by Joan Druett
This meant dealing with Royal Tom, but in the meantime he had become accustomed to the men, to the extent that there was a kind of unwritten truce between them. If they left him and his harem alone, pursuing other sea lion groups instead, he did not attack, merely staring at the intruders disdainfully while his wives and calves made themselves scarce by retreating to the water or the bush. Alick, Harry, and George had become relaxed and familiar with him too—overly so, in Captain Musgrave’s estimation, because he had heard, though indirectly, that the men had been teasing the old fellow.
Having noticed that he did not like to go into the water when his coat was dry, they had plagued him into galumphing haughtily down to the edge of the surf. There he remained, however, scratching himself in a leisurely fashion. They kept on trying to torment him into flopping into the water, but he won the psychological battle, rather to Musgrave’s satisfaction. He did not want the seal life on Figure-of-Eight Island to be disturbed, except when absolutely necessary, “but as I was not there myself I suppose the boys wanted to have a little fun to themselves, which would have cost them a reprimand had I heard of it in a direct manner.”
The “boys” probably deserved all the fun they could find, considering that the prospects were so grim, but Musgrave was gloomy again himself. Not only was the thought of winter a depressing one, but the six-month mark of their departure from Sydney was looming, along with the anniversary of his birth.
“Tuesday, May 10, 1864,” he penned at the start of his next journal entry. “For some days back I have not been very well. Today I have had a very severe headache, but as it has now left me, and as I did not write on Sunday as usual, I shall do a little of it this evening; and, moreover, as this is the anniversary (32nd) of my birth, I have made it a point for some years to pledge my mother on this day in a bottle of good old port.” This year, he had to content himself with toasting her in a tumbler of sacchary beer. “It is not very good, but still it is preferable to cold water.”
Outside, as he noted next, it was blowing a heavy northwest gale with rain, which helped him to be properly thankful for his blessings. Inside the warm and comfortable cabin he and his men had built, he was sitting by a roaring fire, digesting a meal of fresh roast seal . . . utterly unaware that twenty miles to the northwest of cozy Epigwaitt, the great Scottish square-rigger Invercauld was ripping out her keel on an Auckland Island reef, and spilling her crew into the depths of the freezing black night.
THE 888-TON INVERCAULD had left Melbourne for South America on May 3, 1864, on the second leg of her maiden voyage, with a crew of twenty-five but no passengers. As she was in ballast, being on the way to Callao to take on a freight of fertilizer, she was very light and slow to respond to the helm. She had iron masts and wire rigging instead of wood and rope—common enough at the time, but a circumstance that was to prove dire.
When she sailed from Melbourne the weather was fine, but the first night out the wind began to gust, with heavy showers of sleet and snow. However, regular routine was followed, one of the earliest jobs being to “cathead” the anchor—secure it on the bows—and stow away the cable. The sailor who recorded this was twenty-three-year-old Robert Holding, who, like François Raynal, had spent years on the Australian goldfields, where he had prospected in the winters and run a steam threshing machine in the summers. Holding was a natural wanderer, but currently his ambition was to get back to his homeland, England.
Most of the crew had come on the ship from Aberdeen, Scotland, and were strangers to him. He knew the names of the captain, George Dalgarno, the first mate, Andrew Smith, and the second mate, an American seaman, James Mahoney, who had been promoted to the post the day after leaving Australia, but very little else about them. On May 10, according to his account, he began to learn a great deal more.
The ship was running southeast before the northwest gale, in thick, rainy, snowy weather. At four in the afternoon, estimating by dead reckoning they were close to the Auckland Islands, Captain Dalgarno ordered a double lookout to be kept, so extra men were sent to stare with slitted eyes into the sleet and fog, straining for the first glimpse of danger. At 7:40 P.M., when the lookout forward shouted out a warning of land ahead, Dalgarno instructed the first mate, Andrew Smith, to bring the ship about on the starboard tack, assuming that the sighting was of the southwestern end of Adams Island. Disastrously, however, he was twenty miles out in his estimate, and the land the lookout had sighted was the northwestern promontory of Auckland Island, northwest Cape. Without realizing it, Dalgarno had navigated the ship onto one of the most dangerous coasts in the world, one that thirty years later a visitor likened to “the Jaws of Hell.”
The ship wore her stern round in the stormy darkness, as men hauled at braces and the helmsman heaved down the wheel to bring her to a southern heading. Dalgarno and Smith fully expected that this would take her clear of Adams Island, but, moments later, the lookouts bawled, “Land O!”—as the first mate wrote, “to our wonder and astonishment, land was again reported right ahead.” Tall cliffs bulged out of the sea. As Smith stared in horror and confusion, he heard the captain shout urgent orders to brace up and bring the ship about on an eastern heading.
Round they brought the ship’s stern again, while the storm gusted and the torrential rain poured, fretted with sleet and snow. Then they were steering north of east. At the same time they crowded on all the sail they could, “thinking to get a passage between the small island that we sighted first and the larger one. There appeared, however,” Smith continued, “so many rocks, reefs and breakers ahead, that we saw it would be very dangerous, but still carried on sail, in hopes of getting through this passage, as we knew there was no other chance of getting clear, owing to the direction from which the wind was blowing. It was then very dark, with heavy rain, a hurricane blowing, and a tremendous sea running and anyone who knows about beating a light ship off a lee shore can easily understand what our thoughts were when we expected every minute to strike.”
By this time, too, the seamen were exhausted. They had all been pulling and hauling at iron-hard ropes for at least two hours. There was another warning shriek from the lookouts as breakers were glimpsed, and Captain Dalgarno shouted an order to luff—come up into the wind. Instead, the ship fell off, and lost her headway. Her doom was sealed. Gripped by the twin forces of the northwest storm and her leeway, the Invercauld sagged sideways onto one of the steepest, most forbidding coasts in the subantarctic.
Holding turned from his work to stare with growing terror. They were just three hundred yards to the shore, a distance that was decreasing with every surge of the waves. Suddenly reefs, seething with phosphorescence, popped out of the sea, while black, streaming cliffs abruptly materialized from the rain and snow. Then they were in the surf. Panic and confusion reigned. The captain shouted out for the sounding line to be cast, yet the Invercauld was so close to the cliffs that the royals—the uppermost masts—were snapping off as they touched overhanging stone. When Robert Holding looked around in desperation, it was to see that the mate had broken down in tears, while the second mate was meaninglessly screaming, “Luff, luff, luff!” at the man at the helm. Then he heard the captain bawl out orders to drop the anchor—an anchor that, days earlier, had been secured to the outside of the bows.
Surf boomed, while the storm shrieked in crescendo. The boats were still lashed to struts above the deck, and Dalgarno yelled at Holding to cut them free. However, what the captain later called “the fatal moment” had arrived. With a series of dull crashes the Invercauld struck, and there were no more orders to be heard.
The jibboom was whirled away. The ship lifted on the crest of a wave, and slammed down. With a sickening crunch the keel caved in, and the ballast plunged through the bottom. What was left of the ship bounced and lurched sideways, and, as Dalgarno put it, “a frightful shock sent both [sic] our masts by the board.” Disastrously, the three iron masts and wire rigging followed the ballast to the depths, carrying with them every inch of the can
vas and rope that could otherwise have been used for shelter on the beach.
The remainder of the Invercauld was breaking up fast. When Holding, clinging to the poop with five others, looked over the stern, the wild water between the rocks and the beach was strewn with floating wreckage and struggling men. Another heavy sea struck the ship. He looked back, and to his horror there were only two of his companions left. Then a third great wave overwhelmed what was left of the poop, and abruptly Holding was alone.
The following sea washed him completely off the wreck, carrying him with it as it surged up onto the beach. He staggered out of the water, calling out in desperation, terrified that he was the only one who had survived. Other voices answered from the icy blackness, and the small group huddled together through the rest of the dreadful night.
WITH THE FIRST GLIMMER of light they gathered up the longest planks they could find, and set them tepee-fashion about a hollow in the rocks. Other voices called out from the murk, and more survivors joined them. They all crammed themselves into the lean-to, seeking a little warmth. When day dawned, a roll call established that nineteen men had survived—ten seamen, plus the captain, the two officers, the cook, the steward, the boatswain, the carpenter, and the two ship’s boys.
They were soaked through and bruised and chafed. Most, including the captain and first mate, had kicked off their seaboots so that they wouldn’t be dragged down in the seas that swept them off the wreck, and their numb, bare feet were battered and bleeding. While Dalgarno and Smith had kept their heavy overcoats, the others had not. The cook was a peculiar sight, because he had gone to his cabin just before the ship struck, and put on his best suit over the clothes he was wearing. Now, as Holding observed, he was so overburdened with tight, sodden garments he could scarcely move an inch.
Their surroundings could not have been more dismal; all of them wondered if the men who had died were the fortunate ones. The narrow, horseshoe-shaped beach where they were huddled was at the foot of an almost perpendicular precipice that reared more than three hundred feet overhead. Water plunged straight down the sheer granite walls, to be blown into spume before it even reached the tumbled rocks and the sea. Though the men were not doomed to endure the agony of thirst that was so often the fate of shipwrecked sailors, the water that they scooped out of rockpools was brackish and slimy.
The only part of the ship still visible was a part of the stern. Shattered wood was strewn all about the surface of the water and the rocks. Apart from the leathery, snakelike kelp, and the birds that circled screaming far overhead, there seemed to be no other life—no shellfish, no fish, and certainly no seals. Searching the sea wrack for food that might have been washed ashore yielded just two pounds of sodden biscuit, and about the same amount of salt pork.
Luckily, they had matches—two boxes, one belonging to the cook, the other to the steward—and so a fire was speedily lit. According to Holding, however, when the cook tried to dry the rest of his matches, he carelessly burned the lot. The mate, Andrew Smith, then tried to do the same with the other box, and would have lost them, too, if Holding hadn’t grabbed them away and saved them. After that, the seaman refused to give them back. It was beginning to become clear to him that if he was ever to survive this ordeal, it would be by his own resourcefulness.
Instead of demonstrating leadership, Captain Dalgarno seemed too paralyzed to order a search for shelter and food. The party stayed on the beach a total of five days and nights, of which the nights were perhaps the worst. The lean-to measured only five by eight feet, and so nineteen men had to pack themselves on top of each other for them all to fit in, which led to fights and agonizing cramp. In the process—though it was not noticed for a while—they also caught vermin such as body lice and head lice from each other. Eerily, they could hear a dog howling in the far distance, and conjectured that the captain’s Irish setter had escaped.
Daytimes were a protracted ordeal of looking for food. The few small shellfish they found were quickly gobbled down before others could grab them away. Some tried to eat the thick rubbery kelp. Others pulled up some of the Stilbocarpa plants that grew in cracks in the cliff, and when they found that the sugary rhizomes were edible, they gnawed at them gratefully. The Invercauld disappeared completely, leaving the grisly corpse of one of their past shipmates suspended from an inaccessible bit of wreckage. They had already found the bodies of the other five men who had drowned, and stripped them of their clothing. It was a huge relief when this sixth corpse finally fell off the spar, and they did not have to look at it anymore. When the decomposing body washed up on the beach, however, they removed that dead man’s clothes too. Then, after giving out the garments to those who needed them most, they left the stripped corpse for the tides to carry off to scavengers. Like the other five bodies, it soon disappeared.
It became a priority to get to the top of the cliff. A narrow fissure ran up it at an angle, and four men, including one named Tait, made up their minds to climb it, if they could. The others watched them until they were out of sight, and when they didn’t come back concluded that they had succeeded. Three returned next day, saying that they had gotten to the top, and had seen tussock and the tracks of sheep. Tait, they added, had fallen onto the rocks.
“Well,” declared Holding, the experienced prospector, “if there are sheep on this island I will have some damper and mutton tonight.” Forthwith, he set off up the cliff, finding that the Stilbocarpa plants clung strongly enough to cracks in the rock to serve as handholds. As he climbed, he listened for noises of others following, but when he finally squirmed over the top and stood up to survey the terrain, he was alone. The freezing rain poured down on him, soaking his clothes, and he had to slit his eyes to assess his surroundings.
He looked downward first. Below, the water was relatively calm. Though he could easily distinguish the rocks where the Invercauld had struck, it was impossible to see the beach or the camp, because they were tucked under the cliff he had climbed. Then he looked about the top of the tussock-clad plateau where he stood. To the south, tall, inaccessible mountains lost their summits in the clouds; far beyond them, though Holding did not know it, lay the snug shelter of Epigwaitt on the other end of the island. When he turned and looked northward, the land looked more promising, because, though forbiddingly clothed in scrub and thick, tall tussock, the hills were not high. From his vantage point he could see as far as the northeastern coast, and glimpse two large bays set below hills that sloped much more gently than the cliff he had just climbed, and which looked as if they afforded shelter and food.
The wiry turf beneath the new boots he had bought in Melbourne was boggy and getting more so with the rain, and he could see the animal tracks the other men had described clearly enough to decide that they had been made by pigs, not sheep. It was too late to go back, so Holding went over to some rocks, and curled up in a crevice to shiver through a night that seemed endless. At that time of year it was fifteen hours long, while all the time the freezing rain lashed down.
At long last dawn broke. Holding clambered back down the cliff to the wreck site, to find that three of the men were missing, having gone off on an exploring expedition of their own. Tait, the man who had fallen, had rejoined the party in the meantime, but was quite delirious. Holding told the others what he had seen, describing the eastern side of the island and its promising bays, and eventually the rest agreed that it was a good idea to try to get there. Tait was incapable of climbing, so they left him behind, with a volunteer to watch over him until he passed away.
It took a long time for Holding to hassle and help them all up the cliff, but in the end they arrived at the top, to find the three men who had left the party dashing toward them with the glad news that they had caught a little pig by chasing it down and then falling onto it. Though they’d eaten the raw liver already, they were carrying the rest of the carcass. The party hastily made a windbreak, and lit a fire. “We gave it very little cooking for fear of losing too much of it,” wrote Andrew
Smith. Some of the men threw themselves flat on the ground like animals, to lap up the drips of blood.
Drawn by the fire and the smell of cooking, the sailor who had volunteered to stay with Tait rejoined them. He told Andrew Smith that Tait was dead, but confided to Holding that it wasn’t so. After they had left he had gotten frightened, he said, and then, having decided that his best chance of survival was to stick with the group, he had followed them up the cliff.
Holding didn’t blame him, agreeing that keeping together was indeed the best plan. However, the very next morning the cook and three of the sailors took off on their own, saying they wanted to hunt for more pigs. Captain Dalgarno and the two mates, Smith and Mahoney, said nothing to deter them, seemingly sunk in numb apathy. Holding was left with the entire responsibility of directing the trek across the island to the east coast, a slow business because most did not have boots, and many had become very weak.
Still the rain poured down, while the temperature hovered just above freezing. Miserably, in a lengthening line, they straggled across the soggy landscape, while Holding ranged back and forth trying to encourage them. He had to rely on persuasion: being just a common seaman, he did not have the rank to force the party to follow his orders. As darkness loomed, he couldn’t talk the straggle of men into taking another step, even though, as he bitterly remembered later, the beach that offered decent shelter was only about two hundred yards away.
As Holding battled to light a fire in the long, wet grass, the pig-hunters rejoined them, empty-handed and without the cook. He had set himself down in the tussock and refused to go an inch farther, they said. It was too dark to look for him then, so after another long, dreadful night spent huddled in the rain, two men were sent in search. It was only a short time before they returned, though, saying the cook was nowhere to be seen. Holding didn’t send them back, as it was so likely that the poor fellow was dead of exposure. Not only had the cook endured a week of appalling cold and wet with little or no food but his limbs were cramped by his tight layers of clothes.
