Under Full Sail

by Rob Mundle

  The captain saw their predicament as being too dangerous for the ship’s three boats to be launched before first light. Inside the cave, the night was as black as bitumen, and the backwash coming from the waves rolling in would almost certainly have capsized a small boat. Everyone could only hope that General Grant – which was then aground at the bow and floating in 25 fathoms of water at the stern – would remain intact until morning. However, with rocks, rigging, masts, sails and yards still thundering to the deck, Captain Loughlin ordered that everyone congregate at the stern.

  It was an agonisingly long wait for the day to dawn, so the moment there was sufficient light two boats were launched and navigated safely out of the cave. James Teer, who had been ordered into one of those boats, later explained what followed:

  The longboat, then lying on the quarter-deck, was filled with passengers, and the ship was sinking rapidly (the heel of the main-mast having evidently been driven through the ship’s bottom by contact with the rocks above), till the boat with its cargo [of passengers] was floated off her deck, [but once] the longboat was quite clear of the ship, the sea breaking over her filled her with water, and she was swamped when about 100 yards from the ship. We then went as near the boat as it was safe to go, and saved three of the passengers, being all who were able to swim through the surf to us.

  One of those pitched into the sea from the longboat was Mary Ann Jewell, wife of crew member Joseph Jewell. On seeing the boat capsize then go upside down, Joseph jumped from the ship into the wild water, swam to his wife and succeeded in getting her aboard one of the two boats that were nearby but were not able to execute a rescue of the victims of the capsize because of the dangerous surf.

  By this time General Grant’s entire hull was submerged and sinking deeper, taking those who had remained on board with her. The captain was last seen clinging to the mizzen topmast crosstrees, waving his kerchief to the few who had managed to escape the ship.

  These few, who were aboard the two remaining boats, numbered fifteen – nine crew and six passengers, among them James Teer, and Joseph and Mary Ann Jewell. It was obvious to them that there was nowhere to land along the adjacent coast, so they decided to row 6 miles offshore to Disappointment Island. They arrived there late the next day, after what Teer would describe as a testing twenty-four hours:

  We had more trouble than we anticipated to get there; our boat having such a quantity of beef and pork and bouilli [stewed meat] tins in her and seven men. It was only with incessant bailing we could keep out the water which from time to time she lifted. Once or twice she was all but full . . . [we headed] towards the north end of the island . . . and seeing a large rock about one and a half miles distant . . . we pulled for it, and reached it just at dark.

  They remained there for a few days, then, when the weather was favourable, the two boats were rowed 15 nautical miles around the northern end of the largest island to Port Ross, where they established a camp.

  There was considerable anxiety for all soon after they arrived when they realised they had only one match remaining. Teer later noted:

  From this one match we obtained fire, which, by constant care, we never allowed to go out . . . Boiled one or two birds obtained on Disappointment Island, and one tin of bouilli. Gathered some limpets, which were cooked with the birds in the empty bouilli tins. This was our first meal after three days and two nights of suffering, and never did sumptuous repast taste better to a king than this frugal meal to us.

  They were fortunate to find a derelict whalers’ hut that provided some shelter, and providence again smiled on them when it came to finding food: they were able to catch and slaughter pigs and goats, which had been left on the island for that exact purpose, as a food source for shipwrecked sailors. Seal meat, wild birds and shellfish brought the occasional change to their diet.

  Their only clothing was what they had been wearing when General Grant sank, so they set about making clothing from the skins of seals – shirts, trousers, vests, caps, moccasins, even underclothing. Still, they would suffer greatly during the winter months, when the island was lashed by snow, rain, sleet and frigid westerly gales, conditions so brutal that one man died.

  A lookout roster was established so that during daylight hours someone was always watching in case a ship – more than likely a whaler – might happen by. They also kept a large fire burning around the clock in the hope that the smoke might be sighted by day, or its flames by night.

  After nine frustrating months of looking, hoping, praying that a ship might come their way – and just trying to survive – four of the men elected to try to reach New Zealand and raise the alarm. They prepared one of the boats by decking it with seals’ skins, then loaded it with food and water. The four men ‘carried about 30 gallons of water in seals’ gullets, and some seals’ meat, and the flesh of three goats, and about two dozen eggs – all cooked’, wrote Teer. However, they had no compass or navigation instruments, and could only hope that New Zealand would be, as they thought, to the east-north-east.

  But it was actually slightly west of north. Sadly, the four men were never seen again.

  After eighteen arduous months in extreme circumstances, there came a brief hope of rescue: ‘The man on the look-out sighted a sail to the eastward of the Island, which afterwards proved to be the Fanny,’ Teer’s story read, ‘but as she passed on without seeming to notice the smoke we made as a signal to her we began to give up all hopes.’

  Within forty-eight hours, though, the survivors had real cause for joy:

  On the 21st November sighted the brig Amherst, Captain P. Gilroy, of Invercargill, running along the land from the southward. The boat was launched, and we pulled and got on board. We were very kindly received by both officers and crew. On the following morning, after nearly nineteen months of the severest hardships, all of us were taken aboard.

  Some six weeks later, Amherst sailed into port in Invercargill, at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, carrying nine men and one woman, all of whom had come back from the dead.

  *

  One of the most remarkable stories of a wreck and survival on the Australian route came in late 1853. It involved the English-built 900-ton, three-masted, barque-rigged clipper Meridian, which measured upwards of 150 feet in overall length. She had been launched the previous year in Sunderland, on England’s east coast near the Scottish border. Her captain, Richard Hernaman, described his ship as ‘the most beautiful barque that ever left the port of London’. He had already commanded her on one return passage to Australia, her maiden voyage, taking government-funded emigrants to Brisbane’s Moreton Bay. Hernaman was considered to be a capable and experienced navigator, and he had four return passages to Sydney to his credit. In a career spanning fifteen years, he had never lost a man.

  Meridian’s second voyage to Sydney, which was expected to take around 120 days, departed Gravesend, on the Thames downstream from London, on 4 June 1853. The event occurred amid the usual wave of heavy sadness melded with excited anticipation of a new life in another part of the world. Eighty-four passengers were aboard: twenty-six men, seventeen women and forty-one children under the age of sixteen, including a seven-week-old baby girl named Fanny. Fifty-eight of those on board were crammed into steerage-class accommodation. The ship’s crew numbered twenty-three, which was considered the absolute minimum for such an undertaking.

  Among the few first-class passengers was Londoner Alfred James Peter Lutwyche, a forty-three year old judge and writer, who would go on to become prominent in political circles in New South Wales, and later the yet-to-be-proclaimed colony of Queensland. Having retired from the bench in London because of ill health, he accepted the casual role of Sydney-based colonial reporter for London newspaper the Morning Chronicle.

  He was never expecting, however, that his first major report would be a detailed and dramatic fifty-two page account of how, against incredible odds, he and others survived the wreck of Meridian on a desolate and remote island in the southern
seas. His story was built on his conviction that no one except those aboard the ship could have any real appreciation of the emotions faced by those ‘who have been snatched, by what may almost be termed a series of miracles, from the jaws of a triple death – drowning, cold and starvation’.

  It was a fast and uneventful sail south in the Atlantic, where there was ‘merrymaking’, music and dancing on the deck most evenings – a passage that Lutwyche described as among the finest he had ever made. Meridian then rounded the Cape of Good Hope and headed on a great circle route deep into the southern seas towards Australia. The only disconcerting aspect of the voyage at that point was that the ship’s doctor – who, according to one passenger, Mrs M.W. Moore, ‘was a drunkard and often caused uproar’ – behaved so appallingly that the captain threatened to put him in irons.

  When they were nearly 3000 nautical miles beyond the cape, the captain suspected there was an error with his chronometer – the only one on board. Because an accurate time was essential for the calculation of longitude in such a remote part of the world, he decided to alter course slightly to the north with the intention of sighting St Paul’s Island. This would give him a precise position on his chart from which he could plot a safe course towards Bass Strait.

  However, what Lutwyche described as a ‘strong gale’ descended on the ship. Because of the new wind direction, Meridian could not sail the desired course towards the island, so the captain changed his plans. He directed the helmsman to bear up a few degrees and hold a course so that the ship would be on a heading towards the extremely remote, uninhabited, 22-square-mile Amsterdam Island, a speck in the Southern Indian Ocean that was potentially an active volcano. It was 50 nautical miles to the north of St Paul’s Island, 1800 nautical miles north of Antarctica, and the same distance south-west of Western Australia’s Cape Leeuwin. The captain expected to see the outline of the island and its collar of white water around midnight, and once that was achieved he could confirm the ship’s position on the navigation chart and check the accuracy of the chronometer. He would then call for a change of course towards Australia, or more specifically Bass Strait, which was 3000 nautical miles away.

  Lutwyche, who noted that no lookout had been positioned atop the forecastle at the bow, explained what followed:

  I was looking for something or other in my cabin, which was on the port side, when suddenly a smart shock made the ship quiver from stem to stern, and nearly threw me down on the floor. At first I was under the impression that we had run foul of another vessel, but after the lapse of a few seconds, five or six more violent shocks made Meridian stagger from side to side like a drunken man, and obliged me to cling fast to my cabin . . . The piercing screams of the children testified the extremity of their alarm, though they knew not, poor things, the nature of the calamity which had befallen them, but the peculiar grating sound of the bottom by which the shocks were accompanied left little room for doubt, in my mind, that the vessel was striking against rocks . . . for a time all was confusion, terror, and despair.

  Instead of sighting Amsterdam Island, Captain Hernaman had guided his ship straight into the south-western corner of it in a gale at 7.15 on the night of Wednesday, 24 August. Lutwyche continued:

  As the captain gained the quarter-deck the terrible truth flashed upon him, and with another exclamation of ‘my God! it is the island,’ he seized the wheel, and tried to put the helm a-starboard. The vessel again struck violently, and he then shouted, ‘now, every man for himself,’ stripped off his coat, waistcoat, and trowsers, and bade one of the hands, named Snow, assist him in casting off one of the hen-coops. While they were thus engaged, a heavy sea burst over the poop and swept him and Snow overboard, but Snow caught a rope as he fell, and climbed up again into the mizzen rigging on the port side . . . The captain was never seen again . . . the vessel . . . was now fast upon the rocks, and the sport of the breakers.

  Two others died within minutes of the loss of the captain when they, too, were washed overboard by the might of a massive wave cascading along the deck. They were the ship’s ageing cook, Thomas George, and a Swiss steerage-class passenger.

  Rev. James Voller, who was travelling to Sydney to take up the position of minister at the Baptist Chapel in Bathurst Street, would write of a ‘furious battering’, in which wave after wave was ‘striking the ship with violence and rapidity until a great wave of water swirled between decks and down hatches into the hold’.

  In less than five minutes, the hull planking on the port side proved no match for the force of the sea and the pounding on the rocks. It was stove in, and the hull, which by now was leaning heavily to port towards the shore, rapidly filled with water. Most of the terrified passengers remained below ’tween decks in pitch darkness, all the time clambering awkwardly towards the high side so they remained above the rising water level. Parents were frantically grabbing their children and dragging them hurriedly towards any area in the cabin deemed safe. Lutwyche wrote that one youngster asked innocently ‘whether the voyage was over’, while another was heard to say, ‘Aunt Sarah would have a good fire. It’s very wet.’

  Amid this mayhem and confusion Rev. Voller struggled through the darkness to rescue the captain’s wife from her cabin, then suddenly realised he was on the verge of losing one of his own children. ‘The cabin was half filled with water, and the furniture tossed around and broken’, he wrote later. ‘I felt under the bed to find my little girl, dreading almost to feel what I expected to find – her lifeless and mangled body. By what seemed a special mercy, however, she was entirely unhurt.’

  In prose typical of the day, Lutwyche put the situation into perspective:

  . . . the portals of Death alone were open to receive the voyagers. Every instant the dreadful summons was expected, but in the meanwhile, clinging to every projection that offered itself; the second cabin families remained in the ’tween decks comforting one another with the assurance that they would soon be in a better place, and that when death did come, they would at least die together.

  For two hours the passengers remained at death’s door, huddled together in the accommodation area while the dying ship writhed and heaved on the rocks in unison with the surge of each mighty wave. There was no reason at that time to go on deck: it was impossible to reach the shore in such treacherous conditions, and there was every chance they would be washed over the side amid the white water of a wave breaking over the ship. Even so, their circumstances below deck were becoming increasingly perilous: cargo that had broken loose in the ship’s hold was now ‘floating about in the ’tween decks, threatening destruction to all with whom it came in contact’.

  The break-up of the ship was now imminent, and heavy timber hull frames and deck beams were giving off a terrifying sound as they fractured and splintered. Two crewmen went below and directed the majority of passengers up the companionway, onto the deck and aft, where the only protection to be had was in the cuddy cabin, normally the domain of first class passengers. One young woman was doing everything possible to shelter her newborn baby – born aboard Meridian after departing England – while young children, drenched through, cried with fear and cold. However, efforts by the passengers to glean information regarding the predicament being faced were met with stony silence.

  ‘No eye could pierce the surrounding darkness, and nothing was heard without but the roar of the tempest and the groaning of the ill-fated vessel’, Lutwyche would recall. ‘Under these circumstances, being appealed for my advice, I recommended that no attempt should be made to leave the ship, but that we should remain by the wreck as long as she would hold together, and endeavour when she broke up, to reach the shore, as each might best, on the floating pieces of timber. Our position, however, appeared so desperate, that I believe very few cherished the hope of escape, and for my own part, I exhorted all around me to think no more of this life, but to implore God’s mercy and forgiveness, while there was yet time vouchsafed for repentance.’ Rev. Voller then began praying aloud, and Lutwyche no
ted there was immediately a ‘calmness and composure which showed that they were prepared to meet death’.

  Salvation was tormentingly close – huge boulders were sitting fortress-like at the base of a high, sheer cliff just 50 feet away – but the raging, white, storm-driven surf that was boiling so violently between the disintegrating ship and the shore put them beyond reach. The churning seas spelled death instead of deliverance.

  Lutwyche would pen a reference to what he saw as one of the ‘disgraceful exceptions’ to the courage and acceptance shown by most of the passengers:

  Indignation finds no place in the bosoms of men on the verge of eternity. But while human beings have human feelings, it will be impossible to recall, without exciting emotions of measureless contempt, the figure of a man in the prime of life, six feet high, and stout in proportion, with an air-bed fastened round his middle, shouting out that he ‘must be saved’, and forcing his way first to this part of the ship and then to that through the throng of helpless women and children in order to find some means of escape for himself.

  Thomas Henderson, travelling with his wife Margaret and their eight children, gave his version of the unfolding drama:

  Under the advice of one of the mates, Leonard Worthington, whose bearing and cool judgement were beyond all praise, we remained between decks about two hours and a half, supporting as many of my infants in my arms as I could grasp, and holding them up to windward out of the way of the wreck[age] that was washing about between decks, the water at times reaching my shoulders, the ship reclining over at forty-five degrees or thereabouts. Mother and children calm and still; never dreaming that we should live the night through.