The Lone Hand of Milford Sound.

In the early Seventies the well-seasoned sailor and carbineer was serving before the mast in a Government steamer under Captain Fairchild, and on one of the vessel's cruises around the coast he was several times in Milford Sound. He had a turn, too, at seal-hunting on the Southern coast. That was the period when whaling and sealing were the two chief industries of the far south. The celebrated old barque “Chance,” of which one reads in Frank Bullen's “Cruise of the Cachalot,” was waddling around Foveaux Strait with her Maori and half-caste crew under Captain Paddy Gilroy; and schooners and cutters and even open whaleboats went cruising into the West Coast Sounds after fur seals. Sutherland conceived the notion that Milford was a likely place for gold, and when he finally resolved to settle there he spent most of his time prospecting, with intervals of seal-hunting to provide the means for the purchase of the supplies the “Hinemoa” or the “Stella” brought him once every six months or so. His gun and his fishing lines kept him in what food he required besides his bags of oatmeal and flour, his tea and sugar. For two or three years he lived quite alone, before he was joined by a mate, John Mackay, with whom he afterwards prospected and explored well into the Eighties.

This gigantic, silent place seemed to him an excellent retreat in which to live his own life, undisturbed by others' chatter, unworried by orders, his own master, able to choose his own day's work or not to work at all, if the fit so took him. His dog was sufficient company; his treasure-hunting was an eternal fascination. There in his tent, and later in his slab whare he spent month after month in perfect solitariness, the only human being on the shores of all the fiord country.