NEW ZEALAND

Transcriber’s Notes

[Page 53]—wid-winter changed to mid-winter.

[Page 151]—sullenly changed to suddenly.

The spelling of Lake Te-Anau has been retained with a hyphen and the township of Te Anau without a hyphen.

A larger version of the map on page 242 at the end of the project, can be viewed by clicking on the map in a web browser only as HTML.

Other changes made are noted at the [end of the book.]

AGENTS

ON M’KINNON’S PASS

NEW ZEALAND

PAINTED BY

F. AND W. WRIGHT

DESCRIBED BY

Hon. WILLIAM PEMBER REEVES

HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR NEW ZEALAND

Ultima regna canam fluido contermina mundo

LONDON

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

1908

Contents

[List of Illustrations]

[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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 faëry 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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.

“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 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. 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 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 equal in beauty or distinction certain other chieftains of the forest. Surely the cedar-like rimu—silvæ 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 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 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 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 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 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. “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 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 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, 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 fœtidissima, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 “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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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.