FAREWELL TO VIENNA

This message was printed (in Maori and German) by our two authors before they left Vienna.

Dear friends and people of Vienna, we greet you. We two men from New Zealand have come here on your frigate Novara to see your land and the white people who live there; now we have seen it all. This city is very beautiful, so are the houses and the streets and the fountains and the fishes in the fountains, so are the gardens and the sculptured heads; all things are very beautiful in Vienna, very beautiful.

We have seen the State Printing Works where we are staying, to learn your language and the craft of printing; we have seen the treasury and the great Stephanskirche as well as the very beautiful new church in Lerchenfeld. We climbed the tower of the Stephanskirche and also visited the garden in Schoenbrunn, belonging to the emperor of Austria. There we saw all the animals; it gave us great pleasure to see the animals about which we heard the English talk to us in New Zealand—the lion, the tiger, the elephant, the wolf, the reindeer, the fox, the bear, the giraffe, in short all animals and birds of which we had seen pictures in New Zealand.

Our teachers in New Zealand had also told us about your kings of old—how brave the Germanic kings used to be and how powerful were their armies. During our stay we saw the garments of those kings and their arsenals and afterwards we saw their effigies in the vaults of a church; the pakehas of New Zealand had talked about all these things, and how beautiful they were. We have seen your country; it is very good. There is only one evil thing and that is the abundance of snow and the harshness of the wind for the biting of the wind hurts our eyes, and also the great cold. In New Zealand it is not cold; snow in New Zealand lies only on the tops of mountains and only little of it; and the snowy mountains are far away, nowhere near the town. We greet you all, dear friends and people of Vienna.