The Dieffenbach oil legend dies hard

Press, 26 July 1980, Page 15

The Dieffenbach oil legend dies hard

' It Is often chimed that the young German doctor and naturalist, Ernst Dieffenbach, a political refugee who came with the Wakefields as surgeon aboard the Tory in 1839, was the first European to detect the presence of oil in this country. That is quite wrong. When Dieffenbach then aged '29, landed on the morning of October 28, 1839, at Ngamotu close to where New Plymouth now stands, his aim was to be the first man to climb Mount Egmont He had no inkling that he was on the fringe of the large Taranaki oilfield, and the vast Maui offshore gasfield, now being exploited. Petroleum in any form was quite unknown to, the modem world then regardless of what the ancients may or may not have observed. What Dieffenbach observed is - set down in his’ book ‘■Travels ‘in New Zealand,” and nowhere does he say anything about discovering ! petroleum here. How .could he, if he didn’t :know that the stuff exist!ed. ■" . i AH he has to say, of the-, i remotest relevance, is contained in just two sentences: “A strong smell of sulphuretted hydrogen gas may also be observed

about a mile from highwater mark. The natives have a whimsical story of an ‘atua’ (spirit), who they say was drowned here, and is still undergoing decomposition.” From these few- wordsthe quite untenable inference has been drawn that Dieffenbach was the first to detect the smell of petroleum gas in New Zealand. Sulphuretted hydrogen, as we know from our experiments in the “stinks” lab at school, smells like ' rotten eggs. Petroleum, in any form, has quite a different odour.

By

ARTHUR KIDSON

; No-one.’ will ever know just what it was that Dieffenbach smelled, or what gave rise to. the Maori myth he quotes. But it certainly . wasn’t petroleum. . And where was “about a mile from high-water mark”? Inland or offshore? Inland, a mile or so beyond the sandhills, there were, he notes, swamps and lagoons ... “which abound with ducks, but contain .no fish , other than some large eels, in order to catch’which the natives formerly cut through the

sandhills and emptied the lagoon. Round these lagoons the vegetation was very rich ...” Decaying vegetation gives off its own smells, and so do rotting carcases. Offshore at Ngamotu, a mile or so from, highwater mark, is a wide expanse of water increasingly popular for swim* mers, small ships, yachts, rowers (regattas have been held there for well over a century) and hopeful fishermen in their dinghies. Hundreds of thousands of people, holidaymakers, picknickers, local resi-

dents, visitors, have frequented the shore at Ngamotu, and thousands continue to do so. Some few may have caught the odd whiff of petroleum gas, but nothing like what Dieffenbach described. Liquid petroleum was first discovered in New Zealand some years after Dieffenbach’s death in 1855 at his birthplace, . Giessen, where he had become professor of geology at the university. . Early in the 1860 s New Plymouth settlers noticed small pools of oil when

they kicked stones aside on the Ngamotu beach. First steps to identify this liquid and discover its source were taken by a local politician, E. M. Smith, nicknamed “Ironsand Smith” because of his intense interest in the vast ironsand deposits there. Smith was the pioneer of all pioneers. He went bankrupt in his efforts to establish an ironsand industry based, primarily, on Ngamotu. Meanwhile he collected, from that same beach, a sample of Taranaki oil, which he sent to the Birmingham Chemical Association for appraisal. He got a favourable report. So, in 1865, just seven years after Colonel Edwin L. Drake drilled the world’s first oil-bore at Titusville, Pennsylvania, New Zealanders began digging for soil, with shovels, on the beach at Ngamotu, at the instigation of E. M. Smith. They named their well Alpha, since it was the first one in New Zealand, and the first in the British Empire. They stuck up a notice reading: “To. Oil or London,” signifying their determination to bore right through the earth, if need be, to reach their quarry.