THE MAHAKIPAWA REEF AND THE WAIKAKAHO DIGGINGS.

Press, Volume XLV, Issue 7194, 2 November 1888, Page 3

THE MAHAKIPAWA REEF AND THE WAIKAKAHO DIGGINGS.

By the Warrigal.

I forget who it was who told mc the story of Fifty Pound Tom, but I know he who told it helped himself to a pannikin of coffee from the billy near the fire, and lit his pipe with a live coal which he picked up with his fingers. I remember also that the the mountain camp looked picturesque. The firelight gleamed on the tent, on the men seated in it, smoking and talking, and on Mr Oliver baking a loaf in a camp oven. The smoke curled up to the trees that waved their branches high overhead. A fresh breeze rustled and murmured through the forest, and went headlong down the gully below Uβ with a sound like rushing water, This breeze would fan the camp fires of the gold seekers on the Mahakipawa, and shake the flies and flaps of their tents, bnt it would carry no such meaning to them as it did to us. It came to us fresh from the sea, only touching the tips of virgin forests as it passed, it came over a boundless stretch of land and sea. To the gold seekers it only came down the gully, and the gully they say is darned narrow. The breeze was cool on the mountain, but the fire was hot, the day had been long and the night would not last long, so we went to sleep and awoke at sunrise, two of the party hoarse with colds, and another with a pain in his back. A splash in the creek, a climb up its banks, mutton chops and boiled coffee f made us ready for another day's work, but after eating there was time for a smoke, and during that time I heard the bell bird troll its longringing note, and the tui pipe a few bars of a lovely melody as sweetly and easily as a prima donna singing when she is glad. Then I left the camp and clambered up the steep path through the forest. I reached the pegs of the Mahakipawa claim, and after waiting a short time at this rendezvous, Mr Faulkner, whom I had been expecting, came up and showed mc the outcrop of the reef. There has been very little work done, in fact the reef is so recently discovered that little could be done to prove it, and until something of its length, breadth, depth, and gold-bearing qualities are known it will not be wise to publish opinions upon it. The outcrop, a nice looking quartz block about 3ft thick, is in decomposed and very friable schist rock. The course of the reef is north and south, with a dip of about 38 degrees to the east. A shaft has been sunk on the reef about ISf t, and I exposes good hanging and foot walls. I I broke off a considerable lot of stone, examined the face of the reef closely, but could find no gold. My companion spent some time picking at a small leader, but even he could not discover any of the rich specimens which he and others said existed there. I am not surprised at specimens showing gold being difficult to find, because unless a reef is very rich and the gold finely disseminated the colour is not to be found in every few inches of stone; besides this, the stone was dirty, and we had no water with which to wash it. We broke out a dish full of stone and mullock, scrambled down the precipitous slope of the hill to a little spring, and without crushing or rubbing the stone in any way obtained a good show of gold by ordinary washing. This outcrop of quartz is nearly 2000 ft above sea level; it is on a narrow, steepsided spur, and should offer lots of backs for very short drives, if the reef only lives down. The locality is not particularly favourable for the erection of crushing machinery, or the transport of quartz* except by the aid of an aerial tramway. There is no water power available for miles around, as both the Mahakipawa and the Waikakahao creeks are reserved 'for alluvial workings. There is, however, plenty of timber for fuel, and machinery could be taken by steamer to within a few miles of a crushing site. The country in which the quartz is found is easily worked, and if the existence of innumerable rich quartz specimens (I think I said that nearly all the gold I saw taken from the Makakipawa is more or less mixed with quartz) is any proof of the existence of rich reefs, then these hills, which will be most thoroughly searched by quartz miners, will yet yield up the secret of the heavy gold discovered.

Mr Faulkner, who had guided mc to this outcrop, left mc to fossick about at my pleasure whilst he returned to perform some of the mysterious rites that are ne. cessary to secure claims of any description. I was to meet him at some point on a blazed track, or failing to see him I wa* to cooee at the same rendezvous. I left the outcrop and clambered up the faca of the hill, forcing my way through an undergrowth tough and tenacious. The ground is covered with a network of roots, for the forest is dense; the roots are hidden with moss and forest debris, so walking there is no easy matter. As I clambered upwards I thought how diffl. colt it is for any small party to prospect

such a country for reefs. The natural cuttings—the creeks—are filled with boulders, their banks are covered deep with broken rocks, shingle, earth and scrub. The hills, too, are covered with great tangled forests which hide nearly every eign of the solid rocks of which they are composed. The quartz reefs, however, being of a much harder nature than the schist formation, are certain to be more prominent, therefore if systematic prospecting is carried on some rich quartz mines should be opened. I suppose however that most of this country will be bored with scrip, and sunk with shares before any gold is sent down from the batteries.

By exerting myself I soon reached the crest of the hill and saw around mc a glorious view. To the north there stretched the region of the Sounds, a land of steep sided irregular hills dark with forests in places, gaunt and brown to the north-east; and amongst these hills, lying in crater-i ike hollows, and winding valleys, rested depths of clear water like lakes and rivers seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Far away to the north, where the hills grew empurpled by distance, the land met the sea in masses of islands and ragged peninsulas ; and beyond them was the open sea, a smooth wall of darkest blue, rising to a broader stretch of white cloud mountains. To the east Cloudy Bay curved in towards mc and seemed to reach the base of the hills beneath my resting place, and further south a long tongue of low yellow land jutted out into thesea t guarding the bay and forming the south boundary of a valley so great that it is called a plain, and almost forms a province. Through this valley there winds a silver path, it is a great river and near it numerous white objects like a big flock of sheep are clustered. They are the.houses of Blenheim, the capital of Marlborough. To the south and west there is nothing but great dark hills and illimitable forests, a land of gloom and mystery, but a land for the goldseeker or the seeker after any mineral treasure. The wind blew cold over my mountain eyrie, and there was much to be done besides admiring a landscape, so I descended the western spur, and striking the path through the forest I followed it a short distance and then cooeed. I heard an answer from the gully beneath, and soon after I was joined by Annear, Faulkner, and party. We visited another outcrop of quartz, which was on the opposite side of the spur to the Mahakipawa but on the same line of reef. Tha stone is of the same class as the first outcrop I described, the reef is about two feet thick and shows little more than two yards on the surface. Owing to the uncertainty as to what sized claims wonld be granted at the Wardens Court, so little work has been done to open out the ree* that one can see nothing and say nothing about their prospects. After breaking off a few fragments of quartz from the reef we found a specimen that showed gold. I have seen reefs that showed gold more freely, but specimen hunting is only a chance game after all, and a few more strokes of the pick might have disclosed sufficient specimens to stock a sharebroker's window. The possibilities of this region as a field for quartz mining wonld form an admirable subject for the writers of prospectuses. The rich specimens in the neighbouring creeks, the class of rock forming the hills, and the little that is known of the country would just suit the fervid imagination of the inspired mining prophet. I bade good-bye to my hospitable friends. Mr Annear put mc on the track for the Waikakahao creek, and left mc, and I found myself alone in the forest. The track 1 had to follow was not so plain that one could march along il without the possibility of being lost. A blaze mark on a tree, a twig bent in a particular direction, a few footprints in the soft grounds were all the marks to guide mc though a labrynith of trees and over rocky uneven ground. The general direction was to descend the hill, but this course was not so easy as one would imagine; descending a precipitous slope covered with New Zealand bush offers some difficulties. You may go down for half-a-dozen feet swiftly, noiselessly, and easily, but the way you bring up against a stump or with a supplejack round your neck demands considerable command over your temper. One of the methods of descending is to mix yourself in the meshes of a lawyer bush and then wriggle downwards; the motion is not bad but is destructive to clothes. By slips and bumps and jumps I get within a few hundred feet of the bottom of a deep narrow ravine, and see the gleam of a white tent through the trees. This satisfies mc that I have struck the Waikakahao creek, and five minutes afterwards I am drinking tea in a miner's camp. The Waikakahao creek is similar in appearance to Mahakipawa, it is the same steep-sided water course through foliated schist rock. Ramera Erihana told mc that Kakahao meant the flower (or feathery tuft) of the toitoi and Wai as most oeople in this country know is used to signify water whether creek or river, so Waikakahao should mean the creek of the toitoi flower. lam not aware that anybody else but the original prospectors have obtained gold, but I imagine it is only because nobody else has reached the bed rock. The Waikakahao is more steep-sided and rugged in its descent than the Mahakipawa ; the rocks in its stream are larger and the wash deeper. Until several or the claims have bottomed the payable character of this field cannot be ascertained. It is limited in extent and nearly all the available ground has been pegged off. I walked all through the workings in the stream bed and saw that it would require considerable labour to sink even a few feet, owing to the large size of the boulders. I am surprised that neither here nor in the Mahakipawa has machinery been used to assist stripping. Shear legs, or even a boom slung from a tree with a crab winch and large sized grips attached to the tackle, would lift out ten times the weight of stones with half the labour in the same time. Instead of spending two or three pounds on such simple apparatus the men laboriously break up the larger rocks with pick hammers, bars, or powder and pile up the fragments by hand. The piece of rock which requires the efforts or two men to break and handle for an hoar could be shifted with a crab winch in five minutes. In. no place along the creek did I see where the men had struck bottom. I noticed that just above the falls a narrow band of flne hard slate ran through the schist. This band of slate runs across the creek and if I was a gold seeker I should try just above and below this bar. The band of slate shows numerous flne quartz stringers, and reefs might be fonnd somewhere along its course. Lower down the creek parties were sinking on low terraces or flats where the creek once ran. The wash here was lighter but the sinking will be pretty deep. There is a stale old joke echoed all op the ravine, "That the bottom has fallen out of the Waikakahao"; but nobody has sunk deep yet. They seem to think a twenty foot shaft a big thing there; when they sink a hundred feet, they can joke about it if they like. There are more dogs and blucher boots on the Waikakahao creek than on any other diggings I have seen. This may signify that it is the most recently rushed, but it may mean that there are more new chum diggers there. The Waikakahao creek widens out as it descends to a lower level, where it ceases to be a torrent, and winds round extensive flats covered with noble trees. On these flats numerous tents are pitched, and here and there men are sinking for gold; but not half the men encamped by the creek here are mining— they are simply waiting to grow sceptical on everything connected with gold and work.

On reaching a lower level where the ravine opens out into a fair eized valley and the forest dwindles down to ti-tree scrub the calico township of Waikakahao aoDeare, and I am able to satisfy my mountain appetite with dry bread,' rancid batter and tea, for the email sum of one shilling. Just below the township in the bed of the valley a party of men are sink-, ing a prospecting shaft. They are down' about the same depth, the wash is exactly similar, and the purpose is the same as the shaft I described sunk by Johnstone and party on Cullen's Flat, Mahakipawa. If this shaft reaches auriferous ground it shonld prove a large extent of easily worked country to oe gold-bearing. I sincerely hope the men will sink until they reach a good bottom, for the place is really worth proving, and if payable gold is found there will be such a rush to Maryborough as New Zealand has not seen for the last twenty years.