News of the discovery reached New Zealand’s young capital of Auckland in early December, 1848.[2] Sydney found out two days before Christmas in the Sydney Morning Herald. Hobart read about it just a month before the Stirlingshire’s arrival on the 9^th February, 1849, and Adelaide people knew by the 27^th of January.

By the end of 1850, up to 200 sailing vessels, big and small, had set sail from New Zealand and Australia to the promised land, often via Tahiti or Hawaii.[3]

                                                                    Painting of Hobart in 1850 by T.Crawford

He didn’t make his fortune then, but noticed something else that ultimately made it for him a short time later. Hargraves realised that the geology of the goldfields he was seeing there looked remarkably similar to that of an area of New South Wales that he had seen some years before. Seized with a conviction to prove his theory, he rushed back to San Francisco to find passage back to Australia. On all sides, people he told of his idea derided him.

 

                          “…I still worked away at mining in California successfully, and very many still worked away at mining and very many times told my friend Davison that he would come over to my diggings in New South Wales. I then expected every day a ship would bring news of the discovery; however no such tidings reached us, and in the fall of 1850, just as the snow was about to commence, I made up my mind to return to Sydney, and wished Mr. Davison to come also, assuring him that I would point out a gold-field near Bathhurst. His answer was, ‘I am in a gold-field: go you and find your gold-field in New South Wales, and then I will come to it”…..

                          “…to San Francisco and took my passage in the barque Emma, Captain Arthur Devlin, a native of the colony, who with Joseph Walford Esq., was the owner of the ship, and in the bay of San Francisco, on board the barque Emma I reiterated my previously expressed opinions, and boldly stated the object of my voyage, to the great amusement of the Captain[4] in particular, who frequently got up a joke at my expense as the ‘Hargraves gold-hunting freak’, as he was pleased jocosely to call it. I was lodging a few days at Mr. Underwood’s establishment, where I entertained some of my American friends at a dinner there, again before I boarded the ship. I asserted my belief in the auriferous wealth of New South Wales. Mr. Davison was present. I also in a conversation with William Abercombie Esq., on that day expressed the same opinions (Mr. Abercrombie is now in Melbourne, his address is Brasnell’s Hotel, Lonsdale Street). Well, Gentlemen, I arrived in Sydney on 7^th January, 1851…”[5]

 

As luck would have it, there is even a brief record of the voyage by way of an article in the Sydney Shipping Gazette  -

barque Emma, 295 tons, Captain Devlin

from San Francisco 23rd November 1850,

arrived Sydney 7th January 1851

                          The Emma:— Captain Devlin has kindly favoured us with the following interesting account of this vessel's passage:— The above vessel sailed from the anchorage on the 23rd November, 1850, and has made the passage over in forty-five days, and from land to land in thirty-seven days, having been beating off a lee shore the first seven days after leaving the port, with gales veering between south-west and west-south-west, and a mountainous sea from the westward. She ran from the land to the Line[6] in sixteen days, which she crossed in 156'50 west, carrying strong winds the whole time between north-east and east, passed seventy miles to the eastward of the Navigator group[7], and within one mile of the island of Vavau[8] ; sighted Turtle Island,[9] and carried moderate winds between north-east and east-north-east to the extreme of the Southern Tropic, when I experienced a series of moderate gales between west-north-west and north-west, accompanied with much thunder, lightning and rain. Barometer receded to 29'40 and stood so for six days in continuance. Sighted Lord Howe's Island on the 1st January, and experienced light south-west winds and fine weather for several days. On the 4th had a strong southerly gale, which lasted eighteen hours, when the wind became light at south-east to east, with fine weather, until I made land yesterday of Newcastle. Made the run for the meridian of Sandwich Islands to Sydney Heads in twenty-seven days.[10]

Hargraves made his way over the Blue Mountains until he came out on the bare plains near the town of Orange, 250 km west of Sydney, New South Wales. There, on the 12^th February, 1851, in a place now called Ophir,[11] he found the yellow metal. The Australian gold-rush was on.

Other discoveries in Victoria, and the biggest of all in September, 1851 at Ballarat, New South Wales, not far from Melbourne, and then again later Van Diemen’s Land, provided more stimuli to the economies of the New Zealand colonies and Maori businesses than the goldfields of North America. It coincided with, and affected positively, the climb out of the economic recession that had held sway since the early 1840s. It also ‘caused the permanent cessation of transportation of convicts from Britain to Australia by taking away the fear of it, and altering the relative cost of maintaining convicts.’[12]  

 

In New Zealand, by early 1852, an association was formed in Auckland that offered a reward for a commercially worthwhile find of gold in the general vicinity of the Auckland region. The arrival back from the California gold-fields of experienced gold-miners including Charles Ring at the end of September, was closely followed by the raising of the reward offered by the General Gold Reward Committee, from £100 up to £500, (possibly at the suggestion of Ring himself).

 

A week later, Ring advised the committee that he and his brother had found gold in the Kupanga Creek at Coromandel Harbour. On the 20^th October[13], the schooner Undine hired by the reward committee, arrived with prospectors to check Ring’s claims. Auckland held its breath. On Saturday morning, 23^rd October, 1852, the Undine, all dressed in flags, sailed up the Waitemata Harbour to the wild excitement of the population.[14]

 

The New Zealand discoveries in the Coromandel area proved disappointing. Less alluvial than either the California or Australian gold-fields, it would await the finding of gold in the South Island in early 1861 before New Zealand truly gained its ‘Gold card’. It must, however, have struck Nagle, the Abercrombie brothers and William Webster as ironic (aurific?) that the first indications of gold in New Zealand had been found almost on their doorstep at Whanganui                  

        

 A few short years later, in the northern-hemisphere spring of 1858, a few miners prospecting along the Thompson and Fraser Rivers in western Canada, including one with a New Zealand background, James Houston, were the agents by which the Fraser River gold-rush erupted, drawing 30,000 prospectors by the end of the same year.

 

Houston was a youthful Scot who ran away from home with a school mate, Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, who soon reached his objective in Pennsylvania, went on to wealth and fame in the steel business. Houston, however, was diverted by shipwreck off the coast of New Zealand. Captured by Maories, he twice escaped, the second time successfully, by swimming out to a ship. Making his way via South America to New York and then California, he made his way north, though not without many more adventures, to Hudson Bay Company Territory in Canada, arriving more dead than alive. He and a handful of other miners panned for gold in the area from the spring of 1857. They also bought gold off local Shuswap Indians for a pittance, until the Hudson Bay Company’s Chief Trader at Fort Kamloops learnt of it. After that, both the European and the Shuswap Indian miners sold their gold to the Chief Trader, who sent it on to the Company’s Western Headquarters office at Fort Victoria, run by the Chief Factor James Douglas,[15] who was also the Governor of Vancouver Island. Spreading knowledge of the first small 800 ounce package of gold forwarded by Douglas to the San Francisco Federal mint in February, 1858, started what became known as the Fraser River gold-rush. 

James Douglas immediately wrote to the Home Government in London, warning of the impending impacts and suggested a military force be sent immediately to impose law and order. London acted quickly despite the lengthy duration of communications, but not soon enough to deal with the immediacy of the ‘invasion’ of British Territory. Douglas, acting illegally, let miners know that they were trespassers on British soil. He stationed vessels at the entrance to the Fraser River to collect taxes. (see Nagle’s letters to the ‘Alta’ newspaper in April, 1858). ‘These American miners also had strong American sympathies and could easily bring about the annexation of British Columbia. Due to this immigration and due in part to the shortage of qualified men, Douglas extended an invitation to California Blacks to settle in British Columbia, specifically Fort Victoria. Both the miners and first black settlers arrived on Sunday, April 25, 1858’.[16] (see page XXX).

The Royal Engineers, sent from England under its commander Major Moody, eventually arrived in November of 1858, by which time Douglas was also made the Governor of the new colony of British Columbia. In 1862, the Cariboo district of British Columbia was home to yet another gold-rush.

                                                                                                                                                                                         Sir James Douglas

 Don Armitage 2008 (copyright)

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