New Zealand

by Reginald Horsley

The moa was long ago exterminated by the Maori, who saw in its huge bulk magnificent prospect of a feast of meat. All that is left of it to-day are bones in various museums, one or two complete skeletons, and a few immense eggs.

There were several species of this bird, the largest of them from twelve to fourteen feet in height; but, huge as they were, they appear to have possessed little power of self-defence, though a kick from one of their enormous legs and long-clawed feet would have killed a man. But, like all wingless birds, they were shy and timid, never coming to a knowledge of their strength; so they fell before a weaker animal, but one of infinitely greater ingenuity.

The bones of birds are filled with air, for the sake of warmth and lightness; but the leg bones of the moa, like those of a beast, and unlike those of any known bird, were filled with marrow.

Diminutive in size, and in appearance even more extraordinary than its cousin, the moa, is the kiwi, as the Maori named the apteryx from its peculiar cry. Several species were plentiful in the Islands, but some of them have become extinct, and the rest are fast disappearing. The Maori attract the bird by imitating its call and, as it is rather stupid, it is easily caught and killed.

The kiwi was served up at table, as were most things in New Zealand which walked or swam or flew; but what gave it surpassing value in Maori eyes was its plumage of short, silky feathers, whose beauty they were quick to recognise, and which they employed in fashioning one of the rarest and most ornamental of their mats (kahu-kiwi).

There was little difficulty about the erection of houses and forts, the building of canoes, the shaping of spears and clubs. Given the ability to construct, there was material in plenty. Throughout the land spread magnificent forests, whose plumed tops waved above trunks uprearing one hundred feet, or more, some of them of an age well-nigh incredible. Few and short appeared the years of man beside the life of the giant kauri[36] which for close upon four thousand years had towered there, stately emperors in a company of kings.[37] How brief the age of their forest court compared with their own—the totara[38] with its eight hundred years of life, the rimu[39] with its six hundred, the matai[40] with its four hundred. What are they beside the dominant kauri? Mortals, looking up to an immortal.

Crowded in those forests primeval were trees bearing wood with capacity for every class of work to which man could put his hand. Trees with wood of iron hardness; trees with wood so soft that it fell away in silky flakes at the touch of the knife; trees with wood of medium consistence, durable as stone; trees whose wood under the hands of the artist-polisher took on a beauty indescribable; trees whose bark was rich in all that the tanner needs; trees which yielded invaluable resin and turpentine; trees which gave up no less valuable tar and pitch; trees which could be reduced to wood-pulp for the making of paper when the time for that should come: all these there were, and more.

So the Maori set to work, building houses and forts, and hewing out canoes. For the last, those who dwelt in the north chose the great trunks of the kauri, often forty feet in circumference, and of such diameter that a tall man with outspread arms could not stretch from rim to rim of the cross section. In the south they used the totara, likewise a pine, and great, but a pigmy beside the imperial kauri.