The General Gates

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 154, 26 March 1938, Page 3 (Supplement)

The General Gates

In 1821 an American sealing ship, the General Gates, anchored off Puysegur Point, Southland, to collect sealskins, and it is recorded that in six weeks the men sealing there could take as many as 3563 skins. But a party of these Americans were not so lucky for one night a tana fell upon them and after looting the place carried them off. The survivors say that they were marched several hundred miles to a sandy bay on the West Coast of the South Island, where they were tied to trees and left foodless for days. Then one by one some were killed by a club, cooked and eaten, while their comrades looked on, and were offered pieces of baked human flesh. One night during a thunder storm, Price and West, the two -remaining prisoners, managed to get away in a canoe left lying on the beach, and after drifting about for three days the trading schooner Margery picked them up half dead. The captain of the General Gates was Abimelech Riggs, who began his career in the Pacific by enlisting convicts as seamen from Sydney, and it is said he was captured in New Zealand waters and stood trial for this in New South Wales. His seamen were therefore wanted men, and he lost two or three parties of them in much the same way as this party, for he would sail off and leave them to their fate. But he had liis revenge when he met a fleet of Maori eanoes in Eoveaux Strait by calmly running them down and leaving them .to their fate.— D.M. .(Auckland).