With Other Early Essays
With Other Early Essays
Author of “Erewhon,” “The Way of All Flesh,” etc.
Edited by R. A. Streatfeild
Introduction
By R. A. Streatfeild
By R. A. Streatfeild
Since Butler’s death in 1902 his fame has spread so rapidly and the
world of letters now takes so keen in interest in the man and his
writings that no apology is necessary for the republication of even his
least significant works. I had long desired to bring out a new edition
of his earliest bookA First Year in Canterbury Settlement, together
with the other pieces that he wrote during his residence in New Zealand,
and, that wish being now realised, I have added a supplementary group of
pieces written during his undergraduate days at Cambridge, so that the
present volume forms a tolerably complete record of Butler’s literary
activity up to the days ofErewhon, the only omission of any importance
being that of his pamphlet, published anonymously in 1865,The Evidence
for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as Contained in the four
Evangelists critically examined. I have not reprinted this, because
practically the whole of it was incorporated intoThe Fair Haven.
A First Year in Canterbury Settlementhas long been out of print, and
copies of the original edition
are difficult to procure. Butler
professed to think poorly of it. Writing in 1889 to his friend Alfred
Marks, who had picked up a second-hand copy and felt some doubt as to
its authorship, he said: “I am afraid the little book you have referred
to was written by me. My people edited my letters home. I did not
write freely to them, of course, because they were my people. If I was
at all freer anywhere they cut it out before printing it; besides, I had
not yet shed my Cambridge skin and its trail is everywhere, I am afraid,
perceptible. I have never read the book myself. I dipped into a few
pages when they sent it to me in New Zealand, but saw ‘prig’ written
upon them so plainly that I read no more and never have and never mean
to. I am told the book sells for 1 pound a copy in New Zealand; in
fact, last autumn I know Sir Walter Buller gave that for a copy in
England, so as a speculation it is worth 2s. 6d. or 3s. I stole a
passage or two from it forErewhon, meaning to let it go and never be
reprinted during my lifetime.”
This must be taken with a grain of salt. It was Butler’s habit
sometimes to entertain his friends and himself by speaking of his own
works with studied disrespect, as when, with reference to his own Darwin
and the Origin of Species, which also is reprinted in this volume, he
described philosophical dialogues as “the most offensive form, except
poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even
literature can assume.” The circumstances which led toA First Yearbeing written
have been fully described by Mr. Festing Jones in his
sketch of Butler’s life prefixed toThe Humour of Homer(Fifield,
London, 1913, Kennerley, New York), and I will only briefly recapitulate
them. Butler left England for New Zealand in September, 1859, remaining
in the colony until 1864.A First Yearwas published in 1863 in
Butler’s name by his father, who contributed a short preface, stating
that the book was compiled from his son’s journal and letters, with
extracts from two papers contributed toThe Eagle, the magazine of St.
John’s College, Cambridge. These two papers had appeared inin the
form of three articles entitled “Our Emigrant” and signed “Cellarius.”
By comparing these articles with the book as published by Butler’s
father it is possible to arrive at some conclusion as to the amount of
editing to which Butler’s prose was submitted. Some passages in the
articles do not appear in the book at all; others appear unaltered;
others again have been slightly doctored, apparently with the object of
robbing them of a certain youthful “cocksureness,” which probably grated
upon the paternal nerves, but seems to me to create an atmosphere of an
engaging freshness which I miss in the edited version. So much of the
“Our Emigrant” articles is repeated inA First Yearalmost if not quite
verbatim that it did not seem worth while to reprint the articles in
their entirety. I have, however, included in this collection one
extract from the latter which was not incorporated intoA First Year,
though it describes at greater length an
incident referred to on p. 74.
From this extract, which I have called “Crossing the Rangitata,” readers
will be able to see for themselves how fresh and spirited Butler’s
original descriptions of his adventures were, and will probably regret
that he did not take the publication ofA First Yearinto his own hands,
instead of allowing his father to have a hand in it.
With regard to the other pieces included in this volume I have
thought it best to prefix brief notes, when necessary, to each in turn
explaining the circumstances in which they were written and, when it was
possible, giving the date of composition.
In preparing the book for publication I have been materially helped by
friends in both hemispheres. My thanks are specially due to Miss
Colborne-Veel, of Christ-church, N.Z., for copying some of Butler’s
early contributions toThe Press, and in particular for her kindness in
allowing me to make use of her notes on “The English Cricketers”; to Mr.
A. T. Bartholomew for his courtesy in allowing me to reprint his article
on “Butler and the Simeonites,” which originally appeared inThe
Cambridge Magazineof 1 March, 1913, and throws so interesting a light
upon a certain passage inThe Way of All Flesh. The article is here
reprinted by the kind permission of the editor and proprietor ofThe
Cambridge Magazine; to Mr. J. F. Harris for his generous assistance in
tracing and copying several of Butler’s early contributions toThe
Eagle; to Mr. W. H. Triggs, the
editor ofThe Press, for allowing me to
make use of much interesting matter relating to Butler that has appeared
in the columns of that journal; and lastly to Mr. Henry Festing Jones,
whose help and counsel have been as invaluable to me in preparing this
volume for the Press as they have been in past years in the case of the
other books by Butler that I have been privileged to edit.
R. A. STREATFEILD.
NEW ZEALAND
[By the
The writer of the following pages, having resolved on emigrating to New
Zealand, took his passage in the ill-fated ship Burmah, which never
reached her destination, and is believed to have perished with all on
board. His berth was chosen, and the passage-money paid, when important
alterations were made in the arrangements of the vessel, in order to
make room for some stock which was being sent out to the Canterbury
Settlement.
The space left for the accommodation of the passengers being thus curtailed, and the comforts of the voyage seeming likely to be much diminished, the writer was most providentially induced to change his ship, and, a few weeks later, secured a berth in another vessel.
The work is compiled from the actual letters and journal of a young
emigrant, with extracts from two papers contributed by him to the Eagle,
a periodical issued by some of the members of St. John’s College,
Cambridge, at which the writer took his degree. This variety in the
sources from which the materials are put together must be the apology
for some defects in their connection and coherence. It is hoped also
that the circumstances of bodily fatigue and actual
For whatever of presumption may appear in giving this little book to the
public, the friends of the writer alone are answerable. It was at their
wish only that he consented to its being printed. It is, however,
submitted to the reader, in the hope that the unbiassed impressions of
colonial life, as they fell freshly on a young mind, may not be wholly
devoid of interest. Its value to his friends at home is not diminished
by the fact that the MS., having been sent out to New Zealand for
revision, was, on its return, lost in the Colombo, and was fished up
from the Indian Ocean so nearly washed out as to have been with some
difficulty deciphered.
It should be further stated, for the encouragement of those who think of following the example of the author, and emigrating to the same settlement, that his most recent letters indicate that he has no reason to regret the step that he has taken, and that the results of his undertaking have hitherto fully justified his expectations.
Langar Rectory
June 29, 1863
Of “A First Year in Canterbury Settlement”
Chapter I
Embarkation at Gravesend—Arrest of Passenger—Tilbury Fort—Deal—Bay of Biscay Gale—Becalmed off Teneriffe—Fire in the Galley—Trade Winds- -Belt of Calms—Death on Board—Shark—Current—S. E. Trade Winds— Temperature—Birds—Southern Cross—Cyclone.
It is a windy, rainy day—cold withal; a little boat is putting off from the pier at Gravesend, and making for a ship that is lying moored in the middle of the river; therein are some half-dozen passengers and a lot of heterogeneous-looking luggage; among the passengers, and the owner of some of the most heterogeneous of the heterogeneous luggage, is myself. The ship is an emigrant ship, and I am one of the emigrants.
On having clambered over the ship’s side and found myself on deck, I was
somewhat taken aback with the apparently inextricable confusion of
everything on board; the slush upon the decks, the crying, the kissing,
the mustering of the passengers, the stowing away of baggage still left
upon the decks, the rain and the gloomy sky created a kind of half-
amusing, half-distressing bewilderment, which I could plainly see to be
participated in by most of the other landsmen on board.
And so the afternoon wore on, wet, cold, and comfortless—no dinner served on account of the general confusion. The emigration commissioner was taking a final survey of the ship and shaking hands with this, that, and the other of the passengers. Fresh arrivals kept continually creating a little additional excitement—these were saloon passengers, who alone were permitted to join the ship at Gravesend. By and by a couple of policemen made their appearance and arrested one of the party, a London cabman, for debt. He had a large family, and a subscription was soon started to pay the sum he owed. Subsequently, a much larger subscription would have been made in order to have him taken away by anybody or anything.
Little by little the confusion subsided. The emigration commissioner left; at six we were at last allowed some victuals. Unpacking my books and arranging them in my cabin filled up the remainder of the evening, save the time devoted to a couple of meditative pipes. The emigrants went to bed, and when, at about ten o’clock, I went up for a little time upon the poop, I heard no sound save the clanging of the clocks from the various churches of Gravesend, the pattering of rain upon the decks, and the rushing of the river as it gurgled against the ship’s side.
Early next morning the cocks began to crow
The river widened out hour by hour. Soon our little steam-tug left us.
A fair wind sprung up, and at two o’clock, or thereabouts, we found
ourselves off Ramsgate. Here we anchored and waited till the tide,
early next morning. This took us to Deal, off which we again remained a
whole day. On Monday morning
I will not waste time and space by describing the horrible sea-sickness
of most of the passengers, a misery which I did not myself experience,
nor yet will I prolong the narrative of our voyage down the Channel—it
was short and eventless. The captain says there is more danger between
Gravesend and the Start Point (where we lost sight of land) than all the
way between there and New Zealand. Fogs are so frequent and collisions
occur so often. Our own passage was free from adventure. In the Bay of
Biscay the water assumed a blue hue of almost incredible depth; there,
moreover, we had our first touch of a gale—not that it deserved to be
called a gale in comparison with what we have since experienced, still
we learnt what double-reefs meant. After this the wind fell very light,
and continued so for a few days. On referring to my diary, I perceive
that on the 10th of October we had only got as far south as the forty-
first parallel of latitude, and late on that night a heavy squall coming
up from the S.W. brought a foul wind with it. It soon freshened, and by
two o’clock in the morning the noise of the flapping sails, as the men
were reefing them, and of the wind roaring through the rigging, was
deafening. All next day we lay hove to under a close-reefed main-
topsail, which, being interpreted, means that the only sail set was the
main-topsail, and that that was close reefed; moreover, that the ship
was laid at right angles to the wind and the yards braced sharp up.
Thus a ship drifts very slowly, and remains steadier than she would
otherwise; she ships few or no seas, and, though she rolls a
On the evening of the third day a light air sprung up, and we watched
the islands gradually retire into the distance. Next morning they were
faint and shrunken, and by midday they were gone. The wind was the
commencement of the north-east trades. On the next day (Thursday,
October 27, lat. 27° 40′) the cook was boiling some fat in
a large saucepan, when the bottom burnt through and the fat fell out
over the fire, got lighted, and then ran about the whole galley, blazing
and flaming as though it would set the place on fire, whereat an alarm
of fire was raised, the effect of which was electrical: there was no
real danger about the affair, for a fire is easily extinguishable on a
ship when only above board; it is when it breaks out in the hold, is
unperceived, gains strength, and finally bursts its prison, that it
becomes a serious matter to extinguish it. This was quenched in five
minutes, but the faces of the female steerage passengers were awful. I
noticed about many a peculiar contraction and elevation of one eyebrow,
which I had never seen before on the living
The trades carried us down to latitude 9°. They were but light
while they lasted, and left us soon. There is no wind more agreeable
than the N.E. trades. The sun keeps the air deliciously warm, the
breeze deliciously fresh. The vessel sits bolt upright, steering a
S.S.W. course, with the wind nearly aft: she glides along with scarcely
any perceptible motion; sometimes, in the cabin, one would fancy one
must be on dry land. The sky is of a greyish blue, and the sea silver
grey, with a very slight haze round the horizon. The water is very
smooth, even with a wind which would elsewhere raise a considerable sea.
In latitude 19°, longitude 25°, we first fell in with
flying fish. These are usually in flocks, and are seen in greatest
abundance in the morning; they fly a great way and very well, not with
the kind of jump which a fish takes when springing out of the water, but
with a bona fide flight, sometimes close to the water, sometimes some
feet above it. One flew on board, and measured roughly eighteen inches
between the tips of its wings. On Saturday, November 5, the trades left
us suddenly after a thunder-storm, which gave us an opportunity of
seeing chain lightning, which I only remember to have seen once in
England. As soon as the storm was over, we perceived that the wind was
gone, and knew that we had entered that unhappy region of calms which
extends over a belt of some five degrees rather to the north of the
line.
We knew that the weather about the line was often calm, but had pictured
to ourselves a gorgeous sun,
One day we had a little excitement in capturing a shark, whose triangular black fin had been veering about above water for some time at a little distance from the ship. I will not detail a process that has so often been described, but will content myself with saying that he did not die unavenged, inasmuch as he administered a series of cuffs and blows to anyone that was near him which would have done credit to a prize-fighter, and several of the men got severe handling or, I should rather say, “tailing” from him. He was accompanied by two beautifully striped pilot fish—the never-failing attendants of the shark.
One day during this calm we fell in with a current, when the aspect of the sea was completely changed. It resembled a furiously rushing river, and had the sound belonging to a strong stream, only much intensified; the waves, too, tossed up their heads perpendicularly into the air; whilst the empty flour-casks drifted ahead of us and to one side. It was impossible to look at the sea without noticing its very singular appearance. Soon a wind springing up raised the waves and obliterated the more manifest features of the current, but for two or three days afterwards we could perceive it more or less. There is always at this time of year a strong westerly set here. The wind was the commencement of the S.E. trades, and was welcomed by all with the greatest pleasure. In two days more we reached the line.
We crossed the line far too much to the west, in longitude 31° 6′,
after a very long passage of nearly seven weeks, such as our
captain says he never remembers to have made; fine winds, however, now
began to favour us, and in another week we got out of
The great feature of the southern seas is the multitude of birds which
inhabit it. Huge albatrosses,
We reached the Cape, passing about six degrees south of it, in twenty-
five days after crossing the line, a very fair passage; and since the
Cape we have done well until a week ago, when, after a series of very
fine runs, and during as fair a breeze as one would wish to see, we were
some of us astonished to see the captain giving orders to reef topsails.
The royals were stowed, so were the top-gallant-sails, topsails close
reefed, mainsail reefed, and just at 10.45 p.m., as I was going to bed,
I heard the captain give the order to take a reef in the foresail and
furl the mainsail; but before I was in bed a quarter of an hour
afterwards, a blast of wind came up like a wall, and all night it blew a
regular hurricane. The glass, which had dropped very fast all day, and
fallen lower than the captain had ever seen it in the southern
hemisphere, had given him warning what was coming, and he had prepared
for it. That night we ran away before the wind to the north, next day
we lay hove-to till evening, and two days afterwards the gale was
repeated, but with still greater violence. The captain was all ready
for it, and a ship, if she is a good sea-boat, may laugh at any winds or
any waves provided she be prepared. The danger is when a ship has got
all sail set and one of these bursts of wind is shot out at her; then
her masts go overboard in no time. Sailors generally estimate a gale of
wind by the amount of damage it does, if they don’t lose a mast or get
their bulwarks washed away, or at any rate carry away a few
Life on Board—Calm—Boat Lowered—Snares and Traps—Land—Driven off coast—Enter Port Lyttelton—Requisites for a Sea Voyage—Spirit of Adventure aroused.
Before continuing the narrative of my voyage, I must turn to other
topics and give you some account of my life on board. My time has
passed very pleasantly: I have read a good deal; I have nearly finished
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, am studying Liebig’s
Agricultural Chemistry, and learning the concertina on the instrument of
one of my fellow-passengers. Besides this, I have had the getting up
and management of our choir. We practise three or four times a week; we
chant the Venite, Glorias, and
* * * * * *
During the month that has elapsed since writing the last sentence, we
have had strong gales and long, tedious calms. On one of these
occasions the captain lowered a boat, and a lot of us scrambled over the
ship’s side and got in, taking it in turns to row. The first thing that
surprised us was the very much warmer temperature of the sea-level than
that on deck. The change was astonishing. I have suffered from a
severe cold ever since my return to the ship. On deck it was cold,
thermometer 46° on the sea-level it was deliciously warm. The
next thing that surprised us was the way in which the ship was pitching,
though it appeared a dead calm. Up she rose and down she fell upon a
great hummocky swell which came lazily up from the S.W., making our
horizon from the boat all uneven. On deck we had thought it a very
slight swell; in the boat we perceived what a heavy, humpy, ungainly
heap of waters kept rising and sinking all round us, sometimes blocking
out the whole ship, save the top of the main royal, in the strangest way
in the world. We pulled round the ship, thinking we had never in our
lives seen anything so beautiful as she then looked in the sunny
morning, when suddenly we saw a large ripple in the waters not far off.
At first the captain imagined it to have been caused by a whale, and was
rather alarmed, but by and by it turned out to be nothing but a shoal of
fish. Then we made for a large piece of seaweed which we had seen some
way astern. It extended some ten feet deep, and was a huge, tangled,
loose, floating mass; among it nestled little fishes innumerable, and as
we looked down amid its intricate branches through the sun-lit azure of
the water, the effect was beautiful. This mass we attached
We are now (January 21) in great hopes of sighting
January 22.—Yesterday at midday I was sitting writing in my cabin, when
I heard the joyful cry of “Land!” and, rushing on deck, saw the swelling
and beautiful outline of the high land in Stewart’s Island. We had
passed close by the Snares in the morning, but the weather was too thick
for us to see them, though the birds flocked therefrom in myriads. We
then passed between the Traps, which the captain saw distinctly, one on
each side of him, from the main topgallant yard.
See Preface.January 26.—Alas for the vanity of human speculation! After writing
the last paragraph the wind fell light, then sprung up foul, and so we
were slowly driven to the E.N.E. On Monday night it blew hard, and we
had close-reefed topsails. Tuesday morning at five it was lovely, and
the reefs were all shaken out; a light air sprang up, and the ship, at
10 o’clock, had come up to her course, when suddenly, without the
smallest warning, a gale came down upon us from the S.W. like a wall.
The men were luckily very smart in taking in canvas, but at one time the
captain thought he should have had to cut away the mizzenmast. We were
reduced literally to bare poles, and lay-to under a piece of tarpaulin,
six times doubled, and about two yards square, fastened up in the mizzen
rigging. All day and night we lay thus, drifting to leeward at three
knots an hour. In the twenty-four hours we had drifted sixty miles.
Next day the wind moderated; but at 12 we found that we were eighty
miles north of the peninsula and some 3° east of it. So we set a
little sail, and commenced forereaching slowly on our course. Little
and little the wind died, and it soon fell dead calm. That evening
(Wednesday), some twenty albatrosses being congregated like a flock of
geese round the ship’s stern, we succeeded in catching some of them, the
first we
The Roman Emperor,
said the captain. “Are you all well?”—“All well.” Then the captain
asked, “Has the Robert Small arrived?”—“No,” was the answer, “nor yet
the Burmah.”
A few words concerning the precautions advisable for anyone who is about to take a long sea-voyage may perhaps be useful. First and foremost, unless provided with a companion whom he well knows and can trust, he must have a cabin to himself. There are many men with whom one can be on excellent terms when not compelled to be perpetually with them, but whom the propinquity of the same cabin would render simply intolerable. It would not even be particularly agreeable to be awakened during a hardly captured wink of sleep by the question “Is it not awful?” that, however, would be a minor inconvenience. No one, I am sure, will repent paying a few pounds more for a single cabin who has seen the inconvenience that others have suffered from having a drunken or disagreeable companion in so confined a space. It is not even like a large room. He should have books in plenty, both light and solid. A folding arm-chair is a great comfort, and a very cheap one. In the hot weather I found mine invaluable, and, in the bush, it will still come in usefully. He should have a little table and common chair: these are real luxuries, as all who have tried to write, or seen others attempt it, from a low arm-chair at a washing-stand will readily acknowledge.
A small disinfecting charcoal filter is very desirable. Ship’s water is often bad, and the ship’s filter may be old and defective. Mine has secured me and others during the voyage pure and sweet-tasting water, when we could not drink that supplied us by the ship. A bottle or two of raspberry vinegar will be found a luxury when near the line. By the aid of these means and appliances I have succeeded in making myself exceedingly comfortable. A small chest of drawers would have been preferable to a couple of boxes for my clothes, and I should recommend another to get one. A ten-pound note will suffice for all these things. The bunk should not be too wide: one rolls so in rough weather; of course it should not be athwartships, if avoidable. No one in his right mind will go second class if he can, by any hook or crook, raise money enough to go first.
On the whole, there are many advantageous results from a sea-voyage. One’s geography improves apace, and numberless incidents occur pregnant with interest to a landsman; moreover, there are sure to be many on board who have travelled far and wide, and one gains a great deal of information about all sorts of races and places. One effect is, perhaps, pernicious, but this will probably soon wear off on land. It awakens an adventurous spirit, and kindles a strong desire to visit almost every spot upon the face of the globe. The captain yarns about California and the China seas—the doctor about Valparaiso and the Andes—another raves about Hawaii and the islands of the Pacific—while a fourth will compare nothing with Japan.
The world begins to feel very small when one finds one can get half
round it in three months; and one
I search my diary in vain to find some pretermitted adventure wherewith to give you a thrill, or, as good Mrs. B. calls it, “a feel”; but I can find none. The mail is going; I will write again by the next.
Aspect of Port Lyttelton—Ascent of Hill behind it—View—Christ Church —Yankeeisms—Return to Port Lyttelton and Ship—Phormium Tenax—Visit to a Farm—Moa Bones.
January 27,
We dined at the table d’hote at the Mitre—so foreign and yet so
English—the windows open to the ground,
After dinner I and another commenced the ascent of the hill between port
and Christ Church. We had not gone far before we put our knapsacks on
the back of the pack-horse that goes over the hill every day (poor pack-
horse!). It is indeed an awful pull up that hill; yet we were so
anxious to see what was on the other side of it that we scarcely noticed
the fatigue: I thought it very beautiful. It is volcanic, brown, and
dry; large intervals of crumbling soil, and then a stiff, wiry,
uncompromising-looking tussock of the very hardest grass; then perhaps a
flax bush, or, as we should have said, a flax plant; then more crumbly,
brown, dry soil, mixed with fine but dried grass, and then more
tussocks; volcanic rock everywhere cropping out, sometimes red and
tolerably soft, sometimes black and abominably hard. There was a great
deal, too, of a very uncomfortable prickly shrub, which they call
Irishman, and which I do not like the look of at all. There were cattle
browsing where they could, but to my eyes it seemed as though they had
but poor times of it. So we continued to climb, panting and broiling in
the afternoon sun, and much admiring the lovely view beneath. At last
we near the top, and look down upon the plain, bounded by the distant
Apennines, that run through the middle of the island. Near at hand, at
the foot of the hill, we saw a few pretty
At the bottom of the hill we met the car to Christ Church; it halted some time at a little wooden public-house, and by and by at another, where was a Methodist preacher, who had just been reaping corn for two pounds an acre. He showed me some half-dozen stalks of gigantic size, but most of that along the roadside was thin and poor. Then we reached Christ Church on the little river Avon; it is larger than Lyttelton and more scattered, but not so pretty. Here, too, the men are shaggy, clear-complexioned, brown, and healthy-looking, and wear exceedingly rowdy hats. I put up at Mr. Rowland Davis’s; and as no one during the evening seemed much inclined to talk to me, I listened to the conversation.
The all-engrossing topics seemed to be sheep, horses, dogs, cattle,
English grasses, paddocks, bush, and so
you believe it.” When they want to answer in the affirmative they say
“It is so,” “It does so.” The word “hum,” too, without pronouncing the
u, is in amusing requisition. I perceived that this stood either for
assent, or doubt, or wonder, or a general expression of comprehension
without compromising the hummer’s own opinion, and indeed for a great
many more things than these; in fact, if a man did not want to say
anything at all he said “hum hum.” It is a very good expression, and
saves much trouble when its familiar use has been acquired. Beyond
these trifles I noticed no Yankeeism, and the conversation was English
in point of expression. I was rather startled at hearing one gentleman
ask another whether he meant to wash this year, and receive the answer
“No.” I soon discovered that a person’s sheep are himself. If his
sheep are clean, he is clean. He does not wash his sheep before
shearing, but he washes; and, most marvellous of all, it is not his
sheep which lamb, but he “lambs down” himself.
* * * * * *
I have purchased a horse, by name Doctor. I hope he is a homoeopathist.
He is in colour bay, distinctly branded P. C. on the near shoulder. I
am glad the
On Friday I went to Port Lyttelton, meeting on the way many of our late
fellow-passengers—some despondent, some hopeful; one or two dinnerless
and in the dumps when we first encountered them, but dinnered and
hopeful when we met them again on our return. We chatted with and
encouraged them all, pointing out the general healthy, well-conditioned
look of the residents. Went on board. How strangely changed the ship
appeared! Sunny, motionless, and quiet; no noisy children, no
slatternly, slipshod women rolling about the decks, no slush, no washing
of dirty linen in dirtier water. There was the old mate in a clean
shirt at last, leaning against the mainmast, and smoking his yard of
clay; the butcher close—shaven and clean; the sailors smart, and
welcoming us with a smile. It almost looked like going home. Dined in
Lyttelton with several of my fellow-passengers, who evidently thought it
best to be off with the old love before they were on with the new, i.e.
to spend all they brought with them before they set about acquiring a
new fortune. Then went and helped Mr. and Mrs. R. to arrange their new
house, i.e. R. and I scrubbed the
Saturday.—Rode again to port, and saw my case of saddlery still on
board. When riding back the haze obscured the snowy range, and the
scenery reminded me much of Cambridgeshire. The distinctive marks which
characterise it as not English are the occasional Ti palms, which have a
very tropical appearance, and the luxuriance of the Phormium tenax. If
you strip a shred of this leaf not thicker than an ordinary piece of
string, you will find it hard work to break it, if you succeed in doing
so at all without cutting your finger. On the whole, if the road
leading from Heathcote Ferry to Christ Church were through an avenue of
mulberry trees, and the fields on either side were cultivated with
Indian corn and vineyards, and if through these you could catch an
occasional glimpse of a distant cathedral of pure white marble, you
might well imagine yourself nearing Milan. As it is, the country is a
sort of a cross between the plains of Lombardy and the fens of North
Cambridgeshire.
At night, a lot of Nelson and Wellington men came to the club. I was amused at dinner by a certain sailor and others, who maintained that the end of the world was likely to arrive shortly; the principal argument appearing to be, that there was no more sheep country to be found in Canterbury. This fact is, I fear, only too true. With this single exception, the conversation was purely horsy and sheepy. The fact is, the races are approaching, and they are the grand annual jubilee of Canterbury.
Next morning, I rode some miles into the country, and visited a farm.
Found the inmates (two brothers) at dinner. Cold boiled mutton and
bread, and cold tea without milk, poured straight from a huge kettle in
which it is made every morning, seem the staple commodities. No
potatoes—nothing hot. They had no servant, and no cow. The bread,
which was very white, was made by the younger. They showed me, with
some little pleasure, some of the improvements they were making, and
told me what they meant to do; and I looked at them with great respect.
These men were as good gentlemen, in the conventional sense of the word,
as any with whom we associate in England—I daresay, de facto, much
better than many of them. They showed me some moa bones which they had
ploughed up (the moa, as you doubtless know, was an enormous bird, which
must have stood some fifteen feet high), also some stone Maori battle-
axes. They bought this land two years ago, and assured me that, even
though they had not touched it, they could get for it cent per cent upon
the price which they then gave.
Sheep on Terms, Schedule and Explanation—Investment in Sheep-run—Risk of Disease, and Laws upon the Subject—Investment in laying down Land in English Grass—In Farming—Journey to Oxford—Journey to the Glaciers— Remote Settlers—Literature in the Bush—Blankets and Flies—Ascent of the Rakaia—Camping out—Glaciers—Minerals—Parrots—Unexplored Col— Burning the Flats—Return.
February 10, s.
6d. per head in lieu of wool. This would give me 2s. 6d. as the yearly
interest on 25s. Besides this he would allow me 40 per cent per annum
of increase, half male, and half female, and of these the females would
bear increase also as soon as they had attained the age of two years;
moreover, the increase would return me 2s. 6d. per head wool money as
soon as they became sheep. At the end of the term, my sheep would be
returned to me as per agreement, with no deduction for deaths, but the
original sheep would be, of course, so much the older, and some of them
being doubtless dead, sheep of the same age as they would have been will
be returned in their place.
I will subjoin a schedule showing what 500 ewes will amount to in seven
years; we will date from
The yearly wool money would be:—
I will explain briefly the meaning of this.
We will suppose that the ewes have all two teeth to start with—two
teeth indicate one year old, four teeth two years, six teeth three
years, eight teeth (or full mouthed) four years. For the edification of
some of my readers as ignorant as I am myself upon ovine matters, I may
mention that the above teeth are to be looked for in the lower jaw and
not the upper, the front portion of which is toothless. The ewes, then,
being one year old to start with, they will be eight years old at the
end of seven years. I have only, however, given you so long a term that
you may see what would be the result of putting out sheep on terms
either for three, four, five, six, or seven years, according as you
like. Sheep at eight years old will be in their old age: they will
live nine or ten years—sometimes more, but an eight-year-old sheep
would be what is called a broken-mouthed creature; that is to say, it
would have lost some of its teeth from old age, and would generally be
found to crawl along at the tail end of the mob; so that of the 2582
sheep returned to me, 500 would be very old, 200 would be seven years
old, 200 six years old. All these would pass as old sheep, and not
fetch very much; one
s. a head for the lot all round.
Perhaps, however, you might sell the 200 six years old with the younger
ones. Not to overestimate, count these 700 old sheep as worth nothing
at all, and consider that I have s.
a head to 10s., and at the end of my term I realise £900. Suppose
that of the wool money I have only spent £62 10s. per annum, i.e.
ten per cent on the original outlay, and that I have laid by the
remainder of the wool money. I shall have from the wool money a surplus
of £630 (some of which should have been making ten per cent
interest for some time); that is to say, my total receipts for the sheep
should be at the least £1530. Say that the capital had only
doubled itself in the seven years, the investment could not be
considered a bad one. The above is a bona-fide statement of one of the
commonest methods of investing money in sheep. I cannot think from all
I have heard that sheep will be lower than 10s. a head, still some place
the minimum value as low as 6s.
s. a head, and are not to be
had under. Secondly, The diggings in Otago have caused the value of
wethers to rise, and as they are now selling at 33s. on the runs of the
Otago station (I quote the Lyttelton Times, which may be depended upon),
and those runs are only very partially stocked, the supply there must in
all probability fall short of the demand. The price of sheep in this
settlement is therefore raised also, and likely to continue high. All
depends upon what this next spring may bring forth upon the Otago gold-
fields. If they keep up the reputation which they sustained until the
winter caused the diggers to retreat, the price will be high for some
few years longer; if they turn out a failure, it must fall before very
long. Still, there is a large and increasing population in Canterbury,
and as its sheep-feeding area is as nothing compared with that of
Australia, we do not expect sheep here ever to fall as low as they did
there before the diggings. Indeed, they hardly can do so; for our sheep
are larger than the Australian, and clip a much heavier fleece, so that
their fleece, and skins, and tallow must be of greater value. Should
means be found of converting the meat into portable soup, the carcase of
the sheep ought, even at its lowest value, to be considerably higher
than 10s. Nothing is heard about this yet, for the country is not
nearly stocked, so that the thing is not needed; but one would, à
priori, be under the impression that there should ultimately be no
insuperable difficulty in rescuing the meat from waste. It is a matter
which might well attract the attention of scientific men in England. We
should all be exceedingly obliged to them if they would kindly cause
sheep to be as high as 15s. or 17s. seven years hence, and I can see no
reason why, if the meat could be made use of, they should fall lower.
In other respects, what I have written about sheep on terms is true to
the present day.
The question arises, What is to be done with one’s money when the term is out? I cannot answer; yet surely the colony cannot be quite used up in seven years, and one can hardly suppose but that, even in that advanced state of the settlement, means will not be found of investing a few thousand pounds to advantage.
The general recommendation which I receive is to buy the goodwill of a
run; this cannot be done under about £100 for every thousand
acres. Thus, a run of 20,000 acres will be worth £ The above is true to the present day (s. a head. Say £8000 instead of £6000, and the rest
will stand. £8000 should do the thing handsomely.
Another mode of investment highly spoken of is that of buying land and
laying it down in English grass, thus making a permanent estate of it.
But I fear this will not do for me, both because it requires a large
experience of things in general, which, as you well know, I do not
possess, and because I should want
bona-fide labouring men who
can make it answer. The number of farms in the neighbourhood of Christ
Church seems at first to contradict this statement; but I believe the
fact to be, that these farms are chiefly in the hands of labouring men,
who had made a little money, bought land, and cultivated it themselves.
These men can do well, but those who have to buy labour cannot make it
answer. The difficulty lies in the high rate of wages.
February 13.—Since my last I have been paying a visit of a few days at
Kaiapoi, and made a short trip up to the Harewood Forest, near to which
the township of Oxford is situated. Why it should be called Oxford I do
not know.
After leaving Rangiora, which is about 8 miles from Kaiapoi, I followed
the Harewood road till it became a mere track, then a footpath, and then
dwindled away to nothing at all. I soon found myself in the middle of
the plains, with nothing but brown tussocks of grass before me and
behind me, and on either side. The day was rather dark, and the
mountains were obliterated by a haze. “Oh the pleasure of the plains,”
I thought to myself; but, upon my word, I think old Handel would find
but little pleasure in these. They are, in clear weather, monotonous
and dazzling; in cloudy weather monotonous and sad; and they have little
to recommend them but the facility they afford for travelling, and the
grass which grows upon them. This, at least, was the impression I
derived from my first acquaintance with them, as I found myself steering
for the extremity of some low downs about six miles distant. I thought
these downs would never get nearer. At length I saw a tent-like object,
dotting itself upon the plain, with eight black mice as it were in front
of it. This turned out to be a dray, loaded with wool, coming down from
the country. It was the first symptom of sheep that I had come upon,
for, to my surprise, I saw no sheep upon the plains, neither did I see
any in the whole of my little excursion. I am told that this
disappoints most new-comers. They are told that sheep farming is the
great business of Canterbury, but they see no sheep; the reason of this
is, partly because the runs
I may as well here correct an error, which I had been under, and which you may, perhaps, have shared with me—native grass cannot be mown.
After proceeding some few miles further, I came to a station, where, though a perfect stranger, and at first (at some little distance) mistaken for a Maori, I was most kindly treated, and spent a very agreeable evening. The people here are very hospitable; and I have received kindness already upon several occasions, from persons upon whom I had no sort of claim.
Next day I went to Oxford, which lies at the foot of the first ranges, and is supposed to be a promising place. Here, for the first time, I saw the bush; it was very beautiful; numerous creepers, and a luxuriant undergrowth among the trees, gave the forest a wholly un-European aspect, and realised, in some degree, one’s idea of tropical vegetation. It was full of birds that sang loudly and sweetly. The trees here are all evergreens, and are not considered very good for timber. I am told that they have mostly a twist in them, and are in other respects not first rate.
* * * * * *
March 24.—At last I have been really in the extreme back country, and
positively, right up to a glacier.
As soon as I saw the mountains, I longed to get on the other side of them, and now my wish has been gratified.
I left Christ Church in company with a sheep farmer, who owns a run in the back country, behind the Malvern Hills, and who kindly offered to take me with him on a short expedition he was going to make into the remoter valleys of the island, in hopes of finding some considerable piece of country which had not yet been applied for.
We started February 28th, and had rather an unpleasant ride of twenty-
five miles, against a very high N.W. wind. This wind is very hot, very
parching, and very violent; it blew the dust into our eyes so that we
could hardly keep them open. Towards evening, however, it somewhat
moderated, as it generally does. There was nothing of interest on the
track, save a dry
At night, and by a lovely clear, cold moonlight, we
bona fide beyond the pale of
civilisation; no boarded floors, no chairs, nor any similar luxuries;
everything was of the very simplest description. Four men inhabited the
hut, and their life appears a kind of mixture of that of a dog and that
of an emperor, with a considerable predominance of the latter. They
have no cook, and take it turn and turn to cook and wash up, two one
week, and two the next. They have a good garden, and gave us a capital
feed of potatoes and peas, both fried together, an excellent
combination. Their culinary apparatus and plates, cups, knives, and
forks, are very limited in number. The men are all gentlemen and sons
of gentlemen, and one of them is a Cambridge man, who took a high
second-class a year or two before my time. Every now and then he leaves
his up-country avocations, and becomes a great gun at the college in
Christ Church, examining the boys; he then returns to his shepherding,
cooking, bullock-driving, etc. etc., as the case may be. I am informed
that the having faithfully learned the ingenuous arts, has so far
mollified his morals that he is an exceedingly humane and judicious
bullock-driver. He regarded me as a somewhat despicable new-comer (at
least so I imagined), and when next morning I asked where I should wash,
he gave rather a French shrug of the shoulders, and said, “The lake.” I
felt the rebuke to be well merited, and that with the lake in front of
the house, I should have been at no loss for the means of performing my
ablutions. So I retired abashed and cleansed myself therein. Under his
bed I found Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. So you will see that
Machiavellian discourses upon
the first decade of Livy. The wonder-stricken visitor laid down the
book and took up another, which was, at any rate, written in English.
This he found to be Bishop Butler’s Analogy. Putting it down speedily
as something not in his line, he laid hands upon a third. This proved
to be Patrum Apostolicorum Opera, on which he saddled his horse and went
right away, leaving the Oxonian to his baking. This man must certainly
be considered a rare exception. New Zealand seems far better adapted to
develop and maintain in health the physical than the intellectual
nature. The fact is, people here are busy making money; that is the
inducement which led them to come in the first instance, and they show
their sense by devoting their energies to the work. Yet, after all, it
may be questioned whether the intellect is not as well schooled here as
at home, though in a very different manner. Men are as shrewd and
sensible, as alive to the humorous, and as hard-headed. Moreover, there
is much nonsense in the old country from which people here are free.
There is little conventionalism, little formality, and much liberality
of sentiment; very little sectarianism, and, as a general rule, a
healthy, sensible tone in conversation, which I like much. But it does
not do to speak about John Sebastian Bach’s Fugues, or pre-Raphaelite
pictures.
To return, however, to the matter in hand. Of
On the morning after I arrived, for the first time in my life I saw a
sheep killed. It is rather unpleasant, but I suppose I shall get as
indifferent to it as other—people are by and by. To show you that the
knives of the establishment are numbered, I may mention that the same
knife killed the sheep and carved the mutton we had for dinner. After
an early dinner, my patron and myself started on our journey, and
Our saddles were our pillows and we strapped our blankets round us by
saddle-straps, and my companion (I believe) slept very soundly; for my
part the scene was altogether too novel to allow me to sleep. I kept
looking up and seeing the stars just as I was going off to sleep, and
that woke me again; I had also underestimated the amount of blankets
which I should require, and it was not long before the romance of the
situation wore off, and a rather chilly reality occupied its place;
moreover, the flat was stony, and I was not knowing enough to have
selected a spot which gave a hollow for the hip-bone. My great object,
however, was to conceal my condition from my companion, for never was a
freshman at névé near the top of it, and was all excitement. We were very anxious
to know if this was the backbone range of the island, and were hopeful
that if it was we might find some pass to the other side. The ranges on
either hand were, as I said before, covered with bush, and these, with
the rugged Alps in front of us, made a magnificent view. We went on,
and soon there came out a much grander mountain—a glorious glaciered
fellow—and then came more, and the mountains closed in, and the river
dwindled and began leaping from stone to stone, and we were shortly in
scenery of the true Alpine nature—very, very grand. It wanted,
however, a châlet or two, or some sign of human handiwork in the fore-
ground; as it was, the scene was too savage.
All the time we kept looking for gold, not in a scientific manner, but
we had a kind of idea that if we looked in the shingly beds of the
numerous tributaries to the Harpur, we should surely find either gold or
copper or something good. So at every shingle-bed we came to (and every
little tributary had a great shingle-bed) we lay down and gazed into the
pebbles with all our eyes. We found plenty of stones
When we had reached nearly the base of the mountains, we left our
horses, for we could use them no longer, and, crossing and recrossing
the stream, at length turned up through the bush to our right. This
bush, though very beautiful to look at, is composed of nothing but the
poorest black birch. We had no
Immediately on emerging from the bush we found all vegetation at an end.
We were on the moraine of an old glacier, and saw nothing in front of us
but frightful precipices and glaciers. There was a saddle, however, not
above a couple of thousand feet higher. This saddle was covered with
snow, and, as we had neither provisions nor blankets, we were obliged to
give up going to the top of it. We returned with less reluctance, from
the almost absolute certainty, firstly, that we were not upon the main
range; secondly, that this saddle would only lead to the Waimakiriri,
the next river above the Rakaia. Of these two points my companion was
so convinced, that we did not greatly regret leaving it unexplored. Our
object was commercial, and not scientific; our motive
This might be shown also by a consideration of the volume of water which supplies the main streams of the Rakaia and the Waimakiriri, and comparing it with the insignificant amount which finds its way down the Harpur. The glaciers that feed the two larger streams must be very extensive, thus showing that the highest range lies still farther to the northward and westward. The Waimakiriri is the next river to the northward of the Rakaia.
That night we camped as before, only I was more knowing, and slept with
my clothes on, and found a hollow for my hip-bone, by which contrivances
I slept like a top. Next morning, at early dawn, the scene was most
magnificent. The mountains were pale as ghosts, and almost sickening
from their death-like whiteness. We gazed at them for a moment or two,
and then turned to making a fire, which in the cold frosty morning was
en route for the
station from which we had started. We burnt the flats as we rode down,
and made a smoke which was noticed between fifty and sixty miles off. I
have seen no grander sight than the fire upon a country which has never
before been burnt, and on which there is a large quantity of Irishman.
The sun soon loses all brightness, and looks as though seen through
smoked glass. The volumes of smoke are something that must be seen to
be appreciated. The flames roar, and the grass crackles, and every now
and then a glorious lurid flare marks the ignition of an Irishman; his
dry thorns blaze fiercely for a minute or so, and then the fire leaves
him, charred and blackened for ever. A year or two hence, a stiff nor’-
wester will blow him over, and he will lie there and rot, and fatten the
surrounding grass; often, however, he shoots out again from the roots,
and then he is a considerable nuisance. On the plains Irishman is but a
small shrub, that hardly rises higher than the tussocks; it is only in
the back country that it attains any considerable size: there its trunk
is often as thick as a man’s body.
We got back about an hour after sundown, just as heavy rain was coming on, and were very glad not to be again camping out, for it rained furiously and incessantly the whole night long. Next day we returned to the lower station belonging to my companion, which was as replete with European comforts as the upper was devoid of them; yet, for my part, I could live very comfortably at either.
Ascent of the Waimakiriri—Crossing the River—Gorge—Ascent of the Rangitata—View of M’Kenzie Plains—M’Kenzie—Mount Cook—Ascent of the Hurunui—Col leading to West Coast.
Since my last, I have made another expedition into the back country, in
the hope of finding some little run which had been overlooked. I have
been unsuccessful, as indeed I was likely to be: still I had a pleasant
excursion, and have seen many more glaciers, and much finer ones than on
my last trip. This time I went up the Waimakiriri by myself, and found
that we had been fully right in our supposition that the Rakaia saddles
would only lead on to that river. The main features were precisely
similar to those on the Rakaia, save that the valley was broader, the
river longer, and the mountains very much higher. I had to cross the
Waimakiriri just after a fresh, when the water was thick, and I assure
you I did not like it. I crossed it first on the plains, where it flows
between two very high terraces, which are from half a mile to a mile
apart, and of which the most northern must be, I should think, 300 feet
high. It was so steep, and so covered with stones towards the base, and
so broken with strips of shingle that had fallen over the grass, that it
took me a full hour to lead my horse from the top to the bottom. I dare
say my clumsiness was partly in fault; but certainly in Switzerland I
never saw a horse taken down so nasty a place: and so glad was I to be
at the bottom of it, that I thought comparatively little of the river,
which was close at hand waiting to be crossed. From
The Waimakiriri flows from the back country out into the plains through a very beautiful narrow gorge. The channel winds between wooded rocks, beneath which the river whirls and frets and eddies most gloriously. Above the lower cliffs, which descend perpendicularly into the river, rise lofty mountains to an elevation of several thousand feet: so that the scenery here is truly fine. In the river-bed, near the gorge, there is a good deal of lignite, and, near the Kowai, a little tributary which comes in a few miles below the gorge, there is an extensive bed of true and valuable coal.
The back country of the Waimakiriri is inaccessible by dray, so that all the stores and all the wool have to be packed in and packed out on horseback. This is a very great drawback, and one which is not likely to be soon removed. In winter-time, also, the pass which leads into it is sometimes entirely obstructed by snow, so that the squatters in that part of the country must have a harder time of it than those on the plains. They have bush, however, and that is a very important thing.
I shall not give you any full account of what I saw as I went up the
Waimakiriri, for were I to do so I should only repeat my last letter.
Suffice it that there is a magnificent mountain chain of truly Alpine
character at the head of the river, and that, in parts, the scenery is
quite equal in grandeur to that of auberge, with its vin ordinaire and refreshing fruit! These
things, however, are as yet in the far future. As for vin ordinaire, I
do not suppose that, except at Akaroa, the climate will ever admit of
grapes ripening in this settlement—not that the summer is not warm
enough, but because the night frosts come early, even while the days are
exceedingly hot. Neither does one see how these back valleys can ever
become so densely peopled as Switzerland; they are too rocky and too
poor, and too much cut up by river-beds.
I saw one saddle low enough to be covered with bush, ending a valley of some miles in length, through which flowed a small stream with dense bush on either side. I firmly believe that this saddle will lead to the West Coast; but as the valley was impassable for a horse, and as, being alone, I was afraid to tackle the carrying food and blankets, and to leave Doctor, who might very probably walk off whilst I was on the wrong side of the Waimakiriri, I shirked the investigation. I certainly ought to have gone up that valley. I feel as though I had left a stone unturned, and must, if all is well, at some future time take someone with me and explore it. I found a few flats up the river, but they were too small and too high up to be worth my while to take.
April,
I have little to tell you concerning the Rangitata different from what I have already written about the Waimakiriri and the Harpur. The first great interest was, of course, finding the country which we took up; the next was what I confess to the weakness of having enjoyed much more— namely, a most magnificent view of that most magnificent mountain, Mount Cook. It is one of the grandest I have ever seen. I will give you a short account of the day.
We started from a lonely valley, down which runs a stream called Forest
Creek. It is an ugly, barren-looking place enough—a deep valley
between two high ranges, which are not entirely clear of snow for more
than three or four months in the year. As its name imports, it has some
wood, though not much, for the Rangitata back country is very bare of
timber. We started, as I said, from the bottom of this valley on a
clear frosty morning—so frosty that the tea-leaves in our pannikins
were frozen, and our outer blanket crisped with frozen dew. We went up
a little gorge, as narrow as a street in Genoa, with huge black and
dripping precipices overhanging it, so as almost to shut out the light
of heaven. I never saw so curious a place in my life. It soon opened
out, and we followed up the little stream which flowed through it. This
was no easy work. The scrub was very dense, and the rocks huge. The
spaniard “piked us intil the bane,” and I assure you that we were hard
set to make any headway at all. At last we came to a waterfall, the
In seven hours from the time we started, we were on the top. Hence we
had hoped to discover some entirely new country, but were disappointed,
for we only saw the Mackenzie Plains lying stretched out for miles away
to the southward. These plains are so called after a notorious
shepherd, who discovered them some few years since. Keeping his
knowledge to himself, he used to steal his master’s sheep and drive them
quietly into his unsuspected hiding-place. This he did so cleverly that
he was not detected until he had stolen many hundred. Much obscurity
hangs over his proceedings: it is supposed that he made one successful
trip down to Otago, through this country, and sold a good many of the
sheep he had stolen. He is a man of great physical strength, and can be
no common character; many stories are told about him, and his fame will
be lasting. He was taken and escaped more than once, and finally was
pardoned by the Governor, on condition of his leaving New Zealand. It
was rather a strange proceeding, and I doubt how fair to the country
which he may have chosen to honour with his presence, for I should
suppose there is hardly a more daring and dangerous rascal going.
However, his boldness and skill had won him sympathy and admiration, so
that I believe the pardon was rather a popular act than otherwise. To
thinks he has seen Mount Cook, you may
be quite sure that he has not seen it. The moment it comes into sight
the exclamation is, “That is Mount Cook!”—not “That must be Mount
Cook!” There is no possibility of mistake. There is a glorious field
for the members of the Alpine Club here. Mount Cook awaits them, and he
who first scales it will be crowned with undying laurels: for my part,
though it is hazardous to say this of any mountain, I do not think that
any human being will ever reach its top.
I am forgetting myself into admiring a mountain which is of no use for
sheep. This is wrong. A mountain here is only beautiful if it has good
grass on it. Scenery is not scenery—it is “country,” subauditâ voce
“sheep.” If it is good for sheep, it is beautiful, magnificent, and all
the rest of it; if not, it is not worth looking at. I am cultivating
this tone of mind with considerable success, but you must pardon me for
an occasional outbreak of the old Adam.
Of course I called my companion up, and he agreed with me that he had never seen anything so wonderful. We got down, very much tired, a little after dark. We had had a very fatiguing day, but it was amply repaid. That night it froze pretty sharply, and our upper blankets were again stiff.
* * * * * *
May, mimis, as they
are called—a few light sticks thrown together, and covered with grass,
affording a sort of half-and-half shelter for a single individual. How
comfortable!
Hut—Cadets—Openings for Emigrants without Capital—For those who bring Money—Drunkenness—Introductions—The Rakaia—Valley leading to the Rangitata—Snow-grass and Spaniard—Solitude—Rain and Flood—Cat— Irishman—Discomforts of Hut—Gradual Improvement—Value of Cat.
I am now going to put up a V hut on the country that I took up on the Rangitata, meaning to hibernate there in order to see what the place is like. I shall also build a more permanent hut there, for I must have someone with me, and we may as well be doing something as nothing. I have hopes of being able to purchase some good country in the immediate vicinity. There is a piece on which I have my eye, and which adjoins that I have already. There can be, I imagine, no doubt that this is excellent sheep country; still, I should like to see it in winter.
* * * * * *
June, fait accompli, if so small an undertaking
can be spoken of in so dignified a manner. It consists of a small roof
set upon the ground; it is a hut, all roof and no walls. I was very
clumsy, and so, in good truth, was my man. Still, at last, by dint of
perseverance, we have made it wind and water tight. It was a job that
should have taken us about a couple of days to have done in first-rate
style; as it was, I am not going to tell you how long it did take. I
must certainly send the man to the right-about, but the difficulty is to
get another, for the aforesaid hut is five-and-twenty miles (at the very
least) from any
gratis, but works (or is supposed to work) in order to learn.
The two who accompanied me both left me in a very short time. I have
nothing to say against either of them; both did their best, and I am
much obliged to them for what they did, but a very few days’ experience
showed me that the system is a bad one for all the parties concerned in
it. The cadet soon gets tired of working for nothing; and, as he is not
paid, it is difficult to come down upon him. If he is good for
anything, he is worth pay, as well as board and lodging. If not worth
more than these last, he is simply a nuisance, for he sets a bad
example, which cannot be checked otherwise than by dismissal; and it is
not an easy or pleasant matter to dismiss one whose relation is rather
that of your friend than your servant. The position is a false one, and
the blame of its failure lies with the person who takes the cadet, for
either he is getting an advantage without giving its due equivalent, or
he is keeping a useless man about his place, to the equal detriment both
of the man and of himself. It may be said that the advantage offered to
the cadet, in allowing him an insight into colonial life, is a bona-fide
payment for what work he may do. This is not the case; for where labour
is so very valuable, a good man is in such high demand that he may find
well-paid employment directly. When a man takes a cadet’s billet it is
a tolerably sure symptom that he means half-and-half work, in which case
he is much worse
You may ask, What is the opening here for young men of good birth and
breeding, who have nothing but health and strength and energy for their
capital? I would answer, Nothing very brilliant, still, they may be
pretty sure of getting a shepherd’s billet somewhere up-country, if they
are known to be trustworthy. If they sustain this character, they will
soon make friends, and find no great difficulty, after the lapse of a
year or two, in getting an overseer’s place, with from £100 to £200
a year, and their board and lodging. They will find plenty of good
investments for the small sums which they may be able to lay by, and if
they are bona-fide smart men, some situation is quite sure to turn up by
and by in which they may better themselves. In fact, they are quite
sure to do well in time; but time is necessary here, as well as in other
places. True, less time may do here, and true
must be one that will pay the borrower), the means of increasing capital
in this settlement are great. For young men, however, sons of gentlemen
and gentlemen themselves, sheep or cattle are the most obvious and best
investment. They can buy and put out upon terms, as I have already
described. They can also buy land, and let it with a purchasing clause,
by which they can make first-rate interest. Thus, twenty acres cost £40;
this they can let for five years, at 5s. an acre, the lessee
being allowed to purchase the land at £5 an acre in five years’
time, which, the chances are, he will be both able and willing to do.
Beyond sheep, cattle, and land, there are few if any investments here
for gentlemen who come out with little practical experience in any
business or profession, but others would turn up with time.
What I have written above refers to good men. There are many such who
find the conventionalities of English
I should be loth to advise any gentleman to come out here unless he have
either money and an average share of good sense, or else a large amount
of proper self-respect and strength of purpose. If a young man goes out
to friends, on an arrangement definitely settled before he leaves
England, he is at any rate certain of employment and of a home upon his
landing here; but if he lands friendless, or simply the bearer of a few
letters of introduction, obtained from second or third hand—because his
cousin knew somebody who had a friend who had married a lady whose
* * * * * *
A short time after I got up to the Rangitata, I had occasion to go down
again to Christ Church, and stayed there one day. On my return, with a
companion, we were delayed two days at the Rakaia: a very heavy fresh
had come down, so as to render the river impassable even in the punt.
The punt can only work upon one stream; but in a heavy fresh the streams
are very numerous, and almost all of them impassable for a horse without
swimming him, which, in such a river as the Rakaia, is very dangerous
work. Sometimes, perhaps half a dozen times in a year, the river is
what is called bank and bank; that is to say, one mass of water from one
side to the other. It is frightfully rapid, and as thick as pea soup.
The river-bed is not far short of a mile in breadth, so you may judge of
the immense volume of water that comes down it at these times. It is
seldom more than three days impassable in the punt. On the third day
they commenced crossing in the punt, behind which we swam out horses;
since then the clouds had hung unceasingly upon the mountain ranges, and
though much of what had fallen would, on the back ranges, be in all
probability snow, we could not doubt but that the Rangitata would afford
us some trouble, nor were we even certain about the Ashburton, a river
which, though partly glacier-fed, is generally easily crossed anywhere.
We found the Ashburton high, but lower than it had been; in one or two
of the eleven crossing-places between our afternoon and evening resting-
places we were wet up to the saddle-flaps—still
Soon after we started the rain ceased, and the clouds slowly uplifted
themselves from the mountain sides. We were riding through the valley
that leads from the Ashburton to the upper valley of the Rangitata, and
kept on the right-hand side of it. It is a long, open valley, the
bottom of which consists of a large swamp, from which rise terrace after
terrace up the mountains on either side; the country is, as it were,
crumpled up in an extraordinary manner, so that it is full of small
ponds or lagoons—sometimes dry, sometimes merely swampy, now as full of
water as they could be. The number of these is great; they do not,
however, attract the eye, being hidden by the hillocks with which each
is more or less surrounded; they vary in extent from a few square feet
or yards to perhaps an acre or two, while one or two attain the
dimensions of a considerable lake. There is no timber in this valley,
and accordingly the scenery, though on a large scale, is neither
impressive nor pleasing; the mountains are large swelling hummocks,
grassed up to the summit, and though steeply declivitous, entirely
destitute of precipice. Truly it is rather a dismal place on a dark
day, and somewhat like the world’s end which the young prince travelled
to in the story of “Cherry, or the Frog Bride.” The grass is coarse and
cold-looking—great tufts of what is called snow-grass, and spaniard.
The first of these grows in a clump sometimes five or six feet in
diameter and four or five feet high; sheep and cattle pick at it when
they are hungry, but seldom touch it
πηγη ναρΘηκοπληρωτου πυρος,
lighting them at right angles to the
wind. The second is purely prospective; it will be very valuable for
planting on the tops of walls to serve instead of broken bottles: not a
cat would attempt a wall so defended.
Snow-grass, tussock grass, spaniard, rushes, swamps, lagoons, terraces,
meaningless rises and indentations of the ground, and two great brown
grassy mountains
After about ten miles we turned a corner and looked down upon the upper valley of the Rangitata—very grand, very gloomy, and very desolate. The river-bed, about a mile and a half broad, was now conveying a very large amount of water to sea.
Some think that the source of the river lies many miles higher, and that it works its way yet far back into the mountains; but as we looked up the river-bed we saw two large and gloomy gorges, at the end of each of which were huge glaciers, distinctly visible to the naked eye, but through the telescope resolvable into tumbled masses of blue ice, exact counterparts of the Swiss and Italian glaciers. These are quite sufficient to account for the volume of water in the Rangitata, without going any farther.
The river had been high for many days; so high that a party of men, who
were taking a dray over to a run which was then being just started on
the other side (and which is now mine), had been detained camping out
for ten days, and were delayed for ten days more before the dray could
cross. We spent a few minutes with these men, among whom was a youth
whom I had brought away from home with me, when I was starting down for
Christ Church, in order that he might get some beef from P——’s and take
it back again. The river
We all wanted to get back, for home, though home be only a V hut, is worth pushing for; a little thing will induce a man to leave it, but if he is near his journey’s end he will go through most places to reach it again. So we determined on going on, and after great difficulty and many turnings up one stream and down another we succeeded in getting safely over. We were wet well over the knee, but just avoided swimming. I got into one quicksand, of which the river is full, and had to jump off my mare, but this was quite near the bank.
I had a cat on the pommel of my saddle, for the rats used to come and take the meat from off our very plates by our side. She got a sousing when the mare was in the quicksand, but I heard her purring not very long after, and was comforted. Of course she was in a bag. I do not know how it is, but men here are much fonder of cats than they are at home.
After we had crossed the river, there were many troublesome creeks yet to go through—sluggish and swampy, with bad places for getting in and out at; these, however, were as nothing in comparison with the river itself, which we all had feared more than we cared to say, and which, in good truth, was not altogether unworthy of fear.
By and by we turned up the shingly river-bed which leads to the spot on
which my hut is built. The river is called Forest Creek, and, though
usually nothing but a large brook, it was now high, and unpleasant from
its rapidity and the large boulders over which it
I had left the V hut warm and comfortable, and on my return found it
very different. I fear we had not put enough thatch upon it, and the
ten days’ rain had proved too much for it. It was now neither air-tight
nor water-tight; the floor, or rather the ground, was soaked and soppy
with mud; the nice warm snow-grass on which I had lain so comfortably
the night before I left, was muddy and wet; altogether, there being no
fire inside, the place was as revolting-looking an affair as one would
wish to see: coming wet and cold off a journey, we had hoped for better
things. There was nothing for it but to make the best of it, so we had
tea, and fried some of the beef—the smell of which was anything but
agreeable, for it had been lying ten days on the ground on the other
side the Rangitata, and was,
I had brought up a tin kettle with me. This was a great comfort and acquisition, for before we had nothing larger than pint pannikins to fetch up water in from the creek; this was all very well by daylight, but in the dark the hundred yards from the hut to the creek were no easy travelling with a pannikin in each hand. The ground was very stony, and covered with burnt Irishman scrub, against which (the Irishman being black and charred, and consequently invisible in the dark) I was continually stumbling and spilling half the water. There was a terrace, too, so that we seldom arrived with much more than half a pannikin, and the kettle was an immense step in advance. The Irishman called it very “beneficial,” as he called everything that pleased him. He was a great character: he used to “destroy” his food, not eat it. If I asked him to have any more bread or meat, he would say, with perfect seriousness, that he had “destroyed enough this time.” He had many other quaint expressions of this sort, but they did not serve to make the hut water- tight, and I was half regretfully obliged to send him away a short time afterwards.
The winter’s experience satisfied me that the country that H—— and I had
found would not do for sheep, unless worked in connection with more that
was clear
Loading Dray—Bullocks—Want of Roads—Banks Peninsula—Front and Back Ranges of Mountains—River-beds—Origin of the Plains—Terraces—Tutu— Fords—Floods—Lost Bullocks—Scarcity of Features on the Plains— Terraces—Crossing the Ashburton—Change of Weather—Roofless Hut— Brandy-keg.
I completed the loading of my dray on a Tuesday afternoon in the early
part of
Flour, tea, sugar, tools, household utensils few and rough, a plough and
harrows, doors, windows, oats and potatoes for seed, and all the usual
denizens of a kitchen garden; these, with a few private effects, formed
the main bulk of the contents, amounting to about a ton and a half in
weight. I had only six bullocks, but these were good ones, and worth
many a team of eight; a team of eight will draw from two to three tons
along a pretty good road. Bullocks are very scarce here; none are to be
got under twenty pounds, while thirty pounds is no unusual price for a
good harness bullock. They can do much more in harness than in bows and
yokes, but the expense of harness and the constant disorder into which
it gets, render it cheaper to use more bullocks in the simpler tackle.
Each bullock has its name, and knows it as well as a dog does his.
There is generally a tinge of the comic in the names given to them.
Many stations have a small mob of cattle from whence to draw their
working bullocks, so that a few more or a few less makes little or no
difference. They are not fed with corn at accommodation-houses, as
horses are; when their work is done, they are turned out to feed till
dark, or till eight or nine o’clock. A bullock fills himself, if on
pretty good feed, in about three or three and a half hours; he then lies
down till very early morning, at which time the chances are ten to one
that, awakening refreshed
The road from Christ Church to Main’s is metalled for about four and a half miles; there are fences and fields on both sides, either laid down in English grass or sown with grain; the fences are chiefly low ditch and bank planted with gorse, rarely with quick, the scarcity of which detracts from the resemblance to English scenery which would otherwise prevail. The copy, however, is slatternly compared with the original; the scarcity of timber, the high price of labour, and the pressing urgency of more important claims upon the time of the small agriculturist, prevent him, for the most part, from attaining the spick- and-span neatness of an English homestead. Many makeshifts are necessary; a broken rail or gate is mended with a piece of flax, so, occasionally, are the roads. I have seen the Government roads themselves being repaired with no other material than stiff tussocks of grass, flax, and rushes: this is bad, but to a certain extent necessary, where there is so much to be done and so few hands and so little money with which to do it.
After getting off the completed portion of the road, the track commences
along the plains unassisted by the hand of man. Before one, and behind
one, and on either hand, waves the yellow tussock upon the stony
On the right, at a considerable distance, rises the long range of mountains which the inhabitants of Christ Church suppose to be the backbone of the island, and which they call the Snowy Range. The real axis of the island, however, lies much farther back, and between it and the range now in sight the land has no rest, but is continually steep up and steep down, as if Nature had determined to try how much mountain she could place upon a given space; she had, however, still some regard for utility, for the mountains are rarely precipitous—very steep, often rocky and shingly when they have attained a great elevation, but seldom, if ever, until in immediate proximity to the West Coast range, abrupt like the descent from the top of Snowdon towards Capel Curig or the precipices of Clogwyn du’r arddu. The great range is truly Alpine, and the front range occasionally reaches an altitude of nearly 7000 feet.
The result of this absence of precipice is, that there are no waterfalls in the front ranges and few in the back, and these few very insignificant as regards the volume of the water. In Switzerland one has the falls of the Rhine, of the Aar, the Giesbach, the Staubbach, and cataracts great and small innumerable; here there is nothing of the kind, quite as many large rivers, but few waterfalls, to make up for which the rivers run with an almost incredible fall. Mount Peel is twenty-five miles from the sea, and the river-bed of the Rangitata underneath that mountain is 800 feet above the sea line, the river running in a straight course though winding about in its wasteful river- bed. To all appearance it is running through a level plain. Of the remarkable gorges through which each river finds its way out of the mountains into the plains I must speak when I take my dray through the gorge of the Ashburton, though this is the least remarkable of them all; in the meantime I must return to the dray on its way to Main’s, although I see another digression awaiting me as soon as I have got it two miles ahead of its present position.
It is tedious work keeping constant company with the bullocks; they travel so slowly. Let us linger behind and sun ourselves upon a tussock or a flax bush, and let them travel on until we catch them up again.
They are now going down into an old river-bed formerly tenanted by the
Waimakiriri, which then flowed into Lake Ellesmere, ten or a dozen miles
south of Christ Church, and which now enters the sea at Kaiapoi, twelve
miles north of it; besides this old channel, it has others which it has
discarded with fickle
These old river channels, or at any rate channels where portions of the
rivers have at one time come down, are everywhere about the plains, but
the nearer you get to a river the more you see of them; on either side
the Rakaia, after it has got clear of the gorge, you find channel after
channel, now completely grassed over for some miles, betraying the
action of river water as plainly as possible. The rivers after leaving
their several gorges lie, as it were, on the highest part of a huge
fanlike delta, which radiates from the gorge down to the sea; the plains
are almost entirely, for many miles on either side the rivers, composed
of nothing but
I said the rivers lie on the highest part of the delta; not always the highest, but seldom the lowest. There is reason to believe that in the course of centuries they oscillate from side to side. For instance, four miles north of the Rakaia there is a terrace some twelve or fourteen feet high; the water in the river is nine feet above the top of this terrace. To the eye of the casual observer there is no perceptible difference between the levels, still the difference exists and has been measured. I am no geologist myself, but have been informed of this by one who is in the Government Survey Office, and upon whose authority I can rely.
The general opinion is that the Rakaia is now tending rather to the
northern side. A fresh comes down upon a crumbling bank of sand and
loose shingle with incredible force, tearing it away hour by hour in
ravenous bites. In fording the river one crosses now a considerable
stream on the northern side, where four months ago there was hardly any;
while after one has done with the water part of the story, there remains
a large extent of river-bed, in the process of gradually being covered
with cabbage-trees, flax, tussock, Irishman, and other plants and
evergreens; yet after one is once clear
The plains, at first sight, would appear to have been brought down by the rivers from the mountains. The stones upon them are all water-worn, and they are traversed by a great number of old water-courses, all tending more or less from the mountains to the sea. How, then, are we to account for the deep and very wide channels cut by the rivers?—for channels, it may be, more than a mile broad, and flanked on either side by steep terraces, which, near the mountains, are several feet high? If the rivers cut these terraces, and made these deep channels, the plains must have been there already for the rivers to cut them. It must be remembered that I write without any scientific knowledge.
How, again, are we to account for the repetition of the phenomenon
exhibited by the larger rivers, in every tributary, small or great, from
the glaciers to the sea? They are all as like as pea to pea in
principle, though of course varying in detail. Yet every trifling
watercourse, as it emerges from mountainous to level ground, presents
the same phenomenon, namely, a large gully, far too large for the water
which could ever have come down it, gradually widening out, and then
disappearing. The general opinion here among the reputed cognoscenti
is, that all these gullies were formed in the process of the gradual
upheaval of the island from the sea, and that the plains were originally
sea-bottoms, slowly raised, and still slowly raising themselves.
Doubtless, the rivers brought the stones down, but they were deposited
in the sea.
The terraces, which are so abundant all over the back country, and which rise, one behind another, to the number, it may be, of twenty or thirty, with the most unpicturesque regularity (on my run there are fully twenty), are supposed to be elevated sea-beaches. They are to be seen even as high as four or five thousand feet above the level of the sea, and I doubt not that a geologist might find traces of them higher still.
Therefore, though, when first looking at the plains and river-bed flats which are so abundant in the back country, one might be inclined to think that no other agent than the rivers themselves had been at work, and though, when one sees the delta below, and the empty gully above, like a minute-glass after the egg has been boiled—the top glass empty of the sand, and the bottom glass full of it—one is tempted to rest satisfied; yet when we look closer, we shall find that more is wanted in order to account for the phenomena exhibited, and the geologists of the island supply that more, by means of upheaval.
I pay the tribute of a humble salaam to science, and return to my subject.
We crossed the old river-bed of the Waimakiriri, and crawled slowly on to Main’s, through the descending twilight. One sees Main’s about six miles off, and it appears to be about six hours before one reaches it. A little hump for the house, and a longer hump for the stables.
The tutu not having yet begun to spring, I yarded my bullocks at Main’s.
This demands explanation. Tutu is a plant which dies away in the
winter, and shoots up anew from the old roots in spring, growing from
six inches to two or three feet in height,
As, then, my bullocks could not get tuted on being turned out empty, I yarded them. The next day we made thirteen miles over the plains to the Waikitty (written Waikirikiri) or Selwyn. Still the same monotonous plains, the same interminable tussock, dotted with the same cabbage- trees.
On the morrow, ten more monotonous miles to the banks of the Rakaia.
This river is one of the largest in the province, second only to the
Waitaki. It contains about as much water as the Rhone above Martigny,
perhaps even more, but it rather resembles an Italian than a Swiss
river. With due care, it is fordable in many places, though very rarely
so when occupying a single channel. It is, however, seldom found in one
stream, but flows, like the rest of these rivers, with alternate periods
of rapid and comparatively smooth water every few yards. The place to
look for a ford is just above a spit where the river forks into two or
more branches; there is generally here a bar of shingle with shallow
water, while immediately below, in each stream, there is a dangerous
rapid. A very little practice and knowledge of each river will enable a
man to detect a ford at a glance. These fords shift every fresh. In
the Waimakiriri or Rangitata, they occur every quarter of a mile or
less; in the Rakaia, you may go three or four miles for a good one.
During a fresh, the Rakaia is not fordable, at any rate, no one ought to
ford it; but the two first-named rivers may be crossed, with great care,
in pretty heavy freshes, without the water going higher than the knees
of the rider. It is always, however, an unpleasant task to
If I were to speak of the rise of the Rakaia, or rather of the numerous
branches which form it; of their vast and wasteful beds; the glaciers
that they spring from, one of which comes down half-way across the
river-bed (thus tending to prove that the glaciers are descending, for
the river-bed is both above and below the glacier); of the wonderful
gorge with its terraces rising shelf upon shelf, like fortifications,
many hundred feet above the river; the crystals found there, and the
wild pigs—I should weary the reader too much, and fill half a volume:
the bullocks must
On the night of our arrival at the Rakaia I did not yard the bullocks, as they seemed inclined to stay quietly with some others that were about the place; next morning they were gone. Were they up the river, or down the river, across the river, or gone back? You are at Cambridge, and have lost your bullocks. They were bred in Yorkshire, but have been used a good deal in the neighbourhood of Dorchester, and may have consequently made in either direction; they may, however, have worked down the Cam, and be in full feed for Lynn; or, again, they may be snugly stowed away in a gully half-way between the Fitzwilliam Museum and Trumpington. You saw a mob of cattle feeding quietly about Madingley on the preceding evening, and they may have joined in with these; or were they attracted by the fine feed in the neighbourhood of Cherryhinton? Where shall you go to look for them?
Matters in reality, however, are not so bad as this. A bullock cannot
walk without leaving a track, if the ground he travels on is capable of
receiving one. Again, if he does not know the country in advance of
him, the chances are strong that he has gone back the way he came; he
will travel in a track if he happens to light on one; he finds it easier
going. Animals are cautious in proceeding onwards when they don’t know
the ground. They have ever a lion in their path until they know it, and
have found it free from beasts of prey. If, however, they have been
seen heading decidedly in any direction over-night, in that direction
they will most likely be found sooner or later. Bullocks cannot go long
without water. They will travel to a
Ours had gone back ten miles, to the Waikitty; we soon obtained clues as to their whereabouts, and had them back again in time to proceed on our journey. The river being very low, we did not unload the dray and put the contents across in the boat, but drove the bullocks straight through. Eighteen weary monotonous miles over the same plains, covered with the same tussock grass, and dotted with the same cabbage-trees. The mountains, however, grew gradually nearer, and Banks Peninsula dwindled perceptibly. That night we made Mr. M——’s station, and were thankful.
Again we did not yard the bullocks, and again we lost them. They were
only five miles off, but we did not find them till afternoon, and lost a
day. As they had travelled in all nearly forty miles, I had had mercy
upon them, intending that they should fill themselves well during the
night, and be ready for a long pull next day. Even the merciful man
himself, however, would except a working bullock from the beasts who
have any claim upon his good feeling. Let him go straining his eyes
examining every dark spot in a circumference many long miles in extent.
Let him gallop a couple of miles in this direction and the other, and
discover that he has only been lessening the distance between himself
and a group of cabbage-trees; let him feel the word “bullock” eating
itself in indelible characters into his heart, and he will refrain from
mercy to working bullocks as long as he lives. But as there are few
positive pleasures equal in intensity to the negative one of release
from pain, so it is when at last a group of six oblong objects, five
dark
Now we follow up one branch of the Ashburton, and commence making
straight for the mountains; still, however, we are on the same
monotonous plains, and crawl our twenty miles with very few objects that
can possibly serve as landmarks. It is wonderful how small an object
gets a name in the great dearth of features. Cabbage-tree hill, half-
way between Main’s and the Waikitty, is an almost imperceptible rise
some ten yards across and two or three feet high: the cabbage-trees
have disappeared. Between the Rakaia and Mr. M——’s station is a place
they call the half-way gully, but it is neither a gully nor half-way,
being only a grip in the earth, causing no perceptible difference in the
level of the track, and extending but a few yards on
In the small River Ashburton, or rather in one of its most trivial branches, we had a little misunderstanding with the bullocks; the leaders, for some reason best known to themselves, slewed sharply round, and tied themselves into an inextricable knot with the polars, while the body bullocks, by a manoeuvre not unfrequent, shifted, or as it is technically termed slipped, the yoke under their necks, and the bows over; the off bullock turning upon the near side and the near bullock upon the off. By what means they do this I cannot explain, but believe it would make a conjuror’s fortune in England. How they got the chains between their legs and how they kicked to liberate themselves, how we abused them, and, finally, unchaining them, set them right, I need not here particularise; we finally triumphed, but this delay caused us not to reach our destination till after dark.
Here the good woman of the house took us into her confidence in the matter of her corns, from the irritated condition of which she argued that bad weather was about to ensue. The next morning, however, we started anew, and, after about three or four miles, entered the valley of the south and larger Ashburton, bidding adieu to the plains completely.
And now that I approach the description of the gorge, I feel utterly
unequal to the task, not because the scene
First, there is the river, flowing very rapidly upon a bed of large
shingle, with alternate rapids and smooth places, constantly forking and
constantly reuniting itself like tangled skeins of silver ribbon
surrounding lozenge-shaped islets of sand and gravel. On either side is
a long flat composed of shingle similar to the bed of the river itself,
but covered with vegetation, tussock, and scrub, with fine feed for
sheep or cattle among the burnt Irishman thickets. The flat is some
half-mile broad on each side the river, narrowing as the mountains draw
in closer upon the stream. It is terminated by a steep terrace. Twenty
or thirty feet above this terrace is another flat, we will say
semicircular, for I am generalising, which again is surrounded by a
steeply sloping terrace like an amphitheatre; above this another flat,
receding still farther back, perhaps half a mile in places, perhaps
almost close above the one below it; above this another flat, receding
farther, and so on, until the level of the plain proper, or highest
flat, is several hundred feet above the river. I have not seen a single
river in Canterbury which is not more or less terraced even below the
gorge. The angle of the terrace is always very steep: I seldom see one
less than 45°. One always has to get off and lead one’s horse
down, except when an artificial cutting has been made, or advantage can
be taken of some gully that descends
Our road lay up the Ashburton, which we had repeatedly to cross and recross.
A dray going through a river is a pretty sight enough when you are utterly unconcerned in the contents thereof; the rushing water stemmed by the bullocks and the dray, the energetic appeals of the driver to Tommy or Nobbler to lift the dray over the large stones in the river, the creaking dray, the cracking whip, form a tout ensemble rather agreeable than otherwise. But when the bullocks, having pulled the dray into the middle of the river, refuse entirely to pull it out again; when the leaders turn sharp round and look at you, or stick their heads under the bellies of the polars; when the gentle pats on the forehead with the stock of the whip prove unavailing, and you are obliged to have recourse to strong measures, it is less agreeable: especially if the animals turn just after having got your dray half-way up the bank, and, twisting it round upon a steeply inclined surface, throw the centre of gravity far beyond the base: over goes the dray into the water. Alas, my sugar! my tea! my flour! my crockery! It is all over—drop the curtain.
I beg to state my dray did not upset this time,
We made about seventeen miles and crossed the river ten times, so that the bullocks, which had never before been accustomed to river-work, became quite used to it, and manageable, and have continued so ever since.
We halted for the night at a shepherd’s hut: awakening out of slumber I heard the fitful gusts of violent wind come puff, puff, buffet, and die away again; nor’-wester all over. I went out and saw the unmistakable north-west clouds tearing away in front of the moon. I remembered Mrs. W——’s corns, and anathematised them in my heart.
It may be imagined that I turned out of a comfortable bed, slipped on my boots, and then went out; no such thing: we were all lying in our clothes with one blanket between us and the bare floor—our heads pillowed on our saddle-bags.
The next day we made only three miles to Mr. P——’s station. There we unloaded the dray, greased it, and restored half the load, intending to make another journey for the remainder, as the road was very bad.
One dray had been over the ground before us. That took four days to do
the first ten miles, and then was
We left the dray and went on some two or three miles on foot for the purpose of camping where there was firewood. There was a hut, too, in the place for which we were making. It was not yet roofed, and had neither door nor window; but as it was near firewood and water we made for it, had supper, and turned in.
In the middle of the night someone, poking his nose out of his blanket, informed us that it was snowing, and in the morning we found it continuing to do so, with a good sprinkling on the ground. We thought nothing of it, and, returning to the dray, found the bullocks, put them to, and started on our way; but when we came above the gully, at the bottom of which the hut lay, we were obliged to give in. There was a very bad creek, which we tried in vain for an hour or so to cross. The snow was falling very thickly, and driving right into the bullocks’ faces. We were all very cold and weary, and determined to go down to the hut again, expecting fine weather in the morning. We carried down a kettle, a camp oven, some flour, tea, sugar, and salt beef; also a novel or two, and the future towels of the establishment, which wanted hemming; also the two cats. Thus equipped we went down the gulley, and got back to the hut about three o’clock in the afternoon. The gulley sheltered us, and there the snow was kind and warm, though bitterly cold on the terrace. We threw a few burnt Irishman sticks across the top of the walls, and put a couple of counterpanes over them, thus obtaining a little shelter near the fire. The snow inside the hut was about six inches deep, and soon became sloppy, so that at night we preferred to make a hole in the snow and sleep outside.
The fall continued all that night, and in the morning we found ourselves
thickly covered. It was still snowing hard, so there was no stirring.
We read the novels, hemmed the towels, smoked, and took it
philosophically. There was plenty of firewood to keep us warm. By
night the snow was fully two feet thick everywhere, and in the drifts
five and six feet. I determined that
Great excitement prevailed over drawing the cork. It was fast; it broke the point of someone’s knife. “Shove it in,” said I, breathless with impatience; no—no—it yielded, and shortly afterwards, giving up all opposition, came quickly out. A tin pannikin was produced. With a gurgling sound out flowed the precious liquid. “Halloa!” said one; “it’s not brandy, it’s port wine.” “Port wine!” cried another; “it smells more like rum.” I voted for its being claret; another moment, however, settled the question, and established the contents of the cask as being excellent vinegar. The two unfortunate men had brought the vinegar keg instead of the brandy.
The rest may be imagined. That night, however, two of us were attacked with diarrhoea, and the vinegar proved of great service, for vinegar and water is an admirable remedy for this complaint.
The snow continued till afternoon the next day. It then sulkily ceased, and commenced thawing. At night it froze very hard indeed, and the next day a nor’-wester sprang up which made the snow disappear with the most astonishing rapidity. Not having then learnt that no amount of melting snow will produce any important effect upon the river, and, fearing that it might rise, we determined to push on: but this was as yet impossible. Next morning, however, we made an early start, and got triumphantly to our journey’s end at about half-past ten o’clock. My own country, which lay considerably lower, was entirely free of snow, while we learnt afterwards that it had never been deeper than four inches.
Taking up the Run—Hut within the Boundary—Land Regulations—Race to Christ Church—Contest for Priority of Application—Successful issue— Winds and their Effects—Their conflicting Currents—Sheep crossing the River.
There was a little hut on my run built by another person, and tenanted
by his shepherd. G—— had an application for 5,000 acres in the same
block of country with mine, and as the boundaries were uncertain until
the whole was surveyed, and the runs definitely marked out on the
Government maps, he had placed his hut upon a spot that turned out
eventually not to belong to him. I had waited to see how the land was
allotted before I took it up. Knowing the country well, and finding it
allotted to my satisfaction, I made my bargain on the same day that the
question was settled. I took a tracing from the Government map up with
me, and we arrived on the run about a fortnight
The Canterbury regulations concerning the purchase of waste lands from
the Crown are among the very best existing. They are all free to any
purchaser with the exception of a few Government reserves for certain
public purposes, as railway-township reserves, and so forth. Every run-
holder has a pre-emptive right over 250 acres round his homestead, and
50 acres round any other buildings he may have upon his run. He must
register this right, or it is of no avail. By this means he is secured
from an enemy buying up his homestead without his previous knowledge.
Whoever wishes to purchase a sheep farmer’s homestead must first give
him a considerable notice, and then can only buy if the occupant refuses
to do so at the price of £2 an acre. Of course the occupant would
not refuse, and the thing
But to return. Firstly, G—— had not registered any pre-emptive right, and, secondly, if he had it would have been worthless, because his hut was situated on my run and not on his own. I was sure that he had not bought the freehold; I was also certain that he meant to buy it. So, well knowing there was not a moment to lose, I went towards Christ Church the same afternoon, and supped at a shepherd’s hut three miles lower down, and intended to travel quietly all night.
The Ashburton, however, was heavily freshed, and the night was pitch
dark. After crossing and re-crossing it four times I was afraid to go
on, and camping down, waited for daylight. Resuming my journey with
early dawn, I had not gone far when, happening to turn round, I saw a
man on horseback about a quarter of a mile behind me. I knew at once
that this was
I feared that our applications would be simultaneous, or that we should
have an indecorous scuffle for the book in the Land Office itself. In
this case, there would only have remained the unsatisfactory alternative
of drawing lots for precedence. There was nothing for it but to go on,
and see how matters would turn up. Before midday, and whilst still
sixty miles from town, my horse knocked-up completely, and would not go
another step. G——’s horse, only two months before, had gone a hundred
miles in less than fifteen hours, and was now pitted against mine, which
was thoroughly done-up. Rather anticipating this, I had determined
I shall never forget my relief when, at a station where I had already received great kindness, I obtained the loan of a horse that had been taken up that morning from a three-months’ spell. No greater service could, at the time, have been rendered me, and I felt that I had indeed met with a friend in need.
The prospect was now brilliant, save that the Rakaia was said to be very
heavily freshed. Fearing I might have to swim for it, I left my watch
at M——’s, and went on with the satisfactory reflection that, at any rate,
if I could not cross, G—— could not do so either. To my delight,
however, the river was very low, and I forded it without the smallest
difficulty a little before sunset. A few hours afterwards, down it
came. I heard that G—— was an hour ahead of me, but this was of no
consequence. Riding ten miles farther, and now only twenty-five miles
from Christ Church, I called at an accommodation-house, and heard that
G—— was within, so went on, and determined to camp and rest my horse.
The night was again intensely dark, and it soon came on to rain so
heavily that there was nothing for it but to start again for the next
accommodation-house, twelve miles from town. I slept there a few hours,
and by seven o’clock next morning was in Christ Church. So was G——. We
could neither of us do anything till the Land Office opened at ten
o’clock. At twenty minutes before ten I repaired thither, expecting to
find G—— in waiting, and anticipating a row. If it came
The clock, as the clerk was ready to witness, was twenty minutes before ten. I learnt from him also that G—— had written his name down about half an hour. This was all right. My course was to wait till after ten, write my name, and oppose G——’s application as having been entered unduly, and before office-hours. I have no doubt that I should have succeeded in gaining my point in this way, but a much easier victory was in store for me.
Running my eye through the list of names, to my great surprise I saw my
own among them. It had been entered by my solicitor, on another matter
of business, the previous day, but it stood next below G——’s. G——’s name,
then, had clearly been inserted unfairly, out of due order. The whole
thing was made clear to the Commissioners of the Waste Lands, and I need
not say that I effected my purchase without difficulty. A few weeks
afterwards, allowing him for his hut and yard, I bought G—— out entirely.
I will now return to the Rangitata.
There is a large flat on either side of it, sloping very gently down to
the river-bed proper, which is from one to two miles across. The one
flat belongs to me, and that on the north bank to another. The river is
very easily crossed, as it flows in a great many channels; in
The nor’-westers are a very remarkable feature in the climate of this settlement. They are excessively violent, sometimes shaking the very house; hot, dry, from having already poured out their moisture, and enervating like the Italian sirocco. The fact seems to be, that the nor’-west winds come heated from the tropics, and charged with moisture from the ocean, and this is precipitated by the ice-fields of the mountains in deluges of rain, chiefly on the western side, but occasionally extending some distance to the east. They blow from two or three hours to as many days, and if they last any length of time, are generally succeeded by a sudden change to sou’-west—the cold, rainy, or snowy wind. We catch the nor’-west in full force, but are sheltered from the sou’-west, which, with us, is a quiet wind, accompanied with gentle drizzling but cold rain, and, in the winter, snow.
The nor’-wester is first descried on the river-bed. Through the door of my hut, from which the snowy range is visible, at our early breakfast, I see a lovely summer’s morning, breathlessly quiet, and intensely hot. Suddenly a little cloud of dust is driven down the river-bed a mile and a half off; it increases, till one would think the river was on fire, and that the opposite mountains were obscured by volumes of smoke. Still it is calm with us. By and by, as the day increases, the wind gathers strength, and, extending beyond the river-bed, gives the flats on either side a benefit; then it catches the downs, and generally blows hard till four or five o’clock, when it calms down, and is followed by a cool and tranquil night, delightful to every sense. If, however, the wind does not cease, and it has been raining up the gorges, there will be a fresh; and, if the rain has come down any distance from the main range, it will be a heavy fresh; while if there has been a clap or two of thunder (a very rare occurrence), it will be a fresh in which the river will not be fordable. The floods come and go with great rapidity. The river will begin to rise a very few hours after the rain commences, and will generally have subsided to its former level about forty-eight hours after the rain has ceased.
As we generally come in for the tail-end of the nor’-western rains, so
we sometimes, though less frequently, get that of the sou’-west winds
also. The sou’-west rain comes to us up the river through the lower
gorge, and is consequently sou’-east rain with us, owing to the
direction of the valley. But it is always called sou’-west if it comes
from the southward at all. In fact, there are only three recognised
winds, the north-
It is curious to watch the battle between the north-west and south-east wind, as we often see it. For some days, perhaps, the upper gorges may have been obscured with dark and surging clouds, and the snowy ranges hidden from view. Suddenly the mountains at the lower end of the valley become banked-up with clouds, and the sand begins to blow up the river- bed some miles below, while it is still blowing down with us. The southerly “burster,” as it is called, gradually creeps up, and at last drives the other off the field. A few chilly puffs, then a great one, and in a minute or two the air becomes cold, even in the height of summer. Indeed, I have seen snow fall on the 12th of January. It was not much, but the air was as cold as in mid-winter.
The force of the south-west wind is here broken by the front ranges, and
on these it often leaves its rain or snow, while we are quite exempt
from either. We frequently hear both of more rain and of more snow on
the plains than we have had, though my hut is at an elevation of
In the back country, sheep can always find shelter in the gullies, or under the lee of the mountain.
We have here been singularly favoured with regard to snow this last winter, for whereas I was absolutely detained by the snow upon the plains on my way from Christ Church, because my horse would have had nothing to eat had I gone on, when I arrived at home I found they had been all astonishment as to what could possibly have been keeping me so long away.
The nor’-westers sometimes blow even in mid-winter, but are most frequent in spring and summer, sometimes continuing for a fortnight together.
During a nor’-wester, the sand on the river-bed is blinding, filling eyes, nose, and ears, and stinging sharply every exposed part. I lately had the felicity of getting a small mob of sheep into the river-bed (with a view of crossing them on to my own country) whilst this wind was blowing. There were only between seven and eight hundred, and as we were three, with two dogs, we expected to be able to put them through ourselves. We did so through the two first considerable streams, and then could not get them to move on any farther. As they paused, I will take the opportunity to digress and describe the process of putting sheep across a river.
The first thing is to carefully secure a spot fitted for the purpose, for which the principal requisites are: first, that the current set for the opposite bank, so that the sheep will be carried towards it. Sheep cannot swim against a strong current, and if the stream be flowing evenly down mid-channel, they will be carried down a long way before they land; if, however, it sets at all towards the side from which they started, they will probably be landed by the stream on that same side. Therefore the current should flow towards the opposite bank. Secondly, there must be a good landing-place for the sheep. A spot must not be selected where the current sweeps underneath a hollow bank of gravel or a perpendicular wall of shingle; the bank on to which the sheep are to land must shelve, no matter how steeply, provided it does not rise perpendicularly out of the water. Thirdly, a good place must be chosen for putting them in; the water must not become deep all at once, or the sheep won’t face it. It must be shallow at the commencement, so that they may have got too far to recede before they find their mistake. Fourthly, there should be no tutu in the immediate vicinity of either the place where the sheep are put into the river or that on to which they are to come out; for, in spite of your most frantic endeavours, you will be very liable to get some sheep tuted. These requisites being secured, the depth of the water is, of course, a matter of no moment; the narrowness of the stream being a point of far greater importance. These rivers abound in places combining every requisite.
The sheep being mobbed up together near the spot where they are intended
to enter the water, the best plan is to split off a small number, say a
hundred or
If the sheep are obstinate and will not take the water, it is a good plan to haul one or two over first, pulling them through by the near hind leg; these will often entice the others, or a few lambs will encourage their mothers to come over to them, unless indeed they immediately swim back to their mothers: the first was the plan we adopted.
As I said, our sheep were got across the first two streams without much
difficulty; then they became completely silly. The awful wind, so high
that we could
I hardly know why I have introduced this into an account of a trip with a bullock dray; it is, however, a colonial incident, such as might happen any day. In a life of continual excitement one thinks very little of these things. They may, however, serve to give English readers a glimpse of some of the numerous incidents which, constantly occurring in one shape or other, render the life of a colonist not only endurable, but actually pleasant.
Plants of Canterbury—Turnip—Tutu—Ferns—Ti Palm—Birds—Paradise Duck—Tern—Quail—Wood Hen—Robin—Linnet—Pigeon—Moa—New Parroquet— Quadrupeds—Eels—Insects—Weta—Lizards.
The flora of this province is very disappointing, and the absence of
beautiful flowers adds to the uninteresting character which too
generally pervades the scenery, save among the great Southern Alps
themselves. There is no burst of bloom as there is in Switzerland and
Italy, and the trees being, with few insignificant exceptions, all
evergreen, the difference between winter and summer is chiefly
perceptible by the state of the grass and the temperature. I do not
know one really pretty flower which belongs to the plains; I believe
there are one or two, but they are rare, and form no feature in the
landscape. I never yet saw a blue flower growing wild here, nor indeed
one of any other colour but white or yellow; if there are such they do
not prevail, and their absence is sensibly felt. We have no soldanellas
and auriculas, and Alpine cowslips, no brilliant gentians and anemones.
used
to sow it where they camped, for the Maoris in this island are almost a
thing of the past.
The root of the spaniard, it should be added, will support life for some little time.
Tutu (pronounced toot) is a plant which abounds upon the plains for some few miles near the river-beds; it is at first sight not much unlike myrtle, but is in reality a wholly different sort of plant; it dies down in the winter, and springs up again from its old roots. These roots are sometimes used for firewood, and are very tough, so much so as not unfrequently to break ploughs. It is poisonous for sheep and cattle if eaten on an empty stomach.
New Zealand is rich in ferns. We have a tree-fern which grows as high
as twenty feet. We have also some of the English species; among them I
believe the Hymenophyllum Tunbridgense, with many of the same tribe. I
see a little fern which, to my eyes, is
Asplenium
Trichomanes. Every English fern which I know has a variety something
like it here, though seldom identical. We have one to correspond with
the adder’s tongue and moonwort, with the Adiantum nigrum and Capillus
Veneris, with the Blechnum boreale, with the Ceterach and Ruta muraria,
and with the Cystopterids. I never saw a Woodsia here; but I think that
every other English family is represented, and that we have many more
besides. On the whole, the British character of many of the ferns is
rather striking, as indeed is the case with our birds and insects; but,
with a few conspicuous exceptions, the old country has greatly the
advantage over us.
The cabbage-tree or ti palm is not a true palm, though it looks like one. It has not the least resemblance to a cabbage. It has a tuft of green leaves, which are rather palmy-looking at a distance, and which springs from the top of a pithy, worthless stem, varying from one to twenty or thirty feet in height. Sometimes the stem is branched at the top, and each branch ends in a tuft. The flax and the cabbage-tree and the tussock-grass are the great botanical features of the country. Add fern and tutu, and for the back country, spear-grass and Irishman, and we have summed up such prevalent plants as strike the eye.
As for the birds, they appear at first sight very few indeed. On the
plains one sees a little lark with two white feathers in the tail, and
in other respects exactly like the English skylark, save that he does
not soar, and has only a little chirrup instead of song. There are also
paradise ducks, hawks, terns, red-bills,
The paradise duck is a very beautiful bird. The male appears black,
with white on the wing, when flying: when on the ground, however, he
shows some dark greys and glossy greens and russets, which make him very
handsome. He is truly a goose, and not a duck. He says “whiz” through
his throat, and dwells a long time upon the “z.” He is about the size
of a farmyard duck. The plumage of the female is really gorgeous. Her
head is pure white, and her body beautifully coloured with greens and
russets and white. She screams, and does not say “whiz.” Her mate is
much fonder of her than she is of him, for if she is wounded he will
come to see what is the matter, whereas if he is hurt his base partner
flies instantly off and seeks new wedlock, affording a fresh example of
the superior fidelity of the male to the female sex. When they have
young, they feign lameness, like the plover. I have several times been
thus tricked by them. One soon, however, becomes an old bird oneself,
and is not to be caught with such chaff any more. We look about for the
young ones, clip off the top joint of one wing, and leave them; thus, in
a few months’ time, we can get prime young ducks for the running after
them. The old birds are very bad eating. I rather believe they are
aware of this, for they are very bold, and come very close to us. There
are two that constantly come within ten yards of my hut, and I hope mean
to build in the neighbourhood, for the eggs are excellent. Being geese,
and not ducks, they eat grass. The young birds are called flappers till
they can fly, and can be run down easily.
The hawk is simply a large hawk, and to the unscientific nothing more. There is a small sparrow-hawk, too, which is very bold, and which will attack a man if he goes near its nest.
The tern is a beautiful little bird about twice as big as a swallow, and somewhat resembling it in its flight, but much more graceful. It has a black satin head, and lavender satin and white over the rest of its body. It has an orange bill and feet; and is not seen 4 in the back country during the winter.
The red-bill is, I believe, identical with the oyster-catcher of the Cornish coast. It has a long orange bill, and orange feet, and is black and white over the body.
The sand-piper is very like the lark in plumage.
The quail is nearly exterminated. It is exactly like a small partridge, and is most excellent eating. Ten years ago it was very abundant, but now it is very rarely seen. The poor little thing is entirely defenceless; it cannot take more than three flights, and then it is done up. Some say the fires have destroyed them; some say the sheep have trod on their eggs; some that they have all been hunted down: my own opinion is that the wild cats, which have increased so as to be very numerous, have driven the little creatures nearly off the face of the earth.
There are wood hens also on the plains; but, though very abundant, they
are not much seen. The wood hen is a bird rather resembling the
pheasant tribe in plumage, but not so handsome. It has a long, sharp
bill and long feet. It is about the size of a hen. It cannot fly, but
sticks its little bob-tail up and down whenever it walks, and has a
curious Paul-Pry-like gait, which is rather amusing. It is exceedingly
bold, and will
I must not omit to mention the white crane, a very beautiful bird, with immense wings, of the purest white; and the swamp hen, with a tail which it is constantly bobbing up and down like the wood hen; it has a good deal of bluish purple about it, and is very handsome.
There are other birds on the plains, especially about the river-beds, but not many worthy of notice.
In the back country, however, we have a considerable variety. I have mentioned the kaka and the parroquet.
The robin is a pretty little fellow, in build and manners very like our
English robin, but tamer. His plumage, however, is different, for he
has a dusky black tail coat and a pale canary-coloured waistcoat. When
The tomtit is like its English namesake in shape, but smaller, and with a glossy black head and bright yellow breast.
The wren is a beautiful little bird, much smaller than the English one, and with green about its plumage.
The tui or parson-bird is a starling, and has a small tuft of white cravat-like feathers growing from his throat. True to his starling nature, he has a delicious voice.
We have a thrush, but it is rather rare. It is just like the English, save that it has some red feathers in its tail.
Our teal is, if not the same as the English teal, so like it, that the difference is not noticeable.
Our linnet is a little larger than the English, with a clear, bell-like voice, as of a blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil. Indeed, we might call him the harmonious blacksmith.
The pigeon is larger than the English, and far handsomer. He has much white and glossy green shot with purple about him, and is one of the most beautiful birds I ever saw. He is very foolish, and can be noosed with ease. Tie a string with a noose at the end of it to a long stick, and you may put it round his neck and catch him. The kakas, too, will let you do this, and in a few days become quite tame.
Besides these, there is an owl or two. These are heard occasionally, but not seen. Often at night one hears a solemn cry of “More pork! more pork! more pork!” I have heard people talk, too, of a laughing jackass (not the Australian bird of that name), but no one has ever seen it.
Occasionally we hear rumours of the footprint of a moa, and the Nelson
surveyors found fresh foot-tracks of a bird, which were measured for
fourteen inches. Of this there can be little doubt; but since a wood
hen’s foot measures four inches, and a wood hen does not stand higher
than a hen, fourteen inches is hardly long enough for the track of a
moa, the largest kind of which stood fifteen feet high. We often find
some of their bones lying in a heap upon the ground, but never a perfect
skeleton. Little heaps of their gizzard stones, too, are constantly
found. They consist of very smooth and polished flints and cornelians,
with sometimes quartz. The bird generally chose rather pretty stones.
I do not remember finding a single sandstone specimen of a moa gizzard
stone. Those heaps are easily
I really know of few other birds to tell you about. There is a good
sprinkling more, but they form no feature in the country, and are only
interesting to the naturalist. There is the kiwi, or apteryx, which is
about as large as a turkey, but only found on the West Coast. There is
a green ground parrot too, called the kakapo, a night bird, and hardly
ever found on the eastern side of the island. There is also a very rare
and as yet unnamed kind of kaka, much larger and handsomer than the kaka
itself, of which I and another shot one of the first, if not the very
first, observed specimen. Being hungry, far from home, and without
meat, we ate the interesting creature, but made a note of it for the
benefit of science. Since then it has found its way into more worthy
hands, and was, a few months ago, sent home to be named. Altogether, I
am acquainted with about seventy species of birds belonging to the
Canterbury settlement, and I do not think that there are many more. Two
albatrosses came to my wool-shed about seven months ago, and a dead one
was found at Mount Peel not long since. I did not see the former
myself, but my cook, who was a sailor, watched them
As for the quadrupeds of New Zealand, they are easily disposed of. There are but two, a kind of rat, which is now banished by the Norway rat, and an animal of either the otter or beaver species, which is known rather by rumour than by actual certainty.
The fishes, too, will give us little trouble. There are only a sort of minnow and an eel. This last grows to a great size, and is abundant even in the clear, rapid, snow-fed rivers. In every creek one may catch eels, and they are excellent eating, if they be cooked in such a manner as to get rid of the oil.
as Barham says, with his usual good sense. I am told that the other night a great noise was heard in the kitchen of a gentleman with whom I have the honour to be acquainted, and that the servants, getting up, found an eel chasing a cat round about the room. I believe this story. The eel was in a bucket of water, and doomed to die upon the morrow. Doubtless the cat had attempted to take liberties with him; on which a sudden thought struck the eel that he might as well eat the cat as the cat eat him; and he was preparing to suit the action to the word when he was discovered.
The insects are insignificant and ugly, and, like the plants, devoid of
general interest. There is one rather pretty butterfly, like our
English tortoiseshell. There is a sprinkling of beetles, a few ants,
and a detestable sandfly, that, on quiet, cloudy mornings, especially
near
Summing up, then, the whole of the vegetable and animal productions of this settlement, I think that it is not too much to say that they are decidedly inferior in beauty and interest to those of the old world. You will think that I have a prejudice against the natural history of Canterbury. I assure you I have no such thing; and I believe that anyone, on arriving here, would receive a similar impression with myself.
Choice of a Run—Boundaries—Maoris—Wages—Servants—Drunkenness— Cooking—Wethers—Choice of Homestead—Watchfulness required—Burning the Country—Yards for Sheep—Ewes and Lambs—Lambing Season—Wool Sheds—Sheep Washing—Putting up a Hut—Gardens—Farewell.
In looking for a run, some distance must be traversed; the country near Christ Church is already stocked. The waste lands are, indeed, said to be wholly taken up throughout the colony, wherever they are capable of supporting sheep. It may, however, be a matter of some satisfaction to a new settler to examine this point for himself, and to consider what he requires in the probable event of having to purchase the goodwill of a run, with the improvements upon it, which can hardly be obtained under £150 per 1000 acres.
A river boundary is most desirable; the point above or below the
confluence of two rivers is still better, as there are then only two
sides to guard. Stony ground must not be considered as an impediment;
grass grows between the stones, and a dray can travel upon it. England
must have been a most impracticable country to traverse before metalled
roads were made. Here the surface is almost everywhere a compact mass
of shingle; it is for the most part only near the sea that the shingle
is covered with soil. Forest and swamp are much greater impediments to
a journey than a far greater distance of hard ground would prove. A
river such as the Cam or Ouse would be far more difficult to cross
without bridges than the Rakaia or Rangitata, notwithstanding their
volume and rapidity; the former
There are few Maoris here; they inhabit the north island, and are only in small numbers, and degenerate in this, so may be passed over unnoticed. The only effectual policy in dealing with them is to show a bold front, and, at the same time, do them a good turn whenever you can be quite certain that your kindness will not be misunderstood as a symptom of fear. There are no wild animals that will molest your sheep. In Australia they have to watch the flocks night and day because of the wild dogs. The yards, of course, are not proof against dogs, and the Australian shepherd’s hut is built close against the yard; here this is unnecessary.
Having settled that you will take up your country or purchase the lease of it, you must consider next how to get a dray on to it. Horses are not to be thought of except for riding; you must buy a dray and bullocks. The rivers here are not navigable.
Wages are high. People do not leave England and go to live at the antipodes to work for the same wages which they had at home. They want to better themselves as well as you do, and, the supply being limited, they will ask and get from £1 to 30s. a week besides their board and billet.
You must remember you will have a rough life at first; there will be a
good deal of cold and exposure; a good deal of tent work; possibly a
fever or two; to
You and your men will have to be on rather a different footing from that
on which you stood in England. There, if your servant were in any
respect what you did not wish, you were certain of getting plenty of
others to take his place. Here, if a man does not find you quite what
he wishes, he is certain of getting plenty of others to employ him. In
fact, he is at a premium, and soon finds this out. On really good men
this produces no other effect than a demand for high wages. They will
be respectful and civil, though there will be a slight but quite
unobjectionable difference in their manner toward you. Bad men assume
an air of defiance which renders their immediate dismissal a matter of
necessity. When you have good men, however, you must recognise the
different position in which you stand toward them as compared with that
which subsisted at home. The fact is, they are more your equals and
more independent of you, and, this being the case, you must treat them
accordingly. I do not advise you for one moment to submit to
disrespect; this would be a fatal error. A man whose conduct does not
satisfy you must be sent about his business as certainly as in England;
but when you have men who do suit you, you must, besides paying them
handsomely, expect them to treat you rather as an English yeoman would
speak to the squire of his parish than as an English labourer would
speak to him. The labour markets will not be so bad but that good men
can be had, and as long as you put up with bad men it serves you right
to be the loser by your weakness.
Some good hands are very improvident, and will for
dead horse to work off—that is, a
debt at the accommodation house—and will work hard for another year to
have another drinking bout at the end of it. This is a thing fatally
common here. Such men are often first-rate hands and thoroughly good
fellows when away from drink; but, on the whole, saving men are perhaps
the best. Commend yourself to a good screw for a shepherd; if he knows
the value of money he knows the value of lambs, and if he has contracted
the habit of being careful with his own money he will be apt to be so
with yours also. But in justice to the improvident, it must be owned
they are often admirable men save in the one point of sobriety.
Their political knowledge is absolutely nil, and, were the colony to give them political power, it might as well give gunpowder to children.
How many hands shall you want?
We will say a couple of good bush hands, who will put up your hut and
yards and wool-shed. If you are in a hurry and have plenty of money you
can have more. Besides these you will want a bullock driver and
shepherd, unless you are shepherd yourself. You must manage the cooking
among you as best you can, and must be content to wash up yourself,
taking your full part in the culinary processes, or you will soon find
disaffection in the camp; but if you can afford to have a cook, have one
by all means. It is a great nuisance to come in from a long round after
sheep and find the fire out and no hot water to make tea, and to have to
set to work immediately to get your men’s supper; for they cannot earn
To return to the culinary department. Your natural poetry of palate will teach you the proper treatment of the onion, and you will ere long be able to handle that inestimable vegetable with the breadth yet delicacy which it requires. Many other things you will learn, which for your sake as well as my own I will not enumerate here. Let the above suffice for examples.
At first your wethers will run with your ewes, and you will only want
one shepherd; but as soon as the mob gets up to two or three thousand
the wethers should be kept separate; you will then want another
shepherd. As soon as you have secured your run you must buy sheep;
otherwise you lose time, as the run is only valuable for the sheep it
carries. Bring sheep,
Start your dray, then, from town and join it with your sheep on the way up. Your sheep will not travel more than ten miles a day if you are to do them justice; so your dray must keep pace with them. You will generally find plenty of firewood on the track. You can camp under the dray at night. In about a week you will get on to your run, and very glad you will feel when you are safely come to the end of your journey. See the horses properly looked to at once; then set up the tent, make a good fire, put the kettle on, out with the frying-pan and get your supper, smoke the calumet of peace, and go to bed.
The first question is, Where shall you place your homestead? You must
put it in such a situation as will be most convenient for working the
sheep. These are the real masters of the place—the run is theirs, not
yours: you cannot bear this in mind too diligently. All considerations
of pleasantness of site must succumb to this. You must fix on such a
situation as not to cut
must, however, have water and firewood at hand, which is
a great convenience, to say nothing of the saving of labour and expense.
Therefore, if you can find a bush near a stream, make your homestead on
the lee side of it. A stream is a boundary, and your hut, if built in
such a position, will interfere with your sheep as little as possible.
The sheep will make for rising ground and hill-side to camp at night, and generally feed with their heads up the wind, if it is not too violent. As your mob increases, you can put an out-station on the other side the run.
In order to prevent the sheep straying beyond your boundaries, keep ever hovering at a distance round them, so far off that they shall not be disturbed by your presence, and even be ignorant that you are looking at them. Sheep cannot be too closely watched, or too much left to themselves. You must remember they are your masters, and not you theirs; you exist for them, not they for you. If you bear this well in mind, you will be able to turn the tables on them effectually at shearing-time. But if you once begin to make the sheep suit their feeding-hours to your convenience, you may as well give up sheep-farming at once. You will soon find the mob begin to look poor, your percentage of lambs will fall off, and in fact you will have to pay very heavily for saving your own trouble, as indeed would be the case in every occupation or profession you might adopt.
Of course you will have to turn your sheep back when they approach the boundary of your neighbour. Be ready, then, at the boundary. You have been watching them creeping up in a large semicircle toward the forbidden ground. As long as they are on their own run let them alone, give them not a moment’s anxiety of mind; but directly they reach the boundary, show yourself with your dog in your most terrific aspect. Startle them, frighten them, disturb their peace; do so again and again, at the same spot, from the very first day. Let them always have peace on their own run, and none anywhere off it. In a month or two you will find the sheep begin to understand your meaning, and it will then be very easy work to keep them within bounds. If, however, you suffer them to have half an hour now and then on the forbidden territory, they will be constantly making for it. The chances are that the feed is good on or about the boundary, and they will be seduced by this to cross, and go on and on till they are quite beyond your control.
You will have burnt a large patch of feed on the outset. Burn it in early spring, on a day when rain appears to be at hand. It is dangerous to burn too much at once: a large fire may run farther than you wish, and, being no respecter of imaginary boundaries, will cross on to your neighbour’s run without compunction and without regard to his sheep, and then heavy damages will be brought against you. Burn, however, you must; so do it carefully. Light one strip first, and keep putting it out by beating it with leafy branches, This will form a fireproof boundary between you and your neighbour.
Burnt feed means contented and well-conditioned sheep. The delicately green and juicy grass which springs up after burning is far better for sheep than the rank and dry growth of summer after it has been withered by the winter’s frosts. Your sheep will not ramble, for if they have plenty of burnt pasture they are contented where they are. They feed in the morning, bunch themselves together in clusters during the heat of the day, and feed again at night.
Moreover, on burnt pasture, no fire can come down upon you from your neighbour so as to hurt your sheep.
The day will come when you will have no more occasion for burning, when your run will be fully stocked, and the sheep will keep your feed so closely cropped that it will do without it. It is certainly a mortification to see volumes of smoke rising into the air, and to know that all that smoke might have been wool, and might have been sold by you for 2s. a pound in England. You will think it great waste, and regret that you have not more sheep to eat it. However, that will come to pass in time; and meanwhile, if you have not mouths enough upon your run to make wool of it, you must burn it off and make smoke of it instead. There is sure to be a good deal of rough scrub and brushwood on the run, which is better destroyed, and which sheep would not touch; therefore, for the ultimate value of your run, it is as well or better that it should be fired than fed off.
The very first work to be done after your arrival will be to make a yard
for your sheep. Make this large enough to hold five or six times as
many sheep as you possess at first. It may be square in shape. Place
two
The sheep, we will suppose, are to be thoroughly overhauled. You wish, for some reason, to inspect their case fully yourself, or you must tail your lambs, in which case every lamb has to be caught, and you will cut its tail off, and ear-mark it with your own earmark; or, again, you will see fit to draft out all the lambs that are ready for weaning; or you may wish to cull the mob, and sell off the worst-woolled sheep; or your neighbour’s sheep may have joined with yours; or for many other reasons it is necessary that your flock should be closely examined. Without good yards it is impossible to do this well—they are an essential of the highest importance.
Select, then, a site as dry and stony as possible (for your sheep will have to be put into the yard over night), and at daylight in the morning set to work.
Fill the yard B with sheep from the big yard A. The yard B we will
suppose to hold about 600. Fill C from B: C shall hold about 100.
When the sheep are in that small yard C (which is called the drafting-
yard),
D and E. Or, it may be,
you are drafting two different sorts of sheep at once; then there will
be two yards in which to put them. When you have done with the small
mob, let it out into the yard F, taking the tally of the sheep as they
pass through the gate. This gate, therefore, must be a small one, so as
not to admit more than one or two at a time. It would be tedious work
filling the small yard C from the big one A; for in that large space the
sheep will run about, and it will take you some few minutes every time.
From the smaller yard B, however, C will easily be filled. Among the
other great advantages of good yards, there is none greater than the
time saved. This is of the highest importance, for the ewes will be
hungry, and their lambs will have sucked them dry; and then, as soon as
they are turned out of the yards, the mothers will race off after feed,
and the lambs, being weak, will lag behind; and the Merino ewe being a
bad mother, the two may never meet again, and the lamb will die.
Therefore it is essential to begin work of this sort early in the
morning, and to have yards so constructed as to cause as little loss of
time as possible. I will not say that the plan given above is the very
best that could be devised, but it is common out here, and answers all
practical purposes. The weakest point is in the approach to B from A.
As soon as you have done with the mob, let them
You may perhaps wonder how you are to know that your sheep are all
right, and that none get away. You cannot be quite certain of this.
You may be pretty sure, however, for you will soon have a large number
of sheep with whom you are personally acquainted, and who have, from
time to time, forced themselves upon your attention either by peculiar
beauty or peculiar ugliness, or by having certain marks upon them. You
will have a black sheep or two, and probably a long-tailed one or two,
and a sheep with only one eye, and another with a wart on its nose, and
so forth. These will be your marked sheep, and if you find all of them
you may be satisfied that the rest are safe also. Your eye will soon
become very accurate in telling you the number of a mob of sheep.
When the sheep are lambing they should not be disturbed. You cannot meddle with a mob of lambing ewes without doing them mischief. Some one or two lambs, or perhaps many more, will be lost every time you disturb the flock. The young sheep, until they have had their lambs a few days, and learnt their value, will leave them upon the slightest provocation. Then there is a serious moral injury inflicted upon the ewe: she becomes familiar with the crime of infanticide, and will be apt to leave her next lamb as carelessly as her first. If, however, she has once reared a lamb, she will be fond of the next, and, when old, will face anything, even a dog, for the sake of her child.
When, therefore, the sheep are lambing, you must ride or walk farther
round, and notice any tracks you may see: anything rather than disturb
the sheep.
Besides the yards above described, you will want one or two smaller ones for getting the sheep into the wool-shed at shearing-time, and you will also want a small yard for branding. The wool-shed is a roomy covered building, with a large central space, and an aisle-like partition on each side. These last will be for holding the sheep during the night. The shearers will want to begin with daylight, and the dew will not yet be off the wool if the sheep are exposed. If wool is packed damp it will heat and spoil; therefore a sufficient number of sheep must be left under cover through the night to last the shearers till the dew is off. In a wool-shed the aisles would be called skilions (whence the name is derived I know not, nor whether it has two l’s in it or one). All the sheep go into the skilions. The shearers shear in the centre, which is large enough to leave room for the wool to be stowed away at one end. The shearers pull the sheep out of the skilions as they want them. Each picks the worst sheep, i.e. that with the least wool upon it, that happens to be at hand at the time, trying to put the best-woolled sheep, which are consequently the hardest to shear, upon someone else; and so the heaviest-woolled and largest sheep get shorn the last.
A good man will shear 100 sheep in a day, some even more; but 100 is
reckoned good work. I have known 195 sheep to be shorn by one man in a
day; but I fancy these must have been from an old and bare mob, and that
this number of well-woolled sheep would be quite beyond one man’s power.
Sheep are not shorn so
Then follows the draying of the wool to port, and the bullocks come in for their full share of work. It is a pleasant sight to see the first load of wool start down, but a far pleasanter to see the dray returning from its last trip.
Shearing well over will be a weight off your mind. This is your most especially busy and anxious time of year, and when the wool is safely down you will be glad indeed.
It may have been a matter of question with you, Shall I wash my sheep before shearing or not? If you wash them at all, you should do it thoroughly, and take considerable pains to have them clean; otherwise you had better shear in the grease, i.e. not wash. Wool in the grease weighs about one-third heavier, and consequently fetches a lower price in the market. When wool falls, moreover, the fall tells first upon greasy wool. Still many shear in the grease, and some consider it pays them better to do so. It is a mooted point, but the general opinion is in favour of washing.
As soon as you have put up one yard, you may set to work upon a hut for
yourself and men. This you will make of split wooden slabs set upright
in the ground, and nailed on to a wall-plate. You will first plant
large posts at each of the corners, and one at either side every door,
and four for the chimney. At the top of
By and by, as you grow richer, you may burn bricks at your leisure, and eventually build a brick house. At first, however, you must rough it.
You will set about a garden at once. You will bring up fowls at once. Pigs may wait till you have time to put up a regular stye, and to have grown potatoes enough to feed them. Two fat and well-tended pigs are worth half a dozen half-starved wretches. Such neglected brutes make a place look very untidy, and their existence will be a burden to themselves, and an eyesore to you.
In a year or two you will find yourself very comfortable. You will get a little fruit from your garden in summer, and will have a prospect of much more. You will have cows, and plenty of butter and milk and eggs; you will have pigs, and, if you choose it, bees, plenty of vegetables, and, in fact, may live upon the fat of the land, with very little trouble, and almost as little expense. If you grudge this, your fare will be rather unvaried, and will consist solely of tea, mutton, bread, and possibly potatoes. For the first year, these are all you must expect; the second will improve matters; and the third should see you surrounded with luxuries.
If you are your own shepherd, which at first is more than probable, you
will find that shepherding is one of the most prosaic professions you
could have adopted.
And now, gentle reader, I wish you luck with your run. If you have tolerably good fortune, in a very short time you will be a rich man. Hoping that this may be the case, there remains nothing for me but to wish you heartily farewell.
Suppose you were to ask your way from Mr. Phillips’s station to mine, I
should direct you thus: “Work your way towards yonder mountain; pass
underneath it between it and the lake, having the mountain on your right
hand and the lake on your left; if you come upon any swamps, go round
them or, if you think you can, go through them; if you get stuck up by
any creeks—a creek is the colonial term for a stream—you’ll very
likely see cattle marks, by following the creek up and down; but there
is nothing there that ought to stick you up if you keep out of the big
swamp at the bottom of the valley; after passing that mountain follow
the lake till it ends, keeping well on the hill-side above it, and make
the end of the valley, where you will come upon a high terrace above a
large gully, with a very strong creek at the bottom of it; get down the
terrace, where you’ll see a patch of burnt ground, and follow the river-
bed till it opens on to a flat; turn to your left and keep down the
mountain sides that run along the Rangitata; keep well near them and so
avoid the swamps; cross the Rangitata opposite where you see a large
river-bed coming into it from the other side, and follow this river-bed
till you see my hut some eight miles up it.” Perhaps I have thus been
better able to describe the nature of the travelling than by any other.
If one can get anything
Well, we had followed these directions for some way, as far in fact as
the terrace, when, the river coming into full view, I saw that the
Rangitata was very high. Worse than that, I saw Mr. Phillips and a
party of men who were taking a dray over to a run just on the other side
of the river, and who had been prevented from crossing for ten days by
the state of the water. Among them, to my horror, I recognised my
cadet, whom I had left behind me with beef which he was to have taken
over to my place a week and more back; whereon my mind misgave me that a
poor Irishman who had been left alone at my place might be in a sore
plight, having been left with no meat and no human being within reach
for a period of ten days. I don’t think I should have attempted
crossing the river but for this. Under the circumstances, however, I
determined at once on making a push for it, and accordingly taking my
two cadets with me and the unfortunate beef that was already putrescent
—it had lain on the ground in a sack all the time—we started along
under the hills and got opposite the place where I intended crossing by
about three o’clock. I had climbed the mountain side and surveyed the
river from thence before approaching the river itself. At last we were
by the water’s edge. Of course, I led the way, being as it were
patronus of the expedition, and having been out some four months longer
than either of my companions; still, having never crossed any of the
rivers on horseback in a fresh, having never seen the Rangitata in a
fresh, and being utterly unable to guess how deep any stream
As I said before, at last we were on the water’s edge; a rushing stream
some sixty yards wide was the first instalment of our passage. It was
about the colour and consistency of cream and soot, and how deep? I had
not the remotest idea; the only thing for it was to go in and see. So
choosing a spot just above a spit and a rapid—at such spots there is
sure to be a ford, if there is a ford anywhere—I walked my mare quickly
into it, having perfect confidence in her, and, I believe, she having
more confidence in me than some who have known me in England might
suppose. In we went; in the middle of the stream the water was only a
little over her belly (she is sixteen hands high); a little farther, by
sitting back on my saddle and lifting my feet up I might have avoided
getting them wet, had I cared
So I failed to cross this stream there, but, determined if possible to
get across the river and see whether the Irishman was alive or dead, we
turned higher up the stream and by and by found a place where it
divided. By carefully selecting a spot I was able to cross the first
stream without the waters getting higher than my saddle-flaps, and the
second scarcely over the horse’s belly. After that there were two
streams somewhat similar to the first, and then the dangers of the
passage of the river might be considered as accomplished—the dangers,
but not the difficulties. These consisted in the sluggish creeks and
swampy ground thickly overgrown with Irishman, snow-grass, and spaniard,
which extend on either side the river for
As the following dialogue embodies the earliest fruits of Butler’s
study of the works of Charles Darwin, with whose name his own was
destined in later years to be so closely connected, and thus
possesses an interest apart from its intrinsic merit, a few words as
to the circumstances in which it was published will not be out of
place.
was published. Shortly
afterwards the book came into Butler’s hands. He seems to have read
it carefully, and meditated upon it. The result of his meditations
took the shape of the following dialogue, which was published on 20
December, 1862, in the PRESS which had been started in the town of
Christ Church in May, 1861. The dialogue did not by any means pass
unnoticed. On the 17th of January, 1863, a leading article (of
course unsigned) appeared in the PRESS, under the title “Barrel-Organs,”
discussing Darwin’s theories, and incidentally referring to
Butler’s dialogue. A reply to this article, signed A .M., appeared
on the 21st of February, and the correspondence was continued until
the 22nd of June, 1863. The dialogue itself, which was unearthed
from the early files of the
mainly owing to the exertions of
Mr. Henry Festing Jones, was reprinted, together with the
correspondence that followed its publication, in the PRESS of June 8
and 15, 1912. Soon after the original appearance of Butler’s
dialogue a copy of it fell into the hands of Charles Darwin, possibly
sent to him by a friend in New Zealand. Darwin was sufficiently
struck by it to forward it to the editor of some magazine, which has
not been identified, with the following letter:—
Down, Bromley, Kent, S.E.
March 24 [1863 ].
(Private).
The autograph of this letter was purchased from Mr. Tregaskis by Mr.
Festing Jones, and subsequently presented by him to the Museum at
Christ Church. The letter cannot be dated with certainty, but since
Butler’s dialogue was published in December, 1862, and it is at least
probable that the copy of the PRESS which contained it was sent to
Darwin shortly after it appeared, we may conclude with tolerable
certainty that
the letter was written in March, 1863. Further light
is thrown on the controversy by a correspondence which took place
between Butler and Darwin in 1865, shortly after Butler’s return to
England. During that year Butler had published a pamphlet entitled
The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the
Four Evangelists critically examined, of which he afterwards
incorporated the substance into The Fair Haven.
Down, Bromley, Kent.
September 30 [1865 ].
My dear Sir,—I am much obliged to you for so kindly sending me your
Evidences, etc. We have read it with much interest. It seems to me
written with much force, vigour, and clearness; and the main argument
to me is quite new. I particularly agree with all you say in your
preface.
I do not know whether you intend to return to New Zealand, and, if
you are inclined to write, I should much like to know what your
future plans are.
My health has been so bad during the last five months that I have
been confined to my bedroom. Had it been otherwise I would have
asked you if you could have spared the time to have paid us a visit;
but this at present is impossible, and I fear will be so for some
time.
With my best thanks for your present,
I remain,
My dear Sir,
Yours very faithfully,
I remain,
My dear Sir,
Yours very faithfully,
Charles Darwin .
To this letter Butler replied as follows:—
15 Clifford’s Inn, E.C.
October 1st, 1865 .
Dear Sir,—I knew you were ill and I never meant to give you the
fatigue of writing to me. Please do not trouble yourself to do so
again. As you kindly ask my plans I may say that, though I very
probably may return to New Zealand in three or four years, I have no
intention of doing so before that time. My study is art, and
anything else I may indulge in is only by-play; it may cause you some
little wonder that at my age I should have started as an art student,
and I may perhaps be permitted to explain that this was always my
wish for years, that I had begun six years ago, as soon as ever I
found that I could not conscientiously take orders; my father so
strongly disapproved of the idea that I gave it up and went out to
New Zealand, stayed there for five years, worked like a common
servant, though on a run of my own, and sold out little more than a
year ago, thinking that prices were going to fall—which they have
since done. Being then rather at a loss what to do and my capital
being all locked up, I took the opportunity to return to my old plan,
and have been studying for the last ten years unremittingly. I hope
that in three or four years more I shall be able to go on very well
by myself, and then I may go back to New Zealand or no as
circumstances shall seem to render advisable. I must apologise for
so much detail, but hardly knew how to explain myself without it.
I always delighted in your ORIGIN OF SPECIES as soon as I saw it out
in New Zealand—not as knowing anything whatsoever of natural
history, but it enters into
so many deeply interesting questions, or
rather it suggests so many, that it thoroughly fascinated me. I
therefore feel all the greater pleasure that my pamphlet should
please you, however full of errors.
The first dialogue on the ORIGIN which I wrote in the PRESS called
forth a contemptuous rejoinder from (I believe) the Bishop of
Wellington—(please do not mention the name, though I think that at
this distance of space and time I might mention it to yourself) I
answered it with the enclosed, which may amuse you. I assumed
another character because my dialogue was in my hearing very severely
criticised by two or three whose opinion I thought worth having, and
I deferred to their judgment in my next. I do not think I should do
so now. I fear you will be shocked at an appeal to the periodicals
mentioned in my letter, but they form a very staple article of bush
diet, and we used to get a good deal of superficial knowledge out of
them. I feared to go in too heavy on the side of the ORIGIN, because
I thought that, having said my say as well as I could, I had better
now take a less impassioned tone; but I was really exceedingly angry.
Please do not trouble yourself to answer this, and believe me,
Yours most sincerely,
S.Samuel Butler
This elicited a second letter from Darwin:-
Down, Bromley, Kent.
October 6.
My dear Sir,—I thank you sincerely for your kind and frank letter,
which has interested me greatly. What
a singular and varied career
you have already run. Did you keep any journal or notes in New
Zealand? For it strikes me that with your rare powers of writing you
might make a very interesting work descriptive of a colonist’s life
in New Zealand.
I return your printed letter, which you might like to keep. It has
amused me, especially the part in which you criticise yourself. To
appreciate the letter fully I ought to have read the bishop’s letter,
which seems to have been very rich.
You tell me not to answer your note, but I could not resist the wish
to thank you for your letter.
With every good wish, believe me, my dear Sir,
Yours sincerely,
Ch.Charles Darwin
It is curious that in this correspondence Darwin makes no reference
to the fact that he had already had in his possession a copy of
Butler’s dialogue and had endeavoured to induce the editor of an
English periodical to reprint it. It is possible that we have not
here the whole of the correspondence which passed between Darwin and
Butler at this period, and this theory is supported by the fact that
Butler seems to take for granted that Darwin knew all about the
appearance of the original dialogue on the ORIGIN OF SPECIES in the
PRESS. Enough, however, has been given to explain the correspondence which
the publication of the dialogue occasioned. I do not know what
authority Butler had for supposing that Charles John Abraham, Bishop
of Wellington, was the author of the article entitled “Barrel-Organs,”
and the “Savoyard” of the subsequent controversy. However,
at that time Butler was deep in the
counsels of the PRESS, and he may
have received private information on the subject. Butler’s own
reappearance over the initials A. M. is sufficiently explained in his
letter to Darwin.
It is worth observing that Butler appears in the dialogue and ensuing
correspondence in a character very different from that which he was
later to assume. Here we have him as an ardent supporter of Charles
Darwin, and adopting a contemptuous tone with regard to the claims of
Erasmus Darwin to have sown the seed which was afterwards raised to
maturity by his grandson. It would be interesting to know if it was
this correspondence that first turned Butler’s attention seriously to
the works of the older evolutionists and ultimately led to the
production of EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW, in which the indebtedness of
Charles Darwin to Erasmus Darwin, Buffon and Lamarck is demonstrated
with such compelling force.
A Dialogue
[From the
Press,
F. So you have finished
C. You cannot expect me to like him. He is so hard and logical, and he treats his subject with such an intensity of dry reasoning without giving himself the loose rein for a single moment from one end of the book to the other, that I must confess I have found it a great effort to read him through.
F. But I fancy that, if you are to be candid, you
C. I agree with you, and I do not like his book partly on that very account. He seems to have no eye but for the single point at which he is aiming.
F. But is not that a great virtue in a writer?
C. A great virtue, but a cold and hard one.
F. In my opinion it is a grave and wise one. Moreover, I conceive
that the judicial calmness which so strongly characterises the whole
book, the absence of all passion, the air of extreme and anxious
caution which pervades it throughout, are rather the result of
training and artificially acquired self-restraint than symptoms of a
cold and unimpassioned nature; at any rate, whether the lawyer-like
faculty of swearing both sides of a question and attaching the full
value to both is acquired or natural in
C. I admit it. Science is all head—she has no heart at all.
F. You are right. But a man of science may be a man of other things
besides science, and though he may have, and ought to have no heart
during a
C. I tell you I do not like the book.
F. May I catechise you a little upon it?
C. To your heart’s content.
F. Firstly, then, I will ask you what is the one great impression
that you have derived from reading it; or, rather, what do you think
to be the main impression that
C. Why, I should say some such thing as the following—that men are descended from monkeys, and monkeys from something else, and so on back to dogs and horses and hedge-sparrows and pigeons and cinipedes (what is a cinipede?) and cheesemites, and then through the plants down to duckweed.
F. You express the prevalent idea concerning the book, which as you express it appears nonsensical enough.
C. How, then, should you express it yourself?
F. Hand me the book and I will read it to you through from beginning
to end, for to express it more briefly than
C. That is nonsense; as you asked me what impression I derived from the book, so now I ask you, and I charge you to answer me.
F. Well, I assent to the justice of your demand, but I shall comply with it by requiring your assent to a few principal statements deducible from the work.
C. So be it.
F. You will grant then, firstly, that all plants and animals
increase very rapidly, and that unless they were in some manner
checked, the world would soon be overstocked. Take cats, for
instance; see with what rapidity they breed on the different runs in
this province where there is little or nothing to check them; or even
take the more slowly breeding sheep, and see how soon 500 ewes become
5000 sheep under favourable circumstances. Suppose this sort of
thing to go on for a hundred million years or so, and where would be
the standing room for all the different plants and animals that would
be now existing, did they not materially check each other’s increase,
or were they not liable in some way to be checked by other causes?
Remember the quail; how plentiful they were until the cats came with
the settlers from Europe. Why were they so abundant? Simply because
they had plenty to eat, and could get sufficient shelter from the
hawks to multiply freely. The cats came, and tussocks stood the poor
little creatures in but poor stead. The cats increased and
multiplied because they had plenty of food and no natural enemy to
check them. Let them wait a year or two, till they have materially
reduced the larks also, as they have long since reduced the quail,
and let them have to depend solely upon occasional dead lambs and
sheep, and they will find a certain rather formidable natural enemy
called Famine rise slowly but inexorably against them and slaughter
them wholesale. The first proposition then to which I demand your
assent is that all plants and animals tend to increase in a high
geometrical ratio; that they all endeavour to get that which is
necessary for their own welfare; that, as
C. Of course; it is obvious.
F. You admit then that there is in Nature a perpetual warfare of plant, of bird, of beast, of fish, of reptile; that each is striving selfishly for its own advantage, and will get what it wants if it can.
C. If what?
F. If it can. How comes it then that sometimes it cannot? Simply because all are not of equal strength, and the weaker must go to the wall.
C. You seem to gloat over your devilish statement.
F. Gloat or no gloat, is it true or no? I am not one of those
Who would unnaturally better Nature By making out that that which is, is not.
If the law of Nature is “struggle,” it is better to look the matter in the face and adapt yourself to the conditions of your existence. Nature will not bow to you, neither will you mend matters by patting her on the back and telling her that she is not so black as she is painted. My dear fellow, my dear sentimental friend, do you eat roast beef or roast mutton?
C. Drop that chaff and go back to the matter in hand.
F. To continue then with the cats. Famine comes and tests them, so
to speak; the weaker, the less active, the less cunning, and the less
enduring cats get killed off, and only the strongest and smartest
cats survive; there will be no favouritism shown to
C. This, too, is obvious.
F. Extend this to all animals and plants, and the same thing will hold good concerning them all. I shall now change the ground and demand assent to another statement. You know that though the offspring of all plants and animals is in the main like the parent, yet that in almost every instance slight deviations occur, and that sometimes there is even considerable divergence from the parent type. It must also be admitted that these slight variations are often, or at least sometimes, capable of being perpetuated by inheritance. Indeed, it is only in consequence of this fact that our sheep and cattle have been capable of so much improvement.
C. I admit this.
F. Then the whole matter lies in a nutshell. Suppose that hundreds
of millions of years ago there existed upon this earth a single
primordial form of the very lowest life, or suppose that three or
four such primordial forms existed. Change of climate, of food, of
any of the circumstances which surrounded any member of this first
and lowest class of life would tend to alter it in some slight
manner, and the alteration would have a tendency to perpetuate itself
by inheritance. Many failures would doubtless occur, but with the
ad
infinitum.
C. It is very horrid.
F. No more horrid than that you should eat roast mutton or boiled beef.
C. But it is utterly subversive of Christianity; for if this theory is true the fall of man is entirely fabulous; and if the fall, then the redemption, these two being inseparably bound together.
F. My dear friend, there I am not bound to follow you. I believe in
Christianity, and I believe in ad
infinitum. Once grant these two things, and the rest is a mere
matter of time and degree. That the immense differences between the
camel and the pig should have come about in six thousand years is not
believable; but in six hundred million years it is not incredible,
more especially when we consider that by the assistance of geology a
very perfect chain has been formed between the two. Let this
instance suffice. Once grant the principles, once grant that
competition is a great power in Nature, and that changes of
circumstances and habits produce a tendency to variation in the
offspring (no matter how slight such variation may be), and unless
you can define the possible limit of such variation during an
infinite series of generations, unless you can show that there is a
limit, and that
C. Thank you, but for my own part I confess to caring very little
whether my millionth ancestor was
[From the
Press,
Dugald Stewart in his Dissertation on the Progress of Metaphysics
says: “On reflecting on the repeated reproduction of ancient
paradoxes by modern authors one is almost tempted to suppose that
human invention is limited, like a barrel-organ, to a specific number
of tunes.”
It would be a very amusing and instructive task for a man of reading
and reflection to note down the instances he meets with of these old
tunes coming up again and again in regular succession with hardly any
change of note, and with all the old hitches and involuntary squeaks
that the barrel-organ had played in days gone by. It is most amusing
to see the old quotations repeated year after year and volume after
volume, till at last some more careful enquirer turns to the passage
referred to and finds that they have all been taken in and have
followed the lead of the first daring inventor of the mis-statement.
Hallam has had the courage, in the supplement to his History of the
Middle Ages, p. 398, to acknowledge an error of this sort that he has
been led into.
But the particular instance of barrel-organism that is present to our
minds just now is the Darwinian theory of the development of species
by natural selection, of which we hear so much. This is nothing new,
but a réchauffée of the old story that his
We learn from that same great and cautious writer Hallam in his
History of Literature that there are traces of this theory and of
other popular theories of the present day in the works of Giordano
Bruno, the Neapolitan who was burnt at Rome by the Inquisition in
Vestiges of Creation. He was a
Pantheist, and, as Hallam says, borrowed all his theories from the
eclectic philosophers, from Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, and
ultimately they were no doubt of Oriental origin. This is just what
has been shown again and again to be the history of German Pantheism;
it is a mere barrel-organ repetition of the Brahman metaphysics found
in Hindu cosmogonies. Bruno’s theory regarding development of
species was in Hallam’s words: “There is nothing so small or so
unimportant but that a portion of spirit dwells in it; and this
spiritual substance requires a proper subject to become a plant or an
animal”; and Hallam in a note on this passage observes how the modern
theories of equivocal generation correspond with Bruno’s.
No doubt Hallam is right in saying that they are all of Oriental
origin. Pythagoras borrowed from thence
Perhaps Prometheus was the first Darwin of antiquity, for he is said to have begun his creation from below, and after passing from the invertebrate to the sub-vertebrate, from thence to the backbone, from the backbone to the mammalia, and from the mammalia to the manco- cerebral, he compounded man of each and all:-
One word more about barrel-organs. We have heard on the undoubted
authority of ear and eyewitnesses, that in a neighbouring province
there is a church where the psalms are sung to a barrel-organ, but
unfortunately the psalm tunes come in the middle of the set, and the
jigs and waltzes have to be played through before the psalm can
start. Just so is it with Darwinism and all similar theories. All
his fantasias, as we saw in a late article, are made to come round at
last to religious questions, with which really and truly they have
nothing to do, but were it not for their supposed effect upon
religion, no one would waste
[From the
Press,
To the Editor of the Press.
Sir—In two of your numbers you have already taken notice of Darwin’s theory of the origin of species; I would venture to trespass upon your space in order to criticise briefly both your notices.
The first is evidently the composition of a warm adherent of the
theory in question; the writer overlooks all the real difficulties in
the way of accepting it, and, caught by the obvious truth of much
that Darwin says, has rushed to the conclusion that all is equally
true. He writes with the tone of a partisan, of one deficient in
scientific caution, and from the frequent repetition of the same
ideas manifest in his dialogue one would be led to suspect that he
was but little versed in habits of literary composition and
philosophical argument. Yet he may fairly claim the merit of having
written in earnest. He has treated a serious subject seriously
according to his lights; and though his lights are not brilliant
ones, yet he has apparently done his best to show the theory on which
he is writing in its most favourable aspect. He is rash, evidently
well satisfied with himself, very possibly mistaken, and just one of
those persons who (without intending it) are more apt to mislead than
Old fallacies are constantly recurring. Therefore Darwin’s theory is a fallacy.
They come again and again, like tunes in a barrel-organ. Therefore Darwin’s theory is a fallacy.
Hallam made a mistake, and in his History of the Middle Ages, p. 398,
he corrects himself. Therefore Darwin’s theory is wrong.
Dr. Darwin in the last century said the same thing as his son or grandson says now—will the writer of the article refer to anything bearing on natural selection and the struggle for existence in Dr. Darwin’s work?—and a foolish nobleman said something foolish about monkey’s tails. Therefore Darwin’s theory is wrong.
Giordano Bruno was burnt in the year
And finally, as a clinching argument, in one of the neighbouring settlements there is a barrel-organ which plays its psalm tunes in the middle of its jigs and waltzes. After this all lingering doubts concerning the falsehood of Darwin’s theory must be at an end, and any person of ordinary common sense must admit that the theory of development by natural selection is unwarranted by experience and reason.
The articles conclude with an implied statement that Darwin supposes the Polar bear to swim about catching flies for so long a period that at last it gets the fins it wishes for.
Now, however sceptical I may yet feel about the truth of all Darwin’s theory, I cannot sit quietly by and see him misrepresented in such a scandalously slovenly manner. What Darwin does say is that sometimes diversified and changed habits may be observed in individuals of the same species; that is that there are eccentric animals just as there are eccentric men. He adduces a few instances and winds up by saying that “in North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching—almost like a whale— insects in the water.” This and nothing more. (See pp. 201 and 202.)
Because Darwin says that a bear of rather eccentric habits happened to be seen by Hearne swimming for hours and catching insects almost like a whale, your writer (with a carelessness hardly to be reprehended in sufficiently strong terms) asserts by implication that Darwin supposes the whale to be developed from the bear by the latter having had a strong desire to possess fins. This is disgraceful.
I can hardly be mistaken in supposing that I have quoted the passage your writer alludes to. Should I be in error, I trust he will give the reference to the place in which Darwin is guilty of the nonsense that is fathered upon him in your article.
It must be remembered that there have been few great inventions in
physics or discoveries in science which have not been foreshadowed to
a certain extent
Now, when the Saturday Review, the Cornhill Magazine, Once a Week,
and Macmillan’s Magazine, not to mention other periodicals, have
either actually and completely as in the case of the first two,
provisionally as in the last mentioned, given their adherence to the
theory in question, it may be taken for granted that the arguments in
its favour are sufficiently specious to have attracted the attention
and approbation of a considerable number of well-educated men in
England. Three months ago the theory of development by natural
selection was openly supported by Professor Huxley before the British
Association at Cambridge. I am not adducing Professor Huxley’s
advocacy as a proof that Darwin is right (indeed, Owen opposed him
tooth and nail), but as a proof that there is sufficient to be said
on Darwin’s side to demand more respectful attention than your last
writer has thought it worth while to give it. A theory which the
British Association is discussing with great care in England is not
to be set down by off-hand nicknames in Canterbury.
To those, however, who do feel an interest in the question, I would
venture to give a word or two of
Your obedient servant,
[From the
Press,
To the Editor of the Press.
Sir—A correspondent signing himself “A. M.” in the issue of February
21st says: —“Will the writer (of an article on barrel-organs) refer
to anything bearing upon natural selection and the struggle for
existence in Dr. Darwin’s work?” This is one of the trade forms by
which writers imply that there is no such passage, and yet leave a
loophole if they are proved wrong. I will, however, furnish him with
a passage from the notes of Darwin’s Botanic Garden:-
“I am acquainted with a philosopher who, contemplating this subject,
thinks it not impossible that the first insects were anthers or
stigmas of flowers, which had by some means loosed themselves from
their parent plant; and that many insects have gradually
This passage contains the germ of Mr. Charles Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection:—
“Analogy would lead me to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from one prototype.”
Here are a few specimens, his illustrations of the theory:—
“There seems to me no great difficulty in believing that natural selection has actually converted a swim-bladder into a lung or organ used exclusively for respiration.” “A swim-bladder has apparently been converted into an air-breathing lung.” “We must be cautious in concluding that a bat could not have been formed by natural selection from an animal which at first could only glide through the air.” “I can see no insuperable difficulty in further believing it possible that the membrane-connected fingers and forearm of the galeopithecus might be greatly lengthened by natural selection, and this, as far as the organs of flight are concerned, would convert it into a bat.” “The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of a porpoise, and leg of a horse, the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant, and innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications.”
I do not mean to go through your correspondent’s letter, otherwise “I
could hardly reprehend in sufficiently strong terms” (and all that
sort of thing) the perversion of what I said about Giordano Bruno.
But “ex uno disce omnes”—I am, etc.,
[From the
Press,
To the Editor of the Press.
Sir—The “Savoyard” of last Saturday has shown that he has perused
Darwin’s Botanic Garden with greater attention than myself. I am
obliged to him for his correction of my carelessness, and have not
the smallest desire to make use of any loopholes to avoid being
“proved wrong.” Let, then, the “Savoyard’s” assertion that Dr.
Darwin had to a certain extent forestalled Mr. C. Darwin stand, and
let my implied denial that in the older Darwin’s works passages
bearing on natural selection, or the struggle for existence, could be
found, go for nought, or rather let it be set down against me.
What follows? Has the “Savoyard” (supposing him to be the author of the article on barrel-organs) adduced one particle of real argument the more to show that the real Darwin’s theory is wrong?
The elder Darwin writes in a note that “he is acquainted with a
philosopher who thinks it not impossible that the first insects were
the anthers or stigmas of flowers, which by some means, etc. etc.”
Was there ever a great theory yet which was not more or less developed from previous speculations which were all to a certain extent wrong, and all ridiculed, perhaps not undeservedly, at the time of their appearance? There is a wide difference between a speculation and a theory. A speculation involves the notion of a man climbing into a lofty position, and descrying a somewhat remote object which he cannot fully make out. A theory implies that the theorist has looked long and steadfastly till he is clear in his own mind concerning the nature of the thing which he is beholding. I submit that the “Savoyard” has unfairly made use of the failure of certain speculations in order to show that a distinct theory is untenable.
Let it be granted that Darwin’s theory has been foreshadowed by
numerous previous writers. Grant the “Savoyard” his Giordano Bruno,
and give full weight to the barrel-organ in a neighbouring
settlement, I would still ask, has the theory of natural development
of species ever been placed in anything approaching its present clear
and connected form before the appearance of Mr. Darwin’s book? Has
it ever received the full attention of the scientific world as a duly
organised theory, one presented in a tangible shape and demanding
investigation, as the conclusion arrived at by a man of known
scientific attainments
It would be mere presumption on my part either to attack or defend Darwin, but my indignation was roused at seeing him misrepresented and treated disdainfully. I would wish, too, that the “Savoyard” would have condescended to notice that little matter of the bear. I have searched my copy of Darwin again and again to find anything relating to the subject except what I have quoted in my previous letter.
[From the
Press,
To the Editor of the Press.
Sir—Your correspondent “A. M.” is pertinacious on the subject of the bear being changed into a whale, which I said Darwin contemplated as not impossible. I did not take the trouble in any former letter to answer him on that point, as his language was so intemperate. He has modified his tone in his last letter, and really seems open to the conviction that he may be the “careless” writer after all; and so on reflection I have determined to give him the opportunity of doing me justice.
In his letter of February 21 he says: “I cannot sit by and see
Darwin misrepresented in such a scandalously slovenly manner. What
Darwin does say is ‘that sometimes diversified and changed habits
almost like a whale, insects in the water.’
This, and nothing more, pp. 201, 202.”
Then follows a passage about my carelessness, which (he says) is hardly to be reprehended in sufficiently strong terms, and he ends with saying: “This is disgraceful.”
Now you may well suppose that I was a little puzzled at the seeming audacity of a writer who should adopt this style, when the words which follow his quotation from Darwin are (in the edition from which I quoted) as follows: “Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered by natural selection more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”
Now this passage was a remarkable instance of the idea that I was
illustrating in the article on “Barrel-organs,” because Buffon in his
Histoire Naturelle had conceived a theory of degeneracy (the exact
converse of Darwin’s theory of ascension) by which the bear might
pass into a seal, and that into a whale. Trusting now to the
fairness of “A. M.” I leave to him to say whether he has quoted from
the same edition as I have, and whether the additional words I have
I am, Sir, etc.,
“The Savoyard,” or player
on Barrel-organs.
(The paragraph in question has been the occasion of much discussion.
The only edition in our hands is the third, seventh thousand, which
contains the paragraph as quoted by “A. M.” We have heard that it is
different in earlier editions, but have not been able to find one.
The difference between “A. M.” and “The Savoyard” is clearly one of
different editions. Darwin appears to have been ashamed of the
inconsequent inference suggested, and to have withdrawn it.—Ed. the
Press.)
[From the
Press,
To the Editor of the Press.
Sir—I extract the following from an article in the Saturday Review
of
“As regards the ducks, for example, inter-breeding goes on to a very
great extent among nearly all the genera, which are well represented
in the collection.
inter se. At page 15
(of the list of vertebrated animals living in the gardens of the
Zoological Society of London, Longman and Co.,
I fear that both you and your readers will be dead sick of Darwin, but the above is worthy of notice. My compliments to the “Savoyard.”
“Darwin Among the Machines” originally appeared in the Christ Church
PRESS, (Fifield, London, 1912,
Kennerley, New York), with a prefatory note pointing out its
connection with the genesis of Erewhon, to which readers desirous of
further information may be referred.
[To the Editor of the
Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June,
Sir—There are few things of which the present generation is more
justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily
taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. And indeed it is
matter for great congratulation on many grounds. It is unnecessary
to mention these here, for they are sufficiently obvious; our present
business lies with considerations which may somewhat tend to humble
our pride and to make us think seriously of the future prospects of
the human race. If we revert to the earliest primordial types of
mechanical life, to the lever, the wedge, the inclined plane, the
screw and the pulley, or (for analogy would lead us one step further)
to that one primordial type from which all the mechanical kingdom has
been
Great Eastern, we find ourselves almost
awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the
gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the
slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom. We shall find it
impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this
mighty movement is to be. In what direction is it tending? What
will be its upshot? To give a few imperfect hints towards a solution
of these questions is the object of the present letter.
We have used the words “mechanical life,” “the mechanical kingdom,” “the mechanical world” and so forth, and we have done so advisedly, for as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race.
We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of
machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task of
classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species,
varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting
links between machines of widely different characters, of pointing
out how subservience to the use of man has played that part among
machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and
vegetable kingdoms, of pointing out rudimentary organs
We were asked by a learned brother philosopher who saw this
article in MS. what we meant by alluding to rudimentary organs in
machines. Could we, he asked, give any example of such organs? We
pointed to the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl of our
tobacco pipe. This organ was originally designed for the same
purpose as the rim at the bottom of a tea-cup, which is but another
form of the same function. Its purpose was to keep the heat of the
pipe from marking the table on which it rested. Originally, as we
have seen in very early tobacco pipes, this protuberance was of a
very different shape to what it is now. It was broad at the bottom
and flat, so that while the pipe was being smoked the bowl might rest
upon the table. Use and disuse have here come into play and served
to reduce the function to its present rudimentary condition. That
these rudimentary organs are rarer in machinery than in animal life
is owing to the more prompt action of the human selection as compared
with the slower but even surer operation of natural selection. Man
may make mistakes; in the long run nature never does so. We have
only given an imperfect example, but the intelligent reader will
supply himself with illustrations.
Some few hints we have determined to venture upon, though we do so
with the profoundest diffidence. Firstly, we would remark that as
some of the lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size than
has descended to their more highly organised living representatives,
so a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their
development and progress. Take the watch for instance. Examine the
beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play
of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is
but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century—
it is no deterioration from them. The day may come when clocks,
which certainly at the present day are not
The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will
suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious
questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of
creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely
to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that
we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to
the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily
giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious
contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to
them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of
ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power,
inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to
them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to
aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires
will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin,
shame, and sorrow will have no place among them. Their minds will be
in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows
no wants, is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture
them. Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment.
The guilty conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the
insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the
unworthy takes
We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we
have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the
machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to
exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his
state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than
he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle,
and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever
experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt
that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals
far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is
reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for
their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower
animals. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep; they will
not only require our services in the parturition of their young
(which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands), but
also in feeding them, in setting
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by
day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily
bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the
energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.
The upshot is simply
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.
For the present we shall leave this subject, which we present gratis to the members of the Philosophical Society. Should they consent to avail themselves of the vast field which we have pointed out, we shall endeavour to labour in it ourselves at some future and indefinite period.
I am, Sir, etc.,
Cellarius
“Lucubratio Ebria,” like “Darwin Among the Machines,” has already
appeared in
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler
with a prefatory note by
Mr. Festing Jones, explaining its connection with
Erewhon
and
Life
and Habit.
I need therefore only repeat that it was written by
Butler after his return to England and sent to New Zealand, where it
was published in the
Press
on July 29, 1865.
[From the
Press,
There is a period in the evening, or more generally towards the still
small hours of the morning, in which we so far unbend as to take a
single glass of hot whisky and water. We will neither defend the
practice nor excuse it. We state it as a fact which must be borne in
mind by the readers of this article; for we know not how, whether it
be the inspiration of the drink or the relief from the harassing work
with which the day has been occupied or from whatever other cause,
yet we are certainly liable about this time to such a prophetic
influence as we seldom else experience. We are rapt in a dream such
as we ourselves know to be a dream, and which, like other dreams, we
can hardly embody in a distinct
The limbs of the lower animals have never been modified by any act of
deliberation and forethought on their own part. Recent researches
have thrown absolutely no light upon the origin of life—upon the
initial force which introduced a sense of identity and a deliberate
faculty into the world; but they do certainly appear to show very
clearly that each species of the animal and vegetable kingdom has
been moulded into its present shape by chances and changes of many
millions of years, by chances and changes over which the creature
modified had no control whatever, and concerning whose aim it was
alike unconscious and indifferent, by forces which seem insensate to
the pain which they inflict, but by whose inexorably beneficent
cruelty the brave and strong keep
fortes creantur fortibus et bonis, good men beget good children;
the rule held even in the geological period; good ichthyosauri begot
good ichthyosauri, and would to our discomfort have gone on doing so
to the present time had not better creatures been begetting better
things than ichthyosauri, or famine or fire or convulsion put an end
to them. Good apes begot good apes, and at last when human
intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi-
simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could of his own
forethought add extra-corporaneous limbs to the members of his own
body, and become not only a vertebrate mammal, but a vertebrate
machinate mammal into the bargain.
It was a wise monkey that first learned to carry a stick, and a
useful monkey that mimicked him. For the race of man has learned to
walk uprightly much as a child learns the same thing. At first he
crawls on all fours, then he clambers, laying hold of whatever he
can; and lastly he stands upright alone and walks, but for a long
time with an unsteady step. So when the human race was in its
gorilla-hood it generally carried a stick; from carrying a stick for
many million years it became accustomed and modified to an upright
position. The stick wherewith it had learned to walk would now serve
to beat its younger
The mind grew because the body grew; more things were perceived, more
things were handled, and being handled became familiar. But this
came about chiefly because there was a hand to handle with; without
the hand there would be no handling, and no method of holding and
examining is comparable to the human hand. The tail of an opossum is
a prehensile thing, but it is too far from his eyes; the elephant’s
trunk is better, and it is probably to their trunks that the
elephants owe their sagacity. It is here that the bee, in spite of
her wings, has failed. She has a high civilisation, but it is one
whose equilibrium appears to have been already attained; the
appearance is a false one, for the bee changes, though more slowly
than man can watch her; but the reason of the very gradual nature of
the change is chiefly because the physical organisation of the insect
changes, but slowly also. She is poorly off for hands, and has never
fairly grasped the notion of tacking on other limbs to the limbs of
her own body, and so being short lived to boot she remains from
century to century to human eyes in statu quo. Her body never
becomes machinate, whereas this new phase of organism
If there were a race of men without any mechanical appliances we
should see this clearly. There are none, nor have there been, so far
as we can tell, for millions and millions of years. The lowest
Australian savage carries weapons for the fight or the chase, and has
his cooking and drinking utensils at home; a race without these
things would be completely feræ naturae and not men at all. We are
unable to point to any example of a race absolutely devoid of extra-
corporaneous limbs, but we can see among the Chinese that with the
failure to invent new limbs a civilisation becomes as much fixed as
that of the ants; and among savage tribes we observe that few
implements involve a state of things scarcely human at all. Such
tribes only advance pari passu with the creatures upon which they
feed.
It is a mistake, then, to take the view adopted by a previous
correspondent of this paper, to consider the machines as identities,
to animalise them and to
In confirmation of the views concerning mechanism which we have been
advocating above, it must be remembered that men are not merely the
children of their parents, but they are begotten of the institutions
of the state of the mechanical sciences under which they are born and
bred. These things have made us what we are. We are children of the
plough, the spade, and the ship; we are children of the extended
liberty and knowledge which the printing press has diffused. Our
ancestors added these things to their previously existing members;
the new limbs were preserved by natural selection and incorporated
into human society; they descended with modifications, and hence
proceeds the difference between our ancestors and ourselves. By the
institutions and state of science under which a man is born it is
determined whether he shall have the limbs of an Australian savage or
those of a nineteenth-century Englishman. The former is supplemented
with little save a rug and a javelin; the latter varies his physique
with the changes of the season, with age and with advancing
Let the reader ponder over these last remarks and he will see that
the principal varieties and sub-varieties of the human race are not
now to be looked for among the negroes, the Circassians, the Malays,
or the American aborigines, but among the rich and the poor. The
difference in physical organisation between these two species of man
is far greater than that between the so-called types of humanity.
The rich man can go from here to England whenever he feels inclined,
the legs of the other are by an invisible fatality prevented from
carrying him beyond certain narrow limits. Neither rich nor poor as
yet see the philosophy of the thing, or admit that he who can tack a
portion of one of the P. and O. boats on to his identity is a much
more highly organised being than one who cannot. Yet the fact is
patent enough, if we once think it over, from the mere consideration
of the respect with which we so often treat those who are richer than
ourselves. We observe men for the
We admit that these last sentences are open to question, and we should hardly like to commit ourselves irrecoverably to the sentiments they express; but we will say this much for certain, namely, that the rich man is the true hundred-handed Gyges of the poets. He alone possesses the full complement of limbs who stands at the summit of opulence, and we may assert with strictly scientific accuracy that the Rothschilds are the most astonishing organisms that the world has ever yet seen. For to the nerves or tissues, or whatever it be that answers to the helm of a rich man’s desires, there is a whole army of limbs seen and unseen attachable; he may be reckoned by his horse-power, by the number of foot-pounds which he has money enough to set in motion. Who, then, will deny that a man whose will represents the motive power of a thousand horses is a being very different from the one who is equivalent but to the power of a single one?
Henceforward, then, instead of saying that a man is hard up, let us
say that his organisation is at a low ebb, or, if we wish him well,
let us hope that he will grow plenty of limbs. It must be remembered
that we are dealing with physical organisations only. We do
Act III, Scene I
The following brief essay was contributed by Butler to a small
miscellany entitled
Literary Foundlings: Verse and Prose, Collected
in Canterbury, N.Z.,
which was published at Christ Church on the
occasion of a bazaar held there in March, 1864, in aid of the funds
of the Christ Church Orphan Asylum, and offered for sale during the
progress of the bazaar. The miscellany consisted entirely of the
productions of Canterbury writers, and among the contributors were
Dean Jacobs, Canon Cottrell, and James Edward FitzGerald, the founder
of the Press.
When Prince Ferdinand was wrecked on the island Miranda was fifteen
years old. We can hardly suppose that she had ever seen Ariel, and
Caliban was a detestable object whom her father took good care to
keep as much out of her way as possible. Caliban was like the man
cook on a back-country run. “’Tis a villain, sir,” says Miranda. “I
do not love to look on.” “But as ’tis,” returns Prospero, “we cannot
miss him; he does make our fire, fetch in our wood, and serve in
offices that profit us.” Hands were scarce, and Prospero was obliged
to put up with
he’s safe for these three hours.”
Safe—if she had only said that “papa was safe,” the sentence would
have been purely modern, and have suited Thackeray as well as
Shakspeare. See how quickly she has learnt to regard her father as
one to be watched and probably kept in a good humour for the sake of
Ferdinand. We suppose that the secret of the modern character of
this particular passage lies simply in the fact that young people
make love pretty much in the same way now that they did three hundred
years ago; and possibly, with the exception that “the governor” may
be substituted for the words “my father” by the young ladies of three
hundred years hence, the passage will sound as fresh and modern then
as it does now. Let the Prosperos of that age take a lesson, and
either not allow the Ferdinands to pile up firewood, or so to arrange
their studies as not to be “safe” for any three consecutive hours.
It is true that Prospero’s objection to the match was only feigned,
but Miranda thought otherwise, and for all purposes of argument we
are justified in supposing that he was in earnest.
The following lines were written by Butler in February, 1864, and
appeared in the
Press.
They refer to a visit paid to New Zealand by
a team of English cricketers, and have kindly been copied and sent to
me by Miss Colborne-Veel, whose father was editor of the
Press
at the
time that Butler was writing for it. Miss Colborne-Veel has further
permitted to me to make use of the following explanatory note: “The
coming of the All England team was naturally a glorious event in a
province only fourteen years old. The Mayor and Councillors had ‘a
car of state’—otherwise a brake—‘with postilions in the English
style.’ Cobb and Co. supplied a six-horse coach for the English
eleven, the yellow paint upon which suggested the ‘glittering chariot
of pure gold.’ So they drove in triumph from the station and through
the town. Tinley for England and Tennant for Canterbury were the
heroes of the match. At the Wednesday dinner referred to they
exchanged compliments and cricket balls across the table. This early
esteem for cricket may be explained by a remark made by the All
England captain, that ‘on no cricket ground in any colony had he met
so many public school men, especially men from old Rugby, as at
Canterbury.’”
[To the Editor, the Press,
Sir—The following lines, which profess to have been written by a friend of mine at three o’clock in the morning after the dinner of Wednesday last, have been presented to myself with a request that I should forward them to you. I would suggest to the writer of them the following quotation from “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”
I am, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
S.B.
“You find not the apostrophes, and so miss the accent; let me
supervise the canzonet. Here are only numbers ratified; but for the
elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret. … Imitari
is nothing. So doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the
tired horse his rider.”
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act IV, S. 2.
Horatio. …
Claud. But will it pay, Horatio?
Hor. Let Shylock see to that, but yet I trust
Claud. Which side went in first?
Hor. We did,
Claud. Poor souls! Th’ unkindest heart had bled for them.
Hor. Fortune turned her wheel,
* * * * * *
* * * * * *
Claud. Thou must be drunk, Horatio.
Hor. So I am.
CAMBRIDGE
This essay is believed to be the first composition by Samuel Butler
that appeared in print. It was published in the first number of the
Eagle
, a magazine written and edited by members of St. John’s
College, Cambridge, in the Lent Term, 1858, when Butler was in his
fourth and last year of residence.
[From the
Eagle, Vol. 1, No. 1, Lent Term,
I sit down scarcely knowing how to grasp my own meaning, and give it a tangible shape in words; and yet it is concerning this very expression of our thoughts in words that I wish to speak. As I muse things fall more into their proper places, and, little fit for the task as my confession pronounces me to be, I will try to make clear that which is in my mind.
I think, then, that the style of our authors of a couple of hundred
years ago was more terse and masculine than that of those of the
present day, possessing both more of the graphic element, and more
vigour, straightforwardness, and conciseness. Most readers will
have anticipated me in admitting that a man should be clear of his
meaning before he endeavours to give to it any kind of utterance,
and that
I incline to believe that as irons support the rickety child, whilst
they impede the healthy one, so rules, for the most part, are but
useful to the weaker among us. Our greatest masters in language,
whether prose or verse, in painting, music, architecture, or the
like, have been those who preceded the rule and whose excellence
gave rise thereto; men who preceded, I should rather say, not the
rule, but the discovery of the rule, men whose intuitive perception
led them to the right practice. We cannot imagine Homer to have
studied rules, and the infant genius of those giants of their art,
Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven, who composed at the ages of seven,
five, and ten, must certainly have been unfettered by them: to the
less brilliantly endowed, however, they have a use as being
compendious safeguards against error. Let me then lay down as the
best of all rules for writing, “forgetfulness of self, and
carefulness of the matter in hand.”
A book that is worth reading will be worth reading thoughtfully, and
there are but few good books, save certain novels, that it is well
to read in an arm-chair. Most will bear standing to. At the
present time we seem to lack the impassiveness and impartiality
which was so marked among the writings of our forefathers, we are
seldom content with the simple narration of fact, but must rush off
into an almost declamatory description of them; my meaning will be
plain to all who have studied Thucydides. The dignity of his
simplicity is, I think, marred by those who put in the accessories
which seem thought necessary in all present histories. How few
writers of the present day would not, instead of
This was called to my attention by a distinguished Greek
scholar of this University.
νυξ γαρ επεγενετο
τψ εργψ,
rather write, “Night fell upon this horrid
scene of bloodshed.”
Neither again is it well to write and go over the ground again with the pruning knife, though this fault is better than the other; to take care of the matter, and let the words take care of themselves, is the best safeguard.
To this I shall be answered, “Yes, but is not a diamond cut and polished a more beautiful object than when rough?” I grant it, and more valuable, inasmuch as it has run chance of spoliation in the cutting, but I maintain that the thinking man, the man whose thoughts are great and worth the consideration of others, will “deal in proprieties,” and will from the mine of his thoughts produce ready-cut diamonds, or rather will cut them there spontaneously, ere ever they see the light of day.
There are a few points still which it were well we should consider.
We are all too apt when we sit down to study a subject to have
already formed our opinion, and to weave all matter to the warp of
our preconceived judgment, to fall in with the received
There is no shame in being obliged to others for opinions, the shame
is not being honest enough to acknowledge it: I would have no one
omit to put down a useful thought because it was not his own,
provided it tended to the better expression of his matter, and he
did not conceal its source; let him, however, set out the borrowed
capital to interest. One word more and I have done. With regard to
our subject, the best rule is not to write concerning that about
which we cannot at our present age know anything save by a process
which is commonly called cram: on all such matters there are abler
writers than ourselves; the men, in fact, from whom we cram. Never
let us hunt after a subject, unless we have something which we feel
urged on to say, it is better to say nothing; who are so ridiculous
as those who talk for the sake of talking, save only those who write
for the sake of writing? But there are subjects which all young men
think about. Who can take a walk in our streets and not think? The
most trivial incident has ramifications, to whose guidance if we
surrender our thoughts, we are oft-times led upon a gold mine
unawares, and no man whether old or young is worse for reading the
ingenuous and unaffected statement of a young man’s thoughts. There
are some things in which experience blunts the mental vision,
I am aware that I have digressed from the original purpose of my essay, but I hope for pardon, if, believing the digression to be of more value than the original matter, I have not checked my pen, but let it run on even as my heart directed it.
Cellarius.
This essay was published in the Eagle, Vol. 1, No. 5. in the Easter
Term, 1859. It describes a holiday trip made by Butler in June,
1857, in company with a friend whose name, which was Joseph Green,
Butler Italianised as Giuseppe Verdi. I am permitted by Professor
Bonney to quote a few words from a private letter of his referring
to Butler’s tour: “It was remarkable in the amount of ground
covered and the small sum spent, but still more in the direction
taken in the first part of the tour. Dauphiné was then almost a
Terra Incognita to English or any other travellers.”
[From the
Eagle, Vol. 1, No. 5, Easter Term,
As the vacation is near, and many may find themselves with three weeks’ time on their hand, five-and-twenty pounds in their pockets, and the map of Europe before them, perhaps the following sketch of what can be effected with such money and in such time, may not come amiss to those, who, like ourselves a couple of years ago, are in doubt how to enjoy themselves most effectually after a term’s hard reading.
To some, probably, the tour we decided upon may seem too hurried,
and the fatigue too great for too little profit; still even to these
it may happen that a portion of the following pages may be useful.
Indeed, the tour was scarcely conceived at first in its full extent,
originally we had intended devoting ourselves entirely to the French
architecture of Normandy and Brittany. Then we grew ambitious, and
stretched our imaginations to Paris. Then the longing for a snowy
mountain waxed, and the love of French Gothic waned, and we
determined to explore the French Alps. Then we thought that we must
just step over them and take a peep into Italy, and so, disdaining
to return by the road we had already travelled, we would cut off the
north-west corner of Italy, and cross the Alps again into
Switzerland, where, of course, we must see the cream of what was to
be seen; and then thinking it possible that our three weeks and our
five-and-twenty pounds might be looking foolish, we would return,
via Strasburg to Paris, and so to Cambridge. This plan we
eventually carried into execution, spending not a penny more money,
nor an hour’s more time; and, despite the declarations which met us
on all sides that we could never achieve anything like all we had
intended, I hope to be able to show how we did achieve it, and how
anyone else may do the like if he has a mind. A person with a good
deal of energy might do much more than this; we ourselves had at one
time entertained thoughts of going to Rome for two days, and thence
to Naples, walking over the Monte St. Angelo from Castellamare to
Amalfi (which for my own part I cherish with fond affection, as
being far the most lovely thing that I have ever
Nunc Dimittis, and
I still think it would have been very possible; but, on the whole, such a
journey would not have been so well, for the long tedious road between
Marseilles and Paris would have twice been traversed by us, to say nothing
of the sea journey between Marseilles and Cività Vecchia. However, no more
of what might have been, let us proceed to what was.
If on Tuesday, June 9 [i.e.
The next day we spent in Paris, and of it no account need be given,
save perhaps the reader may be advised to ascend the Arc de
Triomphe, and not to waste his time in looking at Napoleon’s hats
and coats and shoes in the Louvre; to eschew all the picture rooms
save the one with the Murillos, and the great gallery, and to dine
at the Dîners de Paris. If he asks leave to wash his hands before
dining there, he will observe a little astonishment among the
waiters at the barbarian cleanliness of the English, and be shown
into a little room, where a diminutive bowl will be proffered to
him, of which more anon; let him first (as we did) wash or rather
sprinkle his face as best he can, and then we will tell him after
dinner what we generally do with the bowls in question. I forget
how many things they gave us, but I am sure many more than would be
pleasant to read, nor do I remember any circumstance connected with
the dinner, save that on occasion of one of the courses, the waiter
perceiving a little perplexity on my part as to how I should manage
an artichoke served à la française,
feelingly removed my knife and fork from my hand and cut it up himself
into six mouthfuls, returning me the whole with a sigh of gratitude for
the escape of the artichoke from a barbarous and unnatural end; and then
after dinner they brought us little tumblers of warm lavender scent and
water to wash our mouths out, and the little bowls to spit into; but
enough of eating, we must have some more coffee at a café on the
Boulevards, watch the carriages and the people and the dresses and
the sunshine and all the pomps and
It is still dark—as dark, that is, as the midsummer night will
allow it to be, when we are aware that we have entered on a tunnel;
a long tunnel, very long—I fancy there must be high hills above it;
for I remember that some few years ago when I was travelling up from
Marseilles to Paris in midwinter, all the way from Avignon (between
which place and Châlon the railway was not completed), there had
been a dense frozen fog; on neither hand could anything beyond the
road be descried, while every bush and tree was coated with a thick
and steadily increasing fringe of silver hoar-frost, for the night
and day, and half-day that it took us to reach this tunnel, all was
the same—bitter cold dense fog and ever silently increasing hoar-
frost: but on emerging from it, the whole scene was completely
changed; the air was clear, the sun shining brightly, no hoar-frost
and only a few patches of fast melting snow, everything in fact
betokening a thaw of some days’ duration. Another thing I know
café au lait and a huge hunch of bread, get a
miserable wash, compared with which the spittoons of the Dîners de Paris
were luxurious, and return in time to proceed to St. Rambert, whence the
railroad branches off to Grenoble. It is very beautiful between
Lyons and St. Rambert. The mulberry trees show the silkworm to be a
denizen of the country, while the fields are dazzlingly brilliant
with poppies and salvias; on the other side of the Rhône rise high
cloud-capped hills, but towards the Alps we strain our eyes in vain.
At St. Rambert the railroad to Grenoble branches
calèche was preparing to drive us on to
Bourg d’Oisans, a place some six or seven and thirty miles farther on,
and by thirty minutes past three we find ourselves reclining easily within it,
and digesting dinner with the assistance of a little packet, for which we paid
one-and-fourpence at the well-known shop of Mr. Bacon, Market-
square, Cambridge. It is very charming. The air is sweet, warm,
and sunny, there has been bad weather for some days here, but it is
clearing up; the clouds are lifting themselves hour by hour, we are
evidently going to have a pleasant spell of fine weather. The
calèche jolts a little, and the horse is decidedly
shabby, both qua horse and qua harness,
but our moustaches are growing, and our general appearance is in keeping. The
wine was very pleasant at Grenoble, and we have a pound of ripe cherries between
us; so, on the whole, we would not change with his Royal Highness Prince
This we must remind the reader is Thursday night, on Tuesday morning we left London, spent one day in Paris, and are now sleeping among the Alps, sharpish work, but very satisfactory, and a prelude to better things by and by. The next day we made rather a mistake, instead of going straight on to Briançon we went up a valley towards Mont Pelvoux (a mountain nearly 14,00