THE MATAURA.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume VI, Issue 594, 24 March 1882, Page 2

THE MATAURA.

The Mataura was inspected on Tuesday by the directors of the New Zealand Shipping Company. During her voyage of 94 days, her refrigerating apparatus has worked magnificently. fthe can carry 8000 or more sheep in her frozen chamber, where, beneath the icy forms of Engli-Ii grouse, partridges, and Labrador salmon, the reporters had a very short snowballing match on Tuesday The following descrip tion of the engines is taken from the

Press: —

'■ One steam cylinder of diameter, when started, sets the two air-compressing chambers going. These air squeezers, as they could be called, as the piston rod in each works backwards or forwards, fulfil the business of receiving the atmosphere from the engine room through valves, and after the a>r is admitted it is compressed to a pressure of 40 to 501bs to the square inch. As may be supposed, the chamr-ers have to be of great strength, and they are therefore tested by the patentee before leaving the foundry to a pressure of 751bs. T'le air thus received and pressed finds an escape from the eompresser chambers, through a pipe into a chamber underneath, passing thence into a second chamber, and so on through a third out along the bed of the engine, and into what is termed the cooler. Pressed up to the state described it rushes, as stated, through the three chambers beneath. In these chambers a steady rush of water is kept round the sides of each, the water being forced up by pumps from the ocean. From these it rushes to the cooler. This cooler is situated a short distance from the engine, and would readily be mistaken for a wooden partition of the engine room, It consists, however, of a wooden box specially lined for the purpose, and containing several hundred pipes. The air flies through these pipes with all the speed which air compressed as this is might be expected to do in search of expansion and freedom. By the time it emerges from the last of the copper tubes in the cooler it has lost any he it it ever possessed, and, passing from there to the expansion chamber, a massive mahogany chest, it rushes in there at a temperature of something like 50 degrees below Fahrenheit's zero, due to the sudden expansion it there undergoes. From the expansion chamber it iiies along the exhaust passage out into

the meat room, or refrigerating abode of the beef and mutton carcases. Here another pipe's mouth is open to receive it. and after circulating amongst tho whitened forms of the frost-stiffened occupants of the Mautaura's arctic chambers, it returns again to the compresser chambers, to be once more forced into confined limits.

As before stated, the Mataura loads at Port Chalmers.