POSTSCRIPT POETRY | HISTORY

A Gilded Life
The history of gold hunting in New Zealand is replete with the little-known story of a gold-digger with an Indian connection.
Anu Kumar

n Arthur Conan Doyles collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes, there is a story of a vile and vindictive sea captain named Peter Carey, a man so perpetually drunk that it only added to his other sins: of hurling abuse at his family and picking ghts with neighbours, so much so that he lived apart, alone in an outhouse, where he was found dead one afternoon, a harpoon through him, and no one was left much the sadder. The story was titled Black Peter, suggestive of the evil in the sea captain.
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december 28, 2013 vol xlviII no 52
EPW Economic & Political Weekly

POSTSCRIPT HISTORY

Black Peter wasnt just a mere character in ction. Fifty inaugurated in Glenore in 2009, the very area where Peters years before Conan Doyles collection was published, a man hunted for gold. called Edward Peters, who bore the same egregious nickPeters was just a dabbler who used primitive tools. Most name, unexpectedly discovered gold in Otago, in the South of the gold he did nd was drained away in the washing. Island of New Zealand. This was in 1857 when the heady days Some surveyors he took around dismissed him as an amaof the Gold Rush were still on. The rush had been on since teur, but his nd on one occasion was enough for the provthe 1840s when prospectors and adventurers crossed seas in inces chief surveyor to describe it as the best sample of search of fortune, moving between California, Australia and, gold ever found. last of all, New Zealand. It was three years later that, drawn by these stories, a One of the stories relating to this gold hunt and the myriad Tasmanian called Gabriel Read struck gold in the area close characters involved in it makes up the premise of the recent by that now bears his name, Gabriels Gully. Read received Booker-winning novel, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, the 1,000 bounty promised by the Otago Provincial Council. which is set in Hokitika, on the west coast of New Zealands Peters, for his part, did press claims but to no avail. Some of South Island. In the mid-1860s, this region was one of the last the wrong done to him was attempted to be undone only in 1885, when the New Zealand Parliament heard a petition places in New Zealand where gold was found. Earlier on, championed by the legislator and newspaperman Vincent whalers had found gold up on the Coromandel Peninsula of Pyke. The parliament promised to raise a similar sum if the the North Island, and also at Nelson, on the north coast of public too managed a contribution of 50. This amount the South Island. helped serve as a pension for Peters until his death in 1893. But the most signicant gold ndings were in Otago, and Peters remained in his old occupation, and spent Edward Peters was the man, it is now widely ...the most his last days at the Benevolent Institution. A year accepted, who rst discovered gold there. At rst significant gold later, Read died in an asylum in Tasmania. he was never credited with the discovery. findings were in That initial discovery of gold sparked the gold Indeed, his story was disregarded and has only Otago, and Edward rush in Otago. The region saw a huge inux of recently been resurrected with the help of Peters was the man, population, growing by the thousands in the space dedicated historians. it is now widely of just six months in 1861. Along with the miners No one knows the origins of Edward Peters. He accepted, who came up an entire support system of traders, supis believed to belong to Bombay and was on first discovered pliers and others. Dunedin, the principal city of board the ship The Maori, serving as a cook when gold there the Otago Region, became one of New Zealands he simply decided to abandon post one day, when largest cities and the second-largest city in the South Island. it docked at Port Chalmers in New Zealand. Yet he did turn For years the dilemma persisted of who really deserved himself in to the authorities, and served a full six weeks of credit the discoverer of the gold reserves or the one who hard labour before giving himself up to a peripatetic life. developed them into a gold mine. The issue was debated at He moved into the interior, offering his services to sheep the highest levels. A report in 1854 by a committee set up by farmers and other landowners. Small streams and canals cut the Victoria Legislative Council in Australia recommended, across this rocky region of Glenore, where people like Peters in one instance, differing amounts of reward, not merely to offered help as hut builders and mule drivers who escorted the discoverer but even to those who had conducted research cattle across difcult terrain. on the subject, and to another for his explorations and for It is believed that Peters was camping with a group of spreading information on the discovery of gold in Victoria. sheep farmers when he went out one evening to wash the Despite the belated honour, much of Edward Peters dishes at the nearby Tuapeka stream. Or perhaps it was life and character will always remain a mystery. There can someone in the group who told him that the clay there was be only speculation about his early life in Bombay. One exceptionally ne, and Peters went out to see for himself, account places him as an Anglo-Indian, for Bombay was, in urged by the prospecting experience he had gathered in succession, Portuguese- and then British-owned. One could California. It was late 1857, and some of the early gold that perhaps speculate, based on his epithet, that he was a Sidi he dredged up helped pay for his provisions. A year later, in from the sea-faring community of East Africa, whose the company of two other shepherds, Peters found gold in members have been sailing across the Arabian Sea from sufcient quantity to fashion a gold ring, which can still be time immemorial. Serving variously in the kingdoms along found in the Otago Museum. the coast, they were hardy soldiers and experienced sailors. The historian Alan Williams has been instrumental Sidi communities live on in pockets of the west coast of India in penning Peters story from old records. Though there and even in Pakistan, marginal and ill-documented as was were earlier efforts to recognise Peters efforts, it was the life of Edward Peters. Williams painstaking research in his book, Edward Peters (Black Peter): The Discoverer of the First Workable Goldeld Anu Kumar (anukumar0811@gmail.com) was once with EPW and is now a US-based in Otago that led to a memorial in Peters honour being writer who blogs at anukumar.org
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

december 28, 2013

vol xlviII no 52

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