"If ever I come to anchor, it will be here!" So declared the pioneer of Milford Sound, the remarkable Scot, Donald Sutherland (1843-1919), when he visited the fiord with a sealing party. And return he did, albeit some 14 years later. In his first two years at Milford he never so much as saw another human face as he explored the surroundings, living off the land and scheming to develop deposits of greenstone and asbestos. An old friend, John M'Kay, had joined him in his plans by the time the discovery of the Sutherland Falls was made, when the pair startled the world with their claim that the falls were over 1,000 metres high. The Government sent a party in to confirm the find.

Tourists attracted by the falls began to come by boat and overland. Sutherland built his John o'Groats Hotel at "Milford City" (forerunner of today's modern complex) and the man who claimed he could "live on the smell of the north wind, and a raupo hut is as warm as a palace" was entertaining nobility in a region where for some years he had lived as a hermit. When visitors left, Sutherland would enter his own cryptic comments on them in his famous Visitors' Book, such as "The two meanest scunkes that ever came into this sound."

It was at this time that Sutherland married a long-suffering Dunedin widow. Together they ran the hostel, with Sutherland guiding groups to and from the falls he had found, and in the off-season working on the formation of what were to become the latter stages of the renowned Milford Track. Sutherland's grave is signposted near the carpark, between the hotel and the wharf.

A nonchalant entry in Sutherland's Visitors' Book reads: "On track to Sutherland waterfall from Milford Sound from Oct. 1889 to May 1890, being the first to reach the summit of Sutherland waterfall, highest in the world, on March 9, 1890". It disguises the triumph of the brave if brash William Quill who, in 31/2 hours, climbed to the top of the falls. It was he who found at their head the lake that now bears his name. A contemporary wrote: "The daring feat of the adventurous Quill will never be emulated by any but those absolutely hankering to mature their insurance policies, or possessed of a morbid desire to be gathered up in a shovel."

Within a year the youthful Quill had met his end. He was lost while climbing on the Gertrude Saddle and was traced only to the edge of a precipice down which he presumably plunged to his death. His climb of the falls has only once been repeated, by a track guide in 1950 who, after a six-hour climb, reached the summit only to find no alternative route down but by retracing his steps in the gathering gloom.
The falls, for years thought to be the world's tallest, plummet 580.3 metres in leaps of 248.4, 228.9 and 103 metres.