The profits realized upon ventures from Nelson to the Gold Coast are enormous; nothing less than fifty per cent. will compensate the owners for losses on the bars. The first cattle imported from Nelson to The Buller fetched at the latter place double the price they had cost only two days earlier. One result of this maritime usury that was told me by the steward of the steamer in which I came down from Nelson is worth recording for the benefit of the Economists. They had on board, he said, a stock of spirits, sufficient for several trips, but they altered their prices according to locality; from Nelson to The Buller, they charged 6d. a drink, but, once in the river, the price rose to 1s., at which it remained until the ship left port upon her return to Nelson, when it fell again to 6d. A drover coming down in charge of cattle was a great friend of this steward, and the latter confirmed the story which he had told me by waking the drover when we were off The Buller bar: “Say, mister, if you want a drink, you‘d better take it. It‘ll be shilling drinks in five minutes.”
The Hokitikians flatter themselves that their city is the “most rising place” on earth, and it must be confessed that if population alone is to be regarded, the rapidity of its growth has been amazing. At the time of my visit, one year and a half had passed since the settlement was formed by a few diggers, and it already had a permanent population of ten thousand, while no less than sixty thousand diggers and their friends claimed it for their headquarters. San Francisco itself did not rise so fast, Melbourne not much faster; but Hokitika, it must be remembered, is not only a gold field port, but itself upon the gold field. It is San Francisco and Placerville in one—Ballarat and Melbourne.
Inferior in its banks and theaters to Virginia City, or even Austin, there is one point in which Hokitika surpasses every American mining town that I have seen—the goodness, namely, of its roads. Working upon them in the bright morning sun which this day graced “rainy Hokitika” with its presence, were a gang of diggers and sailors, dressed in the clothes which every one must wear in a digging town, unless he wishes to be stared at by passers-by. Even sailors on shore “for a run” here wear cord breeches and high tight-fitting boots, often armed with spurs, though, as there are no horses except those of the Gold Coast Police, they cannot enjoy much riding. The gang working on the roads were like the people I met about the town—rough, but not ill-looking fellows. To my astonishment I saw, conspicuous among their red shirts and “jumpers,” the blue and white uniform of the mounted police; and from the way in which the constables handled their loaded rifles, I came to the conclusion that the road-menders must be a gang of prisoners. On inquiry, I found that all the New Zealand “convicts,” including under this sweeping title men convicted for mere petty offenses, and sentenced to hard labor for a month, are made to do good practical work upon the roads: so much resistance to the police, so much new road made or old road mended. I was reminded of the Missourian practice of setting prisoners to dig out the stumps that cumber the streets of the younger towns: the sentence on a man for being drunk is said to be that he pull up a black walnut stump; drunk and disorderly, a large buck-eye; assaulting the sheriff, a tough old hickory root, and so on.
The hair and beard of the short-sentence “convicts” in New Zealand is never cut, and there is nothing hang-dog in their looks; but their faces are often bright, and even happy. These cheerful prisoners are for the most part “runners”—sailors who have broken their agreements in order to get upon the diggings, and who bear their punishment philosophically, with the hope of future “finds” before them.
When the great rush to Melbourne occurred in 1848, ships by the hundred were left in the Yarra without a single hand to navigate them. Nuggets in the hand would not tempt sailors away from the hunt after the nuggets in the bush. Ships left Hobson‘s Bay for Chili with half a dozen hands; and in one case that came within my knowledge, a captain, his mate, and three Maories took a brig across the Pacific to San Francisco.
As the morning wore on, I came near seeing something of more serious crime than that for which these “runners” were convicted. “Sticking-up,” as highway robbery is called in the colonies, has always been common in Australia and New Zealand, but of late the bush-rangers, deserting their old tactics, have commenced to murder as well as rob. In three months of 1866, no less than fifty or sixty murders took place in the South Island of New Zealand, all of them committed, it was believed, by a gang known as “The Thugs.” Mr. George Dobson, the government surveyor, was murdered near Hokitika in May, but it was not till November that the gang was broken up by the police and volunteers. Levy, Kelly, and Burgess, three of the most notorious of the villains, were on their trial at Hokitika while I was there, and Sullivan, also a member of the band, who had been taken at Nelson, had volunteered to give evidence against them. Sullivan was to come by steamer from the North, without touching at The Buller or The Grey; and when the ship was signaled, the excitement of the population became considerable, the diggers asserting that Sullivan was not only the basest, but the most guilty of all the gang. As the vessel ran across the bar and into the bay, the police were marched down to the landing-place, and a yelling crowd surrounded them, threatening to lynch the informer. When the steamer came alongside the wharf, Sullivan was not to be seen, and it was soon discovered that he had been landed in a whale-boat upon the outer beach. Off rushed the crowd to intercept the party in the town; but they found the jail gates already shut and barred.
It was hard to say whether it was for Thuggism or for turning Queen‘s evidence that Sullivan was to be lynched: crime is looked at here as leniently as it is in Texas. I once met a man who had been a coroner at one of the digging towns, who, talking of “old times,” said, quietly enough: “Oh, yes, plenty of work; we used to make a good deal of it. You see I was paid by fees, so I used generally to manage to hold four or five inquests on each body. Awful rogues my assistants were: I shouldn‘t like to have some of those men‘s sins to answer for.”
The Gold Coast Police Force, which has been formed to put a stop to Thuggism and bush-ranging, is a splendid body of cavalry, about which many good stories are told. One digger said to me: “Seen our policemen? We don‘t have no younger sons of British peers among ’em.” Another account says that none but members of the older English universities are admitted to the force.
There are here, upon the diggings, many military men and university graduates, who generally retain their polish of manner, though outwardly they are often the roughest of the rough. Some of them tell strange stories. One Cambridge man, who was acting as a post-office clerk (not at Hokitika), told me that in 1862, shortly after taking his degree, he went out to British Columbia to settle upon land. He soon spent his capital at billiards in Victoria City, and went as a digger to the Frazer River. There he made a “pile,” which he gambled away on his road back, and he struggled through the winter of 1863-4 by shooting and selling game. In 1864 he was attached as a hunter to the Vancouver‘s Exploring Expedition, and in 1865 started with a small sum of money for Australia. He was wrecked, lost all he had, and was forced to work his passage down to Melbourne. From there he went into South Australia as the driver of a reaping machine, and was finally, through the efforts of his friends in England, appointed to a post-office clerkship in New Zealand, which colony he intended to quit for California or Chili. This was not the only man of education whom I myself found upon the diggings, as I met with a Christchurch man, who, however, had left Oxford without a degree, actually working as a digger in a surface mine.
In the outskirts of Hokitika, I came upon a palpable Life Guardsman, cooking for a roadside station, with his smock worn like a soldier‘s tunic, and his cap stuck on one ear in Windsor fashion. A “squatter” from near Christchurch, who was at The Buller, selling sheep, told me that he had an ex-captain in the Guards at work for weekly wages on his “sheep-run,” and that a neighbor had a lieutenant of lancers rail-splitting at his “station.”