INDUSTRY THAT FAILED
GREENSTONE EXPORT TRADE.
Dr Edward Shortland’s intensely interesting account of his journey round the South Island in 1843-tl4 in the course of his duties as Protector of Aborigines mentions an. attempt by the old-time sealers to develop a greenstone export trade about 1840 or a little earlier.. They had seen a huge block of greenstone in the middle of the "Piopiotahi torrent," and interested a Manila merchant in the export of the stone to China. Piopiotahi is the Maori name for the Cleddau River flowing into Milford Sound, but it was usually applied to the Sound as a whole. The trial shipment sent to China proved unsaleable, as the Chinese disliked the black specks in the stone. The stone found at Anita Bay, Milford Sound, is the tangiwai variety, pale and nearly translucent, and scientifically quite different from the darker green nephrite which is the real greenstone worked and prized by the Maoris. Some of lhe stone was. however, sold off to natives in the Wellington district at Is a lb. The men who had worked the stone to send to China got disgusted waiting for their arrears of pay and scattered round the Foveaux Strait whaling settlements. Captain Anglem, living in retirement on Stewart Island, told the Rev J. F. H.. Wohlers, the missionary it Ruapuke Island, that he had worked greenstone on the West Coast, blasting it with gunpowder. This was very likely the same enterprise that Shortland chronicled. Certainly the men at Piopiotahi had had a difficult task, diverting the stream in which they found their block before th - >y began working it.
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 August 1939, Page 6
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269INDUSTRY THAT FAILED Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 August 1939, Page 6
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