ALP, FIORD, AND SANCTUARY
[Illustration: THE WAIRAU GORGE]
In one way the south-western is the most enjoyable division of
picturesque New Zealand. There is little here to regret or fear for.
Unlike the beauty of the northern forests, here is a grandeur that will
not pass away. Even in the thermal zone you are haunted by the memory
of the lost terraces; but among the alps and fiords of the south-west
Nature sits very strongly entrenched. From the Buller Gorge to Puysegur
Point, and from Lake Menzies to Lake Hau-roto, both the climate and
the lie of the land combine to keep man’s destructiveness at bay.
Longitudinal ridges seam this territory from north to south--not a
single dividing chain, but half-a-dozen ranges, lofty, steep, and
entangled. Rivers thread every valley, and are the swiftest, coldest,
and most dangerous of that treacherous race, the mountain torrents
of our islands. On the eastern and drier side, settlement can do
little to spoil the impressiveness of the mountains; for the great
landscapes--at any rate north of Lake Hawea--usually begin at or near
the snow-line. The edge of this is several thousand feet lower
than in Switzerland. Below it comes a zone sometimes dotted with
beech-woods, monotonous and seldom very high, but beautiful in their
vesture of grey-green lichen, and carpeted with green and golden moss,
often deep and not always soaked and slimy underneath. Or in the open
the sub-alpine zone is redeemed by an abundance of ground-flowers such
as our lower country cannot show. For this is the home of the deep,
bowl-shaped buttercup called the shepherd’s lily, of mountain-daisies
and veronicas many and varied, and of those groves of the ribbon-wood
that are more lovely than orchards of almond-trees in spring-time. On
the rocks above them the mountaineer who has climbed in Switzerland
will recognise the edelweiss. Among the blanched snow-grass and coarse
tussocks, the thorny “Wild Irishman,” and the spiky “Spaniard,” with
its handsome _chevaux-de-frise_ of yellow-green bayonets, conspire
to make riding difficult on the flats and terraces. These last often
attract the eye by their high faces, bold curves, and curious, almost
smooth, regularity. For the rest, the more eastern of the mountains
usually become barer and duller as the watershed is left farther
behind. Oases of charm they have, where the flora of some sheltered
ravine or well-hidden lake detains the botanist; but, as a rule, their
brilliant sunshine and exhilarating air, their massive forms and wild
intersecting rivers, have much to do to save them from being summed up
as stony, arid, bleak, and tiresome.
[Illustration: IN THE HOOKER VALLEY]
At its worst, however, the eastern region may claim to be serviceable
to the lover of scenery as well as to the sheep-farmer. Its
thinly-grassed slopes, bare rocks, and fan-shaped shingle-slips
furnish, at any rate, a foil to the grandeur of the central range and
the luxuriance of the west. It is, indeed, not easy to believe that
such glaciers and passes, such lakes and sea-gulfs, lie beyond the
stern barrier, and the enjoyment, when wonderland is penetrated, is all
the greater. For the rest, any English reader who cares to feel himself
among our tussock-clad ranges will find a masterly sketch of them and
their atmosphere in the first chapters of Samuel Butler’s _Erewhon_.
Butler’s sheep-station, “Mesopotamia” by name, lay among the alps of
Canterbury, and the satirist himself did some exploring work in his
pastoral days, work concerning which I recall a story told me by an old
settler whom I will call the Sheriff. This gentleman, meeting Butler
one day in Christchurch in the early sixties, noticed that his face and
neck were burned to the colour of red-chocolate. “Hullo, my friend,”
said he, “you have been among the snow!” “Hush!” answered Butler in an
apprehensive whisper, and looking round the smoking-room nervously,
“how do you know that?” “By the colour of your face; nothing more,”
was the reply. They talked a while, and Butler presently admitted that
he had been up to the dividing range and had seen a great sight away
beyond it. “I’ve found a hundred thousand acres of ‘country,’” said
he. “Naturally I wish you to keep this quiet till I have proved
it and applied to the Government for a pastoral licence.” “Well, I
congratulate you,” said the Sheriff. “If it will carry sheep you’ve
made your fortune, that’s all”; but he intimated his doubts as to
whether the blue expanse seen from far off could be grass country. And
indeed, when next he met Butler, the latter shook his head ruefully:
“You were quite right; it was all bush.” I have often wondered whether
that experience was the basis of the passage that tells of the
thrilling discovery of Erewhon beyond the pass guarded by the great
images.
In one of his letters about the infant Canterbury settlement Butler
gives a description of Aorangi, or Mount Cook, which, so far as I know,
is the earliest sketch of the mountain by a writer of note. It was,
however, not an Englishman, but a German man of science, Sir Julius
von Haast, who published the first careful and connected account of
the Southern Alps. Von Haast was not a mountaineer, but a geologist,
and though he attacked Aorangi, he did not ascend more than two-thirds
of it. But he could write, and had an eye for scenery as well as for
strata. The book which he published on the geology of Canterbury and
Westland did very much the same service to the Southern Alps that von
Hochstetter’s contemporary work did for the hot lakes. The two German
_savants_ brought to the knowledge of the world outside two very
different but remarkable regions. It is true that the realm of flowery
uplands, glaciers, ice-walls, and snow-fields told of by von Haast, had
nothing in it so uncommon as the geysers and so strange as the pink
and white terraces made familiar by von Hochstetter. But the higher
Southern Alps, when once you are among them, may fairly challenge
comparison with those of Switzerland. Their elevation is not equal by
two or three thousand feet, but the lower level of their snow-line just
about makes up the disparity. Then, too, on the flanks of their western
side the mountains of the south have a drapery of forest far more
varied and beautiful than the Swiss pine woods. On the western side,
too, the foot of the mountain rampart is virtually washed by the ocean.
Take the whole mountain territory of the south-west with its passes,
lakes, glaciers, river-gorges, and fiords, and one need not hesitate to
assert that it holds its own when compared with what Nature has done in
Switzerland, Savoy, and Dauphiny.
[Illustration: MOUNT COOK]
Aorangi, with its 12,349 feet, exceeds the peak of Teneriffe by 159
feet. It is the highest point in our islands, for Mount Tasman, its
neighbour, which comes second, fails to equal it by 874 feet. Only
two or three other summits surpass 11,000 feet, and the number which
attain to anything over 10,000 is not great. From the south-west,
Aorangi, with the ridge attached to it, resembles the high-pitched
roof of a Gothic church with a broad, massive spire standing up from
the northern end. When, under strong sunlight, the ice glitters on the
steep crags, and the snow-fields, unearthly in their purity, contrast
with the green tint of the crawling glaciers, the great mountain is a
spectacle worthy of its fame. Yet high and shapely as it is, and
worthy of its name, Cloud-in-the-Heavens, it is not the most beautiful
mountain in the islands. That honour may be claimed by Egmont, just
as Tongariro may demand precedence as the venerated centre of Maori
reverence and legend. Nor, formidable as Aorangi looks, is it, I should
imagine, as impracticable as one or two summits farther south, notably
Mount Balloon. However, unlike Kosciusko in Australia, it is a truly
imposing height, and worthy of its premier place. With it the story
of New Zealand alpine-climbing has been bound up for a quarter of a
century, and such romance as that story has to show is chiefly found
in attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to reach the topmost point
of Aorangi. Canterbury had been settled for thirty-two years before
the first of these was made. For the low snow-line, great cliffs, and
enormous glaciers of the Southern Alps have their especial cause of
origin. They bespeak an extraordinary steepness in the rock faces, and
a boisterous climate with rapid and baffling changes of temperature.
Not a climber or explorer amongst them but has been beaten back at
times by tempests, or held a prisoner for many hours, listening
through a sleepless night to the howling of north-west or south-west
wind--lucky if he is not drenched to the skin by rain or flood. As for
the temperature, an observer once noted a fall of fifty-three degrees
in a few hours. On the snow-fields the hot sun blisters the skin of
your face and neck, and even at a lower level makes a heavy coat an
intolerable burden; but the same coat--flung impatiently on the ground
and left there--may be picked up next morning frozen as stiff as a
board. These extremes of heat and cold, these sudden and furious gales,
are partly, I imagine, the cause of the loose and rotten state of much
of the rock-surface, of the incessant falls of stones, ice-blocks, and
snow, and of the number and size of the avalanches. At any rate, the
higher alps showed a front which, to ordinary dwellers on our plains,
seemed terrific, and which even gave pause to mountain-climbers of
some Swiss experience. So even von Haast’s book did not do much more
than increase the number of visitors to the more accessible glaciers
and sub-alpine valleys. The spirit of mountaineering lay dormant year
after year, and it was not until 1882 that an unexpected invader from
Europe delivered the sudden and successful stroke that awoke it. The
raider was Mr. Green, an Irish clergyman, who, with two Swiss guides,
Boss and Kaufmann, landed in the autumn of 1882. His object was the
ascent of Aorangi; he had crossed the world to make it. He found our
inner mountains just as Nature had left them, and, before beginning
his climb, had to leave human life behind, and camp at the foot of the
mountain with so much of the resources of civilisation as he could take
with him. One of his first encounters with a New Zealand river in a
hurry ended in the loss of his light cart, which was washed away. Its
wrecked and stranded remains lay for years in the river-bed a battered
relic of a notable expedition. To cap his troubles, a pack-horse
carrying flour, tea, sugar, and spare clothing, coolly lay down when
fording a shallow torrent, and rolled on its back--and therefore on
its pack--in the rapid water. Ten days of preliminary tramping and
clambering, during which five separate camps were formed, only carried
the party with their provisions and apparatus to a height of less
than 4000 feet above the sea. They had toiled over moraine boulders,
been entangled in dense and prickly scrubs, and once driven back by a
fierce north-wester. On the other hand the scenery was glorious and
the air exhilarating. Nothing round them seemed tame except the wild
birds. Keas, wekas, and blue ducks were as confiding and fearless as
our birds are wont to be till man has taught them distrust and terror.
Among these the Swiss obtained the raw material of a supper almost
as easily as in a farmyard. On the 25th of February the final ascent
was begun. But Aorangi did not yield at the first summons. Days were
consumed in futile attempts from the south and east. On their first
day they were checked by finding themselves on a crumbling knife-like
ridge, from which protruded spines of rock that shook beneath their
tread. A kick, so it seemed, would have sent the surface into the abyss
on either side. The bridge that leads to the Mahometan paradise could
not be a more fearful passage. Two days later they were baffled on the
east side by walls of rock from which even Boss and Kaufmann turned
hopelessly away. It was not until March 2, after spending a night above
the clouds, that they hit upon a new glacier, the Linda, over which
they found a winding route to the north-eastern ridge which joins
Cook to Tasman. The day’s work was long and severe, and until late in
the afternoon the issue was doubtful. A gale burst upon them from the
north-west, and they had to go on through curling mists and a wind that
chilled them to the bone. It was six o’clock in the evening when they
found themselves standing on the icy scalp of the obstinate mountain,
and even then they did not attain the highest point. There was not a
moment to lose if they were to regain some lower point of comparative
security; for March is the first month of autumn in South New Zealand,
and the evenings then begin to draw in. So Mr. Green had to retreat
when within either a few score feet or a few score yards of the actual
goal. As it was, night closed in on the party when they were but a
short way down, and they spent the dark hours on a ledge less than two
feet wide, high over an icy ravine. Sleep or faintness alike meant
death. They stood there hour after hour singing, stamping, talking, and
listening to the rain pattering on rock and hissing on snow. All night
long the wind howled: the wall at their backs vibrated to the roar of
the avalanches: water streaming down its face soaked their clothing.
For food they had three meat lozenges each. They sucked at empty
pipes, and pinched and nudged each other to drive sleep away. By the
irony of fate it happened that close beneath them were wide and almost
comfortable shelves. But night is not the time to wander about the face
of a precipice, looking for sleeping berths, 10,000 feet above the sea.
Mr. Green and his guides were happy to escape with life and limb, and
not to have to pay such a price for victory as was paid by Whymper’s
party after scaling the Matterhorn.
Mr. Green’s climb, the tale of which is told easily in his own bright
and workmanlike book, gave an enlivening shock to young New Zealand.
It had been left to a European to show them the way; but the lesson
was not wasted. They now understood that mountains were something
more than rough country, some of which carried sheep, while some did
not. They learned that they had an alpine playground equal to any in
the Old World--a new realm where danger might be courted and exploits
put on record. The dormant spirit of mountaineering woke up at last.
Many difficulties confronted the colonial lads. They had everything
to learn and no one to teach them. Without guides, equipment, or
experience--without detailed maps, or any preliminary smoothing of the
path, they had to face unforeseen obstacles and uncommon risks. They
had to do everything for themselves. Only by endangering their necks
could they learn the use of rope and ice-axe. Only by going under
fire, and being grazed or missed by stones and showers of ice, could
they learn which hours of the day and conditions of the weather were
most dangerous, and when slopes might be sought and when ravines must
be shunned. They had to teach themselves the trick of the _glissade_
and the method of crossing frail bridges of snow. Appliances they
could import from Europe. As for guides, some of them turned guides
themselves. Of course they started with a general knowledge of the
climate, of “roughing it” in the hills, and of life in the open. They
could scramble to the heights to which sheep scramble, and could turn
round in the wilderness without losing their way. Thews and sinews,
pluck and enthusiasm, had to do the rest, and gradually did it. As
Mr. Malcolm Ross, one of the adventurous band, has pointed out with
legitimate pride, their experience was gained and their work done
without a single fatal accident--a happy record, all the more striking
by contrast with the heavy toll of life levied by the rivers of our
mountain territory. The company of climbers, therefore, must have
joined intelligence to resolution, for, up to the present, they have
broken nothing but records. Mr. Mannering, one of the earliest of them,
attacked Aorangi five times within five years. After being thwarted by
such accidents as rain-storms, the illness of a companion, and--most
irritating of all--the dropping of a “swag” holding necessaries,
he, with his friend Mr. Dixon, at last attained to the ice-cap in
December 1890. Their final climb was a signal exhibition of courage and
endurance. They left their bivouac (7480 feet in air) at four o’clock
in the morning, and, after nine hours of plodding upward in soft snow
had to begin the labour of cutting ice-steps. In the morning they were
roasted by the glaring sun; in the shade of the afternoon their rope
and coats were frozen stiff, and the skin from their hands stuck to the
steel of their ice-axes. Dixon, a thirteen-stone man, fell through a
snow-wreath, and was only saved by a supreme effort. Pelted by falling
ice the two amateurs cut their way onward, and at half-past five in
the evening found themselves unscathed and only about a hundred feet
below the point gained by Mr. Green and his Swiss. They made an effort
to hew steps up to the apex of the ice-cap, but time was too short and
the wind was freshening; as it was they had to work their way down by
lantern light. Now they had to creep backwards, now to clean out the
steps cut in the daylight; now their way was lost, again they found
it, and discovered that some gulf had grown wider. They did not regain
their bivouac till nearly three in the morning after twenty-three hours
of strain to body and mind.[4]
[4] For Mr. Mannering’s narrative see _With Axe and Rope in the New
Zealand Alps_, London, 1891.
[Illustration: MOUNT SEFTON]
Four years later came victory, final and complete, and won in a fashion
peculiarly gratifying to young New Zealand. News came that Mr. E. A.
Fitzgerald, a skilled mountaineer, was coming from Europe to achieve
the technical success which Green and Mannering had just missed.
Some climbers of South Canterbury resolved to anticipate him, and,
for the honour of the colony, be the first to stand on the coveted
pinnacle. A party of three--Messrs. Clark, Graham, and Fyfe--left
Timaru, accordingly, and on Christmas Day 1894 achieved their object.
Mr. Fitzgerald arrived only to find that he had been forestalled,
and must find other peaks to conquer. Of these there was no lack;
he had some interesting experiences. After his return to England he
remarked to the writer that climbing in the Andes was plain and
easy in comparison with the dangers and difficulties of the Southern
Alps. One of his severest struggles, however, was not with snow and
ice, but with a river and forest in Westland. Years before, Messrs.
Harper and Blakiston had surmounted the saddle--or, more properly
speaking, wall--at the head of the Hooker glacier, and looking over
into Westland, had ascertained that it would be possible to go down
to the coast by that way. Government surveyors had confirmed this
impression, but no one had traversed the pass. It remained for Mr.
Fitzgerald to do this and show that the route was practicable. He and
his guide Zurbriggen accomplished the task. They must, however, have
greatly underestimated the difficulties which beset those who would
force a passage along the bed of an untracked western torrent. Pent
in a precipitous gorge, they had to wade and stumble along a wild
river-trough. Here they clung to or clambered over dripping rocks,
there they were numbed in the ice-cold and swirling water. Enormous
boulders encumbered and almost barred the ravine, so that the river
itself had had to scoop out subterranean passages through which the
explorers were fain to creep. Taking to the shore, as they won their
way downward, they tried to penetrate the matted scrubs. Even had they
been bushmen, and armed with tomahawks and slashers, they would have
found this no easy task. As it was they returned to the river-bed and
trudged along, wet and weary; their provisions gave out, and Fitzgerald
had to deaden the pangs of hunger by chewing black tobacco. He
found the remedy effectual, but very nauseating. Without gun or powder
and shot, and knowing nothing of the botany of the country, they
ran very close to starvation, and must have lost their lives had a
sudden flood filled the rivers’ tributaries and so cut them off from
the coast. As it was they did the final forty-eight hours of walking
without food, and were on their last legs when they heard the dogs
barking in a surveyor’s camp, where their adventure ended.
Not caring to follow in the wake of others, Mr. Fitzgerald left Aorangi
alone, but Zurbriggen climbed thither on his own account in 1895.
An Anglo-Colonial party gained the top ten years later, so that the
ice-cap may now almost be classed among familiar spots. Still, as late
as 1906 something still remained to be done on the mountain--namely,
to go up on one side and go down on the other. This feat, so simple
to state, but so difficult to perform, was accomplished last year by
three New Zealanders and an Englishman. To make sure of having time
enough, they started from their camp--which was at a height of between
6000 and 7000 feet on the eastern side--three-quarters of an hour
before midnight. Hours of night walking followed over moonlit snows,
looked down upon by ghostly crests. When light came the day was fine
and grew bright and beautiful,--so clear that looking down they could
see the ocean beyond the eastern shore, the homesteads standing out on
the yellow-green plains, and on the snows, far, very far down, their
own footprints dotting the smooth whiteness beneath them. It took
them, however, nearly fourteen hours to reach the summit, and then
the most dangerous part of their work only began. They had to gain
the Hooker glacier by creeping down frosted rocks as slippery as an
ice-slide. Long bouts of step-cutting had to be done, and in places the
men had to be lowered by the rope one at a time. Instead of reaching
their goal--the Hermitage Inn below the glacier--in twenty hours,
they consumed no less than thirty-six. During these they were almost
incessantly in motion, and as a display of stamina the performance, one
imagines, must rank high among the exertions of mountaineers. Many fine
spectacles repaid them. One of these, a western view from the rocks
high above the Hooker glacier, is thus described by Mr. Malcolm Ross,
who was of the party:--
“The sun dipped to the rim of the sea, and the western heavens were
glorious with colour, heightened by the distant gloom. Almost on a
level with us, away beyond Sefton, a bank of flame-coloured cloud
stretched seaward from the lesser mountains towards the ocean, and
beyond that again was a far-away continent of cloud, sombre and
mysterious as if it were part of another world. The rugged mountains
and the forests and valleys of southern Westland were being gripped in
the shades of night. A long headland, still thousands of feet below on
the south-west, stretched itself out into the darkened sea, a thin line
of white at its base indicating the tumbling breakers of the Pacific
Ocean.”
[Illustration: THE TASMAN GLACIER]
Mr. Green, as he looked out from a half-way halting-place on the ascent
of Aorangi, and took in the succession of crowded, shining crests
and peaks surging up to the north and north-east of him, felt the
Alpine-climber’s spirit glow within him. Here was a wealth of peaks
awaiting conquest; here was adventure enough for the hands and feet
of a whole generation of mountaineers. Scarcely one of the heights
had then been scaled. This is not so now. Peak after peak of the
Southern Alps has fallen to European or Colonial enterprise, and the
ambitious visitor to the Mount Cook region, in particular, will have
some trouble to find much that remains virgin and yet accessible. For
the unambitious, on the other hand, everything has been made easy. The
Government and its tourist department has taken the district in hand
almost as thoroughly as at Roto-rua, and the holiday-maker may count
on being housed, fed, driven about, guided, and protected efficiently
and at a reasonable price. Happily, too, nothing staring or vulgar
defaces the landscape. Nor do tourists, yet, throng the valleys in
those insufferable crowds that spoil so much romance in Switzerland
and Italy. Were they more numerous than they are, the scale of the
ranges and glaciers is too large to allow the vantage-spots to be
mobbed. Take the glaciers: take those that wind along the flanks of
the Mount Cook range on its eastern and western sides, and, converging
to the south, are drained by the river Tasman. The Tasman glacier
itself is eighteen miles long; its greatest width is over two miles;
its average width over a mile. The Murchison glacier, which joins the
Tasman below the glacier ice, is more than ten miles long. And to the
west and south-west of the range aforesaid, the Hooker and Mueller
glaciers are on a scale not much less striking. The number of tributary
glaciers that feed these enormous ice-serpents has not, I fancy, been
closely estimated, but from heights lofty enough to overlook most
of the glacier system that veins the Aorangi region, explorers have
counted over fifty seen from one spot. Perhaps the finest sight in the
alpine country--at any rate to those who do not scale peaks--is the
Hochstetter ice-fall. This frozen cataract comes down from a great snow
plateau, some 9000 feet above the sea, to the east of Aorangi. The
fall descends, perhaps, 4000 feet to the Tasman glacier. It is much
more than a mile in breadth, and has the appearance of tumbling water,
storm-beaten, broken, confused, surging round rocks. It has, indeed,
something more than the mere appearance of wild unrest, for water pours
through its clefts, and cubes and toppling pinnacles of ice break away
and crash as they fall from hour to hour.
[Illustration: THE CECIL AND WALTER PEAKS]
If the Hochstetter has a rival of its own kind in the island, that
would seem to be the Douglas glacier. This, scarcely known before 1907,
was then visited and examined by Dr. Mackintosh Bell. By his account
it surpasses the Hochstetter in this, that instead of confronting the
stern grandeur of an Alpine valley, it looks down upon the evergreen
forest and unbroken foliage of Westland. The glacier itself comes down
from large, high-lying snow-fields over a mighty cliff, estimated
to be 3000 feet in height. The upper half of the wall is clothed
with rugged ice; but the lower rock-face is too steep for this, and
its perpendicular front is bare. Beneath it the glacier continues.
Waterfall succeeds waterfall: thirty-five in all stream down from the
ice above to the ice below. Mingled with the sound of their downpouring
the explorers heard the crashing of the avalanches. Every few minutes
one of these slid or shot into the depths. Roar followed roar like
cannon fired in slow succession, so that the noise echoing among the
mountains drowned the voices of the wondering beholders.
Oddly enough the lakes of the South Island are nearly all on the
drier side of the watershed. Kanieri and Mahinapua, two well-known
exceptions, are charming, but small. A third exception, Brunner, is
large, but lies among wooded hills without any special pretensions
to grandeur. For the rest the lakes are to the east of the dividing
range, and may be regarded as the complement of the fiords to the
west thereof. But their line stretches out much farther to the north,
for they may be said to include Lake Roto-roa, a long, narrow, but
beautiful water, folded among the mountains of Nelson. Then come
Brunner and Sumner, and the series continues in fine succession
southwards, ending with Lake Hau-roto near the butt-end of the
island. Broadly speaking, the lake scenery improves as you go south.
Wakatipu is in advance of Wanaka and Hawea, Te Anau of Wakatipu;
while Manapouri, beautiful in irregularity, fairly surpasses all
its fellows. The northern half of Wakatipu is, indeed, hard to beat;
but the southern arm, though grand, curves among steeps too hard and
treeless to please the eye altogether. In the same way Te Anau would
be the finest lake in the islands were it not for the flatness of most
of the eastern shore; the three long western arms are magnificent,
and so is the northern part of the main water. But of Manapouri one
may write without ifs and buts. Its deep, clear waters moving round a
multitude of islets; its coves and cliff-points, gulf beyond gulf and
cape beyond cape; the steeps that overhang it, so terrific, yet so
richly clothed; the unscathed foliage sprinkled with tree-flowers,--all
form as faultless a combination of lovely scenes as a wilderness can
well show. From the western arm that reaches out as though to penetrate
to the sea-fiords not far away beyond the mountains, to the eastern
bay, whence the deep volume of the Waiau flows out, there is nothing
to spoil the charm. What Lucerne is to Switzerland Manapouri is to New
Zealand. Man has not helped it with historical associations and touches
of foreign colour. On the other hand, man has not yet spoiled it with
big hotels, blatant advertisements, and insufferable press of tourists.
[Illustration: MANAPOURI]
In one respect--their names--our South Island lakes are more lucky
than our mountains. Most of them have been allowed to keep the names
given them by the Maori. When the Polynesian syllables are given fair
play--which is not always the case in the white man’s mouth--they
are usually liquid or dignified. Manapouri, Te Anau, Roto-roa, and
Hau-roto, are fair examples. Fortunately the lakes which we have chosen
to rechristen have seldom been badly treated. Coleridge, Christabel,
Alabaster, Tennyson, Ellesmere, Marian, Hilda, are pleasant in sound
and suggestion. Our mountains have not come off so well--in the South
Island at any rate. Some have fared better than others. Mount Aspiring,
Mount Pisa, the Sheerdown, the Remarkables, Mounts Aurum, Somnus,
Cosmos, Fourpeaks, Hamilton, Wakefield, Darwin, Brabazon, Alexander,
Rolleston, Franklin, Mitre Peak, Terror Peak, and the Pinnacle, are
not names to cavil at. But I cannot think that such appellations as
Cook, Hutt, Brown, Stokes, Jukes, Largs, Hopkins, Dick, Thomas, Harris,
Pillans, Hankinson, Thompson, and Skelmorlies, do much to heighten
scenic grandeur. However, there they are, and there, doubtless, they
will remain; for we are used to them, so do not mind them. We should
even, it may be, be sorry to lose them.
[Illustration: MITRE PEAK]
The Sounds--the watery labyrinth of the south-west coast--have but one
counterpart in the northern hemisphere, the fiords of Norway. Whether
their number should be reckoned to be fifteen or nineteen is of no
consequence. Enough that between Big Bay and Puysegur Point they indent
the littoral with successive inlets winding between cliffs, straying
round islets and bluffs, and penetrating deep into the heart of the
Alps. They should be called fiords, for that name alone gives any
suggestion of their slender length and of the towering height of the
mountains that confine them. But the pioneers and sailors of three
generations ago chose to dub them “The Sounds,” so The Sounds they
remain. It is best to approach them from the south, beginning with
Perseverance Inlet and ending with Milford Sound. For the heights round
Milford are the loftiest of any, and after their sublimity the softer
aspect of some of the other gulfs is apt to lose impressiveness. The
vast monotony and chilly uneasiness of the ocean without heightens
the contrast at the entrances. Outside the guardian headlands all is
cold and uneasy. Between one inlet and another the sea beats on sheer
faces of cruel granite. Instantaneous is the change when the gates
are entered, and the voyager finds his vessel floating on a surface
narrower than a lake and more peaceful than a river. The very throbbing
of a steamer’s engines becomes gentler and reaches the ears softly
like heart-beats. The arms of the mountains seem stretched to shut out
tumult and distraction. Milford, for instance, is a dark-green riband
of salt water compressed between cliffs less than a mile apart, and
in one pass narrowing to a width of five hundred yards. Yet though
the bulwarks of your ship are near firm earth, the keel is far above
it. All the Sounds are deep: when Captain Cook moored the _Endeavour_
in Dusky Sound her yards interlocked with the branches of trees. But
Milford is probably the deepest of all. There the sounding-line has
reached bottom at nearly thirteen hundred feet. Few swirling currents
seem to disturb these quiet gulfs; and the sweep of the western
gales, too, is shut out from most of the bays and reaches. The force
that seems at work everywhere and always is water. Clouds and mists
in a thousand changing shapes fleet above the mountain crests, are
wreathed round peaks, or drift along the fronts of the towering cliffs.
When they settle down the rain falls in sheets: an inch or thereabouts
may be registered daily for weeks. But it does not always rain in
the Sounds, and when it ceases and the sunshine streams down, the
innumerable waterfalls are a spectacle indeed. At any time the number
of cascades and cataracts is great: the roar of the larger and the
murmur of the smaller are the chief sounds heard; they take the place
of the wind that has been left outside the great enclosures. But after
heavy rain--and most rains on that coast are heavy--the number of
waterfalls defies computation. They seam the mountain-sides with white
lines swiftly moving, embroider green precipices with silver, and churn
up the calm sea-water with their plunging shock. The highest of them
all, the Sutherland, is not on the sea-shore, but lies fourteen miles
up a densely-wooded valley. It is so high--1904 feet--that the three
cascades of its descent seem almost too slender a thread for the mighty
amphitheatre behind and around them. Than the cliffs themselves nothing
could well be finer. Lofty as they are, however, they are surpassed
by some of the walls that hem in Milford; for these are computed to
rise nearly five thousand feet. They must be a good second to those
stupendous sea-faces in eastern Formosa which are said to exceed six
thousand feet. Nor in volume or energy is the Sutherland at all equal
to the Bowen, which falls on the sea-beach at Milford in two leaps. Its
height in all is, perhaps, but six hundred feet. But the upper fall
dives into a bowl of hard rock with such weight that the whole watery
mass rebounds in a noble curve to plunge white and foaming to the sea’s
edge.
There is no need to measure heights, calculate bulk, or compare one
sight with another in a territory where beauty and grandeur are spent
so freely. The glory of the Sounds is not found in this cliff or that
waterfall, in the elevation of any one range or the especial grace
of any curve or channel. It comes from the astonishing succession,
yet variety, of grand yet beautiful prospects, of charm near at hand
contrasted with the sternness of the rocky and snowy wilderness which
forms the aerial boundary of the background. The exact height of cliffs
and mountain-steeps matters little. What is important is that--except
on the steepest of the great walls of Milford--almost every yard of
their surface is beautified with a drapery of frond and foliage.
Where the angle is too acute for trees to root themselves ferns and
creepers cloak the faces; where even these fail green mosses save the
rocks from bareness, and contrast softly with the sparkling threads of
ever-present water.
[Illustration: IN MILFORD SOUND]
Scarcely anywhere can the eye take in the whole of an inlet at once.
The narrower fiords wind, the wider are sprinkled with islets. As the
vessel slowly moves on, the scene changes; a fresh vista opens
out with every mile; the gazer comes to every bend with undiminished
expectation. The two longest of the gulfs measure twenty-two miles
from gates to inmost ends. Milford is barely nine miles long--but how
many scenes are met with in those nine! No sooner does the sense of
confinement between dark and terrific heights become oppressive than
some high prospect opens out to the upward gaze, and the sunshine
lightens up the wooded shoulders and glittering snow-fields of some
distant mount. Then the whole realm is so utterly wild, so unspoiled
and unprofaned. Man has done nothing to injure or wreck it. Nowhere
have you to avert your eyes to avoid seeing blackened tracts, the work
of axe and fire. The absurdities of man’s architecture are not here,
nor his litter, dirt and stenches. The clean, beautiful wilderness goes
on and on, far as the eye can travel and farther by many a league.
Protected on one side by the ocean, on the other by the mountainous
labyrinth, it stretches with its deep gulfs and virgin valleys to
remain the delight and refreshment of generations wearied with the
smoke and soilure of the cities of men.
[Illustration: ON THE CLINTON RIVER]
We often call this largest of our national parks a paradise. To
apply the term to such a wilderness is a curious instance of change
in the use of words. The Persian “paradise” was a hunting-ground
where the great king could chase wild beasts without interruption.
In our south-west, on the contrary, guns and bird-snaring are alike
forbidden, and animal life is preserved, not to be hunted, but to be
observed. As most of my readers know, the birds of our islands, by
their variety and singularity, atone for the almost complete absence
of four-footed mammals. The most curious are the flightless kinds.
Not that these comprise all that is interesting in our bird-life by
any means. The rare stitch-bird; those beautiful singers, the tui,
bell-bird, and saddle-back; many marine birds, and those friendly
little creatures the robins and fantails of the bush, amuse others as
well as the zoologists. But the flightless birds--the roa, the grey
kiwi, the takahé, the kakapo, the flightless duck of the Aucklands,
and the weka--are our chief scientific treasures, unless the tuatara
lizard and the short-tailed bat may be considered to rival them. Some
of our ground-birds have the further claim on the attention of science,
that they are the relatives of the extinct and gigantic moa. That
monstrous, and probably harmless, animal was exterminated by fires and
Maori hunters centuries ago. Bones, eggs, and feathers remain to attest
its former numbers, and the roa and kiwi to give the unscientific a
notion of its looks and habits. The story of the thigh-bone which found
its way to Sir Richard Owen seventy years ago, and of his diagnosis
therefrom of a walking bird about the size of an ostrich, is one of
the romances of zoology. The earlier moas were far taller and more
ponderous than any ostrich. Their relationship to the ancient moas of
Madagascar, as well as their colossal stature, are further suggestions
that New Zealand is what it looks--the relics of a submerged
southern continent. After the discovery of moa skeletons there
were great hopes that living survivors of some of the tall birds would
yet be found, and the unexplored and intricate south-west was by common
consent the most promising field in which to search. In 1848 a rail
over three feet high--the takahé--was caught by sealers in Dusky Sound.
Fifty years later, when hope had almost died out, another takahé was
taken alive--the bird that now stands stuffed in a German museum. But,
alas! this rail is the solitary “find” that has rewarded us in the last
sixty years, and the expectation of lighting upon any flightless bird
larger than a roa flutters very faintly now. All the more, therefore,
ought we to bestow thought on the preservation of the odd and curious
wild life that is left to us. The outlook for our native birds has long
been very far from bright. Many years ago the Norway rat had penetrated
every corner of the islands. Cats, descended from wanderers of the
domestic species, are to be found in forest and mountain, and have
grown fiercer and more active with each decade. Sparrows, blackbirds,
and thrushes compete for Nature’s supplies of honey and insects. Last,
and, perhaps, their worst enemies of all, are the stoats, weasels, and
ferrets, which sheep-farmers were foolish enough to import a quarter
of a century ago to combat the rabbit. Luckily, more effectual methods
of coping with rabbits have since been perfected, for had we to trust
to imported vermin our pastures would be in a bad case. As it is, the
stoat and weasel levy toll on many a poultry yard, and their ravages
among the unhappy wild birds of the forest are more deplorable still.
In both islands they have found their way across from the east coast
to the west: rivers, lakes, rock, snow, and ice have been powerless
to stop them. Even the native birds that can fly lose their eggs and
nestlings. The flightless birds are helpless. Weasels can kill much
more formidable game than kiwi and kakapo; a single weasel has been
known to dispose of a kea parrot in captivity. Pressed, then, by
these and their other foes, the native birds are disappearing in wide
tracts of the main islands. Twenty years ago this was sufficiently
notorious; and at length in the ’nineties the Government was aroused
to do something to save a remnant. Throughout the whole of the Great
Reserve of the south-west shooting was, and still is, discouraged. But
this is not enough. Only on islets off the coast can the birds be safe
from ferrets and similar vermin, to say nothing of human collectors and
sportsmen.
[Illustration: AT THE HEAD OF LAKE TE-ANAU]
It was decided, therefore, to set aside such island sanctuaries, and to
station paid care-takers on them. There are now three of these insular
refuges: Resolution Island, off Dusky Sound; Kapiti, in Cook’s Strait;
and the Little Barrier Island, at the mouth of the Hauraki Gulf. The
broken and richly-wooded Resolution contains some 50,000 acres, and
is as good a place for its present uses as could be found. Remote
from settlement, drenched by continual rains, it attracts no one but
a casual sight-seer. On the other hand, its care-taker is in close
touch with the whole region of the fiords, and can watch over and
to some extent guard the wild life therein. The experiences of this
officer, Mr. Richard Henry, are uncommon enough. For twelve years he
lived near lakes Manapouri and Te Anau studying the birds on that side
of the wilderness. Since 1900 he has been stationed on the western
coast, at Pigeon Island, near Resolution. There, with such society as a
boy and a dog can afford him, this guardian of birds passes year after
year in a climate where the rainfall ranges, I suppose, from 140 inches
to 200 in the twelvemonth. Inured to solitude and sandflies Mr. Henry
appears sufficiently happy in watching the habits of his favourite
birds, their enemies the beasts, and their neighbours the sea-fish. He
can write as well as observe, and his reports and papers are looked for
by all who care for Nature in our country.
It is odd that in so vast a wilderness, and one so densely clothed with
vegetation as are the mountains and valleys of the south-west, there
should not be room enough and to spare for the European singing-birds
as well as the native kind. But if we are to believe the care-taker at
Resolution Island--and better testimony than his could not easily be
had,--the sparrow alone, to say nothing of the thrush and blackbird,
is almost as deadly an enemy as the flightless birds have. For the
sparrow not only takes a share of the insects which are supposed to be
his food, but consumes more than his share of the honey of the rata
and other native flowers. Six sparrows which Mr. Henry managed to kill
with a lucky shot one summer morning were found to be plump and full
of honey--it oozed out of their beaks. Thrushes and blackbirds are just
as ready to take to a vegetable diet, so that the angry care-taker is
driven to denounce the birds of Europe as “jabbering sparrows and other
musical humbugs that come here under false pretences.” Then the native
birds themselves are not always forbearing to each other. The wekas,
the commonest and most active of the flightless birds, are remorseless
thieves, and will steal the eggs of wild ducks or farm poultry
indifferently. Though as big as a domestic fowl, wekas are no great
fighters: a bantam cock, or even a bantam hen, will rout the biggest of
them. On the other hand, Mr. Henry has seen a weka tackle a bush rat
and pin it down in its hole under a log. That the weka will survive in
considerable numbers even on the mainland seems likely. The fate of the
two kinds of kiwi, the big brown roa and his small grey cousin, seems
more doubtful.
Both are the most timid, harmless, and helpless of birds. All their
strength and faculties seem concentrated in the long and sensitive
beaks with which they probe the ground or catch insects that flutter
near it. In soft peat or moss they will pierce as deeply as ten inches
to secure a worm; and the extraordinary powers of hearing and scent
which enable them to detect prey buried so far beneath the surface are
nothing short of mysterious. Their part in the world that man controls
would seem to be that of insect destroyers in gardens and orchards.
Perhaps had colonists been wiser they would have been preserved and
bred for this purpose for the last fifty years. As it is man has
preferred to let the kiwis go and to import insectivorous allies, most
of which have turned out to be doubtful blessings. Among both kiwis and
wekas the males are the most dutiful of husbands and fathers. After the
eggs are laid they do most of the sitting, and at a later stage provide
the chicks with food. The female kiwi, too, is the larger bird, and has
the longer beak--points of interest in the avifauna of a land where
women’s franchise is law. Very different is the division of labour
between the sexes in the case of the kakapo or night-parrot. This also
is classed among flightless birds, not because it has no wings--for
its wings are well developed--but because ages ago it lost the art of
flying. Finding ground food plentiful in the wet mountain forests, and
having no foes to fear, the night-parrot waxed fat and flightless.
Now, after the coming of the stoat and weasel, it is too late for its
habits to change. The male kakapo are famous for a peculiar drumming
love-song, an odd tremulous sound that can be heard miles away. But
though musical courtiers, they are by no means such self-sacrificing
husbands as other flightless birds. They leave hatching and other
work to the mothers, who are so worn by the process that the race
only breeds in intermittent years. Tame and guileless as most native
birds are apt to be, the kakapo exceeds them all in a kind of sleepy
apathy. Mr. Henry tells how he once noticed one sitting on wood under
a drooping fern. He nudged it with his finger and spoke to it, but the
bird only muttered hoarsely, and appeared to go to sleep again as the
disturber moved away.
Kapiti, in Cook’s Strait, containing, as it does, barely 5000 acres, is
the smallest of the three island sanctuaries, but unlike the other two
it has made some figure in New Zealand history. In the blood-stained
years before annexation it was seized by the noted marauder Rauparaha,
whose acute eye saw in it a stronghold at once difficult to attack,
and excellently placed for raids upon the main islands, both north
and south. From Kapiti, with his Ngatitoa warriors and his fleet of
war-canoes, he became a terror to his race. His expeditions, marked
with the usual treachery, massacre, and cannibalism of Maori warfare,
reached as far south as Akaroa in Banks’ Peninsula, and indirectly led
to the invasion of the Chathams, and the almost complete extirpation
of the inoffensive Moriori. Rauparaha’s early life might have taught
him pity, for he was himself a fugitive who, with his people, had
been hunted away first from Kawhia, then from Taranaki, by the
stronger Waikato. He lived to wreak vengeance--on the weaker tribes
of the south. No mean captain, he seems only to have suffered one
reverse in the South Island--a surprise by Tuhawaiki (Bloody Jack).
Certainly his only fight with white men--that which we choose to
call the Wairau massacre--was disastrous enough to us. In Kapiti
itself, in the days before the hoisting of the Union Jack, Rauparaha
had white neighbours--I had almost said friends--in the shape of the
shore whalers, whose long boats were then a feature of our coastal
waters. They called him “Rowbulla,” and affected to regard him with
the familiarity which breeds contempt. On his side he found that they
served his purpose--which in their case was trade--well enough. Both
Maori and whaler have long since passed away from Kapiti, and scarce a
trace of them remains, save the wild goats which roam about the heights
and destroy the undergrowth of the forest. The island itself resembles
one side of a high-pitched roof. To the west, a long cliff, 1700 feet
high, faces the famous north-west gales of Cook’s Strait, and shows
the wearing effects of wind and wave. Eastward from the ridge the land
slopes at a practicable angle, and most of it is covered with a thick,
though not very imposing forest. Among the ratas, karakas, tree ferns
and scrub of the gullies, wild pigeons, bell-birds, tuis, whiteheads,
and other native birds still hold their own. Plants from the north and
south mingle in a fashion that charms botanists like Dr. Cockayne. This
gentleman has lately conveyed to Kapiti a number of specimens from the
far-away Auckland isles, and if the Government will be pleased to have
the goats and cattle killed off, and interlopers, like the sparrows and
the Californian quail, kept down, there is no reason why Kapiti should
not become a centre of refuge for the rarer species of our harassed
fauna and flora.
[Illustration: THE BULLER RIVER NEAR HAWK’S CRAIG]
Twice as large as Kapiti, and quite twice as picturesque, the Little
Barrier Island, the northern bird-sanctuary, is otherwise little known.
It has no history to speak of, though Mr. Shakespear, its care-taker,
has gathered one or two traditions. A sharp fight, for instance,
between two bands of Maori was decided on its shore; and for many years
thereafter a tree which stood there was pointed out as the “gallows” on
which the cannibal victors hung the bodies of their slain enemies. At
another spot on the boulders of the beach an unhappy fugitive is said
to have paddled in his canoe, flying from a defeat on the mainland.
Landing exhausted, he found the islanders as merciless as the foes
behind, and was promptly clubbed and eaten. However, the Little Barrier
is to-day as peaceful an asylum as the heart of a persecuted bird could
desire. The stitch-bird, no longer hunted by collectors, is once more
increasing in numbers there, and has for companion the bell-bird--the
sweetest of our songsters, save one,--which has been driven from its
habitat on the main North Island. Godwits, wearied with their long
return journey from Siberia, are fain, “spent with the vast and howling
main,” to rest on the Little Barrier before passing on their way across
the Hauraki Gulf. Fantails and other wild feathered things flutter
round the care-taker’s house, for--so he tells us--he does not suffer
any birds--not even the friendless and much-disliked cormorant--to
be injured. Along with the birds, the tuatara lizard (and the kauri,
pohutu-kawa, and other trees, quite as much in need of asylum as the
birds) may grow and decay unmolested in the quiet ravines. The island
lies forty-five miles from Auckland, and nearly twenty from
the nearest mainland, so there is no need for it to be disturbed by
anything worse than the warm and rainy winds that burst upon it from
north-east and north-west.
* * * * *
Water, the force that beautifies the west and south-west, has been
the chief foe of their explorers. The first whites to penetrate their
gorges and wet forests found their main obstacles in rivers, lakes,
and swamps. Unlike pioneers elsewhere, they had nothing to fear from
savages, beasts, reptiles, or fever. Brunner, one of the earliest
to enter Westland, spent more than a year away from civilisation,
encountering hardship, but never in danger of violence from man
or beast. Still, such a rugged and soaking labyrinth could not be
traversed and mapped out without loss. There is a death-roll, though
not a very long one. Nearly all the deaths were due to drowning. Mr.
Charlton Howitt, one of the Anglo-Victorian family of writers and
explorers, was lost with two companions in Lake Brunner. The one
survivor of Howitt’s party died from the effects of hardship. Mr.
Townsend, a Government officer, who searched Lake Brunner for Howitt’s
body, was himself drowned not long after, also with two companions.
Mr. Whitcombe, surveyor, perished in trying to cross the Teremakau in
a canoe. Von Haast’s friend, the botanist Dr. Sinclair, was drowned
in a torrent in the Alps of Canterbury. Quintin M’Kinnon, who did as
much as any one to open up the region between the southern lakes and
the Sounds, sank in a squall while sailing alone in Lake Te Anau.
Professor Brown, of the University of Otago, who disappeared in the
wilds to the west of Manapouri, is believed to have been swept away in
a stream there. The surveyor Quill, the only man who has yet climbed
to the top of the Sutherland Falls, lost his life afterwards in the
Wakatipu wilderness. Only one death by man’s violence is to be noted
in the list--that of Dobson, a young surveyor of much promise, who was
murdered by bush-rangers in northern Westland about forty years ago. I
have named victims well known and directly engaged in exploring. The
number of gold-diggers, shepherds, swagmen, and nondescripts who have
gone down in the swift and ice-cold rivers of our mountains is large.
Among them are not a few nameless adventurers drawn westward by the
gold rushes of the ’sixties. It is a difficult matter to gauge from
the bank the precise amount of risk to be faced in fording a clouded
torrent as it swirls down over hidden boulders and shifting shingle.
Even old hands miscalculate sometimes. When once a swagman stumbles
badly and loses his balance, he is swept away, and the struggle is soon
over. There is a cry; a man and a swag are rolled over and over; he
drops his burden and one or both are sucked under in an eddy--perhaps
to reappear, perhaps not. It may be that the body is stranded on a
shallow, or it may be that the current bears it down to a grave in the
sea.
[Illustration: BELOW THE JUNCTION OF THE BULLER AND INANGAHUA RIVERS]
The south-western coast was the first part of our islands seen by a
European. Tasman sighted the mountains of Westland in 1642. Cook
visited the Sounds more than once, and spent some time in Dusky Sound
in 1771. Vancouver, who served under Cook, anchored there in command
of an expedition in 1789; and Malaspina, a Spanish navigator, took his
ship among the fiords towards the end of the eighteenth century. But
Tasman did not land; and though the others did, and it is interesting
to remember that such noted explorers of the southern seas came there
in the old days of three-cornered hats, pigtails, and scurvy, still it
must be admitted that their doings in our south-western havens were
entirely commonplace. Vancouver and the Spaniards had no adventures.
Nothing that concerns Cook can fail to interest the student; and the
story of his anchorages and surveys, of the “spruce beer” which he
brewed from a mixture of sprigs of rimu and leaves of manuka, and
of his encounters with the solitary family of Maori met with on the
coast, is full of meaning to the few who pore over the scraps of
narrative which compose the history of our country prior to 1800. There
is satisfaction in knowing that the stumps of the trees cut down by
Cook’s men are still to be recognised. To the general reader, however,
any stirring elements found in the early story of the South Island
were brought in by the sealers and whalers who came in the wake of
the famous navigators, rather than by the discoverers themselves. One
lasting service the first seamen did to the Sounds: they left plain and
expressive names on most of the gulfs, coves, and headlands. Doubtful
Sound, Dusky Sound, Wet Jacket Arm, Chalky Island, Parrot Island,
Wood Hen Cove, speak of the rough experiences and everyday life of the
sailors. Resolution, Perseverance, Discovery have a salt savour of
difficulties sought out and overcome. For the rest the charm of the
south-west comes but in slight degree from old associations. It is a
paradise without a past.
[Illustration: BREAM HEAD, WHANGAREI HEADS]
The sealers and whalers of the first four decades of the nineteenth
century knew our outlying islands well. Of the interior of our mainland
they knew nothing whatever; but they searched every bay and cove of the
butt-end of the South Island, of Rakiura, and of the smaller islets
for the whale and fur seal. The schooners and brigs that carried these
rough-handed adventurers commonly hailed either from Sydney, Boston,
or Nantucket, places that were not in those days schools of marine
politeness or forbearance. The captains and crews that they sent out
to southern seas looked on the New Zealand coast as a No Man’s Land,
peopled by ferocious cannibals, who were to be traded with, or killed,
as circumstances might direct. The Maori met them very much in the
same spirit. Many are the stories told of the dealings, peaceable or
warlike, of the white ruffians with the brown savages. In 1823, for
instance, the schooner _Snapper_ brought away from Rakiura to Sydney a
certain James Caddell, a white seaman with a tattooed face. This man
had, so he declared, been landed on Stewart Island seventeen years
earlier, as one of a party of seal-hunters. They were at once set upon
by the natives, and all killed save Caddell, who saved his life by
clutching the sacred mantle of a chief and thus obtaining the benefit
of the law of Tapu. He was allowed to join the tribe, to become one of
the fighting men, and to marry a chief’s daughter. At any rate, that
was his story. It may have been true, for he is said to have turned his
back on Sydney and deliberately returned to live among the Maori.
A more dramatic tale is that of the fate of a boat’s crew from the
_General Gates_, American sealing ship. In 1821 her captain landed a
party of six men somewhere near Puysegur Point to collect seal-skins.
So abundant were the fur seals on our south-west coast in those days
that in six weeks the men had taken and salted 3563 skins. Suddenly
a party of Maori burst into their hut about midnight, seized the
unlucky Americans, and, after looting the place, marched them off as
prisoners. According to the survivors, they were compelled to trudge
between three and four hundred miles, and were finally taken to a big
sandy bay on the west coast of the South Island. Here they were tied
to trees and left without food till they were ravenously hungry. Then
one of them, John Rawton, was killed with a club. His head was buried
in the ground; his body dressed, cooked, and eaten. On each of the next
three days another of the wretched seamen was seized and devoured in
the same way, their companions looking on like Ulysses in the cave of
the Cyclops. As a crowning horror the starving seamen were offered some
of the baked human flesh and ate it. After four days of this torment
there came a storm with thunder and lightning, which drove the natives
away to take shelter. Left thus unguarded, Price and West, the two
remaining prisoners, contrived to slip their bonds of flax. A canoe
was lying on the beach, and rough as the surf was, they managed to
launch her. Scarcely were they afloat before the natives returned and
rushed into the sea after them, yelling loudly. The Americans had just
sufficient start and no more. Paddling for dear life, they left the
land behind, and had the extraordinary fortune, after floating about
for three days, to be picked up, half dead, by the trading schooner
_Margery_. The story of their capture and escape is to be found in
Polack’s _New Zealand_, published in 1838. Recently, Mr. Robert M’Nab
has unearthed contemporary references to the _General Gates_, and, in
his book _Muri-huku_, has given an extended account of the adventures
of her skipper and crew. The captain, Abimelech Riggs by name, seems
to have been a very choice salt-water blackguard. He began his career
at the Antipodes by enlisting convicts in Sydney, and carrying them
off as seamen. For this he was arrested in New Zealand waters, and had
to stand his trial in Sydney. In Mr. M’Nab’s opinion, he lost two if
not three parties of his men on the New Zealand coast, where he seems
to have left them to take their chance, sailing off and remaining away
with the finest indifference. Finally, he appears to have taken revenge
by running down certain canoes manned by Maori which he chanced to meet
in Foveaux Straits. After that _coup_, Captain Abimelech Riggs
vanishes from our stage, a worthy precursor of Captain Stewart of the
brig _Elisabeth_, the blackest scoundrel of our Alsatian period.
[Illustration: LAWYER’S HEAD]
Maori history does not contribute very much to the romance of the
south-west. A broken tribe, the Ngatimamoe, were in the eighteenth
century driven back to lurk among the mountains and lakes there. Once
they had owned the whole South Island. Their pitiless supplanters, the
Ngaitahu, would not let them rest even in their unenviable mountain
refuges. They were chased farther and farther westward, and finally
exterminated. A few still existed when the first navigators cast anchor
in the fiords. For many years explorers hoped to find some tiny clan
hidden away in the tangled recesses of Fiordland; but it would seem
that they are gone, like the moa.
The whites came in time to witness the beginning of a fresh process
of raiding and dispossession--the attacks on the Ngaitahu by other
tribes from the north. The raids of Rauparaha among the Ngaitahu of
the eastern coast of the South Island have often been described; for,
thanks to Mr. Travers, Canon Stack, and other chroniclers, many of
their details have been preserved. Much less is known of the doings
of Rauparaha’s lieutenants on the western coast, though one of their
expeditions passed through the mountains and the heart of Otago.
Probably enough, his Ngatitoa turned their steps towards Westland
in the hope of annexing the tract wherein is found the famous
greenstone--a nephrite prized by the Maori at once for its hardness and
beauty. In their stone age--that is to say, until the earlier decades
of the nineteenth century--it furnished them with their most effective
tools and deadliest weapons. The best of it is so hard that steel will
not scratch its surface, while its clear colour, varying from light to
the darkest green, is far richer than the hue of oriental jade. Many
years--as much as two generations--might be consumed in cutting and
polishing a greenstone _meré_ fit for a great chief.[5] When perfected,
such a weapon became a sacred heirloom, the loss of which would be
wailed over as a blow to its owner’s tribe.
[5] See Mr. Justice Chapman’s paper on the working of greenstone in the
_Transactions of the N.Z. Institute_.
[Illustration: A MAORI CHIEFTAINESS]
The country of the greenstone lies between the Arahura and Hokitika
rivers in Westland, a territory by no means easy to invade eighty
years ago. The war parties of the Ngatitoa reached it, however,
creeping along the rugged sea-coast, and, where the beaches ended,
scaling cliffs by means of ladders. They conquered the greenstone
district (from which the whole South Island takes its Maori name,
Te Wai Pounamou), and settled down there among the subdued natives.
Then, one might fancy, the Ngatitoa would have halted. South of the
Teremakau valley there was no greenstone; for the stone, _tangi-wai_,
found near Milford Sound, though often classed with greenstone, is
a distinct mineral, softer and much less valuable. Nor were there
any more tribes with villages worth plundering. Save for a few
wandering fugitives, the mountains and coast of the south-west were
empty, or peopled only by the Maori imagination with ogres and fairies,
dangerous to the intruder. Beyond this drenched and difficult country,
however, the Ngatitoa resolved to pass. They learned--from captives,
one supposes--of the existence of a low saddle, by which a man may
cross from the west coast to the lakes of Otago without mounting two
thousand feet. By this way, the Haast Pass, they resolved to march, and
fall with musket and _meré_ upon the unexpecting Ngaitahu of Otago.
Their leader in this daring project was a certain Puoho. We may believe
that the successes of Rauparaha on the east coast, and the fall, one
after the other, of Omihi, the two stockades of Akaroa, and the famous
_pa_ of Kaiapoi, had fired the blood of his young men, and that Puoho
dreamed of nothing less than the complete conquest of the south. He
nearly effected it. By a daring canoe voyage from Port Nicholson to
southern Westland, and by landing there and crossing the Haast Saddle,
this tattooed Hannibal turned the higher Alps and descended upon Lake
Hawea, surprising there a village of the Ngaitahu. Only one of the
inhabitants escaped, a lad who was saved to guide the marauders to
the camp of a family living at Lake Wanaka. The boy managed to slip
away from the two captors who were his guards, and ran all the way
to Wanaka to warn the threatened family--his own relatives. When the
two guards gave chase, they found the intended victims prepared for
them; they fell into an ambuscade and were both killed--tomahawked.
Before the main body of the invaders came up, the Ngaitahu family was
far away. At Wanaka, Puoho’s daring scheme became more daring still,
for he conceived and executed no less a plan than that of paddling
down the Clutha River on rafts made of flax sticks--crazy craft for
such a river. The flower stalks or sticks of the native flax are
buoyant enough when dead and dry; but they soon become water-logged
and are absurdly brittle. They supply such rafts as small boys love to
construct for the navigation of small lagoons. And that strange river,
the Clutha, while about half as long as the Thames, tears down to the
sea bearing far more water than the Nile. Nevertheless the Clutha did
not drown Puoho and his men: they made their way to the sea through the
open country of the south-east. Then passing on to the river Mataura,
they took another village somewhere between the sea and the site of a
town that now rejoices in the name of Gore. Then indeed the fate of the
Ngaitahu hung in the balance, and the Otago branches of the tribe were
threatened with the doom of those of the northern half of the island.
They were saved because in Southland there was at the moment their one
capable leader in their later days of trouble--the chief Tuhawaiki,
whom the sealers of the south coast called Bloody Jack. Hurrying up
with all the warriors he could collect, and reinforced by some of the
white sealers aforesaid, this personage attacked the Ngatitoa by the
Mataura, took their stockade by escalade, and killed or captured the
band. Puoho himself was shot by a chief who lived to tell of the
fray for more than sixty years afterwards. So the Ngaitahu escaped
the slavery or extinction which they in earlier days had inflicted on
the Ngatimamoe. For, three years after Puoho’s raid, the New Zealand
Company appeared in Cook’s Strait, and thereafter Rauparaha and his
braves harried the South Island no more.