the year 1860 it was known that gold
existed there, but the difficulties of exploring a strip of broken
surf-beaten coast, cut off from settled districts by range upon range
of Alps, and itself made up of precipitous hills, and valleys covered
with densest jungle and cloven by the gorges of bitterly cold and
impassable torrents, were exceptionally great. More than one of the
Government officers sent there to explore were either swept away by
some torrent or came back half-crippled by hunger and rheumatism. One
surveyor who stuck to his work for months in the soaking, cheerless
bush, existing on birds, bush-rats, and roots, was thought a hero, and
with cause. Even Maoris dreaded parts of this wilderness, and believed
it to be the abode of dragons and a lost tribe of their own race. They
valued it chiefly as the home of their much-prized jade or greenstone.
Searching for this, a party of them, early in 1864, found gold. Later
on in the same year a certain Albert Hunt also found paying gold on
the Greenstone creek. Hunt was afterwards denounced as an impostor,
and had to fly for his life from a mob of enraged and disappointed
gold-seekers; but the gold was there nevertheless. In 1865 the stream
which had been pouring into Otago was diverted to the new fields in
Westland, and in parties or singly, in the face of almost incredible
natural difficulties, adventurous men worked their way to every point
of the west coast. In a few months 30,000 diggers were searching its
beaches and valleys with such results that it seemed astonishing
that the gold could have lain unseen so long. Many lost their lives,
drowned in the rivers or starved to death in the dripping bush. The
price of provisions at times went to fabulous heights, as much as L150
being paid for a ton of flour, and a shilling apiece for candles. What
did prices matter to men who were getting from 1 oz. to 1 lb. weight
of gold-dust a day, or who could stagger the gold-buyers sent to their
camps by the bankers by pouring out washed gold by the pannikin? So
rich was the wash-dirt in many of the valleys, and the black sand on
many of the sea-beaches, that for years L8 to L10 a week was regarded
as only a fair living wage. In 1866 the west coast exported gold to
the value of L2,140,000.

On a strip of sand-bank between the dank bush and the bar-bound mouth
of the Hokitika river a mushroom city sprang up, starting into a
bustling life of cheerful rashness and great expectatio