William Pember Reeves

“ Even the ordinary free man was simply buried in the ground in a sitting posture and forgotten. But the departure of a chief of rank and fame, of great mana or prestige, was the signal for national mourning. With wreaths of green leaves on their heads, friends sat round the body wailing the long-drawn cry, Aué! Aué! or listening to some funeral chant recited in his praise. Women cut themselves with sharp sea-shells or flakes of volcanic glass till the blood ran down. The corpse sat in state adorned with flowers and red ochre and clad in the finest of mantles. ”

“ Though pale and delicate, the tints of the rock are not their least beauty. Grey, yellow, brown, fawn, terra-cotta, even pale orange are to be noted. No photograph can give the charm of the drapery that clothes these cliffs. Photographs give no light or colour, and New Zealand scenery without light and colour is Hamlet with Hamlet left out. How could a photograph even hint at the dark, glossy green of the glistening karaka leaves, the feathery, waving foliage of the lace bark, or the white and purple bloom of the koromiko? ”

“ But the wilder the north-west wind of New Zealand, the more sudden and complete may be the change to the south-west. Such a shifting came about, and in a moment the flames enveloped the walls. Shouting in triumph, Rauparaha's men mustered in array and danced their frenzied war-dance, leaping high in air, and tossing and catching their muskets with fierce yells. "The earth," says an eye-witness, "shook beneath their stamping." Then they charged through the burning breach, and the defenders fell in heaps or fled before them. The lagoon was black with the heads of men swimming for life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is difficult, perhaps, for those living in the cool and abundantly watered British Islands to sympathise with dwellers in hotter climates, or to understand what a blessing and beauty these continual and never-failing watercourses of New Zealand seem to visitors from sultrier and drier lands. The sun is quite strong enough to make men thankful for this gift of abundant water, and to make the running ripple of some little forest rivulet, heard long before it is seen through the green thickets, as musical to the ears of the tired rider as the note of the bell-bird itself. ”

“ The sunshine falls on patches of gleaming snow and trailing mist, and lights up the grey crags which start out like mushrooms on the barren slopes. On all sides streams tear down over beds of the loose shingle, of which they carry away thousands of tons winter after winter. Their brawling is perhaps the only sound you will hear through slow-footed afternoons, save, always, the whistle or sighing of the persistent wind. A stunted beech bush clothes the spurs here and there, growing short and thick as a fleece of dark wool. ”

“ It is as different to the sharp dry air of the Canterbury ranges as velvet is to canvas; it soothes, and in hot weather relaxes. The black birch with dark trunk, spreading branches, and light leaves, is now mingled with the queenly rimu, and the stiff, small-leaved, formal white pine. Winding and hanging plants festoon everything, and everything is bearded with long streamers of moss, not grey but rich green and golden. Always some river rushes along in sight or fills the ear with its noise. ”

“ But the Waikato country was flat or undulating, clothed in fern and with only patches of forest. A first-class high road—the river—ran right through it. The sturdy resistance of the natives was due first to their splendid courage and skilful use of rifle-pits and earthworks, and in the second place to our want of dash and tactical resource. Clever as the Maori engineers were, bravely as the brown warriors defended their entrenchments, their positions ought to have been nothing more than traps for them, seeing how overwhelming was the white force. ”

“ On such a morning from a hill looking northward over league after league of rolling virgin forest I have seen the great volcano, Mount Ruapehu, rear up his 9,000 feet, seeming a solitary mass, the upper part distinctly seen, blue and snow-capped, the lower bathed and half-lost in a pearl-coloured haze. Most impressive of all is it to catch sight, through a cleft in the forest, of the peak of Mount Egmont, and of the flanks of the almost perfect cone curving upward from the sea-shore for 8,300 feet. The sentinel volcano stands alone. ”

“ None but a man of genius could have breathed life into it. Fortunately the genius appeared.
Though the name of Gibbon Wakefield will probably be remembered as long as the history of Australia and New Zealand is read, the man himself was, during most of his active career, under a cloud. The abduction of an heiress—a mad freak for which he paid by imprisonment and disgrace—deprived him of the hope of ordinary public distinction. For many years he had to work masked—had to pour forth his views in anonymous tracts and letters, had to make pawns of dull men with respectable names. ”

“ The sea-god fled to the ocean, where he and his children dwell as fishes. The two gods of plant-food hid in the Earth, and she, forgiving mother that she was, sheltered them in her breast. Only Tu, the god of mankind, stayed erect and undaunted. So it is that the winds and storms make war to this day upon men, wrecking their canoes, tearing down their houses and fences and ruining all their handiwork. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 1865 the stream which had been pouring into Otago was diverted to the new fields in Westland, and in parties or singly, in the face of almost incredible natural difficulties, adventurous men worked their way to every point of the west coast. In a few months 30,000 diggers were searching its beaches and valleys with such results that it seemed astonishing that the gold could have lain unseen so long. Many lost their lives, drowned in the rivers or starved to death in the dripping bush. ”

“ Labour-saving machinery from the United States came in to embolden the growers of cereals; the export of wheat rose to millions of bushels; and the droning hum of the steam threshing-machine and the whir of the reaper-and-binder began to be heard in a thousand fields from northern Canterbury to Southland. In the north McLean steadfastly kept the peace, and the Colony bade fair to become rich by leaps and bounds. The modern community has perhaps yet to be found which can bear sudden prosperity coolly. New Zealand in the seventies certainly did not. ”

“ Like Waharoa and Hongi he was small, spare and sinewy; an active man even after three-score years and ten. In repose his aquiline features were placid and his manners dignified. But in excitement, his small, keen, deep-sunken eyes glared like a wild beast's, and an overhanging upper lip curled back over long teeth which suggested to colonists—his enemies—the fangs of a wolf. Born near the picturesque inlet of Kawhia, he first won fame as a youth by laying a clever ambuscade for a Waikato war-party. ”

“ All things to all men, plausible to the old, magnetic to the young, persuasive among the intellectual, impressive to the weak-minded, Gibbon Wakefield was always more than the mere clever, selfish schemer which many thought him. Just as his fresh face and bluff British manner concealed the subtle mind ever spinning webs and weaving plans, so, behind and above all his plots and dodging, was the high dream and ideal to which he was faithful, and which redeemed his life. ”

“ If the Southern Alps surpass the Kaikouras in beauty it is because of the contrast they show on their western flanks, between gaunt grandeur aloft, and the softest luxuriance below. The forest climbs to the snow line, while the snow line descends as if to meet it. So abrupt is the descent that the transition is like the change in a theatre-scene. Especially striking is the transformation in the passage over the fine pass which leads through the dividing range between pastoral Canterbury and Westland. ”

“ The climate might be healthy and the mountain outlines noble. But nothing but work, and successful work, could reconcile an educated and imaginative man to the monotony of a daily outlook over league after league of stony soil, thinly clothed by pallid, wiry tussocks bending under an eternal, uncompromising wind; where the only living creatures in sight might often be small lizards or a twittering grey bird miscalled a lark ”

“ The Endeavour lay in the bay for some time, and a brisk trade grew up between ship and shore. On one great, never-to-be-forgotten day little Taniwha and some of his play-fellows were taken out in a canoe and went on board the magic ship. Wrapped in their flax cloaks they sat close together on the deck, not daring to move about for fear they might be bewitched in some dark corner, and so might never be able to go away and get home again. But their sharp brown eyes noted everything. They easily made out the leader of the goblins. He was a tino tangata (a very man—emphatically a man) . ”

“ Buying and selling were unknown. On and by the land the Maori lived, and he clung to it closely as any Irish peasant. "The best death a man can die is for the land," ran a proverb. "Let us die for the land!" shouted a chieftain, haranguing his fighting men before one of their first battles with the English. No appeal would be more certain to strike home.
Though the tribal estate was communal property in so far that any member could go out into the wilderness and fell trees and reclaim the waste, the fruits of such work, the timber and plantations, at once became personal property. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was Stewart, ex-Jacobite, sealer, and pilot, whose name still conceals Rakiura, and whose Highland pride made him wear the royal tartan to the last as he sat in Maori villages smoking among the blanketed savages. There was the half-caste Chaseland, whose mother was an Australian "gin," and who was acknowledged to be the most dexterous and best-tempered steersman in New Zealand—when sober. He needed his skill when he steered an open boat from the Chathams to Otago across five hundred miles of wind-vexed sea. ”

“ Solfataras, mud volcanoes and fumaroles are counted in hundreds in the volcanic zone. If there were not such curiosities, still the beauty of the mountains, lakes, streams and patches of forest would, with the bright invigorating air, make the holiday-maker seek them in numbers. Through the middle of this curious region runs the Waikato, the longest and on the whole most tranquil and useful of that excitable race the rivers of New Zealand. Even the Waikato has its adventures. ”

“ All beings, gods, heroes and men, are sprung from the ancient union of Heaven and Earth, Rangi and Papa. Rangi was the father and Earth the great mother of all. Even now, in these days, the rain, the snow, the dew and the clouds are the creative powers which come down from Rangi to mother Earth and cause the trees, the shrubs and the plants to grow in spring and flourish in summer. ”

“ In another lament a grieving mother is compared to the drooping fronds of the tree-fern. The maiden keeping tryst bids the light fleecy cloudlets, which in New Zealand so often scud across the sky before the sea-wind, to be messengers to her laggard gallant.
"The sun grows dim and hastes away
As a woman from the scene of battle,"
says the lament for a dead chief. [1] The very names given to hills, lakes, and rivers will be witnesses in future days of the poetic instinct of the Maori—perhaps the last destined to remain in his land. ”

“ When you have left these tracts, and have risen a thousand feet or so, you come to a volcanic plateau, clad for the most part in dark green and rusty bracken or tussocks of faded yellow. Right in the centre rise the great volcanoes, Ruapehu, Tongariro and Tarawera, majestic in their outlines, fascinating because of the restless fires within and the outbreaks which have been and will again take place. Scattered about this plateau are lakes of every shape and size, from Taupo—called Te Moana (the sea) by the Maoris—to the tiniest lakelets and ponds. ”

“ But enough of the scenery of the Colony. This is to be a story, not a sketch-book. Enough that the drama of New Zealand's history, now in the second act, has been placed on one of the most remarkable and favourable stages in the globe. Much—too much—of its wild and singular beauty must be ruined in the process of settlement. But very much is indestructible. The colonists are also awakening to the truth that mere Vandalism is as stupid as it is brutal. Societies are being established for the preservation of scenery. The Government has undertaken to protect the more famous spots. ”

“ Sunrise is the moment to see him when his summit, sheeted with snow, is tinged with the crimson of morning and touched by clouds streaming past in the wind. Lucky is the eye that thus beholds Egmont, for he is a cloud-gatherer who does not show his face every day or to every gazer. ”