"Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full
Out of their choicest and their whitest wool."
The Company's settlements were no longer confined to the shores of Cook's Straits. In 1846, Earl Grey, formerly Lord Howick, came to the Colonial Office, and set himself to compensate the Company for former official hostility. He secured for it a loan of £250,000, and handed over to it large blocks of land in the South Island, which—less certain reserves—was in process of complete purchase from its handful of Maori owners. The Company, gaining thus a new lease of life, went to work. In 1848 and 1850 that was done which ought to have been done a decade sooner, and the void spaces of Otago and Canterbury were made the sites of settlements of a quasi-religious kind. The Otago settlement was the outcome of the Scottish Disruption; its pioneers landed in March, 1848. They were a band of Free Kirk Presbyterians, appropriately headed by a Captain Cargill, a Peninsular veteran and a descendant of Donald Cargill, and by the Rev. Thomas Burns, a minister of sterling worth, who was a nephew of the poet. Otago has this year celebrated her jubilee, and the mayor of her chief city, Captain Cargill's son, is the first citizen of a town of nearly 50,000 inhabitants which in energy and beauty is worthy of its name—Dunedin. For years, however, the progress of the young settlement was slow. Purchasers of its land at the "sufficient price"—£2 an acre—were provokingly few, so few indeed that the regulation price had to be reduced. It had no Maori troubles worth speaking of, but the hills that beset its site, rugged and bush-covered, were troublesome to clear and settle, the winter climate is bleaker than that of northern or central New Zealand, and a good deal of Scottish endurance and toughness was needed before the colonists won their way through to the more fertile and open territory which lay waiting for them, both on their right hand and on their left, in the broad province of Otago. Like General Grant in his last campaign, they had to keep on "pegging away," and they did. They stood stoutly by their kirk, and gave it a valuable endowment of land. Their leaders felt keenly the difficulty of getting good school teaching for the children, a defect so well repaired later on that the primary schools of Otago are now, perhaps, the best in New Zealand, while Dunedin was the seat of the Colony's first university college. They had a gaol, the prisoners of which in early days were sometimes let out for a half-holiday, with the warning from the gaoler, Johnnie Barr, that if they did not come back by eight o'clock they would be locked out for the night.[1] The usual dress of the settlers was a blue shirt, moleskin or corduroy trousers, and a slouch hat. Their leader, Captain Cargill, wore always a blue "bonnet" with a crimson knob thereon. They named their harbour Port Chalmers, and a stream, hard by their city, the Water of Leith. The plodding, brave, clannish, and cantankerous little community soon ceased to be altogether Scotch. Indeed, the pioneers, called the Old Identities, seemed almost swamped by the flood of gold-seekers which poured in in the years after 1861. Nevertheless, Otago is still the headquarters of that large and very active element in the population of the Colony which makes the features and accent of North Britain more familiar to New Zealanders than to most Englishmen.
[Footnote 1: An amusing article might be written on the more primitive gaols of the early settlements. At Wanganui there were no means of confining certain drunken bush-sawyers whose vagaries were a nuisance; so they were fined in timber—so many feet for each orgie—and building material for a prison thus obtained. When it was put up, however, the sawyers had departed, and the empty house of detention became of use as a storehouse for the gaoler's potatoes.
In a violent gale in the Southern Alps one of these wooden "lock-ups" was lifted in air, carried bodily away and deposited in a neighbouring thicket. Its solitary prisoner disappeared in the whirlwind. Believers in his innocence imagined for him a celestial ascent somewhat like that of Elijah. What is certain is that he was never seen again in that locality.
A more comfortable gaol was that made for himself by a high and very ingenious provincial official. Arrested for debt, he proclaimed his own house a district prison, and as visiting Justice committed himself to be detained therein.]
The next little colony founded in New Zealand dates its birth from 1850. Though it was to be Otago's next-door neighbour, it was neither Presbyterian nor Scottish, but English and Episcopalian. This was the Canterbury settlement. It owed its existence to an association in which the late Lord Lyttelton was prominent. As in the case of Otago, this association worked in conjunction with the New Zealand Company, and proposed to administer its lands on the Wakefield system. Gibbon Wakefield himself (his brother, the Colonel, had died in 1847) laboured untiringly at its foundation, amid troubles which were all the more annoying in that the association was in financial difficulties from its birth.[1] Three pounds an acre was to be the price of land in the Canterbury Block, of which one pound was to go to the church and education, two pounds to be spent on the work of development. The settlers landed in December, 1850, from four vessels, the immigrants in which have ever since had in their new home the exclusive right to the name of Pilgrims. The dream of the founders of Canterbury was to transport to the Antipodes a complete section of English society, or, more exactly, of the English Church. It was to be a slice of England from top to bottom. At the top were to be an Earl and a Bishop; at the bottom the English labourer, better clothed, better fed, and contented. Their square, flat city they called Christchurch, and its rectangular streets by the names of the Anglican Bishoprics. One schismatic of a street called High was alone allowed to cut diagonally across the lines of its clerical neighbours. But the clear stream of the place, which then ran past flax, koromiko, and glittering toé-toé, and now winds under weeping-willows, the founders spared from any sacerdotal name; it is called Avon. When wooden cottages and "shedifices" began to dot the bare urban sections far apart, the Pilgrims called their town the City of Magnificent Distances, and cheerfully told you how new-comers from London rode through and out of Christchurch and thereafter innocently inquired whether the town still lay much ahead. The Canterbury dream seems a little pathetic as well as amusing now, but those who dreamed it were very much in earnest in 1850, and they laid the foundation stones of a fine settlement, though not precisely of the kind they contemplated. Their affairs for some years were managed by John Robert Godley, a name still well remembered at the War Office, where he afterwards became Under-Secretary. He had been the life and soul of the Canterbury Association, and as its agent went out to New Zealand, partly in search of health and partly with the honourable ambition to found a colony worthy of England. He made a strong administrator. Their Earl and their Bishop soon fled from the hard facts of pioneer life, but the Pilgrims as a rule were made of sterner stuff, and sticking to their task, they soon spread over the yellow, sunny plains, high-terraced mountain valleys, and wind-swept hillsides of their province. Their territory was better suited than Otago for the first stages of settlement, and for thirty years its progress was remarkable.
[Footnote 1: It was when he was at this work that Dr. Garnett pictures him so vividly—"the sanguine, enthusiastic projector, fertile, inventive creator, his head an arsenal of expedients and every failure pregnant with a remedy, imperious or suasive as suits his turn; terrible in wrath or exuberant in affection; commanding, exhorting, entreating, as like an eminent personage of old he
On the surface there were certain differences between the Canterbury colonists and those of Otago, which local feeling intensified in a manner always paltry, though sometimes amusing. When the stiff-backed Free-Churchmen who were to colonize Otago gathered on board the emigrant ship which was to take them across the seas, they opened their psalm-books. Their minister, like Burns' cottar, "waled a portion wi' judicious care," and the Puritans, slowly chanting on, rolled out the appeal to the God of Bethel:—
"God of our fathers, be the God
of their succeeding race!"
Such men and women might not be amusing fellow-passengers on a four months' sea-voyage,—and, indeed, there is reason to believe that they were not,—but settlers made of such stuff were not likely to fail in the hard fight with Nature at the far end of the earth; and they did not fail. The Canterbury Pilgrims, on the other hand, bade farewell to old England by dancing at a ball. In their new home they did not renounce their love of dancing, though their ladies had sometimes to be driven in a bullock-dray to the door of the ballroom, and stories are told of young gentlemen, enthusiastic waltzers, riding on horseback to the happy scene clad in evening dress and with coat-tails carefully pinned up. But the Canterbury folk did not, on the whole, make worse settlers for not taking themselves quite so seriously as some of their neighbours. The English gentleman has a fund of cheery adaptiveness which often carries him through Colonial life abreast of graver competitors. So the settler who built a loaf of station-bread into the earthen wall of his house, alleging that it was the hardest and most durable material he could procure, did not, we may believe, find a sense of humour encumber him in the troubles of a settler's life. For there were troubles. The pastoral provinces were no Dresden-china Arcadia. Nature is very stubborn in the wilderness, even in the happier climes, where she offers, for the most part, merely a passive resistance. An occasional storm or flood was about her only outburst of active opposition in South-eastern New Zealand. Nevertheless, an educated European who finds himself standing in an interminable plain or on a windy hillside where nothing has been done, where he is about to begin that work of reclaiming the desert which has been going on in Europe for thousands of years, and of which the average civilized man is the calm, self-satisfied, unconscious inheritor, finds that he must shift his point of view! The nineteenth-century Briton face to face with the conditions of primitive man is a spectacle fine in the general, but often ludicrous or piteous in the particular. The loneliness, the coarseness, the everlasting insistence of the pettiest and most troublesome wants and difficulties, harden and brace many minds, but narrow most and torment some. Wild game, song-birds, fish, forest trees, were but some of the things of which there were few or none round nearly all the young pastoral settlements. Everything was to make. The climate might be healthy and the mountain outlines noble. But nothing but work, and successful work, could reconcile an educated and imaginative man to the monotony of a daily outlook over league after league of stony soil, thinly clothed by pallid, wiry tussocks bending under an eternal, uncompromising wind; where the only living creatures in sight might often be small lizards or a twittering grey bird miscalled a lark; or where the only sound, save the wind aforesaid, might be the ring of his horse's shoe against a stone, or the bleat of a dull-coated merino, scarcely distinguishable from the dull plain round it. To cure an unfit new-comer, dangerously enamoured of the romance of colonization, few experiences could surpass a week of sheep-driving, where life became a prolonged crawl at the heels of a slow, dusty, greasy-smelling "mob" straggling along at a maximum pace of two miles an hour. If patience and a good collie helped the tyro through that ordeal, such allies were quite too feeble to be of service in the supreme trial of bullock-driving, where a long whip and a vocabulary copious beyond the dreams of Englishmen were the only effective helpers known to man in the management of the clumsy dray and the eight heavy-yoked, lumbering beasts dragging it. Wonderful tales are told of cultivated men in the wilderness, Oxonians disguised as station-cooks, who quoted Virgil over their dish-washing or asked your opinion on a tough passage of Thucydides whilst baking a batch of bread. Most working settlers, as a matter of fact, did well enough if they kept up a running acquaintance with English literature; and station-cooks, as a race, were ever greater at grog than at Greek.
Prior to about 1857 there was little or no intercourse between the various settlements. Steamers and telegraphs had not yet appeared. The answer to a letter sent from Cook's Straits to Auckland might come in seven weeks or might not. It would come in seventy hours now. Despatches were sometimes sent from Wellington to Auckland viâ Sydney, to save time. In 1850 Sir William Fox and Mr. Justice Chapman took six days to sail across Cook's Straits from Nelson to Wellington, a voyage which now occupies eight hours. They were passengers in the Government brig, a by-word for unseaworthiness and discomfort. In this vessel the South Island members of the first New Zealand parliament spent nearly nine weeks in beating up the coast to the scene of their labours in Auckland. But the delight with which the coming of steamships in the fifties was hailed was not so much a rejoicing over more regular coastal communication, as joy because the English Mail would come sooner and oftener. How they did wait and watch for the letters and newspapers from Home, those exiles of the early days! Lucky did they count themselves if they had news ten times a year, and not more than four months old. One of the best of their stories is of a certain lover whose gallant grace was not unworthy a courtier of Queen Elizabeth. One evening this swain, after securing at the post-office his treasured mail budget, was escorting his lady-love home through the muddy, ill-lighted streets of little Christchurch. A light of some sort was needed at an especially miry crossing. The devoted squire did not spread out his cloak, as did Sir Walter Raleigh. He had no cloak to spread. But he deftly made a torch of his unread English letters, and, bending down, lighted the way across the mud. His sacrifice, it is believed, did not go wholly unrewarded.
