Produced by F E H, MWS and the Online Distributed

Transcriber’s Notes

  Page 53—wid-winter changed to mid-winter.
  Page 151—sullenly changed to suddenly.

  The spelling of Lake Te-Anau has been retained with a hyphen
  and the township of Te Anau without a hyphen.

  Other changes made are noted at the end of the book.

NEW ZEALAND

AGENTS

    AMERICA        THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                     64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

    AUSTRALASIA    THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
                     205 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE

    CANADA         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
                     ST. MARTIN’S HOUSE, 70 BOND STREET, TORONTO

    INDIA          MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
                     MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
                     309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA

[Illustration: ON M’KINNON’S PASS]

    NEW ZEALAND

    PAINTED BY

    F. AND W. WRIGHT

    DESCRIBED BY

    HON. WILLIAM PEMBER REEVES

    HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR NEW ZEALAND

    _Ultima regna canam fluido contermina mundo_

    LONDON
    ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
    1908

Contents

    CHAPTER I

      PAGE

    THE ISLANDS AND THEIR CITIES 1

    CHAPTER II

    COUNTRY LIFE 28

    SPORT AND ATHLETICS 52

    CHAPTER IV

    IN THE FOREST 76

    CHAPTER V

    FIRE AND WATER 115

    CHAPTER VI

    ALP, FIORD, AND SANCTUARY 160

    CHAPTER VII

    OUTLYING ISLANDS 204

    APPENDIX

    A WORD TO THE TOURIST 230

List of Illustrations

    1. On M’Kinnon’s Pass _Frontispiece_

           FACING PAGE

    2. “Paradise,” Lake Wakatipu 2

    3. Te-Wenga 4

    4. Diamond Lake 6

    5. On the Bealey River 8

    6. Wellington 18

    7. Dunedin 20

    8. Napier 24

    9. The Bathing Pool 26

    10. Nelson 28

    11. On the Beach at Ngunguru 30

    12. At the Foot of Lake Te-Anau 32

    13. The Waikato at Ngaruawahia 34

    14. Tree Ferns 38

    15. A Maori Village 42

    16. A Pataka 44

    17. Coromandel 50

    18. Cathedral Peaks 56

    19. The Rees Valley and Richardson Range 58

    20. At the Head of Lake Wakatipu 66

    21. North Fiord, Lake Te-Anau 68

    22. Christchurch 72

    23. Canoe Hurdle Race 74

    24. Waihi Bay, Whangaroa Harbour 74

    25. The Return of the War Canoe 76

    26. Okahumoko Bay, Whangaroa 78

    27. Maori Fishing Party 80

    28. Carved House, Ohinemutu 82

    29. A Bush Road 84

    30. Among the Kauri 88

    31. Pohutu-kawa in Bloom, Whangaroa Harbour 90

    32. Nikau Palms 94

    33. On the Pelorus River 98

    34. Auckland 100

    35. Mount Egmont 104

    36. Tarei-po-Kiore 106

    37. Morning on the Wanganui River 108

    38. On the Upper Wanganui 110

    39. Wairua Falls 112

    40. “The Dragon’s Mouth” 120

    41. Huka Falls 122

    42. Ara-tia-tia Rapids 124

    43. Lake Taupo 130

    44. In a Hot Pool 134

    45. Ngongotaha Mountain 136

    46. Lake and Mount Tarawera 144

    47. Maori Washing-day, Ohinemutu 146

    48. Wairoa Geyser 150

    49. Cooking in a Hot Spring 152

    50. The Champagne Cauldron 154

    51. Evening on Lake Roto-rua 156

    52. Planting Potatoes 158

    53. The Wairau Gorge 160

    54. In the Hooker Valley 162

    55. Mount Cook 164

    56. Mount Sefton 172

    57. The Tasman Glacier 174

    58. The Cecil and Walter Peaks 176

    59. Manapouri 178

    60. Mitre Peak 180

    61. In Milford Sound 182

    62. On the Clinton River 184

    63. At the Head of Lake Te-Anau 186

    64. The Buller River near Hawk’s Craig 192

    65. Below the Junction of the Buller and Inangahua Rivers 194

    66. Bream Head, Whangarei Heads 196

    67. Lawyer’s Head 198

    68. A Maori Chieftainess 200

    69. Weaving the Kaitaka 212

    70. “Te Hongi” 216

    71. Wahine’s Canoe Race on the Waikato 218

    72. Native Gathering 220

    73. White Cliffs, Buller River 230

    74. The Otira Gorge 232

    75. Lake Waikare-Moana 234

      _Map at end of Volume._ 242

CHAPTER I

THE ISLANDS AND THEIR CITIES

The poet who wrote the hexameter quoted on the title-page meant it to
be the first line of a Latin epic. The epic was not written--in Latin
at any rate,--and the poet’s change of purpose had consequences of
moment to literature. But I have always been glad that the line quoted
was rescued from the fire, for it fits our islands very well. They
are, indeed, on the bounds of the watery world. Beyond their southern
outposts the seaman meets nothing till he sees the iceblink of the
Antarctic.

From the day of its annexation, so disliked by Downing Street, to
the passing of those experimental laws so frowned upon by orthodox
economists, our colony has contrived to attract interest and cause
controversy. A great deal has been written about New Zealand; indeed,
the books and pamphlets upon it form a respectable little library. Yet
is the picture which the average European reader forms in his mind
anything like the islands? I doubt it. The patriotic but misleading
name, “The Britain of the South,” is responsible for impressions
that are scarcely correct, while the map of the world on Mercator’s
Projection is another offender. New Zealand is not very like Great
Britain, though spots can be found there--mainly in the province of
Canterbury and in North Otago--where Englishmen or Scotsmen might
almost think themselves at home. But even this likeness, pleasant as
it is at moments, does not often extend beyond the foreground, at any
rate as far as likeness to England is concerned. It is usually an
effect produced by the transplanting of English trees and flowers,
cultivation of English crops and grasses, acclimatisation of English
birds and beasts, and the copying more or less closely of the English
houses and dress of to-day. It is a likeness that is the work of the
colonists themselves. They have made it, and are very proud of it. The
resemblance to Scotland is not quite the same thing. It sometimes does
extend to the natural features of the country. In the eastern half of
the South Island particularly, there are landscapes where the Scot’s
memory, one fancies, must often be carried back to the Selkirks, the
peaks of Arran, or the Highland lochs of his native land. Always,
however, it is Scotland under a different sky. The New Zealanders live,
on the average, twelve degrees nearer the equator than do dwellers in
the old country, and though the chill of the Southern Ocean makes the
change of climate less than the difference of latitude would lead one
to expect, it is still considerable. The skies are bluer and higher,
the air clearer, and the sun much hotter than in the British
Isles. The heavens are a spacious dome alive with light and wind. Ample
as the rainfall is, and it is ample almost everywhere, the islands,
except in the south-west, strike the traveller as a sunny as well as a
bracing country. This is due to the ocean breezes and the strength of
the sunshine. The average number of wet days in the year is 151; but
even a wet day is seldom without sunshine, it may be for some hours, it
will be at least a few gleams. Such a thing as a dry day without a ray
of brilliance is virtually unknown over four-fifths of the colony. I
once had the felicity of living in London during twenty-two successive
days in which there was neither a drop of rain nor an hour of sunshine.
If such a period were to afflict New Zealand, the inhabitants would
assuredly imagine that Doomsday was at hand. “Truly the light is sweet,
and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun,” is a text
which might be adopted as a motto for the islands.

[Illustration: “PARADISE,” LAKE WAKATIPU]

In the matter of climate the islanders are certainly the spoilt
children of Nature; and this is not because the wind does not blow
or the rain fall in their country, but because of what Bishop Selwyn
called “the elastic air and perpetual motion” which breed cheerfulness
and energy all the year round. Of all European climates it resembles
most closely, perhaps, that of the coasts of France and Spain fronting
on the Bay of Biscay. Round New Zealand are the same blue, sparkling,
and uneasy seas, and the same westerly winds, often wet and sometimes
rising into strong gales. And where France and Spain join you may see
in the Pyrenees very much such a barrier of unbroken mountains as the
far-reaching, snowy chains that form the backbone of the islands of the
south. Further, though mountainous, ours is an oceanic country, and
this prevents the climate from being marked by great extremes. It is
temperate in the most exact sense of the word. The difference between
the mean of the hottest month and the mean of the coldest month is not
more than fifteen degrees in most of the settlements. Christchurch is
an exception, and even in Christchurch it is only twenty degrees. In
Wellington the mean for the whole year is almost precisely the same
as in St. Louis in the United States. But the annual mean is often a
deceitful guide. St. Louis is sixteen degrees warmer in summer and
seventeen degrees colder in winter than Wellington; and that makes all
the difference when comfort is concerned. Wellington is slightly cooler
than London in midsummer, and considerably warmer in winter. Finally,
in the matter of wind, the European must not let himself be misled by
the playful exaggerations in certain current New Zealand stories. It
is not the case that the experienced citizen of Wellington clutches
convulsively at his hat whenever he turns a street-corner in any city
of the world; nor is it true that the teeth of sheep in the Canterbury
mountain valleys are worn down in their efforts to hold on to the long
tussock grass, so as to save themselves from being blown away by
the north-west gales. Taken as a whole, our land is neither more nor
less windy than the coasts of the English Channel between Dover and the
Isle of Wight. I write with the advantage of having had many years’
experience of both climates.

[Illustration: TE-WENGA]

On the map of the world New Zealand has the look of a slim insular
strip, a Lilliputian satellite of the broad continent of Australia.
It is, however, twelve hundred miles from the continent, and there
are no island stations between to act as links; the Tasman Sea is an
unbroken and often stormy stretch of water. Indeed, New Zealand is as
close to Polynesia as to Australia, for the gap between Cape Maria Van
Diemen and Niue or Savage Island is also about twelve hundred miles
across. In result, then, the colony cannot be termed a member of any
group or division, political or scientific. It is a lonely oceanic
archipelago, remote from the great centres of the earth, but with a
character, attractions, and a busy life of its own. Though so small on
the map, it does not strike those who see it as a little country. Its
scenery is marked by height and steepness; its mountain ranges and bold
sea-cliffs impress the new-comer by size and wildness. The clear air,
too, enables the eye to travel far; and where the gazer can hold many
miles of country in view--country stretching away, as a rule, to lofty
backgrounds--the adjective “small” does not easily occur to the mind.
Countries like Holland and Belgium seem as small as they are; that is
because they are flat, and thickly sown with cities and villages. In
them man is everything, and Nature appears tamed and subservient. But
New Zealand submits to man slowly, sometimes not at all. There the
rapid rivers, long deep lakes, steep hill-sides, and mountain-chains
rising near to or above the snow-line are features of a scenery varying
from romantic softness to rough grandeur. Indeed the first impression
given by the coast, when seen from the deck of an approaching ship, is
that of the remnant of some huge drowned continent that long ago may
have spread over degrees of longitude where now the Southern Ocean is a
weary waste.

[Illustration: DIAMOND LAKE]

Nor, again, is this impression of largeness created by immense tracts
of level monotony, as in so many continental views. There is none of
the tiresome sameness that besets the railway passenger on the road
from The Hague to Moscow--the succession of flat fields, sandy heaths,
black pine woods, and dead marshes. For the keynote of our scenery is
variety. Few countries in the world yield so rapid a series of sharp
contrasts--contrasts between warm north and cool south; between brisk,
clear east and moist, mild west; between the leafy, genial charm of
the coastal bays and the snows and rocky walls of the dorsal ridges.
The very mountains differ in character. Here are Alps with long white
crests and bony shoulders emerging from forests of beech; there
rise volcanoes, symmetrical cones, streaked with snow, and in some
instances incessantly sending up steam or vapour from their summits.
Most striking of all the differences, perhaps, is the complete change
from the deep and ancient forests which formerly covered half
the islands, to the long stretches of green grass or fern land where,
before the coming of the settlers, you could ride for miles and pass
never a tree. Of course many of these natural features are changing
under the masterful hands of the British colonist. Forests are being
cut down and burned, plains and open valleys ploughed up and sown,
swamps drained, and their picturesque tangle of broad-bladed flax,
giant reeds, and sharp-edged grasses remorselessly cleared away.
Thousands of miles of hedges, chiefly of gorse, now seam the open
country with green or golden lines, and divide the surface into more or
less rectangular fields; and broom and sweetbriar, detested weeds as
they are, brighten many a slope with gold or rose-colour in spring-time.

Plantations of exotic trees grow in number and height yearly, and show
a curious blending of the flora of England, California, and Australia.
Most British trees and bushes thrive exceedingly, though some of them,
as the ash, the spruce, the holly, and the whitethorn, find the summers
too hot and the winters not frosty enough in many localities. More than
in trees, hedgerows, or corn-crops, the handiwork of the colonist is
seen in the ever-widening areas sown with English grasses. Everything
has to give way to grass. The consuming passion of the New Zealand
settler is to make grass grow where it did not grow before, or where
it did grow before, to put better grass in its place. So trees, ferns,
flax, and rushes have to pass away; with them have to go the wiry
native tussock and tall, blanched snow-grass. Already thirteen million
acres are sown with one or other mixture of cock’s-foot, timothy,
clover, rye-grass, fescue--for the New Zealand farmer is knowing in
grasses; and every year scores of thousands of acres are added to the
area thus artificially grassed. Can you wonder? The carrying power of
acres improved in this way is about nine times that of land left in
native pasture; while as for forest and fern land, they, before man
attacked them, could carry next to no cattle or sheep at all. In the
progress of settlement New Zealand is sacrificing much beauty in the
districts once clad in forest. Outside these, however, quite half the
archipelago was already open land when the whites came, and in this
division the work of the settler has been almost entirely improvement.
Forty years ago it needed all the gold of the sunshine and all the
tonic quality of the air to make the wide tracts of stunted bracken
in the north, and even wider expanses of sparse yellowish tussock in
the south, look anything but cheerless, empty, and half-barren. The
pages of many early travellers testify to this and tell of an effect
of depression now quite absent. Further, for fifteen years past the
process of settling the soil has not been confined to breaking in the
wilderness and enlarging the frontiers of cultivated and peopled land.
This good work is indeed going on. But hand in hand with it there
goes on a process of subdivision by which fresh homes rise yearly
in districts already accounted settled; the farmstead chimneys send
up their smoke ever nearer to each other; and the loneliness
and consequent dulness that once half spoiled country life is being
brightened. Very few New Zealanders now need live without neighbours
within an easy ride, if not walk.

[Illustration: ON THE BEALEY RIVER]

Like the province of the Netherlands the name of which it bears, New
Zealand is a green land where water meets the eye everywhere. There
the resemblance ends. The dull grey tones of the atmosphere of old
Zealand, the deep, unchanging green of its pastures, the dead level
and slow current of its shallow and turbid waters, are conspicuously
absent at the Antipodes. When the New Zealander thinks of water his
thoughts go naturally to an ocean, blue and restless, and to rivers
sometimes swollen and clouded, sometimes clear and shrunken, but always
rapid. Even the mountain lakes, though they have their days of peace,
are more often ruffled by breezes or lashed by gales. In a word,
water means water in motion; and among the sounds most familiar to a
New Zealander’s ears are the hoarse brawling of torrents, grinding
and bearing seaward the loose shingle of the mountains, and the deep
roar of the surf of the Pacific, borne miles inland through the long
still nights when the winds have ceased from troubling. It is no mere
accident, then, that rowing and sailing are among the chief pastimes of
the well-watered islands, or that the islanders have become ship-owners
on a considerable scale. Young countries do not always carry much
of their own trade; but, thanks to the energy and astute management
of their Union Steamship Company, New Zealanders not only control
their own coasting trade, but virtually the whole of the traffic
between their own shores, Australia, and the South Sea Islands. The
inter-colonial trade is substantial, amounting to between £5,000,000
and £6,000,000 a year. Much larger, of course, is the trade with the
mother country; for our colony, with some success, does her best to
shoulder a way in at the open but somewhat crowded door of London.
Of her total oversea trade of about £37,000,000 a year, more than
two-thirds is carried on with England and Scotland. Here again the
colonial ship-owner has a share of the carrying business, for the
best known of the four ocean steamship companies in its service is
identified with the Dominion, and bears its name.

With variety of scenery and climate there comes, of course, an equal
variety of products. The colony is eleven hundred miles long, and lies
nearly due north and south. The latitudes, moreover, through which it
extends, namely, those from 34° to 47°, are well suited to diversity.
So you get a range from the oranges and olives of the north to the
oats and rye of colder Southland. Minerals, too, are found of more
than one kind. At first the early settlers seemed none too quick in
appreciating the advantages offered them by so varied a country. They
pinned their faith to wool and wheat only, adding gold, after a time,
to their larger exports. But experience showed that though wool and
wheat yielded large profits, these profits fluctuated, as they still
do. So the growers had to look round and seek for fresh outlets and
industries. Thirty years ago, when their colony was first beginning to
attract some sort of notice in the world’s markets, they still depended
on wool, gold, cereals, hides, and tallow. Cereals they have now
almost ceased to export, though they grow enough for home consumption;
they have found other things that pay better. They produce twice as
much gold as they did then, and grow more wool than ever. Indeed that
important animal, the New Zealand sheep, is still the mainstay of his
country. Last year’s export of wool brought in nearly £7,700,000. But
to the three or four industries enumerated the colonists have added
seven or eight more, each respectable in size and profitable in the
return it yields. To gold their miners have added coal, the output
of which is now two million tons a year. Another mineral--or sort of
mineral--is the fossil resin of the giant Kauri pine, of which the
markets of Europe and North America absorb more than half-a-million
pounds’ worth yearly. Freezing and cold storage have become main allies
of the New Zealand farmer, whose export of frozen mutton and lamb now
approaches in value £4,000,000. Almost as remarkable is the effect of
refrigerating on dairying in the islands. Hundreds of co-operative
butter factories and creameries have been built during the last twenty
years. It is not too much to say that they have transformed the face
of whole provinces. It is possible to grow wool on a large scale with
but the sparsest population, as the interior of Australia shows; but
it is not possible to grow butter or cheese without multiplying homes
and planting families fairly thickly on the land. In New Zealand even
the growing of meat and wool is now chiefly done on moderate-sized
land-holdings. The average size of our flocks is but a thousand head.
But it is dairying that is _par excellence_ the industry of the small
man. It was so from the first, and every decade shows a tendency to
closer subdivision of the land devoted to producing butter and cheese.
Within the last few years, again, yet another industry has seemed to be
on the road to more scientific organisation. This is the manufacture
of hemp from the fibre of the native flax. One cannot call this a new
thing, for the colonists tried it on a fairly large scale more than
thirty years ago; but their enterprise seemed again and again doomed
to disappointment, for New Zealand hemp proved for a long while but
a tricky and uncertain article of commerce. It was and is a kind of
understudy of manilla, holding a place somewhere between that and
sisal. For many years, however, it seemed unable to get a firm footing
in the markets, and when the price of manilla fell was apt to be
neglected altogether. During the last decade, however, the flax millers
have decidedly improved its quality, and a demand for it has sprung up
in countries outside Great Britain. It is said that Americans use it in
lieu of hair, and that the Japanese can imitate silk with it. Certainly
the Germans, Dutch, and French buy it, to spin into binder-twine, or,
may be, to “blend” with other fibres.

To the ordinary stranger from Europe, the most interesting of our
industries are those that bear least likeness to the manufactures
and agriculture of an old country. To him there is a savour of the
strange and new in kauri-gum digging, gold-mining, timber-cutting,
and saw-milling, and even the conversion of bushes of flax into
bales of hemp. But if I were asked to choose two industries before
others to describe with some minuteness, I think I should select
the growing, freezing, and export of meat, and the application of
the factory system to the making and export of butter and cheese.
Though my countrymen have no monopoly of these they have from the
first shown marked activity in organising and exploiting them. In one
chief branch of refrigeration their produce stands first in quality,
if not in quantity. I refer to the supply of mutton and lamb to the
English market. In this they have to compete with the larger flocks
of Australia and the Argentine, as well as, indirectly, with the
huge herds and gigantic trade combinations of the United States. Of
the competitors whose products meet at Smithfield, they are the most
distant, and in their command of capital the least powerful. Moreover,
they are without the advantage--if advantage it be--of cheap labour.
Yet their meat has for many years commanded the best prices paid for
frozen mutton and lamb in London, and the demand, far from being
unequal to the supply, has been chiefly limited by the difficulty of
increasing our flocks fast enough to keep pace with it. In the contest
for English favour, our farmers, though handicapped in the manner
mentioned above, started with three advantages--healthy flocks and
herds, a genial climate, and an educated people. The climate enables
their sheep and cattle to remain out all the year round. Except in the
Southern Alps, they suffer very little loss from weather. The sunny
air helps them to keep disease down, and, as already said, the best
artificial grasses flourish in our islands as they flourish in very few
countries. The standard of education makes labour, albeit highly paid,
skilful and trustworthy. The farm-workers and meat-factory hands are
clean, efficient, and fully alive to the need for sanitary precautions.
The horrors described in Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle” are impossible in
New Zealand for many reasons. Of these, the first is that the men
employed in meat factories would not tolerate their existence.

There are thirty-seven establishments in the colony for meat freezing
and preserving, employing over three thousand hands and paying nearly
£300,000 a year in wages. The value of their output is about £5,000,000
a year, and the bulk of it is exported to the port of London. The
weight of meat sent to the United Kingdom last year was two hundred and
thirty-seven million pounds avoirdupois. Then there are about three
hundred and twenty dairy-butter or cheese factories, without counting
a larger outer circle of skimming stations. To these the dairy-farmers
send their milk, getting it back after skimming. That completes their
share of the work; expert factory hands and managers do the rest. As
for meat-freezing, from beginning to end the industry is scientifically
managed and carefully supervised. At its inception, a quarter of a
century ago, the flocks of the colony were healthy and of good strains
of blood. But they were bred chiefly to grow wool, and mainly showed a
basis of Merino crossed with Lincoln or Leicester. Nowadays the Romney
Marsh blood predominates in the stud flocks, especially in the North
Island. Lincoln, Leicester, Merino, Border Leicester, Shropshire, and
South Down follow in order. For five-and-twenty years our breeders
have brought their skill to bear on crossing, with a view to producing
the best meat for the freezing factory, without ruining the quality
of their wool. They still face the cost and trouble of importing stud
sheep from England, though their own selected animals have brought
them good prices in South America, Australia, and South Africa.
Flocks and herds alike are subjected to regular inspection by the
veterinary officers of the Department of Agriculture; and though the
slaughter-yards and factories of the freezing companies are models of
order, speed, and cleanliness, the Government expert is there too, and
nothing may be sold thence without his certificate, for every carcase
must bear the official mark. From the factory to the steamer, from
one end of the earth to the other, the frozen carcases are vigilantly
watched, and the temperature of the air they are stored in is regulated
with painful care. As much trouble is taken to keep freezing chambers
cold as to keep a king’s palace warm. The shipping companies are as
jealously anxious about the condition of their meat cargoes as they are
for the contentment of their passengers and the safety of their ships.
At the London Docks the meat is once more examined by a New Zealand
official, and finally at Smithfield, as the carcases are delivered
there in the small hours of the morning, they are scanned for the last
time by a veterinary expert from the Antipodes. Moreover, since our
meat goes now to other British ports as well as to London, and since,
too, nearly half of what is discharged in the Thames no longer finds
its way to Smithfield, our inspectors have to follow our meat into
the provinces and report upon the condition in which it reaches such
towns as Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, and Manchester. Furthermore,
they do their best to track it a stage farther and ascertain its fate
at the hands of the unsentimental retail trader. Most New Zealand meat
is now honestly sold as what it is. Some of the best of it, however,
is still palmed off on the consumer as British. On the other hand,
South American mutton is sometimes passed off as New Zealand. The
housewife who buys “Canterbury Lamb” because she likes all things
Kentish is not yet altogether extinct. For all this the clumsily-drawn
English law, which makes conviction so difficult, must be held mainly
responsible. New Zealand butter, too, suffers at the hands of English
manipulators. It is what Tooley Street calls a dry butter--that is to
say, it contains on an average not more than some eleven per cent of
moisture. This renders it a favourite for mixing with milk and for
selling as “milk-blended” butter, a process at which makers in the
colony can only look on wrathfully but helplessly. Otherwise they have
little to complain about, for their butter has for years past brought
them prices almost as high as those of good Danish, while during the
butter famine of the first few months of 1908 as much as 150 shillings
a hundredweight was paid for parcels of it. Before shipment in the
colony, butter and cheese are graded by public inspectors. Every box
bears the Government stamp. In practice the verdict of the grader is
accepted by the English purchasers. Relatively the amount of frozen
beef which we export is not large; but our climate and pastures are too
well suited for beef-growing to make it likely that the discrepancy
will continue. Probably frozen beef will give place to chilled; that
is to say, improvements in the art of chilling will enable our beef to
be carried at a temperature of, let us say, 30° Fahrenheit, instead
of 12°. It will then arrive in England soft and fit for immediate
use: thawing will not be needed, and a higher price will be obtained.
But, however far behind New Zealand may as yet lag in the beef trade,
enough has been done in other branches of refrigeration to show
how scientific, well-organised, and efficient colonial industry is
becoming, and how very far the farmers and graziers of the islands are
from working in the rough and hand-to-mouth fashion that settlers in
new countries are supposed to affect.

[Illustration: WELLINGTON]

The purpose of this sketch, however, is not to dilate upon the growth
of our commerce and industry, remarkable as that is in a country so
isolated and a population only now touching a million. My object,
rather, is to give something of an outline of the archipelago itself,
of the people who live there between the mountains and the sea, and of
the life and society that a new-comer may expect to see. Mainly, then,
the most striking peculiarities of the islands, as a land undergoing
the process of occupation, are the decentralised character of this
occupation, and the large areas, almost unpeopled, that still remain
in a country relatively small in size. New Zealand was originally not
so much a colony as a group of little settlements bound together none
too comfortably. Its nine provinces, with their clashing interests and
intense jealousies, were politically abolished more than thirty years
ago; but some of the local feeling which they stood for and suffered
for still remains, and will remain as long as mountain ranges and
straits of the sea divide New Zealand. Troublesome as its divisions are
to politicians, merchants, ship-owners, councils of defence, and many
other persons and interests, they nevertheless have their advantages.
They breed emulation, competition, civic patriotism; and the local
life, parochial as it looks to observers from larger communities,
is at least far better than the stagnation of provinces drained of
vitality by an enormous metropolis. For in New Zealand you have four
chief towns, large enough to be dignified with the name of cities, as
well as twice as many brisk and aspiring seaports, each the centre and
outlet of a respectable tract of advancing country. All these have
to be thought of when any general scheme for opening up, defending,
or educating the country is in question. Our University, to give one
example, is an examining body, with five affiliated colleges; but
these colleges lie in towns far apart, hundreds of miles from each
other. The ocean steamship companies before mentioned have to carry
merchandise to and from six or eight ports. Singers and actors have to
travel to at least as many towns to find audiences. Wellington, the
capital, is still not the largest of the four chief towns, rapid as its
progress has been during the last generation. Auckland, with 90,000
people, is the largest, as it is the most beautiful; Wellington, with
70,000, holds but the second place.

Decentralised as New Zealand is, large as its rural population is, and
pleasant as its country life can be, still its four chief towns hold
between them more than a quarter of its people, and cannot therefore
be passed over in a sentence. Europeans are apt to be impatient of
colonial towns, seeing in them collections of buildings neither large
enough to be imposing nor old enough to be mellowed into beauty or
quaintness. And it is true that in our four cities you have towns
without architectural or historic interest, and in size only about
equal to Hastings, Oxford, Coventry, and York. Yet these towns,
standing where seventy years ago nothing stood, have other features of
interest beside their newness. Cities are, after all, chiefly important
as places in which civilised men and women can live decently and
comfortably, and do their daily work under conditions which are healthy
and neither degrading nor disagreeable. The first business of a city
is to be useful, and its second to be healthy. Certainly it should not
be hideous; but our cities are not hideous. What if the streets tend
to straight rigidity, while the dwelling-houses are mostly of wood,
and the brick and stone business edifices embody modern commercialism!
The European visitor will note these features; but he will note also
the spirit of cleanliness, order, and convenience everywhere active
among a people as alert and sturdy as they are well fed and comfortably
clad. The unconcealed pride of the colonist in material progress may
sometimes jar a little on the tourist in search of the odd, barbaric,
or picturesque. But the colonist, after all, is building up a civilised
nation. Art, important as it is, cannot be the foundation of a young
state.

[Illustration: DUNEDIN]

In the towns, then, you see bustling streets where electric tramways
run out into roomy suburbs, and where motor-cars have already ceased to
be a novelty. You notice that the towns are even better drained than
paved, and that the water supply everywhere is as good as it ought
to be in so well-watered a country. The visitor can send telegrams
for sixpence and letters for a penny, and finds the State telephone
system as convenient as it is cheap. If the hotels do not display
American magnificence they do not charge American prices, for they
give you comfort and civility for twelve-and-sixpence a day. Theatres
and concert-halls are commodious, if not imposing; and, thanks to
travelling companies and to famous artists passing through on their
way to or from Australia, there is usually a good play to be seen or
good music to be heard. Indeed, if there be an art which New Zealanders
can be said to love, it is music. Their choral societies and
glee clubs are many, and they have at least one choir much above the
average. Nor are they indifferent to the sister art of painting, a
foundation for which is laid in their State schools, where all children
have to learn to draw. Good art schools have been founded in the larger
towns, and in some of the smaller. Societies are buying and collecting
pictures for their galleries. At the International Exhibition held
in Christchurch in 1906-7 the fine display of British art, for which
our people had to thank the English Government, was welcomed with
the enthusiasm it deserved. The picture galleries were thronged from
beginning to end of the Exhibition, and the many thousands of pounds
spent in purchases gave material evidence of the capacity of New
Zealanders to appreciate good art when they have the chance of seeing
it.

The same may be said of literature. To say that they all love books
would be absurd; but of what nation can that be said? What can truly
be affirmed is that all of them read newspapers; that most of them
read books of some sort; and that all their books are not novels.
Booksellers tell you that the demand for cheap editions of well-known
authors is astonishing in so small a population. They try to write
books, too, and do not always fail; and a small anthology--it would
have to be very slender--might be filled with genuine New Zealand
poetry. Domett’s reputation is established. Arthur Adams, Arnold Wall,
and Miss Mackay, when at their best, are poets, and good poets.

Of course, however, it is in the newspapers that we have the plainest
evidence of the average public taste. It is a land of newspapers, town
and country, daily and weekly, small or of substantial size. To say
that the best of these equals the best of the English provincial papers
is not, I fear, true. The islands contain no daily newspaper which a
journalist can honestly call equal to the _Manchester Guardian_ or the
_Birmingham Post_; but many of the papers are good, and some of them
are extraordinarily good for towns the largest of which contains, with
its suburbs, but 90,000 people. No one journal towers above the others.
If I were asked to choose a morning, an evening, and a weekly paper, I
should perhaps name the _Otago Daily Times_, the Wellington _Evening
Post_, and the Christchurch _Weekly Press_; but the _Auckland Weekly
News_ has the best illustrations, and I could understand a good judge
making a different selection. The most characteristic of the papers are
illustrated weekly editions of the chief dailies. These good though
not original products of island journalism are pretty close imitations
of their Victorian prototype, _The Australasian_. The influence of the
Press is considerable, though not perhaps as great as might be looked
for from the numbers and success of the newspapers. Moreover, and this
is really curious, they influence the public less in the politics of
the colony than in several other fields.

In a book on New Zealand published ten years ago, I wrote in my haste
the words, “There is no Colonial literature.” What I meant to express,
and doubtless ought to have said, is that there is no body of writing
by New Zealanders at once substantial and distinguished enough to
be considered a literature. I did not mean to suggest that, amongst
the considerable mass of published matter for which my countrymen
are responsible, there is nothing of good literary quality. It would
not have been true to say this ten years ago, and it would be still
less true to say it now. Amongst the large body of conscientious work
published in the colony itself during the last quarter of a century
there is some very good writing indeed. A certain amount of it deserves
to be better known outside our borders than it is. Putting manner aside
for the moment, and dealing only with matter, it is, I think, true to
say that any thorough student of New Zealand as it is to-day, or has
been since 1880, must for authentic information mainly go to works
published in the colony itself. I have some right to speak, for I have
been reading about New Zealand for forty years, and all my reading
has not been desultory. Slight as is this book, for instance, and
partly based as it is on personal recollection and knowledge gleaned
orally, still I could not have written it without very careful study
of many colonial writings. In scanning my list of later authorities
consulted, I am surprised to find what very few exceptions there are to
the rule that they are printed at the other end of the world. To begin
with, the weekly newspapers of the Dominion are mines of information
to any one who knows how to work them. So are the Blue-books, and
that bible of the student of nature and tradition in our islands,
the _Transactions of the New Zealand Institute_. Then there is the
_Journal of the Polynesian Society_; after which comes a long list of
official publications. First among them rank Kirk’s _Forest Flora_ and
Mr. Percy Smith’s _Eruption of Tarawera_. The best general sketch of
Maori manners, customs, and beliefs, is that of Edward Tregear; far the
best book on Maori art is A. Hamilton’s. Quite lately Mr. M’Nab, the
present Minister of Lands, has made a very valuable contribution to the
early chronicles of South New Zealand, in his _Muri-huku_, for which
generations of students will be grateful. Mr. Carrick’s gossip--also
about our South--and Mr. Ross’s mountaineering articles must not be
passed over. Furthermore, there is an illustrated manual of our plants
by Laing and Blackwell, which is something more than a manual, for it
is full of reading which is enjoyable merely as reading. And there is
a manual of our animal life in which the work of Hutton, Drummond,
and Potts is blended with excellent results. Dr. Cockayne’s botanic
articles, Mr. Shand’s papers on the Chathams, and Mr. Buick’s local
Histories of Marlborough and Manawatu deserve also to be noted. Much of
Mr. James Cowan’s writing for the Government Tourist Department is well
above the average of that class of work.

[Illustration: NAPIER]

Society in the towns is made up of a mingling of what in England would
be called the middle and upper-middle classes. In some circles the
latter preponderate, in others the former. New Zealanders occasionally
boast that in their country class distinctions are unknown;
but though this is true politically--for there are no privileged
classes and no lower orders--the line is drawn in matters social, and
sometimes in odd and amusing ways. The townsfolk inside the line are
financiers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, manufacturers, clergymen,
newspaper owners, the higher officials, and the larger sort of agents
and contractors. Here and there, _rari nantes_, are to be encountered
men who paint or write, or are musicians, or professors, or teachers
of colleges or secondary schools. Most of the older and some of the
younger are British-born, but the differences between them and the
native-born are not very apparent, though shades of difference can be
detected. Money, birth, official position, and ability are passports
there, much as in other countries; though it is only fair to say that
money is not all-powerful, and that ability, if not brilliant, has a
slightly better chance than in older societies. On the surface the
urban middle class in the colony differs but little from people of
the same sort in the larger provincial cities of the mother country.
Indeed the likeness is remarkable, albeit in the colony there is no
aristocracy, no smart set, no Army, Navy, or dominant Church; while
underneath there is no multitude of hungry and hard-driven poor for
the rich to shrink from or regard as dangerous. Yet, except for the
comparative absence of frock-coats and tall silk hats, and for the
somewhat easier and less suspicious manner, the middle class remain a
British middle class still. It is, then, pleasant to think that, if
they retain English prejudices, they have also the traditional virtues
of the English official and man of business.

[Illustration: THE BATHING POOL]

To a social student, however, the most interesting and, on the whole,
most cheering aspect of town life is supplied by the work-people. They
are worth watching as they go to their shops and factories between
eight and nine in the morning, or when, after five in the afternoon,
they pour into the streets with their work done and something of the
day yet left to call their own. The clean, well-ventilated work-rooms
are worth a visit certainly. But it is the men and women, youths and
girls themselves who, to any one acquainted with factory hands in
the Old World, seem the best worth attention. Everywhere you note a
decent average of health, strength, and contentment. The men do not
look stunted or deadened, the women pinched or sallow, the children
weedy or underfed. Most of them seem bright and self-confident, with
colour in their faces and plenty of flesh on their frames, uniting
something of English solidity with a good deal of American alertness.
Seventy thousand hands--the number employed in our factories and
workshops--may seem few enough. But forty years ago they could not
muster seven thousand, and the proportional increase during the last
twelve years has been very rapid. To what extent their healthy and
comfortable condition is due to the much-discussed labour laws of
New Zealand is a moot point which need not be discussed here. What
is certain is that for many years past the artisans and labourers
of the colony have increased in numbers, while earning higher
wages and working shorter hours than formerly. At the same time the
employers as a body have prospered as they never prospered before,
and this prosperity shows as yet no sign of abatement. That what is
called the labour problem has been solved in New Zealand no sensible
man would pretend. But at least the more wasteful and ruinous forms
of industrial conflicts have for many years been few and (with two
exceptions) very brief, a blessing none too common in civilised
communities. As a testimony to the condition of the New Zealand worker
I can hardly do better than quote the opinion of the well-known English
labour leader, Mr. Keir Hardie. Whatever my readers may think of his
opinions--and some of them may not be among his warm admirers--they
will admit that he is precisely the last man in the Empire likely to
give an overflattering picture of the lot of the labourer anywhere.
His business is to voice the grievances of his class, not to conceal
or suppress them. Now, Mr. Hardie, after a tour round the Empire,
deliberately picks out New Zealand as the most desirable country for
a British emigrant workman. The standard of comfort there appears to
him to be higher than elsewhere, and he recognises that the public
conscience is sensitive to the fair claims of labour.

CHAPTER II

COUNTRY LIFE

When all is said, however, it is not the cities which interest most
the ordinary visitors to New Zealand. They may have a charm which it
is no exaggeration to call loveliness, as Auckland has; or be finely
seated on hill-sides overlooking noble harbours, as Wellington and
Dunedin are. They may have sweetly redeeming features, like the river
banks, public and private gardens, and the vistas of hills and distant
mountains seen in flat Christchurch. They may be pleasant altogether
both in themselves and their landscape, as Nelson is. But after all
they are towns, and modern towns, whose best qualities are that they
are wholesome and that their raw newness is passing away. It is to the
country and the country life that travellers naturally turn for escape
into something with a spice of novelty and maybe a touch of romance.
Nor need they be disappointed. Country life in the islands varies with
the locality and the year. It is not always bright, any more than is
the New Zealand sky. It is not always prosperous, any more than
you can claim that the seasons are always favourable. But, on the
whole, I do not hesitate to say, that to a healthy capable farmer or
rural worker the colony offers the most inviting life in the world.
In the first place, the life is cheerful and healthy; in the next
place, the work, though laborious at times, need not be killing; and
then the solitude, that deadly accompaniment of early colonial life,
has now ceased to be continuous except in a few scattered outposts.
Moreover--and this is important--there is money in it. The incompetent
or inexperienced farmer may, of course, lose his capital, just as a
drunken or stupid labourer may fail to save out of his wages. But year
in, year out, the farmer who knows his business and sticks to it can
and does make money, improve his property, and see his position grow
safer and his anxieties less. Good farmers can make profits quite apart
from the very considerable increment which comes to the value of land
as population spreads. Whatever may be said of this rise in price as
a matter of public policy, it fills the pockets of individuals in a
manner highly satisfactory to many of the present generation.

[Illustration: NELSON]

One of the most cheerful features in New Zealand country life, perhaps,
is the extent to which those who own the land are taking root in the
soil. Far the greater part of the settled country is in the hands of
men and families who live on the land, and may go on living there as
long as they please; no one can oust them. They are either freeholders,
or tenants of the State or public bodies. Such tenants hold their lands
on terms so easy that their position as working farmers is as good as
or better than that of freeholders. As prospective sellers of land they
may not be so well placed; but that is another story. Anyway, rural New
Zealand is becoming filled with capable independent farmers, with farms
of all sizes from the estate of four thousand or five thousand acres to
the peasant holding of fifty or one hundred. Colonists still think in
large areas when they define the degrees of land-holding and ownership.

[Illustration: ON THE BEACH AT NGUNGURU]

And here a New Zealander, endeavouring to make a general sketch that
may place realities clearly before the English eye, is confronted
with the difficulty, almost impossibility, of helping the European
to conceive a thinly peopled territory. Suppose, for a moment, what
the British Islands would be like if they were populated on the New
Zealand scale--that is to say, if they held about a million souls, of
whom fifty thousand were brown and the rest white. The brown would
be English-speaking and half civilised, and the whites just workaday
Britons of the middle and labouring classes, better fed, a little
taller and rather more tanned by sun and wind. That at first sight
does not seem to imply any revolutionary change. But imagine yourself
standing on the deck of a steamer running up the English Channel past
the coast as it would look if nineteen-twentieths of the British
population, and all traces of them and the historic past of their
country, had been swept away. The cliff edges of Cornwall and hills
of Devon would be covered with thick forest, and perhaps a few people
might cluster round single piers in sheltered inlets like Falmouth
and Plymouth. The Chalk Downs of Wiltshire and Hampshire would be held
by a score or two of sheep-farmers, tenants of the Crown, running
their flocks over enormous areas of scanty grass. Fertile strips like
the vale of Blackmore would be occupied by independent farmers with
from three hundred to two thousand acres of grass and crops round
their homesteads. Southampton would be the largest town in the British
Islands, a flourishing and busy seaport, containing with its suburbs
not less than 90,000 people. Its inhabitants would proudly point to
the railway system, of which they were the terminus, and by which they
were connected with Liverpool, the second city of the United Kingdom,
holding with Birkenhead about 70,000 souls. Journeying from Southampton
to Liverpool on a single line of rails, the traveller would note a
comfortable race of small farmers established in the valley of the
Thames, and would hear of similar conditions about the Wye and the
Severn. But he would be struck by the almost empty look of the wide
pastoral stretches in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and would find axemen
struggling with Nature in the forest of Arden, where dense thickets
would still cover the whole of Warwickshire and spread over into the
neighbouring counties. Arrived at Liverpool after a twelve hours’
journey, he might wish to visit Dublin or Glasgow, the only two other
considerable towns in the British Islands; the one about as large as
York now is, the other the size of Northampton. He would be informed
by the Government tourist agent in Liverpool that his easiest way to
Glasgow would be by sea to a landing-place in the Solway Firth, where
he would find the southern terminus of the Scotch railways. He would
discover that England and Scotland were not yet linked by rail, though
that great step in progress was confidently looked for within a few
months.

[Illustration: AT THE FOOT OF LAKE TE-ANAU]

By all this I do not mean to suggest that there are no spots in
New Zealand where the modern side of rural English life is already
closely reproduced. On an earlier page I have said that there are. Our
country life differs widely as you pass from district to district,
and is marked by as much variety as is almost everything else in the
islands. On the east coast of the South Island, between Southland
and the Kaikouras, mixed farming is scientifically carried on with
no small expenditure of skill and capital. The same can be said of
certain districts on the west coast of the Wellington Province, and in
the province of Hawkes Bay, within a moderate distance of the town of
Napier. Elsewhere, with certain exceptions, farming is of a rougher
and more primitive-looking sort than anything seen in the mother
country, though it does not follow that a comparatively rough, unkempt
appearance denotes lack of skill or agricultural knowledge. It may
mean, and usually does mean, that the land is in the earlier stages of
settlement, and that the holders have not yet had time to think much
of appearances. Then outside the class of small or middle-sized farms
come the large holdings of the islands, which are like nothing at all
in the United Kingdom. They are of two kinds, freehold and Crown
lands held under pastoral licences. Generally speaking, the freeholds
are much the more valuable, have much more arable land, and will, in
days to come, carry many more people. The pastoral Crown tenants have,
by the pressure of land laws and the demands of settlement, been more
and more restricted to the wilder and more barren areas of the islands.
They still hold more than ten million acres; but this country chiefly
lies in the mountainous interior, covering steep faces where the plough
will never go, and narrow terraces and cold, stony valleys where the
snow lies deep in winter.

On these sheep stations life changes more slowly than elsewhere. If you
wish to form an idea of what pastoral life “up-country” was forty years
ago, you can still do so by spending a month or two at one of these
mountain homesteads. There you may possibly have the owner and the
owner’s family for society, but are rather more likely to be yourself
furnishing a solitary manager with not unwelcome company. Round about
the homestead you will still see the traditional features of colonial
station life, the long wool-shed with high-pitched roof of shingles
or corrugated iron, and the sheep-yards which, to the eye of the new
chum, seem such an unmeaning labyrinth. Not far off will stand the
men’s huts, a little larger than of yore, and more likely nowadays to
be frame cottages than to be slab whares with the sleeping-bunks and
low, wide chimneys of days gone by. In out-of-the-way spots the station
store may still occasionally be found, with its atmosphere made
odorous by hob-nailed boots, moleskin trousers, brown sugar, flannel
shirts, tea, tar, and black tobacco. For the Truck Act does not apply
to sheep stations, and there are still places far enough away from a
township to make the station store a convenience to the men.

[Illustration: THE WAIKATO AT NGARUAWAHIA]

At such places the homestead is still probably nothing more than a
modest cottage, roomy, but built of wood, and owing any attractiveness
it has to its broad verandah, perhaps festooned with creepers, and
to the garden and orchard which are now seldom absent. In the last
generation the harder and coarser specimens of the pioneers often
affected to hold gardens and garden-stuffs cheap, and to despise
planting and adornment of any kind, summing them up as “fancy work.”
This was not always mere stinginess or brute indifference to everything
that did not directly pay, though it sometimes was. There can be no
doubt that absentee owners or mortgagee companies were often mean
enough in these things. But the spirit that grudged every hour of
labour bestowed on anything except the raising of wool, mutton, or
corn, was often the outcome of nothing worse than absorption in a
ceaseless and unsparing battle with Nature and the fluctuations of
markets. The first generation of settlers had to wrestle hard to keep
their foothold; and, naturally, the men who usually survived through
bad times were those who concentrated themselves most intensely on
the struggle for success and existence. But time mellows everything.
The struggle for life has still to be sustained in New Zealand. It
is easier than of yore, however; and the continued prosperity of the
last twelve or thirteen years has enabled settlers to bestow thought
and money on the lighter and pleasanter side. Homesteads are brighter
places than they were: they may not be artistic, but even the most
remote are nearly always comfortable. More than comfort the working
settler does not ask for.

Then in estimating how far New Zealand country life may be enjoyable
and satisfying we must remember that it is mainly a life out of
doors. On farms and stations of all sorts and sizes the men spend
many hours daily in the open, sometimes near the homestead, sometimes
miles away from it. To them, therefore, climate is of more importance
than room-space, and sunshine than furniture. If we except a handful
of mountaineers, the country worker in New Zealand is either never
snowbound at all, or, at the worst, is hampered by a snowstorm once
a year. Many showery days there are, and now and again the bursts of
wind and rain are wild enough to force ploughmen to quit work, or
shepherds to seek cover; but apart from a few tempests there is nothing
to keep country-folk indoors. It is never either too hot or too cold
for out-door work, while for at least one day in three in an average
year it is a positive pleasure to breathe the air and live under the
pleasant skies.

The contrast between the station of the back-ranges and the country
place of the wealthy freeholder is the contrast between the first
generation of colonial life and the third. The lord of 40,000 acres
may be a rural settler or a rich man with interests in town as well as
country. In either case his house is something far more costly than
the old wooden bungalow. It is defended by plantations and approached
by a curving carriage drive. When the proprietor arrives at his
front door he is as likely to step out of a motor-car as to dismount
from horseback. Within, you may find an airy billiard-room; without,
smooth-shaven tennis lawns, and perhaps a bowling-green. The family
and their guests wear evening dress at dinner, where the wine will
be expensive and may even be good. In the smoking-room, cigars have
displaced the briar-root pipes of our fathers. The stables are higher
and more spacious than were the dwellings of the men of the early
days. Neat grooms and trained gardeners are seen in the place of the
“rouse-abouts” of yore. Dip and wool-shed are discreetly hidden from
view; and a conservatory rises where meat once hung on the gallows.

For a colony whose days are not threescore years and ten, ours has made
some creditable headway in gardening. The good and bad points of our
climate alike encourage us to cultivate the art. The combination of
an ample rainfall with lavish sunshine helps the gardener’s skill. On
the other hand, the winds--those gales from north-west and south-west,
varied by the teasing persistency of the steadier north-easter,
plague of spring afternoons--make the planting of hedgerows and
shelter clumps an inevitable self-defence. So while, on the one hand,
the colonist hews and burns and drains away the natural vegetation
of forest and swamp, on the other, in the character of planter and
gardener, he does something to make amends. The colours of England and
New Zealand glow side by side in the flowers round his grass plots,
while Australia and North America furnish sombre break-winds, and
contribute some oddities of foliage and a share of colour. In seaside
gardens the Norfolk Island pine takes the place held by the cedar of
Lebanon on English lawns. The mimosa and jackarandah of Australia
persist in flowering in the frosty days of our early spring. On the
verandahs, jessamine and Virginia creeper intertwine with the clematis
and passion-flower of the bush. The palm-lily--insulted with the
nickname of cabbage-tree--is hardy enough to flourish anywhere despite
its semi-tropical look; but the nikau, our true palm, requires shelter
from bitter or violent winds. The toé-toé (a reed with golden plumes),
the glossy native flax (a lily with leaves like the blade of a classic
Roman sword), and two shrubs, the matipo and karaka, are less timid, so
more serviceable. The crimson parrot’s-beak and veronicas--white, pink,
and purple--are easily and commonly grown; and though the manuka does
not rival the English whitethorn in popularity, the pohutu-kawa, most
striking of flowering trees, surpasses the ruddy may and pink chestnut
of the old country. Some English garden-charms cannot be transplanted.
The thick sward and living green of soft lawns, the moss and mellowing
lichens that steal slowly over bark and walls, the quaintness that
belongs to old-fashioned landscape gardening, the venerable aspect of
aged trees,--these cannot be looked for in gardens the eldest of which
scarcely count half a century. But a climate in which arum lilies run
wild in the hedgerows, and in which bougainvilleas, camellias, azaleas,
oleanders, and even (in the north) the stephanotis, bloom in the open
air, gives to skill great opportunities. Then the lover of ferns--and
they have many lovers in New Zealand--has there a whole realm to call
his own. Not that every fern will grow in every garden. Among distinct
varieties numbering scores, there are many that naturally cling to the
peace and moisture of deep gullies and overshadowing jungle. There,
indeed, is found a wealth of them--ferns with trunks as thick as trees,
and ferns with fronds as fine as hair or as delicate as lace; and there
are filmy ferns, and such as cling to and twine round their greater
brethren, and pendant ferns that droop from crevices and drape the
faces of cliffs. To these add ferns that climb aloft as parasites on
branches and among foliage, or that creep upon the ground, after the
manner of lycopodium, or coat fallen forest trees like mosses. The
tree-ferns are large enough to be hewn down with axes, and to spread
their fronds as wide as the state umbrellas of Asiatic kings. Thirty
feet is no uncommon span for the shade they cast, and their height
has been known to reach fifty feet. They are to other ferns as the
wandering albatross is to lesser sea-birds. The black-trunked
are the tallest, while the silver-fronded, whose wings seem as though
frosted on the underside, are the most beautiful. In places they stand
together in dense groves. Attempt to penetrate these and you find a
dusky entanglement where your feet sink into tinder and dead, brown
litter. But look down upon a grove from above, and your eyes view a
canopy of green intricacies, a waving covering of soft, wing-like
fronds, and fresh, curving plumes.

[Illustration: TREE FERNS]

The change in country life now going on so rapidly has not meant merely
more comfort for the employer: the position of the men also has altered
for the better. While the land-owner’s house and surroundings show a
measure of refinement, and even something that may at the other end
of the earth pass for luxury, the station hands are far better cared
for than was the case a generation or two ago. The interior of the
“men’s huts” no longer reminds you of the foc’sle of a merchantship.
Seek out the men’s quarters on one of the better managed estates, and
it may easily happen that you will now find a substantial, well-built
cottage with a broad verandah round two sides. Inside you are shown a
commodious dining-room, and a reading-room supplied with newspapers and
even books. To each man is assigned a separate bedroom, clean and airy,
and a big bathroom is supplemented by decent lavatory arrangements.
The food was always abundant--in the roughest days the estate owners
never grudged their men plenty of “tucker.” But it is now much more
varied and better cooked, and therefore wholesome. To some extent this
improvement in the country labourer’s lot is due to legal enactment and
government inspection. But it is only fair to say that in some of the
most notable instances it comes from spontaneous action by employers
themselves. New Zealand has developed a public conscience during the
last twenty years in matters relating to the treatment of labour, and
by this development the country employers have been touched as much as
any section of the community. They were never an unkindly race, and it
may now be fairly claimed that they compare favourably with any similar
class of employers within the Empire.

At the other end of the rural scale to the establishment of the great
land-owner we see the home of the bush settler--the pioneer of to-day.
Perhaps the Crown has leased a block of virgin forest to him; perhaps
he is one of the tenants of a Maori tribe, holding on a twenty-one
or forty-two years’ lease; perhaps he has contrived to pick up a
freehold in the rough. At any rate he and his mate are on the ground
armed with saw and axe for their long attack upon Nature; and as you
note the muscles of their bared arms, and the swell of the chests
expanding under their light singlets, you are quite ready to believe
that Nature will come out of the contest in a damaged condition. It is
their business to hack and grub, hew and burn, blacken and deface. The
sooner they can set the fire running through tracts of fern or piles
of felled bush the sooner will they be able to scatter broadcast the
contents of certain bags of grass seed now carefully stowed away in
their shanty under cover of tarpaulins. Sworn enemies are they of tall
bracken and stately pines. To their eyes nothing can equal in beauty
a landscape of black, fire-scorched stumps and charred logs--if only
on the soil between these they may behold the green shoots of young
grass thrusting ten million blades upward. What matter the ugliness and
wreckage of the first stages of settlement, if, after many years, a
tidy farm and smiling homestead are to be the outcome? In the meantime,
while under-scrubbing and bush-felling are going on, the axemen build
for themselves a slab hut with shingled roof. The furniture probably
exemplifies the great art of “doing without.” The legs of their table
are posts driven into the clay floor: to other posts are nailed the
sacking on which their blankets are spread. A couple of sea chests
hold their clothes and odds and ends. A sheepskin or two do duty for
rugs. Tallow candles, or maybe kerosene, furnish light. A very few
well-thumbed books, and a pack or two of more than well-thumbed cards,
provide amusement. Not that there are many hours in the week for
amusement. When cooking is done, washing and mending have to be taken
in hand. Flannel and blue dungaree require washing after a while, and
even garments of canvas and moleskin must be repaired sooner or later.
A camp oven, a frying-pan, and a big teapot form the front rank of
their cooking utensils, and fuel, at least, is abundant. Baking-powder
helps them to make bread. Bush pork, wild birds, and fish may vary a
diet in which mutton and sardines figure monotonously. After a while
a few vegetables are grown behind the hut, and the settlers find time
to milk a cow. Soon afterwards, perhaps, occurs the chief event of
pioneer life--the coming of a wife on to the scene. With her arrival
is the beginning of a civilised life indoors, though her earlier years
as a housekeeper may be an era of odd shifts and desperate expedients.
A bush household is lucky if it is near enough to a metalled road to
enable stores to be brought within fairly easy reach. More probably
such necessaries as flour, groceries, tools, and grass seed--anything,
in short, from a grindstone to a bag of sugar--have to be brought by
pack-horse along a bush-track where road-metal is an unattainable
luxury, and which may not unfairly be described as a succession of
mud-holes divided by logs. Along such a thoroughfare many a rain-soaked
pioneer has guided in days past the mud-plastered pack-horse which
has carried the first beginnings of his fortunes. For what sustains
the average settler through the early struggles of pioneering in the
wilderness is chiefly the example of those who have done the same
thing before, have lived as hard a life or harder, and have emerged as
substantial farmers and leading settlers, respected throughout their
district. Success has crowned the achievement so many thousand times
in the past that the back-country settler of to-day, as he fells his
bush and toils along his muddy track, may well be sustained by hope
and by visions of macadamised coach roads running past well-grassed,
well-stocked sheep or dairy farms in days to come.

[Illustration: A MAORI VILLAGE]

Predominant as the white man is in New Zealand, the brown man is too
interesting and important to be forgotten even in a rough and hasty
sketch. The Maori do not dwell in towns: they are an element of our
country life. They now number no more than a twentieth of our people;
but whereas a generation ago they were regarded as a doomed race,
whose end, perhaps, was not very far distant, their disappearance
is now regarded as by no means certain. I doubt, indeed, whether it
is even probable. Until the end of the nineteenth century official
returns appeared to show that the race was steadily and indeed rapidly
diminishing. More recent and more accurate figures, however, seem
to prove either that the Maori have regained vitality, or that past
estimates of their numbers were too low. I am inclined to think that
the explanation is found in both these reasons. In past decades our
Census officers never claimed to be able to reckon the strength of the
Maori with absolute accuracy, chiefly because the Natives would give
them little or no help in their work. It is not quite so difficult
now as formerly to enumerate the members of the tribes. Furthermore,
there is reason to hope that the health of the race is improving and
that its spirit is reviving. The first shock with our civilisation and
our overwhelming strength is over. The Maori, beaten in war with us,
were not disgraced: though their defeat disheartened them, it did not
lead their conquerors to despise them. Again, though they have been
deprived of some of their land, and have sold a great part of the rest,
the tribes are still great landlords. They hold the fee-simple of
nearly seven million acres of land, much of it fertile. This is a large
estate for about fifty thousand men, women, and children. Moreover,
it is a valuable estate. I daresay its selling price might be rated
at a higher figure than the value of the whole of New Zealand when we
annexed it. Some of this great property is leased to white tenants;
most of it is still retained by the native tribes. So long as they can
continue to hold land on a considerable scale they will always have
a chance, and may be sure of respectful treatment. At the worst they
have had, and still have, three powerful allies. The Government of the
colony may sometimes have erred against them, but in the main it has
stood between them and the baser and greedier sort of whites. Maori
children are educated free of cost. Most of them can now at least read
and write English. Quite as useful is the work of the Department of
Public Health. If I am not mistaken, it has been the main cause of the
lowered Maori death-rate of the last ten years. Then the clergy of
more than one Church have always been the Maori’s friends. Weak--too
weak--as their hands have been, their voices have been raised again and
again on the native’s behalf. Thirdly, the leaders of the temperance
movement--one of the most powerful influences in our public life--have
done all they can to save the Maori of the interior from the curse
of drink. Allies, then, have been fighting for the Maori. Moreover,
they are citizens with a vote at the polls and a voice in Parliament.
Were one political party disposed to bully the natives, the other
might be tempted to befriend them. But the better sort of white has no
desire to bully. He may not admit that the brown man is socially his
equal; but there is neither hatred nor loathing between the races.

[Illustration: A PATAKA]

In a word, the outlook for the Maori, though still doubtful, is by no
means desperate. They will own land; they will collect substantial
rents from white tenants; they will be educated; they will retain the
franchise. At last they are beginning to learn the laws of sanitation
and the uses of ventilation and hospitals. The doctors of the Health
Department have persuaded them to pull down hundreds of dirty old huts,
are caring for their infants, and are awaking a wholesome distrust of
the trickeries of those mischievous conjuror-quacks, the _tohungas_.
Some of these good physicians--Dr. Pomaré, for instance--are themselves
Maori. More of his stamp are wanted; also more Maori lawyers like
Mr. Apirana Ngata, M.P. Much will turn upon the ability of the race
to master co-operative farming. That there is hope of this is shown
by the success of the Ngatiporou tribesmen, who in recent years
have cleared and sown sixty thousand acres of land, and now own
eighty-three thousand sheep, more than three thousand cattle, and more
than eight thousand pigs. Only let the sanitary lesson be learned and
the industrial problem solved, and the qualities of the Maori may be
trusted to do the rest. Their muscular strength and courage, their
courtesy and vein of humour, their poetic power and artistic sense,
are gifts that make it desirable that the race should survive and win a
permanent place among civilised men.

Watching the tendencies of New Zealand life and laws to-day, one
is tempted to look ahead and think of what country life in the
islands may become in a generation or so, soon after the colony has
celebrated its hundredth anniversary. It should be a pleasant life,
even pleasanter than that of our own time; for more gaps will have
been filled up and more angles rubbed off. Limiting laws and graduated
taxes will have made an end of the great estates: a land-owner with
more than £120,000 of real property will probably be unknown. Many
land-owners will be richer than that, but it will be because a part
of their money is invested in personalty. But in peacefully making an
end of _latifundia_ the law-makers will not have succeeded--even if
that were their design--in handing over the land to peasants: there
will be no sweeping revolution. Much of the soil will still be held
by large and substantial farmers,--eight or ten thousand in number,
perhaps,--educated men married to wives of some culture and refinement.
The process of subdivision will have swelled the numbers and increased
the influence of land-holders. The unpopularity which attached
itself to the enormous estates will pass away with them. Some of the
farming gentlemen of the future will be descendants of members of the
English upper and upper-middle classes. Others will be the grandsons
of hard-headed Scotch shepherds, English rural labourers, small
tenants, or successful men of commerce. Whatever their origin, however,
education, intermarriage, and common habits of life will tend to level
them into a homogeneous class. Dressed in tweed suits, wide-awake hats,
and gaiters, riding good horses or driving in powerful motors, and with
their alert, bony faces browned and reddened by sun and wind, they will
look and will be a healthy, self-confident, intelligent race. Despite
overmuch tea and tobacco, their nerves will seldom be highly strung;
the blessed sunshine and the air of the sea and the mountains will
save them from that. Moreover, colonial cookery will be better than
it has been, and diet more varied. Nor will our farmers trouble the
doctors much or poison themselves with patent drugs. Owning anything
from half a square mile to six or seven square miles of land, they
will be immensely proud of their stake in the country and cheerfully
convinced of their value as the backbone of the community. They will
not be a vicious lot; early marriage and life in the open air will
prevent that. Nor will drunkenness be fashionable, though there will be
gambling and probably far too much horse-racing. Varying in size from
three or four hundred to four or five thousand acres, their properties,
with stock and improvements, may be worth anything from five or six
thousand to seventy or eighty thousand pounds, but amongst themselves
the smaller and larger owners will meet on terms of easy equality. They
will gradually form an educated rural gentry with which the wealthier
townspeople will be very proud and eager to mix. A few of them, whose
land is rich, may lease it out in small allotments, and try to become
squires on a modified English pattern. But most of them will work their
land themselves, living on it, riding over it daily, directing their
men, and, if need be, lending a hand themselves. That will be their
salvation, bringing them as it will into daily contact with practical
things and working humanity. Conservative, of course, they will be,
and in theory opposed to Socialism, yet assenting from time to time
to Socialistic measures when persuaded of their immediate usefulness.
Thus they will keep a keen eye on the State railways, steamships, and
Department of Agriculture, and develop the machinery of these in their
own interests. A few of the richer of them from time to time may find
that life in Europe so pleases them--or their wives--that they will
sell out and cut adrift from the colony; but there will be no class of
absentee owners--growling, heavily taxed, and unpopular. Our working
gentlemen will stick to the country, and will be hotly, sometimes
boisterously, patriotic, however much they may at moments abuse
governments and labour laws. Most of them will be freeholders. Allied
with them will be State pastoral tenants--holding smaller runs than
now--to be found in the mountains, on the pumice plateau, or where the
clay is hungry. Socially these tenants will be indistinguishable from
the freeholders.

Solitude will be a thing of the past; for roads will be excellent,
motors common, and every homestead will have its telephone. And just as
kerosene lamps and wax candles superseded the tallow dips of the early
settlers, so in turn will electric light reign, not here and there
merely, but almost everywhere. Their main recreations will be shooting,
fishing, motor-driving, riding, and sailing; for games--save polo--and
pure athletics will be left to boys and to men placed lower in the
social scale. They will read books, but are scarcely likely to care
much about art, classing painting and music rather with such things as
wood-carving and embroidery--as women’s work, something for men to look
at rather than produce. But they will be gardeners, and their wives
will pay the arts a certain homage. The furniture of their houses may
seem scanty in European eyes, but will not lack a simple elegance. In
their gardens, however, those of them who have money to spare will
spend more freely, and on brightening these with colour and sheltering
them with soft masses of foliage no mean amount of taste and skill
will be lavished. These gardens will be the scenes of much of the most
enjoyable social intercourse to be had in the country. Perhaps--who
knows?--some painter, happy in a share of Watteau’s light grace or
Fragonard’s eye for decorative effect in foliage, may find in the New
Zealand garden festivals, with their music, converse, and games, and
their framework of beauty, subjects worthy of art.

[Illustration: COROMANDEL]

Socially and financially beneath these country gentlemen, though
politically their equals, and in intelligence often not inferior to
them, will come the more numerous, rougher and poorer races of small
farmers and country labourers. Here will be seen harder lives and
a heavier physique--men whose thews and sinews will make Imperial
recruiting officers sigh wistfully. Holding anything from twenty or
thirty up to two or three hundred acres, the small farmers will have
their times of stress and anxiety, when they will be hard put to it
to weather a bad season combined with low prices. But their practical
skill, strength, and industry, and their ability, at a pinch, to do
without all but bare necessaries, will usually pull them through.
Moreover, they too will be educated, and no mere race of dull-witted
boors. At the worst they will always be able to take to wage-earning
for a time, and the smaller of them will commonly pass part of each
year in working for others. Sometimes their sons will be labourers,
and members of trade unions, and this close contact with organised
labour and Socialism will have curious political results. As a class
they will be much courted by politicians, and will distrust the rich,
especially the rich of the towns. Their main and growing grievance will
be the difficulty of putting their sons on the land. For themselves
they will be able to live cheaply, and in good years save money; for
customs tariffs will be more and more modified to suit them. Some of
their children will migrate to the towns; others will become managers,
overseers, shepherds, drovers. They will have their share of sport, and
from among them will come most of the best athletes of the country,
professional and other. Nowhere will be seen a cringing tenantry,
hat-touching peasantry, or underfed farm labourers. The country
labourers, thoroughly organised, well paid, and active, will yet be not
altogether ill-humoured in politics; for, by comparison with the lot of
their class in other parts of the world, theirs will be a life of hope,
comfort, and confidence.

SPORT AND ATHLETICS

Sport in the islands resembles their climate and scenery. To name the
distinguishing feature I have once more to employ the well-worn word,
variety. Even if we limit the term to the pursuit of game, there is
enough of that to enable an idle man to pass his time all the year
round. In the autumn there is deer-shooting of the best, and in the
early winter the sportsman may turn to wild ducks and swamp-hen. Then
wild goats have begun to infest certain high ranges, especially the
backbone of the province of Wellington and the mountains in central
Otago. In stalking them the hunter may have to exhibit no small share
of the coolness of head and stoutness of limb which are brought to
play in Europe in the chase of the chamois, ibex, and moufflon. In
addition to sureness of foot, the goats have already developed an
activity and cunning unknown to their tame ancestors. They will lie or
stand motionless and unnoticed among the bewildering rocks, letting
the stalker seek for them in vain; and when roused they bound away at
a speed that is no mean test of rifle-shooting, particularly when the
marksman is hot and panting with fatigue. And when brought to a stand
against rocks, or among the roots of mountain beeches, or on the stones
of a river-bed, they will show fight and charge dogs and even men. The
twisted or wrinkled horns of an old he-goat are not despicable weapons.
As the reward of many hours’ hard clambering, varied by wading through
ice-cold torrents, and spiced, it may be, with some danger, the goat
hunter may secure a long pair of curving horns, or in mid-winter a
thick, warm pelt, sometimes, though rarely, pure white. Moreover, he
may feel that he is ridding the mountain pastures of an unlicensed
competitor of that sacred quadruped, the sheep. Goats are by no means
welcome on sheep-runs. Colonel Craddock, it is true, complains that it
is not easy to regard them as wild, inasmuch as their coats retain the
familiar colours of the domestic animals. He wishes they would change
to some distinctive hue. This feeling is perhaps akin to the soldier’s
dislike to shooting at men who retain the plain clothes of civilians
instead of donning uniform--a repugnance experienced now and then by
some of our fighting men in South Africa.

Rabbits, of course, as a national scourge, are to be shot at any time,
and though on the whole now held in check, are in some districts still
only too abundant. Occasionally when elaborate plans are being laid
for poisoning a tract of infested country, the owner of the land may
wish no interference, and the man with a gun may be warned off as a
disturber of a peace intended to lull the rabbit into security. But,
speaking generally, any one who wishes to shoot these vermin may find
country where he can do so to his heart’s content, and pose the while
as a public benefactor.

The largest game in the colony are the wild cattle. These, like the
goats and pigs, are descendants of tame and respectable farm animals.
On many mountain sheep-runs, annual cattle hunts are organised to
thin their numbers, for the young bulls become dangerous to lonely
shepherds and musterers, and do great damage to fences. Moreover, the
wild herds eat their full share of grass, as their fat condition when
shot often shows. Generations of life in the hills, fern, and bush
have had their effect on runaway breeds. The pigs especially have
put on an almost aristocratic air of lean savagery. Their heads and
flanks are thinner, their shoulders higher and more muscular, their
tusks have become formidable, and their nimbleness on steep hill-sides
almost astonishing. A quick dog, or even an athletic man on foot, may
keep pace with a boar on the upward track; but when going headlong
downhill the pig leaves everything behind. The ivory tusks of an old
boar will protrude three or four inches from his jaw, and woe to the
dog or horse that feels their razor-edge and cruel sidelong rip. The
hide, too, has become inches thick in places, where it would, I should
think, be insensible to a hot branding iron. At any rate, the spear
or sheath knife that is to pierce it must be held in clever as well
as strong hands. Even a rifle-bullet, if striking obliquely, will
glance off from the shield on the shoulder of a tough old boar. Wild
pigs are among the sheep-farmer’s enemies. Boars and sows alike prey
on his young lambs in spring-time, and every year do thousands of
pounds’ worth of mischief in certain out-of-the-way country. So here
again the sportsman may plume himself upon making war upon a public
nuisance. In bygone days these destructive brutes could be found in
numbers prowling over open grassy downs, where riders could chase them
spear in hand, and where sheep-dogs could bring them to bay. They were
killed without exception or mercy for age or sex; and the spectacle of
pigs a few weeks old being speared or knifed along with their mothers
was not exhilarating. But they were pests, and contracts were often let
for clearing a certain piece of country of them. As evidence of their
slaughter the contractors had to bring in their long, tufted tails.
These the station manager counted with care, for the contract money
was at the rate of so much a tail. I have known ninepence to be the
reigning price. Nowadays, however, the pigs are chiefly to be found
in remote forests, dense manuka scrub, or tall bracken, and if caught
in the open it is when they have stolen out by moonlight on a raid
upon lambs. The thick fern not only affords them cover but food: “the
wild boar out of the wood doth root it up,” and finds in it a clean,
sweet diet. Many a combat at close quarters takes place every year
in the North Island, in fern from three to six feet high, when some
avenging farmer makes an end of the ravager of his flocks. Numbers
of the pigs are shot; but shooting, though a practical way of ridding
a countryside of them, lacks, of course, the excitement and spice of
danger that belong to the chase on foot with heavy knife or straight
short sword. Here the hunter trusts both for success and safety to his
dogs, who, when cunning and well-trained, will catch a boar by the ears
and hold him till he has been stabbed. Ordinary sheep-dogs will not
often do this; a cattle-dog, or a strong mongrel with a dash of mastiff
or bulldog, is less likely to be shaken off. Good collies, moreover,
are valuable animals. Not that sheep-dogs fail in eagerness for the
chase; they will often stray off to track pigs on their own account.
And any one who has seen and heard them when the boar, brought to bay
against some tree trunk, rock, or high bank, makes short mad rushes at
his tormentors, will understand how fully the average dog shares the
hunter’s zest.

[Illustration: CATHEDRAL PEAKS]

Another though much rarer plague to the flock-owner are the wild
dogs. These also prey by night and lie close by day, and if they were
numerous the lot of farmers near rough, unoccupied stretches of country
would be anxious indeed; for the wild dogs not only kill enough for a
meal, but go on worrying and tearing sheep, either for their blood, or
for the excitement and pleasure of killing. When three or four of them
form a small pack and hunt together, the damage they can do in a few
nights is such that the persecuted farmer counts the cost in ten-pound
notes. They are often too fast and savage to be stopped by a shepherd’s
dogs, and accurate rifle-shooting by moonlight--to say nothing of
moonless nights--is not the easiest of accomplishments. Failing a lucky
shot, poison is perhaps the most efficacious remedy. Happily these
dogs--which are not sprung from the fat, harmless little native curs
which the Maori once used to fondle and eat--are almost confined to a
few remote tracts. Any notorious pack soon gets short shrift, so there
need be no fear of any distinct race of wild hounds establishing itself
in the wilderness.

Another _hostis humani generis_, against which every man’s hand or
gun may be turned at any season, is the kea. A wild parrot, known to
science as _Nestor notabilis_, the kea nevertheless shows how fierce
and hawk-like a parrot can become. His sharp, curving beak, and
dark-green plumage, brightened by patches of red under the wings, are
parrot-like enough. But see him in his home among the High Alps of the
South Island, and he resembles anything rather than the grey African
domestic who talks in cages. Nor does he suggest the white cockatoos
that may be watched passing in flights above rivers and forest glades
in the Australian bush. Unlike his cousin the kaka, who is a forest
bird, the kea nests on steep rocky faces or lofty cliffs, between two
and five thousand feet above sea-level. If he descends thence to visit
the trees of the mountain valleys, it is usually in search of food;
though Thomas Potts, the naturalist, says that keas will fly from the
western flanks of the Alps to the bluffs on the sea-coast and rest
there. One envies them that flight, for it must give them in mid-air
an unequalled bird’s-eye view of some of the noblest scenery in the
island. Before the coming of the settlers these bold mountaineers
supported a harmless life on honey, seeds, insects, and such apologies
for fruits as our sub-alpine forests afford. But as sheep spread
into the higher pastures of the backbone ranges, the kea discovered
the attractions of flesh, and especially of mutton fat. Beginning,
probably, by picking up scraps of meat in the station slaughter-yards,
he learned to prey on dead sheep, and, finally, to attack living
animals. His favourite titbit being kidney fat, he perches on the
unhappy sheep and thrusts his merciless beak through the wool into
their backs. Strangely enough, it seems to take more than one assault
of the kind to kill a sheep; but though forty years have passed since
the kea began to practise his trick, the victims do not yet seem to
have learned to roll over on their backs and thereby rid themselves of
their persecutors. Even the light active sheep of the mountains are,
it would seem, more stupid than birds of prey. Ingenious persons have
suggested that the kea was led to peck at the sheep’s fleecy backs
through their likeness to those odd grey masses of mossy vegetation,
called “vegetable sheep,” which dot so many New Zealand mountain
slopes, and which birds investigate in search of insects.

[Illustration: THE REES VALLEY AND RICHARDSON RANGE]

Shepherds and station hands wage war on the kea, sometimes encouraged
thereto by a bounty; for there are run-holders and local councils who
will give one, two, or three shillings for each bird killed. Let a pair
of keas be seen near a shepherd’s hut, and the master runs for
his gun, while his wife will imitate the bird’s long whining note to
attract them downwards; for, venturesome and rapacious as the kea is,
he is just as confiding and sociable as the gentler kaka, and can be
lured by the same devices. Stoats and weasels, too, harass him on their
own account. Thus the bird’s numbers are kept down, and the damage they
do to flocks is not on the whole as great as of yore. Indeed, some
sceptics doubt the whole story, while other flippant persons suggest
that the kea’s ravages are chiefly in evidence when the Government
is about to re-assess the rents of the Alpine runs. Against these
sneers, however, may be quoted a large, indeed overwhelming, mass of
testimony from the pastoral people of the back-country. This evidence
seems to show that most keas do not molest sheep. The evil work is done
by a few reprobate birds--two or three pairs out of a large flock,
perhaps--which the shepherds nickname “butchers.” Only this year I was
told of a flock of hoggets which, when penned up in a sheep-yard, were
attacked by a couple of beaked marauders, who in a single night killed
or wounded scores of them as they stood packed together and helpless.
No laws, therefore, protect the kea, nor does any public opinion shield
him from the gun in any month. His only defences are inaccessible
mountain cliffs and the wild weather of winter and spring-time in the
Southern Alps.

Acclimatisation has made some woeful mistakes in New Zealand, for is
it not responsible for the rabbit and the house-sparrow, the stoat
and the weasel? On the other hand, it has many striking successes to
boast of in the shape of birds, beasts, and fishes, which commerce and
industry would never have brought to the islands in the regular way of
business. Of these, one may select the deer among beasts, the trout
among fishes, and the pheasant, quail, and starling among birds. Many
colonists, it is true, would include skylarks, blackbirds, and thrushes
among the good works for which acclimatising societies have to be
thanked; but of late years these songsters have been compassed about
with a great cloud of hostile witnesses who bear vehement testimony
against them as pestilent thieves. No such complaints, however, are
made against the red-deer, the handsomest wild animals yet introduced
into New Zealand. Indeed, several provinces compete for the honour
of having been their first New Zealand home. As a matter of fact, it
would appear that as long ago as 1861 a stag and two hinds, the gift
of Lord Petre, were turned out on the Nelson hills. Next year another
small shipment reached Wellington safely, and were liberated in the
Wairarapa. These came from the Royal Park at Windsor, and were secured
by the courtesy of the Prince Consort.

In 1871 some Scottish red-deer were turned loose in the Otago mountains
near Lakes Wanaka and Hawea. In all these districts the deer have
spread and thriven mightily, and it is possible that the herds of the
colony now number altogether as many as ten thousand. Otago sportsmen
boast of the unadulterated Scottish blood of their stags, whose fine
heads are certainly worthy of any ancestry. In the Wairarapa the
remarkable size of the deer is attributed to the strain of German blood
in the animals imported from the Royal Park. As yet, however, the
finest head secured in the colony was not carried by a deer belonging
to any of the three largest and best-known shooting-grounds of the
islands. It was obtained in 1907 from a stag shot by Mr. George Gerard
in the Rakaia Gorge in Canterbury. The Rakaia Gorge herd only dates
from 1897, and is still small, but astonishing stories are told of some
of its heads. At any rate the antlers of Mr. Gerard’s stag have been
repeatedly measured. One of them is forty-seven inches long, the other
forty-two inches and a half.

Deer-stalking in New Zealand can scarcely be recommended as an easy
diversion for rich and elderly London gentlemen. It is not sport for
the fat and scant-of-breath who may be suffering from sedentary living
and a plethora of public banquets. New Zealand hills are steep, new
Zealand forests and scrubs are dense or matted. Even the open country
of the mountains requires lungs of leather and sinews of wire. The
hunter when unlucky cannot solace his evenings with gay human society
or with the best cookery to be found in a luxurious, civilised country.
If he be an old bush-hand, skilful at camping-out, he may make himself
fairly comfortable in a rough way, but that is all. Nor are such things
as big drives, or slaughter on a large scale, to be had at any price.
Shooting licences are cheap--they can be had from the secretary of an
acclimatisation society for from one to three pounds; but the number
of stags a man is permitted to shoot in any one district varies from
two to six. To get these, weeks of physical labour and self-denial may
be required. On the other hand, trustworthy guides may be engaged, and
colonial hospitality may vary the rigours of camp life. Then, too,
may be counted the delights of a mountain life, the scenery of which
excels Scotland, while the freshness of the upland air is brilliant and
exhilarating in a fashion that Britons can scarcely imagine. And to
counterbalance loneliness, the hunter has the sensation of undisturbed
independence and freedom from the trammels of convention, as he looks
round him in a true wilderness which the hand of man has not yet gashed
or fouled.

Wild-fowl shooting ranges from tame butchery of trustful native pigeons
and parrots to the pursuit of the nimble godwit, and of that wary
bird and strong flyer, the grey duck. The godwit is so interesting a
bird to science that one almost wonders that ornithologists do not
petition Parliament to have it declared _tapu_. They tell us that in
the Southern winter it migrates oversea and makes no less a journey
than that from New Zealand to Northern Siberia by way of Formosa and
the Sea of Okhotsk. Even if this distance is covered in easy stages
during three months’ time, it seems a great feat of bird instinct, and
makes one regret that the godwit so often returns to our tidal inlets
only to fall a prey to some keen sportsmen indifferent to its migratory
achievements.

The only excuse for molesting the wood-pigeon is that he is very good
to eat. The kaka parrot, too, another woodlander, makes a capital
stew. Neither victim offers the slightest difficulty to the gunner--I
cannot say sportsman. Indeed the kaka will flutter round the slayer
as he stands with his foot on the wing of a wounded bird, a cruel but
effective decoy-trick. Another native bird easy to hit on the wing is
the queer-looking pukeko, a big rail with bright-red beak and rich-blue
plumage. The pukeko, however, though he flies so heavily, can run fast
and hide cleverly. Moreover, in addition to being good for the table,
he is a plague to the owners of standing corn. In order to reach the
half-ripe ears he beats down the tops of a number of stalks, and so
constructs a light platform on which he stands and moves about, looking
like a feathered stilt-walker, and feasting the while to his heart’s
content. Grain-growers, therefore, show him no mercy, and follow him
into his native swamps, where the tall flax bushes, toé-toé, and giant
bulrushes furnish even so large a bird with ample cover. When, however,
a dog puts him up, and he takes to the air, he is the easiest of marks,
for any one capable of hitting a flying haystack can hit a pukeko.

Very different are the wild ducks. They soon learn the fear of man and
the fowling-piece. They are, moreover, carefully protected both by law
and by public opinion among sportsmen. So they are still to be found
in numbers on lakes and lagoons by the sea-coast as well as in the
sequestered interior. Large flocks of them, for example, haunt Lake
Ellesmere, a wide brackish stretch of shallow water not many miles from
the city of Christchurch. But in such localities all the arts of the
English duck-hunter have to be employed, and artificial cover, decoys,
and first-rate markmanship must be brought into play. The grey duck,
the shoveller, and teal, both black and red, all give good sport.
Strong of flight and well defended by thick, close-fitting suits of
feathers, they need quick, straight shooting. A long shot at a scared
grey duck, as, taking the alarm, he makes off down the wind, is no
bad test of eye and hand. In return, they are as excellent game-birds
dead as living. This last is more than can be said for the handsomest
game-bird of the country, the so-called paradise duck. Its plumage, so
oddly contrasting in the dark male and reddish white-headed female,
makes it the most easily recognised of wild-fowl. It also has developed
a well-founded suspiciousness of man and his traps, and so manages
to survive and occupy mountain lakes and valleys in considerable
flocks. Unlike the grey species which are found beyond the Tasman Sea,
the smaller and more delicately framed blue duck is peculiar to the
islands. It is neither shy nor common, and, as it does no harm to any
sort of crop, law and public opinion might, one would think, combine to
save it from the gun and leave it to swim unmolested among the boulders
and rocks of its cold streams and dripping mountain gorges.

Nature did not furnish New Zealand much better with fresh-water fish
than with quadrupeds: her allowance of both was curiously scanty. A
worthless little bull-trout was the most common fish, and that white
men found uneatable, though the Maoris made of it a staple article of
diet. Large eels, indeed, are found in both lakes and rivers, and where
they live in clear, clean, running water, are good food enough; but
the excellent whitebait and smelts which go up the tidal rivers can
scarcely be termed dwellers in fresh water; and for the rest, the fresh
waters used to yield nothing but small crayfish. Here our acclimatisers
had a fair field before them, and their efforts to stock it have been
on the whole successful, though the success has been chequered. For
fifty years they have striven to introduce the salmon, taking much
care and thought, and spending many thousands of pounds on repeated
experiments; but the salmon will not thrive in the southern rivers. The
young, when hatched out and turned adrift, make their way down to the
sea, but never return themselves. Many legends are current of their
misadventures in salt water. They are said, for instance, to be pursued
and devoured by the big barracouta, so well known to deep-sea fishermen
in the southern ocean. But every explanation of the disappearance of
the young salmon still lacks proof. The fact is undoubted, but its
cause may be classed with certain other fishy mysteries of our coast.
Why, for instance, does that delectable creature the frost-fish cast
itself up on our beaches in the coldest weather, committing suicide for
the pleasure of our _gourmets_? Why does that cream-coloured playfellow
of our coasters, Pelorus Jack, dart out to frolic round the bows of
steamships as they run through the French Pass?

[Illustration: AT THE HEAD OF LAKE WAKATIPU]

But if our acclimatisers have failed with salmon, fortune has been kind
to their efforts with trout. Forty years ago there was no such fish
in the islands. Now from north to south the rivers and lakes are well
stocked, while certain waters may be said with literal truth to swarm
with them. Here, they are the brown trout so well known to anglers at
home; there, they are the rainbow kind, equally good for sport. At
present the chief local peculiarity of both breeds seems to be the size
to which they frequently attain. They are large enough in the rivers;
and in many lakes they show a size and weight which could throw into
the shade old English stories of giant pike. Fish of from fifteen to
twenty-five pounds in weight are frequently captured by anglers. Above
the higher of these figures, catches with the rod are rare. Indeed, the
giant trout of the southern lakes will not look at a fly. Perhaps the
best sport in lakes anywhere is to be had with the minnow. Trolling
from steam-launches is a favourite amusement at Roto-rua. It seems
generally agreed that in the rivers trout tend to decrease in size as
they increase in numbers. The size, however, still remains large enough
to make an English angler’s mouth water. So it has come about that
the fame of New Zealand fishing has gone abroad into many lands, and
that men come with rod and line from far and near to try our waters.
Fishing in these is not always child’s play. Most of the streams
are swift and chilling; the wader wants boots of the stoutest, and, in
default of guidance, must trust to his own wits to protect him among
rapids, sharp rocks, and deep swirling pools. He may, of course, obtain
sport in spots where everything is made easy for the visitor, as in
the waters near Roto-rua. Or he may cast a fly in the willow-bordered,
shingly rivers of Canterbury, among fields and hedgerows as orderly and
comfortable-looking as anything in the south of England. But much of
the best fishing in the islands is rougher and more solitary work, and,
big as the baskets to be obtained are, the sport requires enthusiasm
as well as skill. Moreover, rules have to be observed. Licences are
cheap enough, but the acclimatisation societies are wisely despotic,
and regulate many things, from the methods of catching to the privilege
of sale. In the main, the satisfactory results speak for themselves,
though of course a certain amount of poaching and illegal catching
goes on. In certain mountain lakes, by the way, one rule--that against
spearing--has to be relaxed; otherwise the huge trout would prey upon
their small brethren to such an extent as to stop all increase. So
occasionally an exciting night’s sport may be enjoyed from a boat in
one or other of the Alpine lakes. The boatmen prepare a huge torch
of sacking or sugar-bags wound round a pole and saturated with tar
or kerosene. Then the boat is rowed gently into six or eight feet of
water, and the flaring torch held steadily over the surface. Soon the
big trout come swarming to the light, diving under the boat, knocking
against the bow, and leaping and splashing. The spearman standing erect
makes thrust after thrust, now transfixing his prey, now missing his
aim, or it may be, before the night’s work is done, losing his footing
and falling headlong into the lake, amid a roar of laughter from boat
and shore.

[Illustration: NORTH FIORD, LAKE TE-ANAU]

The merest sketch of sports and amusements in New Zealand demands
more space for the horse than I can afford to give. My countrymen are
not, as is sometimes supposed, a nation of riders, any more than they
are a nation of marksmen; but the proportion of men who can shoot and
ride is far greater among them than in older countries. The horse is
still a means of locomotion and a necessity of life everywhere outside
the towns, while even among townsmen a respectable minority of riders
can be found. How far the rapid increase of motors and cycles of all
kinds is likely to displace the horse is a matter for speculation. At
present, perhaps, the machine is more likely to interfere with the
carriage-horse than the saddle-horse. Nor will I hazard an opinion as
to the place that might be held by New Zealanders in a competition
between riding nations. Australians, I fancy, consider their stockmen
and steeplechase-riders superior to anything of the kind in our
islands. And in a certain kind of riding--that through open bush after
cattle, amongst standing and fallen timber--I can scarcely imagine any
horsemen in the world surpassing the best Australian stock-riders.
On the other hand, in a hilly country, and on wet, slippery ground,
New Zealanders and New Zealand horses show cat-like qualities,
which would puzzle Australians, whose experience has been gathered
chiefly on dry plains and easy downs. Comparisons apart, the Dominion
certainly rears clever riders and good horses. A meet of New Zealand
harriers would not be despised even by Leicestershire fox-hunters. To
begin with, the hare of the Antipodes, like so many other European
animals there, has gained in size and strength, and therefore in pace.
The horses, if rather lighter than English, have plenty of speed and
staying-power, and their owners are a hard-riding lot. Gorse fences,
though not, perhaps, so formidable as they look at first sight, afford
stiff jumping. And if a spice of danger be desired, the riders who
put their horses at them may always speculate upon the chances of
encountering hidden wire. The legend that New Zealand horses jump wire
almost as a matter of course has only a foundation of fact; some of
them do, many of them do not. Nor are the somewhat wild stories of
meets where unkempt horses with flowing manes and tails and coats never
touched by brush or curry-comb, are bestridden by riders as untidy, to
be taken for gospel now. Very few of those who follow the harriers in
New Zealand at all resemble dog-fanciers bestriding mustangs. True,
they do not dress in the faultless fashion of those English masters of
fox-hounds whose portraits flame on the walls of the Royal Academy.
Some at least of them do their own grooming. Yet, speaking generally,
the impression left is neat and workmanlike, and is none the worse
for a certain simplicity and even a touch of roughness. The meets
are pleasant gatherings, all the more so because they are neither
overcrowded, nor are there too many of them. Much the same may be said
of the polo matches, where good riding and good ponies are to be seen.
Twenty years ago trained ponies could be bought in the islands for
£25 apiece. Now they, in common with all horseflesh, are a good deal
more costly. However, sport in New Zealand, though more expensive than
of yore, is still comparatively cheap, and that, and the absence of
crowds, are among its chief attractions.

As in other countries, there are tens of thousands of men and women
who never ride a horse, but who find in horse-racing--or in attending
race-meetings--an absorbing amusement. The number of race-meetings
held in both islands is very great. Flat-racing, hurdle-racing,
steeplechasing, and trotting,--all these can assemble their votaries
in thousands. Sportsmen and others think little of traversing hundreds
of miles of land or sea to attend one of the larger meetings. Ladies
muster at these almost as strongly as men. As for the smaller meetings
up-country, they, of course, are social gatherings of the easiest and
most cheerful sort. In bygone years they not seldom degenerated towards
evening into uproarious affairs. Nowadays, however, race-meetings,
small and large, are marked by a sobriety which, to a former
generation, might have seemed wasteful and depressing. To a stranger
the chief features of the races appear to be their number, the size
of the stakes, the average quality of the horses, and the working of
the totalisator. This last, a betting machine, is in use wherever the
law will allow it, and is a source of profit both to the Government
and the racing clubs. The Government taxes its receipts, and the clubs
retain ten per cent of them; hence the handsome stakes offered by the
jockey club committees. The sum that passes through these machines in
the course of the year is enormous, and represents, in the opinion of
many, a national weakness and evil. In defence of the totalisator it
is argued that the individual wagers which it registers are small, and
that it has almost put an end to a more ruinous and disastrous form of
betting, that with bookmakers. It is certainly a popular institution
with an odd flavour of democracy about it, for it has levelled down
betting and at the same time extended it. Indeed, it almost seems to
exhaust the gambling element in New Zealand life; for, as compared with
other nations, my countrymen are not especially addicted to throwing
away their money on games of chance.

Passing from what is commonly called sport to athletic games, we tread
safer ground. One of these games, football, is quite as popular as
horse-racing--indeed, among boys and lads more popular; and whatever
may be its future, football has up to the present time been a clean,
honest, genuine game, free from professionalism and excessive gambling.
The influence of the New Zealand Rugby Union, with its net-work of
federations and clubs, has been and still is a power for good; and
though it is true that the famous and successful visit of the “All
Black” team to Great Britain has lately been parodied by a professional
tour in England and Wales, there is still hope that professionalism
may be held at bay. For, as yet, the passion for football, which is
perhaps the main peculiarity of New Zealand athletics, is a simple
love of the game, and of the struggles and triumphs attending it. The
average New Zealand lad and young man looks for nothing but a good
hard tussle in which his side may win and he, if luck wills it, may
distinguish himself. As yet, money-making scarcely enters into his
thoughts. The day may come in New Zealand, as it has in England, when
bands of skilled mercenaries, recruited from far and near, may play in
the name of cities and districts, the population of which turns out to
bet pounds or pence on their paid dexterity. But, as yet, a football
match in the colony is just a whole-hearted struggle between manly
youths whose zeal for their club and town is not based on the receipt
of a weekly stipend.

[Illustration: CHRISTCHURCH]

Why cricket should lag so far behind football seems at first sight
puzzling; for few countries would seem better suited to the most
scientific of out-door games than the east and centre of New Zealand,
with their sunny but not tropical climate, and their fresh sward of
good green grass. Two reasons, probably, account for the disparity. To
begin with, cricket, at any rate first-class cricket, takes up far more
time than football. Its matches last for days; even practice at the
nets consumes hours. Athletics in New Zealand are the exercise and
recreation of men who have to work for a livelihood. The idle amateur
and the trained professional are equally rare: you see neither the
professional who plays to live, nor the gentleman who lives to play.
The shorter hours of the ordinary working day, helped by the longer
measure of daylight allowed by nature, enable a much larger class than
in England to give a limited amount of time to athletics. But the time
is limited, and first-class cricket therefore, with its heavy demands
on the attention of its votaries, suffers accordingly. Cricket, again,
is a summer game, and in summer the middle or poorer classes have a
far larger variety of amusements to turn to than in winter. Sailing,
rowing, cycling, lawn tennis, fishing, picnics by the sea or in the
forest, mountain-climbing, and tramps in the wilderness, all compete
with cricket to a much greater degree than with football. Indeed the
horse and the gun are well-nigh the only dangerous rivals that football
has, and they are confined to a much more limited class. So while New
Zealand stands at the head of the list of countries that play the Rugby
game, our cricketers could at the best furnish an eleven able to play a
moderately strong English county. The game does, indeed, make headway,
but is eclipsed both by the pre-eminent local success of football, and
by the triumphs of cricket in Australia and South Africa. Meanwhile,
cricket matches in New Zealand, if not Olympian contests, are at any
rate pleasant games. One is not sure whether the less strenuous sort
of cricket, when played in bright weather among surroundings where
good-fellowship and sociability take the place of the excitement of
yelling thousands, is not, after all, the better side of a noble game.

[Illustration: CANOE HURDLE RACE]

[Illustration: WAIHI BAY, WHANGAROA HARBOUR]

As rowing men know, New Zealand has produced more than one sculler of
repute, and at this moment Webb, of the Wanganui River, holds the title
of champion of the world. With this development of sculling, there is
a curiously contrasted lack of especial excellence in other forms of
rowing. Indeed one is inclined to predict that aquatic skill in the
islands will, in days to come, display itself rather in sailing. The
South Pacific is an unquiet ocean, and long stretches of our coast
are iron-bound cliffs or monotonous beaches. But to say nothing of
half-a-hundred large lakes, there are at least three coastal regions
which seem made for yachting. The most striking of these, but one
better adapted for steam yachts than for sailing or small open craft,
is at the butt-end of the South Island, and includes the fiords of the
south-west coast and the harbours of eastern Stewart Island. Between
the two Bluff Harbour lies handy as the yachtsman’s headquarters.
The second of the three chief yachting grounds of the colony has
been placed by nature on the southern side of Cook’s Strait among a
multitude of channels, islands, and sheltered bays, accessible alike
from Wellington, Nelson, or Picton, and affording a delightful change
and refuge from bleak, wind-smitten Cook’s Strait. The best, because
the most easily enjoyed of the three, is the Hauraki Gulf, studded with
islands, fringed with pleasant beaches and inviting coves,
and commanded by the most convenient of harbours in the shape of
the Waitemata. Nor, charming and spacious as the gulf is, need the
Auckland yachtsmen limit themselves to it. Unless entirely wedded to
smooth water, they can run northward past the Little Barrier Island
and visit that fine succession of beautiful inlets, Whangarei, the
Bay of Islands, and Whangaroa. All lie within easy reach, and all are
so extensive and so picturesquely diversified with cliffs, spurs,
bays, and islets, that any yachtsman able to navigate a cutter with
reasonable skill should ask for nothing better than a summer cruise to
and about them.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE FOREST

In one of the rambling myths of the Maori we are told how the hero
Rata, wishing to build a canoe, went into the forest and felled a
tree. In the old days of stone axes, tree-felling was not the work of
an hour, but the toil of days. Great, therefore, was Rata’s vexation
when, on returning to the scene of his labours, he found that the tree
had been set up again by magic, and was standing without a trace of
injury. Much perplexed, the woodcutter thereupon sought out a famous
goddess or priestess, who told him that the restoration was the work
of the Hakaturi, or wood-fairies, whom he must propitiate with certain
ceremonies and incantations. Rata therefore once more cut the tree
down, and having done so, hid himself close by. Presently from the
thickets there issued a company of small bow-legged people, who,
surrounding the fallen tree, began to chant to it somewhat as follows:--

    Ah! ’tis Rata; he is felling
    Tané’s forest, our green dwelling.
    Yet we cry, and lo, upspring
    Chips and splinters quivering.
    Leap together--life will hold you!
    Cling together--strength will fold you!
    Yes--the tree-god’s ribs are bound
    Now by living bark around.
    Yes--the trembling wood is seen,
    Standing straight and growing green.

[Illustration: THE RETURN OF THE WAR CANOE]

And, surely enough, as they sang, the severed trunk rose and reunited,
and every flake and chip of bark and wood flew together straightway.
Then Rata, calling out to them, followed the injunctions given him.
They talked with him, and in the end he was told to go away and
return next morning. When he came back, lo! in the sunshine lay a new
war-canoe, glorious with black and red painting, and tufts of large
white feathers, and with cunning spirals on prow and tall stern-post,
carved as no human hand could carve them. In this canoe he sailed over
the sea to attack and destroy the murderer of his father.

Lovers of the New Zealand forest, who have to live in an age when axe
and fire are doing their deadly work so fast, must regret that the
fairies, defenders of trees, have now passed away. Of yore when the
Maori were about to fell a tree they made propitiatory offerings to
Tané and his elves, at any rate when the tree was one of size. For, so
Tregear tells us, they distinguished between the aristocracy of the
forest and the common multitude. Totara and rimu were _rangatira_, or
gentlemen to whom sacrifice must be offered, while underbrush might be
hacked and slashed without apology. So it would seem that when Cowley
was writing the lines--

    Hail, old patrician trees so great and good;
    Hail, ye plebeian underwood!

he was echoing a class distinction already hit upon by the fancy of
tattooed savages in an undiscovered island. Now all things are being
levelled. Great Tané is dead, and the children of the tree-god have few
friends. Perhaps some uncommercial botanist or misliked rhymester may
venture on a word for them; or some much-badgered official may mark
out a reserve in fear and trembling. Canon Stack, who knew the Maori
of the South Island so well, says that half a century ago the belief
in fairies was devout, and that he often conversed with men who were
certain that they had seen them. One narrator in particular had caught
sight of a band of them at work amid the curling mists of a lofty
hill-top where they were building a stockaded village. So evident was
the faith of the man in the vision he described that Canon Stack was
forced to think that he had seen the forms of human builders reflected
on the mountain-mist, after the fashion of the spectre of the Brocken.

[Illustration: OKAHUMOKO BAY, WHANGAROA]

For myself, I could not have the heart to apply scientific analysis to
our Maori fairy-tales, all too brief and scanty as they are. It is,
doubtless, interesting to speculate on the possible connections of
these with the existence of shadowy tribes who may have inhabited parts
of New Zealand in the distant centuries, and been driven into
inaccessible mountains and entangled woods by the Maori invader. To me,
however, the legends seem to indicate a belief, not in one supernatural
race, but in several. In Europe, of course, the Northern traditions
described beings of every sort of shape, from giants and two-headed
ogres to minute elves almost too small to be seen. And in the same
continent, under clearer skies, were the classic myths of nymphs and
woodland deities, human in shape, but of a beauty exceeding that of
mankind. So Keats could dream of enchanting things that happened

    Upon a time before the faëry broods
    Drove nymph and satyr from the prosperous woods,
    Before King Oberon’s bright diadem,
    Sceptre and mantle clasped with dewy gem,
    Frightened away the dryads and the fauns
    From rushes green and brakes and cowslipp’d lawns.

In much the same way do the Maori stories vary. One tells us of giant
hunters attended by two-headed dogs. Another seems to indicate a
tiny race of wood elves or goblins. Elsewhere the Maori story-teller
explains that fairies were much like human beings, but white-skinned,
and with red or yellow hair, nearly resembling the Pakeha. They haunted
the sea-shore and the recesses of the hill-forests, whither they
would decoy the incautious Maori by their singing. The sound of their
cheerful songs was sweet and clear, and in the night-time the traveller
would hear their voices among the trees, now on this side, now on
that; or the notes would seem to rise near at hand, and then recede
and fall, dying away on the distant hill-sides. Their women were
beautiful, and more than one Maori ancestral chief possessed himself of
a fairy wife. On the other hand, the fairies would carry off the women
and maidens of the Maori, or even, sometimes, little children, who were
never seen again, though their voices were heard by sorrowing mothers
calling in the air over the tree-tops.

[Illustration: MAORI FISHING PARTY]

Sir George Grey was the first, I think, to write down any of the Maori
fairy-tales; at any rate, two of the best of them are found in his
book. One concerns the adventure of the chief Kahukura, who, walking
one evening on the sea-shore in the far north of the North Island, saw
strange footprints and canoe marks on the sands. Clearly fishermen had
been there; but their landing and departure must have taken place in
the night, and there was something about the marks they had left that
was puzzling and uncanny. Kahukura went his way pondering, and “held
fast in his heart what he had seen.” So after nightfall back he came to
the spot, and after a while the shore was covered with fairies. Canoes
were paddled to land dragging nets full of mackerel, and all were busy
in securing the fish. Kahukura mingled with the throng, and was as busy
as any, picking up fish and running a string of flax through their
gills. Like many Maori chiefs, he was a light-complexioned man, so
fair that in the starlight the fairies took him for one of themselves.
Morning approached, and the fishermen were anxious to finish their
work; but Kahukura contrived by dropping and scattering fish to
impede and delay them until dawn. With the first streaks of daylight
the fairies discovered that a man was among them, and fled in confusion
by sea and land, leaving their large seine net lying on the shore. It
is true that the net was made of rushes; but the pattern and knotting
were so perfect and ingenious that the Maori copied them, and that is
how they learned to make fishing-nets.

Another chief, Te Kanawa, fell in with the fairies high up on a wooded
mountain near the river Waikato. This encounter also, we are assured,
took place long ago, before the coming of white men. Te Kanawa had
been hunting the wingless kiwi, and, surprised by night, had to encamp
in the forest. He made his bed of fern among the buttresses at the
foot of a large pukatea-tree, and, protected by these and his fire,
hoped to pass the night comfortably. Soon, however, he heard voices
and footsteps, and fairies began to circle round about, talking and
laughing, and peeping over the buttresses of the pukatea at the
handsome young chief. Their women openly commented on his good looks,
jesting with each other at their eagerness to examine him. Te Kanawa,
however, was exceedingly terrified, and thought of nothing but of how
he might propitiate his inquisitive admirers and save himself from some
injury at their hands. So he took from his neck his hei-tiki, or charm
of greenstone, and from his ears his shark’s-tooth ornaments, and hung
them upon a wand which he held out as an offering to the fairy folk.
At once these turned to examine the gifts with deep interest. According
to one version of the story they made patterns of them, cut out of
wood and leaves. According to another, they, by enchantment, took away
the shadows or resemblances of the prized objects. In either case they
were satisfied to leave the tangible ornaments with their owner, and