The historic clay smoking pipe found on a remote Fiordland beach is thought to have belonged to the explorer and miner William Docherty.
The historic clay smoking pipe found on a remote Fiordland beach is thought to have belonged to the explorer and miner William Docherty.
A clay tobacco pipe found on a remote beach in New Zealand's southwest corner is thought have belonged to a solitary Scottish explorer and miner who lived there more than a century ago.
William Docherty died in 1896 aged 65. From 1877 to 1894 he lived at Dusky Sound in a variety of tent camps and in a bush hut on the mainland north of Cooper Island.
Six months ago, nature guide Richard Heyward was checking stoat traps around the shoreline of Cooper Island when, during a break, he went to scout a new place for his employer, Real Journeys, to take tourists.
One side of the historic clay smoking pipe is marked "Davidson" and the other "Glasgow".
The company is behind a project to eradicate stoats and rats from the island so endangered native birds can be reintroduced.
"I thought it would be a good idea to check Docherty's beach as it is close to Cooper Island," said Heyward.
The historic pipe was found on this remote beach in Dusky Sound.
The historic pipe was found on the mainland shore of Dusky Sound, north of Cooper Island in Fiordland. Map / topomap.co.nz
Walking along the pebbly beach, he saw the pipe, which is marked "Glasgow" on one side and "Davidson" on the other.
Thomas Davidson was a maker of clay pipes at Glasgow, Scotland in the 1800s.
"I knew it was most likely Docherty's pipe and he wouldn't have been pleased to have lost it as he lived a frugal existence prospecting for minerals," said Heyward.
He notified Heritage NZ and gave the pipe to the Department of Conservation.
The historic pipe was found by nature guide Richard Heyward on a beach in Dusky Sound.
DoC ranger Pania Dalley said, "This is a piece of Fiordland history. Docherty was one of Dusky's longest-serving European residents and we have very few physical relics from his existence during this time, as his old hut site is slowly being absorbed by the Fiordland bush."
The last staff visit documented in Fiordland National Park records was in 1980. All that then remained of the hut, which had once had a shingle roof and corrugated-iron chimney, was its stone hearth.
"I'm going in there in a couple of weeks' time to see what we can see," said Dalley.
She said clay pipes were a common item in Docherty's day, but this one's survival and its likely connection to him made it exceptional.
"I suspect it has been safely buried for a very long time and was brought up by a king tide."
Docherty dug for gold at numerous places in Otago and South Westland before heading south to Dusky Sound.
According to an 1896 obituary in the Southland Times, "He was one of those strangely constituted beings to whom solitude is their one pleasure, and following his peculiar bent he found his way into every nook and corner of these western sounds and Preservation Inlet.
"Many times he believed himself to have made discoveries of value and on the strength of his reports a considerable amount of money was from time to time invested."
He died at the gold-rush town of Cromarty in Preservation Inlet, where he had been looking after a reef on Coal Island and was buried on nearby Cemetery Island.
The pipe will be held in the Southland Museum at Invercargill. But first it will be displayed at a charity ball on Saturday beside Lake Wakatipu which is to raise money for the Cooper Island project.
