298 SIGHT-SEEING IN NEW ZEALAND. 



But New Zealand, separated from Australia, the nearest land, 

 by twelve hundred miles of stormy ocean, was still more back- 

 ward in the race of life. Fern brakes and lycopod mosses covered 

 the whole country that was not forest. Grass palms, tall tree- 

 ferns, and impenetrable jungles of evergreen trees, loaded down 

 with orchids, climbing ferns, lianas, and every kind of parasitic 

 growths, silent and gloomy from the almost total absence of 

 animal life, formed its forest scenery. A few species of the 

 apteryx (the kiwis) and the giant moas, birds without a trace of 

 wings, constituted the land fauna of this desolate country. There 

 were absolutely no quadrupeds, no mammalia, and no reptiles 

 except a few lizards, that were indigenous to the islands. 



A race of Malay Indians, nearest akin to the Sandwich Island- 

 ers, had in quite recent years found its way to these shores, 

 bringing with them some dogs and rats, the sweet potato and the 

 taro, the root from which the Sandwich Islanders make their 

 "poi." Here was a race of men, a product of the most recent 

 of the geological eras, stranded on a half developed relic of the 

 old Carboniferous period, that did not produce a spear of grain, 

 or an herb, or a tuber, or a fruit, or any vegetable that was really 

 fit for a man to eat. I suppose it was about the hardest conditi- 

 ons in the way of getting a living that a colony of emigrants 

 ever found itself in. Until the dogs and rats and roots which 

 they brought had increased sufficiently to be levied upon, they 

 found almost their sole food in the roots of the common fern- 

 brake, the Pteris esculenta, and in what they could catch of the 

 great running birds which they found there in large abundance. 



At the time when they were first brought to the notice of 

 Europeans by Capt. Cook, a little over a hundred years ago, they 

 had eaten up all the moas on the islands, and had begun to eat 

 up each other, in sheer necessity for fresh meat, as they always 

 claimed. The Maoris (pronounced Mouries) were unquestion- 

 ably a race of cannibals; and until about forty years ago, no 

 white man who set any value on a decent funeral cared much to 

 go among them. I have seen many an old tattooed chief who, 

 they said, had eaten his man. I saw at Ohinemutu a still linger- 

 ing relic of an aged chieftain. He had been a powerful warrior 



