by Matt Vance
The white spots were not marble. The islands are composed entirely of granite and have a proliferation of birds, so what Bligh saw would have been glistening guano, hard-polished by the weather.
During the sealing boom of the early nineteenth century, several voyages were mounted to the Bounties to harvest skins. In 1808 a Captain Moody of the Santa Anna deposited a fourteen-strong gang on the islands. After the ship sailed off it got into strife somewhere near Norfolk Island. Some time later another sealing ship, the King George, happened upon the miserable remains of the gang. ‘The sealers had been greatly distressed for want of water and provisions,’ the captain reported. They had been living on a diet of rainwater, seals and albatrosses. Three had died due to ‘hardships’ and the rest were in a sorry state. Their nine awful months ashore at the Bounties remains the standing record for human habitation on the islands.
In 1888 a New Zealand government ship, the Stella, visited. One of the passengers was William Dougall, an amateur photographer. Dougall’s experience seems to have been less than pleasant. ‘You can smell the Bounties before you can see them,’ he later wrote. ‘You feel particularly good-humoured when you slip, and putting your hand to save yourself your arm is buried to the elbow in a pool of semi-solid guano. … When we got back to the Stella the steward blocked our way and demanded that we should discard our unsavoury garments before entering the saloon.’
Comments such as these aroused the interest of fortune hunters. Guano was a vital ingredient in soil fertilisers, and a mint could be made mining and shipping it to the growing agricultural lands of the British Empire. The belief there was a vast quantity on the islands sparked interest as to who might own them. The thought the treasure-laden Bounties could be swiped from under its nose jolted the colonial government of New Zealand, the islands’ nearest neighbour, into formally taking possession in 1870 and ushering the place into the sacred realm of the British Empire.
The windfall turned out to be an illusion. To be profitable, guano has to be deposited in thick layers. While the surface of the Bounties looked guano-rich, steady erosion by wind and water had left only a thin layer of the stuff.
After this the Bounties remained firmly out of sight and out of mind. Wilful ignorance of their bleak nature extended to New Zealand’s Department of Lands and Survey. Despite numerous reports from sailors about the islands’ unwelcoming geography and lack of vegetation, in 1894 the department advertised a twenty-one-year lease on a pastoral run for one pound a year. There were no takers.
Gerry Clark on Totorore, Bounty Islands, 1997.
Birdman
49°42′S
I had not been on many journeys south before I realised any conversation about the Southern Ocean would eventually arrive at the topic of Gerry Clark, the fearless sailor, amateur birder and master of understatement who once said. ‘One has always to accept a certain amount of risk or nothing is accomplished.’
Clark, a legend of the Southern Ocean, began his affair with the sea on his fourteenth birthday by enlisting in the British Merchant Navy. His training took place on an old battleship, HMS Worcester, which was permanently anchored in the Thames Estuary. During shore leave he engaged in his other great interest, birdwatching, on the estuary and nearby rivers. By seventeen he was in Singapore, working for the Union-Castle Steamship Company. His sharp mind and unflappable demeanour got him noticed. Within a few years he was assistant marine superintendent and studying for the rank of captain.
By 1958 Clark and his wife wanted a more stable family life. They sold up in Singapore and moved to New Zealand, buying an orchard and becoming pioneers in the organic growing of citrus and subtropical fruits. Clark’s seafaring was now sporadic. To help support the struggling orchard he would occasionally undertake delivery voyages of ships, fishing boats and yachts. On these brief sojourns at sea, he began to hone his love of birds into a particular passion for seabirds.
The waters around New Zealand and the wider South Pacific are a seabirder’s paradise. The interplay of subantarctic, temperate and subtropical habitats and the sheer vastness of the ocean make for a huge diversity of pelagic bird life.
Clark began to expand his ardour for birds ever further south. He also took evening classes in boat-building. He was not a natural craftsman but he had an eye for making things strong and functional. By 1968 he had built a seven-metre engineless yacht. He could have stopped there and enjoyed the delights of cruising in the beautiful Hauraki Gulf. Instead he entered the yacht, Ketiga, in the first solo trans-Tasman yacht race. Three years later he set out to circumnavigate New Zealand via the subantarctic Auckland, Campbell and Chatham Islands.
This would be a turning point. He glimpsed seabird paradise and was moved by the violence and the beauty of the Southern Ocean. He came up with a plan to build a larger boat strong enough to withstand the rigours of a long-distance voyage in the ocean’s wild seas. Over the next seven years he constructed an Alan Wright-designed eleven-metre cutter in native kauri timber, selling some of the orchard to pay the bills.
In late 1982 he launched the boat, which he called Totorore, the Māori name of the Antarctic prion. Barely a year later, with the aim of gathering more information about the seabirds of the Southern Ocean, he embarked on a 38,413-nautical-mile, three-year easterly circumnavigation of Antarctica. It was to become one of the most remarkable small boat voyages of all time.
Clark sailed out into the approaching winter. With him was Ken Back, the first of many crew; for most of his voyaging Clark would have companions who were prepared for the sake of the birds to endure the privations of seasickness, close quarters and the ever-present possibility of death that came with a yacht the size of Totorore.
Icy rigging on Totorore, Antarctic Peninsula.
The men saw birds aplenty. In Chile’s Juan Fernández Islands they spotted rare petrels. Further north they discovered rockhopper and macaroni penguins. They unearthed large colonies of black-browed albatrosses, southern giant petrels and blue petrels, made the first confirmed sighting of prions breeding in Chile, and saw the largest colony of sooty shearwaters. On the unexplored coastline of South Georgia they made the first accurate counts of wandering albatrosses and king penguins.
They then headed to the deep south. No one had dared to sail near the Antarctic Peninsula in winter. It was known that even a mild storm could be dangerous. The photograph Clark took of Totorore’s rigging completely iced up has sent a chill into the heart of sailors ever since. After three days of desperately chipping at the ice with hammers and screwdrivers, he managed to save the boat from capsizing and slipping into cold oblivion.
Gerry was now fifty-seven but he had the stamina of a much younger man. He set out on the second leg of the journey, which would take the boat from Cape Town in South Africa to Fremantle in Australia. He and the crew found black-browed albatrosses breeding on Îlots des Apôtres and Île des Pingouins, rocky uninhabited islands in the subantarctic Crozet Archipelago, but this leg of their voyage would become more famous as an epic of survival than for its ornithological discoveries. Somewhere between Cape Town and Marion Island, Totorore capsized in a storm and lost its mast. Clark continued on with makeshift masts and a sail made from an orange tarpaulin, but even worse was to come. East of Heard Island the yacht was rolled 360 degrees five separate times, in seas that were extreme even by Southern Ocean standards. Clark’s usual optimism deserted him. He recorded in his log: ‘A night of terror has shattered my confidence and has left me in a serious doubt as to my chances of survival.’
The fear might have crushed a lesser man but Clark kept going and managed to keep Totorore afloat. For the next sixty-eight days the boat drifted and sailed in a general north-easterly direction, the tarpaulin strapped between bipod masts made of spinnaker poles.
As Clark neared the West Australian coast near Fremantle he noted, ‘I could see some beautiful big yachts, all obviously of the same class, sailing around Gage Roads [the shipping channel] and several passed close by
to see what strange craft was coming into the harbour with its little orange square sail.’
The yachts were those of New Zealand’s America’s Cup team, in training for the 1987 regatta. Not only had Clark survived the worst of the Southern Ocean, he had stumbled into the embrace of New Zealand’s best sailors, who would help return Totorore to its finest form for the voyage home.
Totorore’s arrival in Clark’s home port of Kerikeri was a typically humble affair. An Anglican minister, Bill Law, stood on the steps of the landing, surrounded by the crew of the boat and supporters of the Totorore voyage, and led a prayer of thanksgiving for the safe return. Clark would describe the scene in his 1988 book The Totorore Voyage: ‘I could not keep the tears from my eyes or the catch from my voice as I was welcomed with handshakes and kisses. I was overflowing with love and happiness.’
Totorore, Bucket Cove, Bounty Islands, 1997.
The reception may have been local and low-key but the recognition of Clark’s achievements made him a celebrity. He was awarded an MBE by the New Zealand Government, the Northland Blue Water Trophy by the Whangarei Harbour Board, the Tilman Medal by the Royal Cruising Club, the Blue Water Medal by the Cruising Club of America, the Fred Norris Medal by the Devonport Yacht Club, the Tequila Propeller Award by the Royal Akarana Yacht Club and the Stolberger Medal by the New Zealand Yacht Navigators Society. To crown it all he became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Within a year Totorore had been refitted and Clark was heading south again. At the Chatham Islands he helped track a rare endemic petrel, the tāiko, and recorded the first evidence of cape pigeons breeding on the islands. Over the next decade he and Totorore would make sixteen voyages to subantarctic islands, transporting and providing support to numerous volunteers, contractors and ornithology students with small research budgets. He actively sought grants, sponsorships and even personal donations to help pay for the trips, making it possible for conservation-minded people to contribute to projects that were a low priority for government funding.
Clark was a sailor’s sailor, always keeping his mind on his boat and its wellbeing while others went ashore to count birds and have other adventures. Despite this, he retained his enthusiasm for seabirds and relished the rare chances he had to land and observe nature in the raw.
In June 1999 Clark and a forty-seven-year-old crewman Roger Sale transported two albatross researchers, Martin Renner and Anja Schulze, to Antipodes Island, 415 nautical miles south-east of New Zealand. It was the heart of winter. Renner and Schulze were on a mission to recover radio transmitters that had been attached to ten Antipodean albatrosses four months earlier and to assess the birds’ condition. This involved staking out their nests on the north coast and catching the adult albatrosses as they returned to feed their chicks. The information gained about the foraging habits of the birds would be a vital link in understanding their behaviour.
While Renner and Schulze began their work, Clark and Sale sailed off to lay anchor in nearby Alert Bay. Each night Clark would talk with the pair by radio and the teams would update each other on conditions and intentions. Like many anchorages in the Southern Ocean, Alert Bay was exposed and wild. On June 11 Clark mentioned that he was going to sail Totorore around to South Bay because gale force northerlies were forecast. This was the last communication Renner and Schulze would have with him. On June 20, worried that he had not answered their calls for several days, the two scientists managed to scramble down the cliffs of South Bay. Lying on the shore were pieces of wreckage from the Totorore.
A seventy-tonne search vessel sailed at once from New Zealand’s Port Chalmers, finally reaching the island through rain and snow. It picked up Renner and Schulze and searched the coast. No trace was ever found of Gerry Clark and Roger Sale.
Coastwatchers on Auckland Island, photographed by Charles Fleming, 1942.
Coastwatchers
50°31′S
During the Second World War German raiders lurked in the Pacific, intent on picking off any Allied merchant ships that strayed into their path. When reports reached the New Zealand government of warships heading south, it realised the good anchorages and protected harbours of the larger of its subantarctic islands would be a welcome refuge for such enemy vessels. This became full-blown paranoia when a New Zealand freighter, the Turakina, was sunk by a German raider in the Tasman Sea and twenty survivors taken prisoner. When later released the men reported being taken to a harbour with snow and tussock-clad slopes.
The war cabinet was not going to be caught off guard again. It instigated a coastwatching programme on the islands and code-named it the Cape Expedition. The sheltered harbours of Port Ross and Carnley in Auckland Island and Perseverance Harbour in Campbell Island were chosen as bases. They had three important features: large natural harbours, closeness to the New Zealand mainland – 475 and 700 kilometres respectively – and no residents.
The Aerodrome Branch of the Public Works Department was asked to find suitable sites and personnel. The living quarters needed to be satisfactory for what the war cabinet described as ‘an indefinite stay in a rigorous climate from which radio contact could be made’. The buildings needed to be both well concealed and close to excellent vantage points of the harbours. A supply vessel, the Ranui, would keep the men in fresh food and contact with the outside world.
The cabinet instructions were blunt: ‘Our object is to destroy or disable enemy raiders. To do this we must have intelligence of their movements. Your object is to report any ships visiting the Auckland or Campbell Islands, and to continue reporting without being detected.’
The islands were certainly known to the Germans. In the days leading up to the outbreak of the war a German-flagged steamship, the Erlangen, had slunk out of Port Chalmers in New Zealand’s South Island and headed to Auckland Island. The crew were not keen on spending the war in prison and desperate to get to Nazi-friendly South America. At Carnley Harbour they laid in a supply of freshly chopped rata wood to supplement their meagre supply of coal for the ship’s boilers; a patch of second-growth bush is visible in the deep recess of the harbour to this day. Undetected, they eventually reached Chile after a harrowing voyage across the Southern Ocean.
Each of our voyages south usually included a visit to a coastwatching station on the Auckland Islands. The huts still boasted coal range ovens and a large trove of rusty cans. I often wondered what it had been like for the young men isolated from the world in this grim place and found the answer in the writings of twenty-nine-year-old coastwatcher Graham Turbott, who would later become director of the Auckland War Memorial Museum.
Contact with the outside world, Turbott reported, was limited to daily weather and shipping reports, sent in scrambled Morse code. During the first two years private messages were not allowed except in cases of bereavement. Later this was relaxed to allow the sending and receiving of two personal messages a year and a sporadic mail run on the Ranui. Any news of the war came soaked in propaganda via shortwave radio.
In the early stages the expedition members wore civilian dress. If captured they were to say they were fishermen. However, in 1942 a group of New Zealand coastwatchers stationed in the Gilbert Islands were captured and beheaded by the Imperial Japanese Navy. It was the beginning of a fashion for coastwatcher executions that rapidly spread across the north-western Pacific. To try and prevent the killings, the war cabinet gave each member of the Cape Expedition a uniform and the nominal rank of private, on the tenuous basis that the execution of prisoners of war was against the Geneva Convention. If push came to shove, the men were to don the uniforms and cite the convention.
Among the planners of the Cape Expedition was Robert Falla. The curator of Canterbury Museum, Falla had carried out extensive field studies on the subantarctic islands while assistant zoologist on Douglas Mawson's 1929–30 Antarctic Research Expedition. This was the chance of a lifetime as far as he was concerned. Little was yet known of the natural science of the Aucklands so any observations made or specimens
collected would be a giant leap forward. He suggested including among the coastwatchers young men of a scientific bent. The isolation and monotonous routine of a coastwatcher was well known. Extracurricular activity would, he argued, help them stay sane. The Aerodrome Branch agreed and issued a standing instruction: ‘In addition to their regular duties, expedition personnel should be encouraged to record general observations of natural phenomena.’
Initially the work was done in a haphazard manner but from 1942 a new policy required there to be one person of a professional background in natural science on the staff at each coastwatching station. The names of these men read like a science roll of honour; they included ornithologist and geologist Charles Fleming and naturalist Jack Sorensen. Their presence not only led to the development of more systematic ways of recording information but the enhancing of their companions’ knowledge of natural history.
As the war rolled on, the threat of invasion became less acute. The Pacific war moved north and the threat from German raiders diminished as resources were redirected to the fighting in Europe. The New Zealand government now established survey parties to map the islands in detail. Good visibility was needed to take readings by theodolite and the constantly cloudy weather made for a lot of downtime, which was used for further scientific studies.
Graham Turbott joined the expedition in 1944. His introduction to the Auckland Island No.1 coastwatching station at Port Ross was from the deck of a government ketch, the New Golden Hind. The boat, he noted, had twin engines, one American and the other British; they were referred to as Mr Roosevelt and Mr Churchill. The naming of inanimate objects continued ashore. Turbott observed that the short tracks around the station had Wellington street names, some from the seedier end of town. ‘Lambton Quay’ led to ‘Town Belt’ then to bohemian ‘Cuba Street’ and finally to ‘Haining Street’, once home to the city’s opium dens.
