SUVA TRAGEDY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 12 August 1924, Page 2

SUVA TRAGEDY.

MURDER OF MR C. B. SEALY. A tragic termination of a brilliant career is involved in the murder of Mr Christopher Byers Sealy, a New Zealander, reported from Fiji to have been found shot dead near Suva, the sum of £4OO which he was carrying in a bag on his motor cycle being missing. Mr Sealy had a fairly lengthy connection with the Upper Waikato, doing yeoman service in .the pioneering work of the timber industry and the Arapuni scheme. A son of a Public Works official, Mr Sealv entered the Lands and Sur vev Department as a junior under the former Commissioner of the Auckland Lands District, Mr H. M. Skeet, and showed unusual aptitude for surveying and outside work generally, to the extent that he was lately described by Mr Skeet as a natural engineer. Mr Sealy joined the staff of Mr J. E. Fulton, a prominent Wellington engineer, and it was in this capacity that he went to the Upper Waikato about 1903, and made a survey for the extension to Taupo of the Taupo Totara Timber Company’s railway, while later he was engaged in the provision of many miles of bush tramway for the company. His biggest work, however, was probably his reconnaissance surveys of the timber bushes in the Upper Waikato and Taupo districts, including the Taupo Totara Timber Company’s and the great Tongariro Block. The subsequent milling of the timber and check' surveys by the Forestry Department have proved Mr Scaly’s figures as remarkably accurate, and Mr Sealy is considered by authorities to have been the foremost measurer of standing timber in the Dominion. Later Mr Sealy was appointed by the Public Works Department as engineer in charge of investigation works at Arapuni, which comprised the driving of an elaborate 'system of tunnels and shafts to explore the strata comprising the dam site and carrying out of experiments to ascertain the pressure, resisting qualities, and porosity of the rock. He ( left Arapuni to accept an important l appointment on the Public Works staff of the Fijian Government, which delegated to him the task of binding a route for a main arterial road from Suva through the island. Despite the difficult nature of the country, Mr Sealv found a very satis-factory-route, antf was then deputed to construct the road.