Samuel Butler's Sheep

By 1840, it was clear that the industries that had first brought Europeans to New Zealand, particularly sealing and shore whaling, were faltering. In their place settlers were turning to a new primary export, wool: the commodity upon which Britain's industrial revolution and economic hegemony were based at the time. As James Belich writes, the ‘powered mills and factory-production techniques’ of Britain were ‘clothing and blanketing a good part of the world’, and as the empire expanded so did its pastures: to the Indian Subcontinent, South Africa, Australia and eventually New Zealand. During the 1830s and 1840s, Australian merinos were brought across the Tasman in large numbers, but breeding within New Zealand soon took over. There were over a million sheep in the country by 1860, 13 million by 1880, 20 million by the end of the century.1During the 1850s and 1860s, the ready availability of ‘free land, free grass and a large local market could mean staggering profits for those first in. “Sheep farming”, observed the Otago Witness in the 1850s, “‘presents visions of quite dazzling wealth’”.2Among the British immigrants who took advantage of this boom was the young Samuel Butler. During his four years on a Canterbury sheep run from 1860 to 1864, Butler ‘doubled his £4000 capital […], which helped make up for the paltry £69 3s 10d he received in royalties from his famous book Erewhon’.3 Of course, Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisted (1901) were themselves products of Butler's time in New Zealand. Like Butler's own emigration – which he describes first-hand in the autobiographical First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863) – the emigration of George Higgs, the narrator of Erewhon, derives from the entrepreneurial promise of imperial pastoralism: ‘when I left home it was with the intention of going to some new colony, and either finding, or even perhaps purchasing, waste crown land suitable for cattle or sheep farming, by which means I thought that I could better my fortunes more rapidly than in England’.4Reaching an unnamed settlement on the other side of the globe, Higgs describes the prospect he encounters as Nature's own invitation to the pastoralist: ‘millions on millions of acres of the most beautifully grassed country in the world, and of the best suited for all manner of sheep and cattle’ (p. 3). This description, based on 1860s Canterbury, ignores the strenuous labour by which human beings had constructed this agrarian idyll: the cutting or burning of the podocarp forest, the draining of the wetlands that originally covered the plains, the introduction of European grasses.5 By the time Butler reached Port Lyttelton in 1860, settlers had taken the readily accessible land in Canterbury. Seeking further inland and on higher ground than had his predecessors, Butler eventually found free pastureland in the upper valley of the Rangitata River. Higgs, faced by the same lack of ‘waste’ land, repeats Butler's journey of exploration. The first five chapters of Erewhon are thus based on Butler's own quest, including his discovery (in the company of his friend John Holland Baker) of the Whitcombe Pass.6In transforming his experience into satirical fiction, however, Butler dissects the colonial enterprise that drove settlers like him; for Butler, British imperialism consists of three distinct but co-operating forms. The first of these is aesthetic pastoralism, the evocation of Arcadia. Originating in antiquity, this trope gained a renewed life in eighteenth-century Britain, where its characteristic features – the amorous adventures of shepherds and shepherdesses, set amidst an idyllically fertile landscape of fruiting trees and gentle livestock – fulfilled several different cultural functions. On the one hand, aesthetic pastoralism provided a compensatory fantasy for an increasingly urbanized population separated from rural life. It served as a satirical counterpoint to metropolitan values and an idealization of the agricultural industry upon which British dominance depended. On the other hand, as John Andrews suggests, neo-classical Arcadianism helped mythologize and celebrate the necessary outsourcing of British agricultural production during the nineteenth century.7Entrepreneurs of colonialism, such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield, drew on the fertile landscapes and utopian social relations of the Arcadian tradition to promote their plans for settlement to prospective emigrants.8 The second form of pastoralism anatomized by Butler is the capitalist and agricultural practice of sheep-farming, the real-life investment of labour and money in livestock and land for profit. In the early chapters of Erewhon, Higgs's outlook alternates between Arcadian and mercenary impulses. At one moment he responds to a new vista with the kind of descriptive rhapsody – a valley ‘blue with evening shadow’, a hillside ‘brilliant with the sunset gold’, a river ‘boisterous and terrible’, a climate of ‘ineffable purity’, a region of ‘solemn peacefulness’ – that was familiar to Victorians as the stuff of the Arcadian picturesque (p. 17). The next moment he dismisses the landscape as ‘nothing but a few flats covered with scrub on either side the river, and mountains which were perfectly worthless’. Higgs's aesthetic appreciation quickly fades when it is not accompanied by the promise of economic reward: ‘my curiosity about the nature of the country above the gorge was now quite satisfied’, he declares, since ‘there was no available sheep country’ and hence ‘no money in it whatever’ (p. 21). This attitude reflects Butler's knowledge of the disposition of actual pastoralists, which he expresses in First Year: ‘our motive was pounds, shillings, and pence: and where this failed us, we lost all excitement and curiosity’.9A little later in the same volume Butler reprimands himself for ‘admiring a mountain which is of no use for sheep. This is wrong. A mountain here is only beautiful if it has good grass on it […]. If it is good for sheep, it is beautiful, magnificent, and all the rest of it; if not, it is not worth looking at’.10In Erewhon, similarly, aesthetic inspiration and capitalist aspiration sometimes meet to produce a heightened effect, for example when Higgs, on the verge of defeat, sees the clouds part to reveal ‘an easy pass in the mountains directly opposite to me, through which I caught a glimpse of an immeasurable extent of blue and distant plains’. The vanishing-point composition of this scene – which Butler, an accomplished painter, borrows from the tradition of perspectival landscape painting – parallels the profit motive, drawing the imagination of the reader into the distance just as Higgs resolves to continue, despite exhaustion and danger, in ‘the hope of finding an immense tract of available sheep country’ that he can ‘monopolise’ and ‘grasp at the possible profits therefrom’ (pp. 26–28). Bathetically, though, and unlike Butler himself, Higgs never achieves his quest, for the territory over the range is already occupied by a pastoral society. Erewhon is ‘a land of shepherds’ on the Arcadian model: a ‘highly cultivated’ landscape of towns, cities, villages, orchards, pine forests and plains. The first humans he meets are ‘two lovely girls’ tending their flock, nubile shepherdesses straight out of a pastoral idyll; the first house he visits resembles ‘a shepherd's hut upon [his] master's sheep-run’; his first meal is milk and mutton (pp. 42, 48–49, 54). Instead of an area of ‘waste’ land from which he can make his fortune, Higgs has discovered a mirror-image of the pastoral fantasy that shapes the settlement he has left behind. It seems he cannot go beyond the reach of the pastoral economy. Even his subsequent departure from Erewhon and return to Britain are bound up with it: accompanied by his love-interest, Arowhena, Higgs escapes Erewhon in a hot-air balloon that lands in the ocean, to be rescued by a ship en route from Calloa to Genoa with a cargo of guano, and transferred thence to ‘an English vessel bound from Melbourne to London with wool’ (pp. 314–15). Guano, used for fertiliser, was a crucial raw material for nineteenth-century sheep-farming, and wool was of course one of its two primary products.11 The final chapter of Erewhon brings into focus the third form of pastoralism that combines with the aesthetic and agricultural forms. Higgs announces his intention to form an association and raise capital for a navy of armed vessels to transport cargoes of Erewhonians – ‘packed closely and fed at a very reasonable cost’ – to Queensland, where they will be sold under indenture to ‘the sugar-growers of that settlement, who are in great want of labour’ (pp. 318–20). Modestly, Higgs acknowledges this scheme is inspired by a real article in The Times in which the Governor of Queensland attempts ‘to set at rest an uneasy feeling which at present existed in the country’ regarding the importation by that colony of indentured labourers from Polynesia by pointing out that their detention allows them to be given ‘religious instruction’ (pp.321–22).12In the same way, Higgs assures prospective investors that the Erewhonian labourers will be ‘lodged in the households of religious sugar-growers’ so that ‘each day, as soon as they could be spared from their work in the plantations, they would be assembled for praise, and be thoroughly grounded in the Church Catechism’. Higgs's scheme will ‘convert the Erewhonians not only into good Christians but into a source of considerable profit to the shareholders’, who will have ‘the comfort of reflecting that they [are] saving souls and filling their own pockets at one and the same moment’ (pp. 320–21). In the familiar symbolic language of the Gospel parable, the Erewhonians are lost sheep to be gathered into the fold; in the more pragmatic argot of the market, they are stock to be fleeced. This association between the mission of the pastor and that of the pastoralist, between the pastoral ambitions of Christian evangelism and those of agricultural capitalism, recalls the parodic sacrament enacted at the start of the journey to Erewhon by Higgs and his native guide Chowbok, which makes use of wool bales and sheep-tallow candles and takes place in a wool-shed ‘built somewhat on the same plan as a cathedral’ (pp. 11–12). This sardonic portrayal of Christian evangelism, the third form of ‘pastoral work’ satirized in Erewhon, is infused not only with Butler's longstanding hostility to organised religion, but also with his awareness that the systematic colonization of the Canterbury district involved a carefully organized collaboration between the New Zealand Company and the Church of England.13 Concluding Erewhon with these references to ‘blackbirding’ (forced indenture) in the Pacific reinforces the point that agricultural colonialism is not a benign realization of Arcadian and Christian ideals but a project entailing the large-scale dispossession, transformation and exploitation of humans, as well as of animals and ecosystems. 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As James has Butler in New Zealand was not a of pastoralism and but a in which was with and a place that a of the between and human in these Butler out that humans are not of nature who on a and of This is a for several it in the of the most and of it so the of and it most on collaboration with that most of New – the sheep.

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