Chapter I.
CHARLESTON—ITS BIRTH AND EARLY DEVELOPMENT.
CHARLESTON was born in August of 1866; born, it is said, of two or more venturesome fortune-seekers, Timothy Linahan and another or others, who, having failed to find golden foot-spaces unowned around the river-port of Hokitika, or at the Grey, pushed northward to hunt for others amidst the untrodden spaces and beaches of the coast.
The region between Buller and Grey was then terra incognita, unexplored and uninhabited save for a few Maoris, and unseen by white man excepting two or three intrepid spirits who had hurriedly traversed the coastline many years before.
Brunner and Heaphy (afterwards Major Heaphy, V.C.), surveyors employed by the New Zealand Company, travelled in 1845 and 1846 from Cape Farewell to the river Mawhera, which they named Grey in honour of Captain Grey (later, in 1848, Sir George Grey) then Governor of the Colony. They pronounced the West Coast as “unfit for settlement, and its rivers as unsafe for vessels to enter.” Later, Brunner, with two Maori companions, explored the region from South Spit at Buller mouth to the Grey, and received the Royal Geographical Society’s medal for the exploit.
In 1857 James Mackay, Warden of the Aorere Goldfield (the first Goldfield Warden in the Colony), travelled on foot from West Wanganui to the Buller, which he sounded from a canoe and reported as suitable for vessels of fair draught; he then proceeded onward to the Grey, passing through
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