Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 403, May, 1849. Various

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      "When a man, of whatever condition, has finally determined to emigrate, there is no longer any room in his mind for thought about the circumstances that surround him: his life is for some time an unbroken and happy dream of the imagination. The labourer – whose dream is generally realised – thinks of light work and high wages, good victuals in abundance, beer and tobacco at pleasure, and getting in time to be a master in his trade, or to having a farm of his own. The novelty of the passage would be a delight to him, were it not for the ennui arising from want of occupation. On his arrival at the colony, all goes well with him. He finds himself a person of great value, a sort of personage, and can indulge almost any inclination that seizes him. If he is a brute, as many emigrant labourers are, through being brutally brought up from infancy to manhood, he lives, to use his own expression, 'like a fighting cock,' till gross enjoyment carries him off the scene. If he is of the better sort, by nature and education, he works hard, saves money, and becomes a man of property – perhaps builds himself a nice house, glories with his now grand and happy wife in counting the children, the more the merrier, and cannot find anything on earth to complain of, but the exorbitant wages he has to pay. The change for this class of men being from pauperism, or next door to it, to plenty and property, is indescribably, to our apprehensions almost inconceivably, agreeable.

      "But the classes who can hardly imagine the pleasant feelings which emigration provides for the well-disposed pauper, have pleasant feelings of their own when they emigrate, which are perhaps more lively in proportion to the greater susceptibility of a more cultivated mind to the sensations of mental pain and pleasure. Emigrants of cultivated mind, from the moment when they determine to be colonists, have their dreams, which, though far from being always, or ever fully realised, are, I have been told by hundreds of this class, very delightful indeed. They think with great pleasure of getting away from the disagreeable position of anxiety, perhaps of wearing dependence, in which the universal and excessive competition of this country has placed them. But it is on the future that their imagination exclusively seizes. They can think in earnest about nothing but the colony. I have known a man of this class, who had been too careless of money here, begin, as soon as he had resolved on emigration, to save sixpences, and take care of bits of string, saying 'everything will be of use there.' There! it is common for people whose thoughts are fixed 'there,' to break themselves all at once of a confirmed habit – that of reading their favourite newspaper every day. All the newspapers of the old country are now equally uninteresting to them. If one falls in their way, they perhaps turn with alacrity to the shipping lists, and advertisements of passenger ships, or even to an account of the sale of Australian wool, or New Zealand flax; but they cannot see either the parliamentary debate, or the leading article which used to embody their own opinions, or the reports, accidents, and offences, of which they used to spell every word. Their reading now is confined to letters and newspapers from the colony, and books relating to it. They can hardly talk about anything that does not relate to 'there.'" – (P. 127.)

      A man is far gone, indeed, when he has given up his Times! This zeal for emigration amongst the better classes, and especially amongst educated youths, who find the avenues to wealth blocked up in their own country, is, we apprehend, peculiar to our day, and amongst the most novel aspects which the subject of colonisation assumes. How many of these latter find their imaginations travelling even to the antipodes! Where shall we colonise? is a question canvassed in many a family, sometimes half in jest, half in earnest, till it leads to the actual departure of the boldest or most restless of the circle. Books are brought down and consulted; from the ponderous folio of Captain Cook's voyages – which, with its rude but most illustrative of prints, was the amusement of their childhood, when they would have thought a habitation in the moon as probable a business as one in New Zealand – to the last hot-pressed journal of a residence in Sydney; and every colony in turn is examined and discussed. Here climate is so delicious you may sleep without hazard in the open air. Sleep! yes, if the musquitoes let you. Musquitoes – oh! Another reads with delight of the noble breed of horses that now run wild in Australia, and of the bold horsemanship of those who drive in the herd of bullocks from their extensive pasturage, when it is necessary to assemble in order to number and to mark them. The name of the thing does not sound so romantic as that of a buffalo-hunt; but, armed with your tremendous whip, from the back of a horse whom you turn and wind at pleasure, to drive your not over-tractable bullocks, must task a good seat, and a steady hand, and a quick eye. A third dwells with a quieter delight on the beautiful scenery, and the pastoral life so suitable to it, which New Zealand will disclose. Valleys green as the meadows of Devonshire, hills as picturesque as those of Scotland, and the sky of Italy over all! and the aborigines friendly, peaceable. Yes, murmurs one, until they eat you. Faugh! but they are reformed in that particular. Besides, Dr Dieffenbach says, here, that "they find Europeans salt and disagreeable." Probably they had been masticating some tough old sailor, who had fed on junk all his life, and they found him salt enough. But let no one in his love of science suggest this explanation to them; let us rest under the odium of being salt and disagreeable.

      These aborigines – one would certainly wish they were out of the way. Wild men! Wild – one cannot have fellowship with them. Men – one cannot shoot them. In Australia they are said to be not much wiser than baboons – one wishes they were altogether baboons, or altogether men. In New Zealand they are, upon the whole, a docile, simple people. The missionaries are schooling them as they would little children. A very simple people! They had heard of horses and of horsemanship; it was some tradition handed down from their great discoverer, Captain Cook. When lately some portly swine were landed on the island, they concluded these were the famous horses men rode upon in England. "They rode two of them to death." Probably, by that time, they suspected there was some error in the case.

      Hapless aborigines! How it comes to pass we cannot stop to inquire, but certain it is they never prosper in any union with the white man. They get his gin, they get his gunpowder, and, here and there, some travesty of his religion. This is the best bargain they make where they are most fortunate. The two first gifts of the white man, at all events, add nothing to the amenity of character, and happen to be precisely the gifts they could most vividly appreciate. Our civilisation seems to have no other effect than to break up the sort of rude harmony which existed in their previous barbarism. They imitate, they do not emulate; what they see of us they do not understand. That ridiculous exhibition, so often described, which they make with our costume – a naked man with hat and feathers stuck upon his head; or, better still, converting a pair of leathers into a glistening helmet, the two legs hanging down at the back, where the flowing horse-hair is wont to fall – is a perfect emblem of what they have gained in mind and character from our civilisation.

      These poor New Zealanders are losing – what think you says Dr Dieffenbach? – their digestion; getting dyspeptic. The missionaries have tamed them down; they eat more, fight less, and die faster. One of the "brethren," not the least intelligent to our mind, has introduced cricket as a substitute for their war-dances and other fooleries they had abolished.

      When we want the soil which such aborigines are loosely tenanting, we must, we presume, displace them. There is no help for it. But, in all other cases, we could wish the white man would leave these dark children of the earth alone. If there exists another Tahiti, such as it was when Cook discovered it, such as we read of it under the old name of Otaheite, we hope that some eternal mist, drawn in a wide circle round the island, will shroud it from all future navigators. Were we some great mariner, and had discovered such an island, and had eaten of the bread-fruit of the hospitable native, and reclined under their peaceful trees, and seen their youths and maidens crowned with green boughs, sporting like fishes in their beautiful clear seas, no mermaid happier – we should know but of one way to prove our gratitude – to close our lips for ever on the discovery we had made. If there exist in some untraversed region of the ocean another such spot, and if there are still any genii, or jins, or whatever sea-fairies may be called, left behind in the world, we beseech of them to protect it from all prying circumnavigators. Let them raise bewildering mists, or scare the helmsman with imaginary breakers, or sit cross-legged upon the binnacle, and bewitch the compass – anyhow let them protect СКАЧАТЬ