1927 - Saunders, A. Tales of a Pioneer - VII. WORK, p 37-43

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CHAPTER VII

WORK

DURING the hot, dry weather of our first autumn in Nelson, we built our temporary shelters near the Maitai River. It was then a harmless little stream bridged over by a fallen tree; and, with our English ideas about rivers, we thought it would continue so, never dreaming what it would be like when the first heavy rain poured hundreds of mountain torrents into it. I built my residence in the forest on one of its banks, my carpenter's shop on the other, crossing the river many times a day on my easily constructed bridge. It was not until nearly the shortest day, on my birthday morning, that, rising at the first peep of dawn from my blanket on a bench, I stepped up to my knees in ice-cold water, and saw, in the dim light, a deep yellow torrent, five hundred yards wide, carrying down uprooted trees from the mountains, rolling between me and my carpenter's shop. I remember trying to console myself with the thought that it must have drowned seme of the rats that had become an indescribable nuisance in our flax-walled houses.

Soon after this, we came into possession of our town acres; but the number of my choice for a section was 954 out of 1100, so that I had to take one far from the business part of the town, and with no timber growing on it. I tried my hand at a wattle and daub house, but was quite new to the work and getting on very badly with it, when a splendid Irish labourer, named William McGowan, who thoroughly understood what he was about, and left me only the carpenter's work to do, came to my assistance. Between us, we built a really good, comfortable house, which he and his wife lived in, taking me as their boarder. I started a bakehouse, but, the price of bread going down, I very soon gave it up, and

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bought two of the very wild cows that had been imported by a Mr Tod. Cullen and another Somerset man also bought cows, for which we paid £40 each, at the same time. These animals were soon left entirely to me, and a long, rough job I had with them. They were never quiet enough to milk; but, with infinite difficulty, I taught them to work, and, when this was accomplished, three of them died after eating tutu berries. It would have saved me a lot of trouble if they had done so three months earlier.

As I had taken a contract for hauling timber with the cows, I bought a cart mare for £80, gave £40 for an unbroken filly to work with her, and started carting timber to town from across the Wairoa River, a distance of thirteen miles. It was rough, dangerous work, and, for a long time, mine was the only two-horse team on the road, so that I was rarely without some passenger needing a lift on top of the timber, and thus learned a good deal about my neighbours, hearing many a sad tale of poverty and starvation after the New Zealand Company stopped payment.

Opportunities to send letters from New Zealand to England were, in 1842, so exceedingly few, so roundabout, and so slow, that it was nearly a year before my first letters reached my home in Lavington, telling my family of my safe arrival in New Zealand, and of the wreck of the "Fifeshire" on the Nelson rocks as she was attempting to leave the harbour on her return voyage. By the first ship that left England for New Zealand after receiving my letters, father kindly sent me a Leicester ram, two Southdown rams, a boar and sow of the large Berkshire and a boar and sow of the small Berkshire breed of pigs, and some Cochin China fowls. Our old nurse, Eliza Carter, sent me a splendid rat-catching cat, which had done so much good on board the ship that the captain begged hard to have her left there. She was the first cat to resolutely face the audacious swarms of New Zealand rats. The Berkshire pigs were exceedingly good, and, with their wonderful fecundity, soon supplanted the long-legged, coarse animals left by Captain Cook, whilst the Leicester ram was the first to prove the great value of crossing that breed with Merino ewes.

The ship "Tyne," in which my livestock came, arrived first at Wellington, where she stayed for some

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weeks. Mr Tuckett, who was at this time both Chief Surveyor and the Company's agent, asked me to go to Wellington in a whale boat to take charge of some despatches he was sending to Colonel Wakefield, and I was glad to do this, as I was impatient to see my sheep, pigs and poultry. A boat's crew was hastily mustered, and proved to be by no means a trustworthy one, although the helmsman, Barney Miller, was said to be a most skilful boatman. We spent the first night on D'Urville Island; the second at Jackson's Bend, where we were most amusingly entertained by Jackson himself; and the third in Queen Charlotte Sound.

The next day's work was well known to be a dangerous one, and proved more so than we had expected. We were caught in a north-west hurricane, which filled the boat with water, forcing us to bail out for our lives. It was impossible to keep our course for Wellington, as we had to fly before the wind, which took us out of Cook Strait to where the cliffs of the North Island sheltered us somewhat from the violent nor'-wester. We passed a miserable night, with, at one time, little hope of living till morning in such a sea; but, the wind moderating towards the evening of the next day, with very hard pulling we managed to get into Wellington Harbour, where I delivered the somewhat wet and soiled despatches to Colonel Wakefield.

Of course, we were all much exhausted, and I told the boatmen that we would take two days' rest, and start on our return journey on the third morning, if fine. The weather was bright enough when the time came to depart; but the boatmen did not appear, and, when at last I found them, they were all drunk. They continued in this state for several days, until a small schooner was sent to Nelson by Colonel Wakefield, and I was instructed to take the despatches in her, which I was not at all unwilling to do.

As Nelson grew to be more like a town and less like a feeding ground for my horses, I found that it was not the right place for my home, and that I ought to live at the other end of my work where the timber I carted was sawn. Here a village had sprung up upon what was called the "Teetotal Section"; so that, letting my house to a wood-turner named Robinson, with whom I was destined to be much associated a few years later, I went to lodge with a Mrs Allen, the mother of William and

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Joseph Herrick, my life-long friends. From this time I began to prosper financially, very, very slowly, but steadily.

There was something terribly depressing in all the circumstances of the deaths of twenty of our neighbours and friends, so suddenly and unexpectedly, at Tua Marina. To this sad tragedy I will refer more fully a little later on; but even the calamity at the Wairau, terrible as it was, depressed me less than the loss of fourteen fellow-settlers, one after another, within a year of that event. These neighbours met their deaths by drowning in the unbridged and dangerous rivers on whose banks they had settled; but it would make my story too long and too sad to describe all the circumstances of these tragedies.

During this same year, I myself had three remarkably narrow escapes from drowning. In one case, I was driving in a cart a timid young horse I was breaking in. I met a friend who was tramping along with a pig he had just bought, and offered him a ride, which he gladly accepted. Between us, we hoisted the pig into the cart, but my passenger soon became much displeased with my nag's manners, and, when I started to cross the river on a temporary plank bridge with no side rails, he jumped out behind, saying that he was not going to risk his life crossing over a bridge like that. A few seconds after, my horse took fright at something, and, suddenly jumping to one side, fell ten feet into a stream of water some four feet deep--both cart and horse turning exactly upside down in the fall. By some means which I could never understand, I contrived to jump clear of the cart as it turned over, and was so little hurt that I was able to save the horse from drowning by lifting his head out of the water and holding it there. My passenger, meantime, had ventured on to the bridge, and shouted to me to let that dangerous brute drown, and lift the cart off his English pig. I shouted back that I could not right the cart whilst the horse was upside down in it, but that, if he would come to my assistance, we would cut the traces and save both pig and horse. To this he replied that I wanted to drown him as well as his pig, and he continued to abuse me roundly until a passer-by arrived who jumped in and helped me, too late, however, to prevent the pig being drowned.

On another occasion, when attempting to ford a river

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that was flooded with snow water, I was washed off the ford and carried down a mile, in a muddy torrent, amongst uprooted trees, until one of the trees fortunately grounded near the bank. I had just enough strength to enable me to climb on to it, but was so completely benumbed with the ice-cold water that I could not creep along the tree to the land; but my good friend, William McGowan, saw me and came to my rescue. On that very same day, a notoriously good swimmer, named Burke, attempted to cross that river, but became benumbed in the snow-water, and was drowned in the presence of a number of spectators.

A few weeks later, in another snow-water flood, my horse was washed off the ford, and I had to force him to swim more than a mile down the river before we could find any bank low enough to scramble out on.

For some two years, my neighbours seemed to look upon me as the water-spaniel of the district who could cross the river whenever he pleased and could never be drowned. There were no Maoris living in the Waimea, or I should never have been promoted to that honour.

But I am sure you will be asking long before this why I did not build a mill at once, and get to work with the machinery that I had brought from England. To that question I can give half-a-dozen answers, any one of which would be quite sufficient to account for my not doing so. In the first place, no one was growing any wheat that would want grinding; secondly, it was not possible to procure any site upon which to build a mill, much less to secure the many rights usually necessary to obtain the undisturbed use of a water-fall; thirdly, there was no good water-power to be obtained in or near the town of Nelson, without going far beyond the surveyed and sold town acres, and no one could give or sell me any right over land extending beyond that, as the country land had not been surveyed or chosen; and, fourthly, there was no really good water-power to be obtained in any accessible position that would not cost far more than I could afford to utilise and secure. Before I could see any security for going to work, two companies and two individuals had started building flour-mills, two in the town and two in the country, none of which proved remunerative.

I must not close this account of my earliest years in Nelson without some mention of one of New Zealand's

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most successful temperance workers, the most valuable temperance convert I ever made, with, perhaps, the exception of Sir William Fox. I cannot tell you anything about his birth, his education, or his childhood, as he was thirty-two years of age when I first saw him. He came to Nelson in charge of the first working-cattle brought to that province; and, on the arrival of the "Fifeshire" in Nelson Harbour on February lst, 1842, he and his master earned £11 in one morning by carting the goods of the twenty-two cabin passengers. I was then struck with his fine head and honest face and manners; his good English, so entirely free from any county dialect; and the skilful way in which he managed his oxen.

I wondered how it was that the ox-driver was such a very superior man to the ox-owner. In the afternoon, I was still more surprised to see their much valued oxen turned out into what we had named the Toi Toi Valley, whilst master and man lay helplessly drunk under their dray in what is now the principal street of Nelson. This proved to be the order of the day for several weeks, as they had no difficulty in earning enough money every morning to enable them to get gloriously drunk every afternoon, and I used to think that the oxen had a better chance of life than the men at such a game. Their dray was always left on Sundays in what is now the centre of the city of Nelson, and I selected it as the best platform I could find from which to give a temperance address every Sunday afternoon, nor did I consider it any the less suitable on account of the specimens of the victims of drink who so often lay beneath it. On one occasion, when they were less helpless than usual, they tipped up the pole of the dray, and said they would have no such nonsense talked on their premises. On the following Thursday, there came a heavy knocking at my door before four o'clock in the morning. Rising somewhat reluctantly, I opened it, and who should be there but the man that was always known as Ben the Bullock Driver.

"Have you your pledge book here?" he said.

"Oh, yes, " I answered.

"Well, let me sign it, and you shall never again see me making such a fool of myself as long as I live."

"Come in," I said. "I will make a fire, and we will have some breakfast together and talk it over."

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I was surprised to find him quite sober, and he soon brought tears to my eyes, as he wept over all he had suffered, and made others suffer, by his mad craving for drink. He soon, naturally, became the great object of attraction at all our temperance meetings. He asked me to let him take charge of the first New Zealand Temperance Pledge Book, and he greatly prized it as long as he lived, taking every opportunity to exhibit it. He started a Band of Hope in Nelson, and had a wonderful power of persuading even publicans' children to join it, so that he became a great power for good in Nelson. He was never ranked among the rulers and honourables of the province, but many a sincere and deserved blessing has been pronounced upon his head. His fifty-seven years of unselfish work in the cause of Temperance will be remembered when the name of many a more conspicuous pursuer of wealth and distinction has faded into oblivion.