Kapiti, in Cook’s Strait, containing, as it does, barely 5000 acres, is the smallest of the three island sanctuaries, but unlike the other two it has made some figure in New Zealand history. In the blood-stained years before annexation it was seized by the noted marauder Rauparaha, whose acute eye saw in it a stronghold at once difficult to attack, and excellently placed for raids upon the main islands, both north and south. From Kapiti, with his Ngatitoa warriors and his fleet of war-canoes, he became a terror to his race. His expeditions, marked with the usual treachery, massacre, and cannibalism of Maori warfare, reached as far south as Akaroa in Banks’ Peninsula, and indirectly led to the invasion of the Chathams, and the almost complete extirpation of the inoffensive Moriori. Rauparaha’s early life might have taught him pity, for he was himself a fugitive who, with his people, had been hunted away first from Kawhia, then from Taranaki, by the stronger Waikato. He lived to wreak vengeance—on the weaker tribes of the south. No mean captain, he seems only to have suffered one reverse in the South Island—a surprise by Tuhawaiki (Bloody Jack). Certainly his only fight with white men—that which we choose to call the Wairau massacre—was disastrous enough to us. In Kapiti itself, in the days before the hoisting of the Union Jack, Rauparaha had white neighbours—I had almost said friends—in the shape of the shore whalers, whose long boats were then a feature of our coastal waters. They called him “Rowbulla,” and affected to regard him with the familiarity which breeds contempt. On his side he found that they served his purpose—which in their case was trade—well enough. Both Maori and whaler have long since passed away from Kapiti, and scarce a trace of them remains, save the wild goats which roam about the heights and destroy the undergrowth of the forest. The island itself resembles one side of a high-pitched roof. To the west, a long cliff, 1700 feet high, faces the famous north-west gales of Cook’s Strait, and shows the wearing effects of wind and wave. Eastward from the ridge the land slopes at a practicable angle, and most of it is covered with a thick, though not very imposing forest. Among the ratas, karakas, tree ferns and scrub of the gullies, wild pigeons, bell-birds, tuis, whiteheads, and other native birds still hold their own. Plants from the north and south mingle in a fashion that charms botanists like Dr. Cockayne. This gentleman has lately conveyed to Kapiti a number of specimens from the far-away Auckland isles, and if the Government will be pleased to have the goats and cattle killed off, and interlopers, like the sparrows and the Californian quail, kept down, there is no reason why Kapiti should not become a centre of refuge for the rarer species of our harassed fauna and flora.
THE BULLER RIVER NEAR HAWK’S CRAIG
Twice as large as Kapiti, and quite twice as picturesque, the Little Barrier Island, the northern bird-sanctuary, is otherwise little known. It has no history to speak of, though Mr. Shakespear, its care-taker, has gathered one or two traditions. A sharp fight, for instance, between two bands of Maori was decided on its shore; and for many years thereafter a tree which stood there was pointed out as the “gallows” on which the cannibal victors hung the bodies of their slain enemies. At another spot on the boulders of the beach an unhappy fugitive is said to have paddled in his canoe, flying from a defeat on the mainland. Landing exhausted, he found the islanders as merciless as the foes behind, and was promptly clubbed and eaten. However, the Little Barrier is to-day as peaceful an asylum as the heart of a persecuted bird could desire. The stitch-bird, no longer hunted by collectors, is once more increasing in numbers there, and has for companion the bell-bird—the sweetest of our songsters, save one,—which has been driven from its habitat on the main North Island. Godwits, wearied with their long return journey from Siberia, are fain, “spent with the vast and howling main,” to rest on the Little Barrier before passing on their way across the Hauraki Gulf. Fantails and other wild feathered things flutter round the care-taker’s house, for—so he tells us—he does not suffer any birds—not even the friendless and much-disliked cormorant—to be injured. Along with the birds, the tuatara lizard (and the kauri, pohutu-kawa, and other trees, quite as much in need of asylum as the birds) may grow and decay unmolested in the quiet ravines. The island lies forty-five miles from Auckland, and nearly twenty from the nearest mainland, so there is no need for it to be disturbed by anything worse than the warm and rainy winds that burst upon it from north-east and north-west.
Water, the force that beautifies the west and south-west, has been the chief foe of their explorers. The first whites to penetrate their gorges and wet forests found their main obstacles in rivers, lakes, and swamps. Unlike pioneers elsewhere, they had nothing to fear from savages, beasts, reptiles, or fever. Brunner, one of the earliest to enter Westland, spent more than a year away from civilisation, encountering hardship, but never in danger of violence from man or beast. Still, such a rugged and soaking labyrinth could not be traversed and mapped out without loss. There is a death-roll, though not a very long one. Nearly all the deaths were due to drowning. Mr. Charlton Howitt, one of the Anglo-Victorian family of writers and explorers, was lost with two companions in Lake Brunner. The one survivor of Howitt’s party died from the effects of hardship. Mr. Townsend, a Government officer, who searched Lake Brunner for Howitt’s body, was himself drowned not long after, also with two companions. Mr. Whitcombe, surveyor, perished in trying to cross the Teremakau in a canoe. Von Haast’s friend, the botanist Dr. Sinclair, was drowned in a torrent in the Alps of Canterbury. Quintin M’Kinnon, who did as much as any one to open up the region between the southern lakes and the Sounds, sank in a squall while sailing alone in Lake Te Anau. Professor Brown, of the University of Otago, who disappeared in the wilds to the west of Manapouri, is believed to have been swept away in a stream there. The surveyor Quill, the only man who has yet climbed to the top of the Sutherland Falls, lost his life afterwards in the Wakatipu wilderness. Only one death by man’s violence is to be noted in the list—that of Dobson, a young surveyor of much promise, who was murdered by bush-rangers in northern Westland about forty years ago. I have named victims well known and directly engaged in exploring. The number of gold-diggers, shepherds, swagmen, and nondescripts who have gone down in the swift and ice-cold rivers of our mountains is large. Among them are not a few nameless adventurers drawn westward by the gold rushes of the ’sixties. It is a difficult matter to gauge from the bank the precise amount of risk to be faced in fording a clouded torrent as it swirls down over hidden boulders and shifting shingle. Even old hands miscalculate sometimes. When once a swagman stumbles badly and loses his balance, he is swept away, and the struggle is soon over. There is a cry; a man and a swag are rolled over and over; he drops his burden and one or both are sucked under in an eddy—perhaps to reappear, perhaps not. It may be that the body is stranded on a shallow, or it may be that the current bears it down to a grave in the sea.
BELOW THE JUNCTION OF THE BULLER AND INANGAHUA RIVERS
The south-western coast was the first part of our islands seen by a European. Tasman sighted the mountains of Westland in 1642. Cook visited the Sounds more than once, and spent some time in Dusky Sound in 1771. Vancouver, who served under Cook, anchored there in command of an expedition in 1789; and Malaspina, a Spanish navigator, took his ship among the fiords towards the end of the eighteenth century. But Tasman did not land; and though the others did, and it is interesting to remember that such noted explorers of the southern seas came there in the old days of three-cornered hats, pigtails, and scurvy, still it must be admitted that their doings in our south-western havens were entirely commonplace. Vancouver and the Spaniards had no adventures. Nothing that concerns Cook can fail to interest the student; and the story of his anchorages and surveys, of the “spruce beer” which he brewed from a mixture of sprigs of rimu and leaves of manuka, and of his encounters with the solitary family of Maori met with on the coast, is full of meaning to the few who pore over the scraps of narrative which compose the history of our country prior to 1800. There is satisfaction in knowing that the stumps of the trees cut down by Cook’s men are still to be recognised. To the general reader, however, any stirring elements found in the early story of the South Island were brought in by the sealers and whalers who came in the wake of the famous navigators, rather than by the discoverers themselves. One lasting service the first seamen did to the Sounds: they left plain and expressive names on most of the gulfs, coves, and headlands. Doubtful Sound, Dusky Sound, Wet Jacket Arm, Chalky Island, Parrot Island, Wood Hen Cove, speak of the rough experiences and everyday life of the sailors. Resolution, Perseverance, Discovery have a salt savour of difficulties sought out and overcome. For the rest the charm of the south-west comes but in slight degree from old associations. It is a paradise without a past.
