CHAPTER XXVIII.

AMERICA.

We are coasting again, gliding through calm blue waters, watching the

dolphins as they play, and the boobies as they fly stroke and stroke

with the paddles of the ship. Mountains rise through the warm misty air,

and form a long towering line upon the upper skies. Hanging high above

us are the Volcano of Fire and that of Water--twin menacers of Guatamala

City. In the sixteenth century, the water-mountain drowned it; in the

eighteenth, it was burnt by the fire-hill. Since then, the city has

been shaken to pieces by earthquakes, and of sixty thousand men and

women, hardly one escaped. Down the valley, between the peaks, we have

through the mahogany groves an exquisite distant view toward the city.

Once more passing on, we get peeps, now of West Honduras, and now of the

island coffee plantations of Costa Rica. The heat is terrible. It was

just here, if we are to believe Drake, that he fell in with a shower so

hot and scalding, that each drop burnt its hole through his men‘s

clothes as they hung up to dry. “Steep stories,” it is clear, were known

before the plantation of America.

Now that the time has come for a leave-taking of the continent, we can

begin to reflect upon facts gleaned during visits to twenty-nine of the

forty-five Territories and States--twenty-nine empires the size of

Spain.

A man may see American countries, from the pine-wastes of Maine to the

slopes of the Sierra; may talk with American men and women, from the

sober citizens of Boston to Digger Indians in California; may eat of

American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colorado to clambakes on the

shores near Salem; and yet, from the time he first “smells the molasses”

at Nantucket light-ship to the moment when the pilot quits him at the

Golden Gate, may have no idea of an American. You may have seen the

East, the South, the West, the Pacific States, and yet have failed to

find America. It is not till you have left her shores that her image

grows up in the mind.

The first thing that strikes the Englishman just landed in New York is

the apparent Latinization of the English in America; but before he

leaves the country, he comes to see that this is at most a local fact,

and that the true moral of America is the vigor of the English race--the

defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the man

whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four

pence. Excluding the Atlantic cities, the English in America are

absorbing the Germans and the Celts, destroying the Red Indians, and

checking the advance of the Chinese.

The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. Up to the

commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians of

Central North America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the

English colonists, no numerous race had ever been blotted out by an

invader. The Danes and Saxons amalgamated with the Britons, the Normans

with the English, the Tartars with the Chinese, the Goths and

Burgundians with the Gauls: the Spaniards not only never annihilated a

people, but have themselves been all but completely expelled by the

Indians, in Mexico and South America. The Portuguese in Ceylon, the

Dutch in Java, the French in Canada and Algeria, have conquered but not

killed off the native peoples. Hitherto it has been nature‘s rule, that

the race that peopled a country in the earliest historic days should

people it to the end of time. The American problem is this: does the

law, in a modified shape, hold good, in spite of the destruction of the

native population? Is it true that the negroes, now that they are free,

are commencing slowly to die out? that the New Englanders are dying

fast, and their places being supplied by immigrants? Can the English in

America, in the long run, survive the common fate of all migrating

races? Is it true that, if the American settlers continue to exist, it

will be at the price of being no longer English, but Red Indian? It is

certain that the English families long in the land have the features of

the extirpated race; on the other hand, in the negroes there is at

present no trace of any change, save in their becoming dark brown

instead of black.

The Maories--an immigrant race--were dying off in New Zealand when we

landed there. The Indians of Mexico--another immigrant people--had

themselves undergone decline, numerical and moral, when we first became

acquainted with them. Are we English in turn to degenerate abroad, under

pressure of a great natural law forbidding change? It is easy to say

that the English in Old England are not a native but an immigrant race;

that they show no symptoms of decline. There, however, the change was

slight, the distance short, the difference of climate small.

The rapidity of the disappearance of physical type is equaled at least,

if not exceeded, by that of the total alteration of the moral

characteristics of the immigrant races--the entire destruction of

eccentricity, in short. The change that comes over those among the Irish

who do not remain in the great towns is not greater than that which

overtakes the English handworkers, of whom some thousands reach America

each year. Gradually settling down on land, and finding themselves lost

in a sea of intelligence, and freed from the inspiring obstacles of

antiquated institutions and class prejudice, the English handicraftsman,

ceasing to be roused to aggressive Radicalism by the opposition of

sinister interests, merges into the contented homestead settler, or

adventurous backwoodsman. Greater even than this revolution of character

is that which falls upon the Celt. Not only is it a fact known alike to

physiologists and statisticians, that the children of Irish parents born

in America are, physically, not Irish, Americans, but the like is true

of the moral type: the change in this is at least as sweeping. The son

of Fenian Pat and bright-eyed Biddy is the normal gaunt American, quick

of thought, but slow of speech, whom we have begun to recognize as the

latest product of the Saxon race, when housed upon the Western prairies,

or in the pine-woods of New England.

For the moral change in the British workman it is not difficult to

account: the man who will leave country, home, and friends, to seek new

fortunes in America, is essentially not an ordinary man. As a rule, he

is above the average in intelligence, or, if defective in this point, he

makes up for lack of wit by the possession of concentrativeness and

energy. Such a man will have pushed himself to the front in his club,

his union, or his shop, before he emigrates. In England he is somebody;

in America he finds all hands contented; or, if not this, at all events

too busy to complain of such ills as they profess to labor under. Among

contented men, his equals both in intelligence and ambition, in a

country of perfect freedom of speech, of manners, of laws, and of

society, the occupation of his mind is gone, and he comes to think

himself what others seem to think--a nobody; a man who no longer is a

living force. He settles upon land; and when the world knows him no

more, his children are happy corn-growers in his stead.

The shape of North America makes the existence of distinct peoples

within her limits almost impossible. An upturned bowl, with a mountain

rim, from which the streams run inward toward the center, she must fuse

together all the races that settle within her borders, and the fusion

must now be in an English mould.

There are homogeneous foreign populations in several portions of the

United States; not only the Irish and Chinese, at whose prospects we

have already glanced, but also Germans in Pennsylvania, Spanish in

Florida, French in Louisiana and at Sault de Ste Marie. In Wisconsin

there is a Norwegian population of over a hundred thousand, retaining

their own language and their own architecture, and presenting the

appearance of a tough morsel for the English to digest; at the same

time, the Swedes were the first settlers of Delaware and New Jersey, and

there they have disappeared.

Milwaukee is a Norwegian town. The houses are narrow and high, the

windows many, with circular tops ornamented in wood or dark-brown stone,

and a heavy wooden cornice crowns the front. The churches have the

wooden bulb and spire which are characteristic of the Scandinavian

public buildings. The Norwegians will not mix with other races, and

invariably flock to spots where there is already a large population

speaking their own tongue. Those who enter Canada generally become

dissatisfied with the country, and pass on into Wisconsin, or Minnesota,

but the Canadian government has now under its consideration a plan for

founding a Norwegian colony on Lake Huron. The numbers of this people

are not so great as to make it important to inquire whether they will

ever merge into the general population. Analogy would lead us to expect

that they will be absorbed; their existence is not historical, like that

of the French in Lower Canada.

From Burlington, in Iowa, I had visited a spot the history of which is

typical of the development of America--Nauvoo. Founded in 1840 by Joe

Smith, the Mormon city stood upon a bluff overhanging the Des Moines

rapids of the Mississippi, presenting on the land side the aspect of a

gentle, graceful slope, surmounted by a plain. After the fanatical

pioneers of English civilization had been driven from the city, and

their temple burnt, there came Cabet‘s Icarian band, who tried to found

a new France in the desert; but in 1856 the leader died, and his people

dispersed themselves about the States of Iowa and Missouri. Next came

the English settlers, active, thriving, regardless of tradition, and

Nauvoo is entering on a new life as the capital of a Wine-growing

country. I found Cabet and the Mormons alike forgotten. The ruins of the

temple have disappeared, and the huge stones have been used up in

cellars, built to contain the Hock--a pleasant wine, like Zeltinger.

The bearing upon religion of the gradual destruction of race is of great

moment to the world. Christianity will gain by the change; but which of

its many branches will receive support is a question which only admits

of an imperfect answer. Arguing _à priori_, we should expect to find

that, on the one hand, a tendency toward unity would manifest itself,

taking the shape, perhaps, of a gain of strength by the Catholic and

Anglican Churches; on the other hand, there would be a contrary and

still stronger tendency toward an infinite multiplication of beliefs,

till millions of men and women would become each of them his own church.

Coming to the actual cases in which we can trace the tendencies that

commence to manifest themselves, we find that in America the Anglican

Church is gaining ground, especially on the Pacific side, and that the

Catholics do not seem to meet with any such success as we should have

looked for; retaining, indeed, their hold over the Irish women and a

portion of the men, and having their historic French branches in

Louisiana and in Canada, but not, unless it be in the Cities of New York

and Philadelphia, making much way among the English.

Between San Francisco and Chicago, for religious purposes the most

cosmopolitan of cities, we have to draw distinctions. In the Pacific

city the disturbing cause is the presence of New Yorkers; in the

metropolis of the Northwestern States it is the dominance of New England

ideas: still, we shall find no two cities so free from local color, and

from the influence of race. The result of an examination is not

encouraging: in both cities there is much external show in the shape of

church attendance; in neither does religion strike its roots deeply into

the hearts of the citizens, except so far as it is alien and imported.

The Spiritualist and Unitarian churches are both of them in Chicago

extremely strong: they support newspapers and periodicals of their own,

and are led by men and women of remarkable ability, but they are not the

less Cambridge Unitarianism, Boston Spiritualism; there is nothing of

the Northwest about them. In San Francisco, on the other hand,

Anglicanism is prospering, but it is New York Episcopalianism, sustained

by immigrants and money from the East; in no sense is it a Californian

church.

Throughout America the multiplication of churches is rapid, but among

the native-born Americans, Supernaturalism is advancing with great

strides. The Shakers are strong in thought, the Spiritualists in wealth

and numbers; Communism gains ground, but not Polygamy--the Mormon is a

purely European church.

There is just now progressing in America a great movement, headed by the

“Radical Unitarians,” toward “free religion,” or church without creed.

The leaders deny that there is sufficient security for the spread of

religion in each man‘s individual action: they desire collective work by

all free-thinkers and liberal religionists in the direction of truth and

purity of life. Christianity is higher than dogma, we are told; there is

no way out of infinite multiplication of creeds but by their total

extirpation. Oneness of purpose and a common love for truth form the

members’ only tie. Elder Frederick Evans said to me: “All truth forms

part of Shakerism;” but these free religionists assure us that in all

truth consists their sole religion.

The distinctive feature of these American philosophical and religious

systems is their gigantic width: for instance, every human being who

admits that disembodied spirits may in any way hold intercourse with

dwellers upon earth, whatever else he may believe or disbelieve, is

claimed by the Spiritualists as a member of their church. They tell us

that by “Spiritualism they understand whatever bears relation to

spirit;” their system embraces all existence, brute, human, and divine;

in fact, “the real man is a spirit.” According to these ardent

proselytizers, every poet, every man with a grain of imagination in his

nature, is a “Spiritualist.” They claim Plato, Socrates, Milton,

Shakspeare, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Luther, Joseph Addison,

Melancthon, Paul, Stephen, the whole of the Hebrew prophets, Homer, and

John Wesley, among the members of their Church. They have lately

canonized new saints: St. Confucius, St. Theodore (Parker), St. Ralph

(Waldo Emerson), St. Emma (Hardinge), all figure in their calendar. It

is a noteworthy fact that the saints are mostly resident in New England.

The tracts published at the _Spiritual Clarion_ office, Auburn, New

York, put forward Spiritualism as a religion which is to stand toward

existing churches as did Christianity toward Judaism, and announce a new

dispensation to the peoples of the earth “who have sown their wild oats

in Christianity,” but they spell supersede with a “c.”

This strange religion has long since left behind the rappings and

table-turnings in which it took its birth. The secret of its success is

that it supplies to every man the satisfaction of the universal craving

for the supernatural, in any form in which he will receive it. The

Spiritualists claim two millions of active believers and five million

“favorers” in America.

The presence of a large German population is thought by some to have an

important bearing on the religious future of America, but the Germans

have hitherto kept themselves apart from the intellectual progress of

the nation. They, as a rule, withdraw from towns, and, retaining their

language and supporting local papers of their own, live out of the world

of American literature and politics; taking, however, at rare intervals,

a patriotic part in national affairs, as was notably the case at the

time of the late rebellion. Living thus by themselves, they have even

less influence upon American religious thought than have the Irish, who,

speaking the English tongue, and dwelling almost exclusively in towns,

are brought more into contact with the daily life of the republic. The

Germans in America are in the main pure materialists under a certain

show of deism, but hitherto there has been no alliance between them and

the powerful Chicago Radical Unitarians, difference of language having

thus far proved a bar to the formation of a league which would otherwise

have been inevitable.

On the whole, it would seem that for the moment religious prospects are

not bright; the tendency is rather toward intense and

unhealthily-developed feeling in the few, and subscription to some one

of the Episcopalian churches--Catholic, Anglican, or Methodist--among

the many, coupled with real indifference. Neither the tendency to unity

of creeds nor that toward infinite multiplication of beliefs has yet

made that progress which abstract speculation would have led us to

expect, but so far as we can judge from the few facts before us, there

is much likelihood that multiplication will in the future prove too

strong for unity.

After all there is not in America a greater wonder than the Englishman

himself, for it is to this continent that you must come to find him in

full possession of his powers. Two hundred and fifty millions of people

speak or are ruled by those who speak the English tongue, and inhabit a

third of the habitable globe; but, at the present rate of increase, in

sixty years there will be two hundred and fifty millions of Englishmen

dwelling in the United States alone. America has somewhat grown since

the time when it was gravely proposed to call her Alleghania, after a

chain of mountains which, looking from this western side, may be said to

skirt her eastern border, and the loftiest peaks of which are but half

the height of the very passes of the Rocky Mountains.

America is becoming not English merely, but world-embracing in the

variety of its type; and, as the English element has given language and

history to that land, America offers the English race the moral

directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions

and the English tongue. Through America, England is speaking to the

world.

PART II.

POLYNESIA.

CHAPTER I.

PITCAIRN ISLAND.

Panama is a picturesque time-worn Spanish city, that rises abruptly from

the sea in a confused pile of decaying bastions and decayed cathedrals,

while a dense jungle of mangrove and bamboo threatens to bury it in rich

greenery. The forest is filled with baboons and lizards of gigantic

size, and is gay with the bright plumage of the toucans and macaws,

while, within the walls, every housetop bears its living load of hideous

turkey-buzzards, foul-winged and bloodshot-eyed.

It was the rainy season (which here, indeed, lasts for three-quarters of

the year), and each day was an alternation of shower-bath, and

vapor-bath with sickly sun. On the first night of my stay, there was a

lunar rainbow, which I went on to the roof of the hotel to watch. The

misty sky was white with the reflected light of the hidden moon, which

was obscured by an inky cloud, that seemed a tunnel through the heavens.

In a few minutes I was driven from my post by the tropical rain.

At the railway station, I parted from my Californian friends, who were

bound for Aspinwall, and thence by steamer to New York. A stranger scene

it has not often been my fortune to behold. There cannot have been less

than a thousand natives, wearing enormous hats and little else, and

selling everything, from linen suits to the last French novel. A tame

jaguar, a pelican, parrots, monkeys, pearls, shells, flowers, green

cocoa-nuts and turtles, mangoes and wild dogs, were among the things for

sale. The station was guarded by the army of the Republic of New

Granada, consisting of five officers, a bugler, a drummer, and nineteen

privates. Six of the men wore red trowsers and dirty shirts for uniform;

the rest dressed as they pleased, which was generally in Adamic style.

Not even the officers had shoes; and of the twenty-one men, one was a

full-blooded Indian, some ten were negroes, and the remainder

nondescripts, but among them was of course an Irishman from Cork or

Kilkenny. After the train had started, the troops formed, and marched

briskly through the town, the drummer trotting along some twenty yards

before the company, French-fashion, and beating the _retraite_. The

French invalids from Acapulco, who were awaiting in Panama the arrival

of an Imperial frigate at Aspinwall, stood in the streets to see the New

Granadans pass, twirling their moustaches, and smiling grimly. One old

drum-major, lean and worn with fever, turned to me, and, shrugging his

shoulders, pointed to his side: the Granadans had their bayonets tied on

with string.

Whether Panama will continue to hold its present position as the “gate

of the Pacific” is somewhat doubtful: Nicaragua offers greater

advantages to the English, Tehuantepec to the American traders. The Gulf

of Panama and the ocean for a great distance to the westward from its

mouth are notorious for their freedom from all breezes; the gulf lies,

indeed, in the equatorial belt of calms, and sailing-vessels can never

make much use of the port of Panama. Aspinwall or Colon, on the Atlantic

side, has no true port whatever. As long, however, as the question is

merely one of railroad and steamship traffic, Panama may hold its own

against the other isthmus cities; but when the canal is cut, the

selected spot must be one that shall be beyond the reach of calms--in

Nicaragua or Mexico.

From Panama I sailed in one of the ships of the new Colonial Line, for

Wellington, in New Zealand--the longest steam-voyage in the world. Our

course was to be a “great circle” to Pitcairn Island, and another great

circle thence to Cape Palliser, near Wellington--a distance in all of

some 6600 miles; but our actual course was nearer 7000. When off the

Galapagos Islands, we met the cold southerly wind and water, known as

the Chilian current, and crossed the equator in a breeze which forced us

all to wear great-coats, and to dream that, instead of entering the

southern hemisphere, we had come by mistake within the arctic circle.

After traversing lonely and hitherto unknown seas and looking in vain

for a new guano island, on the sixteenth day we worked out the ship‘s

position at noon with more than usual care, if that were possible, and

found that in four hours we ought to be at Pitcairn Island. At half-past

two o‘clock, land was sighted right ahead; and by four o‘clock, we were

in the bay, such as it is, at Pitcairn.

Although at sea there was a calm, the surf from the ground-swell beat

heavily upon the shore, and we were faint to content ourselves with the

view of the island from our decks. It consists of a single volcanic

peak, hung with an arras of green creeping plants, passion-flowers, and

trumpet-vines. As for the people, they came off to us dancing over the

seas in their canoes, and bringing us green oranges and bananas, while a

huge Union Jack was run up on their flagstaff by those who remained on

shore.

As the first man came on deck, he rushed to the captain, and, shaking

hands violently, cried, in pure English, entirely free from accent,

“How do you do, captain? How‘s Victoria?” There was no disrespect in the

omission of the title “Queen;” the question seemed to come from the

heart. The bright-eyed lads, Adams and Young, descendants of the Bounty

mutineers, who had been the first to climb our sides, announced the

coming of Moses Young, the “magistrate” of the isle, who presently

boarded us in state. He was a grave and gentlemanly man, English in

appearance, but somewhat slightly built, as were, indeed, the lads. The

magistrate came off to lay before the captain the facts relating to a

feud which exists between two parties of the islanders, and upon which

they require arbitration. He had been under the impression that we were

a man-of-war, as we had fired two guns on entering the bay, and being

received by our officers, who wore the cap of the Naval Reserve, he

continued in the belief till the captain explained what the “Rakaia”

was, and why she had called at Pitcairn.

The case which the captain was to have heard judicially was laid before

us for our advice while the flues of the ship were being cleaned. When

the British government removed the Pitcairn Islanders to Norfolk Island,

no return to the old home was contemplated, but the indolent half-castes

found the task of keeping the Norfolk Island convict roads in good

repair one heavier than they cared to perform, and fifty-two of them

have lately come back to Pitcairn. A widow who returned with the others

claims a third of the whole island as having been the property of her

late husband, and is supported in her demand by half the islanders,

while Moses Young and the remainder of the people admit the facts, but

assert that the desertion of the island was complete, and operated as an

entire abandonment of titles, which the reoccupation cannot revive. The

success of the woman‘s claim, they say, would be the destruction of the

prosperity of Pitcairn.

The case would be an extremely curious one if it had to be decided upon

legal grounds, for it would raise complicated questions both on the

nature of British citizenship and the character of the “occupation”

title; but it is probable that the islanders will abide by the decision

of the Governor of New South Wales, to which colony they consider

themselves in some degree attached.

When we had drawn up a case to be submitted to Sir John Young, at

Sydney, our captain made a commercial treaty with the magistrate, who

agreed to supply the ships of the new line, whenever daylight allowed

them to call at Pitcairn, with oranges, bananas, ducks, and fowls, for

which he was to receive cloth and tobacco in exchange, tobacco being the

money of the Polynesian Archipelago. Mr. Young told us that his people

had thirty sheep, which were owned by each of the families in turn, the

household taking care of them, and receiving the profits for one year.

Water, he said, sometimes falls short in the island, but they then make

use of the juice of the green cocoa-nut. Their school is excellent; all

the children can read and write, and in the election of magistrates they

have female suffrage.

When we went on deck again to talk to the younger men, Adams asked us a

new question: “Have you a _Sunday at Home_, or a _British Workman_?” Our

books and papers having been ransacked, Moses Young prepared to leave

the ship, taking with him presents from the stores. Besides the cloth,

tobacco, hats, and linen, there was a bottle of brandy; given for

medicine, as the islanders are strict teetotalers. While Young held the

bottle in his hand, afraid to trust the lads with it, Adams read the

label and cried out, “Brandy? How much for a dose?.... Oh, yes! all

right--I know: it‘s good for the women!” When they at last left the

ship‘s side, one of the canoes was filled with a crinoline and blue silk

dress for Mrs. Young, and another with a red and brown tartan for Mrs.

Adams, both given by lady passengers, while the lads went ashore in

dust-coats and smoking-caps.

Now that the French, with their singular habit of everywhere annexing

countries which other colonizing nations have rejected, are rapidly

occupying all the Polynesian groups except the only ones that are of

value--namely, the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand--Pitcairn becomes of

some interest as a solitary British post on the very border of the

French dominions, and it has for us the stronger claim to notice which

is raised by the fact that it has figured for the last few years on the

wrong side of our British budget.

As we stood out from the bay into the lonely seas, the island peak

showed a black outline against a pale-green sky, but in the west the

heavy clouds that in the Pacific never fail to cumber the horizon were

glowing with a crimson cast by the now-set sun, and the dancing wavelets

were tinted with reflected hues.

The “scarlet shafts,” which poets have ascribed to the tropical sunrise,

are common at sunset in the South Pacific. Almost every night the

declining sun, sinking behind the clouds, throws rays across the

sky--not yellow, as in Europe and America, but red or rosy pink. On the

night after leaving Pitcairn, I saw a still grander effect of light and

color. The sun had set, and in the west the clear greenish sky was

hidden by pitch-black thunder-clouds. Through these were crimson caves.

On the twenty-ninth day of our voyage, we sighted the frowning cliffs of

Palliser, where the bold bluff, coming sheer down three thousand feet,

receives the full shock of the South Seas--a fitting introduction to the

grand scenery of New Zealand; and within a few hours we were running up

the great sea-lake of Port Nicholson toward long lines of steamers at a

wharf, behind which were the cottages of Wellington, the capital.

To me, coming from San Francisco and the Nevadan towns, Wellington

appeared very English and extremely quiet; the town is sunny and still,

but with a holiday look; indeed, I could not help fancying that it was

Sunday. A certain haziness as to what was the day of the week prevailed

among the passengers and crew, for we had arrived upon our Wednesday,

the New Zealand Thursday, and so, without losing an hour, lost a day,

which, unless by going round the world the other way, can never be

regained. The bright colors of the painted wooden houses, the clear air,

the rose-beds, and the emerald-green grass, are the true cause of the

holiday look of the New Zealand towns, and Wellington is the gayest of

them all; for, owing to the frequency of earthquakes, the townsfolk are

not allowed to build in brick or stone. The natives say that once in

every month “Ruaimoko turns himself,” and sad things follow to the

shaken earth.

It was now November, the New Zealand spring, and the outskirts of

Wellington were gay with the cherry-trees in full fruiting and English

dog-roses in full bloom, while on every road-side bank the gorse blazed

in its coat of yellow: there was, too, to me, a singular charm in the

bright green turf, after the tawny grass of California.

Without making a long halt, I started for the South Island, first

steaming across Cook‘s Straits, and up Queen Charlotte Sound to Picton,

and then through the French Pass--a narrow passage filled with fearful

whirlpools--to Nelson, a gemlike little Cornish village. After a day‘s

“cattle-branding” with an old college friend at his farm in the valley

of the Maitai, I sailed again for the south, laying for a night in

Massacre Bay, to avoid the worst of a tremendous gale, and then coasting

down to The Buller and Hokitika--the new gold-fields of the colonies.

CHAPTER II.

HOKITIKA.

Placed in the very track of storms, and open to the sweep of rolling

seas from every quarter, exposed to waves that run from pole to pole, or

from South Africa, to Cape Horn, the shores of New Zealand are famed for

swell and surf, and her western rivers for the danger of their bars.

Insurances at Melbourne are five times as high for the voyage to

Hokitika as for the longer cruise to Brisbane.

In our little steamer of a hundred tons, built to cross the bars, we had

reached the mouth of the Hokitika River soon after dark, but lay all

night some ten miles to the southwest of the port. As we steamed in the

early morning from our anchorage, there rose up on the east the finest

sunrise view on which it has been my fortune to set eyes.

[Illustration: NEW ZEALAND]

A hundred miles of the Southern Alps stood out upon a pale-blue sky in

curves of a gloomy white that were just beginning to blush with pink,

but ended to the southward in a cone of fire that stood up from the

ocean: it was the snow-dome of Mount Cook struck by the rising sun. The

evergreen bush, flaming with the crimson of the rata-blooms, hung upon

the mountain-side, and covered the plain to the very margin of the

narrow sands with a dense jungle. It was one of those sights that haunt

men for years, like the eyes of Mary in Bellini‘s Milan picture.

On the bar, three ranks of waves appeared to stand fixed in walls of

surf. These huge rollers are sad destroyers of the New Zealand coasting

ships: a steamer was lost here a week before my visit, and the

harbormaster‘s whale-boat dashed in pieces, and two men drowned.

Lashing everything that was on deck, and battening down the hatches in

case we should ground in crossing, we prepared to run the gauntlet. The

steamers often ground for an instant while in the trough between the

waves, and the second sea, pooping them, sweeps them from end to end,

but carries them into the still water. Watching our time, we were borne

on a great rolling white-capped wave into the quiet lakelet that forms

the harbor, just as the sun, coming slowly up behind the range, was

firing the Alps from north to south; but it was not till we had lain

some minutes at the wharf that the sun rose to us poor mortals of the

sea and plain. Hokitika Bay is strangely like the lower portion of the

Lago Maggiore, but Mount Rosa is inferior to Mount Cook.

As I walked up from the quay to the town, looking for the “Empire”

Hotel, which I had heard was the best in Hokitika, I spied a boy

carrying a bundle of some newspaper. It was the early edition for the

up-country coaches, but I asked if he could spare me a copy. He put one

into my hand. “How much?” I asked. “A snapper.” “A snapper?” “Ay--a

tizzy.” Understanding this more familiar term, I gave him a shilling.

Instead of “change,” he cocked up his knee, slapt the shilling down on

it, and said “Cry!” I accordingly cried “Woman!” and won, he loyally

returning the coin, and walking off minus a paper.

When I reached that particular gin-palace which was known as _the_

hotel, I found that all the rooms were occupied, but that I could, if I

pleased, lie down on a deal side-table in the billiard-room. In our

voyage down the coast from Nelson, we had brought for The Buller and for

Hokitika a cabin full of cut flowers for bouquets, of which the diggers

are extremely fond. The fact was pretty enough: the store set upon a

single rose--“an English rosebud”--culled from a plant that had been

brought from the Old Country in a clipper ship, was still more touching,

but the flowers made sleep below impossible, and it had been blowing too

hard for me to sleep on deck, so that I was glad to lie down upon my

table for an hour‘s rest. The boards were rough and full of cracks, and

I began to dream that, walking on the landing-stage, I ran against a

man, who drew his revolver upon me. In wrenching it from him, I hurt my

hand in the lock, and woke to find my fingers pinched in one of the

chinks of the long table. Despairing of further sleep, I started to walk

through Hokitika, and to explore the “clearings” which the settlers are

making in the bush.

At Pakihi and The Buller, I had already seen the places to which the

latest gold-digging “rush” had taken place, with the result of planting

there some thousands of men with nothing to eat but gold--for diggers,

however shrewd, fall an easy prey to those who tell them of spots where

gold may be had for the digging, and never stop to think how they shall

live. No attempt is at present made to grow even vegetables for the

diggers’ food: every one is engrossed in the search for gold. It is true

that the dense jungle is being driven back from the diggers’ camps by

fire and sword, but the clearing is only made to give room for tents and

houses. At The Buller, I had found the forest, which comes down at

present to the water‘s edge, and crowds upon the twenty shanties and

hundred tents and boweries which form the town, smoking with fires on

every side, and the parrots chattering with fright. The fires

obstinately refused to spread, but the tall feathery trees were falling

fast under the axes of some hundred diggers, who seemed not to have much

romantic sympathy for the sufferings of the tree-ferns they had

uprooted, or of the passion-flowers they were tearing from the

evergreens they had embraced.

The soil about The Fox, The Buller, The Okitiki, and the other

west-coast rivers on which gold is found, is a black leaf-mould of

extraordinary depth and richness; but in New Zealand, as in America, the

poor lands are first occupied by the settlers, because the fat soils

will pay for the clearing only when there is already a considerable

population on the land. On this west coast it rains nearly all the year,

and vegetation has such power, that “rainy Hokitika” must long continue

to be fed from Christchurch and from Nelson, for it is as hard to keep

the land clear as it is at the first to clear it.

The profits realized upon ventures from Nelson to the Gold Coast are

enormous; nothing less than fifty per cent. will compensate the owners

for losses on the bars. The first cattle imported from Nelson to The

Buller fetched at the latter place double the price they had cost only

two days earlier. One result of this maritime usury that was told me by

the steward of the steamer in which I came down from Nelson is worth

recording for the benefit of the Economists. They had on board, he said,

a stock of spirits, sufficient for several trips, but they altered their

prices according to locality; from Nelson to The Buller, they charged

6_d_. a drink, but, once in the river, the price rose to 1_s_., at which

it remained until the ship left port upon her return to Nelson, when it

fell again to 6_d_. A drover coming down in charge of cattle was a great

friend of this steward, and the latter confirmed the story which he had

told me by waking the drover when we were off The Buller bar: “Say,

mister, if you want a drink, you‘d better take it. It‘ll be shilling

drinks in five minutes.”

The Hokitikians flatter themselves that their city is the “most rising

place” on earth, and it must be confessed that if population alone is to

be regarded, the rapidity of its growth has been amazing. At the time of

my visit, one year and a half had passed since the settlement was formed

by a few diggers, and it already had a permanent population of ten

thousand, while no less than sixty thousand diggers and their friends

claimed it for their headquarters. San Francisco itself did not rise so

fast, Melbourne not much faster; but Hokitika, it must be remembered, is

not only a gold field port, but itself upon the gold field. It is San

Francisco and Placerville in one--Ballarat and Melbourne.

Inferior in its banks and theaters to Virginia City, or even Austin,

there is one point in which Hokitika surpasses every American mining

town that I have seen--the goodness, namely, of its roads. Working upon

them in the bright morning sun which this day graced “rainy Hokitika”

with its presence, were a gang of diggers and sailors, dressed in the

clothes which every one must wear in a digging town, unless he wishes

to be stared at by passers-by. Even sailors on shore “for a run” here

wear cord breeches and high tight-fitting boots, often armed with spurs,

though, as there are no horses except those of the Gold Coast Police,

they cannot enjoy much riding. The gang working on the roads were like

the people I met about the town--rough, but not ill-looking fellows. To

my astonishment I saw, conspicuous among their red shirts and “jumpers,”

the blue and white uniform of the mounted police; and from the way in

which the constables handled their loaded rifles, I came to the

conclusion that the road-menders must be a gang of prisoners. On

inquiry, I found that all the New Zealand “convicts,” including under

this sweeping title men convicted for mere petty offenses, and sentenced

to hard labor for a month, are made to do good practical work upon the

roads: so much resistance to the police, so much new road made or old

road mended. I was reminded of the Missourian practice of setting

prisoners to dig out the stumps that cumber the streets of the younger

towns: the sentence on a man for being drunk is said to be that he pull

up a black walnut stump; drunk and disorderly, a large buck-eye;

assaulting the sheriff, a tough old hickory root, and so on.

The hair and beard of the short-sentence “convicts” in New Zealand is

never cut, and there is nothing hang-dog in their looks; but their faces

are often bright, and even happy. These cheerful prisoners are for the

most part “runners”--sailors who have broken their agreements in order

to get upon the diggings, and who bear their punishment philosophically,

with the hope of future “finds” before them.

When the great rush to Melbourne occurred in 1848, ships by the hundred

were left in the Yarra without a single hand to navigate them. Nuggets

in the hand would not tempt sailors away from the hunt after the nuggets

in the bush. Ships left Hobson‘s Bay for Chili with half a dozen hands;

and in one case that came within my knowledge, a captain, his mate, and

three Maories took a brig across the Pacific to San Francisco.

As the morning wore on, I came near seeing something of more serious

crime than that for which these “runners” were convicted. “Sticking-up,”

as highway robbery is called in the colonies, has always been common in

Australia and New Zealand, but of late the bush-rangers, deserting their

old tactics, have commenced to murder as well as rob. In three months of

1866, no less than fifty or sixty murders took place in the South Island

of New Zealand, all of them committed, it was believed, by a gang known

as “The Thugs.” Mr. George Dobson, the government surveyor, was murdered

near Hokitika in May, but it was not till November that the gang was

broken up by the police and volunteers. Levy, Kelly, and Burgess, three

of the most notorious of the villains, were on their trial at Hokitika

while I was there, and Sullivan, also a member of the band, who had been

taken at Nelson, had volunteered to give evidence against them. Sullivan

was to come by steamer from the North, without touching at The Buller or

The Grey; and when the ship was signaled, the excitement of the

population became considerable, the diggers asserting that Sullivan was

not only the basest, but the most guilty of all the gang. As the vessel

ran across the bar and into the bay, the police were marched down to the

landing-place, and a yelling crowd surrounded them, threatening to lynch

the informer. When the steamer came alongside the wharf, Sullivan was

not to be seen, and it was soon discovered that he had been landed in a

whale-boat upon the outer beach. Off rushed the crowd to intercept the

party in the town; but they found the jail gates already shut and

barred.

It was hard to say whether it was for Thuggism or for turning Queen‘s

evidence that Sullivan was to be lynched: crime is looked at here as

leniently as it is in Texas. I once met a man who had been a coroner at

one of the digging towns, who, talking of “old times,” said, quietly

enough: “Oh, yes, plenty of work; we used to _make_ a good deal of it.

You see I was paid by fees, so I used generally to manage to hold four

or five inquests on each body. Awful rogues my assistants were: I

shouldn‘t like to have some of those men‘s sins to answer for.”

The Gold Coast Police Force, which has been formed to put a stop to

Thuggism and bush-ranging, is a splendid body of cavalry, about which

many good stories are told. One digger said to me: “Seen our policemen?

We don‘t have no _younger sons_ of British peers among ’em.” Another

account says that none but members of the older English universities are

admitted to the force.

There are here, upon the diggings, many military men and university

graduates, who generally retain their polish of manner, though outwardly

they are often the roughest of the rough. Some of them tell strange

stories. One Cambridge man, who was acting as a post-office clerk (not

at Hokitika), told me that in 1862, shortly after taking his degree, he

went out to British Columbia to settle upon land. He soon spent his

capital at billiards in Victoria City, and went as a digger to the

Frazer River. There he made a “pile,” which he gambled away on his road

back, and he struggled through the winter of 1863-4 by shooting and

selling game. In 1864 he was attached as a hunter to the Vancouver‘s

Exploring Expedition, and in 1865 started with a small sum of money for

Australia. He was wrecked, lost all he had, and was forced to work his

passage down to Melbourne. From there he went into South Australia as

the driver of a reaping machine, and was finally, through the efforts of

his friends in England, appointed to a post-office clerkship in New

Zealand, which colony he intended to quit for California or Chili. This

was not the only man of education whom I myself found upon the diggings,

as I met with a Christchurch man, who, however, had left Oxford without

a degree, actually working as a digger in a surface mine.

In the outskirts of Hokitika, I came upon a palpable Life Guardsman,

cooking for a roadside station, with his smock worn like a soldier‘s

tunic, and his cap stuck on one ear in Windsor fashion. A “squatter”

from near Christchurch, who was at The Buller, selling sheep, told me

that he had an ex-captain in the Guards at work for weekly wages on his

“sheep-run,” and that a neighbor had a lieutenant of lancers

rail-splitting at his “station.”

Neither the habits nor the morals of this strange community are of the

best. You never see a drunken man, but drinking is apparently the chief

occupation of that portion of the town population which is not actually

employed in digging. The mail-coaches which run across the island on the

great new road, and along the sands to the other mining settlements,

have singularly short stages, made so, it would seem, for the benefit of

the keepers of the “saloons,” for at every halt one or other of the

passengers is expected to “shout,” or “stand,” as it would be called at

home, “drinks all round.” “What‘ll yer shout?” is the only question;

and want of coined money need be no hinderance, for “gold-dust is taken

at the bar.” One of the favorite amusements of the diggers at Pakihi, on

the days when the store-schooner arrives from Nelson, is to fill a

bucket with champagne, and drink till they feel “comfortable.” This

done, they seat themselves in the road, with their feet on the

window-sill of the shanty, and, calling to the first passer, ask him to

drink from the bucket. If he consents--good: if not, up they jump, and

duck his head in the wine, which remains for the next comer.

When I left Hokitika, it was by the new road, 170 miles in length, which

crosses the Alps and the island, and connects Christchurch, the capital

of Canterbury, with the western parts of the province. The bush between

the sea and mountains is extremely lovely. The highway is “corduroyed”

with trunks of the tree-fern, and, in the swamps, the sleepers have

commenced to grow at each end, so that a close-set double row of young

tree-ferns is rising along portions of the road. The bush is densely

matted with an undergrowth of supple-jack and all kinds of creepers, but

here and there one finds a grove of tree-ferns twenty feet in height,

and grown so thickly as to prevent the existence of underwood and ground

plants.

The peculiarity which makes the New Zealand west-coast scenery the most

beautiful in the world to those who like more green than California has

to show, is that here alone can you find semi-tropical vegetation

growing close up to the eternal snows. The latitude and the great

moisture of the climate bring the long glaciers very low into the

valleys; and the absence of all true winter, coupled with the rain-fall,

causes the growth of palmlike ferns upon the ice-river‘s very edge. The

glaciers of Mount Cook are the longest in the world, except those at

the sources of the Indus, but close about them have been found

tree-ferns of thirty and forty feet in height. It is not till you enter

the mountains that you escape the moisture of the coast, and quit for

the scenery of the Alps the scenery of fairy-land.

Bumping and tumbling in the mail-cart through the rushing blue-gray

waters of the Taramakao, I found myself within the mountains of the

Snowy Range. In the Otira Gorge, also know as Arthur‘s Pass--from Arthur

Dobson, brother to the surveyor murdered by the Thugs--six small

glaciers were in sight at once. The Rocky Mountains opposite to Denver

are loftier and not less snowy than the New Zealand Alps, but in the

Rockies there are no glaciers south of about 50° N.; while in New

Zealand--a winterless country--they are common at eight degrees nearer

to the line. The varying amount of moisture has doubtless caused this

difference.

As we journeyed through the pass, there was one grand view--and only

one: the glimpse of the ravine to the eastward of Mount Rollestone,

caught from the desert shore of Lake Misery--a tarn near the “divide” of

waters. About its banks there grows a plant, unknown, they say, except

at this lonely spot--the Rockwood lily--a bushy plant, with a round,

polished, concave leaf, and a cup-shaped flower of virgin white, that

seems to take its tint from the encircling snows.

In the evening, we had a view that for gloomy grandeur cannot well be

matched--that from near Bealey township, where we struck the Waimakiriri

Valley. The river bed is half a mile in width, the stream itself not

more than ten yards across, but, like all New Zealand rivers, subjects

to freshets, which fill its bed to a great depth with a surging, foaming

flood. Some of the victims of the Waimakiriri are buried alongside the

road. Dark evergreen bush shuts in the river bed, and is topped on the

one side by dreary frozen peaks, and on the other by still gloomier

mountains of bare rock.

Our road, next morning, from The Cass, where we had spent the night, lay

through the eastern foot-hills and down to Canterbury Plains by way of

Porter‘s Pass--a narrow track on the top of a tremendous precipice, but

soon to be changed for a road cut along its face. The plains are one

great sheep-run, open, almost flat, and upon which you lose all sense of

size. At the mountain-foot they are covered with tall, coarse, native

grass, and are dry, like the Kansas prairie; about Christchurch, the

English clover and English grasses have usurped the soil, and all is

fresh and green.

New Zealand is at present divided into nine semi-independent provinces,

of which three are large and powerful, and the remainder comparatively

small and poor. Six of the nine are true States, having each its history

as an independent settlement; the remaining three are creations of the

Federal government or of the crown.

These are not the only difficulties in the way of New Zealand statesmen,

for the provinces themselves are far from being homogeneous units. Two

of the wealthiest of all the States, which were settled as colonies with

a religious tinge--Otago, Presbyterian; and Canterbury,

Episcopalian--have been blessed or cursed with the presence of a vast

horde of diggers, of no particular religion, and free from any reverence

for things established. Canterbury Province is not only politically

divided against itself, but geographically split in twain by the Snowy

Range, and the diggers hold the west-coast bush, the old settlers the

east-coast plain. East and west, each cries out that the other side is

robbing it. The Christchurch people say that their money is being spent

on Westland, and the Westland diggers cry out against the foppery and

aristocratic pretense of Christchurch. A division of the province seems

inevitable, unless, indeed, the “Centralists” gain the day, and bring

about either a closer union of the whole of the provinces, coupled with

a grant of local self-government to their subdivisions, or else the

entire destruction of the provincial system.

The division into provinces was at one time necessary, from the fact

that the settlements were historically distinct, and physically cut off

from each other by the impenetrability of the bush and the absence of

all roads; but the barriers are now surmounted, and no sufficient reason

can be found for keeping up ten cabinets and ten legislatures for a

population of only 200,000 souls. Such is the costliness of the

provincial system and of Maori wars, that the taxation of the New

Zealanders is nine times as heavy as that of their brother colonists in

Canada.

It is not probable that so costly and so inefficient a system of

government as that which now obtains in New Zealand can long continue to

exist. It is not only dear and bad, but dangerous in addition; and

during my visit to Port Chalmers, the province of Otago was loudly

threatening secession. Like all other federal constitutions, that of New

Zealand fails to provide a sufficiently strong central power to meet a

divergence of interests between the several States. The system which

failed in Greece, which failed in Germany, which failed in America, has

failed here in the antipodes; and it may be said that, in these days of

improved communications, wherever federation is possible, a still

closer union is at least as likely to prove lasting.

New Zealand suffers, not only by the artificial division into provinces,

but also by the physical division of the country into two great islands,

too far apart to be ever thoroughly homogeneous, too near together to be

wholly independent of each other. The difficulty has been hitherto

increased by the existence in the North of a powerful and warlike native

race, all but extinct in the South Island. Not only have the Southern

people no native wars, but they have no native claimants from whom every

acre for the settler must be bought, and they naturally decline to

submit to ruinous taxation to purchase Parewanui from, or to defend

Taranaki against, the Maories. Having been thwarted by the Home

government in the agitation for the “separation” of the islands, the

Southern people now aim at “Ultra-Provincialism,” declaring for a system

under which the provinces would virtually be independent colonies,

connected only by a confederation of the loosest kind.

The jealousies of the great towns, here as in Italy, have much bearing

upon the political situation. Auckland is for separation, because in

that event it would of necessity become the seat of the government of

the North Island. In the South, Christchurch and Dunedin have similar

claims; and each of them, ignoring the other, begs for separation in the

hope of becoming the Southern capital. Wellington and Nelson alone are

for the continuance of the federation--Wellington because it is already

the capital, and Nelson because it is intriguing to supplant its

neighbor. Although the difficulties of the moment mainly arise out of

the war expenditure, and will terminate with the extinction of the Maori

race, her geographical shape almost forbids us to hope that New Zealand

will ever form a single country under a strong central government.

To obtain an adequate idea of the difficulty of his task, a new

governor, on landing in New Zealand, could not do better than cross the

Southern Island. On the west side of the mountains he would find a

restless digger-democracy, likely to be succeeded in the future by small

manufacturers, and spade-farmers growing root-crops upon small holdings

of fertile loam; on the east, gentlemen sheep-farmers, holding their

twenty thousand acres each; supporters by their position of the existing

state of things, or of an aristocratic republic, in which men of their

own caste would rule.

Christchurch--Episcopalian, dignified--the first settlement in the

province, and still the capital, affects to despise Hokitika, already

more wealthy and more populous. Christchurch imports English rooks to

caw in the elm-trees of her cathedral close; Hokitika imports men.

Christchurch has not fallen away from her traditions: every street is

named from an English bishopric, and the society is that of an English

country town.

Returning northward, along the coast, in the shade of the cold and

gloomy mountains of the Kaikoura Range, I found at Wellington two

invitations awaiting me to be present at great gatherings of the native

tribes.

The next day I started for the Manawatu River and Parewanui Pah.

CHAPTER III.

POLYNESIANS.

The name “Maori” is said to mean “native,” but the boast on the part of

the Maori race contained in the title “Natives of the Soil” is one which

conflicts with their traditions. These make them out to be mere

interlopers--Tahitians, they themselves say--who, within historic ages,

sailed down island by island in their war canoes, massacring the

inhabitants, and, finally landing in New Zealand, found a numerous horde

of blacks of the Australian race living in the forests of the South

Island. Favored by a year of exceptional drought, they set fire to the

woods, and burnt to the last man, or drove into the sea the aboriginal

possessors of the soil. Some ethnologists believe that this account is

in the main correct, but hold that the Maori race is Malay, and not

originally Tahitian: others have tried to show that the conflict between

blacks and browns was not confined to these two islands, but raged

throughout the whole of Polynesia; and that it was terminated in New

Zealand itself, not by the destruction of the blacks, but by the

amalgamation of the opposing races.

The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to New Zealand. The

accounts of some of the migrations are circumstantial in the extreme,

and describe the first planting of the yams, the astonishment of the

people at the new flowers and trees of the islands, and many such

details of the landing. The names of the chiefs and of the canoes are

given in a sort of “catalogue of ships,” and the wars of the settlers

are narrated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common to the

legends of all lands.

The canoe fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth century it is

believed, and the people landed chanting a chorus-speech, which is still

preserved:

“We come at last to this fair land--a resting-place; Spirit of the

Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our hearts for food.”

That the Maories are Polynesians there can be no doubt: a bird with them

is “manu,” a fish “ika” (the Greek ἱχθυς, become with

the digamma “piscis” and “poisson;” and connected with “fisch,” and

“fish”), as they are throughout the Malayan archipelago and Polynesian

isles; the Maori “atua,” a god, is the “hotua” of the Friendly

Islanders; the “wahrés,” or native huts, are identical in all the

islands; the names of the chief deities are the same throughout

Polynesia, and the practice of tattooing, the custom of carving

grotesque squatting figures on tombs, canoes, and “pahs,” and that of

tabooing things, places, times, and persons, prevail from Hawaii to

Stewart‘s Land, though not everywhere so strictly read as in the Tonga

Isles, where the very ducks are muzzled to keep them from disturbing by

their quacking the sacred stillness of “tapú time.”

Polynesian traditions mostly point to the Malay peninsula as the cradle

of the race, and the personal resemblance of the Maories to the Malays

is very strong, except in the setting of the eyes; while the figures on

the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs have eyes more oblique than are

now found among the Maori people. Strangely enough, the New Zealand

“pah” is identical with the Burmese “stockade,” but the word “pah”

stands both for the palisade and for the village of wahrés which it

contains. The Polynesian and Malay tongues have not much in common; but

that variations of language sufficiently great to leave no apparent tie

spring up in a few centuries, cannot be denied by us who know for

certain that “visible” and “optician” come from a common root, and can

trace the steps through which “jour” is derived from “dies.”

The tradition of the Polynesians is that they came from Paradise, which

they place, in the southern islands, to the north; in the northern

islands, to the westward. This legend indicates a migration from Asia to

the northern islands, and thence southward to New Zealand, and accounts

for the non-colonization of Australia by the Polynesians. The sea

between New Zealand, and Australia is too rough and wide to be traversed

by canoes, and the wind-chart shows that the track of the Malays must

have been eastward along the equatorial belt of calms, and then back to

the southwest with the southeast trade-wind right abeam to their canoes.

The wanderings of the Polynesian race were, probably, not confined to

the Pacific. Ethnology is as yet in its infancy: we know nothing of the

Tudas of the Neilgherries; we ask in vain who are the Gonds; we are in

doubt about the Japanese; we are lost in perplexity as to who we may be

ourselves; but there is at least as much ground for the statement that

the Red Indians are Malays as for the assertion that we are Saxons.

The resemblances between the Red Indians and the Pacific Islanders are

innumerable. Strachey‘s account of the Indians of Virginia, written in

1612, needs but a change in the names to fit the Maories: Powhátan‘s

house is that of William Thompson. Cannibalism prevailed in Brazil and

along the Pacific coast of North America at the time of their discovery,

and even the Indians of Chili ate many an early navigator; the

aborigines of Vancouver Island are tattooed; their canoes resemble those

of the Malays, and the mode of paddling is the same from New Zealand to

Hudson‘s Bay--from Florida to Singapore. Jade ornaments of the shape of

the Maori “Heitiki” (the charm worn about the neck) have been found by

the French in Guadaloupe; the giant masonry of Central America is

identical with that of Cambodia and Siam. Small-legged squatting

figures, like those of the idols of China and Japan, not only surmount

the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs, but are found eastward to

Honduras, westward to Burmah, to Tartary, and to Ceylon. The fiber mats,

common to Polynesia and Red India, are unknown to savages elsewhere, and

the feather headdresses of the Maories are almost identical with those

of the Delawares or Hurons.

In the Indians of America and of Polynesia there is the same hatred of

continued toil, and the same readiness to engage in violent exertion for

a time. Superstition and witchcraft are common to all untaught peoples,

but in the Malays and red men they take similar shapes; and the Indians

of Mexico and Peru had, like all the Polynesians, a sacred language,

understood only by the priests. The American altars were one with the

temples of the Pacific, and were not confined to Mexico, for they form

the “mounds” of Ohio and Illinois. There is great likeness between the

legend of Maui, the Maori hero, and that of Hiawatha, especially in the

history of how the sun was noosed, and made to move more slowly through

the skies, so as to give men long days for toil. The resemblance of the

Maori “runanga,” or assembly for debate, to the Indian council is

extremely close, and throughout America and Polynesia a singular

blending of poetry and ferocity is characteristic of the Malays.

In color, the Indians and Polynesians are not alike; but color does not

seem to be, ethnologically speaking, of much account. The Hindoos of

Calcutta have the same features as those of Delhi; but the former are

black, the latter brown, or, if high-caste men, almost white. Exposure

to sun, in a damp, hot climate, seems to blacken every race that it does

not destroy. The races that it will finally destroy, tropical heat first

whitens. The English planters of Mississippi and Florida are extremely

dark, yet there is not a suspicion of black blood in their veins: it is

the white blood of the slaves to which the Abolitionists refer in their

philippics. The Jews at Bombay and Aden are of a deep brown; in Morocco

they are swarthy; in England, nearly white.

Religious rites and social customs outlast both physical type and

language; but even were it otherwise, there is great resemblance in

build and feature between the Polynesians and many of the “Red-Indian”

tribes. The aboriginal people of New York State are described by the

early navigators not as tall, grave, hooked-nose men, but as copper

colored, pleasant looking, and with quick, shrewd eyes; and the Mexican

Indian bears more likeness to the Sandwich Islander than to the Delaware

or Cherokee.

In reaching South America, there were no distances to be overcome such

as to present insurmountable difficulties to the Malays. Their canoes

have frequently, within the years that we have had our missionary

stations in the islands, made involuntary voyages of six or seven

hundred miles. A Western editor has said of Columbus that he deserves no

praise for discovering America, as it is so large that he could not well

have missed it; but Easter Island is so small, that the chances must

have been thousands to one against its being reached by canoes sailing

even from the nearest land; yet it is an ascertained fact that Easter

Island was peopled by the Polynesians. Whatever drove canoes to Easter

Island would have driven them from the island to Chili and Peru. The

Polynesian Malays would sometimes be taken out to sea by sudden storms,

by war, by hunger, by love of change. In war time, whole tribes have,

within historic days, been clapped into their boats, and sent to sea by

a merciful conqueror who had dined: this occurs, however, only when the

market is already surfeited with human joints.

In sailing from America to New Zealand, we met strong westerly winds

before we had gone half way across the seas, and, south of the

trade-wind region, these blow constantly to within a short distance of

the American coast, where they are lost upon the edge of the Chilian

current. A canoe blown off from the southern islands, and running

steadily before the wind, would be cast on the Peruvian coast near

Quito.

When Columbus landed in the Atlantic islands, he was, perhaps, not

mistaken in his belief that it was “The Indies” that he had found--an

India peopled by the Malay race, till lately the most widely-scattered

of all the nations of the world, but one which the English seem destined

to supplant.

The Maories, without doubt, were originally Malays, emigrants from the

winterless climate of the Malay peninsula and Polynesian archipelago;

and, although the northernmost portions of New Zealand suited them not

ill, the cold winters of the South Island prevented the spread of the

bands they planted there. At all times it has been remarked by

ethnologists and acclimatizers that it is easier by far to carry men and

beasts from the poles toward the tropics than from the tropics to the

colder regions. The Malays, in coming to New Zealand, unknowingly broke

one of Nature‘s laws, and their descendants are paying the penalty in

extinction.

CHAPTER IV.

PAREWANUI PAH.

“Here is Pétatoné.

This is the 10th of December;

The sun shines, and the birds sing;

Clear is the water in rivers and streams;

Bright is the sky, and the sun is high in the air.

This is the 10th of December;

But where is the money?

Three years has this matter in many debates been discussed,

And here at last is Pétatoné;

But where is the money?”

A band of Maori women, slowly chanting in a high, strained key, stood at

the gate of a pah, and met with this song a few Englishmen who were

driving rapidly on to their land.

Our track lay through a swamp of the New Zealand flax. Huge swordlike

leaves and giant flower-stalks all but hid from view the Maori

stockades. To the left was a village of low wahrés, fenced round with a

double row of lofty posts, carved with rude images of gods and men, and

having posterns here and there. On the right were groves of karakas,

children of Tanemahuta, the New Zealand sacred trees--under their shade,

on a hill, a camp and another and larger pah. In startling contrast to

the dense masses of the oily leaves, there stretched a great extent of

light-green sward, where there were other camps and a tall flagstaff,

from which floated the white flag and the Union Jack, emblems of British

sovereignty and peace.

A thousand kilted Maories dotted the green landscape with patches of

brilliant tartans and scarlet cloth. Women lounged about, whiling away

the time with dance and song; and from all the corners of the glade the

soft cadence of the Maori cry of welcome came floating to us on the

breeze, sweet as the sound of distant bells.

As we drove quickly on, we found ourselves in the midst of a thronging

crowd of square-built men, brown in color, and for the most part not

much darker than Spaniards, but with here and there a woolly negro in

their ranks. Glancing at them as we were hurried past, we saw that the

men were robust, well limbed, and tall. They greeted us pleasantly with

many a cheerful, open smile, but the faces of the older people were

horribly tattooed in spiral curves. The chiefs carried battle-clubs of

jade and bone; the women wore strange ornaments. At the flagstaff we

pulled up, and, while the preliminaries of the council were arranged,

had time to discuss with Maori and with “Pakéha” (white man) the

questions that had brought us thither.

The purchase of an enormous block of land--that of the Manawatu--had

long been an object wished for and worked for by the Provincial

Government of Wellington. The completion of the sale it was that had

brought the Superintendent, Dr. Featherston, and humbler Pakéhas to

Parewanui Pah. It was not only that the land was wanted by way of room

for the flood of settlers, but purchase by government was, moreover, the

only means whereby war between the various native claimants of the land

could be prevented. The Pakéha and Maori had agreed upon a price; the

question that remained for settlement was how the money should be

shared. One tribe had owned the land from the earliest times; another

had conquered some miles of it; a third had had one of its chiefs cooked

and eaten upon the ground. In the eye of the Maori law, the last of

these titles was the best: the blood of a chief overrides all mere

historic claims. The two strongest human motives concurred to make war

probable, for avarice and jealousy alike prevented agreement as to the

division of the spoil. Each of the three tribes claiming had half a

dozen allied and related nations upon the ground; every man was there

who had a claim, direct or indirect, or thought he had, to any portion

of the block. Individual ownership and tribal ownership conflicted. The

Ngatiapa were well armed; the Ngatiraukawa had their rifles; the

Wanganuis had sent for theirs. The greatest tact on the part of Dr.

Featherston was needed to prevent a fight such as would have roused New

Zealand from Auckland to Port Nicholson.

On a signal from the Superintendent, the heralds went round the camps

and pahs to call the tribes to council. The summons was a long-drawn

minor-descending-scale: a plaintiff cadence, which at a distance blends

into a bell-like chord. The words mean: “Come hither! Come hither! Come!

come! Maories! Come--!” and men, women, and children soon came thronging

in from every side, the chiefs bearing scepters and spears of ceremony,

and their women wearing round their necks the symbol of nobility, the

Heitiki, or greenstone god. These images, we were told, have pedigrees,

and names like those of men.

We, with the resident magistrate of Wanganui, seated ourselves beneath

the flagstaff. A chief, meeting the people as they came up, stayed them

with the gesture that Homer ascribes to Hector, and bade them sit in a

huge circle round the spar.

No sooner were we seated on our mat than there ran slowly into the

center of the ring a plumed and kilted chief, with sparkling eyes, the

perfection of a savage. Halting suddenly, he raised himself upon his

toes, frowned, and stood brandishing his short feathered spear. It was

Hunia té Hakéké, the young chief of the Ngatiapa.

Throwing off his plaid, he commenced to speak, springing hither and

thither with leopard-like freedom of gait, and sometimes leaping high

into the air to emphasize a word. Fierce as were the gestures, his

speech was conciliatory, and the Maori flowed from his lips--a soft

Tuscan tongue. As, with a movement full of vigorous grace, he sprang

back to the ranks, to take his seat, there ran round the ring a hum and

buzz of popular applause.

“Governor” Hunia was followed by a young Wanganui chief, who wore

hunting breeches and high boots, and a long black mantle over his

European clothes. There was something odd in the shape of the cloak; and

when we came to look closely at it, we found that it was the skirt of

the riding-habit of his half-caste wife. The great chiefs paid so little

heed to this flippant fellow, as to stand up and harangue their tribes

in the middle of his speech, which came thus to an untimely end.

A funny old graybeard, Waitéré Maru Maru, next rose, and, smothering

down the jocularity of his face, turned toward us for a moment the

typical head of Peter, as you see it on the windows of every modern

church--for a moment only, for, as he raised his hand to wave his tribal

scepter, his apostolic drapery began to slip from off his shoulders, and

he had to clutch at it with the energy of a topman taking-in a reef in a

whole gale. His speech was full of Nestorian proverbs and wise saws, but

he wandered off into a history of the Wanganui lands, by which he soon

became as wearied as we ourselves were; for he stopped short, and, with

a twinkle of the eye, said: “Ah! Waitéré is no longer young: he is

climbing the snow-clad mountain Ruahiné; he is becoming an old man;” and

down he sat.

Karanama, a small Ngatiraukawa chief with a white moustache, who looked

like an old French concierge, followed Maru Maru, and, with much use of

his scepter, related a dream foretelling the happy issue of the

negotiations; for the little man was one of those “dreamers of dreams”

against whom Moses warned the Israelites.

Karanama‘s was not the only trance and vision of which we heard in the

course of these debates. The Maories believe that in their dreams the

seers hear great bands of spirits singing chants: these when they wake

the prophets reveal to all the people; but it is remarked that the

vision is generally to the advantage of the seer‘s tribe.

Karanama‘s speech was answered by the head chief of the Rangitané

Maories, Té Peeti Té Awé Awé, who, throwing off his upper clothing as he

warmed to his subject, and strutting pompously round and round the ring,

challenged Karanama to immediate battle, or his tribe to general

encounter; but he cooled down as he went on, and in his last sentence

showed us that Maori oratory, however ornate usually, can be made

extremely terse. “It is hot,” he said--“it is hot, and the very birds

are loath to sing. We have talked for a week, and are therefore dry. Let

us take our share--£10,000, or whatever we can get, and then we shall be

dry no more.”

The Maori custom of walking about, dancing, leaping, undressing,

running, and brandishing spears during the delivery of a speech is

convenient for all parties: to the speaker, because it gives him time to

think of what he shall say next; to the listener, because it allows him

to weigh the speaker‘s words; to the European hearer, because it permits

the interpreter to keep pace with the orator without an effort. On this

occasion, the resident magistrate of Wanganui, Mr. Buller, a Maori

scholar of eminence, and the attached friend of some of the chiefs,

interpreted for Dr. Featherston; and we were allowed to lean over him in

such a way as to hear every word that passed. That the able

Superintendent of Wellington--the great protector of the Maories, the

man to whom they look as to Queen Victoria‘s second in command, should

be wholly dependent upon interpreters, however skilled, seems almost too

singular to be believed; but it is possible that Dr. Featherston may

find in pretended want of knowledge much advantage to the government. He

is able to collect his thoughts before he replies to a difficult

question; he can allow an epithet to escape his notice in the filter of

translation; he can listen and speak with greater dignity.

The day was wearing on before Té Peeti‘s speech was done, and, as the

Maories say, our waistbands began to slip down low; so all now went to

lunch, both Maori and Pakéha, they sitting in circles, each with his

bowl, or flax-blade dish, and wooden spoon, we having a table and a

chair or two in the Mission-house; but we were so tempted by Hori

Kingi‘s whitebait that we begged some of him as we passed. The Maories

boil the little fish in milk, and flavor them with leeks. Great fish,

meat, vegetables, almost all they eat, in short, save whitebait, is

“steamed” in the underground native oven. A hole is dug, and filled with

wood, and stones are piled upon the wood, a small opening being left for

draught. While the wood is burning, the stones become red-hot, and fall

through into the hole. They are then covered with damp fern, or else

with wet mats of flax, plaited at the moment; the meat is put in, and

covered with more mats; the whole is sprinkled with water, and then

earth is heaped on till the vapor ceases to escape. The joint takes

about an hour, and is delicious. Fish is wrapped in a kind of dock-leaf,

and so steamed.

While the men‘s eating was thus going on, many of the women stood idly

round, and we were enabled to judge of Maori beauty. A profusion of

long, crisp curls, a short black pipe thrust between stained lips, a

pair of black eyes gleaming from a tattooed face, denote the Maori

_belle_, who wears for her only robe a long bedgown of dirty calico, but

whose ears and neck are tricked out with greenstone ornaments, the signs

of birth and wealth. Here and there you find a girl with long, smooth

tresses, and almond-shaped black eyes: these charms often go along with

prominent, thin features, and suggest at once the Jewess and the gipsy

girl. The women smoke continually; the men, not much.

When at four o‘clock we returned to the flagstaff, we found that the

temperature, which during the morning had been too hot, had become that

of a fine English June--the air light, the trees and grass lit by a

gleaming yellow sunshine that reminded me of the Californian haze.

During luncheon we had heard that Dr. Featherston‘s proposals as to the

division of the purchase-money had been accepted by the Ngatiapa, but

not by Hunia himself, whose vanity would brook no scheme not of his own

conception. We were no sooner returned to the ring than he burst in upon

us with a defiant speech. “Unjust,” he declared, “as was the proposition

of great ‘Pétatoné’ (Featherston), he would have accepted it for the

sake of peace had he been allowed to divide the tribal share; but as the

Wanganuis insisted on having a third of his £15,000, and as Pétatoné

seemed to support them in their claim, he should have nothing more to do

with the sale.” “The Wangenuis claim as our relatives,” he said:

“verily, the pumpkin-shoots spread far.”

Karanama, the seer, stood up to answer Hunia, and began his speech in a

tone of ridicule. “Hunia is like the ti-tree: if you cut him down he

sprouts again.” Hunia sat quietly through a good deal of this kind of

wit, till at last some epithet provoked him to interrupt the speaker.

“What a fine fellow you are, Karanama; you‘ll tell us soon that you‘ve

two pair of legs.” “Sit down!” shrieked Karanama, and a word-war ensued,

but the abuse was too full of native raciness and vigor to be fit for

English ears. The chiefs kept dancing round the ring, threatening each

other with their spears. “Why do you not hurl at me, Karanama?” said

Hunia; “it is easier to parry spears than lies.” At last Hunia sat down.

Karanama, feinting and making at him with his spear, reproached Hunia

with a serious flaw in his pedigree--a blot which is said to account for

Hunia‘s hatred to the Ngatiraukawa, to whom his mother was for years a

slave. Hunia, without rising from the ground, shrieked “Liar!” Karanama

again spoke the obnoxious word. Springing from the ground, Hunia

snatched his spear from where it stood, and ran at his enemy as though

to strike him. Karanama stood stock-still. Coming up to him at a charge,

Hunia suddenly stopped, raised himself on tiptoe, shaking his spear, and

flung out some contemptuous epithet; then turned, and stalked slowly,

with a springing gait, back to his own corner of the ring. There he

stood, haranguing his people in a bitter undertone. Karanama did the

like with his. The interpreters could not keep pace with what was said.

We understood that the chiefs were calling each upon his tribe to

support him, if need were, in war. After a few minutes of this pause

they wheeled round, as though by a common impulse, and again began to

pour out torrents of abuse. The applause became frequent, hums quickened

into shouts, cheer followed cheer, till at last the ring was alive with

men and women springing from the ground, and crying out on the opposing

leader for a dastard.

We had previously been told to have no fear that resort would be had to

blows. The Maories never fight upon a sudden quarrel: war is with them a

solemn act, entered upon only after much deliberation. Those of us who

were strangers to New Zealand were nevertheless not without our doubts,

while for half an hour we lay upon the grass watching the armed

champions running round the ring, challenging each other to mortal

combat on the spot.

The chieftains at last became exhausted, and the Mission-bell beginning

to toll for evening chapel, Hunia broke off in the middle of his abuse:

“Ah! I hear the bell!” and, turning, stalked out of the ring toward his

pah, leaving it to be inferred, by those who did not know him, that he

was going to attend the service. The meeting broke up in confusion, and

the Upper Wanganui tribes at once began their march toward the

mountains, leaving behind them only a delegation of their chiefs.

As we drove down to the coast, we talked over the close resemblance of

the Maori runanga to the Homeric council; it had struck us all. Here, as

in the Greek camp, we had the ring of people, into which advanced the

lance-bearing or scepter-bearing chiefs, they alone speaking, and the

people backing them only by a hum: “The block of wood dictates not to

the carver, neither the people to their chiefs,” is a Maori proverb. The

boasting of ancestry, and bragging of deeds and military exploits, to

which modern wind-bags would only casually allude, was also thoroughly

Homeric. In Hunia we had our Achilles; the retreat of Hunia to his wahré

was that of Achilles to his tent; the cause of quarrel alone was

different, though in both cases it arose out of the division of spoil,

in the one case the result of lucky wars, in the other of the Pakéha‘s

weakness. The Argive and Maori leaders are one in fire, figure, port,

and mien; alike, too, even in their sulkiness. In Waitéré and Aperahama

Tipai we had two Nestors; our Thersites was Porea, the jester, a

half-mad buffoon, continually mimicking the chiefs or interrupting them,

and being by them or their messengers as often kicked and cuffed. In the

frequency of repetition, the use of proverbs and of simile, the Maories

resemble not Homer‘s Greeks so much as Homer‘s self; but the calling

together of the people by the heralds, the secret conclave of the

chiefs, the feast, the conduct of the assembly--all were the exact

repetition of the events recorded in the first and second books of the

“Iliad” as having happened on the Trojan plains. The single point of

difference was not in favor of the Greeks; the Maori women took their

place in council with the men.

As we drove home, a storm came on, and hung about the coast so long,

that it was not till near eleven at night that we were able to take our

swim in the heated waters of the Manawatu River, and frighten off every

duck and heron in the district.

In the morning, we rose to alarming news. Upon the pretext of the

presence in the neighborhood of the Hau-Hau chief Wi Hapi, with a war

party of 200 men, the unarmed Parewanui natives had sent to Wanganui for

their guns, and it was only by a conciliatory speech at the midnight

runanga that Mr. Buller had succeeded in preventing a complete break-up

of all the camps, if not an intertribal war. There seemed to be white

men behind the scenes who were not friendly to the sale, and the debate

had lasted from dark till dawn.

While we were at breakfast, a Ngatiapa officer of the native contingent

brought down a letter to Dr. Featherston from Hunia and Hori Kingi,

calling us to a general meeting of the tribes convened for noon, to be

held in the Ngatiapa Pah. The letter was addressed, “Kia té Pétatoné té

Huperinténé”--“To the Featherston, the Superintendent”--the alterations

in the chief words being made to bring them within the grasp of Maori

tongues, which cannot sound _f‘s_, _th‘s_, nor sibilants of any kind.

The absence of harsh sounds, and the rule which makes every word end

with a vowel, give a peculiar softness and charm to the Maori language.

Sugar becomes huka; scissors, hikiri; sheep, hipi; and so with all

English words adopted into Maori. The rendering of the Hebrew names of

the Old Testament is often singular: Genesis becomes Kenehi; Exodus is

altered into Ekoruhe; Leviticus is hardly recognizable in Rewitikuha;

Tiuteronomi reads strangely for Deuteronomy, and Hohua for Joshua;

Jacob, Isaac, Moses, become Hakopa, Ihaka, and Mohi; Egypt is softened

into Ihipa, Jordan into Horámo. The list of the nations of Canaan seems

to have been a stumbling-block in the missionaries’ way. The success

obtained with Girgashites has not been great; it stands Kirekahi; Gaash

is transmuted into Kaaha, and Eleazar into Ereatara.

When we drove on to the ground all was at a deadlock--the flagstaff

bare, the chiefs sleeping in their wahrés, and the common folk whiling

away the hours with haka songs. Dr. Featherston retired from the ground,

declaring that till the Queen‘s flag was hoisted he would attend no

debate; but he permitted us to wander in among the Maories.

We were introduced to Tamiana té Rauparaha, chief of the Ngatitoa branch

of the Ngatiraukawa, and son of the great cannibal chief of the same

name, who murdered Captain Wakefield. Old Rauparaha it was who hired an

English ship to carry him and his nation to the South Island, where they

ate several tribes, boiling the chiefs, by the captain‘s consent, in the

ship‘s coppers, and salting down for future use the common people. When

the captain, on return to port, claimed his price, Rauparaha told him to

go about his business, or he should be salted too. The captain took the

hint, but he did not escape for long, as he was finally eaten by the

Sandwich Islanders in Hawaii.

In answer to our request for a dance-song, Tamiana and Horomona Torémi

replied, through an interpreter, that “the hands of the singers should

beat time as fast as the pinions of the wild duck;” and in a minute we

were in the middle of an animated crowd of boys and women collected by

Porea, the buffoon.

As soon as the singers had squatted upon the grass, the jester began to

run slowly up and down between their ranks as they sat swinging backward

and forward in regular time, groaning in chorus, and looking upward with

distorted faces.

In a second dance, a girl standing out upon the grass chanted the air--a

kind of capstan song--and then the “dancers,” who were seated in one

long row, joined in chorus, breathing violently in perfect time, half

forming words, but not notes, swinging from side to side like the

howling dervishes, and using frightful gestures. This strange

whisper-roaring went on increasing in rapidity and fierceness, till at

last the singers worked themselves into a frenzy, in which they rolled

their eyes, stiffened the arms and legs, clutched and clawed with the

fingers, and snorted like maddened horses. Stripping off their clothes,

they looked more like the Maories of thirty years ago than those who see

them only at the mission-stations would believe. Other song-dances, in

which the singers stood striking their heels at measured intervals upon

the earth, were taken up with equal vigor by the boys and women, the

grown men in their dignity keeping themselves aloof, although in his

heart every Maori loves mimetic dance and song. We remarked that in the

“haka” the old women seemed more in earnest than the young, who were

always bursting into laughter, and forgetting words and time.

The savage love for semitones makes Maori music somewhat wearisome to

the English ear; so after a time we began to walk through the pahs and

sketch the Maories, to their great delight. I was drawing the grand old

head of a venerable dame--Oriuhia té Aka--when she asked to see what I

was about. As soon as I showed her the sketch, she began to call me

names, and from her gestures I saw that the insult was in the omission

of the tattooing on her chin. When I inserted the stripes and curves,

her delight was such that I greatly feared she would have embraced me.

Strolling into the karaka groves, we came upon a Maori wooden tomb, of

which the front was carved with figures three feet high, grotesque and

obscene. Gigantic eyes, hands bearing clubs, limbs without bodies, and

bodies without limbs, were figured here and there among more perfect

carvings, and the whole was of a character which the Maories of to-day

disown as they do cannibalism, wishing to have these horrid things

forgotten. The sudden rise of the Hau-Hau fanaticism within the last few

years has shown us that the layer of civilization by which the old Maori

habits are overlaid is thin indeed.

The flags remained down all day, and in the afternoon we returned to the

coast to shoot duck and pukéko, a sort of moor-hen. It was not easy

work, for the birds fell in the flax swamp, and the giant swordlike

leaves of the _Phormium tenax_ cut our hands as we pushed our way

through its dense clumps and bushes, while some of the party suffered

badly from the sun: Maui, the Maories say, must have chained him up too

near the earth. After dark, we could see the glare of the fires in the

karaka groves, where the Maories were in council, and a government

surveyor came in to report that he had met the dissentient Wanganuis

riding fast toward the hills.

In the morning, we were allowed to stay upon the coast till ten or

eleven o‘clock, when a messenger came down from Mr. Buller to call us to

the pah: the council of the chiefs had again sat all night--for the

Maories act upon their proverb that the eyes of great chiefs should

know no rest--and Hunia had carried everything before him in the debate.

As soon as the ring was formed, Hunia apologized for the pulling down of

the Queen‘s flag; it had been done, he said, as a sign that the sale was

broken off, not as an act of disrespect. Having, in short, had things

entirely his own way, he was disposed to be extremely friendly both to

whites and Maories. The sale, he said, must be brought about, or the

“world would be on fire with an intertribal war. What is the good of the

mountain-land? There is nothing to eat but stones; granite is a hard but

not a strengthening food; and women and land are the ruin of men.”

After congratulatory speeches from other chiefs, some of the older men

treated us to histories of the deeds that had been wrought upon the

block of land. Some of their speeches--notably those of Aperahama and

Ihakara--were largely built up of legendary poems; but the orators

quoted the poetry as such only when in doubt how far the sentiments were

those of the assembled people: when they were backed by the hum which

denotes applause, they at one commenced with singular art to weave the

poetry into that which was their own.

As soon as the speeches were over, Hunia and Ihakara marched up to the

flagstaff carrying between them the deed-of-sale. Putting it down before

Dr. Featherston, they shook hands with each other and with him, and

swore that for the future there should be eternal friendship between

their tribes. The deed was then signed by many hundred men and women,

and Dr. Featherston started with Captain té Képa, of the native

contingent, to fetch the £25,000 from Wanganui town, the Maories firing

their rifles into the air as a salute.

The Superintendent was no sooner gone than a kind of solemn grief seemed

to come over the assembled people. After all, they were selling the

graves of their ancestors, they argued. The wife of Hamuéra, seizing her

husband‘s greenstone club, ran out from the ranks of the women, and

began to intone an impromptu song, which was echoed by the women, in a

pathetic chorus-chant:

“The sun shines, but we quit our land: we abandon forever its forests,

its mountains, its groves, its lakes, its shores.

All its fair fisheries, here, under the bright sun, forever we renounce.

It is a lovely day; fair will be the children that are born to-day; but

we quit our land.

In some parts there is forest; in others, the ground is skimmed over

by the birds in their flight.

Upon the trees there is fruit; in the streams, fish; in the fields,

potatoes; fern-roots in the bush; but we quit our land.”

It is in chorus-speeches of this kind that David‘s psalms must have been

recited by the Jews; but on this occasion there was a good deal of mere

acting in the grief, for the tribes had never occupied the land that

they now sold.

The next day, Dr. Featherston drove into camp surrounded by a brilliant

cavalcade of Maori cavalry, amid much yelling and firing of pieces

skyward. Hunia, in receiving him, declared that he would not have the

money paid till the morrow, as the sun must shine upon the transfer of

the lands. It would take his people all the night, he said, to work

themselves up to the right pitch for a war-dance; so he sent down a

strong guard to watch the money-chests, which had been conveyed to the

missionary hut. The Ngatiapa sentry posted inside the room was an odd

cross between savagery and civilization; he wore the cap of the native

contingent; and nothing else but a red kilt. He was armed with a short

Wilkinson rifle, for which he had, however, not a round of ammunition,

his cartridges being Enfield and his piece unloaded. Barbarian or not,

he seemed to like raw gin, with which some Englishman had unlawfully and

unfairly tempted him.

In the morning, the money was handed over in the runanga-house, and a

signet-ring presented to Hunia by Dr. Featherston in pledge of peace,

and memory of the sale; but owing to the heat, we soon adjourned to the

karaka grove, where Hunia made a congratulatory and somewhat boastful

speech, offering his friendship and alliance to Dr. Featherston.

The assembly was soon dismissed, and the chiefs withdrew to prepare for

the grandest war-dance that had been seen for years, while a party went

off to catch and kill the oxen that were to be “steamed” whole, just as

our friends’ fathers would have steamed us.

A chief was detached by Hunia to guide us to a hill whence we commanded

the whole glade. No sooner had we taken our seats than the Ngatiraukawa

to the number of a hundred fighting-men, armed with spears and led by a

dozen women bearing clubs, marched out from their camp, and formed in

column, their chiefs making speeches of exhortation from the ranks.

After a pause, we heard the measured groaning of a distant haka, and

looking up the glade, at the distance of a mile saw some twoscore

Wanganui warriors jumping in perfect time, now to one side, now to the

other, grasping their rifles by the barrel, and raising them as one man

each time they jumped. Presently, bending one knee, but stiffening the

other leg, they advanced, stepping together with a hopping movement,

slapping their hips and thighs, and shouting from the palate, “Hough!

Hough!” with fearful emphasis.

A shout from the Ngatiraukawa hailed the approach of the Ngatiapa, who

deployed from the woods some two hundred strong, all armed with Enfield

rifles. They united with the Wanganuis, and marched slowly down with

their rifles at the “charge,” steadily singing war-songs. When within a

hundred yards of the opposing ranks, they halted, and sent in their

challenge. The Ngatiraukawa and Ngatiapa heralds passed each other in

silence, and each delivered his message to the hostile chief.

We could see that the allies were led by Hunia in all the bravery of his

war-costume. In his hair he wore a heron plume, and another was fastened

near the muzzle of his short carbine; his limbs were bare, but about his

shoulders he had a pure white scarf of satin. His kilt was gauze-silk,

of three colors--pink, emerald, and cherry--arranged in such a way as to

show as much of the green as of the two other colors. The contrast,

which upon a white skin would have been glaring in its ugliness, was

perfect when backed by the nut-brown of Hunia‘s chest and legs. As he

ran before his tribe, he was the ideal savage.

The instant that the heralds had returned, a charge took place, the

forces passing through each other‘s ranks as they do upon the stage, but

with frightful yells. After this they formed two deep, in three

companies, and danced the “musket-exercise war-dance” in wonderful time,

the women leading, thrusting out their tongues, and shaking their long

pendant breasts. Among them was Hamuéra‘s wife, standing drawn up to her

full height, her limbs stiffened, her head thrown back, her mouth wide

open and tongue protruding, her eyes rolled so as to show the white, and

her arms stretched out in front of her, as she slowly chanted. The

illusion was perfect: she became for the time a mad prophetess; yet all

the frenzy was assumed at a whim, to be cast aside in half an hour. The

shouts were of the same under-breath kind as in the haka, but they were

aided by the sounds of horns and conch-shells, and from the number of

men engaged the noise was this time terrible. After much fierce singing

the musket-dance was repeated, with furious leaps and gestures, till the

men became utterly exhausted, when the review was closed by a general

discharge of rifles. Running with nimble feet, the dancers were soon

back within their pahs, and the feast, beginning now, was, like a

Russian banquet, prolonged till morning.

It is not hard to understand the conduct of Lord Durham‘s settlers, who

landed here in 1837. The friendly natives received the party with a

war-dance, which had upon them such an effect that they immediately took

ship for Australia, where they remained.

The next day, when we called on Governor Hunia at his wahré to bid him

farewell, before our departure for the capital, he made two speeches to

us, which are worth recording as specimens of Maori oratory. Speaking

through Mr. Buller, who had been kind enough to escort us to the

Ngatiapa‘s wahré, Hunia said:

“Hail, guests! You have just now seen the settlement of a great

dispute--the greatest of modern time.

“This was a weighty trouble--a grave difficulty.

“Many Pakéhas have tried to settle it--in vain. For Pétatoné was it

reserved to end it. I have said that great is our gratitude to Pétatoné.

“If Pétatoné hath need of me in the future, I shall be there. If he

climbs the lofty tree, I will climb it with him. If he scales high

cliffs, I will scale them too. If Pétatoné needeth help, he shall have

it; and where he leads, there will I follow.

“Such are the words of Hunia.”

To this speech one of us replied, explaining our position as guests from

Britain.

Hunia then began again to speak:

“O my guests, a few days since when asked for a war-dance, I refused. I

refused because my people were sad at heart.

“We were loath to refuse our guests, but the tribes were grieved; the

peeple were sorrowful at heart.

“To-day we are happy, and the war-dance has taken place.

“O my guests, when ye return to our great Queen, tell her that we will

fight for her again as we have fought before.

“She is our Queen as well as your Queen--Queen of Maories and Queen of

Pakéha.

“Should wars arise, we will take up our rifles, and march whithersoever

she shall direct.

“You have heard of the King movement. I was a Kingite; but that did not

prevent me fighting for the Queen--I and my chiefs.

“My cousin, Wirému, went to England, and saw our Queen. He returned....

“When you landed in this island, he was already dead....

“He died fighting for our Queen.

“As he died, _we_ will die, if need be--I and all my chiefs. This do you

tell our Queen.

“I have said.”

This passage, spoken as Hunia spoke it, was one of noble eloquence and

singular rhetoric art. The few first words about Wirému were spoken in a

half indifferent way; but there was a long pause before and after the

statement that he was dead, and a sinking of the voice when he related

how Wirému had died, followed by a burst of sudden fire in the “As he

died, _we_ will die--I and all my chiefs.”

After a minute or two, Hunia resumed:

“This is another word.

“We are all of us glad to see you.

“When we wrote to Pétatoné, we asked him that he would bring with him

Pakéhas from England and from Australia--Pakéhas from all parts of the

Queen‘s broad lands.

“Pakéhas who should return to tell the Queen that the Ngatiapa are her

liegemen.

“We are much rejoiced that you are here. May your heart rest here among

us; but if you go once more to your English home, tell the people that

we are Pétatoné‘s faithful subjects and the Queen‘s.

“I have said.”

After pledging Hunia in a cup of wine, we returned to our temporary

home.

CHAPTER V.

THE MAORIES.

Parting with my companions (who were going northward) in order that I

might return to Wellington, and thence take ship to Taranaki, I started

at daybreak on a lovely morning to walk by the sea-shore to Otaki. As I

left the bank of the Manawatu River for the sands, Mount Egmont near

Taranaki, and Mounts Ruapéhu and Tongariro, in the center of the

island, hung their great snow domes in the soft blue of the sky behind

me, and seemed to have parted from their bases.

I soon passed through the flax-swamp where we for days had shot the

pukéko, and coming out upon the wet sands, which here are glittering and

full of the Taranaki steel, I took off boots and socks, and trudged the

whole distance barefoot, regardless of the morrow. It was hard to walk

without crunching with the heel shells which would be thought rare at

home, and here and there charming little tern and other tiny sea-fowl

flew at me, and all but pecked my eyes out for coming near their nests.

During the day, I forded two large rivers and small streams innumerable,

and swam the Ohau, where Dr. Featherston last week lost his dog-cart in

the quick-sands, but I managed to reach Otaki before sunset, in time to

revel in a typical New Zealand view. The foreground was composed of

ancient sand-hills, covered with the native flax, with the

deliciously-scented Manuka ti-tree, brilliant in white flower, and with

giant fern, tuft-grass, and tussac. Farther inland was the bush,

evergreen, bunchlike in its foliage, and so overladen with parasitic

vegetation, that the true leaves were hidden by usurpers, or crushed to

death in the folds of snakelike creepers. The view was bounded by

bush-clad mountains, rosy with the sunset tints.

Otaki is Archdeacon Hadfield‘s church-settlement of Christian Maories;

but of late there have been signs of wavering in the tribes, and I found

Major Edwardes, who had been with us at Parewanui, engaged in holding,

for the government, a runanga of Hau-Haus, or Antichristian Maories, in

the Otaki Pah. Some of these fellows had lately held a meeting, and had

themselves rebaptized, but this time _out of_ instead of _into_ the

church. They received fresh names, and are said to have politely invited

the archdeacon to perform the ceremony.

Maori Church of Englandism has proved a failure. A dozen native

clergymen are, it is true, supported in comfort by their countrymen, but

the tribes would support a hundred such, if necessary, rather than give

up the fertile “reservations,” such as that of Otaki, which their

pretended Christianity has secured. There is much in the Maori that is

tiger-like, and it is in the blood, not to be drawn out of it by a few

years of playing at Christianity.