NEW ZEALAND RELATIVES OF THOREAU

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 361, 24 May 1946, Page 14

NEW ZEALAND RELATIVES OF THOREAU

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OME readers will remember that when Dr. H. S. Canby visited New Zealand last year we put some questions to him about Henry David Thoreau. Now he is putting questions to us. He wants to know, as Thoreau’s biographer, if there are any surviving relatives of Thoreau in New Zealand, and if anyone can add to a letter he has received from James Walker, of Auckland, First we reprint the letter: "Sir, "Here are brief details of my acquaintance with the Thoreau family in New Zealand. "In 1907 when travelling from London to New Zealand I met on board ship a Mr. Thoreau, of Timaru, Canterbury, New Zealand. He was returning to New Zealand after leaving his two sisters in London with their two maiden aunts, the Misses Thoreau. He had accompanied his sisters to London after the death of their mother, Mrs. Thoreau, of New Zealand, and he told

me that these aunts and a cousin, Dr, Thoreau, of Harper Street, London, were the only other Thoreaus surviving of the original Channel Island family. Some months later I was invited to spend Christmas at his father’s home at Fairview, Timaru, where I was his guest for some days. "Mr. Philip Edward Thoreau was a gentleman farmer, a man of fine appearance and some dignity. On the death of his uncle years earlier he had been summoned to the Channel Islands, and had come into an inheritance which included many family heirlooms. This relative was the last Thoreau in Jersey. Mr. P. E. Thoreau was then informed by the solicitor of his relationship with Henry D. Thoreau, of Concord, of which he had no prior. knowledge. although he had been in Canada in his youth in the employment of the Hudson Bay Company, at the time when H.D.T. was alive and widely known. "He showed me the collection: of family portraits (paintings) which I

— detail: Mr. and Mrs. Philip Thoreau, his grandfather and grandmother (valued at £500 each); Marie le Gallais, his great-grandmother; his father and mother; his uncle, Judge Lerrier; another uncle, Major Reinon, "There are additional points I learned from him: The Thoreau family hold the first quarterings known. Through the union of the Houses of Leon and Castile the undernoted were the most powerful

San — Spanish nobles- Princes del Toro e Zamona. Also, from entries in the family Bible of Philip Thoreau, of Jersey, Mr. P. E. Thoreau’s grandfather, an uncle of Mr. Thoreau, of New Zealand, was a major in the Spanish. Legion during the Peninsular War. A Thoreau was Archbishop of the Cathedral of Dol. Another Thoreau was the admiral in command of the French fleet attacking Bantry Bay, Ireland. The Prince del Toro e

Zamona (Castile) went to France at the time of the Inquisition. "Mr. P. E. Thoreau, of Timaru, was good enough to autograph my copy of Walden. His father was born in 1813 and died in 1879. Mr. P. E. Thoreau was a second cousin of H. D. Thoreau, of Concord. Their paternal grandparents were brothers. "The son with whom I had travelled became a land and house agent in Timaru. There are several Thoreaus listed in the New Zealand Directory in recent years (all in Timaru)), but the latest issue of the Directory names only one-Mr. Abyn (?) Thoreau, Crescent Point, Timaru, Canterbury. The family portraits and other material may still be in his possession. According to H. S. Salt, Henry D. Thoreau’s grandfather married a Scotch woman. It persists in my mind that she was the daughter of | the Rev. Thomas Burns, a relation of | obert Burns, the Scottish poet. Pronunciation of the name Thoreau by the New Zealand members of the family was Toro (accent on the first syllable). "Yours sincerely,

JAMES WALKER

HAT letter has already appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature and is reprinted in The Listener in the hope that New Zealanders may be moved to communicate with its editor (direct or through us). But Dr. Canby introduced it to his American readers with a romantic reference to Timaru. We quote this in full: "Timaru in Canterbury Province of the South Island of New Zealand is a little red-roofed city close to the bluffs and the sea, and not far from Christchurch, the university centre. I flew over it in June, and if I remember

rightly the green and white surf bids | in front of it on the black sand beaches so characteristic of the South Island. Behind, lie the stretches of the great Canterbury Plain, a checkerboard of farms, and beyond, the foothills, snow | crested when I was there, and still further and higher, the great Alpine chain, ‘the long white cloud,’ as the Maoris called it, with its glaciers and fjords. It was over this mountain barrier thatSamuel Butler climbed to his fabled Erewhon. He knew, of course, that only the Tasman Sea was on the other side, but the setting is perfect for something unknown over the ranges. Butler lived from 1859 to 1864 at a sheep station on the Rangitata River, which is just above Timaru. If a Thoreau was in Timaru at the time, he would surely have known him in a _ country so sparsely settled in the 1860's."