Cruise states that this solemn dedication has sometimes saved these depositories from spoliation, even on occasion of a hostile attack by another tribe. "One of the gentlemen of the ship," this writer adds, "was present at the 'shackerie,'[[AL]] or harvest-home, if it may be so called, of Shungie's people. It was celebrated in a wood, where a square space had been cleared of trees, in the centre of which three very tall posts, driven into the ground in the form of a triangle, supported an immense pile of baskets of coomeras. The tribe of Teeperree[[AM]] of Wangarooa[[AN]] was invited to participate in the rejoicings, which consisted of a number of dances performed round the pole, succeeded by a very splendid feast; and when Teeperree's men were going away, they received a present of as many coomeras as they could carry with them." In New Zealand all the cultivated fields are strictly "tabooed," as well as the people employed in cultivating them, who live upon the spot while they proceed with their labours, and are not permitted to pass the boundary until they are terminated; nor are any others allowed to trespass upon the sacred enclosure.
We have already mentioned more than once the lofty forests of New Zealand. Of these, considered as a mere ornament to the country, all who have seen them speak in terms of the highest admiration. Anderson, the surgeon whom Cook took with him on board the "Resolution" in his third voyage, describes them as "flourishing with a vigour almost superior to anything that imagination can conceive, and affording an august prospect to those who are delighted with the grand and beautiful works of Nature."
"It is impossible," says Nicholas, "to imagine, in the wildest and most picturesque walks of Nature, a sight more sublime and majestic, or which can more forcibly challenge the admiration of the traveller, than a New Zealand forest."
And indeed, when we are told that the trees rise generally to the height of from eighty to a hundred feet, straight as a mast and without a branch, and are then crowned with tops of such umbrageous foliage that the rays of the sun, in endeavouring to pierce through them, can hardly make more than a dim twilight in the lonely recesses below, so that herbage cannot grow there, and the rank soil produces nothing but a thick spread of climbing and intertwisted underwood, we may conceive how imposing must be the gloomy grandeur of these gigantic and impenetrable groves.
Scene in a New Zealand forest.
In the woods in the neighbourhood of Poverty Bay, Cook says he found trees of above twenty different sorts, altogether unknown to anybody on board; and almost every new district which he visited afterwards presented to him a profusion of new varieties. But the trees that have as yet chiefly attracted the attention of Europeans are certain of those more lofty ones of which we have just spoken.
These trees had attracted Cook's attention in his first voyage, as likely to prove admirably adapted for masts, if the timber, which in its original state he considered rather too heavy for that purpose, could, like that of the European pitch-pine, be lightened by tapping; they would then, he says, be such masts as no country in Europe could produce. Crozet, however, asserts, in his account of Marion's voyage that they found what he calls the cedar of New Zealand to weigh no heavier than the best Riga fir.
Nicholas brought some of the seeds of the New Zealand phormium with him to England in 1815; but unfortunately they lost their vegetative properties during the voyage. It appears, however, that, some years before, it had been brought to blossom, though imperfectly, in the neighbourhood of London; and in France it is said to have been cultivated in the open air with great success, by Freycinet and Faujas St. Fond. Under the culture of the former of these gentlemen it grew, in 1813, to the height of seven feet six lines, the stalk being three inches and four lines in circumference at the base, and two inches and a half, half-way up. Upon one stalk he had a hundred and nine flowers, of a greenish yellow colour; and he had made some very strong ropes from the leaves, from which he had obtained the flax by a very simple process.