The Jeweller’s Window

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30390, 14 March 1964, Page 10

The Jeweller’s Window

A CRY of woe, not unexpected, hag gone up from the workers on the Manapouiri proj ect at Doubtful Sound. All those, and there are many, who have experience of life in that area, will sympathise. I visited the sound while the previous project was preparing and a party of about 40 men was in camp at the Manapouri end. Their lot was miserable, sitting idle in the tents for days on end listening to the raiii and submitting their skins to the attentions of the sandflies. Th e workers on the present scheme are now martyrs too; let us hope that repellents are provided and, if not, that “sandfly money” is added to the daily wage. In May, 1773, Captain Cook spent some weeks in Dusky Bay. On the May 11, he began a long description. of this place, its scenery—“nothing but woods and barren craggy precipices, no meadows or lawns to be seen nor plains nor flatt land of any extent,” —and its resources, the abundance of fish, “craw and other shell-fish," seals in plenty “excellent eating, not a bit inferior to the finest beef

stakes,” wild fowl also in plenty, “Ducks, Shaggs, Cormorants, Penguins and other aquatick birds.” It all reads like the prospectus of an earthly paradise, and certainly Cook and his officers much enjoyed their stay there, but alas there was one blot on the landscape. “The most mischievous animal here is the small black sandfly which are exceeding numerous and are so troublesome that they exceed every thing of the kind I have met with; wherever they light they cause swelling and such an intolerable itching that it is not possible to refrain from scratching and at last ends in ulcers like small pox” so Cook complains. There was, of course, the weather too, “another ilcon-. veniency, the almost continual rain.’’ The scientists, we are told, are trying to find some way of dealing with this plague, but as the little devils breed only in running water, which is so plentiful in those regions, it seems most improbable that any mode of destroying them in mass will ever be devised, or so it seems to me.