MR SALA ON WELLINGTON.

New Zealand Times, Volume XLV, Issue 7641, 26 November 1885, Page 3

MR SALA ON WELLINGTON.

In the Sydney Mornin? Herald o£ the 7th inat., Mr G. A. Sala gives hia views about Wellington, and describes his experiences in this city. A large portion deals with Mr Sala’s cab travels in search o£ lodgings, his treatment in the lodgings when found, and the trials o£ stewardesses on board steamers. Much of this we have not thought it needful to reproduce ;

“’Tie a very fine thing-,” the comic ditty of the past reminded us, “ to be father-in-law to a very magnificent threo-taiied bashaw.” Analogously, did I think it a very fine thing to have made a capital passage in the XJ.S S. Manapouri down tho east coast of Now Zealand from Auckland to Welliugton, and to find myself about half past 4 one Sunday afternoon safe and sound in the noble harbor of the legislative aod executive capital of New Zealand, which said capital is situated on the shores of Port Nicholson, an inlet of Oook Strait—pray do not forget Cook Strait—about 1200 miles south-east of Sydney, and some 1400 miles north-east of Mel hour.-is, I felt quite elated at the thought of having reached Wellington. The harbor is a really magnificent sheet of water, entered between towering heads, near which a fow jagged reefs show their teeth. But the anchorage in the middle channel is deep and safe ; and the port itself is a splendid aqueous expanse, 19,000 acres in area, where the largest ships can tide at anchor in perfect safety, and come right up to the wharf to load or unload. The sea, that golden Sabbath afternoon, was glassy smooth, end deep lapislazuii blue—no Lake of Garda, no Lake of Como, was ever to me more enchant ing than the harbor of Wellington was at first sight. At first sight! How many things there have been that enchanted you at first sight ! The Golden Horn, Stambonl, and the Bosphorus ; the young lady with the dazzling complexion, the silken tresses, and the pearly teeth, to whom you were first introduced in the year One ; all were very enchanting at first sight. So was Wellington ; that lovely harbor ! The sea-gulls were peacefully flitting hither and th'ther, occasionally taking a merry bob into tho water ; all wore a smiling, tranquil, happy air. Away to the left lie Petone and tho Lower Hutt ; to the right is the verdant acclivity of Mount Victoria, dimpled with pretty white villas as the sides slope to the shore of the bay. These, and the distant amphitheatre of hills and crags, are quite beautiful onoogh tor you ; but a friend on deck, who is to the manner born, whispers to yon that he minds the time when the harbor of Wellington wore an aspect even more enchanting, and when the hills which sloped to the sea were all thick with luxuriant foliage, and feathery with multitudinonsly various fern. Yes, I thought it a very fine thing to be at Wellington, and I almost felt inclined to raise my hat in token of grateful salutation to tho compact crowd which was, as usual, drawn np on the wharf to see the Manapouri coma in. As it was at Auckland, so it was at Wellington, and so will it be, I suppose, at Lyttelton and Port Chalmers. But that Sunday afternoon the crowd on Waterloo-quay, Welling, ton, filled me with quite a pleasant interest. Such a well-dressed crowd they looked, and such nice children ! I anticipated having quite a merry time in the capital of Maoriland. I had heard nothing but good accounts of the comfort and the cuisine at the Occidental Hotel, and looked cheerfully up and down the wharf in search of an expressman who would take charge of my luggage, and a backman who would convoy myself and my belongings on shore. W»’ is me I I had been reckoning altogether without my hod. The expressman was to the fore, the hackney-carriage driver was on hand —very much and very expensively on hand, ns it afterwards proved ; but the fateful intelligence Boon reached ns that there was no room at the Occidental Hotel. The New Zealand Parliament was in its last week of session, and until the Honorable Houses were “up” there was no hope of there being room for strangers at the Occidental. Mind yon, it was Sunday—the grim, ironbonnd, inflexibly strait-laced Aus* tralasian Sunday—and there was no help for it but, with the courteous permission of Captain Logan, to sleep on board the Manapouri, and hope for better luck in the way of finding some kind o! quarters or another on Monday morning. . . , “ 'Twas a very fine thing,” again, to have passed so quiet a night in a comfortable state-room on shipboard- in Wellington harbor ; but when Monday morning came it brought with it no better prospect of hotel accommodation tbau we had bad on the previous evening. Leaving my luggage on the wharf, and in a state of extreme dejection, I lauded at Waterloo Wharf, and fell into the hands of a tall young man with a bine worsted comforter ronnd bis neck, who drove a hackney carriage and pair. Charge, 4a per hour and la for wharfage. Tho pair of horaes weedy, but swift of foot. The tall young driver had a companion on tho box—a companion shorter and slighter than he, but in degree as lanky. Aa they went, ■thia twain on the box, they both whistled ;

not, I should say, for want of thought, bnt the rather, I should say, from the soothing reflection that something exceptionally remunerative in the way of cab-hire was about to be made out of me. The carriage itself was a pleasing example of the survival of tb-. fittest. It was a barouche, that closed, I" bad survived, I should say, several seasons at Brighton or S'-. Leonard**, nd one or two at Melbourne, and, for ths time, it made one feel quite at home The homc'ike feeling, how ever, vanished as we continued to ruin'de “ half a league, half a league, half a league onward,” and, to my thinking, considerably more than half a league, vainly searching for an hotel of which the landlord or landlady would bo ho charitable as t > fcak* in. Again, to my distraction, had I reckoned without my host. Not only had the circumstance of Parliament being iu session to be taken into account, but the trop plein of the Wellingtonian Industrial and Artistic Exhibition was approaching its culmination ; and the congress in question had brought to the Legislative capital crowds of visitors from every province in the Colony ; in spite, too, of the universal business depression which, I am told on authority I dare not question, is existent, A fearful depression—an awful depression, New Zealand, I learn, is thirty millions in debt to the public creditor alone. Every child that comes into the world in this beautiful land is handicapped from bis first entrance into life with indebtedness to the extent of £55 sterling. Imagine such a load of pecuniary embarrassment on the baby’s head before even the sections in its tender young cranium are knit together, A million and a half of pounds sterling must go out of the country every year to pay the implacable home creditor* tale of interest ; and while he justifiably insists on hia pound of flesh, the price* of wool and grain continue to rule desperately low, and the meat-preserving companies of New Zealand find that they cannot deliver their frozen mutton at a. lower rate than 3d per lb, and that at Home their profits are to a disastrous extent eaten up by the middlemen and distributors. Truly, a shocking state of things, Yet 1 am told that the attendance at the Wellington Exhibition averages 1200 a day, and families continue to flock in from the provinces to see the show and cram the hotels to suffocation. As for the twain on the box, the depression, apparently, had not reached them. They ceased to whistle, and, as the American humorist put. it, “to drive mo round promiscuously.” To no avail. There are many—well, so-called “hotels” in Wellington; but not even the proprietor of the lowliest “pub.” would have anything to say to us. They were all fall—- “ chock-a-block,” as one of the Bonifaces phrased it, to whom I made unsuccessful suit. The worst of it was that throughout our quest we were pursued by a shaggy man of ferocious aspect, but actuated by the friendliest intentions toward us, who was, indeed, the driver of an express waggon, and who had made up hia mind that he was destined to convey our luggage from the steamer to the place where eventually we were to find shelter for our unhappy heads. [Heie Mr Sala relates at some length how, after a long tour of exploration he ultimately became domiciled in Molesworth-street.] I had not been very long an inhabitant of Molesworth street before I became fully convinced of the right of the legislative capital of New Zealand to be called Windy Wellington, Of course, before coming here I had been much acquainted with the details of the extraordinary atmospheric mishap which took place in September, 1880, when ataspotknown as “Siberia,” bbtwean two of the four railway tunnels between Kaitoke and Cross Creek on the Wairarapa line, the furious wind, which is almost incessantly sweeping through the gully, absolutely blew a train off the rails. Several of the passengers were killed by this, I suppose unprecedented accident, unless, indeed, we are to believe in the truth of the legend current at that exceptionally boisterous place, the Escorial in Spain, where, according to the country people, a coach and six conveying a foreign ambassador accredited to the Court of Phillip IL, were coachmen, lacquey?, and all, some time in the 16th century, swept from the earth by the violence of a north-westerly gale, and have been whirling round aud round, invisible in the empyrean ever since. A “ break-gole ” ba* been created on the spot where the train was blown over in 1880, and the train now never ascends or descends the incline without two locomotives, one in front and another behind. In addition to these precautions, there is a centre rail, ae there need to be on the “ Fell ” railway over Mount Otn r s, while the tunnel was in course of construction, and the wheels of the engines are so arranged that they press on the bides of this centre rail, which rises to a height of 18in from the ground, and act as a brake. Sj that at present, when you make the facile, fearsome, but safe descent of “Siberia,” you are only reminded of the fatal hurricane of September, 1880, by the hoiriblo roaring of the blast round the carriages, and the showers of pebbles driven by the wind against the windowpanea. No “ break-gale,” however, is practicable in Cook Strait, in which, between Wellington, in the North Island, and Picton, in the South Island, the wind bloweth where it listeth all the year round. The winds ! Say, rather, a round dozen of them. They seem to be collected at either end of Cook Strait, and to be poured into that passage as through a funnel. Cyclones, tornadoes, monsoons, “northers,” “southerly busters,” the Mediterranean “mistral,” the Africa’s « sirocco,” the “ Damontam,” and that insidious, treacherous, icy wind which blows from the Guadarrena Range over Madrid, and is so fatally subtle that it will slay a man while it will- scarcely suffice ta blow out a caudle, would all seem to be decanted into Cook Strait, for the delectation of Wellington. You never know where the wind is to “ have ” yon. Like the slyly ferocious dog alluded t-> by Quilp in the “Old Curiosity Shop ” —the dog which lived on one side of the road, but would sometimes hide in amhush on the other side, waiting for a spring—the wind at Wellington veers, chops, changes, goes back on itself, and then returns to the charge with a seemingly inexhaustible fertility of afflictive resource. At Trieste, on the Adriatic, they say that the “boza” ia such a firm, stable, enduring wind that you might accept a bill on it. I have not yet used the wind at Wellington as a desk < n which to draw a draft on Loudon ; but I have litt'e doubt as to its capacity for having a peg driven into it on which you might bang your bat. But the wind at Wellington occasionally, and mercifully, desists from going “on the rampage.” So I rejoice to record there were some really beautiful days during my stay in Wellington, and I found the city a very enjoyable one. The chief business thoroughfare, a long curved street, at the northern extremity of which is Government House, embosomed iu beautiful gardens, is called Lambfcon Quay—not entirely on the Incus a non lucendo principle ; for although it is actually aa inland thoroughfare, it was once the coastline of the harbor. The citizens of Wellington have, however, driven back the sea, and reclaimed from it that which they urgently needed, a tract of land on which to build a business quarter ; and further reclamations between the Queen’s Wharf and the locality known as the Te Aro are in contemplation. Lambton-quay thus corresponds precisely, topographically speaking, to our “Strand” at home. The shops aud warehouses on Lambtou quay and io the other business centres of the city are numerous, handsome, and copiously supplied, and notwithstanding the fact that New Zealand is, to a certain extent, a protectionist Colony, European commodities are not unreasonably dear. For my part, I wish that they were dearer ; although I bad to pay 7s for a pair of Dent’s best kid gloves, two button*. New Zealand ought to be able to make her own gloves, even as ohe is wearing her own tweeds. She ought to build her owu ships, and to become, as she will become some day, a grand maritime and manufacturing country. She has plenty of water and plenty—a magnificent plenty—of wood ; and the mention of the last boon of nature leads me to snatch a glance at Wellington from the ligneous point of view. The capital of New Zealand is to a great extent a wooden city. Not by any means of ignoble logcabins or weatherboard shanties ; the rather a town of wooden palaces. Government House is a wooden fabric. The Houses of Parliament are of wood. The Government buildings are an enormous conglomeration of timber, covering tw> acres, cmtaining over 160 rooms, and said to be the largest wooden structure in the world. If you ask why there is so much wind at Wellington, the answer to your query Is at once ready, It is Cook Straits. If,again, you are anxious to know why wood is so extensively used for building purposes at Wellington,. the reply will be equally prompt. Earthquakes ; or rather, the apprehension thereof.