Late one afternoon in March 1860, a man in a thin green velvet jacket and a wide-awake hat arrived on foot at a sheep station called Glenmark, about 40 miles north of Christchurch. The man was in his mid-fifties, but looked older. Several people who met him that day later agreed that he looked “groomed,” although they disagreed on whether his corduroy pants were patched or not. Earlier in the day he was given a glass of beer by the landlord of the Kōwai pub, 15 miles south of Glenmark, and after keeping a close eye on him, the landlord sent another beer and a free meal.
The man, whose name was Henry Davis, took to the road again. For a few miles he got a ride on a passing wagon. By mid-afternoon the wind began to blow and the rain was seen turning white in the foothills to the south. As Davis walked to the farm in Glenmark, about a mile from the road, it started to rain and he encountered the station's manager and co-owner who was coming from the stockyards. Piercing-eyed, tall and handsome – at eighty he was still “slender as a youth and as straight as a gun barrel,” a neighbor recalled – George Moore was already one of the richest men in the colony. He saw the stranger and stopped.
“What do you want?”
“I'm looking for work.”
For a man to show up at a remote station asking for work was well within the normal course of events. The population of the new colony of Canterbury was small, there were few roads and the nights were very dark. By 1860, a small army of swagmen walked from place to place in search of work and, if work was not available, shelter and food. It was considered a clear duty to provide these. Obituaries of wealthy men often included the phrase, “No swagman was ever rejected.”
“What are you doing?” Moore asked.
“I am an obstacle maker.”
“Such work does not exist here.”
Davis then asked if he could spend the night in the men's cabin.
Moore: “I don't run a hotel. There is public accommodation at the Weka Pass. Ten kilometers if you go back and take the road. Three miles if you go over the hills.”
They looked at each other for a few moments, the rich man and the poor man, and then turned away never to meet again.
It now started to rain heavily and darkness fell early. Davis must have seen a light at a window because he then knocked on the door of a cabin where a carpenter named John Henry lived with his wife. Henry also refused Davis accommodation.
A week later he told a Christchurch court what had happened: “He asked for a drink of water, which I gave him, as I had no tea at the time. He said, “I have just seen Mr. Moore who has denied me stopping here this dreadful wet night: what shall I do?”
“[He] attempted to enter the hut, but I refused, saying that Mr. Moore had on a previous occasion accused me of having two men on the spot. . . I sent him to the wool shed about three or four hundred yards away, where he would find shelter. While I was awake it rained heavily all night. About midnight I heard the dogs barking and I said to my wife that the poor man has lost his way, I think.
That was a Wednesday evening.
Davis was nowhere to be found the next morning and his existence was therefore forgotten. Glenmark was by this time a vast estate, about 60,000 hectares, and days or weeks might pass before he was found, but in fact it was not until a day later that a shepherd saw a man in the distance, apparently sleeping in the sun: Last Friday morning, March 9, between 8 and 9 o'clock, I saw a man lying on the ground about a mile from the station, near the direction of the Pass.
“He was lying on his back with one leg crossed over the other and his arms spread out, while his hat was about 20 yards away from him. I thought he was sleeping, but since I saw no movement while calling for my dog, I thought he was dead. I went forward and saw some blood stains on his face and a four barrel pistol at his feet. . .”
If the barking of the dogs that John Henry heard was a reliable indicator, Davis had committed suicide around midnight. He never found the woolshed. There was no path to follow over the hill to Weka Pass. In other words, he had slogged in darkness and rain for four hours and covered a mile.
When news of the incident broke, there was public outrage. The new colony was a Church of England settlement and quite high-class. There was not much concern for equality, but everyone was, according to High Church and Tory principles, linked together in a net of rights and duties. There was a special obligation on the rich to care for the poor. “Shame – a thousand times shame,” said the Lyttelton times, “to the person who sent from his door into the wasteland a starving man with sore feet, with no chance of shelter or prospect of something to eat . . . What man with a touch of feeling would serve a dog like that?
George Moore coolly defended himself at the inquest: 'He could have found his way if he had been the right kind of man in the way I pointed out to him; it started to get dark. . . There might have been room in the hut for another couple; But . . . Too many times I have been forced to do so. I refused him because he was drinking. I smelled him on it. That was one reason. . . He didn't seem weak; he looked like a strong, capable man. I am guided by my opinion on whether men are cheaters or looking for work. I considered this man an impostor. I didn't get the feeling he was really looking for work, although he did ask for one.”
Moore himself was, in his own opinion, the right kind of man. He was a Manxman, tough as nails. He regularly walked the 40 miles to Christchurch and when caught in the rain at night, he did not thrash around wishing he were dead, but climbed a flax bush and went to sleep. He did not know that Davis had a gun with him and that in a fit of desperation he would turn it on himself, and therefore cannot be held entirely responsible for the suicide, but it must have been his contempt for a “weakling” that has given him more reason to do so. horrible decisions.
The body was found around nine o'clock on Friday morning. The farm hands wanted to move it, at least to the wool shed, but Moore forbade this. It appears no one was even allowed to approach Davis to cover his face. Moore eventually sent word to the nearest town, but only by the slowest method: a passing dray.
“I had no horse at hand,” he told the inquest.
A police officer arrived in Glenmark on Sunday morning. Davis had been dead for more than 80 hours and was still lying where he fell. His wide-awake, broad-brimmed hat of felt or straw, worn by most male colonists against the strong sunlight of the antipode, was still twenty yards from his body. The autumn sun had been shining on the body for two days. The dissolution had begun.
The officer asked if one of the carpenters could make a coffin to carry the dead man away. Moore refused. His men, he said, worked on a contract basis: he could not order them to do this. In any case, it was Sunday. How could a carpenter work on the Sabbath? The police officer was presented with a box that was at the house.
“I looked at it but it was too narrow,” the officer told the court.
Moore then gave him an old sack from the woolshed to carry the body away.
“Average, harsh, barbaric, blasphemous man!” shouted the Lyttelton times. “[We] we express our disgust that religion is used as an excuse for lack of charity. We cannot say with certainty that Mr. Moore's violation falls within the letter of the law; maybe that's true. But this we do know: that hereafter no hand of any Christian man shall hold Mr. Moore's until he has atoned for his profound crime against the laws of God and man.
Moore was not the least bit moved by this horror. He was burned in effigy in Christchurch. What did he care? When he went into the city, he carried a tent on his back and slept in the marketplace. Glenmark expanded from 60,000 to 150,000 hectares. He waged war on all sides: 'What do I care about my neighbors?' – and deliberately kept his sheep infected with scabies so that other livestock farmers would not take their flocks to market in his country. He became known as 'Scabby' Moore. It is said that at one point he was ordered to cure his sheep of the disease and instead drove mobs off a cliff to die on the beach below.
Any workman at Glenmark seen with a straight back during the day was dismissed on the spot for limpness. The men naturally hated their master: “The sky turned blue as soon as he got out of earshot,” one neighbor recalled. No races were built for pulling the sheep on Glenmark's cattle ranches. “I have no interest in hiring a shepherd who is too lazy to lift a sheep over the rail.”
Twenty years after the swagman died, Moore built the most beautiful country house ever seen in New Zealand. The house had a special feature: there was only one outside door, and it was at the front. Moore's fear was that while his back was turned, the servants would throw away his valuables or hand a piece of bread to a poor man at the kitchen door.
It is heartening to report that everything Moore built was reduced to ashes in his own lifetime. Two years after it was completed, the great house burned to the ground. Molten lead poured like rain over the single door. His daughter Annie, a spinster, rushed back and forth to save her canaries and carried them to a Wellingtonia tree in the middle of the lawn, but the tree also caught fire and Miss Moore herself was “very scorched.”
A few years later, the vast estate was broken up under threat of expropriation by the government. Moore subsequently retired to Christchurch, where he became blind. Annie saw her chance and married the doctor. Moore never knew. He sat in the dark in his mansion on Park Terrace, listening to travelers and treasure hunters, unaware that the greatest prize, Annie, had already given herself away.
Long before that he had quarreled with his wife and his three sons and broken off contact with them, and there he died in Park Terrace, blind, friendless, deceived, soon to be forgotten in the singular oblivion that hastens to consume all memory to erase. of those who live a selfish life, except for one strange circumstance: a magnificent creature, one of the greatest creations of evolution – the largest eagle that ever flew – was named after him.
Harpagornis moorei.
This is the first chapter of the brilliant new book on natural history Hard at the Cloud House by Peter Walker (Massey University Press, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide. It tells the story of the giant Haast eagle, which once ruled the Southern Alps; it's one of the best books of the year, and ReadingRoom is dedicating the entire week to this masterpiece. Tomorrow: The author writes about a curious link with Taika Waititi, who tells Walker, “Oh. Mine. Goodness.”