INTERPRETER AND FRIEND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 214, 10 September 1931, Page 6

INTERPRETER AND FRIEND.

Elsdon Best's career had two sides—the picturesque and the scientific. His adventures in New Zealand and America would make a book by themselves, though it is recorded of him that he found in the Wild West the best defence against gunmen was not to carry a gun. But no story of the roving and adventurous life of this man who loved the country so much better than the town would be half so valuable as the monumental records he left of Maori history and lore. They are relatively little read, these scholarly compilations, the fruit of years of patient study, but they are priceless as a record of a past that is part of our national heritage, a past that, if not captured now, will be lost for ever. Elsdon Best lived among primitive Maoris, and soon made them regard him as a friend rather than an official. He got to know their language, history and traditions better than they did themselves, and.fortunately he took voluminous notes and afterwards was able to put the results of his observations into books. This gives an idea of what he did in the Urewera when it was still a hidden land; from one old couple he gathered one winter over four hundred songs. "You are making me remember things that your fellow pakeha have been forty years trying to make me forget," said a blind old Maori of the Wanganui, as Best drew stories of the old days from him. New Zealand should remember this great ethnologist gratefully and .profit by his example,