WAIRUA FALLS
When the tree has been felled and cross-cut and the branches lopped off, the log may be lying many miles from the mill. Hills and ravines may have to be crossed or avoided. Orpheus with his lute would be invaluable to the New Zealand saw-miller. The local poet, though fond enough of addressing his stanzas to the forest trees, does not pretend to draw them to follow in his footsteps. Nor are our poets on the side of the saw-mills. So bushmen have to fall back upon mechanical devices and the aid of water-power. Long narrow tracks are cut, and floored with smooth skids. Along these logs are dragged—it may be by the wire rope of a traction machine, it may be by a team of bullocks. Over very short distances the logs are shifted by the men themselves, who “jack” them with a dexterity astonishing to the townsmen. Mainly, the journey to the mill is made either by tramway or water. Where a deep river is at hand, floating timber is a comparatively simple business. But more often the logs have to slide, be rolled or be hauled, into the beds of streams or creeks that may be half dry for months together. To obtain the needful depth of water, dams are often built, above which the logs accumulate in numbers and stay floating while their owners wait patiently for a fresh. Or the timber may remain stranded, in shallow creeks or in the reeds or stones of dwindled rivers. At length the rain-storm bursts, the sluices of the dams are hastily opened, and the logs in great companies start on their swim for the sea-coast. A heavy flood may mean loss to farmer and gardener, and be a nuisance to travellers; but to the saw-millers of a province it may be like the breaking-up of a long drought. They rub their hands and tell you that they have not had such a turn of luck for a twelvemonth,—“millions of feet were brought down yesterday!” As the rains descend and the floods come, their men hurry away to loosen barriers, start logs on their way, or steer them in their course. Wild is the rush of the timber as it is thus swept away, not in long orderly rafts such as one sees zigzagging along on the Elbe or St. Lawrence, but in a frantic mob of racing logs, spinning round, rolled over and over, colliding, plunging and reappearing in the swirling water. Rafts you may see in the ordinary way being towed down the Wairoa River to the Kaipara harbour by steam tugs. But in flood-time, when thousands of logs are taking an irresponsible course towards the ocean, the little steamers have a more exciting task. It is theirs to chase the logs, which, rolling and bobbing like schools of escaping whales, have to be caught and towed to some boom or harbourage near the saw-mill for which they are destined. Otherwise they may become imbedded in tidal mud, or may drift away to sea and be lost. Logs bearing the marks of Auckland saw-millers have been found ere now stranded on distant beaches after a voyage of several hundred miles.
Like axemen and log-rollers, the river hands who look after dams and floating logs have their accidents and hairbreadth escapes. They have to trust to courage and to an amphibious dexterity, of which they exhibit an ample share. Watch a man standing upright on a log huge enough to be a mast, and poling it along as though it were a punt. That looks easier than it is. But watch the same man without any pole controlling a rolling log and steering it with feet alone. That does not even look easy. Some years ago, it is said, a mill hand, when opening a dam in a rain-storm, fell into the flood and was swept down among the released timber. Amid the crash of tumbling logs he was carried over the dam and over a waterfall farther down stream. Yet he reached the bank with no worse injury than a broken wrist! I tell the tale as it was printed in an Auckland newspaper.
[CHAPTER V]
FIRE AND WATER
A long time ago, that is to say, in the twilight of Maori tradition, the chief Ngatoro and his wife, attended by a slave, landed on the shores of the Bay of Plenty. Thence they wandered inland through forests and over ferny downs, reaching at last a great central lake, beyond which high mountains stood sentry in the very heart of the island. One of these snow-clad summits they resolved to gain; but half-way on the climb the slave fell ill of sheer cold. Then the chief bethought him that in the Bay of Plenty he had noticed an island steaming and smoking, boiling with heat. Hot coals brought thence might warm the party and save the slave’s life. So Ngatoro, who was magician as well as chieftain, looked eastward and made incantations; and soon the fire rushing through the air fell at his feet. Another more prosaic version of the tale says that, Maori fashion, the kind-hearted hero despatched a messenger to bring the fire; he sent his wife. She, traversing land and sea at full speed, was soon back from White Island with a calabash full of glowing embers. From this, as she hurried along, sparks dropped here and there on her track. And wherever these fell the earth caught fire, hot springs bubbled up, and steam-jets burst through the fern. All her haste, however, went for nought; the slave died. Furious at his loss, her lord and master flung the red embers down one of the craters of Mount Tongariro, and from that day to this the mountains of Taupo have been filled with volcanic fires, smouldering or breaking out in eruption.[1]Such is one of the many legends which have grown up round the lakes and summits of the most famous volcanic province of New Zealand. It indicates the Maori understanding that the high cones south-west of Lake Taupo are one end of a chain of volcanic forces, and that the other end is White Island (Whaka-ari), the isolated crater which lifts its head above the sea twenty-seven miles out in the wide Bay of Plenty. It is a natural sulphur factory. Seen from the shores of the bay it looks peaceful enough. Its only peculiarity seems to be a white cloud rising high or streaming on the wind to leeward from the tip of its cone. At a distance the cloud appears not unlike other white clouds; but in the brightest weather it never vanishes away. I once spent three sunny spring days in riding round the great arc of the Bay of Plenty, often cantering for miles together along the sandy beach. There, out to sea, lay White Island always in view and always flying its white vapour-flag. In reality the quiet-looking islet seethes with fiery life. Seen at close quarters it is found to be a shell, which from one side looks comically like the well-worn stump of a hollow tooth. It is a barren crater near a thousand feet high, enclosing what was a lake and is now shrunk to a warm green pool, ringed with bright yellow sulphur. Hot springs boil and roar on the crater-lake’s surface, ever sending up columns of hissing and roaring steam many hundred feet into the air. At times, as in 1886, the steam has shot to the almost incredible height of fifteen thousand feet, a white pillar visible a hundred miles away. You may thrust a stick through the floor of the crater into the soft hot paste beneath. The walls of the abyss glow with heat, steam-jets hiss from their fissures, and on the outside is a thick crust of sulphur. The reek of the pit’s fumes easily outdoes that of the blackest and most vicious of London fogs. “It is not that soft smell of Roto-rua,” wrote Mr. Buddle, who smelt the place in 1906, “but an odour of sulphurous acid which sticks in one’s throat.” Yet commerce once tried to lay hands on White Island, and men were found willing to try and work amid its noisome activities. Commerce, however, failed to make Tartarus pay. Not far away from White Island lies Mayor Island, which once upon a time must have been an even stranger spot. It also is a high crater. On the rim of its yawning pit are to be seen the ruins of a Maori stockade, which, perched in mid-air and approachable only over the sea, must have been a hard nut for storming parties to crack in the bygone days of tribal wars. All is quiet now; the volcano has died out and the wars have become old tales.
[1] After writing this page I found that Mr. Percy Smith, formerly Surveyor-General, gives another version of the legend. He tells how the hero Ngatoro, landing on the shore of the Bay of Plenty, went inland, and, with a companion named Ngauruhoe, climbed Tongariro. Near the summit, Ngauruhoe died of cold, and Ngatoro, himself half-frozen, shouted to his sisters far away in the legendary island of Hawaiki to bring fire. His cry reached them far across the ocean, and they started to his rescue. Whenever they halted—as at White Island—and lit their camp fire, geysers spouted up from the ground. But when at length they reached Tongariro, it was only to find that Ngatoro, tired of waiting for them, had gone back to the coast.