green cloth. Payment of three shillings for the use of a blanket on the floor, with half a dozen fellows gambling at your head or feet the whole night through, and disturbing your slumbers by going ‘five pounds better’ every five minutes, was by no means an uncommon incident. A large theatre was built and it was opened every night to packed houses at high prices. . . . . There was a large police force stationed at the camp where there was gathered a mass of humanity.
“Here resided ‘King’ Sale, Warden Revell and other Canterbury Provincial Government officials, as well as prisoners waiting trial. There was no jail then, only a lock-up, and prisoners committed had to be escorted over the range to Christchurch for trial. The place indeed outgrew itself. The authorities could not grapple with the wonderful flow of population.
“Let me here recall one of the pictures to be met with on the beach in those days. A stranger visiting Hokitika for the first time, and not previously apprised of the unenviable notoriety which the port had gained for itself, would be struck with astonishment at the multitude of wrecks and remains of wrecks with which the beach was covered. From the entrance of the river to where the Montezuma had been cast high and dry, the picture was one that could not be equalled in the colony, and perhaps not in the world. In one spot the last
