GOLD-DIGGERS AND GUM-DIGGERS
"Fortune, they say, flies from us: she but wheels
Like the fleet sea-bird round the fowler's skiff,
Lost in the mist one moment, and the next
Brushing the white sail with a whiter wing
As if to court the aim. Experience watches,
And has her on the turn."
When the Waitara war broke out the white population did not number
more than seventy-five thousand. When Te Kooti was chased into the
King Country it had grown to nearly four times that sum, in the face
of debt, doubt, and the paralyzing effects of war. A great ally of
settlement had come upon the scene. In 1861 profitable goldfields were
discovered in Otago. The little Free Church colony, which in thirteen
years had scarcely increased to that number of thousands, was
thunderstruck at the news. For years there had been rumours of gold
in the river beds and amongst the mountains of the South Island. From
1857 to 1860 about £150,000 had been won in Nelson. In 1858, a certain
Asiatic, Edward Peters, known to his familiars as Black Pete, who had
somehow wandered from his native Bombay through Australia to Otago,
had struck gold there; and in March, 1861, there was a rush to a
short-lived goldfield at the Lindis, another spot in that province.
But it was not until the winter of that year that the prospector,
Gabriel Read, found in a gully at Tuapeka the indubitable signs of a
good alluvial field. Digging with a butcher's knife, he collected in
ten hours nearly five-and-twenty pounds' worth of the yellow metal.
Then he sunk hole after hole for some distance, finding gold in all.
Unlike most discoverers, Read made no attempt to keep his fortune
to himself, but wrote frankly of it to Sir John Richardson, the
superintendent of the province. For this he was ultimately paid the
not extravagant reward of £1,000. The good Presbyterians of Dunedin
hardly knew in what spirit to receive the tidings. But some of them
did not hesitate to test the field. Very soberly, almost in sad
solemnity, they set to work there, and the result solved all doubts.
Half Dunedin rushed to Tuapeka. At one of the country kirks the
congregation was reduced to the minister and precentor. The news went
across the seas. Diggers from Australia and elsewhere poured in by the
thousand. Before many months the province's population had doubled,
and the prayerful and painful era of caution, the day of small things,
was whisked away in a whirl of Victorian enterprise. For the next few
years the history of Otago became a series of rushes. Economically,
no doubt, "rush" is the proper word to apply to the old stampedes to
colonial goldfields. But in New Zealand, at any rate, the physical
methods of progression thither were laborious in the extreme. The
would-be miner tramped slowly and painfully along, carrying as much in
the way of provisions and tools as his back would bear. Lucky was the
man who had a horse to ride, or the rudest cart to drive in. When, as
time went on, gold was found high up the streams amongst the ice-cold
rivers and bleak tussock-covered mountains of the interior, the
hardships endured by the gold-seekers were often very great. The
country was treeless and wind-swept. Sheep roamed over the tussocks,
but of other provisions there were none. Hungry diggers were thankful
to pay half a crown for enough flour to fill a tin pannikin. £120 a
ton was charged for carting goods from Dunedin. Not only did fuel
fetch siege prices, but five pounds would be paid for an old gin-case,
for the boards of a dray, or any few pieces of wood out of which a
miner's "cradle" could be patched up. The miners did not exactly make
light of these obstacles, for, of the thousands who poured into the
province after the first discoveries, large numbers fled from the
snow and starvation of the winters, when the swollen rivers rose, and
covered up the rich drift on the beaches under their banks. But enough
remained to carry on the work of prospecting, and the finds were rich
enough to lure new-comers. In the year 1863 the export of gold from
Otago rose to more than two millions sterling. Extraordinary patches
were found in the sands and drift of the mountain torrents. It is
recorded of one party that, when crossing a river, their dog was swept
away by the current on to a small rocky point. A digger went to rescue
it, and never was humanity more promptly rewarded, for from the
sands by the rock he unearthed more than £1,000 worth of gold before
nightfall. Some of the more fortunate prospectors had their footsteps
dogged by watchful bands bent on sharing their good luck. One of them,
however, named Fox, managed to elude this espionage for some time, and
it was the Government geologist--now Sir James Hector--who, while on a
scientific journey, discovered him and some forty companions quietly
working in a lonely valley.
The goldfields of Otago had scarcely reached the zenith of their
prosperity before equally rich finds were reported from the west coast
of the Canterbury province. From the year 1860 it was known that gold
existed there, but the difficulties of exploring a strip of broken
surf-beaten coast, cut off from settled districts by range upon range
of Alps, and itself made up of precipitous hills, and valleys covered
with densest jungle and cloven by the gorges of bitterly cold and
impassable torrents, were exceptionally great. More than one of the
Government officers sent there to explore were either swept away by
some torrent or came back half-crippled by hunger and rheumatism. One
surveyor who stuck to his work for months in the soaking, cheerless
bush, existing on birds, bush-rats, and roots, was thought a hero, and
with cause. Even Maoris dreaded parts of this wilderness, and believed
it to be the abode of dragons and a lost tribe of their own race. They
valued it chiefly as the home of their much-prized jade or greenstone.
Searching for this, a party of them, early in 1864, found gold. Later
on in the same year a certain Albert Hunt also found paying gold on
the Greenstone creek. Hunt was afterwards denounced as an impostor,
and had to fly for his life from a mob of enraged and disappointed
gold-seekers; but the gold was there nevertheless. In 1865 the stream
which had been pouring into Otago was diverted to the new fields in
Westland, and in parties or singly, in the face of almost incredible
natural difficulties, adventurous men worked their way to every point
of the west coast. In a few months 30,000 diggers were searching its
beaches and valleys with such results that it seemed astonishing
that the gold could have lain unseen so long. Many lost their lives,
drowned in the rivers or starved to death in the dripping bush. The
price of provisions at times went to fabulous heights, as much as £150
being paid for a ton of flour, and a shilling apiece for candles. What
did prices matter to men who were getting from 1 oz. to 1 lb. weight
of gold-dust a day, or who could stagger the gold-buyers sent to their
camps by the bankers by pouring out washed gold by the pannikin? So
rich was the wash-dirt in many of the valleys, and the black sand on
many of the sea-beaches, that for years £8 to £10 a week was regarded
as only a fair living wage. In 1866 the west coast exported gold to
the value of £2,140,000.
On a strip of sand-bank between the dank bush and the bar-bound mouth
of the Hokitika river a mushroom city sprang up, starting into a
bustling life of cheerful rashness and great expectations. In 1864 a
few tents were pitched on the place; in 1865 one of the largest towns
in New Zealand was to be seen. Wood and canvas were the building
materials--the wood unseasoned pine, smelling fresh and resinous at
first, anon shrinking, warping, and entailing cracked walls, creaking
doors, and rattling window-sashes. Every second building was a
grog-shanty, where liquor, more or less fiery, was retailed at a
shilling a glass, and the traveller might hire a blanket and a soft
plank on the floor for three shillings a night. Under a rainfall of
more than 100 inches a year, tracks became sloughs before they could
be turned into streets and roads. All the rivers on the coast
were bar-bound. Food and supplies came by sea, and many were the
coasting-craft which broke their backs crossing the bars, or which
ended their working-life on shoals. Yet when hundreds of adventurers
were willing to pay £5 apiece for the twelve hours' passage from
Nelson, high rates of insurance did not deter ship-owners. River
floods joined the surf in making difficulties. Eligible town sections
bought at speculative prices were sometimes washed out to sea, and a
river now runs over the first site of the prosperous town of Westport.
It was striking to note how quickly things settled down into a very
tolerable kind of rough order. Among the diggers themselves there was
little crime or even violence. It is true that a Greymouth storekeeper
when asked "How's trade?" concisely pictured a temporary stagnation
by gloomily remarking, "There ain't bin a fight for a week!" But
an occasional bout of fisticuffs and a good deal of drinking and
gambling, were about the worst sins of the gold-seekers. Any one who
objected to be saluted as "mate!" or who was crazy enough to dream
of wearing a long black coat or a tall black hat, would find life
harassing at the diggings. But, at any rate, in New Zealand diggers
did not use revolvers with the playful frequency of the Californians
of Mr. Bret Harte. Nor did they shoe the horse of their first Member
of Parliament with gold, or do a variety of the odd things done in
Australian gold-fields. They laughed heartily when the Canterbury
Provincial Government sent over the Alps an escort of strapping
mounted policemen, armed to the teeth, to carry away gold securely
in a bullet-proof cart. They preferred to send their gold away in
peaceful coasting steamers. When, in 1867, one or two Irish rows were
dignified with the title of Fenian Riots, and a company of militia
were sent down from their more serious Maori work in the North Island
to restore order in Hokitika, they encountered nothing more dangerous
than a hospitality too lavish even for their powers of absorption. One
gang of bushrangers, and one only, ever disturbed the coast. The four
ruffians who composed it murdered at least six men before they were
hunted down. Three were hung; the fourth, who saved his neck by
turning Queen's evidence, was not lynched. No one ever has been
lynched in New Zealand. For the rest the ordinary police-constable was
always able to deal with the sharpers, drunkards, and petty thieves
who are among the camp-followers of every army of gold-seekers.
So quietly were officials submitted to that sometimes, when a
police-magistrate failed to appear in a goldfields' court through
some accident of road or river, his clerk would calmly hear cases
and impose fines, or a police-sergeant remand the accused without
authority and without resistance. In the staid Westland of to-day it
is so impossible to find offenders enough to make a show of filling
the Hokitika prison that the Premier, who sits for Hokitika, is
upbraided in Parliament for sinful extravagance in not closing the
establishment.
No sooner had the cream been skimmed off the southern goldfields than
yields of almost equal value were reported from the north. The Thames
and Coromandel fields in the east of the Auckland province differed
from those in the South Island. They were from the outset not alluvial
but quartz mines. So rich, however, were some of the Thames mines that
the excitement they caused was as great as that roused by the alluvial
patches of Otago and Westland. The opening up of the Northern fields
was retarded throughout the sixties by Maori wars, and the demands of
peaceful but hard-fisted Maori landlords. £1 a miner had to be paid to
these latter for the right to prospect their country. They delayed the
opening of the now famous Ohinemuri field until 1875. When on March
3rd of that year the Goldfields' Warden declared Ohinemuri open, the
declaration was made to an excited crowd of hundreds of prospectors,
who pushed jostling and fighting round the Warden's table for their
licenses, and then galloped off on horseback across country in a wild
race to be first to "peg out" claims. Years before this, however, the
shores of the Hauraki Gulf had been systematically worked, and in 1871
the gold export from Auckland had risen to more than £1,100,000.
New Zealand still remains a gold-producing colony, albeit the days of
the solitary adventurer working in the wash-dirt of his claim with
pick, shovel, and cradle are pretty nearly over. The nomadic digger
who called no man master is a steady-going wage-earner now. Coal-mines
and quartz-reefs are the mainstays of Westland. Company management,
trade unions, conciliation cases, and laws against Sunday labour have
succeeded the rough, free-and-easy days of glittering possibilities
for everybody. Even the alluvial fields are now systematically worked
by hydraulic sluicing companies. They are no longer poor men's
diggings. In Otago steam-dredges successfully search the river
bottoms. In quartz-mining the capitalist has always been the
organizing and controlling power. The application of cyanide and other
scientific improvements has revived this branch of mining within the
last four years, and, despite the bursting of the usual number of
bubbles, there is good reason to suppose that the £54,000,000 which is
so far the approximate yield of gold from the Colony will during the
next decade be swelled by many millions.
The gold-digger is found in many parts of the earth; the gum-digger
belongs to New Zealand alone. With spade, knife, and gum-spear he
wanders over certain tracts of the province of Auckland, especially
the long, deeply-indented, broken peninsula, which is the northern
end of New Zealand. The so-called gum for which he searches is the
turpentine, which, oozing out of the trunk of the kauri pines, hardens
into lumps of an amber-like resin. Its many shades of colour darken
from white through every kind of yellow and brown to jet. A little is
clear, most is clouded. Half a century ago, when the English soldiers
campaigning against Heké had to spend rainy nights in the bush without
tent or fire, they made shift to get light and even warmth by kindling
flame with pieces of the kauri gum, which in those days could be seen
lying about on the ground's surface. Still, the chips and scraps which
remain when kauri-gum has been cleaned and scraped for market are used
in the making of fire-kindlers. But for the resin itself a better use
was long ago found--the manufacture of varnish. At the moment when,
under Governor Fitzroy, the infant Auckland settlement was at its
lowest, a demand for kauri-gum from the United States shone as a gleam
of hope to the settlers, while the Maoris near the town became too
busied in picking up gum to trouble themselves about appeals to join
Heké's crusade against the _Pakeha_. Though the trade seemed to die
away so completely that in a book written in 1848 I find it briefly
dismissed with the words, "The bubble has burst," nevertheless it is
to-day well-nigh as brisk as ever, and has many a time and oft stood
Auckland in good stead.
[Illustration: KAURI PINE TREE
Photo by J. MARTIN, Auckland]
The greater kauri pines show smooth grey trunks of from eight to
twelve feet in diameter. Even Mr. Gladstone would have recoiled from
these giants, which are laid low, not with axes, but with heavy double
saws worked on scaffolds six feet high erected against the doomed
trees. As the British ox, with his short horns and cube-like form, is
the result of generations of breeding with a single eye to meat, so
that huge candelabrum, the kauri, might be fancied to be the outcome
of thousands of years of experiment in producing the perfection of
a timber tree. Its solid column may rise a hundred feet without a
branch; its small-leaved patchy foliage seems almost ludicrously
scanty; it is all timber--good wood. Clean, soft, easily worked, the
saws seem to cut it like cheese. It takes perhaps 800 years for the
largest pines to come to their best. So plentiful are they that,
though fires and every sort of wastefulness have ravaged them, the
Kauri Timber Company can put 40,000,000 feet of timber through their
mills in a year, can find employment for two thousand men, and can
look forward to doing so for another twenty years. After that----!
The resin may be found in tree-forks high above the ground. Climbing
to these by ropes, men have taken thence lumps weighing as much as a
hundredweight. But most and the best resin is found in the earth, and
for the last generation the soil of the North has been probed and
turned over in search of it, until whole tracts look as though they
had been rooted up by droves of wild swine. In many of these tracts
not a pine is standing now. How and when the forests disappeared,
whether by fire or otherwise, and how soil so peculiarly sterile could
have nourished the finest of trees, are matters always in dispute.
There is little but the resin to show the locality of many of the
vanished forests. Where they once were the earth is hungry, white, and
barren, though dressed in deceptive green by stunted fern and
manuka. In the swamps and ravines, where they may thrust down their
steel-pointed flexible spears as much as eight feet, the roaming
diggers use that weapon to explore the field. In the hard open country
they have to fall back upon the spade. Unlike the gold-seeker, the
gum-digger can hope for no great and sudden stroke of fortune. He will
be lucky if hard work brings him on the average £1 a week. But without
anything to pay for house-room, fuel, or water, he can live on twelve
and sixpence while earning his pound, and can at least fancy that he
is his own master. Some 7,000 whites and Maoris are engaged in finding
the 8,000 tons or thereabouts of resin, which is the quantity which in
a fairly good year England and America will buy at an average price
of £60 a ton. About 1,500 of the hunters for gum are Istrians and
Dalmatians--good diggers, but bad colonists; for years of work do not
attach them to the country, and almost always they take their savings
home to the fringing islands and warm bays of the Adriatic.