Wanderings in Search of Gold

THE story of exploration is not so much con­cerned with the discovery of gold as with the period following the first big rushes when miners and prospectors were risking death by starvation and drowning to find further fields for exploitation.

After the sensational Otago gold rush precipitated by Read’s discovery in May, 1861, men scoured the interior and combed the ranges for their precious metal. The Shotover, Dart, Rees and other rugged valleys were scenes of exultation and disappointment. Adventurous prospecting leaders such as Caples and Barrington made journeys of desperate hardship into the back-country.

If Otago’s gold-fields had driven men to exploration, the West Coast diggings were still more sensational. Lone explorers like Brunner and Mackay were only too willing to agree with the sealer, de Blosseville, who in 1824 wrote of the West Coast that it was ‘ one long solitude, with a forbidding sky, frequent tempests, and impene­trable forests.’ Few were prepared to face the doubtful joys of crossing flooded rivers, snow saddles, and untracked bush. But the gold-fever changed that.

Attracted by the legends of gold in the Buller Valley (1859) and Whitcombe Valley (1863), Hunt, a will-o’-the-wisp who fled before the lantern light of his jealous fellows, struck rich finds near Lake Brunner in 1864. His rivals, French and Smart, were also successful. Mother Canterbury frowned at her uncouth child Westland; but the lifted eyebrows soon fell when the amazing wealth of the fields was realised. Vessels plied the difficult West Coast bars and men thronged the Divide Passes. In 1864 the valley flats were crowded. A year later the wealth at Okarito gave men the impetus to follow rivers to the glaciers. Gorges were seemingly impassable, bush impenetrable, rivers unfordable; yet the search prospered. West-land was on the map and the diggers were there to fossick with picks, and to wash with pans.