As I mentioned in a previous chapter, your Australasian is essentially a wanderer, and the huge distances involved have no terrors for him. Land travel, except where the railways run, is slow, painful, difficult, and often dangerous, although essentially romantic. But where business is concerned romance has little scope, and delay is to be avoided at all costs. Consequently, from the very earliest days of the Colonies there was an attempt made to satisfy the needs of the travelling public by making communication by sea as safe and easy as could be. The efforts of the pioneers in this direction met with great and well-deserved success, but side by side with their growth in power and wealth came the demands of the seamen and firemen to share. These demands were favoured by successive Colonial Governments, which have always had the interests of the workers at heart, being usually composed of men who had been hand-workers themselves. Of course, in the result the workers always won, amid the plaints of the shipowners who predicted ruin to their enterprises if such wages and such food were made compulsory. But the lugubrious prophecies of evil have not been fulfilled, even in the remotest sense, for to-day the coastal trade of Australasia is without a parallel in the world.
Indeed it seems almost miraculous, remembering the paucity of the population, how so immense a fleet can be maintained. Take, for instance, the Union Company, which, when I was in New Zealand thirty-three years ago, was just a babe in swaddling clothes with four or five small steamers. To-day it has a fleet of fifty-five fine steamships, including a veritable ocean flyer, the turbine Maheno—a pioneer, really, in ocean navigation for this part of the world. The headquarters of this giant Company are at Dunedin, a city of less than 60,000 inhabitants or one-fifth of the population of the Borough of Camberwell, in London. Yet, great as this Company is and splendid as are the services it renders, it has not been able to keep the whole of the coasting trade of these islands, with their population of less than 900,000, in its own hands. It has to share the trade with another growing firm, that of Huddart, Parker & Co., and smaller local firms like the Northern Steamship Company. Of course, the efforts of these firms are not alone confined to New Zealand. They maintain a constant communication between Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, and the Union Company sends its ships farther afield with great success to China, Japan, San Francisco, and Vancouver. It would not, I think, need a very great stretch of their energies for them to compete for the home trade (to Britain, I mean) with such giants as the Shaw, Savill, and Albion Company, the New Zealand Shipping Company, and Messrs. Tyser & Co. But I do not think they will bother about that as yet, since the Intercolonial trade is in so prosperous a condition, in spite of the high wages and good conditions of life accorded to the sailors and firemen.
In Australia, while there is no such phenomenally large Company working as the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand, we have wonderful evidences of the virility and enterprise of the seafaring element. Not only in the Australasian United Steam Navigation Company, and Howard Smith & Co., with several minor Companies to serve the coast, but there are such Companies as Messrs. Gibbs, Bright & Co. and Messrs. Currie & Co., who devote themselves to trade with India, China, and Malaysia, and, of course, possess steamers capable of holding their own with any deep-water ships owned by any other nation. I only mention this to show how, in spite of the short-sightedness of the rulers of this wonderful country in keeping the population down, the breed holds true and the mercantile fleet of Australasia is, in proportion, far greater than that of Great Britain—in proportion, that is, to population; any other comparison would be manifestly unfair. It is really difficult to realise how, in a city with a population of less than 60,000 inhabitants Dunedin, not by any means the first, but the fourth, in point of population in a land that numbers less than 900,000 all told, there should be owned a fleet of steamships worthy to take its place with those of any great Company in the world.
It is, I think, a portent of considerable magnitude that these Antipodean States are reaching out so vigorously after the oversea trade, as distinguished from the Intercolonial business. Messrs. Archibald Currie & Co., of Melbourne, trade with India, and are building ever larger and larger steamers to sustain the bulk of their rapidly growing business. Messrs. Gibbs, Bright & Co., and Messrs. Burns, Philp & Co., reach out after the Polynesian trade and the immense business that is being done in the Eastern Archipelago, Singapore, Malaysia, and China. The Union Company goes even farther afield, connecting the Northern Island up with Australasia viâ Vancouver, and straining every nerve to make the mail service in this direction as effective, despite the increased distance, as that carried on by the jerry-built ships of the American O.S.S. Company. By the utter short-sightedness and supineness of our rulers at home, the beautiful Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands became the property of the United States, who, in pursuance of their fixed policy, immediately declared them to be a portion of the United States coast, and excluded foreign—that is British—trade, between them and San Francisco or any other Yankee port. Is it any wonder that everybody out here grows restive at the unaccountable oscillations and vacillations of British policy, if the treatment of the Society Islands, Navigator Islands, New Hebrides, and New Guinea questions could be called a policy of anything else but drift and relinquish? It seems impossible for our rulers to realise that every port annexed by a foreign power means its being practically closed to British trade whether home or colonial. But these things are fully and practically realised here, and are bitterly resented.
At present, however, I am principally concerned with my departure from Sydney in this fine ship Zealandia, which is as perfect in her equipment, as up-to-date in every respect as any ocean liner, and, as I before mentioned, fully as large as the early ships of the Orient Line, such as the Garonne, John Elder, Lusitania, or Cuzco. As she slips away from her wharf and we glide quietly seawards, my mind flies back to the days of thirty-five years ago when I used to make the trip we are now on twice a month in a ship that, although only about one-third the size of this, was one of the finest coasters in the whole of Australasia, the Wentworth. I look somewhat wistfully at the beautiful panorama, wondering whether I shall ever behold it again, but thankful that I have once more been privileged to renew my acquaintance with one of the most beautiful spots on earth.
My almost invariable luck still holds, for the sea is like a mill-pond, this stretch of ocean between Australia and New Zealand not being a Mare Serenitatis by any means, as a rule. We have a fairly large number of passengers, many of whom belong to a theatrical company on tour, my first introduction to a travelling troupe. As there are only two classes in these ships, first and steerage, we have a curious gathering in saloon and smoke-room of scene-shifters, actors, and all the rest of the extraordinary "push" that goes to make up a theatrical company. But it is a typical little democracy, the manager of the whole show being on the best and most intimate possible terms with every member of his company down to the least important. To my mind, however, the most remarkable feature of this business is that there is a company of thirty children, of ages ranging from eight to fourteen, who are a study in themselves. They are the most precocious small people I have ever met, and yet not offensively so, like that terror in miniature, the American child. They are evidently as happy as it is possible for children to be, and every grown-up member of the company without exception is devoted to them, although they really seem to be unspoilable. They have, of course, a matron and a doctor in attendance upon them, and I understand that when they are ashore they attend school every forenoon. Healthier, happier, brighter children I never saw, their very business being a supreme delight. But glad as one must feel at seeing a lot of small folks having such a manifestly good time, the thought would persistently obtrude itself—what about their future? This gadding about from place to place in the company of people who, however kind, are not notable for a sense of responsibility, is most unsettling, and few indeed of these youngsters, either boys or girls, will be able to settle down again until middle age; while what is going to become of them during that awkward interregnum during which they are too old for their present business and not old enough, assuming they have the talent, for ordinary actors and actresses nobody seems to know or care. At present they are certainly living up to the letter of the Gospel injunction to take no thought for to-morrow, and, at any rate, they are having a splendid time.
In a blaze of golden sunset we sight the Three Kings, those outlying northern sentinels of New Zealand which will now always be remembered for the horrors attendant upon the wreck of the Elingamite only a few years ago. Curiously enough that terrible story—as it was so fully reiterated about the civilised world I need not now re-tell it—completely overlaid my early recollections of the Three Kings, all fortunately very pleasant. As a small boy in a Sydney steamer bound to Auckland I often saw them and always in fine weather, while again in a whaleship as a young man I have circled around their grim pinnacles, and never saw them veiled in the tempest spray which these stern seas can always raise upon the slightest provocation. Be sure I was up early in the morning, for the view along the north-east coast of New Zealand if the weather is fine is not to be beaten anywhere, more especially as you near the Hauraki Gulf and begin to approach Auckland. The fine weather still held, and the sun, blazing out of a cloudless sky, illuminated every crag, islet, and beach as we sped up the splendid sound to where grim Rangitoto waits like a stern sentinel over the smiling harbour, whose entrance he guards. I suppose living constantly within sight of a volcano, whether it be active or extinct, as long as its activity is not pronounced, tends to oblivion of its potentialities. But I confess that in my youthful days I never entered or left Auckland without glancing fearfully upwards at the crater of Rangitoto, as do visitors to Naples at Vesuvius, and wondering whether some day or other the giant Enceladus would awake from his slumbers and involve all that busy, beautiful environment in one heap of smoking ruins, Absit omen, and yet remembering the gigantic upheaval which caused the ruin of the pink and white terraces a quarter of a century ago, and, as geologists tell us, was only prevented from overwhelming this beautiful town by an extraordinary barrier of strata beneath the soil which shed the earth tremors off as a breakwater sheds the waves, it is impossible for an outsider who has been a frequent visitor to avoid having some such reflections as these. Fortunately for the progress of the world, the condition of mind of dwellers in seismic districts is closely akin to that of consumptives. It is a truism how a poor fellow in the last stages of phthisis will look commiseratingly upon a fellow-sufferer perhaps not nearly so far gone, and say, "Poor chap! he can't last long." When you anxiously inquire after the speaker's health he assures you, between bursts of coughing, that it is vastly improved, and really he has hardly ever felt better in his life. And so, in spite of St. Pierre, of Vesuvius, or of San Francisco, the volcano-encircled towns of the world go steadily on their way without apparently giving a thought to what may happen at any hour. Which, of course, is just how it should be, if our life is to be lived at all in decent fashion.
Ah! here we are in Auckland. But, dear me, I hardly know the place, and have to look back to Rangitoto to get my bearings. There is, of course, the same splendid land-locked harbour, but in my day there was one wharf with a "T" at its end, and the smaller fry of schooners and such-like, which in those early days Auckland was famous for building, had to be content with tiny jetties or an outer berth in the anchorage. And now the whole water-front of the city is a labyrinth of wharves, which, being yet all too small, are being extended with the utmost energy. No docks are needed in this entirely peaceful and land-locked bay, but wharves, wharves, and ever more wharves, to accommodate the trade of the Britain of the South. It is a splendid object lesson in the maritime instincts of the British race that this city, whose total population is about one-fifth of a big London parish, should have an oversea trade of such enormous dimensions as to require the expenditure of millions on the wharfage accommodation!