by Bruce Ansley
So no one took any chances. We were glued to the track. We wound through the sulphuric morass without putting a foot wrong.
Grains of silica in the rocks glittered in the sun: silica adds power to eruptions. The occasional stream crossed the path, the water so sharp and bitter it seemed to corrode your tongue.
We walked over an angry-yellow terrain. Water boiled, mud bubbled. The whole business looked like some giant pot of hellish brew, certainly not one you’d ever want to taste, but I did. The water from a tiny stream was acrid.
Pure sulphur is tasteless, but when I licked a film of sulphur powder, my tongue curled in shock.
All the while the cracked cliffs hovered like spectres.
It was a beautiful, evil place, the scariest I’d ever been to, and the most memorable. Vents hissed. We carried masks, for sometimes the thick air seemed to reach into your body. People coughed and wheezed. When we left we took great gulps of the clean sea air. Some of us might have been gasping with relief. It seemed to me to be the proper end to a journey along the red line.
13
Passing by
Whitcombe Pass is named after a man who thought it might be a fine route between Canterbury and the West Coast. He died trying to prove it.
Maori knew the Pass, for they needed routes between the Coast and Canterbury for the same reason Pakeha did: the passage of treasure. For Pakeha it was gold, for Maori the precious pounamu, or greenstone. But they preferred a pass to the north.
Time has not improved the Whitcombe Pass, nor its reputation. The Department of Conservation warns novices away: only the fit, well-equipped and experienced should try it.
It is a very tricky route over the Southern Alps and perhaps the best that can be said is that it’s not the trickiest. As a wild journey however, its pedigree is impeccable. It burst onto a wider stage through Samuel Butler, the young English immigrant who was then searching the peaks for sheep country and would make his fortune founding Mesopotamia Station in the Upper Rangitata Valley (see Chapter 11).
Just as Butler was probably the first Englishman to see what later became Arthur’s Pass, he was also the first to see the Whitcombe.
He set out from Mesopotamia with John Holland Baker, a young surveyor. The two travelled up the Clyde River, which flowed into the Rangitata, without seeing any clear country. They turned back down the Clyde to its fork with the Lawrence River, and headed up the Lawrence.
This was truly a grand landscape. The Arrowsmith Range rose on one side of them, the Jollie Range on the other, overtures to the full symphony of the Alps. Butler and Baker crossed the Jollies over what is now the Butler Saddle, Chowbok Col rising beside him. Ahead lay the Southern Alps. From where he stood he could see a pass. It looked accessible.
Butler could not reach it on that trip, but early in 1861 he approached by way of Lake Heron, slogged up a likely stream now called the Lauper, and there it lay: a pass leading through the Alps to the West Coast.
The journey carved itself into his soul. His later novel Erewhon described that route accurately. His fictional character had been searching for sheep country with his companion, Chowbok, when he saw the saddle far ahead. He thought it part of the main range, and his blood was ‘on fire with hope and elation’. Chowbok was not as pleased; he sensibly abandoned the narrator.
The real-life Butler did not spend much time on the pass he’d found. He looked around him, declared the country unsuitable for sheep, and went back.
John Whitcombe, Canterbury’s road surveyor, should have done the same. Had he looked over the edge into the horrid wilderness to the west and declared it unsuitable for roads, he might have lived to a contented old age, telling his story from winged armchairs in the gentlemen’s clubs of Christchurch.
To get to his pass from the east you need to cross the Rakaia in its least unruly mood. On the way you pass Mount Algidus Station, where Mona Anderson wrote A River Rules My Life. The river ruling her life was the Wilberforce, which flows into the Rakaia, the two of them whittling the land to a point. The country impressed her with its primitive beauty, sheer mountains, rivers, gorges. It impresses everyone who goes there, and scares the hell out of more impressionable souls, like me.
In Erewhon Butler wrote of a sombre, sullen place, with gigantic forms and barbarous stone fiends, where the air was dark and heavy, making the loneliness even more oppressive. Bang on, although he might have added that the air often moves rather quickly.
Well, the pass itself isn’t so bad, a rocky place but level, convincing those early explorers that there might be a safe passage here. But I looked into the void and my first thought was: Wow, is that the time? I have urgent business back down there on the Plains.
Years later I thought to have another crack at it.
It was spring. The Rakaia was high, and gushing, and as Mona Anderson described it with ‘the spring thaw on its back, brown, ugly and raging, a killer river that no man in his senses would cross’. Every one of my senses agreed: it might be better to attack the pass from its other end.
Butler’s hero crosses over the pass and speeds downhill into his utopian civilisation on the other side. I drove back down the valley, north along the edge of the Plains, through Arthur’s Pass and over the top to the West Coast where Butler’s mystical civilisation is these days known as Hokitika.
The town wears the utopian mantle modestly. I find it best considered from the public bar of the Railway Hotel. I can see the mountains from there. They look wet, wild and cold.
In 1863, two years after Butler, John Whitcombe made the crossing; or, the crossing unmade him, for he left his name on the pass but his body buried to its boots in West Coast shingle.
Gold had been discovered on the West Coast. The Coast was booming; Canterbury was growing quickly. But the two were separated by the dangerous bulk of the Alps. Something had to be done. The impassable had to be made passable, a route between the two had to be found. Surveyors and explorers were sent out to poke into every likely pass, and Whitcombe decided he was the man for this one.
He did not seem well-equipped for it. In the best traditions of English explorers he came from a prosperous family, possibly fell out with them over his marriage to a publican’s daughter, and headed for the colonies. By 1863 he was the father of five and expecting a sixth. He might not have donned baggy shorts and a pith helmet, exactly, but he rushed in where novelists, sheep farmers and angels all feared to tread.
His instructions were to discover a mountain pass and return. He decided instead to go all the way through the Alps to the West Coast.
Most people have imagined him to be some sort of functionary; that is, if they thought of him at all, and scarcely anyone did until John Pascoe, climber, explorer, writer, photographer and unusual public servant entered the picture in the late 1950s. Pascoe was no mean adventurer himself. One of his mountaineering achievements was his ascent of Mount Evans, not far from the Whitcombe Pass, on his third attempt in 1934. It was then the highest unclimbed peak in New Zealand, a vicious spike probably spied by both Butler and Whitcombe who, like right-minded citizens, kept well clear of it.
Pascoe uncovered a narrative in the Canterbury Provincial Gazette of 6 July 1863. It had been written by Jakob Lauper, Whitecombe’s companion, a Swiss guide who wrote his original story in German.
The Gazette published the English version, which languished, forgotten, until Pascoe came along. It was republished as a little book in 1960 by that good old Christchurch firm Whitcombe and Tombs, founded by Bertie Whitcombe, apparently no relation to John.
Jakob Lauper felt to me like Phileas Fogg’s Passepartout, or Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza, an unfailing, faithful servant to a flawed master and the real hero of the story even if (like Phileas Fogg and Don Quixote) without Whitcombe there’d be no story. He was a Swiss guide treated by Whitcombe as a beast of burden, and Whitcombe ignored what proved to be Lauper’s very good advice. He lived as long as he did only because of Lauper, who did his best to save hi
s boss from himself but eventually failed.
Surveyors were heroes of the day, men who pushed into the unknown and left their names on the maps they made. People such as Thomas Brunner and Charles Heaphy were immortalised. Their work was dangerous; starvation, drowning and falls from high places were part of their job descriptions.
Perhaps John Whitcombe struck out in search of fame. After all, he was a roads surveyor. No likely roadway had yet been found through Canterbury’s Alps for a very good reason: the mountains were high and dangerous. There were other possibilities, more attractive than Whitcombe’s. The Dobson brothers, Arthur, Edward and George, were already working on easier routes.
The Harper Pass was the most likely. Edward Dobson was clearing a track through Hawarden in North Canterbury, past Lake Sumner and up the Hurunui River, across Harper Pass and down the Taramakau to join what is now the West Coast highway at Aickens. His brother Arthur meanwhile was investigating a path up the Waimakariri River. Maori showed him their pounamu route, cut deep into the rock of the Alps and descending to Otira. That pathway became known as Arthur’s Pass and is still the main highway between the West Coast and Canterbury.
But Whitcombe fancied his own prospects. He climbed to the top of his pass and decided to push on, in the grand tradition of Scott of the Antarctic, or David Livingstone of Africa. Perhaps he thought being English was enough. He was poorly equipped and his food was awful, even for an Englishman. His idea of mountain clothing was a possum fur rug.
His only good decision was to take Jakob Lauper with him. Whitcombe took his rug and a dozen biscuits. Lauper carried the rest: hatchet, billy, rope, pannikins, tea, sugar, rat traps, tobacco, matches, salt, mutton, instruments, blankets. A third man accompanied them to the pass, laden; then he turned back and Lauper took the lot.
The Swiss could already see the flaw in the plan. The descent was ‘very much broken everywhere. The valley gets narrower and narrower; water rushes forth from under all the rocks, and in a short time a large stream is formed . . . From both sides of the valley small streams fall down nearly perpendicular.’
They reached an impasse. Huge rocks blocked their way, and whirlpools, and they were boxed in by cliffs. Whitcombe declared it impossible to go on, and not possible to go back. What was Lauper going to do about it?
The Swiss lowered himself into the water on a rope: ‘The water boiled, and hissed, and foamed like a witch’s cauldron.’ Up to his neck, he managed to cross. He cut some poles and improvised a bridge for the boss.
The sugar dissolved. The biscuits collapsed into a soggy mass. Whitcombe declared himself weak and tired: ‘He had no idea the road would be so fearfully rough.’
Whitcombe said he’d pay Lauper to carry his sopping, flyblown possum rug and he would sleep under the guide’s blanket. Lauper kept his head, although by then he must have had serious misgivings about the man. He even panned for gold, and found some.
It could take them a whole day to go less than 200 metres. ‘We could not make a fire, we ate a little of the [biscuit] dough, which was getting worse and worse, and the last morsel of meat we had with us.’
Lauper’s descriptions grew more desperate: ceaseless rain, long perpendicular walls, whirlpools. They were starving, and freezing.
After ten days they got to the bottom. They fought their way through a tangle of rainforest and swamps and reached the sea. They walked in warm sunshine, found an old pa. Whitcombe went to sleep. Lauper searched for food, found a handful of small potatoes and some Maori cabbage. It was their last meal together.
Whitcombe told Lauper the guide had lost weight, and asked how he looked himself? Lauper said he did not look so very bad, ‘but, in reality, he could not be recognised — his eyes were sunk deep in his head, his lips were white, and his face was as yellow as a wax figure; you could almost see his teeth through his cheeks.’
They came to the Taramakau River. Lauper judged it impossible to cross, and if you see that mighty river after heavy rain, you’d know he was right. Besides, he could not swim. He wanted to follow the river into the bush, find a place to cross, catch some birds to eat.
Whitcombe had had enough of bush. He refused. He set about making a raft but then found instead the remains of two Maori waka. ‘Hurrah,’ he said. He bound them together. The canoe raft floated just forty centimetres above the water.
‘You can see now you’ve got nothing to worry about,’ said Whitcombe. ‘Together they’ll take us across perfectly safely.’
Lauper’s heart sank even faster than the raft would.
It was later in the afternoon when they launched this flimsy craft into the river. ‘It’s going really well,’ cried Whitcombe. ‘Couldn’t be better.’
They went under, of course. The raft went deeper, and deeper, and in a moment they were shooting towards the surf at the river entrance.
Whitcombe changed his mind. ‘We are lost, Jakob, and it is all my fault,’ he cried. He struck out for shore.
‘I had no doubt he would save himself, but I thought I was lost — lost, beyond all hope,’ Lauper wrote.
He clung to the wreckage. He was swept over the river bar. The first wave hit him: ‘It was as high as a house and certain to swallow me up.’
Waves broke all around him. It was dark. Out to sea he went. He clung so tightly his hands seemed to be nailed to the remains of the canoe, which threatened to batter him senseless. ‘I have stared death in the face before . . . but I had never seen it so horrible and so close.’
Then he felt ground beneath his feet. The next wave swept him out to sea. Back and forth he surfed until, nearly senseless, he was shot headfirst into a pile of driftwood and clamped himself to it. He burrowed into wet sand, numbed, and not even daylight could stir him. At last, he realised he was alive.
He was stiff as a log. His hands were black with West Coast sandflies. He vomited sand and seawater, staggered to his feet. He was wearing only a pair of trousers and a flannel shirt. He felt like Robinson Crusoe.
He shuffled back along the beach. There was Whitcombe’s possum rug. A parcel of tobacco. His hairbrush lay in the sand and a little further down, why, a pair of boots stuck up. He hurried along the sand. Tore away at it. Below the boots lay Whitcombe’s body, drilled deep into the shore. He was, Lauper reported, quite dead.
The Swiss fought his way back to the shanty towns that comprised West Coast civilisation then. Later in Christchurch, in the best tradition of English explorers, Whitcombe was proclaimed a hero. He got the naming rights to the pass while, until John Pascoe’s discovery, Lauper faded away.
The Swiss became known as ‘old Jakob’, and some accounts decided that Whitcombe had died saving the guide’s life. The points that, first, Lauper alone had kept Whitcombe alive as long as he did, and second, that Whitcombe had endangered the guide’s life by ignoring his advice, were put aside as inconvenient truths. Whitcombe was among the glorious dead and Lauper was still alive.
Well, Whitcombe’s pass is as awful as ever and it is warm here in the Railway Hotel, and safe, and I don’t really want to go into the mountains on my own. That is a stupid idea, usually, but I work it through like this: I’ll walk up the Whitcombe Pass track to the Rapid Creek hut, two hours, say. If all is going well and the weather is holding I’ll go on to the Frew Hut, another three hours, spend the night there and come down again. It’s only part of the journey and Jakob Lauper would have had no trouble with it, but it’ll give me an idea of the country he had to deal with, or the easier parts of it. And I have no alternative, no one to go with me anyway. Writing is a lonely business. I’m well-equipped. I’ve left a note of my route and a list of who to call if my wife Sally hasn’t heard from me by a certain time.
She is not at all happy about this, reading it more as a suicide note. She shows it to a friend. ‘He’s mad!’ shrieks the friend, so piercingly I can almost hear it here in Hokitika. I think of it more as a masterly composition, short and succinct. No wasted words. To the point.
She point
s out that the Department of Conservation still rates the Whitcombe Pass track among the most dangerous in the country. I rate it less risky than missing a deadline.
She is right, of course. People of my advancing, nay, galloping years should not tramp alone, and especially not in these mountains.
Yet I get up early and drive through farmland and dairy country. Civilised. Spring mists brush the land, a little drizzle hiding the mountains ahead. It parts every now and then, revealing that lowering green of the West Coast mountains. Mine is the only car in the parking area but I leave it anyway, telling myself that, oh well, I can always turn back.
The route follows an old farm track at first, with a bit of gorse here, some pasture there, the occasional piece of abandoned machinery, a Coast trademark. Coasters are very good at abandoned machinery. A bulldozer may sit fair square in the middle of a paddock, scrub growing through it, as if its driver had knocked off for smoko one day and never gone back. The occasional paradise duck complains loudly about my passing.
The track drops down into the Hokitika River bed, and the ducks form squadrons launching into a cacophony of complaint.
An old cableway crosses the river. It is no longer used, to my relief, for it looks feeble above the rushing grey-green river below hissing between boulders lying like spat pebbles. Close up they’re more like giant pieces of rock strewn so higgledy-piggledy along the bank that you understand the immense power of this river and resolve to stay as far away from it as possible, unlike poor Jakob who, starving and worn down to his elements, had to cross the thing on his way north to the Taramakau.
This is a huge river, a torrent which would shade many more celebrated — the Manawatu, the Whanganui, the Waiau. I’ve been on the track for only half an hour and I’m already in awe of the man.
