Ill Manning s ''Old New Zealand' in 



voyage, and the salt still hung about him, and gave 

 him an amount of rough energy, which (with, I 

 suspect, a slight crossing of older blood) enabled 

 him to colonise for a time ; salt enough, at any rate, 

 to prevent his ever wanting any more, he, like the 

 Gaucho, never using that condiment, — 'a simple fact 

 which shows the utter nonsense of the historical 

 ' Dutch torture.' Whence he came is, and I sup- 

 pose ever will be, a disputed point. Somewhere up 

 in the north-east, probably, where the great continent 

 sinks lower and lower into the blue sea, driving off 

 its inhabitants little by little, as the coral reef grows 

 round its descending peaks. 



His manners and customs, his Tapu and his 

 Tangi, and his hundred and one little civilisations, 

 smack of that latitude. He was civilised gentleman 

 enough to give his craft a pretty name, The Arrawa, 

 and in it he brought himself, a trifle of wives, 

 his dog, and a certain mysterious rat with curious 

 peculiarities, which two last he kept most carefully 

 for his own private delectation, and so took possession 

 of what we now call New Zealand some, — what 

 shall we say, six or seven hundred years ago ? 

 Whether he found any human beings there before 

 him is uncertain. If he did not, the first thing 

 which struck him must have been the mighty Moa 

 bird, eight feet high, stalking and picking among 

 the giant ferns, like the grandfather of all Cochin- 

 Chinas. 



A strange bundle of contraries he was when 



z 



