Scroll down to the links below. They will take you to historically fascinating letters written in 1925- 28 by my father Huia McAven, to his mother, which depicts the time when he went to sea to explore the world. It includes interesting obsesrvations about life in South America and England at that time.
At 17 years of age Huia set sail from Auckland in a four masted schooner, the mv.William Mitchell.
Due to a problem with the ship, Huia was laid off and left stranded  in Chile for 2 years. He was robbed of all his money and possessions, and had to get a job in the salt mines of Tocopilla.
Consequently he managed to survive and learnt to speak Spanish very well. He eventually managed to get on to another ship and sailed for UK and Europe, and continued to practice speaking the Spanish language until he died in 1980.

These  hand written letters have been lovingly and diligently  typed out by Heather Milne, daughter of Huia McAven. I have scanned each letter and uploaded each as a separate image on this website for viewing.  Each file size is quite large: ranging between 70 kbs to 170 kbs in size, on average. That means if you have a slow internet connection, it will take a little while to open each of the pages. However it is a worthwhile read, so please do persevere.

If you have any trouble reading the size of the text, when you are looking at these letters:
Note that if you are using a new browser i.e. Internet explorer 6, you will find that a little icon appears near the bottom of the screen, which is available to click on, for the purpose of expanding the image (of the letter) to its full readable size.
 

Please remember to use your windows browser "BACK" button to get back to this page. Any problems you can email me.

Enjoy these letters.
Gillian McAven 

McAven-Willetts Family tree documents and photos page