Twice as large as Kapiti, and quite twice as picturesque, the Little Barrier Island, the northern bird-sanctuary, is otherwise little known. It has no history to speak of, though Mr. Shakespear, its care-taker, has gathered one or two traditions. A sharp fight, for instance, between two bands of Maori was decided on its shore; and for many years thereafter a tree which stood there was pointed out as the “gallows” on which the cannibal victors hung the bodies of their slain enemies. At another spot on the boulders of the beach an unhappy fugitive is said to have paddled in his canoe, flying from a defeat on the mainland. Landing exhausted, he found the islanders as merciless as the foes behind, and was promptly clubbed and eaten. However, the Little Barrier is to-day as peaceful an asylum as the heart of a persecuted bird could desire. The stitch-bird, no longer hunted by collectors, is once more increasing in numbers there, and has for companion the bell-bird—the sweetest of our songsters, save one,—which has been driven from its habitat on the main North Island. Godwits, wearied with their long return journey from Siberia, are fain, “spent with the vast and howling main,” to rest on the Little Barrier before passing on their way across the Hauraki Gulf. Fantails and other wild feathered things flutter round the care-taker’s house, for—so he tells us—he does not suffer any birds—not even the friendless and much-disliked cormorant—to be injured. Along with the birds, the tuatara lizard (and the kauri, pohutu-kawa, and other trees, quite as much in need of asylum as the birds) may grow and decay unmolested in the quiet ravines. The island lies forty-five miles from Auckland, and nearly twenty from the nearest mainland, so there is no need for it to be disturbed by anything worse than the warm and rainy winds that burst upon it from north-east and north-west.

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Water, the force that beautifies the west and south-west, has been the chief foe of their explorers. The first whites to penetrate their gorges and wet forests found their main obstacles in rivers, lakes, and swamps. Unlike pioneers elsewhere, they had nothing to fear from savages, beasts, reptiles, or fever. Brunner, one of the earliest to enter Westland, spent more than a year away from civilisation, encountering hardship, but never in danger of violence from man or beast. Still, such a rugged and soaking labyrinth could not be traversed and mapped out without loss. There is a death-roll, though not a very long one. Nearly all the deaths were due to drowning. Mr. Charlton Howitt, one of the Anglo-Victorian family of writers and explorers, was lost with two companions in Lake Brunner. The one survivor of Howitt’s party died from the effects of hardship. Mr. Townsend, a Government officer, who searched Lake Brunner for Howitt’s body, was himself drowned not long after, also with two companions. Mr. Whitcombe, surveyor, perished in trying to cross the Teremakau in a canoe. Von Haast’s friend, the botanist Dr. Sinclair, was drowned in a torrent in the Alps of Canterbury. Quintin M’Kinnon, who did as much as any one to open up the region between the southern lakes and the Sounds, sank in a squall while sailing alone in Lake Te Anau. Professor Brown, of the University of Otago, who disappeared in the wilds to the west of Manapouri, is believed to have been swept away in a stream there. The surveyor Quill, the only man who has yet climbed to the top of the Sutherland Falls, lost his life afterwards in the Wakatipu wilderness. Only one death by man’s violence is to be noted in the list—that of Dobson, a young surveyor of much promise, who was murdered by bush-rangers in northern Westland about forty years ago. I have named victims well known and directly engaged in exploring. The number of gold-diggers, shepherds, swagmen, and nondescripts who have gone down in the swift and ice-cold rivers of our mountains is large. Among them are not a few nameless adventurers drawn westward by the gold rushes of the ’sixties. It is a difficult matter to gauge from the bank the precise amount of risk to be faced in fording a clouded torrent as it swirls down over hidden boulders and shifting shingle. Even old hands miscalculate sometimes. When once a swagman stumbles badly and loses his balance, he is swept away, and the struggle is soon over. There is a cry; a man and a swag are rolled over and over; he drops his burden and one or both are sucked under in an eddy—perhaps to reappear, perhaps not. It may be that the body is stranded on a shallow, or it may be that the current bears it down to a grave in the sea.

The south-western coast was the first part of our islands seen by a European. Tasman sighted the mountains of Westland in 1642. Cook visited the Sounds more than once, and spent some time in Dusky Sound in 1771. Vancouver, who served under Cook, anchored there in command of an expedition in 1789; and Malaspina, a Spanish navigator, took his ship among the fiords towards the end of the eighteenth century. But Tasman did not land; and though the others did, and it is interesting to remember that such noted explorers of the southern seas came there in the old days of three-cornered hats, pigtails, and scurvy, still it must be admitted that their doings in our south-western havens were entirely commonplace. Vancouver and the Spaniards had no adventures. Nothing that concerns Cook can fail to interest the student; and the story of his anchorages and surveys, of the “spruce beer” which he brewed from a mixture of sprigs of rimu and leaves of manuka, and of his encounters with the solitary family of Maori met with on the coast, is full of meaning to the few who pore over the scraps of narrative which compose the history of our country prior to 1800. There is satisfaction in knowing that the stumps of the trees cut down by Cook’s men are still to be recognised. To the general reader, however, any stirring elements found in the early story of the South Island were brought in by the sealers and whalers who came in the wake of the famous navigators, rather than by the discoverers themselves. One lasting service the first seamen did to the Sounds: they left plain and expressive names on most of the gulfs, coves, and headlands. Doubtful Sound, Dusky Sound, Wet Jacket Arm, Chalky Island, Parrot Island, Wood Hen Cove, speak of the rough experiences and everyday life of the sailors. Resolution, Perseverance, Discovery have a salt savour of difficulties sought out and overcome. For the rest the charm of the south-west comes but in slight degree from old associations. It is a paradise without a past.

The sealers and whalers of the first four decades of the nineteenth century knew our outlying islands well. Of the interior of our mainland they knew nothing whatever; but they searched every bay and cove of the butt-end of the South Island, of Rakiura, and of the smaller islets for the whale and fur seal. The schooners and brigs that carried these rough-handed adventurers commonly hailed either from Sydney, Boston, or Nantucket, places that were not in those days schools of marine politeness or forbearance. The captains and crews that they sent out to southern seas looked on the New Zealand coast as a No Man’s Land, peopled by ferocious cannibals, who were to be traded with, or killed, as circumstances might direct. The Maori met them very much in the same spirit. Many are the stories told of the dealings, peaceable or warlike, of the white ruffians with the brown savages. In 1823, for instance, the schooner Snapper brought away from Rakiura to Sydney a certain James Caddell, a white seaman with a tattooed face. This man had, so he declared, been landed on Stewart Island seventeen years earlier, as one of a party of seal-hunters. They were at once set upon by the natives, and all killed save Caddell, who saved his life by clutching the sacred mantle of a chief and thus obtaining the benefit of the law of Tapu. He was allowed to join the tribe, to become one of the fighting men, and to marry a chief’s daughter. At any rate, that was his story. It may have been true, for he is said to have turned his back on Sydney and deliberately returned to live among the Maori.

A more dramatic tale is that of the fate of a boat’s crew from the General Gates, American sealing ship. In 1821 her captain landed a party of six men somewhere near Puysegur Point to collect seal-skins. So abundant were the fur seals on our south-west coast in those days that in six weeks the men had taken and salted 3563 skins. Suddenly a party of Maori burst into their hut about midnight, seized the unlucky Americans, and, after looting the place, marched them off as prisoners. According to the survivors, they were compelled to trudge between three and four hundred miles, and were finally taken to a big sandy bay on the west coast of the South Island. Here they were tied to trees and left without food till they were ravenously hungry. Then one of them, John Rawton, was killed with a club. His head was buried in the ground; his body dressed, cooked, and eaten. On each of the next three days another of the wretched seamen was seized and devoured in the same way, their companions looking on like Ulysses in the cave of the Cyclops. As a crowning horror the starving seamen were offered some of the baked human flesh and ate it. After four days of this torment there came a storm with thunder and lightning, which drove the natives away to take shelter. Left thus unguarded, Price and West, the two remaining prisoners, contrived to slip their bonds of flax. A canoe was lying on the beach, and rough as the surf was, they managed to launch her. Scarcely were they afloat before the natives returned and rushed into the sea after them, yelling loudly. The Americans had just sufficient start and no more. Paddling for dear life, they left the land behind, and had the extraordinary fortune, after floating about for three days, to be picked up, half dead, by the trading schooner Margery. The story of their capture and escape is to be found in Polack’s New Zealand, published in 1838. Recently, Mr. Robert M’Nab has unearthed contemporary references to the General Gates, and, in his book Muri-huku, has given an extended account of the adventures of her skipper and crew. The captain, Abimelech Riggs by name, seems to have been a very choice salt-water blackguard. He began his career at the Antipodes by enlisting convicts in Sydney, and carrying them off as seamen. For this he was arrested in New Zealand waters, and had to stand his trial in Sydney. In Mr. M’Nab’s opinion, he lost two if not three parties of his men on the New Zealand coast, where he seems to have left them to take their chance, sailing off and remaining away with the finest indifference. Finally, he appears to have taken revenge by running down certain canoes manned by Maori which he chanced to meet in Foveaux Straits. After that coup, Captain Abimelech Riggs vanishes from our stage, a worthy precursor of Captain Stewart of the brig Elisabeth, the blackest scoundrel of our Alsatian period.

Maori history does not contribute very much to the romance of the south-west. A broken tribe, the Ngatimamoe, were in the eighteenth century driven back to lurk among the mountains and lakes there. Once they had owned the whole South Island. Their pitiless supplanters, the Ngaitahu, would not let them rest even in their unenviable mountain refuges. They were chased farther and farther westward, and finally exterminated. A few still existed when the first navigators cast anchor in the fiords. For many years explorers hoped to find some tiny clan hidden away in the tangled recesses of Fiordland; but it would seem that they are gone, like the moa.

The whites came in time to witness the beginning of a fresh process of raiding and dispossession—the attacks on the Ngaitahu by other tribes from the north. The raids of Rauparaha among the Ngaitahu of the eastern coast of the South Island have often been described; for, thanks to Mr. Travers, Canon Stack, and other chroniclers, many of their details have been preserved. Much less is known of the doings of Rauparaha’s lieutenants on the western coast, though one of their expeditions passed through the mountains and the heart of Otago. Probably enough, his Ngatitoa turned their steps towards Westland in the hope of annexing the tract wherein is found the famous greenstone—a nephrite prized by the Maori at once for its hardness and beauty. In their stone age—that is to say, until the earlier decades of the nineteenth century—it furnished them with their most effective tools and deadliest weapons. The best of it is so hard that steel will not scratch its surface, while its clear colour, varying from light to the darkest green, is far richer than the hue of oriental jade. Many years—as much as two generations—might be consumed in cutting and polishing a greenstone meré fit for a great chief.[5] When perfected, such a weapon became a sacred heirloom, the loss of which would be wailed over as a blow to its owner’s tribe.

The country of the greenstone lies between the Arahura and Hokitika rivers in Westland, a territory by no means easy to invade eighty years ago. The war parties of the Ngatitoa reached it, however, creeping along the rugged sea-coast, and, where the beaches ended, scaling cliffs by means of ladders. They conquered the greenstone district (from which the whole South Island takes its Maori name, Te Wai Pounamou), and settled down there among the subdued natives. Then, one might fancy, the Ngatitoa would have halted. South of the Teremakau valley there was no greenstone; for the stone, tangi-wai, found near Milford Sound, though often classed with greenstone, is a distinct mineral, softer and much less valuable. Nor were there any more tribes with villages worth plundering. Save for a few wandering fugitives, the mountains and coast of the south-west were empty, or peopled only by the Maori imagination with ogres and fairies, dangerous to the intruder. Beyond this drenched and difficult country, however, the Ngatitoa resolved to pass. They learned—from captives, one supposes—of the existence of a low saddle, by which a man may cross from the west coast to the lakes of Otago without mounting two thousand feet. By this way, the Haast Pass, they resolved to march, and fall with musket and meré upon the unexpecting Ngaitahu of Otago. Their leader in this daring project was a certain Puoho. We may believe that the successes of Rauparaha on the east coast, and the fall, one after the other, of Omihi, the two stockades of Akaroa, and the famous pa of Kaiapoi, had fired the blood of his young men, and that Puoho dreamed of nothing less than the complete conquest of the south. He nearly effected it. By a daring canoe voyage from Port Nicholson to southern Westland, and by landing there and crossing the Haast Saddle, this tattooed Hannibal turned the higher Alps and descended upon Lake Hawea, surprising there a village of the Ngaitahu. Only one of the inhabitants escaped, a lad who was saved to guide the marauders to the camp of a family living at Lake Wanaka. The boy managed to slip away from the two captors who were his guards, and ran all the way to Wanaka to warn the threatened family—his own relatives. When the two guards gave chase, they found the intended victims prepared for them; they fell into an ambuscade and were both killed—tomahawked. Before the main body of the invaders came up, the Ngaitahu family was far away. At Wanaka, Puoho’s daring scheme became more daring still, for he conceived and executed no less a plan than that of paddling down the Clutha River on rafts made of flax sticks—crazy craft for such a river. The flower stalks or sticks of the native flax are buoyant enough when dead and dry; but they soon become water-logged and are absurdly brittle. They supply such rafts as small boys love to construct for the navigation of small lagoons. And that strange river, the Clutha, while about half as long as the Thames, tears down to the sea bearing far more water than the Nile. Nevertheless the Clutha did not drown Puoho and his men: they made their way to the sea through the open country of the south-east. Then passing on to the river Mataura, they took another village somewhere between the sea and the site of a town that now rejoices in the name of Gore. Then indeed the fate of the Ngaitahu hung in the balance, and the Otago branches of the tribe were threatened with the doom of those of the northern half of the island. They were saved because in Southland there was at the moment their one capable leader in their later days of trouble—the chief Tuhawaiki, whom the sealers of the south coast called Bloody Jack. Hurrying up with all the warriors he could collect, and reinforced by some of the white sealers aforesaid, this personage attacked the Ngatitoa by the Mataura, took their stockade by escalade, and killed or captured the band. Puoho himself was shot by a chief who lived to tell of the fray for more than sixty years afterwards. So the Ngaitahu escaped the slavery or extinction which they in earlier days had inflicted on the Ngatimamoe. For, three years after Puoho’s raid, the New Zealand Company appeared in Cook’s Strait, and thereafter Rauparaha and his braves harried the South Island no more.

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