ROUND ABOUT NEW ZEALAND

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VII, Issue 112, 11 May 1872, Page 4

ROUND ABOUT NEW ZEALAND

( Continued from the Australasian.) We made Wellington at 7 a.m. next morning, impressed with the fact that each succeeding port worked hard for preeminence in difficult entrances to their harbors, and if I could throw in, say, a couple sandbars, I should put my dollars on Wellington. The weak-back ailments of New Zealand towns prevailed largely in Wellington ; everything seemed on a slope, although when the houses, stores, and hotels met it appeared to me that Wellington carried more actual " go " in it, more business life, than any New Zealand place I had met with. But on cabs I will give Wellington the credit of sustaining the most horrible means of road torture in existence, and the most ancient, to describe which is surprisingly difficult, the sides of the conveyance being built up in small glass windows, the roof slantingdicular, the springs no doubt solid metal, and the face funereal, there can be nothing more done to their cabs to complete one's agony ; a commitment of a day's ride in one would reform the most irrefragable of criminals, the most cheeky larrikin would deliver tracks after a six hours' confinement in a Wellington cab, and I should like to be present with Judge Williams on a circuit tour in one of these cabs and hear him sentencing after ! To the Hutt is the fashionable drive for Wellington, said Hutfc being reached after a serpent twisting kind of wandering on the shores of the charming harbor, and, with the exception of a perfect and living talking-machine in the shape of a barber, Wellington is comfortably done in a day. This barber is the genuine supple-jack merchant of New Zealand, and to return from New Zealand miuus a supple-jack stick nowadays is akin to a crime. It is a perfect treat to hear this man explain the rise and fall of the supplejack interests, no matter how like a mummy you are, that is " pressed for time." This barber is three Figaros in one, and no stranger can leave him save under a load of supples. But Etika ana te hau mo te hokinga atu (there is a fair wind to go back with), and, with spanker up, we are away down the harbor steaming hard and fast, with high ' mountains on every side, and at nightfall sit listening to the wonderful descriptions of the well-known French Pass, a kind of rapids we shall be doing at daylight ere we reach Nelson. I had read of the French Pass scores of times, and as often longed for the opportunity of " doing it ; " therefore it is excusable being found, as I was, half a dozen times on deck during that bright moonlit night, afraid of losing any part of the wild and mystic scenery around. Ere daylight I fixed myself finally near the skipper, and the surprises I received in the way of sailing dodges delighted me. It seemed to my unnautical eye perfectly miraculous the way in which the rubicund John M'Lean steered his vessed. Rocks, lofty and monumental shaped, rearing their rugged sides upon every quarter, starboard or larboord, Scyllas and Charybdises in hundreds, and as daylight, soft, grey, and beautiful, stole o'er the scene, it appeared to me astounding how we got where we ■were in the absence of broad daylight. We lay-to in a kind of amphitheatre, bills and mountains hemming us in, no apparent entrance or exit, and the appearance of three men at the wheel, with the ship calmly resting within some 300 yards of the land, realised the fact that something uncommon was about to happen. We looked like a boat's crew waiting for the signal " off," and we had not long to linger, for in a few minutes the mists and clouds began their morniug ascent of the mountain tracks, and we floated with the curling, twisting Btream of ocean, now narrowed to the width of, say, 400 feet. Looking ahead, it appeared to be the captain's sole anxiety to run clean full tilt a't'the grim rocks guarding the porch of the Pass, but silently and noiselessly we glide into the current, now running fast and faster, until one sess nothing but certain destruction around, for we are broadside on, and within a hundred feet from the hissing, storming cauldron, the roaring and tearing waters under our bulwarks catching the steamer like a chip, and the excitement intensifies as the captain nervously, gaspingly, gives "full speed.",, There is not time for reflection, a few whirrs of , the screw, and we are doing 22 miles an hour, the tide 12 and the engines 10 ; the sight is appalling, for the waters curl whirlpool-like^ and , the lodging of sharp rock could be jumped upon from the bulwarks. l I should give, the French, Pass a very wide berth, ; whpn " Tempests ride o'er the welkin-lashing waves/ if e'er the " unerring hand of fate" fixed, me in command of ships; but, once through the " narrows " ,; I^ confess . to a feeling of free breathing 'and, a.yery deep regard for

the faintest vestige perhaps imaginable found of any vessel losing her head ahoul this Pass, for although the clangers slacken ; when you are through, no one can imagine a more confused writhing and churning aceue than the ocean presents after the squeezing it undergoes here. I believe about 60 miles can be saved by running this rocky gauntlet ; I should imagine the sight is the only one nature ran it so close with without the assistance of earthquakes, and marine insurance agents would lose all the wild rugged charm connected with the spot ; the sight with them would partake of percentages, war ones, high and well divided. The Romans considered they had a good thing on with their seven hills, but the Nelsonians can start Rome with a dozen thrown iv, and then Rome is not in it, for Nelson surely must have been the head emporium for the New Zealand earthquake market ; it is burst up with hills, mountains, and gorges, and viewed from the sea one wonders where the town can stick, or if it is on the summit of the flattest-looking ridge. The echoes in Nelson must be complete bands music; of here when " The village cock Counts the night watches to his feathery dames," one crow ought to last a whole night and be picked up in the morning still on the round of mountainous echo ! They boast a sixteen-foot tide in Nelson. I left the deck of the ste ,mer feet above the wharf, and returning an hour or two afterwards, found it necessary to descend a good d( ,1 to board her, while for miles around we were hemmed in by high land, wondering how we got to the wharf, or what particular bend of land we had sailed over an hour or two previously. The tradesmen, barbers, and others seem full of confidence. They leave their shops and wares unguarded, and watch a stranger with earnestness. One barber's assistant seemed thunderstruck at my enquiry for the shaver, his boss, telling me with simple innocence, that the man of lather was eating, several streets away, his answer reminding me, in its rugged simplicity, of the one got by a colonel who called upon the Duke of Argyll only to find him out. His red-headed porter, however, answering to the colonel's question of "where was the Duke ? " " hees awa at the wattar, weshin himsel." The duke was at Scarborough. To he continued.