I think this anecdote may serve to conclude my sketches of Maori manners. It shows the childlike temper of the Maori, their easily excited passions, quick gusts of rage, and equally ready return to docility and good-humour. It is an instance of how modern Maori character is driven by two widely different forces, and of how it oscillates between two systems—the tapu Maori and the tapu Pakeha. It illustrates with strange force—more so than any other incident which has happened in this generation, perhaps—that wonderful power, once so extensive and real, but now almost obsolete except in such rare instances as this—that influence which I have previously spoken of, and have named "the Mana of the Missionary."
"It is impossible to imagine, in the wildest and most picturesque walks of Nature, a sight more sublime and majestic, or which can more forcibly challenge the admiration of the traveller, than a New Zealand forest,"—writes an early voyager to this country. From the first, those who visited these shores were struck with the extent and beauty of our forests, the size of the trees, and the wealth of the vegetation. And, at the present day, the emigrant from Scotland or England, brought here into the depths of the bush, fails not to feel his inmost nature responding to the glory and the grandeur of the scenery.
The woodlands of Northern New Zealand may be divided into two general classes, the heavy bush and the light bush. The first is the true primeval forest, the growth, probably, of two or three thousand years. This is by far the most abundant and extensive of the two. There is nothing in Great Britain to afford comparison with it.
The light bush, on the other hand, is not dissimilar to a very wild and luxuriant English wood, if one excepts the difference of the vegetation. It fills up the gullies, and covers the hill-sides, where Maori cultivation once occupied the ground. It is by no means so extensive as the heavy bush, but may be said to fringe it here and there, and to border once populous rivers. These copsewoods spring up very rapidly. Light bush that is only forty years old will rival English woods that have stood a century, in the relative size of the trees. The jungle is so dense that it is often almost impervious to passage altogether, until the axe has cleared a road. It has a rich and fresh appearance when looked at as a whole, a verdancy and wealth of varying tints, a general beauty that seems to make our name for it appear an ill-chosen one; for we generally call the light bush "scrub."