It seems that, shortly before he came out to New Zealand, O'Gaygun was concerned with others in the exportation from Ireland to America of a certain mineral. It was a heavy, white, glistening earth, which I take to have been witherite, or carbonate of baryta.
This stuff was sold ostensibly for paint-making, and certain Yankee merchants bought up all they could of it. Shipload after shipload went to America, and the Irish speculators were in high glee as the demand for it increased; although such a quantity had been shipped as would have sufficed to have whitewashed the entire two continents.
At last the real destination of the mineral came to light. It was powdered and mixed with flour, which America was then exporting largely to Europe. It made the finest flours heavier, and made seconds rank as first-class. So, according to O'Gaygun, hundreds and thousands of tons of this witherite were eaten by cheated Europe in the form of bread. A whole mountain, so he says, was shipped to the land of the Stars and Stripes; and as much as was sent came back to Europe as flour.
When the thing was blown upon, of course, the export gradually ceased. And I believe that O'Gaygun and his associates were blamed for participation in the fraud. Therefore he, poor, deluded Irishman, has ever since held the Yankee to be of very nature iniquitous in all his dealings. Well, let us hope that kauri-gum is, after all, only an innocent varnish basis, as is generally stated, and that it is not eaten as pork or beans or anything by a too-confiding British public.
The gum-diggers of Northern New Zealand are a peculiar body of nomads. They are recruited from every nation, and from every rank of society, and, like the communities gathered together on Australian or Californian gold-fields, present a strange medley of opposites.
Among them one may come across men who are graduates of the universities. One may find members of noble houses, representatives of historic names; nay, twice I have met men born to titles gum-digging. Then one may find diggers who should belong to professions they have abandoned—civil, military, learned, artistic. Clerks, accountants, secretaries, and shopmen swell the ranks of our Bohemian army. There are guileless peasants, natives of Norfolk or Devon, France or Germany, perhaps; and there are runaway sailors, ex-convicts, tinkers, tailors, printers' devils, pirates, rowdies, negroes, Kanakas, Maoris, Chinamen; a collection of gentlemen educated to every pursuit under the sun, in fact.
Throughout all this heterogeneous assemblage there exists entire equality, but little fraternization. Each man is as good as his fellow; there is no recognized line of demarcation between man and man. Yet gum-diggers are not gregarious as a rule; they are too jealous, each of another's possible luck, to admit of general brotherhood. Generally little gangs associate together and work in company; but it is rare that they do so on communistic principles. More often, each member of the gang works entirely for his own hand, though they may have food and so on in common.
There is precious little feeling of caste, or prejudice on account of different social ranks, remaining to us in this free land. What there is, however, places gum-diggers, as a class, on the bottommost level of society. Not that even that distinction conveys any slight upon individual gum-diggers; it is more a sort of abstract principle, than anything real or practical.
Still, they are sneered at occasionally by other colonists. It is a favourite theory that, if you should see some particularly haughty swell come out with all the pomp of a first-class passage, some grandiose creature of the scapegrace-fine-gentleman sort, with such airs and dignity as befit a man who feels that the colony was made for him, and not he for the colony, you may chuckle over his probable descent to gum-digging very soon. You have to get out of his lordly path while the air of the quarter-deck is round him, feeling that this humble country is only too much honoured by his mere presence in it. But, in a few months' time, you come across him on the gum-field, in ankle-jacks and ragged shirt, picking up a scanty living. He is Captain Gorgeous Dashabout no longer.
There is a certain charm about gum-digging, particularly to people of unsettled and gypsy-like disposition. You have no boss. You can do as you like; work when you like, and how you like; and lie on your back when it pleases you to do so, without fear of being rowed at by any one. Moreover, with ordinary luck, you can make as good wages as by working on a farm, and that with less actual toil, though possibly some additional hardship.