Four years later came victory, final and complete, and won in a fashion peculiarly gratifying to young New Zealand. News came that Mr. E. A. Fitzgerald, a skilled mountaineer, was coming from Europe to achieve the technical success which Green and Mannering had just missed. Some climbers of South Canterbury resolved to anticipate him, and, for the honour of the colony, be the first to stand on the coveted pinnacle. A party of three--Messrs. Clark, Graham, and Fyfe--left Timaru, accordingly, and on Christmas Day 1894 achieved their object. Mr. Fitzgerald arrived only to find that he had been forestalled, and must find other peaks to conquer. Of these there was no lack; he had some interesting experiences. After his return to England he remarked to the writer that climbing in the Andes was plain and easy in comparison with the dangers and difficulties of the Southern Alps. One of his severest struggles, however, was not with snow and ice, but with a river and forest in Westland. Years before, Messrs. Harper and Blakiston had surmounted the saddle--or, more properly speaking, wall--at the head of the Hooker glacier, and looking over into Westland, had ascertained that it would be possible to go down to the coast by that way. Government surveyors had confirmed this impression, but no one had traversed the pass. It remained for Mr. Fitzgerald to do this and show that the route was practicable. He and his guide Zurbriggen accomplished the task. They must, however, have greatly underestimated the difficulties which beset those who would force a passage along the bed of an untracked western torrent. Pent in a precipitous gorge, they had to wade and stumble along a wild river-trough. Here they clung to or clambered over dripping rocks, there they were numbed in the ice-cold and swirling water. Enormous boulders encumbered and almost barred the ravine, so that the river itself had had to scoop out subterranean passages through which the explorers were fain to creep. Taking to the shore, as they won their way downward, they tried to penetrate the matted scrubs. Even had they been bushmen, and armed with tomahawks and slashers, they would have found this no easy task. As it was they returned to the river-bed and trudged along, wet and weary; their provisions gave out, and Fitzgerald had to deaden the pangs of hunger by chewing black tobacco. He found the remedy effectual, but very nauseating. Without gun or powder and shot, and knowing nothing of the botany of the country, they ran very close to starvation, and must have lost their lives had a sudden flood filled the rivers’ tributaries and so cut them off from the coast. As it was they did the final forty-eight hours of walking without food, and were on their last legs when they heard the dogs barking in a surveyor’s camp, where their adventure ended.