The Long White Cloud by William Pember Reeves
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William Pember Reeves >> The Long White Cloud
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THE LONG WHITE CLOUD
AO TEA ROA
By William Pember Reeves
Agent-General In London for New Zealand
1899
[Illustration: Frontispiece.
TE REINGA WATERFALL, GISBORNE
Photo by W.F. CRAWFORD.]
Preface
I believe that there is amongst the people of the Mother Country a
minority, now ceasing to be small, which takes a quickening interest
in the Colonies. It no longer consists merely of would-be investors,
or emigrants who want to inquire into the resources, industries, and
finances of one or other of the self-governing parts of the Empire.
Many of its members never expect to see a colony. But they have come
to recognise that those new-comers into the circle of civilized
communities, the daughter nations of Britain, are not unworthy of
English study and English pride. They have begun to suspect that
the story of their struggles into existence and prosperity may be
stirring, romantic, and interesting, and that some of their political
institutions and experiments may be instructive, though others may
seem less safe than curious. Some of those who think thus complain
that it is not always easy to find an account of a colony which shall
be neither an official advertisement, the sketch of a globe-trotting
impressionist, nor yet an article manufactured to order by some honest
but untravelled maker of books. They ask--or at least some of them, to
my knowledge, ask--for a history in which the picturesque side of the
story shall not be ignored, written simply and concisely by a writer
who has made a special study of his subject, or who has lived and
moved amongst the places, persons, and incidents he describes.
I have lived in New Zealand, have seen it and studied it from end to
end, and have had to do with its affairs: it is my country. But I
should not have presumed to endeavour to supply in its case the want
above indicated had any short descriptive history of the colony from
its discovery to the present year been available. Among the many
scores of books about the Islands--some of which are good, more of
which are bad--I know of none which does what is aimed at in this
volume. I have, therefore, taken in hand a short sketch-history of
mine, published some six months ago, have cut out some of it and have
revised the rest, and blended it with the material of the following
chapters, of which it forms nearly one-third. The result is something
not quite so meagre in quantity or staccato in style, though even now
less full than I should have liked to make it, had it been other than
the work of an unknown writer telling the story of a small archipelago
which is at once the most distant and well-nigh the youngest of
English states. I have done my best in the later chapters to describe
certain men and experiments without letting personal likes and
dislikes run away with my pen; have taken pains to avoid loading my
pages with the names of places and persons of no particular interest
to British readers; and at the same time have tried not to forget the
value of local colour and atmosphere in a book of this kind.
If _The Long White Cloud_ should fail to please a discerning public,
it will not prove that a good, well-written history of a colony like
New Zealand is not wanted, and may not succeed, but merely that I have
not done the work well enough. That may easily be, inasmuch as until
this year my encounters with English prose have almost all taken the
form of political articles or official correspondence. Doubtless these
do not afford the best possible training. But of the quality of the
material awaiting a capable writer there can be no question. There,
ready to his hand, are the beauty of those islands of mid-ocean, the
grandeur of their Alps and fiords, the strangeness of the volcanic
districts, the lavishness, yet grace, of the forests; the mixture of
quaintness, poetry, and ferocity in the Maori, and the gallant drama
of their struggle against our overwhelming strength; the adventures
of the gold-seekers and other pioneers; the high aims of the colony's
founders, and the venturesome democratic experiments of those who have
succeeded them. If in these there is not the stuff for a fine book,
then I am most strangely mistaken. And if I have failed in the
following pages, then let me hope that some fellow-countryman, and
better craftsman, will come to the rescue, and will do with a firmer
hand and a lighter touch the work attempted here.
NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I have to thank Major-General Robley, not only for drawing the
tail-piece to the second chapter, and thereby giving the book a minute
but correct pattern of the Maori _moko_ or face-tattooing, but for
kindly lending me photographs and drawings from which several other
illustrations have been taken. Two or three of the tail-pieces are
after designs in Mr. Hamilton's _Maori Art_. I have also to thank
Mr. A. Martin of Wanganui for his kind permission to use his fine
photograph of Mount Egmont and a view on a "papa" river. Mr. W.F.
Crawford was good enough to put at my disposal his photograph of
the Te Reinga waterfall, a view which will be new even to most New
Zealanders. The portrait of Major Kemp and that of a Muaopoko Maori
standing by a carved canoe-prow were given to me by Sir Walter Buller.
"A New Zealand Settler's Home" was the gift of Mr. Winckleman of
Auckland, well known amongst New Zealand amateur photographers. I have
also gratefully to acknowledge the photographs which are the work
of Mr. Josiah Martin of Auckland, Messrs. Beattie and Sanderson of
Auckland, Mr. Iles of the Thames, and Mr. Morris of Dunedin, and to
thank Messrs. Sampson, Low and Co. for the use of the blocks from
which the portraits of Sir Harry Atkinson and the Hon. John McKenzie
are taken.
Contents
Chapter I
THE LONG WHITE CLOUD
Chapter II
THE MAORI
Chapter III
THE MAORI AND THE UNSEEN
Chapter IV
THE NAVIGATORS
Chapter V
NO MAN'S LAND
Chapter VI
MISSION SCHOONER AND WHALE BOAT
Chapter VII
THE MUSKETS OF HONGI
Chapter VIII
"A MAN OF WAR WITHOUT GUNS"
Chapter IX
THE DREAMS OF GIBBON WAKEFIELD
Chapter X
IN THE CAUDINE FORKS
Chapter XI
THROUGH WEAKNESS INTO WAR
Chapter XII
GOOD GOVERNOR GREY
Chapter XIII
THE PASTORAL PROVINCES
Chapter XIV
LEARNING TO WALK
Chapter XV
GOVERNOR BROWNE'S BAD BARGAIN
Chapter XVI
_TUPARA_ AGAINST ENFIELD
Chapter XVII
THE FIRE IN THE FERN
Chapter XVIII
GOLD-DIGGERS AND GUM-DIGGERS
Chapter XIX
THE PROVINCES AND THE PUBLIC WORKS POLICY
Chapter XX
IN PARLIAMENT
Chapter XXI
SOME BONES OF CONTENTION
Chapter XXII
EIGHT YEARS OF EXPERIMENT
Chapter XXIII
THE NEW ZEALANDERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
List of Illustrations
Te Reinga Waterfall
A Western Alpine Valley
The White Terrace, Rotomahana
On a River--"Papa" Country
Maori and Carved Bow of Canoe
A Maori Maiden
Stern of Canoe
Maori Wahine
Carved Gateway of Maori Village
Mount Egmont, Taranaki
View of Nelson
Sir George Grey
The Curving Coast
War Map
Rewi
Major Kemp
Kauri Pine Tree
The Hon. John Mackenzie
Sir Harry Atkinson
A New Zealand Settler's Home
Picton--Queen Charlotte's Sound
The Hon. John Balance
Te Waharoa. Henare Kaihau, M.H.R. Hon. James Carroll,
M.H.R. Right Hon. R.J. Seddon (_Premier_). Mahuta (_The
Maori "King"_)
Maoris Conveying Guests in a Canoe
A Rural State School
Map of New Zealand
Chapter I
THE LONG WHITE CLOUD[1]
[Footnote 1: Ao-Tea-Roa, the Maori name of New Zealand.]
"If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face--and you'll forget them all."
Though one of the parts of the earth best fitted for man, New Zealand
was probably about the last of such lands occupied by the human race.
The first European to find it was a Dutch sea-captain who was looking
for something else, and who thought it a part of South America, from
which it is sundered by five thousand miles of ocean. It takes its
name from a province of Holland to which it does not bear the remotest
likeness, and is usually regarded as the antipodes of England, but is
not. Taken possession of by an English navigator, whose action, at
first adopted, was afterwards reversed by his country's rulers, it was
only annexed at length by the English Government which did not want
it, to keep it from the French who did. The Colony's capital bears the
name of a famous British commander, whose sole connection with the
country was a flat refusal to aid in adding it to the Empire. Those
who settled it meant it to be a theatre for the Wakefield Land
System. The spirit of the land laws, however, which its settlers have
gradually developed is a complete negation of Wakefield's principle.
Some of the chief New Zealand settlements were founded by Church
associations; but the Colony's education system has long been purely
secular. From the first those who governed the Islands laboured
earnestly to preserve and benefit the native race, and on the whole
the treatment extended to them has been just and often generous--yet
the wars with them were long, obstinate, and mischievous beyond
the common. The pioneer colonists looked upon New Zealand as an
agricultural country, but its main industries have turned out to be
grazing and mining. From the character of its original settlers it was
expected to be the most conservative of the colonies; it is just now
ranked as the most democratic. Not only by its founders, but for many
years afterwards, Irish were avowedly or tacitly excluded from the
immigrants sent to it. Now, however, at least one person in eight in
the Colony is of that race.
It would be easy to expand this list into an essay on the vanity
of human wishes. It would not be hard to add thereto a formidable
catalogue of serious mistakes made both in England and New Zealand by
those responsible for the Colony's affairs--mistakes, some of which,
at least, seem now to argue an almost inconceivable lack of knowledge
and foresight. So constantly have the anticipations of its officials
and settlers been reversed in the story of New Zealand that it becomes
none too easy to trace any thread of guiding wisdom or consistent
purpose therein. The broad result, however, has been a fine and
vigorous colony. Some will see in its record of early struggles,
difficulties and mistakes endured, paid for and surmounted, a signal
instance of the overruling care of Providence. To the cynic the tale
must be merely a minor portion of the "supreme ironic procession with
laughter of gods in the background." To the writer it seems, at least,
to give a very notable proof of the collective ability of a colonizing
race to overcome obstacles and repair blunders. The Colony of New
Zealand is not a monument of the genius of any one man or group of
men. It is the outcome of the vitality and industry of a people
obstinate but resourceful, selfish but honest, often ill-informed and
wrong, but with the saving virtue of an ability to learn from their
own mistakes.
From one standpoint the story of New Zealand ought not to take long to
tell. It stretches over less time than that of almost any land with
any pretensions to size, beauty, or interest. New Zealand was only
discovered by Europeans in the reign of our King Charles I., and even
then the Dutch explorer who sighted its lofty coasts did not set foot
upon them. The first European to step on to its shores did so only
when the great American colonies were beginning to fret at the ties
which bound them to England. The pioneers of New Zealand colonization,
the missionaries, whalers, and flax and timber traders, did not come
upon the scene until the years of Napoleon's decline and fall. Queen
Victoria had been on the throne for three years before the Colonial
Office was reluctantly compelled to add the Islands to an Empire which
the official mind regarded as already overgrown.
Yet so striking, varied, and attractive are the country's features, so
full of bustle, change and experiment have its few years been, that
lack of material is about the last complaint that need be made by a
writer on New Zealand. The list of books on the Colony is indeed so
long that its bibliography is a larger volume than this; and the chief
plea to be urged for this history must be its brevity--a quality none
too common in Colonial literature.
A New Zealander writing in London may be forgiven if he begins by
warning English readers not to expect in the aspect of New Zealand
either a replica of the British Islands or anything resembling
Australia. The long, narrow, mountainous islands upon which Abel
Jansen Tasman stumbled in December, 1642, are so far from being the
antipodes of Britain that they lie on an average twelve degrees nearer
the equator. Take Liverpool as a central city of the United Kingdom;
it lies nearly on the 53rd parallel of north latitude. Wellington, the
most central city of New Zealand, is not far from the 41st parallel of
southern latitude. True, New Zealand has no warm Gulf Stream to wash
her shores. But neither is she chilled by east winds blowing upon her
from the colder half of a continent. Neither her contour nor climate
is in the least Australian. It is not merely that twelve hundred miles
of ocean separate the flat, rounded, massive-looking continent from
the high, slender, irregular islands. The ocean is deep and stormy.
Until the nineteenth century there was absolutely no going to and
fro across it. Many plants are found in both countries, but they are
almost all small and not in any way conspicuous. Only one bird of
passage migrates across the intervening sea. The dominating trees of
Australia are myrtles (called eucalypts); those of New Zealand are
beeches (called birches), and various species of pines. The strange
marsupials, the snakes, the great running birds, the wild dogs
of Australia, have no counterpart in New Zealand. The climate
of Australia, south of Capricorn, is, except on the eastern and
south-eastern coast, as hot and dry as the South African. And the
Australian mountains, moderate in height and flattened, as a rule, at
the summit, remind one not a little of the table-topped elevations so
familiar to riders on the veldt and karroo. The western coast of New
Zealand is one of the rainiest parts of the Empire. Even the drier
east coast only now and then suffers from drought On the west coast
the thermometer seldom rises above 75 deg. in the shade; on the other not
often above 90 deg.. New Zealand, too, is a land of cliffs, ridges, peaks,
and cones. Some of the loftier volcanoes are still active, and the
vapour of their craters mounts skyward above white fields of eternal
snow. The whole length of the South Island is ridged by Alpine ranges,
which, though not quite equal in height to the giants of Switzerland,
do not lose by comparison with the finest of the Pyrenees.
No man with an eye for the beautiful or the novel would call Australia
either unlovely or dull. It is not, however, a land of sharp and
sudden contrasts: New Zealand is.
The Australian woods, too, are park-like: their trees, though
interesting, and by no means without charm, have a strong family
likeness. Their prevailing colours are yellow, brown, light green, and
grey. Light and heat penetrate them everywhere.
The cool, noiseless forests of New Zealand are deep jungles, giant
thickets, like those tropic labyrinths where traveller and hunter have
to cut their path through tangled bushes and interlacing creepers.
Their general hue is not light but dark green, relieved, it is true,
by soft fern fronds, light-tinted shrubs, and crimson or snow-white
flowers. Still the tone is somewhat sombre, and would be more
noticeably so but for the prevalent sunshine and the great variety of
species of trees and ferns growing side by side. The distinction of
the forest scenery may be summed up best in the words dignity and
luxuriance. The tall trees grow close together. For the most part
their leaves are small, but their close neighbourhood hinders this
from spoiling the effect. The eye wanders over swell after swell, and
into cavern after cavern of unbroken foliage. To the botanist who
enters them these silent, stately forests show such a wealth of
intricate, tangled life, that the delighted examiner hardly knows
which way to turn first.
[Illustration: A WESTERN ALPINE VALLEY
Photo by MORRIS, Dunedin.]
As a rule the lower part of the trunks is branchless; stems rise up
like tall pillars in long colonnades. But this does not mean that they
are bare. Climbing ferns, lichens, pendant grasses, air-plants, and
orchids drape the columns. Tough lianas swing in air: coiling roots
overspread the ground. Bushes, shrubs, reeds and ferns of every size
and height combine to make a woven thicket, filling up and even
choking the spaces between trunk and trunk. Supple, snaky vines writhe
amid the foliage, and bind the undergrowth together.
The forest trees are evergreens, and even in mid-winter are
fresh-looking. The glowing autumnal tints of English woods are never
theirs; yet they show every shade of green, from the light of the
puriri to the dark of the totara, from the bronze-hued willow-like
leaves of the tawa to the vivid green of the matai, or the soft
golden-green of the drooping rimu. Then, though the ground-flowers
cannot compare in number with those of England or Australia,[1]
the Islands are the chosen land of the fern, and are fortunate in
flowering creepers, shrubs, and trees. There are the koromiko bush
with white and purple blossoms, and the white convolvulus which covers
whole thickets with blooms, delicate as carved ivory, whiter than
milk. There are the starry clematis, cream-coloured or white, and the
manuka, with tiny but numberless flowers. The yellow kowhai, seen
on the hillsides, shows the russet tint of autumn at the height of
spring-time. Yet the king of the forest flowers is, perhaps, the
crimson, feathery rata. Is it a creeper, or is it a tree? Both
opinions are held; both are right. One species of the rata is an
ordinary climber; another springs sometimes from the ground, sometimes
from the fork of a tree into which the seed is blown or dropped.
Thence it throws out long rootlets, some to earth, others which wrap
round the trunk on which it is growing. Gradually this rata becomes a
tree itself, kills its supporter, and growing round the dead stick,
ends in almost hiding it from view.
[Footnote 1: The Alps, however, show much floral beauty, and the
ground-flowers of the Auckland Islands, an outlying group of New
Zealand islets, impressed the botanist Kirk as unsurpassed in the
South Temperate Zone.]
In the month of February, when the rata flowers in the Alps, there are
valleys which are ablaze for miles with
"Flowers that with one scarlet gleam
Cover a hundred leagues, and seem
To set the hills on fire."
But the most gorgeous of all flowering trees, as distinguished from
creepers, is the sea-loving pohutu kawa. When the wind is tossing its
branches the contrast is startling between its blood-red flowers and
the dark upper side and white, downy under side of its leaves.
Like the Australians, New Zealand Colonists call their forest "bush."
What in England might be called bush or brushwood is called "scrub" in
the Colonies.
The wood of many of the trees is not only useful timber, but when cut
and polished is often beautiful in grain. Unhappily, their destruction
goes on with rapid strides. The trees, as is usually the case with
those the wood of which is hard, grow slowly. They feel exposure to
wind, and seem to need the society and shelter of their fellows. It is
almost impossible to restore a New Zealand forest when once destroyed.
Then most of the finest trees are found on rich soil. The land is
wanted for grazing and cultivation. The settler comes with axe and
fire-stick, and in a few hours unsightly ashes and black funereal
stumps have replaced the noble woods which Nature took centuries
to grow. No attempt is made to use a great part of the timber. The
process is inevitable, and in great part needful, frightfully wasteful
as it seems. But the forest reserves of the Colony, large as they are,
should be made even more ample. Twelve hundred thousand acres are not
enough--as the New Zealanders will regretfully admit when a decade or
so hence they begin to import timber instead of exporting it. As for
interfering with reserves already made, any legislator who suggests
it should propose his motion with a noose round his neck, after the
laudable custom followed in a certain classic republic.
New Zealand is by no means a flat country, though there are in it some
fair-sized plains, one of which--that of Canterbury--is about as flat
a stretch of one hundred miles as is to be found in the world. On the
whole, however, both North and South Islands are lands of the mountain
and the flood, and not only in this, but in the contour of some of
their peaks and coast-line, show more than a fanciful resemblance to
the west of Scotland. But the New Zealand mountains are far loftier
than anything in the British Islands. The rocky coasts as a rule rise
up steeply from the ocean, standing out in many places in bold bluffs
and high precipices. The seas round are not shallow, dull, or turbid,
but deep, blue, wind-stirred, foam-flecked, and more often than not
lit by brilliant sunshine. The climate and colouring, too, are not
only essentially un-English, but differ very widely in different parts
of the Islands. For New Zealand, though narrow, has length, stretching
through 13 degrees of latitude, and for something like 1,100 miles
from north to south. As might be looked for in a mountainous country,
lying in the open ocean, the climate is windy, and except in two or
three districts, moist. It is gloriously healthy and briskly cheerful.
Summed up in one word, its prevailing characteristic is light!
Hot as are many summer days, they are seldom sultry enough to breed
the heavy, overhanging heat-haze which shrouds the heaven nearer the
tropics. Sharp as are the frosts of winter nights in the central and
southern part of the South Island, the days even in mid-winter
are often radiant, giving seven or eight hours of clear, pleasant
sunshine. For the most part the rains are heavy but not prolonged;
they come in a steady, business-like downpour, or in sharp, angry
squalls; suddenly the rain ceases, the clouds break, and the sun is
shining from a blue sky. Fogs and mists are not unknown, but are rare
and passing visitors, do not come to stay, and are not brown and
yellow in hue but more the colour of a clean fleece of wool. They
do not taste of cold smoke, gas, sulphur, or mud. High lying and
ocean-girt, the long, slender islands are lands of sunshine and the
sea. It is not merely that their coast-line measures 4,300 miles, but
that they are so shaped and so elevated that from innumerable hilltops
and mountain summits distant glimpses may be caught of the blue salt
water. From the peak of Aorangi, 12,350 feet in air, the Alpine
climber Mannering saw not only the mantle of clouds which at that
moment covered the western sea twenty miles away, but a streak of blue
ocean seventy miles off near Hokitika to the north-west, and by the
hills of Bank's Peninsula to the north-east, a haze which indicated
the Eastern Ocean. Thus, from her highest peak, he looked right across
New Zealand. The Dutch, then, its discoverers, were not so wrong in
naming it Zealand or Sea-land.
Next to light, perhaps the chief characteristic of the country and its
climate is variety. Thanks to its great length the north differs much
from the south. Southland is as cool as northern France, with an
occasional southerly wind as keen as Kingsley's wild north-easter. But
in gardens to the north of Auckland I have stood under olive trees
laden with berries. Hard by were orange trees, figs, and lemon trees
in full bearing. Not far off a winding tidal creek was fringed with
mangroves. Exotic palm trees and the cane-brake will grow there
easily. All over the North Island, except at high altitudes, and in
the more sheltered portions of the South Island, camellias and azaleas
bloom in the open air. The grape vine bids fair to lead to wine-making
in both islands--unless the total abstainers grow strong enough to put
their foot on the manufacture of alcohol in any form in an already
distinctly and increasingly sober Colony.
But in New Zealand not only is the north in marked contrast with the
south, but the contrast between the east and west is even more sharply
defined. As a rule the two coasts are divided by a broad belt of
mountainous country. The words "chain" and "spine" are misnomers, at
any rate in the South Island, inasmuch as they are not sufficiently
expressive of breadth. The rain-bringing winds in New Zealand blow
chiefly from the north-west and south-west. The moisture-laden clouds
rolling up from the ocean gather and condense against the western
flanks of the mountains, where an abundant rainfall has nourished
through ages past an unbroken and evergreen forest. Nothing could well
be more utterly different than these matted jungles of the wet west
coast--with their prevailing tint of rich dark green, their narrow,
rank, moist valleys and steep mountain sides--and the eastern scenery
of the South Island. The sounds or fiords of the south-west are
perhaps the loveliest series of gulfs in the world. Inlet succeeds
inlet, deep, calm, and winding far in amongst the steep and towering
mountains. The lower slopes of these are clothed with a thick tangle
of forest, where foliage is kept eternally fresh and vivid by rain and
mist. White torrents and waterfalls everywhere seam the verdure and
break the stillness.
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