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Title: New Zealand's first century : the Dominion's scene and story : the pageant of nation-making
Author: Cowan, James
Published: T.P.R. Printing Co., Wellington, N.Z., 1939
Issued by The New Zealand Government Department ot Tourist and Publicity 1939 Hon. F. Langstone, Minister in Charge. L. J. Schmitt, General Managei
Foreword
HIS descriptive sketch, or series of vignettes, of the New Zealand scene and story is presented as preliminary to the Centennial celebrations of the Dominion’s foundation as a British country in 1840. The book is not a history; during the next year or so an official series of historical surveys is to be published, in the necessary full detail, as an authoritative record of the first hundred years of the colony’s existence.
Phases and stages of New Zealand’s life and endeavour, so adventurous and strenuous, are here reviewed in brief compass; and a picture is outlined of the progress which has been made in little more than the span of an ordinary lifetime.
The principal Centennial celebration in the summer of 1939-40 will be the New Zealand Exhibition, held on a site close to the ocean at Rongotai, Lyall Bay; pageants of history, aquatic carnivals and a great Maori assembly at Auckland, and a Centennial gathering at the site of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Besides these, every city and town throughout the Dominion will mark the great occasion by celebrations, varied according to locality and history. In the Centennial year New Zealand will be on show to the world, at the most agreeable season for travel, sport and pleasure in the Southern Hemisphere.
1840 1940
Our First Century
The Pageant of
Nation - Making
(By James Cowan)
INTO a period of a little over a century in New Zealand has been compressed a story of progress which in the old lands of the North was spread over a thousand or two thousand years or more. Events and changes have moved quickly in our country. Since the early first part of the nineteenth century New Zealand life has developed from the stone age to the era of aeroplanes and radio and all the numberless other marvels of modern science. In other countries the change from primitive conditions to civilisation, wealth and culture has been a slow and gradual accretion. Here how short has been the period in which a strong young nation has been evolved and developed into a Dominion of the British Commonwealth. So rapidly has life moved here that the era of the pioneer seems remote. Yet there are many people living who have seen New Zealand a very wild country indeed, in which daily life in some parts was adventurous and perilous in the extreme.
trade in kauri timber, with its shipping and its adventures; the achievements of the settlers who felled the bush to build their homes, and who in the years of war often worked under arms; the military history made by the ten thousand troops, British and Colonial, horse, foot and artillery, who waged campaigns quite on the grand scale at first, under Imperial generals; then the long guerilla warfare, bush-fighting, in which Maori methods were adopted by pakeha forces as well as the Government’s Maori allies.
There was the vivid life on the great gold rushes, particularly on the West Coast, where thousands of diggers’ tents whitened the beaches, then gave place to goldtowns of rough materials but wonderful wealth; where the roaring camps had enough saloons and stores and banks to furnish a city, and where they faded away quickly when the great alluvial deposits dwindled. Action was there in plenty, adventure and danger, the lure of gold, the seeking, the finding and the losing.
The English trader was well established along the coast and in many inland parts. He was fortunate in such places as the banks of the Waikato, the Waipa, the Waihou and the Northern Wairoa where he could get his dressed flax and his pigs down to the ships by canoe. Elsewhere, as at Rotorua, he had to depend on his friends the chiefs to supply strings of human packhorses, their women and slaves. The long inter-tribal wars had only just ceased in 1840; the people were wearying of strife, and the missionaries who had been driven from their stations, as at Rotorua, had taken up their work again.
This quick transformation was largely helped by the favourable conditions of climate and soil. How fortunate we are as compared with some countries where great extremes of climate, want of water, great deserts, plagues of wild animals and reptile and insect life have hindered the progress of the pioneer settler. New Zealand has been fortunate, too, in the class of people who were its first British settlers. English, Scottish and Irish, they were the best of their breed. The very first comers were coast-squatters; their concern was chiefly with the sea. But apart from those brave and self-sacrificing people, the missionaries, the men and women who broke in the wild country did not come until a little less than a century ago. At any rate New Zealand got the pick of the AngloCeltic stock in its early settlers. Some came because of poverty, many out of pure love of adventure, many because the old places were too small for growing families; there were people of culture and some wealth. Whatever the impelling reason, they were nearly all the stuff of which the proper founders of a nation are made. It was in the nature of a gamble with Fate for many. They only faintly realised perhaps the difficulties that would confront them when they reached the land of promise that beckoned far away.
It can never be said of New Zealand that it is a land without a past. There were more than a thousand years of Maori-Polynesian explorings and land-settling, war and adventure, then early European explorers and namegivers, the early traders and whalers and seal hunters; the often perilous life on our four thousand miles of sea coast; the labours and travels of the missionaries; the
Further south, about Cook Strait, the whaling stations were the principal, in fact the only, scenes of pakeha enterprise and what civilisation there was. There was a rough township in Waiorua Bay, on Kapiti Island; there was another at Te Awaiti Bay (“Old Tarwhite”), in Tory Channel, and there were others here and there along the coast of the South Island to Otago Heads. Where New Plymouth is now there was, too, a whaling station, Moturoa, of Dicky Barrett fame. The west coast of the South Island lay quite unknown since Cook’s visit, except to an occasional venturesome sealing vessel’s crew. Its golden treasure had yet to be discovered. The only known mineral wealth was the pounamu, or greenstone—the Maori jewel-stone. The great lakes of the south were unknown to the white man; indeed next to nothing was known of such a place as Lake Taupo. Bush and swamp and mountains and river—it seemed an unconquerable country. Yet in the space of little more than the average span of man’s life these islands have been cleared and planted, covered with farms and villages, cities and towns; great seaports have been made; the country has been railroaded from end to end; the great bridges and tunnels are monuments of engineering skill; tens of millions of cattle and sheep graze on the hills—the great plains are rich granaries; factories and mills are everywhere; the rivers and cataracts have been turned to enormous industrial use, providing electric power and light.
1840
The population of the country is not yet great—it is only a little over a million and a half —but a natural process of selection operated almost from the beginning. The Anglo-Celtic race has found in New Zealand the country that fulfils its ideal of a land for work and development and home-making. Agreeable climate, fruitful soil, and abundant rainfall, the three great essentials, make it a country eminently suited to the needs of a nation whose chief interests lie in the production of wealth from the land.
MT. COOK
New Zealand has accomplished some things justifying national pride. Physical well being comes first. She leads the world in care for child life, attested by the figures showing the lowest infantile mortality (31.21 per 1000), the lowest death rate, the longest average expectancy of life, 63 years. In industrial life, the Dominion farmers, with the State’s expert assistance, have established the highest standard of dairy production in the world. New Zealand has been called the Empire’s dairy farm. New Zealand has a greater number of sheep per square mile than any other country, nearly nine times as many as Australia. One-twenty-fifth of the world’s flocks are in this small country.
This colony of New Zealand was in its infancy considered rather a burden and an anxiety to the Mother Land. It was founded by a set of people who, if not exactly rebels against the conventions, were at any rate discontented with the opportunities old England afforded them. English statesmen found rather to their disgust that they must assume the responsibility of possessing and looking after colonies at the remotest end of the earth, and help them with troops and munitions when they got into trouble with the owners of the soil. Never could they have dreamed that these burdensome Antipodes would some day be a help and strength to the British nation, by supplying it in peace time with a continuous stream of food-laden ships, and in war time with tens of thousands of Colonial soldiers as well as vast quantities of food and the raw material for clothing. Many years were to pass before the Old Country realised that New Zealand was a useful member of the family instead of a poor relation who was for ever getting into hot water.
# The Discoverers
ALFRED DOMETT, in his poem “Ranolf and Amohia,” wrote an eloquent tribute to Captain Cook. He described him as
“That keen searcher of the Seas “Whose tempest-battling never-baffled keel “Left half our planet little to reveal
Domett likened Cook to the traditional Maui, the heroic fisherman, England’s great rover of science, “Huntsman of pure fame,” who
“Zigzagged the vast Pacific as he prest “ With god-like patience his benignant quest “True hero-god, who realised the notion “Its races feign of mythic Maui still, “And plucked up with a giant might of will “A hundred islands from Oblivion's ocean'.”
But Maui was no myth. He was the Polynesian world’s most vigorous and daring sailor chief, and the first traditional voyager to New Zealand. He has usually been confused with the earlier Maui of mythology, in the legends of the obtaining of fire and the battle with the sun. The Maui who “fished up,” otherwise discovered New Zealand was no mythical hero or demigod, but a man who became a great and daring voyager and explorer. He was the Tasman and the Captain Cook of his day. His fishing (“hi” is the Maori word) of this country in the traditions, was simply the Maori’s figurative way of describing how he brought new lands above the horizon as he sailed onward.
Maui did not come from Tahiti or Rarotonga, but from the traditional island called Mataora, this was very likely Samoa. His voyages were the longest and most daring in the history, not only of Pacific Islands exploration, but of the globe, for they extended from New Zealand in the south to Hawaii in the North Pacific, and across a vast breadth of ocean east and west.
It is believed that a thousand years ago there were probably many islands in existence which have since sunk beneath the ocean. Hawaiian traditions indicate that there was most likely a kind of chain of islands and atolls between the Hawaiian Islands and Samoa and Tahiti. The greater part of the chain has disappeared. In Maui’s day it would have been a series of waymarks for the Polynesian canoe-sailors. Similarly, there were most likely islands between New Zealand and Rarotonga which have become submerged in the course of centuries, such as the lost island called Tuanaki, believed to have sunk less than a century ago.
It is chiefly among the Ngai-Tahu Maoris of the South Island, and some of the East Cape people in the
From the painting by Capt. Clayton The "Endeavour" oH the East Coast of New Zealand, A.D. 1769.
1940
New Zealand’s First Century
Captain Cook
Emigrant Ships of the Sixties, in the Trades.
North, that the historical narrative of Maui has been preserved. There are pedigree lists of varying length. They show that Maui arrived on these shores 45 to 50 generations ago—we may put it at about 700 A.D. That was three centuries before Kupe (whom some tribes claim as the original discoverer) sailed the Southern Seas.
The Maahunui, said the South Island elders, was the canoe in which Maui and his crew voyaged to New Zealand. He first landed in the South Island. Probably he had been carried far south by the strong winds, and the mountains of the south were the first land he saw. It was from the South Island that he discovered the North, or, in the language of the legend-tellers, fished it up from the ocean.
At left. An Emigrant Clipper of the Eighties. Below. A Maori War Canoe on the Waikato river.
The Kaikoura Peninsula is called “The Thwart (Taumanu) of Maui’s Canoe”; it is said that the heroic fisherman braced his foot against it when he was hauling up his landfish. The South Island itself is symbolically called “Te Waka-a-Maui,” or “Maui’s Canoe.”
Following Maui, who reported his discovery on his return to the tropic islands, there came a certain “Captain Courageous” named Rakaihaitu, in his canoe the Uruao, forty-three generations ago—about 850 A.D. Kupe, in the Matahourua, from Tahiti, visited and explored this coast about 1000 A.D.
ROTORUA THERMAL
* New Sea-land
THERE are many New Zealanders who are not altogether satisfied with the present Dutch-given name of the Dominion and who would like to see a change to some designation more expressive of our national tradition and sentiment. But no suggestion yet made justifies an alteration. “Dominion of Oceania” has been suggested but it is too indefinite, and deprives New Zealand of its identity and merges it with a thousand other islands of the Pacific. As for Maori names, there are several suitable for local use, as poetical and historical descriptions of these islands, and Aotearoa fits well enough as such a term for the whole Dominion, but in these alternative names the authentic ancient recognised terms should be preserved. Nukuroa, meaning long, or far-extending land, is one of the Polynesian names for New Zealand. Te Ika-a-Maui is well known as a name for the North Island, but its South Island complement should also be remembered—Te Waka-a-Maui, or “Maui’s Canoe.” It was from the South Island, according to Southern legend, that Maui fished up, or discovered the North; and it is confirmation, or at any rate a curious coincidence, of this Maori tradition that pakeha geologists concede a greater age to the South Island than to the North.
But for national use, a place on the map of the world, the various Maori names are not practicable. It does not seem possible at this time of day to interfere with the existing name of our country, for all its Dutch origin. Abel Tasman did not give New Zealand its name; he named it “Staten-landt,” after the Netherlands StatesGeneral. It was the Netherlands Government cartographers who named it Nova Zelandia, or Niew Zeeland, after the district of Zeeland, in Holland, apparently to be in harmony with the name Nova Hollandia for Australia, and not after any fancied resemblance between the Dutch coast and this country. It is not correct, therefore, to say that Tasman named these islands because the coast reminded him of his own homeland; it would have been apparent to him that no countries could be more unlike each other.
But the name, after all, is quite a good and fitting one. To give it its complete English spelling it is truly
a “New Sea-land.” Its situation on the globe, its great distance from other lands—a disadvantage in some respects, more than compensated for by its security and individuality—its sea-indented character, its sea-tempered climate, all go to justify the name. Miss Baughan, in her poem “Maui’s Fish” expresses the essentially sea-partak-ing quality of the New Zealand scene:
Land ! A young land from the seal A dark land of forest; a bright land, of sky and of summits, of tussock sun-gilded, of headlands proclaiming the sun. Plumed with sky-feathers, with clouds and with snow, begirt with the mat of the ocean, Bordered with foam, with fine fringes of sand, with breast-jewels of clear-coloured pebbles; Up it sprang, out it burst from the folds of the foam, out it stood, Bare-bright, on the jewel-bright sea: A new Landl
New Zealand’s name is descriptive, and it is not awkward or cumbrous. It is as short as Australia or Canada or America. And it has acquired some mana in the world. It will do us very well, all things considered. What New Zealanders do not want is that unblessed word “Australasia.”
Aotea-roa has been translated wrongly as “Long White Cloud.” Someone told Pember Reeves, who took it as a book title and gave it popular currency. But “Long White Land” is more accurate.
The Maori discoverers of old di( not liken the land to a white clone Even when seen from a great dis tance an expanse of land on th horizon does not resemble a whit cloud; it is usually dark in colour often gloomy. But when closely approached and the character o the coast reveals itself, and when as the navigator sails along it, anc the brilliant sunshine lights it up such a land as our east coast may truly be described as long land of light, Aotea-roa. Many parts of the coas northward of Hawke’s Bay justify the name. There is as an example, that beautiful stretch of white cliff extend ing westward from Matata in the Bay of Plenty. Thi flashing white wall of rock, its chalk-like brightness inten sified by the great groves of pohutukawa, their ancien boughs of deep green drooping over the edge of the bluff A sailor of Polynesia, coasting along here, his eyes de lighted by the glorious land after long and weary week of “ever climbing up the climbing wave,” might well call it “The Long Bright World.”
Many of the names on our coast maps crystallise history and remind us always of the men who made that history in their small old-fashioned ships cruising in strange and perilous waters without charts and without the friendly guidance of coastal lights and beacons and sailing directions. Relatively, such men as Cook and D’Urville were more skilful and resourceful sailors than many navigators of to-day, for they were without the many inventions of shipboard science that so simplify and safeguard modern sea traffic. They had to make their own surveys and their own charts; they were astronomers, and above all, they were perfect seamen and perfect masters and leaders of men.
1840 New Zealand’s First Century 1940
The Maori King, Tawhiao.
The Old Time Maori Village Life.
• The Maori People
The tattooed warrior face has for a century symbolised the Maori race and the New Zealand heroic life. The head of Tawhiao, the Maori King of two generations ago, is engraved on the Government bank notes; it figures in commercial advertisements and divides with the Kiwi the honours of the best-known publicity totem for the Dominion and its trade. Indeed the Maori head itself, nicely smoke-cured, was an item of white-man’s trade a century ago, for foreign museums. A generation ago the dark deeply-carved face of the old fighting man was a familiar sight in many north New Zealand villages. Now they are all gone; the last tattooed man of the race died several years ago. There remain but the blueblack engraved and pigmented lips and chin of the older women. Young New Zealand
A Maori Malta of Welcome.
has other views of personal adornment. All manner of innovations borrowed from the pakeha are symptomatic of the changed life and mental outlook of the native people, the largest division of the Polynesian race.
There was a time, not so long ago, when the Maori could procure his living from the soil, the waters, the forest, quite independent of the white man’s commodities. As the result of the irresistible European pressure he is less resourceful, his tastes are largely identical with those of his pakeha neighbours. Clothing, dwellings
A Maori Canoe Crew.
1840
New Zealand’s First Century
1940
For several years past the Maori and half-caste population of New Zealand has been increasing at a greater rate than the all-white. The latest estimate published by the Government Statistician is 87,563 people of predominantly Maori blood. At the census of 1926 the native population was returned at 63,670, an increase of
the new Government schemes for re-establishing the Maori on the land splendid progress has been made. The Maori farmer can farm industriously and well when he is given a fair opportunity and is assisted with advice and capital as the pakeha settler is assisted. No farms are better managed or kept more free from noxious growth than some of the group settlements started in the Rotorua country that was a waste of scrub and fern only a few years ago. The system begun by Ngata in his East Coast homeland has been extended over many other districts. The Maori small farms, already productive beyond expectations, are a lesson to very many of our less thorough white farmers. The grand old walls of mighty ranges, mountains of fame and poetry, stand guard over the new homes and well-kept farms below, where bright streams coil through grassy fields, all Maori. The schemes have cost much money, but the expenditure is well justified on many hundreds of thousands of acres.
and food are identical with those of the whites. (Indeed white is not the best distinguishing term, for the Maori and half-caste are often as light of skin as any pure-blood pakeha). Intermarriage is on the increase; the races have been in process of blending for the last hundred years and more. A few tribes preserve much of their olden conservative attitude but the barriers in externals of life have largely disappeared. Education is general; there are 150 primary schools for Maoris, and several colleges, and the University is open to the Native race as to the English. There are young town-bred Maoris whose education and environment tend to assimilate them closely with the pakeha.
The Landing of Governor Hobson af Waitangi, Bay of Islands
18,000 on the estimate made 25 years previously. Twenty years ago an investigation made as to the proportion of white blood in the native population showed that it was about 50 per cent. But the pure Maori element is strong and holds its own. The falling birth rate of the pakeha in the last few years has not been copied by the Maori. It has been apparent for many years that the Maori community—and half-castes are chiefly to be regarded as predominantly Maori, for the mother’s people usually have the stronger hold upon them—is steadily advancing in importance in the New Zealand scene.
More land and money are needed, and the scheme for providing both has been worked out by the Native Minister and his Board of Native Affairs. The Government has also taken up the problem of decently housing the people in those districts most in need of it.
There would not be any necessity for State action, of course, if the old independent primitive life of the Maori could have been restored. Some tribes, within one’s own memory, possessed a vast range of country, and were selfcontained, and could subsist and thrive without any pakeha supplies if need be. But the pakeha has the land now, Problems of to-day are being grappled with successfully, in one district after another, and the Maori farmers of the new order will become an increasingly valuable part of the national life.
The most vital consideration in the future of the Maori is the land. Land the people must have; their place is not in the cities and towns, except for a few who have assimilated European ways and whose children are reared in town life. For 99 per cent, the open land is the only place, but the process of divesting the Maori of his best land has reached a point which means ruin, unless much of it is restored.
The rejuvenation of the ancient race was pioneered by two truly great men; the late Sir Maui Pomare, apostle of health and sanitation, and Sir Apirana Ngata, who led the people back into the healthy farming life. Now under
The ancient community life, however, will remain, in part. The tribal meeting-house and the marae or assembly ground, where meetings and festivities are held “under the shining sun,” are necessary features of the social organisation. The arts of wood-carving and (in the Waikato, in particular) canoe-making will not fade out. Almost every village has its handsomely carved assembly-house, decorated within and without in the traditional manner; and more of these peculiarly artistic halls which fit so well the landscape beauty, are being built.
WHABGAREI HARBOR
A Modern Maori Examines the Masterpieces of his Ancestors. Mr. King! Tahiwi, noted Radio Artist and Scholar looks back into the past
1840
New Zealand's First Century
1940
* Our Fortunate Land
below, a golden glitter against the black of the country night. There are lights, too, in many a roadside homestead; there is the sound of music in the air, for the radio is a necessary of existence far back.
NEW ZEALANDERS should thank their gods daily, after reading the cable news, for the happy fortune of life in such a land as this. We are blessed in beauty of landscape, in soil and climate and water and wood; we are blessed in the mighty protective arm that blue ocean has placed around us, and in the distance and comparative isolation that once was counted a disadvanta S e - The horrors of modern warfare that surpass in ghastly massacre all the wars of earlier times cannot easily touch us here. We are spared climatic terrors that afflict continental lands; we have no “dust bowl,” and no nightmare of drowned cities. Visitors from overseas express delight at the vivid green and the luxuriant grass and the glory of trees that New Zealand shows. Some of them have remarked on the excellence and the cheapness of the food they were served. The freshness of everything, the freedom, the healthiness of the New Zealand life, the inviting character of the country for home-seekers, is the theme of many.
We are only too well aware, of course, that everything in this New Zealand garden is not lovely. Many parts of the land are already suffering seriously from the greed and the ignorance of those who deforested the country in a century of unrestricted removal of the forest and destruction of the original timber capital, without replacement. Wild animals foolishly introduced work ruin in the bush. If grass grows luxuriantly, so do many noxious weeds. There are people who complain that everything is dear, and that it is difficult to make farming pay.
While the New Zealand countryside is in many places beginning to take on the well-tended closely settled aspect of an English landscape, these rural districts of farm and orchard, homestead and village, with hills and valleys and plains on which millions of sheep find pasturage, besides the many thousands of dairy farms, have a foil and background of a strange wild character, the mountains and forests and geyserlands of the primeval New Zealand. Here nature has built the most gorgeous of scenery, built it, too, on a grand scale for so comparatively small a country. This scenic plan of the island Dominion seems almost purposely designed to give the utmost variety of landscape charm within a limited area. The traveller who contrives to run through New Zealand by rail or motor-car finds it a land of constant surprises, of amazing and sometimes terrifying revelations of nature’s powers, but just round the corner are the quiet farmlands and gardenlands that seem to have been tamed and settled for longer than a century.
Kipling and Gilbert Chesterton picture the old-world antiquity and peace, the quiet labours of generation after generation, that touch of age that is ever young:
See yonder little mill that clacks So busy by the brook ? She has ground her corn and paid her tax Ever since Domesday Book.
And yet, weighing up everything, and giving complaints full play, the conclusion of the whole matter is vastly in New Zealand’s favour. The intelligent visitor from overseas sees the picture in its true perspective; his knowledge of other countries and other peoples enables him to strike an accurate balance. We have many people who came here originally for sport, and who have become permanent settlers. An American ex-naval officer, who is a writer, lately announced his intention of making his home here; he had found “the most beautiful place in the world.” He might well have added, the most peaceful land, and the most agreeable climate. We may miss a lot, because we are not in the whirl of metropolitan life. But there are the compensations, which perhaps are not valued as they should be by New Zealanders, because they are the commonplaces of daily life.
We have nothing in our land like that. We can but point to our grand old trees that have stood their ground for two thousand years, or tell the dimly-remembered story of some of those great scarped earthworks of the Maori that crown the ancient hills. And yet, in a very liberal sense, there is no country that has made more thrilling history in one brief century than New Zealand has.
There are a hundred places tapu to the memory of brave men —and women, too—who died there in combat, in an era still well within the memory of many New Zealanders. There are places which the associations of nearly a thousand years have given a kind of sacred aura of humanity, the accumulated memory of generation after generation of people who have lived and loved and fought and died there. There are islands as dear to the Maori as lonely Pitcairn is to its children.
The hydro-electric light and power stations, scientific triumps of recent times in the Dominion, have transformed life for country and small-town dwellers. The far-out farm has its electric power supply for machine power and for cooking and lighting. The light services especially have enormously enhanced the pleasure of a country life —or rather, perhaps, ameliorated the loneliness. What a contrast, the country village of the past and the brisk little town it has become to-day. Once upon a time, we would pass through a township and see but one solitary light, the kerosene lantern that the law required every public housekeeper to keep burning over his front door from dark to daylight. No street lights, no guiding light but the stars, or haply a jolly round moon. Night entertainments which called the country dweller were usually fixed for a night of full moon.
Now, travelling swiftly and easily along remote roads, you are never far from the bright lights. The one-time small settlement flashes at you suddenly as you emerge from the hills or the bush —a constellation in the valley
Mokoia, in Lake Rotorua is not any common Earth, Water or wood or air, But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye."
They had a veritable Merlin of their own there, indeed more than one.
•The Treaty of Waitangi
IN the first month of 1940 New Zealand will celebrate its first century as a British possession. The islands of New Zealand were not annexed, as some writers have said. The British flag was hoisted as the result of a friendly treaty between the Queen’s representative and the Maori chiefs. This treaty was signed at Waitangi on the shore of the Bay of Islands, and it has been called the Great Charter of the Maori race, because it assured
to them their rights and liberties and the full and undisturbed possession of their lands, forests and fisheries. The Maoris ceded their supreme rights to Queen Victoria; they accepted the protection of the British flag and thus became British citizens on terms of equality with the British-born subjects of the Crown.
This perfect equality of the two races, as recognised in the treaty, is a most important point. In other countries inhabited by primitive native races, the white people did not always treat the natives as equals. Usually might was right. If the British or Americans or French or any other great civilised nation wanted a new country for their settlers and their trade, they usually just took it. Only where the inhabitants who owned the land were strong and numerous and able to fight for it did the whites respect their rights. The Maoris were a strong, intelligent, brave military race; every man and boy could use arms, therefore the Pakeha admitted their rights.
There was a time when mention of the Treaty of Waitangi aroused abusive speeches by politicians,
Historic Relics of (he Old Pioneer Days • The gun upon which Ihe girl leans, was named " Pu-Nui " (The Big Gun) by Ihe Maoris. The two larger guns in the centre saw service during the fighting in Taranaki, the smaller piece on Ihe right having belonged to Ihe barque " Harriet ” wrecked on Ihe coast and plundered by the Maoris. The lower illustration depicts an ancient Trypol and Cresset used by early whalers one hundred years ago.
1840
and contemptuous comment by writers who palpably were ignorant of the circumstances under which it came into being. Maori patriots pleaded for a more faithful observance of its provisions which preserved their ancestral rights. There were many Europeans who enjoined the fulfilment of those provisions as a sacred obligation. But there is no need to-day to stress the national duty under that Treaty. We are one people now. Pakeha and Maori have long since joined hands for ever.
Now the spot where the Treaty was signed is a national memorial. It remained for a great and discerning Englishman, recently Governor-General of the Dominion, to revive interest in and veneration for the pact of Waitangi and all the associations, the true romance of history that attach to it. Lord and Lady Bledisloe’s most generous purchase and gift of the Waitangi estate to the people of New Zealand created a concern in the story of the founding of the nation that could not have been aroused in any other way. New Zealanders have been too apt to take such things for granted. Waitangi is a national sanctuary, preserved in perpetuity to the country as a place of classic memories.
A Typical Clipper Ship of the Eighties:
Had not the Maori been a strong character, a practised warrior, he would have been reduced to the position of a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water for the white man. Indeed, Colonel Wakefield, soon after his arrival, gave it as his opinion that that was the destined position of the native race. Better acquaintance with the Maori very soon forced him to modify his opinion. The wars were unfortunate, but they at least produced in each race a respect and a regard for the other that perhaps only the field of battle would have created.
Only for Maori friendship and hospitality, and also for mutual desire for trade, the first settlers of Wellington, Auckland, and other parts of New Zealand could not have established themselves here. They were only able to land and remain here through the friendship and cordial welcome of the great Maori chiefs and their people. In the north Auckland City would not have been founded, and settlement would not have been attempted by Governor Hobson but for the friendship of the powerful Chiefs and tribes. A deputation of chiefs of Ngati-Whatua and Waikato visited the Bay of Islands after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and urged Hobson to found a settlement on the Waitemata, and when the first settlers came the local Maoris gave them the most generous of welcomes. They built raupo houses to shelter them, they assisted to land the newcomers; they brought supplies of food for the white strangers. This happy condition continued in Auckland, both races living and thriving in close neighbourhood for twenty years, until the unhappy wars began.
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* The Pioneers
Wellington’s Beginning
THE man who was the first champion and advocate of the true science of colonisation, and but for whom it is doubtful whether New Zealand would be under the British flag to-day, is at last beginning to receive the recognition that is his long-deferred due. Edward Gibbon Wakefield has been in his grave nearly three-quarters of a century, and his name was all but forgotten by the New Zealanders who grew up in peaceful occupation of the country that he, more than any other man, won for them. Historians of the Dominion have discovered, or re-dis-covered, Wakefield, and have gone to many pains to record the facts of his strangely-varied career, and to trace the development of his long fight for the spread of free British settlement overseas, as distinguished from officialism and transportation, and in particular his share in the beginning of our own national story. The Wakefield
The "Malaura" which took the first cargo of Frozen Meat from Auckland in 1882.
brothers made mistakes, but these mistakes can be admitted without impairing the fame of the men who founded our settlements.
Edward Gibbon Wakefield died in Wellington in 1862, at the age of sixty-six. The Wakefields did not get much land for themselves. All that Edward Gibbon, the founder of colonisation, acquired was his burial plot. There are ornate monuments to many lesser men in New Zealand, but none to Wakefield. However, as one of his biographers truly says, the capital city that spreads around his resting place is the real memorial, the fruit of his brain and toil, “symbol and representative of the colony which he made, living and visible embodiment of the dreams of long ago.”
The first vessel to come to New Zealand, bringing Colonel Wakefield as Agent or Governor, did not take emigrants but officials and surveyors, to prepare the way for the coming of the fleet of passenger ships. This craft was the Torn, a new ship of 382 tons, armed with eight guns. In those days every merchant ship carried guns mounted on her decks, for defence against the country’s foes, and especially against pirates. The Government gave the Wakefields and their company to understand that it disapproved of the proposed settlement in a non-British country, and when the Tory was despatched from Plymouth, on May 6, 1839, with staff and equipment for the new colony, a frigate was sent to stop
New Zealand's First Century
Historic Buildings of the Old War Days
Above. —The famous Round House af New Plymouth, brought from London in sections and erected for Officers' Quarters during the Maori Wars. Below. Officers' Messrooms at Wanganui during the war period, with representatives of British Regiments in front.
WANGANUI RIVER
her. But the little ship was a fast sailer; the Navy ship saw nothing of her. The Tory made a fast passage; she sighted the west coast of New Zealand after a voyage of 96 days, and, guided by Captain Cook’s chart of Cook Strait, sailed into Ship Cove, Queen Charlotte Sound. After a stay there and an examination of the surrounding bays by Colonel Wakefield and his surveyors, it was decided to make for the northern side of the Strait. On September 20, 1839, the Tory sailed into Port
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Nicholson—it was not known as Wellington Harbour then —and anchored between Matiu Island and the northern beach at Pito-one. On shore the Maoris cordially greeted Wakefield. A preliminary payment was made for land, and arrangements were made for the coming of the immigrants, whose ships came early in 1840.
A poem was written by Thomas Campbell, then the British Poet Laureate, as a salute to these adventurers, addressed to the emigrants who embarked for New Zealand in the first ships of the New Zealand Company. (It was Campbell who wrote “Ye Mariners of England,” “The Exile of Erin,” “The Battle of the Baltic” and other stirring poems.) These are the principal verses of the song which was set to music:
Steer, helmsman, till you steer our way By stars beyond the Line;
We go to found a realm one day Like England’s self to shine.
Cheer up, cheer up, our course we’ll keep, With dauntless heart and hand;
And when we’ve ploughed the stormy deep, We’ll plough a smiling land!
A land where beauties importune The Briton to its bowers,
To sow but plenteous seeds, and prune Luxuriant fruit and flowers.
The"e tracts uncheered by human words. Seclusion’s wildest holds,
Shall hear the lowing of our herds, The tinkling of our folds.
Britannia’s pride is in our hearts, Her blood is in our veins—
We’ll girdle earth with British arts Like Ariel’s magic chains.
Cheer up, cheer up, our course we’ll keep, With dauntless heart and hand;
And when we’ve ploughed the stormy deep We’ll plough a smiling land!
This song for the emigrants to the far-off land was first printed in the first number of the “New Zealand Gazette,” the Company’s paper, published in London in August, 1839.
But when that song was published the Company had not yet acquired a solitary acre of New Zealand for Campbell’s singing ploughman. The Wakefields cherished great expectations, there was much of the swift and haphazard in their methods. They made many mistakes, their purchases were loose and indefinite; the missionaries the only reliable intermediaries with the Maoris, disapproved of the Company’s wholesale land-buying scheme. But the plantation, however ill-managed in detail, on the shores of Cook Strait hastened the coming of the British flag. The French were active in the Pacific seeking to acquire islands, while the English Government was not greatly interested :n colonics.
* Auckland's Early Settlers.
THE first British settlers of the Auckland district, unlike the English people who founded Wellington, were not immigrants, strictly speaking. They were not members of any organised body of new colonists. The haphazard manner of the young capital’s beginning was in strong contrast to the system on which Wellington, Canterbury, Nelson and New Plymouth were founded. Those colonies were established on definite, clearly-cut lines by bodies of English and Scottish people, with a small Irish element. Their schemes of settlement were carefully drawn up in England and Scotland before ever a ship was chartered for the great enterprise. Auckland grew up with a medley of humanity, of all grades—
A Pioneer Home.
officials, traders, farmers, labourers, timber sawyers, land speculators, all trades and grades of society. They came by schooner and brig and barque from New South Wales or more remote parts, attracted by the reports of cheap land and the anticipation of quick profits, all the opportunities open to those who came early to a new land of promise. There were many young and restless and adventure-loving men, the class of pioneer who two decades later rushed to the great gold-diggings in the South Island.
In the beginnings of white settlement on the shores of the Waitemata there was disappointment for many, but the capital founded by Governor Hobson at least escaped the troubles which came early to the New Zealand Company’s colonies in the more southern parts of the island. There were no quarrels here with the Maoris who sold the first land to the officials and settlers.
A year after Auckland was founded the population of the little town was about 1,500, and it was scarcely more than 2000 when the first regular body of immigrants, numbering 535, came sailing in from the Clyde in two vessels, the ship Duchess of Argyle and the barque Jane Gifford. They proved the most worthy of colonists. Scottish Presbyterians all, they were of a good honest sturdy type. Their descendants are many in the land to-day.
The Founding of Nelson
IT is a curious fact that Nelson Settlement was named long before a site was chosen for it. It was the second of the little colonies planted by the Wakefields for the New Zealand Company, and it was named in England before the pioneer ships sailed in 1841. When the expedition reached Wellington, the problem was to find a location
IN A KAURI FOREST
Above.— Timber Workers in fhe New Zealand Forest. • Below.— A Typical Axeman.
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New Zealand's First Century
1840
for the Colony. The Wakefields were inclined to send the pioneers to Lyttelton Harbour, then called Port Cooper. Governor Hobson wanted the settlers to make the justfounded settlement of Auckland their home. The expedition was commanded by Captain Arthur Wakefield and consisted of the ship Whitby , the barque Will Watch and the brig Arrow , with a staff of surveyors and others and a party of working men numbering about seventy, who were described at the time as “a most likely-looking crew to form the nucleus of a new colony.”
The existence of Nelson Haven was then quite unknown to Europeans, but there was an enterprising young master mariner in Wellington, Captain F. G. Moore, who commanded a brigantine called the Jewess and who had traded with the Maoris at West Wanganui and other places on the Northern end of the South Island. He was a friend of Charles Heaphy, the surveyor, afterwards famed for his explorations. Moore thought it might be profitable to the New Zealand Company to search Blind Bay or Tasman Bay for a suitable site, and the Wakefields asked him to accompany the Whitby as pilot in the exploration. The ships sailed across Cook Strait and anchored at Astrolabe Island in Blind Bay. From Captain Wakefield’s ship Moore and Heaphy cruised about the great bay. It was Captain Moore who, with a young surveyor named Brown, and a crew consisting of Coxswain Cross and four sailors, was the first to discover the celebrated Boulder Bank, and the safe haven behind it. Moore was the first white man to set foot on the 9-miles long stony bank. Rejoining the boat he sailed into the sheltered harbour, took soundings, and reconnoitred the landing in the strange uninhabited country, and the crew pitched camp on November 5, 1841.
new haven, piloted by Captain Moore and under the secuie lee of the great natural breakwater —the Tahuna-a-Tamaiea of the Maoris—lay the founders of the now wealthy province of Nelson.
“The city of sunshine, fruit and flowers” is a description that has been written of Nelson. It can be enlarged in its scope of reference to embrace most of the province, it certainly fits well the beautiful country from which the city draws its business and fills the holds of the ships that come in to the haven by the deep channel cut through the historic Tahuna.
* New Plymouth’s Founders
That was a dramatic Guy Fawke’s night. When darkness came on, Moore and his comrades saw a fire blazing in the distance on Astrolabe Island, where Captain Wakefield had promised to light one. The arrangement was that the boat’s crew should light a fire and signal with rockets if a suitable site was discovered. Up blazed the first pakeha bonfire on the shore of Whakatu,, where Nelson now stands, and after a little a rocket sailed up from the ship at distant Astrolabe. Moore fired three rockets as an answering signal, another one flashed from the Whitby, and the dull boom of a ship’s gun came over the water. The night was calm and clear, and all hands rejoiced at the fortunate conclusion of the day’s work, and a tot of brandy was served out to each in celebration of the history-making occasion. Four days later the three pioneer vessels arrived in the
THE men and women who founded the settlement of New Plymouth and the Province of Taranaki were such pioneers as England does not seem to produce to-day. At any rate the immigrants from England in recent times seem very different people from the men of Devon and Cornwall and Kent who laid their axes and saws to the Taranaki forest nearly a hundred years ago. It took a stout, resolute heart to break with the familiar hills of the ancient homeland and set out in a small sailing ship on the voyage to a wild, unknown country at the other side of the world. Those who came to New Zealand in the first years of British settlement were of the best, the stock best suited for breaking in a new land. Their quality was thoroughly tested in Taranaki, where the conditions were much harder than in any of the other settlements established by the New Zealand Company. The difficulty of obtaining enough land for farmers, the great tangled bush that extended almost to the sea, and presently disputes with the Maoris, made the New Plymouth founders’ lot a difficult one for many years after the first shipload of English families was landed on the black iron-sand beach. The compensations were the fertile soil, the pleasant and healthy climate and the suitability of the west coast country for homes and productive farms. The glory of the landscape, too, was appreciated by all who came determined to make their way in this wonderful, scantily peopled country. The pioneer farmer soon came to feel that there was a kind of protective genius and majesty in the lofty, snow-topped cone that the Maoris called Taranaki, the mountain that gave its name to all this region within sight of it. Captain Cook had named it Mount Egmont, a quite unfitting title for this crown and citade of the land. The Maori reverenced the peak, swelling up
A New Zealand Low-Level Light
so grandly from the vast forests, as a mountain god and a parent; and when the wars with the pakeha began they clung to that symbol passionately. No other part of New Zealand to-day has so beautiful and inspiring an emblem for patriotic worship.
The Canterbury Settlement
IN 1850 the town of Christchurch came into being. The Canterbury Association acquired about two million and a half acres of land from the New Zealand Company, which had purchased the greater part of the South Island from the Maoris —a bargain which was excellent from the pakehas’ point of view; the descendants of the sellers look at it in a very different light. That enormous area of country was obtained for an absurdly small sum which the sellers were constrained to accept because they were practically threatened that if they did not take it the money would be paid to Te Rauparaha, their northern enemy.
MT. EGMONT
Surveyors were sent out in 1848 to make preparations for the arrival of the colonists; and in September, 1850, three ships left Plymouth and one left London, carrying immigrants of all classes for Port Cooper, as Lyttelton Harbour was then called. Most famous of those Pilgrim Ships is the Charlotte Jane, which brought the officials of the Canterbury Association s colony. A pen drawing made by a passenger, Dr. A. C. Barker, looking forward from the quar-ter-deck, shows the little Charlotte Jane lifting along before a good fair wind, with the port stud-ding-sails set.
A Light-Keeper views a line Marine Picture.
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The pictures of these early-day ships, the Mayflowers of 1850, with their old-fashioned details of build and rig, present a strange contrast to the splendid motor liners which now carry passengers daily in and out through Lyttelton Heads. The pioneer vessels besides the Charlotte Jane (720 tons), were the Randolph (761 tons), Sir George Seymour (850 tons), and the Cressy (720 tons). The Cressy, which came from London, was a barque; all the others were full-rigged ships. Between them they brought 746 passengers.
A very notable man among the leaders of the settlement who came in the Charlotte Jane was Mr. J. E. Fitzgerald, whose name lives in our history as that of a brilliant writer and speaker and a legislator. On the voyage he wrote a poem, the “Night-Watch Song of the Charlotte Jane,” which was set to music. The first verse ran:
Branding Young Stock on a Cattle Station.
'Tis the first watch of the night, brothers, And the strong ivind rides the deep,
And the cold stars, shining bright, brothers, Their mystic courses keep.
Whilst our ship her path is cleaving The flashing waters through,
Here's a health to the land we're leaving, And the land we're going to I
“They found another England here,” a New Zealand poet wrote in describing the adventures and toils of the Canterbury Pilgrims, the South of England men who founded the City of Christchurch and broke in the great, tussock prairie now known as the Canterbury Plains. But it was another England in its possibilities, not in its then appearance and condition. A vast unpeopled land, it spread far away on three sides of the pioneer settlement, for a hundred miles longitudinally with the lay of the island and forty to fifty miles inland. The sea and the volcanic ranges of the Lyttelton Harbour cirque and Banks Peninsula and the Pacific Ocean on the east, and in the west the saw-edged snowy wall of the Southern
Alps, more than ten thousand feet high, the ultimate ice fence of the pastoral prairie. It was scarcely an England then, but viewed now from the hills there is much of the beauty of rural England reproduced on a more spacious plan.
* Otago and Southland
BOTH the Otago and the Canterbury colonies of pioneer settlers came out to the new land under the mana of Church associations. Otago, founded in 1848, remained almost wholly Scottish Presbyterian in character until the early Sixties, when thousands of gold diggers poured in from Victoria and other parts of the world; these eager treasure-hunters modified the original exclusiveness of the province.
The pioneer ships of Otago (the name is a corruption of Otakou, meaning the place of red ochre, originally a place near the entrance to the harbour) were the John Wickliff and the Philip Laing. They came from the Clyde; they brought 326 immigrants, the founders of the now great and wealthy region which embraces Southland as well as Otago.
It was at first proposed in Scotland that the town on Otago Harbour should be called New Edinburgh, but fortunately a better choice was made. Dunedin is the old Celtic name of Edinburgh. This was chosen on the suggestion of the Edinburgh publisher, Mr. Chambers. The situation of the town was beautiful; and much of the native bush which existed there has been preserved to this day. The climate and the scenery reminded the Scottish immigrants of their beloved Caledonia; and when they came to explore the great unknown land that lay beyond the rolling hills and the plains they discovered that it was a wonderful land of lakes, even grander than those of their northern homes. Scottish institutions took firm root in Dunedin; the little town grew into a very solid and prosperous city, renowned not only for its commercial importance but for its colleges; in that respect it was the foremost province in New Zealand.
•The Missionaries and the Maoris
ALTHOUGH the self-appointed task of implanting the Christian faith in New Zealand was begun by the Rev. Samuel Marsden in 1814, at the Bay of Islands (the Rev. Thomas Kendall was the actual preacher of the first sermon in these waters), it was quite thirty years later before the country could be said to have been converted to the white man’s religion. And even then the pakeha propaganda, in its various forms, was only accepted with many reservation. It was not likely that a people with so rich and beautiful a system of spiritual belief, and so copious and elaborate a religious ritual of their own would immediately empty their minds of all that they believed, and adopt in its entirety a strange religion from abroad. The Maoris gradually
Familiar Scenes on Country Roads in the Hawke's Bay District.
1840
accepted the missionary dogmas for a variety of reasons. It was a great and wonderful novelty; the missionaries were amiable and kindly folk, who did not attempt to make profit out of their contact with the natives. They gave many presents, and did not expect much in return except the attention of the people. For a long time the Maoris could not understand the various systems of theology preached to them, but this great principle they quickly grasped; it was a gospel of peace. This came as a relief to many a war-weary community. It promised security of life and safety and happiness in place of war, massacre and cannibalism. On general principles it was wise to treat the missionaries with respect and hospitality.
DROVING SHEEP
It is not often wise to interfere with the ancient beliefs and customs of a primitive people or to seek to change the ancient religion which has served the community for many centuries. Modern education and a sympathetic study of native races have produced a more tolerant and kindly attitude toward those who are classed as “savage” races. But the missionary intrusion into Maori life was justified by results.
By the time Bishop Selwyn arrived in New Zealand, in 1842, the Maoris had been under missionary influence for more than twenty years, so that the ground was well broken for him. The chief heroes of the work in his Church were William Williams and his brother Henry (who had been a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, fighting against the French and the Americans), who planted one station and another, and made many cruises along the coast. Henry Williams and his helpers, pakeha and Maori, built a small schooner at Paihia and used her as a mission ship up and down the eastern side of the island.
Gradually the little mission colonies were planted at Tauranga, Rotorua, Waikato and Waipa, the Waihou, or Thames, Matamata, Poverty Bay. There was sad trouble at Rotorua in ±836; the mission station was sacked and destroyed in the cannibal wars and the station at Matamata had to be abandoned in this year.
One of the great men of the mission was the Rev. John Morgan, who civilised and Christianised the Upper Waikato-Waipa Country. His headquarters were at Te Awamutu; the beautiful old church there and a similar church at Eangiaowhia are monuments to his benevolent and useful regime. He taught the Maoris agriculture, he introduced wheat and fruit-trees. Through his efforts the Waikato people became farmers with wheat fields and numerous water mills for grinding the grain. Many of
the villages were embowered in peach groves. In the course of twenty years much of the Waikato assumed an aspect of cultivated beauty; the tragedy of war and conquest in 1863-1864 ruined and dispossessed Mr. Morgan’s industrious farming tribes.
Far away in the South of New Zealand there was a notable pioneer missionary, Mr. Wohlers, a Lutheran teacher from Germany, who in 1843 settled in a strange remote place, Ruapuke Island. On that small windy isle the missionary lived with a Maori tribe for many years. Ruapuke became a kind of lona for the south of New Zealand; Wohlers was a St. Columba, to whom people came in their canoes and boats from far and near to learn of the new dispensation.
The centenary of Pompallier’s arrival in New Zealand, 1838, was celebrated with great ceremony and enthusiasm at Totara Point, Hokianga Harbour, and also in Auckland, early last year. At Hokianga the Maoris especially gathered in large numbers to do honour to the memory of venerated “Pamapuria,” who began his labours among them without assistant or companion, a lone hand of the Church.
The Wesleyan missionaries, following closely on the English Church pioneers, encountered much trouble at their earliest station, Kaeo, at the head of Whangaroa Harbour. They struggled on, they made the “Hahi Wetere” a strong beneficent institution in some of the wildest parts of the western side of the Island. There was an amicable arrangement by which that littoral and its inland river system became their zone of labours. The names of Leigh and Hobbs, Woon (“Te Wunu” of the Maoris), Whiteley, Buller, Gittos, Buddie, Wallis, are revered in the annals of Methodism in the Dominion. William Gittos (“Te Kitohi”) was the last survivor of the missionary band; he was of the second generation, carrying on the propaganda begun by the apostles of the Thirties; a man of many parts, wiser in Maori lore than his predecessors; a farmer as well as a teacher, a doctor, an adviser in land and political troubles; above all, a peacemaker.
• The Kauri Trade
THE story of a kauri tree is the industrial epic of North New Zealand. There were the visits of the whaleships and the flax-traders, but the timber ships made the pakeha-Maori history of most places except the Bay of Islands, port of the whalers. Of tragedy there was much, due as often as not to the misdeeds of the whites and their ignorance of native customs and beliefs. But in general the Maoris welcomed the coming of the kauri- buyers, and they displayed great aptitude in pre-
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New Zealand’s First Century
A Sheep Station Homestead near Gisborne.
paring the spars to suit the requirements of the ships. The communal system of the tribes was excellently adapted to the needs of the business, in which the whole man strength of a clan would often be employed, in return for white-man’s goods and arms. This description of a timber-ship’s cargo, for the Royal Navy, loaded by the Maoris in the Waitemata Harbour and the shores of the Hauraki, appeared in the “Southern Cross,” Auckland, October 22, 1847.
From Shearing Floor lo Examining Shed. • Two phases in fhe handling of fhe Golden Fleece in Hew Zealand.
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homeward voyage on Wednesday evening (18th Oct.), having on board a cargo of contract spars of the finest description. Nothing can better illustrate the advantages which result from an intelligent aboriginal population than the fact that this cargo, and many others, have been felled, squared, and dragged out, entirely by natives, who, as axe-men stand unrivalled. even by Jonathan himself. The Hope carries home 84 spars and pieces of timber; of these, one spar measures 102 feet in length, and of contract dimensions ; two spars are 92 feet; twelve spars above 80 feet, and twenty-six spars above 70 feet making the cargo contain 41 spars 70 feet and upwards, all of which had to be dragged nearly two miles by the natives from the forest to the salt water. It is worthy of particular notice that the whole cargo was taken on board with a 3-inch rope, manufactured by our industrious and enterprising townsman, Mr. Robertson, from the native flax. A European rope of the same size
the chief items of trade in the North; the shore stations of the many boat parties were the chief centres of European work and traffic in the South. It is a wonderful story, the hundred years of whale-catching that began with the opening of the nineteenth century. British, American and Australian vessels, with now and again a Frenchman, cruised the Southern Seas in quest of the sperm whale, so valuable for oil obtained by boiling down its blubber and for the spermaceti or fine oil, honey-coloured, contained in its head. There was also the species called the “right” whale, much sought for because of the bone contained in its mouth, like black slats with bushy ends, hanging down from the roof of the mouth.
WELLINGTON
It was the ocean-roving ships from the eastern coast of the United States and from London and Sydney that first brought the often doubtful blessings of civilisation to
New Zealand’s Up-to-date Shipping Facilities; A Fleet of Modern Liners and Cargo Steamers at Wellington
Long after the Navy ceased to draw on New Zealand for the spars that once were indispensable in a ship, every large port on both east and west coasts from Auckland northward furnished cargoes of kauri for all parts of the world, and the industry developed into one in which all the most modern scientific methods of working timber were applied. Water-carriage in the long peninsula, with its many rivers and tidal estuaries, was of first importance in the working of the timber areas and the loading of ships.
* The Early Whaleships
THE killing of whales for their oil and bone is the oldest industry in the history of New Zealand and its adjacent seas. It was associated with much that was adventurous in the early history of this country. Whaling was all-important in the South Seas a century ago; it brought great fleets of hunting ships to these waters, and it provided the principal export from the southern parts of New Zealand. Timber and flax were
many a Maori bay. They preceded the missionaries in many places, and there was little friendship between the early Church apostles and the captains and crews of the ships. We read much about this in the histories of the pioneer days, especially in North Auckland. The whaleships’ cruises usually lasted for about three years. During that time it was necessary to call at some New Zealand or South Sea Islands bay to obtain fresh supplies of food and water, also firewood for use in the brick furnaces of the “tryworks” which every vessel carried on her deck; the whale-blubber was boiled down in great iron pots, and the resultant oil was stored in barrels in the hold.
A century ago this great whaling trade was at its height. There were then hundreds of ships engaged in the trade, each ship with a crew of from 25 to 40 men. In the off-season on the New Zealand coast, that is when whales were comparatively scarce, having migrated to the Antarctic Seas, there were sometimes 30 or 40 ships anchored in various parts of the Bay of Islands, chiefly
Modern Steel Construction in the Dominion. Big Buildings now dominating the Cities.
at Kororareka and Wahapu. (The accent is placed on the third syllable, thus: Ko-ro-rah-rekka.) There were sometimes hundreds of “liberty men” on shore enjoying themselves in the rough little town that is now sedate Russell. About 1840 Kororareka had a population of about a thousand people, pakeha and Maori. The other chief northern resort, Mangonui, was a popular place
New Zealand's National Game
NGAURUHOE VOLCANO
* The Pageant of the Ships
THE pioneering era may be said to have ceased in this country when the sailing ships ceased to carry passengers and steamships took the place of the squarerigged clippers. The earliest ships, such as the Duchess of Argyle and the Jane Gifford which brought the first regular immigrants to Auckland, and the Tory, which pioneered Wellington, were small vessels compared with the clippers of the Sixties and Seventies. One’s imagination is greatly drawn by the narratives of the oldtime sailing ships landing their sea-weary pilgrims of whom Thomas Campbell wrote in his poem for the Wellington pioneers, that when they’d ploughed the stormy deep they’d plough a smiling land. There are some fine lines in Alan Mulgan’s poem of the pioneers, “Golden Wedding,” picturing the summer-time approach to New Zealand’s shores after the storm and ocean-stress of a four months’ voyage:
“ . . . Watches curve and run In easy flight under a waxing sun; The full-flowered masts are towers of loveliness. The wind is merciful, the waters bless; Till one calm eve, blue-robed and sunset-browed, A white cloud hangs too white and clear for cloud, God’s friendly half-for got ten hills still stand, And the long loneliness is over — landl”
We saw in Auckland and the Bay of Islands some of the last of the old American whaling barques, up to the Nineties; such antique types as the Chas. W. Morgan, the Gay head, the Alaska, the Canton. The ancient Morgan, of New Bedford, with her thick apple bows, squared-off stern, tumble home sides and all-hemp rigging, was a contemporary of the whaleships of Herman Melville’s time; she was the Pequod of “Moby Dick” to the life. Much later came the new steam whalers, Norwegian, huge mother ships with their flotillas of gunboats.
It was in the Sixties that New Zealand ports saw some of the most famous of sea-beauties. Tall and lovely ships with names that fitted the era of romance and
for supplies for there was a large Maori population, and food of all kinds was most plentiful. An early settler recorded that thb whaleships were so numerous there one season that the vessels moored in the narrow mouth of the harbour, side by side, made a kind of bridge right across from the township front to the opposite shore.
the splendour of sail tradition —the Lightning, Avalanche, Blue Jacket, Red Jacket, Rob Roy, Chariot of Fame, Eastward Ho\ Gloriosa, Queen of Beauty, Rose of Sharon —imagine such names on the bows of a modern liner, tramp oil-tanker.
The great Otago and Westland gold rushes of the Sixties brought several of the fast sailers to New Zealand. The Lightning and the Red Jacket, the two fastest ships of their time came from Melbourne, each brought a thousand eager diggers from the Victoria fields to Port Chalmers bound for the new treasure land, 1860-61. An oldtimer who came in the Red Jacket told me that the miners and sailors were all singing the new version of the old “Banks of Sacramento” chantey:
“Oh blow ye winds, heigh-ol For the golden land of Otay-go ;
There’s plenty of gold, we’ve all beer, told, In the glorious land of Otay-go\”
Many thousands of passengers—cabin, tween decks and steerage or emigrant hold—landed from the later ships, the handsome and powerful iron clippers of the Seventies and Eighties—such ships as the rakish Crusader, the Opawa, Waitangi, Waimate, Piako, Auckland, Invercargill, Waikato, Taranaki, Turakina (she once outran a steam liner); the beautifully-modelled Shaw Savill flyers called after the stars in the Pleiades constellation; such rovers of the seas, seeking cargoes, as the uncommonly lofty Macrihanish, that prettily-modelled little tea-clipper, the barque Coul-na-Kyle (in dock she revealed lines like a yacht). The Lady Jocelyn, name of history, a splendid old ex-trooper, with her three skysail-yards; graceful speedy, fast-sailing always. Next, the age of the first fleets of square-rigged steamships, new age of speed, retaining still the beauty of sail—some ship-rigged, some barque-rigged—the Arawa, Tainui, Kaikoura, Rimutaka Tongariro, Aorangi. The last compromise of steam and canvas; then the modern liner, ever increasing in size, speed and comfort.
Port accommodation for the big ships is of the best; a record of splendid progress in size and efficiency from the day of primitive jetties or none at all. The greatest liner yet seen in these southern seas, the luxuryship the Empress of Britain, 42,348 tons, the tenth largest merchant vessel afloat, was berthed easily at the Pipitea wharf, Wellington City, on April 10, 1938, and two days later at Auckland.
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New Zealand, Home of Great Racing Stock • In centre.— Head of the famous ' Phar Lap.'
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* The Troops Go By
THE most stirring period of our military history, the decade 1860-1870, left its lasting stamp on the character and traditions of the North Island. It was in 1860 that the first alarms of the coming storm set the town and country volunteers drilling in expectation of active service; it was 1870 before the last British regiment boarded the transport for England, thus bringing to an end an Imperial military connection which had lasted for thirty years. Interest and pride in the war service of that era are still strong among descendants of the colonists who did sentry and patrol duty on the outskirts of the town, marched along the rough roads laden with their heavy Enfields and their cumbrous equipment, to build redoubts and help conquer the Maori country; stronger still among the sons and grandsons of those who lived on the frontier of those days and who risked bullet and tomahawk as they went about their farm work.
Modern Railway Facilities in the Capital City.
There are many veterans of the World War whose fathers served in the Maori Wars and some whose grandfathers were Imperial soldiers before them and who came to New Zealand in the 58th or the 65th or some other unit of the “old red army”; and there is in some families among us a soldiering story that dates back to the Napoleonic wars. The spirit of the pioneer, the memory of a perilous past still strong in the minds of old families, have not yet been swamped by the quickly-growing population of newcomers to whom mention of Fort Britomart or the Otahuhu camp or the Queen’s Redoubt means nothing.
The streets and waterfront of Auckland, Wellington, and New Plymouth were full of military colour and movement. Newly-landed regiments or detachments of regiments came marching up to the Albert Barracks, where Albert Park now spreads in brilliant flower-beds, and there was continual marching out to the front. Even after the Waikato War had ended British battalions were sent
up-country on garrison duty. The famous 57th—the “Die-hards”—for example, were sent up to Te Awamutu after their Taranaki campaign was finished. This regiment was considered the finest in India when it was ordered out to New Zealand; its ranks were filled with veterans of the Crimea, men of splendid stature and muscular frames. An onlooker who saw the headquarters of the regiment land at the Wynyard Pier, Auckland, from the troopship wrote of these “Die-hards”: “The aspect of the 57th men, bronzed and warlike, with faces hard as the steel of their bayonets, was distinctly formidable.”
But perhaps the 65th—the “Hiketi-Piwhete” of the Taranaki Maoris—were the pick of all these units of the old red army that Auckland and Wellington and Taranaki watched come and go with sloped rifles and fixed bayonets. Like the 57th, they were mostly Irishmen; big handsome, whiskered, keen-eyed athletes; seasoned colonials, for they had been in New Zealand far longer than any of the other Imperial regiments. The officers of the 65th, it is said, used to boast that the Battalion of the 65th in New Zealand would cover more ground on parade than any similar number of men in the Guards. Some hundreds of men in this regiment took their discharge in Auckland and settled in the colony, and many of them joined the Armed Constabulary when that field force was formed in 1867.
Then there were the 14th and the 18th (the Royal Irish), the 40th, the 50th; the descendants of some of these warriors are numerous in the land to-day. The 14th (second battalion) w*as largely Irish, like the 57th and 65th. The tongue of Tipperary and Connaught was more often heard in the ranks of these regiments than the dialects of the English shires. It is a fact not generally understood that the wars against the Maoris were fought and won chiefly not by Englishmen, but by the Irish.
* A Charm of Cities—Auckland and the Hauraki
THE city of Auckland rests a hand on two oceans, east and west. Henry Williams, the Navy man turned missionary, displayed a prophet-like foresight and a great sailor’s sense of geography when he advised Governor Hobson to transfer the young capital from the Bay of Islands to the Waitemata. No part of New Zealand or Australia shows so noble a command of a site for a great city. That fact is realised by the traveller to-day when he views the city and the harbour and the outer Gulf from the front of the splendid War Memorial Museum, crowning in its white and classic beauty the green Domain Hill; or better still from the top of Maungakiekie, sacred pinnacle of Tamaki isthmus, graceful nipple on the ten-mile plain, where the city and its suburbs extend from coast to coast. Modern Auckland, with its
World Famous Liners visit the Ports of Hew Zealand. • Big Tonnage Accommodated with ease in Spacious Berths at Wellington, Capital City of the Dominion. • All the Leading Ports of New Zealand possess thoroughly Up-to-date Facilities for the Efficient Handling of Ships and Cargoes.
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great buildings and its miles of wharfage has straightened and reclaimed and made over entirely the primitive foreshore. But the hill cones of the ancient volcanic age, with their craters and their Maori-terraced slopes, imperishably emboss the Whenua-tamaki, the contested land of the Maori tribes that is now the greatest city of the Southern Islands world. Those terraces above terraces, their miles upon miles of entrenchments of centuries ago, are the memorials of a vanished people who were great natural military engineers as they were the greatest ocean navigators of the ancient world. The fortunate dovetailing of sea and shore, and the many-islanded Hauraki are Auckland’s greatest glory. Look north and east and you see islands green and islands blue, islands boldly cut, enchanted distant mountains, shadows of islands. How amazingly well sheltered the nort of the Waitemata is from the open sweep of ocean! Holidays see the Gulf white-flecked for leagues with sails. There are hundreds of miles of yacht cruising ground here. A Cyclades of islands interposes its shield of yellow cliffs, lava slopes, in-and-out contours of gently undulating land, generously wooded, between the harbour mouth and the Pacific surges; overpeering all is dark Rangitoto’s triple peak, a great volcanic park and wild-nature museum, swelling up evenly in sweeping lines from a perfectlv circular base and looking from nearly all quarters exactly the same; Waitemata’s guardian and overlord. It is the Gulf fisherman’s and yachtsman’s unfailing compass and weather-glass, conspicuous point for the steersman from far at sea. An Italian fisherman in the outer gulf was asked why he did not carry a compass in his boat. “Comp’? What ze good-a comp’?” he retorted. “Don’t you see Rangitot’?”
* Some Sforylands
■ N a cruise through the great peninsula of North AuckI land people find many places of auiet novel charm. I Craggy Whangaroa, Hokianga of the soft sub-tropic climate where the taro grows in the Maori gardens and where I have seen the ripening bananas in an old settler’s garden; Kaikohe, centre of Maori nationalism in old time; then Waitangi and lazy old Kororareka come into the travel picture. Shrines of story; memories of great pioneers and bold tattooed warrior figures of the past. Familiar stories; yet there is an added thrill in them when one treads the historic snots. Go to old Kerikeri, snoozing away there by its tidal river, and see how generations of feet have worn those bluestone steps in the mission store, like a fort-house, that was built a century ago; and climb those deeply worn timber stairs, too, to Selwyn’s library rooms of the Forties. At the Bay you may try your luck at the swordfish, if you are one of those indomitable souls who can endure a tossing power-launch and enjoy a blistering sunburn, so that you haul in a huge and furious fish. A memory of “Darius,” otherwise the late D. M. Ross, of Gisborne; he was the only poet who wrote verses about the swordfish, or who ever found a rhyme for ambergris. Two of his verses from a poem on North Auckland:
FRANZ JOSEF GLACIER
No winter comes assailing Your strong established peace From land and sea exhaling An odorous ambergris.
Far off the tawny beaches In golden rippled light The great black marlin breaches In mad tremendous fight.
IT is a coincidence of historical importance that the period of greatest political trouble in New Zealand was also the era of greatest wealth-winning from the golden sands and quartz reefs. In the ten years of almost continuous civil war (1860-1870), many scores of thousands of gold-diggers rushed from Australia and California and other parts of the world to Otago, then to the Westland Coast, and next to the Thames, or Hauraki, where gold was won galore. Our first primitive diggings at Gabriel’s Gully, the Dunstan, the West Coast, and the Coromandel-Thames-Ohinemuri shores and hills were Sacramento, Bendigo and Ballarat all over again. The foreshore and the steep clay hills covered with forest were soon reduced to the wreckage that all digginggrounds show. The reef fields were amazingly rich for the first few years. One Thames mine returned a ton of gold a fortnight. The famous Shotover (named after a treasure river on the Wakatipu diggings), owned by four lucky diggers, quickly yielded them £40,000 apiece. For nine months the Caledonian mine, at the Moanataiari, of 2,800 shares, paid the owners a dividend of £l2 per share every fortnight. In one fortnight the yield was one and a-half tons of gold. That Thames period of fevered gold-getting, from 1868 onward for several years, served a greatly useful purpose in influencing for prosperity the northern part of New Zealand at a critical period. Nowadays farming is more important, but still “there’s gold in the mountain, and silver in the mine.” After the first great rushes had ended the Ohinemuri-Waihi hills quartz mines yielded many millions, and the great mines still return richly from low-grade ores scientifically worked. In the South Island dredging and sluicing are carried on with profit on some of the old fields.
* Lakeland and Geyserland
THE gateway of the hills which opens out Rotorua, the geyserland capital, has a beauty and a wonder peculiarly its own. No town in New Zealand has an approach as fine and imagination-stirring, not even the entrance to Auckland—through the islands of the great Hauraki Gulf. Nearly a thousand feet below, as you come over the Mamaku range by railway or motorcar is Lake Rotorua, set in its great saucer of hills, blue and grey and green; and then the pretty town, in its plantations and flowery parks; its white streets, and here and there coils and columns of steam lazily rising from the hot springs and pools. An aerial tour across the great Lakes and Hot Springs region between Rotorua and Taupo first of all impresses the traveller with the number, wonder and beauty of the lakes. The flying-man sees below and around such a vision as James Hogg’s “bonnie Kilmeny” dreamed of Old Caledonia, but a brighter, greener land of enchantment. Here the water-mirrors of Wonderland lie, some blue, some brown-green, some milky-opaque, some like little silver plates set in the green bush, or in the ferny hollows. Lakes of all colours and contours, some many miles in length, some quiet tarns in the forested or shrub-clothed hills, some little more than pools, darkblue or almost black, occupying the round crateral saucers of extinct volcanies. Most of the lakes of any size are closely grouped in the Rotorua-Rotomahana country. Rotorua itself, roughly pear-shaped, is seven miles in greatest length. Beautiful Rotoiti is connected by a canal-like stream with Rotorua, and is of somewhat greater length, though narrower. Then there are Roto-ehu and Roto-ma, lakes of the woods; Okataina, with its lofty
* The Thames Gold Diggings
Carrying on the Famous Traditions of New Zealand Arms: • A Parade of Sea, Land and Air Forces, with College Cadets on the
Civic Beauly and Old World Charm, a Feature ol New Zealand Cities. At lop: A Glimpse o« Auckland City from Albert Park. Bottom right: The Old Windmill. Auckland.
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forested shores, its air of silence and sanctuary; Tarawera, stretching along the base of its grim old volcano; Rotomahana, which fills the crater-chasm formed when the old lake, where the terraces once gleamed through their lainbow haze, was blown into the air, and rained over the face of the land; Okareka with its subterranean outlet; Tikitapu of turquoise blue; Roto-kakahi of greenish hue; Rerewhakakaitu with its pumice terraces under Mount Tarawera’s shadow. Then thirty miles south is the greatest of all—Taupo.
The travelled sybarite in luxurious warm mineral baths has a new pleasure in store for him should he discover a certain hot spring on the north shore of Lake Taupo. The charm of it lies in its setting as much as in the delicious feel of the waters. It is a shallow rock tank of light-blue water, ever renewed by a boiling spring that bubbles up in the rocks under the pumice cliff about a mile down the east coast of Taupo Moana from Taupo township. There is no bathing spring just like it in all the Wai-ariki country. A little beyond it is the glistening white beach of Waipahihi Bay, below a Maori village.
* The Bath Delectable
BEMARKABLES, LAKE WAKATIPU
SCIENTIFIC men have written much of the healing mineral waters of the New Zealand hydro-thermal region, have analysed the contents of the wai-ariki, measured their flow, recorded their effect on sufferers from rheumatism and sciatica and other ills. In this non-scientific survey of scene and life the writer is impelled to mention what doctors may consider the less important aspect of the hot sulphur and baths, their delicious virtues as soft and soothing bathing waters. One has tingled and gasped in that most potent of healing springs, the Postmaster Bath, on the edge of Rotorua Lake. Sat also with one’s pores absorbing sulphur in that celebrated spring, the Priest, in the Rotorua Sanatorium ground. The Priest and the Postmaster, one of each a day, were perfect and complete cures for rheumatism and sciatica. But we do not bathe in that brew of acids and sodas and sulphur in the Postmaster Spring for pleasure.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of delicious pools and springs scattered throughout the Rotorua-Taupo volcanic zone, where one may lie at ease, for hours for that matter, for “time goes by the other way” when you enter the soft silky springs the old Maoris called “wai-ariki,” the “lordly waters.”
The Maori always had a liking for the body-soothing wai-ariki at Ohinemutu and Whakarewarewa, and a score of other villages in the Rotorua lakes district. He fixed his home right in the midst of the mazes of boiling springs, and the warm bathing pools. In the boiling ngawha, the women cooked their food, in the wai-ariki all the people gathered for a social soak in the evenings after work was done. The children spent half their waking hours in the warm springs. There surely are no cleaner youngsters than the brown tamariki of geyserland.
This bath, called Taharepa, is open to sky and lakeside. One can lie at ease there and lazily watch the ripples creaming on the beach; see even the yellow steam cui 1 drift from Ngauruhoe volcano and the ice and snow of Ruapehu flash in the sun fifty miles away. The Maoris long ago carved a head-rest at the shore end of the bath. You can take a nap there, unless the bath is already occupied, for it is a one-man dip—lapped in the soothing waters. A little low rocky point runs out close by, and on its edge, near the water, is a graceful kowhai tree which in the spring of the year decks itself in golden blossom. It completes the scene, and is prettier than any picture.
The Beauty of Wellington
ONE of the writers and lecturers from overseas who have said pleasant things about New Zealand was charmed with Wellington’s Italian lake-like harbour and its circumvallation of blue ranges. His poetic soul would have delighted, had he been with us longer, with some aspects of Wellington landscape as residents know it, and most of all the dwellers on the hills. The mists on the mountains give this up-and-down city a quality of beauty that no other city in these islands can show, not even Dunedin. About the end of the winter months, and when spring is slowly merging into early summer, Wellington has a morning glory of mingled fog and sunlight that gives an ever-changing picture of soft colour and mist forms.
Many miles away, in the wonderful valley of OrakeiKorako, where the Waikato River rolls in grand blue volume between geyser-pitted banks, there are natural bathing places fed by just such a silicated mineral spring.
Auckland has its misty beauty of early morning. Many of us remember the sight, out beyond Rangitoto Channel, of Admiral Sperry’s American fleet in line silently emerging out of the luminous fog like spirit ships, in seemingly endless procession. That was very nearly thirty years ago, yet it remains in the memory when later pictures have faded. But Wellington’s morning mist panorama is of quite an alpine character. Looking out from the heights, five hundred feet above the city, some quiet dawn-time before the sun has swung up over the Orongorongo Ranges, you might almost imagine yourself in the heart of some mountain region in the interior. The silent city in the gulch below is invisible, drowned in a fleecy sea; so, too, is the harbour; only the higher summits lift above the level ocean of vapour, like islands rising from a softly-swirling ocean. Dwellers on the heights here are gods looking out over a world of white and smoky blue, pitying those benighted ones who are content to live on the levels so far below.
Often we would see a whole family enjoying its pipe and its sweet potatoes and koura crayfish while sitting in the household bathing pool, fed by the waters from a boiling well. There was a sylvan pool of water on Mokoia Island, besides Hinemoa’s famous bath.
In the famous geyser village of Wakarewarewa there is a boiling pool, once a spouting geyser, which supplies a bath popularly called the Oil Bath, because of the effect on the skin. It is not oil, of course; the water contains a very thin silica which imparts the softest, most delicate coating to the skin.
Some bathing waters in this hundred miles long marvel region are in idyllic sylvan surroundings. The white man’s bathing-pavilion and the marble tank have still to arrive in the heart of the island.
And, there is often a soft, dreamy beauty about Wellington nights that even Auckland harbour’s summer-time nocturnes cannot surpass. One night when the moon rose out of the north-eastern cloud banks and illumined the harbour—it was to be exact, about two o’clock in the
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wards Sir) Dillon Bell, father of the late Sir Francis Bell, of Wellington—who was the New Zealand Company s agent in New Plymouth. 1847-48. This Hua block was officially named the Bell Block, and the name remains, though the strong stockade and blockhouses built on its commanding hill in 1860 have long since disappeared.
morning—there was the thinnest haze that gave it all a kind of enchanted silvery softness, toning the light to the magic glimmer of a glowworn cave. Directly above the moon great Jupiter stared with scarcely winking eye. In the moon-path on the moveless waters rode an anchored vessel, maybe one of those arks of ugliness, an oil tanker; in this pale light she might have been a ship of faery. Down yonder, the Dominion Art Gallery and Museum gleamed in its marble on Pukeahu hill. Nearer, there was a shadowy glen, where fern-trees grew, a dell of foliage such as you see in many of our suburbs, a place where the riroriro trills and where the tui sometimes comes from the bush in the winter foraging for sweets. This quiet night, had it been in a mid-England wood, I fancied, one might have heard the nightingale.
* Christchurch the Serene
AUCKLAND has been called a city of parks and gardens, but Christchurch outdoes it in its flowerspangled robe of foliage, a garment so broad and generous and solacing that the traveller rather wonders to find the Canterbury capital the place of big business it is—wool and fat lambs, grain, butter, cheese. More than three-quarters of a century has not greatly modified in externals the aims of the founders who patterned it on English cathedral towns. It has increased in beauty with the years. Oaks and elms shading broad lawns, bright waters of little streams glancing through willowed canopies; lordly chestnut avenues, slender and lacelike grace of silver birches, jonquil beds that go slanting to the clear little Avon; grenadier lines of poplars in their bright spring clothes; snowy hawthorns scenting the public gardens, yellow spangles of the kowhai, New Zealand’s golden-shower tree, that blossoms on leafless branches. Parks in their greenness and garden graces, extending over hundreds of acres, are within a few minutes’ stroll of the city. If the visitor loses the way, in the maze of gardens and lawns, lakelets and creektwists and pretty bridges, he can orient himself by a glance at that tall slender marlinspike, cross-tipped for luck, the church compass needle, lifting above the treetops. All roads lead to Cathedral Square.
But if you know Wellington you will know that this is too good to last. This soft, unearthly beauty—what did it portend? We had not long to wait. Before peep of dawn moon and stars vanished in a thickening sea fog that came stealing in from Cook Strait. The fog darkened, came piling in, and up with a whoosh! came the wind. We were in for the familiar old southerly “buster.” The whale hunters of Tory Channel and Kaikoura talk of the “butt-end of a sou’-wester.” Here it is, howling like an Antarctic gale. In forty-eight hours, perhaps, it will repent of its bluster and will chop right round to the opposite quarter and blow a gentle northerly again; and thus we may have two or three days of quiet brilliant weather. Such is quick-change climate in the City of the Strait.
* Taranaki
TARANAKI above all places was a battlefield of Hauhau and colonial soldiers. A military map of that most fertile and beautiful part of the North Island is marked everywhere with the cross-swords that denote the scenes of engagements. There was a notably brave defence of a small redoubt, at Tuiutuiumokai, near the present town of Hawera, by a score of military settlers and Armed Constabulary against about five times their number of Maoris from the bush headquarters of the Hauhaus. This defence has been called the “Rorke’s Drift” of Taranaki, in allusion to that heroic defence of a British camp in the Zulu war. The Hauhaus attacked with gun and tomahawk very early in the morning They surrounded the small and unfinished earthwork, and for three or four hours fought to overwhelm the little garrison and obtain the rifles and ammunition. Half the defenders were killed, and when at last relief arrived there were only six men unwounded. A thrilling and gallant piece of work, a deed of glory in which it should be added, nearly all the defenders were Irishmen. Some of them had been in the B7th Regiment, the famous “Die-hards.” When they took their discharge they joined the colonial forces. The Bell Block township, eight miles from New Plymouth, a place once noted in Taranaki s war history, has become famous in another way to-day, for it is the site of the New Plymouth aerodrome, the landing place for which aeroplanes steer in crossing the Tasman Sea, their guiding mark Mount Egmont. The name has puzzled many strangers to Taranaki. It has been called “Bell Rock,” and some have even jumped to the conclusion that it is the great crag we know as Paritutu, on the New Plymouth shore. One of the accounts of Miss Jean Batten’s great flight across the Tasman described her relief on sighting this “Bell Rock.
The fact is that Bell Block is the name of the farming district on the New Plymouth-Waitara Road called originally by the Maoris Hua, a word which means fruit. It was brought from the Atia-Awa people by Mr. (after-
‘ They found another England here,” a New Zealand poet wrote in describing the adventures and toils of the Canterbury Pilgrims, the South of England men who founded the City of Christchurch and broke in the great, tussock prairie now known as the Canterbury Plains. But it was another England in its possibilities, not in its then appearance and condition. A vast unpeopled land, it spread far away on three sides of the pioneer settlement, for a hundred miles longitudinally with the lay of the island and forty to fifty miles inland. The sea and the volcanic ranges of the Lyttelton Harbour cirque and Banks Peninsula and the Pacific Ocean on the east, and in the west the saw-edged snowy wall of the Southern Alps, more than ten thousand feet high, the ultimate ice fence of the pastoral prairie. It was scarcely an England then, but viewed now from the hills there is much of beauty of rural England reproduced on a more spacious plan.
• Westland
The Air-minded Coast THE coast of Westland, olden Maori treasure-land for the greenstone workers, has its rich store of golddigging history. Hokitika river-mouth was often crowded with ships. One of the most famous of the gold towns of the Coast is the little seaside village of Okarito, down the surge-smitten ocean-front ninety miles south of Hokitika. (Okarito is a short drive from the
High about the bold sea-gate of Port Lyttelton are the Port Hills, Alps in miniature, but volcanic Alps. There is nothing in New Zealand, land of volcanic ranges as it is, that gives more variety of rock-sculpture. These bold castle crags, the “eyebrows of the hills,” give the landscape a wildness, a core of savagery, that is in its way a foil to the peaceful plains beyond.
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foot of the Franz Josef Glacier.) Thousands of diggers, most of them young, strong and adventurous, the flower of manhood, poured into Okarito. Some pushed far up the forbidding ravines down which the glacial rivers bore their sands of gold, plunged into the tangled forest and grapled with unkind nature for her treasure store. That wild life is history; to-day it is scientific gold-salvage with dredges, and a great timber-milling industry.
of land, and belted about with rich forests, like a garment, it climbs in the delicious sweeping curves that only volcanic cones show, to an altitude of over eight thousand feet. There is not a peak in the South Island that can compare in those qualities of satisfying symmetry with our ancient fire-mountains of the North. Taranaki must remain the perfect type of the high places of the earth—at any rate our sector of it. It has a tropical rival, the active volcano of Mayon, in the Southern Phillipines, but that peak lacks the crowning beauty of snow.
That one-time back-of-beyond, the South Westland country, has become in one important respect the most progressive district of New Zealand. In former years the dramatic glories of the colour-soaked West Coast, the lakes, the glaciers that descend to the bush, and other Alpine wonders, were far away and not easy to reach. Now travel and mail and goods transit by aeroplane have become an ordinary part of life; a necessity of existence on the long torrent-split littoral of the Golden Coast. The Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers and the principal lakes are reached with ease and speed by motor cars; for the farther south regions there is the flying service. There is a regular service by ’plane up and down the coast, linking up the remote settlements of farmers and bushmen and prospectors with Hokitika town. The distance from Hokitika to Okuru, south of the Haast River mouth, is 200 miles. Bv road the journey takes three or four days, and more if the unbridged rivers south of the Fox Glacier flat are in flood.
Seen through a framing of forest and fern trees, Taranaki is a picture entrancing. More glorious still does it appear when seen from the ocean. It received favourable mention in Captain Conor O’Brien’s book “Across Three Oceans.” in which he described his world cruise some years ago in his little vessel, the 30-ton ketch Saoirse, flying the flag of the Irish Free State. This was his impression of Taranaki from the sea, his first sight of New Zealand at daylight as he approached the West Coast from Melbourne:—
A few years ago there were no more isolated places in the Dominion than those bush settlers’ homes and small townships dotted along the narrow harbourless coast as far south as Okuru and Jackson’s Bay. Now they are ahead of the cities in the most modern ways of travel. The air mail and air taxi have completely altered the tempo of life.
“ The clouds were lying low on the water, and high above them the sun was emerging from behind the colossal cone of Mount Egmont which I had anproached within forty miles. I think this was the most impressive mountain scenery I ever saw. The parabolic sweep of a mountain cone is a very beautiful line, but it is commonlv rather flat: the andesite of Eemont, however, an unusually steep curve, and moreover the less interesting 3000 feet at the bottom (the whole peak is 8000 feeO were cut off bv the low mists and the curvature of the globe. Various causes make a mountain look big; the stark symmetry of the volcano is one. the complexity of such a system as Snowdon is another, but the most notent is the contrast when one sees them standing on another element, such as the true horizon, or a mist Ivinaon a level plain, so that there is a gan of as manv miles as one’s imagination cares to make it between the foreground and the background.”
The worst river crossing of all is the Haast, which is nearly a mile wide at the mouth, running in several strong streams. Travellers have been held up there for days, waiting for the great snowy river to subside. This wild land is now being roaded and bridged, but it is slow difficult work. However, the aeroplane has changed all that. It flies the distance in a few hours, and if necessary makes the return journey with passengers, mails and goods in the one day.
Captain O’Brien wielded a rather mordant and ironical pen when describing colonial towns and people. He was cruel enough to say that New Zealand was so unreliable a place that rows of houses were sometimes seen sliding down the mud streets. But his testimonial to Egmont’s beauty compensates for all that.
• New Zealand’s Mountains
A WRITER who has done much climbing described Mt. Tasman as “New Zealand’s finest mountain.” Such an opinion is clearly open to contradiction. Tasman’s shape undoubtedly is beautiful, but Aorangi is more commanding, besides being a trifle loftier; and Tasman is closely neighboured by many other peaks, all of which attract the eye. The noblest sight in the Alps, apart from the glaciers, is the vast rugged wall of Aorangi as seen from the Hooker Valley. Next in order of grandeur is Mt. Aspiring, to which the Maoris had given long ago a name equally fine, Titi-tea (pronounced Tee-tee-tay-ah), meaning “Sharp Wedge of Glittering White.”
But for beauty of outline and all the landscape qualities one could wish to see in a perfect mountain, turn to Taranaki, or, as Captain Cook unfortunately named it, Mt. Egmont.
It is a peerless peak. It is not dwarfed by other mountains, it does not lose in effect by rising from an alpine chain with a hundred other peaks. Swelling up in shapely dignity from the plains and the seafront belt
Tongariro. Np-auruhoe and Ruapehu may truly be described as beneficent volcanoes. Lone ago they were tremendously, ferociouslv at work, hurling showers of ash and numice far over the land and disgorging rivers of glowing lava. The exnlosive forces of steam wrought enormous changes in their contour from age to age; Tongariro and Ruapehu literally blew their heads off as they built themselves up. Now, in their old age, they content themselves, with simmering away, steaming gently, smoking a leisurely volcanic pipe, with at rare intervals an exhibition of fireworks from Ngauruhoe’s crater. Hot rocks and incandescent masses of ash, the periodical ebullition of an overcharged heart. This little fit of temper over, Ngauruhoe settles down for another few years, peacefully smoking away. And it is essen-
MITRE PEAK
1840 _
1940
New Zealand s First Century
tially a harmless volcano. None of the ejecta hurled with such rumblings and roarings from the crater depths ever falls beyond the base of the mountain. Ngauruhoe goes on building up its cone, gradually increasing its lower bulk from its hot heart, a perfect illustration of the manner in which a volcanic peak is made. The Red Crater and its sister craters on Tongariro are the most wonderful spots in the National Park region. Most of them are dead, but the still steaming orifices are always places to watch for reminders of the fact that in the words of the sailors’ chantey, “There’s fire down below.”
* Great Rivers
A STRONG river, like a solitary mountain, has a kind of personality of its own, a character of force and strength that compels the admiration of modern man as it drew forth the worship of the ancients. The Waikato, of all our New Zealand inland waterways, is the stream whose story is most intimately intertwined with the history of the country. The Whanganui—to give it its rightful spelling—has a greater continuous navigable length than the Waikato for small steamers and motor craft and canoes, but the many rapids and its comparative shallowness place it second to the Waikato. Each river has its own quality of beauty, combined with utility. The Whanganui is pre-eminently a river of the forest and of fern-draped cliffs, though the Mokau is for some thirty miles overhung by grander timber trees. The Waikato does not possess this wild woodland glory; it cannot be called a bush river. It is a highway of the plains, at once a builder-up and a carver-out at successive stages of its history from its birth in volcano land. Its beauty is of as various types as its story is dramatically chequered with tragedy, poetry and romance.
* The Maori Forests
IN former days the Maori, barefooted and little cumbered with clothing, needed only a narrow pad-track for road on land and a dug-out canoe for water transport. The forest that covered the greater part of the North Island was no obstacle to him as it was to the European traveller and settler. It was his friend and shelter and one of his main sources of food supply. His life was interwoven with the life of the bush from which he drew so much of his subsistence. In the heart of the forest he needed only a few small clearings; he did not burn away the woods for great distances over plains and hills. To the early white settler the bush was an encumbrance and often a terror; he saw no beauty in it and appraised its value only in terms of timber, which gave him cursed hard work in the sawpit; it harboured, in war time, foes incredibly swift of movement and skilled in sudden raid and ambuscade. Presently, however, the settler-bushman became so familiar with the bush that he was able to meet the brown warrior on equal terms in forest fighting.
* Akaroa
Those early-day colonists who were able to appreciate the great beauty of the forest and the landscape features of the country were profoundly impressed by the peculiar character of the New Zealand bush, its solemn stillness, its twilight depth of shade, its cool damp fragrance, its riotous growth of tree and vine and epiphyte; its soft mossy floor, the glory of tropic-like ferns and shrubs that formed its close undergrowth. Huge trees rose like masts uplifting thick canopies of leaves; their branches were laden with pendulous abundance of ferns and parasitic vegetation; nikau palms raised curved ceilings of exquisite grace. The fronds of great fern trees gently waved, drooping in valley or on hillside.
In the often wasteful course of settlement the forests have been felled and milled or burned away, and were it not for the foresight of the later generation of colonists these rich indigenous woodlands would soon be altogether a thing of the past. Most New Zealanders have now come to regard the native forest as a precious possession which should be conserved as a heritage of ever-increasing use as well as beauty, and so forest reserves are numerous but not numerous enough. Protective and water-supply forests are most necessary for the future of the country and towns.
In the South Island the forested parts, chiefly on the western coast and in the great mountainous south-western segment of the island, have suffered less from man’s axe and saw. But the elemental features of the primeval landscape in New Zealand, the alpine peaks, the lakes, the wonderful steaming mountains, the granite cliffs that wall the southern fiords, are not affected at all by the advance of settlement, except in so far that access has been made more easy during the last few years.
IN the South Island we have a sanctuary of history of a different kind, the pleasantest rural region in South New Zealand, and that is Banks Peninsula. Its contour and its romantic-seeming valleys and hills and the lava crags, tors and pinnacles that protrude from the grassy range tops like the earth god’s pointed fingers, all blend with the local legends. Many people remember Akaroa as the little town where the honey-tongued tui sings in the gumtrees and the fruit groves. It is a bower of trees and flowers, and the most storied of towns. The place-names have their associations of French and English who were first rivals and then friends in the earlv years of settlement. Names of old-time Balguerie and Berard, Mont Bossu, Petit Carenage Bay, Duvauchelles, and such English landscape names as Brazenose, fit description of that tomahawk-face of a mountain. And for the Maori ones, Onawe, a poem in itself, a name of tragedy; Te U-Kura, Red Cloud’s Rest, towering on hilltop; and Tarawera, name of omen and significant of volcanic origin, like its more famous Northern namesake, and more appropriate than the pakeha surveyor’s name for the dark crag, Mt. Sinclair.
* Southern Caledonia
SCOTTISH, substantial, solid and prosperous and withal generous and hospitable, is Dunedin. A city of modern buildings, of evident wealth, strong, dependable, not given to extravagant decoration. But nature has done much to adorn this southernmost of our seaport cities. Native forest comes close down and takes the citizens’ gardens in its arms. One approaches it by rail along a coast that from Oamaru southward has reminded travellers of the Riviera, an in-and-out shoreline where the grassy fields wander down to the sea, where the surf creams in on the yellow and grey and white sands of a hundred curving bays. Here is the gateway to the grand landscapes of the Otago-Southland Lakes country, and beyond that the mysterious, magnificently shaggy forest wilds, of alps, canyons, glacier, waterfall, the Fiordland National Park.
1840 -
1940
New Zealand’s Firsf Century
* The Great Southern Lakes
WAKATIPU, that great serpentine of deepest blue, is the supreme type of our lake scenery. When one sails along the South Arm of Lake Wakatipu from the rail-head at Kingston and gazes up at the tors and spikes and sword-blades of the strangely weathered mountains it seems more like some sea-fiord than a far inland lake. Everything is built on such a scale that it looks part of a wild sea coast. The water in the sound, where a lead-line would go down a thousand feet, is of an uncanny stillness.
The afternoon sun sets the ancient crag-tops glowing like incandescent rocks; down in the watery canyon, not more than a mile wide in places, it is as if one were in a deep river gorge into which the direct sunshine fell only at midday. It is very grand mountain architecture, and the play of colour on the summits is a picture of glory; but it is a relief to pass out from the narrows and see a wider vista of the lake, with the middle arm spreading away to the elbow on the west and north. Then there is the Alpine town across the elbow—the white houses and soft-green plantations of Queenstown, as pretty a little town as one can find in the length of New Zealand—all the prettier for its contrast with the mountain landscapes that hem it in.
Fantastic as well as grim is the face of some of these mighty mountain walls. Never can one forget the sunset glow on the Cecil Peaks, the Bayonet Peaks, Mt. Walter. But the picture to remember above all others is that of those shark’s-teeth peaks that serrate the front of the Remarkables. Carved sharply against the sky this quite monstrous sierra rises from one dizzy pinnacle to another until it culminates in the Double Cone, twin crags of sawedged rock very nearly 7,900 feet high—6,9oo feet above the lake.
From such heights one can look around at the dark sea of mountain tops, incredibly broken, shattered as if by ages of earthquake play, that stretches away for leagues upon leagues to north and east. We see the lake as a mountain kea parrot might see it in his flight, or as an aviator from his ’plane. It suggests at once some enormous snake of blue lying lazily watchful, coiling its slow length among the mountains. It appears from a high look-out place a lighter blue than it was five thousand feet below. It lay one dawntime as quiet as could be; the morning breezes had not set in, and we saw the currents and flaws that slightly darkened its surface like little rivers of blue oil. That was the fancy that the general contour of Wakatipu suggested, a water-reptile, perhaps, half uncoiled, in its bed amid the bare and aged mountains.
Wakatipu is the collecting tank for many snow-fed rivers, some of which, again, have their sources in beautiful alpine tarns. Its outlet is a famous gold-bearing river, the Kawarau.
“Come and lift your fortune now, Dam the roaring Kawarau.”
More than sixty years ago this region was the scene of frenzied diggers’ activity, and now of the most modern scientific efforts for the salving of hidden gold.
• Forests of Fiordland
ON the famous overland journey to Milford Sound, the climax of New Zealand’s landscape glories, the Government has provided places of stay and guides, made tracks, bridged rivers, made the overland trek a way of pleasure. For miles the track is through a moss-floored forest, where flowering lacebark trees shower blossoms like orange flowers on glassy river and calm lakelet. One gazes up in wonder at the triple leap of the Sutherland Falls, a cataract descending nearly two thousand feet from the cloud-belted heights. An amazing land; its rock architecture, its ice-carved cliffs and pinnacles, its profound ravines, its league after league of lawless mountains all daze the eye, confuse all sense of proportions. In contrast to the fierce aspect of those impregnable high places, the valley-bottoms are filled with fairy-like woods. Goblin places of hanging mossbeards are there; branches and trailing vines interlace overhead and all around; and everywhere the ferns, all kinds of ferns, from the tender dewy things that mat the ground and broider the tree-trunks, to the lofty and slender ferntree with its lacy waterfall of frondage.
That is the overland walk; there is a great motor road nearing completion, but it must penetrate a granite mountain yet; this heavy work is well under way.
# A Gateway of the Gods
THERE is a scene quite as amazing as the mile-high vertical precipices of Milford, and that is the look-out from the summit of McKinnon’s Pass, over which the track through Fiordland goes from Lake Te Anau to the sea. That alpine saddle, dipping down between two enormous monolith-like crags—Balloon Peak on one side and Mount Hart on the other—is about the same height as Arthur’s Pass, far away to the north, but has an infinitely grander setting. On the inland side there is the Clinton Valley, that ice-carved canyon which terminates in a halfcircle of bare rock two thousand feet high or more almost vertical, streaming with cascades from the alpine snows still higher. If you have come from the inland Lakes side you have climbed that precipice by a corkscrew track. Then, from the other side of the Pass top, less than half a mile across, you look straight down on the tropic-green forests and the flashing streams, and wonder how you are going to get down there, into the valley of the Arthur River that goes out towards the sea fiord. Peak after peak of rock and snow and ice shoot up around, in crags, pyramids, cones, jagged spires, and, directly ahead, across the valley, a glacier flashes white fire, bedded in the lap of a black mountain. Its crevasses gleam pale blue, its edge sags over a cliff and every now and then discharges avalanches into the chasm where the little mists are flirting with the riverheads and the treetops. That glacier, the Jervois, almost overhangs the head of the trail by which you go down into the depths of the damp and mossy forest. The colour of the place, the richness of vegetation, the contrasts of savagery and loveliness in landscape, are something beyond imagination until vou set eyes on this wild, dripping, fantastically-painted ’ corner of New Zealand.
The men who first set foot in this gateway of the gods are kept in memory by a rough-hewn cairn on the Pass top. Quintin McKinnon was a fearless and adventurous fellow of the same type as that other doughty Highlander, Donald Sutherland, who explored so much of Fiordland. Like Sutherland, he did much of his work lone-handed. For months he roved about the great lakes particularly Te Anau—he was drowned there at last -
1 939
quite alone. Most men would go crazy in such a land if condemned to live a solitary life there, amidst its rains and fogs and storms and its hordes of mosquitoes and sandflies, which divide the twenty-four hours into two watches and attend incessantly to duty. But McKinnon found his greatest joy in that kind of life. The story of his discovery of the Pass is a little epic of courageous endeavour. For years he had the idea that a practicable pass could be found to Milford Sound, and at last, in 1888, he struggled up that mountain side under Balloon —he was probably the first man to set eyes on that peak —and clambered down the precipice into the seawardtrending gulch. It was the sight of some black swans—which had been introduced to the lakes from Australia—flying over the dip in the alps that gave a survey party from Dunedin then engaged in the Arthur Valley the idea that a pass for human beings might also exist there. A few days later McKinnon and his mate Mitchell, surprised the surveyors and his friend Sutherland by appearing unexpectedly in the valley. They had come over the lofty gap, in the wake of the wild fowl.
* The Granite Walls of Milford
MUCH as has been written about Milford Sound, the crowning feature of our Fiordland, and much as it has been photographed, it will never receive its full measure of justice until some artist of genius captures on canvas its strange and overpowering beauty. It is a place that can never be exaggerated by the painter. There are cliffs there, ice-shaved walls, that go straight up for three-quarters of a mile, and that in a place where the sea-canyon is barely a third of a mile wide and the dark water more than a thousand feet deep. The greatest ocean liners are dwarfed by those heights which they closely skirt as they cruise up to the Sound head and turn in the deep water dock of nature’s making. That amazing pinnacle Mitre Peak is a mile high. The overwhelming straightness of those granite wails and their grimness, and withal a rich glowing colour, are qualities that elude the best camera. The artist’s pencil and brush are needed to convey in full the impression that the Sound scenery makes on the mind of the beholder, a barbaric beauty deepened under certain atmospheric conditions. Van der Velden, had he ever seen Milford, would have been able to capture the spirit of the place, when the impending gloom of coming storms gives the place a terrible glory, or when the mists are lifting after heavy rain and when the grey and green precipices are silverlaced everywhere with cascades and rainbow-lit veils of spray.
• The Anchor of Maui's Canoe
MOVING Southward, one finds Stewart Island, a peculiarly enthralling corner of the Dominion, in dovetailed landscape and seascape as well as in history and legend. Those coast-names of Rakiura are little gems of history in themselves. Good old-sailor names, ship names, whaler and sealer names, hard-weather names, and names that suggest rest and
New Zealand’s First Century
The Old Pioneer Reviews the Dominion's Colourful Past.
1940
relief, calm retreats, port after stormy seas. From a learned Maori of the last generation I heard the classic name for Stewart Island, a name indicating the keen geographical sense of the Maori, Te Punga o te Waka a Maui, which means “The Anchor of Maui’s Canoe.” This is exclusively a concept of the ancient tribes of the South Island. How well those old sages understood the geography and topography of the country! They had no maps or charts, no compass to give them their bearings, but they had a good working mental survey of the lie of the land.
* Our Pacific Islands Empire
NEW Zealand’s star-studded blue ensign floats over a score of islands of ail shapes, formations and sizes in the tropic zone of the South Pacific. Our little ocean empire which has been extended in recent years, stretches from the Antarctic regions to within eight degrees of the Equator. We are entitled by Royal proclamation to fly our flag over a sector of the great Antarctic Continent and on the lone isle of desolation in the Ross Sea where the southernmost of all volcanoes Mt. Erebus, sometimes thaws out its snowv crown with the heat from its glowing heart. Islands of all imaginable forms and all manner of climes, from the misty ironbound Aucklands and Campbell and Antipodes, haunt of sea-elephants and penguins and breeding-place of the royal albatross, and the Chatham Islands, home of a pakehaMaori population of fishermen and sheepfarmers; up to the semi-tro-nic Kermadecs; northward still to Niue, largest of our raised coral islands; the high lands of Samoa (held under the Mandate), Rarotonga and its sisters with their bold volcanic crags and their mountain streams. Then Lineward to the lagoon islands called atolls, round-curled shavings of rock and sand clothed with palms, like gardens on the illimitable expanse of blue, where ocean eternally assaults the reefs that rise like walls from the great deeps.
Very small these islands look on the map of the Pacific. The ring-islands are pin-points on the lonely seas. But they and their peoples are of a political and economic and ethnological value far exceeding their apparent importance on the map. Here experiments in the government of native Polynesian communities have been carried through. In the two largest islands of Samoa, Upolu and Savaii, under the Mandate, the balance between the primitive old order and the new spirit of progress is still in the wavering stage.
Many of these islands have strange and dramatic histories, especially Upolu and the lesser islands, the reef islands—Suwarrow of a hundred adventure stories—a real treasure island; Manihiki, Rakahanga and Penrhyn of the pearl lagoons; Aitutaki, with its hardy and daring sailormen; Pukapuka, or Danger Islands; Palmerston Island, with its half-caste clan founded by a many-wived roving English trader; the Tokelau or Union group of atolls, once almost depopulated by Peruvian slave-ships. There is no need, I have often thought when reading novels purporting to portray South Sea life, to go to the trouble of inventing tales of romance. The real thing outdoes fiction in the Pacific.
(Sr rata
Owing to the outbreak of war occurring during
the printing of this publication, it has been found
necessary to modify and in some cases to cancel
some of the fixtures mentioned in the foreword.
NEW ZEALAND GOVERNMENT TOURIST DEPARTMENT’S FREE TRAVEL SERVICE.
ONE of the principal duties of the officers of the New Zealand Government Tourist Department is to afford all possible assistance to travellers. With a thorough knowledge of conditions, the Service will, free of all charge, plan itineraries suitable to the needs and desires of the individual or party, make reservations for trains, steamers, motors, air travel, and hotel accommodation.
Officers of the Department meet in the stream all incoming passenger vessels. Advice and information will be freely given on application. The Department's officers, honorary representatives, and agencies overseas, as listed below, are available to support the work of the organization in the Dominion.
OFFICES IN NEW ZEALAND.
The Department has Information and Booking Bureaux in all the main towns in New Zealand. HEAD OFFICE: D.I.C. Building. Wellington, New Zealand.
OFFICES AND HONORARY AGENCIES OVERSEAS.
GREAT BRITAIN AND EUROPE—
CEYLON—
V/ I, 1 liUil Mr. A. R. Hughes, Hong Kong Bank Buildings (P.O. Box 328), COLOMBO.
The High Commissioner for New Zealand, 415 The Strand, London, W.C. 2.
CHINA—
New Zealand Trade and Tourist Commissioner, Cantersteen, 47, BRUSSELS.
Mr. C. G. Davis, 131 Devonport Road, TIENTSIN, NORTH CHINA. Mr. S. Hutchison, 384 North Soochow Road, SHANGHAI. Mr. S. T. Williamson, P. & O. Buildings, HONG KONG.
CANADA AND UNITED STATES—
N.Z. Trade and Tourist Commissioner, Canada, Permanent Building, 320 Bay Street, TORONTO 2.
Mr. E. E. Acland (P.O. Box 16), VANCOUVER. New Zealand Trade and Tourist Commissioner, Hollingsworth Buildings, 606 South Hill Street, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.
SINGAPORE
American Express Company,
FlJl—Messrs Brown and Joske, Ltd., SUVA.
AUSTRALIA—
SOUTH AFRICA—
New Zealand Tourist and Trade Commissioner, 14 Martin Place (opposite G.P.0.), SYDNEY.
m l i ii iwv n Mr. H. Middlebrook, 3 Natal Bank Buildings (Box 1822), DURBAN.
New Zealand Government Offices, Collins House, 360 Collins Street, MELBOURNE.
Mr. H. J. Constable (P.O. Box 1909), JOHANNESBURG Parry, Leon, and Hayhoe, Ltd., JOHANNESBURG, and at all principal centres in South and Portuguese East Africa.
Dewar and Jones, King’s House, Queen Street, BRISBANE.
South Australia Intelligence and Tourist Bureau, ADELAIDE.
INDIA—
New Zealand Insurance Co., CALCUTTA, RANGOON, BOMBAY.
West Australia Government Tourist Bureau, PERTH.
TRAVEL FIRM AGENCIES AND BOOKING OFFICES.
EUROPE AND ASIA—
AMERICA— A : /■ /All
Messrs. Thos. Cook and Son. (All offices.) Pickford’s Tourist Service, 206 High Holborn, LONDON. Messrs. Hickie, Borman, Grant, and Company, 25 Cockspur Street, LONDON, S.W. 1.
American Express Company. (All offices.) Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand.
(All offices.) Canadian Pacific Railways. (All offices.) Canadian National Railways. (All offices.) Messrs. Thos. Cook and Son Wagons-Lits Ltd.
Messrs. T. Hamer and Company, Ltd., Walter House, 418-422 The Strand, LONDON, Netherland-India Tourist Office, BATAVIA C. and SOURABAYA.
(All offices.) Messrs. Raymond and Whitcomb. (All offices.) Matson Line (Oceanic Steamship Company). (All offices.)
Permanent link to this item
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Bibliographic details
APA: Cowan, James. (1939). New Zealand's first century : the Dominion's scene and story : the pageant of nation-making. T.P.R. Printing Co.
Chicago: Cowan, James. New Zealand's first century : the Dominion's scene and story : the pageant of nation-making. Wellington, N.Z.: T.P.R. Printing Co., 1939.
MLA: Cowan, James. New Zealand's first century : the Dominion's scene and story : the pageant of nation-making. T.P.R. Printing Co., 1939.
Word Count
21,352
New Zealand's first century : the Dominion's scene and story : the pageant of nation-making Cowan, James, T.P.R. Printing Co., Wellington, N.Z., 1939
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