Greater Britain Part 19

Neither the habits nor the morals of this strange community are of the best. You never see a drunken man, but drinking is apparently the chief occupation of that portion of the town population which is not actually employed in digging. The mail-coaches which run across the island on the great new road, and along the sands to the other mining settlements, have singularly short stages, made so, it would seem, for the benefit of the keepers of the "saloons," for at every halt one or other of the pa.s.sengers is expected to "shout," or "stand," as it would be called at home, "drinks all round." "What'll yer shout?" is the only question; and want of coined money need be no hinderance, for "gold-dust is taken at the bar." One of the favorite amus.e.m.e.nts of the diggers at Pakihi, on the days when the store-schooner arrives from Nelson, is to fill a bucket with champagne, and drink till they feel "comfortable." This done, they seat themselves in the road, with their feet on the window-sill of the shanty, and, calling to the first pa.s.ser, ask him to drink from the bucket. If he consents--good: if not, up they jump, and duck his head in the wine, which remains for the next comer.

When I left Hokitika, it was by the new road, 170 miles in length, which crosses the Alps and the island, and connects Christchurch, the capital of Canterbury, with the western parts of the province. The bush between the sea and mountains is extremely lovely. The highway is "corduroyed"

with trunks of the tree-fern, and, in the swamps, the sleepers have commenced to grow at each end, so that a close-set double row of young tree-ferns is rising along portions of the road. The bush is densely matted with an undergrowth of supple-jack and all kinds of creepers, but here and there one finds a grove of tree-ferns twenty feet in height, and grown so thickly as to prevent the existence of underwood and ground plants.

The peculiarity which makes the New Zealand west-coast scenery the most beautiful in the world to those who like more green than California has to show, is that here alone can you find semi-tropical vegetation growing close up to the eternal snows. The lat.i.tude and the great moisture of the climate bring the long glaciers very low into the valleys; and the absence of all true winter, coupled with the rain-fall, causes the growth of palmlike ferns upon the ice-river's very edge. The glaciers of Mount Cook are the longest in the world, except those at the sources of the Indus, but close about them have been found tree-ferns of thirty and forty feet in height. It is not till you enter the mountains that you escape the moisture of the coast, and quit for the scenery of the Alps the scenery of fairy-land.

b.u.mping and tumbling in the mail-cart through the rushing blue-gray waters of the Taramakao, I found myself within the mountains of the Snowy Range. In the Otira Gorge, also know as Arthur's Pa.s.s--from Arthur Dobson, brother to the surveyor murdered by the Thugs--six small glaciers were in sight at once. The Rocky Mountains opposite to Denver are loftier and not less snowy than the New Zealand Alps, but in the Rockies there are no glaciers south of about 50 N.; while in New Zealand--a winterless country--they are common at eight degrees nearer to the line. The varying amount of moisture has doubtless caused this difference.

As we journeyed through the pa.s.s, there was one grand view--and only one: the glimpse of the ravine to the eastward of Mount Rollestone, caught from the desert sh.o.r.e of Lake Misery--a tarn near the "divide" of waters. About its banks there grows a plant, unknown, they say, except at this lonely spot--the Rockwood lily--a bushy plant, with a round, polished, concave leaf, and a cup-shaped flower of virgin white, that seems to take its tint from the encircling snows.

In the evening, we had a view that for gloomy grandeur cannot well be matched--that from near Bealey township, where we struck the Waimakiriri Valley. The river bed is half a mile in width, the stream itself not more than ten yards across, but, like all New Zealand rivers, subjects to freshets, which fill its bed to a great depth with a surging, foaming flood. Some of the victims of the Waimakiriri are buried alongside the road. Dark evergreen bush shuts in the river bed, and is topped on the one side by dreary frozen peaks, and on the other by still gloomier mountains of bare rock.

Our road, next morning, from The Ca.s.s, where we had spent the night, lay through the eastern foot-hills and down to Canterbury Plains by way of Porter's Pa.s.s--a narrow track on the top of a tremendous precipice, but soon to be changed for a road cut along its face. The plains are one great sheep-run, open, almost flat, and upon which you lose all sense of size. At the mountain-foot they are covered with tall, coa.r.s.e, native gra.s.s, and are dry, like the Kansas prairie; about Christchurch, the English clover and English gra.s.ses have usurped the soil, and all is fresh and green.

New Zealand is at present divided into nine semi-independent provinces, of which three are large and powerful, and the remainder comparatively small and poor. Six of the nine are true States, having each its history as an independent settlement; the remaining three are creations of the Federal government or of the crown.

These are not the only difficulties in the way of New Zealand statesmen, for the provinces themselves are far from being h.o.m.ogeneous units. Two of the wealthiest of all the States, which were settled as colonies with a religious tinge--Otago, Presbyterian; and Canterbury, Episcopalian--have been blessed or cursed with the presence of a vast horde of diggers, of no particular religion, and free from any reverence for things established. Canterbury Province is not only politically divided against itself, but geographically split in twain by the Snowy Range, and the diggers hold the west-coast bush, the old settlers the east-coast plain. East and west, each cries out that the other side is robbing it. The Christchurch people say that their money is being spent on Westland, and the Westland diggers cry out against the foppery and aristocratic pretense of Christchurch. A division of the province seems inevitable, unless, indeed, the "Centralists" gain the day, and bring about either a closer union of the whole of the provinces, coupled with a grant of local self-government to their subdivisions, or else the entire destruction of the provincial system.

The division into provinces was at one time necessary, from the fact that the settlements were historically distinct, and physically cut off from each other by the impenetrability of the bush and the absence of all roads; but the barriers are now surmounted, and no sufficient reason can be found for keeping up ten cabinets and ten legislatures for a population of only 200,000 souls. Such is the costliness of the provincial system and of Maori wars, that the taxation of the New Zealanders is nine times as heavy as that of their brother colonists in Canada.

It is not probable that so costly and so inefficient a system of government as that which now obtains in New Zealand can long continue to exist. It is not only dear and bad, but dangerous in addition; and during my visit to Port Chalmers, the province of Otago was loudly threatening secession. Like all other federal const.i.tutions, that of New Zealand fails to provide a sufficiently strong central power to meet a divergence of interests between the several States. The system which failed in Greece, which failed in Germany, which failed in America, has failed here in the antipodes; and it may be said that, in these days of improved communications, wherever federation is possible, a still closer union is at least as likely to prove lasting.

New Zealand suffers, not only by the artificial division into provinces, but also by the physical division of the country into two great islands, too far apart to be ever thoroughly h.o.m.ogeneous, too near together to be wholly independent of each other. The difficulty has been hitherto increased by the existence in the North of a powerful and warlike native race, all but extinct in the South Island. Not only have the Southern people no native wars, but they have no native claimants from whom every acre for the settler must be bought, and they naturally decline to submit to ruinous taxation to purchase Parewanui from, or to defend Taranaki against, the Maories. Having been thwarted by the Home government in the agitation for the "separation" of the islands, the Southern people now aim at "Ultra-Provincialism," declaring for a system under which the provinces would virtually be independent colonies, connected only by a confederation of the loosest kind.

The jealousies of the great towns, here as in Italy, have much bearing upon the political situation. Auckland is for separation, because in that event it would of necessity become the seat of the government of the North Island. In the South, Christchurch and Dunedin have similar claims; and each of them, ignoring the other, begs for separation in the hope of becoming the Southern capital. Wellington and Nelson alone are for the continuance of the federation--Wellington because it is already the capital, and Nelson because it is intriguing to supplant its neighbor. Although the difficulties of the moment mainly arise out of the war expenditure, and will terminate with the extinction of the Maori race, her geographical shape almost forbids us to hope that New Zealand will ever form a single country under a strong central government.

To obtain an adequate idea of the difficulty of his task, a new governor, on landing in New Zealand, could not do better than cross the Southern Island. On the west side of the mountains he would find a restless digger-democracy, likely to be succeeded in the future by small manufacturers, and spade-farmers growing root-crops upon small holdings of fertile loam; on the east, gentlemen sheep-farmers, holding their twenty thousand acres each; supporters by their position of the existing state of things, or of an aristocratic republic, in which men of their own caste would rule.

Christchurch--Episcopalian, dignified--the first settlement in the province, and still the capital, affects to despise Hokitika, already more wealthy and more populous. Christchurch imports English rooks to caw in the elm-trees of her cathedral close; Hokitika imports men.

Christchurch has not fallen away from her traditions: every street is named from an English bishopric, and the society is that of an English country town.

Returning northward, along the coast, in the shade of the cold and gloomy mountains of the Kaikoura Range, I found at Wellington two invitations awaiting me to be present at great gatherings of the native tribes.

The next day I started for the Manawatu River and Parewanui Pah.

CHAPTER III.

POLYNESIANS.

The name "Maori" is said to mean "native," but the boast on the part of the Maori race contained in the t.i.tle "Natives of the Soil" is one which conflicts with their traditions. These make them out to be mere interlopers--Tahitians, they themselves say--who, within historic ages, sailed down island by island in their war canoes, ma.s.sacring the inhabitants, and, finally landing in New Zealand, found a numerous horde of blacks of the Australian race living in the forests of the South Island. Favored by a year of exceptional drought, they set fire to the woods, and burnt to the last man, or drove into the sea the aboriginal possessors of the soil. Some ethnologists believe that this account is in the main correct, but hold that the Maori race is Malay, and not originally Tahitian: others have tried to show that the conflict between blacks and browns was not confined to these two islands, but raged throughout the whole of Polynesia; and that it was terminated in New Zealand itself, not by the destruction of the blacks, but by the amalgamation of the opposing races.

The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to New Zealand. The accounts of some of the migrations are circ.u.mstantial in the extreme, and describe the first planting of the yams, the astonishment of the people at the new flowers and trees of the islands, and many such details of the landing. The names of the chiefs and of the canoes are given in a sort of "catalogue of ships," and the wars of the settlers are narrated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common to the legends of all lands.

The canoe fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth century it is believed, and the people landed chanting a chorus-speech, which is still preserved:

"We come at last to this fair land--a resting-place; Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our hearts for food."

That the Maories are Polynesians there can be no doubt: a bird with them is "manu," a fish "ika" (the Greek ?????, become with the digamma "piscis" and "poisson;" and connected with "fisch," and "fish"), as they are throughout the Malayan archipelago and Polynesian isles; the Maori "atua," a G.o.d, is the "hotua" of the Friendly Islanders; the "wahres," or native huts, are identical in all the islands; the names of the chief deities are the same throughout Polynesia, and the practice of tattooing, the custom of carving grotesque squatting figures on tombs, canoes, and "pahs," and that of tabooing things, places, times, and persons, prevail from Hawaii to Stewart's Land, though not everywhere so strictly read as in the Tonga Isles, where the very ducks are muzzled to keep them from disturbing by their quacking the sacred stillness of "tapu time."

Polynesian traditions mostly point to the Malay peninsula as the cradle of the race, and the personal resemblance of the Maories to the Malays is very strong, except in the setting of the eyes; while the figures on the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs have eyes more oblique than are now found among the Maori people. Strangely enough, the New Zealand "pah" is identical with the Burmese "stockade," but the word "pah"

stands both for the palisade and for the village of wahres which it contains. The Polynesian and Malay tongues have not much in common; but that variations of language sufficiently great to leave no apparent tie spring up in a few centuries, cannot be denied by us who know for certain that "visible" and "optician" come from a common root, and can trace the steps through which "jour" is derived from "dies."

The tradition of the Polynesians is that they came from Paradise, which they place, in the southern islands, to the north; in the northern islands, to the westward. This legend indicates a migration from Asia to the northern islands, and thence southward to New Zealand, and accounts for the non-colonization of Australia by the Polynesians. The sea between New Zealand, and Australia is too rough and wide to be traversed by canoes, and the wind-chart shows that the track of the Malays must have been eastward along the equatorial belt of calms, and then back to the southwest with the southeast trade-wind right abeam to their canoes.

The wanderings of the Polynesian race were, probably, not confined to the Pacific. Ethnology is as yet in its infancy: we know nothing of the Tudas of the Neilgherries; we ask in vain who are the Gonds; we are in doubt about the j.a.panese; we are lost in perplexity as to who we may be ourselves; but there is at least as much ground for the statement that the Red Indians are Malays as for the a.s.sertion that we are Saxons.

The resemblances between the Red Indians and the Pacific Islanders are innumerable. Strachey's account of the Indians of Virginia, written in 1612, needs but a change in the names to fit the Maories: Powhatan's house is that of William Thompson. Cannibalism prevailed in Brazil and along the Pacific coast of North America at the time of their discovery, and even the Indians of Chili ate many an early navigator; the aborigines of Vancouver Island are tattooed; their canoes resemble those of the Malays, and the mode of paddling is the same from New Zealand to Hudson's Bay--from Florida to Singapore. Jade ornaments of the shape of the Maori "Heitiki" (the charm worn about the neck) have been found by the French in Guadaloupe; the giant masonry of Central America is identical with that of Cambodia and Siam. Small-legged squatting figures, like those of the idols of China and j.a.pan, not only surmount the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs, but are found eastward to Honduras, westward to Burmah, to Tartary, and to Ceylon. The fiber mats, common to Polynesia and Red India, are unknown to savages elsewhere, and the feather headdresses of the Maories are almost identical with those of the Delawares or Hurons.

In the Indians of America and of Polynesia there is the same hatred of continued toil, and the same readiness to engage in violent exertion for a time. Superst.i.tion and witchcraft are common to all untaught peoples, but in the Malays and red men they take similar shapes; and the Indians of Mexico and Peru had, like all the Polynesians, a sacred language, understood only by the priests. The American altars were one with the temples of the Pacific, and were not confined to Mexico, for they form the "mounds" of Ohio and Illinois. There is great likeness between the legend of Maui, the Maori hero, and that of Hiawatha, especially in the history of how the sun was noosed, and made to move more slowly through the skies, so as to give men long days for toil. The resemblance of the Maori "runanga," or a.s.sembly for debate, to the Indian council is extremely close, and throughout America and Polynesia a singular blending of poetry and ferocity is characteristic of the Malays.

In color, the Indians and Polynesians are not alike; but color does not seem to be, ethnologically speaking, of much account. The Hindoos of Calcutta have the same features as those of Delhi; but the former are black, the latter brown, or, if high-caste men, almost white. Exposure to sun, in a damp, hot climate, seems to blacken every race that it does not destroy. The races that it will finally destroy, tropical heat first whitens. The English planters of Mississippi and Florida are extremely dark, yet there is not a suspicion of black blood in their veins: it is the white blood of the slaves to which the Abolitionists refer in their philippics. The Jews at Bombay and Aden are of a deep brown; in Morocco they are swarthy; in England, nearly white.

Religious rites and social customs outlast both physical type and language; but even were it otherwise, there is great resemblance in build and feature between the Polynesians and many of the "Red-Indian"

tribes. The aboriginal people of New York State are described by the early navigators not as tall, grave, hooked-nose men, but as copper colored, pleasant looking, and with quick, shrewd eyes; and the Mexican Indian bears more likeness to the Sandwich Islander than to the Delaware or Cherokee.

In reaching South America, there were no distances to be overcome such as to present insurmountable difficulties to the Malays. Their canoes have frequently, within the years that we have had our missionary stations in the islands, made involuntary voyages of six or seven hundred miles. A Western editor has said of Columbus that he deserves no praise for discovering America, as it is so large that he could not well have missed it; but Easter Island is so small, that the chances must have been thousands to one against its being reached by canoes sailing even from the nearest land; yet it is an ascertained fact that Easter Island was peopled by the Polynesians. Whatever drove canoes to Easter Island would have driven them from the island to Chili and Peru. The Polynesian Malays would sometimes be taken out to sea by sudden storms, by war, by hunger, by love of change. In war time, whole tribes have, within historic days, been clapped into their boats, and sent to sea by a merciful conqueror who had dined: this occurs, however, only when the market is already surfeited with human joints.

In sailing from America to New Zealand, we met strong westerly winds before we had gone half way across the seas, and, south of the trade-wind region, these blow constantly to within a short distance of the American coast, where they are lost upon the edge of the Chilian current. A canoe blown off from the southern islands, and running steadily before the wind, would be cast on the Peruvian coast near Quito.

When Columbus landed in the Atlantic islands, he was, perhaps, not mistaken in his belief that it was "The Indies" that he had found--an India peopled by the Malay race, till lately the most widely-scattered of all the nations of the world, but one which the English seem destined to supplant.

The Maories, without doubt, were originally Malays, emigrants from the winterless climate of the Malay peninsula and Polynesian archipelago; and, although the northernmost portions of New Zealand suited them not ill, the cold winters of the South Island prevented the spread of the bands they planted there. At all times it has been remarked by ethnologists and acclimatizers that it is easier by far to carry men and beasts from the poles toward the tropics than from the tropics to the colder regions. The Malays, in coming to New Zealand, unknowingly broke one of Nature's laws, and their descendants are paying the penalty in extinction.

CHAPTER IV.

PAREWANUI PAH.

"Here is Petatone.

This is the 10th of December; The sun shines, and the birds sing; Clear is the water in rivers and streams; Bright is the sky, and the sun is high in the air.

This is the 10th of December; But where is the money?

Three years has this matter in many debates been discussed, And here at last is Petatone; But where is the money?"

A band of Maori women, slowly chanting in a high, strained key, stood at the gate of a pah, and met with this song a few Englishmen who were driving rapidly on to their land.

Our track lay through a swamp of the New Zealand flax. Huge swordlike leaves and giant flower-stalks all but hid from view the Maori stockades. To the left was a village of low wahres, fenced round with a double row of lofty posts, carved with rude images of G.o.ds and men, and having posterns here and there. On the right were groves of karakas, children of Tanemahuta, the New Zealand sacred trees--under their shade, on a hill, a camp and another and larger pah. In startling contrast to the dense ma.s.ses of the oily leaves, there stretched a great extent of light-green sward, where there were other camps and a tall flagstaff, from which floated the white flag and the Union Jack, emblems of British sovereignty and peace.

A thousand kilted Maories dotted the green landscape with patches of brilliant tartans and scarlet cloth. Women lounged about, whiling away the time with dance and song; and from all the corners of the glade the soft cadence of the Maori cry of welcome came floating to us on the breeze, sweet as the sound of distant bells.

As we drove quickly on, we found ourselves in the midst of a thronging crowd of square-built men, brown in color, and for the most part not much darker than Spaniards, but with here and there a woolly negro in their ranks. Glancing at them as we were hurried past, we saw that the men were robust, well limbed, and tall. They greeted us pleasantly with many a cheerful, open smile, but the faces of the older people were horribly tattooed in spiral curves. The chiefs carried battle-clubs of jade and bone; the women wore strange ornaments. At the flagstaff we pulled up, and, while the preliminaries of the council were arranged, had time to discuss with Maori and with "Pakeha" (white man) the questions that had brought us thither.