Thanks to a thick white fog, she ran on a reef in daylight on a quiet Sunday morning. She was carrying fifty-eight of a crew and about twice as many passengers. There was but a moderate sea, and, as those on board kept cool, four boats and two rafts were launched. Though one boat was capsized, and though waves washed several persons off the wreck, nearly every one swam to a boat or was picked up. One woman, however, was picked up dead. No great loss or sufferings need have followed but for the fog. As it was, the shipwrecked people were caught by currents, and had to row or drift about blindly. Their fates were various. The largest boat, with fifty-two souls, was luckiest: it reached Hohoura on the mainland after but twenty-five hours of wretchedness. There the Maori—like the barbarous people of Melita—showed them no small kindness. It is recorded that one native hurried down to the beach with a large loaf, which was quickly divided into fifty-two morsels. Others came with horses, and the castaways, helped up to the kainga, had hot tea and food served out to them. Whale-boats then put out and intercepted a passing steamer, which at once made for the Three Kings. There, on Tuesday, eighty-nine more of the shipwrecked were discovered and rescued. One party of these had come within a hundred and fifty yards of an islet, only to be swept away by a current against which they struggled vainly. Finally, they made Great King, and supported life on raw shell-fish till, on the third day after the wreck, the sun, coming out, enabled them (with the aid of their watch-glasses) to dry the six matches which they had with them. Five of these failed to ignite; the sixth gave them fire, and, with fire, hope and comparative comfort. They even gave chase to the wild goats of the island, but, needless to say, neither caught nor killed any.
One of the rafts, unhappily, failed to make land at all. A strong current carried it away to sea, and in four days it drifted sixty-two miles. Fifteen men and one woman were on it, without food or water, miserably clothed, and drenched incessantly by the wash or spray. The woman gave up part of her clothing to half-naked men, dying herself on the third day. Four others succumbed through exhaustion; two threw themselves into the sea in delirium. Three steamers were out searching for the unfortunates. It was the Penguin, a King’s ship, which found them, as the fifth day of their sufferings was beginning, and when but one man could stand upright. The captain of the man-of-war had carefully gauged the strength of the current, and followed the raft far out to the north-east.
Gold and silver, to the value of £17,000, went down with the Elingamite. Treasure-seekers have repeatedly tried to fish it up, but in vain.
WEAVING THE KAITAKA
Five hundred miles to the east of Banks’ Peninsula lie the pleasant group called the Chatham Islands. They owe their auspicious name to their luck in being discovered in 1790 by the Government ship Chatham. Otherwise they might have been named after Lord Auckland, or Mr. Robert Campbell, or Stewart the sealer, as have others of our islands. They are fabled of old to have been, like Delos, floating isles, borne hither and thither by sea and wind. The Apollo who brought them to anchor was the demi-god Kahu. The myth, perhaps, had its origin in the powerful currents which are still a cause of anxiety to shipmasters navigating the seas round their shores. They are fertile spots, neither flat nor lofty, but altogether habitable. The soft air is full of sunshine, tempered by the ocean haze, and in it groves of karaka-trees, with their large polished leaves and gleaming fruit, flourish as they flourish nowhere else. Neither too hot nor cold, neither large nor impossibly small—they are about two and a half times the size of the Isle of Wight,—the Chathams, one would think, should have nothing in their story but pleasantness and peace. And, as far as we know, the lot of their old inhabitants, the Moriori, was for centuries marked neither by bloodshed nor dire disaster. The Moriori were Polynesians akin to, yet distinct from, the Maori. Perhaps they were the last separate remnant of some earlier immigrants to New Zealand; or it is possible that their canoes brought them from the South Seas to the Chathams direct; at any rate they found the little land to their liking, and living there undisturbed, increased till, a hundred years ago, they mustered some two thousand souls. Unlike the Maori, they were not skilled gardeners; but they knew how to cook fern-root, and how to render the poisonous karaka berries innocuous. Their rocks and reefs were nesting-places for albatrosses and mutton-birds; so they had fowl and eggs in plenty. A large and very deep lagoon on their main island—said to be the crater of a volcano—swarmed with eels.
They were clever fishermen, and would put to sea on extraordinary rafts formed of flax sticks buoyed up by the bladders of the giant kelp. Their beaches were well furnished with shell-fish. Finally, the fur seal haunted their shores in numbers, and supplied them with the warmest of clothing. Indeed, though they could weave mantles of flax, and dye them more artistically than the Maori, they gradually lost the art: their sealskin mantles were enough for them. As the life of savages goes, theirs seems to have been, until eighty years ago, as happy as it was peaceful and absolutely harmless. For the Moriori did not fight among themselves, and having, so far as they knew, no enemies, knew not the meaning of war. They were rather expert at making simple tools of stone and wood, but had no weapons, or any use therefor.
Upon these altogether inoffensive and unprovocative islanders came a series of misfortunes which in a couple of decades wiped out most of the little race, broke its spirit, and doomed it to extinction. What had they done to deserve this—the fate of the Tasmanians? They were not unteachable and repulsive like the Tasmanians. Thomas Potts, a trained observer, has minutely described one of them, a survivor of their calamitous days. He saw in the Moriori a man “robust in figure, tall of stature, not darker in colour perhaps than many a Maori, but of a dull, dusky hue, rather than of the rich brown” so common in the Maori. Prominent brows, almond eyes, and a curved, somewhat fleshy nose gave the face a Jewish cast. The eyes seemed quietly watchful—the eyes of a patient animal “not yet attacked, but preparing or prepared for defence.” Otherwise the man’s demeanour was quiet and stolid. Bishop Selwyn, too, who visited the Chathams in 1848, bears witness to the courteous and attractive bearing of the Moriori. They were not drunken, irreclaimably vicious, or especially slothful. They were simply ignorant, innocent, and kindly, and so unfitted for wicked times and a reign of cruelty.
White sealers and whalers coming in friendly guise began their destruction, exterminating their seals, scaring away their sea-fowl, infecting them with loathsome diseases. Worse was to come. In the sealing schooners casual Maori seamen visited the Chathams, and saw in them a nook as pleasant and defenceless as the city of Laish. One of these wanderers on his return home painted a picture of the group to an audience of the Ngatiawa tribe in words which Mr. Shand thus renders:—