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1910 the property had passed into the hands of Morris and party. To this party the then Minister of Mines promised a subsidy of £10,000 to enable the ground to be prospected at depth, but the holders were not able to find their proportion of the cost and did no work, with the consequence that a cancellation suit against them in the Warden’s Court was successful. Several years later the claims, together with the Fiery Cross and Just-in-Time claims, again came into the hands of the same party, and this time the Boatman’s Consolidated Company was formed to carry out the deep-level testing. This company received the £10,000 previously promised as subsidy, and sank the Fiery Cross shaft to 1,000 ft., but no further work was done on the Welcome Claim.
During the time it was actively worked the Welcome Mine produced 31,360 tons of quartz, which yielded 67,676 oz. 19 dwt. gold, valued at £261,155 18s. 2d., and paid in dividends £110,250. As the shareholders in the old company subscribed the small sum of £3,500 only, the claim was thus one of the most payable in the whole district.
Homeward Bound Mine.—This claim, as already stated, was next on the north to the Welcome. The first company formed to work it was registered in 1883, but although it spent a considerable amount of money it met with no success. The principal work carried out was the driving of a long crosscut adit from Boatman’s Creek towards the Specimen Hill Claim, and sinking from it, at a distance of about 2,300 ft. from daylight, a vertical shaft to a depth of 300 ft. This adit was known locally by the varied names of the Boatman’s low-level tunnel, the Homeward Bound tunnel, and the Specimen Hill tunnel. Seven companies—the Occidental, Welcome No. 2, Homeward Bound, Specimen Hill, Comstock, North Cleopatra, and the Great Eastern—holding claims on or near its line, contributed for a start to the cost of its construction, but long before the work was finished all but the Homeward Bound and Specimen Hill Companies had ceased to exist, and these two completed it. The object in driving the adit and sinking the shaft was to pick up the Welcome shoot at depth, but no sign of it was ever seen in the workings, and a glance at the longitudinal section of the mines now shows that the shaft would have had to reach a much greater depth before there was any chance of meeting it. The work mentioned was completed about the end of 1887, and thereafter for some years little appears to have been done in the way of mining. In 1893 the company merged with the Welcome and Eureka Companies to form the Welcome United—or, as it is termed in some of the old reports, the New Welcome Company. No further prospecting was done, however, in the Homeward Bound ground till 1898, when the company repaired the old adit, and from a point in it about 1,500 ft. from the portal drove out southerly for a distance of 1,153 ft. to come under the old Welcome workings, with which connection was made. The purpose of this work was to try and find the downward continuation of the Welcome shoot itself below the No. 9 Welcome level, but no success rewarded the effort. About 1909 or 1910 another attempt to locate something of value in the claim seems to have been made, but after repairing the adit once more for a good part of its length the party carrying out the work had to give up. Eventually the claim became the property of the Boatman’s Consolidated Mines, Ltd., but no further work was done on it.
Reform Mine.—Turning to the southern end of the lode-series, the Reform Company worked a claim adjoining the Just-in-Time. The ground had previously been held by the Imperial Company, which in 1883, in conjunction with the Just-in-Time, sank a shaft to 200 ft. on their joint boundary. It
