Page:Downey•Quartz·Reefs·West·Coast•1928.pdf/68

be defined. Be this as it may, it can be said that there was little in the history of the mine to lead to the belief that the property is one in any case for the further prospecting of which any considerable expense would be justified. It would have been a good thing if, when the Low-level Tunnel was open, some lateral prospecting had been done from it to determine the point. An amalgamation of the Venus and Low-level Companies had been arranged with this end in view, but when the privileges held by them passed to the Consolidated Goldfields that company was intent only on pushing the tunnel in to the Golden Fleece shoot, and did not trouble about any other work, and it is questionable if the great cost of reopening the tunnel now for the purpose would be warranted.

As far as the Royal section of the line is concerned there is no reason whatever for thinking that any further development on it would yield any better results than were obtained, and the Ajax shoot was worked out down to 1,800 ft. The chance of locating the lost portion of the Golden Fleece shoot may perhaps justify some prospecting effort. Considering that the two adjoining shoots, the Ajax and Royal, lived down to 1,800 ft., and were still going underfoot, there seems no good reason for thinking otherwise than that the Golden Fleece shoot would also live down in a similar manner, and, as the shoot was longer and richer than the others, some far better effort to locate it was justified than was apparently made in the past. It is on record that the Golden Fleece Extended Company brought a diamond drill from Australia for the purpose of using it in the search for the downward continuation of the shoot, but there is no record available as to what work was done with it in this direction. Local tradition has it that the crown of the drill was lost in the first hole and could not be recovered, and the assumption is that no further use was made of the plant. Any drill-hole that was put in would be betweeen the surface at the Ajax shaft and No. 6 level, and was in all likelihood started from No. 4 or No. 5 level. In any case, such literature as there is dealing with the history of the mine at the time leads the writer to the conclusion that the hole was directed westerly from the old workings, in which case it may well have been advanced to any distance without finding the reef sought for. Referring to the cutting-off of the shoot, H. A. Gordon, Inspecting Engineer of Mines, mentions that “at the north side of the shaft a dislocation took place which caused a considerable throw in the lode, and it has not been picked up again on the north side of the dislocation or fault. Very good stone was got up to the fault, and there are indications that this lode will be again found to the northward of the fault and to the westward of the ground worked.” In view of this statement, the theory that the lost part of the shoot lay to the westward was probably the generally accepted explanation of the position at the time, consequently any work that was done by the way of searching for the lost reef would have been carried out in that direction. In a study of the mine made at a later date, however, Dr. Henderson came to the conclusion that the greater probability was that the lost portion of the shoot might be expected to lie to the eastward of the old workings. He points out that in the upper levels more than 1,000 ft. of lode-channel was ore-bearing, but the length below No. 6 level was reduced to about 700 ft., from which fact it was probable that three rather ill-defined ore-shoots were worked in the upper levels, the most northern of which was cut off by a fault of which the angle of dip was slightly steeper than the pitch of the shoots. A fault of this nature would have a northerly dip and an east-north-east strike, and the fact that each of the three bottom levels in the mine turned eastward following a pronounced fissure leaves little doubt