MINE IS A MYSTERY BY MURRAY DEAR O
ver the years I have built up an extensive library of naval and nautical books, with many titles long out of print. Sometimes my library can be very useful in answering odd maritime questions, and sometimes not! In December 2008, Malcolm Hansen, a Department of Conservation employee, found an old sea mine while tramping around Kahurangi Point, near Kahurangi National Park. The New Zealand Army's explosive ordnanace disposal squadron subsequently rendered the mine safe and moved it to the DoC workshop at Karamea.
Initial speculation was that the mine was one of the 35 laid by the German raider Wolf off Farewell Spit on the night of June 25-26, 1917. My immediate reaction on seeing an internet image was that it was the wrong shape for a Second World War German mine, and it was in the wrong place for a mine laid off Farewell Spit.
My reasoning was based on the flow of the East Australia Current. This warm current originates in the tropics, runs down the southeastern coast of Australia to Tasmania, east across the Tasman Sea to the South Island, then north up New Zealand's western coast and back to the tropics.
I thought the mine was much more likely to be one of the 230 laid by the German raider Pinguin and the minelayer Passat off southeastern Australia in late 1940. Several of these mines
drifted ashore on New Zealand's western coast and one is preserved at Mokau, North Taranaki.
I was suitably surprised to learn from Richard Jackson, then editor of Navy Today, that it had been identified as an old Victorian/Edwardian era British harbour defence mine. Officially described as a British 500lb EC buoyant submarine mine (electric control), this type of mine was developed in the 1870s purely for the defence of harbours and fortresses. The mine found was circa 1900, but may have been laid around 1904.
New Zealand and Australia were gripped by Russophobia during the late 19th and early 20th century. The defence of New Zealand's four main ports consisted of coastal artillery, torpedo boats and harbour minefields. The minefields would only be laid in the event of a direct naval threat and three "submarine mining steamers" were acquired for this purpose. The Lady Roberts was based at Auckland, her sistership the Janie Seddon at Wellington and the much smaller Ellen Balance at Lyttelton. Quite clearly, it was most unlikely the mine originated
from Auckland, Wellington, Lyttelton or Otago Harbours. I examined the possibility that the mine might have drifted from Australia. Defensive minefields were indeed laid off Sydney and Melbourne during the Russian Scare of 1885 but I was unable to find any record of mines laid off Australian ports from
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