MAN of the MOUNTAINS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 6

MAN of the MOUNTAINS

"7 YING in a Camp all day with no one to talk to... 1 often ask myself in amazement what impulse drives me into the Wilds. Had I remained at home in the Old Country, I might now have been the respectable Father of a family, passing the same Lampost-on the -sad to office-the exact same minute day after day, per- ~ haps even standing at the Church Plate on a Sunday with a benevolent smile & a White choker. A comfortably situated old Foggy. A tooth in a Wheel of a Mercantile machine a perambulating Ink bottle, Ledger & blooting pad, with just sufficient thinking powers & education to gabble on the topics of the day, but with my Reasoning’ powers completely dormant. But such a life was not for me... as here I am after thirty years wandering, crouched under a few yards of Calico, with the rain pouring & the Wind & Thunder roaring among the mountains a homeless friendless, Vagabond, with a past that looks dreary & a future still more so, still I can’t regret having followed such a lifesand I know that even if I & thousands besides me perish miserably the impulse which impells them to search the Wild places of the Earth is good, one or two are bound to add something to the Worlds stock of Knowledge while so doing, & even a small gtain of Knowledge is cheaply purchased at the expense of a thousand ordinary lives." More than six decades have passed Since these words were written, and their author is still perhaps the least known of New Zealand’s explorers, When Charles Edward Douglas died (in 1916) his death caused little comment in a world preoccupied with the wicer concerns of war. Yet it marked the end of an era-the great era of Westland pioneering and exploration. Douglas, or Mr Explorer Douglas, as the Lands and Survey officially called him, devoted his life to the exploration of his adopted country, but it was not an

ordinary life, and the recent publication of his life and writings* may help to prove that when Scotland lost a bank clerk New Zealand gained one of the greatest of her explorers. Charles Douglas was born on July 1, 1840, at Edinburgh, son of James Douglas and Martha Brook, and educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh. Of this school, John Pascoe comments that it was "a bottleneck for many of the good young brains of Scotland. As a source of culture its influence was profound." Many famous men were former pupils of the school: Sir Walter Scott, George Borrow, James Boswell, Alexander Graham Bell, and (linking it with New Zealand) men like Captain Cargill, Superintendent of Otago Province in the fifties, and W. D.

Murison, an early editor of the Otago Daily Times: Some of the masters passed into literary and other history: Allan Masterton and Willie Nicol who, in 1789, drank whisky with Robert Burns-‘"‘O Willie brewed a peck o’ maut, And Rob and Allan cam to -see," which Allan set to music. Perhaps Charles Douglas sang in the Okarito Hotel the chorus: "We are na’ fou, we're nae, that fou, But just a drappie in our e’e!’ Some time after leaving school [Boveies joined the Commercial Bank of Scotland as an apprentice. The bank was almost a family affair, as Charles’s three brothers all spent time in the same career. His eldest brother, who became Sir William Fettes Douglas and President. of the Royal Scottish Academy, had ten years in the Commercial Bank before leaving to become a

. professional artist. Charles spent only half ‘that time there, and December, 1862, found him landing at Port Chalmers in the immigrant ship Pladda. Unknown arrivals such as Douglas would learn in that open and rugged country how to look after themselves; to use their ingenuity at improvising, and their sinews to survive natural hazard$. What the young Scot did not know about hill and mountain country he would quickly have discovered in the wilds of North-west Otago, And he was soon to change this land of sun and wide spaces for an environment of a different character. Sometime after the middle sixties he went to the West Coast and stayed there till his death. Douglas mentions the Shotover in his writings, and it was to another place famous in mining history that he made his way from Otago. For it was at Okarito that Douglas began his career in South Westland..He later was to write, "This town is situated at the mouth of the river, and is strictly speaking a seaport town, depending for its existence on the diggings; as they declined so did Okarito, and now it only has two pubs, a store, gaol & a monthly magistrate. The few cityzens spend their time shouting for each other, and talking about the good old times never to return. . ." He also defined three eras of progress for the ordinary digging township: "First the calico, sardine tin, and broken bottle era. Second the weather board, and sheet iron .period. Third the borough. Some never get beyond the first, a few reach the second, and still fewer the third." Okarito in the early sixties. however, skipped the calico period, for it "sprung into the weatherboard era all at once. In those days [wrote Douglas] it was entirely a public house town with a resident Warden, and a staff of Police to maintain order, a Survey and Custom house, harbour master, and a remarkably rowdy class of inhabitants and visitors. It made qa desperate effort to reach the borough stage but ignomenously failed. A town council was elected who at once started to tax the cityzens, but as they had no power to do so, no one was fool enough to pay, so as there were no funds even for councillors beer it was judged best to retire. . ." Before becoming a full-time explorer, Douglas worked at a variety of jobs:

packing supplies in to miners, stock droving, mining-even a stint as farmer and ferryman. From 1868, when Douglas accompanied Julius Haast on a journey south down the coast, twenty years were to pass before the ranges claimed him completely, All this time, however, he was increasing his knowledge of Westland-the bush, the birds, the mountains and rivers; learning to identify minerals and geological formations, and to use survey instruments to make a record of the country he traversed. To understand the difficulties and the accomplishments of exploration made by Douglas [writes Mr Pascoe] it is important to realise what kind of country he faced in its primeval state for nearly forty years. . . South Westland was the Jand of rain-forest and flooded rivers,:of sudden and ferocious gorges,’ of unexpected and pleasant grass flats, of tumbled blue ice and untidy upheaved rock moraines, and of rugged, nearly harbourless coasts. Above all these, there rose the proud sentinels; reat mountains whose summits had never m climbed. The swift rivers were unbridged, and many of the coastal headlands were untraversable even at a low and calm tide. . . Its graces were the blossoms of the rata, the fronds of ferns and the song of birds as yet unsavaged by animals or man. . The work of Douglas has literally taken a volume to describe, part in the words of its editor and the rest in the writings of Douglas himself. A catalogue of exploratory trips would mean nothing here; it is enough to say that this emigrant Scot travelled up nearly every Westland river, traversed many glaciers and snowfields high up on the divide that still remain remote. and little visited. Rivers like the Waiatoto, Arawata, Karangarua, Cook, Haast and Cascade will always be associated with his name, But it is to the authentic voice we must fe to see Douglas the man, the wherefore of his work, and the Westland he loved, The quotations that fol-low-from the diaries of 1891 that cover exploration of the Waiatoto-like the previous extracts from Douglas’s diaries, preserve the characteristic inconsistencies of spelling and punctuation. "For historical reasons," says Mr Pascoe in a footnote, "it is fairer to

print the writing uncorrected, and his minor offences do not make meaning obscure." Tuesday 3 Feby . . . Fools think that knowledge can only be got from books & men, & call me a Fool for wasting my life in mountain Solitudes, but if in so doing I have found nothing new in Thought or worth giving to the World, I have at least gathered glimmerings of Truth as to how nature works, glimmerings which if they bear no fruit in this Life, may in the next where darkness will be light. Monday 23 Feby Sketched in the Pickle Haub [Pickelhaube] Glacier & ‘the flat... The name Pickle Haube is a puzzel. Who or what is it,? is Pickle &c the name of some celebrated German Proffessor or was he a Mongol General, or is it the name of a New Sauce, invented by

some Philanthropest to make Rabbit Stew more palatable thaff it is? I must enquire & get a bottle. Wednesday 25 Feby Started with Camp, as the hills were clear. Sketched up and down the river, took bearings &c, just got up to the foot of the Flat when it came on a Deluge of rain. I couldn’t find a safe ford, having no time to look about me, So camped on the East side close to the Fan of a large Creek. . . The night looks in for a storm, but I am in a splendid Camping place. Hens & Rabbits Galore, Wood good & all safe unless the hills slip away which isn’t likely, Writing this a la Maorie with nothing on but a blanket, my only shift of clothes is drying at a roaring fire, & the rain is coming down in Torrents. Thursday 26 Feby One chap once much admired a Tree in a sketch of mine. The said Tree I thought I intended for a Snowy Mountain Peak. I was requested to draw a Settlers Shanty once, but had sense enough to decline. In the first place I couldn’t have drawn him on the Verandah to look like a human being, & in the second place even if I had been able, he never could have understood. why I couldnt draw ‘a life size figure on a four inch piece of paper. I am not romancing. There is a man down here who considers himself educated, rather above the Common herd in fact who on looking over a map burst out laughing. On asking him the reason he said "why look here, the Lagoon near my house is over a hundred yards long, & the Surveyor has put it down a wee bit of a thing not half an inch." This staggered me, I thought he might be joking, but no he was in ernest, his brain that the Donkey was so proud | of was that of an Animal. He could only take in a peice of an Idea at a time, & far more people are so gifted than most men would imagine. However I was glad to hear his peice of Idea; at one time I thought I had fathomed the

depth of human stupidity when I meet a man who started Up the Landsbro to get to the Sea, but.this Special Settler showed me a lower depth still, . . Tuesday 3 March . . . I have an interesting family [of wekas] round the Camp at Present, a father mother & three cheeky youngsters, & really how wonderfull they are in their ways. I can tell as well what they are saying as if I had the Magic ring of King Solomon. The other day there was an unopened Jam Pot lying outside the Tent. She came along turned it over, looked wise, pecked round the rim but could make nothing out of it. He came up & shoved her to one side, with a "clear out old Woman what do you know about opening -Jam Pots’? He propped the Jar of Ambrosia on its side and struck an attitude; while the Wife and family gazed in admiration as the Old Man, raised his shoulders above his head, then came down with a bang on the Tin. Julius Caesar! What a discomfiture, his beak glanced off & buried itself up to the eyes in the Mud. The Youngsters sniggered, the Old Woman trying to put on a hypocritical look of sympathy rushed forward & said "Are you hurt, dear, do let me straighten your proboscis & wash the mud out of your eyes & then try again I know you can open Jam Pot." "Try it yourself he yelled, you know I don’t care for Jam" & he sneaked away to repair &. wash his beak. Since then he avoids that Tin but she tapps it & looks steadily at him, remarks "how good some people are at opening Jam Pots," while the Young fiends make his life a burden, by their muffled sniggering. Brief and isolated quotations can, of course, only hint at the man, and the variety, depth and liveliness of his o servations. "He was," says Mr Pascoe, "a pioneer of his time in his search for knowledge as he was in his search for new country. Restlessness and curiosity, courage and the tenacity to sustain it: these were some of his qualities,"

_*MR EXPLORER DOUGLAS, edited by John Pascoe; A. H. and A. W. Reed; 37/6,