A COLONIAL CAXTON.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21112, 20 February 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

A COLONIAL CAXTON.

BEGINNING OF OUR PRESS.

I!Y MATANGA.

By coincidence, the press conference has spent here some February days that close on a century ago were fateful in the history of printing in New Zealand. On February 17, 1835, the first proof was " pulled" from a press in this country, and by the 21st of the month our first printer saw twenty-five copies of our first book stitched and trimmed ready for use. In his eyes, those were great days, ancl he had reason to be proud of his pioneering. The place was Faihia, in the Bay of Islands, a little missionary centre that was headquarters of the Church Missionary Society in this farthest outpost of its enterprise —the first seat of organised culture at the Antipodes; the booklet, a beginning of things in print that wero soon to multiply in useful variety, contained the Epistles to the Ephesians and the Philippians rendered into Maori; and the proud printer was William Colenso, afterwards famous for his service to science as well as religion, and a man of much intellectual and practical resource. When the first hundred years of our island story have centennial telling, an honourable place will be his due. No mistake had been made in persuading him to leave England for this important bit of pioneering work. A man of less ability and courage would have failed utterly. His difficulties were tremendous, some of them quite unforeseep and others the product of mischance. How he won through is a tale with more than a touch of romance. His troubles began on the day of arrival, after much delay en route —a January day of that early year. There he was at last, looking from the deck ot the vessel that had brought with him his precious implements—or some of them, as he was soon to discover vexingly. To get them ashore was not easy. Writing about it all, he tells the story in order. " On January 3, 1835," he says, "we got the press and heavy boxes of type landed. It was a very difficult matter to land the printing press safely." It was a large Stanhope with a very bulky and heavy staple—even some printers of the present day will know what that is, and the uninitiated may identify it as the main, upright part of the iron contraption. There was no wharf, no good landing-place; only a shelving sandy beach open to the easterly wind. No boat of the mission station was big enough or strong enough to bear the burden, and Colenso says the Maori canoes were too small and cranky. There was nothing for it but to lash two canoes together and build a little platform across them. So, working very early in the morning, before the sea-breeze sprang up, the ticklish job was accomplished. Missing Links. So far, well. Next was the landing of the boxes of type, simpler, but as risky. They, too, were heavy, for typemetal is mainly lead. To open thein on board and thus " divide to conquer" was the first thought. But the ship was such a novelty in many Maori eyes that her deck was crowded with men " all very wild and rough and some of them not very friendly." To open these packages before their eyes would have been to court trouble; type-metal would make such splendid musket-balls, and just then these brown-skinned fellows were much more interested in these things than in books. So the boxes had to be landed as they were. *' It was a matter of very great relief to us when all our precious stores were safely on shore and without loss." His rejoicing, alas, was brief. The unpacking proceeded, only to discover at last that many essentials were missing. Someone had blundered, either in England or at Sydney. Printers will realise Colenso's plight as they note these lacks: no quoins or wooden furniture (metal devices of the kind not having then come into use), no galleys, no cases, no leads of any size, no brass rules, no composing sticks, no inking table, no potash, no lye brushes, no mallet and shooter, no roller irons or stock, no page cord, and—worse than all —no imposing stone and not a scrap of printing paper. It was " Hamlet" without essential stage-properties, with little more than ghost and scenery. Undaunted. None of the missing articles could come from England in less than eighteen months, nor from Sydney in less than six or eight, even should they be still in some agent's warehouse there. But, nothing daunted—heartened, indeed, by the sight of a massive cast-iron roller-mould among the things landed on the beach, and by recollection of his own composing stick in his luggage—Colenso went ahead. A handy joiner in the Bay made a few wooden galleys and a wooden inking-table, also some type-cases on a plan devised to suit the, special needs of Maori, with its strong demand for some letters and no need for others. But the quoins and furniture long remained a source of vexation for lack of suitable and seasoned wood. How to get a " stone " for imposing ? He won a classic triumph. A big basaltic boulder was taken from the river on the way to Kerikeri, and there a catechist, who had been a stone-mason in England, managed to cut it satisfactorily into halves, defects in the sawn surface being filled with cement. " Perhaps," writes the printer, " this is the only instance of a pair of imposing-stones made out of a boulder of basalt." Hp might have enlarged ecstatically on that. It was one of many makeshifts, to be employed for a long time. He contrived a large inking " hall." He laboriously pasted paper strips together fcr spacing between lines, as there wasn't a shred of cardboard to be got. Writing-paper from the missionaries' pri•vate supplies was requisitioned for the printing, and their ladies produced some pink blotting-paper from their desks to give a look of distinction to the stronger paper on which it was pasted to make covers. His First Staff. Help was got from various sources in the heavier less technical work. Sailors from American whalers did some of this. Three tattooed chiefs from Kawakawa way learned, to their delight, some of the mysteries of typography and were of valued assistance, but the young fry were disposed to be a nuisance. Still, the task for which Colonso had come was well begun, in spite of dogging difficulties. These were not all over when, years, later, much English work was tackled, especially when he had to print the Treaty of Waitangi and other things for an imperious Government that wanted much and paid nothing. Then the extra " sorts" (ot letters) had to be put in little piles on a table and on the floor; and it would have been a marvellous sight for his brother-printers in the Old Land to see Colenso going round the makeshift room in eager dashes this way and that for the next addition to the growing line under his thumb in that priceless stick, bought years before in London. But we get moro like London every day now, and those emergencies seem far away. Not so far, though, as the press conference may have remembered even in its sessions of highly modern business, for the first hundred _ years after our colonial Caxton's beginning have not been licked off yet.