PREFATORY NOTE
BY THE RIGHT HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE
On the west side of the Southern Island of New Zealand there rises from the sea a magnificent mass of snowy mountains, whose highest peak, Aorangi or Mount Cook, reaches an elevation of 12,347 feet. Some of the loftiest summits are visible in the far distance from the railway which runs down the east coast of the island from Christchurch to Dunedin, but to appreciate the full grandeur of the range it must be seen either from out at sea or from points north of it on the west coast. The view from the seaport of Greymouth on that coast, nearly a hundred miles from Aorangi, is not only one of the finest mountain views which the world affords, but is almost unique as a prospect of a long line of snows rising right out of an ocean. One must go to North-Western America, or to the Caucasus where it approaches the Euxine, north of Poti, or possibly to Kamschatka (of which I cannot speak from personal knowledge), to find peaks so high which have the full value of their height, because they spring directly from the sea. The Andes are of course loftier, but they stand farther back from the shore, and they are seldom well seen from it.
In Southern New Zealand the line of perpetual snow is much lower than it is in the Alps of Europe. It varies, of course, in different parts of the range; but generally speaking, a mountain 12,000 feet high in New Zealand carries as much snow and ice as one of 15,000 feet in the Swiss Alps, and New Zealanders point with pride to glaciers comparable to the Aletsch and the Mer de Glace. On the west, some of the great ice-streams descend to within seven hundred feet of sea-level, and below the line of perpetual snow the steep declivities are covered with a thick and tangled forest, extremely difficult to penetrate, where tree ferns grow luxuriantly in the depths of the gorges. The region is one of the wettest and most thickly wooded in the world; and it is a region that might have lain long unexplored, except in those few spots where gold has been found, had it not been for the growth, about seventy years ago, of the passion for mountaineering, which has carried British climbers all over the earth in search of places where their prowess could find a field for its display. The first who forced their way into it were some New Zealand Government surveyors in 1862.
The first mountaineer to attempt Aorangi was my friend the Rev. W. S. Green of Dublin (now one of the most honoured veterans of our own Alpine Club), who had all but reached the summit when nightfall and bad weather forced him to turn back. After him came some bold New Zealand climbers and Mr. E. A. Fitzgerald. One of the former, Mr. T. C. Fyfe, with his companions, George Graham and J. Clark, reached the very top of Aorangi in 1894. Among these native mountaineers Mr. Malcolm Ross has been one of the most daring and most persevering. I had the pleasure, at Wellington, New Zealand, a year and a half ago, of listening to a most interesting description which he gave of his adventures and those of his comrades, and could realize from it the dangers as well as the hardships which the climber has to face in New Zealand. The weather, on the west coast especially, can be awful, for fierce storms sweep up from the Tasman Sea, that most tempestuous part of the Pacific, whose twelve hundred miles furnished the twelve hundred reasons why New Zealand declined to enter the Australian Federation. The base of operations is distant, for no alpine hotels and hardly any shelter huts have yet been built, such as those which the Swiss, German-Austrian, and Italian Alpine clubs have recently provided in their mountain lands. The New Zealand climber, who has been almost always his own guide, has sometimes to be his own porter also. And the slopes and glens, when one approaches the west coast, are covered with so dense a growth of trees and shrubs that progress is always slow and often difficult. No finer work in conquering nature has been done by climbers anywhere than here. But the guerdon was worth the effort. The scenery is magnificent, with a character that is all its own, for New Zealand landscapes are unlike not only those of our northern hemisphere, but those of South America also; and the youth of the Islands have been fired by the ambition to emulate those British mountaineers whose achievements they admire, as well as by a patriotic love for their own beautiful and fascinating land. I hope that the fresh and vivid descriptions Mr. Ross gives of the charms of New Zealand landscape, and of the scope which its peaks and glaciers afford for the energy and skill of those who find that the European Alps have now little that is new to offer, may draw to it more and more visitors from Britain.
February 2, 1914.