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 CHAPTER XI

The Sea of the Greenstone—Two Mistakes—Christchurch—Horse-Racing and Gambling—Drunkards' Islands

, across stormy Cook Strait, stretches the five-hundred-mile length of Te Wai-o-Pounamu, "The Sea of the Greenstone,"—The New Munster of early colonial days, the South Island of to-day. Here, in 1770, Captain Cook took possession of New Zealand in the name of King George III. Here Abel Tasman, long before, was deterred from landing by hostile Maoris, and sailed away, leaving behind him a territory that would have made a rich prize for Holland. In old Maahunui are fertile grain-fields, wide and dreary tussock plains, and mountainous chaos. Here, wearing away the beds in which they lie, are the remnants of an ancient icecap that deeply grooved the mountains and piled their debris in drifts from one hundred to a thousand feet deep. Here also are glacier-gouged basins filled by sea and torrential streams where one can sail on mirroring waters from five hundred to more than a thousand feet in depth. In this land are enchanting gorges; alluring forests; unnumbered waterfalls; swift, clear rivers that flow in profound, narrow canyons; and silt-laden rivers that ramble over wide beds of glacial wreckage.

In traveling from Wellington to Lyttelton, the first of