History was made in our North Island by the long wars between the Maoris and the British and Colonial forces. In the South Island the story of adventure was provided chiefly by the early explorers and surveyors who penetrated the great unknown land and blazed the way for settlement, and by the golddiggers who thronged to the wonderfully rich alluvial fields. In this sketch of pathfinding enterprise the writer describes the difficulties encountered and the tasks accomplished by three notable pioneers of Nelson and the West Coast.

The record of pioneering exploration in New Zealand differs in one special feature from that of similar enterprise in Australia. The want of water was the greatest obstacle to the progress of discovery in the interior of the Australian continent. Here the trail-breaker found conditions exactly the reverse of that. There was no need to carry a water supply here; on the contrary, the explorer and surveyor found the rivers, especially in the South Island, were their chief hindrances. The bush and the mountains were formidable enough to the men who blazed the way, but they were a known quantity. But the snow and rain-fed torrents of the South, and particularly the wild West Coast, subject to sudden floods, were a continual source of anxiety and peril. Drowning came to be regarded as a natural death on the Coast in the days of the pioneer map-makers and golddiggers. The rivers, and the forests that masked most of the West, made the task of the early explorers slow and difficult. To a few men of stubborn courage and great powers of endurance the young colony was indebted for lifting the veil of mystery that lay over the Wai-Pounamu, and revealing its mineral treasures that brought so much wealth to the country.

In the first two decades of British settlement in the South Island three great names are associated with the record of exploration and of the opening of Maori territory to Pakeha settlement—Thomas Brunner, Charles Heaphy, and James Mackay. Contemporary with Mackay was John Rochfort (the discoverer of the Buller goldfields), and others followed, each surveyor or prospector adding something to the outside world's knowledge of the unknown land. Cold and hunger and almost daily risk of death or accident were the lot of those foreloopers of the Pakeha race in the sparsely peopled or quite uninhabited land; loaded with heavy swags, sometimes ill and lame, fording rushing torrents, climbing precipices, and when their scanty stores gave out, living precariously on birds and eels and other food of the bush.