Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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The fireproof clay and brick buildings dissolved in the earthquake, as the thatched huts had melted in the fire. Terrified, many families tried to flee to Sydney on the Sobraon; but the vessel in beating out of the Heads missed stays, ran ashore, and went to pieces on the rocks. Taking this as an omen, the passengers returned to Wellington, to rebuild the city.
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In that year, 1848, Arthur Beauchamp came of age. He had developed into a young man impatient of existing conditions and restless under conventional ties. He was small and aggressive; and to these qualities were added self-confidence, a quick temper, wit (inclining, in the habit of the day, unduly towards the pun) and an immense loquacity. Something in him attracted the particular attention of his aunt, for he alone of the family seems to have been in communication with her. She imparted to him her faith in the future of New Zealand, and eventually made over to him her land-claims there.
It was an opening, and he needed one. The “British Plate” manufactory in Holborn was now closed down. His four eldest brothers had died, leaving him the second surviving son. Henry Herron, now the eldest, had been taken into the business of Mr. De Charmes (his uncle by marriage with one of the Stones) who was a merchant in London. He had now been sent by his firm to the Mauritius, whence he had moved on to Sydney, and started business there. What Henry was doing in Australia, Arthur would do in New Zealand.
So in 1848 Arthur Beauchamp sailed for Sydney in the barque Lochnagar. Pioneering in the Antipodes needed courage at that moment, when out of the dangerous unexplored were coming tales of Englishmen eaten by cannibals in New Zealand, and murdered by convicts in Australia. The voyage itself called for some endurance. It was a voyage of three or four months, during which fresh food could be had only as long as live stock survived; when passengers’ quarters were barely as good as quarters for stock; and when a part of every ship’s cargo was a bale of canvas bags for the bodies, to be let over the ship’s side en route. Boats were few to Australia — fewer to New Zealand, then. Mary Taylor, in Wellington, having read Jane Eyre, watched for a month for a mail ship to take her letter back to Charlotte Bronte:
“After I had read it” (she wrote in July, 1849)”I went on to the top of Mt. Victoria and looked for a ship to carry a letter to you. There was a little thing with one mast, and also H.M.S. ‘Fly’ and nothing else. If a cattle vessel came from Sydney she would take a mail, but we had east wind for a month and nothing can come in.”
Arthur reached Wellington from Sydney, the next year. Incoming vessels lay a mile or more out from shore, served by a fleet of small boats, each with a single sail; often these capsized in the south-westerly gales. It was dangerous to enter the Heads at all, with no lighthouse there.
The city had risen again, brick on brick: new Government offices, banks and stone buildings, tenements and homes. Two good-sized Maori pahs were near by — one at Te Aro, one where Tinakori Road ran later. Shops lined one side of Lambton Quay which twisted with the shore; the sea lapped on the other, at times rolling across the road and even into the “stores.”
About this time, too the Hon. Algernon Tollemache reached New Zealand. In purchasing thirty-four of the original land sections, he had acted as agent for the Countess of Dysart, as well as on his own behalf. He had drawn throughout the London ballotting and his numbers, from 58 to 1035, including some of the best city land — had been acquired both by original lottery and later exchange. He was summoned by letters describing local conditions.
“There is much distress in the Colony on account of the non-settlement of land claims” (ran one a few years before). …”Here we have so many barbers, taylors, ribbon weavers, button makers … please to tell Mr. Tollemache they are not farmers and we want farmers in a new colony. We have far too many lawyers …”
The New Zealand Land Company, in the effort to recompense some unpaid claims, had bought from the Maoris Waitohi (including the site of Picton); and that “blood-drenched plain,” the Wairau, had opened for white settlement in 1849; but now, in 1850, the Company had finally surrendered its charter to the Crown, and Arthur Beauchamp, arrived to take possession of the lands left him by his aunt, found that complications between the Government and the Company made it impossible to make good his claims. Chance had intervened once more. At that moment came word of goldfields just discovered in Australia; he dropped his original intention of settling immediately in Wellington, and sailed again for Sydney.
While he was on the gold-fields, another terrible earthquake shook stone from stone the remaining brick and plaster houses of Wellington; and in the path of earthquake came tidal waves. Once more the city was rebuilt, this time with square, wooden, box-like buildings, earthquake-proof, with red slate roofs — proof against fire — the style that was to remain. It was built for a commercial city, yet no commerce could completely spoil those sharply-folded hills. The low buildings simply clung to them like grey and red barnacles about the rim of a bay. Rising on the steep terraces like an Italian city, Wellington overflowed a succession of hills into a succession of hollows and valleys: Karori, Wadestown, the Hutt. The natural amphitheatre surrounding the Harbour was scalloped by bays: Day’s, Evans, Oriental Bay. The Harbour, once a crater, so many fathoms deep, showed the bottomless green of New Zealand jade on calm days; but it was seldom calm. Winds whip continually between those two Islands, as down a funnel, to Wellington at the base.”The broom behind the windy town” took the place of native bush — broom and gorse and eucalyptus — instead of rata, beech, and tree fern.
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It was a passage of only eight days from Wellington — but eight of the roughest days that any sea provides — to Port Fairy, beyond Melbourne on the south coast of Victoria, where (on June 10th, 1854) Arthur Beauchamp married Mary Elizabeth Stanley. Her ancestors had belonged to the same trade as the Beauchamp family; her father was a silversmith in Lancashire. Though she was so young (only eighteen), she, too, was the stock of which pioneers are made, and she was ready to meet Australia with her young husband — was braced to the new adventure, uninhibited, set to it as one leans against the wind to hold a balance. Her body was flexible and sound, strengthened by the tense spirit, hemmed in to itself safely by a ring of belief she had cast about her — a religious belief she was never to lose. As another would say “grace before meat,” Elizabeth Stanley veered an instant before Australia, and only her family knew why she bent her head.
Her bridal journey was through one of the most lawless parts of the civilised world of the time. Australia and Tasmania were England’s penal stations then, had been for sixty-seven years past, and were to be for thirteen years more, until some 160,000 criminals — half victims of atrocious law, half true criminal types — had been poured over Victoria, Tasmania, and New South Wales. To these were added the adventurers — transients drawn together by the goldfields. Seasoned pioneers like the historic Captain Barry, who had been through California’s and Sydney’s first gold-rushes, found Victoria in those days “the roughest and wildest place in the world to do business in.” The shifting of whole towns over-night to new goldfields was effective enough evasion of civil authority.
Even in Melbourne, capital and port of Victoria, the Government was lax and feeble:
“Crimes of the most fearful character and degree abound on all sides”; (a resident of Melbourne had written, only the year before)”the roads swarm with bushrangers; the streets with burglars and desperadoes of every kind. In broad daylight, and in the most public streets, men have been knocked down, ill-used, and robbed; and shops have been invaded by armed ruffians who have ‘stuck up’ the inmates, and rifled the premises even situated in crowded thoroughfares. … Murders of the most frightful character have become so numerous that they are given only passing notice, and such is the inefficiency of the police that scarcely since the foundation of the colony has one perpetrator of premeditated murders been brought to justice. Police are cowed, or leagued with the actors in outrages. … We have all the evils of the Lynch law without its vigour or promptitude …”
To this city, Arthur Beauchamp, then twenty-six, was bringing his eighteen-year-old bride. It was mid-winter, and roads for those 100 miles were little more than ruts through the bush. Why he should have chosen