Hokitika.

Placed in the very track of storms, and open to the sweep of rolling seas from every quarter, exposed to waves that run from pole to pole, or from South Africa to Cape Horn, the shores of New Zealand are famed for swell and surf, and her western rivers for the danger of their bars. Insurances at Melbourne are five times as high for the voyage to Hokitika as for the longer cruise to Brisbane.

In our little steamer of a hundred tons, built to cross the bars, we had reached the mouth of the Hokitika River soon after dark, but lay all night some ten miles to the south-west of the port. As we steamed in the early morning page 218from our anchorage, there rose up on the east the finest sunrise view on which it has been my fortune to set eyes.

A hundred miles of the Southern Alps stood out upon a pale-blue sky, in curves of a gloomy white that were just beginning to blush with pink, but ended to the southward in a cone of fire that blazed up from the ocean. It was the snow-dome of Mount Cook, struck by the rising sun. The evergreen bush, flaming with the crimson of the rata blooms, hung upon the mountain-side, and covered the plain with a dense jungle. It was one of those sights that haunt men for years, like the eyes of Mary in Bellini's Milan picture.

On the bar, three ranks of waves appeared to stand fixed in walls of surf. These huge rollers are sad destroyers of the New Zealand coasting-ships. A steamer was lost here a week before my visit, and the harbourmaster's whale-boat dashed in pieces, and two men drowned.

Lashing everything that was on deck, and battening down the hatches, in case we should ground in crossing, we prepared to run the gauntlet. The steamers often ground for an instant while in the trough between the waves, and the second sea, pooping them, sweeps them from end to end, but carries them into still water. Watching our time, we were borne on a great rolling white-capped wave into the quiet lakelet that forms the harbour, just as the sun, coming slowly up behind the range, was firing the Alps from north to south; but it was not till we had lain some minutes at the wharf that the sun rose to us poor mortals of the sea and plain. Hokitika Bay is strangely like the lower portion of the Lago Maggiore, but the Mount Rosa is inferior to Mount Cook.

When I reached that particular gin-palace which was known as the hotel I found that all the rooms were occupied, but that I could, if I pleased, lie down on a deal sidetable in the billiard-room. In our voyage down the coast from Nelson we had brought for the Buller and for Hokitika a cabin-full of cut flowers for bouquets, of which the diggers are extremely fond. The fact was pretty enough; the store put upon a single rose—"an English rosebud"— culled from a plant that had been brought from the Old Country in a clipper ship was still more touching; but the flowers made sleep below impossible, and it had been blow-page 219ing too hard for me to sleep on deck, so that I was glad to lie down upon my table for an hour's rest. The boards were rough, and full of cracks; and I began to dream that, walking on the landing-stage, I ran against a man, who drew his revolver on me. In wrenching it from him I hurt my hand in the lock, and woke to find my fingers pinched in one of the chinks of the long table. Despairin of further sleep, I started to walk through Hokitika, and to explore the "clearings" which the settlers are making in the bush.

At Pakihi and the Buller I had already seen the places to which the latest gold-digging "rush" had taken place, with the result of planting there some thousands of men with nothing to eat but gold—for diggers, however shrewd, fall an easy prey to those who tell them of spots where gold may be had for the digging, No attempt is at present made to grow even vegetables for the diggers' food: every one is engrossed in the search for gold. It is true that the dense jungle is being driven back from the diggers' camps by fire and sword, but the clearing is made only to give room for tents and houses. At the Buller I had found the forest—which comes down at present to the water's edge, and crowds upon the twenty shanties and hundred tents which form the town—smoking with fires on every side, and the parrots chattering with fright. The fires obstinately refused to spread, but the tall feathery trees were falling fast under the axes of some hundred diggers, who seemed not to have much romantic sympathy for the sufferings of the tree-ferns they had uprooted, or of the passion-flowers they were tearing from the evergreens they had embraced.

The profits realised upon ventures from Nelson to the gold coast are enormous—nothing less than fifty per cent, will compensate the owners for losses on the bars. The first cattle imported from Nelson to the Buller fetched at the latter place double the price they had cost only two days earlier.

The Hokitikians flatter themselves that their city is the "most rising place" on earth; and it must be confessed that, if population alone is to be regarded, the rapidity of its growth has been amazing. At the time of my visit, one year and a half had passed since the settlement was formed page 220by a few diggers, and it already had a permanent population of ten thousand; while no less than sixty thousand diggers and their friends claimed it for their headquarters. San Francisco itself did not rise so fast, Melbourne not much faster. But Hokitika, it must be remembered, is not only a goldfield port, but itself upon the goldfield. It is San Francisco and Placerville in one—Ballarat and Melbourne.

Inferior in its banks and theatres to Virginia City, or even Austin, there is one point in which Hokitika surpasses every American mining town that I have seen—namely, the goodness of its roads. Working upon them in the bright morning sun which this day graced "rainy Hokitika" with its presence were a gang of diggers and sailors, dressed in the clothes which every one must wear in a digging town unless he wishes to be stared at by the passers-by. Even sailors on shore "for a run" here wear cord breeches and high tight-fitting boots, often armed with spurs; though, as there are no horses except those of the gold-coast, police, they cannot enjoy much riding. The gang working on the roads were like the people I met about the town—rough, but not ill-looking fellows. To my astonishment I saw, conspicuous among their red shirts and junipers, the blue-and-white uniform of the mounted police; and from the way in which the constables handled their loaded rifles I came to the conclusion that the road-menders must be a gang of prisoners. On inquiry I found that all the New Zealand "convicts," including under this sweeping title men convicted for mere petty offences, and sentenced to hard labour for a month, are made to do good practical work on the roads. I was reminded of the Mis sourian practice of setting prisoners to dig out the stumps that cumber the streets of the younger towns: the sentence on a man for being drunk is said to be that he pull up a black walnut stump; drunk and disorderly, a large buck-eye; assaulting the sheriff, a tough old hickory root; and so on.

When the great rush to Melbourne occurred, in 1848, ships by the hundred were left in the Yarra without a single hand to navigate them. Nuggets in the hand would not tempt sailors away from the hunt after nuggets in the bush. Ships left Hobson's Bay for Chili with half a dozen hands; page 221and in one case that came within my knowledge a captain, his mate, and three Maoris took a brig across the Pacific to San Francisco.

As the morning were on I came near seeing something of more serious crime than that for which these "runners" were convicted. "Sticking-up," as highway robbery is called in the colonies, has always been common in Australia and New Zealand; but of late the bushrangers, deserting their old tactics, have commenced to murder as well as rob. In three months of 1866, no less than fiffiy or sixty murders took place in the South Island of New Zealand, all of them committed, it was believed, by a gang known as "The Thugs." Mr. George Dobson, the Government surveyor, was murdered near Hokitika in May; but it was not till November that the gang was broken up by the police and volunteers. Levy, Kelly, and Burgess, three of the most notorious of the villains, were on their trial at Hokitika while I was there; and Sullivan, also a member of the band, who had been taken at Nelson, had volunteered to give evidence against them. Sullivan was to come by steamer from the north, without touching at the Buller or the Grey. And when the ship was signalled the excitement of the population became considerable, the diggers asserting that Sullivan was not only the basest, but the most guilty of all the gang. As the vessel ran across the bar and into the bay, the police were marched down to the landing-place, and a yelling crowd surrounded them, threatening to lynch the informer. When the steamer came alongside the wharf, Sullivan was not to be seen, and it was soon discovered that he had been landed in a whale-boat upon the outer beach. Off rushed the crowd to intercept the party in the town, but they found the gaol gates already shut and barred. It was hard to say whether it was for Thuggism or for turning Queen's evidence that Sullivan was to be lynched.

The gold-coast police force, which has been formed to put a stop to Thuggism and bushranging, is a splendid body of cavalry, about which many good stories are told. One digger said to me, "Seen our policemen? We don't have no younger sons of British peers among 'em." Another account says that none but members of the older English universities are admitted to the force.

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There are here, upon the diggings, many military men and university graduates, who generally retain their polish of manner, though outwardly they are often the roughest of the rough. Some of them tell strange stories. One Cambridge man, who was acting as a post-office clerk (not at Hokitika), told me that in 1862, shortly after taking his degree, he went out to British Columbia to settle upon land. He soon spent his capital at billiards in Victoria City, and went as a digger to the Fraser River. There he made a "pile," which he gambled away on his road back; and he struggled through the winter of 1863-64 by shooting and selling game, In 1864 he was attached as a hunter to the Vancouver's exploring expedition, and in 1965 started with a small sum of money for Australia. He was wrecked, lost all he had, and was forced to work his passage down to Melbourne. Thence he went into South Australia as the driver of a reaping-machine, and was finally, through the efforts of his friends m England, appointed to a post-office clerkship in New Zealand, which colony he intended to quit for California or Chili. This was not the only man of education whom I myself found upon the diggings, as I met with a Christ Church man, who, however, had left Oxford without a degree, actually working as a digger in a surface-mine.

In the outskirts of Hokitika I came upon a palpable Lifeguardsman cooking for a roadside station, with his smock worn like a soldier's tunic, and his cap stuck on one ear in Windsor fashion. A squatter from near Christchurch, who was at the Buller selling sheep, told me that he had an ex-captain in the Guards at work for weekly wages on his sheep-run, and that a neighbour had a lieutenant of Lancers rail-splitting at his station.

When I left Hokitika it was by the new road, 170 miles in length, which crosses the Alps and the Island, and connects Christchurch, the capital of Canterbury, with the western parts of the province. The bush between the sea and the mountains is extremely lovely. The highway is "corduroyed" with trunks of the tree-fern, and in the swamps the sleepers have begun to grow at each end, so that a close-set double row ol young tree-ferns is rising along portions of the road. The bush is densely matted with an undergrowth of supplejack and all kinds of creepers, page 223but here and there one finds a grove of fern-trees twenty feet in height, and grown so thickly as to prevent the existence of underwood and ground-plants.

The peculiarity which makes the New Zealand West Coast scenery the most beautiful in the world to those who like more green than California has to show, is that here alone can you find semi-tropical vegetation growing close up to the eternal snows. The latitude and the great moisture of the climate bring the long glaciers very low into the valleys; and the absence of all true winter, coupled with the rainfall, causes the growth of palm-like ferns upon the ice-river's very edge. The glaciers of Mount Cook are the longest in the world, except those at the sources of the Indus, but close about them have been found tree-ferns of thirty and forty feet in height. It is not till you enter the mountains that you escape the moisture of the coast, and quit for the scenery of the Alps the scenery of fairy-land.

Bumping and tumbling in the mail-cart through the rushing blue-grey waters of the Teremakau I found myself within the mountains of the Snowy Range. From Arthur's Pasd—named from Arthur Dobson, brother to the surveyor murdered by the Thugs—six small glaciers were in sight at once. The Rocky Mountains opposite to Denver are loftier and not less snowy than the New Zealand Alps, but in the Rockies there are no glaciers south of about 50° north; while in New Zealand—a winterless country—they are common at 8° nearer to the line.

As we journeyed through the pass, there was one grand view, and only one: the glimpse of the ravine to the east-ward of Mount Rolleston, caught from the desert shore of Lake Misery—a tarn near the "divide" of waters. About its hanks there grows the Rockwood lily,^* a bushy plant, with a round, polished, concave leaf, and a cup-shaped flower of virgin white, that seems to take its tint from the encircling snows.

In the evening we had a view that for gloomy grandeur cannot well be matched—that from near Bealey^† Township, where we struck the Waimakariri Valley. The river-bed is page 224half a mile in width, the stream itself not more than ten yards across, but, like all New Zealand rivers, subject to freshets, which fill its bed to a great depth with a surging, foaming flood. Some of the victims of the Waimakariri are buried alongside the road. Dark evergreen bush shuts in the river-bed, and is topped on the one side by dreary frozen peaks, and on the other by still gloomier mountains of bare rock.

—Sir Charles Dilke

("Greater Britain," 1866).