A Relic of Early Days.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXX, Issue XV, 11 April 1903, Page 1038

A Relic of Early Days.

An interesting relic of the first New Zealand built ship as been found at Facile Harbour, Dusky Sound, by Captain Bollons, of the Government steamer Hinemoa. This particular relic is a wonderful rata plank that must have eeased to be a tree at least 100 years ago, but which, nevertheless, remains in a remarkable state of preservation. On the outside the wood has become the colour of the earth in which it has lain for so long, and the moss-grown surface is mostly in a state of decay. But the rottenness does not reach deeper than a quarter of an inch, and an incision with a penknife soon brings to light the firm, hard wood of the durable rata. The interest attaching to the plank is that it was felled, sawn, levelled and morticed in order that it might form part of the first ship built in New Zealand away back in 1795. The builders evidently found they had more planks than they needed, and this piece of rata was left by the old sawpit at Facile Harbour, where it had since remained. The history of this early specimen of the rough shipwrights’ work of the whalers is worth re .’ailing.

A year or two prior to 1795 the whaler Britannia arrived in Dusky Sound,bringing with her the frame of a small schooner. The object was to land the skeleton and a detachment of men, leave them to plank up the frame, and use the schooner for whaling about the Sounds, while the whaler herself operated in the further waters. The planks were carried in so far that the skeleton ship and the mon were left at Facile Harbour, but the Britannia, returned before they had completed the planking, took the men away and left the unfinished boat on the beach. The next incident in the story is that the ship Endeavour, which in 1795 left Sydney for the West Indies, became leaky, ran to Dusky Sound, then about the only known harbour, having found

its way on to Cook’s Chart, and beached, with the object of repairing. But the Endeuvourers found their ship had got past repairs—at any rate, such repairs as they eould make. They found it better to complete the planking up of the schooner left by the Britannia, and the result was so satisfactory that a portion of the Endeavour’s crew, under the mate, succeeded in sailing from here to Sydney, though apparently the voyage was a trying one, as it is recorded that they arrived in an exhausted state. The rest of the Endeavourers at the Sound were taken off by other vessels. What subsequently became of the schooner is not known, and that is why the only known relic of her brought away by Captain Bollons has a special antiquarian interest.

The plank, which is now on the Hinemoa, is 10 inches wide by 3 inches thick, and 12 feet long. It has been cut into for morticing purposes, and on one side is bevelled. The saw pit is in the bush, about a vessel’s length from high-water mark, and in this pit the boards were roughly squared. There appears to be no possibility of error about this, as no other sawpit has ever been dug in this locality, and there has been no other use or occasion for one, so the plank that the builder rejected may after all become head of a corner in some museum.

The relic throws an interesting sidelight on the misty beginnings of New Zealand colonies, and those beginnings are older than we are apt to believe. Within a score of years after Cook, and well within the century before last, the old whalers frequented the coasts of the Sounds and Stewart Island, and some of them lived with the Maoris. They w>re contemporary with the birth of the United States and the French Republic, and it is odd to reflect that in the year of the Reign of Terror, when France was in throes, away at the Antipodes the dim glades of Dusky Sound were echoing the music of the saw and the mallet —peaceful pioneers of new industry in a new land.