First Year in Canterbury Settlement

Before he wrote the biting satire of 'Erewhon' and the autobiographical 'The Way of All Flesh,' Samuel Butler spent four years as a sheep farmer in New Zealand's remote Canterbury high country. Arriving in 1860 as a twenty-nine-year-old Oxford-educated gentleman, the son of a clergyman, he came with capital and ambition. What he found was raw: the brutal reality of colonial life, the isolation of the backcountry, the eccentric characters who populated the frontier. This book chronicles his journey across the young settlement on horseback, his quest for suitable land, and his eventual establishment of the 'Mesopotamia' run. It's a fascinating window into colonial New Zealand, but also into the making of a writer who would later skewer English society with merciless precision. The young man's naivety, his observations about settlers and Maori, and the sheer physical challenge of surviving in a wild landscape make this far more than a period travelogue. It is, in essence, Butler's first attempt at understanding the strange and the arbitrary in human institutions.