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Author's preface

Into the middle of the largest ocean of the terrestrial globe Providence has dropped three oases of land, shaped like two enormous ships dragging a third, a little cockboat, which in turn is surrounded by a flock of sea-fowl in the form of tiny islets and rocks. These two great frigates with the little boat hanging to the south are secured by indestructible anchors. Stretching from north to south the land divides the Pacific Ocean along a thousand miles. From the east it receives mild winds and meets a sea which is always lightly billowing and silvery with foam, and never sulky. From the west it is struck by storms which visit the Southern Hemisphere with a never tiring and furious regularity. They furrow the forehead of the ocean into deep wrinkles. The ocean in turn revenges itself by carrying away the light sand from the coast, leaving there only particles of heavy gold ground into dust. This plunder would soon deplete the western coasts of the islands if Nature and its mysterious subterranean forces had not compensated for the loss by thrusting the shores higher and higher out of the main.

These offspring of Neptune and Pluto lead a lonely life. Luckier with their temperate climate even than the British Isles and far more beautiful than they, they are less happy in their lack of immediate neighbours. The nearest continent—Australia—lies a week's journey away by steamer. Thus the three New Zealand sisters have no rival, no neighbour. Their communities can emerge into nationhood and live in safe solitude, as does Japan.

How wondrous those islands appear from shipboard! How often have I seen the pearly light and deep-blue folds of the sea breaking noisily on the gold-bearing sands, and the plains dotted with the white tents of the gold-diggers, which look like so many sheep scattered over a meadow! Higher up one can see the bright green hills dotted with groups of cottages, embroidered with flowers, and gently flowing with the fans of cabbage trees and flax. Steep mountain slopes rise above, thronged with dark trees, hung with many shaded purple, gold, or brown leaves. Lustrous green valleys cut across the mountains. White glaciers streak them, sometimes flowing to the very foothills. The view is dominated by granite domes, grey and blue, rust-stained basalt columns, and rugged, weathered pyramids or corrugated peaks eternally crowned with snow. Above these rises page xxiv only a plume of volcanic smoke which in the daytime looks like a transparent ever-growing river of grey steam, sinking into the blue expanse of sky. After sunset this cloud changes into a large flower, purple below from the reflection of subterranean fires, and changing above into a lily with a golden calyx and a pink corolla, formed by sunrays caught in their flight. At night, the calyx flames like a conflagration, and the dark corolla blazes in the sky. The firmament, which almost always has a Sicilian clarity, stretches above.

I was the first of those of my countrymen who write and collect new impressions to see this scene. Small wonder that I fell in love with it, with the same kind of sentiment a discoverer probably feels towards the land he has conquered for civilization. Alas, it is not easy to find a place on this earth where we Poles, who are by preference stay-at-homes, would not occasionally be driven by fate. I am proud that I was the first of a crowd of unwilling wanderers to arrive in this enchanting place.

The image of this archipelago and the memory of my unusual adventures there have long been before my eyes. Several years have elapsed, destiny has separated me by the diameter of the terrestrial globe from my favourite islands, and taken me to a contrasting land where, instead of looking out on the waves of the sea, I gazed at an ocean of snow for half a year; and saw instead of cabbage trees, mountains, and volcanoes, only limitless plains and stormy clouds. During my first winter here frost and gale imprisoned me in a log cabin set in a desert where a journey without a compass was just as difficult as on the open sea, and where to lose one's way and fall into the clutches of hurricanes screaming from the North Pole might mean death.

I passed my enforced hibernation chopping wood for several hours each day, to have enough fuel to last a whole night. I did the chopping inside the cabin, for the weather did not permit me to work abroad. A fire burned constantly in the iron stove, which had one of those small windows of transparent mica, so popular in North America for the glimpse of lively flames they allow, the sight of which itself hardens one against the cold.

Green logs of poplar or cotton tree, hissing with damp, were ready to go out even as I watched over them, and sometimes did go out when I negligently fell asleep for an hour. When that happened, a pail of water turned into a lump of ice, food solidified, boots changed into two metallic pipes, my watch stopped. The cabin's walls, two layers of logs lined with thick paper, were covered with patterns like those flowers with which the Snow Queen decorates page xxv our windows as a New Year's gift. Then I fully understood the horror of being exiled to a hyperborean land. I scrambled breathlessly from my bed and poured petrol on to the blackened wood with numb fingers to draw flames from the dead fire as quickly as I could.

This monotonous winter life, so different from the delights of a subtropical zone, constantly reminded me of that faraway land. I sighed for the country where the seasons are known only by the calendar and not by the barometer or frost-bitten limbs. I sat yearning by the fire. Its crackle recalled the noise of fern-tree stems being trampled by a Maori foot. Flames took on the shape of friends from whom I had parted, or whom I had buried, and clouds of smoke curled into the features of the swarthy natives of that evergreen place. The clatter of the iron chimney, which projected through the roof reminded me of menacing Maori war cries. Alone on this empty prairie I dwelt with my bygone friends.

New details of the past constantly came to my mind. What I had seen myself, and what I had been told of events which I had not seen, merged together. These were the key to my yellowed notebooks, the relics of my wanderings. Memory helped the scraps of paper to live again; they in turn helped to clarify memory; imagination filled in the gaps in the scenes whose ends I had not witnessed. The past became clear, as the hieroglyphics of a stenographer do, although he wrote them long ago and has forgotten their contents and even how to read them until some accident suggests the meaning of a certain phrase, when everything is suddenly plain.

So I reconstructed my camp life in the highlands of the New Zealand mountains and in those densely furrowed valleys where our excavations had made every step a pitfall for the careless passerby; where stood villages of tents and towns of tin; where the midday sun scarcely succeeded in looking into the deep valleys, and at night only a narrow strip of stars hung in the sky; and where this cramped landscape was bordered by virgin peaks, lit at dusk with an Alpine aurora. There we gathered round the brightly burning fires, stretched out our weary limbs on bundles of fern leaves, and listened to the best storyteller in the company tell his tales of distant lands and faraway seas, of incredibly rich veins of quartz, of gold-bearing streams, and of pretty girls. We were all young. Before we bade one another goodnight, we always argued as to which of them were the prettiest and made love the best.

There were bearded Italians and finical Frenchmen, solemn Anglo-Saxons and giddy Poles. As you would expect our opinions on such a tender subject varied. One of the Poles, an old-timer in New page xxvi Zealand, settled for the dusky Maori girls. With inconceivable perversity in taste, so far as the majority were concerned, he preferred their brown complexions and aquiline features to those of European women. He thought their full figures worthy of Greek sculptors, and their eagerness for love affairs with Europeans he explained by their desire to rise above the humiliation in which half-civilized peoples hold their women. During a succession of fine autumn evenings he told us all he knew of the life of the natives, whom most of us knew only through a few representatives working in the goldfields.

What I could recall of these tales in my hermitage by the Missouri River I will here repeat in the mother tongue of that storyteller who, in broken English, the universal language of Oceania, drew for us the vicissitudes, customs, and sufferings of the Maoris. I will try to translate these campfire stories into a more literary idiom.

Conditions have doubtless changed since the time when this Polish vagrant collected the material used here. The Maori race is dying out like the snow in spring, melting away unresistingly. A strange peace, which stems from the extinction of the original owners of the land and the increase of the white invaders, envelops New Zealand in its protective wings. The war cries that echoed from the forests have quietened, the plough upturns the fern, the Cross of Saint George flutters on flagstaffs erected to display the colours of the Maori king. The remnants of the valiant Maori race are peacefully dying.

I shall not try to analyse the eternal rights, whose motives the human mind will probably never fathom, which rule the destinies of races and peoples, and make history a register of the birth, growth, and death of nations. I shall not hide that with tears in my eyes and anxiety in my heart I listened to the death throes of the tribes, a few of whose types will be seen in my story, and whose land, which I trampled so lightheartedly, has been conquered by the pale-faced step-children of New Zealand. I write these notes for two reasons: to preserve my vagrant companion's stories, and to celebrate the memory of the children of that country to whom I dedicate my work.