FOOD FROM NEW ZEALAND.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume XXIV, Issue 9662, 18 November 1882, Page 2

FOOD FROM NEW ZEALAND.

■*■ (Home News, October sth.) New Zealand has made a bold and seemingly successful attempt to complete with Australia in bringing home foreign meat. A cargo has just arrived by a long sea route, round the Cape, and in a sailiug ship, the Mataura, Captain Greenstreet. The whole voyage was thus expanded to one hundred and two days, and the experiment consequently was more fully tried than in the swift steamers which have 'already brought consignments home. The Mataura encountered great heat, and for two months the thermometer registered 84 deg. in the shade. Yet the refrigerating chamber worked admirably all the time, and officers and orew were alike continuously supplied with meat and oher articles of food, such as fish, hares, rabbits, and butter, of which the cargo also consisted, all perfectly sweet and fresh. The butter, it was noticed, was perfectly cold and hard. The whole cargo has now been placed in the English markets, and ia very generally appreciated. The mutton was most excellent in quality, equal to the best Southdown, and the fish was also much liked. The success of this new experiment and the ease with which it has been accomplished will, no doubt, lead to a speedy development of the trade. The refrigerating apparatus, that invented by Messrs Haslem, of Derby, is not expensive, and the outlay in coal to keep up the low temperature extremely small, a total quantity of 180 tons having sufficed for the whole voyage. There seems no reason why many other sailing Bhips should not be adopted to take up the practice, which promises to be vary remunerative. Freights of early colonial fruit and vegetables brought home fresh in these air-ohambers would have a wonderfully rapid Bale in London.