The country of the greenstone lies between the Arahura and Hokitika rivers in Westland, a territory by no means easy to invade eighty years ago. The war parties of the Ngatitoa reached it, however, creeping along the rugged sea-coast, and, where the beaches ended, scaling cliffs by means of ladders. They conquered the greenstone district (from which the whole South Island takes its Maori name, Te Wai Pounamou), and settled down there among the subdued natives. Then, one might fancy, the Ngatitoa would have halted. South of the Teremakau valley there was no greenstone; for the stone, tangi-wai, found near Milford Sound, though often classed with greenstone, is a distinct mineral, softer and much less valuable. Nor were there any more tribes with villages worth plundering. Save for a few wandering fugitives, the mountains and coast of the south-west were empty, or peopled only by the Maori imagination with ogres and fairies, dangerous to the intruder. Beyond this drenched and difficult country, however, the Ngatitoa resolved to pass. They learned—from captives, one supposes—of the existence of a low saddle, by which a man may cross from the west coast to the lakes of Otago without mounting two thousand feet. By this way, the Haast Pass, they resolved to march, and fall with musket and meré upon the unexpecting Ngaitahu of Otago. Their leader in this daring project was a certain Puoho. We may believe that the successes of Rauparaha on the east coast, and the fall, one after the other, of Omihi, the two stockades of Akaroa, and the famous pa of Kaiapoi, had fired the blood of his young men, and that Puoho dreamed of nothing less than the complete conquest of the south. He nearly effected it. By a daring canoe voyage from Port Nicholson to southern Westland, and by landing there and crossing the Haast Saddle, this tattooed Hannibal turned the higher Alps and descended upon Lake Hawea, surprising there a village of the Ngaitahu. Only one of the inhabitants escaped, a lad who was saved to guide the marauders to the camp of a family living at Lake Wanaka. The boy managed to slip away from the two captors who were his guards, and ran all the way to Wanaka to warn the threatened family—his own relatives. When the two guards gave chase, they found the intended victims prepared for them; they fell into an ambuscade and were both killed—tomahawked. Before the main body of the invaders came up, the Ngaitahu family was far away. At Wanaka, Puoho’s daring scheme became more daring still, for he conceived and executed no less a plan than that of paddling down the Clutha River on rafts made of flax sticks—crazy craft for such a river. The flower stalks or sticks of the native flax are buoyant enough when dead and dry; but they soon become water-logged and are absurdly brittle. They supply such rafts as small boys love to construct for the navigation of small lagoons. And that strange river, the Clutha, while about half as long as the Thames, tears down to the sea bearing far more water than the Nile. Nevertheless the Clutha did not drown Puoho and his men: they made their way to the sea through the open country of the south-east. Then passing on to the river Mataura, they took another village somewhere between the sea and the site of a town that now rejoices in the name of Gore. Then indeed the fate of the Ngaitahu hung in the balance, and the Otago branches of the tribe were threatened with the doom of those of the northern half of the island. They were saved because in Southland there was at the moment their one capable leader in their later days of trouble—the chief Tuhawaiki, whom the sealers of the south coast called Bloody Jack. Hurrying up with all the warriors he could collect, and reinforced by some of the white sealers aforesaid, this personage attacked the Ngatitoa by the Mataura, took their stockade by escalade, and killed or captured the band. Puoho himself was shot by a chief who lived to tell of the fray for more than sixty years afterwards. So the Ngaitahu escaped the slavery or extinction which they in earlier days had inflicted on the Ngatimamoe. For, three years after Puoho’s raid, the New Zealand Company appeared in Cook’s Strait, and thereafter Rauparaha and his braves harried the South Island no more.
[CHAPTER VII]
OUTLYING ISLANDS
The New Zealand mainland—if the word may be used for anything so slender and fragmentary—is long as well as slight. Nearly eleven hundred miles divide the south end of Stewart Island from Cape Maria Van Diemen. If the outposts of the main are counted in, then the Dominion becomes a much larger, though more watery, expanse. Its length is about doubled, and the contrast between the sunny Kermadecs and the storm-beaten Aucklands becomes one of those things in which Science delights. It is a far cry from the trepang and tropic birds (the salmon-pink bo’suns) of the northern rocks to the sea-lions that yawn at the casual visitor to Disappointment Island. The Kermadecs—to employ an overworked expression—bask in the smiles of perpetual summer. The Three Kings, lying thirty-eight miles beyond the tip of the North Island, might be Portuguese isles, and the Chathams—as far as climate goes—bits of France. But the peaty groups of the shivering South lie right across the pathway of the Antarctic gales. Even on their quieter days the grey sky that overhangs them looks down on a sea that is a welter of cold indigo laced with white. Relentless erosion by ocean rollers from the south-west has worn away their western and south-western shores into steep cliffs, cut by sharp-edged fissures and pitted by deep caves. For their vegetation you must seek their eastern slopes and valleys, or the shores of land-locked harbours. On some of the smaller of them, parakeets and other land-birds learn to fly little and fly low, lest they should be blown out to sea. The wild ducks of the Aucklands are flightless, and in the same group are found flies without wings. In the Snares the mutton-bird tree lies down on its stomach to escape the buffeting blasts, clutching the treacherous peat with fresh rootlets as it grows or crawls along. The western front of the Aucklands shows a wall of dark basalt, thirty miles long, and from four hundred to twelve hundred feet high. No beach skirts it; no trees soften it; only one inlet breaks it. Innumerable jets and little cascades stream from its sharp upper edge, but—so say eye-witnesses—none appear to reach the sea: the pitiless gusts seize the water, scatter it into spray-smoke and blow it into air. The wind keeps the waterfalls from falling, and their vapour, driven upward, has been mistaken for smoke from the fires of castaway seamen.
There is, however, one race to whom even the smallest and wildest of our islets are a source of unceasing interest and ever-fresh, if malodorous, pleasure. Zoologists know them for the procreant cradles of Antarctic sea-fowl. And that, from the Kermadecs to the Bounties and the Antipodes, they assuredly are. On Raoul—the largest Kermadec—you may walk among thousands of mutton-birds and kick them off their nests. On the West King, gannets and mackerel gulls cover acre after acre so thickly that you cannot help breaking eggs as you tread, or stumbling against mother-gannets, sharp in the beak. On dismal Antipodes Island, the dreary green of grass and sedge is picked out with big white birds like white rosettes. In the Aucklands, the wandering albatross is found in myriads, and may be studied as it sits guarding its solitary egg on the rough nest from which only brute force will move it. On the spongy Snares, penguins have their rookeries; mutton-birds swarm, not in thousands, but millions; sea-hawks prey on the young of other birds, and will fly fiercely at man, the strange intruder. Earth, air, and sea, all are possessed by birds of unimaginable number and intolerable smell. Penguins describe curves in the air as they dive neatly from the rocks. Mutton-birds burrow in the ground, whence their odd noises mount up strangely. Their subterranean clamour mingles with the deafening discords of the rookeries above ground. On large patches the vegetation is worn away and the surface defiled. All the water is fouled. The odour, like the offence of Hamlet’s uncle, “is rank: it smells to Heaven.” Mr. Justice Chapman found it strong a mile out to sea. In that, however, the Snares must cede the palm to the Bounties; dreadful and barren rocks on which a few insects—a cricket notably—alone find room to exist among the sea-birds. In violent tempests the foam is said to search every corner of the Bounties, cleansing them for the nonce from their ordure. But the purity, such as it is, is short lived. All who have smelt them are satisfied to hope that surf and sea-birds may ever retain possession there. Indeed, as much may be said for the Snares. Science may sometimes perambulate them, just as Science—with a handkerchief to her nose—may occasionally pick her steps about the Bounties; but none save savants and sea-lions are likely to claim any interest in these noisome castles of the sea-fowl.
Some of our larger outposts in the ocean are not repulsive by any means. If human society were of no account, the Kermadecs would be pleasant enough. One or two of them seem much more like Robinson Crusoe’s fertile island, as we read of it in Defoe’s pages, than is Juan Fernandez. Even the wild goats are not lacking. Flowering trees grow on well-wooded and lofty Raoul; Meyer Island has a useful boat-harbour; good fish abound in the warm and pellucid sea. To complete the geniality, the largest island—some seven or eight thousand acres in size—has a hot bathing-pool. One heroic family defy solitude there, cultivate the fertile soil, and grow coffee, bananas, figs, vines, olives, melons, peaches, lemons, citrons, and, it would seem, anything from grenadilloes to potatoes. Twenty years ago, or thereabout, our Government tempted a handful of settlers to try life there. A volcanic disturbance scared them away, however, and the one family has since plodded on alone. Stories are told of the life its members live, of their skill in swimming and diving, and their struggles with armies of rats and other troubles. Once when the steamer that visits them yearly was late, its captain found the mother of the family reduced to her last nib—with which she nevertheless had kept up her diary. On board the steamer was the lady’s eldest daughter, a married woman living in New Zealand. She was making a rough voyage of a thousand miles to see her mother—for two days. Sooner or later—if talk means anything—Auckland enterprise will set up a fish-curing station on Meyer Island. That, I suppose, will be an answer to the doubts which beset the minds of the Lords of the British Admiralty when this group, with its Breton name, was annexed to New Zealand. The colony asked for it, and the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty were duly consulted. Their secretary wrote a laconic reply to the Colonial Office observing that if New Zealand wanted the Kermadecs my Lords saw “no particular reason” why “that colony” should not have “these islands or islets”; but of what possible use they could be to New Zealand my Lords couldn’t imagine.
The Three Kings mark a point in our history. It was on the 5th of January that Tasman discovered them. So he named them after the three wise kings of the East—Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. The Great King, the largest of them, is not very great, for it contains, perhaps, six or seven hundred acres. It is cliff-bound, but a landing may usually be made on one side or the other, for its shape resembles the device of the Isle of Man. Into one of its coves a cascade comes down, tumbling two hundred feet from a green and well-timbered valley above. Tasman saw the cascade; and as the Heemskirk and her cockle-shell of a consort were short of fresh water, he sent “Francis Jacobsz in our shallop, and Mr. Gillimans, the supercargo,” with casks to be filled. When, however, the two boats neared the rocks, the men found thereon fierce-looking, well-armed natives, who shouted to them in hoarse voices. Moreover, the surf ran too high for an easy landing. So the Dutchmen turned from the white cascade, and pulled back to Tasman, who took them aboard again, and sailed away, to discover the Friendly Islands. Thus it came about that though he discovered our country, and spent many days on our coasts, neither he nor any of his men ever set foot on shore there. Did Francis Jacobsz, one wonders, really think the surf at Great King so dangerous? Or was it that good Mr. Gillimans, supercargo and man of business, disliked the uncomfortable-looking spears and patu-patu in the hands of the Rarewa men? Tasman, at any rate, came to no harm at the Three Kings, which is more than can be said of all shipmasters; for they are beset with tusky reefs and strong currents. A noted wreck there was that of the steamship Elingamite, which went down six years ago, not far from the edge of the deep ocean chasm where the submarine foundations of New Zealand seem to end suddenly in a deep cleft of ocean.