White men could generally escape by affecting to ignore the thing and taking ship for another country.
Unfortunately, as the reader will perceive, circumstances prevented my adoption of this course.
At the time I am telling of I was superintending their northern trading station at Te Mata for Messrs. Franks, Backhouse, and Co., a big Auckland firm. Puketawa—whom I have mentioned in previous Wide World contributions—a native of the South Island, educated at a mission school, was by way of being my servant and store-help. Having lived much with Europeans, and being ridiculously proud of the little the mission school had taught him, he affected to despise the Maoris of the neighbourhood. “Ignorant savages,” he called them, and stood aloof in the light of superior wisdom. At times he even permitted himself a mild remonstrance at what he considered my undue intimacy with the heathen. Education had made Puketawa a bit of a snob; but, for all that, he was a very good fellow.
The store, residence, and outbuildings stood on the shore of the tidal estuary of the Mangapai River. Over a low range of hills running parallel with the coast, at a distance of about half a mile, was the Maori “kainga” (village), having a population of about nine hundred souls.
It was with the object of bringing the blessings of civilization to these benighted inhabitants and—of course, quite incidentally—securing a profit to themselves that my principals had established the trading post.
Being the only station within a radius of fifty miles, trade was good, and neither merchants nor agent had reason for complaint on the score of value or bulk of the cargoes of native produce picked up by the firm’s trading steamer on its quarterly round.
By largess of sweets to the piccaninnies and gauds of cheap jewellery to their mothers, I had gained a certain popularity. With Te Horo, the chief, I was on terms of close friendship. I had quite won the old fellow’s heart by a timely gift of an imitation pearl necklace to his youngest and favourite wife. By careful tutelage I was fast inducing in these children of Nature a craving for the things of the white man’s higher life as represented by cotton goods, sugar, tea, tobacco, etc. For obvious reasons, therefore, I was anxious to retain their good will, and careful lest by any infringement of custom or superstition I should unwittingly offend. In the light of what follows this should be remembered.
The snipe were thick that autumn on the tidal flats at the river’s mouth, and as a break to the monotony and with a view to change of diet I would often close the store on Saturday afternoons and, with Puketawa, drop down stream on a gunning expedition.
It was on one of these weekly excursions that misfortune fell upon us. The birds were shy that day, and we followed them far over the sand-flats. Intent on our sport, neither of us noticed the signs of an ominous change in the weather, till, chancing to look seaward, I became suddenly aware of it. The blue water had changed in colour to a leaden grey and the horizon was hidden in a dense shroud of mist, which, with the wind behind it, was rapidly rolling up towards us. There was no time to lose. Our boat was at anchor a mile away on the inner edge of the sand-flat. It would be a race between us and the fog. If overtaken on those interminable banks we might wander, hopeless, till the returning tide drowned us like rats in a trap.
Fortune favoured us. We reached the boat, and, breathless, had just tumbled into it and hoisted sail, when the sea-fog shut down like a curtain. Sky, cliffs, and river channel were blotted out in an instant. No pretence at keeping a course was possible. The river ran due west, and, the wind coming from the east, it only remained to sit tight and let the boat scud before it, trusting to luck that we did not ram any one of the hundred rocky islets studding the river’s mouth.