THE CANTERBURY SETTLEMENT DURING ITS FIRST TWO YEARS

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28618, 21 June 1958, Page 3

THE CANTERBURY SETTLEMENT DURING ITS FIRST TWO YEARS

[Reviewed by

R.C.L.]

J The Torlesse Papers: The Jonr- . nals and Letters of Charles • Obins Torlesse concerning the • Foundation of the Canterbury , Settlement in New Zealand. » 1848-51. Edited by Peter • Bromley Mating. Pegasus ’ Press. 238 pp. • The publication last year of the ’first volume of “A History of Can•terbury” will have done much to ’stimulate fresh interest in the ’early beginnings of the Canter< .bury settlement. In that volume •mention was made of the prepara‘tory surveying operations carried .out prior to the arrival of the .“First Four Ships.” For a day -to »day account of what such work ‘involved, and of the kind of life ■the surveyors led roughing it on •the plains, one could not do better than peruse the Torlesse ‘papers. Dr. Maling, whose editing .of them is a model piece of workmanship, has divided them into a ‘number of sections. Moreover, he ’.has prefaced each section with an .explanatory paragraph informing •the reader of what has transpired, >P to that point, in the direction .of the Canterbury Association’s •affairs in England. In this way •the reader is kept abreast of the .larger pattern of events of which .the surveying operations formed •but a contributory part. ’ It was not until September, 1849 .that the surveying of the Canterbury plains really got under way, •and the district assigned to Torlesse lay between the Ashley and .Waimakariri rivers. Prior to this •he had been sent by Captain Thomas —the Canterbury Association’s agent at Lyttelton—to make an exploring trip in South Canterbury in search of coal. It had been a long and arduous journey occupying 49 days. Just what it entailed in the way of hazard and high adventure it must be left for these journals to relate. Suffice it to say that with the help of his Maori guide, Torlesse eventually came upon coal ‘‘cropping out ~ of the river bank” at a place not easily identifiable in his journal, but described in a footnote thereto as being “well up the Tangawai river above Albury.” It is this kind of elucidatory footnote that assists the reader materially in finding his way about in these papers and in identifying the place-names referred to therein. As for people mentioned in the text, Dr. Maling has supplied helpful biographical details concerning a number of them; and his scholarly annotation thus, clothes with meaning much that would otherwise be lacking in significance to the reader. For example, in Torlesse’s journal entry of 22nd January, 1849, there is a bald reference to one, “Newcome just arrived in the Ajax from England.” The reader, at a loss to know just who this new arrival was, is supplied with the following brief, illuminating footnote: “Newcome was one of the Association’s members who saw Thomas’s party off at Gravesend. He was a Welshman, the son of an archdeacon, and had been in the army before coming out to New Zealand. He settled in the Awatere Valley, Marlborough.” 1 U The descripition of the Canterbury Plains, contained in these journals, will be of. considerable interest to the geographer who might wish to reconstruct the pattern Of the landscape of the 1850’s. For, far from being the description of a casual observer, it is that of a man who came to know these plains as intimately as Thoreau his Walden. It takes account, naturally, of the wildlife in which they abounded — wildlife about which one of the first Canterbury colonists wrote in a letter of May 3, 1851: “The

•wamps with innumerable wildfowl, especially ducks, and some with herds of wild pigs.” From their survey camp in the Kaiapoi district, often did Torlesse and his working party sally forth on a pig hunt. And the tally with which each such expedition was rewarded received faithful entry in his journal. At one time he counted as many as 70 pigs in. a herd on the north'bank of the. Eyre river. And as for ducks and quail, these journals are never done telling of the number that fell to the surveyor’s guns. Any bird, whether •wood-pigeon, white crane, or Oyster catcher, was considered fair game when meat was scarce. Wild dogs also scoured the plains making, from time to time, furtive raids upon the surveyor’s larder. •They were shot on sight. 'And when, on one occasion, Torlesse and his companions gave chase to a marauding dog, the excitement of the hunt resembled— Me writes—that of an English fox hunt. Torlesse was most conscientious .when it came to letter writing. Never a ship came in bringing mail from England, but he set himself industriously to compile nn answer to each letter he received. So indefatigable was he—.'writing sometimes far into the bight—that his camp mates chided him for it. There is about his letters a warmth and expansiveness that one misses in the more brief, business-like entries in his .journals. And it is in one of his more expansive moods that we «hd him writing from Lyttelton J° his mother, in August. 1849: ‘Mrs Cridland I hope will be down here shortly, so that I shall occasionally be fortunate enough •to s. 66 a lady: otherwise I am I shall lapse into inevitable barbarism.” That he was fond of

reading is evident from the books referred to in his journals from time to time-—“Dombey and Son” and “The Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold,” to mention but two of them. And for a young man of 25, was he not just a trifle absent-minded? The fact that he should lose a telescope, a compass, and his belt, in quick succession, might be allowed to pass without comment. But when he follows this up with the confession that he arrived at his- survey camp, only to discover that he had “left the tea behind,” we begin to suspect him of woolgathering. One judges him to have been a man of strong physique. How otherwise could he have roughed it as he did? Out in all weathers, one day—“in a cold easterly wind”—crossing creeks up to his neck in water, and the next day “struggling up to the middle in quick mud,” clearly one had to be tough for the surveyor’s life. Many a time was Torlesse thrown by his horse. But he seems always to have landed on his feet. Even had he suffered sferious injury from a fall, a doctor would not always have been

journals that we read of Dr. William Donald walking from Lyttelton to the surveyors’ camp in the Kaiapoi district—a distance of some 20 miles—in order to attend to a man who was seriously ill The surveyors would have thought nothing of walking such a distance on any working day. Horses were not easy to come by. and the price asked for one in Lyttelton in October, 1849, was £2B—a sum that was considered too high by Torlesse. If he would

not bargain at that price, we may be sure that his workmen would be even less inclined to do so. As it was, the horses they used about their camp often had -an annoying way of being nowhere in sight when the surveyors came to fetch them in the morning. With unfenced plains to range far and wide upon, it mean that hours—and, sometimes, days—would elapse before the refractory wanderers were received and brought in. For a period of seven commencing September 2, 1850, the scene shifts from the surveyors’ camp as the journals take note of a holiday which Torlesse spent in Dunedin, whence he travelled further south as far as the Tokomairiro district. He went south, in the. first place, at the invitation of his cousin, E. J. Wakefield, who had suggested that together they should walk from Dunedin to Christchurch. This plan, however, was abandoned. The Otago interlude over-, events rapidly moved forward to the memorable 16th of December that witnessed the arrival of the Charlotte Jane and the Randolph within a few hours of one another. Aboard the former was Edward Ward, Torlesse’s old school fellow. From this point onwards the journals of Torlesse and Ward have so much in common that they should be read as complementary volumes. And it is pleasing to be able to note that simultaneously with its publishing of the Torlesse Papers the Pegasus Press is bringing out a new edition of The Journal of Edward Ward.

In conclusion, one must remark upon the care which Dr. Maling has shown in his selection of illustrations to accompany the : book under review. Particularly appropriate is the inclusion of a sketch by Sir William Fox of the Deans brothers’ Farm at Riccarton—made in 1848. Torlesse was often a visitor there. The maps provided in this book are one of its distinguishing features. That on the front endpaper is a “Sketch of the Country intended for the settlement of Canterbury” signed by “J. Thomas, Principal Surveyor, Canterbury Association,” while that on the back ehdp?per shows the trigonometrical stations established by Torlesse and Boys in *1849-50 in the Oxford, Ashley and Mandeville Districts.

A printers’ error that should be noted occurs on page 197, line 5. where in place of the z words “he continues’’ there should be substituted the words “barring his.’* The publishing of the Torlesse Papers is, indeed, a notable event. And what constitutes it so is the fact that their author, to quote Dr. Maling, “has left us what is undoubtedly the most comprehensive record of the Canterbury Settlement during its first two years.”