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This Book is not a systematic history of the settlement of New Zealand from the beginnings of British enterprise, but is intended to place before the reader some of the salient features of pioneer life, especially in its more adventurous aspects. The real history of our country during the past century was not made in the towns or in the Legislature, but in the country over a prolonged breaking-in period. The settlers' efforts to establish themselves on the land were conditioned by geography, climate, the character of soil and vegetation, and the distribution of the Maori population. Perhaps the last factor was the most important of all in its effect on the acquisition of land. The vast difference between the two islands in the forest and grass covering of the land was the next agent in influencing the character and progress of the settler's work. The small farmer, the man of
But it was the presence of the Maori and the great bush that chiefly affected the progress of the restless pakeha in the North. The clash of races created the history that has given New Zealand what may be called its heroic genius, the soul that a land wins only by grievous stress and strife and the evocation of poignant human emotions. New Zealand has been a land of vivid life and ennobling adventure. Above all it was a frontier, a land of many frontiers, in a period well within our memories. It is a country where the farmer in the North Island became also a frontiersman, not by
In this book the opening chapters are given to the description of a typical immigrant family's introduction to New Zealand life from the beginning, where hundreds of questing souls who made up the shipload find themselves in the utter strangeness of ocean surroundings. The newcomers are introduced to bush life, where their farming experience and hereditary love of land make then-lot comparatively easy. They are the right stuff for colonial life. The narrative then ranges over New Zealand from the far North to Otago, but is chiefly concerned with the frontiers. These are the Upper Waikato, the King Country borders, Taranaki, the Bay of Plenty, where the settler,
'Deep and wideThe wheels of progress have pass'd on,The silent pioneer is goneHis ghost is moving down the trees.'Joaquin Miller
The mountains of Spain, with their shadowed defiles and their bare, sunlit crags, were plain on the port beam. The passengers, or those of them who had recovered from the tossing about in the narrow seas, were gazing out over the bulwarks and poop rail and asking eager questions. "Was that the savage country where travellers were robbed of all their money and deprived of an ear or a nose or so before being tossed over the cliffs? Would New Zealand be anything like that? The highlands of perilous romance faded into a soft blue haze as the three pillars of canvas marched into the Atlantic before the gradually strengthening breeze. It had come steady from the north and the ship was able to lay her course with square yards.
The sea now was no more than a long easy swell, after the hullabaloo of weather which had rushed the ship out from the Mersey, a rude introduction to ocean life for the four hundred emigrants who crowded the White Star clipper. A near observer
Every detail of the ship showed her American build, from the iron-bound wooden-stocked anchors to the yellow pine of her topmasts and the whiteness of her mostly-cotton sails, shining in tiers up to the skysail like a tiny oblong cloud a hundred and fifty feet above the deck. Looking outboard one would have seen that the vessel had a broad yellow band along her covering-board, defining her sea-kindly sheer and her high lift of bow. No make-believe lines of painted gun-ports chequered her sides. That fashion of thirteen dummy ports a-side was left to the British ships; at any rate the New England and Nova Scotian builders preferred plain honest economical black. Double-topsails had just Mermaid's owners preferred the old-style whole sails.
So much having been said to introduce this transitory home of four hundred potential settlers of New Zealand, we make our way aft, jostling and being jostled in the process, for the crowded deck is still a kind of skating-floor for the awkward squads who have not yet found their sea-legs. On the long poop there seems to be a kind of beauty show, for all the young women are there, basking in the sun, drying their hair, and singing and chattering. That is the domain of the two score cabin passengers and the fifty or more single-girl emigrants. The captain paces the sacred starboard side, his telescope under his arm, regular Navy fashion. The second mate, officer of the watch, keeps to his port side except when he crosses it at a question from his commander, and now and again glances at the course steered by the big-whiskered seaman at the six-foot wheel. A glance down the companionway or through the skylight shows a spacious cuddy interior, with much of carving and some pictures; and if you went below and made a closer inspection you would see something of warlike decoration also, for round the foot of the mizzen-mast is a rack for rifles and muskets, and half-a-dozen of those antique relics, the long boarding pikes that hold memories of Nelson and the North and 'Up the Rebels!' of Ireland. Up on deck, near the break of the poop, is a swivel gun, Mermaid had had a voyage or two in the East Indies and China trade, the pirate hunting-ground.
Looking round, one would have observed that most of those emigrants seemed men and women of the out-of-doors—no meagrely grown, undernourished folk from the factory towns and the Black counties. There were tall, straight-backed, stalwart countrymen and jolly, rich-bosomed women, and many a black-eyed Susan and a red-haired and blue-eyed Rosaleen—named for the love of old Ireland—and Bridget, named for the saint. There were Scottish girls from Ayr and Galloway; there were Flora MacDonald-like women from the Isles. Irish and Scottish by their pleasant tongues seemed to predominate. The clatter of tongues flowed around the grave-eyed captain like a torrent about a dark and silent rock. Probably more than half the emigrants were women and children. The tide of female-kind seemed overwhelming to some of the womenless crew. 'All them fine gurrls locked up at dark every night,' a sailor growled. 'And very good need for it too,' a mate reminded him. The doctor's and matron's rule was strict on these emigrant ships. But not always effective. Shipboard love finds a way to wriggle through in a hundred days' voyage.
This shipload of questing souls, with all then-hopes and fears and ambitions, is now fairly launched Mermaid, let us dip into the private diary kept by one of them. He came from the Isle of Man with his family of eight-—a tall, deep-chested farmer, seemingly the right stuff for a frontier life.
The diarist and his family were not pressed abroad by want of money, for they were prosperous farming people, as prosperity went in the Isle of Man in the fifties. 'There was no lack of anything,' said one of them. 'There were two farms in the family.' This was in the beautiful country of hill and glen in from Castletown. 'The people thought we were mad to break up life there and go to New Zealand.' But the Isle of Man was old and very small; there was not much room there for growing families; and the faraway land called for people to build homes. Each adult settler who paid his or her passage out received forty acres of land free and twenty acres for each child. So the family bade farewell, not without many a tear and many a sigh, to their beloved Isle of Mannin Beg, isle of fairies, in which everyone believed, place of lovely comfortable homes and immemorial fields. They bade farewell to the old farms of Ballasherlogue and Ballakilpatrick; farewell to their forefathers lying in the green churchyard of Arboury, in Colby Glen; and in the emigrant ship found a new and bewildering world.
'We have all day an hubbub,' this diarist wrote in
The customary routine of shipboard life in a leisurely sailing vessel was varied by a gale now and again, and now and then a quarrel or a trial by a selected jury of some dispute or some offender against the unwritten code of conduct. As the Equator was approached, the nights grew hot beyond bearing below in the crowded cabins and 'tween-decks.
Ten degrees north of the Line, in calm weather, the captain gave orders for a large staysail to be rigged out and lowered into the sea to make a bath for the men and boys. The sail was supported by a line from a yardarm and two ropes from the ship's side. It held ten or fourteen men at a time. Next day a large water cask was cut in two for baths for children. The halves were set on opposite sides of the deck, one for boys and one for girls.
The average rate of sailing until the ship was 23 degrees south of the Line worked out at 174 miles a day. The fair wind increased as the latitude of the
Shipboard was a grand place for the youngsters. 'The children are in very good spirits. Tommy imitates the loud coarse order of the boatswain with regard to sheets and braces, and then the sailors' notes. Richy says he doesn't care to go on land any more.' (Richard, as it happened, saw a good deal of wild work on land in his after life. He served in the Colonial forces in the Hauhau wars, and earned the New Zealand war medal.)
The little homeland left astern for ever was never out of the diarist's thoughts. On 5 September, in 41 south lat: 'This had been a fine March morning in the Isle of Man.'
'Friday, September 7: In the last 48 hours the ship sailed 510 miles.' She was running down the easting and edging south in her great circle sailing. Ten and eleven knots were often logged. 'It is winterly indeed. All hands called to take in sail. Twenty men together on the main-topsail-yard, reefing, and about 25 of the passengers doing all we can below. The sailors complain she has very heavy rigging. With too few men.' So any help the men and lads among the passengers could give the crew was welcomed. It was a regular thing for a score of hefty farmers to tally on to sheets and braces at the call of 'Bout
Blowing hard, ship rolling along in the Roaring Forties with squared yards, sailing sometimes at 13 knots. '. . . . More sail set—she was sailed very hard ... rather hard to our liking.... The spray on some of the dangerous rocks could be seen.' These were the Crozets. 'Very cold. To clear Kerguelen Island we are sailing S. and by E.1/4.E. We are now near 52 degrees South latitude.'
The wind eased off a bit and more sail was set. 'I felt my mind rather uneasy (15 September) at seeing the ship so splendid at night with 19 sails set on her. I slept but very little for fear of a squall, till I heard the sailors taking in sail.' (The previous day's entry had been: '. . . . The captain seems to be in great anxiety about the appearance of the weather.') 'At four o'clock in the morning I went on deck where all hands were busily employed. The best of the sailors aloft reefing and taking in sails, the rest engaged on deck. I did what I could with them for about two hours, the gale increasing. Nineteen men were now on reefing the main-topsail.'
The narrator then ventured to make, in his cautious Manx way, some comment on the sail-carrying of the previous night. He put it with polite diplomacy, though he describes it as 'very free.' 'I stood up on the poop when the Captain came and spoke very free. "I mentioned to a friend last night, sir," I said,
Mermaid's commander made as politely as he had been addressed the non-committal reply, 'A very true remark,' and talked of the ship's position.
Now it came on to snow heavily, the gale increasing, and it was bitterly cold. 'The sea began to rise like hills. Ship now only under three close-reefed topsails instead of 19 whole sails last night.' Next day the foresail was set again, and two staysails and the Mermaid went storming along before the howling westerly. A miserable time for the passengers, especially the women, for the ship rolled greatly. But the skipper 'is very much delighted with her, and some of the sailors say they were never in such a ship in their lives'—which may be read two ways.
Diary entry: 'September 21—We have been busy with the sailors spreading sails. Steering east at 10 knots . . . .' High seas sometimes lopped on board. 'A sea broke over the poop and down into the saloon.' And snow—'the pastime with many is pelting each other with snowballs.' A fair wind and plenty of it, so much so that on 28 September the ship was racing along at 14 knots.
On 1 October, now close to Tasmania, 'all hands, not excepting passengers, were called to "Auckland sheets and New Zealand braces" to square the yards after a spell of head winds.' The land of promise was now only a thousand miles away—a matter of a few days—and all hands were longing to see it. No wonder the penned-up people pined for a sight of something beside the rolling waves and the wheeling albatrosses. They had not seen any land since passing Madeira, nor a vessel for six weeks. More sail was made until the Mermaid had her main-royal on again. Diary entry: '. . . . Half-past three a.m.—wind blew very hard from the north-west by west—I rose and Robert Cowley after me when the sailors were pleased to get the least help. The mizzen-topgallant-sail and outer jib were taken offher. Sea now smooth; she sailed about 13 knots.'
And, at last, land—the Three Kings. 'They are large, broken rocks, like the Barrow and the Stack at the Calf of Man, but much larger.' Now, dodging down the coast to Auckland, delayed by contrary winds. The captain was 'very much mortified' and afraid he would be beaten to Auckland by the London ship Maori. He had learned by telegraph, just before leaving Liverpool, that the
As the ship sailed up Rangitoto Channel the captain Maori had not yet been reported.
So at last, after one hundred days at sea, the beautiful Mermaid lay at anchor in the Waitemata, her immigrants now to embark on another new and strange enterprise, new toils and joys and sorrows, making their homes in a new land under conditions utterly different from the ordered familiar life in the quiet English shires, on the hills of Ulster and in the sheltered glens of Man.
The crisp chop of the axe sharply echoing from the wall of bush is the first note of settlement in a new land. 'Feel my blade,' says the axe. 'It serves notice to you tall trees, towering there in your pride and strength. You block the way; down you come. Man is here knocking at the door. Down you come! Make way for the spade, the plough, the grass-seed and the food crops.' The axe was the newcomer's first weapon in this North Island of New Zealand, timbered as it was to within a few miles of the coast. In Southern parts the settler seeking pastures for sheep and cattle began by firing the scrub and thick, high, coarse grass, a tangled growth. Axe and saw were not their tools of attack. Here in the North was the forest-edge, where fern and glossy-green foliage of tupakihi and rustling flax-bushes soon gave place to the unpierced barrier of lofty trees.
The height and thickness of those trees and the density of branch and leafage amazed the stalwart stranger who stood gazing at them, axe in hand.
The stranger's axe was new; he had been eager before even getting his camp sweated down to try its edge against these pillars that propped up a new sky. Most of them were thicker through than the masts of the ship from which he and his family had lately landed after a voyage round half the globe. He had taken a chip or two out of one of the small trees. The blade sank into the tawa trunk with a chunk that gave him a strange pleasure. The cut in bark and tree-flesh released a cool, moist pungency, a fragrance new to him. It was that smell of newly-cut wood and soon the fragrance of burning twigs and branches that were to hold him captive for life. He plied his sharp axe again until his vigorous and straightly-directed blows brought the tree crashing down to the ferny ground. He picked up a chunk and smelt it, as a primitive man landing in a new country might sniff a handful of soil. It touched a primeval sense of adventure and exploration.
The axeman walked out from the bush fringe to the tents gleaming against the dark of the tall timber. In the little camp there were two tents and a tarpaulin shelter for piles of baggage trunks, shipboard chests, and boxes of food stores and a hundred supplies.
'Good sound philosophy,' said a man who came up at that moment to speak to the head of the family, a generously-whiskered fellow of bush-settler cut and dress. He was a farmer from the fringe of cultivation a mile away, who had arranged to cart the newcomers' loads of baggage and stores into their raw new section. His bullock-team stood at the edge of the space of cleared ground, where the low bushes and fern-clumps had been slashed away to make way for the camp. The good-natured and kindly neighbour gave the assistance without which they would have been rather helpless in that beginning of a new life where everything was strange. The pound a day the immigrant had offered him to take them on to their land and see them settled there for the beginning of the new life was not excessive pay for the considerable service he gave.
After the business at the Land Office, from which the immigrant emerged with his papers of title, the old settler who knew the ropes had smoothed the
The settler, still grasping his new axe, gazed hard over the forest landscape, rising into a tumble of bush ranges, a rugged upswell of shouldering hills, one above the other away to the horizon. The farmer, whose neighbour he was now to be, guessed the tenor of his thoughts. He smiled as he said:
'Yes, it's a tough job you have before you, old man. But you must bear in mind that the heavy bush land makes the best farms when it's cleared. It's ten times better in the long run than the easy-looking land that's clear of big stuff, and only tea-tree or fern to get rid of. In a few years this will be grass paddocks
Sitting there on one of the ship-trunks, the man of experience expounded some of the wisdom of the bush country, and the business of setting up a home in a land that seemed at first sight a barbarous wilderness. But it would soon be sundown. He jumped up and laid hold of the trunk to get it under canvas. 'Come along, I'll have to see you all ship-shape before I get away with my team.'
The little camp had taken on a face of orderliness before the teamster was under way, with eloquent appeals and whip-cracks like pistol-shots. 'See you in the morning,' shouted the bullock-driver as he plodded round a bastion of tall timber.
That first night in the bush was vividly remembered by the new-chum family long after later memories had become blurred by familiarity. It was their first night with the mosquitoes. 'These awful stinging flies!' was the first complaint as evening came down. The settler neighbour had not thought of advising them to provide themselves with mosquito netting before they left town. Bush-seasoned himself, he did not feel the need of it. Some newcomers, after one taste of the mosquito myriads— or rather one taste of their blood by the mosquitoes— made muslin bags with draw-strings, to cover their heads and shoulders at night. All the naeroa of Hunua gathered to the feast. The 'stinging flies' at any rate kept the family so busy that the strange, deep silence of the forest and now and again the sharp cry of the weka or the mournful call of the morepork failed to depress or startle them.
Morning came at last and with it relief. Forest voices, the harsh ka-ka of the big parrot and the chunk-choo of the tui, clear as glass, echoed from near and far along the forest-edge. There were bell-notes dropping from the darkness of the trees.
'How lovely!' said the mother, 'how fresh and sweet the morning is! But look at your face in the glass, Betsy!'
Not only Betsy but mother and all bore signs of the night's battle with the naeroa hordes.
The boys were out with the first touch of dawn. Tommy, the youngest, who had been reluctant to leave the ship, played bo's'n with a whistle he had acquired. He imitated the gruff orders of the bo's'n and his mate:
'Starbowlines ahoy! Show a leg, rouse and shine, ye cripples! Up you come, turn to, or I'll help you along with the toe of me boot!'
'Aye, aye, bo's'n,' said the big brother, 'and you can turn to yourself, and get the fire going for breakfast!'
'I'd like to have been that big bo's'n,' said Tommy as he set about his job. 'But I may be a bullock-driver yet. The gentleman who fetched our things out here must have been a bo's'n once, by the way he could talk to his bullocks.'
Their helpful neighbour from down the track was with them soon after breakfast, on horseback this time. He sympathised with them in a gravely amused way as their sufferings were described by mother, echoed by the girls. 'My fault,' he said; 'I should
'Good—that's one of our first colonial hints,' said the father. 'There's a job for you, Tommy, when we get our cow.'
'But you must be getting a roof over you first thing,' said the neighbour. 'Now, I've arranged with a couple of the Maoris down at Papakura creek to run you up a nikau whare—a bush hut, you know. That's your first house until you can get slabs and shingles split. Then when you are under cover and getting used to the life, we can see about pit-sawing boards for a proper house, but the whare will have to do for a while.'
The new settler and his wife thanked their kindly friend who had taken them under his wing so opportunely. 'It's all right,' he said. 'I'm fairly well fixed in my place for the present and I can give you new-chums a hand. The Maoris will be here presently, good fellows who can tackle anything in the bush and farming line. They grow wheat; the old missionaries taught them the white man's farming, and they grind the wheat at their little wheel mill at the
Two cheerful young Maoris came up and greeted the pakehas. Both could speak some English. They set to on a neat whare with beautifully-made walls of nikau-palm leaves, artistic as well as useful, with a thick roofing of fern-tree fronds. By the end of the second day, with the assistance of the white family in the cutting, fetching and carrying, there was a rain-tight house, one that would be cool in hot weather and warm and windproof in cold.
That was the beginning of the new life. Gradually the settler and his family fitted themselves into the conditions of the country, on the edge of the interminable forest. It was not so very difficult for these country-bred folk. They cut their way slowly into the bush, with the near-by Maoris to call upon for help and bush-sense. When a little ground was cleared, the neighbour lent them his bullocks and plough. To the Maoris, a few pounds of tobacco and gifts of clothes were more acceptable than money.
That neighbourly spirit among the Maoris as well as their pakeha neighbours helped mightily in establishing immigrants on the land in the first two decades of British settlement. Unfortunately it did not last. In the third year of the Mermaid family's life in the bush the Waikato war began. The kindly Maoris of this South Auckland country were forced into the struggle. Sooner than desert the Kingite
The Maori women of the nearest families pressed their noses to their pakeha friends' and wept over the parting. 'We must go,' they said, 'our men must take their guns and help Waikato in the war. We want peace, but we cannot give up our King, much as we like the pakeha. Farewell! E noho ra, e hoa ma, e noho! Remain there, friends, remain there!'
That unhappy check to the peaceful subjugation of the bush and the winning of a livelihood from the newly-turned soil altered the course of life for many a border family. The tragedy of war, like so many far greater wars before and since, could have been avoided. At any rate, the frontier settlers and the Maori farmers were not the war-makers.
True pioneering conditions prevailed in some parts of these islands to a quite recent period. Consider some of the features and episodes of life in the interior of the North Island. Up to about 1883 the King Country was closed to British men. The Government did not venture to assert authority anywhere in that huge area of country between Lake Taupo and the west coast and between the Puniu and Waipa rivers and the White Cliffs, north Taranaki. In 1880 the Kingites killed a white trespasser at Taumarunui by way of asserting the Maori King's sovereignty and the high chiefs' policy of exclusion. A few years before that a farm worker was shot and beheaded within a few miles of Cambridge township, and the frontier settlers armed and patrolled the troubled border line. It was not until 1885 that the Armed Constabulary were disbanded and the border redoubts were abandoned as no longer needed. All Taranaki was practically an armed camp in 1881, the time of the march on Parihaka.
That was the military position at the beginning of the eighties, and it sufficiently indicates the exciting, not to say anxious, position of many hundreds of our settlers and their families. As for farming conditions, they were primitive; there was the simple life in real earnest. Roads in many settlements were non-existent or were made by the settlers themselves, unless the Armed Constabulary were turned on to them. Surveyors, telegraph-line construction parties, gold prospectors—all had their difficulties and often their perils. Among the Maoris themselves there were many quarrels, sometimes resulting in bloodshed, as in the little campaign on the Poroti gumfields, between Whangarei and the Mangakahia and Northern Wairoa in 1888, in which three men were killed and several wounded. Up to the eighties nearly all immigrants came to New Zealand in sailing vessels. Many parts of the interior were imperfectly explored; as for the South Island, the work of discovery was still going on in such places as South Westland and the western part of Otago and Southland.
There are men who were on Gabriel's Gully and other Otago goldfields at the beginning of the sixties; many more who explored the West Coast for gold. Pioneer settlers, old sailors, whalers, soldiers, surveyors,
In spite of the utu in revenge for injuries or for the satisfaction of an inter-tribal vendetta. The influence of the missionaries and of such far-seeing and benevolent men as
Neighbourly trading and the cultivation of the soil had kept most of the tribes peacefully busy until 1860. The chief cause of the growing distrust and suspicion on the part of the Maori was the land. The land, always the land, was the root of evil. The white population was increasing quickly; shiploads of
The Maori of the old generation had a shrewd wit, with which he often made play at the expense of the pakeha. An old missionary friend of mine, '
Another simile bears upon the white man's steady advance in the King Country. The surveyors sent into the Maori country to spy out and map the land Kai-ruri, said
Again, an old land-owner at Kawarau, Kaipara, was engaged in an argument with a Government agent, touching land-selling. The pakeha official was bent on a purchase, the conservative owner of many acres was determined to hold on to them. 'Money—your money!' he said. 'What is it? We sell the land, and the money vanishes like the dew on the taro leaves, licked up by the morning sun.'
The missionaries were New Zealand's first English settlers and farmers. They had made oases of civilisation and productiveness in the northern part of the country long before British control of these islands was established. A full quarter of a century of mission effort had elapsed, with its gradual but sure influence for the better on the native population, when the
The first sheep brought to the Bay of Islands were landed in 1814 by the great
The English buildings at Waimate, Kerikeri, and Paihia, the churches and schools, the fields of English grass, the large cultivations of wheat and potatoes, besides the Maori kumara and taro, impressed early travellers with the beneficial results of the pioneers' very practical mission. It was necessary, first of all, to grow food for the children under missionary instruction, and it was desirable to increase the food staples of the tribes around the stations. The Hauraki shores, Waikato, Hokianga, Tauranga, the Thames Valley, and Rotorua were in turn the scenes of English farming on a small scale, more or less successful, before the first British immigrants reached the newly-proclaimed colony.
After the first English apostles introduced by Samuel Marsden came traders and adventurers of all degrees. Most of them could have been classed as undesirables. There were legitimate trading agents brought over by Sydney vessels to buy flax in exchange for muskets and ammunition, and there
There were two grades of pakeha-Maori, the white men who took naturally to the blanket and the kainga life, and the better-class squatter or trader who, » although marrying into the tribe, did not abandon his civilised pakeha habits but instead tried to educate his hoa wahine in the elements of European culture.
The runaway sailors, whalers, and miscellaneous adventurers were usually of a much lower intellectual and social grade than the women they acquired as wives. When the missionary came to marry some of these couples, it was found that while the rough pakeha was in many cases unable to read or write, the rangatira woman could write her name in an easy flowing script, proof that she had been taught at a mission school.
There was a quite numerous pakeha-Maori population along the northern coast in 1840, but it was not until Auckland town had been well established that the British settlement of the northern shores by farmers was begun. The Whangarei district was one of the first places of pakeha life that was not wholly devoted to the kauri-timber felling and shipping
The first regular immigrants to Auckland and the North were the Scottish settlers from the Clyde in the Jane Gifford
and
We know that the Scottish Highland evictions, the Irish potato famine, the labour conditions in England, directed the thoughts of many to the new lands round the world, but it would be quite misleading and historically incorrect to say or infer that New Zealand was peopled mostly by people who were starving in the mother countries. The proportion of our early immigrants born in the slums of the Old Country cities must have been very small indeed. There was a process of natural selection which sent the best class of Englishman and Scot and Irishman overseas, at any rate the class best fitted to break in a raw, new country and make it a home of civilisation and comfort. Many were men and women of educa-
The story of the Highland settlement of Waipu is an epic of adventure and endeavour. Its founders were chiefly crofters and their descendants who had been driven from their homes in Ross-shire, Suther-landshire, and other parts of the Highlands to make room for large sheepowners' flocks and rich men's deer and grouse, a series of cold-blooded evictions which
The
The Nova Scotians set resolutely to work for the great adventure. They felled trees and cut them up for timbers and planking, forged ironwork, and built a brig which they named Highland Lassie
, and another vessel, the brig
Other vessels followed, most of them built by the Gertrude
, the small brigantine
Its Macs of divers clans are celebrated for their sea-going proclivities. So numerous are the McKenzie seamen of Waipu birth that it is related that on one occasion nine master mariners of the name were in their ships at the same time in Auckland harbour. To the clan lists of Waipu, Mangapai, and Omaha,
Only the very old people among the founders of our Nova Scotian Highland settlements in North
The life of the farmer is so protected and eased to-day by a watchful Government, and the people have become so accustomed to ask and receive State assistance, that the stories of some of the early-days settlement seem almost incredible. Immigrants arriving in the first four decades of New Zealand's existence as a British colony were often sent off to perfectly wild, unroaded forest regions, there to chop out a living. Many race elements have gone to the making of the New Zealander of to-day,
There is the story of the Bohemian colony at Puhoi, some thirty-five miles north of Auckland. The founders of Puhoi were eighty-three men, women and children from Staab, in Bohemia, which was part of the old Austrian Empire.
Puhoi is reached by a good road to-day, passing through Waiwera on the northward journey from Auckland. The founder of this community in the Maori bush was
The first party of Bohemians left Staab, about a hundred miles from Prague, on 26 February 1863 and travelled to Liverpool by way of Hamburg and Altona. At Liverpool they embarked in the ship War Spirit
, which landed them at Auckland in June 1863.
The first sight of the Promised Land was most depressing. Captain Krippner's choice was a lamentable error of judgment. There was not a road of any kind; the only way to reach their allotted land was by sea and up a tidal creek; there was hardly a level acre; all was broken into hills and gullies; and every part of it was covered with bush. The nearest inhabitants were a few Maoris who lived in the primitive way under their chief
For an account of some of the difficulties of these people, who made excellent settlers and a permanent valuable addition to the young New Zealand nation, I turn to
The Puhoi men—and women, too—felled bush, cut firewood and shingles for shipment to Auckland, and burned large quantities of rimu bark to make charcoal in order to earn money for the necessaries of life. For years everything had to go by sea and there was very little left after freight had been paid. There was not enough money in this little community to buy a cow until several years had passed. Towards the end of the second year when some of the thick bush had been felled and burned, some small patches of ground were ready for potatoes and wheat. The wheat, when reaped, was ground into flour in small steel handmills. So the little community fared along, each year felling more of the all-surrounding bush. Another contingent of Bohemians arrived in 1866 and settled at Ahuroa, close to Puhoi, and these communities by hard work and mutual help gradually built up the pretty and comfortable settlements of to-day.
But for all their toil and semi-starvation in the early years those splendid settlers never lost their courage nor their capacity for making the best of life. Their one great relaxation was dancing. Puhoi became famous in Auckland for its dances, which sometimes lasted for three days and nights. Those hospitable and
Matamata town and the rich dairy-farming lands about it are an excellent example of the changes which closer settlement has brought about in New Zealand. It is all to the good that this once great estate belonging to one man should now support many hundreds of families. But
J. C. Firth's son, the late
Speaking of the large estates in the Thames Valley at the end of the last century, a visitor said: 'There is no doubt that farming was more impressive and picturesque on those large estates than it is to-day. I saw 20,000 sheep in one mob on 100 acres of turnips. Great mobs of cattle were frequently on the move. With its vast blocks and herds, Matamata was singularly bare of human life. Apart from the contractors engaged in draining, ploughing, fencing, and similar work, there were only twenty-five men permanently employed, and these apart from the managers only averaged from 20s. to 25s. per week in wages. On the site of the present town district of over 1,000 people, there was only a wool shed, empty and lifeless except during a few weeks through the year. Between the railway station and the homestead, about five miles away, there was not a house to be seen. Those who know the Matamata of to-day can realise what John McKenzie's Lands for Settlement Act did for this estate as well as for others in various parts of New Zealand.'
The principal organised migration of Irish people to New Zealand was that of the pioneers of Katikati, Tauranga, in 1875-78. This was a body, or rather two
Several hundreds of an excellent class of colonists, all from Ulster, were brought in the ships Carisbrooke Castle, Dover Castle, Lady Jocelyn
, and
Some of the land allotted to them on the Tauranga shores was not of the best quality, but the Katikati settlements and farms were soon scenes of industry and comfortable homes.
Mention has been made of the foodstuffs, especially wheat and flour, that were brought to Auckland from the Maori country. It was the
The Maoris of the Waikato and the Waipa, as well as those of other districts, were industrious and prosperous, thanks to the missionaries and to the help given by muka (dressed flax). After each harvest the Waipa and Waikato rivers were busy with this canoe transport going down fully laden to the market and returning with goods purchased in Auckland. The route was via Waiuku, which was then a very busy place, and Onehunga.
A great deal of the heavy work on the farms was done by means of an ohu (working bee). The harvesting was also done by this method.
A member of a leading half-caste family of the King Country, the late
The war ended the golden age in the Waikato. The British conquest replaced the Maori tribes with military settlers, as far south as the Puniu and Waipa rivers. Waikato took refuge with Ngati-Maniapoto who lost only their northernmost village and headquarters, Kihikihi. Some 3,000 military settlers were introduced, and were given free sections ranging from 50 to 300 acres. Redoubts were the centres around which the settlements were grouped.
The first home I knew, the first trees and flowers, were on the soil that had less than ten years before been a battlefield. The place had originally been a grant to a Waikato Militia officer, who sold it. The farm lay with a gentle tilt to the north. Wheat was much grown and gave large yields. Memory lingers on the many peach groves and cherry groves, Maori planted, laden with the largest and sweetest fruit ever grown.
There were tongues of raupo and flax swamp thrust into the land from the broad belt of forest
The farm life was comfortable and happy, however primitive in some ways. There were farm and household utensils never seen now. Peaches fattened the pigs; even the horses and cattle munched those peaches. We had everything we needed; to the youthful mind, that knew no other life, it was endless comfort. I came to know later how short cash often was, and how settler and storekeeper often had resort to the barter system in which no money passed. Later on I carried to the township every Saturday on the saddle in front of me a box of home-churned butter, that surpassed in excellence of flavour any factory butter of to-day. We got fourpence a pound
The things we did without simply because we had never heard of them—at any rate we youngsters had not—were legion. We were happy at home; those evenings were never monotonous. We had books at any rate. I am sure I don't know how modern youth would survive a revival of those movie-less, radio-less, jazz-less evenings, the only sound from the outside dark the sharp wailing call of the weka in the swamp and the bittern's occasional muffled boom.
The farming then was mixed; root and grain crops of many kinds were grown, and there were sheep as well as cattle on every farm of any size. Candles were made by the farmer's wife from tallow; I remember the tin moulds used. Smelly candles they were, but better than nothing, especially when kerosene was hard to get. We had orchards of generous size. There were no orchard pests; but caterpillars once destroyed a wheat crop.
The flax-bush was all important. No farmer could have done without it, for a score of purposes. The down or pollen (hunehune) of the raupo flowerhead was a substitute for feathers or kapok in filling pillows and cushions. Harness was made, in the early farming days, from green cowhide, cured with salt and alum. Plough and bridle reins and stirrup leathers were manufactured in that way. Floor mats
The housewives made much use of the abundant fruit. The big honey peaches were cut in slices, which were strung with darning needle and thread or string, and hung out in the wind and sun to dry; then they were laid out on boards, or on sheets of corrugated iron, thoroughly dried in the hot midsummer sun, and finally hung up in festoons in the rafters of the kitchen for future use in pies. This practice seems to have become a lost art in the country; no doubt because those beautiful peaches of the pre-blight years are no longer seen, except in a few places on the Bay of Plenty coast. The farm women in South Africa, I am told, sun-dry their peaches in exactly the same way.
There was no factory-cured bacon in the pioneer days, for there were no factories. We dealt with our pigs on the farm, and we had a hand in every stage of the process from sty to kitchen. After the killing the meat was well rubbed in with salt, a business several times repeated, and then was transferred to the smoke-house, a small slab whare without a window and entered by a low door. Here the dissected pig was hung in the smoke of a sawdust fire which was kept steadily burning, or rather smouldering, on the earth floor for many days. When
We have travelled far since those days of the semi-primitive life. But I question whether the excessive specialisation of the farming industry has been altogether a change for the better. The dairy-farm nowadays is often a bare, comfortless place. The ground for plantations is begrudged; most of the trees are felled; there are fewer orchards. A farm in the early days was self-contained; nearly everything that the family needed except clothes and a few groceries was produced there. Intensive dairy farming means that some of the amenities that make country life pleasant and happy are sacrificed.
I know if I were a boy again I would sooner be a youngster on a far-back Waikato farm of that era than on one of these down-to-date places where they put through a hundred cows twice daily. We were not slaves to that exasperating animal. We were not all standardised then by radio and cinema and motor-car and labour-saving machinery. There are
On rare occasions there was an entertainment of some kind in the township, or the next one. There was the first amateur minstrel show of the young eighties in the village hall. What mystery about those 'Genuine Tennessee Negro Minstrels!' What excitement, what floor-pounding with heavy boots when up rolled the rag and revealed the drop-scene, a bush picture with a misty mountain and a Maori canoe and the creek! It was painted by an artist in the Armed Constabulary redoubt on the hill. There they were, all in a half-moon row, the darkies of our dreams, with a long-whiskered, venerable Uncle Tom in their midst. It was very new and wonderful.
The sharp eyes of boyhood, however, soon penetrated the burnt-cork disguise. 'Why, it's old
There they were, the old soldiers and some of the young, the talent of the township, singing and strumming away like billy-oh. They sang all the old Christy Minstrel ditties—new to us youngsters—and they told each other the funniest jokes in the most solemn manner. The sophisticated cinema-sated young folk of the day cannot imagine what a treat
The township school picnic day was an outing long looked for and enjoyed with zest. Plump and bustled beauty played 'Jolly Miller' with whiskered manhood under the peach trees, and the dames picked up their skirts for the foot races and ran like wekas—and if you know the weka you will remember it can get some pace on when it likes.
But the annual race-meeting was the great day of the year. The races were the gathering place for settlers for thirty miles around. Many of them rode their own horses, and there was no monkey-crouch jockeying in those days. Stockman's seat, as in the hunts, and weights a well-grown man's. Tattooed and bushy-whiskered Hauhaus who had been ready to raid the border farmer a few years before came in and got tight in pakeha company and yelled hilarious hakas when a Maori horse came in first. Big hikapene for another drink. He told me he had lived in Orakau before the war, and was one of the owners.
All such gatherings, jovially unconventional, tended to build and strengthen the pakeha-Maori friendship.
We frequently saw Te Kooti in those years, 1884-1889. He was a man of middle size, with grey hair and sparse grey beard. His features were finely cut, his strong nose aquiline, his expression determined, dogged. He was not tattooed, his frame was spare, his shoulders slightly stooped. One of his hands was
In one way and another there was pleasure in the country life in one's youth. There was leisure, for all the hard work. Life went in a contemplative sort of way; there was time to think. No one was in a hurry except in the strenuous and rough-country riding after half-wild cattle. There was always another day. We cannot return along the old paths of life—perhaps few of us would even if we could— but one would like to recapture something of the early-days outlook, the freshness and the delight that every rising sun brought with it when it glistened on the dewy fields and the trees and the flax-blades of the old loved places.
I had been reading
Ploughman's Progress. Coincidentally, there came to me from the Waikato a note on a relative's pioneering adventures on the Old Frontier, a very different kind of life from rural England's. The old-timer was
When a youngster of barely twenty-one, Tom Qualtrough had taken a contract to plough an area of unbroken land on Grice and Walker's cattle run at Roto-o-Rangi and Puahue and Panehakua and on towards the Maunga-tautari Ranges. Part of this large stock run lay on the Maori side of the war-confiscation boundary and was held on leasehold from some of the Maori owners. One day in April 1873 he drove his team afield, to begin his ploughing, when a party of armed natives suddenly appeared
The young ploughman did not argue the point. He turned his team about, and presently reported to the manager of the station. The Maoris, or at any rate their leader
It was a fearfully anxious time on the frontier farms. All thought it was the prelude to another war. Settlers were armed. The Waikato Cavalry, two troops divided into patrol detachments, watched the tracks and the river fords. The Poverty Bay massacre was still raw in all minds. The Constabulary posts were strengthened and more blockhouses and redoubts were built. Happily it did not go beyond
During the crisis Maori and pakeha both prepared for war, though no one but a few of the most hostile Hauhaus wanted it. Even Auckland was alarmed— more than a hundred miles away.
Before that barbarous killing there had been alarms long after the end of the Waikato war and after the white side of the border was well settled. There was here and there a murder. In 1870 a farm worker went missing near Orakau—a young fellow named
Young Lyon had struck up a love affair with a Maori girl just across the river. She was a married girl, and her husband was soon on the trail. He followed the pakeha from the trysting-place in the fern one night and tomahawked him. When that became known, the people of the frontier townships and homesteads breathed again. The Constabulary, too, and the Authorities all the way to Wellington. There was no need for action; tomahawk law settled the case. The Maori husband just retired to Te Kuiti for a change of air, and presumably also of wives.
There were two classes of pakeha frontiersmen that the old patriots of the King Country particularly distrusted and disliked. ('Dislike' is indeed a mild term for it.) One was the Government surveyor, with his instruments, his pegs, his observation marks and stations. The other was the prospector for gold. Both these outlanders gave the Hauhaus of the border much trouble in their time and kept them on the alert to see that they did not trespass on the sacred territory of the Maori King.
Pirongia Mountain, so beautiful and so mysterious a place in our young days, when it rose unspoiled and forested from the valley where the Waipa River flowed, was the scene of both surveyors' and gold-seekers' explorations very soon after the Waikato
There were surveyors here and there, however, on the edge of the Dangerous Land, and these were more easily found than the gold-prospectors. In the latter part of 1870 there was a Government surveyor named
Mr Todd, who had several assistants, had pitched his tents in the shelter of the bush, and had made a comfortable camp. One of his party,
Several times warnings were sent to the surveyor that to persist with his work would be dangerous. He took no notice of these cautions; and at last some of the extreme Kingite party decided that something
When the alarm reached the Alexandra redoubt, a relief party of Constabulary and volunteers hurried off across the river and carried in the body of Mr Todd and the wounded man. As for the shooting party, it was off at its best speed either for Kawhia or for that safe retreat, the densely-forested Hauturu Range, to the south. The leader was
Incidents of that kind occurred on all the frontiers of the Hauhau districts in the often anxious period between the end of the actual fighting and the final peace. There was excitement all along the South Auckland border country, and Constabulary posts were garrisoned at strategic points; here and there alarmed families took refuge in the redoubts and
There were some rather hysterical people in Auckland who demanded more protection against the 'savage Maoris.' But the border farmers kept their heads. They attended to their farms, milked their cows and saw to their crops; those who had rifles took them with them to the fields.
A few months later, under the authority of the Native and Defence Minister,
There were suggestions that the Maoris over the border should be outlawed and that any who came over should be shot. The Aukati should be a barrier against Maoris, just as it was against the pakeha. Aukati Line. Compare with
In August 1879—nine years after the Pirongia killing just related—there was another shooting affair in which surveyors were the targets.
tupara
Tupara, a double-barrelled gun.ito, representing the object of hatred and revenge. The Maoris thought him dead and left him where he lay. When they had gone he crawled down towards the swamp. He was found by a half-caste woman,
In the North Island much of the story of exploring survey is involved with Maori agrarian politics,
History has a way of repeating itself, and the old lessons are often taught again. Roads are the first thing needed in the conquest of a country, and many a road first made by an army long ago has become a motor highway of to-day. The methods of
Our sympathy usually goes to the people whose country is invaded. They have justice on their side as a rule, for they are defending their native land. But we must admire the wisdom of the invading road-makers.
In 1870
There was still a little war in the Urewera Country, but at last (in May 1872)
There is a great historical novel, The New Road
, written by the late
The historians tell us that General Wade's road never became more than a military highway. 'It is a dead road now,' wrote
That road to Kawhia, one of the last made by the Force, was a true strategic route, as well as a commercial one. It opened up the last retreat of the conservative Kingites. They regarded Kawhia Harbour as King Tawhiao's own seaport, not to be entered without his permission, and they were downcast and angry when it was made easy of access by the guiding beacons erected at Heads for shipping and by the road carried across the wooded ranges from Alexandra.
In Taranaki Province many frontier and pioneer roads were made by the Armed Constabulary. There were redoubts and stockades in many places, as in the South Auckland country. The Constabulary for all their navvying toil, were ready to drop pick and shovel and axe and take up the rifle again at a moment's notice. We saw much of that Constabulary life on the frontier of Waikato, where redoubts and blockhouses stood like sentries along the pakeha side of the border.
Similar conditions existed to some extent along the Bay of Plenty shores from Tauranga to Opotiki. There were posts of defence at the entrances to several river gorges where the Hauhaus inland, especially Tamaikowha and his fierce fighting tribe
The farmhouse, with its garden and orchard and its stables and stockyards, lies comfortably on a gentle northward-looking slope, facing the direction of greatest sunshine, on the old Confiscation Boundary line. The land here rests with an easy tilt to the north; a few hundred yards in rear of the willow-shaded homestead there is a steep drop to the levels along the bank of the clear, gravelly river which once was the border between the settled farm country and the dangerous land. From this height you may trace east and west for many miles the geological break in the land facing the south, a long irregular line of quick descents. The farmhouse is just under the lee of the highest part of this tilted table; and so escapes the direct bite of the winter southerlies. Not far away is a Maori settlement of the half-pakeha, half-native sort; away down on the flat below is another village where the shining river comes round in a half-loop. Not so long ago all this country beyond the homestead was
The pioneer settler to whose courage and pioneering energy the transformation of this part of the out-back is chiefly to be accounted, is a shrewd kindly Scotsman (from Perthshire) whose tongue after more than sixty years' absence has not lost its agreeable tang of old Caledonia. But we must cast back over the decades and show the young pioneer in his first years of endeavour, making his start and striving with all his native shrewdness to establish himself in the Maori land.
In the very early sixties the flax curtain goes up on the riverside trader, a brisk youngster who set up his flax store and his trade room on the Lower Waikato River. His trading-place is a long raupo shed; he stocks blankets and prints, three-legged cooking-pots, pannikins, bags of sugar, tobacco, jew's harps, tomahawks, anything and everything
Then comes the Waikato war, and the trader's head sits uneasily on his shoulders for a while, for Kingite war parties are abroad, and he is one of the first marked for attack by the Waikatos from up-river. Though he is well liked by every Maori, he is a Queen's pakeha, and that is sufficient. So when the troops come up he becomes a military contractor; he organises a corps of friendly Maoris to carry supplies up-river from the Heads for
The war is over; the lands of the Waikato and the garden country of the mid-Waipa have passed to the conquering Queen, and our trader, turned farmer, is now settled on a section of confiscated land just beyond the spot where the final battle of the campaign was fought and where a hundred Maori patriots He buried in the trenches that they held with such desperate courage.
When the Thames gold-diggings are at their height of production and new rich finds are being made daily, he leaves his lonely farm a while and tries his fortune on the Thames. Returning with a little welcome capital, he sets out to develop his square miles of hill, slope and swamp. He marries, a bonny daughter of a sturdy Scot, a farm girl, a good horsewoman, and as plucky as himself over rough country. But the frontier is troubled. There are alarms of raid and massacre, for the evicted Maoris are just over the border.
The most uncomfortably adventurous period on this part of the frontier was long after the war. Often when the settler's wife was left alone in the house during the day she imagined how easy it would be for the Maoris to creep up and attack the place, for high fern grew almost to the back door. Her husband left her a double-barrel gun, loaded, but what was that against a war party?
The settlers along the border formed volunteer mounted corps, and these troops of Waikato Cavalry,
Those were some of the passages and episodes of life that developed the pioneer's native virtues of resourcefulness, courage, and self-reliance. There were hard times, harder than any that try the settler's pluck to-day. Markets were far away; there were no freezing companies, no dairy produce buyers chasing the farmer with cheques. A milking cow fetched barely as many shillings as it would pounds to-day.
The home farm is a thousand acres in extent; the sons' farms cover another four thousand acres or so, and nearly every acre of this area, most of it only lately broken in, is producing wealth in fat stock and in butter and cheese and wool. The newer country brought into use has been broken in from
On the family estates there were at the time of which I write more than 1,500 cattle, mostly Shorthorns, a good-sized flock of sheep, and about 150 horses. There were 200 milking cows, which assured big monthly cheques; but fat stock for the freezing works was the great standby. Horse-breeding, too, at one period paid well; quite fifty horses of good pedigree were sold off the place in the year. Maori labour was largely employed; but the hardest work has always been tackled by the pioneer and his sons, the finest type of frontier-reared farmers. Three boys went soldiering in the Great War; one fell in France; the married ones remaining did their part in turning out food to help fill the refrigerators for England.
The head of the clan reached a patriarchal age, living his sanely active life in the open air—helped by a sanguine temperament that declined to take a gloomy view of things even when times were hardest and a generous touch of the wit that is the salt of life. He was good yet for a fifty-mile horseback ride over the back country or for a long day with the farm wagon or in the shearing shed. Most often, however, he was to be found in the office at
Even so lately as 1890 there was not a white farmer in all that vast expanse of country south of the Puniu River at Te Awamutu stretching to the plains of North Taranaki in the one direction and to the Wanganui River in the other. For more than a hundred miles southward and from the Tasman Sea to Lake Taupo all was Maori as far as any cultivation was concerned. The railway builders and tunnellers were at work on the north end of the Main Trunk, by arrangement in 1884 between the Government and the Kingite chiefs, but for all except that slowly advancing thin iron thread it lay under the grave silence of a region that awaits the I magic touch of civilised industry. It was indeed a romantic-seeming spot in the mid-eighties, when we looked out southward from the Upper Waikato border and rode across those gently undulating plains of the Manukarere and round about Otorohanga and Otewa, kaingas here
Maori horse tracks were the only roads except the rough wagon trail made by the early carters to Otorohanga and Te Kuiti and Poro-o-Tarao, a road that knew no engineer but followed the easiest natural grade regardless of distance. Of bridges there was none. There were canoes in all the navigable streams and in those days, before the weeping-willow had blocked the rivers, large canoes could be paddled and poled from the Waikato and Waipa right up to where the town of Te Kuiti now stands. Everywhere there were hospitable welcomes for us in that Rohepotae of the transition period. We were never so happy as when we could get away for long rides for a day or two, camping at Louis Hetet came to New Zealand a hundred years ago in a whaling expedition, and went back to France to return with sheep, cattle, and seeds and start farming in the Maori Country. He married a chieftainess of the Maniapoto tribe. The oldest son, 'Haere mai ki te kai!' was the invitation at every camp and every village. We could have had half-a-dozen breakfasts one morning when we took the track from Otorohanga by way of Mangawhero to Te Kooti's well-ordered village at Otewa, and so on round to the trail that led back to the Puniu. The Maori is more sophisticated now, though he has not lost the good old hospitable instinct. He discovered by experience that when he went out into the hard pakeha world there was no invitation to food unless he had money in his pocket. Unless indeed he called at a farmhouse of a remote settler where the old open-handed hospitality prevailed.
And now all those towns and townships, all those thousands of pakeha homes and farms, all along the Main Trunk and down to Taranaki and out to the Tasman Sea, all that wealth and comfort of the King Country to-day—they are the product of little more than forty years. A world of real adventure has been compressed within that brief period of nation-making.
Our jumping-off place one summer morning of long ago was Te Kuiti, a rough place in those days, when it was the Head of the Line, and when the vast beyond of the King Country lay wrapped in mystery to all but the Maori owners of the soil and the surveyors, and the men of the out-of-doors whose business it was to skirmish ahead of settlement and make the first roads and railways. Not an acre of King Country land had passed into white farmers' hands at that date (1892), not a pakeha homestead redeemed the wastes of fern and manuka southward of the Puniu River, the old Aukati, or boundary, between pakeha and Maori. Except for the thin line of the Main Trunk rail pushed a little way into the open fern country from the Waikato side—and that only by sufferance of the tattooed lords of the land, headed by the huge-framed, imperious, kingly-looking
Now the white man was coming, and presently his iron rail and his locomotive would make the trail that was to cut through the mana of the Maori. Just now it was the transition period; the pakeha settler was climbing over the wall, and it was our
The battle of the routes was on. Auckland people were mostly in favour of making the railway to Taranaki. Wellington wanted the Central route—the present line. There was a huge gap to fill, right down to Hunterville and Marton. The middle portion of the Main Trunk of to-day was a blank on the map, two hundred miles of it, so far as rail and road were concerned.
Two days after leaving Te Kuiti, we were trailing in single file down the mountain side from the Poro-o-tarao, and opening up a wide, wild prospect of green forests and blue ranges, far-spreading valleys, and silver river peeps, with great rugged kopje-like crags of volcanic rock building a skyline on the south. No wheel roads then, in 'ninety-two; the only way was a horse track. Below us lay the valley of the Ongarue; we had crossed the divide from the Mokau head-waters, and all the streams we saw and forded thenceforth went to swell the Wanganui River.
We rode down into the Ongarue Valley, winding through the tall fern and groves and tawa and rimu, down into the gravel of that divinely clear Maramataha, a tributary stream cascading past the little Maori village of Waimeha from the tableland of the
From the Ongarue, at Te Kawakawa—just about where Ongarue railway station stands to-day—we turned off sharply to the west, between two mighty green hills; and then south-westward ho! for the Taranaki bush and Stratford a hundred miles away.
From a hilltop, where our horse track corkscrewed through tall fern and bright green bushes of tupakihi with its clusters of black tutu berries, we had our first look-out over the Ohura Valley, and the seemingly interminable forest that stretched from the shadowy undulations below almost to the base of Mount Egmont—a huge and shaggy and lonely land. No grass field, no fence, no house or even tent, no smoke of settlers' burning-off fire, gave civilised touch to the silent expanse. Valley and hill and glinting stream and dark solemn forest lay bathed in soft blue haze, mysterious, unpeopled; as untouched by man, it seemed to us gazing over it there, as it might have been a thousand years ago.
'Take a good look at the Ohura,' said the boss of the party, the veteran
And that was true, for in the days that followed we had no such comprehensive eye-sweep as we had that day. We appraised the soil, the quality and quantity of the timber, the uses of that timber—
Leaving our horses to go back to Te Kuiti with the packer, we rolled our swags for the long traverse. We footed it over those alluvial flats of the Ohura basin, all densely timbered then, where townships and farmhouses stand to-day. We left the Huatahi levels, with their continuous roof of leaves uplifted on enormous pillars of pine and rata and tawa, and climbed the steep Paparata Range—the railway route tunnels through it now—that separates the valleys of the Ohura and the Tangarakau. We heard from our mates Julian and Puhi about the ruggedness of the Tangarakau Gorge that lay ahead of us.
We knew that very few had been before us. They could all have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, 'Wirihana' Hursthouse himself, with all his thirty years of Taranaki survey, had never been right through on this trail.
That was the rugged route to Taranaki, eighty solid miles of bush from Ohura to Stratford. It was the fashion in Auckland to depreciate the possibilities of the unknown Waimarino route across the great
No British colony planted in a new country had a more courageous, determined, and industrious set of pioneers than the men and women of Devon and Cornwall and other South of England counties who peopled the province of Taranaki in the young forties, and, under many difficulties, established a beautiful group of farming settlements close to the seaward flanks of Egmont. There were many families whose descendants bear with pride names of high honour in the annals of New Zealand. There were makers of the nation there, the Atkinsons and Richmonds, the Smiths and Hursthouses, the Messengers, Northcrofts, Bayleys, Carringtons, and Ardens, and many another who very literally cut out their homes from the wilds. It was not only the obstacles of wild Nature they had to conquer in this forest-tangled land. The Maori was at first a friend but was forced into hostility when land disputes began. The Maori, for all his early amicable dealings with the New Plymouth
Natural leaders emerged from the few hundreds of bushmen and ploughmen and bullock-drivers; men already well schooled in the toil of settlement, familiar with the forest and its tracks, and quick to adapt themselves to the conditions of guerilla fighting. One of these leaders was young
The earliest homes of the bush setders were huts built of the material at hand—saplings and fern trees and nikau palm thatch, and the first cultivation was done with the spade. Gradually, once the newcomers got a rainproof roof over their heads, timber was felled, the tree trunks were cross-cut and slabs were split for building huts. The next stage was the saw-pit, where logs were sawn into boards. So, presendy, neat cottages of weatherboards and shingled roofs replaced the primitive thatch and slab whares. Cattle and horses were imported from
The pioneer farmers were capable soldiers when the need for fighting came. There was good material there; none better. The settlers were not regular troops fighting because it was their paid calling. There was no glory in the strife for them. They were peace-loving men, forced into war by the exigencies of settlement or by unwise government policy; and they took up the rifle to defend their homes and the cultivations they had made, or to fight for more land.
The spirit of danger was in the air on the border country of Taranaki as it was in South Waikato, long after the wars had ended. There were frequent alarms among the farmer families in the scattered settlements, and among the bushmen engaged in felling and pit-sawing timber and at the steam-power mills that superseded the saw-pits. The border country was expected to be the scene of fighting again quite ten years after the Hauhau war had been brought to a close, and so the frontier came to be studded with fortified places for defence.
The Maoris did not build any more strongholds; if it came to fighting, the bush would now be their best shelter. The forts were of various designs, according to the military skill of the builders and the local conditions. Some were timber stockades, with
A redoubt on the edge of the forest at Ketemarae was an example of the numerous forts which were built by the bushmen and settlers as a rallying place in case of attack. It was built in 1879 in a new bush clearing, where the town of Normanby now stands, on the railway line. It has been demolished long ago, like most of the other historic places in Taranaki. (The spot where it stood is the present site of the soldiers' monument in the Normanby Domain.) The original name of the district is Ketemarae, a famous name in Maori tradition and war history. The first pioneer of the place, the late
Then warnings reached the sawmiller, who had at first not troubled about his own defence, that some of the young warriors of Parihaka and Pungarehu and thereabouts in the Maori country to the west were likely to raid Ketemarae. The sawmill, with its valuable engine, might be destroyed. The mill men and bushfellers were all armed with rifles, and they kept guard in turns at night. An old Maori warrior named
Soon they had this redoubt completed, with a timber barracks inside. The entrance was by a drawbridge over the trench; this plank bridge could be hauled up on the inner side at night, when it
It was many months before the tension quite relaxed; there was drilling everywhere, and South Taranaki was an armed camp. But the sawmilling work must go on; so must grass-seed sowing in the newly-cut country. The tree-fellers took their rifles with, them as regularly as they took their food and tea-billy when they went out to their daily bush work. It was nearly the end of 1881 before all was serene again on the frontier.
There was a land grievance of the Maoris behind all these alarms and wild stories of renewed war. The Maoris under
The sight of the pioneer homes in the north Taranaki bush appealed many years ago with peculiar
'The gardens, the galvanised-iron tin houses, the wooden chimneys built outside, the doorways filled with groups of children growing within, and the flowers and vines without, make a landscape which may have too many sharp edges, and colours too incongruous to delight the eye of the landscape artist, but it is a picture any statesman might be proud to sign his name to. Every home here is an adventure, the goal of a Pilgrim's Progress.'
'Now we have fully considered wept over and bid adieu to this land inherited by us from our forefathers with all its rivers lakes waters streams trees stones grass plains forests good places and bad and everything either above or below the soil and all and everything connected with the said land we have fully and entirely given up under the shining sun of the present day as a lasting possession to Victoria the Queen of England and to all the Kings and Queens her successors for ever.'
Translation of final clause in the deeds of sale of blocks of land in Hawke's Bay, 1851-1856, including Scinde Island (Mataruahou) and Ahuriri, the site of the present town of Napier.
It was early in 1851 that
The first settlers who took up grazing holdings on the great levels and the rolling hill country of Heretaunga and Ruataniwha were fortunate in the generally clear character of the province and in the freedom from Maori wars. They had lordly ideas as to the areas necessary for their sheep stations. Ruataniwha, Waipukurau, Takapau, Waimarama, and some other large districts were held by a very few men in the beginning, until the days of subdivision came. They deserved all their good fortune, however, those pioneers.
The Hawke's Bay country was quite unroaded, the rivers unbridged, there were frequent floods; the first flocks of sheep were ravaged by wild pigs and Maori dogs. The prices of wool were low; there was no market for anything else but tallow from the boiled-down sheep, and the task of getting the clip to the shipping port was difficult and expensive. But there was the compensation that meant much to those early adventurers—the freedom of the life,
The names of many of the early families are prominent in the story of the peaceful development of Hawke's Bay—the names of Russell, Nairn, A'Deane, Lambert, Lowry, Hill, Gordon, Williams, Ormond, Kinross, Gollan, Colonel Lambert, Colonel Herrick. Many of them are there to-day, and their beautiful homesteads and the well-stocked downs and hills are a pleasant sight.
One of the largest estates originally was Maraekakaho, the Maclean property. When Donald Maclean took it over after he left Government employ—the original owners could not carry on— it was a wilderness of fern and scrub, with undrained swamps. The property was stocked with merino sheep, which were crossed with Lincolns and Leicesters upon the establishment of the frozen-meat industry. When it was thoroughly cleared, Maraekakaho was sown in English grasses and stocked with various classes of purebred stock. Maraekakaho became famous as a stud farm as well as a sheeprun. Stud horses, sheep, and cattle were bred, and sent all over New Zealand and Australia. In the early days the run was of great extent but was reduced by sales, especially to those who had been employed on the estate. Sir Douglas Maclean took
Much of Hawke's Bay, particularly in the region about Hastings (Heretaunga) and the Havelock hills, is given over to the dairy business and much to fruit growing, for which the province is particularly adapted by reason of the generally mild climate, its rich soil and its topography, lying as it does well to the rising sun.
The northern nations of Europe had a worthy share in the making of the nation. From the beginning of the seventies Norway, Sweden, and Denmark sent us many thousands of the best kind of colonists—industrious, frugal, sober, and loyal to the country of their choice. They were the men and women who conquered the Seventy-Mile Bush in southern Hawke's Bay; and Norsewood, Ormondville, Dannevirke, Mauriceville, Eketahuna, and several other towns owe their origin to these Norsemen. The dense and gloomy forest which covered nearly a hundred miles of country from north to
The circumstances of the English acquisition of the shores on which Wellington city and suburbs stand have often been related in other publications. Here I shall give some brief account of the early settlers' efforts and experiences that are not recorded in any book. The Wakefields treated the original owners of the soil very fairly, and there are Maori families to-day who draw large rents from properties—the original tenths—in the heart of the city and in the suburbs. In this cross-section of Wellington pioneering some account is given of Karori, a suburb that was founded very shortly after the first immigrant ships arrived from England. The life was described to me by old setders dating back to 1840.
Karori was a true backblocks settlement in Wellington's early days. The little farms were cut out of the heavy forest, as in the Hutt Valley. The pioneers described the beautiful and dense forests of tall timber that covered the Wellington hills and the Karori
In those days, too, up to the sixties, the bush swarmed with native birds, especially kaka parrots, tui, and pigeons.
One of the splendid old ladies of Karori,
Karori, like the Hutt Valley and other places, had its stockade for protection from the Maori raiders in 1846. This description of the primitive little fort was given to the author chiefly by
The stockade was built on the crown of the rise just to the south of the present main road through Karori; the road-cutting in Lancaster Street is within a few yards of the spot. It was but a small affair; it enclosed a space of about thirty feet by
The forest at that time was cut away for about five chains on the upper side (south and south-east) of the Karori road, but on the other side the heavy timber grew to the line of the present tramway line. Eight or nine men of the Karori Militia usually remained in the stockade at night, in readiness for alarm, to resist
An old-settled family told about the social life in the pioneer days. The great festivities that relieved heavy toil were wedding-parties. The girls married at sixteen or seventeen and set to raising families without loss of time. They told us of the old songs. 'Can you Dance the Polka?' was one of the ditties much in demand at parties. 'Oh, Susannah!' was another; that came with the first of the gold-diggers about 1860. 'Susannah, dear,' ('A buckwheat cake was in her mouth, a tear was in her eye'), and the 'Bound for California' chorus were just as heartily chanted in the Karori settlers' bush homes as they were on the old Western trail or on the round-the-Horn ships crowded for San Francisco.
The region extending from Wairau in Marlborough and the Kaikoura Mountains to the Waitaki River, South Canterbury, was the great sheep country of the native-grass plains and downs that first engaged the South Island settlers. It was the ground of the men with large ideas who took by preference to the lordly pastoral life. Otago, more arduous, followed. It was hard, rough, dangerous work in the beginning. There were almost as many deaths from accident, mostly drowning in the great snow-fed torrents, as there were a few years later on the Central Otago and West Coast goldfields. Snow blizzards caused heavy losses of stock. But there were the compensations of becoming the chief of tens of thousands of acres, hundreds of thousands, the glorious freedom of the tussock prairie, the rauhea grass waved by the mountain wind, and the desire for exploration that life on the uplands stimulated. It was a life for the young and the adventurous. There was always the growling
Sheepfarming on the high Canterbury and Marlborough country would have been immensely simplified could some kind power have been persuaded to run all those torrents into great settling tanks like Pukaki and give the harassed sheepowner moderate-paced rivers, gentle streams and limpid lakes.
The pioneer runholders from Nelson and Marlborough southward to Otago had no previous knowledge of such country. They began by setting fire to the whole countryside, to clear it of the high coarse growth of tussock and the manuka and matakauri and mikimiki bushes to prepare the way for the new clean growth of prairie grass, before it could be stocked with sheep. Their methods were rough and ready—they did not improve them. To-day in many places they are burning the tussock as they did in the fifties. For many years this seasonal procedure brought fresh toothsome grass, on which the most favoured breed, the merino, and its successors flourished. The deterioration of high country pastures at last became apparent. The roots of the grass suffered, died in patches, and the soil, having little to hold it, became eroded wherever water and
We do not need to read of the disastrous results of erosion caused by over-grazing and other errors of farming in the United States. We have here sufficiently troublesome examples of destruction of vegetation on high steep country and along river-banks and watersheds.
Canterbury residents have for years accepted as a necessary affliction the summer dust-laden nor'-westers blowing across the plains. There were no such dust plagues until the large pastoralists created them with their tussock-burning and their excessive depasturing of flocks.
That much being said, the pioneering merit, the resourcefulness under primitive conditions and the pluck of the first big sheep-graziers call for admiration. The first pastoralists drove and coaxed their bullock-teams across wide affrighting rivers and braved storms that were all the more to be dreaded
Before the Canterbury pioneering era came Marlborough. This and other letters are quoted by
The country at Flaxbourne (where the township of Seddon is now situated) he likened, in his letters to England, to the Dorsetshire Downs. 'I have not a neighbour, Native or European, for 40 miles, so I am monarch of all I survey. It is a fine, healthy
Three years later the partners had 11,000 sheep and were selling rams at £20 apiece. When they first brought the sheep they drove them over in two lots— Weld's one day, and Clifford's a day later. Crossing the Bluff River they had to throw all the sheep into the water—'a day and a half's hard work.'
The partners built a boat for their own use, thirty-six feet over all, rigged like a cutter, with a little mizzen. Weld wrote that one day he sailed halfway across Cook Strait, 'but a shift of wind contrary to tide, with a very heavy sea, drove us into port again. In going out we beat the Eagle
, a large brigantine, that ought to have been able to take us on her deck and beat us, and in returning we licked a little schooner that had the impudence to come out of one of the bays and challenge us.'
Large sheep stations, with their beautiful homesteads, are still the dominant feature of the South Marlborough landscape. But great areas of excellent agricultural land have been subdivided into dairy farms and cropping lands, and stock-fattening farms,
The history of Marlborough, Canterbury, and Otago is very different from that of the North Island because there were no Maori wars in the South Island to delay the progress of farming. The only spice of adventure, apart from the natural obstacles of wild rivers, was provided by the great gold-seeking rushes in the period 1860-65, first in the bleak and dreary back country of Otago, and then on the forest-covered and wet coast of Wesdand. That Golden Coast was then officially a part of Canterbury. When gold was discovered there the news did not cause much rejoicing in Canterbury. The sheepfarmers and grain growers were content with their steady and uneventful march to prosperity. There were many among them who strongly disapproved of the gold discovery and the diggers. They complained that it was all very unsettling; they did not like the invasion of the country by an army of eager treasure-hunters.
From 1864 onward there came thousands of
The perils and adventures of the first sheepfarmers in Canterbury and Otago have been narrated by many of the station-founding families.
Innumerable mishaps befell those first plucky settlers in an inhospitable country. Many were recorded by Butler in his books. The story of the Mackenzie Plains is well known. The first Mac, who
Central Otago people look back regretfully to the sixties when gold was taken out of river pockets in incredible quantities. A couple of diggers would get a thousand pounds' worth of gold in a day's sluicing. The story is told by Early Days in Central Otago. In 1860 the pioneer settler of Wakatipu,
That was before the great gold discoveries. By the end of 1862 there were 4,000 diggers in the Wakatipu district, mostly at the Shotover and the Arrow. Their only way of getting flour and other stores in the first few months on the fields was to buy it from Mr Rees at the homestead, and he was dependent on his boat for getting the goods up the lake. There were very often hundreds of hungry diggers waiting there for it, and they paid half-a-crown for a pannikinful. Then when the gold had to be sent away to Kingston for the town banks, Rees's whaleboat had to carry it all, until other boats were brought up from the seaport. In the first week of this work in 1862 the boat took 25,000 ounces of gold, worth nearly £100,000. On the second week's trip it carried 18,000 ounces, and the third week 16,000 ounces. Presently other boats were placed on the lake, and before long there was a small steamer. But while the first great rush lasted that useful whaleboat earned its weight in gold many times over. Meanwhile the pioneer sheepfarmers were finding that wool was not the sole money-earning product of their runs.
The largest of all the huge blocks of sheep and cattle country taken up in the South Island was the McLean brothers' run of 450,000 acres extending from Lake Hawea to below Cromwell on the east side of the Clutha River. The McLeans were men of courage and large ideas; and they needed big blocks
The first sheep-man at Lake Wanaka was
The telephone, then the radio, and now the aeroplane successively conquered space and time; they have brisked up the whole West Coast. When first I travelled that way through to Otago, in 1906, nearly a week's journey by horse from the end of the wheel road, the South Westlanders seemed as strange to the world as a sailingship's crew at the end of a long voyage; and a traveller's arrival south of the Haast was something of an event. That isolation was accountable in part, I suppose, for the warm hospitality extended to visitors. It was isolation, indeed, in that land without bridges or shipping port; the only access by horse, the only goods traffic by packhorse, except for the small steamer to the Bruce Bay and Okura open roadsteads two or three times a year. The inhabitants perforce were healthy; there was no doctor within a hundred and fifty miles of the Haast. Now a sick person can be flown to the Hokitika Hospital in a few hours. Men hurt in bush accidents have been
The bush regions of South Westland are becoming more settled, there are large sawmills far down the coast, and gold prospecting has received a stimulus from the ease with which such places as the Arawata and other isolated valleys can be reached. In the homes of the pioneer gold-diggers and cattle farmers and their families children grew to adult years without having seen a town or a shop or a railway train or even the mail coach. Hokitika was as remote as London to them; the only world they knew was that strip of wild bush country between the Alps and the surf. There were greybeards there who had not travelled fifty miles from their homes since they landed on the coast in the middle sixties. Those ancients of the treasure countries are not yet extinct. It is a land for long life.
Noting the wealth of this land of many resources, following upon the golden age of the sixties, it is curious indeed to remark that all this vast West Coast from the Nelson boundary down to Milford Sound was acquired by the Government for £300.
Down the Coast he assembled the Maoris at the various far-scattered villages, with great care and patience, and the payment was made at the Mawhera (Greymouth). The Ngai-Tahu people, from whom the great purchase was made, numbered a hundred and ten. That was in 1860. So passed to the State a vast territory which in a few years was to produce enormous treasure in gold and attract tens of thousands of eager diggers from all parts of the world. The Maoris were content, because liberal reserves were made for them.
It is, or was, a good old custom in the North of Ireland and in Scotland to say a prayer when crossing a bridge. 'God bless the bridge and the man who made it,' said the Scot of the old school, grateful to the builders who spanned the dangerous rivers. That spirit of thankfulness may be disappearing now in the well-bridged, smoothed-out old lands. In New Zealand we are not yet nearly out of the constructive stage. We are continually reminded of the fact that one of the first needs of a district is the bridge. But before the bridge came the punt.
Before our country districts were able to build expensive bridges over the large rivers, the ferry punt, working on wire ropes, was the chief means of crossing for horse and vehicle and foot travellers. Some of these punts were large enough to take a coach and four horses, or a small mob of stock, up to about twenty head. They consisted of boatshaped flat pontoons on floats and a deck of planking, with a strong rail on each side, and a gate or a rope
One man was sufficient to attend to the punt and collect the fee, which covered the cost of mamtaining the ferry. There was a tariff of fees; so much for the vehicle—mail coach, wagon, dray, buggy, or springcart—according to the number of horses and the size of the vehicle. The passengers in a coach usually paid sixpence each. If cattle, sheep, or horses were being ferried the crossing was often a slow procedure and there frequently was trouble when some half-wild steers were being driven on board.
Rivers which were too deep to ford made the punt a necessity on the main routes before bridges were built. The location was important; the punts could not be fixed where the river was very swift; the place was usually where it began to slacken down, as at the place where the Buller River emerged from the
The settlers of the Upper Waikato in pioneer days sometimes drove their mobs of stock all the way down to the Auckland market, a hundred miles or more. A farmer was crossing the Waikato River at Hamilton with his mob from Tamahere in several punt-loads and was mid-way between the banks with the last load when the rope broke and the punt capsized. In a moment the water was full of frightened and bellowing cattle, and several were drowned. The owner told me that he was in among the bullocks and went down to the bottom of the river twice. More by good luck than by his swimming powers he reached the shore on the Hamilton West side, unhurt except for a kick or so and a jab of the horns from some half-drowned beast.
It was a long, hard, and sometimes dangerous stock-driving journey in those pre-railway days,
To return to the punt. There were several lower down the broad Waikato; I remember particularly those at Huntly and Tuakau, where bridges now stand. One moonlit night, about midnight, a dozen of us crossed ourselves and horses from the Tuakau landing to Onewhero, on the western side of the river; a long, slow operation. The river is about a quarter of a mile wide there and moves leisurely and unrippled on its majestic course to the sea. It was a special police mission to the Opuatia, in the heart of the great Onewhero bush, then penetrated only by a rough Maori track. Only one settler lived
Now it is a well-tamed region of rich farms; where is that forest wild? Most of it went up in smoke. Now a fine bridge has replaced the rather cranky punt and your motor-car glides across it smoothly in a few moments just where we took an hour to get our police and survey party in two loads over the water that unforgotten moonlit midnight.
In the South Island too punts were indispensable, especially on such a river as the Buller. In Central Otago there were several important punts on the great Clutha (or Matau) River, with its length of 150 miles. A Dunedin message stated (March 1939) that the hopes of Clutha Valley settlers for more than sixty years were realised when the punt which had provided the only means of crossing the river at Clydevale during all that time was superseded by a modern concrete bridge. More than 2,500 people were present for the opening of the bridge by the Postmaster-General, the
Far down the West Coast a very long bridge has to be built. This is to cross the Haast, or Awarua River, that wide, snowy river which comes rolling down from the glaciers of the Southern Alps. Such rivers are often difficult and dangerous to cross on horse-
It is true that the aeroplane is a boon in such far-out places as Westland, so easily and swiftly carrying passengers, mails, and goods. But roads and bridges are needed for heavy traffic and for driving stock.
Before railways and motor-cars had made transit easy and luxurious, the horse was the only long-distance time-saver for the New Zea-lander; and they raised good horses in those days. There were two brothers who had come from the Tamaki, near Auckland, and who had undertaken ploughing contracts on the Roto-o-rangi estate, on the old Frontier line, before they settled on their own farms, which had to be broken in from a wild state. The elder brother was courting his Kate, as he said, at the Tamaki, but it was a long way to go, quite a hundred miles. Yet he did it frequently, riding the hundred miles on the Saturday and returning to the station by the Monday. He would leave very early in the morning, ride the tracks and cross the unbridged streams—there was only a punt on the Waikato River at Ngaruawahia, and the other rivers had none—travel the Great South Road, and reach the Tamaki at night, 'do his courting', and off again next day.
There was a quick travelling lover for you; but the hardy lads of those Waikato days did not regard it as anything out of the way. They bred splendid horses then, hacks that could carry a man's weight and last the long day at a steady tireless gait.
The other brother also made week-end trips to the Tamaki to see his parents. On one occasion he rode down there from Roto-o-rangi on the Saturday. On the following evening the men at the frontier-station were astonished to see his horse, without rider or saddle or bridle, come trotting up and put his head over the gate. He had got out of the paddock at the Tamaki farm, not finding the company or the feed to his taste, and made a quick journey home. Two hundred miles in two days may seem a knockout journey for horseflesh, yet they could do it in those times. He must have swum the Waikato River at Ngaruawahia on his return journey; the puntman would scarcely be likely to give a stray horse a free passage.
That courting-day's ioo-mile ride was comfortable going in good weather, for all its roughness, for only the more northern portion of it was a metalled road sixty-five years ago. But probably only the fact that there was a girl at journey's-end would have taken the young farmer at such a pace. It was wise advice the old ostler gave in Romany Rye
, when he told his roving acquaintance that 'no gentleman—supposing he weighs sixteen
In those restless days on the outer marches, several cavalry corps were raised. The settlers and their sons prided themselves on their good horses, their riding and their shooting. The Waikato Cavalry have been mentioned. The Waiuku Cavalry, under
New Zealand, fortunately, is a land where the horse will always be needed. Much of the country must remain a pastoral land; there are hill regions
A great deal could be written about the need for encouraging horse-raising in spite of this machine-crazy age. For one thing, there is military need for the horse. It can go where machines cannot travel. There is a tendency to return to the horse in many countries. As a New Zealander said, since war-time restrictions on fuel were imposed (September 1939) 'petrol for the horse can be grown on the farm.'
To country school-children the horse is still a necessary friend. Both pakeha and Maori need ponies to carry them to school, especially in places where roads are rough and streams unbridged.
The late
Although the motor-car drove the horse off the fatally smooth highway and off most farms, it seems rather early in the day to regard the once indispensable shoeing forge as little more than a museum curiosity, an antique. Yet that is the fate that has overtaken a trade which only a generation ago employed many hundreds of men in this country.
A time there was when—to paraphrase
The country smith of my time was a perfect master of ironcraft; he could manufacture many things in an emergency which did not belong to his main vocation of horse-shoeing. He could not only mend tools but make new ones. There was nothing, seemingly, that he could not do with his fire and anvil and hammer and pincers.
Then he was wise in horse lore. He could tell often enough what was the matter with a horse when the owner could not diagnose its ailment. He could extract its teeth, or file them where they needed it. He could show careless owners where ill-fitting harness caused suffering. He could make branding
It was a high and honourable calling in the old time, was the smith's. In our pioneer days the blacksmith had perforce, often enough, to become armourer as in medieval times. There was a smith in Auckland town in 1863 who was as useful and skilful a weapon-maker as that blacksmith in Arkansas who made the famous bowie knives of American and Mexican border history. (They were called after
A veteran of the Rangers showed me the much-
The smithy was a place of community gossip. That was where the news of the township obtained circulation quite as much as in the store down the road. It all depended on the temperament of the smith. Dour
It was in one of the early-day smithies on the Great South Road, at either Papakura or Drury, that a certain stumpy little Maori of Waikato learned the smith's trade and many useful bits of iron craftsmanship, until the tribal call came and he went off to fighting in 1863. His name was
There is one class of pioneer whose labours and services to the rural communities have not yet been described in anything like adequate form—and that is the doctor. The medical men in the days of our beginnings were often men of true heroic spirit, who were confronted with difficulties scarcely to be imagined by the doctors of this highly scientific age, with its easy and speedy means of communication, its hospitals and all the apparatus of science. Travel was difficult and often dangerous, delays were many and unavoidable. One has seen the back-country doctor at work, riding his rounds, often over horrible sloughs of mud, miscalled roads, visiting widely separated patients, sometimes splashing through a flooded river, often reduced to the most primitive of makeshifts in the cause of healing. Accidents in the backblocks were more serious than they are now, when even aeroplanes can be called in to the aid of patient and doctor.
Sometimes, as on the wild West Coast of the South
'He is the flower (such as it is) of our civilisation,' Underwoods. 'Generosity he has, such as is possible to those who practise an art, never to those who drive a trade; discretion, tested by a hundred secrets; tact, tried in a thousand embarrassments; and what are more important, Heraclean cheerfulness and courage.'
Stevenson had exceptional reason to express gratitude to the doctoring fraternity, in the Old World and the New; but there cannot be many people who have not good cause for like thankfulness to some physician or surgeon. And more especially the country practitioner in a district not yet out of its pioneering stage. The doctor is an altruist in practice as well as theory.
Riding along the up-country roads, we often met on his rounds the doctor of our district. A man he was beloved over all the countryside. No matter what the hour of the day or night, or the state of the weather, he was ready to set off in response to an urgent call. He was a thorough old sport,
There was little ready money in the Waikato in in those early eighties, and that Trinity College man had often enough to take out his fees in a load of firewood, a few hundredweight of potatoes, or some oats for his horse, now and then half a sheep. Often he rode across the Puniu into the King Country, and, as his Maori patients never had any cash to pay him, he took utu by getting the lads to show him the best pheasant shooting grounds, or a clump of bush where pigeons were fat and plentiful.
The doctor had plenty of shooting in the Waikato, but not much of a living. A professional man needed some hard cash at times. He had to keep abreast of the times with medical books, and his medicine
Every bush and back-country region in New Zealand has its memories of such men. There were many excellent Army surgeons who settled in the country. A type of these was a surgeon and physician whose memory is held in high honour in Taranaki, the competent and popular
There was
Parson, priest, or minister, the spiritual shepherd in our country places had too often the grey and ill-rewarded part of the vicar in Golden Wedding. Stipends were precarious, a variable quantity. Like the doctor's, the clergyman's financial barometer was a reflex of the farmer's markets and the weather. There were years when vestry and committee of elders found it impossible to squeeze much sustenance blood from a stony-broke parish. It may not be very different to-day. But the parson's profession cannot be assessed only in terms of monetary rewards.
There was a parson in an Upper Waikato township, whose wide-spread parish necessitated much saddle work over rough roads. The pretty Selwyn-period Maori-mission church and the historic old parsonage, among its oaks and fruit trees and green fields by the river were the admiration of visitors, but the passers-through little knew the parson's financial straits which everyone in the neighbourhood seemed
However, he hung it out well, as the vestry themselves admiringly said. He tended the souls of his parish for many a year until some lucky bequest took him back to England.
An up-country clergyman's work, in pioneer times, at any rate, called for men of tough physique; and it was not for the weakling. There was a Presbyterian minister, a young man who had come out from Edinburgh for the sake of his lungs. A contrast to his country-weather flock, that pale, ascetic, lean-bodied scholar, with the great dark eyes and the thin black beard; he looked a man of another world. His spirit burned too ardently for that frail frame. The rough horseback travelling, the solitary life in that little manse in the fern in the bend of the foggy
There was his opposite in physical fitness for the shepherd's backblocks round, a genial and hard-riding priest,
Even better qualified for out-of-doors life was a certain vigorous athlete of a parson I met years ago down at the gold-mining township, Ross, on the West Coast. Ross was in its palmy and rowdy days of plenty-money; the Mont D'Or sluicing claim was literally what its name implied.
The
One Sunday morning the congregation was waiting but there was no service in the little English Church at Ross. The parson had heard that there were three climbers missing up in the Alps between the heads of the Franz Josef and the Tasman Glaciers, and he was leading the searchers on the western side.
'Oh, well,' was the general voice of the faithful at the church when the message came and they went off to their dinners, 'he'll do more good there. We'll have a fine sermon about it when he comes home. He's a man, he is!'
I have told of a country doctor who often carried a double-barrel gun on his horseback rounds in the Waikato. The pioneer missionary on long tramps through the country sometimes provided himself with food in the same way. His gun was a necessary part of his travelling equipment. But there were times when he fell under suspicion among those who hated both missionaries and Maoris. After the Wairau massacre in 1843, when Wellington armed, all the gunpowder in the town was placed under the control of the authorities. Some powder was found in the house of the
Mr Smales explained the reason why, but it was not easy to convince their critics. In some notes written in his old age, when he was living in retirement on his little farm at the Tamaki, Auckland, he narrated that episode of fifty years before. 'In our long journeys,' he said, 'we found it necessary and a great acquisition to carry our gun, though for neither sport nor defensive purposes, but as a means of replenishing our daily provisions. Birds such as the wild duck and the pigeon were then so plentiful that they often gave us an ample and a most dainty kinaki (titbit.)'
An old Maori friend, who now and again, from his kainga near Tauranga, sends me a story of his ancestors or his views on subjects of the day, discoursed in the last letter on the altered conditions of life on the land. Like many pakehas, he declared that even the climate is not what it used to be. The burden of his reflections may be summarised in the pakeha lament for the good old times. He is a farmer and an orchardist, and though he appreciates modern methods, he believes life was more comfortable in the days of his youth.
'I am thinking,' he says in Maori, 'of the cultivation of the land in about the year 1877. Our principal labour then was the growing of wheat. That continued until about the year 1888. Our crops were always abundant. The world was well nourished then; there was plenty of food for all. The land was much better in those days; there were no blights. With a small amount of labour the people were abundantly fed. The children did not need many
'But with the coming of many new pakehas and all their fruit trees and seeds and manures of all kinds, there came the blights. Weeds of all kinds came, too, and the healthy growth of our fruit and other crops gradually declined. Now the earth does not possess the strength it once did for the growing of food. The good soil was poisoned with bone manure and other noxious stinking fertilisers. When we grew wheat and ground our own corn in our waterwheel mills, the flour we produced was better than any we can buy to-day, and the bread was better for us. And, what is more, our pakeha friends said the same thing.
'I have thought a great deal over these matters,' the old philosopher continued, 'and I am wondering whether all the strange inventions that are so 'Hau o te takiwa' was the expression used here, signifying the atmosphere—literally 'wind of the outer space.'Uira, lightning, is the comprehensive word used for electricity and all electrical contrivances.
I can only pass those questions on to our wise men. As for the rest, my correspondent's countrymen are grappling now with the new conditions of life and labour and are beginning to make a success of it. But with all the new avenues opening up before them, and with all the new hope that increase in population should give them, there is the wistful look back on the less anxious and more spacious life. Therein our Maori friends are no different from the pakeha. It was ever thus. The earth was cleaner, the
As the greater part of this survey of New Zealand's pioneer period was written from my own knowledge and experience on the border of settlement and from the human documents that, unlike a book, could be cross-examined, a long list of authorities is not necessary. Some references, however, are necessary in order to point the reader to selected useful books dealing with periods and phases of New Zealand's pioneer development.
Foremost of the books which describe the transition period, when the pakeha-Maori flourished, is Poenamo
(London, 1881), treating of the shore of the Hauraki and its life in 1840. It is a better book than
The Maori wars are described sectionally in many books; the only complete history of the campaigns from 1845 on to the early seventies, giving both sides of the struggle impartially, is New Zealand Wars
(2 vols., Wellington, 1922-3), published by the
The History of the County of Patea
(Hawera, 1937) by
The Life of Sir Frederick Weld
(London, 1914) by
During 1939 two collections of pioneer reminiscences by members of women's organisations have been published. These books, Brave Days
(Wellington, 1939) by the Women's Division of the
The type used in this book is monotype
Aldine Bembo
of which the text is set in 13 point * The typography
was arranged by
J. C. Beaglehole
*