Rakiura

(By Stuart Perry.)

Stewart Island, we call it; but the Maori has another and more euphonious name: “Rakiura”; fitter for general use than the longer honorific title of “Te Puka (punga)-o-te Waka-a-Maui (The Anchor of Maui's canoe).

As you pass round to the cluster of houses at Half Moon Bay, you realise that this place at least has not been spoilt by man. The little settlement might be a reconstruction made from one of W. H. G. Kingston's descriptions of a mission settlement somewhere where you might catch sight of a frigate or a corvette chasing a wicked looking dhow with rakish masts and a cargo of black ivory. But the hills show a difference—they are pure New Zealand, wooded, and almost uninvaded by man.

Inland are punga tracks, like the corduroy roads the early American settlers constructed so laboriously. The punga logs are split from end to end, and bound together to form a solid way across the Island.

A strange place, this, and a sun-bather's Paradise: too far south to be really hot, but always sheltered. The island gives the impression of a giant starfish. Whichever way the wind blows—and it blows from every quarter—it is always possible by rounding another headland or two to get sun without wind. And just off the point there will probably be a dinghy, with enthusiastic fishermen (or sometimes fishermen bored with success) pulling up blue cod and butterfish as fast almost as their sinkers touch the bottom, and strange gaudy dragon fish like Chinese dolphins.

South, well south, Stewart Island is really “down under,” and in consequence many of the great ocean currents, trying to wind themselves round the world's mythical axis, pass the shores of the Island, leaving wreckage of forgotten ships, lost in far away seas; driftwood from God knows where; golf balls alleged to have floated all the way from St. Andrew's, the Scots' home of the Royal and Ancient Game; ambergris, once so valuable. Stories are told of men camping on the beach at the south of the Island, waiting until a priceless lump of this evil-smelling stuff should drift ashore. Like the pearl, the “splendid sickness” of the oyster, ambergris is the result of a disease, a disease which attacks the whale. Its pungency makes it an excellent base for perfumes, and fabulous prices, until quite recently, were given for it. Even now, although artificial substitutes have made their appearance, ambergris is valuable, and visitors to the Island keep their eyes open for lumps of the grey or black bituminous substance floating ashore or lying on the beach.

Stewart Island oysters are famous throughout the country, and ketches with little auxiliary engines take loads where boats put ashore, and, in season, the oysters are collected in petrol tins—and so the party goes home, in the warm summer evening; for almost every night the Island lives up to its name, Rakiura, the Isle of the Glowing Sky.

Many romances could be imagined about this little triangle of land, so far to the south. Mr. James Cowan, writing of Stewart Island, and familiar with its shape and its names—Port Adventure, Cannibal Bay, Hidden Island, Small-craft Retreat, Fright Cove, Sealers' Bay, Pearl Island, Glory Cove, Shipbuilders' Cove, Chew-tobacco Bay—hit on a pleasant fancy. “The figure and the names of Rakiura would have delighted the man who wove one of the world's greatest romances about a map that he had drawn of a fanciful island. Robert Louis Stevenson has told in his essay ‘My First Book’ how delighted he was with his own first notion of ‘Treasure Island.’ Not then had Stevenson known a South Sea island; he lived to see them in vast variety, yet had he known our own Great Barrier and

A glimpse of Paterson Iniet, Stewart Island, South Island, New Zealand.

page 24 Stewart Island he might have been just as charmed with their winding harbours, their tall timber and their dark cliffs, their old heavedowns.”

There is or was, at the south of the Island, a Norwegian whaling station, and as far back as the time of the “Cachalot” the waters of the Island were known as a great place for whalers to reap their harvest.

The mutton bird does not constitute the whole of the bird life of the Island: the bell-bird's note may be heard over its wooded slopes; the long-tailed cuckoo and the shining cuckoo are both to be found. The albatross, petrel, and mollymawk may be seen, and among the land birds it is said that there are still kiwis, as well as wekas, kakas, parakeets, tuis, robms, tomtits and fantails.

But it is the unspoilt beauty of the trees and the ferns, the heavy silence, which must have given Mr. Cowan his thought of Treasure Island. Down in Caerhowel Arm, or round a point in Paterson Inlet, it would come as a shock but not as a surprise to meet old Ben Gunn; and it needs little effort of the imagination to see the mastheads of the deserted “His-paniola” over the sandspit at the end of any of the points about Port Pegasus. A block-house with a stockade on Hana-nui (Mount Anglem) would be no more out of place than on Spy-Glass Hill. Like Treasure Island, it is the sort of place where man seems an interloper; and an inter-loper who scarcely succeeds in dis-turbing the tranquility and the serenity of innumerable years.

“America has done more for the World than any other Nation,” remarked a speaker at a farewell dinner at Auckland to a well-known American, “She has given us tobacco.” (Loud and prolonged applause). Yes, smokers everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to Uncle Sam; they never can repay for the priceless gift which has done so much to render existence happier and life better worth living. Nor must the credit due to those who have devised better methods of tobacco culture and superior methods of manufacture, be forgotten. And in this connection the name of the National Tobacco Company, Ltd., of Napier, stands out prominently for their toasting process (exclusively their own) not only vastly improves flavour and aroma but makes their tobacco safe for even the inveterate smoker. Hence the ever increasing demand for the famous toasted blends, Cut plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold and Desert Gold. No finer tobaccos than these are produced. They never vary in quality and are the only genuine toasted blends manufactured.^*