MANY COUNTRIES VISITED.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20915, 24 July 1933, Page 8

MANY COUNTRIES VISITED.

MINING ENGINEER'S

TRAVELS

WORK IN SOI'TII A.MEUK A

After 27 years of travelling in many parts of the world in pursuit of his profession of mining engineer Lieutenant-Colonel A. T. Watson is paying his second visit to New Zealand. Colonel Watson, who was born in Central Otago, is at present visiting relatives in Christchurch. The countries visited by Colonel Watson in the course of his travels include the Argentine Republic, Tierra del Fuego, the Gold Coast, Siberia, Northern Nigeria, Spain and Portugal, Canada and the United States, Brazil, and the republics in northern South America. At present he is manager of a gold mine in Colombia, where he has been for the last eight years. Shortly before the war and again soon after it, Colonel Watson made trips up to the head waters of the river Amazon. On his first trip in 1910 he travelled 2300 miles up the river in the ocean-going steamer in which he had crossed the Atlantic from Liverpool. In those day* every part of the huge territory round the river was being visited by rubber hunters, and there was actually very little of it that had not been, to some extent, explored. On his second trip after the war the rubber hunters had practically left the country, all the rubber having been cut out or else the low market price not making it worth taking. Service in Air Force.

In the war Colonel Watson served as a pilot in the Air Force, rising to the rank of wing commander. Afterwards he paid a short visit to New Zealand and then returned to his work of mining engineer, making his second trip up the Amazon, two trips to the Gold Coast, and also visiting the Peace river district of British Columbia. Finally he settled down in the Republic of Colombia. Colonel Watson said that in Colombia most of the gold was won by alluvial mining. He was manager for an English company which owned two dredges and a sluicing plant on the river Nechi. Last year the country produced £1,000,000 worth of gold. The plant was worked by natives with "foreign" overseers and engineers—"foreigners," Colonel Watson explained, meaning anyone who was not a Colombian, and including Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Americans, and Continentals. Altogether more than 200 men were employed by his company. In the low-lying parts of the country the climate was very hot and malarial, but on the high plateaus it was wonderfully healthy, said Colonel Watson. The country had had a stable government now for many years, and there were large sums of English capital invested there. Colonel Watson, with Mrs Watson and their two children, who travel everywhere with him, will leave New Zealand for Australia within a few weeks. In Australia he will inspect several mines, and then will go on to England, returning to Colombia by way of New York. They have just returned from a visit to Central Otago, where they visited Cromwell, although Colonel Watson had not time to inspect the gold mining going oil there.