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tons in her hold at the time; and we also got her boats and cut away the rigging, and in fact all the movable things about her. The beach was a steep one then, and she lay pretty close in. All the things that we saved were taken away by the Magnet when she next called.

“The life we led there was a jolly one. There was plenty of work, and fair pay for it, though we thought it rather hard that the vessels would give us no more than £14 a ton for the oil and 1s. a pound for the whalebone. These were carefully measured and weighed out on the beach before any of the stuff left us, and I can tell you we looked sharply after our own interests. The only thing that bothered us was that we hadn’t got too much of a change in tucker. We had a bit of beef at first—all salt, mind you—but that soon ran out, and then we lived on fish and kakas and pigeons, and for vegetables we had to fall back on fern root, with a few potatoes now and then, which we had to go down to Otago for. We also brought some pigs up, and they were the first ever seen in Moeraki. We built styes for them, and kept them as long as we could; but we couldn’t go on finding food for them, as we wanted all our tucker for ourselves, so we had to let them go, and they were the first of the pigs that afterwards spread all over this part of the country. As soon as we could spare the time we made gardens, and then we were all right. We had heaps of fish and spuds, and if that kind of food will make a man a Maori, I must be as much a Maori as anyone in the country.

“After the first season Hughes went over to Sydney for a trip. If I haven’t told you before, you may as well write down here that Hughes died in Hampden somewhere about seven years ago, upwards of eighty years of age, and he was buried there. He was just the sort of man for early colonial life. He