The neatly transcribed, typewritten volumes she opened in front of me dated from the 1840s onwards, and as I delved into the entries I was taken by the missionary’s descriptions of his travels up and down the Whanganui River. The places he described were close to the cleared farms, forestry plantations and bush country I’d travelled through with Archer. Taylor’s landscape, though, was primeval and fecund, teeming with life. More than once he described the scenery as ‘romantic’ and the term struck me as fitting, given the way nature appeared to dwarf him. The power of the natural world was even more accentuated through his references to the mighty river rapids and the occasional rumble and rattle of earthquakes that rocked his camp. I followed him as he walked through dense bush, over bluffs and across volcanic landscapes, but in terms of smell, there wasn’t much to go on. There were only a few passages and even those were brief: the earth floor of a church covered in aromatic mānuka branches, another laid with dried fern.

By now other visitors had come into the library, groups of schoolchildren filing in and out, chatting as they picked up books from the shelves or studied the glass-topped display cases. Researchers came and went, talking loudly at the librarian’s desk: a man seeking information about a relative killed in Messines, a woman researching 1940s fashion, a university graduate wanting to continue her research into artist Charles Blomfield’s letters, a teenager working on a project about influenza. Their requests didn’t distract me: I was too engrossed in what I was reading to be drawn back to the present day.

After a few hours I came to the final volume in my selection, an entry that included a cross-country journey made in April 1849 from Taylor’s home in Whanganui to Tauranga, and then on to Auckland. A passage jumped out at me. Near Matamata he came across an abandoned mission house, visible from far away because of the number of ‘foreign’ trees forming a grove nearby. As he drew nearer he began to list the plants he encountered: blooming furze that perfumed the ‘wilderness’, sweet briar and evening primrose, tufts of strawberry plants, a large woodbine bush, a huge mimosa and wild asparagus. All the windows of the house were broken and the lawn had been dug up by pigs. I reread the passage, marvelling at the detail of the picture he painted. But it was his use of the word ‘foreign’ to describe the mission house trees, rather than ‘exotic’ or even ‘non-native’ that seemed to emphasise a sense of distance between him and his temporary garden surroundings. It was as if, at that moment, he had cast himself in the role of local or even ‘native’. Had I been wrong in thinking he didn’t feel at home in the bush and forest? Maybe my own lack of familiarity with such an environment had caused me to misinterpret his attachment to the land he journeyed through.