Milford Sound
The New Zealand expedition set off today on the good ship Oceanic Discoverer, embarking at Milford Sound, one of the world’s great scenic vistas. Milford Sound is located in Fiordland, a National Park in the remote south western corner of New Zealand’s South Island. The sound is a fiord, carved out of the granite landscape by a glacier during the Otiran ice age, a period lasting from 75,000 to 14,000 years ago. Milford Sound is dominated by Mitre Peak, which towers 5577 feet (1,700 meters) above the water level. Today Fiordland turned on its typical moody, rainy weather, obscuring some of the mountain peaks but producing many photogenic waterfalls. Famed for its beauty, the sound is at the same time notorious for frequent rain and swarms of overly friendly sandflies.
Milford Sound is known to Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, as Piopiotahi. They visited the sound by waka (canoe) in search of a particular type of pounamu (jade or greenstone) known as takiwai or tangiwai. The name indicates that the stone had within it shapes that resembled tears. (Maori referred to New Zealand’s South Island as Te Wai Pounamu or Te Wahi Pounamu- the water of greenstone or the place of greenstone). The first European recorded to have entered Milford was a Welshman, John Grono, who came around 1809 in search of seals. Grono named the fiord Milford Haven, (later changed to Milford Sound), after the waterway near his home town of Newport in Wales. In later years, despite the difficulty of access, the beauty of the sound drew visitors by boat and occasionally by boat. The Governor of New Zealand, Sir George Bowen, visited in the ship HMS Clio, in 1871. While at Milford Bowen named the two most prominent waterfalls; with Stirling Falls named for the Clio’s captain Commodore Frederick Stirling, and Bowen Falls named for Lady Bowen. Since the completion of the Milford tunnel in 1953, the sound has become accessible by road and much more frequently visited.
Milford Sound is also the end point for the legendary 33 mile walkway the Milford Track, described as the finest walk in the world. It is a remarkable but little known fact that the first work on the track was carried out by convict labor. In 1890 a prison colony, named Humeville after Inspector-General of Prisons Arthur Hume, was set up at Milford. The colony was abandoned after two years, during which time there had been at least two succesful escapes, as neither prisoners nor guards could cope with the isolation, rain and sandflies.
In our own journey through the sound we experienced the sublime beauty of water and mountains in one of nature’s great panoramas. The experience was enhanced by the presence of gulls, terns, New Zealand fur seals and a spectacular escort of bottlenose dolpins, riding the bow wave of the Oceanic Discoverer. A great start to what looks set to be a wonderful adventure in Aotearoa. (Aotearoa is the Maori name for New Zealand, often mistranslated as ‘the long white cloud’. It is probably more accurately rendered as ‘long bright world’.)
