The Long White Cloud: "Ao Tea Roa"

by William Pember Reeves

Chapter I

THE LONG WHITE CLOUD[1]

"If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face—and you'll forget them all."

[Footnote 1: Ao-Tea-Roa, the Maori name of New Zealand.]

Though one of the parts of the earth best fitted for man, New Zealand was probably about the last of such lands occupied by the human race. The first European to find it was a Dutch sea-captain who was looking for something else, and who thought it a part of South America, from which it is sundered by five thousand miles of ocean. It takes its name from a province of Holland to which it does not bear the remotest likeness, and is usually regarded as the antipodes of England, but is not. Taken possession of by an English navigator, whose action, at first adopted, was afterwards reversed by his country's rulers, it was only annexed at length by the English Government which did not want it, to keep it from the French who did. The Colony's capital bears the name of a famous British commander, whose sole connection with the country was a flat refusal to aid in adding it to the Empire. Those who settled it meant it to be a theatre for the Wakefield Land System. The spirit of the land laws, however, which its settlers have gradually developed is a complete negation of Wakefield's principle. Some of the chief New Zealand settlements were founded by Church associations; but the Colony's education system has long been purely secular. From the first those who governed the Islands laboured earnestly to preserve and benefit the native race, and on the whole the treatment extended to them has been just and often generous—yet the wars with them were long, obstinate, and mischievous beyond the common. The pioneer colonists looked upon New Zealand as an agricultural country, but its main industries have turned out to be grazing and mining. From the character of its original settlers it was expected to be the most conservative of the colonies; it is just now ranked as the most democratic. Not only by its founders, but for many years afterwards, Irish were avowedly or tacitly excluded from the immigrants sent to it. Now, however, at least one person in eight in the Colony is of that race.

It would be easy to expand this list into an essay on the vanity of human wishes. It would not be hard to add thereto a formidable catalogue of serious mistakes made both in England and New Zealand by those responsible for the Colony's affairs—mistakes, some of which, at least, seem now to argue an almost inconceivable lack of knowledge and foresight. So constantly have the anticipations of its officials and settlers been reversed in the story of New Zealand that it becomes none too easy to trace any thread of guiding wisdom or consistent purpose therein. The broad result, however, has been a fine and vigorous colony. Some will see in its record of early struggles, difficulties and mistakes endured, paid for and surmounted, a signal instance of the overruling care of Providence. To the cynic the tale must be merely a minor portion of the "supreme ironic procession with laughter of gods in the background." To the writer it seems, at least, to give a very notable proof of the collective ability of a colonizing race to overcome obstacles and repair blunders. The Colony of New Zealand is not a monument of the genius of any one man or group of men. It is the outcome of the vitality and industry of a people obstinate but resourceful, selfish but honest, often ill-informed and wrong, but with the saving virtue of an ability to learn from their own mistakes.

From one standpoint the story of New Zealand ought not to take long to tell. It stretches over less time than that of almost any land with any pretensions to size, beauty, or interest. New Zealand was only discovered by Europeans in the reign of our King Charles I., and even then the Dutch explorer who sighted its lofty coasts did not set foot upon them. The first European to step on to its shores did so only when the great American colonies were beginning to fret at the ties which bound them to England. The pioneers of New Zealand colonization, the missionaries, whalers, and flax and timber traders, did not come upon the scene until the years of Napoleon's decline and fall. Queen Victoria had been on the throne for three years before the Colonial Office was reluctantly compelled to add the Islands to an Empire which the official mind regarded as already overgrown.

Yet so striking, varied, and attractive are the country's features, so full of bustle, change and experiment have its few years been, that lack of material is about the last complaint that need be made by a writer on New Zealand. The list of books on the Colony is indeed so long that its bibliography is a larger volume than this; and the chief plea to be urged for this history must be its brevity—a quality none too common in Colonial literature.

A New Zealander writing in London may be forgiven if he begins by warning English readers not to expect in the aspect of New Zealand either a replica of the British Islands or anything resembling Australia. The long, narrow, mountainous islands upon which Abel Jansen Tasman stumbled in December, 1642, are so far from being the antipodes of Britain that they lie on an average twelve degrees nearer the equator. Take Liverpool as a central city of the United Kingdom; it lies nearly on the 53rd parallel of north latitude. Wellington, the most central city of New Zealand, is not far from the 41st parallel of southern latitude. True, New Zealand has no warm Gulf Stream to wash her shores. But neither is she chilled by east winds blowing upon her from the colder half of a continent. Neither her contour nor climate is in the least Australian. It is not merely that twelve hundred miles of ocean separate the flat, rounded, massive-looking continent from the high, slender, irregular islands. The ocean is deep and stormy. Until the nineteenth century there was absolutely no going to and fro across it. Many plants are found in both countries, but they are almost all small and not in any way conspicuous. Only one bird of passage migrates across the intervening sea. The dominating trees of Australia are myrtles (called eucalypts); those of New Zealand are beeches (called birches), and various species of pines. The strange marsupials, the snakes, the great running birds, the wild dogs of Australia, have no counterpart in New Zealand. The climate of Australia, south of Capricorn, is, except on the eastern and south-eastern coast, as hot and dry as the South African. And the Australian mountains, moderate in height and flattened, as a rule, at the summit, remind one not a little of the table-topped elevations so familiar to riders on the veldt and karroo. The western coast of New Zealand is one of the rainiest parts of the Empire. Even the drier east coast only now and then suffers from drought On the west coast the thermometer seldom rises above 75° in the shade; on the other not often above 90°. New Zealand, too, is a land of cliffs, ridges, peaks, and cones. Some of the loftier volcanoes are still active, and the vapour of their craters mounts skyward above white fields of eternal snow. The whole length of the South Island is ridged by Alpine ranges, which, though not quite equal in height to the giants of Switzerland, do not lose by comparison with the finest of the Pyrenees.

No man with an eye for the beautiful or the novel would call Australia either unlovely or dull. It is not, however, a land of sharp and sudden contrasts: New Zealand is.