CHAPTER I. JAMES WEST STACK'S STORY.
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BOOK I
JAMES WEST STACK'S STORY
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CHAPTER I
I travel amongst my flock on Banks Peninsula. How the Christchurch artesian water supply was discovered. I find good friends.
When Bishop Harper parted from me in Dunedin in 1860, because being without a horse I could not accompany him back to Christchurch overland, I took passage in a small schooner for Lyttelton. My fellow-passengers were Dr. Buchanan and Dr. Sinclair, the late Colonial Secretary. On arriving at Lyttelton the first news we got was that typhoid fever was very prevalent in the town, and that people were dying daily. One of the victims was the son of our captain. On reaching Christchurch I heard nothing talked about but the prevailing epidemic, and I began to think that Christchurch was going to prove a second Sierra Leone and be known as the "white man's grave."
After paying the natives at Kaiapoi a visit, I decided to go and see the Maoris on Banks Peninsula. 1 Pita Te Hori 2 accompanied me to Little River. It was a long
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and wearying journey. After spending some days there, Pita agreed to act as my guide to Port Levy, through the forest and up the hillsides. There was no pretence of a road or track beyond a pig track. How the horses managed to get through the undergrowth and up the mountain side puzzled me--they climbed like cats over the rocky parts of the trail.
The sun had set when we reached the Springs at the top of Mount Sinclair, and began our descent into Port Levy. We proceeded very slowly, owing to obstacles of various kinds, and got benighted in the woods. Pita was very mortified to find that we could not accomplish the journey in the usual time, owing to his inability to see the track. We tied our horses to the trees, and took off the saddles which served as pillows, and tried to go to sleep at the foot of a great forest tree, but the wind through the trees made us shiver with cold. When morning came we were very glad to renew our journey, and soon reached our destination without further mishap.
As I was now familiar with the route between the different Maori villages, I often went alone, carrying my knapsack, and a little food with me in case of accident. What I dreaded most was spraining my foot in some place where no one might pass for weeks, and where I might die of hunger, and be eaten by wild pigs without ever being found. I could not afford to pay anyone to accompany me on these journeys, and Maoris were not always at liberty to leave their work and go with me. Tamate Tikao always made a point of sending someone with me to the next village I went to, from where he
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was staying, because he knew it was dangerous to go about the forest-clad hills alone. The range between Little River and Port Levy was nearly three thousand feet high. At first I felt no ill effects from the constant climbing over the Peninsula hills, but after some months my heart troubled me, especially after my return from accompanying the Bishop to Otago. The shaking up my joints and muscles got, from the rough motion of the horse I rode, did me permanent injury, for I never could ride for many hours together after that journey without enduring great pain in my back and shoulders.
I experienced great inconvenience in my walking tours from the great heat and dryness of the air. The hot nor'-westerly winds were unknown to me in the North Island, and are peculiar to Canterbury. Like everyone else I found them very depressing to the spirits. During my first two years in Canterbury--1859 and 1860-- nor'-westerly winds prevailed and blew incessantly, for months together. As very little rain fell, the ground got quite parched, and all the vegetation became so dry that when a fire broke out anywhere it was impossible to put it out. Fires were burning all over the country, and smoke was to be seen in every direction. It was proved that many of these fires had been caused by smokers throwing down their matches on the dusty roads, which at once caught fire and burned like dry peat. The beautiful forests of Banks Peninsula did not escape and, unfortunately, one of the finest kinds of trees, the totara, which grew everywhere, was the means of spreading and keeping up the conflagration. The totara possesses a
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very thick, dry bark, with thin, paper-like scales on its surface, which proved very inflammable. Sparks from a burning tree a quarter of a mile off alighting on this bark caused it quickly to burst into flame.
Early in 1860 Tamate Tikao told me that he was so impressed by something I had said about the duty of caring for the children's education, that he was going to open a school in his own house, and do what he could to teach them, if I would consent to give special instruction in arithmetic, geography, history and English, which I gladly undertook to do. Tamate boarded at his own cost ten of the pupils, whom he had induced parents at a distance to send to him, and for nearly two years carried on the teaching, with my occasional assistance. But when all his stores of food were exhausted, he was obliged to disband the school, but not before many of the pupils had learned to read and write and cypher.
It was during the time I so frequently visited the Peninsula that I made the acquaintance of Mr. Aylmer, 3 the clergyman at Akaroa. He was a fine old Irish gentleman, whom I always enjoyed seeing, and who became one of my most attached friends.
While typhoid fever was carrying off so many people on the plains, the Peninsula people were quite free from the scourge. The fever was said to be caused by the decaying vegetable matter exposed to the air by the
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newly upturned soil. Wherever ploughing took place, or drainage, there cases of fever occurred. There was, however, an additional reason in Christchurch for its appearance, owing to the contamination of the drinking water. Every dwelling place possessed a well, few of them being more than six feet deep, which supplied the inmates with drinking water. A few feet away from the well stood a sentry box, and alongside it a pit into which all drainage and refuse from the house was thrown. If the bedroom jugs were filled with water during the day in hot weather, the smell from the water was so offensive by night that no one could stay in the room until it was poured away. The water was contaminated by leakage from the adjacent cesspits.
As the wells were all so shallow, it occurred to someone that, by sinking lower down, purer water might be got. How that was to be done so as to prevent the foul water from filtering through, was the difficulty. It was solved by a happy thought which occurred to the mind of a working plumber, who had a quantity of small gas pipes, about two inches in diameter, for which no use could be found. He commenced driving one of the pipes down into the soil, adding fresh joints as he went down, when, to his joy, he found, at a depth of forty feet, a strong uprush of pure water, which continued to flow from the pipe. This discovery led to the adoption of artesian overflow wells all over the place, and in time helped to rid Christchurch of the typhoid plague.
One of my first Canterbury friends was the Rev.
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George Cotterill, 4 who was then Diocesan Secretary. He was the first Christchurch gentleman to call upon me. It was a business call, but before going away he asked me to spend an evening with him at his house on the Ferry road, which I did shortly afterwards, where I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Cotterill and their large family of young children, who were all crowded into a very small house. Both Mr. and Mrs. Cotterill were very kind and sympathetic, and from that first visit to them dates a warm, life-long friendship. As soon as they moved into the house which was then being built f0r them at Christ's College, they expressed a wish that I would stay with them whenever I had to pass through Christchurch. They were always so unmistakably pleased to see me that I thoroughly enjoyed my visits to them. No matter how crowded their house was with their large family and numerous boarder pupils, Mrs. Cotterill always made a corner for me.
I found Mr. Cotterill's conversation intensely interesting, and an intellectual treat after associating with
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Maoris, and the class of Europeans one encountered on the roads, whose conversation was anything but instructive. Mr. Cotterill possessed a great fund of humour; but where I derived the greatest benefit from my intercourse with him was by the interchange of thought upon the questions relating to the Christian faith which were being debated with so much angry feeling at the time. As a young man utterly dissatisfied with the way in which the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ was being presented by the official teachers of Christianity, and knowing that many of the assertions they made had no foundation in fact, I hardly knew what to accept and what to reject of their positive statements which they put forth with so much assurance. It was an intense relief to me to find a man like Mr. Cotterill, who had received the best education an English University could give, and who had been many years in the ministry of the Church, troubled with exactly the same doubts and difficulties as I felt. We were able to talk over the subjects that interested me with perfect frankness, and to seek a solution of our difficulties. Writers who were scouted as infidels and condemned unheard, like Darwin and Huxley and Tyndall, we read and pondered over, being convinced in our own minds that the Book of Nature was as truly a revelation of God as the Bible itself; and that these two Books must be compared one with the other before the truth about Him could be known.
