Foul Bottoms with John Quirk: A Tale of Two Shipwrecks

Shipwreck survivors endured extreme hardship on Auckland Island after the wrecks of Grafton and Invercauld. Credit: John Quirk

This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine and is the latest edition of Foul Bottoms with John Quirk exploring maritime history, shipwreck survival and seafaring stories.

I had just been writing about the survivors of two shipwrecks on Auckland Island and the privations they endured. 12 degrees would be a heatwave there. One wreck was 162 years ago this month. The survivors had very different outcomes.

Under the command of 42-year-old captain Thomas Musgrave, the 56-ton schooner Grafton sailed from Sydney on November 12, 1863, on an expedition chartered by Frenchman Francis Edouard Raynel. He planned to evaluate tin mining and sealing for skins and oil on Auckland and Campbell islands. He had the experience of six years at sea and eleven in the Australian goldfields. When they reached Campbell Island, Raynel was taken ill and unable to carry out fruitless mining surveys and there was a scarcity of seals. They headed for Camley Harbour on Auckland Island.

Despite being in the snuggest anchorage on the island, on New Year’s Day 1864 a heavy storm blew up, the anchor cable parted and Grafton was driven ashore. All five crew survived the night on deck and with a line attached to the wreck they made it towards the surf in the 12-foot dinghy when seaman Alexander McLaren bravely leapt into the sea with another line, attached it to a tree and pulled the boat through the surf. An example of bravery and initiative that typified their survival.

The ailing Raynel was brought ashore and cared for by his shipmates. Before the wreck was pounded to pieces, they salvaged food, tools, navigation equipment, canvas and Raynel’s gun with powder and shot. The expedition had only provisioned for four months, and half had been used up, but they eked out their existence for 18 months on seals, birds and fish. Initially, they built a temporary shelter from the ship’s spars and sails. Raynel had built cabins in the Australian goldfields and directed the construction of a solid cabin with a stone chimney. Salvaged furniture and skilled innovation provided bunks, a dining table and desk. Musgrave taught the illiterate seamen to read and write and kept a log using seal blood for ink. To keep scurvy at bay, or so he said, Raynel brewed ale from local flowering plants. So they could sit around the fire, drinking beer and playing cards, chess or dominoes which they had made.

Escape

Before leaving Sydney, the expedition was assured that if they had not returned in a year, a search expedition would set out. After the first year, the crew gave up on waiting and realised they had to engineer their own escape. They started, then gave up trying to create a boat from Grafton’s timbers, so they extended the dinghy to 14’6” and built up the topsides and decked her over with canvas and added a false keel.

They built bellows from seal skins, then a forge. They made charcoal by heating firewood stacked vertically around a central flue and burning it at 800C while smothered with turf to stop it from igniting. To make nails, they hammered salvaged iron into narrow square sectioned strips, cut it to length, hammered a point at one end and forged a head on the other. They foraged by day and made 50 nails a night. Musgrave, McLaren and the now recovered Raynel set out for New Zealand and after five days they were off Stewart Island and met the cutter Flying Scud whose British skipper and his Māori wife had built a house there. Flying Scud took them to Invercargill where funds were raised for the rescue of George Harris and Henry Bron, the cook, seven weeks later. An amazing achievement of initiative, skill and camaraderie that enabled all five men to survive.

Invercauld wreck

Four months after Grafton was wrecked, a navigational error by Captain George Dalgarno (the name is pure Scottish, not a left over from an Armada survivor) who’s larger 880-ton Scottish barque, Invercauld, struck the island at 2.00am on May 11th, 1864. She was on her way from Melbourne to Calao in Chile with a cargo of timber to return with a load of guano. She immediately broke up. Of the crew, 19 of the 25 managed to get ashore, shedding their boots and heavy coats to fight their way through the surf. Six drowned and their bodies were stripped by the survivors. A bag of ships biscuit, and a kilo of salted pork were salvaged and eked out over the first four days.

The steward found matches in his pocket. One was dry enough to light a fire to dry the others. Somehow all the others ignited at once. With a cargo of timber there should have been enough drifting ashore to build a cabin, but the cove where they landed was apparently too small to accommodate them. After five days Dalgarno partially recovered from his state of shock and agreed to 23-year-old seaman Robert Holding’s urging that they must all climb to higher ground and over to the more protected eastern side of the island. It took them two weeks of trudging barefoot and ill clad in the freezing sleet, subsiding on roots and leaves. They eventually found a small pig which was captured and devoured. Just one pig? Do you think there may have been more?

Six, including Holding, planned to return to the wreck site, but after a while, he came back to rejoin the main group. The others were never seen again. During this ordeal the captain, first mate Smith and second mate Mahoney rigidly asserted their position of rank. “They never hurt themselves with work”, recalled Holding at a later enquiry. They insisted that the younger ship’s boys brought them shellfish, edible roots, berries and water. Until the four of them died of starvation, exhaustion and exposure.

Nine remaining men were overjoyed to reach the eastern side of the island and find a bay of limpets. But they soon exhausted them and moved south looking for further shellfish. They found an abandoned whaling station, just a collection of primitive old turf huts but the first shelter they had known. They caught a seal and after devouring it, used the skin over a sapling frame to build a boat for fishing. But before they could use it, a storm swept it out to sea. Amazingly, they started building another boat. After reading the efforts of the disciplined Grafton, you wonder how this starved, ill-disciplined bunch of survivors could have managed it. However, they used the boat to reach nearby islands. One was overrun with rabbits which gave food and skins. To prepare for the next winter they built a sod walled shelter with a fireplace and chimney.

Their numbers dwindled to four until one died after a fight. Holding reported that parts of him were eaten by the skipper. The young Holding took over and organised the two others to systematic foraging.

Rescue

A year and ten days after they were wrecked, the Portuguese ship Julian dropped anchor in their bay. She was leaking badly and the skipper hoped he might get help from the whaling station he had seen on the charts, not knowing it had been abandoned a decade before. The three that remained from the 25 crew, Dalgarno, Smith and Holding, were taken to Chile. The skipper and mate were given passage to Rotterdam, leaving Holding behind and destitute.

After 60 years Holding wrote of the wreck and his experiences, hammering Captain Dalgarno for lack of leadership. He lived into his nineties, and his great-great-granddaughter wrote “Wake of the Invercauld” from his personal notes. The wrecks occurred in very different locations and Invercauld undoubtedly suffered worse conditions than Grafton, but you can’t help wondering how differently Captain Musgrave would have managed the situation.

Ironically, readers may remember that the following year the ship General Grant drifted into a cave while becalmed and was wrecked. Two years later. (Afloat May 2023) The 15 survivors made it to a sealers hut just north of where Invercauld was wrecked and found enough food to survive for 18 months; including pigs and goats which had been left behind by sealers as a food source. The Grafton crew had found just one pig and never imagined there could be more. They were saved by sending out fleets of driftwood toy boats inscribed with a rescue message, one of which was found on Stewart Island, 300 miles due north, just off Invercargill.

Amazing.

This feature article originally appeared in AFLOAT Magazine. To explore more stories like this, browse the AFLOAT Magazine archive or view the latest edition of AFLOAT Magazine.