The West Coast coal trade

The ideal source for a study of the coastal trade would be a list of sailings from each port with a breakdown of cargoes by tonnage for each port of destination. Our newspapers do provide full lists of sailings from all recognised ports, but breakdowns of cargo dispatched were published only for a few lesser ports, and for one main port, Lyttelton. Unfortunately these cargoes are listed mainly as a heterogeneous mix of kegs, casks, sacks, bags, gunnies, bales, boxes, crates, packages, etc., etc. With a detailed knowledge of contemporary packaging customs one might make some progress in turning some of this into tonnages. It will be noted that we have repeatedly made use of another possible approach—the use of the railway tonnages delivered to a port. However not all cargo reached the wharves by rail. Also a very wide range of goods was covered by the railway classification ‘merchandise’. Whatever approach one takes there is a further difficulty in moving on to work out ton-mileages. There is no indication in any of the sources of the destination of much of this cargo.

Fortunately there is a considerable lessening of all these difficulties for the coal port of Greymouth. Coal, returned as ‘minerals’, made up practically all of Greymouth's railway ‘goods inward’. And this coal made up the great bulk of all cargo leaving the port. Each Monday of 1885 the Grey River Argus reported the total tonnage of coal shipped in the previous week. While there is no full listing of cargoes, as there is for Lyttelton, there are quite frequent comments giving the cargoes or carrying capacity of particular ships. Many of the sailings were direct for particular named ports. By collating all available information it should be possible to work out quite a firm ton-mileage figure for Greymouth's coastal coal shipments of 1885. We will tackle the more manageable task of working through the sailings of the week 22–28 March 1885, as set out in Table 14.7, to provide an overview of the trade and to show how a fair estimate of its ton-mileage could be made.

Calculating ton-mileages is a simple matter for vessels sailing direct to a single named port (i.e. all but the Mawhera). Thus for the Mary Wadley sailing the 538 miles to Napier it works out at 107,600. The Mawhera arrived at Nelson at 3.45 p.m. on 26 March and ‘sailed shortly afterwards’ for Wellington, so she had no time to unload coal at Nelson. She spent 27 March at Wellington, sailing on 28 March for Port Chalmers. Her cargo has been divided evenly between Wellington and Port Chalmers. The small steamers sailing between Greymouth and Hokitika took a varied mix of cargo mainly transshipped from larger vessels, but apparently topped up with coal as required by the Hokitika market, so they have been allotted 15 tons each. With these arrangements the week's coal shipments from Greymouth account for 1,926,395 ton-miles. Total coal exports from Greymouth for 1885 were 135,565 tons. If their distribution was similar to the 22–28 March week, they accounted for over 70,000,000 ton-miles; somewhat more than all the goods traffic of the whole railway system in 1885. Yet Greymouth's 1885 sailings account for less than 3 per cent of the colony's total for the year.