It was 1893 and Richard Henry was 48 years old. The woman he had loved had rejected him. A close friend had just been killed in a boating accident. He suffered from chronic low back pain and was always taking pills. His life passion in recent years was studying and attempting to save New Zealand’s flightless birds, and he had hoped to get a job as the curator of a new bird sanctuary on Resolution Island but that had been indefinitely postponed.
He left Te Anau where he had been living on the South Island and travelled to the North Island, stopping to soak at the geothermal hot springs at Rotorua in an attempt to relieve his back pain. It didn’t help. He met with several botanists and naturalists at universities but they showed no real interest in this self-educated man’s viewpoints on birds. He had no work and was too old for the hard physical labor of tree-cutting. His life had come to nothing, and while in Auckland, he decided to kill himself. The gun barrel wasn’t aligned properly and the first bullet he shot deflected off his skull and lodged harmlessly in his head. He re-cocked the revolver and fired again.
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