by Joan Druett
Standing out to the open sea was marked by two omens. First, the Grafton was almost immediately hit by an unexpected squall from the icy south. This swiftly moderated, but it was a timely warning of what lay ahead. Then, at midnight on November 14, when the wind had completely died and the black water shone like silk, the sky was filled with a shower of meteors that continued till dawn. As Raynal wrote, it was a splendid sight—but the barometer was falling, and it was a grim augury too.
At dawn next day it was still a dead calm. A light air might last a few minutes, the sails would fill, and the ship might sail about half a mile before the sails flapped, sagged, and then hung limp. At the start of the afternoon watch thunderheads gathered, turning the western horizon into a boiling mass of purple-black billows, which progressed slowly and ominously over the sky. At night, torn clouds raced across the face of the moon.
The hurricane grew gradually, taking the next two days to build up to full force. At dusk on November 18 the sky became pitch-black except for a band of phosphorescence on the horizon that delineated a ragged, heavy sea. “The clouds, which are very low, sweep over us with dizzy swiftness,” wrote Raynal, using the present tense to convey the dramatic impact of the scene. “Every moment they are furrowed by vivid lightnings. The rain—icy rain—lashes and smites us. At intervals the thunder mingles its formidable voice in a thousand ominous sounds.”
At eleven o’clock that night Raynal took over the tiller from the Norwegian seaman, Alick Maclaren, who had been steering. Dazzled by the constant lightning flashes, he could scarcely distinguish the compass in the binnacle, but somehow he managed to hold her onto her course. The ship was pitching and plunging as everything aloft strained and shuddered—and then, just as a deafening crack of thunder crashed out, Raynal was thrown headlong by a sudden squall.
He landed sprawling on the deck, losing his grip of the tiller. The rudder slapped free, and the schooner fell off her course, coming side-on to the force of the waves. A huge breaker reared up as high as the foremast and then crashed viciously down, smashing part of the bulwarks and tipping the hull far over. Crashing noises echoed from below as the ten tons of loose sandstone ballast slid in one mass. Suddenly the Grafton fell onto her side, while all men on board held their breaths in terrified suspense. They waited, waited, for her to drop back onto an even keel, but instead she stayed on her starboard side, thumping as she hit the foaming waves. Her deck was slanted too steeply for men to walk on, and the heavy planking of the hull creaked deafeningly, while the strained masts and rigging whined in protest.
Raynal, bruised and drenched, staggered to his feet, struggled along the sloped deck to the stern, and grabbed the tiller again, while Alick clung to a mast. Musgrave clawed his way up the companionway ladder, while the two sailors who were off duty came tumbling and sliding out of the forecastle. With great difficulty Musgrave, Alick, Harry, and George took in sail, while Raynal fought with the tiller, doggedly driving the schooner hard up to windward. Then Musgrave took over, while the Frenchman, with the others, clambered down to the hold, to find everything heaped on the starboard side, which was currently the bottom of the schooner. If the iron ballast had not been held in place by the solid floor, the Grafton would have foundered.
The noise was deafening. Waves crashed just inches from their ears as ten tons of sandstone tumbled and slid with horrid thuds. Raynal and the three sailors struggled to secure recalcitrant blocks, barrels, and bags of wet salt. By the time the schooner had been brought upright on her keel, day was breaking. When they clambered back on deck, they were weak with exhaustion, and Musgrave’s blue and white hands were frozen by the cold to the tiller.
THE TEMPEST RAGED ON. They couldn’t set their sails again until November 21, when they also lit the fire in the galley stove. The sky was thick with cloud, and whales spouted all around them—an ominous sign of another storm to come—but at least it was calm. When Musgrave took an observation at noon, it was to find that the gale had blown them off their course by more than one hundred fifty miles. They didn’t glimpse land until November 30, and then it was through a gathering fog, which soon became so dense that it was impossible to see from one end of the little schooner to the other. Throughout that night they lay to under short sail, waiting for dawn. When the sun finally rose the fog had cleared, but Campbell Island was nowhere to be seen.
Coming about, the schooner resumed her course, approaching their target from the west. As the sun rose high in the pale blue sky, tall rock pillars lifted like sentinels from the sea, twisted and eroded by wind and waves into strange, angry shapes, their crowns surrounded by screaming flocks of frigate birds, and white surf at their feet. Beyond, awe-inspiring cliffs reared as much as one thousand feet, their reddish walls shining black where water streamed, the sea pounding savagely at their base. Narrow terraces were crowded with colonies of mollymawk albatrosses, which soared in masses at times, filling the sky with their outstretched wings. The vegetation in the steeply descending gullies was sparse, thin, and pale brown in color; the few shrubs that had managed to survive the year-round freezing temperatures were hunched, blown flat by the constant bitter winds.
If the westerly wind gusted up, they were on a dangerous lee shore—the Grafton could be blown onto the rocks and reduced to a whirl of wreckage. Musgrave worked the ship around a massive cape and then coasted along the southern side of the island, where a series of six tall peaks rose from precipitous, contorted cliffs, and more rock pillars reared out of the sea. At last, at dawn on December 2, they turned northeast and sailed past great limestone bluffs that were striped with bands of lichen and loud with the cries of birds. Wrote François Raynal: “11 A.M. Dropped anchor in five fathoms water, at the head of the bay.”
They were in Perseverance Harbour, and an unexpectedly pleasant scene lay before them. Dun-colored slopes clothed with tussock and studded with outcrops of white-streaked stone undulated upward to blend with the brown and purple foothills. In the distance, a single pyramid-shaped peak was lighted up by the bright sun that glistened on its closest flank. The weather was warm—so warm that Raynal wondered if the seals that were supposed to be there had been driven away from the beach to find shade. “The sails had scarcely been furled before Musgrave and I went ashore,” he wrote—but they didn’t find any seals in the scrub, either.
The two men started prospecting for the fabled argentiferous tin at dawn the next day. It didn’t take many moments to realize that it was not going to be nearly as easy as Sarpy had promised—after they got into the bush, “more than once we were compelled to lie flat on the ground and crawl under the lianas,” wrote Raynal. However, they managed to get to the pyramidal peak, which they named the Dome. Scrambling to the top, they found a grand view to the west, where there was a big inlet, marked on the chart as Monument Harbour. Descending the western side of the hill, they trekked as far as the top of the cliff that overlooked this harbor, and then stood for a while contemplating a roughly tumbled ocean that stretched almost uninterrupted all the way around the world.
There were no seals to be seen on the beach below, just a couple of sea lions. Throughout the long scramble, there had not been a single trace of tin ore to be glimpsed. All they had gained was a voracious appetite. Musgrave and Raynal lit a fire, boiled a billy, and had breakfast.
THE NEXT DAY when Raynal woke he was feverish, and by nightfall he was delirious. The illness that had driven him to give up prospecting had returned, laying him so low for the next three weeks that Musgrave, fully expecting him to die, dug a hole for his grave. Raynal put his relapse down to the change of climate and the unusual exertion, but the dashing of his ebullient hopes must have played a part. While he was confined to his berth, Musgrave, with Alick, took over the quest for the tin mine, but with not the slightest hint of success. “Did it escape his investigations, or does it not exist?” Raynal ruminated later. “I cannot say,” he confessed—but must have quietly admitted to himself that the second option was the more likely one.
Their worst expectations were realized. All they could do now was think of some way to retrieve the expedition. Killing seals for their pelts and oil was the best alternative, but still there was no sign of fur seals, and sea lions were very scarce. This was something that could be directly attributed to the voracity of the early sealers. Within weeks of the moment the discovery of the island was announced in Sydney in 1810, hundreds of greedy, desperate men had arrived, to kill and skin every single seal they found, right down to the last little pup. The populations of the various seal species had never been dense on Campbell, but throughout the southern sealing rush of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the rapacious gangs had never hesitated to wipe out even the smallest herds of their quarry. Here, the result had been that within three years the fur seal was close to extinction. Fifty years after the sealers had given up and gone, the Grafton seal hunt was as doomed as the search for argentiferous tin.
Recognizing the futility of spending any more time and energy at Campbell Island, Captain Musgrave made up his mind to return to Sydney as soon as Raynal was fit to travel. The anchor was weighed on December 29 and the schooner made sail and scudded down the long inlet toward the open sea and home. Fatefully, however, Musgrave—who commenced his journal the following day—had decided to call at the Auckland Islands to assess the seal population there.
THE AUCKLAND ISLANDS group is made up of two hilly, windswept landmasses and a multitude of islets. The larger of the two main islands, named Auckland, lies to the north of the smaller one, Adams, and is separated from its southern neighbor by a body of water called Carnley Harbour, which is actually a strait. The western coast of the group presents a forbidding rampart of tall precipices, while the eastern shores are broken up into headlands, outcrops, and reefs that extend hundreds of feet into the ocean. The islets lie mostly about the northern shores of Auckland Island, where there is another fine harbor, though one large rock, named Disappointment Island, lies off the cliffs of the western coast.
Because of their remote location, the Auckland Islands escaped the notice of explorers like James Cook, and weren’t sighted until August 18, 1806. Their discoverer, Captain Abraham Bristow of the South Seas whaleship Ocean, was in the employ of the London oil merchant firm of Enderby and Sons. Because he was on the way back to England, and his ship was full of oil, he did not drop anchor, pausing only to name the group after Lord Auckland, a family friend. Returning the following year, this time in command of the whaleship Sarah, he anchored in the harbor in the northern part of Auckland Island, calling it Sarah’s Bosom. After taking formal possession in the name of the crown he released pigs for future hunting parties, and then departed to spread the news of this rich new seal fishery.
In Sydney, the tidings led to a lot of excitement. Local merchants hired an American sealing skipper, Rhode Islander Samuel Rodman Chace, put him in command of the 185-ton King George—the largest vessel ever built in the colony—and gave him the job of freighting men, tools, and provisions to the islands, called Bristow’s Islands by the sealers. Others streamed in his wake, leading to a vicious competition for furs that took place at set times of the year.
There were two recognized sealing seasons. The first began in April and extended over the early southern winter, when newly weaned calves were taken. Their soft, chocolate brown furs, once dried, were intended for the lucrative Chinese market, where they were purchased for trimming ceremonial robes. The second killing took place over the southern summer, starting in December, when older seals, both male and female, were assembling on the rookeries to calve and mate over the next four months.
In the weeks before each of these seasons, gangs of men would be set on shore with casks, cauldrons, clubs, and knives, and left to stockpile skins and oil (taken from the layer of fat beneath the skin, and used both for lamp oil and to lubricate machinery), ready for the sealing captains to collect as the killing time came to a close. With no thought for the future, all seals within reach were killed and skinned, and their pelts salted, packed in barrels, and shipped to London. There they were processed for the clothing trade, which turned the best furs into sleek, full-length coats much in demand by both ladies and gentlemen and made waistcoats and hats from the rest. It was like the lumber industry today, where beautiful timbers like mahogany, rosewood, and ebony are used to make fine cabinetwork, while trees of lesser quality are processed into mass-produced furniture or even pulped for paper.
However, like the tearing down of primeval rain forest to make way for roads, the sealing trade was ultimately doomed, because it squandered natural resources without any thought for the future. No one seemed to take into account the fact that if all the cows and bulls were killed off in the southern summer, there would be no pups the following autumn. Initially, the catch was enormous, with just one ship reporting a take of thirty-eight thousand pelts in the first four-month season alone—at the cost of many more than thirty-eight thousand seals, because a lot of the skins were damaged during the attack, or spoiled by mold and vermin. Within just a dozen years, unsurprisingly, the seal population had been reduced to the extent that it was not worth dropping a gang at the Aucklands anymore.
Then, in 1823, to everyone’s surprise, Captain Robert Johnson, commander of the New York schooner Henry, reported taking about thirteen thousand fine furs at Enderby Island, in the north of the Auckland Islands group. As the sealers realized that the seal population had recovered, another rush commenced, but this one was even more short-lived than the first. The following year, sealing captains reported taking only two thousand pelts; and in November 1825 the Sydney sealer Sally lost two boats and six men in the struggle to get just two hundred skins. In January 1830, during the breeding season four years after that miserable excursion, Captain Benjamin Morrell of the Connecticut discovery schooner Antarctic dropped anchor in Carnley Harbour—to find no fur seals at all.
For some time after that, though the whaleships hunting the New Zealand ground occasionally called there to forage for firewood, fresh water, and edible vegetables, the island group was of interest only to discoverers. On March 7, 1840, the gun-brig Porpoise, one of the six ships of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, called at Sarah’s Bosom on the way to New Zealand, and left three days later, after her officers and crew had roamed about the landscape and planted a signboard announcing the date of their arrival and the identity of their ship. Captain Ringgold of the Porpoise later reported to Charles Wilkes, the commander of the expedition, that his men had found a little hut that had been built by a French whaling crew, a grave with a wooden cross, and a small garden of turnips, carrots, and potatoes—to which they had added a few onion plants—but no other sign of human life at all.
Just one day after the Porpoise left, Wilkes’s rival, the French explorer Dumont D’Urville, arrived to find a Portuguese whaleship riding at anchor in Sarah’s Bosom while her boats hunted the sea around the islands for whales. D’Urville and his men read the Americans’ signboard with interest, and then explored in the pouring rain. They also fished, but the catch proved to be inedible, as it was full of worms. They painted a signboard of their own, and set it up next to the Porpoise one, and then, after pausing to record that the grave belonged to a French whaling captain, M. Lefrançois, who had committed suicide in a fit of depression—ostensibly triggered by his failure to invent a gunharpoon, but perhaps because of the unrelenting weather—they, too, set sail for New Zealand.
Eight months later, on November 20, 1840, the eminent English explorer James Clark Ross arrived with two naval vessels, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, which were later to be lost in Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition. Extraordinarily handsome and lionized by London society, Ross was also distinguished by an abundance of energy. After reading both signboards, he organized the setting up of an observatory. Over the next three weeks, measurements were taken and charts drawn. With blithe disregard of possible effects on the natural environment, the party released pigs, rabbits, and hens,
and planted gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, turnips, cabbages, and currants. In a final flourish, Sarah’s Bosom was renamed Port Ross (though Ross’s personal preference was Rendezvous Harbour). Then they took the observatory down and sailed away for Campbell Island and the Antarctic.
This last visit was to have ramifications. After getting back to Hobart, Tasmania, Ross suggested to the authorities that the Auckland Islands would make a capital penal colony, now that New South Wales and Tasmania had outrun their usefulness in that respect. Instead, Charles Enderby, scion of the firm of Enderby and Sons that had owned the ship whose captain had first sighted the group, decided to colonize the islands as a whaling settlement.
In the southern summer of 1849–50, Enderby arrived with one hundred fifty men, women, and children to set up a village called Hardwicke, in Erebus Cove, Port Ross, and try to eke a living from soil that had been touted as rich and fertile, but turned out to be acid, salt, and unthrifty, in a climate that was eternally dismal. Within three years, daunted by the isolation, the weather, and the lack of whales, it was decided to abandon the experiment. The pioneers departed, some going back to England, while others headed for the Australian gold rush.
Once more the Auckland Islands were uninhabited by man, known only as a graveyard for ships sailing the Great Circle route from Australia to Cape Horn. Then the Grafton arrived.
