Читать книгу Down Under with the Prince - Everard Cotes - Страница 11

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A still, sun-filled autumn morning, with crisp sharp air that made it a pleasure to be alive, on wide, sheltered mother-of-pearl waters, bounded by grassy hills, with frequent hummocks and white gleaming cliffs, greeted the Renown as she neared New Zealand on the morning of the 24th of April, 1920. Dotted over the hills, like sheep at grazing, were numerous red-roofed country houses, which developed pleasant gardens with green fields between as the distance decreased. Out of shadowy bays and inlets crept motor-boats in ones and twos and threes, the numbers growing as township and village each contributed its quota, so that, by the time the Renown was amongst them, there had assembled a fleet of very considerable dimensions decorated with flags and filled with cheerful men, women and children, soldiers in khaki, wounded in hospital blue, pretty girls in smart frocks, all clapping, cheering, and laughing in the most inspiring welcome imaginable.

The Prince climbed to his look-out above the bridge, and waved back a cheery acknowledgment. Bands struck up in half a dozen of the boats. Flags leapt up like wind-swept flowers in a herbaceous harbour. The hubbub grew. Numbers of sailing yachts joined the assemblage. Rowing boats chipped in, and, by the time the first harbour buoy was reached, the Renown was sliding along with some hundreds of small craft racing beside her, in imminent danger of collision alike with her and with one another. The last headland turned, Auckland itself came into view, a red-and-white city climbing up the sides of a beautiful, sheltered cove, with clear, deep water in front, and a green, conical extinct volcano behind. Coloured bunting fluttered from the rigging of all the vessels in port, and long vistas of greenery and flags led up the volcano from the water's edge. One caught glimpses of wide wharves, black with clustering crowds, and of dark masses of people on the slopes of Rangitoto, all on the look-out for the arrival of the Prince from Mother England.

We had arrived at the first of the island continents which had drawn us all, battle-cruiser, Prince and passengers, half-way round the world. The ports of call behind us faded into instructive entertainments by the way. Here was another home of the race, another place in the sun where the breed throve and multiplied, and developed, under conditions fresh and far from the source, the man and womanhood we are proud to call British.

Auckland was an appropriate starting point for the Royal tour. The city was the capital of the Dominion until 1865 and now has over a hundred thousand inhabitants. It was founded in 1840 by Captain Hobson, R.N., when he added New Zealand to the Empire, the British Government having characteristically disavowed the action of Captain Cook who set up the Union Jack in 1779. The place had its godfather in Lord Auckland, the most distinguished First Lord of the Admiralty in Hobson's time, and thus a suitable sponser for the second city of a Dominion which owes its being to the Empire's sea-power. Auckland now has a fine harbour and a shipping trade of 2-1/2 million tons per annum. It is a place to which the prosperous sheep farmer looks forward to retiring, as it has educational opportunities, social amenities, and one of the most genial climates in the whole Dominion.

The Renown was brought alongside one of the wharves, on which black top-hats and brilliant uniforms guided the eye to groups which proved to include the Prime Minister of the country, the Leader of the Opposition, the members of the Cabinet, the General Officer Commanding, the Mayor of Auckland, and the President of the Harbour Board. Thus New Zealand waited to greet the Prince.

At the appointed moment the Governor-General drove up in a motor-car. The ship was dressed. Bands played, guards on the quarter-deck presented arms, His Excellency was duly conducted aboard, where the Prince as duly received him. Later on, with more saluting, a full brass band for the Governor, and bos'n's whistling for the Prince, the Royal party went ashore, and New Zealand welcomed her future King. It was a little bit of England that had gone on board to make a call of ceremony. It was the whole of New Zealand, heart and hand, that took charge of His Royal Highness ashore.

Out of a multitude of motors the procession to Government House was formed. The cars proceeded through wide, well-built streets of stone business houses, smothered in wreaths and flags. Crowds of cheering people lined the pavement. Upstanding soldiers and cadets in smart khaki uniforms kept the roadway. The Prince, by now, was standing on the seat of his motor-car, waving greetings to the crowds, who responded vociferously. Two equerries, on the front seats, clung to his coat-tail to prevent his falling out of the vehicle. The Governor-General sat back with a smiling face alongside. The route led through the city, and out amongst solid residential houses, standing in gardens brilliant with variegated chrysanthemums, flaming red salvias, purple bougainvilleas, and the greenest of shaven lawns, with cedars and palms together spreading the shade of the north and the south.

Old Government House, which still serves an Excellency from Wellington on tour, where the Dominion's address was read by the Hon. Mr. Massey, Prime Minister, with his Cabinet standing by, is a spacious, Georgian building surrounded by an old-world garden of lawns, shrubs and flowers. It has a homely charm and beautiful views; it made one think of Surrey, and must have been left with regret when New Zealand changed her capital. Thence the route led back through the city to the Town Hall, which was packed to its utmost capacity with well-dressed people who gave the Prince a rousing reception. Here more addresses were presented, and an informal levée was held, everybody present filing past. Large crowds, meanwhile, waited patiently outside for his reappearance.

Later in the day the Prince was taken to the Domain cricket-ground, where he reviewed five thousand returned soldiers and cadets and again received an ovation. This cricket-ground is at the bottom of a shallow valley, grassy hills forming a natural amphitheatre. Looked at from the central stand while the review was in progress, the slopes of the amphitheatre were as if covered with a fine Persian carpet, so thick was the crowd upon the ground. It was a carpet that had frequent spasms of agitation, the cheering and hat-slinging, whenever the Prince came near to it, being exceedingly lively. H.R.H. first went down the lines of the troops and had a friendly word for every officer and a number of the men. Later on every man who had been wounded or disabled was presented to him individually, the Prince going round to search them out himself. When this had been completed he presented war decorations to those who had won them at the front. It was nearly dark by the time the last hand had been shaken and the last word said. The cheering, when it was over, was something to remember.

The following day was Anzac Sunday, and was taken up with religious war-services, H.R.H. attending those at St. Mary's Cathedral in the morning, and at the Town Hall in the afternoon. The Town Hall service was especially impressive. The Prince, slender in the world-familiar khaki, stood in the crowded gathering, and as the Dead March was played, and the Last Post sounded in memory of sons who had fallen, the people knew him the Empire's symbol of their sacrifice. Perhaps there, where the women sobbed to see him, he touched the supreme height of his mission.

The cricket-ground, on the following day, was again the scene of an enormous gathering. Eight thousand children were here assembled and went through pretty evolutions and drill. In the terminal figure some two thousand little girls, attired respectively in red, white and blue frocks, so grouped themselves as to form, first the word "Welcome," and afterwards the Union Jack, which waved and rustled as the children bent and swayed to time given by a mite mounted on an eight-foot stool in front. The crowd which surrounded the enclosure, on this occasion, was estimated at thirty thousand.

From Auckland the Prince went south on a train, every part of which, from the engine to the brake-van, had been built in New Zealand workshops.

The first thing one realizes starting for anywhere in New Zealand is the thing that has been a geography wonder since the age of nine, the queer inversion of the climate. The experience is curious, notwithstanding all one's submission to the fact since that time, so potent a governor of associations is a little word. We had arrived at the North Island, where the climate was warm and sunny like that of Italy. People coming with more permanent intentions had a way of settling in the South Island to be under home conditions of temperature, many of them gradually moving across the Strait to the North Island in pursuit of balmier airs. We saw the late autumn apples of April here and there ungathered on the trees about Auckland, and were grateful to escape the imaginative dislocation of a midsummer Christmas, with sunstroke as the punishment of over-indulgence. It would be interesting to know in what period of residence New Zealand undertakes to change one's dreams.

A green, rolling land, homely turnip fields, orchards, pasture containing fine cattle and sheep, pleasant, red-roofed farm-houses, comfortable country residences, and thriving market towns at frequent intervals, sped past the train. At Ngaruawahia, two thousand brown-faced, high-cheekboned Maoris, in European dress, greeted the Prince from outside the railway fence, men, women and children, hand in hand, repeatedly bowing to the ground, to slow rhythmic soft-voiced singing, as the train steamed by. At the same time, a dozen pretty Maori girls, in flowing white frocks, bare feet, and raven masses of waving fillet-bound hair, swayed, undulated and step-danced upon a mat upon the side of the track. These folk were Maori, as often as not, by courtesy rather than by strict racial description. Few pure-bred Maoris indeed are now to be found in New Zealand, and it is said that the mixture of brown and white is here more successful than anywhere else in the world. At all events one received the impression of a people plastic to the print of a new civilization, and developing happily in it.

At Hamilton, a town of ten thousand inhabitants, more formal ceremonies were gone through. The whole place was decorated. The people assembled in the streets, where they cheered most vigorously. Several hundred returned soldiers, and a very large number of children, stood in lines upon the racecourse where they were inspected by the Prince. Several addresses of welcome were read, that from the local municipality being presented by Mayor Watt, a prominent Hamilton solicitor and a man of much influence, also of dramatic instinct it appeared, since he discarded for this occasion the chains and ermine of his official garb, in favour of the private's uniform he had worn at the front.

A few stations further on, five hundred children were upon the platform, singing "God Bless the Prince of Wales," as the train went past. They had come in from a neighbouring mining-camp to catch a glimpse of the Royal visitor, who waved to them from his carriage. The flourishing coal-mining centre of Huntley, where a valuable brown lignite, capable of being coked, is being raised in large quantities from shafts, some of which are only three hundred feet deep, was also passed, the inhabitants assembling along the railway line and cheering as the train went through. A large experimental farm, where the secret of converting barren land into fruitful by means of basic slag has been discovered; cold storage factories where incredible masses of New Zealand mutton are being preserved for export; and extensive works where pumice, here found in the scoria of long-extinct volcanoes, is turned into material for the insulating of boilers, passed in procession before the train. We saw also peat-swamps, in process of profitable reclamation by means of drainage, in the valley of the wide Waikato stream.

Presently a second engine was attached to the train, which now crept slowly upwards, through a tangled wilderness of dense-forested gorge and mountain canyon, the scenery being of the wildest. The imported spruce, oak, willow, and ash of the more settled region gave place to feathery green punga tree-ferns, and stiff brown tawa of indigenous growth. Clearings were seen at intervals where cultivation struggled with the grey, bushy manuka scrub; well-kept fields, in the hands of white settlers, alternating with unkempt jungle, where the easy-going communal hapu tenure of Maori ownership is still in force.

Suddenly, the scenery opened up, and we saw, in the soft rays of the setting sun, a wide panorama of blue lake, and olive-green headland, round the dark, conical Mokoia island, famous in Maori tradition as the trysting-place to which Princess Hinemoa and her lover Tutanekai swam across the lake. Here, almost in the shadow of the Tarawera volcano, which blew up with terrific results to the countryside thirty years ago, we found the pleasant little station of Rotorua, where an address was presented and the Prince shook hands with a long line of returned Maori soldiers.

Visits to the wonderful spouting geysers of this famous neighbourhood, with Maori receptions and national dances, occupied the next two days, some of the party also taking advantage of the holiday to catch a number of very fine lake-trout, creatures which have thriven and multiplied amazingly since their importation from Great Britain a few years ago. The Maori dances are a thing by themselves. They are performed by warriors and maidens in phalanxes. The men, often stout and sometimes elderly, who in ordinary life may be lawyers, landlords, doctors, or retail dealers, put patches of black paint on their faces, array themselves in tassellated pui-pui mat loin-clothes and arm themselves with slender feather-tufted spears. Then, bare-footed, bare-legged, bare-backed, and bare-headed, they line up in battalions, and leap and stamp, stick their tongues out, grimace, slap their knees, emit volleys of sharp barking shouts, and thrust and swing their spears, in wonderful time to the music of full string bands. The ladies, many of them good-looking, with melting brown eyes, well-developed figures, and graceful carriage, are more restrained in their performances. They are bare-headed, with long waving hair down their backs, kept in place by a coloured ribbon round the forehead. They may be dressed in voluminous brown cloaks of soft kiwi feathers, or in loose, embroidered draperies of every colour, their feet and ankles, sometimes bare, sometimes encased in high-heeled American shoes and black lace stockings. They stand or sit in long lines, singing the softest of crooning songs, the while swaying, posturing, undulating, or step-dancing in perfect unison, to represent the movement of paddling, spinning, weaving, swimming, or setting sail. At the same time they swing white poi-balls, the size of oranges, attached to strings, which form in their swift gyrations gauzy circles of light around each hand, a charming performance worthy of Leicester Square.

In the case of Rotorua ceremonies, performances took place, first on the lake shore, on ground which emitted clouds of steam in the very face of the dancers, and afterwards, on a much larger scale, on a wide grassy plain adjoining, where six thousand Maoris, brought from all parts of New Zealand, the South Island as well as the North, were encamped in military bell-tents, a legacy of the war. Here, battalion after battalion, first of men, then of girls, and finally of the two combined, performed in quick succession, at least a thousand dancers taking part, while ten thousand spectators, about half of whom may have been Maoris or half-castes, and the balance Europeans, looked on and applauded. Here I suppose if anywhere we saw the pure-blooded Maori, though it seems a distinction with little difference. Unlike most Orientals, the children of mixed ancestry continue the traditions of the pure-breeds, put on their clothes, speak their language and boast their ancestry. One of the most striking of the figures was where the warriors stole out between ranks of dancing maidens, to take an enemy unawares, who was supposed to have been beguiled into believing that he had only women to deal with. Sir James Carrol and the Hon. Mr. A. T. Ngata, both Maori members of the New Zealand Parliament, and both distinguished speakers, took a prominent part in the ceremonies.

The address presented to the Prince by these loyal and attractive people was characteristically picturesque. It was read, first in English, and afterwards in Maori, by one of the chiefs, an elderly gentleman of reverend appearance in fine Kiwi robe, who spoke in a pleasant, resonant, well-rounded voice. "You bring with you," he said, "memories of our beloved dead. They live again who strove with you on the fields of TU in many lands beyond seas. Your presence there endeared you to the hearts of our warriors. Your brief sojourn here will soften the sorrows of those whose dear ones have followed the setting sun. Royal son of an illustrious line, king that is to be, we are proud that you should carry on the traditions of your race and house. For it is meet that those who sit on high should turn an equal face to humble as to mighty. Walk, therefore, among your own people sure of their hearts, fostering therein the love they bore Queen Victoria and those who came after her. Welcome and farewell. Return in peace without misgivings, bearing to His Majesty the King, and to Her Majesty the Queen, the renewal of the oath we swore to them on this ground a generation ago. The Maori people will be true till death, and so farewell."

The history of the Maoris is one long record of chivalry and courage, and their promise is one they will perform.