The Cataraqui’s passengers were leaving behind homes in small towns and cities in the north of England and midlands – Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Staffordshire – places where chances for improvement were bleak. The prospect of three and a half months of cramped conditions, monotony, seasickness and poor food seemed a small price to pay for the chance of a new life in a new land.
The voyage out is reported to have been uneventful. Six babies died on the way, a figure strangely balanced by the five that were born during the voyage. One unsettling note was the ill feeling between the captain and the ship’s surgeon-superintendent, Charles Carpenter, friction that would later have dire consequences.
A disturbing, some would say portentous incident, was when a crewman, one Robert Harvey, was lost overboard, somewhere in the vastness of the Indian Ocean.
At the beginning of July, after three months at sea, the Cataraqui rounded the Cape of Good Hope and began crossing the long final stretch of open water towards Australia. With a week to go, the weather began to deteriorate, then developed into a typical winter storm, which continued uninterrupted for days. Captain Finlay ‘close reefed’ the ship’s topsails, letting her run at speed before the gale. But looming large was, he knew, the Australian coast, where he must negotiate the ‘needle’s eye’.
For four straight days, the bad weather left him unable to fix his position via stars or sun, estimating instead by ‘dead reckoning’ – a doubtful art of navigation at the best of times. Finlay believed the Cataraqui to be about 30 miles south-west of Portland on Victoria’s south-west coast, and on the evening of Sunday 3 August, he decided to reduce sail and ‘heave to’ (or maintain his position as best he could) for the night, and in the morning resume a course that would take him clear of Cape Otway then on to the port of Melbourne.
On the afternoon of what was expected to be their last night at sea, the captain had given permission for the passengers’ trunks and boxes to be brought up from the holds in order that their finest ‘holiday attire’ could be selected for the much-anticipated arrival the next day.
Captain Finlay’s positioning was incorrect. He was in fact 50 or 60 miles to the south of where he believed the ship to be, and instead of clear water ahead of him, hidden behind the mist and the rain, was the rocky west coast of King Island. Safe, though, passengers and crew would be until the morning as they marked time in the water. But an inexplicable decision by their captain would cost nearly all of them their lives.
Bishop Frances Russell Nixon, who preceded Reverend Brownrigg on an earlier journey through the islands in the mid-nineteenth century, relates the story of the tension between the captain and the ship’s surgeon, Carpenter. They had clashed throughout the voyage and now Carpenter was unimpressed by what he perceived as Captain Finlay’s over-caution in waiting out the bad weather. Late on the Sunday evening, Finlay:
… overheard the surgeon criticising his caution in very disparaging terms, and attributing a commendable prudence to personal fear. In a moment of impatient irritation he went up on deck and gave his counter orders, ‘Shake out the reefs, and stand on!’
It’s hard to conceive of his thinking at that moment, blinded by the weather in unlit, unfamiliar waters and a storm coming on. Perhaps the fatigue of the last months, and his frustration at not being able to fix his position was only now, at the end of a long journey, beginning to show, but his snap order to proceed through the night would cost 400 lives. One of Cataraqui’s surviving crewmen later recorded at an enquiry held in Melbourne:
On Monday, the 4th instant, I went on deck at 4 A.M. to relieve the watch, when I found the ship running free under three close-reefed topsails and reefed foresail. The captain was on deck at the time, and gave me orders to continue the course east by north, to keep a good look-out, and let him know at daylight. About half-past four o’clock, A.M., the tempest still continuing, rain falling in torrents, and the darkness of the night such as not to allow any object to be seen within a few hundred yards of the vessel, the ship struck, going at the rate, I suppose, of about seven knots through the water …
The impact was severe enough to knock the helmsman to the deck, but the Cataraqui continued for a few minutes before hitting again. A sounding was taken and 4 feet of water was found to be in her hold. For a second time, she limped on before she struck a third reef, and stuck.
George Guthrie, the ship’s chief mate and one of its few survivors, later recounted to the Port Melbourne Gazette:
The scene of confusion and misery that ensued at this awful period, it is impossible to describe. All the passengers attempted to rush on deck, and many succeeded in doing so, until the ladders were knocked away by the workings of the vessel; the shrieks from men, women and children from below were terrific, calling on the watch on deck to assist them …
Waves began to break over the ship. She had struck the jagged rocks on King Island’s south-west shore, at a place called Fitzmaurice Point. Many of the passengers who had managed to be hauled up onto the deck by the crew had been injured in the chaos below and were washed away immediately. At about 5 am, the ship suddenly fell over on her port side. Seeing she was doomed, Captain Finlay ordered the masts to be cut away to try and right her; rope lines were rigged and the terrified passengers were lashed to the timbers to give them something to cling to on the deck’s crazy angle. Says another contemporary account:
The scene was dreadful, the sea pouring over the vessel, the planks and timbers crashing and breaking, the waters rushing in from below and pouring down from above, the raging of the wind in the rigging, and the boiling, and hissing of the sea, joined to the dreadful shrieks of the women and children who were drowning below decks.
The shrieks ceased, as all those still trapped in the flooded hull were drowned. Another crewmember remembered:
The sea by this time was breaking on deck, and sweeping every thing away, with part of the crew and passengers. Nothing could be done from this till day-break, when we hoped that by means of a raft of the spars … some of the people might be enabled to reach the shore.
As the horrific day dawned, the surviving passengers, now only 200 in number, could see that they were barely a hundred metres from the shore, but in the fierce wind and mountainous seas, it may as well have been 10 miles.
At about ten in the morning, a surviving quarter boat was launched in which the doctor, Carpenter, the boatswain and two crew attempted to reach the shore. It immediately capsized, drowning the lot. All day they clung to the wreck, desperate and terrified as they watched others, one by one, or in groups, succumb to the cold and the exhaustion and slip into the water or be taken away with each successive wave. Then at midnight the Cataraqui began to break up, parting first amidships and taking another hundred people with her.
Those who survived the second night, the ones not hanging dead where they had been lashed to what now remained of the bow section, were released from the rope lines to give them some hope of being washed ashore. Only about thirty were now left, clinging in the howling wind and rain. Bits of rope were collected, in the hope of constructing a buoy to reach the shore and provide some anchor by which a line could be stretched to the ship to haul others in. Howie recalled:
… but not withstanding every effort, the buoy could not be got nearer than twenty yards from the shore, owing to its getting entangled with the sea-weed on the rocks, and there was no one on shore to catch it and secure it on the sand.
The captain, one of the last survivors, made a final attempt to reach land but he too was beaten back. In front of them, the shore must have seemed almost within touching distance, but even in the unlikely event that any one of them could swim, in such seas, that too was an impossibility.
The crewman records his own survival:
At daybreak, she commenced breaking up altogether, when I was washed away from the spritsail yard, and do not remember scarcely any thing until I found myself on the rock, where I had been washed by the violence of the sea. I foun
d two on shore at this time, and shortly afterwards, we found six more that had been washed from the bows, when she finally broke up. On my looking around, I could not see any part of the vessel above water. Out of all onboard, nine only were saved.
Guthrie survived by grabbing a piece of plank and leaping from his last position on the bowsprit, glancing back he saw ‘the captain and second mate and steward clinging at the bows, with about 18 or 20 only left alive, amid a host of dead bodies on the fragment of the wreck’.
A chance wave picked up Guthrie, carried him over the reef and deposited him, exhausted, on the shore.
As hard as it is to imagine such terrible loss of life so close to shore, John Fletcher, who later took the survivors away on his vessel, Midge, gives some idea of the power of that sea:
During a breeze the surf upon the shore is tremendous near the position of the wreck of the Cataraqui. I stood upon a ledge of rock forty feet above the level of the sea, and found that over this, had been driven by the sea, the whole of the midship part of the vessel, from the after main to the mizzen, a mass of about 40 feet by 15.
Just nine people survived out of more than 400, washed up on a deserted beach on an all-but-deserted island. Just one emigrant lived, thirty-year-old Solomon Brown, who lost his wife and four children. With him was the ship’s chief, Charles Guthrie, six seamen and a carpenter’s apprentice, William Blackstock. They were almost devoid of clothing, but from the surf managed to retrieve a single sodden blanket and a small tin of preserved fowl to divide between them.
The shoreline and bush around them, said Guthrie, ‘was strewed with pieces of the wreck and portions of dead corpses in horrible confusion’.
There were no permanent inhabitants on King Island at this time, but the nine were found by the curious figure of David Howie, a former convict who was camped with two Aboriginal women, Maria and Georgia, hunting seals and wallabies at Sea Elephant Bay 16 miles to the south. How he came to find the survivors is itself an intriguing side tale, revealed years later in a forgotten letter to the Melbourne newspaper, Argus, by a local carpenter. It said that Maria:
… dreamed that she saw a big ship and thousands of people drowning, which, after her many persuasions, induced the party to go to that part of the island. When they arrived at Wrecktop Point, they discovered the wreck, nine survivors, and numerous dead bodies strewed along the beach. They then went … for provisions to feed the survivors, which they did.
Another story, however, says simply that the current washed one of the bodies down towards Howie’s camp and he went searching for the wreck himself. Whatever the truth, for four weeks he and the Aboriginal women cared for the nine men, kept them warm with fires, finding food and creating shelter, and Howie took it upon himself also to bury the hundreds of bodies in mass graves on the beach. Many, smashed as they had been against the reef, were horribly disfigured, while others were simply in pieces. A total of 342 bodies were buried in five main graves, and several smaller ones. After a month, a passing vessel, the Midge, took the survivors away, bringing them finally to Port Melbourne on 13 September, arriving in vastly different circumstances from those they had envisaged a few weeks before.
News of the catastrophe which had engulfed the now long-overdue Cataraqui spread like fire through the town, and a special edition of the Port Phillip Herald was printed that same day. An appeal and inquiry were launched, and Howie, who had arrived in Australia nine years earlier as a convict, transported from Scotland for housebreaking, became a hero. For his efforts in sheltering the survivors and his grizzly work of burying the dead, he received forty guineas and 10 acres of land on King Island, subsequently becoming famous as ‘the constable of the Strait’, using his superb seaman’s skills in sailing through the islands to regularly report his findings. The reward for Maria, the Aboriginal woman some say saw the Cataraqui in a vision, has not been recorded.
Years later, in 1857, Bishop Nixon recorded his visit to the site of the wreck, taken there by a still-shaken Howie himself.
At last we came to the great grave of all, within sight of the very rocks on which the ship was dashed to pieces. ‘Here,’ he said in a hoarse whisper, each muscle of his face quivering with the remembrance of the horrid task of former years, ‘here I buried 245.’
Thomas Guthrie, the chief mate, not having had enough of seafaring, received thirty guineas, and within a month had found employment on another ship, Eliza, but perished in yet another shipwreck off South Australia a few years later. Solomon Brown, the Cataraqui’s sole surviving emigrant, also escaped, but temporarily. Having survived the deadly seas, he supposedly drowned in a shallow creek, again just a handful of years after the terrible event, still Australia’s worst civil maritime disaster, almost 170 years later.
31
THE CRUEL ROCKS
The road which lead me to the site of the Cataraqui was, to say the least, confusing. The only hire care available was new and enormous and felt rather grand. All the buttons worked. The radio was loud and had real bass. Bumps in the road became invisible, except for a soft, satisfying drum roll as the car rode over them – really just a wink to let me know they were there at all. It was gold in colour, and still had a faint ‘new car’ smell denoting luxury and success. No one, though, had said anything about taking it off-road. But if I was going to get to the site of the Cataraqui, that was what I had to do.
The sign was not all that clear, so I double-checked the map. King Island has many kilometres of road, but few that are sealed, and certainly not one leading to an obscure place on a wild and rocky coast with no landmarks, save for it being the site of a 170 year-old shipwreck. The sign was small but showed the universal shipwreck symbol adopted by local governments worldwide – a comical toy boat disappearing beneath a white line at an angle of 45 degrees.
Turning onto the gravel, the tyres complained by making a sudden growling sound. Some low hills concealed the distance to the water as I snaked past a line of trees adjacent to some lush farmland. Kilometre after kilometre I seemed to be travelling, as the wheel ruts in this one-car lane became ominously deeper. Then the road stopped altogether and I seemed to be in the middle of someone’s paddock. A gap in a fence a hundred metres ahead beckoned and sure enough the road started again. This happened three bewildering times. Surely more people than this were interested enough to visit the site of Australia’s deadliest shipwreck?
Finally, the line of the coast loomed ahead but the track took a sharp left turn. I followed it, again for what seemed like ages. A dreadful sucking sound and the occasional scrape came from somewhere near my feet as the weeds and rocks knocked against the lovely new car’s underside along the badly eroded track. I began to panic, convinced I had mucked this up, was about to bog the car, and was probably on the wrong road to start with. Cursing, I vowed to proceed no further than the next corner. After reneging three or four times, I at last spotted in the distance a small bench, a sign and the scariest looking rocks I’ve ever seen.
In front of me, the natural elements of sea, sand and rock came together in a terrible natural amphitheatre. In one glance, so many questions that had nagged me about the Cataraqui’s terrible loss of life so close to shore were answered: of all the places for a ship to run aground in a storm, this would have to be the very worst.
Thousands upon thousands of tiny serrated lines of basalt, uplifted over the aeons into startling angles, formed a series of impenetrable barriers many metres high, like a permanent army of swordsmen, weapons drawn and pointing out to sea. From the ocean side, it must have seemed like a solid, black wall, and razor sharp.
I clambered over as much of it as I could to get closer to the water, up and down over ankle-turning ridges that varied crazily in height, then a series of deep, water-filled canyons in and out of which the surf pulsed in long searching fingers. The same watery passages that once were clogged with bodies disgorged from the broken ship, the waves sucking at their limbs, giving a macabre illusion of life.
I
sat and watched the boiling meeting of rock and water in front of me, running my hands over the bare facets of stone. They were rough and serrated, like the edges of a million bread knives. Today was calm, with only the gentlest of swells riding languidly on the sea, and still the crash of the waves and spumes of foam were spectacular. It was also summer, yet the spray which caught me had a chill that made me shiver. The Cataraqui was wrecked here in winter, and I shuddered thinking about the August cold.
Looking out, a hundred metres or so, the waves revealed another reef, just visible as the rip drew back, a long, straight black line running parallel to the main ramparts on which I sat. Yes, surely, as I held up my binoculars, that was it: the very rock on which the great ship had foundered. So close, but as I now saw, in reality an interminable distance. The notion that even one could survive seemed now a miracle.
Howie’s mass graves were said to have been dug along the strip of protected beach behind the rocks, near where the track now runs. Accounts say he did his best to mark the site with proper fence posts, but they have long disappeared. As I walked along that little strip of beach, protected, ironically, by the same terrible rocks that had wrought such fury on the Cataraqui, I unfolded a copy of one of the newspaper articles, written at the time and containing the testament of the ship’s chief mate, Thomas Guthrie. At the conclusion of his words is a long list of the Cataraqui’s passengers who perished at this terrible, beautiful spot: a list of some of those who took the risk of starting a new life in a new land, and who so nearly succeeded, but who came to grief on the last day of a long voyage. As I walked along the beach, I quietly read aloud some of the names of those whose bones lay somewhere under my feet:
The Forgotten Islands Page 19
