TWO MORE CENTENNIAL SURVEYS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 24, 8 December 1939, Page 19

TWO MORE CENTENNIAL SURVEYS

NAVIGATORS AND EXPLORERS. By J. D. Pascoe. WHALERS AND SEALERS. By D. O. W. Hail. The publication of two more pictorials from Centennial House brings New Zealand history to the stage of organised settlement. "The Beginning" has told the story of the rocks. " The Maori" has recorded the known facts about the arrival of the first humans on the three islands. Now we reach navigation and exploration, and then move on to whalers and _ sealers. Apart from their pictorial excellence the surveys are perhaps most notable as models of condensation. In the bibliography for " Navigators and Explorers " J. D. Pascoe has acknowledged nine books as his sources. In fact, he has probably used ninety, or more, in his research and his checking. D. O. W. Hall must have had even greater difficulty in reducing to coherence the great mass of fact, fiction, and legend that has grown up about the first days of the whalers and sealers. But although such brevity might have meant dull chronicles, with more names and dates than story, each writer has retained narrative interest without sacrifice of accuracy. Pascoe has even managed to add something of his own very personal style to the letterpress for " Navigators and Explorers." In the search for gold he sees Hunt as a will-’o-the-wisp who "fled before the lantern light of his jealous fellows," and Mother Canterbury frowning "at her uncouth child Westland," but lowering the lifted eyebrows when the amazing wealth of the goldfields was . realised. North Island readers may complain that exploration is presented as primarily a South Island story. But in the North Island exploration was almost automatic. War delayed it, but military reconnaissance furthered it. In the South, the quest for new farm lands took the first settlers into the most obvious corners of the eastern country and even, in the case of Butler, as far as a view of Westland’s unlikely gorges; but it was gold that gave the real impetus to carry men through what must then have seemed the near impossible. After the gold and the prospectors came the men of science, and others such as Charles Douglas, who

carried through the most strenuous exe plorations for sheer love of the life. Hall does not exactly make halos for the whalers, but he does absolve them from many of the iniquities that have been heaped on their heads. They are presented as a tough lot, all the same, asking only for oil, and dispensing with etiquette. Three of them, Hall reports, were left on The Snares islands in 1810, with one quart of rice, one pot, and half a bushel of potatoes. When they were taken off in 1817 they had built five houses, taken 1,300 sealskins, and coaxed the potatoes into crops. The relation of whaling to exploration is not Hall’s only interest. His survey also has something about whaling methods, how and where and which whales are caught, and their place in modern industry. The remaining pictorials are to be published singly, at fortnightly intervals. Each, it is clear, will whet appetites for the next, and the whole series must certainly excite interest in the historical surveys to follow in book form.