# Rambles on the Golden Coast of New Zealand/Chapter 9

THE HOKITIKA AND CHRISTCHURCH ROAD.
CHAPTER IX.
HIS volume will be found to contain seven lithographic views taken from different points on the interesting overland journey from Christchurch to Hokitika. They comprise the Otira Gorge, Bealey Gorge, Arthur’s Pass, Lady Waterfall, Devil’s Punchbowl, and two views of the Avenue on the western side of the ranges.
Tourists may first be informed of the cost of the journey from the Eastern capital overland to the West Coast. The information, as given in the “New Zealand Tourists’ Vade Mecum,” a small handbook to the services of the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand, which also contains a guide to the principal ports of the Colony visited by that Company’s steamers, is as follows:—“Tourists who desire to visit the West Coast of the Middle Island would do well to travel overland from Christchurch, and thus secure the opportunity of driving through the magnificent scenery of the West Coast road, the passage of the Otira Gorge being inexpressibly grand and beautiful in the variety of its effects. Tourists taking this route travel by rail, 7.20 a.m., to Springfield (38 miles); fares—First Class, 5s. 8d.; second class, 3s. 9d.; return (Saturday), 7s. 6d. and 5s., whence on Tuesdays and Fridays coaches depart for Hokitika, Greymouth, Reefton, and Westport. Single fare, to Hokitika and Greymouth, £4, 10s.; return, available for one month, £7.” To this we may add that coaches from the West Coast to Christchurch leave Hokitika every Tuesday and Friday at 5 a.m., taking on Greymouth and Kumara passengers at the latter place at 7 a.m., reaching Christchurch early the following evening, the fares being the same from either end.
The journey from the East to the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand is, in truth, one of surpassing grandeur. It is universally admitted by the most experienced travellers that the road from Canterbury to Westland, presents the most picturesque, gorgeous, and romantic scenery of any part of the world. To quote the words of Mr Thomas Bracken, “Here we have a land, yet fresh from the hand of its Maker, formed in all the wild prodigality of natural beauty. A land of stupendous mountains, roaring cataracts, silvery cascades, fantastic volcanic formations, magnificent landscapes, noble forests, and picturesque lakes,” meeting the tourist at every turn, in a thirty hours’ journey. This West Coast road must be seen to be appreciated and enjoyed. The stupendous grandeur of the scenery in many places is beyond description, and is such as can only be realised by actual vision and experience. I have had the good and bad fortune to have travelled over this new “land of the mountain and the ​flood” in all weathers and seasons. The sublime picture presented in the summer and autumn months when the rata is in full bloom, and the hills are crowned with luxuriant foliage, is not to be surpassed in variety and effect in any country under the sun. Likewise in mid-winter, when the Alpine ranges are clad in their snowy garments, and are “crowned with thousands of fantastic spires, turrets, and battlements towering above deep valleys filled with enormous glaciers,” they carry, in their wild magnificence, a convincing proof of the omnipotence of the world’s Great Architect.
There are two reports of journeys over this road, which have received publicity, and which struck me as furnishing most excellent descriptions of this grand tour and wonderful piece of country. The first is that which was written to a friend by the Rev. Charles Clarke, who made the overland journey to the West Coast in mid-summer of 1878, and the next is that of Mr Julian Thomas, well known to Australian and New Zealand readers as the “Vagabond,” who visited the West Coast about mid-winter of 1883. Both accounts are well worthy of publication in this volume, as they will convey to the traveller the impression formed of the journey, by two able writers, at opposite seasons of the year. It may be explained that the driver of the coach in which the Rev. Mr Clarke travelled was Mr Thomas Power, an experienced whip, and a jovial fellow on the box. The severity of many winters among the ranges has of late told on his constitution, and though a young man, he is now a confirmed victim to rheumatism. “The Vagabond’s” guide with the ribbons was Mr Arthur Davis, the present popular driver on the western side. Mr Cassidy, one of the proprietors of the line, has of late resumed personal charge on the eastern side, and to the credit of the management, it is no less pleasing than it is surprising to be said, that there has been no accident of a serious nature reported in connection with this line of coaches since it was first established.
The Rev. Charles Clarke, starting from Christchurch on a lovely summer morning, thus descants along the way:— “For a long distance there was nothing but a flat plain, more or less under cultivation, but not showing signs of extraordinary agricultural thrift and energy; it had a beauty of its own, for ‘lowing herds wound slowly o’er the lea,’ birds sprang from the dewy pastures, and soared aloft on twinkling wings. The air was fresh and bright, and in the blue the clouds were sailing like summer butterflies. The grass waved, the flowers nodded, the leaves danced, the young corn spread out its emerald spears to the sunshine. The very waters sparkled as if they felt a living joy. The little train jogged along contentedly through the level country, stopping here and there at stations like magnified packing cases, to take a leisurely little drink to slake the thirst of its parched little throat, and then toddled on again to where the ridge of snow-capped hills cut with sharp outline the clear morning sky.” Reaching Porter’s Pass, he proceeds to say:—“Steadily for an hour we climbed up the Pass, down which the coach bowls on its return journey in ten minutes, the road a mere shelf scooped out of the hillside, and zig-zagging on the brink of the precipice in a highly picturesque and nervous fashion.
​The sunny afternoon was very peaceful. Nothing more startling than a cow-bell broke the silence; an occasional change of horses was quite an exciting event, especially when the leaders refused to be ‘hitched up,’ and we began to think, as we nodded on the box, that, like the Vicar of Wakefield, we were living in a state of great comfort, and had neither revolutions to fear, nor fatigue to undergo.
“We were now fairly among the mountains, the road as it wound among the foothills seeming to be blocked up at every turn by the heights that appeared to crowd together for the purpose of gazing at us over one another’s shoulders. Late in the afternoon we opened on a broad sunny valley, and saw on a distant hillside an assemblage of rocks, some grouped like the buildings of a Cyclopoean city deserted by its founders, some standing alone, stern and grim like sentries petrified at their posts; others again looking like the tombs of a colossal graveyard, or the circling seats of a vast amphitheatre; and further still huge groups and solitary masses like the gigantic monoliths of Stonehenge. A wonderful spectacle, overspread as it was with mellow liquid lights, that flooded the hill-tops, lingered lovingly about the savage crags, and even trickled over into their sombre shadows.
“It has grown very cold, and the nipping eager air bites shrewdly.
At the time of Mr Clarke’s visit, the Cass Hotel was the resting place for the night. Now the first day’s journey ends at the Bealey, where there is a comfortable hotel, by the name of the “Glacier Hotel,” kept by Mr James O’Malley. Proceeding from the Cass, Mr Clarke continues:—“After a hearty breakfast we were once again climbing hills, and bumping and crunching across river beds. We rejoiced in our special good fortune in respect of good weather; hundreds of prostrate trees and the scarred hillsides bear impress to the awful rage of the storms which sweep here all the winter long. The track is indicated sometimes by fallen trunks, and sometimes is half obliterated by the ravages of tempests. Now it winds through desolate marshes or wide belts of shingle, cleft here and there by rushing streams which, in wintry storms, or when the melting snow pours from the mountains, join in one mighty roaring torrent that overleaps its banks and sweeps rocks and trees in hideous confusion along its devastating course. After sundry ups and downs we entered the justly famous gorge of ‘The Otira’ (white waters). I cannot pretend to describe in detail this glorious region. It lives in my memory as a succession of forests, mountains, lakes, and waterfalls, as brilliant and fascinating as the most vivid fancy could depict, or the most exacting eye desire.
“There were bold hills covered with luxuriant foliage, the rich trees waving in the transparent air, backed by the white summits of still loftier ranges, upon whose surfaces, delicate and lovely, now monstrous or grotesque, the changeful light wrought itself in a magical variety of contrasted colours. Deep solitary ravines walled in by precipitous cliffs devoid of verdure, and overhanging the dark swift streams that swirl about their ​bases, dismal to the eye and oppressive to the heart. Miles upon miles of road, smooth and well kept as the avenues of an English park, running through a dense undergrowth of stately fern trees and an endless variety of blooming creepers, that, intertwining each with other, formed an impenetrable jungle. The trunks and even the loftiest branches of the huge trees were coated with moss and hung with ferns, and looked like bearded druids, some clasped in the writhing coils of dark-stemmed rata vines, and yielding slowly to the insidious parasites which sap their vitals, while they make gay the surfaces of their life. There were hundreds of delicious chines, any one of which would make the fortune of its owner, could it be transferred to Devonshire or the Isle of Wight, nooks where the sunshine steals in and goes to sleep, and the winds breathe in soft whispers; festooned with trailing ferns and carpeted with fairy mosses, and overhung with dripping boughs that catch a brighter green from the translucent water that from a shelf of rock, 500 ft. above, comes leaping, sparkling, dancing, gurgling, dashing, and performing all the antics with which Southey credits the water that comes down the Lodore. This is the finest cascade in the gorge, and is supplied by an alpine lake lying 3000 ft. above the sea, and called the ‘Devil’s Punchbowl.’
“By-the-by, what a skilful engineer and what a thirsty soul that same Devil must be, or how is it that in so many different parts of the world he should have built so many bridges, dug his trident into so many chasms and passes, and scooped out so many dykes, basins, and punchbowls. If popular nomenclature goes for anything, it seems he has a hand in fashioning some of the boldest and grandest scenery on this planet.
“It is perfectly marvellous to note how Nature, with her two ministers of sun and water, repairs the ravages of the destroyer Man, and takes back her scarred and broken handiwork into her heart again. There was not a log by the wayside, or a cutting for the passage of the road, but every square foot of it was a microscopic study, embroidered with variegated mosses, and fringed with ferns of the rarest and most exquisite workmanship. The very stones were thickly coated with a minute lichen, bright scarlet of colour, and with an odour like violets. Everything bore witness to the ceaseless activity of Nature’s deft and noiseless fingers.
“The scene changed perpetually, and weariness was charmed away as we rattled along the edge of precipices, where
The road was full of sharp turns, round which the horses slipped in the most knowing fashion, the leaders making full tilt at the wall, and coming round with a swing, just as their noses scraped the rock.
“Apropos of horses, the driver assured us at one time that we were being drawn by a team of poets, Byron and Longfellow leading, with Milton and Moore as wheelers. He added that Shakespeare and Tennyson were the regular companions of Milton and ​Byron, but unfortunately Shakespeare (save the mark) was lame, and the Laureate was at grass. Our next team, a fine lot of roans, bore very high-falutin titles—Julius Cæsar, Hannibal, Scipio, and Caius Gracchua. Inasmuch, however, as I heard the driver, in a moment of inadvertence, rebuke the Carthaginian general by the commonplace name of ‘Fred,’ I came to the conclusion that his nomenclature was a pleasant bit of bunkum manufactured for the occasion. More power to him! That coachman must have received a special unction from the father of all blarney, for he fibbed with a natural facility, and sweet imagination, grown quite uncommon in the terribly matter-of-fact days on which our lot is cast.
“Crossing the rivers is a process the reverse of re-assuring to nervous people, though there is really very little danger in ordinary weather, for the fords are carefully watched and sounded, the drivers particularly alert and skilful, and the horses patient, clever, and stanch. I cannot feel, however, that I would ever come to enjoy the sensation of the coach slipping bodily down steep banks, and bumping across wide beds of shingle, every stone of which seems to have a malignant faculty for jolting the vehicle in a contrary direction. Then comes a slow sliding plunge, and the straining horses are girth-deep, and the swirling waters, rushing against the wheels and under-carriage, makes one—in the language of the hymn—cast wistful eyes to the other side of Jordan, and wish to be at home. There is nothing sluggardly about these rivers, at all events, for they absolutely refuse to lie still in their beds, but rise up and shift their quarters upon the slightest provocation; and so far from studying the comfort and safety of the Queen’s lieges, they seem to bubble and chuckle with malicious pleasure, if there appears to be a chance of swallowing up a coachful of unwary passengers. Perhaps it may be an excuse for their fractiousness to remember how often they are crossed by the travelling public. This afternoon we had a curious illustration of their treachery, and of the way in which, after many days, they disgorge their prey. Soon after crossing the Taipo (devil) river, a man on horseback hailed us, and holding up some tattered fragments of paper, said he had found the mail bags which had been swept away on 11th May 1876.
“Evening is drawing on apace, and our journey’s end is near. There, full before us, is the sea. We catch the glitter of the crested surf, though its roar is inaudible at this distance. The sun is peering over the farthest verge of the level plain of waters, staining the deep with crimson, and lighting with a rosy glow the peaks of the enchanted region through which we have so lately passed. This soon fades, and as
“‘The Star of Evening
Melts and trembles, though the purple
Hangs suspended in the twilight,’
they stand out against the daffodil sky, glimmering with pale greenish hues; and as we rattle into the town, we can see them wrapped about their breasts with clinging mists, hooded with sombre clouds, silent, dark menacing—solemnity itself.
“I cannot express the enjoyment this trip has given me. It is a delightful compensation ​for my laborious life, that carries me through scenes whose beauty will dwell in my memory for ever.”
Arriving in Westland, Mr Clarke concluded by saying, “The people are warmhearted, free-handed, and intelligent, and have crowded to my lectures in an astonishing fashion. Everywhere I have had a cordial welcome, and substantial tokens of their appreciation.”
“The Vagabond” visited the West Coast in the month of July 1883, as “special” for the Australasian newspaper. His communications appeared under the head of “Round About New Zealand.” His start from Christchurch and his experiences to the summit of Porter’s Pass are narrated as follows:—“My last day in Christchurch it blows great guns, and snow and hail and sleet complete my discomfort. Kind friends sympathise with me on the journey I am about to undertake, and urge me to tarry. Willingly I would do so. I long to see more of Christchurch and its people, but a warrior of the press must onward. This must not be my Capua; Rome on the West Coast awaits me; the passage of the Southern Alps and the Otira Gorge is before me. They pity me, these kind friends, and advise me to lay in a stock of blankets for the journey. I compromise by buying a woollen scarf of the most striking combination of hideous colours. But I confess I do not like it, as I sit up late in the comfortable smoking room listening to the howling of the wind. My only companion is the supremely ugly, and, therefore, of his kind, consummately beautiful, English bulldog Baby, who sits on another chair, and listens with the greatest attention to a case of international copyright which I read from the Albany Law Journal. Baby criticises this by licking his jaws and whining ferociously, as who would say, ‘Let me at these publishers, and they shall feel my opinion.’ I shall always remember Baby’s sympathy with pleasure. It is a cold frosty morning when I leave the house of the genial Coker for an early start by the train at 8 a.m. In the cars one’s idea is to coil up as warm as possible, and go to sleep. But 14 miles away on the south line one has to change at Rolleston Junction, and as I have no desire to be carried back to Dunedin, I must perforce keep awake. When I get into the local train, I find two other passengers. I eye them suspiciously, as they do me. Are they going overland, and will there be a contest for the box seat? We are going west now onward across the Canterbury plains to the Southern Alps, the snow on which lies low, showing the severity of the weather. Cultivated fields and English grass paddocks on each side. Smart settlements, with churches and schools. There is a junction to White Cliff, where there is coal. Next comes the township of Sheffield, rather a misnomer in an agricultural country. Then we arrive at Springfield, forty-three miles from Christchurch, and the terminus of the line. Here we have an early dinner at noon, before taking the five-horse coach over the first stage of the journey to the West Coast.
“The half hour that we wait Mr Cassidy utilises by showing me his horses and dogs. Both are warmly clothed. To see the greyhounds running about in thick coats is a sign I am in a country where there is a winter. The mayor and principal citizens interview ​me and ask me to drink, to which, bearing in mind the journey I have before me, I assent. Besides, I remember what an unknown Western poet said:—
“’You see, it was the custom then To shoot as quick as wink,
If any man should dare say “No!” When axed to take a drink.
“’But folks out thar was posted up In all them social laws; And very few was ever shot For that particular cause.’
I hope I shall never ‘die in my boots’ for refusing what down South we styled ‘the courtesies customary amongst gentlemen.’ I am on the road to the unknown (to me) West Coast. Wild and lawless in the old days by repute; a country of rough miners, quick, perchance, to take offence. I will give them no cause for such, but will obey their ‘social laws,’ and sacrifice my principles and my liver by imbibing their fusel when called upon! We start in triumph amidst the cheers of the whole population of Springfield. The departure and arrival of the bi-weekly coach is an event to them. We bowl along a good road, with a gradual ascent. All the way from Christchurch the rise has also been gradual, so the mountains do not look so high. The snow is lying about in patches. There is no bush, and the brown tussock grass has a dismal look, reminding me of the hills round the Clutha. A few miles out and we are at the bottom of a very steep incline, the road winding round the face of the mountain before us. Then the pleasant driver halts and seductively asks, ‘Will any of you gentlemen like to walk up here?’ I do not know why it is that I have not moral courage to refuse. I have paid £4, 10s., the fare from Springfield to Hokitika, and now I am asked to walk up the hardest pinch! However, as they all alight, I do likewise. ‘I shall be at the top waiting for you,’ says our Jehu, and he gallops his horses round the mountain, while we take the short cut by the old road through ‘Porter’s Pass,’ the only practicable route discovered from the Canterbury Plains.
“A winding road through a narrow deep gorge. Nothing on the hillsides but snow patches and tussock. The mountain in many places casts a heavy shadow—the sun’s rays do not reach us. The road is frost-bound. The streams which in summer would be babbling and breaking into a thousand ripples, are now sealed in the sleep of winter. Great icicles hang down from the banks. The path is covered with frozen snow and ice. The cold would be intense but that the hard exercise warms me. I am fain after a time to take off my thick coat and rest on a clump of hard grass. . . . It is a hard and stiff pull, indeed, of a mile and a-half, till we join the coach again, which has to go some twice the distance. We must have ascended 1500 ft. to 2000 ft. in a very short time, as we are now at the summit of Porter’s Pass, 3400 ft. above the level of the sea. Close by is the highest telegraph pole in New Zealand. After this feat of walking over the pass I begin to think I shall yet be fit to ascend Mount Cook. The Excelsior spirit grows on one! ​Still I am glad to mount the box-seat once more, and muffle myself up from the keen breeze which comes from the west.
“I think that this is a good case for a modern Mark Tapley, and I begin to wish that I had imitated Anthony Trollope, who never made this journey, but wrote his charming account from the descriptions given him by the warriors at Christchurch. Is it for this that I have come many miles to see the Otira Gorge? I dose, and fancy myself a glacier, and awake with my intellects frozen. The cold has increased, and there is six inches of snow on the ground. We are now at the top of the saddle of ‘Arthur’s Pass,’ 3200 ft. high. Here is the division of the eastern and western watersheds, and of Canterbury and Westland. The sun rises. It is somewhere there behind the clouds. There is light, and the snow ceases a little. ‘We go down 1500 ft. in a very short time,’ says Davis. The brakes are hard down, and then full speed ahead. Below us is one great sea of fog and mist, into which we appear plunging. Down, and down at full gallop. We turn round sharp corners, which, with the certainty of what would happen if anything broke, makes the nervous shiver. There is a ‘Devil’s Elbow’ in the beautiful drive over the hills from Adelaide. There are a dozen Devil's Elbows here. Down, and down. I have seen nothing like it but the Guyger Grade. All the while the cheery voice of Arthur Davis—gift of his Cambrian ancestors—rings out cheerily. It is contagious. I toss the stump of my cigar over the cliff—the bottom a thousand feet below. No matter Jadis les rois, I burst out, when a great snowflake sweeps down my throat, and nearly chokes me. ‘Hurrah! Come up, my beauties,’ yells Davis, as he turns the coach round a corner which seems something like the apex of the pon asinoirum. We are over the saddle of Arthur’s Pass, and in the eastern end of the Otira Gorge.”
Then the much-travelled “Vagabond” is fairly taken aback at the grandeur of the scenery at this particular point, and proceeds to give the following graphic description:—“Now the dawn breaks fully, and I am fully rewarded for all my trouble and the petty trials endured. Now I experience the culmination of all the beauties I have seen in New Zealand—of all the beauties I have seen under the Southern Cross. Never to be effaced from my memory a sight worth a journey over land and sea—worth a voyage from the old world—worth hardships and discomforts—worth a king’s ransom—and yet which is within ten days of Melbourne or Sydney, and can be enjoyed for a trifling cost. New Zealand is a country of surprises in the beautiful; the southern and northern lake districts have each their admirers; but none can say they know this country thoroughly till they have been this drive to the West Coast. Finis coronat opus.
“This is the narrowest of passes; the Otira is a rapid stream, dashing over a rocky bed, whilst the mountains arise on each side thousands of feet above us, clothed everywhere with foliage which crowns the beauty of form and outline, giving light and colour to what otherwise would be like the Kawararu Gorge—grand but terrible. The character of the flora is changed, now that we are on the western slope; no longer the birch, with its sombre green, but red and white pines, giant fuschia trees, the rata and ​veronica. In summer time, tier upon tier of scarlet bands—a blaze of brilliant colour—relieved by a variety of shades of green from a thousand species of ferns and creepers. Nature has run riot here! The road is but a shelf along the ridge, mostly cut out of the solid rock which hangs overhead. In places it has to be built out, the timbers being bolted into the rocks. We overhang the torrent below whilst our three leaders turn the corners in front, chaffing their harness against the boulders as they pass. In summer, how lovely! But now? Years ago, at some pantomime in London or Paris, I saw ‘The Home of the Snow Queen’—a scene-painter’s dream, an idyll of canvas, lime light, and mechanism, which from boyish days remained fixed on my memory. It is here reproduced in nature in the Otira Gorge. The driven snow has covered everything with virgin purity. Every bow of the pine, each leaf on the rata is traced in white. Every creeper trailing from the trees is a delicate festoon of snow. The great fronds of the giant ferns bend beneath the weight of the flakes which cover them; they are a thousand times more lovely than in their spring verdancy. It is a supremely beautiful sight, one which the driver says he has seldom seen. It is fairyland itself! Cascades tumble down the rocks into Otira, whose living crystals are only equalled by the great icicles which overhang the road; sheets of ice cover the hillsides. Every turn brings a different beauty of form as we gallop along for four miles. Everything is pure and chaste as the heaven from which we tell children the snow falls.
“A fearsome journey this. We are shown many places where teams have been over the side of the road. But no accident has ever happened to the coach. The horses are trained like those of a circus, and the driver is the perfection of human forethought. At half-past seven we arrive at the end of the Gorge, and halt at an accommodation house for breakfast. The first thing is to clean the coach from snow. I am in a regular bank, and have to be dug out. The driver’s fur cap and beard are all frozen into one. He would serve as a good portrait of old Father Christmas. There are five bonnie young girls, rosy and healthy, at this place. The cold agrees with them. It has also given us a good appetite. On again, across the Otira, and over many mountain streams, which have suspension footbridges at the fords. In spring time, when the thaws take place, these torrents are often impassable for weeks. Through the fairy snow forest for miles until we strike the banks of the Teremakau, when suddenly the scene changes—everything is green instead of white. We are below the level of the snowfall, which is replaced by a soft rain. A long stretch of beautiful road called the Avenue is before us. There is a wonderful difference between the vegetation on the east and west coasts of New Zealand. It is the same as noticed on the west coast of North America, a luxuriance of Nature due to the heavy rainfall. Here there are great trees, giant ferns, which look like palms, lianas hanging from bough to bough, deep mossy carpets underneath, a thousand rills of water gurgling on each hand—it is tropical in the profusion of vegetable life. The forest meets overhead, and the road seems strangely familiar. It is the route from Fonwhari to La Foa. I wonder if Captain Rathonis, A.D.C., remembers the day when we rode thither, and our horses’ hoofs rattled amongst the skulls of the dead convicts. The telegraph wire ​completes the resemblance to New Caledonia; did not the rebel Canaques cut it down there, and use it in making the stockades, which Messrs E. and J. O’Donahue and myself discovered on our retreat from Oua Tom? Again, the road changes to a vista, which one may have often seen in the home woods of an English park, a drive for pheasants and foxes. I have Stoneleigh in my mind's eye when I see this. Anon, it is a scene in British Columbia. I pass through a dozen climates to-day, besides Fairyland in the Gorge. Everywhere it is beautiful, and if it is so in the winter, what is it in its summer glory? I repeat it is the culmination of all the beauties I have seen, and the traveller who fails to make the journey to the West Coast misses the grandest sight of its kind in the world.
“On we go by the side of the Teremakau, whose channel is broad and vague, but flood limits defined by high wooded banks. We pass a few scattered homesteads, a few patches of cultivation with fences of living fern tree; a few head of cattle are seen running in the bush; a saw-mill or two show we are approaching civilisation. We are nearing the mining districts of Westland, the province which separated itself from Canterbury in 1867, and whose history since the discovery of gold in 1864 has shown Homeric strivings with the forces of nature unsurpassed in the world. It must be remembered that a large portion of the Southern Alps is yet unexplored. ‘It will never be known how many men have perished in these wild mountains and rivers, without a fellow-creature near, or any witness of their fate, but the lofty rocks and towering pine trees. Thousands came to this district year by year in pursuit of wealth, forsaking the comfort of their homes, to lead a life of wild excitement, ending in madness or death, or to perish alone in desolate places.’ But the early gold seeker formed a province, in the second decade they married and settled, as witness the scores of children who run out and cheer us at Dillman’s Town, the first mining settlement we pass through. Here I could imagine myself once more in parts of California or Nevada. Great flumes run across the road. Races, tail-races, sluice-boxes, sludge-channels—everything as one sees it on the Pacific coast. The hillsides have been washed away by water brought to bear through great hoses. The great heaps of stones are covered with a light red fungus, which gives forth a faint perfume. Everything is totally different to an Australian mining centre. Dillman’s Town itself is not very extensive, and the architecture is of the primal digger order, every house having an iron chimney built outside. But the glimpses of reaches of the Teremakau River with its pine-clad banks are very beautiful, and the generally well-fed and well-clad air of the children shows that Dillman’s is a prosperous community.
Speaking of Mr Arthur Davis, the driver of Cobb & Co.’s coach between the Bealey and Hokitika, “The Vagabond” says:—“Over the singles where there is no defined road, our driver takes us without the slighest hesitation. Night seems to him all the same as day. Suddenly the snow begins to fall, and it freezes as it falls. Such cold I have, perhaps, felt before, but it seems like a dream. Snow, snow, snow, it falls, all around us; it fills every corner in our rugs and clothing. We are snowed up behind and before. We can hardly see the leaders. The flakes come in heavy drifts striking in our faces, stinging and blinding. Up the hillsides, along the banks of the Bealey river by a perilous track, the danger of which we cannot see, high mountains above us, the gorge beneath us. For myself, I am one mass of icy snow, a frozen witness. Everything is white and chilly looking. Yet all the while Arthur Davis sings cheerily and encourages his horses; he seems perfectly happy and doesn’t swear. A real ‘gilt-edged driver’ this. Of all the whips by whom I have sat in the colonies, he is the best. He ‘takes the cake.’ The other day Davis drove 150 miles in 23 hours without any rest, and then came in fresh and smiling. It is indeed true of him, ‘a merry heart goes all the day; a sad heart dies in a mile.’”
Though somewhat apart from the subject of this chapter, we feel constrained to give “The Vagabond’s” first impression of the West Coast, its climate, and its people. He proceeds:—“We are in another climate. The mildness of the air is charming after the cold of Otago and the ranges. A lovely place this Hokitika. The long stretch of surf-bound shore, crested billows everywhere save the entrance to the harbour in the Hokitika River, the town backed by the primeval forest, not like the Australian bush, but varying in colour and shade; far beyond is the range of the Alps towering to the skies, culminating in the monarch of New Zealand, Mount Cook. How lovely, how grand this looks in the clear atmosphere! And how surprising is this same clearness after the fogs and mist I have experienced around Wakitipu and Wanaka. I have an idea that, after all, this West Coast is the place to come for scenery. Mr Mueller, the chief surveyor, who is courtesy itself to me, points out on the map how Mount Cook can be reached in one day’s journey from the sea, and he shows also the routes to the ‘Franz Joseph’ and other grand glaciers, which are miles in length, and which contain caverns ​of beauty which the painter has never dreamed of, and in which adventurous travellers have encamped. What a fool I was to waste my time around the southern lakes! This evidently is the point of departure of the seeker of the sublime in nature. I am very much disappointed that I did not know of these things before. I am amongst a grand people now—open-hearted, hospitable, spontaneous.”
Mr Falconer Larkworthy, Managing Director of the Bank of New Zealand in London, in a well-written pamphlet published in 1881, entitled “New Zealand Revisited,” dwells at some length upon the beauties of the scenery of the West Coast. Writing of his trip from Christchurch to Hokitika, he says:—“The Alps in the Middle Island, 400 miles in length, resemble the Swiss Alps only in name, as their slopes are clothed with luxuriant vegetation, often to the snow level, and their shapes have a picturesqueness and individuality of their own, owing to their crystalline formation as against the great conglomerate beds of the Miocene formation of portions of the Swiss Alps.
“The Otira Gorge, through which the road passes from the East to the West Coast over this Alpine range, forms a tract of the most enchanting scenery in the Colony, not to be equalled by anything of a similar kind I have yet seen in any part of the world.”