An incident at Glenmark station in Canterbury

Late one afternoon in March 1860 a man in a thin green velveteen jacket and a wide-awake hat arrived on foot at a sheep station named Glenmark, about 65 kilometres north of Christchurch. The man was in his mid-fifties but he looked older. Several people who met him that day agreed later that he looked “careworn”, although they could not agree whether his corduroy trousers were patched or not. Earlier in the day he was given a glass of ale by the landlord of the Kōwai pub, 25 kilometres south of Glenmark, and then, after watching him closely, the landlord sent out another ale 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 rain could be seen whitening in the foothills to the south. As Davis walked towards the farm house at Glenmark, about a mile from the road, rain began falling and he encountered the manager andpart-owner of the station coming from the stockyards. With a piercing gaze, tall, handsome — when he was 80 he was still ‘slim as a youngster and straight as a gun barrel’, a neighbour 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 turn up at a remote station asking for work was well within the normal run of things. The population of the new colony of Canterbury was small, the roads few and the nights very dark. By 1860 there was a little army of swagmen walking from place to place looking for work and, if there was no work available, for shelter and food. It was regarded as a plain duty to provide these. Obituaries for wealthy men often included the sentence, “No swagman was ever turned away”.

“What do you do?” asked Moore.

“I’m a hurdle-maker.”

“There’s no such work here.”

Davis then asked if he could stay the night in the men’s hut.

Moore: “I don’t run a hotel. There’s public accommodation at Weka Pass. Six miles if you go back and take the road. Three miles if you go over the hills.”

They regarded each other for a few moments, the rich man and the poor man, then turned away, never to meet again.

The rain was now coming down in earnest and darkness fell early because of it. Davis must have seen a light at a window because he then knocked at the door of a hut where a carpenter named John Henry lived with his wife. Henry also refused Davis shelter.

A week later he told a Christchurch court what 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 come into the hut, but I refused, and said that Mr Moore had on a former occasion accused me of having had two men at the place . . . I directed him to the woolshed about three or four hundred yards distant, where he would find shelter. It was raining heavily all night while I was awake. About midnight I heard the dogs barking, and I said to my wife that poor man has lost his way, I think.”

That was a Wednesday night.

Davis was nowhere to be seen the next morning and his existence was therefore forgotten. Glenmark was by then a vast estate, about 60,000 acres, and days or weeks might have passed before he was found but in fact it was only one day later that a shepherd saw a man in the distance, apparently sleeping in the sun: “On Friday morning last, March 9th, 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, his hat lying about twenty yards from him. I thought he was sleeping, but as I saw no motion as I was calling to my dog, I then thought that he was dead. I went forward and saw some spots of blood on his face and a four-barrelled pistol lying at his feet . . .”

If the barking of the dogs heard by John Henry was a reliable indicator, Davis had killed himself about midnight. He had never found the woolshed. There was no path to follow over the hill to Weka Pass. For four hours, in other words, he had floundered in darkness and rain and travelled a mile.

When news of the incident became known there was public outrage. The new colony was a Church of England settlement and rather high-minded. There was not much bother about equality but everyone, according to high-church and high Tory principles, was bound together in a net of rights and duties. There was a special obligation on the rich to look after the poor. “Shame — a thousand times shame,” said the Lyttelton Times, “to the individual who sent from his door into the waste a famished footsore man, without a chance of reaching shelter or a prospect of a bit to eat . . . What man with a spark of feeling would serve a dog so?”

George Moore defended himself coolly at the inquest: “He could have found his way if he had been the right sort of man by the way I pointed out to him; it was getting dusk . . . There might have been room in the hut for several more; but . . . I have been imposed upon too often. I refused him because he was in liquor. I smelt him of it. That was one reason . . . He did not appear to be feeble; he looked a strong, able man. I am guided by my opinion as to whether men are impostors or looking for work. I considered this man an impostor. I did not think he was really looking for work, although he asked for it.”

Moore himself was, in his own view, very much the right sort of man. He was a Manxman, hard as nails. He regularly walked the 40 miles to Christchurch and if he was caught out in the rain at night he did not flounder about and wish he were dead but climbed into a flax bush and went to sleep. He did not know that Davis was carrying a pistol and would turn it on himself in a fit of despair, and he therefore cannot be entirely blamed for the suicide, but it must have been his contempt for a ‘weakling’ that led him to more atrocious decisions.

The body had been found about nine o’clock on Friday morning. The farmhands wanted to move it, at least into the woolshed, but Moore forbade this. It seems that no one was allowed even to approach Davis to cover his face. Moore eventually sent a message to the nearest town, but only by the slowest method, a passing dray.

“I had no horse handy,” he told the inquest.

A policeman arrived at Glenmark on Sunday morning. Davis had been dead more than 80 hours and was still lying where he had fallen. His wide-awake, the broad-brimmed hat of felt or straw worn by most male settlers against the strong antipodean sunlight, was still 20 metres from his body. The autumn sun had been shining on the body for two days. Decomposition had set in.

The constable asked if one of the carpenters could make a box to carry the dead man away. Moore refused. His men, he said, worked on contract: he could not order them to do this. In any case, it was Sunday. How could a carpenter possibly work on the Sabbath? The policeman was offered a box that was lying up at the house.

“I looked at it but it was too narrow,” the constable told the court.

Moore then let him have an old sack from the woolshed to carry away the body.

“Mean, hard-hearted, barbarous, blasphemous man!” cried the Lyttelton Times. “[We] express our loathing at religion being made an excuse for want of charity. We cannot say with certainty that Mr Moore’s offence is within the letter of the law; perhaps it may be. But this we do know — that after this, no hand of a Christian man should clasp that of Mr Moore till he has done penance for his deep crime against the laws of God and man.”

Moore was not in the least moved by this anathema. He was burnt in effigy in Christchurch. What did he care? When he went to town he carried a tent on his back and slept in Market Square. Glenmark expanded from 60,000 to 150,000 acres. He waged war on all sides — “What do I care for my neighbours?” — and deliberately kept his sheep diseased with scab, so that other runholders would not take their flocks to market across his land. He became known as ‘Scabby’ Moore. At one point, it is said, 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 daylight hours was fired on the spot for slacking. The men naturally hated their master: “The air turned blue as soon as he had moved out of hearing,” a neighbour recalled. In the Glenmark stockyards, no races were built for drafting the sheep. “I do not care to employ a shepherd too lazy to lift a sheep over a rail.”

Twenty years after the swagman died, Moore built the most magnificent mansion yet seen in New Zealand. The house had a peculiar feature: there was only one external door, which was at the front. Moore’s dread was that, while his back was turned, the servants might spirit away his valuables or hand a piece of bread to a poor man at the kitchen door.

It is pleasing to report that everything Moore built turned 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 daughterAnnie, a spinster, rushed in and out to save her canaries, carrying them to a Wellingtonia tree in the middle of the lawn, but the tree also caught fire and Miss Moore herself was “much scorched”.

A few years later the vast estate was broken up under threat of government expropriation. Moore then retired to Christchurch, where he went blind. Annie saw her chance and married the family doctor. Moore never knew. He sat in the dark in his mansion on Park Terrace listening out for wayfarers and treasure hunters, unaware that the greatest prize, Annie, had already given herself away.

Long before, he had quarrelled with his wife and his three sons and broken off contact with them and there he died in Park Terrace, sightless, friendless, deceived, and he would have soon been forgotten in the special oblivion which races to erase all memory of those who live selfish lives except for one strange circumstance: a magnificent creature, one of the great productions of evolution — the largest eagle that ever flew — was named after him.

Harpagornis moorei.

This is the opening chapter of the new brilliant book of natural history Hard by the Cloud House by Peter Walker (Massey University Press, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide. It tells the story of the giant Haast’s eagle, which once ruled over the Southern Alps; it is one of the year’s best books, and ReadingRoom is devoting all week to this masterpiece. Tomorrow: an interview with an auto electrician of Charleston on the West Coast, who was with caver Phil Wood of Westport when they found an almost complete fossil of the eagle.