Tancred, writing of Canterbury in 1856, says, “The native rat forms numerous burrows, rendering the soil unsafe for a horse.” He also repeats the statement about its being exterminated by that formidable invader the Norway rat. Mr. W. T. L. Travers, writing in 1869, says, “It has been the fashion to assume that before the arrival of Europeans in this colony this creature [the native rat] was common, and to attribute its destruction to the European rat; and, indeed, the Natives have been credited with a proverb in relation to this point. It is not in effect impossible that the ultimate destruction of those which still existed when trade was first opened between Europeans and the Natives, long after the colonization of New Zealand, may have been hastened by the introduction of the European rat; but I am satisfied that before that time they had become very scarce, and, indeed, I have been told by gentlemen who have lived in the northern part of this [the South] Island for upwards of forty years that they never saw a specimen.”
Speaking of Nelson in 1842, Judge Broad said, “Native rats were an intolerable nuisance; they ate everything, ran about the houses in the dark, and had no fear of man. They drove the cats away, and only disappeared when rat-killing dogs were introduced.” I do not think these were native rats at all, for the latter ate only vegetable matter, and these vermin seemed to eat everything.
Dr. Hocken has an interesting statement in his “Early History of New Zealand,” as follows: “In 1840 Messrs. Dodds and Davis, of Sydney, established a farming settlement at Riccarton, close to where Christchurch now stands, and sent down James Heriot (or Hariot) as manager, two farm hands, and two teams of bullocks. They ploughed and cultivated about 30 acres of land and secured their crops. But in less than a year they decided to abandon all further efforts. Numberless rats attacked the garnered stores, and the bar at the mouth of the river or estuary proved a sad obstacle to shipping whatever grain had been spared by the scourge of rats.” We do not know now which species this was, though I think it was probably the black rat.
It is rather interesting that in 1870 Sir Walter Buller wrote a paper “On the New Zealand Rat,” and he both figured and described the European black rat (_Mus rattus_). I have already said that this rat probably arrived with some of the first ships which came to the country. Oldfield Thomas in a paper written in 1897 in the “Proceedings of the Zoological Society” says that the rats normally inhabiting ships are not, as is commonly supposed, _Mus decumanus_, but _Mus rattus_, and in most cases these are of the grey variety of that animal, with white belly, though the black form may often be caught in the same ship as the grey.