group left in 1797. The attention of the sealers moved to Bass Strait from 1798 but returned to New Zealand, at Dusky Sound, from 1802. In that year Captain Charles Bishop and George Bass in the spent 14 days in Dusky Sound stripping iron from the hulk of Captain Brampton's old ship the Endeavour. The blacksmith converted the iron into axes which they then used in Tahiti to trade for pork before returning to Sydney by November 1802. Following this, in January 1803, George Bass asked Governor King of New South Wales for a fishing monopoly, from a line bisecting New Zealand from Dusky Sound to Otago Harbour extending south to include the subantarctic Islands. It was not granted, but it indicates the sealers' area of interest and Dusky Sound's place in it. The Matilda under Captain Fowler was on this part of the coast in 1814 when six of his lascar (Indian) seamen absconded in an open boat. It seems it was at Dusky Sound they were set upon by Maori when three were killed and eaten and the others enslaved. One or more of them later lived in what is now the Dunedin district. Sealers continued to visit until the late 1820s when the second sealing boom faded. An attempt was made in 1903 to construct a road from Dusky Sound to Lake Manapouri, but it was never completed, terminating abruptly at Bishop Burn, on the western side of Loch Maree. In December 2019, the name of the fiord was officially altered to Tamatea / Dusky Sound. Access Access to the sound is by sea or air only, with no roads reaching the coast at this point. However, the Dusky Track stretches to the upper reaches of the sound, at Supper Cove, from lakes Manapouri and Hauroko. External links See also Tramping in New Zealand References Fiords of New Zealand Important Bird Areas of New Zealand Sounds of Fiordland