The Enderby Settlement

by The Enderby Settlement (epub)

  Enderby’s Short Account of the Auckland Islands48 was published the same month. It included lyrical descriptions by a Captain Morrell of the American merchant service, from his visit in 1829. Morrell wrote of ‘extensive level plains covered with beautiful grass and refreshing verdure, extending back about five miles and then rising into elevated hills’ and was of the opinion that:

  Auckland’s Island is one of the finest places for a small settlement that can be found on any island in the southern hemisphere above the latitude of thirty-five. Every valuable animal would thrive here … Grain, fruits, vegetables of all kinds (excepting the tropical fruits) could be made to flourish here with very little labour. No island on the globe, of equal dimensions, can boast so many excellent harbours, safe, and easy of access; and at the head of each is a beautiful valley, extending inland, admirably calculated for the site of a village.49

  To his credit, Enderby did warn that ‘it might perhaps be as well to receive some of [these statements] with caution’.50

  What carried greater weight with the government was the fact that Sir James Clark Ross, in backing ‘those truly enterprising merchants, the Messrs Enderby’, had been of the opinion that ‘in the whole range of the vast Southern Ocean no spot could be found combining so completely the essential requisites for a fixed whaling station’.51 Ross had also mentioned to Enderby ‘that the whales in these high southern seas are much more numerous than those he had ever seen in the North’, and that the islands lay in the southern latitudes of ‘a most extensive fishery, as yet undisturbed’, which could not easily be taken advantage of from Europe or America.52

  The Americans, Enderby pointed out in his proposal, had an unprecedented 730 vessels at the time, giving employment to upwards of 20,000 seamen; whereas the number of British whaling ships had dwindled from 861 to just 36. It was, in fact, ‘a matter both of the greatest regret and humiliation, that the British Southern Whale Fishery should be in the depressed condition it is’. Numerous companies had successively withdrawn from the trade: one result of this was that while the trade itself was declining, the Enderbys’ firm was now at the forefront of those remaining. Enderby put Britain’s decline down to ‘a combination of causes’, chief among them the withdrawal of government bounties on ships employed in the fishery, the reduction of duties on foreign vegetable oils, with which whale oil was in competition, and the freedom from duties granted to the colonies, such as New Zealand, the Australian colonies and Newfoundland.53

  There was, Enderby argued, no shortage of whales: ‘If whales disappear for a time from one part where they had previously abounded, they are to be found in another … All experience proves that whales do not entirely disappear, but merely migrate in consequence of their favourite haunts being too continuously invaded. The Americans, at least,’ he pointed out, ‘capture them in abundance.’54 Success, he went on, lay not in individual efforts, but in the pooling of capital in a common enterprise, namely the Southern Whale Fishery Company, with Enderby at its head and Preston as its secretary.

  To celebrate the realisation of Enderby’s plans, a public dinner was given in his honour, attended by Members of Parliament and leading citizens of the City of London, at the London Tavern in April 1849.55 Four months later the three ships of Enderby’s Auckland Islands expedition sailed.

  They left the parent company of Enderby Brothers in a precarious state. The Times reported that before Charles Enderby’s departure, ‘the works at Greenwich had been disposed of, and the subsequent business of the house – limited to that of merchants, dealing chiefly in Australian wool. It is hardly necessary to add that the difficulties of the firm have not in any way been caused by their connection with the Southern Whale Fishery Company [which] was not of a nature to lead to anything else than their advantage.’56 The expedition could, in other words, be the saving of the parent company’s fortunes.

  By this time Charles Enderby’s bold venture was seen as a matter of national pride and prestige which could hardly fail.

  A huge colony of shy or white-capped mollymawks on Disappointment Island. Each distant white dot is a nesting bird.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Settling In

  Although he had taken the advice of Sir James Clark Ross in choosing to base his settlement on the shores of Port Ross, Enderby was still keen to visit the main island’s more extensive Southern Harbour. He may also have felt that what he had seen so far of the east coast differed so dramatically from Captain Morrell’s descriptions of it, that the record had to be put straight.

  Within a month of arriving Mackworth records: ‘His Excellency sailed this morning in a whale boat to make a circuit of the Island.’1 Enderby wisely chose to do so anticlockwise, taking on the exposed and treacherous west coast while the weather was calm, before ‘venturing the western passage’ into the Southern Harbour, and leaving his return up the more sheltered east coast until last.2

  From Port Ross, he travelled west along the deeply indented north coast, with its columnar basalt cliffs, bays and numerous offshore islets, to the jagged volcanic stacks off North West Cape. He then sailed southwest for 4.5–5 miles (7–8 kilometres) to Disappointment Island before continuing south, keeping well clear of the main island’s sheer western cliffs.

  Bristow probably named the island Disappointment because he found no fur seals there. He also failed to find a safe place to get ashore. It remains one of the world’s most unmodified and unspoilt islands, with its lush profusion of giant-leaved flowering megaherbs sheltering nesting penguins and white-capped (or shy) mollymawks, tall poa tussock grasses, and a huge breeding colony of mollymawks on the island’s upper grassy slopes.

  Sheer wall of western cliffs, rising to more than 300 metres.

  Shy mollymawks on Disappointment Island, nesting on the lower slopes among megaherbs, predominantly the purple-flowered Anisotome latifolia.

  Disappointment Island is a volcanic remnant near the centre of the northern of the two huge marine volcanoes which built the Auckland Islands from the sea floor 15–19 million years ago; the southern volcano is centred on Carnley Harbour. Severe erosion by the prevailing sou’westerly gales and pounding seas over millions of years is estimated to have worn away as much as 9.5 miles (15 kilometres) from the western side of the Auckland Islands, creating today’s rampart of the western cliffs, rising from 120 to close on 600 metres in an almost continuous wall for more than 20 miles (32 kilometres).3

  Megaherbs and tussock on Disappointment Island, looking towards the main island. In the foreground are the giant daisy-like Pleurophyllum speciosum, the yellow-flowered Stilbocarpa polaris and the carrot-like leaves of the umbelliferous Anisotome latifolia. The merchant ship Dundonald, bound from Sydney to London, was wrecked here in 1907 – the last of nine shipwrecks in the Auckland Islands. Its sixteen survivors were marooned on the island over the long winter months until they were able to sail in a makeshift coracle to the main island. They were finally rescued, eight months since the wreck, by the government steamer Hinemoa, on its regular round dropping off depots of provisions for eventual castaways.

  Rounding the island’s South West Cape, Enderby now negotiated the narrow and treacherous Victoria Passage between the main island and Adams Island, the second largest of the Auckland group, to enter the narrow Western Arm of Carnley Harbour.

  Surprisingly, on Bristow’s early ‘Sketch of Lord Auckland’s Groupe’ of 1806, Carnley Harbour is shown as smaller than Port Ross, whereas it is approximately four times the size, and roughly divided into four parts: the Western Arm, the smaller Coleridge Bay and Musgrave Harbour, the broad Northern Arm – some 4.5–5 miles (7–8 kilometres) long and ending within 1.8 miles (3 kilometres) of the west coast – and the Eastern Arm, long and narrow like the Western Arm, and opening onto the east coast. The harbour thus gives onto the sea to both west and east, with the 13-mile (21.5-kilometre) length of Adams Island enclosing its southern side.

  Looking from Adams Island to the narrow and hazardous Victoria
Passage between Adams and the main island. ‘I am by no means certain that it is even a safe boat passage, for the seamen by whom I was accompanied were, I thought, fearful of venturing where the surf was continually breaking with considerable force, and we only pushed forward when on the top of a wave, in order to avoid touching the rocks.’

  Enderby, Abstract of Reports

  Bristow’s map of the Auckland Islands, 1806.

  At the centre of the four arms of the harbour, and joined by a low, narrow neck to the land, is the Musgrave Peninsula, closing the wide view and possibly responsible for Bristow’s impression that Carnley Harbour was smaller than it is. This steep peninsula is thought to be the centre of the Carnley volcano, with the harbour as its collapsed, sea-filled caldera.

  High on the Musgrave Peninsula’s slopes is the lookout for New Zealand’s World War II Tagua Bay coastwatcher station, one of two on the main island. To the north, on the normally sheltered eastern shore of North Arm, is the site of the Auckland Islands’ first shipwreck – that of Thomas Musgrave’s Grafton in 1864 – and the subject of F.E. Raynal’s classic Wrecked on a Reef; or, Twenty Months among the Auckland Isles.4 Further north, at the head of North Arm, is the clearing where the German cargo steamer Erlangen lay in hiding in the very first days of World War II while cutting rata for fuel – a challenge in itself – before making its epic voyage across the Pacific to South America.5

  An aerial photo looking east over the western cliffs to the gentler eastern side and a glimpse of Carnley Harbour.

  Whalers and sealers had used this beautiful harbour, with rata forest lining its shores, well before the time of the Enderby settlement. With its many sheltered landings, it was to become a favourite retreat for Charles Enderby. Whaleboats were generally used for exploration around the coast, and Enderby records that ‘in these expeditions we generally sleep under the boat, which is hauled up on the shore, and turned half over, a fire being lighted in front of it; and as I have myself slept in this manner no less than seven times, without suffering from damp or cold, the climate cannot be considered either unwholesome or bad’.6

  Enderby completed his circuit of the island by returning up the east coast where, in 1829, Morrell had been the first of the Antarctic explorers to visit the islands, accompanied by his wife and her brother, on the schooner Antarctica. Their purpose had been to examine prospects for trade in the Pacific. They had sailed up from Desolation Island to the south, but even this could scarcely account for Morrell’s wildly exaggerated descriptions of this coast.

  Morrell had described it as being principally lined with a pebbly or sandy beach, behind which his ‘extensive plains covered with beautiful grass and refreshing verdure’7 extended back for 5 miles. But such an account could not possibly have been written from observations taken at the time, for the east coast has numerous rocky headlands and few sandy beaches. Morrell made no mention of the dozen or so steep-sided inlets probing deep inland, such as Chambres, Musgrave and Norman inlets, which are such a prominent feature up the length of the coast. Norman Inlet, 4.9 miles (8 kilometres) long, reaches like the North Arm of Carnley Harbour to within less than 2 miles (3 kilometres) of the west coast and all but cuts the main island in two.

  As for Morrell’s ‘extensive plains’, the whole island is remarkably short of flat land, which seldom extends more than a few hundred metres from the shore, let alone 5 miles (8 kilometres); and almost nowhere is there easy access past the gnarled rata forest, dense scrub, tussock and peat bogs to the high herbfields and the stark interior.

  Morrell, assured by whaling men that the winters were ‘mild, temperate, and salubrious’, had called at the height of summer, and must have struck an unusually fine eight days. He was certainly no stranger to poetic licence, describing a profusion of ‘euphorbia, crane’s bill, cud-weed – virgin’s bower, vanelloe, French willow, all-heal, eye-bright, and a variety of others’ – virtually none of which exist on the Auckland Islands!

  He considered the land highly productive: ‘Were the forests cleared away, very few spots would be found that could not be converted to excellent pasturage or tillage land.’ Finally, he summed up his effusive account with words Enderby had been wise to omit in his account of the Auckland Islands: ‘The whole island would form a delightful retreat to a few amiable families, who wish for a “dear little isle of their own”.’8

  Enderby returned from his circumnavigation of the main island with an enthusiastic report of the Southern Harbour, and a request that Mackworth visit it soon.9 Mackworth promptly set off the following day and returned to Port Ross three days later, to find ‘the Governor had commenced preparations for making Shoe Island a receptacle for Culprits, and had pardoned and received back to duty the men Landells, Furneaux and Lear [previously punished by Mackworth], simply stopping their pay for the time they have been off duty’.10

  The way troublemakers should be dealt with and punished was to prove a matter of intermittent friction between Enderby and Mackworth, undermining Mackworth’s authority and lessening Enderby’s own. Enderby, at 52, was more than twice Mackworth’s age, and tended to have a kindly and avuncular attitude towards his colonists – and, no doubt, towards Mackworth at times. He was not always easy to work for, and Mackworth, who quickly proved to be a firm and effective disciplinarian, must have been exasperated by Enderby’s tendency to countermand his decisions by making unilateral changes on disciplinary matters. Mackworth’s diary gives many examples of Enderby pardoning men, easing their sentences, or reducing fines imposed on them by the magistrates. This was in spite of the fact that on his very first day, sensing a lack of discipline and its likely cause, Mackworth had ‘undertaken the whole management of affairs on shore’, and made efforts to control the supply of liquor. Early on, finding some men discussing a grievance with the Governor and refusing to go to work, he had, not for the first time, ‘begged his Excellency to leave the management of the men entirely to me’.11 Enderby had undertaken to comply, but frequently found it hard to do so.

  The two chiefs, Matioro and Ngatere, had been made special constables in recognition of their cooperation and leadership, and within Mackworth’s first week one of the Brisk’s seamen, William Horsman, who had refused duty and been found guilty of theft, was sent to Ngatere’s Ocean Point pa until a ship arrived and he could be deported. He was followed two days later by another troublemaker, John Welsh. To Mackworth’s annoyance, within three weeks he was asked to ‘recall from banishment William Horsman by order of the Governor’. Enderby later reduced the fine imposed on Horsman from £4 to £3. A further frustration, this time for Enderby as well as Mackworth, was Welsh’s refusal to return to the settlement when ordered to do so. Conditions obviously suited him better at the pa!

  Mackworth must have hoped that his third attempt to take on magisterial duties and leave Enderby free to organise the colony’s whaling and shipping operations would finally be successful, when he recorded on 11 February: ‘To day the Governor acceeded to my wish and has placed the management of affairs entirely in my hands.’ He still of course had to answer to Enderby, who held the ultimate authority. But the Company’s directors back in London must have had misgivings about Enderby’s administrative abilities before the expedition left England, and determined that Mackworth should be involved in decisionmaking. In his letter to his mother, Mackworth told her that by order of the Court of Directors he was to be consulted on all matters, ‘which in point of responsibility makes a material alteration in my position’ – and that ‘circumstances have already placed me in a position higher than I was before. My duties certainly are arduous and trying … but my constitution seems to have strengthened to meet them … I am soldier, sailor, judge, lawyer, engineer, and everything else. I make a miserable lawyer, consulting the book for everything; but make a good common sense judge.’12 There was a delicate balance of responsibility between the Chief Commissioner and his second in command.

  It was a rare fine day and a light breeze was blowing when t
wo ships appeared to the east of Enderby Island. They were HMS Havannah, a fully rigged three-masted 20-gun frigate, under the command of the Hon. Captain Erskine, RN, the Senior Officer of the New Zealand and Australia station, based at Sydney; and the smaller HMS Fly, a 14-gun cutter-rigged sloop under the command of Commander Oliver, RN. HMS Havannah, fast and sleek and second only to a ship of the line, was more than twice the size of the Samuel Enderby, while the smaller warship matched the Samuel Enderby for size.

  It was Commander Oliver of HMS Fly who had made the report, which had reached Enderby before sailing from England, that the only inhabitants of the islands were ‘a few maories who appear to be indifferently off’.13

  Captain Erskine of HMS Havannah had written on 12 November 1849 to his friend Sir George Grey, Governor of New Zealand: ‘If all is quiet [in Taranaki] perhaps you would not object to a visit to the Auckland Islands, whither I am anxious to go. I see Mr Enderby’s appt. is mentioned as Lieut Governor! One should not prejudge, but I can’t help thinking the scheme a wild one.’14 Three and a half weeks later, on hearing Enderby had passed Hobart Town, Erskine had added: ‘How Mr Enderby is to succeed, who must bring all his stores &c. from distant places I don’t understand, but I hope to know more about that subject before long.’15