History

missed this man

I have not long returned to New Zealand from the Cook Islands where I have been doing some historical research for some years.

Would any readers have de tails on a Captain J. B. Young.

Perhaps your magazine has published something on him at an earlier time.

I have met a blank wall in trying to find out about this

man. The only reference I have been able to find was in a Cook Islands newspaper “Te Torea” 1895.

It suggested he had ships named “Victoria Prince Alfred Niva Queen Zillah (Schooners) Spray Blanche (Cutters)”.

I have traced some of the vessels later but under other owners.

Young apparently partnered Henry Nicholas about 1850 in a store at Avatiu, Rarotonga and introduced cotton gins and steam engines to Rarotonga but nothing is known of him now.

Historians seem to have missed him unless something has been written in one of your early editions?

Tony Monteith,

Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand.