THE PASTORAL PROVINCES
"Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full
Out of their choicest and their whitest wool."
The Company's settlements were no longer confined to the shores of
Cook's Straits. In 1846, Earl Grey, formerly Lord Howick, came to the
Colonial Office, and set himself to compensate the Company for former
official hostility. He secured for it a loan of £250,000, and handed
over to it large blocks of land in the South Island, which--less
certain reserves--was in process of complete purchase from its handful
of Maori owners. The Company, gaining thus a new lease of life, went
to work. In 1848 and 1850 that was done which ought to have been done
a decade sooner, and the void spaces of Otago and Canterbury were
made the sites of settlements of a quasi-religious kind. The Otago
settlement was the outcome of the Scottish Disruption; its pioneers
landed in March, 1848. They were a band of Free Kirk Presbyterians,
appropriately headed by a Captain Cargill, a Peninsular veteran and a
descendant of Donald Cargill, and by the Rev. Thomas Burns, a minister
of sterling worth, who was a nephew of the poet. Otago has this year
celebrated her jubilee, and the mayor of her chief city, Captain
Cargill's son, is the first citizen of a town of nearly 50,000
inhabitants which in energy and beauty is worthy of its name--Dunedin.
For years, however, the progress of the young settlement was slow.
Purchasers of its land at the "sufficient price"--£2 an acre--were
provokingly few, so few indeed that the regulation price had to be
reduced. It had no Maori troubles worth speaking of, but the hills
that beset its site, rugged and bush-covered, were troublesome to
clear and settle, the winter climate is bleaker than that of northern
or central New Zealand, and a good deal of Scottish endurance and
toughness was needed before the colonists won their way through to the
more fertile and open territory which lay waiting for them, both on
their right hand and on their left, in the broad province of Otago.
Like General Grant in his last campaign, they had to keep on "pegging
away," and they did. They stood stoutly by their kirk, and gave it a
valuable endowment of land. Their leaders felt keenly the difficulty
of getting good school teaching for the children, a defect so well
repaired later on that the primary schools of Otago are now, perhaps,
the best in New Zealand, while Dunedin was the seat of the Colony's
first university college. They had a gaol, the prisoners of which in
early days were sometimes let out for a half-holiday, with the warning
from the gaoler, Johnnie Barr, that if they did not come back by eight
o'clock they would be locked out for the night.[1] The usual dress of
the settlers was a blue shirt, moleskin or corduroy trousers, and a
slouch hat. Their leader, Captain Cargill, wore always a blue "bonnet"
with a crimson knob thereon. They named their harbour Port Chalmers,
and a stream, hard by their city, the Water of Leith. The plodding,
brave, clannish, and cantankerous little community soon ceased to be
altogether Scotch. Indeed, the pioneers, called the Old Identities,
seemed almost swamped by the flood of gold-seekers which poured in in
the years after 1861. Nevertheless, Otago is still the headquarters
of that large and very active element in the population of the Colony
which makes the features and accent of North Britain more familiar to
New Zealanders than to most Englishmen.
[Footnote 1: An amusing article might be written on the more primitive
gaols of the early settlements. At Wanganui there were no means of
confining certain drunken bush-sawyers whose vagaries were a nuisance;
so they were fined in timber--so many feet for each orgie--and
building material for a prison thus obtained. When it was put up,
however, the sawyers had departed, and the empty house of detention
became of use as a storehouse for the gaoler's potatoes.
In a violent gale in the Southern Alps one of these wooden "lock-ups"
was lifted in air, carried bodily away and deposited in a neighbouring
thicket. Its solitary prisoner disappeared in the whirlwind. Believers
in his innocence imagined for him a celestial ascent somewhat like
that of Elijah. What is certain is that he was never seen again in
that locality.
A more comfortable gaol was that made for himself by a high and very
ingenious provincial official. Arrested for debt, he proclaimed his
own house a district prison, and as visiting Justice committed himself
to be detained therein.]
The next little colony founded in New Zealand dates its birth from
1850. Though it was to be Otago's next-door neighbour, it was neither
Presbyterian nor Scottish, but English and Episcopalian. This was the
Canterbury settlement. It owed its existence to an association in
which the late Lord Lyttelton was prominent. As in the case of Otago,
this association worked in conjunction with the New Zealand Company,
and proposed to administer its lands on the Wakefield system. Gibbon
Wakefield himself (his brother, the Colonel, had died in 1847)
laboured untiringly at its foundation, amid troubles which were
all the more annoying in that the association was in financial
difficulties from its birth.[1] Three pounds an acre was to be the
price of land in the Canterbury Block, of which one pound was to go
to the church and education, two pounds to be spent on the work of
development. The settlers landed in December, 1850, from four vessels,
the immigrants in which have ever since had in their new home the
exclusive right to the name of Pilgrims. The dream of the founders of
Canterbury was to transport to the Antipodes a complete section of
English society, or, more exactly, of the English Church. It was to be
a slice of England from top to bottom. At the top were to be an Earl
and a Bishop; at the bottom the English labourer, better clothed,
better fed, and contented. Their square, flat city they called
Christchurch, and its rectangular streets by the names of the Anglican
Bishoprics. One schismatic of a street called High was alone allowed
to cut diagonally across the lines of its clerical neighbours. But the
clear stream of the place, which then ran past flax, koromiko, and
glittering toé-toé, and now winds under weeping-willows, the founders
spared from any sacerdotal name; it is called Avon. When wooden
cottages and "shedifices" began to dot the bare urban sections
far apart, the Pilgrims called their town the City of Magnificent
Distances, and cheerfully told you how new-comers from London rode
through and out of Christchurch and thereafter innocently inquired
whether the town still lay much ahead. The Canterbury dream seems a
little pathetic as well as amusing now, but those who dreamed it were
very much in earnest in 1850, and they laid the foundation stones of a
fine settlement, though not precisely of the kind they contemplated.
Their affairs for some years were managed by John Robert Godley, a
name still well remembered at the War Office, where he afterwards
became Under-Secretary. He had been the life and soul of the
Canterbury Association, and as its agent went out to New Zealand,
partly in search of health and partly with the honourable ambition
to found a colony worthy of England. He made a strong administrator.
Their Earl and their Bishop soon fled from the hard facts of pioneer
life, but the Pilgrims as a rule were made of sterner stuff, and
sticking to their task, they soon spread over the yellow, sunny
plains, high-terraced mountain valleys, and wind-swept hillsides of
their province. Their territory was better suited than Otago for the
first stages of settlement, and for thirty years its progress was
remarkable.
[Footnote 1: It was when he was at this work that Dr. Garnett pictures
him so vividly--"the sanguine, enthusiastic projector, fertile,
inventive creator, his head an arsenal of expedients and every failure
pregnant with a remedy, imperious or suasive as suits his turn;
terrible in wrath or exuberant in affection; commanding, exhorting,
entreating, as like an eminent personage of old he
"With head, hands, wings or feet pursues his way,
And swims, or wades, or sinks, or creeps, or flies."]
On the surface there were certain differences between the Canterbury
colonists and those of Otago, which local feeling intensified in a
manner always paltry, though sometimes amusing. When the stiff-backed
Free-Churchmen who were to colonize Otago gathered on board the
emigrant ship which was to take them across the seas, they opened
their psalm-books. Their minister, like Burns' cottar, "waled a
portion wi' judicious care," and the Puritans, slowly chanting on,
rolled out the appeal to the God of Bethel:--
"God of our fathers, be the God
of their succeeding race!"
Such men and women might not be amusing fellow-passengers on a four
months' sea-voyage,--and, indeed, there is reason to believe that they
were not,--but settlers made of such stuff were not likely to fail in
the hard fight with Nature at the far end of the earth; and they did
not fail. The Canterbury Pilgrims, on the other hand, bade farewell
to old England by dancing at a ball. In their new home they did not
renounce their love of dancing, though their ladies had sometimes to
be driven in a bullock-dray to the door of the ballroom, and stories
are told of young gentlemen, enthusiastic waltzers, riding on
horseback to the happy scene clad in evening dress and with coat-tails
carefully pinned up. But the Canterbury folk did not, on the whole,
make worse settlers for not taking themselves quite so seriously as
some of their neighbours. The English gentleman has a fund of cheery
adaptiveness which often carries him through Colonial life abreast of
graver competitors. So the settler who built a loaf of station-bread
into the earthen wall of his house, alleging that it was the hardest
and most durable material he could procure, did not, we may believe,
find a sense of humour encumber him in the troubles of a settler's
life. For there were troubles. The pastoral provinces were no
Dresden-china Arcadia. Nature is very stubborn in the wilderness, even
in the happier climes, where she offers, for the most part, merely a
passive resistance. An occasional storm or flood was about her
only outburst of active opposition in South-eastern New Zealand.
Nevertheless, an educated European who finds himself standing in an
interminable plain or on a windy hillside where nothing has been done,
where he is about to begin that work of reclaiming the desert which
has been going on in Europe for thousands of years, and of which
the average civilized man is the calm, self-satisfied, unconscious
inheritor, finds that he must shift his point of view! The
nineteenth-century Briton face to face with the conditions of
primitive man is a spectacle fine in the general, but often ludicrous
or piteous in the particular. The loneliness, the coarseness, the
everlasting insistence of the pettiest and most troublesome wants and
difficulties, harden and brace many minds, but narrow most and torment
some. Wild game, song-birds, fish, forest trees, were but some of the
things of which there were few or none round nearly all the young
pastoral settlements. Everything was to make. The climate might be
healthy and the mountain outlines noble. But nothing but work, and
successful work, could reconcile an educated and imaginative man to
the monotony of a daily outlook over league after league of stony
soil, thinly clothed by pallid, wiry tussocks bending under an
eternal, uncompromising wind; where the only living creatures in sight
might often be small lizards or a twittering grey bird miscalled a
lark; or where the only sound, save the wind aforesaid, might be
the ring of his horse's shoe against a stone, or the bleat of a
dull-coated merino, scarcely distinguishable from the dull plain round
it. To cure an unfit new-comer, dangerously enamoured of the
romance of colonization, few experiences could surpass a week of
sheep-driving, where life became a prolonged crawl at the heels of a
slow, dusty, greasy-smelling "mob" straggling along at a maximum pace
of two miles an hour. If patience and a good collie helped the tyro
through that ordeal, such allies were quite too feeble to be of
service in the supreme trial of bullock-driving, where a long whip and
a vocabulary copious beyond the dreams of Englishmen were the only
effective helpers known to man in the management of the clumsy dray
and the eight heavy-yoked, lumbering beasts dragging it. Wonderful
tales are told of cultivated men in the wilderness, Oxonians disguised
as station-cooks, who quoted Virgil over their dish-washing or asked
your opinion on a tough passage of Thucydides whilst baking a batch of
bread. Most working settlers, as a matter of fact, did well enough
if they kept up a running acquaintance with English literature; and
station-cooks, as a race, were ever greater at grog than at Greek.
Prior to about 1857 there was little or no intercourse between the
various settlements. Steamers and telegraphs had not yet appeared. The
answer to a letter sent from Cook's Straits to Auckland might come
in seven weeks or might not. It would come in seventy hours now.
Despatches were sometimes sent from Wellington to Auckland _viâ_
Sydney, to save time. In 1850 Sir William Fox and Mr. Justice Chapman
took six days to sail across Cook's Straits from Nelson to Wellington,
a voyage which now occupies eight hours. They were passengers in the
Government brig, a by-word for unseaworthiness and discomfort. In this
vessel the South Island members of the first New Zealand parliament
spent nearly nine weeks in beating up the coast to the scene of
their labours in Auckland. But the delight with which the coming of
steamships in the fifties was hailed was not so much a rejoicing over
more regular coastal communication, as joy because the English Mail
would come sooner and oftener. How they did wait and watch for the
letters and newspapers from Home, those exiles of the early days!
Lucky did they count themselves if they had news ten times a year, and
not more than four months old. One of the best of their stories is of
a certain lover whose gallant grace was not unworthy a courtier
of Queen Elizabeth. One evening this swain, after securing at the
post-office his treasured mail budget, was escorting his lady-love
home through the muddy, ill-lighted streets of little Christchurch.
A light of some sort was needed at an especially miry crossing.
The devoted squire did not spread out his cloak, as did Sir Walter
Raleigh. He had no cloak to spread. But he deftly made a torch of his
unread English letters, and, bending down, lighted the way across the
mud. His sacrifice, it is believed, did not go wholly unrewarded.
[Illustration: THE CURVING COAST
Photo by HENRY WRIGHT]
One first-rate boon New Zealand colonists had--good health. Out
of four thousand people in Canterbury in 1854 but twenty-one were
returned as sick or infirm. It almost seemed that but for drink and
drowning there need be no deaths. In Taranaki, in the North Island,
among three thousand people in 1858-59 there was not a funeral for
sixteen months. Crime, too, was pleasantly rare in the settlements.
When Governor Grey, in 1850, appointed Mr. Justice Stephen to
administer law in Otago, that zealous judge had nothing to do for
eighteen months, except to fine defaulting jurors who had been
summoned to try cases which did not exist and who neglected to attend
to try them. Naturally the settlers complained that he did not earn
his £800 a year of salary. His office was abolished, and for seven
years the southern colonists did very well without a judge. Great was
the shock to the public mind when in March, 1855, a certain Mackenzie,
a riever by inheritance doubtless, "lifted" a thousand sheep in a
night from the run of a Mr. Rhodes near Timaru, in South Canterbury,
and disappeared with them among the Southern Alps. When he was
followed and captured, it was found that he had taken refuge in a
bleak but useful upland plain, a discovery of his which bears his name
to this day. He was set on horseback, with his hands tied, and driven
to Christchurch, 150 miles, by captors armed with loaded pistols. That
he was a fellow who needed such precautions was shown by three bold
dashes for freedom, which he afterwards made when serving a five
years' sentence. At the third of these attempts he was shot at and
badly wounded. Ultimately, he was allowed to leave the country.
A sheep-stealer might easily have fallen into temptation in Canterbury
at that time. In three years the settlers owned 100,000 sheep; in
four more half a million. Somewhat slower, the Otago progress was to
223,000 in ten years.
Neither in Canterbury nor Otago were the plough and the spade found to
be the instruments of speediest advance. They were soon eclipsed by
the stockwhip, the shears, the sheep-dog, and the wire-fence. Long
before the foundation of New Zealand, Macarthur had taught the
Australians to acclimatize the merino sheep. Squatters and shepherds
from New South Wales and Tasmania were quick to discover that the
South Island of New Zealand was a well-nigh ideal land for pastoral
enterprise, with a climate where the fleece of a well-bred merino
sheep would yield 4 lbs. of wool as against 21/2 lbs. in New South
Wales. Coming to Canterbury, Otago, and Nelson, they taught the new
settlers to look to wool and meat, rather than to oats and wheat,
for profit and progress. The Australian _coo-ee_, the Australian
buck-jumping horse, the Australian stockwhip and wide-awake hat came
into New Zealand pastoral life, together with much cunning in dodging
land-laws, and a sovereign contempt for small areas. In a few
years the whole of the east and centre of the island, except a few
insignificant cultivated patches, was leased in great "runs" of from
10,000 to 100,000 acres to grazing tenants. The Australian term
"squatter" was applied to and accepted good-humouredly by these.
Socially and politically, however, they were the magnates of the
colony; sometimes financially also, but not always. For the price of
sheep and wool could go down by leaps and bounds, as well as up; the
progeny of the ewes bought for 30s. each in 1862 might have to go at
5s. each in 1868, and greasy wool might fluctuate in value as much as
6d. a lb. Two or three bad years would deliver over the poor squatter
as bond-slave to some bank, mortgage company or merchant, to whom he
had been paying at least 10 per cent. interest, _plus_ 21/2 per cent.
commission exacted twice a year, on advances. In the end, maybe, his
mortgagee stepped in; he and his children saw their homestead, with
its garden and clumps of planted eucalypts, willows, and poplars--an
oasis in the grassy wilderness--no more. Sometimes a new squatter
reigned in his stead, sometimes for years the mortgagee left the place
in charge of a shepherd--a new and dreary form of absentee ownership.
Meanwhile, in the earlier years the squatters were merry monarchs,
reigning as supreme in the Provincial Councils as in the jockey clubs.
They made very wise and excessively severe laws to safeguard their
stock from infection, and other laws, by no means so wise, to
safeguard their runs from selection, laws which undoubtedly hampered
agricultural progress. The peasant cultivator, or "cockatoo" (another
Australian word), followed slowly in the sheep farmer's wake. As late
as 1857 there were not fifty thousand acres of land under tillage
in the South Island. Even wheat at 10s. a bushel did not tempt much
capital into agriculture, though such were the prices of cereals that
in 1855 growers talked dismally of the low price of oats--4s. 6d. a
bushel. Labour, too, preferred in many cases, and not unnaturally, to
earn from 15s. to £1 a day at shearing or harvest-time to entering on
the early struggles of the cockatoo. Nevertheless, many workers did
save their money and go on the land, and many more would have done so
but for that curse of the pioneer working-man--drink.
The Colony's chief export now came to be wool. The wool-growers looked
upon their industry as the backbone of the country. So, at any rate,
for many years it was. But then the system of huge pastoral leases
meant the exclusion of population from the soil. A dozen shepherds and
labourers were enough for the largest run during most of the year.
Only when the sheep had to be mustered and dipped or shorn were a band
of wandering workmen called in. The work done, they tramped off to
undertake the next station, or to drink their wages at the nearest
public-house.
The endowed churches, the great pastoral leases, high-priced land (in
Canterbury), and the absence of Maori troubles, were the peculiar
features of the southern settlements of New Zealand. These new
communities, while adding greatly to the strength and value of the
Colony as a whole, brought their own special difficulties to its
rulers. With rare exceptions the settlers came from England and
Scotland, not from Australia, and were therefore quite unused to
despotic government. Having no Maori tribes in overwhelming force at
their doors, they saw no reason why they should not at once be trusted
with self-government. They therefore threw themselves heartily into
the agitation for a free constitution, which by this time was in
full swing in Wellington amongst the old settlers of the New Zealand
Company. Moreover, in this, for the first time in the history of the
Colony, the settlers were in accord with the Colonial Office. As
early as 1846, Earl Grey had sent out the draft of a constitution the
details of which need not detain us, inasmuch as it never came to
the birth. Sir George Grey refused to proclaim it, and succeeded in
postponing the coming-in of free institutions for six years For many
reasons he was probably right, if only because the Maoris still much
outnumbered the Whites; yet under Earl Grey's proposed constitution
they would have been entirely governed by the white minority. Warlike
and intelligent, and with a full share of self-esteem, they were not
a race likely to put up with such an indignity. But Governor Grey's
action, though justifiable, brought him into collision with the
southern settlers. Godley, with questionable discretion, flung himself
into the constitutional controversy.
Grey was successful in inducing the Maoris to sell a fair amount of
their surplus land. During the last years of his rule and the four or
five years after he went, some millions of acres were bought in the
North Island. This, following on the purchase of the whole of the
South Island, had opened the way for real progress. The huge estate
thus gained by the Crown brought to the front new phases of the
eternal land problem. The question had to be faced as to what were to
be the terms under which this land was to be sold and leased to the
settlers. Up to 1852 the settlers everywhere, except in Auckland, had
to deal, not with the Crown, but with the New Zealand Company. But in
1852 the Company was wound up, and its species of overlordship finally
extinguished. By an English Act of Parliament its debt to the Imperial
Government was forgiven. The Colony was ordered to pay it £263,000
in satisfaction of its land lien. This was commuted in the end for
£200,000 cash, very grudgingly paid out of the first loan raised by a
New Zealand parliament. Thereafter, the Company, with its high aims,
its blunders, its grievances, and its achievements, vanishes from the
story of New Zealand.
In the Church settlements of the South the Wakefield system came into
full operation under favourable conditions. Three pounds an acre were
at the outset charged for land. One pound went to the churches and
their schools. This system of endowment Grey set himself to stop, when
the Company's fall gave him the opportunity, and he did so at the cost
of embittering his relations with the Southerners, which already were
none too pleasant. For the rest, Canterbury continued within its
original special area to sell land at £2 an acre. When Canterbury was
made a province this area was enlarged by the inclusion of a tract in
which land had been sold cheaply, and in which certain large estates
had consequently been formed. Otherwise land has never been cheap in
Canterbury. The Wakefield system has been adhered to there, has been
tried under favourable conditions, and on the whole, at any rate up to
the year 1871, could not be called a failure. As long as the value
of land to speculators was little or nothing above the "sufficient
price," things did not go so badly. The process of free selection at
a uniform price of £2 an acre had amongst other merits the great
advantage of entire simplicity. A great deal of good settlement went
on under it, and ample funds were provided for the construction of
roads, bridges, and other public works.
Meantime, Grey was called upon to devise some general system of land
laws for the rest of the Colony. The result was the famous land
regulations of 1853, a code destined to have lasting and mischievous
effects upon the future of the country. Its main feature was the
reduction of the price of land to ten shillings an acre. Had this been
accompanied by stringent limitations as to the amount to be purchased
by any one man, the result might have been good enough. But it was
not; nor did those who ruled after Grey think fit to impose any such
check until immense areas of the country had been bought by pastoral
tenants and thus permanently locked up against close settlement.
Grey's friends vehemently maintain that it was not he, but those who
afterwards administered his regulations, who were responsible for this
evil. They point out that it was not until after his departure that
the great purchases began. Possibly enough Sir George never dreamt
that his regulations would bring about the bad results they did. More
than that one can hardly say. In drawing them up his strong antipathy
to the New Zealand Company and its system of a high price for land
doubtless obscured his judgment. His own defence on the point, as
printed in his life by Rees, is virtually no defence at all. It is
likely enough that had he retained the control of affairs after 1853
he would have imposed safeguards. He is not the only statesman whose
laws have effects not calculated by their maker.