103]faith. Yet the result is a hewing down and sweeping away of beauty, compared with which the conquests of the Goths and Vandals were conservative processes. For those noted invaders did not level Rome or Carthage to the ground: they left classic architecture standing. To the lover of beautiful Nature the work of our race in New Zealand seems more akin to that of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor, when they swept away population, buildings and agriculture, and Byzantine city and rural life together, in order to turn whole provinces into pasture for their sheep. Not that my countrymen are more blind to beauty than other colonists from Europe. It is mere accident which has laid upon them the burden of having ruined more natural beauty in the last half-century than have other pioneers. The result is none the less saddening. When the first white settlers landed, the islands were supposed still to contain some thirty million acres of forest. The Maori had done a share of destruction by reckless or accidental burning. Other causes, perhaps, had helped to devastate such tracts as the Canterbury plains and the kauri gum-fields. But enough, and more than enough, was left; indeed the bush seemed the chief barrier to rapid settlement. The havoc wrought by careless savages was a trifle compared with the wholesale destruction brought about by our utilising of the forests and the soil. Quod non fecerunt Barbari fecere Barberini. To-day we are told that the timber still standing cannot last our saw-mills more than two generations, and that a supply which was estimated at [104]forty-three thousand million feet in 1905 had shrunk to thirty-six thousand million feet in 1907. The acreage of our forests must be nearer fifteen than twenty millions now. Some of this, covering, as it does, good alluvial soil, must go; but I am far from being alone in believing that four-fifths of it should be conserved, and that where timber is cut the same precautions should be insisted on as in Germany, France, India, and some intelligent portions of North America. Within the last two years great floods in Auckland and Hawke’s Bay, and, farther south, two summers hot and dry beyond precedent, seem to point the moral and strengthen the case for making a courageous stand on behalf of the moiety we have left of the woods that our fathers thought illimitable. MOUNT EGMONT Something has already been done. Forty years ago Thomas Potts, naturalist and politician, raised his voice in the parliamentary wilderness; and in the next decade a Premier, Sir Julius Vogel, came forward with an official scheme of conservation which would have been invaluable had he pressed it home. Since then enlightened officials, like the late Surveyor-General, Mr. Percy Smith, have done what they could. From time to time reserves have been made which, all too small as they are, now protect some millions of acres. In the rainier districts most of this is not in great danger from chance fires. Nor is it always and everywhere true that the forest when burned does not grow again. It can and will do so, if cattle and goats are kept out of it. The lavish beauty of the primeval forest may not return, [105]but that is another matter. The cry that Government reservation only saves trees from the axe to keep them for the fire may be dismissed as a counsel of despair, or—sometimes—as inspired by the saw-miller and land-grabber. Of late years, too, both Government and public are waking up to the wisdom of preserving noted and beautiful scenes. Many years ago the settlers of Taranaki set an example by reserving the upper and middle slopes of their Fusiyama, Mount Egmont. Long stretches of the draped cliffs of Wanganui River have been made as safe as law can make them, though some still remain in danger, and I am told that at Taumaranui, on the upper river, the hum of the saw-mills is ever in your ears. Societies for preserving scenery are at work elsewhere, and the Parliament has passed an Act and established a Board for the purpose of making scenic reserves. Twenty-five thousand acres have lately been set aside on the Board’s advice, and the area will, I assume, be added to yearly. Now and again, in dry, windy summers, the forest turns upon its destroyers and takes revenge. Dying, it involves their works and possessions in its own fiery death. A bush-fire is a fine sight when seen on windy nights, burning whole hill-sides, crawling slowly to windward, or rushing with the wind in leaping tongues and flakes that fly above the tree-tops. The roar, as of a mighty gale, the spouting and whirling of golden sparks, the hissing of sap and resin, and the glowing heat that may be felt a mile away, join grandly in furious energy. Nothing can be finer than the spectacle, just as nothing [106]can be more dreary than the resulting ruin. A piece of bush accidentally burned has no touch of dignity in its wreck. It becomes merely an ugly and hateful jumble, begrimed, untidy, and unserviceable. A tract that has been cut down and fired deliberately is in a better case. Something more like a clean sweep has been made, and the young grass sprouting up gives promise of a better day. But bush through which fire has run too quickly is often spoiled as forest, without becoming of use to the farmer. The best that can be done when trees are thus scorched is for the saw-miller to pick out the larger timber and separate with his machinery the sound inside from the burned envelope. This he does skilfully enough, and much good wood—especially kauri—is thus saved. The simple-minded settler when selling scorched timber sometimes tries to charge for sound and injured portions alike; but the average saw-miller is a man of experience. TAREI-PO-KIORE As I have said, fire sometimes sweeps down upon the forest’s enemies and carries all before it: saw-mills and their out-buildings are made into bonfires, and the stacks of sawn planks and litter of chips and sawdust help the blaze. The owner and his men are lucky if they save more than their portable belongings. Nor does the fire stop there. After making a mouthful of mills and woodcutters’ huts, it may set out for some small township not yet clear of stumps, dead trunks, and inflammable trash. All depends upon the wind. If the flames are being borne along upon the wings of a strong north-west wind—the [107]“regular howling nor’-wester” of up-country vernacular—very little can be done except to take to flight, driving live-stock, and taking such furniture as can be piled on carts and driven away. Fences, house, machinery, garden, and miles of grass may be swept away in a few hours, the labour of half a lifetime may be consumed, and the burnt-out settler may be thankful if the Government comes to his aid with a loan to enable him to buy grass seed to scatter on his blackened acres after the long-desired rains have come. In an exceptionally dry summer—such an extraordinary season as came in January and February of this year—the fire goes to work on a grand scale. In a tract a hundred miles long, thirty or forty outbreaks may be reported within a week. Settlers looking out from their homesteads may see smoke and glowing skies in half-a-dozen directions at once. Now the blaze may approach from this direction, now from that, just as the wind freshens or shifts. Sheep are mustered, and, if possible, driven away. Threatened householders send their furniture away, or dig holes in the ground and bury it. When the danger comes too suddenly to give time for anything more, goods are hastily piled on some bare patch and covered with wet blankets. I have read of a prudent settler who had prepared for these risks of fire by excavating a cave almost large enough to house a band of prophets. After three years the fire came his way, and he duly stored away his possessions in the repository. But just as rain does not fall when you take out a large umbrella, so our provident [108]friend found that the fire would not touch his house. He lost nothing but a shed. MORNING ON THE WANGANUI RIVER If there appears any fair chance of beating back the flames, the men join together, form a line, and give battle. They do not lightly surrender the fruits of years of toil, but will fight rolling smoke, flying sparks, and even scorching flame, hour after hour. Strips of grass are burned off in advance, and dead timber blown up with dynamite. Buckets of water are passed from hand to hand, or the flames are beaten out with sacks or blankets. Seen at night on a burning hill-side, the row of masculine fighting figures stands out jet-black against the red glow, and the wild attitudes and desperate exertions are a study for an artist. Among the men, boys work gleefully; there is no school for them when a fire has to be beaten. Very young children suffer greatly from the smoke with which the air they breathe is laden, perhaps for days together. Even a Londoner would find its volumes trying. Now and again a bushman in the thick of the fight reels half-suffocated, or falls fainting and has to be carried away. But his companions work on; and grass-fires are often stopped and standing crops saved. But fire running through thick bush is a more formidable affair. The heat is terrific, the very soil seems afire; and indeed the flames, after devouring trunks and branches, will work down into the roots and consume them for many feet. Sparks and tongues of flame shoot across roads and streams and start a blaze on the farther side. Messengers riding for help, or settlers trying to reach [109]their families, have often to run the gauntlet perilously on tracks which the fire has reached or is crossing. They gallop through when they can, sometimes with hair and beard singed and clothes smelling of the fire. Men, however, very seldom lose their lives. For one who dies by fire in the bush, fifty are killed by falling timber in the course of tree-felling. Sheep have occasionally to be left to their fate, and are roasted, or escape with wool half-burnt. Wild pigs save themselves; but many native birds perish with their trees, and the trout in the smaller streams die in hundreds. Many stories are told of these bush fires, and of the perils, panics, or displays of courage they have occasioned. Let me repeat one. In a certain “bush township,” or small settlement in the forest, lived a clergyman, who, in addition to working hard among the settlers in a parish half as large as an English county, was a reader of books. He was, I think, a bachelor, and I can well believe that his books were to him something not far removed from wife and children. The life of a parson in the bush certainly deserves some consolations in addition to those of religion. Well, a certain devastating fire took a turn towards the township in which a wooden roof sheltered our parson and his beloved volumes. Some householders were able to drive off with their goods; others stood their ground. The minister, after some reflection, carried his books out of doors, took a spade and began to dig a hole in the earth, meaning to bury them therein. Just as the interment was beginning, a neighbour rode up with the news that [110]the house of a widow woman, not far away, had caught fire and that friends were trying to extinguish the burning or at least save her goods. Whether the book-lover gave “a splendid groan” I do not know; but leaving his treasures, off he ran, and was soon among the busiest of the little salvage corps, hauling and shouldering like a man. When all was done that could be done he hastened back, blackened and perspiring, to his own dwelling. Alas! the fire had outflanked him. Sparks and burning flakes had dropped upon his books and the little collection was a blazing pile. I have forgotten the parson’s name and do not know what became of him. But if any man deserved, in later life, a fine library at the hands of the Fates, he did. I hope that he has one, and that it includes a copy of Mr. Blades’s entertaining treatise on the Enemies of Books. With what gusto he must read chapter i., the title of which is “Fire.” ON THE UPPER WANGANUI Just as a burning forest is a magnificent scene with a dismal sequel, so the saw-miller’s industry, though it finds a paradise and leaves a rubbish-yard, is, while it goes on, a picturesque business. Like many forms of destruction, it lends itself to the exertion of boldness, strength, and skill. The mill itself is probably too primitive to be exactly ugly, and the complicated machinery is interesting when in action, albeit its noises, which at a distance blend into a humming vibration, rise near at hand to tearing and rending, clattering and howling. But the smell of the clean wood is fresh and resinous, and nothing worse than sawdust loads [111]the air. The strong teeth of the saws go through the big logs as though they were cheese. The speed of the transformation, the neatness and utility of the outcome, are pleasing enough. Then the timber-scows, those broad, comfortable-looking craft that go plodding along the northern coasts, may be said, without irony, to have a share of “Batavian grace.” But the more absorbing work of the timber trade begins at the other end, with the selecting and felling of the timber. After that comes the task of hauling or floating it down to the mill. Tree-felling is, one supposes, much the same in all countries where the American pattern of axe is used. With us, as elsewhere, there are sights worth watching. It is worth your while to look at two axemen at work on the tree, giving alternate blows, one swinging the axe from the right, the other from the left. Physically, bush-fellers are among the finest workmen in the islands, and not only in wood-chopping contests, but when at work, under contract in the bush, they make the chips fly apace. Some of them seem able to hew almost as well with one arm as with two; indeed, one-armed men have made useful fellers. Sometimes they attack a tree from the ground; but into the larger trunks they may drive stakes some few feet from the soil, or may honour a giant by building a platform round it. Upon this they stand, swinging their axes or working a large cross-cut saw. Skill, of course, is required in arranging the direction in which the tree shall fall, also in avoiding it when it comes down. Even a broken limb is a serious matter enough in the bush, far from surgical [112]aid. Men thus struck down have to be carried on rough litters to the nearest surgeon. In one case the mates of an injured bush-feller carried him in this way fully sixty miles, taking turns to bear the burden. Even when a man has been killed outright and there is no longer question of surgical aid, the kindliness of the bushmen may still be shown. Men have been known to give up days of remunerative work in order to carry the body of a comrade to some settlement, where it can be buried in consecrated ground. Accidents are common enough in the bush. Only last year an “old hand” fell a victim to mischance after forty years of a bushman’s life. Slipping on a prostrate trunk he fell on the sharp edge of his axe, and was discovered lying there dead in solitude. WAIRUA FALLS When the tree has been felled and cross-cut and the branches lopped off, the log may be lying many miles from the mill. Hills and ravines may have to be crossed or avoided. Orpheus with his lute would be invaluable to the New Zealand saw-miller. The local poet, though fond enough of addressing his stanzas to the forest trees, does not pretend to draw them to follow in his footsteps. Nor are our poets on the side of the saw-mills. So bushmen have to fall back upon mechanical devices and the aid of water-power. Long narrow tracks are cut, and floored with smooth skids. Along these logs are dragged—it may be by the wire rope of a traction machine, it may be by a team of bullocks. Over very short distances the logs are shifted by the men themselves, who “jack” them with a dexterity [113]astonishing to the townsmen. Mainly, the journey to the mill is made either by tramway or water. Where a deep river is at hand, floating timber is a comparatively simple business. But more often the logs have to slide, be rolled or be hauled, into the beds of streams or creeks that may be half dry for months together. To obtain the needful depth of water, dams are often built, above which the logs accumulate in numbers and stay floating while their owners wait patiently for a fresh. Or the timber may remain stranded, in shallow creeks or in the reeds or stones of dwindled rivers. At length the rain-storm bursts, the sluices of the dams are hastily opened, and the logs in great companies start on their swim for the sea-coast. A heavy flood may mean loss to farmer and gardener, and be a nuisance to travellers; but to the saw-millers of a province it may be like the breaking-up of a long drought. They rub their hands and tell you that they have not had such a turn of luck for a twelvemonth,—“millions of feet were brought down yesterday!” As the rains descend and the floods come, their men hurry away to loosen barriers, start logs on their way, or steer them in their course. Wild is the rush of the timber as it is thus swept away, not in long orderly rafts such as one sees zigzagging along on the Elbe or St. Lawrence, but in a frantic mob of racing logs, spinning round, rolled over and over, colliding, plunging and reappearing in the swirling water. Rafts you may see in the ordinary way being towed down the Wairoa River to the Kaipara harbour by steam tugs. [114]But in flood-time, when thousands of logs are taking an irresponsible course towards the ocean, the little steamers have a more exciting task. It is theirs to chase the logs, which, rolling and bobbing like schools of escaping whales, have to be caught and towed to some boom or harbourage near the saw-mill for which they are destined. Otherwise they may become imbedded in tidal mud, or may drift away to sea and be lost. Logs bearing the marks of Auckland saw-millers have been found ere now stranded on distant beaches after a voyage of several hundred miles. Like axemen and log-rollers, the river hands who look after dams and floating logs have their accidents and hairbreadth escapes. They have to trust to courage and to an amphibious dexterity, of which they exhibit an ample share. Watch a man standing upright on a log huge enough to be a mast, and poling it along as though it were a punt. That looks easier than it is. But watch the same man without any pole controlling a rolling log and steering it with feet alone. That does not even look easy. Some years ago, it is said, a mill hand, when opening a dam in a rain-storm, fell into the flood and was swept down among the released timber. Amid the crash of tumbling logs he was carried over the dam and over a waterfall farther down stream. Yet he reached the bank with no worse injury than a broken wrist! I tell the tale as it was printed in an Auckland newspaper. CHAPTER V FIRE AND WATER A long time ago, that is to say, in the twilight of Maori tradition, the chief Ngatoro and his wife, attended by a slave, landed on the shores of the Bay of Plenty. Thence they wandered inland through forests and over ferny downs, reaching at last a great central lake, beyond which high mountains stood sentry in the very heart of the island. One of these snow-clad summits they resolved to gain; but half-way on the climb the slave fell ill of sheer cold. Then the chief bethought him that in the Bay of Plenty he had noticed an island steaming and smoking, boiling with heat. Hot coals brought thence might warm the party and save the slave’s life. So Ngatoro, who was magician as well as chieftain, looked eastward and made incantations; and soon the fire rushing through the air fell at his feet. Another more prosaic version of the tale says that, Maori fashion, the kind-hearted hero despatched a messenger to bring the fire; he sent his wife. She, traversing land and sea at full speed, was soon back from White Island with a calabash full of [116]glowing embers. From this, as she hurried along, sparks dropped here and there on her track. And wherever these fell the earth caught fire, hot springs bubbled up, and steam-jets burst through the fern. All her haste, however, went for nought; the slave died. Furious at his loss, her lord and master flung the red embers down one of the craters of Mount Tongariro, and from that day to this the mountains of Taupo have been filled with volcanic fires, smouldering or breaking out in eruption.[1]Such is one of the many legends which have grown up round the lakes and summits of the most famous volcanic province of New Zealand. It indicates the Maori understanding that the high cones south-west of Lake Taupo are one end of a chain of volcanic forces, and that the other end is White Island (Whaka-ari), the isolated crater which lifts its head above the sea twenty-seven miles out in the wide Bay of Plenty. It is a natural sulphur factory. Seen from the shores of the bay it looks peaceful enough. Its only peculiarity seems to be a white cloud rising high or [117]streaming on the wind to leeward from the tip of its cone. At a distance the cloud appears not unlike other white clouds; but in the brightest weather it never vanishes away. I once spent three sunny spring days in riding round the great arc of the Bay of Plenty, often cantering for miles together along the sandy beach. There, out to sea, lay White Island always in view and always flying its white vapour-flag. In reality the quiet-looking islet seethes with fiery life. Seen at close quarters it is found to be a shell, which from one side looks comically like the well-worn stump of a hollow tooth. It is a barren crater near a thousand feet high, enclosing what was a lake and is now shrunk to a warm green pool, ringed with bright yellow sulphur. Hot springs boil and roar on the crater-lake’s surface, ever sending up columns of hissing and roaring steam many hundred feet into the air. At times, as in 1886, the steam has shot to the almost incredible height of fifteen thousand feet, a white pillar visible a hundred miles away. You may thrust a stick through the floor of the crater into the soft hot paste beneath. The walls of the abyss glow with heat, steam-jets hiss from their fissures, and on the outside is a thick crust of sulphur. The reek of the pit’s fumes easily outdoes that of the blackest and most vicious of London fogs. “It is not that soft smell of Roto-rua,” wrote Mr. Buddle, who smelt the place in 1906, “but an odour of sulphurous acid which sticks in one’s throat.” Yet commerce once tried to lay hands on White Island, and men were found willing to try and work amid its noisome [118]activities. Commerce, however, failed to make Tartarus pay. Not far away from White Island lies Mayor Island, which once upon a time must have been an even stranger spot. It also is a high crater. On the rim of its yawning pit are to be seen the ruins of a Maori stockade, which, perched in mid-air and approachable only over the sea, must have been a hard nut for storming parties to crack in the bygone days of tribal wars. All is quiet now; the volcano has died out and the wars have become old tales. [1] After writing this page I found that Mr. Percy Smith, formerly Surveyor-General, gives another version of the legend. He tells how the hero Ngatoro, landing on the shore of the Bay of Plenty, went inland, and, with a companion named Ngauruhoe, climbed Tongariro. Near the summit, Ngauruhoe died of cold, and Ngatoro, himself half-frozen, shouted to his sisters far away in the legendary island of Hawaiki to bring fire. His cry reached them far across the ocean, and they started to his rescue. Whenever they halted—as at White Island—and lit their camp fire, geysers spouted up from the ground. But when at length they reached Tongariro, it was only to find that Ngatoro, tired of waiting for them, had gone back to the coast. A fourth version of the legend is contained in a paper by Mr. H. Hill in vol. xxiv. of the Transactions of the N.Z. Institute. Needless to say, the scenes between Ruapehu and the sea-coast are not all as terrific as this. The main charm of the volcanic province is, indeed, its variety. Though in a sense its inhabitants live on the lid of a boiler—a boiler, too, that is perforated with steam holes—still it is a lid between five thousand and six thousand square miles in size. This leaves ample room for broad tracts where peace reigns amid apparent solidity and security. Though it is commonly called the Hot Lakes District, none of its larger lakes are really hot, that is to say hot throughout; they are distinctly cold. Roto-mahana before it was blown up in the eruption of 1886 was in no part less than lukewarm; but in those days Roto-mahana only covered 185 acres. At Ohinemutu there is a pool the water of which is unmistakably hot throughout; but it is not more than about a hundred yards long. Usually the hot lagoons are patchy in temperature—boiling at one end, cool at the other. Perhaps the official title, Thermal Springs District, is more accurate. The hot water comes [119]in the form of springs, spouts, and geysers. Boiling pools there are in numbers, veritable cauldrons. Boiling springs burst up on the beaches of the cold lakes, or bubble up through the chilly waters. The bather can lie floating, as the writer has, with his feet in hot and his head in cold water. Very agreeable the sensation is as the sunshine pours from a blue sky on to a lagoon fringed with ferns and green foliage. There are places where the pedestrian fording a river may feel his legs chilled to the marrow by the swift current, and yet find the sandy bottom on which he is treading almost burn the soles of his feet. The first white traveller to describe the thermal springs noted a cold cascade falling on an orifice from which steam was puffing at intervals. The resultant noise was as strange as the sight. So do hot and cold mingle and come into conflict in the thermal territory. “THE DRAGON’S MOUTH” The area of this hydro-thermal district, which Mr. Percy Smith, the best living authority on the subject, calls the Taupo volcanic zone, is roundly about six thousand square miles. As already said, part of it lies under the sea, above which only White Island, Mayor Island, and Whale Island rise to view. Its shape, if we could see the whole of it, would probably be a narrow oval, like an old-fashioned silver hand-mirror with a slender handle. In the handle two active volcanoes lift their heads—Ruapehu, and Tongariro with its three cones. At the other end of the mirror White Island stands up, incessantly at work. This exhausts the list of active volcanoes; but there are six or seven extinct [120]or quiescent volcanoes of first-class importance. Mayor Island, in the Bay of Plenty, is a dead crater rimmed by walls five miles round and nearly 1300 feet high, enclosing a terrible chasm lined with dark obsidian. Mount Edgecombe, an admirably regular cone, easily seen from the coast, has two craters in its summit; and the most appalling explosion ever known in the country occurred in the tract covered by Mount Tarawera and the Roto-mahana Lake. How terrific were the forces displayed by these extinct volcanoes in ages past may be judged by the vast extent of country overlaid by the pumice and volcanic clay belched forth from their craters. Not only is the volcanic zone generally overspread with this, only sparse patches escaping, but pumice is found outside its limits. Within these, it is, loosely speaking, pumice, pumice everywhere, dry, gritty, and useless,—a thin scattering of pumice on the hill-tops and steep slopes,—deep strata of pumice where it has been washed down into valleys and river terraces. Mingled with good soil it is mischievous, though two or three grasses, notably that called Chewing’s fescue, grow well in the mixture. Unmixed pumice is porous and barren. Fortunately the tracts of deep pumice are limited. They soak up the ample rainfall; grass grows, but soon withers; in dry weather a sharp tug will drag a tussock from the roots in the loose, thirsty soil. The popular belief is that it only needs a long-continued process of stamping and rolling to make these pumice expanses hold water and become fertile. Those who think thus point out that around [121]certain lonely lagoons, where wild horses and cattle have been wont to camp and roll, rich green patches of grass are found. Less hopeful observers hold that the destiny of the pumice country is probably to grow trees, fruit-bearing and other, whose deep roots will reach far down to the water. Already the Government, acting on this belief, has taken the work of tree-planting in hand, and millions of young saplings are to be found in the Waiotapu valley and elsewhere in the pumice land. Prison-labour is used for the purpose; and though a camp of convicts, with movable prison-vans like the cages of a travelling menagerie, seems a strange foil to the wonders of Nature, the toil is healthy for the men as well as useful to the country. From the vast extent of the pumice and clay layers it would seem that, uneasy as the thermal territory now is, it has, for all its geysers, steaming cones, and innumerable springs, become but a fretful display of slowly dying forces. So say those who look upon the great catastrophe of 1886 as merely the flicker of a dying flame. HUKA FALLS As already said, the volcanic zone is a land of lakes, many and beautiful. Four of the most interesting—Roto-rua, Roto-iti, Roto-ehu, and Roto-ma—lie in a chain, like pieces of silver loosely strung together. South of these Tarawera sleeps in sight of its terrible mountain, and south again of Tarawera the hot springs of Roto-mahana still draw sight-seers, though its renowned terraces are no longer there. Lake Okataina is near, resting amid unspoiled forest: and there is Roto-kakahi, the green lake, and, hard by, Tikitapu, the blue lake, [122]beautiful by contrast. But, of course, among all the waters Taupo easily overpeers the rest. “The Sea” the Maori call it; and indeed it is so large, and its whole expanse so easily viewed at once from many heights, that it may well be taken to be greater than it is. It covers 242 square miles, but the first white travellers who saw it and wrote about it guessed it to be between three and five hundred. Hold a fair-sized map of the district with the eastern side uppermost and you will note that the shape of Taupo is that of an ass’s head with the ears laid back. This may seem an irreverent simile for the great crater lake, with its deep waters and frowning cliffs, held so sacred and mysterious by the Maori of old. Seldom is its surface flecked by any sail, and only one island of any size breaks the wide expanse. The glory of Taupo—apart from the noble view of the volcanoes southward of it—is a long rampart of cliffs that almost without a break hems in its western side mile after mile. At their highest they reach 1100 feet. So steep are they that in flood-time cascades will make a clean leap from their summits into the lake; and the sheer descent of the wall continues below the surface, for, within a boat’s length of the overhanging cliff, sounding-leads have gone down 400 feet. Many are the waterfalls which in the stormier months of the year seam the rocky faces with white thread-like courses. On a finer scale than the others are the falls called Mokau, which, dashing through a leafy cleft, pour into the deep with a sounding plunge, and, even from a distance, look [123]something broader and stronger than the usual white riband. By contrast, on the eastern side of the lake wide strips of beach are not uncommon, and the banks, plains, and terrace sides of whitish pumice, though not inconsiderable, are but tame when compared with the dark basaltic and trachytic heights overhanging the deep western waters. Many streams feed Taupo; only one river drains it. It is not astonishing, then, that the Maori believed that in the centre a terrible whirlpool circled round a great funnel down which water was sucked into the bowels of the earth. A variant of this legend was that a huge taniwha or saurian monster haunted the western depths, ready and willing to swallow canoes and canoemen together. The river issuing from Taupo is the Waikato, which cuts through the rocky lip of the crater-lake at its north-east corner. There it speeds away as though rejoicing to escape, with a strong clear current about two hundred yards wide. Then, pent suddenly between walls of hard rock, it is jammed into a deep rift not more than seventy feet across. Boiling and raging, the whole river shoots from the face of a steep tree-clothed cliff with something of the force of a horizontal geyser. Very beautiful is the blue and silver column as it falls, with outer edges dissolving into spray, into the broad and almost quiet expanse below. This waterfall, the Huka, though one of the famous sights of the island, does not by any means exhaust the beauties of the Upper Waikato. A little lower down the Ara-tia-tia Rapids furnish a [124]succession of spectacles almost as fine. There for hundreds of yards the river, a writhing serpent of blue and milk-white flecked with silver, tears and zig-zags, spins and foams, among the dripping reefs and between high leafy rocks, “wild with the tumult of tumbling waters.” Broadly speaking, the Taupo plateau is a region of long views. Cold nights are more often than not followed by sunny days. The clear and often brilliant air enables the eye to travel over the nearer plains and hills to where some far-off mountain chain almost always closes the prospect. The mountains are often forest-clad, the plains and terraces usually open. Here will be seen sheets of stunted bracken; there, wide expanses of yellowish tussock-grass. The white pumice and reddish-brown volcanic clay help to give a character to the colouring very different to the black earth and vivid green foliage of other parts of the island. The smooth glacis-like sides of the terraces, and the sharply-cut ridges of the hills, seem a fit setting for the perpetual display of volcanic forces and an adjunct in impressing on the traveller that he is in a land that has been fashioned on a strange design. Nothing in England, and very little in Europe, remotely resembles it. Only sometimes on the dusty tableland of Central Spain, in Old or New Castile, may the New Zealander be reminded of the long views and strong sunlight, or the shining slopes leading up to blue mountain ranges cutting the sky with clean lines. ARA-TIA-TIA RAPIDS Some of the finest landscape views in the central [125]North Island are to be seen from points of vantage on the broken plateau to the westward of Ruapehu. On the one side the huge volcanic mass, a sloping rampart many miles long, closes the scene; on the other, the land, falling towards the coast, is first scantily clothed with coarse tussock-grass and then with open park-like forest. The timber grows heavier towards the coast, and in the river valleys where the curling Wanganui and the lesser streams Waitotara and Patea run between richly-draped cliffs to the sea. Far westward above the green expanse of foliage—soon to be hewn by the axe and blackened by fire—the white triangle of Egmont’s cone glimmers through faint haze against the pale horizon. Between Taupo and the eastern branch of the Upper Wanganui ran a foot-track much used by Maori travellers in days of yore. At one point it wound beneath a steep hill on the side of which a projecting ledge of rock formed a wide shallow cave. Beneath this convenient shelf it is said that a gang of Maori highwaymen were once wont to lurk on the watch for wayfarers, solitary or in small parties. At a signal they sprang out upon these, clubbed them to death, and dragged their bodies to the cave. There these cannibal bush-rangers gorged themselves on the flesh of their victims. I tell the story on the authority of the missionary Taylor, who says that he climbed to the cave, and standing therein saw the ovens used for the horrid meals and the scattered bones of the human victims. If he was not imposed upon, the story [126]supplies a curious exception to Maori customs. Their cannibalism was in the main practised at the expense of enemies slain or captured in inter-tribal wars; and they had distinct if peculiar prejudices in favour of fair fighting. I have read somewhere that in the Drakensberg Mountains above Natal a similar gang of cannibal robbers was once discovered—Kaffirs who systematically lured lonely victims into a certain remote ravine, where they disappeared. One of the curiosities of the Taupo wilderness is the flat-topped mountain Horo-Horo. Steep, wooded slopes lead up to an unbroken ring of precipices encircling an almost level table-top. To the eyes of riders or coach-passengers on the road between Taupo and Roto-rua, the brows of the cliffs seem as inaccessible as the crown of Roraima in British Guiana in the days before Mr. Im Thurn scaled it. The Maori own Horo-Horo, and have villages and cultivations on the lower slopes where there is soil fertile beyond what is common thereabout. Another strange natural fortress not far away is Pohaturoa, a tusk of lava, protruding some eight hundred feet hard by the course of the Waikato and in full view of a favourite crossing-place. Local guides are, or used to be, fond of comparing this eminence with Gibraltar, to which—except that both are rocks—it bears no manner of likeness. The Japanese, as we know, hold sacred their famous volcano Fusiyama. In the same way the Maori in times past regarded Tongariro and Ruapehu as holy ground. But, whereas the Japanese show reverence to [127]Fusi by making pilgrimages to its summit in tens of thousands, the Maori veneration of their great cones took a precisely opposite shape,—they would neither climb them themselves nor allow others to do so. The earlier white travellers were not only refused permission to mount to the summit, but were not even allowed to set foot on the lower slopes. In 1845 the artist George French Angas could not even obtain leave to make a sketch of Tongariro, though he managed to do so by stealth. Six years earlier Bidwill eluded native vigilance and actually reached the summit of one of the cones, probably that of Ngauruhoe, but when, after peering down through the sulphurous clouds of the inaccessible gulf, he made his way back to the shores of Lake Taupo, the local chieftain gave him a very bad quarter of an hour indeed. This personage, known in New Zealand story as Old Te Heu Heu, was one of the most picturesque figures of his race. His great height—“nearly seven feet,” says one traveller; “a complete giant,” writes another—his fair complexion, almost classic features, and great bodily strength are repeatedly alluded to by the whites who saw him; not that whites had that privilege every day, for Te Heu Heu held himself aloof among his own people, defied the white man, and refused to sign the treaty of Waitangi or become a liegeman of the Queen. His tribesmen had a proverb—“Taupo is the Sea; Tongariro is the Mountain; Te Heu Heu is the Man.” This they would repeat with the air of men owning a proprietary interest in the Atlantic Ocean, Kinchin [128]Junga, and Napoleon. He was indeed a great chief, and a perfect specimen of the Maori Rangatira or gentleman. He considered himself the special guardian of the volcanoes. Like him they were tapu—“tapu’d inches thick,” as the author of Old New Zealand would say. Indeed, when his subjects journeyed by a certain road, from one turn of which they could view the cone of Ngauruhoe, they were expected at the critical spot to veil their eyes with their mats so as not to look on the holy summit. At any rate, Bidwill declares that they told him so. Small wonder, therefore, if this venturesome trespasser came in for a severe browbeating from the offended Te Heu Heu, who marched up and down his wharé breaking out into passionate speech. Bidwill asserts that he pacified the great man by so small a present as three figs of tobacco. Of course, it is possible that in 1839 tobacco was more costly at Taupo than in after years. The Maori version of the incident differs from Bidwill’s. In the uneasy year of 1845 Te Heu Heu marched down to the Wanganui coast at the head of a strong war-party. The scared settlers were thankful to find that he did not attack them. He was, indeed, after other game, and was bent on squaring accounts with a local tribe which had shed the blood of his people. Bishop Selwyn, who happened to be then in the neighbourhood, saw and spoke with the highland chieftain, urging peace. The interviews must have been worth watching. On the one side stood the typical barbarian, eloquent, fearless, huge of limb, with [129]handsome face and maize-coloured complexion, and picturesque in kilt, cloak, and head-feather. On the other side was a bishop in hard training, a Christian gentleman, as fine as English culture could furnish, whose clean-cut aquiline face and unyielding mouth had the becoming support of a tall, vigorous frame lending dignity to his clerical garb. Here was the heathen determined to save his tribe from the white man’s grasping hands and dissolving religion; there the missionary seeing in conversion and civilisation the only hope of preserving the Maori race. Death took Te Heu Heu away before he had time to see his policy fail. Fate was scarcely so kind to Selwyn, who lived to see the Ten-Years’ War wreck most of his life’s work among the natives. As far as I know, Te Heu Heu never crossed weapons with white men, though he allied himself with our enemies and gave shelter to fugitives. His region was regarded as inaccessible in the days of good Governor Grey. He was looked upon as a kind of Old Man of the Mountain, and in Auckland they told you stories of his valour, hospitality, choleric temper, and his six—or was it eight?—wives. So the old chief stayed unmolested, and met his end with his mana in no way abated. It was a fitting end: the soil which he guarded so tenaciously overwhelmed him. The steep hill-side over his village became loosened by heavy rain and rotted by steam and sulphur-fumes. It began to crack and slip away. According to one account, a great land-slip descending in the night [130]buried the kainga and all in it save one man. Another story states that the destruction came in the day-time, and that Te Heu Heu refused to flee. He was said to have stood erect, confronting the avalanche, with flashing eyes, and with his white hair blown by the wind. At any rate, the soil of his ancestress the Earth (he claimed direct descent from her) covered him, and for a while his body lay there. After some time his tribe disinterred it, and laying it on a carved and ornamented bier, bore it into the mountains with the purpose of casting it down the burning crater of Tongariro. The intention was dramatic, but the result was something of an anticlimax. When nearing their journey’s end the bearers were startled by the roar of an eruption. They fled in a panic, leaving the remains of their hero to lie on the steep side of the cone on some spot never identified. There they were probably soon hidden by volcanic dust, and so, “ashes to ashes,” slowly mingled with the ancestral mass.[2] [2] The accepted tradition of Te Heu Heu’s funeral is that given above. After these pages went to the printer, however, I lighted upon a newspaper article by Mr. Malcolm Ross, in which that gentleman states that the bier and the body of the chief were not abandoned on the mountain-side, but were hidden in a cave still known to certain members of the tribe. The present Te Heu Heu, says Mr. Ross, talks of disinterring his ancestor’s remains and burying them near the village of Te Rapa. LAKE TAUPO The chiefs of the Maori were often their own minstrels. To compose a panegyric on a predecessor was for them a worthy task. Te Heu Heu himself was no mean poet. His lament for one of his forefathers has beauty, and, in Mr. James Cowan’s version, [131]is well known to New Zealand students. But as a poem it was fairly eclipsed by the funeral ode to his own memory composed and recited by his brother and successor. The translation of this characteristic Maori poem, which appeared in Surgeon-Major Thomson’s book, has been out of print for so many years that I may reproduce some portions of it here:— See o’er the heights of dark Pauhara’s mount The infant morning wakes. Perhaps my friend Returns to me clothed in that lightsome cloud. Alas! I toil alone in this lone world. Yes, thou art gone! Go, thou mighty! go, thou dignified! Go, thou who wert a spreading tree to shade Thy people all when evil hovered round! Sleep on, O Chief, in that dark, damp abode! And hold within thy grasp that weapon rare Bequeathed by thy renownéd ancestor. Turn yet this once thy bold athletic frame, And let me see thy skin carved o’er with lines Of blue; and let me see again thy face Beautifully chiselled into varied forms! Cease, cease thy slumbers, O thou son of Rangi! Wake up! and take thy battle-axe, and tell Thy people of the coming signs, and what Will now befall them. How the foe, tumultuous As are the waves, will rush with spears uplifted, And how thy people will avenge their wrongs. No, thou art fallen; and the earth receives Thee as its prey! But yet thy wondrous fame Shall soar on high, resounding o’er the heavens [132] Loosely speaking, New Zealand is a volcanic archipelago. There are hot pools and a noted sanatorium in the Hanmer plains in the middle of the Middle Island. There are warm springs far to the north of Auckland, near Ohaeawai, where the Maori once gave our troops a beating in the early days of our race-conflict with them. Auckland itself, the queen of New Zealand towns, is almost a crater city. At any rate, it is surrounded by dead craters. You are told that from a hill-top in the suburbs you may count sixty-three volcanic cones. Two sister towns, Wellington and Christchurch, have been repeatedly taken and well shaken by Mother Earth. Old Wellington settlers will gravely remind you that some sixty years ago a man, an inoffensive German baron, lost his life in a shock there. True, he was not swallowed up or crushed by falling ruins; a mirror fell from a wall on to his head. This earthquake was followed in 1855 by another as sharp, and one of the two so alarmed a number of pioneer settlers that they embarked on shipboard to flee from so unquiet a land. Their ship, however, so the story runs, went ashore near the mouth of Wellington harbour, and they returned to remain, and, in some cases, make their fortunes. In 1888 a double shock of earthquake wrecked some feet of the cathedral spire at Christchurch, nipping off the point of it and the gilded iron cross which it sustained, so that it stood for many months looking like a broken lead-pencil. A dozen years later, Cheviot, Amuri, and Waiau were sharply shaken by an earthquake that [133]showed scant mercy to brick chimneys and houses of the material known as cob-and-clay. Finally, in the little Kermadec islets, far to the north of Cape Maria Van Diemen, we encounter hot pools and submarine explosions, and passing seamen have noted there sheets of ejected pumice floating and forming a scum on the surface of the ocean. As might be supposed, guides and hangers-on about Roto-rua and Taupo revel in tales of hairbreadth escapes and hair-raising fatalities. Nine generations ago, say the Maori, a sudden explosion of a geyser scalded to death half the villagers of Ohinemutu. In the way of smaller mishaps you are told how, as two Maori children walked together by Roto-mahana one slipped and broke through the crust of silica into the scalding mud beneath. The other, trying to lift him out, was himself dragged in and both were boiled alive. Near Ohinemutu, three revellers, overfull of confidence and bad rum, stepped off a narrow track at night and perished together in sulphurous mud and scalding steam. At the extremity of Boiling Point a village, or part of a village, is said to have been suddenly engulfed in the waters of Roto-rua. At the southern end of Taupo there is, or was, a legend current that a large wharé filled with dancers met, in a moment, a similar fate. In one case of which I heard, that of a Maori woman, who fell into a pool of a temperature above boiling-point, a witness assured me that she did not appear to suffer pain long: the nervous system was killed by the shock. Near Roto-rua a bather with a weak heart was picked up dead. He [134]had heedlessly plunged into a pool the fumes and chemical action of which are too strong for a weak man. And a certain young English tourist sitting in the pool nicknamed Painkiller was half-poisoned by mephitic vapour, and only saved by the quickness of a Maori guide. That was a generation ago: nowadays the traveller need run no risks. Guides and good medical advice are to be had by all who will use them. No sensible person need incur any danger whatever. Among stories of the boiling pools the most pathetic I can recall is of a collie dog. His master, a shepherd of the Taupo plateau, stood one day on the banks of a certain cauldron idly watching the white steam curling over the bubbling surface. His well-loved dog lay stretched on the mud crust beside him. In a thoughtless moment the shepherd flung a stick into the clear blue pool. In a flash the dog had sprung after it into the water of death. Maddened by the poor creature’s yell of pain, his master rushed to the brink, mechanically tearing off his coat as he ran. In another instant he too would have flung himself to destruction. Fortunately an athletic Maori who was standing by caught the poor man round the knees, threw him on to his back and held him down till all was over with the dog. IN A HOT POOL Near a well-known lake and in a wharé so surrounded by boiling mud, scalding steam, hot water, and burning sulphur as to be difficult of approach, there lived many years ago two friends. One was a teetotaller and a deeply religious man—characteristics not universal in the Hot Lakes district at that precise epoch. The [135]other inhabitant was more nearly normal in tastes and beliefs. The serious-minded friend became noted for having—unpaid, and with his own hands—built a chapel in the wilderness. Yet, unhappily, returning home on a thick rainy evening he slipped and fell into a boiling pool, where next day he was found—dead, of course. In vain the oldest inhabitants of the district sought to warn the survivor. He declined to be terrified, or to change either his dangerous abode or his path thereto. He persisted in walking home late at night whenever it suited him to do so. The “old hands” of the district shook their heads and prophesied that there could be but one end to such recklessness. And, sure enough, on a stormy night the genial and defiant Johnnie slipped in his turn and fell headlong into the pool which had boiled his mate. One wild shout he gave, and men who were within earshot tore to the spot—“Poor old Johnnie! Gone at last! We always said he would!” Out of the darkness and steam, however, they were greeted with a sound of vigorous splashing and of expressions couched in strong vernacular. “Why, Johnnie man, aren’t you dead? Aren’t you boiled to death?” “Not I! There’s no water in this —— country hot enough to boil me. Help me out!” It appeared that the torrents of rain which had been falling had flooded a cold stream hard by, and this, overflowing into the pool, had made it pleasantly tepid. NGONGOTAHA MOUNTAIN Needless to say, there is one fatal event, the story of [136]which overshadows all other stories told of the thermal zone. It is the one convulsion of Nature there, since the settlement of New Zealand, that has been great enough to become tragically famous throughout the world, apart from its interest to science. The eruption of Mount Tarawera was a magnificent and terrible spectacle. Accompanied as it was by the blowing-up of Lake Roto-mahana, it destroyed utterly the beautiful and extraordinary Pink and White Terraces. There can be no doubt that most of those who saw them thought the lost Pink and White Terraces the finest sight in the thermal region. They had not the grandeur of the volcanoes and the lakes, or the glorious energy of the geysers; but they were an astonishing combination of beauty of form and colour, of what looked like rocky massiveness with the life and heat of water in motion. Then there was nothing else of their kind on the earth at all equal to them in scale and completeness. So they could fairly be called unique, and the gazer felt on beholding them that in a sense this was the vision of a lifetime. Could those who saw them have known that the spectacle was to be so transient, this feeling must have been much keener. For how many ages they existed in the ferny wilderness, seen only by a few savages, geologists may guess at. Only for about twelve years were they the resort of any large number of civilised men. It is strange how little their fame had gone abroad before Hochstetter described them after seeing them in 1859. Bidwill, who was twice at Roto-rua in 1839, never mentions [137]them. The naturalist Dieffenbach, who saw them in 1842, dismisses them in a paragraph, laudatory but short. George French Angas, the artist, who was the guest of Te Heu Heu in 1845, and managed, against express orders, to sketch Tongariro, does not seem to have heard of them. Yet he of all men might have been expected to get wind of such a marvel. For a marvel they were, and short as was the space during which they were known to the world, their fame must last until the Fish of Maui is engulfed in the ocean. There, amid the green manuka and rusty-green bracken, on two hill-sides sloping down to a lake of moderate size—Roto-mahana or Warm Lake,—strong boiling springs gushed out. They rose from two broad platforms, each about a hundred yards square, the flooring of craters with reddish-brown sides streaked and patched with sulphur. Their hot water, after seething and swirling in two deep pools, descended to the lake over a series of ledges, basins, or hollowed terraces, which curved out as boldly as the swelling canvas of a ship, so that the balustrades or battlements—call them what you will—seemed the segments of broken circles. Their irregular height varied from two to six feet, and visitors could scale them, as in Egypt they climb the pyramids. One terrace, or rather set of terraces, was called White, the other Pink: but the White were tinged lightly with pink in spots, and their rosy sisters paled here and there, so as to become nearly colourless in places. “White,” moreover, scarcely conveys the exact impression of Te Tarata, except from a distance [138]or under strong light. Domett’s “cataract of marble” summed it up finely. But to be precise, where it was smoothest and where water and the play of light made the surface gleam or glisten, the silica coating of the White ledges reminded you rather of old ivory, or polished bone tinted a faint yellow. As for the “Pink” staircase, one traveller would describe it as bright salmon-pink, another as pale rose, for eyes in different heads see the same things differently. The White Terrace was the higher of the two, and descended with a gentler slope than the other. The skirts of both spread out into the lake, so that its waters flowed over them. The number and fine succession of these ivory arcs and rosy battlements made but half their charm. The hot water as it trickled from shelf to shelf left its flinty sediment in delicate incrustations—here like the folds of a mantle, there resembling fringing lace-work, milk outpoured and frozen, trailing parasites or wild arabesques. Or it made you think of wreathed sea-foam, snow half-melted, or the coral of South Sea reefs. Then among it lay the blue pools, pool after pool, warm, richly coloured, glowing; while over every edge and step fell the water, trickling, spurting, sparkling, and steaming as it slowly cooled on its downward way. So that, though there was a haunting reminder of human architecture and sculpture, there was none of the smug finish of man’s buildings, nothing of the cold dead lifelessness of carved stone-work. The sun shone upon it, the wind played with the water-drops. The blue sky—pale [139]by contrast—overarched the deeper blue of the pools. Green mosses and vivid ferns grew and flourished on the very edge of the steam. What sculptor’s frieze or artist’s structure ever had such a framework? In the genial water the bathers, choosing their temperature, could float or sit, breathing unconfined air and wondering at the softness and strange intensity of colour. They could bathe in the day-time when all was sunshine, or on summer nights when the moonlight turned the ledges to alabaster. Did the tribute of his provinces build for Caracalla such imperial baths as these? No wonder that Nature, after showing such loveliness to our age for a moment, snatched it away from the desecration of scribbling, defacing, civilised men! The eruption of Tarawera was preceded by many signs of disturbance. Science in chronicling them seems to turn gossip and collect portents with the gusto of Plutarch or Froissart. The calamity came on the 10th of June, and therefore in early winter. The weather had been stormy but had cleared, so no warning could be extracted from its behaviour. But, six months before, the cauldron on the uppermost platform of Te Tarata had broken out in strange fashion. Again and again the water had shrunk far down, and had even been sucked in to the supplying pipe, leaving the boiling pit, thirty yards across and as many feet deep, quite dry. Then suddenly the water had boiled up and a geyser, a mounting column or dome many feet in thickness, had shot up into the air, struggling aloft to the height of a hundred and [140]fifty feet. From it there went up a pillar of steam four or five times as high, with a sound heard far and wide. Geyser-like as the action of the terrace-pool had been, nothing on this scale had been recorded before. Then from the Bay of Plenty came the news that thousands of dead fish had been cast up on the beaches, poisoned by the fumes of some submarine explosion. Furthermore, the crater-lake in White Island suddenly went dry—another novelty. Next, keen-eyed observers saw steam issuing from the top of Ruapehu. They could scarcely believe their eyes, for Ruapehu had been quiescent as far back as man’s memory went. But there was no doubt of it. Two athletic surveyors clambered up through the snows, and there, as they looked down four hundred feet on the crater-lake from the precipices that ringed it in, they saw the surface of the water lifted and shaken, and steam rising into the icy air. Later on, just before the catastrophe, the Maori by Roto-mahana lost their chief by sickness. As he lay dying some of his tribe saw a strange canoe, paddled by phantom warriors, glide across the lake and disappear. The number of men in the canoe was thirteen, and as they flitted by their shape changed and they became spirits with dogs’ heads. The tribe, struck with terror, gave up hope for their chief. He died, and his body lay not yet buried when the fatal night came. Lastly, on the day before the eruption, without apparent cause, waves rose and swept across the calm surface of Lake Tarawera, to the alarm of the last party of tourists who visited the Terrace. Dr. Ralph, one of these, noted [141]also that soft mud had apparently just been ejected from the boiler of the Pink Terrace, and lay strewn about twenty-five yards away. He and his friends hastened away, depressed and uneasy. No one, however, Maori or white, seriously conceived of anything like the destruction that was impending. The landlord of the Wairoa hotel grumbled at the native guide Sophia for telling of these ominous incidents. And a Maori chief, with some followers, went to camp upon two little islets in Roto-mahana lying handy for the hot bathing-pools. Why should any one expect that the flat-topped, heavy looking mountain of Tarawera would burst out like Krakatoa? True, Tarawera means “burning peak,” but the hill, and its companion Ruawahia, must have been quiescent for many hundred years. For were not trees growing in clefts near the summits with trunks as thick as the height of a tall man? Nor was there any tradition of explosions on the spot. Thirteen generations ago, said the Maori, a famous chief had been interred in or near one of the craters, and Nature had never disturbed his resting-place. The surprise, therefore, was almost complete, and only the winter season was responsible for the small number of tourists in the district on the 10th of June. It was about an hour past midnight when the convulsion began. First came slight shocks of earthquake; then noises, booming, muttering, and swelling to a roar. The shocks became sharper. Some of them seemed like strokes of a gigantic hammer striking upwards. Then, after a shock felt for fifty[142] miles round, an enormous cloud rose above Tarawera and the mountain spouted fire, stones, and dust to the heavens. The burning crater illumined the cloud, so that it glowed like a “pillar of fire by night.” And above the glow an immense black canopy began to open out and spread for at least sixty miles, east, north-east and south-east. Seen from far off it had the shape of a monstrous mushroom. In the earlier hours of the eruption the outer edges of the mushroom shape were lit up by vivid streams and flashes of lightning, shooting upward, downward, or stabbing the dark mass with fierce sidelong thrusts. Forked bolts sped in fiery zig-zags, or ascended, rocket-fashion, to burst and fall in flaming fragments. Sounds followed them like the crackling of musketry. Brilliantly coloured, the flashes were blue, golden or orange, while some were burning bars of white that stood out, hot and distinct, across the red of the vomiting crater. But more appalling even than the cloudy canopy with its choking dust, the tempest, the rocking earth, or the glare of lightning, was the noise. After two o’clock it became an awful and unceasing roar, deafening the ears, benumbing the nerves, and bewildering the senses of the unhappy beings within the ring of death or imminent danger. It made the windows rattle in the streets of Auckland one hundred and fifty miles away, and awoke many sleepers in Nelson at a more incredible distance. And with the swelling of the roar thick darkness settled down—darkness that covered half a province for hours. Seven hours after the destruction began, settlers far away on [143]the sea-coast to the east were eating their morning meals—if they cared to eat at all—by candle-light. To say that it was a darkness that could be felt would be to belittle its horrors absurdly—at any rate near Tarawera. For miles out from the mountain it was a darkness that smote and killed you—made up as it was of mud and fire, burning stones, and suffocating dust. Whence came the mud? Partly, no doubt, it was formed by steam acting on the volcanic dust-cloud; but, in part, it was the scattered contents of Roto-mahana—a whole lake hurled skyward, water and ooze together. With Roto-mahana went its shores, the Terraces, several neighbouring smaller lakes and many springs. Yet so tremendous was the outburst that even this wreck was not physically the chief feature of the destruction. That was the great rift, an irregular cleft, fourteen or fifteen miles long, opened across the Tarawera and its companion heights. This earth-crack, or succession of cracks, varied in depth from three hundred to nine hundred feet. To any one looking down into it from one of the hill-tops commanding it, it seemed half as deep again. It, and the surrounding black scoria cast up from its depths, soon became cold and dead; but, continuing as it did to bear the marks of the infernal fires that had filled it, the great fissure remained in after years the plainest evidence of that dark night’s work. When I had a sight of it in 1891, it was the centre of a landscape still clothed with desolation. The effect was dreary and unnatural. The deep wound looked an injury to the earth as [144]malign as it was gigantic. It was precisely such a scene as would have suggested to a zealot of the Middle Ages a vision of the pit of damnation. LAKE AND MOUNT TARAWERA Until six in the morning the eruption did not slacken at all. Hot stones and fireballs were carried for miles, and as they fell set huts and forests on fire. Along with their devastation came a rain of mud, loading the roofs of habitations and breaking down the branches of trees. Blasts of hot air were felt, but usually the wind—and it blew violently—was bitter cold. At one moment a kind of cyclone or tornado rushed over Lake Tikitapu, prostrating and splintering, as it passed, the trees close by, and so wrecking a forest famous for its beauty.[3] What went on at the centre of the eruption no eye ever saw—the great cloud hid it. The dust shot aloft is variously computed to have risen six or eight miles. The dust-cloud did not strike down the living as did the rain of mud, fire, and stones. But its mischief extended over a much wider area. Half a day’s journey out from the crater it deposited a layer three inches thick, and it coated even islands miles off the east coast. By the sea-shore one observer thought the sound of its falling was like a gentle rain. But the effect of the black sand and mouse-coloured dust was the opposite of that of rain; for it killed the pasture, and the settlers could only save their cattle and sheep by driving them hastily off. Insect life was half destroyed, and many of the smaller birds shared the fate of the insects. By Lake Roto-iti, fourteen [145]miles to the north of the crater, Major Mair, listening to the dropping of the sand and dust, compared it to a soft ooze like falling snow. It turned the waters of the lake to a sort of soapy grey, and overspread the surrounding hills with an unbroken grey sheet. The small bull-trout and crayfish of the lake floated dead on the surface of the water. After a while birds starved or disappeared. Wild pheasants came to the school-house seeking for chance crumbs of food, and hungry rats were seen roaming about on the smooth carpet of dust. [3] See The Eruption of Tarawera, by S. Percy Smith. MAORI WASHING-DAY, OHINEMUTU How did the human inhabitants of the district fare at Roto-rua and Ohinemutu? Close at hand as they were, no damage was done to life or limb. They were outside the range of the destroying messengers. But nearer to the volcano, in and about Roto-mahana, utter ruin was wrought, and here unfortunately the natives of the Ngati Rangitihi, living at Wairoa and on some other spots, could not escape. Some of them, indeed, were encamped at the time on islets in Roto-mahana itself, and they of course were instantly annihilated in the midst of the convulsion. Their fellow tribesmen at Wairoa went through a more lingering ordeal, to meet, nearly all of them, the same death. About an hour after midnight Mr. Hazard, the Government teacher of the native school at Wairoa, was with his family roused by the earthquake shocks. Looking out into the night they saw the flaming cloud go up from Tarawera, ten miles away. As they watched the spectacle, half in admiration, half in terror, the father [146]said to his daughter, “If we were to live a hundred years, we should not see such a sight again.” He himself did not live three hours, for he died, crushed by the ruin of his house as it broke down under falling mud and stones. The wreck of the building was set alight by a shower of fireballs, yet the schoolmaster’s wife, who was pinned under it by a beam, was dug out next day and lived. Two daughters survived with her; three children perished. Other Europeans in Wairoa took refuge in a hotel, where for hours they stayed, praying and wondering how soon the downpour of fire, hot stones, mud and dust would break in upon them. In the end all escaped save one English tourist named Bainbridge. The Maori in their frail thatched huts were less fortunate; they made little effort to save themselves, and nearly the whole tribe was blotted out. One of them, the aged wizard Tukoto, is said to have been dug out alive after four days: but his hair and beard were matted with the volcanic stuff that had been rained upon him. The rescuers cut away the hair, and Tukoto’s strength thereupon departed like Samson’s. At any rate the old fellow gave up the ghost. In after days he became the chief figure in a Maori legend, which now accounts for the eruption. It seems that a short while before it, the wife of a neighbouring chief had denounced Tukoto for causing the death of her child. Angry at an unjust charge, the old wizard prayed aloud to the god of earthquakes, and to the spirit of Ngatoro, the magician who kindled Tongariro, to send down death upon the chief’s wife [147]and her people. In due course destruction came, but the gods did not nicely discriminate, so Tukoto and those round him were overwhelmed along with his enemies. At another native village not far away the Maori were more fortunate. They had living among them Sophia the guide, whose wharé was larger and more strongly built than the common run of their huts. Sophia, too, was a fine woman, a half-caste, who had inherited calculating power and presence of mind from her Scotch father. Under her roof half a hundred scared neighbours came crowding, trusting that the strong supporting poles would prevent the rain of death from battering it down. When it showed signs of giving way, Sophia, who kept cool, set the refugees to work to shore it up with any props that could be found; and in the end the plucky old woman could boast that no one of those who sought shelter with her lost their lives. The township of Roto-rua, with its side-shows Ohinemutu and Whaka-rewa-rewa, escaped in the great eruption scot free, or at any rate with a light powdering of dust. The place survived to become the social centre of the thermal country, and now offers no suggestion of ruin or devastation. It has been taken in hand by the Government, and is bright, pleasant, and, if anything, too thoroughly comfortable and modern. It is scientifically drained and lighted with electric light. Hotels and tidy lodging-houses look out upon avenues planted with exotic trees. The public gardens [148]cover a peninsula jutting out into the lake, and their flowery winding paths lead to lawns and tennis-courts. Tea is served there by Maori waitresses whose caps and white aprons might befit Kensington Gardens; and a band plays. If the visitors to Roto-rua do not exactly “dance on the slopes of a volcano,” at least they chat and listen to music within sight of the vapour of fumaroles and the steam of hot springs. A steam launch will carry them from one lake to another, or coaches convey them to watch geysers made to spout for their diversion. They may picnic and eat sandwiches in spots where they can listen to muddy cauldrons of what looks like boiling porridge, sucking and gurgling in disagreeable fashion. Or they may watch gouts of dun-coloured mud fitfully issuing from cones like ant-hills—mud volcanoes, to wit. For the country around is not dead or even sleeping, and within a circuit of ten miles from Roto-rua there is enough to be seen to interest an intelligent sight-seer for many days. Personally I do not think Roto-rua the finest spot in the thermal region. Taupo, with its lake, river, and great volcanoes, has, to my mind, higher claims. Much as Roto-rua has to show, I suspect that the Waiotapu valley offers a still better field to the man of science. However, the die has been cast, and Roto-rua, as the terminus of the railway and the seat of the Government sanatorium, has become a kind of thermal capital. There is no need to complain of this. Its attractions are many, and, when they are exhausted, you can go thence to any other point of the region. You may [149]drive to Taupo by one coach-road and return by another, or may easily reach Waiotapu in a forenoon. Anglers start out from Roto-rua to fish in a lake and rivers where trout are more than usually abundant. You can believe if you like that the chief difficulty met with by Roto-rua fishermen is the labour of carrying home their enormous catches. But it is, I understand, true that the weight of trout caught by fly or minnow in a season exceeds forty tons. At any rate—to drop the style of auctioneers’ advertisements—the trout, chiefly of the rainbow kind, are very plentiful, and the sport very good. I would say no harder thing of the attractions of Roto-rua and its circuit than this,—those who have spent a week there must not imagine that they have seen the thermal region. They have not even “done” it, still less do they know it. Almost every part of it has much to interest, and Roto-rua is the beginning, not the end of it all. I know an energetic colonist who, when travelling through Italy, devoted one whole day to seeing Rome. Even he, however, agrees with me that a month is all too short a time for the New Zealand volcanic zone. Sociable or elderly tourists have a right to make themselves snug at Roto-rua or Wairakei. But there are other kinds of travellers; and holiday-makers and lovers of scenery, students of science, sportsmen, and workers seeking for the space and fresh air of the wilderness, will do well to go farther afield. At Roto-rua, as at other spots in the zone, you are in a realm of sulphur. It is in the air as well as the [150]water, tickles your throat, and blackens the silver in your pocket. Amongst many compensating returns it brightens patches of the landscape with brilliant streaks of many hues—not yellow or golden only, but orange, green, blue, blood-red, and even purple. Often where the volcanic mud would be most dismal the sulphur colours and glorifies it. Alum is found frequently alongside it, whitening banks and pool in a way that makes Englishmen think of their chalk downs. One mountain, Maunga Kakaramea (Mount Striped-Earth), has slopes that suggest an immense Scottish plaid. WAIROA GEYSER But more beautiful than the sulphur stripes or the coloured pools, and startling and uncommon in a way that neither lakes nor mountains can be, are the geysers. Since the Pink and White Terraces were blown up, they are, perhaps, the most striking and uncommon feature of the region, which, if it had nothing else to display, would still be well worth a visit. They rival those of the Yellowstone and surpass those of Iceland. New Zealanders have made a study of geysers, and know that they are a capricious race. They burst into sudden activity, and as unexpectedly go to sleep again. The steam-jet of Orakei-Korako, which shot out of the bank of the Waikato at such an odd angle and astonished all beholders for a few years, died down inexplicably. So did the wonderful Waimangu, which threw a column of mud, stones, steam, and boiling water at least 1500 feet into mid-air. The Waikité Geyser, after a long rest, began to play again at the [151]time of the Tarawera eruption. That was natural enough. But why did it suddenly cease to move after the opening of the railway to Roto-rua, two miles away? Mr. Ruskin might have sympathised with it for so resenting the intrusion of commercialism; but tourists did not. Great was the rejoicing when, in 1907, Waikité awoke after a sleep of thirteen years. Curiously enough, another geyser, Pohutu, seems likewise attentive to public events, for on the day upon which the Colony became a Dominion it spouted for no less than fourteen hours, fairly eclipsing the numerous outpourings of oratory from human rivals which graced the occasion. There are geysers enough and to spare in the volcanic zone, to say nothing of the chances of a new performer gushing out at any moment. Some are large enough to be terrific, others small enough to be playful or even amusing. The hydrodynamics of Nature are well understood at Roto-rua, where Mr. Malfroy’s ingenious toy, the artificial geyser, is an exact imitation of their structure and action. The curious may examine this, or they may visit the extinct geyser, Te Waro, down the empty pipe of which a man may be lowered. At fifteen feet below the surface he will find himself in a vaulted chamber twice as roomy as a ship’s cabin and paved and plastered with silica. From the floor another pipe leads to lower subterranean depths. In the days of Te Waro’s activity steam rushing up into this cavern from below would from time to time force the water there violently upward: so the geyser played. To-day there are geysers irritable enough to [152]be set in motion by slices of soap, just as there are solfataras which a lighted match can make to roar, and excitable pools which a handful of earth will stir into effervescence. More impressive are the geysers which spout often, but whose precise time for showing energy cannot be counted on—which are, in fact, the unexpected which is always happening. Very beautiful are the larger geysers, as, after their first roaring outburst and ascent, they stand, apparently climbing up, their effort to overcome the force of gravity seeming to grow greater and greater as they climb. Every part of the huge column seems to be alive; and, indeed, all is in motion within it. Innumerable little fountains gush up on its sides, to curl back and fall earthwards. The sunlight penetrates the mass of water, foam, and steam, catching the crystal drops and painting rainbows which quiver and dance in the wind. Bravely the column holds up, till, its strength spent, it falters and sways, and at last falls or sinks slowly down, subsiding into a seething whirlpool. Brief, as a rule, is the spectacle, but while the fountain is striving to mount skyward it is “all a wonder and a wild desire.” COOKING IN A HOT SPRING Two Maori villages, one at Ohinemutu, the other at Whaka-rewa-rewa, are disordered collections of irregular huts. Among them the brown natives of the thermal district live and move with a gravity and dignity that even their half-gaudy, half-dingy European garb cannot wholly spoil. Passing their lives as they do on the edge of the cold lake, and surrounded by hot pools and steam-jets, they seem a more or less amphibious race, [153]quite untroubled by anxiety about subterranean action. They make all the use they can of Nature’s forces, employing the steam and hot water for various daily wants. Of course they bathe incessantly and wash clothes in the pools. They will sit up to their necks in the warm fluid, and smoke luxuriously in a bath that does not turn cold. But more interesting to watch is their cooking. Here the steam of the blow-holes is their servant; or they will lay their food in baskets of flax in some clean boiling spring, choosing, of course, water that is tasteless. Cooking food by steam was and still is the favourite method of the Maori. Where Nature does not provide the steam, they dig ovens in the earth called hangi, and, wrapping their food in leaves, place it therein on red-hot stones. Then they spread more leaves over them, pour water upon these, and cover the hole with earth. When the oven is opened the food is found thoroughly cooked, and in this respect much more palatable than some of the cookery of the colonists. In their culinary work the Maoris have always been neat and clean. This makes their passion for those two terrible delicacies, putrid maize and dried shark, something of a puzzle. Life at Roto-rua is not all sight-seeing; there is a serious side to it. Invalids resort thither, as they do to Taupo, in ever-increasing numbers. The State sanatorium, with its brand-new bath-house, is as well equipped now as good medical bathing-places are in Europe, and is directed by a physician who was in former years a doctor of repute at Bath. Amid the [154]embarras des richesses offered by the thermal springs of the zone, Roto-rua has been selected as his headquarters, because there two chief and distinct kinds of hot healing waters are found in close neighbourhood, and can be used in the same establishment. The two are acid-sulphur and alkaline-sulphur, and both are heavily loaded with silica. Unlike European springs they gush out at boiling-point, and their potency is undoubted. Sufferers tormented with gout or crippled with rheumatism seek the acid waters; the alkaline act as a nervous sedative and cure various skin diseases. There are swimming baths for holiday-makers who have nothing the matter with them, and massage and the douche for the serious patients. Persons without money are cared for by the servants of the Government. Wonderful cures are reported, and as the fame of the healing waters becomes better and better established the number of successful cases steadily increases. For the curable come confidently expecting to be benefited, and this, of course, is no small factor in the efficacy of the baths, indisputable as their strength is. Apart, too, from its springs, Roto-rua is a sunny place, a thousand feet above the sea. The air is light even in midsummer, and the drainage through the porous pumice and silica is complete. In such a climate, amid such healing influences and such varied and interesting surroundings, the sufferer who cannot gain health at Roto-rua must be in a bad way indeed. THE CHAMPAGNE CAULDRON In the middle of Roto-rua Lake, a green hill in the [155]broad blue surface, rises the isle of Mokoia. There is nothing extraordinary in the way of beauty there. Still, it is high and shapely, with enough foliage to feather the rocks and soften the outlines. Botanists know it as one of the few spots away from the sea-beach where the crimson-flowering pohutu-kawa has deigned to grow. In any case, the scene of the legend of Hinemoa is sure of a warm corner in all New Zealand hearts. The story of the chief’s daughter, and her swim by night across the lake to join her lover on the island, has about it that quality of grace with which most Maori tales are but scantily draped. How many versions of it are to be found in print I do not dare to guess, and shall not venture to add another to their number. For two of New Zealand’s Prime Ministers have told the story well, and I can refer my readers to the prose of Grey and the verse of Domett. Only do I wish that I had heard Maning, the Pakeha Maori, repeat the tale, standing on the shore of Mokoia, as he repeated it there to Dr. Moore. In passing I may, however, do homage to one of the few bits of sweet romance to be found in New Zealand literature. Long may my countrymen steadfastly refuse to disbelieve a word of it! For myself, as one who has bathed in Hinemoa’s bath, I hold by every sentence of the tradition, and am fully persuaded that Hinemoa’s love-sick heart was soothed, as she sat on her flat-topped rock on the mainshore, by the soft music of the native trumpet blown by her hero on the island. After all, the intervening water was some [156]miles broad, and even that terrific instrument, a native trumpet, might be softened by such a distance. Long after the happy union of its lovers, Mokoia saw another sight when Hongi, “eater of men,” marched down with his Ngapuhi musketeers from the north to exterminate the Arawa of the lake country. To the Roto-rua people Mokoia had in times past been a sure refuge. In camp there, they commanded the lake with their canoes; no invader could reach them, for no invader could bring a fleet overland. So it had always been, and the Mokoians trusting thereto, paddled about the lake defying and insulting Hongi and his men in their camp on the farther shore. Yet so sure of victory were the Ngapuhi chiefs that each of the leaders selected as his own booty the war-canoe that seemed handsomest in his eyes. Hongi had never heard of the device by which Mahomet II. captured Constantinople, but he was a man of original methods, and he decided that canoes could be dragged twenty miles or more from the sea-coast to Lake Roto-iti. It is said that an Arawa slave or renegade in his camp suggested the expedient and pointed out the easiest road. At any rate the long haul was successfully achieved, and the canoes of the Plumed Ones—Ngapuhi—paddled from Roto-iti into Roto-rua. Then all was over except the slaughter, for the Mokoians had but half-a-dozen guns, and Hongi’s musketeers from their canoes could pick them off without landing. EVENING ON LAKE ROTO-RUA Fifteen hundred men, women, and children are said [157]to have perished in the final massacre. Whether these figures were “official” I cannot say. The numbers of the slain computed in the Maori stories of their wars between 1816 and 1836 are sometimes staggering; but scant mercy was shown, and all tradition concurs in rating the death-roll far higher than anything known before or after. And Mokoia was crowded with refugees when it fell before Hongi’s warriors. Of course, many of the islanders escaped. Among them a strong swimmer, Hori (George) Haupapa, took to the lake and managed to swim to the farther shore. The life he thus saved on that day of death proved to be long, for Haupapa was reputed to be a hundred years old when he died in peace. The famous Hongi was certainly a savage of uncommon quickness of perception, as his circumventing of the Mokoians in their lake-stronghold shows. He had shrewdness enough to perceive that the Maori tribe which should first secure firearms would hold New Zealand at its mercy; and he was sufficient of a man of business to act upon this theory with success and utter ruthlessness. He probably did more to destroy his race than any white or score of whites; yet his memory is not, so far as I know, held in special detestation by the Maori. Two or three better qualities this destructive cannibal seems to have had, for he protected the missionaries and advised his children to do so likewise. Then he had a soft voice and courteous manner, and, though not great of stature, must have been tough, for the bullet-wound in [158]his chest which finally killed him took two years in doing so. Moreover, his dying exhortation to his sons, “Be strong, be brave!” was quite in the right spirit for the last words of a Maori warrior. Hongi would seem to be an easy name enough to pronounce. Yet none has suffered more from “the taste and fancy of the speller” in books, whether written by Englishmen or Colonists. Polack calls him E’Ongi, and other early travellers, Shongee, Shongi, and Shungie. Finally Mr. J. A. Froude, not to be outdone in inaccuracy, pleasantly disposes of him, in Oceana, as “Hangi.” “Old Colonial,” in an article written in the Pall Mall Gazette, gives Mokoia as the scene of a notable encounter between Bishop Selwyn and Tukoto, a Maori tohunga or wizard. To Selwyn, who claimed to be the servant of an all-powerful God, the tohunga is reported to have said, as he held out a brown withered leaf, “Can you, then, by invoking your God, make this dead leaf green again?” The Bishop answered that no man could do that. Thereupon Tukoto, after chanting certain incantations, threw the leaf into the air, and, lo! its colour changed, and it fluttered to earth fresh and green once more. PLANTING POTATOES Among many odd stories told of the juggling feats of the vanishing race of tohungas this is one of the most curious. More than one version of it is to be found. For example, my friend Edward Tregear, in his book The Maori Race, relates it as an episode of a meeting between Selwyn and Te Heu Heu, where [159]the trick was the riposte of the chief to an appeal by the Bishop to him to change his faith. In that case the place of the encounter could scarcely have been Mokoia, or the tohunga have been Tukoto. Whatever may be said—and a great deal may be said—against the tohunga as the foe of healing and knowledge, the religious prophets who from time to time rise among the Maori are not always entirely bad influences. A certain Rua, who just now commands belief among his countrymen, has managed to induce a following to found a well-built village on a hill-side among the forests of the Uriwera country. There, attended by several wives, he inhabits a comfortable house. Hard by rises a large circular temple, a wonderful effort of his native workmen. He has power enough to prohibit tobacco and alcohol in his settlement, to enforce sanitary rules, and to make his disciples clear and cultivate a large farm. Except that he forbids children from going to school, he does not appear to set himself against the Government. He poses, I understand, as a successor of Christ, and is supposed to be able to walk on the surface of water. His followers were anxious for ocular proof of this, and a hint of their desire was conveyed to the prophet. He assembled them on a river’s bank and gravely inquired, “Do you all from your hearts believe that I can walk on that water?” “We do,” was the response. “Then it is not necessary for me to do it,” said he, and walked composedly back to his hut. CHAPTER VI ALP, FIORD, AND SANCTUARY THE WAIRAU GORGE In one way the south-western is the most enjoyable division of picturesque New Zealand. There is little here to regret or fear for. Unlike the beauty of the northern forests, here is a grandeur that will not pass away. Even in the thermal zone you are haunted by the memory of the lost terraces; but among the alps and fiords of the south-west Nature sits very strongly entrenched. From the Buller Gorge to Puysegur Point, and from Lake Menzies to Lake Hau-roto, both the climate and the lie of the land combine to keep man’s destructiveness at bay. Longitudinal ridges seam this territory from north to south—not a single dividing chain, but half-a-dozen ranges, lofty, steep, and entangled. Rivers thread every valley, and are the swiftest, coldest, and most dangerous of that treacherous race, the mountain torrents of our islands. On the eastern and drier side, settlement can do little to spoil the impressiveness of the mountains; for the great landscapes—at any rate north of Lake Hawea—usually begin at or near the snow-line. The edge [161]of this is several thousand feet lower than in Switzerland. Below it comes a zone sometimes dotted with beech-woods, monotonous and seldom very high, but beautiful in their vesture of grey-green lichen, and carpeted with green and golden moss, often deep and not always soaked and slimy underneath. Or in the open the sub-alpine zone is redeemed by an abundance of ground-flowers such as our lower country cannot show. For this is the home of the deep, bowl-shaped buttercup called the shepherd’s lily, of mountain-daisies and veronicas many and varied, and of those groves of the ribbon-wood that are more lovely than orchards of almond-trees in spring-time. On the rocks above them the mountaineer who has climbed in Switzerland will recognise the edelweiss. Among the blanched snow-grass and coarse tussocks, the thorny “Wild Irishman,” and the spiky “Spaniard,” with its handsome chevaux-de-frise of yellow-green bayonets, conspire to make riding difficult on the flats and terraces. These last often attract the eye by their high faces, bold curves, and curious, almost smooth, regularity. For the rest, the more eastern of the mountains usually become barer and duller as the watershed is left farther behind. Oases of charm they have, where the flora of some sheltered ravine or well-hidden lake detains the botanist; but, as a rule, their brilliant sunshine and exhilarating air, their massive forms and wild intersecting rivers, have much to do to save them from being summed up as stony, arid, bleak, and tiresome. [162] IN THE HOOKER VALLEY At its worst, however, the eastern region may claim to be serviceable to the lover of scenery as well as to the sheep-farmer. Its thinly-grassed slopes, bare rocks, and fan-shaped shingle-slips furnish, at any rate, a foil to the grandeur of the central range and the luxuriance of the west. It is, indeed, not easy to believe that such glaciers and passes, such lakes and sea-gulfs, lie beyond the stern barrier, and the enjoyment, when wonderland is penetrated, is all the greater. For the rest, any English reader who cares to feel himself among our tussock-clad ranges will find a masterly sketch of them and their atmosphere in the first chapters of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. Butler’s sheep-station, “Mesopotamia” by name, lay among the alps of Canterbury, and the satirist himself did some exploring work in his pastoral days, work concerning which I recall a story told me by an old settler whom I will call the Sheriff. This gentleman, meeting Butler one day in Christchurch in the early sixties, noticed that his face and neck were burned to the colour of red-chocolate. “Hullo, my friend,” said he, “you have been among the snow!” “Hush!” answered Butler in an apprehensive whisper, and looking round the smoking-room nervously, “how do you know that?” “By the colour of your face; nothing more,” was the reply. They talked a while, and Butler presently admitted that he had been up to the dividing range and had seen a great sight away beyond it. “I’ve found a hundred thousand acres of ‘country,’” said he. [163]“Naturally I wish you to keep this quiet till I have proved it and applied to the Government for a pastoral licence.” “Well, I congratulate you,” said the Sheriff. “If it will carry sheep you’ve made your fortune, that’s all”; but he intimated his doubts as to whether the blue expanse seen from far off could be grass country. And indeed, when next he met Butler, the latter shook his head ruefully: “You were quite right; it was all bush.” I have often wondered whether that experience was the basis of the passage that tells of the thrilling discovery of Erewhon beyond the pass guarded by the great images. In one of his letters about the infant Canterbury settlement Butler gives a description of Aorangi, or Mount Cook, which, so far as I know, is the earliest sketch of the mountain by a writer of note. It was, however, not an Englishman, but a German man of science, Sir Julius von Haast, who published the first careful and connected account of the Southern Alps. Von Haast was not a mountaineer, but a geologist, and though he attacked Aorangi, he did not ascend more than two-thirds of it. But he could write, and had an eye for scenery as well as for strata. The book which he published on the geology of Canterbury and Westland did very much the same service to the Southern Alps that von Hochstetter’s contemporary work did for the hot lakes. The two German savants brought to the knowledge of the world outside two very different but remarkable regions. It is true that the realm of flowery uplands, glaciers, ice-walls, and snow-fields told of by von Haast, had nothing in it so uncommon as the [164]geysers and so strange as the pink and white terraces made familiar by von Hochstetter. But the higher Southern Alps, when once you are among them, may fairly challenge comparison with those of Switzerland. Their elevation is not equal by two or three thousand feet, but the lower level of their snow-line just about makes up the disparity. Then, too, on the flanks of their western side the mountains of the south have a drapery of forest far more varied and beautiful than the Swiss pine woods. On the western side, too, the foot of the mountain rampart is virtually washed by the ocean. Take the whole mountain territory of the south-west with its passes, lakes, glaciers, river-gorges, and fiords, and one need not hesitate to assert that it holds its own when compared with what Nature has done in Switzerland, Savoy, and Dauphiny. MOUNT COOK Aorangi, with its 12,349 feet, exceeds the peak of Teneriffe by 159 feet. It is the highest point in our islands, for Mount Tasman, its neighbour, which comes second, fails to equal it by 874 feet. Only two or three other summits surpass 11,000 feet, and the number which attain to anything over 10,000 is not great. From the south-west, Aorangi, with the ridge attached to it, resembles the high-pitched roof of a Gothic church with a broad, massive spire standing up from the northern end. When, under strong sunlight, the ice glitters on the steep crags, and the snow-fields, unearthly in their purity, contrast with the green tint of the crawling glaciers, the great mountain is a spectacle worthy of its fame. Yet high and shapely [165]as it is, and worthy of its name, Cloud-in-the-Heavens, it is not the most beautiful mountain in the islands. That honour may be claimed by Egmont, just as Tongariro may demand precedence as the venerated centre of Maori reverence and legend. Nor, formidable as Aorangi looks, is it, I should imagine, as impracticable as one or two summits farther south, notably Mount Balloon. However, unlike Kosciusko in Australia, it is a truly imposing height, and worthy of its premier place. With it the story of New Zealand alpine-climbing has been bound up for a quarter of a century, and such romance as that story has to show is chiefly found in attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to reach the topmost point of Aorangi. Canterbury had been settled for thirty-two years before the first of these was made. For the low snow-line, great cliffs, and enormous glaciers of the Southern Alps have their especial cause of origin. They bespeak an extraordinary steepness in the rock faces, and a boisterous climate with rapid and baffling changes of temperature. Not a climber or explorer amongst them but has been beaten back at times by tempests, or held a prisoner for many hours, listening through a sleepless night to the howling of north-west or south-west wind—lucky if he is not drenched to the skin by rain or flood. As for the temperature, an observer once noted a fall of fifty-three degrees in a few hours. On the snow-fields the hot sun blisters the skin of your face and neck, and even at a lower level makes a heavy coat an intolerable burden; but the same coat—flung impatiently on the ground and [166]left there—may be picked up next morning frozen as stiff as a board. These extremes of heat and cold, these sudden and furious gales, are partly, I imagine, the cause of the loose and rotten state of much of the rock-surface, of the incessant falls of stones, ice-blocks, and snow, and of the number and size of the avalanches. At any rate, the higher alps showed a front which, to ordinary dwellers on our plains, seemed terrific, and which even gave pause to mountain-climbers of some Swiss experience. So even von Haast’s book did not do much more than increase the number of visitors to the more accessible glaciers and sub-alpine valleys. The spirit of mountaineering lay dormant year after year, and it was not until 1882 that an unexpected invader from Europe delivered the sudden and successful stroke that awoke it. The raider was Mr. Green, an Irish clergyman, who, with two Swiss guides, Boss and Kaufmann, landed in the autumn of 1882. His object was the ascent of Aorangi; he had crossed the world to make it. He found our inner mountains just as Nature had left them, and, before beginning his climb, had to leave human life behind, and camp at the foot of the mountain with so much of the resources of civilisation as he could take with him. One of his first encounters with a New Zealand river in a hurry ended in the loss of his light cart, which was washed away. Its wrecked and stranded remains lay for years in the river-bed a battered relic of a notable expedition. To cap his troubles, a pack-horse carrying flour, tea, sugar, and spare clothing, coolly lay down when fording[167] a shallow torrent, and rolled on its back—and therefore on its pack—in the rapid water. Ten days of preliminary tramping and clambering, during which five separate camps were formed, only carried the party with their provisions and apparatus to a height of less than 4000 feet above the sea. They had toiled over moraine boulders, been entangled in dense and prickly scrubs, and once driven back by a fierce north-wester. On the other hand the scenery was glorious and the air exhilarating. Nothing round them seemed tame except the wild birds. Keas, wekas, and blue ducks were as confiding and fearless as our birds are wont to be till man has taught them distrust and terror. Among these the Swiss obtained the raw material of a supper almost as easily as in a farmyard. On the 25th of February the final ascent was begun. But Aorangi did not yield at the first summons. Days were consumed in futile attempts from the south and east. On their first day they were checked by finding themselves on a crumbling knife-like ridge, from which protruded spines of rock that shook beneath their tread. A kick, so it seemed, would have sent the surface into the abyss on either side. The bridge that leads to the Mahometan paradise could not be a more fearful passage. Two days later they were baffled on the east side by walls of rock from which even Boss and Kaufmann turned hopelessly away. It was not until March 2, after spending a night above the clouds, that they hit upon a new glacier, the Linda, over which they found a winding route to the north-eastern [168]ridge which joins Cook to Tasman. The day’s work was long and severe, and until late in the afternoon the issue was doubtful. A gale burst upon them from the north-west, and they had to go on through curling mists and a wind that chilled them to the bone. It was six o’clock in the evening when they found themselves standing on the icy scalp of the obstinate mountain, and even then they did not attain the highest point. There was not a moment to lose if they were to regain some lower point of comparative security; for March is the first month of autumn in South New Zealand, and the evenings then begin to draw in. So Mr. Green had to retreat when within either a few score feet or a few score yards of the actual goal. As it was, night closed in on the party when they were but a short way down, and they spent the dark hours on a ledge less than two feet wide, high over an icy ravine. Sleep or faintness alike meant death. They stood there hour after hour singing, stamping, talking, and listening to the rain pattering on rock and hissing on snow. All night long the wind howled: the wall at their backs vibrated to the roar of the avalanches: water streaming down its face soaked their clothing. For food they had three meat lozenges each. They sucked at empty pipes, and pinched and nudged each other to drive sleep away. By the irony of fate it happened that close beneath them were wide and almost comfortable shelves. But night is not the time to wander about the face of a precipice, looking for sleeping berths, 10,000 feet above the sea. Mr. Green and his [169]guides were happy to escape with life and limb, and not to have to pay such a price for victory as was paid by Whymper’s party after scaling the Matterhorn. Mr. Green’s climb, the tale of which is told easily in his own bright and workmanlike book, gave an enlivening shock to young New Zealand. It had been left to a European to show them the way; but the lesson was not wasted. They now understood that mountains were something more than rough country, some of which carried sheep, while some did not. They learned that they had an alpine playground equal to any in the Old World—a new realm where danger might be courted and exploits put on record. The dormant spirit of mountaineering woke up at last. Many difficulties confronted the colonial lads. They had everything to learn and no one to teach them. Without guides, equipment, or experience—without detailed maps, or any preliminary smoothing of the path, they had to face unforeseen obstacles and uncommon risks. They had to do everything for themselves. Only by endangering their necks could they learn the use of rope and ice-axe. Only by going under fire, and being grazed or missed by stones and showers of ice, could they learn which hours of the day and conditions of the weather were most dangerous, and when slopes might be sought and when ravines must be shunned. They had to teach themselves the trick of the glissade and the method of crossing frail bridges of snow. Appliances they could import from Europe. As for guides, some of them turned guides themselves. Of course they started [170]with a general knowledge of the climate, of “roughing it” in the hills, and of life in the open. They could scramble to the heights to which sheep scramble, and could turn round in the wilderness without losing their way. Thews and sinews, pluck and enthusiasm, had to do the rest, and gradually did it. As Mr. Malcolm Ross, one of the adventurous band, has pointed out with legitimate pride, their experience was gained and their work done without a single fatal accident—a happy record, all the more striking by contrast with the heavy toll of life levied by the rivers of our mountain territory. The company of climbers, therefore, must have joined intelligence to resolution, for, up to the present, they have broken nothing but records. Mr. Mannering, one of the earliest of them, attacked Aorangi five times within five years. After being thwarted by such accidents as rain-storms, the illness of a companion, and—most irritating of all—the dropping of a “swag” holding necessaries, he, with his friend Mr. Dixon, at last attained to the ice-cap in December 1890. Their final climb was a signal exhibition of courage and endurance. They left their bivouac (7480 feet in air) at four o’clock in the morning, and, after nine hours of plodding upward in soft snow had to begin the labour of cutting ice-steps. In the morning they were roasted by the glaring sun; in the shade of the afternoon their rope and coats were frozen stiff, and the skin from their hands stuck to the steel of their ice-axes. Dixon, a thirteen-stone man, fell through a snow-wreath, and was only saved by a supreme effort. Pelted by falling ice [171]the two amateurs cut their way onward, and at half-past five in the evening found themselves unscathed and only about a hundred feet below the point gained by Mr. Green and his Swiss. They made an effort to hew steps up to the apex of the ice-cap, but time was too short and the wind was freshening; as it was they had to work their way down by lantern light. Now they had to creep backwards, now to clean out the steps cut in the daylight; now their way was lost, again they found it, and discovered that some gulf had grown wider. They did not regain their bivouac till nearly three in the morning after twenty-three hours of strain to body and mind.[4] [4] For Mr. Mannering’s narrative see With Axe and Rope in the New Zealand Alps, London, 1891. MOUNT SEFTON Four years later came victory, final and complete, and won in a fashion peculiarly gratifying to young New Zealand. News came that Mr. E. A. Fitzgerald, a skilled mountaineer, was coming from Europe to achieve the technical success which Green and Mannering had just missed. Some climbers of South Canterbury resolved to anticipate him, and, for the honour of the colony, be the first to stand on the coveted pinnacle. A party of three—Messrs. Clark, Graham, and Fyfe—left Timaru, accordingly, and on Christmas Day 1894 achieved their object. Mr. Fitzgerald arrived only to find that he had been forestalled, and must find other peaks to conquer. Of these there was no lack; he had some interesting experiences. After his return to England he remarked to the writer that climbing in [172]the Andes was plain and easy in comparison with the dangers and difficulties of the Southern Alps. One of his severest struggles, however, was not with snow and ice, but with a river and forest in Westland. Years before, Messrs. Harper and Blakiston had surmounted the saddle—or, more properly speaking, wall—at the head of the Hooker glacier, and looking over into Westland, had ascertained that it would be possible to go down to the coast by that way. Government surveyors had confirmed this impression, but no one had traversed the pass. It remained for Mr. Fitzgerald to do this and show that the route was practicable. He and his guide Zurbriggen accomplished the task. They must, however, have greatly underestimated the difficulties which beset those who would force a passage along the bed of an untracked western torrent. Pent in a precipitous gorge, they had to wade and stumble along a wild river-trough. Here they clung to or clambered over dripping rocks, there they were numbed in the ice-cold and swirling water. Enormous boulders encumbered and almost barred the ravine, so that the river itself had had to scoop out subterranean passages through which the explorers were fain to creep. Taking to the shore, as they won their way downward, they tried to penetrate the matted scrubs. Even had they been bushmen, and armed with tomahawks and slashers, they would have found this no easy task. As it was they returned to the river-bed and trudged along, wet and weary; their provisions gave out, and Fitzgerald had to deaden the pangs of hunger by chewing black [173]tobacco. He found the remedy effectual, but very nauseating. Without gun or powder and shot, and knowing nothing of the botany of the country, they ran very close to starvation, and must have lost their lives had a sudden flood filled the rivers’ tributaries and so cut them off from the coast. As it was they did the final forty-eight hours of walking without food, and were on their last legs when they heard the dogs barking in a surveyor’s camp, where their adventure ended. Not caring to follow in the wake of others, Mr. Fitzgerald left Aorangi alone, but Zurbriggen climbed thither on his own account in 1895. An Anglo-Colonial party gained the top ten years later, so that the ice-cap may now almost be classed among familiar spots. Still, as late as 1906 something still remained to be done on the mountain—namely, to go up on one side and go down on the other. This feat, so simple to state, but so difficult to perform, was accomplished last year by three New Zealanders and an Englishman. To make sure of having time enough, they started from their camp—which was at a height of between 6000 and 7000 feet on the eastern side—three-quarters of an hour before midnight. Hours of night walking followed over moonlit snows, looked down upon by ghostly crests. When light came the day was fine and grew bright and beautiful,—so clear that looking down they could see the ocean beyond the eastern shore, the homesteads standing out on the yellow-green plains, and on the snows, far, very far down, their own footprints dotting the smooth whiteness beneath them. It [174]took them, however, nearly fourteen hours to reach the summit, and then the most dangerous part of their work only began. They had to gain the Hooker glacier by creeping down frosted rocks as slippery as an ice-slide. Long bouts of step-cutting had to be done, and in places the men had to be lowered by the rope one at a time. Instead of reaching their goal—the Hermitage Inn below the glacier—in twenty hours, they consumed no less than thirty-six. During these they were almost incessantly in motion, and as a display of stamina the performance, one imagines, must rank high among the exertions of mountaineers. Many fine spectacles repaid them. One of these, a western view from the rocks high above the Hooker glacier, is thus described by Mr. Malcolm Ross, who was of the party:— “The sun dipped to the rim of the sea, and the western heavens were glorious with colour, heightened by the distant gloom. Almost on a level with us, away beyond Sefton, a bank of flame-coloured cloud stretched seaward from the lesser mountains towards the ocean, and beyond that again was a far-away continent of cloud, sombre and mysterious as if it were part of another world. The rugged mountains and the forests and valleys of southern Westland were being gripped in the shades of night. A long headland, still thousands of feet below on the south-west, stretched itself out into the darkened sea, a thin line of white at its base indicating the tumbling breakers of the Pacific Ocean.” [175] THE TASMAN GLACIER Mr. Green, as he looked out from a half-way halting-place on the ascent of Aorangi, and took in the succession of crowded, shining crests and peaks surging up to the north and north-east of him, felt the Alpine-climber’s spirit glow within him. Here was a wealth of peaks awaiting conquest; here was adventure enough for the hands and feet of a whole generation of mountaineers. Scarcely one of the heights had then been scaled. This is not so now. Peak after peak of the Southern Alps has fallen to European or Colonial enterprise, and the ambitious visitor to the Mount Cook region, in particular, will have some trouble to find much that remains virgin and yet accessible. For the unambitious, on the other hand, everything has been made easy. The Government and its tourist department has taken the district in hand almost as thoroughly as at Roto-rua, and the holiday-maker may count on being housed, fed, driven about, guided, and protected efficiently and at a reasonable price. Happily, too, nothing staring or vulgar defaces the landscape. Nor do tourists, yet, throng the valleys in those insufferable crowds that spoil so much romance in Switzerland and Italy. Were they more numerous than they are, the scale of the ranges and glaciers is too large to allow the vantage-spots to be mobbed. Take the glaciers: take those that wind along the flanks of the Mount Cook range on its eastern and western sides, and, converging to the south, are drained by the river Tasman. The Tasman glacier itself is eighteen miles long; its greatest width is over two miles; its average [176]width over a mile. The Murchison glacier, which joins the Tasman below the glacier ice, is more than ten miles long. And to the west and south-west of the range aforesaid, the Hooker and Mueller glaciers are on a scale not much less striking. The number of tributary glaciers that feed these enormous ice-serpents has not, I fancy, been closely estimated, but from heights lofty enough to overlook most of the glacier system that veins the Aorangi region, explorers have counted over fifty seen from one spot. Perhaps the finest sight in the alpine country—at any rate to those who do not scale peaks—is the Hochstetter ice-fall. This frozen cataract comes down from a great snow plateau, some 9000 feet above the sea, to the east of Aorangi. The fall descends, perhaps, 4000 feet to the Tasman glacier. It is much more than a mile in breadth, and has the appearance of tumbling water, storm-beaten, broken, confused, surging round rocks. It has, indeed, something more than the mere appearance of wild unrest, for water pours through its clefts, and cubes and toppling pinnacles of ice break away and crash as they fall from hour to hour. THE CECIL AND WALTER PEAKS If the Hochstetter has a rival of its own kind in the island, that would seem to be the Douglas glacier. This, scarcely known before 1907, was then visited and examined by Dr. Mackintosh Bell. By his account it surpasses the Hochstetter in this, that instead of confronting the stern grandeur of an Alpine valley, it looks down upon the evergreen forest and unbroken foliage of Westland. The glacier itself comes down [177]from large, high-lying snow-fields over a mighty cliff, estimated to be 3000 feet in height. The upper half of the wall is clothed with rugged ice; but the lower rock-face is too steep for this, and its perpendicular front is bare. Beneath it the glacier continues. Waterfall succeeds waterfall: thirty-five in all stream down from the ice above to the ice below. Mingled with the sound of their downpouring the explorers heard the crashing of the avalanches. Every few minutes one of these slid or shot into the depths. Roar followed roar like cannon fired in slow succession, so that the noise echoing among the mountains drowned the voices of the wondering beholders. Oddly enough the lakes of the South Island are nearly all on the drier side of the watershed. Kanieri and Mahinapua, two well-known exceptions, are charming, but small. A third exception, Brunner, is large, but lies among wooded hills without any special pretensions to grandeur. For the rest the lakes are to the east of the dividing range, and may be regarded as the complement of the fiords to the west thereof. But their line stretches out much farther to the north, for they may be said to include Lake Roto-roa, a long, narrow, but beautiful water, folded among the mountains of Nelson. Then come Brunner and Sumner, and the series continues in fine succession southwards, ending with Lake Hau-roto near the butt-end of the island. Broadly speaking, the lake scenery improves as you go south. Wakatipu is in advance of Wanaka and Hawea, Te Anau of Wakatipu; while Manapouri, beautiful in [178]irregularity, fairly surpasses all its fellows. The northern half of Wakatipu is, indeed, hard to beat; but the southern arm, though grand, curves among steeps too hard and treeless to please the eye altogether. In the same way Te Anau would be the finest lake in the islands were it not for the flatness of most of the eastern shore; the three long western arms are magnificent, and so is the northern part of the main water. But of Manapouri one may write without ifs and buts. Its deep, clear waters moving round a multitude of islets; its coves and cliff-points, gulf beyond gulf and cape beyond cape; the steeps that overhang it, so terrific, yet so richly clothed; the unscathed foliage sprinkled with tree-flowers,—all form as faultless a combination of lovely scenes as a wilderness can well show. From the western arm that reaches out as though to penetrate to the sea-fiords not far away beyond the mountains, to the eastern bay, whence the deep volume of the Waiau flows out, there is nothing to spoil the charm. What Lucerne is to Switzerland Manapouri is to New Zealand. Man has not helped it with historical associations and touches of foreign colour. On the other hand, man has not yet spoiled it with big hotels, blatant advertisements, and insufferable press of tourists. MANAPOURI In one respect—their names—our South Island lakes are more lucky than our mountains. Most of them have been allowed to keep the names given them by the Maori. When the Polynesian syllables are given fair play—which is not always the case in the white man’s [179]mouth—they are usually liquid or dignified. Manapouri, Te Anau, Roto-roa, and Hau-roto, are fair examples. Fortunately the lakes which we have chosen to rechristen have seldom been badly treated. Coleridge, Christabel, Alabaster, Tennyson, Ellesmere, Marian, Hilda, are pleasant in sound and suggestion. Our mountains have not come off so well—in the South Island at any rate. Some have fared better than others. Mount Aspiring, Mount Pisa, the Sheerdown, the Remarkables, Mounts Aurum, Somnus, Cosmos, Fourpeaks, Hamilton, Wakefield, Darwin, Brabazon, Alexander, Rolleston, Franklin, Mitre Peak, Terror Peak, and the Pinnacle, are not names to cavil at. But I cannot think that such appellations as Cook, Hutt, Brown, Stokes, Jukes, Largs, Hopkins, Dick, Thomas, Harris, Pillans, Hankinson, Thompson, and Skelmorlies, do much to heighten scenic grandeur. However, there they are, and there, doubtless, they will remain; for we are used to them, so do not mind them. We should even, it may be, be sorry to lose them. MITRE PEAK The Sounds—the watery labyrinth of the south-west coast—have but one counterpart in the northern hemisphere, the fiords of Norway. Whether their number should be reckoned to be fifteen or nineteen is of no consequence. Enough that between Big Bay and Puysegur Point they indent the littoral with successive inlets winding between cliffs, straying round islets and bluffs, and penetrating deep into the heart of the Alps. They should be called fiords, for that name alone gives [180]any suggestion of their slender length and of the towering height of the mountains that confine them. But the pioneers and sailors of three generations ago chose to dub them “The Sounds,” so The Sounds they remain. It is best to approach them from the south, beginning with Perseverance Inlet and ending with Milford Sound. For the heights round Milford are the loftiest of any, and after their sublimity the softer aspect of some of the other gulfs is apt to lose impressiveness. The vast monotony and chilly uneasiness of the ocean without heightens the contrast at the entrances. Outside the guardian headlands all is cold and uneasy. Between one inlet and another the sea beats on sheer faces of cruel granite. Instantaneous is the change when the gates are entered, and the voyager finds his vessel floating on a surface narrower than a lake and more peaceful than a river. The very throbbing of a steamer’s engines becomes gentler and reaches the ears softly like heart-beats. The arms of the mountains seem stretched to shut out tumult and distraction. Milford, for instance, is a dark-green riband of salt water compressed between cliffs less than a mile apart, and in one pass narrowing to a width of five hundred yards. Yet though the bulwarks of your ship are near firm earth, the keel is far above it. All the Sounds are deep: when Captain Cook moored the Endeavour in Dusky Sound her yards interlocked with the branches of trees. But Milford is probably the deepest of all. There the sounding-line has reached bottom at nearly thirteen hundred feet. Few swirling currents seem to [181]disturb these quiet gulfs; and the sweep of the western gales, too, is shut out from most of the bays and reaches. The force that seems at work everywhere and always is water. Clouds and mists in a thousand changing shapes fleet above the mountain crests, are wreathed round peaks, or drift along the fronts of the towering cliffs. When they settle down the rain falls in sheets: an inch or thereabouts may be registered daily for weeks. But it does not always rain in the Sounds, and when it ceases and the sunshine streams down, the innumerable waterfalls are a spectacle indeed. At any time the number of cascades and cataracts is great: the roar of the larger and the murmur of the smaller are the chief sounds heard; they take the place of the wind that has been left outside the great enclosures. But after heavy rain—and most rains on that coast are heavy—the number of waterfalls defies computation. They seam the mountain-sides with white lines swiftly moving, embroider green precipices with silver, and churn up the calm sea-water with their plunging shock. The highest of them all, the Sutherland, is not on the sea-shore, but lies fourteen miles up a densely-wooded valley. It is so high—1904 feet—that the three cascades of its descent seem almost too slender a thread for the mighty amphitheatre behind and around them. Than the cliffs themselves nothing could well be finer. Lofty as they are, however, they are surpassed by some of the walls that hem in Milford; for these are computed to rise nearly five thousand feet. They must be a good second to those stupendous sea-faces[182] in eastern Formosa which are said to exceed six thousand feet. Nor in volume or energy is the Sutherland at all equal to the Bowen, which falls on the sea-beach at Milford in two leaps. Its height in all is, perhaps, but six hundred feet. But the upper fall dives into a bowl of hard rock with such weight that the whole watery mass rebounds in a noble curve to plunge white and foaming to the sea’s edge. There is no need to measure heights, calculate bulk, or compare one sight with another in a territory where beauty and grandeur are spent so freely. The glory of the Sounds is not found in this cliff or that waterfall, in the elevation of any one range or the especial grace of any curve or channel. It comes from the astonishing succession, yet variety, of grand yet beautiful prospects, of charm near at hand contrasted with the sternness of the rocky and snowy wilderness which forms the aerial boundary of the background. The exact height of cliffs and mountain-steeps matters little. What is important is that—except on the steepest of the great walls of Milford—almost every yard of their surface is beautified with a drapery of frond and foliage. Where the angle is too acute for trees to root themselves ferns and creepers cloak the faces; where even these fail green mosses save the rocks from bareness, and contrast softly with the sparkling threads of ever-present water. IN MILFORD SOUND Scarcely anywhere can the eye take in the whole of an inlet at once. The narrower fiords wind, the wider are sprinkled with islets. As the vessel slowly moves [183]on, the scene changes; a fresh vista opens out with every mile; the gazer comes to every bend with undiminished expectation. The two longest of the gulfs measure twenty-two miles from gates to inmost ends. Milford is barely nine miles long—but how many scenes are met with in those nine! No sooner does the sense of confinement between dark and terrific heights become oppressive than some high prospect opens out to the upward gaze, and the sunshine lightens up the wooded shoulders and glittering snow-fields of some distant mount. Then the whole realm is so utterly wild, so unspoiled and unprofaned. Man has done nothing to injure or wreck it. Nowhere have you to avert your eyes to avoid seeing blackened tracts, the work of axe and fire. The absurdities of man’s architecture are not here, nor his litter, dirt and stenches. The clean, beautiful wilderness goes on and on, far as the eye can travel and farther by many a league. Protected on one side by the ocean, on the other by the mountainous labyrinth, it stretches with its deep gulfs and virgin valleys to remain the delight and refreshment of generations wearied with the smoke and soilure of the cities of men. ON THE CLINTON RIVER We often call this largest of our national parks a paradise. To apply the term to such a wilderness is a curious instance of change in the use of words. The Persian “paradise” was a hunting-ground where the great king could chase wild beasts without interruption. In our south-west, on the contrary, guns and bird-snaring are alike forbidden, and animal life is [184]preserved, not to be hunted, but to be observed. As most of my readers know, the birds of our islands, by their variety and singularity, atone for the almost complete absence of four-footed mammals. The most curious are the flightless kinds. Not that these comprise all that is interesting in our bird-life by any means. The rare stitch-bird; those beautiful singers, the tui, bell-bird, and saddle-back; many marine birds, and those friendly little creatures the robins and fantails of the bush, amuse others as well as the zoologists. But the flightless birds—the roa, the grey kiwi, the takahé, the kakapo, the flightless duck of the Aucklands, and the weka—are our chief scientific treasures, unless the tuatara lizard and the short-tailed bat may be considered to rival them. Some of our ground-birds have the further claim on the attention of science, that they are the relatives of the extinct and gigantic moa. That monstrous, and probably harmless, animal was exterminated by fires and Maori hunters centuries ago. Bones, eggs, and feathers remain to attest its former numbers, and the roa and kiwi to give the unscientific a notion of its looks and habits. The story of the thigh-bone which found its way to Sir Richard Owen seventy years ago, and of his diagnosis therefrom of a walking bird about the size of an ostrich, is one of the romances of zoology. The earlier moas were far taller and more ponderous than any ostrich. Their relationship to the ancient moas of Madagascar, as well as their colossal stature, are further suggestions that New Zealand is what it looks—the relics of a submerged [185]southern continent. After the discovery of moa skeletons there were great hopes that living survivors of some of the tall birds would yet be found, and the unexplored and intricate south-west was by common consent the most promising field in which to search. In 1848 a rail over three feet high—the takahé—was caught by sealers in Dusky Sound. Fifty years later, when hope had almost died out, another takahé was taken alive—the bird that now stands stuffed in a German museum. But, alas! this rail is the solitary “find” that has rewarded us in the last sixty years, and the expectation of lighting upon any flightless bird larger than a roa flutters very faintly now. All the more, therefore, ought we to bestow thought on the preservation of the odd and curious wild life that is left to us. The outlook for our native birds has long been very far from bright. Many years ago the Norway rat had penetrated every corner of the islands. Cats, descended from wanderers of the domestic species, are to be found in forest and mountain, and have grown fiercer and more active with each decade. Sparrows, blackbirds, and thrushes compete for Nature’s supplies of honey and insects. Last, and, perhaps, their worst enemies of all, are the stoats, weasels, and ferrets, which sheep-farmers were foolish enough to import a quarter of a century ago to combat the rabbit. Luckily, more effectual methods of coping with rabbits have since been perfected, for had we to trust to imported vermin our pastures would be in a bad case. As it is, the stoat and weasel levy toll on many a poultry yard, [186]and their ravages among the unhappy wild birds of the forest are more deplorable still. In both islands they have found their way across from the east coast to the west: rivers, lakes, rock, snow, and ice have been powerless to stop them. Even the native birds that can fly lose their eggs and nestlings. The flightless birds are helpless. Weasels can kill much more formidable game than kiwi and kakapo; a single weasel has been known to dispose of a kea parrot in captivity. Pressed, then, by these and their other foes, the native birds are disappearing in wide tracts of the main islands. Twenty years ago this was sufficiently notorious; and at length in the ’nineties the Government was aroused to do something to save a remnant. Throughout the whole of the Great Reserve of the south-west shooting was, and still is, discouraged. But this is not enough. Only on islets off the coast can the birds be safe from ferrets and similar vermin, to say nothing of human collectors and sportsmen. AT THE HEAD OF LAKE TE-ANAU It was decided, therefore, to set aside such island sanctuaries, and to station paid care-takers on them. There are now three of these insular refuges: Resolution Island, off Dusky Sound; Kapiti, in Cook’s Strait; and the Little Barrier Island, at the mouth of the Hauraki Gulf. The broken and richly-wooded Resolution contains some 50,000 acres, and is as good a place for its present uses as could be found. Remote from settlement, drenched by continual rains, it attracts no one but a casual sight-seer. On the other hand, its care-taker is in close touch with the whole region of the [187]fiords, and can watch over and to some extent guard the wild life therein. The experiences of this officer, Mr. Richard Henry, are uncommon enough. For twelve years he lived near lakes Manapouri and Te Anau studying the birds on that side of the wilderness. Since 1900 he has been stationed on the western coast, at Pigeon Island, near Resolution. There, with such society as a boy and a dog can afford him, this guardian of birds passes year after year in a climate where the rainfall ranges, I suppose, from 140 inches to 200 in the twelvemonth. Inured to solitude and sandflies Mr. Henry appears sufficiently happy in watching the habits of his favourite birds, their enemies the beasts, and their neighbours the sea-fish. He can write as well as observe, and his reports and papers are looked for by all who care for Nature in our country. It is odd that in so vast a wilderness, and one so densely clothed with vegetation as are the mountains and valleys of the south-west, there should not be room enough and to spare for the European singing-birds as well as the native kind. But if we are to believe the care-taker at Resolution Island—and better testimony than his could not easily be had,—the sparrow alone, to say nothing of the thrush and blackbird, is almost as deadly an enemy as the flightless birds have. For the sparrow not only takes a share of the insects which are supposed to be his food, but consumes more than his share of the honey of the rata and other native flowers. Six sparrows which Mr. Henry managed to kill with a lucky shot one summer morning were found to be [188]plump and full of honey—it oozed out of their beaks. Thrushes and blackbirds are just as ready to take to a vegetable diet, so that the angry care-taker is driven to denounce the birds of Europe as “jabbering sparrows and other musical humbugs that come here under false pretences.” Then the native birds themselves are not always forbearing to each other. The wekas, the commonest and most active of the flightless birds, are remorseless thieves, and will steal the eggs of wild ducks or farm poultry indifferently. Though as big as a domestic fowl, wekas are no great fighters: a bantam cock, or even a bantam hen, will rout the biggest of them. On the other hand, Mr. Henry has seen a weka tackle a bush rat and pin it down in its hole under a log. That the weka will survive in considerable numbers even on the mainland seems likely. The fate of the two kinds of kiwi, the big brown roa and his small grey cousin, seems more doubtful. Both are the most timid, harmless, and helpless of birds. All their strength and faculties seem concentrated in the long and sensitive beaks with which they probe the ground or catch insects that flutter near it. In soft peat or moss they will pierce as deeply as ten inches to secure a worm; and the extraordinary powers of hearing and scent which enable them to detect prey buried so far beneath the surface are nothing short of mysterious. Their part in the world that man controls would seem to be that of insect destroyers in gardens and orchards. Perhaps had colonists been wiser they would have been preserved and bred for this purpose [189]for the last fifty years. As it is man has preferred to let the kiwis go and to import insectivorous allies, most of which have turned out to be doubtful blessings. Among both kiwis and wekas the males are the most dutiful of husbands and fathers. After the eggs are laid they do most of the sitting, and at a later stage provide the chicks with food. The female kiwi, too, is the larger bird, and has the longer beak—points of interest in the avifauna of a land where women’s franchise is law. Very different is the division of labour between the sexes in the case of the kakapo or night-parrot. This also is classed among flightless birds, not because it has no wings—for its wings are well developed—but because ages ago it lost the art of flying. Finding ground food plentiful in the wet mountain forests, and having no foes to fear, the night-parrot waxed fat and flightless. Now, after the coming of the stoat and weasel, it is too late for its habits to change. The male kakapo are famous for a peculiar drumming love-song, an odd tremulous sound that can be heard miles away. But though musical courtiers, they are by no means such self-sacrificing husbands as other flightless birds. They leave hatching and other work to the mothers, who are so worn by the process that the race only breeds in intermittent years. Tame and guileless as most native birds are apt to be, the kakapo exceeds them all in a kind of sleepy apathy. Mr. Henry tells how he once noticed one sitting on wood under a drooping fern. He nudged it with his finger and spoke to it, but the bird only muttered hoarsely, and [190]appeared to go to sleep again as the disturber moved away. Kapiti, in Cook’s Strait, containing, as it does, barely 5000 acres, is the smallest of the three island sanctuaries, but unlike the other two it has made some figure in New Zealand history. In the blood-stained years before annexation it was seized by the noted marauder Rauparaha, whose acute eye saw in it a stronghold at once difficult to attack, and excellently placed for raids upon the main islands, both north and south. From Kapiti, with his Ngatitoa warriors and his fleet of war-canoes, he became a terror to his race. His expeditions, marked with the usual treachery, massacre, and cannibalism of Maori warfare, reached as far south as Akaroa in Banks’ Peninsula, and indirectly led to the invasion of the Chathams, and the almost complete extirpation of the inoffensive Moriori. Rauparaha’s early life might have taught him pity, for he was himself a fugitive who, with his people, had been hunted away first from Kawhia, then from Taranaki, by the stronger Waikato. He lived to wreak vengeance—on the weaker tribes of the south. No mean captain, he seems only to have suffered one reverse in the South Island—a surprise by Tuhawaiki (Bloody Jack). Certainly his only fight with white men—that which we choose to call the Wairau massacre—was disastrous enough to us. In Kapiti itself, in the days before the hoisting of the union Jack, Rauparaha had white neighbours—I had almost said friends—in the shape of the shore whalers, whose [191]long boats were then a feature of our coastal waters. They called him “Rowbulla,” and affected to regard him with the familiarity which breeds contempt. On his side he found that they served his purpose—which in their case was trade—well enough. Both Maori and whaler have long since passed away from Kapiti, and scarce a trace of them remains, save the wild goats which roam about the heights and destroy the undergrowth of the forest. The island itself resembles one side of a high-pitched roof. To the west, a long cliff, 1700 feet high, faces the famous north-west gales of Cook’s Strait, and shows the wearing effects of wind and wave. Eastward from the ridge the land slopes at a practicable angle, and most of it is covered with a thick, though not very imposing forest. Among the ratas, karakas, tree ferns and scrub of the gullies, wild pigeons, bell-birds, tuis, whiteheads, and other native birds still hold their own. Plants from the north and south mingle in a fashion that charms botanists like Dr. Cockayne. This gentleman has lately conveyed to Kapiti a number of specimens from the far-away Auckland isles, and if the Government will be pleased to have the goats and cattle killed off, and interlopers, like the sparrows and the Californian quail, kept down, there is no reason why Kapiti should not become a centre of refuge for the rarer species of our harassed fauna and flora. THE BULLER RIVER NEAR HAWK’S CRAIG Twice as large as Kapiti, and quite twice as picturesque, the Little Barrier Island, the northern bird-sanctuary, is otherwise little known. It has no [192]history to speak of, though Mr. Shakespear, its care-taker, has gathered one or two traditions. A sharp fight, for instance, between two bands of Maori was decided on its shore; and for many years thereafter a tree which stood there was pointed out as the “gallows” on which the cannibal victors hung the bodies of their slain enemies. At another spot on the boulders of the beach an unhappy fugitive is said to have paddled in his canoe, flying from a defeat on the mainland. Landing exhausted, he found the islanders as merciless as the foes behind, and was promptly clubbed and eaten. However, the Little Barrier is to-day as peaceful an asylum as the heart of a persecuted bird could desire. The stitch-bird, no longer hunted by collectors, is once more increasing in numbers there, and has for companion the bell-bird—the sweetest of our songsters, save one,—which has been driven from its habitat on the main North Island. Godwits, wearied with their long return journey from Siberia, are fain, “spent with the vast and howling main,” to rest on the Little Barrier before passing on their way across the Hauraki Gulf. Fantails and other wild feathered things flutter round the care-taker’s house, for—so he tells us—he does not suffer any birds—not even the friendless and much-disliked cormorant—to be injured. Along with the birds, the tuatara lizard (and the kauri, pohutu-kawa, and other trees, quite as much in need of asylum as the birds) may grow and decay unmolested in the quiet ravines. The island lies forty-five miles from [193]Auckland, and nearly twenty from the nearest mainland, so there is no need for it to be disturbed by anything worse than the warm and rainy winds that burst upon it from north-east and north-west. Water, the force that beautifies the west and south-west, has been the chief foe of their explorers. The first whites to penetrate their gorges and wet forests found their main obstacles in rivers, lakes, and swamps. Unlike pioneers elsewhere, they had nothing to fear from savages, beasts, reptiles, or fever. Brunner, one of the earliest to enter Westland, spent more than a year away from civilisation, encountering hardship, but never in danger of violence from man or beast. Still, such a rugged and soaking labyrinth could not be traversed and mapped out without loss. There is a death-roll, though not a very long one. Nearly all the deaths were due to drowning. Mr. Charlton Howitt, one of the Anglo-Victorian family of writers and explorers, was lost with two companions in Lake Brunner. The one survivor of Howitt’s party died from the effects of hardship. Mr. Townsend, a Government officer, who searched Lake Brunner for Howitt’s body, was himself drowned not long after, also with two companions. Mr. Whitcombe, surveyor, perished in trying to cross the Teremakau in a canoe. Von Haast’s friend, the botanist Dr. Sinclair, was drowned in a torrent in the Alps of Canterbury. Quintin M’Kinnon, who did as much as any one to open up the region between the southern lakes and the Sounds, [194]sank in a squall while sailing alone in Lake Te Anau. Professor Brown, of the University of Otago, who disappeared in the wilds to the west of Manapouri, is believed to have been swept away in a stream there. The surveyor Quill, the only man who has yet climbed to the top of the Sutherland Falls, lost his life afterwards in the Wakatipu wilderness. Only one death by man’s violence is to be noted in the list—that of Dobson, a young surveyor of much promise, who was murdered by bush-rangers in northern Westland about forty years ago. I have named victims well known and directly engaged in exploring. The number of gold-diggers, shepherds, swagmen, and nondescripts who have gone down in the swift and ice-cold rivers of our mountains is large. Among them are not a few nameless adventurers drawn westward by the gold rushes of the ’sixties. It is a difficult matter to gauge from the bank the precise amount of risk to be faced in fording a clouded torrent as it swirls down over hidden boulders and shifting shingle. Even old hands miscalculate sometimes. When once a swagman stumbles badly and loses his balance, he is swept away, and the struggle is soon over. There is a cry; a man and a swag are rolled over and over; he drops his burden and one or both are sucked under in an eddy—perhaps to reappear, perhaps not. It may be that the body is stranded on a shallow, or it may be that the current bears it down to a grave in the sea. BELOW THE JUNCTION OF THE BULLER AND INANGAHUA RIVERS The south-western coast was the first part of our islands seen by a European. Tasman sighted the [195]mountains of Westland in 1642. Cook visited the Sounds more than once, and spent some time in Dusky Sound in 1771. Vancouver, who served under Cook, anchored there in command of an expedition in 1789; and Malaspina, a Spanish navigator, took his ship among the fiords towards the end of the eighteenth century. But Tasman did not land; and though the others did, and it is interesting to remember that such noted explorers of the southern seas came there in the old days of three-cornered hats, pigtails, and scurvy, still it must be admitted that their doings in our south-western havens were entirely commonplace. Vancouver and the Spaniards had no adventures. Nothing that concerns Cook can fail to interest the student; and the story of his anchorages and surveys, of the “spruce beer” which he brewed from a mixture of sprigs of rimu and leaves of manuka, and of his encounters with the solitary family of Maori met with on the coast, is full of meaning to the few who pore over the scraps of narrative which compose the history of our country prior to 1800. There is satisfaction in knowing that the stumps of the trees cut down by Cook’s men are still to be recognised. To the general reader, however, any stirring elements found in the early story of the South Island were brought in by the sealers and whalers who came in the wake of the famous navigators, rather than by the discoverers themselves. One lasting service the first seamen did to the Sounds: they left plain and expressive names on most of the gulfs, coves, and headlands. Doubtful Sound, Dusky Sound, Wet Jacket [196]Arm, Chalky Island, Parrot Island, Wood Hen Cove, speak of the rough experiences and everyday life of the sailors. Resolution, Perseverance, Discovery have a salt savour of difficulties sought out and overcome. For the rest the charm of the south-west comes but in slight degree from old associations. It is a paradise without a past. BREAM HEAD, WHANGAREI HEADS The sealers and whalers of the first four decades of the nineteenth century knew our outlying islands well. Of the interior of our mainland they knew nothing whatever; but they searched every bay and cove of the butt-end of the South Island, of Rakiura, and of the smaller islets for the whale and fur seal. The schooners and brigs that carried these rough-handed adventurers commonly hailed either from Sydney, Boston, or Nantucket, places that were not in those days schools of marine politeness or forbearance. The captains and crews that they sent out to southern seas looked on the New Zealand coast as a No Man’s Land, peopled by ferocious cannibals, who were to be traded with, or killed, as circumstances might direct. The Maori met them very much in the same spirit. Many are the stories told of the dealings, peaceable or warlike, of the white ruffians with the brown savages. In 1823, for instance, the schooner Snapper brought away from Rakiura to Sydney a certain James Caddell, a white seaman with a tattooed face. This man had, so he declared, been landed on Stewart Island seventeen years earlier, as one of a party of seal-hunters. They were at once set upon by the [197]natives, and all killed save Caddell, who saved his life by clutching the sacred mantle of a chief and thus obtaining the benefit of the law of Tapu. He was allowed to join the tribe, to become one of the fighting men, and to marry a chief’s daughter. At any rate, that was his story. It may have been true, for he is said to have turned his back on Sydney and deliberately returned to live among the Maori. A more dramatic tale is that of the fate of a boat’s crew from the General Gates, American sealing ship. In 1821 her captain landed a party of six men somewhere near Puysegur Point to collect seal-skins. So abundant were the fur seals on our south-west coast in those days that in six weeks the men had taken and salted 3563 skins. Suddenly a party of Maori burst into their hut about midnight, seized the unlucky Americans, and, after looting the place, marched them off as prisoners. According to the survivors, they were compelled to trudge between three and four hundred miles, and were finally taken to a big sandy bay on the west coast of the South Island. Here they were tied to trees and left without food till they were ravenously hungry. Then one of them, John Rawton, was killed with a club. His head was buried in the ground; his body dressed, cooked, and eaten. On each of the next three days another of the wretched seamen was seized and devoured in the same way, their companions looking on like Ulysses in the cave of the Cyclops. As a crowning horror the starving seamen were offered some of the baked human flesh and ate it. [198]After four days of this torment there came a storm with thunder and lightning, which drove the natives away to take shelter. Left thus unguarded, Price and West, the two remaining prisoners, contrived to slip their bonds of flax. A canoe was lying on the beach, and rough as the surf was, they managed to launch her. Scarcely were they afloat before the natives returned and rushed into the sea after them, yelling loudly. The Americans had just sufficient start and no more. Paddling for dear life, they left the land behind, and had the extraordinary fortune, after floating about for three days, to be picked up, half dead, by the trading schooner Margery. The story of their capture and escape is to be found in Polack’s New Zealand, published in 1838. Recently, Mr. Robert M’Nab has unearthed contemporary references to the General Gates, and, in his book Muri-huku, has given an extended account of the adventures of her skipper and crew. The captain, Abimelech Riggs by name, seems to have been a very choice salt-water blackguard. He began his career at the Antipodes by enlisting convicts in Sydney, and carrying them off as seamen. For this he was arrested in New Zealand waters, and had to stand his trial in Sydney. In Mr. M’Nab’s opinion, he lost two if not three parties of his men on the New Zealand coast, where he seems to have left them to take their chance, sailing off and remaining away with the finest indifference. Finally, he appears to have taken revenge by running down certain canoes manned by Maori which he chanced to meet in Foveaux [199]Straits. After that coup, Captain Abimelech Riggs vanishes from our stage, a worthy precursor of Captain Stewart of the brig Elisabeth, the blackest scoundrel of our Alsatian period. LAWYER’S HEAD Maori history does not contribute very much to the romance of the south-west. A broken tribe, the Ngatimamoe, were in the eighteenth century driven back to lurk among the mountains and lakes there. Once they had owned the whole South Island. Their pitiless supplanters, the Ngaitahu, would not let them rest even in their unenviable mountain refuges. They were chased farther and farther westward, and finally exterminated. A few still existed when the first navigators cast anchor in the fiords. For many years explorers hoped to find some tiny clan hidden away in the tangled recesses of Fiordland; but it would seem that they are gone, like the moa. The whites came in time to witness the beginning of a fresh process of raiding and dispossession—the attacks on the Ngaitahu by other tribes from the north. The raids of Rauparaha among the Ngaitahu of the eastern coast of the South Island have often been described; for, thanks to Mr. Travers, Canon Stack, and other chroniclers, many of their details have been preserved. Much less is known of the doings of Rauparaha’s lieutenants on the western coast, though one of their expeditions passed through the mountains and the heart of Otago. Probably enough, his Ngatitoa turned their steps towards Westland in the hope of annexing the tract wherein is found the [200]famous greenstone—a nephrite prized by the Maori at once for its hardness and beauty. In their stone age—that is to say, until the earlier decades of the nineteenth century—it furnished them with their most effective tools and deadliest weapons. The best of it is so hard that steel will not scratch its surface, while its clear colour, varying from light to the darkest green, is far richer than the hue of oriental jade. Many years—as much as two generations—might be consumed in cutting and polishing a greenstone meré fit for a great chief.[5] When perfected, such a weapon became a sacred heirloom, the loss of which would be wailed over as a blow to its owner’s tribe. [5] See Mr. Justice Chapman’s paper on the working of greenstone in the Transactions of the N.Z. Institute. A MAORI CHIEFTAINESS The country of the greenstone lies between the Arahura and Hokitika rivers in Westland, a territory by no means easy to invade eighty years ago. The war parties of the Ngatitoa reached it, however, creeping along the rugged sea-coast, and, where the beaches ended, scaling cliffs by means of ladders. They conquered the greenstone district (from which the whole South Island takes its Maori name, Te Wai Pounamou), and settled down there among the subdued natives. Then, one might fancy, the Ngatitoa would have halted. South of the Teremakau valley there was no greenstone; for the stone, tangi-wai, found near Milford Sound, though often classed with greenstone, is a distinct mineral, softer and much less valuable. Nor were there any more tribes with villages worth [201]plundering. Save for a few wandering fugitives, the mountains and coast of the south-west were empty, or peopled only by the Maori imagination with ogres and fairies, dangerous to the intruder. Beyond this drenched and difficult country, however, the Ngatitoa resolved to pass. They learned—from captives, one supposes—of the existence of a low saddle, by which a man may cross from the west coast to the lakes of Otago without mounting two thousand feet. By this way, the Haast Pass, they resolved to march, and fall with musket and meré upon the unexpecting Ngaitahu of Otago. Their leader in this daring project was a certain Puoho. We may believe that the successes of Rauparaha on the east coast, and the fall, one after the other, of Omihi, the two stockades of Akaroa, and the famous pa of Kaiapoi, had fired the blood of his young men, and that Puoho dreamed of nothing less than the complete conquest of the south. He nearly effected it. By a daring canoe voyage from Port Nicholson to southern Westland, and by landing there and crossing the Haast Saddle, this tattooed Hannibal turned the higher Alps and descended upon Lake Hawea, surprising there a village of the Ngaitahu. Only one of the inhabitants escaped, a lad who was saved to guide the marauders to the camp of a family living at Lake Wanaka. The boy managed to slip away from the two captors who were his guards, and ran all the way to Wanaka to warn the threatened family—his own relatives. When the two guards gave chase, they found the intended victims prepared for them; they fell into an ambuscade and were both [202]killed—tomahawked. Before the main body of the invaders came up, the Ngaitahu family was far away. At Wanaka, Puoho’s daring scheme became more daring still, for he conceived and executed no less a plan than that of paddling down the Clutha River on rafts made of flax sticks—crazy craft for such a river. The flower stalks or sticks of the native flax are buoyant enough when dead and dry; but they soon become water-logged and are absurdly brittle. They supply such rafts as small boys love to construct for the navigation of small lagoons. And that strange river, the Clutha, while about half as long as the Thames, tears down to the sea bearing far more water than the Nile. Nevertheless the Clutha did not drown Puoho and his men: they made their way to the sea through the open country of the south-east. Then passing on to the river Mataura, they took another village somewhere between the sea and the site of a town that now rejoices in the name of Gore. Then indeed the fate of the Ngaitahu hung in the balance, and the Otago branches of the tribe were threatened with the doom of those of the northern half of the island. They were saved because in Southland there was at the moment their one capable leader in their later days of trouble—the chief Tuhawaiki, whom the sealers of the south coast called Bloody Jack. Hurrying up with all the warriors he could collect, and reinforced by some of the white sealers aforesaid, this personage attacked the Ngatitoa by the Mataura, took their stockade by escalade, and killed or captured the band. Puoho [203]himself was shot by a chief who lived to tell of the fray for more than sixty years afterwards. So the Ngaitahu escaped the slavery or extinction which they in earlier days had inflicted on the Ngatimamoe. For, three years after Puoho’s raid, the New Zealand Company appeared in Cook’s Strait, and thereafter Rauparaha and his braves harried the South Island no more. CHAPTER VII OUTLYING ISLANDS The New Zealand mainland—if the word may be used for anything so slender and fragmentary—is long as well as slight. Nearly eleven hundred miles divide the south end of Stewart Island from Cape Maria Van Diemen. If the outposts of the main are counted in, then the Dominion becomes a much larger, though more watery, expanse. Its length is about doubled, and the contrast between the sunny Kermadecs and the storm-beaten Aucklands becomes one of those things in which Science delights. It is a far cry from the trepang and tropic birds (the salmon-pink bo’suns) of the northern rocks to the sea-lions that yawn at the casual visitor to Disappointment Island. The Kermadecs—to employ an overworked expression—bask in the smiles of perpetual summer. The Three Kings, lying thirty-eight miles beyond the tip of the North Island, might be Portuguese isles, and the Chathams—as far as climate goes—bits of France. But the peaty groups of the shivering South lie right across the pathway of the Antarctic gales. Even on their [205]quieter days the grey sky that overhangs them looks down on a sea that is a welter of cold indigo laced with white. Relentless erosion by ocean rollers from the south-west has worn away their western and south-western shores into steep cliffs, cut by sharp-edged fissures and pitted by deep caves. For their vegetation you must seek their eastern slopes and valleys, or the shores of land-locked harbours. On some of the smaller of them, parakeets and other land-birds learn to fly little and fly low, lest they should be blown out to sea. The wild ducks of the Aucklands are flightless, and in the same group are found flies without wings. In the Snares the mutton-bird tree lies down on its stomach to escape the buffeting blasts, clutching the treacherous peat with fresh rootlets as it grows or crawls along. The western front of the Aucklands shows a wall of dark basalt, thirty miles long, and from four hundred to twelve hundred feet high. No beach skirts it; no trees soften it; only one inlet breaks it. Innumerable jets and little cascades stream from its sharp upper edge, but—so say eye-witnesses—none appear to reach the sea: the pitiless gusts seize the water, scatter it into spray-smoke and blow it into air. The wind keeps the waterfalls from falling, and their vapour, driven upward, has been mistaken for smoke from the fires of castaway seamen. There is, however, one race to whom even the smallest and wildest of our islets are a source of unceasing interest and ever-fresh, if malodorous, pleasure. Zoologists know them for the procreant cradles of [206]Antarctic sea-fowl. And that, from the Kermadecs to the Bounties and the Antipodes, they assuredly are. On Raoul—the largest Kermadec—you may walk among thousands of mutton-birds and kick them off their nests. On the West King, gannets and mackerel gulls cover acre after acre so thickly that you cannot help breaking eggs as you tread, or stumbling against mother-gannets, sharp in the beak. On dismal Antipodes Island, the dreary green of grass and sedge is picked out with big white birds like white rosettes. In the Aucklands, the wandering albatross is found in myriads, and may be studied as it sits guarding its solitary egg on the rough nest from which only brute force will move it. On the spongy Snares, penguins have their rookeries; mutton-birds swarm, not in thousands, but millions; sea-hawks prey on the young of other birds, and will fly fiercely at man, the strange intruder. Earth, air, and sea, all are possessed by birds of unimaginable number and intolerable smell. Penguins describe curves in the air as they dive neatly from the rocks. Mutton-birds burrow in the ground, whence their odd noises mount up strangely. Their subterranean clamour mingles with the deafening discords of the rookeries above ground. On large patches the vegetation is worn away and the surface defiled. All the water is fouled. The odour, like the offence of Hamlet’s uncle, “is rank: it smells to Heaven.” Mr. Justice Chapman found it strong a mile out to sea. In that, however, the Snares must cede the palm to the Bounties; dreadful and barren rocks on which a few [207]insects—a cricket notably—alone find room to exist among the sea-birds. In violent tempests the foam is said to search every corner of the Bounties, cleansing them for the nonce from their ordure. But the purity, such as it is, is short lived. All who have smelt them are satisfied to hope that surf and sea-birds may ever retain possession there. Indeed, as much may be said for the Snares. Science may sometimes perambulate them, just as Science—with a handkerchief to her nose—may occasionally pick her steps about the Bounties; but none save savants and sea-lions are likely to claim any interest in these noisome castles of the sea-fowl. Some of our larger outposts in the ocean are not repulsive by any means. If human society were of no account, the Kermadecs would be pleasant enough. One or two of them seem much more like Robinson Crusoe’s fertile island, as we read of it in Defoe’s pages, than is Juan Fernandez. Even the wild goats are not lacking. Flowering trees grow on well-wooded and lofty Raoul; Meyer Island has a useful boat-harbour; good fish abound in the warm and pellucid sea. To complete the geniality, the largest island—some seven or eight thousand acres in size—has a hot bathing-pool. One heroic family defy solitude there, cultivate the fertile soil, and grow coffee, bananas, figs, vines, olives, melons, peaches, lemons, citrons, and, it would seem, anything from grenadilloes to potatoes. Twenty years ago, or thereabout, our Government tempted a handful of settlers to try life there. A volcanic disturbance scared them away, however, and the one family has [208]since plodded on alone. Stories are told of the life its members live, of their skill in swimming and diving, and their struggles with armies of rats and other troubles. Once when the steamer that visits them yearly was late, its captain found the mother of the family reduced to her last nib—with which she nevertheless had kept up her diary. On board the steamer was the lady’s eldest daughter, a married woman living in New Zealand. She was making a rough voyage of a thousand miles to see her mother—for two days. Sooner or later—if talk means anything—Auckland enterprise will set up a fish-curing station on Meyer Island. That, I suppose, will be an answer to the doubts which beset the minds of the Lords of the British Admiralty when this group, with its Breton name, was annexed to New Zealand. The colony asked for it, and the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty were duly consulted. Their secretary wrote a laconic reply to the Colonial Office observing that if New Zealand wanted the Kermadecs my Lords saw “no particular reason” why “that colony” should not have “these islands or islets”; but of what possible use they could be to New Zealand my Lords couldn’t imagine. The Three Kings mark a point in our history. It was on the 5th of January that Tasman discovered them. So he named them after the three wise kings of the East—Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. The Great King, the largest of them, is not very great, for it contains, perhaps, six or seven hundred acres. It is cliff-bound,[209] but a landing may usually be made on one side or the other, for its shape resembles the device of the Isle of Man. Into one of its coves a cascade comes down, tumbling two hundred feet from a green and well-timbered valley above. Tasman saw the cascade; and as the Heemskirk and her cockle-shell of a consort were short of fresh water, he sent “Francis Jacobsz in our shallop, and Mr. Gillimans, the supercargo,” with casks to be filled. When, however, the two boats neared the rocks, the men found thereon fierce-looking, well-armed natives, who shouted to them in hoarse voices. Moreover, the surf ran too high for an easy landing. So the Dutchmen turned from the white cascade, and pulled back to Tasman, who took them aboard again, and sailed away, to discover the Friendly Islands. Thus it came about that though he discovered our country, and spent many days on our coasts, neither he nor any of his men ever set foot on shore there. Did Francis Jacobsz, one wonders, really think the surf at Great King so dangerous? Or was it that good Mr. Gillimans, supercargo and man of business, disliked the uncomfortable-looking spears and patu-patu in the hands of the Rarewa men? Tasman, at any rate, came to no harm at the Three Kings, which is more than can be said of all shipmasters; for they are beset with tusky reefs and strong currents. A noted wreck there was that of the steamship Elingamite, which went down six years ago, not far from the edge of the deep ocean chasm where the submarine foundations of New Zealand seem to end suddenly in a deep cleft of ocean. [210] Thanks to a thick white fog, she ran on a reef in daylight on a quiet Sunday morning. She was carrying fifty-eight of a crew and about twice as many passengers. There was but a moderate sea, and, as those on board kept cool, four boats and two rafts were launched. Though one boat was capsized, and though waves washed several persons off the wreck, nearly every one swam to a boat or was picked up. One woman, however, was picked up dead. No great loss or sufferings need have followed but for the fog. As it was, the shipwrecked people were caught by currents, and had to row or drift about blindly. Their fates were various. The largest boat, with fifty-two souls, was luckiest: it reached Hohoura on the mainland after but twenty-five hours of wretchedness. There the Maori—like the barbarous people of Melita—showed them no small kindness. It is recorded that one native hurried down to the beach with a large loaf, which was quickly divided into fifty-two morsels. Others came with horses, and the castaways, helped up to the kainga, had hot tea and food served out to them. Whale-boats then put out and intercepted a passing steamer, which at once made for the Three Kings. There, on Tuesday, eighty-nine more of the shipwrecked were discovered and rescued. One party of these had come within a hundred and fifty yards of an islet, only to be swept away by a current against which they struggled vainly. Finally, they made Great King, and supported life on raw shell-fish till, on the third day after the wreck, the sun, coming out, enabled them (with the aid of their [211]watch-glasses) to dry the six matches which they had with them. Five of these failed to ignite; the sixth gave them fire, and, with fire, hope and comparative comfort. They even gave chase to the wild goats of the island, but, needless to say, neither caught nor killed any. One of the rafts, unhappily, failed to make land at all. A strong current carried it away to sea, and in four days it drifted sixty-two miles. Fifteen men and one woman were on it, without food or water, miserably clothed, and drenched incessantly by the wash or spray. The woman gave up part of her clothing to half-naked men, dying herself on the third day. Four others succumbed through exhaustion; two threw themselves into the sea in delirium. Three steamers were out searching for the unfortunates. It was the Penguin, a King’s ship, which found them, as the fifth day of their sufferings was beginning, and when but one man could stand upright. The captain of the man-of-war had carefully gauged the strength of the current, and followed the raft far out to the north-east. Gold and silver, to the value of ￡17,000, went down with the Elingamite. Treasure-seekers have repeatedly tried to fish it up, but in vain. WEAVING THE KAITAKA Five hundred miles to the east of Banks’ Peninsula lie the pleasant group called the Chatham Islands. They owe their auspicious name to their luck in being discovered in 1790 by the Government ship Chatham. Otherwise they might have been named after Lord [212]Auckland, or Mr. Robert Campbell, or Stewart the sealer, as have others of our islands. They are fabled of old to have been, like Delos, floating isles, borne hither and thither by sea and wind. The Apollo who brought them to anchor was the demi-god Kahu. The myth, perhaps, had its origin in the powerful currents which are still a cause of anxiety to shipmasters navigating the seas round their shores. They are fertile spots, neither flat nor lofty, but altogether habitable. The soft air is full of sunshine, tempered by the ocean haze, and in it groves of karaka-trees, with their large polished leaves and gleaming fruit, flourish as they flourish nowhere else. Neither too hot nor cold, neither large nor impossibly small—they are about two and a half times the size of the Isle of Wight,—the Chathams, one would think, should have nothing in their story but pleasantness and peace. And, as far as we know, the lot of their old inhabitants, the Moriori, was for centuries marked neither by bloodshed nor dire disaster. The Moriori were Polynesians akin to, yet distinct from, the Maori. Perhaps they were the last separate remnant of some earlier immigrants to New Zealand; or it is possible that their canoes brought them from the South Seas to the Chathams direct; at any rate they found the little land to their liking, and living there undisturbed, increased till, a hundred years ago, they mustered some two thousand souls. Unlike the Maori, they were not skilled gardeners; but they knew how to cook fern-root, and how to render the poisonous karaka berries innocuous. Their rocks and reefs were nesting-places [213]for albatrosses and mutton-birds; so they had fowl and eggs in plenty. A large and very deep lagoon on their main island—said to be the crater of a volcano—swarmed with eels. They were clever fishermen, and would put to sea on extraordinary rafts formed of flax sticks buoyed up by the bladders of the giant kelp. Their beaches were well furnished with shell-fish. Finally, the fur seal haunted their shores in numbers, and supplied them with the warmest of clothing. Indeed, though they could weave mantles of flax, and dye them more artistically than the Maori, they gradually lost the art: their sealskin mantles were enough for them. As the life of savages goes, theirs seems to have been, until eighty years ago, as happy as it was peaceful and absolutely harmless. For the Moriori did not fight among themselves, and having, so far as they knew, no enemies, knew not the meaning of war. They were rather expert at making simple tools of stone and wood, but had no weapons, or any use therefor. Upon these altogether inoffensive and unprovocative islanders came a series of misfortunes which in a couple of decades wiped out most of the little race, broke its spirit, and doomed it to extinction. What had they done to deserve this—the fate of the Tasmanians? They were not unteachable and repulsive like the Tasmanians. Thomas Potts, a trained observer, has minutely described one of them, a survivor of their calamitous days. He saw in the Moriori a man [214]“robust in figure, tall of stature, not darker in colour perhaps than many a Maori, but of a dull, dusky hue, rather than of the rich brown” so common in the Maori. Prominent brows, almond eyes, and a curved, somewhat fleshy nose gave the face a Jewish cast. The eyes seemed quietly watchful—the eyes of a patient animal “not yet attacked, but preparing or prepared for defence.” Otherwise the man’s demeanour was quiet and stolid. Bishop Selwyn, too, who visited the Chathams in 1848, bears witness to the courteous and attractive bearing of the Moriori. They were not drunken, irreclaimably vicious, or especially slothful. They were simply ignorant, innocent, and kindly, and so unfitted for wicked times and a reign of cruelty. White sealers and whalers coming in friendly guise began their destruction, exterminating their seals, scaring away their sea-fowl, infecting them with loathsome diseases. Worse was to come. In the sealing schooners casual Maori seamen visited the Chathams, and saw in them a nook as pleasant and defenceless as the city of Laish. One of these wanderers on his return home painted a picture of the group to an audience of the Ngatiawa tribe in words which Mr. Shand thus renders:— [215] “There is an island out in the ocean not far from here to the eastward. It is full of birds—both land and sea-birds—of all kinds, some living in the peaty soil, with albatross in plenty on the outlying islands. There is abundance of sea and shell-fish; the lakes swarm with eels; and it is a land of the karaka. The inhabitants are very numerous, but they do not know how to fight, and have no weapons.” “TE HONGI” His hearers saw a vision of a Maori El Dorado! But how was it to be reached? In canoes they could not venture so far, nor did they know the way. Doubtless, however, they remembered how Stewart of the Elisabeth had carried Rauparaha and his warriors to Akaroa in the hold of his brig a few years before. Another brig, the Rodney, was in Cook’s Strait now, seeking a cargo of scraped flax. Her captain, Harewood, was not such a villain as Stewart; but if he could not be bribed he could be terrified—so thought the Ngatiawa. In Port Nicholson (Wellington harbour) lies a little islet with a patch of trees on it, like a tuft of hair on a shaven scalp. Nowadays it is used as a quarantine place for dogs and other doubtful immigrants. Thither the Ngatiawa decoyed Harewood and a boat’s crew, and then seizing the men, cajoled or frightened the skipper into promising to carry them across the sea to their prey. Whether Harewood made much ado about transporting the filibustering cannibals to the Chathams will probably never be known. He seems to have had some scruples, but they were soon overcome, either by fear or greed. Once the bargain was struck he performed his part of it without flinching. The work of transport was no light task. No less than nine hundred of the Maori of Cook’s Strait had resolved to take part in the enterprise, so much had Rauparaha’s freebooting exploits in the south inflamed and unsettled his tribe. To carry this invading horde [216]to the scene of their enterprise the Rodney had to make two trips. On the first of them the Maori were packed in the hold like the negroes on a slaver, and when water ran short suffered miseries of thirst. Had the Moriori known anything of war they might easily have repelled their enemies. As it was, the success of the invasion was prompt and complete. Without losing a man the Maori soon took possession of the Chathams and their inhabitants. The land was parcelled out among the new-comers, and the Moriori and their women tasted the bitterness of enslavement by insolent and brutal savages. They seem to have done all that submissiveness could do to propitiate their swaggering lords. But no submissiveness could save them from the cruelty of barbarians drunk with easy success. Misunderstandings between master and slave would be settled with a blow from a tomahawk. On at least two occasions there were massacres, the results either of passion or panic. In one of these fifty Moriori were killed; in the other, perhaps three times that number of all ages and sexes. On the second occasion the dead were laid out in a line on the sea-beach, parents and children together, so that the bodies touched each other. The dead were of course eaten; it is said that as many as fifty were baked in one oven. I have read, moreover, that the Maori coolly kept a number of their miserable slaves penned up, feeding them well, and killed them from time to time like sheep when butcher’s meat was wanted. This last story is, I should think, doubtful, for as the whole island was but one large slave-pen, [217]there could be no object in keeping victims shut up in a yard. The same story has been told of Rauparaha’s treatment of the islanders of Kapiti. But Kapiti is but a few miles from the main shore, and one of his destined victims, a woman, is said to have swum across the strait with her baby on her back. The unhappy Moriori had nowhere to flee to, unless they were to throw themselves into the sea. The white traders and sealers on the coast were virtually in league with their oppressors. The only escape was death, and that way they were not slow to take. Chroniclers differ as to the precise disease which played havoc with them, but I should imagine that the pestilence which walked among them in the noonday was Despair. At any rate their number, which had been 2000 in 1836, was found to be 212 in 1855. The bulk of the race had then found peace in the grave. It is a relief to know that the sufferings of the survivors had by that time come to an end. Long before 1855 the British flag had been hoisted on the Chathams and slavery abolished. After a while the New Zealand Government insisted upon a certain amount of land being given back to the Moriori. It was a small estate, but it was something. The white man, now lord of all, made no distinction between the two brown races, and in process of time the Maori, themselves reduced to a remnant, learned to treat the Moriori as equals. These better days, however, came too late. The Moriori recognised this. For in 1855, seeing that their race was doomed, they met together and solemnly agreed that the chronicles of their people [218]should be arranged and written down, so that when the last was dead, their name and story should not be forgotten. The conquering Maori themselves did not fare so much better. They stood the test of their easy success as badly as did Pizarro’s filibusters in Peru. They quarrelled with their friends, the white traders and sealers, and suffered in an unprovoked onslaught by the crew of a certain French ship, the Jean Bart. Then two of the conquering clans fell out and fought with each other. In the end a number of them returned to New Zealand, and the remainder failed to multiply or keep up their strength in the Chathams. In the present day Moriori and Maori together—for their blood has mingled—do not number two hundred souls. WAHINE’S CANOE RACE ON THE WAIKATO The affair of the Jean Bart is a curious story. The vessel, a French whaler, anchored off the Chathams in 1839. Eager to trade, the Maori clambered on board in numbers. They began chaffering, and also quarrelling with one another, in a fashion that alarmed the captain. He gave wine to some of his dangerous visitors, and tried to persuade them to go ashore again. Many did so, but several score were still in the ship when she slipped her cable and stood out to sea. Then the Frenchmen, armed with guns and lances, attacked the Maori, who were without weapons, and cleared the decks of them. The fight, however, did not end there. A number of the Ngatiawa were below, whither the whites did not venture to follow them. They presently made their way into a storeroom, found muskets there, and opened fire on the crew. Two of the Frenchmen [219]fell, and the remainder in panic launched three boats and left the ship. By this time the Jean Bart was out of sight of land, but the Maori managed to sail back. She went ashore, and was looted and burnt. About forty natives had been killed in the strange bungling and causeless slaughter. The whalers and their boats were heard of no more. It is thought that they were lost in the endeavour to make New Zealand.[6] [6] In the Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. i., Mr. A. Shand summarises and compares the various versions of this odd business. We have seen how the Maori began their invasion of the Chathams by the seizure of the Rodney at Port Nicholson. It is curious that the best-known incident of the subsequent history of the group was almost the exact converse of this—I mean the seizure at the Chathams of the schooner Rifleman in July 1868. In this case, too, the aggressors were Maori, though they did not belong to the Chathams. They were prisoners of war or suspected natives deported thither from the North Island, and kept there under loose supervision by a weak guard. Their leader, Te Kooti, had never borne arms against us, and had been imprisoned and exiled on suspicion merely. A born leader of men, he contrived the capture of the Rifleman very cleverly, and sailed her back to the North Island successfully, taking with him one hundred and sixty-three men and one hundred and thirty-five women and children. The schooner was carrying a respectable cargo of ammunition, accoutrements, food, and tobacco; but the fugitives could muster between them only about thirty [220]rifles and guns. Yet with this scanty supply of weapons Te Kooti managed to kindle a flame in the Poverty Bay district that took years to extinguish. Finally, after massacring many settlers, and winning or losing a series of fights with our militia and their native allies, his forces were scattered, and he was hunted away with a few followers into the country of the Maori king. There he was allowed to settle undisturbed. He lived long enough to be forgiven, to have his hand shaken by our Native Minister, and to have a house with a bit of land given to him by the Government. He was not a chivalrous opponent. A savage, he made war in savage fashion. But he was a capable person; and I cannot resist the conclusion that in being banished to the Chathams and kept there without trial, he was given reason to think himself most unjustly used. NATIVE GATHERING The only trouble given by the natives at the Chathams in later days took the form of a little comedy. The Maori there own a good deal of live-stock, including some thousands of sheep and a number of unpleasant and objectionable dogs. The Maori kuri, an unattractive mongrel at the best, is never popular with white settlers; but in the year 1890 the kuri of the Chathams became a distinct nuisance. A dog-tax was levied on the owners, but this failed either to make them reduce the number of their dogs or restrain them from worrying the flocks of the white settlers. If I remember rightly, the Maori simply declined to pay the dog-tax. When they were prosecuted and fined, they refused to pay the fines. The [221]Government of the day, with more vigour than humour, despatched a steamer to the Chathams, arrested some forty of the recalcitrants, brought them to the South Island, and lodged them in Lyttelton Gaol. The Maori, who have a keen sense of the ridiculous, offered no resistance whatever. I suspect that they did not greatly dislike the trip; it enabled them to see the world. Their notion of hard labour and prison discipline was to eat well, to smoke tobacco, and to bask in the sunshine of the prison yard. It was impossible to treat them harshly. After a while they were sent home, where their adventure formed food for conversation in many and many a nocturnal korero. In the meantime their dogs lived and continued to chase sheep. At this stage the writer of these pages joined the New Zealand Government, and the unhappy white flock-owners laid their troubles before him. At first the little knot did not seem, to an inexperienced Minister, quite easy to untie. After some cogitation, however, a way was found of ending the comedy of errors. What that was is another story. Since then, no more terrible incident has disturbed the Chathams than the grounding of an Antarctic iceberg on their coast—a somewhat startling apparition in latitude 44° south. Otherwise the Chatham islanders have gone on for the last forty years living quietly in the soft sea-air of their little Arcadia, without roads and without progress. They grow wool and export it; for the rest, they exist. A small steamer visits them half-a-dozen times a year, and brings news, groceries, and clothes, also [222]the correct time. Great is the tribulation when her coming is delayed. A friend of mine who witnessed a belated arrival tells me that the boat found a famine raging. The necessaries lacking, however, were not food, but tobacco and hairpins. The 60,000 sheep depastured on the islands have played havoc with some of the native vegetation, and have brought down retribution in the shape of moving drifts of blown sea-sand, whereby many acres of good pasture have been overwhelmed. However, that wonderful binding grass, the marram, has been used to stop the sand, and is said to have stayed the scourge. Much native “bush” is still left, and shows the curious spectacle of a forest where trees spread luxuriantly but do not grow to much more than twenty feet in height. That, says Professor Dendy, is due to the sea-winds—not cold, but laden with salt. In this woodland you may see a veronica which has become a tree, a kind of sandalwood, and a palm peculiar to the islands. That beautiful flower, the Chatham Island lily—which, by the way, is not a lily,—blooms in many a New Zealand garden. The Auckland Isles lie some three hundred miles south of our mainland. They are nearly four times the size of St. Helena, where, as we know, several thousand people have in the past managed to live, chiefly on beef and a British garrison. No one, however, now lives in the Aucklands. New Zealanders speak of their climate in much the same strain as [223]Frenchmen use when talking of November fogs in London. There are, however, worse climates in several parts of the United Kingdom. It does not always rain there; there are many spots where you are sheltered from the wind. It is not so cold but that tree-ferns will grow—the group is their southern limit. The leaning or bowed habits of the forest are due as much, perhaps, to the peaty soil as to the sou’westers. Vegetables flourish; goats, pigs, and cattle thrive. So far are the valleys and hill-sides from being barren that their plant-life is a joy to the New Zealand botanists, who pray for nothing so much as that settlement may hold its hand and not molest this floral paradise. Pleurophyllums, celmisias, gentians, veronicas, grass-trees, spread beside the sea-gulfs as though in sub-alpine meadows. The leaves are luxuriant, the flowers richer in colour than on our main islands. The jungle of crouching rata tinges the winding shores with its summer scarlet. Dense as are the wind-beaten groves, the scrub that covers the higher slopes is still more closely woven. The forest you may creep through; the scrub is virtually impenetrable. A friend of mine, anxious to descend a steep slope covered with it, did so by lying down and rolling on the matted surface. He likened it to a wire-mattress—with a broken wire sticking up here and there. In addition to their botanical fame, the Aucklands have a sinister renown among seafaring men. Nature has provided the group with nearly a dozen good harbours. Two among these, Port Ross and Carnley [224]Harbour, have found champions enthusiastic enough to style them the finest seaports in the world. Yet, despite this abundance of shelter, the isles are infamous as the scene of shipwrecks. They are in the track of Australian ships making for Cape Horn by passing to the south of New Zealand. In trying to give a wide berth to the Snares, captains sometimes go perilously near the Aucklands. To go no further back, eight wrecks upon them have been recorded during the last forty-five years; while earlier, in 1845, there are said to have been three in one year. The excellent harbours, unluckily, open towards the east; the ships running before the westerly winds are dashed against the terrible walls of rock which make the windward face of the group. The survivors find themselves on desolate and inclement shores hundreds of miles from humanity. Many are the tales of their sufferings. Even now, though the Government of New Zealand keeps up two well-stocked dep?ts of food and clothing there, and despatches a steamer to search for castaways once or twice a year, we still read of catastrophes followed by prolonged misery. Five men from a crew of the Grafton, lost in 1864, spent no less than eighteen months on the islands. At length they patched up the ship’s pinnace sufficiently to carry three of them to Stewart’s Island, where they crept into Port Adventure in the last stage of exhaustion. The two comrades they had left behind were at once sent for and brought away. Less lucky were four sailors who, after the wreck of the General Grant, two years later, tried to [225]repeat the feat of a boat-voyage to Stewart Island. They were lost on the way. Indeed, of eighty-three poor souls cast away with the General Grant, only ten were ultimately rescued, after spending a forlorn six months on the isles. The case of the General Grant was especially noteworthy. She did not run blindly against the cliffs in a tempest, but spent hours tacking on and off the western coast in ordinary weather. Finally, she found her way into a cave, where she went down with most of those on board her. At least ￡30,000 in gold went with her, and in the effort to find the wreck and recover the money, the cutter Daphne was afterwards cast away, with the loss of six lives more. Cruel indeed was the ill-luck of the crew of the four-masted barque Dundonald which struck on the Aucklands in March 1907. They saw a cliff looming out just over their bows shortly after midnight. An attempt to wear the ship merely ended in her being hurled stern foremost into a kind of tunnel. The bow sank, and huge seas washed overboard the captain, his son, and nine of the crew. Sixteen took refuge in the tops, and one of them, a Russian, crept from a yard-arm on to a ledge of the cliff. After daylight a rope was flung to him and doubled, and along this bridge—sixty feet in air above the surges—fifteen men contrived to crawl. On reaching the summit of the cliff they discovered the full extent of their bad fortune. They had been cast away, not on the larger Aucklands, but on the peaked rock ominously named [226]Disappointment Island. It contains but four or five square miles, and is five miles away from the next of the group. Heart-stricken at the discovery, the chief mate lay down and died in a few days. The second mate’s health also gave way. The carpenter and sail-maker, whose skill would have been worth so much to the castaways, had been drowned with the captain. A few damp matches and some canvas and rope were almost all that was saved from the ship before she disappeared in deep water. For seven months the survivors managed to live on Disappointment Island, showing both pluck and ingenuity. For a day or two they had to eat raw sea-birds. Then, when their matches had dried, they managed to kindle a fire of peat—a fire which they did not allow to expire for seven months. They learned a better way of cooking sea-fowl than by roasting them. At the coming of winter weather they dug holes in the peat, and building over these roofs of sods and tussock-grass, lay warm and dry thereunder. These shelters, which have been likened to Kaffir kraals, appear to have been modelled on Russian pig-sties. The seamen found a plant with large creeping stems, full of starch, and edible—by desperate men. When the seals came to the islands they mistook them for sea-serpents, but presently finding out their mistake, they lowered hunters armed with clubs to the foot of the cliffs, and learned, after many experiments, that the right place to hit a seal is above the nose. They found penguins tough eating, and seal’s flesh something to be reserved [227]for dire extremity. Their regular ration of sea-birds, they said, was three molly-hawks a day for each man. As to that, one can only say, with Dominie Sampson, “Prodigious!” Searching their islet they lighted upon a crack in the ring of cliff where a waterfall tumbled into a quiet little boat-harbour, the bathing-pool of sea-lions. Then they determined to build a boat and reach that elysium, the main island, with its dep?t of stores. With greased canvas and crooked boughs cut from the gnarled veronica, which was their only timber, they managed to botch up something between a caricature of a Welsh coracle and “the rotten carcase of a boat” in which Antonio and the King of Naples turned Prospero and Miranda adrift. Rowing this leaky curiosity with forked sticks, three picked adventurers reached the main island—only to return without reaching the dep?t. Another boat, and yet another, had to be built before a second transit could be achieved; and when the second crossing was effected, the coracle sank as the rowers scrambled on shore. This, however, completed the catalogue of their disasters, and was “the last of their sea-sorrow.” The dep?t was reached in September, and in the boat found there the tenants of Disappointment Island were removed to comfort and good feeding at Port Ross. With the help of an old gun they did some cattle-shooting on Enderby Island hard by, and in the end were taken off by the Government steamer Hinemoa in December. Campbell Island, another habitable though sad-coloured spot, is a kind of understudy of the Auck[228]lands—like them, but smaller, with less striking scenery and scantier plant life. It has, however, a local legend odd enough to be worth repeating. In the hodden-grey solitude there are certain graves of shipwrecked men and others. Among them is one called the Grave of the Frenchwoman. On the strength of this name, and of a patch of Scottish heather blooming near it, a tale has grown up, or been constructed, which would be excellent and pathetic if there were the slightest reason to suppose it true. It is that the Frenchwoman who sleeps her last sleep in rainy Campbell Island was a natural daughter of Charles Edward, the Young Pretender. She has even been identified with the daughter of Prince Charles and Clementina Walkenshaw, the Scottish lady who met him at Bannockburn House in the ’45, and long afterwards joined him abroad. This daughter—says the New Zealand story—became, when she grew up, an object of suspicion to the Prince’s Jacobite followers. They believed that she was a spy in the pay of the English Court. So they induced Stewart, a Scottish sea-captain, to kidnap the girl and carry her to some distant land. Stewart—whose name remains on our Stewart Island—did his work as thoroughly as possible by sailing with her to the antipodes of France. On the way he gained her affections, and established her at Campbell Island, where she died and was buried. Such is the story; sentiment has even been expended on the connection between Bonnie Prince Charlie and the patch of heather aforesaid. It is true certainly that there was a daughter named [229]Charlotte or Caroline, or both, born to the Prince and Miss Walkenshaw in the year 1753. But it was the mother, not the daughter, who was suspected of being a spy in English pay. Clementina left the Prince, driven away by his sottish brutalities, just as did his legal wife, the Countess of Albany. The Countess adjusted her account by running away with Alfieri the poet. Abandoned by both women, Charles seems to have found some consolation in the society of his daughter Charlotte, to whom, even in his last degraded years, he showed his better side. He went through the form of making her Duchess of Albany. She remained with him till his death in 1788, and seems to have followed him to the grave a year afterwards. In any case, Stewart, the sea-captain of the legend, did not find his way to our southern isles till the earlier years of the nineteenth century. That was too late by a generation for Jacobite exiles to be concerned about the treachery of English agents. He is described in Surgeon-Major Thomson’s book as a man “who had seen the world and drunk Burgundy,” so it is possible that the story may have had a Burgundian origin. Who the buried Frenchwoman was I cannot say, but French seamen and explorers, as the map shows, have visited and examined Campbell Island. It would be a desolate spot for a Frenchwoman to live in; but when we are under earth, then, if the grave be deep enough, all lands, I suppose, are much alike. The End