Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTMBER 20, 1930. ANIMAL COLONISTS

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 71, 20 September 1930, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTMBER 20, 1930. ANIMAL COLONISTS

In an address which was transmitted on the 30th July by the British Broadcasting Company to, perhaps, 10,000,000 of what'was described yesterday as its "potential audience of 15,000,000 listeners," Mr. J. H. Thomas brought imagination, humour, and a wide range of official information to his survey of a little regarded aspect of Imperial migration.

You can have no idea of the romance of Empire, he said, until you come to know that men and women, are only one Hnd of i emigrant. The British lands oversea have been built up by animals and plants that have arrived there no less as strangers than did the settlers who tended and cultivated them. There is scarcely a single important crop or herd or flock in the Empire that was not brought ia ( ships to its present home. ■

What New Zealand owes to her flocks and herds is brought home to the least imaginative of our town-dwell-ers at a time when the depression of our pastoral industries troubles rich and poor alike and shakes the very basis of public and private finance. But, as with the animals, so with the plants. This little country, like the rest of the Empire, is dependent for many of the things which we have learned to regard as necessaries on the kind of migration to which the Secretary for the A Dominions invites our attention.

When we drink Indian or Ceylon tea, Mr. Thomas asks us to remember that "that huge industry is based on an emigrant plant." Rubber, which was introduced to the knowledge of Europe when Columbus-was "astonished to see the native Indians amusing themselves with a black, heavy ball made from a vegetable gum," and derives its name from its commercial use three centuries later for rubbing out Jead-pencil marks,has been transformed by the development of the motor-car into one of the essentials of civilisation. Mr. Thomas reminds us that the rubber trees which have made British Malaya the world's chief source of the supply- were first introduced within living memory. Cocoa, of which the Gold Coast in British West Africa contributes a large supply, "did not grow there until /it was brought in to displace die jungle." The prosperity which cocoa has brought to the Gold Coast and its reciprocal effects upon British industry are well described by Mr. Thomas.

Native peasant proprietors now get rich on it and spend hundreds of thousands of pounds a year on buying from our British factories. Let me "ivc you, here, a most remarkable compai 3un. What "the Gold Coast has bought from us in the last four years is actually eight times the amount of her purchases in the last four years of the nineteenth century. A jump in trade of 800 per cent, in thirty years —all done on a single emigrant plant— should encourage us to bo hopeful of future Empire development.

A reference to Canadian and Aus-ir-'-m wheat, South African oranges anu vines, British West India sugar and bananas, Kenya coffee, Uganda cotton, and Rhodesian tobacco as "all settlers from other lands" completes Mr. Thomas's treatment of this branch of his subject. It must surely be admitted that this Labour Secretary of State shows himself just as alert to the possibilities of the nonfiscal possibilities of oversea trade as any of his predecessors. Returning to the.animal colonisers of the Empire, Mr. Thomas makes a suggestion of peculiar interest to New Zealanders.

I sometimes think, he says, tTiat^ a new -wing should be added to our picture gallery of Empire builders. In that gallery we should 'find a great oil painting o£ the first sheep, released from its cramped quarters on board ship, stretching its legs _on dry land again, and nibbling delightedly the island pastures of New Zealand. Until something along these lines is done we human beings will have to plead guilty, when we talk about Empire building, of claiming too much for ourselves and not giving credit where it is due to our animal and vegetablo allies.

Mr. Thomas's picture of the first sheep released in this country stretching its cramped legs and enjoying a square green meal again after so many months of misery does credit to his heart and his imagination, hut unfortunately it does not fit the facts. It was Cook who landed the first sheep in this country on the 27th March, 1773, the day after his

arrival in Dusky Sound on his second voyage. The Resolution had been 117 days at sea, and the human travellers were able to enjoy "the fine stream of fresh water" which fell into the sea about a hundred yards from the vessel's stern, and other things which "in their situation might be called the luxuries of life." But what was for them a happy release brought no happiness to their four-footed companions.

The- few sheep and goats they had left were not likely to fare well, there being no grass there bnt what was coarse and harsh. It was expected, however, that they would devour it with great greediness, but they wore sm'prised to find that they would not taste it. Upon examination, they found their teeth loose, and many of them had, every other symptom of an inveterate sea scurvy. Out of four ewes and two rams, which Captain Cook brought from tho Cape, with an intent to put ashore in this country, ho had only been able to preserve one of each; and even these were in so bad a state that it was doubtful if they could recover, notwithstanding all the care possible had been taken of them.

Cook, who had brought his men 10,000 miles with but a single case of scurvy, "occasioned chiefly by a bad habit of body and a complication of other disorders," and not fatal—quite a miracle for those days —had evidently not considered that his stock needed the same kind of protection as his men. Yet the two sheep which he brought up from Dusky Sound to give them a better chance in Queen Charlotte's appear to have perished there, not from scurvy or exhaustion, but from eat-! ing tutu. fe ■ |

On the 22nd [May], in the morning, he writes, the ewe and ram I had with so much care and trouble brought to this place, were both found dead; occasioned, as was supposed, by eating some poisonous plaut. Thus my hopes of stocking this country with a breed, of sheep were blasted in a moment.

So far, therefore, as our pioneer sheep are concerned, Mr. Thomas's happy picture would have no foundation in fact, but that, of course, does not mean that a painter would not be free to indulge his imagination and to follow Mr. Thomas's lead rather than Captain Cook's.

It might, however, be desirable for him to stop short of that audacity of licence which enabled an 18th century poetess to give us her superb picture of Captain Cook scattering from his cornucopia every circumstance of Arcadian bliss all over the Pacific:— To these the Hero leads his living store, And pours new wonders on th' uncultured shore; The silky fleece, fair fruit, and golden grain; ; And future herds and harvests Mess the plain; O'er the green soil his Kids exulting play, And sounds his clarion lond the bird of day; The downy Goose her ruffled bosom laves, Trims her white wing, and wantons in the waves; ' , Stern moves the Bull along th' affrighted shores, And countless nations tremble as he roars. To avoid misconstruction, it may be as well to say that the reference to the exulting play of Captain Cook's "Kids" has no relation to those scandals which Sir Joseph Carruthers has recently refuted. And the mention of the "downy Goose" laving her ruffled bosom reminds us to. add it was Miss Anna Seward, "the Swan of Lichfield," who unloaded her bosom of this perilous stuff. If the rest of the "Poetical Works" which in 1310 Sir Walter Scott thought good enough to edit have perished, these ten lines surely deserve a better fate.