Chairs

The chair or cage was used extensively, and was not uncommon even forty years ago. Mr Explorer Douglas describes it thus: "… a wire rope along which an iron cage runs backwards and forwards. The trip is decidely interesting, especially to strangers to such primitive appliances. Getting into the cage requires some skill, as it has a nasty habit of starting off when only half the passenger is aboard. Once in he sits down on a sort of gridiron suggestive of roast missionary, and lets go the hook and away he sails along the rope. At this part of the journey a stranger generally breaks out in pleasing smiles but the inhabitant knows better. The gridiron gets slower and finally stops about halfway. Then comes trouble, the wheels refuse to revolve, the ropes cut the hands while hauling on it and the traveller wonders where he would be if the hauling rope broke and left him hanging like a guy over the middle of the river. I have crossed on these wire cages scores of times and with all sorts of people, and in no single instance did the men who put them up – and all government officials in general escape without vigorous expressions being hurled at their names and memories. However primitive those bridges are they are decidedly useful."

– Mr Explorer Douglas", edited by John Pascoe.

The experience of a young boy stayed with him all his life: he went with his father to collect the mail bags, a distance of three miles and across the flooded Buller River. In fine weather they forded the river in the trap but "if it was in flood we used to go further up the river and cross it in a 'chair'. This was a box on wheels, running on wire rope stretched from bank to bank and made fast to a tree or posts sunk into the ground. You pulled yourself back and forth by hauling ropes running through blocks. I remember one time Father putting me in this box, sitting me on top of the mail bags, the river roaring beneath me, pitch dark and raining hard. Father was pulling tightly on the rope from the bank; when the chair was halfway across the wind caused the rope to get tangled. Those few minutes that I spent there, the chair not moving until the ropes became clear again, seemed a lifetime, and the fright I got was stamped on my memory for years. When I had carried the bag of mail to the Post Office and got back with the other, and was safely across the river to the old dog-cart and Father, I was a happy boy indeed."

– From an Unfinished Journal" by George McNee.