Page:Rambles on the Golden Coast of New Zealand.djvu/73

Rh of Lake M‘Kerrow, and there, on the day on which we landed, we found some remnants of stores which they had left.

There was a wholesome and habitable look about the country in the vicinity of Martin’s and Big Bay’s, which was, to us, quite refreshing after the fatigue our sense of sight had undergone in gazing at the mountains which form almost the sole feature of the scenery further south. It is true that a somewhat deceptive haze hung over parts of the land; but there was enough visible, and there was plenty visible afterwards, to show that there was here a considerable stretch—many thousands of acres—of available country. Not country available, considered from a sheep-breeding, cattle-rearing, point of view, but country a great deal more available, and with an infinitely superior climate, to anything that the Pilgrim Fathers of the New England States, or the settlers of the Canadas ever realised; and these are not bad samples of colonies. For a timbered country it is also, by the qualities of its timber, and the comparatively open character of its bush, evidently superior to many of those parts of the West Coast which the discovery of gold has already populated; and, without getting excited over it, the venture may be made of saying that, while it is quite equal, in merits of its own, to other, and nominally greater, places on the East Coast, it has only to be attached to interior territory, if that is possible, when those greater places would have one other place to compare with them. Wellington, without the Wairarapa, would not be “a patch upon it.” Nelson, without its Wairau, would be as pretty, but no better. The matter to be solved is the possibility of its connection with an incomparably superior place of either of these—the Lake District of the Province of Otago. Those who ought to be some authority on the subject say that the establishment of such a connection is possible, and a considerable number of degrees within the barely possible. It is not a necessary sequence that, in the event of such communication being established, Martin’s Bay should become the outlet for the produce of that district, or the sole inlet of its supplies. But, connected, the one would re-act upon the other, and both would thrive the better in consequence of the connection. The deficiency of the place is its harbour; but even that deficiency is less in degree than is the deficiency of such harbours as the Hokitika or the Grey; and there is the most abundant shelter not far distant, while inside its bar there are facilities for inland communication for twenty-five miles for any steamer capable of entering the river. Of course it is a very important consideration, in comparing it with Hokitika, that there has not been discovered in its neighbourhood an extensive goldfield; but gold has been found, and in payable quantity, which, according to the West Coast estimate, and in such situations, is not a small one. It is the comment of those who have got gold there that it is not worth a man’s while to work for two or three pounds a week, when he has to bring his provisions to himself in a whaleboat hundreds of miles, and to take the chances of being cast upon the beach with nothing to chew but the cud of repentance. What is required, they say, is communication and the presence of a community.

Big Bay, which we first entered, misled by the haze along the shore, although it appears on the chart as a mere indentation of the coast-line, compared with the