Scene I—The Gold-Diggers' Camp.

The tents and slab huts of a hundred treasure-hunters whitened the banks of the Kapanga Creek and the small streams that came tumbling down from the wooded ranges to the muddy foreshore of Coromandel Harbour. The tentage cover was of all shapes and sizes; the shanties of split timber were mostly roofed with brown strips of tangae, the bark of the totara tree. Some had a covering of blackpine shingles, neatly nailed in overlapping layers. There were not many bushmen-diggers who went to the trouble of shingling their huts; the care they took to make their quarters weatherproof might be taken as an indication that they were there to stay, or at any rate to give their claims a thorough and patient trial. Old warrior Hauauru, the West Wind, had compared the restless gold-diggers in his domains with the wandering albatross, which stopped to pick up a bit of food here and a bit there, and then passed on. The white man just paused long enough to get a trifle of gold, that worthless looking thing “not as big as a sandfly” and not so useful as a bit of fernroot; then he was off again like the bird of the ocean. But the man under the shingled roof—sometimes he even had a little vegetable garden patch —clearly intended to hang on a while.

The mining claims pitted the ferny slopes for a mile or more above the tideway, to the ragged and stumpblackened edge of the forest that went climbing up in waves and tiers of foliage to the range top. The first wild rush to the Coromandel diggings had passed by this time, mid-winter of 1863, and many diggers had left the field with their picks and shovels and wash-dishes, selling out for a five-pound note, or just walking out.

Sundown was knock-off time. To make a ship-shape ceremony of it some digger from the Bendigo and Ballarat fields had introduced the Australian touch by firing a shot from his gun each evening. The crack and the bellow echoing far up the valley and dying away in the foggy ravines told those diggers who were toiling down below that it was time for fire and tucker. Clay-stained figures stepped out of the buckets wound up by their mates at the windlass. Presently fires were twinkling all over the field, and smoke from scores of cooking places rose in blue columns and wreaths. There you would smell that most characteristic incense of the New Zealand wilds—the scent of burning manuka. Little mists crept from the murmuring stream gullies to blend with the smoke of the diggers' camps.

The frying-pan was on; the billy was boiled—they called it the quart-pot in those years of the ‘sixties. Bacon and damper and hard biscuit, and here and there a pigeon from the bush, or a snapper or kingfish from the harbour; that was diggers’ fare. The most delicious fish in the world were there for the catching, and what could be better fare than a fat pigeon, stuffed almost to bursting with the resinous hinau and tawa berries that were abundant right up to midwinter, or a big kaka parrot that could easily be knocked over when it came fluttering and ka-ka-ing around at the imitation of its raucous screech. After the freezing and sterile wastes of the Otago fields, with scarcely a patch of scrub to give fuel, the diggers lived in cheapness and luxury on the Coromandel shore. Food in water and bush, firewood without limit, running water everywhere; all they needed was a trifle of flour and tea and sugar and now and again a side of bacon from the town of Auckland a few hours' sail away across the Gulf.

It was not yet quite dark when a miner came out of a slab-and-sail cloth hut beside the Kapanga and descended the gravelly bank with his greasy tin dishes. He proceeded to wash them by the simple process of swishing them about in the gravel and the swift water. A concertina and a jews harp made melody in a neighbouring camp. The page 50 dish-washer leisurely squatting there drying his tinware raised his voice in a song like a shipboard forebitter:

“Come all ye bright young fellows
Who have a mind to range
Into some far-off country,
Your fortunes for to change.
Come rove with me along the banks
Of the blessed O-hi-o;
Oh, the prairie we will wonder
And we'll chase the buffalo.”

The cheerful singer of the Far West ditty was a lean-framed, hard-featured fellow with a short-pointed red beard; a touch of the American frontiersman about his dress. Sam Nicholls was a Forty-niner. He had fossicked for gold on half a score of fields, from Sacramento to Bendigo and Gabriel's Gully; he had heard the six-shooters cracking in the wild camp towns; he had been one of the Vigilantes that helped to rid infant San Francisco of some of its bad bargains. His digging mate, Von Tempsky, in this Coromandel claim, Number Eight on the Goldfields Warden's register, had been only a year later than Forty-nine himself in the great Californian rush.

“You'll have to revise your ‘Comeall-ye,’ old man,” said Nicholls' mate, who had made the early tea and gone down to the beach to meet the mail cutter. He was a swarthy, foreignlooking man, sparse of beard and long of hair under his black-pointed wideawake. His high cheek-bones gave a touch of the Tartar to his Magyar features. He had a newspaper in his hand. “Never mind your buffalo; we'll make it ‘Maori foe’ now. Here's the ‘Southern Cross’ just in from Auckland. Come inside and read the latest from the Maori war front. The old sword is ready to jump from its sheath again, my friend.”

The Waikato War had just begun, the campaign that was to end in the seizure from the Maori King's tribes of a vast area of native country in the heart of the province. “Here, see what this says, first of all.” Nicholls took the paper opened at the war news and Militia notices. This was the invitation to arms that he read out aloud, above the rushing of the creek: