CANOE AS TROUGH

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 252, 23 October 1937, Page 8

CANOE AS TROUGH

ANCIENT MAORI RELIC DISCOVERY ON EGMONT FARM’ NEW PLY/lOUTH, Oct. 14. I Believed to be 100 years old, 4 Maori canoe has been recovered from a farm near the foot of Mount Egmont and placed in the New Ply* mouth Museum. The canoe was dis* * covered by Miss C. A. Douglas in the Inglewood district only about a mile and a-half from the radius line of the Egmont National Park. It had been doing duty as a water trough in the cow yard of a Dudley Road settler. The canoe, hewn from a totara log. is about 25ft. long. The intention of the builders was apparently to float the canoe from a point near Dudley Road down the Ngatoro Stream, tak* ing advantage, no doubt, of a flood, as far as its junction with the Maunganui, and thence to the Waitaral River, where it would be used for fishing. Had the canoe been floated successfully to the Waitara River thir would have been a remarkable fearThe stump of the totara from which the canoe was hewn is also preserved and there are indications that fire was used to fell the tree. The settler in whose yard the canoe was found felt himself amply recompensed by its replacement with a concrete trough.