Part 19 (1/2)
Neither the habits nor the morals of this strange community are of the best. You never see a drunken man, but drinking is apparently the chief occupation of that portion of the town population which is not actually employed in digging. The mail-coaches which run across the island on the great new road, and along the sands to the other mining settlements, have singularly short stages, made so, it would seem, for the benefit of the keepers of the ”saloons,” for at every halt one or other of the pa.s.sengers is expected to ”shout,” or ”stand,” as it would be called at home, ”drinks all round.” ”What'll yer shout?” is the only question; and want of coined money need be no hinderance, for ”gold-dust is taken at the bar.” One of the favorite amus.e.m.e.nts of the diggers at Pakihi, on the days when the store-schooner arrives from Nelson, is to fill a bucket with champagne, and drink till they feel ”comfortable.” This done, they seat themselves in the road, with their feet on the window-sill of the shanty, and, calling to the first pa.s.ser, ask him to drink from the bucket. If he consents--good: if not, up they jump, and duck his head in the wine, which remains for the next comer.
When I left Hokitika, it was by the new road, 170 miles in length, which crosses the Alps and the island, and connects Christchurch, the capital of Canterbury, with the western parts of the province. The bush between the sea and mountains is extremely lovely. The highway is ”corduroyed”
with trunks of the tree-fern, and, in the swamps, the sleepers have commenced to grow at each end, so that a close-set double row of young tree-ferns is rising along portions of the road. The bush is densely matted with an undergrowth of supple-jack and all kinds of creepers, but here and there one finds a grove of tree-ferns twenty feet in height, and grown so thickly as to prevent the existence of underwood and ground plants.
The peculiarity which makes the New Zealand west-coast scenery the most beautiful in the world to those who like more green than California has to show, is that here alone can you find semi-tropical vegetation growing close up to the eternal snows. The lat.i.tude and the great moisture of the climate bring the long glaciers very low into the valleys; and the absence of all true winter, coupled with the rain-fall, causes the growth of palmlike ferns upon the ice-river's very edge. The glaciers of Mount Cook are the longest in the world, except those at the sources of the Indus, but close about them have been found tree-ferns of thirty and forty feet in height. It is not till you enter the mountains that you escape the moisture of the coast, and quit for the scenery of the Alps the scenery of fairy-land.
b.u.mping and tumbling in the mail-cart through the rus.h.i.+ng blue-gray waters of the Taramakao, I found myself within the mountains of the Snowy Range. In the Otira Gorge, also know as Arthur's Pa.s.s--from Arthur Dobson, brother to the surveyor murdered by the Thugs--six small glaciers were in sight at once. The Rocky Mountains opposite to Denver are loftier and not less snowy than the New Zealand Alps, but in the Rockies there are no glaciers south of about 50 N.; while in New Zealand--a winterless country--they are common at eight degrees nearer to the line. The varying amount of moisture has doubtless caused this difference.
As we journeyed through the pa.s.s, there was one grand view--and only one: the glimpse of the ravine to the eastward of Mount Rollestone, caught from the desert sh.o.r.e of Lake Misery--a tarn near the ”divide” of waters. About its banks there grows a plant, unknown, they say, except at this lonely spot--the Rockwood lily--a bushy plant, with a round, polished, concave leaf, and a cup-shaped flower of virgin white, that seems to take its tint from the encircling snows.
In the evening, we had a view that for gloomy grandeur cannot well be matched--that from near Bealey towns.h.i.+p, where we struck the Waimakiriri Valley. The river bed is half a mile in width, the stream itself not more than ten yards across, but, like all New Zealand rivers, subjects to freshets, which fill its bed to a great depth with a surging, foaming flood. Some of the victims of the Waimakiriri are buried alongside the road. Dark evergreen bush shuts in the river bed, and is topped on the one side by dreary frozen peaks, and on the other by still gloomier mountains of bare rock.
Our road, next morning, from The Ca.s.s, where we had spent the night, lay through the eastern foot-hills and down to Canterbury Plains by way of Porter's Pa.s.s--a narrow track on the top of a tremendous precipice, but soon to be changed for a road cut along its face. The plains are one great sheep-run, open, almost flat, and upon which you lose all sense of size. At the mountain-foot they are covered with tall, coa.r.s.e, native gra.s.s, and are dry, like the Kansas prairie; about Christchurch, the English clover and English gra.s.ses have usurped the soil, and all is fresh and green.
New Zealand is at present divided into nine semi-independent provinces, of which three are large and powerful, and the remainder comparatively small and poor. Six of the nine are true States, having each its history as an independent settlement; the remaining three are creations of the Federal government or of the crown.
These are not the only difficulties in the way of New Zealand statesmen, for the provinces themselves are far from being h.o.m.ogeneous units. Two of the wealthiest of all the States, which were settled as colonies with a religious tinge--Otago, Presbyterian; and Canterbury, Episcopalian--have been blessed or cursed with the presence of a vast horde of diggers, of no particular religion, and free from any reverence for things established. Canterbury Province is not only politically divided against itself, but geographically split in twain by the Snowy Range, and the diggers hold the west-coast bush, the old settlers the east-coast plain. East and west, each cries out that the other side is robbing it. The Christchurch people say that their money is being spent on Westland, and the Westland diggers cry out against the foppery and aristocratic pretense of Christchurch. A division of the province seems inevitable, unless, indeed, the ”Centralists” gain the day, and bring about either a closer union of the whole of the provinces, coupled with a grant of local self-government to their subdivisions, or else the entire destruction of the provincial system.
The division into provinces was at one time necessary, from the fact that the settlements were historically distinct, and physically cut off from each other by the impenetrability of the bush and the absence of all roads; but the barriers are now surmounted, and no sufficient reason can be found for keeping up ten cabinets and ten legislatures for a population of only 200,000 souls. Such is the costliness of the provincial system and of Maori wars, that the taxation of the New Zealanders is nine times as heavy as that of their brother colonists in Canada.
It is not probable that so costly and so inefficient a system of government as that which now obtains in New Zealand can long continue to exist. It is not only dear and bad, but dangerous in addition; and during my visit to Port Chalmers, the province of Otago was loudly threatening secession. Like all other federal const.i.tutions, that of New Zealand fails to provide a sufficiently strong central power to meet a divergence of interests between the several States. The system which failed in Greece, which failed in Germany, which failed in America, has failed here in the antipodes; and it may be said that, in these days of improved communications, wherever federation is possible, a still closer union is at least as likely to prove lasting.
New Zealand suffers, not only by the artificial division into provinces, but also by the physical division of the country into two great islands, too far apart to be ever thoroughly h.o.m.ogeneous, too near together to be wholly independent of each other. The difficulty has been hitherto increased by the existence in the North of a powerful and warlike native race, all but extinct in the South Island. Not only have the Southern people no native wars, but they have no native claimants from whom every acre for the settler must be bought, and they naturally decline to submit to ruinous taxation to purchase Parewanui from, or to defend Taranaki against, the Maories. Having been thwarted by the Home government in the agitation for the ”separation” of the islands, the Southern people now aim at ”Ultra-Provincialism,” declaring for a system under which the provinces would virtually be independent colonies, connected only by a confederation of the loosest kind.
The jealousies of the great towns, here as in Italy, have much bearing upon the political situation. Auckland is for separation, because in that event it would of necessity become the seat of the government of the North Island. In the South, Christchurch and Dunedin have similar claims; and each of them, ignoring the other, begs for separation in the hope of becoming the Southern capital. Wellington and Nelson alone are for the continuance of the federation--Wellington because it is already the capital, and Nelson because it is intriguing to supplant its neighbor. Although the difficulties of the moment mainly arise out of the war expenditure, and will terminate with the extinction of the Maori race, her geographical shape almost forbids us to hope that New Zealand will ever form a single country under a strong central government.
To obtain an adequate idea of the difficulty of his task, a new governor, on landing in New Zealand, could not do better than cross the Southern Island. On the west side of the mountains he would find a restless digger-democracy, likely to be succeeded in the future by small manufacturers, and spade-farmers growing root-crops upon small holdings of fertile loam; on the east, gentlemen sheep-farmers, holding their twenty thousand acres each; supporters by their position of the existing state of things, or of an aristocratic republic, in which men of their own caste would rule.
Christchurch--Episcopalian, dignified--the first settlement in the province, and still the capital, affects to despise Hokitika, already more wealthy and more populous. Christchurch imports English rooks to caw in the elm-trees of her cathedral close; Hokitika imports men.
Christchurch has not fallen away from her traditions: every street is named from an English bishopric, and the society is that of an English country town.
Returning northward, along the coast, in the shade of the cold and gloomy mountains of the Kaikoura Range, I found at Wellington two invitations awaiting me to be present at great gatherings of the native tribes.
The next day I started for the Manawatu River and Parewanui Pah.
CHAPTER III.
POLYNESIANS.
The name ”Maori” is said to mean ”native,” but the boast on the part of the Maori race contained in the t.i.tle ”Natives of the Soil” is one which conflicts with their traditions. These make them out to be mere interlopers--Tahitians, they themselves say--who, within historic ages, sailed down island by island in their war canoes, ma.s.sacring the inhabitants, and, finally landing in New Zealand, found a numerous horde of blacks of the Australian race living in the forests of the South Island. Favored by a year of exceptional drought, they set fire to the woods, and burnt to the last man, or drove into the sea the aboriginal possessors of the soil. Some ethnologists believe that this account is in the main correct, but hold that the Maori race is Malay, and not originally Tahitian: others have tried to show that the conflict between blacks and browns was not confined to these two islands, but raged throughout the whole of Polynesia; and that it was terminated in New Zealand itself, not by the destruction of the blacks, but by the amalgamation of the opposing races.
The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to New Zealand. The accounts of some of the migrations are circ.u.mstantial in the extreme, and describe the first planting of the yams, the astonishment of the people at the new flowers and trees of the islands, and many such details of the landing. The names of the chiefs and of the canoes are given in a sort of ”catalogue of s.h.i.+ps,” and the wars of the settlers are narrated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common to the legends of all lands.
The canoe fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth century it is believed, and the people landed chanting a chorus-speech, which is still preserved:
”We come at last to this fair land--a resting-place; Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our hearts for food.”