[Pages 5-30]
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Look Here.
THERE is no pretence whatever in these notes, to present the reader with English complete at all points.
Very often English complete at all points is a bore to the reader (who deserves all consideration), besides being an unmitigated worry to the author, to however little indulgence that unnecessary person may be entitled.
And in truth many of these notes were first roughly put together in wind-worried huts, or under the drifty shelter of dray-wheels--and however little there was in them of worth before, they would have been made altogether worthless, if diluted down into the smoothness of perfect grammar. So they are offered, like rough colts in a paddock,
"For what they are worth."
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Moreover
I KNOW a friend who, if I print these notes, will come up to me and say: "Look here, why do you call that wretched book of yours, Crusts or Bread Crusts, or some such name? I don't see what it's got to do with either,"--and I shall desire him to exercise those well-known and powerful intellectual faculties of his own in discovering: as I have an appointment which will prevent my having the pleasure of explaining. But I have no appointment which will prevent my saying a word or two to the reader--always courteous and always discreet--in interpretation.
The notes which follow are records of some very rough times which befel the writer some years since, in the middle Island of New Zealand, and are mainly pulled out of an old diary kept on the spot; being hard enough to call them with all reason "Crusts."
They are all bona fide experiences--quite uncoloured--and even if the reader took the trouble of giving them more attentive reading than they expect, they could by no means convey to him the unmitigated roughness of the settler's first years, in an interior where snow, and rain, and
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hail turn out Autumn, and Summer, and sunshine, without notice and without ceremony.
Such hard days are the only fare served up to settlers and explorers whom fate billets on the bare hospitalities of an unfurnished country: and it took some tolerably strong mental ivories to deal with these crusts metaphorical, and get at the result beyond.
I hope that in following them, the reader will not find his intellectual palate too often disappointed, and himself going empty away.
Chart
THE adjoined Chart is in no respect meant to be a Map, in its geographical sense. It is simply intended to enable the reader to follow the accompanying notes with ease; the locality of each note being plainly marked.
It is purposely drawn roughly from memory, to represent the rude knowledge of the country, which was all the early explorers had to guide them.
In the main, however, the chief features of the colony are given with sufficient accuracy for the object desired.
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Landing on the other Side.
ABOUT two and twenty years ago, in the September of 1851, a ship-load of first settlers arrived at the mouth of a great strange harbour, on the Eastern Coast of the middle Island of New Zealand. It was after a long weary voyage of one hundred and twenty-two days, and--what is not to be quite forgotten--just as many nights just as weary. Our weather-battered old ship had been caught in her share of wild weather, and the share of three other ships besides, and her prisoners, the crew and passengers, had not sighted as much land as would serve to stand a flower-pot upon or to grow a geranium.
We were tired of the ship, tired of the voyage, and insufferably tired of each other; and our eyes seemed altogether salt and sea-weary with looking, for nearly five months, upon an unbroken circle of sea.
At last, upon the hundred and twenty-second day of imprisonment, the day broke clear and bright, and as they came from below--above the level of the Quarter Deck--each pair of eyes, used only to look round on an empty horizon, were greeted and stamped with the great bold moun-
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tains of New Zealand, standing out of the sea, huge and clear, in the morning air.
If you have not yourselves met the experience, no poor words of mine will tell you what it is to set eyes suddenly on new land, after living for months on a plain of water; the eyes rest, actually rest on it, and it seems to stand out magnified, solid, and immovable, like a very piece of the great world that cannot be moved. We felt, as we looked, that we had at last and at length found again some peaks of the old earth, of the very existence of which, five months of days, and fourteen thousand miles of nothing but tossing salt water, had absolutely begun to make us sceptical.
Two days later we anchored in a hill-bounded harbour; the next we left the ship, slept upon the new and almost unpaced ground of the antipodes--and our experiences as colonists began.
That man must have a strong, cold heart, who in stepping from a ship's boat into a really new country, does not feel bewildered, and something desolate. When the first settlers put their foot into Canterbury, New Zealand, it was little better, or more cheering, than Juan Fernandez to Robinson Crusoe. The day we landed was rough and wild, with storms of hail and sleet driving up the harbour, making the collection of huts at the
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back of the beach look miserable in the extreme. The plains the future scene of the settlers' operations, were separated from the landing-place, or port, by a ridge of mountains nearly two thousand feet high, over which there was no road, and merely a broken track to the other base. The impressions of our first day were by no means encouraging, and we slept our first night, 1 for want of better shelter, in a loft of loose, open boards, over a wooden shanty, where a mixture of sailors, and new arrivals, kept up a perpetual racket till near morning.
The first three days after arrival were spent in awaiting the landing of our baggage from the ship, in buying sawn timber for the building of a hut, and provisions of salt beef, flour and tea: and in chartering a small coasting craft to take the whole out of the harbour, and up an inland river, on the banks of which, somewhere, lay some land purchased upon paper in London. For this land we ourselves started on foot soon after daybreak the next day, and I never remember beginning to do anything that I thought more utterly and absurdly hopeless.
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After crossing the steep ranges which I have named as forming a rugged barrier between the harbour and the open country, we struggled up, as the evening fell, through jungle and swamp to the banks of the river on which our land, as yet only known to us on paper, was supposed to lie. Almost at the same moment, to our great relief, the craft bearing our goods and chattels, which had had four and twenty hours start of us, and been two days on her trip, hauled round a bend of the river, and in an hour's time was moored to the bank close at hand.
We got out of her, as the sun sank, a small tent, some sugar, a saucepan and frying-pan, and some blankets and old bags; pitched our tent on the highest part of the bank--struck up a fire of small scrub--boiled or stewed some tea in the saucepan-- cooked an unearthly mixture of flour and grease in the frying-pan--ate, drank--put out our camp fire for fear of its spreading among the fern and rushes on the river-bank--and finally retired into our blankets, and old bags, forgetting everything, even on which side of the world we were, and sleeping hard and sound, till the cold early air of the next morning awoke us to the Antipodes.
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Sunrise, Number One.
THE feelings of a settler (especially if he has had but little daylight on the spot the evening before,) on the morning after his first camp in a new country, are mixed and peculiar. He feels very much as if he had been taken up from this earth, and dropped down promiscuously into another; he is altogether bewildered; he has no knowledge or acquaintance with the horizon about him; a big unknown hill plumps into his eyes on one side, a brand new river glitters into them on another, and the full level rays of the round morning sun finally dazzle into his eyes and finish him off altogether. He is, moreover, stiff, cold, and hungry: he hasn't combed his hair, is uncertain about washing arrangements, and idiotically indistinct as to the hitherto regular and distinct fact--the great institution of breakfast. In the first confusion of his ideas, he labours under a sort of momentary hallucination that the thing to do is to do what he has always done, all his life before, viz.: to ring the bell; this idea, however, rapidly vanishes as the stern reality of facts force themselves upon his mind--for where there is no house there can be no bell, and even if there were a bell, there is no servant, and even if there were
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a servant, there is no kitchen, no fireplace, no pantry, no larder, no plates, no tea-cups, no bread-no butter, toast, or coffee, no breakfast-table--no nothing. -So that at last the whole difficulty, like the electric current in a wire circle, returns and re-concentrates itself upon the bewildered colonist who has first conceived it. Even so did it re-concentrate itself upon us--and this was its effect. We first washed our faces in an inconvenient and dripping kind of way in the river; for want of towels, drying them in an old bag, the effect of which is novel, certainly, but not soothing or agreeable. We then tore up enough of scrub with our hands wherewith to make a sort of imitation fire; the saucepan, or rather teapan, was again put into requisition, some tea stewed in it, some more un-namable mess fried in the frying-pan, and a meal perpetrated which was in its strictest sense a breakfast, for it was to us the breaking of our fast--and nothing more.
The day was spent in unloading the craft, and piling up round our tent, like fortifications, our boxes, packages, and casks, just as the traditional pictures represent old Crusoe after his shipwreck.
We were camped in one corner of an immense plain, forty to fifty miles in breadth, and nearly one hundred and thirty in length, forming what are now called the Canterbury Plains. They are
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bounded inland by an almost continuous range of snowy mountains, stretching unbroken from one end of the island to the other; and sea-ward by the open waters of the South Pacific Where the sea and the land meet, the line is marked by a curve of shining foam stretching away for a hundred and thirty miles, unbroken, save at one point, where the hills of Bank's Peninsula, jutting into the sea, form the harbour we had so lately entered. It was as if a great line of beach swept up the English Channel from Dartmouth to Southampton, only one isolated block of hill or bay breaking the crescent of foam from end to end. With an on-shore wind, we could hear all day long the great hollow moaning of this hundred miles of sea, rolling in from the Pacific, and breaking day and night on this silent unpeopled coast. Very silent it was and unpeopled, if I except one tenant of the whole, --the only one before we came, --his resting place (not far from where we camped,) just beyond the reach of the waves, marked by a single rude grave, with a piece of ship-timber for a head-board, on which could just be traced initials something like H. L., roughly cut, and the date, 1822: the spot where the crew of some old whaler, years ago, had landed, and laid one of their number who could weather no more storms with them, but who had gone away where perhaps a weather-beaten old
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South Sea Whaler would find a safe haven for always.
It was in the corner of this plain, and within hearing of these Pacific waves, that our first four Colonial years were spent. I shall not weary the reader with more details of this time than will serve to give a very unvarnished picture of the beginning of Colonial realities.
The beginning of life on a piece of the world on which men have not yet lived, is marked by one super-prominent feature--it is, that while you are in absolute want of everything, you have about you absolutely nothing: --no stock, no fences, no shelter, no house; and moreover and beyond this you have not even primitive simples, as mortar, a ladder, or slates; not even a grind-stone standing to sharpen your axe, nor in this case even a sapling to fell, to give it a handle. One all-important help which is present in most new countries, we lacked--a sufficient supply of rough standing timber. The plains for miles were destitute of a twig large enough to make a walking-stick, and almost all our supplies of timber, for fencing and building, had to be obtained by water, at great labour and cost, from a distant part of the coast.
The climate being at this point of the settlement very much the same as that in the less timbered parts of England--steadier, and less con-
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stantly variable, but subject to driving storms of wind and rain--shelter became the first point aimed at. For days our goods and baggage stood in the open weather, only sheltered by bundles of fern cut on the river-banks; but at the end of the first fortnight, with the help of the sawn timber we had brought with us, a wooden hut was got up, under which ourselves and our more perishable properties found a cover. This done, our own, and the daily life of the settlers around us, became a continued struggle against nature, -- nature so passive, yet so difficult to conquer. The practical observer, not taking so ambitious a view of it as this, would have summed it up in one word (which I shall ask to be allowed to use) --he would have called it "Botheration,"--and so truly it was. Indeed I cannot promise to anyone, during the first years of his breaking-in to Colonial life, that pleasant picnic tone which may sometimes appear, in relation, to surround it.
The climate being so Anglican, the crops grown were just those raised in the old country, and it was necessary to begin by clearing the jungle of rough growth which covered the land: and for months this was the principal occupation. The breaking up of the unused, but rich soil below followed, and this latter had to be done in most cases with a team of cantankerous, half-broken bullocks, or
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a pair of uncertain, restive horses: good stock of all kinds being scarce in the extreme, and a settler considered lucky who possessed anything in the shape of a draught animal that would do his work without jibbing, or kicking his shafts into splinters.
When, after time and trouble, we did at length succeed in getting our first crops into the ground, we had to keep a perpetual watch over them to prevent their devastation: for being close to the coast, we were harried and worried by herds of imported, half-wild, starving Australian cattle, which were landed from the harbor, and hungrily ravaged the country about us. They broke over our young defenceless crops--smashed the few poor fences we were enabled at first to erect--chose out the very centre of our choicest plots, and fought there desperate and bellowing tournaments with each other--and left us few nights of sleep, for a whole twelvemonth, that were not broken by the unmistakable hollow echo of their tramping, and a midnight expedition to scare them back by cracking of stock whips, and promiscuous firing of guns.
For some time in going to and fro to the town or village of Christchurch, which had gradually sprung up, we crossed, both going and coming, a deep river by a narrow shingle ford, the water
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reaching to our chest, our clothes being rolled into a bundle on our heads, and a butter knapsack or pannier strapped to our shoulders; the butter (without being hurt) getting more or less wet, as the case might be. This butter-carrying work was a tramp of eight miles, and we did it for nearly two years in company with two clergymen of the Church of England, one of whom is now an Archdeacon, the other being a connection of the Peel family--a terrific walker, and commonly known in the country as the "Iron Parson."
One great possession and assistance that the settlers had, lay in the richness and fruitfulness of the soil. It was a deep rich chocolate loam, and, well broken up for a year, was easily worked, and gave back in return plentiful and fruitful crops. Still, whatever was done, had to be done under many branch and side difficulties which it is not easy to explain in full to an English experience. Whatever labour we employed was difficult to be got at in the first place, and very dear and very inefficient when obtained. In fact so unsatisfactory and troublesome was it, that by far the heaviest portion of the necessary work fell directly upon the shoulders of the early settlers themselves.
A man considered he did you a great favour by cutting your corn, and when you went to hire
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a labourer, his most favourable reply was, that he would think it over and see what he could do for you. All that was done too was done without the existence of any positive market for what might be produced, and merely with the hope that one would eventually arise. Meanwhile we had to wait; to put up with short commons-- generally of salt beef and flour--to cook our food (without too much firing) under a low chimney of sods built against a hole in the side of the hut, the top of which chimney we could touch with our hands, through which we could sit and watch the stars and moon at night, and down through which poured floods of water in time of rain.
We worked all day, and slept all night--ready, if the bellow of wild cattle aroused us, to be out at a moment's notice. Our hut, (and ours, remember, was but a picture of many others in the settlement,) was a perfect sieve of draughts; we could not even burn a candle in it, except by placing it in the lee of a milk-pan, erected over it; and in the storms of winter, which swept over the unsheltered plains behind us, the roar of the wind round the thin walls at night was wild and deafening. It was a curious period, and an experience that to every Colonist looks unreal when it is past; but I believe that I have in no way over-stated its difficulties, nor given an exaggerated idea of the realities that surround it.
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Wild Ducks, & Mutual Socks.
AFTER we had led a solitary life on the riverside for nearly two years, a human being came and pitched his camp on the opposite bank. He was a gentleman, a good-natured fellow, not in the least fitted for a colonist, and spent his time (as far as I could make out) in alternately shooting wild-ducks, and swinging in a netting hammock slung in the verandah of his hut. His reign was short, yet I was sorry when he went.
He was succeeded by a heavy individual: a decent old fellow, hard-working and pig-headed. We induced his wife to wash our clothes: she did so--it being immediately afterwards obvious that the heavy old fellow wore our socks and his own promiscuously, and that he indulged to any extent in our pocket-handkerchiefs, a luxury which (be it observed) he had hitherto denied himself.
However, we were, in after times, able to render each other many mutual good services, which, to a very great extent, made up for the establishment of this peculiar commonalty of socks and pocket-handkerchiefs.
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Shingler's Bread.
IN the neighbourhood of our earliest camp in the Island, and in fact for hundreds of miles in the less elevated districts, the weather was perfect, -- bright, clear, and exhilarating for months, --and I doubt if it is surpassed as a healthy climate by any country in the world. All English trees, fruits, plants and flowers, grow and multiply; and strawberries and clotted cream of Devonshire are not lost by those who stand feet to feet with us in England. Devonshire cream reminds me of coffee, and this of the fact that, for a long time, we ground our wheat into flour in a coffee-mill, and baked and boiled it, bran and all, in a granulous and nobby state, into puddings and bread. It certainly formed a new variety in bread, but on the whole, I don't know that the decrease in quality was quite made up for by the increase of novelty.
Some few notes back, I have told how bare the plains were of timber. After enclosing and raising more immediately needful crops, great care was taken, in every direction, to rear and encourage
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trees of all kinds. Tasmanian, Australian, and English trees were carefully planted, and their growth tended with all available means.
I have before me a photograph, lately received, which shows the once treeless spot of our first camp. It is now sheltered by ample belts of flourishing trees--poplar, blue-gum, pine, willow, and laburnum: --in the photograph an old friend of mine is standing under a blue-gum seventy feet high. The house, whose gable ends look out in a homely and hospitable way through the trees, was the second which rose upon the ground. The labour of building was made lighter by one or two incidents which are perhaps sufficiently smilable to record.
We had got up, without help, the inside and outside walls, the partitions, roof, and framework; but not having been initiated into the art of putting on shingles for a roof, after some negociation, we secured a professional shingler from the port town. An arrangement was made by which the shingler was to provide himself with everything except bread. We already occupied the half-finished house; and, his cuisine and ours being separate establishments, we provided him with a separate larder. Our larder was a hole in the wall, left as a future chimney; and with great liberality and forethought, we provided the shingler, as his own private and particular larder, with a
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winnowing machine, in the mysterious hollows of which he securely bestowed his bread and cheese upon the shelf. But, as I have said, we were responsible for the bread department.
Now our bread had always one marked and distinguishing feature--it was very substantial; and concluding that the shingler had a more powerful appetite than ourselves, we made his bread especially substantial. The shingler came, and shingled away at the roof for days; still, he never came for fresh bread; and we began to think that he must have a wonderfully delicate appetite, or that he had perhaps some peculiar constitutional distaste for bread: till, one day, it being necessary for us to move the winnowing machine, one of its little trap-doors fell open, and discovered a perfectly new baker's loaf, with a pound of butter in a hollow cut in the crumb. At the same moment, the shingler entered and explained the whole matter by addressing us as follows: "Yes, I've been four miles into Port to get a baker's loaf. You'm all very well yourselves, but your bread's as undigestible as a cow's horn." --In fact we had made his bread so awfully substantial that the poor shingler could not face it: so four loaves, chopped up with an axe, went to the fowls, and the fifth we built into the wall of the house, and very good wall it made, and-- as far as I know, --there it is now.
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The New Chum--His Bed.
BEFORE the house was finished, an English friend arrived and found us out. He was (if the reader will be kind enough not to mention it again) rather a swell. He arrived in a hat, and, what we had then never seen before, a "Noah's Ark" Coat; and really, with our primitive belongings, he rather alarmed us, and, --truth to tell, --I fancy our primitive belongings rather alarmed him. However, the day closed and we had to give him quarters for the night; so having nothing better, we put him to bed on a door we had just made, supported at the ends by two empty casks. He rather delicately introduced himself into this peculiar sleeping apparatus, and cautiously composed himself to slumber. We too retired, dropped into sleep, and all was quiet. Suddenly, at midnight, a perfectly unearthly uproar broke the stillness of the night. We jumped up instantly and felt about in the darkness for our long-coated friend, whom we had put to bed on the door, discovering at last that one of the casks had rolled forward under his ricketty couch, and
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launched him, with great swiftness and precision, into the middle of a heap of barley, on the top of which a litter of puppies and their mother had comfortably camped for the night. We picked him up from among the chaos of barley, darkness, and dogs, but nothing would induce him again to allow himself to be put to bed upon the door; and though we at once made him up quite an excellent bed upon the barley, I do not think he ever forgot his first night's quarters at the Antipodes.
First Church.
THERE are two marked eras in the life of every new settler--the one that comes to him last, I propose to say a few words about first. It is a telling and very pointed sign of the times when he first finds that his week is marked and hedged in at both ends by the coming of a true Sunday. However little the new-world settler may have in him of the saint, or however much, though living under new skies, he may wish to think the day still hallowed, yet there is a commonness all unworthy of it, and a
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flatness of tone (which those who have never missed these home tokens cannot measure) in the passing of a day, --though it be the seventh, --which is not welcomed by bells whose chime he knows, and parted from with the echo of organ notes as farewell.
A seventh day and a day of rest may come, but, except the old signs mark it, the day which his fathers kept before him is not there; and it is a time that touches him very nearly, and tells him of old times, and seems to bring him a thousand miles nearer home, when the day is restored to him, endeared with something of the old remembered surroundings.
So, after the first year or two are beginning to pass (devoted as they must be to insuring bread and food from the untouched earth, and raising shield and shelter overhead) it is an era to hear a bell, however small, from a spire, however low, ring out to tell him that, till another sunrise, he may rest from his labours.
The first church within reach of our camp on the River Heathcote opened its low door about two years after the settlers first pitched their tents upon its banks. It was small and low, yet it had a homely look, for its walls were raised of cob, like more than one other in my native county; and though wild tussocks and great flax-blades still grew up close to its walls, yet it was a church; and being a church, a sign of home to us, and a gain--a gain
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a hundredfold valued, because it had been lost--and found.
The services at first were simple: the reader perhaps would have called them rude--but we were content. The clergyman often came up wet and tired (for he rode from a distance), and the settlers could not always keep the strictest time, for many of them came from far. At first, too, there was no bell to ring them to the door; and the seats were only rude seats, and the singing was not perfect singing; but I do not think their poor service the less won for them the many things they stood in need of--for, they had done what they could.
So we got our church; and it was astonishing to mark the social bettering and improvement which from that time spread around the district. The settlers, meeting regularly at the church door, became more sociable to each other: the work during the week seemed lighter, and the rest at the week's end quieter; and Saturday night became more like Saturday night, because Sunday morning was more like Sunday morning. It is an era in new-world life, when Sunday likens to the Sunday of the fatherland.
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The Bishop--His Robes.
HAVING, as I have said, succeeded in getting our Church, --about this time it became necessary to have Churchwardens; and a gentleman, the son of a clergyman in the North of Devon, was appointed warden for the Parish, having the writer as his very inefficient colleague. The duties of a Churchwarden, at all events at first, in the service of New Zealand Churches, differed from, or rather were more numerous than those of his original type in England. Besides his vestry and parish duties, he had to look after the repairs of the Parsonage; to open the Church door on Sundays; to arrange the Communion Table; make the collections; see that there was water in the font; arrange for and provide against noisy boys, and possible dogs; soothe the choir, which very often wouldn't be soothed; and, what was more responsible than all, --on not infrequent occasions, --to receive and dress the Bishop of the Diocese.
Now there is no man in the Colony, I believe, for whom there is felt a more universal, and well-earned respect and esteem, than for Dr. Harper, the Bishop of Christchurch.
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He was, and is, earnest, zealous, conciliatory--a pattern Colonial Bishop--but still, whether right or wrong, it is impossible to deny that his reception and the arrangement of his robes, were to us very formidable operations. His Lordship rode over to our Church on horseback, going on from thence still further to another Church in the afternoon. We received him at the churchyard gate, unsaddled and tethered out his horse, bringing into the vestry his robes, which he carried strapped upon his saddle, in a valise. On emerging from this close imprisonment, however, they presented a very sorry picture, for a perfect mass of seams ran up and down the black satin, and the lawn sleeves were hopelessly crushed, and wrinkled. In despair I often wished I was a smoothing iron to restore them to themselves. My brother Churchwarden too, I know, shared with me in this anxiety.
The little Church to which his Lordship came was built within a mile of us, and though all in it was not quite as it may be by and by, yet those who came to it then, lacked too many things to criticise too closely what they gained; and the Bishop wore his robes with all dignity, and a good man will beckon his people after him, even though his raiment be somewhat ruffled in his duty: so the settlers heard him gladly, and said of him what, for a moment, may sound hardly well to say; still it is true, and has a meaning beyond the words.
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This is what they said of the Bishop, when at sunset he had bid them good bye; they said: "There is no mistake about Bishop Harper."
Is there any Bishop anywhere who would be offended, or think himself disparaged, if this, heartily, were said of him?
Washerwoman--also Pat.
I HAVE named two eras as marking the advance of new lands. The second is one which I must not forget to give you.
There is an institution in England, whose deep and great value, and whose evermore influence upon our welfare we scarcely recognise as it deserves--an institution which, almost unseen, carries out its weekly mission--an institution upon whose proper working the happiness of thousands depends: --the great institution of Washerwoman.
Now, in a new world, among the many things that are not, the Washerwoman is one; and as in England every one, --as we read, --may, if he likes, be his own lawyer, every man his own doctor, --so, at the Antipodes, at first, every man must be his
