Under Full Sail

by Rob Mundle

  A heavy sea was rolling over us every moment, large spars threatening to crush us, and almost perpendicular rocks, as black as death, staring us in the face. Well, I was determined not to have our heads dashed against the rocks, as had been the fate of so many of my fellow passengers. As we neared the rocks, the boy was washed off the spar, but I still had hold of him. I put out my hand to save our heads and received a cut in the hand, but I felt the land and told the boy we were saved. But not so, for we were washed back out again. I made to land a second time and was washed back again. I tried a third time and was treated in the same way. I was making towards the rock a fourth time, determined to save the lad or die with him, when a spar struck him on the right side of his head – the side I had no control over – and entered his skull; it knocked me under at the same time, but I rose again, and a rope was thrown to me, which I twisted around my arm 20 times at least, and with the assistance of a sailor clambered up the rock. I just got there in time to see the whole ship go down.

  Tayleur took a countless number of passengers and crew with her when she finally surrendered to the elements and slid stern-first into deep water. Her hull then disappeared beneath the surface of the rough and raging sea, until only the tops of her masts were visible. Bringing added ghastliness to what was already a horrific scene were the hundreds of bodies either floating near the wreck or washed up onto the rocky shoreline, and the continuing plaintive cries that could be heard coming from desperate, drowning people who were still in the water, all beyond help.

  In proper maritime tradition, Captain Noble was among the last to leave the ship – or so he thought. After word of the wreck reached nearby Dublin the following day, the steamer Prince was promptly sent to search for survivors. When she reached the wreck site, those on board were astounded to see a passenger, William Vivers, still clinging desperately to the top of one of the masts. He was the only survivor found on board that day.

  The captain’s desperate battle to reach the rocks was also filled with heartbreak. Young Tew later recalled: ‘He swam ashore, and two passengers who had assisted him out of the water were both washed back into the sea again and drowned.’ Tew also told of another remarkable scene: one Frenchman who was just about to grab hold of a rope attached to the shore ‘saw a child sprawling upon the deck. He snatched it up, took hold of its back with his teeth, and carried it safely to shore. The child is unowned.’

  After the survivors had either clambered, or been assisted, up an almost sheer 80-foot cliff to the top of Lambay Island, a myriad of miraculous and heart-rending stories began to unfold. Tew would later relate:

  One man had lost six sisters, four brothers, and a mother. A German had lost a whole family. Another man told me he had lost his brother, his brother’s wife, her three sisters, and four children; others had lost their wives and children.

  There were also stories of frustration and an uncaring crew: it was claimed that some had been utterly paralysed by fear and had done nothing to help save the lives of passengers.

  Because there were no accurate passenger manifests for Tayleur’s voyage, no precise death toll exists. Even so, the nearest estimates are quite horrific. Almost 400 passengers perished, and of the hundred or so women on board only three survived. It was the same terrible count among the seventy children travelling with their parents: only three were saved. One of the few families who did survive were ex-convict Samuel Carby, his wife Sarah and their son Robert. Within days of the tragedy they returned to their home town of Stamford, 75 miles north of London, with only the clothes they were wearing when the ship went down (which, sadly, did not include the underwear into which Sarah had sewn 200 gold sovereigns). The local community rallied to support them and help them re-establish their lives. Incredibly, though, after a short time in Stamford, husband and wife decided they still wanted to travel to Australia – but their teenage son refused to go; understandably, he’d had enough of seafaring. He opted to stay in Stamford with relatives while his parents went to Australia to improve their lot. Many years later, Samuel and Sarah returned to England and their home town; it is not known whether they ever recouped their lost fortune.

  Samuel and his wife obviously were not the only survivors of the wreck of Tayleur who found the lure of gold still too powerful. Many clearly made a successful second attempt to reach Australia, because it is known that there are several descendants across the country today of survivors of the Tayleur tragedy.

  Remarkably, just over half a century after the loss of Tayleur, there came an extraordinary coincidence in maritime history when the world-famous steamship Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Both Tayleur and Titanic were the largest British-built vessels of their type when launched, and both were on their maiden voyages when lost. Moreover, both were sailing under the flag of the White Star Line.

  *

  Of the hundreds of shipwrecks that occurred on the Australian run during the clipper era, there was one in which many lives could have been lost but weren’t. Instead, it became an incident whose circumstances verged on the ridiculous.

  Queen of Nations was an 827-ton wooden clipper launched in Aberdeen in 1861. For the next twenty years she sailed the round-the-world passenger and cargo route between London, Sydney and Auckland under the flag of the Aberdeen Line. Tragedy struck in 1879 while the ship was battling a furious storm in the North Atlantic, when her popular and long-serving master, Captain Archibald Donald, was washed overboard and disappeared into a foaming mass of white ocean.

  When Queen of Nations returned to England, her owners confirmed that Samuel Bache would be her new captain. He was a well-qualified seafarer of French descent who was seen by many as aloof and arrogant. But he was also hiding a major character flaw.

  On 23 February 1881, when Bache guided Queen of Nations out of the Thames bound for Sydney, as well as carrying passengers she had in her holds a cargo comprising thousands of bottles of fine wines and spirits – products for which Captain Bache held a great liking.

  The temptation for a tipple proved too great for both Bache and his first mate even before the ship had cleared the English Channel: they raided the cargo and consequently (according to later reports) remained ‘hopelessly drunk’ for the entire passage.

  In the pre-dawn hours of 31 May 1881, after ninety-seven days at sea, Bache was so intoxicated that he became convinced a slag-heap fire at a coal mine in the hills behind Wollongong was Macquarie Lighthouse at the entrance to Port Jackson, 40 nautical miles to the north. He ordered that Queen of Nations be turned to port and hold a course towards the light and enter Sydney Harbour. It wasn’t until she was surrounded by a breaking surf that the captain realised he had got it wrong: his ship was sailing straight up Corrimal Beach, just north of Wollongong.

  With the ship run aground, passengers and crew, desperate to escape the drunken captain and his equally intoxicated offsider, could not abandon ship quickly enough: they gathered what they could of their possessions and made plans to reach the shore.

  Before long, the first mate, realising what was happening, stumbled up the companionway stairs and staggered onto the deck brandishing two pistols. As he wheeled his way around the deck he shouted that anyone who made an attempt to leave the ship would be shot for desertion.

  But not even that menacing threat was enough to dissuade those determined to escape. Men, women and children leaped like proverbial lemmings into the sea and waded to the beach as fast as their legs could carry them. The first mate started firing shots at random, but he was so drunk that they all missed their mark.

  Salvage operations commenced almost immediately, but within two weeks a savage Tasman Sea storm swept in, bringing waves so powerful that Queen of Nations began to break up. The result was that thousands of bottles of alcohol were washed up onto the beach.

  The local ‘bush telegraph’ swung into action, carrying the message that there was booze for the taking on Corrimal Beach. Hundreds of people are said to have rushed there
to plunder the ‘treasure’, setting the scene for a beach party. The local newspaper reported, ‘Public drunkenness was common for weeks after the grounding of the clipper ship Queen of Nations.’ The crowd on the beach became so large and rowdy that the local police could not control the scene, and had to call in reinforcements from Sydney.

  But fierce storms and navigational errors – real or ridiculous – were just some of the challenges faced by ships plying the perilous route to the Antipodes.

  CHAPTER 6

  Fire, Ice and Fever

  More peril on the seas

  Sea ice and icebergs were a constant threat for ships plying the southern seas in the winter months – a danger that increased considerably when captains decided to sail the shorter and faster composite great circle route, which took them deeper into the higher latitudes.

  Just a few weeks after Lightning and Red Jacket completed their great race to and from Melbourne, the 233-foot, 2000-ton clipper Guiding Star – owned by the Golden Line of Liverpool and built at the Wright shipyard in St John, New Brunswick – disappeared when sailing between the Cape of Good Hope and Melbourne.

  The American ship Mercury reported that she had sighted Guiding Star on 12 February 1855 and all had appeared well. Then the captain of the ship George Marshall stated on arrival in Melbourne that, when sailing along the same course as Guiding Star, his crew had sighted large icebergs and only avoided them by the narrowest of margins. It was calculated that Guiding Star – which was carrying 481 passengers, mostly emigrants, plus sixty-two crew – was only thirty-six hours astern of George Marshall at the time of these sightings. It is more than likely that either she was trapped by ice or she ploughed into a berg, some of which were known to be more than 20 miles long and over 200 feet high – probably at night.

  Of the all-too-numerous ice incidents endured by clipper ships during their reign, probably the most amazing involved the 1000-ton Canadian-built clipper Indian Queen, launched in 1853 and likened to Marco Polo in design. On Sunday, 13 March 1859, she sailed from Melbourne for Liverpool with Captain Edmond Brewer in charge and forty passengers on board – thirty men, three women and seven children. The ship was described in the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘one of the favourites of the Black Ball Line’, while Captain Brewer was said to be ‘a gentleman whose ability and conduct have gained him the reputation of being a kind and trustworthy commander’.

  On 27 March, while making good speed halfway between Melbourne and Cape Horn at 58 degrees south – the region recognised as the most isolated location on the planet – conditions suddenly changed. A gale swept in from the northwest, accompanied by a dense fog and fast-rising swells. Sails were reefed at a rapid rate but still the ship maintained a good speed over the next four days.

  Then, at 2am on 1 April, during a heavy rain squall, Indian Queen thundered into a giant iceberg. The violence of the impact hurled sleeping passengers from their bunks, while the shocked crew members on deck could only watch in horror as masts, yards, sails and rigging either came crashing to the deck or went over the side. This included the foremast, which had sheered off at deck level, and the bowsprit, which exploded into pieces and was soon in the water, wrapped around the bow.

  The first passengers to rush aft to the poop deck were stunned to discover that Indian Queen was lying beam-on against the face of a towering berg. Every person on board, including the crew, was certain that the ship was doomed. Causing added alarm was the fact that there was no one at the helm, neither was there a single on-watch crew member to be seen.

  While off-watch crew members and frightened passengers still below deck groped their way through the darkness and scrambled up the companionway ladders, the cool-headed carpenter, Thomas Howard, responded as might be expected of him. He rushed through the ship’s interior to the bow to check for hull damage, which, considering the force of the impact, he expected to be extensive. But, much to his amazement, the ship was still sound. He then made his way back to the deck and announced to those assembled there that Indian Queen was not taking on water.

  However, the second mate, Philip Leyvret, caused some level of alarm when he declared that the captain, the first mate and most of the on-watch crew had taken the port-side lifeboat and abandoned the ship, apparently convinced that she would sink in a matter of minutes. Such had been Captain Brewer’s haste to get to the lifeboat that he had even left behind his own son, who was an apprentice on the ship.

  On hearing this, the incredulous crowd on deck looked out to the port side and, peering through the darkness, could make out the faint outline of the missing lifeboat a short distance away. On hearing shouts coming from the ship, Captain Brewer and those with him aboard the lifeboat became convinced Indian Queen would remain afloat, so they immediately made efforts to return. Leyvret told of what followed:

  When coming alongside, a back sea [a large backwash coming off the iceberg] filled and swamped the boat. Immediately, the life buoys and a number of spars and ropes were thrown to the struggling crew, but to no effect, they were all drowned.

  Leyvret, now the senior officer on board, quickly took control of the situation. He ordered the few remaining seamen, with the assistance of capable passengers, to cut away what they could of the mast, spars and rigging draped across Indian Queen’s deck. As daylight broke, Leyvret implemented a plan to free the ship from the ice by back-winding at least one of the sails. This proved to be an excellent manoeuvre: the ship slowly drifted along the face of the iceberg, before clearing a corner and freeing herself from it.

  But fate would rule that Indian Queen was still not out of danger. While some men, including passengers, worked to remove the remaining wreckage and others set about establishing a jury rig so the ship could get back under sail, a shrill and panicked cry was heard: ‘Ice to leeward!’ Another huge iceberg was looming out of the fog, and Indian Queen was heading straight for it.

  Leyvret immediately called for the few inefficient sails to be trimmed, in the hope that this would see the ship clear the imminent danger. Tension filled the air as Indian Queen, with debris still being dragged behind her, continued to drift towards the menacing berg.

  Only 100 metres separated her from the towering mountain of ice when she was finally deemed safe. Moments later, the remnants of a jury-rigged mast crashed to the deck unannounced, and ironically destroyed the one remaining lifeboat.

  After a repair effort that lasted many hours, Leyvret decided that the best possible rig had been created from the barely adequate remnants of masts, spars and sails. He then assembled the passengers and remaining crew and advised them that their only option, if they were to have any chance of surviving, was to turn the seriously damaged ship to the north-east and sail almost 4000 nautical miles to Valparaiso in Chile.

  After averaging a mere 4 knots over forty days, and enduring a raft of savage gales and rough seas, the battered Indian Queen – with her bowsprit and much of her rig missing – limped into Valparaiso, to the relief of everyone on board.

  Yet Indian Queen was far from being alone when it came to life-threatening clipper encounters with icebergs: even the famous Marco Polo went close to being claimed by an icy mass mid-ocean. On 4 March 1861, on a passage from Melbourne, when sailing in the same region where Indian Queen had come to grief, Marco Polo struck an iceberg and was so badly damaged that the captain considered making the call to abandon ship. Her bowsprit was smashed to splinters, her foremast fractured and her bow stove in so badly that the leaks could not be stopped.

  After working for many hours, the crew had the situation stabilised, so the captain’s decision was to head for Valparaiso. It took Marco Polo more than a month to get there, and during that time, the pumps were operated constantly so that she would stay afloat. Following repairs that took four months to complete, Marco Polo sailed for Liverpool. She reached there 183 days after departing Melbourne.

  *

  While icebergs were a constant threat to the clippers during the souther
n-hemisphere winter months, fire was another great danger. There is no doubt that a number of ships literally disappeared en route because an uncontrollable fire erupted on board. Generally there were two causes: spontaneous combustion in the holds – especially when wool, hay or similar flammable cargoes were being carried – or a naked flame that took hold in an area such as the galley, a passenger’s cabin or the bosun’s locker forward. The danger of fire was so great that ships’ captains would not tolerate any act that might imperil their vessel.

  This was illustrated on 12 January 1855, when the great clipper ship Lightning could well have been lost to a fire at sea. The incident was reported in the ship’s on-board newspaper:

  About 8pm an alarm of fire was given and great excitement prevailed throughout the ship. This danger was caused by a drunken woman in the second cabin, who set fire to her bonnet; it was soon extinguished and the woman put in irons and confined in the ‘black hole’ for the night as a warning.

  A fire in a cargo hold was the most dangerous and difficult to contain. On most occasions, it would already have smouldered for a considerable time before finally bursting into flames and sending charcoal-coloured smoke belching through hatches to signal its presence.

  Unfortunately the fire-fighting techniques used aboard the wooden-hulled ships were basic, so the chances of extinguishing a large blaze were remote. The likelihood of there being another ship in the region that could come to the rescue was equally slim.

  One of the more miraculous escapes from what had seemed certain death for 227 souls – 180 passengers and forty-seven crew – travelling between Liverpool and Melbourne occurred in August 1857, when the Black Ball Line clipper Eastern City, under the command of Captain Johnstone, caught fire in an isolated locale – 2500 nautical miles west-north-west of Cape Town, and nearly 1000 nautical miles from the east coast of South America.