Up Sindbad Gully.

Some strange, even romantic fancies this otherwise hard matter-of-fact Scot entertained. He believed there were diamonds in the Milford country; and he believed page 27 in the existence of some mysterious amphibious creature which he thought was very likely the original of the Maori legendary taniwha. He had read the Arabian Nights, and he gave the name Sindbad Gully to a defile which runs up at the side of Mitre Peak, and which in some way reminded him of the valley of diamonds in the Oriental story. Two of us went up this wild gulch one day with Sutherland. It is a fearful gully, full of huge rocks confusedly piled, and holes and caverns half-hidden by the decaying vegetation of centuries; a place of twilight gloom, arched over by great twisted trees and drooping fern-plumes. A far wilder place, one imagined, than anything ever seen by Sindbad the Sailor. Sutherland stoutly maintained it was “likely country” for the jewel stone; but all his prospecting was in vain. There was more likelihood of gold, and he once had some men putting in a drive on a supposed auriferous reef a little to the northward of Milford Heads, but there again no luck.

Two places on the Fiordland map preserve Sutherland's name. One is the great waterfall in the upper part of the Arthur Valley, near the McKinnon's Pass track; the other is a fiord just south of Milford, between it and Bligh Sound.