Sara E. Johnson -- special guest We are excited to welcome Sara E. Johnson back to the blog. Her Alexa Glock series, set in New Zealand, is a Murder is Everywhere favorite and she has new secrets to share from her upcoming release, The Hungry Bones . Welcome Sara! I am
happy to be back with Murder is Everywhere. Thanks, Wendall, for asking me to
visit. My fifth Alexa Glock forensic mystery, The Hungry Bones , comes
out in June. Coming June 11. The
setting is a charming former gold-mining town on the South Island of New
Zealand.
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{page:WordSection1;} Arrowtown, New Zealand Alexa, a traveling forensic investigator (most towns
in New Zealand are too small to have any CSI), is called in when a skeleton is
discovered in an unmarked grave. Alexa's specialty is teeth.
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{page:WordSection1;} She'll analyze the strontium isotopes in the enamel of the
skeleton's molar to determine where he spent his formative years, but that's
another very cool story. This story is about gold and ghosts. The Arrowtown area gold
rush began in the 1860s. Most of the miners were English, Irish, and Scottish.
By 1862, fifteen hundred miners camped beside the Arrow River. As
soon as the river and surrounding area was deemed barren, the European miners
rushed off to other goldfields. Chinese miners were recruited to keep the
economy going. By the 1880s, there were five thousand Chinese
in the Otago region, almost all men. Chinese gold-miners in New Zealand The Europeans miners mostly
stayed in New Zealand. (Gosh – they had come all that way!) The Chinese considered themselves
visitors. Their goal was to make money and return home. They did this in one of
two ways: Strike it rich, buy a bowler hat, and sail to Hong Kong on a steamer
ship. The second ticket home was to sail on a corpse ship. You heard right.
There's
a Chinese proverb: Falling leaves return to their roots. The Chinese believed
that after death, the soul hovers over the grave until he is home. Many of the
miners, of course, never struck it rich or made it home. Hence – the corpse ships. Chinese benevolent societies
arranged the ships. If you paid in advance – most miners or their families did
to avoid the calamity of being abandoned – you were guaranteed a trip home if
you died. The first corpse ship, Hoihow, set sail in 1883 with the
remains of 286 miners. Members of the Cheong Sing Tong society had
painstakingly exhumed them from graveyards all over Otago, including Arrowtown.
They defleshed (if necessary) and cleaned every bone and bagged them together
in calico bags. Then they enclosed the bags in zinc boxes covered with wood.
Tiny coffins. The S.S. Ventnor The
next tomb ship was nineteen years later. The S.S. Ventnor sailed from
Wellington on October 26, 1902, with 499 skeletons aboard. Seven elderly
Chinese men were given free passage home in exchange for attending to the
coffins. Somewhere off Hokianga – the far north of the North Island – the Ventnor
went down, taking all those hungry ghosts to the bottom of the sea.
The
Chinese gold miners died twice.
Over the next few months bones and tiny coffins washed
ashore. Māori members of Te Roroa and Te Rarawa iwi (tribes), who were
mystified at the time, respectfully interred them in their urupā (burial
grounds).
The
wreck of the Ventnor was discovered in 2012 and later designated as an
archaeological site.
Do
you have strong feelings about where you want to be buried or have your ashes
spread?
When
I was in New Zealand last year, I visited Opononi, a beach community where a
memorial was built, to pay my respects. The names of all 499 miners are listed
on plaques. It is a beautiful and haunting memorial. Check out The Hungry
Bones , this June, to learn more about the New Zealand gold rush and why one
miner did not want to return to his roots. The book is dedicated in memory of
the Chinese miners. ---Sara You can find Sara at https://www.sarajohnsonauthor.com On Twitter/X at @sarajhn
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