Old letters give first thoughts on new country

Press, 11 October 1986, Page 19

Old letters give first thoughts on new country

By

STAN DARLING

When Max Nicol and his wife sold everything they owned and moved from New Zealand to Britain with their four-year-old son in 1928, one of the places they visited was the old Orphan’s Hospital in Edinburgh.

Mr Nicol, who lives in Sumner and is now 90, had grown up in Dunedin. He had been brought up by two maiden aunts after his mother died when he was less than a year old. At the Edinburgh hospital was a head gardener’s cottage where his grandparents had lived before they emigrated to New Zealand in 1856.

, Although Mr Nicol and his family returned to New Zealand two years later, he had at least temporarily reversed the journey taken by his forebears. Today, a long letter from his grandmother, Margaret Cairns Nicol, to a family in Scotland, reminds us about how some settlers lived during their early days in this country. A diary kept by another passenger aboard their emigration ship, the Strathmore, shows that conditions on board were less than suitable — for which the captain was fined when he reached Port Chalmers.

The drinking water had been stored improperly, for one thing, and had been polluted from early in the three-month voyage. Passengers suffered] most during their trip across the South Pacific. When the ship reached New Zealand waters after rounding Cape Horn, it was well south of Stewart Island, and had to sail up the coast to Otago. Mrs Nicol, however, glossed over the bad things. She wrote that she had been a bad sailor who could not keep her feet in bad weather, and who was seldom without a headache, but says she “never had an hour’s sickness the whole voyage.” The diarist criticised rationing of provisions on the voyage, but Mrs Nicol seems to have kept herself fed well enough, even if the fare was monotonous. “I took my food very well,” she wrote. “Indeed, David ; (her husband) was afraid I would hurt myself with the cogs of brose I supped.” (Brose is made by pouring boiling water or milk on oatmeal, which was plentiful, which has been seasoned with salt and butter.) Mrs Nicol reported that her family "never knew what want was, and many of the sick passengers shared out of our bounty.” Since the Nicols and others lost the urge to drink tea on board the ship, they had plenty saved by the time they reached New Zealand. Its smell had put them off, and Mrs Nicol won-

dered whether she would ever like it again. The water on board made it bad, she; later found. After getting used to land life again, she was back to having tea four times a day. “This is the country for tea” she wrote. “Indeed, it is the country for living well; pies are no scarcity in the poorest man’s house, and gooseberry tarts are the whole go.” It was the place for any working man, she wrote: “For myself, I think it is a funny place — nothing but hill after hill to be seen; but it is the place for the working man. “If labouring men and ploughmen knew the way they are treated here, they would not stop another day in Scotland. What do you think of ploughmen getting from £5O to £6O, with rations, a year? They do not begin work till 8 a.m., and stop at 5 — a fell difference from Home.” Margaret is delighted by the standards of dress (“The people dress very gay here”), but she notes that men with hats are hardly ever seen. They all wear caps. Mr Livingstone, the rector, lives in the only stone house in the neighbourhood.