A Study Of Exploration In New Zealand

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29010, 26 September 1959, Page 3

A Study Of Exploration In New Zealand

The Exploration of New Zealand. By W. G. McClymont. Oxford University Press. 125 pp.

The literature dealing with New Zealand exploration is a growing one. Nevertheless, one has only to glance at Mr McClymont’s “Notes on the Sources” at the end of this book in order to be reminded that a considerable part of this literature has long been out of print. Such indeed is the case with the first edition of this book, which was published in 1940 by the Department of Internal Affairs, as a New Zealand centennial survey. That it has now been published in a new edition by the Oxford University Press is indication in itself of the book’s undoubted and enduring merit. A further glance at Mr McClymont’s “Notes on the Sources” reveals that he has grouped these under several headings, indicative of the different occupations of the explorers he is concerned with, thus: Missionaries, surveyors, sheep farmers, scientists, goldminers, and so on. This we may accept as a convenient, and not an arbitrary grouping. At the same time it is suggestive of the variety of incentives that have impelled men from time to time to leave the settled parts of this country and make for the hidden interior. Thus, to take the case of the missionaries, it was to extend the work of thpir missions that men like Bishop Selwyn and John Morgan went exploring. As for the sheep farmers, it was the search for grazing land that led men like Samuel Butler to explore systematically the back country of Canterbury. And then, what a tremendous fillip to exploration was provided by the discovery of gold in Otago and Westland! Gruelling and arduous, almost beyond endurance, were the journeys

undertaken by prospectors such as A. J. Barrington and Antoine Simonin in “the complicated country between the Hollyford and the Haast.” As for the surveyors and scientists, it was largely the work of government and of colonizing agencies such as the New Zealand Company and the Canterbury Association that made explorers of these men—too numerous to mention here. Suffice it to say of them that not one of any importance has escaped Mr McClymont’s notice. His survey is comprehensive and displays throughout the sure touch of a writer profoundly conversant with his subject. In some parts of the book it is impossible to discover just what sources the author has drawn upon for the facts supplied. Some annotation of the text would have remedied this deficiency, thereby increasing the usefulness of the book to readers with a special interest in the history of New Zealand exploration. Finally, in reading a book such as this, it is essential to have, alongside one, maps that will make it possible to- identify place-names referred to in the narrative. The conventional maps contained in the book itself are quite inadequate for this purpose. Indeed, nothing short of a good historical atlas will suffice to bring out the full significance of Mr McClymont’s narrative. Such an atlas, containing 88 maps of explorers’ journeys, was part and parcel of the same centennial project that included Mr McClymont’s book. Readers of this book will have good reason, then, to regret that work on the New Zealand Centennial Atlas was abandoned six years ago. This notwithstanding, they will freely concede that Mr McClymont has, in this survey, provided a splendid background study of New Zealand exploration.