[Illustration: MAORI ANCESTRAL FIGURE. _To face page 197._]
Even more delightful than its natural beauties is the fact that Auckland has no slums. There are a few narrow streets and mean houses, but the overcrowding and dirt of the poorer quarters of an English town do not exist, and the Auckland city authorities have firmly resolved that they never shall. There is plenty of space, so the houses need not be built too close together, and very few of them are of more than two stories; and as there is far more than enough work for everybody, there need be no poverty.
The Anglican Cathedral is a fine wooden building, the outside painted red, while inside, the wood panelling from floor to ceiling is beautifully polished and left absolutely plain. It is just a hundred years since the Rev. Samuel Marsden and his helpers preached Christianity to the Maoris, and most of them are now at least nominal Christians, and they have all given up cannibalism.
Auckland has a very good museum and two picture galleries.
The museum has a magnificent Maori war canoe with exquisitively carved prow; parts of carved or painted houses; and a complete specimen of a Maori dwelling-house made of native bulrush, the long brown leaves packed closely together both for roof and walls, and fastened securely to a framework of wood. A large number of the exhibits, including most of the native weapons--clubs of stone, greenstone or wood, stone axe-heads and wooden spears--were given by Sir George Grey, who was for many years Governor of New Zealand.
There are many specimens of more peaceful implements: fish-hooks made of bone or of glittering "pawa" shell; carved canoe balers, like large wooden slippers; also several fishing-nets. You see a large wicker birdcage of Maori workmanship, and a number of calabashes for holding water; these latter are made out of gourds, and the gourds were originally brought by the Maoris in their canoes from Hawaika. There is a quantity of kauri gum, and many ornaments made from it--all a clear yellow amber colour.
In the art galleries are pictures both by English and New Zealand artists--some of England, Italy or the Mediterranean, others of New Zealand subjects. One of the most striking represents the coming of the Maoris in the Arawa Canoe--supposed to have been in the fourteenth century. The coast of the new country is shown as a distant, blue headland; on the green sea is the brown canoe, crammed with swarthy, brown bodies in the last stages of exhaustion; some of the men able to point out the land, and some looking eagerly, others too weary to care. How men provided with only frail wooden canoes ever dared to leave their homes in some far northern island of the Pacific seems an almost incredible venture of faith: and that they actually voyaged safely for several hundred miles, and in the end found "Ao Tea Roa"--the Land of the Long White Cloud--as they poetically called their new home, is more astonishing still.