A MEMORY OF DIGGING DAYS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17865, 5 June 1926, Page 23 (Supplement)

A MEMORY OF DIGGING DAYS.

THE SAILORS AND THE CLIPPER BLUE JACKET.

BY

J. C.

Many of the stout lads who took a hand in our pioneering toil in New Zealand thought nothing of a tramp of two or three hundred miles with swags on their backs. No chance of a motor-car lift in the days of the sixties, either. There are men still living who can recall walking nearly the whole, length of the South Island in the days before roads existed. And there were hundreds of gold hunters who swagged it across the Southern Alps even before the Arthur’s PassOtira Road was made. This story refers to a period just sixty years ago, very soon alter the Arthur’s Pass road had been made and when the Golden Coast was at the height of its frenzied treasure-hunt-ing. The narrator is my old acquaintance, Janies Capper, of Hiropi Street, Wellington; old sailor, soldier, digger, bushman, whale-hunter and half a dozen other callings. Now well on in j his eighties, his memory is clear, his | brain active; he could still bawl a 1 bo’sn’s stentorian call of “All hands” if need be. 1 “When the big rush started at Hoki--1 tika in sixty-five,” said Mr Capper, | “I was up at the Great Barrier Island, i after a lot of soldiering and sailoring j We heard about the. Golden Coast, and J nothing would do me and a lot of other young chaps, but we must set off i for the Golden Coast. So off we sailed | in a cutter, forty of us, the Auckland ! cutter Eagle, built at Mahurangi. We j went north-about, round the North j Cape, and got to Hokitika all right, i Very little luck there —all the other fellows were picking up the gold, and it was going into the pubs and dancehalls of the gold town hand over fist. I went on to the Grey and got a job there—a jolly wet one, too, poling boats with supplies up to the Arnold, that comes out of Lake Brunner. “Well, .word came along one day from the other side of the ranges that two wool ships at Lyttelton were waiting to get crews for London. Most of the sailors used to clear out from their ships those days, and make for the diggings, just as they did in California and Melbourne. They were so hard up for sailors, those ships, that they were offering £BO a man for the run to London. So I thought: ‘Here’s big money offering, and it’s years since I was home and saw my mother. I’ll be off to Lyttelton and ship.’ “There was another sailor chap, a mate I’d picked up—l’ve quite forgotten his name—and he, too, had had all the gold digging he wanted. So we decided to go together and walk over the Otira Road —where the big tunnel goes now—and across the plains to Lyttelton. “Off we started with our blankets and things, and on the way to the Tereipakau River (the one that Tom Bracken used to call the ‘Terry M’Cow’) we came up with a Scotchman who was driving two packhorses. He packed to the road camps along the track—they were finishing the road from Canterbury then. I remember we lived on wekas on that tramp to the mountains-—knocked them over with sticks—wekas and damper. Scotty saw that I knew something about jiacking horses and remarked on it. I ought to have known about it. considering that I’d been in the old Transport Corps up the Waikato. TWO MATES DROWNED. “At the Teremakau ford we came to grief. I lost my two poor mates, the sailor and the packer. We didn't reckon 011 any danger; the river was low, though very swift. The packer got on the bigger horse of the two, and took the sailor up behind him, and I followed on the pony. They were a few yards ahead of me when, to my horror, their horse seemed to sit down —he’d slipped on a boulder. The sailor clutched the other man round the neck, and over both of them went j and they were whirled away in a moment. I couldn't help them in the slightest. I got out of it safely by giving my wise little horse his head and letting him pick his steps through the swift current. “Once over the river, I got to Blake's road contract camp, and got some men, and we searched for our poor mates. We found their bodies four miles down the river. The curious thing about it was that their horse got out all right —he was quietly feeding on the river bank a little way down. OVER THE PASS. “At Kelly’s camp, the next place, there was a little old foreigner, a Sardinian ; he’d been an army bugler and fought in the times of Garibaldi—like my old friend Rowley Hill, of Auckland—and now that I think of it, he was very like Rowley—small, nuggety, and tough and plucky as they make ’em. They called the little Sardinian “Tantara-ra at the camp, because of his bugling. Well, he chummed up and we went on together—and I remember to this day the freezing chill of the Otira River. “We tramped up the gorge and over Arthur's Pass, got over the Waimakariri safely—it was running in five streams, about a mile across the streams and shingle altogether—went through the Bealey and down to the plains of Canterbury. We met the gold escort coming tip from Christchurch—three or four mounted men, armed, and an express trap; coming over to carrv the gold from Hokitika They didn't keep the escort going very long, I believe. “Every now and then, on that long tramp we'd meet swaggers, sailors most of them, all bound for the diggings. And everyone that we met I’d ask about wool ships and the pay. Soon the £BO we’d heard about on the Coast dwindled to £2O. Well, I thought, even that would do; I want to get home to see my mother that I d not seen or written to for so long.

THE SHIP THAT NEVER RETURNED. “I tramped through Christchurch very weary; didn't stop, but went right on over the hill to Lyttelton and straight to the wharf. Well, there the Blue Jacket was ready for sea. the famous big American-built clipper, under the White Star. She had shipped all her crew a day or two belore. and all they'd shipped for was £4 10s a month. Well, says I, I wouldn't leave New Zealand for that pay anyhow, so here I’ll stay, and I saw the Blue Jacket go to sea. and I went down to Pigeon Bay, on Banks Peninsula, back at bush work once more for a sawmill, and later I shipped aboard a coasting ketch, and later ran one on shares, and lost her. too, in a terrific gale in Lyttelton Harbour and was all but lost myself. “Now, this is the curious part of it —it was jolly lucky for me I’d taken so long on that tramp across from the West Coast, and was too late to ship in the Blue Jacket, for news came next year that she’d been burned at sea that very voyage, burned off the Faulkland Islands, and nearly all her crew were lost—adrift in boats and never heard of again. The captain’s boat was

picked up by the barque Pyrmont after seven days; he had the ’ thirty-five or thirty-six passengers with him, but the sailormen in the other boats perished —and I’d have been with them no doubt. Spontaneous combustion was the cause—some damp wool among the cargo. I was well out of that fine clipper the Blue Jacket.” TIIE WRECK OF “THE BROTHERS.” To Mr Capper's narrative it may be added that it was at Holmes and Richardson s mill that he worked at Pigeon Bay at 6s a day, cutting totara sleepers tor the Lyttelton tunnel railway line. Mr Findlay’ was the manager there. Mr Holmes discovered that Mr Capper was a sailor, and he gave him a job in his ketch, the ( ourier, earrving sleepers to the Ileathcote, up the river via the Sumner Bar entrance. The ketch could get right up to the line where it crosses the river. Later he and seme others ran a ketch called The Brothers, on shares. This was the vessel in which Capper and his mate Penfold, were wrecked in Lyttelton Harbour one wild, winter day. They were anchored off the town. but. in the fierce sou-Nvest gale the ketch dragged her anchors and drifted down off Officer’s Point. The chain broke, carrying away its windlass and forward gear. The ship John Temperlev, with 300 passengers from London, had just arrived, and was anchored right across the fairway*. 'I he pilot’s whaleboat was lying tied astern of the ship. As the ketch went drifting past lielplesslv, Capper and his mate just managed to roll on board the whaleboat, and thence got on the ship. They were halfperished. but dry clothes and “a tot of rum ’ put them to rights. It was two days before they got. ashore, so wild was the gale. The ketch went to pieces on the rocks in the bay a little way inside Godlev Heads.