NATIVE GATHERING
The only trouble given by the natives at the Chathams in later days took the form of a little comedy. The Maori there own a good deal of live-stock, including some thousands of sheep and a number of unpleasant and objectionable dogs. The Maori kuri, an unattractive mongrel at the best, is never popular with white settlers; but in the year 1890 the kuri of the Chathams became a distinct nuisance. A dog-tax was levied on the owners, but this failed either to make them reduce the number of their dogs or restrain them from worrying the flocks of the white settlers. If I remember rightly, the Maori simply declined to pay the dog-tax. When they were prosecuted and fined, they refused to pay the fines. The Government of the day, with more vigour than humour, despatched a steamer to the Chathams, arrested some forty of the recalcitrants, brought them to the South Island, and lodged them in Lyttelton Gaol. The Maori, who have a keen sense of the ridiculous, offered no resistance whatever. I suspect that they did not greatly dislike the trip; it enabled them to see the world. Their notion of hard labour and prison discipline was to eat well, to smoke tobacco, and to bask in the sunshine of the prison yard. It was impossible to treat them harshly. After a while they were sent home, where their adventure formed food for conversation in many and many a nocturnal korero. In the meantime their dogs lived and continued to chase sheep. At this stage the writer of these pages joined the New Zealand Government, and the unhappy white flock-owners laid their troubles before him. At first the little knot did not seem, to an inexperienced Minister, quite easy to untie. After some cogitation, however, a way was found of ending the comedy of errors. What that was is another story. Since then, no more terrible incident has disturbed the Chathams than the grounding of an Antarctic iceberg on their coast—a somewhat startling apparition in latitude 44° south.
Otherwise the Chatham islanders have gone on for the last forty years living quietly in the soft sea-air of their little Arcadia, without roads and without progress. They grow wool and export it; for the rest, they exist. A small steamer visits them half-a-dozen times a year, and brings news, groceries, and clothes, also the correct time. Great is the tribulation when her coming is delayed. A friend of mine who witnessed a belated arrival tells me that the boat found a famine raging. The necessaries lacking, however, were not food, but tobacco and hairpins. The 60,000 sheep depastured on the islands have played havoc with some of the native vegetation, and have brought down retribution in the shape of moving drifts of blown sea-sand, whereby many acres of good pasture have been overwhelmed. However, that wonderful binding grass, the marram, has been used to stop the sand, and is said to have stayed the scourge. Much native “bush” is still left, and shows the curious spectacle of a forest where trees spread luxuriantly but do not grow to much more than twenty feet in height. That, says Professor Dendy, is due to the sea-winds—not cold, but laden with salt. In this woodland you may see a veronica which has become a tree, a kind of sandalwood, and a palm peculiar to the islands. That beautiful flower, the Chatham Island lily—which, by the way, is not a lily,—blooms in many a New Zealand garden.
The Auckland Isles lie some three hundred miles south of our mainland. They are nearly four times the size of St. Helena, where, as we know, several thousand people have in the past managed to live, chiefly on beef and a British garrison. No one, however, now lives in the Aucklands. New Zealanders speak of their climate in much the same strain as Frenchmen use when talking of November fogs in London. There are, however, worse climates in several parts of the United Kingdom. It does not always rain there; there are many spots where you are sheltered from the wind. It is not so cold but that tree-ferns will grow—the group is their southern limit. The leaning or bowed habits of the forest are due as much, perhaps, to the peaty soil as to the sou’westers. Vegetables flourish; goats, pigs, and cattle thrive. So far are the valleys and hill-sides from being barren that their plant-life is a joy to the New Zealand botanists, who pray for nothing so much as that settlement may hold its hand and not molest this floral paradise. Pleurophyllums, celmisias, gentians, veronicas, grass-trees, spread beside the sea-gulfs as though in sub-alpine meadows. The leaves are luxuriant, the flowers richer in colour than on our main islands. The jungle of crouching rata tinges the winding shores with its summer scarlet. Dense as are the wind-beaten groves, the scrub that covers the higher slopes is still more closely woven. The forest you may creep through; the scrub is virtually impenetrable. A friend of mine, anxious to descend a steep slope covered with it, did so by lying down and rolling on the matted surface. He likened it to a wire-mattress—with a broken wire sticking up here and there.
In addition to their botanical fame, the Aucklands have a sinister renown among seafaring men. Nature has provided the group with nearly a dozen good harbours. Two among these, Port Ross and Carnley Harbour, have found champions enthusiastic enough to style them the finest seaports in the world. Yet, despite this abundance of shelter, the isles are infamous as the scene of shipwrecks. They are in the track of Australian ships making for Cape Horn by passing to the south of New Zealand. In trying to give a wide berth to the Snares, captains sometimes go perilously near the Aucklands. To go no further back, eight wrecks upon them have been recorded during the last forty-five years; while earlier, in 1845, there are said to have been three in one year. The excellent harbours, unluckily, open towards the east; the ships running before the westerly winds are dashed against the terrible walls of rock which make the windward face of the group. The survivors find themselves on desolate and inclement shores hundreds of miles from humanity. Many are the tales of their sufferings. Even now, though the Government of New Zealand keeps up two well-stocked depôts of food and clothing there, and despatches a steamer to search for castaways once or twice a year, we still read of catastrophes followed by prolonged misery. Five men from a crew of the Grafton, lost in 1864, spent no less than eighteen months on the islands. At length they patched up the ship’s pinnace sufficiently to carry three of them to Stewart’s Island, where they crept into Port Adventure in the last stage of exhaustion. The two comrades they had left behind were at once sent for and brought away. Less lucky were four sailors who, after the wreck of the General Grant, two years later, tried to repeat the feat of a boat-voyage to Stewart Island. They were lost on the way. Indeed, of eighty-three poor souls cast away with the General Grant, only ten were ultimately rescued, after spending a forlorn six months on the isles. The case of the General Grant was especially noteworthy. She did not run blindly against the cliffs in a tempest, but spent hours tacking on and off the western coast in ordinary weather. Finally, she found her way into a cave, where she went down with most of those on board her. At least £30,000 in gold went with her, and in the effort to find the wreck and recover the money, the cutter Daphne was afterwards cast away, with the loss of six lives more.
Cruel indeed was the ill-luck of the crew of the four-masted barque Dundonald which struck on the Aucklands in March 1907. They saw a cliff looming out just over their bows shortly after midnight. An attempt to wear the ship merely ended in her being hurled stern foremost into a kind of tunnel. The bow sank, and huge seas washed overboard the captain, his son, and nine of the crew. Sixteen took refuge in the tops, and one of them, a Russian, crept from a yard-arm on to a ledge of the cliff. After daylight a rope was flung to him and doubled, and along this bridge—sixty feet in air above the surges—fifteen men contrived to crawl. On reaching the summit of the cliff they discovered the full extent of their bad fortune. They had been cast away, not on the larger Aucklands, but on the peaked rock ominously named Disappointment Island. It contains but four or five square miles, and is five miles away from the next of the group. Heart-stricken at the discovery, the chief mate lay down and died in a few days. The second mate’s health also gave way. The carpenter and sail-maker, whose skill would have been worth so much to the castaways, had been drowned with the captain. A few damp matches and some canvas and rope were almost all that was saved from the ship before she disappeared in deep water.
For seven months the survivors managed to live on Disappointment Island, showing both pluck and ingenuity. For a day or two they had to eat raw sea-birds. Then, when their matches had dried, they managed to kindle a fire of peat—a fire which they did not allow to expire for seven months. They learned a better way of cooking sea-fowl than by roasting them. At the coming of winter weather they dug holes in the peat, and building over these roofs of sods and tussock-grass, lay warm and dry thereunder. These shelters, which have been likened to Kaffir kraals, appear to have been modelled on Russian pig-sties. The seamen found a plant with large creeping stems, full of starch, and edible—by desperate men. When the seals came to the islands they mistook them for sea-serpents, but presently finding out their mistake, they lowered hunters armed with clubs to the foot of the cliffs, and learned, after many experiments, that the right place to hit a seal is above the nose. They found penguins tough eating, and seal’s flesh something to be reserved for dire extremity. Their regular ration of sea-birds, they said, was three molly-hawks a day for each man. As to that, one can only say, with Dominie Sampson, “Prodigious!” Searching their islet they lighted upon a crack in the ring of cliff where a waterfall tumbled into a quiet little boat-harbour, the bathing-pool of sea-lions. Then they determined to build a boat and reach that elysium, the main island, with its depôt of stores. With greased canvas and crooked boughs cut from the gnarled veronica, which was their only timber, they managed to botch up something between a caricature of a Welsh coracle and “the rotten carcase of a boat” in which Antonio and the King of Naples turned Prospero and Miranda adrift. Rowing this leaky curiosity with forked sticks, three picked adventurers reached the main island—only to return without reaching the depôt. Another boat, and yet another, had to be built before a second transit could be achieved; and when the second crossing was effected, the coracle sank as the rowers scrambled on shore. This, however, completed the catalogue of their disasters, and was “the last of their sea-sorrow.” The depôt was reached in September, and in the boat found there the tenants of Disappointment Island were removed to comfort and good feeding at Port Ross. With the help of an old gun they did some cattle-shooting on Enderby Island hard by, and in the end were taken off by the Government steamer Hinemoa in December.
Campbell Island, another habitable though sad-coloured spot, is a kind of understudy of the Aucklands—like them, but smaller, with less striking scenery and scantier plant life. It has, however, a local legend odd enough to be worth repeating. In the hodden-grey solitude there are certain graves of shipwrecked men and others. Among them is one called the Grave of the Frenchwoman. On the strength of this name, and of a patch of Scottish heather blooming near it, a tale has grown up, or been constructed, which would be excellent and pathetic if there were the slightest reason to suppose it true. It is that the Frenchwoman who sleeps her last sleep in rainy Campbell Island was a natural daughter of Charles Edward, the Young Pretender. She has even been identified with the daughter of Prince Charles and Clementina Walkenshaw, the Scottish lady who met him at Bannockburn House in the ’45, and long afterwards joined him abroad. This daughter—says the New Zealand story—became, when she grew up, an object of suspicion to the Prince’s Jacobite followers. They believed that she was a spy in the pay of the English Court. So they induced Stewart, a Scottish sea-captain, to kidnap the girl and carry her to some distant land. Stewart—whose name remains on our Stewart Island—did his work as thoroughly as possible by sailing with her to the antipodes of France. On the way he gained her affections, and established her at Campbell Island, where she died and was buried. Such is the story; sentiment has even been expended on the connection between Bonnie Prince Charlie and the patch of heather aforesaid.