Around and Around We Go...Our Sea Day

25/10

We arrived at the White Islands about 3:30pm on our sea day. We spent four and a half hours circling this island! No kidding. There was a Gannet colony on it. We were able to see the Gannets fishing by folding up their wings and diving from high in the air. It was amazing! The Volendam's 'Travel Guide' Spencer Brown gave some commentary while we were sailing around it.

From Wikipedia:

The full Māori name for the island is 'Te Puia o Whakaari', meaning 'The Dramatic Volcano.' It was named 'White Island' by Captain Cook on October 1, 1769 because it always appeared to be in a cloud of white steam. Although Cook went close to the island he failed to notice that it was a volcano. Its official name is Whakaari/White Island although it is most well-known as White Island.

Attempts were made in the mid 1880s, 1898-1901 and 1913-1914 to mine sulphur from Whakaari but the last of these came to a halt in September 1914, when part of the western crater rim collapsed, creating a lahar which killed all 10 workers. They disappeared without trace, and only the camp cat (named Peter the Great) survived.

Some years later in 1923 mining was again attempted, but learning from the 1914 disaster, the miners built their huts on a flat part of the island near a gannet colony. Each day they would lower their boat into the sea from a gantry, and row around to the mining factory wharf in Crater Bay. If the sea was rough they had to clamber around the rocks on a very narrow track on the crater’s edge.

Before the days of antibiotics, sulphur was used in medicines as an antibacterial agent, in the making of match heads, and for sterilising wine corks. The miner’s diggings were handled in small rail trucks to the crushing and bagging process in the factory built on the island.

Unfortunately, there was not enough sulphur at Whakaari and so the ground up rock was used as a component of agricultural fertiliser. Eventually the mining ended in the 1930s because of the poor mineral content in the fertiliser. The remains of the buildings can still be seen, much corroded by the sulphuric gasses.

The area is now privately owned.