ENZB - 1959 - Taylor, N. (ed.) Early Travellers in New Zealand [Selected Accounts--Some Augmented with Missing Sections]

[FOREWORD]

FOREWORD

A 'NEW' country takes a great deal of discovering. So does an 'old' country. The English keep on discovering England, sometimes with pleasure, often with surprise. But it has been discovered so often, and written about so much, that the ordinary literate Englishman, even if no traveller, has generally something in the back of his mind compounded of the observations of travellers like Defoe and Arthur Young and Pennant and Cobbett. He may not have read them; none the less he knows their names, and they have contributed to what he knows of the 'social history' of his country. Come to the 'new' country; come, by way of example, to New Zealand. We can say, if we like, that it was discovered by Abel Tasman in 1642, or, more completely, by James Cook in 1769, and be strictly correct; yet, though correct, how far from the truth we are! For those sailors discovered and recorded a coastline; Cook and his companions, also, certainly found out a little about the people and the natural productions of the country. Cook put it within its limits of latitude and longitude. He gave it its first effective publicity. None the less, after all his visits, it still lay, really, an outline on the map, charted with a great deal of accuracy, and unknown.

It was again the travellers--to give so many different sorts of men one compendious name, whatever they travelled for--who made it known. They were inside the country, and the coast was what they started from and came back to. To examine the reasons of each would be to traverse a good many of the motives which, outside love between the sexes, and personal glory, drive on humankind. The travellers' tales that Mrs. Taylor here reprints show vividly the process by which, however impelled, they came to their own comprehension of a land so difficult, often, to explore, so rich in uncommercial reward to the explorer. Sould we say, rather, in reward to the generations who succeeded the explorer? One thinks of the bitter experience of Barrington, or of some of the worst days of Brunner. Perhaps the only reward there--and, considering the circumstances, one rich enough--was to have survived. Others, however arduous

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their journeying--Colenso, Heaphy, Selwyn--got more fun out of it. There were others, pampered men who rode horses, who may have got more fun still--though it could have been no fun for young Lieutenant Meade to sit, that long afternoon of oratory, waiting for the Hauhau tomahawk to descend upon his skull.

We, at any rate, get our reward. We get it in the pages these men wrote. We may, as general readers of no specified country, take then as a number of good yarns. We may, if we are students of what is generally known as the 'expansion' of England, or Europe, or Western capitalist civilization, regard them also as good standard accounts of good standard examples of a process that was going or contemporaneously in a number of wild or semi-wild environments--in Australia and Africa, and mid- and far-west America as well as in New Zealand--a process in which the heroes were much the same sort of men everywhere: sometimes truly heroic, but generally unsung; speaking themselves, when they spoke, in unmistakable prose. The prospector, the missionary, the surveyor, are universal figures, not, on the whole, poetic. If, on the other hand, we are New Zealanders, we may here learn something essential about our country. We can let historical generalization go. We can clutch onto the yarns; and as they become known, we shall enlarge and deepen our tradition, the tradition of a particular people in a particular land, whose mutual workings have given us ourselves. 'As they become known': for they are not well enough known yet, even to the most widely reading, ordinary New Zealander. They were not, when they first appeared in print, flood-lit; no vast acclaim surrounded the printing presses of The Church in the Colonies or the Wakatip Mail. They may seem, for us, odd equivalents of the social and topographical explorations of Britain. Dr. Johnson in the hot lakes district is a very different figure from Dr. Johnson in the Hebrides. Reading them now, we go on our own journey of discovery.

We have one advantage. Mrs. Taylor has been there before us. In this particular sphere of learning she is superb. Apart from anything else, no one who has ever tried to work out precisely where an explorer went even a hundred years ago--good and explicit as the explorer's records may be, or seem to be--but will admire the detail and accuracy of her researches; her honesty when research comes to

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a dead end; the reservoir of knowledge she has drawn from to select and annotate. No one who has had to introduce on to a modern stage persons to some degree or other obscure but will acknowledge her tact and economy as a writer; and, when she sets the stage, her equal expertness. One reader, at least--but it can hardly be only one--is grateful both for the substance of this book, and for the editorial illumination that surrounds it.

J. C. BEAGLEHOLE

Victoria University of Wellington
1 November 1958

[INTRODUCTION]

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INTRODUCTION

EARLY New Zealand travellers present early New Zealand. The part, in a way, contains the whole. Early travellers come to grips directly with country and climate and native people, and make what they can of these things, according to their sense and training and adaptability. Those who left journals that we care to read today were the most conscious, the most articulate: so zealous to convey their experience to others, or preserve it for themselves, that they made a daily record of it. They speak for the submerged silent mass, who did, saw, or felt like them, but wrote no words; for writing was not their business. Of the exceptions, the articulate, many kept travel-journals simply as a private or family record, some sending long journal-letters to friends in England who would marvel over the cool cheerfulness of their hero in this unknown, barbarous New Zealand, the world's end. Some, urged to add to the knowledge of fellow-colonists and the world at large, published them in newspapers or pamphlets; or even, in later life, wrote a book from the diaries, letters, and memories. Now these lie buried in the common graves of old newspapers, or in a neglected cemetery of pamphlets, the good obscure alike with the dull and commonplace. Erratically persons of historical mind spring into the graves and disinter this worthy one and that; others wait still.

Writing was not the business of these travellers any more than it was that of their silent fellows, but their pleasure. They were journal-keepers, not journalists. Nor was travelling their business but rather the means to it. They were missionaries, explorers, surveyors, farmers, gold-miners, soldiers. They wrote, necessarily, from the different viewpoints of their various purposes, with their education, their worldly experience, overlying and flattening out these differences like a uniform or a fall of snow. Often the educated, urbane traveller is more perceptive, and tells a better tale, than a simpler soul on the same road. But sometimes when travelling was a grim ordeal--an ordeal of harsh country, scant food, pitiless weather--the journals of simple men like Brunner or Barrington in the eloquence of their restraint quite overtop the rest.

When we consider their writing we must remember their ages and their period. They were mostly young men--Brunner and Heaphy

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and Meade were in their mid-twenties, Selwyn and Colenso and Thomson in the mid-thirties, Percy Smith was a mere eighteen, Barrington was probably somewhere in the thirties, Abraham was forty-one, Johnson was fifty-three. It is comely for young men to make light of sore feet, rough food, hard beds; one notices that it is poor old Johnson who found the mosquitoes and fleas most troublesome. As the surveyor Thomson wrote twenty years after his reconnaissance journey, 'The air was vigorous, the scenes attractive. The gypsy mode of life had the advantage of being novel.' 1

Then, eight of the eleven travellers who reappear in these pages wrote between 1841 and 1858, two wrote in the 1860's, one in the 1870's. They had grown up when the Romantic movement dominated English letters, making general an admiration of Nature particularly in her wilder, grander aspects, and prompting appreciation of the more picturesque, human-seeming qualities of character. The poems of Wordsworth, of Byron and Scott, the novels of Scott and his contemporaries were their background; besides, of course, the other influences that crowded in to shape or educate them. It is said of Heaphy that he offered, given the first line of any stanza by Byron or Scott, to continue it, and once started on Childe Harold he kept going for more than half an hour. 2 Our Dr. Johnson whiled away some hours of a Tasman crossing discussing the merits of Scott, Bulwer Lytton, and of G. P. R. James, a dull historical novelist who has quite sunk out of most twentieth-century reading, but who could then claim a place in conversation--though perhaps only a lady acquaintance of his would have cared to set him up against Scott. 3 To both Johnson and St. John a grotto-like, fire-lit camp scene suggested a fit subject for Salvator Rosa. Thomson in his writings reveals a very wide reading, including, but by no means limited to, the Romantic school. Colenso splashed his pages with drops drawn from a wide range of poets--he usually took one or two of his favourites with him on his travels--and his later pamphlets were fairly overladen with lengthy poetic illustrations, largely from Longfellow.

Generally, then, their literary experience was a further factor leading these travellers to sing the praises of life in the wilds, of a

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bed in the bush with stars to see, and a weka roasted on a supplejack. Of course much of early New Zealand was so very wild and untamed that even the educated could hunger for the works of man, as Himalayan climbers in 1953 enjoyed the sight of Sherpa huts among the peaks and gorges that lead to Everest. Moreover, colonists from the England of 1840 and onwards, where thousands struggled against thousands for a living, could not but be aware of New Zealand's emptiness, and how amply it might support the stragglers.

Despite some shared attitudes, however, there is a deal of difference among our eleven travellers. They have been selected for their variety, as well as for their intrinsic interest. They represent, I think, in their difference of purpose, of training, of character and interests, some of the major types among the men who travelled early New Zealand. Thus there is the powerful, competent Selwyn, strong in his belief in his Church and its place in the new land; and there is the gentler Abraham, his lieutenant, more used to schoolrooms and gardens than to cliff-climbing and stony beaches, but made strong by his faith in Selwyn. There is Colenso, third and lowliest of the clergymen. Both science and the gospel were his masters, though undoubtedly he found the service of science the more rewarding, less hedged about by unsympathetic men. Together these three may speak for the large body of missionaries who travelled all over the North Island, making peace between tribes, teaching and keeping lively the practices of Christianity, and recording their impressions of Maori life and of Nature in New Zealand. Many of these missionaries, some pretty limited in mind, like good farmer John Morgan of Otawhao, some knowledgeable, like Richard Taylor of Wanganui, kept lengthy accounts of their journeys, embedded in their still lengthier journals--journals unpublished and perhaps unpublishable.

Colenso, in the extracts now reprinted, and indeed in most of his published works, wrote almost wholly and avowedly as a scientist. But he travelled as a missionary, and it was a missionary purpose that led him to the remote places where he collected his new ferns, and glowed with excitement over some charming little clematis or lobelia. As a scientist he also represents the other scientist-travellers --such men as Dieffenbach, the New Zealand Company's naturalist in 1839-41, Bidwill, who climbed Ngauruhoe in 1839, Hochstetter, who probed the North Island with German thoroughness in 1859,

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and Haast and Hector, government geologists in the South Island in the decade that then began.

There follow four surveyors, valuable and necessary travellers in a new country. Heaphy tells spiritedly of his quite sterling work with Brunner in Nelson and on the west coast, concerned at once to give information, to entertain his reader, and perhaps to show his familiarity with the polite world. Brunner, his friend and companion, writes with fine economy of his great eighteen months' journey, contriving to tell much about the west coast and its Nelson approaches, but regrettably little about himself. Percy Smith, still in his teens, and just through his cadetship, his eminence as surveyor-general and Maori scholar some thirty and forty years ahead of him, writes as the young colonial, almost the young colonial savage, giving a fair account of the scarcely known country between the Mokau and the Hot Lakes in the aspects that would interest most colonists, and making so little of hardships that one is almost surprised to find him fainting at Taupo. Then comes John Turnbull Thomson, far more highly trained than the others, to begin in Otago the first really scientific and methodical survey work in New Zealand. Austerely devoted to his profession, he set forth step by step in several pamphlets how a new province should be surveyed, quickly, accurately, and cheaply, before settlers took up runs where ill-defined boundaries would lead to litigation and discredit. In the article here given he describes the beginning of the process, his first reconnaissance survey. Without expounding scientific principles he presents a sober account of the strenuous two months' job, with occasional patches of human liveliness which this cold-mannered person apparently permitted himself only in writing or--to be more exact--in his less formal writing. Thomson had been only a few months in New Zealand at this time, so he noticed small points in the colonial way of life that more acclimatized travellers would take for granted.

John Johnson, the government surgeon, stands as the example of the pure traveller--at least no special purpose, other than curiosity, emerges for his journey into the North Island interior, and indeed his abundant interest in landscape and people makes no other seem necessary. He is the amateur scientist, relishing his geology, dwelling lovingly on panoramas, describing each mile of the river's banks, his style stately and slow-moving as the Waipa itself. Johnson had helped Hobson select the site of Auckland in 1840, six years before,

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and he was to die eighteen months after his journey, at the age of fifty-four. He was a zealous but disinterested colonist, his course was nearly run already, he does not give that sense of having a way to make, a job to get done as fast as possible, that breathes from most of our travellers' tales.

Herbert Meade, R. N., was no colonist at all, but an aristocratic young visitor, with a quite acute sense of situation, showing the flag, as it were, in troubled waters. He is our example of a traveller among hostile Maoris, his is the genuine and eternal schoolboy adventure.

Lieutenant-Colonel St. John instances the later traveller, who starts out in a coach, who rarely has to do without a horse, and who writes when a good deal has already been written. This composite account of journeys made over several years gives no hint of their particular purposes. It has a literary, reminiscing character, whereas the others were published close on the traveller's return, to give needed information to eager fellow-colonists. St. John's military record is that of a poor soldier, but in these rambles he appears an urbane, amiable fellow, the persisting English gentleman, well-meaning if only conventionally perceptive.

Far, very far from him, A. J. Barrington, among his snowy mountains, wrote his laconic diary of cold, hunger, and enduring effort, in quest of the little golden specks that led so many unknown men into places almost unknowable. Barrington was not latest in time among these travellers, but he was already the end-product of the environment he had chosen, a back-country New Zealander, taking his travails and dangers as they came, enjoying the good patches between them.

Of these eleven travellers, five may be called explorers--Colenso and Selwyn in the North Island, Brunner and Heaphy and Barrington in the South. The earliest travel anywhere is exploration: exploration is rather more likely to be written about than later journeyings that have lost the appeal of newness. And it should be remembered that the first traveller to give his account is usually called the explorer, though a silent man may have preceded him. Thus missionaries are credited with exploring most of the North Island--between 1830 and 1850 their tracks had criss-crossed it pretty thoroughly, though several early traders went before them into the Waikato, the Thames, Rotorua, and probably other places. But the traders left merely the barest record of their travels, or no

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record at all. The South Island, with only a few Maoris living near the coasts to be christianized, did not have missionary travellers. By 1850 it was explored only in patches. In Nelson, the first regular settlement, surveyors and settlers had gone out in most directions to pierce through their encircling hills. Brunner had been half-way down the west coast, a party had struggled through the hills beyond the Wairau to Christchurch, just being settled. Bishop Selwyn had trudged from Banks Peninsula to Otago in 1844, passing on the way first some unnamed sailors, and then Shortland, a Maori land reserves commissioner, northward bound on the same route. From Dunedin, settled in 1848, surveyors had done no more than nibble at their large hinterland. In the next fifteen years surveyors, sheep-farmers searching for new land, geologists, gold-miners, were to push far into the mountains of Canterbury and Otago, finding the main passes across the Alps, and leaving only the rainy mountain gorges of Westland and Fiordland to be explored by a later generation of accomplished bushmen.

Of course it can be said that most New Zealand explorers, especially in the North Island, were not really exploring--they were fed and guided by the Maoris, followed Maori tracks, had tales of Maori passes through the mountains to encourage or mislead them. All European intrusions into inhabited lands are subject to this limitation; and pure exploration, it may be argued again, can take place only on the oceans and towards either Pole. Still, the South Island had but a few Maoris, in small patches, and Barrington's party must qualify as explorers even by the purist's standard. There were no porters or Sherpas in their snowy mountains. And many a sheepman, surveyor, or gold-miner, though he took the way spoken of by an old Maori, faced the unknown on his own resources enough to know the essential feelings of exploration, with no rescue party possible, no chance caravan to encounter.

In the North Island, well peopled and well known by the Maoris, missionaries, with a few surveyors and others, were New Zealand's more pampered explorers. True, in their contact with another culture, they had their own peculiar strains and hardships; and perhaps Colenso crossing the Ruahine range, the trackless ferny wastes of inland Hawke's Bay, or the swampy forests of Kaipara, with only his compass and a despairing native to guide him, might have felt occasionally that he was the veritable explorer.

How did the early travellers get along with the native race? Again

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this question really applies only to the North Island. Generally the Maoris were helpful and hospitable, even if flea-ridden. There were a few complaints of robbery, but perhaps the sufferers managed their affairs badly. More frequent were complaints of extortionate charges for food, ferrying over rivers, hire of canoes and guides; but who should blame the Maoris for being apt pupils of those who regarded bargains with savages as amusing devices? On the whole, the most exacting Maoris were those who had already had most contact with the pakeha. Certainly there is a vast difference between the lavish hospitality with which the greenstone workers of the west coast, many of whom had not seen a white man before, received Brunner and Heaphy in 1846, and the hard bargaining that Percy Smith and his friends met between Taranaki and the central lakes in 1858. Except in the wars travellers' lives were not threatened. Lieutenant Meade was in more peril than any pioneering missionary from Marsden onwards. A pioneering missionary, condemning old customs and urging new practices, would seem sufficiently provocative, but a surly reception was the worst he met with. Actually the first gospelling was done by native teachers trickling out from the Bay of Islands mission, started by Marsden in 1815, active since 1823, and English missionaries did not venture forth without some hope of success. Also they were competent in the language and knew something of the customs of the people, though most of these customs had their disapproval. The Maoris literally supported the missionaries on their journeys, giving them food, supplying guides, bearers, canoes--often carrying them over rivers and swamps and up the steepest cliffs.

No other travellers were given such help--even Brunner, so warmly assisted by the loyal and skilful Kehu, and by the friendly villagers of the greenstone country, always, except when ill, bore his full share of the loads, helped in getting firewood and such tasks, and he never rode on Kehu's shoulders. Nor were other travellers so closely concerned with the Maori, who was, of course, the whole reason for the missionaries' presence in his country. We have briefly examined these others. They were not, as we have seen, ordinary settlers. The settlements all started at the coast; and ordinary settlers wishing to go from Auckland, say, to Wellington or New Plymouth, almost always went by sea. Inland went surveyors on their long reconnaissance journeys, government officials buying land, enterprising would-be settlers determined to find

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out for themselves about the country and what it might offer, a few soldiers, partly on duty, partly for pleasure. There were the men of sheer curiosity, like Dr. Johnson; or like J. C. Bidwill, who in 1839 pushed into the interior so sketchily shadowed on the maps and climbed Mount Ngauruhoe. These travellers took part of their food (rice, biscuits, sugar, and tea), bargaining for pork and potatoes, canoes and guides, at first with tobacco, later with money. They were concerned to get along with the Maori, making no attempt to improve him, accepting for the moment, of very necessity, his values and conditions. Some managed to learn a good deal about him, many thought his curious ways worth writing about.

With exploring over, travelling conditions remained much the same for some years in the North Island, where Maori-owned land, bush, and swamps made settlement creep but slowly inland. The main differences were that pakeha travellers now knew where they were going and what to expect. Occasionally they might meet a stray settler, and they found the Maoris increasingly sophisticated. When Abraham and Selwyn walked the coast from the Waikato to New Plymouth in 1855, they travelled much as they might have done in 1835, except for their settlers at Kawhia and Raglan. The Waikato and the Hot Lakes districts throughout the 40's and 50's were pretty much as Johnson found them in 1847, and the way from Mokau to Taupo taken by Percy Smith and his friends in 1858 would have remained unchanged still longer. But by the 1870's when Lieutenant-Colonel St. John rambled, much Maori land had been sold or confiscated in the wars, military settlers had been planted around Hamilton, horse roads were being pushed far inland, and railways were talked of. In Hawke's Bay the old Maori path from Taupo to the coast had broadened into the overland mail track, and was to be the main highway of a motor age.

In the South Island where the land was unpeopled and open, covered merely with tussock-grass and scrub, sheepmen spread out swiftly. By 1856, when J. T. Thomson became chief surveyor of Otago, their stations, tiny shacks on huge runs, had reached the Canterbury foothills, were scattered thinly up the Waitaki to the great lakes, and were edging steadily inland from the southern coasts. Land explored one month might be leased and settled the next or just as soon as the discoverer of a pleasing empty tract could sketch out his run at the survey office, pay a small grazing fee, and bring up a few sheep to establish occupation. It may be noticed

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that there is no sheepfarmer among these eleven travellers. But among the silent people they were remarkably silent, singularly intent on their own business--that is, sheep and country good for sheep. The published accounts of their travels are few and bald, with the one grand exception of Samuel Butler, a more than adequate voice for all, and so sure of reprints that he has no place here.

Then in the early 1860's gold-miners flooded Otago and the west coast, camps and canvas towns sprouted up in valleys unknown a few weeks before, and gold-quickened diggers scoured country that properly belonged to mountaineers. In a few years the flood ebbed back, the towns withered, the camps were deserted, the travellers' tales, told in bar-rooms, were forgotten before they were understood, and few indeed wrote them down--Barrington's is the only substantial first-hand account so far known. With the gold rushes over, and the bones of some of the first wave of settlers beginning to whiten, the second stage of New Zealand's laborious development got under way, and the earliest days and their travelling were over.

These eleven travellers wrote of all aspects of the land, beach, bush, swamp, river, grassland, and mountain. They covered it very unevenly; six went to the Hot Lakes, four through the Waikato valley. But the lakes are in the middle of the island, where all tracks crossed, and the Waikato was the arterial road of the period. Much travel is not represented, partly because of space limitation, partly because the accounts are scrappy when considered as narrative, though they may have some special historical or social interest. Again for reasons of space and limited interest it has been necessary to trim down some of these journals, leaving out, where indicated, the stories of the past, the long descriptions of panoramas, the botanical and geological reflections, the opinions on the possibilities of settlement, and so on, that do not directly contribute much to the theme of travel, though they may obliquely cast light on the traveller and his climate of ideas. But it is hoped that this abbreviation is not serious, as its object is to disentangle and not to maim. The early traveller in New Zealand, after all, himself frequently needed a good deal of disentangling.

The sketch-maps and the footnotes identifying the travellers' place-names with their present-day equivalents will perhaps enable the reader to follow their tracks roughly, either on paper or on the land itself. To save repetition birds and plants which are mentioned in more than one journey are described in a special glossary. In the

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articles originally published in newspapers and pamphlets a few slight and obvious spelling mistakes--for instance, of a word already spelled rightly several times--have been silently corrected so that the reader need not be distracted by vagaries that are probably those of a colonial newspaper rather than the author's own.

It seemed necessary to attempt some uniformity throughout the book in the use of capitals and of italics for Maori words. The original texts are printed ones, not manuscripts; therefore in each a printer may already have dealt according to his custom, without following precisely every letter of the author's pen. Often there is no consistency within each text in the use of capitals--Kahikatea appears on one page, kahikatea on the next. On the other hand, some authors regularly had capitals where they would not be used today--for example, Johnson always had a capital for Native, and Selwyn had one for Pa and Pohutukawa. Throughout these reprints capitals are omitted in such words as missionary, native, pa, chief, pakeha, and rangatira, and in the names of plants and birds and fish-except in the case of Colenso.

Again, the original texts use roman type for Maori words but now and again these words are enclosed in quotation marks. To lessen the distractions of irregularity and emphasis the names of plants and birds and fish are here printed consistently--except for Colenso--in roman, without capitals--the method followed by most of the travellers themselves and the usual practice in New Zealand today. In the notes I have adopted the scientific convention of giving English and Maori names in roman with a capital, and scientific names in italic. Colenso, who was writing as a scientist, used roman with a capital for his Maori names, and italic for the Latin ones; these capitals and italics are retained.

With other Maori words I have attempted a compromise between holding to the roman type of the original texts and avoiding the strange look which they may present to modern readers. Our travellers were writing for people who were familiar with such terms. Some of these words have survived in daily use--words like whare and pa are as much a part of the language in New Zealand as rimu or kowhai or tui or kiwi. On the other hand, tiwai, a canoe without top-sides, or taurekareka, a slave, or ngawha, a hot spring, or kuia, an old woman, seem to be foreign and to deserve italics. But what of tangi, a lament, rangatira, a chief, or tapu, sacred? They have been italicized here, but many would claim that they are as much a part

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of the New Zealand language as tawa or pukeko, perhaps more so than tupakihi or kaka. It is an arbitrary, almost a personal decision. Maori words misspelled, even the commonest ones, such as ware for whare, are italicized and corrected in the footnotes.

In the notes I have given sources where these are in manuscript, typescript, or books not well known. Information that is widely available, such as historical commonplaces, or the application of obsolete place-names, like Port Cooper, Massacre Bay, or Ahuriri, is not attributed to any one source.

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[GLOSSARIES]

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GLOSSARY OF COMMON PLANTS

THIS list describes the plants which the travellers refer to repeatedly as things familiar to their readers and needing no explanation. It does not attempt to give full botanical accounts, but only those aspects which impinged on the travellers--the size and general appearance of trees and shrubs and creepers, their flowers and fruit if conspicuous or edible, their uses, where they grew, and what obstacles they offered to travel. Several authorities have been consulted, but the editor must take full responsibility for any errors that may have occurred in adapting their descriptions to this special purpose.

BRACKEN FERN (Pteridium aquilinum var. esculentum). The New Zealand bracken fern is a very robust form, growing up to 10 feet high in very favourable places, but often shoulder height or lower. It is widespread on waste land, especially that cleared from forest. It is very difficult to force a way through the taller growths of tangled scratchy stems, but the springy fronds make a good camp mattress.

BUSH LAWYER (Rubus spp.), brambles growing in scrub, fern, and on the edges of forest. Leaves and stems are armed with recurved prickles, and these clinging hooks earn its name and make it the enemy of any traveller.

CABBAGE TREE (Cordyline australis), Maori name Ti. Its common European name was given by Captain Cook who used the young top as a vegetable. It grows widely all over New Zealand, varying from 15 to 40 feet high, with one or several trunks from 1 to 4 feet in diameter. On the mature plants the tapering leaves, 1 1/2 to 3 feet long and 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 inches wide at the base, form dense round tufts at the tops of the many branches.

FERN ROOT, aruhe, starchy rhizome of the bracken fern above. A staple Maori food, available all the year round and in most parts of the country, and needing no cultivation. It was dug out with a pointed stick, dried, and stored. It was cooked over the embers (never in an earth oven), beaten to remove the hard outer skin, then chewed end on, and the fibrous material ejected as it collected in the mouth.

FLAX (Phormium tenax), Maori name Harakeke, has sword-shaped leaves 6 to 10 feet long, drooping at the tips, and flowers borne high above on long thick stalks. It grows widely in swamps and other damp places. A very valuable plant to the Maori, the leaves used for weaving baskets

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and all sorts of clothing, and for lashings of every kind. For many purposes the fibres were scraped clean of the green leafy part, by mussel shells and patient, skilful hands. This cleaned fibre was eagerly sought by early traders for rope-making, and in the race to buy muskets many tons of flax were scraped. Now grown commercially and used for floor-matting, wool-packs, sacks, and so on.

KAHIKATEA (Podocarpus dacrydioides), white pine. On this tall tree, ranging from 60 to 100 feet and occasionally more, the head of branches begins high up and is very small and narrow for its height. Small scalelike leaves closely cover the twigs. It occurs throughout most forests except beech forests, and was the main tree over large areas of swampy lowland, most of which are now cleared. Has straight-grained, easily worked white timber, but only the yellow heart-wood is durable.

KARAKA (Corynocarpus laevigata), a handsome tree 30 to 50 feet high, with glossy, dark-green, laurel-like foliage. The oval fruit, about 1 1/2 inches long, is orange when ripe. The kernels are poisonous when raw but the Maoris used them as food--they were first baked in an earth oven, soaked for a day or so in a stream, then washed and knocked about to wear off the flesh and skin, and stored away in baskets. Grows in coastal forest throughout the North Island and in the South as far as Banks Peninsula on the east and to south of Westport on the west.

KAURI (Agathis australis), a tall, massive, cone-bearing tree, the straight pillar-like trunk often soaring up branchless for about two-thirds of its height, then spreading out in massive branches to form a great rounded head covered with small, thick, dark-green leaves. The whole tree is usually 80 to 100 feet high, but a few are known to have reached this height before the first branch. Trees which would afford logs from 50 to 60 feet long and from 48 to 60 inches square are not uncommon in some forests, but the average diameter is about 40 inches. Probably New Zealand's most famous tree, very slow-growing, splendid timber, in great demand for ship's spars in the earliest days, and later for building. Found only in Auckland district, northwards from the Bay of Plenty in the east to Kawhia in the west. Now very scarce as a commercial timber tree; but big trees are still to be seen in many reserves and the species is regenerating quite vigorously in many places where second-growth vegetation is protected from fire.

KIEKIE (Freycinetia banksii), a root-climbing shrub that often hides its host tree in quantities of sword-shaped leaves, 2 feet long, which the Maoris used for weaving baskets. The sprawling almost impenetrable masses met with on bush ridges have often come down with a falling tree and continue to grow quite well near the ground as long as they are not too much shaded. This is also a rock plant.

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KOROMIKO (Veronica or more modernly Hebe), of which there are about 80 species. Most are closely branched woody shrubs a few feet high. Many species occur freely throughout fern and scrub (see Manuka) covered lands; others are the principal constituents of low shrubberies in the high mountains.

KOTUKUTUKU (Fuchsia excorticata) or tree-fuchsia, a small tree 15 to 45 feet high, with an irregular short trunk covered with flaking, papery, light pinkish-brown bark; fuchsia-like flowers about an inch long, green blotched with purple fading to red; the fruit a juicy, purplish-black, many-seeded oblong berry about a 1/2 inch long, called konini. Grows in well-lit forest edges, stream banks, &c. throughout the country.

KOWHAI (Sophora microphylla), a small leguminous tree, in shape a little like a weeping willow; deciduous, and in spring laden with large bright yellow flowers. Grows throughout both islands in open forests and river valleys.

KUMARA (Ipomoea batatas), sweet potato, brought by the Maoris from their Pacific homeland and carefully cultivated. The most important food crop until the introduction of the potato.

MANUKA (Leptospermum scoparium), the most abundant of New Zealand shrubs. It ranges from a tough bristly little plant a few inches high to a tree of 25 feet, according to its environment. It has small, grey-green, leathery leaves, and flowers between November and April in masses of small, five-petalled, white or rosy-flushed flowers which produce woody capsules. It is called tea-tree from the leaves being used for tea by Cook and by some hard-pressed early settlers. The name manuka was and is generally used to include another species of tea-tree that botanists distinguish as L. ericoides, which has softer leaves, smaller flowers and capsules, and grows to a larger tree. Manuka, which New Zealanders often call scrub, covers wide areas of poor land that will not support forest, and also occupies good land where forest has been destroyed. On the latter forest will in time grow again, extinguishing the manuka.

NIKAU, NIKAU-PALM (Rhopalostylis sapida), a true palm, 10 to 25 feet high, with straight ring-marked trunk 6 to 9 inches in diameter sheathed at the top with broad, smooth leaf bases and crowned with wide-spreading leaves 4 to 8 feet long. Grows in lowland forests throughout the North Island, and in the South as far as Banks Peninsula on the east and near Greymouth on the west.

POHUTUKAWA (Metrosideros excelsa) sometimes grows as a low shrub but usually as a tall, much-branched tree, the thick trunk buttressed by

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large roots. Its sprawling many-angled branches of hard timber early made it valuable for boat-building. It grows on sea cliffs and in coastal forest in the North Island to about the latitude of Hawke's Bay, and inland on the shores of lakes on the volcanic plateau; and will grow farther south if planted. Dark green foliage. Profuse clusters of many-stamened crimson flowers make these trees brilliant for a few weeks about Christmas time, and so it is usually called Christmas-tree.

RATA, NORTHERN (Metrosideros robusta), a tall massive tree from 60 to 100 feet high, with an irregular trunk often of great size, and spreading branches. Dark red many-stamened flowers. Usually begins life as a seedling high up on another tree, such as a rimu, and sends roots down to the ground. These roots and the laterals they give off ultimately surround the supporting tree trunk and become grafted to one another, forming a great cylinder, which, on the death and decay of the enclosed tree, becomes the hollow rata trunk. If the seed of the northern rata germinates and establishes itself successfully on a well-lit place in the forest it can grow into a sizable tree with a proper solid stem-trunk.

Grows in forests in many parts of the North Island and the north of the South Island to near Greymouth.

RATA, SOUTHERN (Metrosideros umbellata) varies from a small shrub to a tree 30 to 60 feet high, with trunk 2 to 4 feet in diameter. Bright crimson brush-like flowers, with stamens numerous and long. Abundant on the western side and south of the South Island at all altitudes.

RATA VINES. Some species of Metrosideros are root-climbers with woody cable-like stems, sometimes several inches in diameter.

RIMU (Dacrydium cupressinum) red pine, a tree 60 to 100 feet high with a straight massive trunk up to 4 feet through. When mature it has a comparatively small round-topped head, its branches ending in drooping branchlets closely covered with very short, narrow, pointed, almost prickly leaves. In the immature tree the branches are even more pendulous, with the long ultimate branchlets evenly clad in small, bright green, softly spiky leaves, so that the whole plant has a weeping-willow habit.

It is New Zealand's foremost timber tree. Grows over the whole length of the country and is found in most lowland and montane forests, except those of pure beech.

SPEAR-GRASS or SPANIARDS, called by the Maori Taramea or Kurikuri, belongs to the umbelliferous genus Aciphylla, of which there are a good many species in New Zealand. Commonly there is a spiky flower head 2 to 6 feet high borne above a dense circle of bayonet-like spiny leaves, about 2 feet long, though some species are less fearsome.

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SUPPLEJACK (Rhipogonum scandens), Maori name Kareao, one of the chief obstacles to movement in the bush. Its very hard, tough stems, like stiff ropes half an inch or more thick, hang and twist in dark gullies, binding one tree to another. They are brown or black in colour, and bare of leaves except at the ends of the shoots.

TARO (Colocasia antiquorum), an edible root brought with the main Maori migration from central Polynesia c. 1350. It needed a sandy soil and careful cultivation, so it was never as widely distributed as the sweet potato, and crops were not extensive enough for taro to be other than an extra-choice food.

TAWA (Beilschmiedia tawa), a tree 40 to 80 feet tall, trunk 1 to 3 feet thick, with slim pointed leaves 2 to 3 inches long, fruit a dark-purple oblong berry 1 inch long with the colour and bloom of a damson. A very abundant tree in lowland and montane forests of the North Island and the northern tip of the South Island.

TOETOE (Arundo conspicua), a large pampas-like grass, with cream-coloured feathery flower-heads.

TOMATAGURU or WILD IRISHMAN (Discaria toumatou), Maori name Tumatu-kuru, commonly called Matagouri or by some similar distortion, is a much-branched, very thorny bush or small tree, almost leafless, ranging from 2 to 15 feet in height. It is commonest on the eastern side of the Southern Alps, forming a large part of the vegetation of some mountain valleys.

TOTARA (Podocarpus totara), a tall massive tree 40 to 100 feet high, trunk 2 to 6 feet in diameter, covered with thick furrowed fibrous bark. Stalkless narrow pungent leaves about an inch long, of dull brownish-green. Very durable timber, the favourite of the Maoris for canoes and house-carving. Grows in lowland and montane forests of both North and South Islands.

TUPAKIHI (Coriaria arborea), commonly called Tutu, is a small rather flimsy tree or shrub with shining soft leaves and long clusters of purplish-black very juicy berries. The green shoots and seeds are poisonous, but the juice from the berries is not. Grows on the margin of lowland and montane forests and scrubs and on rocks throughout New Zealand.

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GLOSSARY OF COMMON BIRDS, ETC.

KAKA (Nestor septentrionalis), is a large, plump-bodied parrot. Its plumage is brown tipped with darker brown, with patches of red on the abdomen, under the wings, and about the tail. It is a noisy bird, with a harsh cry like its name. It climbs rapidly, hops on the ground, does acrobatics on the wing, and usually frequents the tops of trees. It eats grubs, seeds, fruit, and nectar; and nests in hollow trees. It was quite common formerly, and the Maoris, who caught it by snaring, spearing, and decoying, valued it both for food and for its red feathers, which were used to decorate their cloaks.

The South Island variety is more greenish than brown, with the head almost white, and is larger than the Northern kind.

KAKAPO (Strigops habroptilus), is a heavy-bodied parrot much larger than the Kaka. Its plumage is yellowish green and brownish buff, mottled and barred with black. It is a ground bird, but runs at a good pace, and climbs trees with agility. It lives in the forest, hiding during the day in rock crevices and holes under trees, which are also its nesting places. It comes out at night, eats berries, leaves, young shoots, and moss; and utters harsh screams and grunting noises.

KIWI {Apteryx), widely known as the symbol of New Zealand, is a roundbodied, sturdy-legged bird, roughly twelve inches high. There are four species--one in the North Island, and three in the South. Two species are dark brown, the others are greyish. The wings are so small they are completely concealed in the body feathers, and there is no visible tail. The beak is long, with nostrils near the tip. The Kiwi lives in dense dark forest and comes out at night, digging in soft ground and leaves with its long beak for worms and grubs. It nests in holes under tree roots or in steep banks, laying one or two enormous eggs about five inches long by three inches wide, out of all proportion to its size.

MOA. Recent research shows that great numbers of these large wingless birds once lived in the grasslands and scrub of New Zealand. From their bones it is determined that there were over twenty species. They ranged from creatures ten or twelve feet high, with very long, ostrich-like necks and leg-bones more massive than those of a draught-horse, to birds only two or three feet high. They were hunted to extinction by the Maoris and by the earlier Polynesian inhabitants, and almost certainly

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were extinct in the North Island earlier than in the South, where some may have survived until only two or three hundred years ago.

NEW ZEALAND PIGEON (Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae), Maori name Kereu or Kuku, is a beautiful bird about the size of a pullet, with a large white breast, brown tail, and most of its other plumage varying shades of bronzed green. It was formerly very abundant throughout the forest that provided its food of berries. Being very fearless, it was easily snared, and it was very good eating.

WEKA or WOODHEN (Gallirallus), of which there are four species, is rather smaller than the domestic hen, with brown and blackish feathers. Its wings are too small for flying, but it can run very quickly. It lives in scrub, swamp, or bush, wherever there is good cover. It eats insects, worms, sandhoppers, dead fish, berries, eggs, and young of ground birds, and anything else it can get. It is very inquisitive and still comes fearlessly around camps in the areas where it has not been exterminated, and there are many accounts of the Weka carrying off any objects, such as spoons or spectacles, that take its fancy.

* * * *

WHITEBAIT is the young of Galaxias attenuatus, Maori name Inanga, which lives most of its adult life in fresh water, descending to tidal water in late summer or autumn, to spawn during the spring tides among the grass and plants at the edge of the river, above ordinary high-water mark. Here the eggs remain, safe from aquatic enemies, till the next spring tide, a fortnight or so later, when the young hatch out and are carried down to the sea. When about five months old, the whitebait, looking like very slim almost transparent tadpoles about two inches long, migrate up river in dense shoals between July and November.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

COLENSO, WILLIAM. 'Excursion in the Northern Island of New Zealand in the summer of 1841-2', Launceston Examiner, Launceston, Tasmania, 1844. For the middle portion of this there is substituted a less botanical account of the same journey taken from 'Early Crossings of Lake Waikaremoana', Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, 1894, vol. xxvii, pp. 361-77.

SELWYN, GEORGE AUGUSTUS. 'Journal of the bishop's visitation tour from July 1842 to January 1843; extracted from letters to his family in England', being part of 'Letters from the bishop to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel together with extracts from his Visitation Journal from July 1842 to January 1843', published by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in The Church in the Colonies, 3rd ed., London, 1847.

ABRAHAM, CHARLES JOHN. 'Journal of a walk with the Bishop of New Zealand in August 1855'. London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Missions to the Heathen, 1856, No. xxxi.

JOHNSON, JOHN. 'Notes from a journal kept during an excursion to the boiling springs of Rotorua and Rotomahana by way of the Waikato and Waipa countries in the summer of eighteen hundred and forty-six and seven', New-Zealander, 22 September-29 December 1847.

HEAPHY, CHARLES. 'Account of an exploring expedition to the S. W. of Nelson', Nelson Examiner, 7 and 14 March 1846.

---'Notes of an expedition to Kawatiri and Araura, on the western coast of the Middle Island', Nelson Examiner, 5 September-17 October 1846.

BRUNNER, THOMAS. Journal of an Expedition to Explore the Interior of the Middle Island, New Zealand. Charles Elliott, Nelson, 1848. Included is a short extract from 'Mr. Brunner's late exploring expedition', Nelson Examiner, 7 October 1848, covering the period 12 December 1847-26 January 1848.

SMITH, STEPHENSON PERCY. 'Notes of a journey from Taranaki to Mokau, Taupo, Rotomahana, Tarawera and Rangitikei', Taranaki News, New Plymouth, 1858.

THOMSON, JOHN TURNBULL. 'Extracts from a journal kept during the performance of a reconnoissance survey of the southern districts of the province of Otago, New Zealand', Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1858, vol. xxviii, pp. 298-329.

MEADE, HERBERT. A Ride through the Disturbed Districts of New Zealand; Together with some Account of the South Sea Islands, ed. R. H. Meade, John Murray, London, 1871.

BARRINGTON, A. J. 'A. J. Barrington's diary of the west coast prospecting party', Lake Wakatip Mail, 2-16 July 1864.

ST. JOHN, JOHN HENRY HERBERT. Pakeha Rambles through Maori Lands. Burrett, Wellington, 1873.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I WISH to record my grateful thanks to the people who have helped me with this book--to Mr. C. R. H. Taylor, of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, and to the staff of that Library; to Miss L. B. Moore, Senior Botanist of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research; to Dr. R. A. Falla, the Director of the Dominion Museum, Wellington, and to Mr. R. K. Dell and Mr. J. Moreland, members of the Museum staff; to the late Mrs. Ruth Allan, historian of Nelson; to Mr. R. I. M. Burnett, of Wellington; to Mr. R. Duthie, of Auckland Public Library; to Mr. A. W. Hampton, of the Lands and Survey Department; Miss Phyllis Mander Jones, till lately Mitchell Librarian, Sydney; Mr. J. B. Palmer, of the Polynesian Society; Mr. John Pascoe, of Wellington; to Mr. Michael Standish, of Dominion Archives, Wellington; Mrs. Gloria Stralheim, of the Hocken Library, University of Dunedin; and to Dr. G. J. Williams, Dean of the Faculty of Mines and Metallurgy, University of Otago.

To Dr. J. C. Beaglehole, of Victoria University of Wellington, I am very greatly indebted, and the travellers themselves should join their thanks to mine. They deserved and needed the help he has given so generously at all stages of the book.

1959 - Taylor, N. (ed.) Early Travellers in New Zealand [Selected Accounts--Some Augmented with Missing Sections] - [Front matter]