14 April: Boreham on George Grey

Knight of the Olive Branch
New Zealand, at any rate, will celebrate today the birthday of Sir George Grey. This commemoration is essentially and pre-eminently a New Zealand affair—unless Scotland, the land from which the pilgrim fathers of 1848 migrated, cares to take a hand in it—but New Zealand has no monopoly in Sir George Grey. Although it was in New Zealand that Sir George displayed his finest gifts of statesmanship and spent the most important years of his life, we cannot forget that it was Australia that lured him, as a young officer from the old land, whilst it was in Australia that some of his most gallant exploits were achieved. Contemplating the social and industrial miseries that followed the Napoleonic Wars, he became convinced that Britain could be saved only by expansion. The English air was alive with rumours as to the suitability of Australia as an outlet for the surplus population of the old world. Grey, then in the twenties, realised that this might be the solution of the problem with which the best brains in Europe were wrestling; he therefore offered to go to the Antipodes and ascertain the truth.

A spice of romance was infused into the scheme at the outset, for Charles Darwin had just returned to England in the Beagle and had electrified his hearers and readers by his recital of the wonders that he had witnessed beyond the seas. The Government decided to place the Beagle at the command of Captain Grey for his new enterprise. And thus he found himself, as he sailed away into the unknown, occupying the very cabin that Darwin had occupied during one of the most fruitful voyages by which the world in general, and science in particular, had ever been enriched. Grey was thrilled by the coincidence. It seemed to him an augury of high fortune.

From A Beautiful Dream To A Bitter Reality
No man ever embarked upon a difficult and hazardous venture with more sanguine expectations. His brain was in a whirl of excitement. He talked of Australia all day and dreamed of Australia all night. Australia was, to him, the hope of the world. He felt that he was going out to transform a void and useless continent, making it the prosperous homeland of the indigent multitudes whose wretchedness had almost broken his heart. "My emotions as I boarded the Beagle," he says, "were like a flood. Here I was, sailing to a quarter of the world which the Creator, in His goodness, had provided for the support and happiness of men. Yet they actually did not know what it was like: the inheritance was still unexplored. And that land was to be all my own, to designate as I wished!"

Unhappily, the romance swiftly evaporated. Few explorers have suffered horrors of so many kinds as fell to the lot of this young soldier. There were days in which the tortures of thirst compelled him and his companions to speculate as to the possibility of preserving their sanity. Lips grew black; tongues swollen; eyes wild. On one occasion the explorer crawled back to civilisation in a condition so abject and emaciated that nobody recognised him. Compelled by ulcerated feet to creep on all fours, with hair and beard shaggy and unkempt, and his voice gone, he had the greatest difficulty in convincing even those who knew him best, that it was indeed he. And—a calamity that preyed more upon his mind than any other—he was afflicted with intolerable remorse at having been forced to take the life of a fellow man.

An Ambassador Of Peace On Many Shores
In the course of that first expedition into the interior, the natives had shown the most unreasoning and uncompromising hostility. On one occasion, where the aborigines had the white men absolutely at their mercy, Sir George Grey had to decide between the massacre of his party and the use of firearms against the blackfellows. When every demonstration of the power of the rifles had failed to awe the natives, and when they were in the very act of hurling the spears that would have meant certain death to himself and his men, Sir George Grey reluctantly pulled the trigger, saw his dusky assailant fall, and watched the others fly in terror. The memory of that moment haunted Sir George to his dying day.

Some people seem born for difficult situations. In South Australia, in New Zealand, and in South Africa, Sir George Grey assumed office as Governor when public affairs were in a situation as desperate as could very well exist. On each occasion he displayed a firmness, a persuasiveness and a tact that quickly changed the surcharged atmosphere and averted the threatened storm. He was only 34 when, in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, paid an eloquent tribute to his administrative genius and enlarged on the incalculable debt under which the shrewd and brave young soldier had placed the Empire. During his term of service in New Zealand he formed the friendship and won the whole-hearted admiration of Dr. Selwyn, the pioneer bishop of that country. Selwyn found a day or two spent in the company of Sir George Grey a wonderful refreshment and inspiration. Sir George Grey stands in our history as an imperial peacemaker. Wherever trouble was brewing he was sent. His genius for conciliation proved invaluable. In every part of the world he contrived to win not only the confidence but the affection of all who came into touch with him; and, among the architects and builders of Empire, there are few whose pacific and constructive achievements throw his into the shade. In his last moments of semi-consciousness in London, he murmured several sentences in the Maori tongue: his heart was still in the ends of the earth and Australia will join with New Zealand in honouring the anniversary of his birth.

F W Boreham

Image: George Grey