by Jim Haynes
News of the wreck and the rescue voyages awakened interest in the area. Hunter himself, as captain of the Sirius, which had circumnavigated the world just above the Antarctic Circle in 1789 to bring supplies from Cape Town to the starving colony, had detected strong currents, and speculation grew about a passage between the mainland and Van Diemen’s Land.
George Bass had arrived as ship’s surgeon on the Reliance in 1795, along with Flinders and John Hunter, who was returning to the colony as Governor. In December 1797 Bass took a whaleboat and a crew of six volunteers to explore the south coast. Past Wilson’s Promontory he kept sailing, until he reached forty degrees south, where howling gale and mountainous waves forced him to turn back. He then followed the coast westward for over 100 kilometres.
Bass made two remarkable discoveries on that voyage. One was his realisation that the waves and wind he had encountered coming from the west indicated that there was no land to the west and Van Diemen’s Land was indeed an island. His second find was more mundane but just as surprising: a group of seven escaped convicts living on a small island, just off the coast near Western Port. They were part of a group who had stolen a boat and attempted to make their way ‘to China’; the others had abandoned their companions on the island.
In 1803 and 1804, settlements were established in Van Diemen’s Land. Soon whalers and sealers were regularly visiting Western Port and Port Phillip Bay. By the 1830s, substantial settlements had been established in Port Fairy and Portland, to the west, in defiance of the Governor’s edict prohibiting settlements that might lead to expansion beyond both his and British control. Nevertheless, a small convict settlement established at Western Port in 1826 to give Britain some presence on the south coast lasted just thirteen months before being abandoned.
Then along came John Batman. Inspired by another free settler, Edward Henty, who had crossed Bass Strait a year earlier to settle without legal permission at Portland Bay, Batman too crossed Bass Strait in June 1835 and secured land on the western shore of Port Phillip Bay, ‘by treaty’ from the local Aboriginal tribe.
Batman had explored the shores of Port Phillip Bay and chose a site for what he called ‘a village’. Within a year the township of Melbourne began to grow on the banks of the Yarra River.
Attempts to stop other settlements had proven futile. In 1836 a magistrate, Captain William Lonsdale, was sent from Sydney to maintain law and order, and in 1837 the township of Melbourne was surveyed and named.
In 1839 Charles La Trobe was appointed Superintendent of the Port Phillip District and the colony established its own police force, customs office and Lands Office. The colonial government in Sydney negotiated with the Land and Emigration Commission for Melbourne to receive much-needed migrants, free settlers with trades, farming skills and families.
When Joseph Robinson was elected to represent Melbourne in the Legislative Council of the Colony of New South Wales in 1844, one of his most pressing concerns was the building of lighthouses in Bass Strait.
The need for lighthouses was obvious. Among many other shipping disasters in Bass Strait’s brief maritime history, the tragedy of the Neva was foremost in the minds of any captains who used the passageway to Sydney, and more lately to the new settlement of Melbourne.
The Neva was a barque of 327 tons. She sailed from Cork for Sydney, commanded by Captain Benjamin Peck, in January 1835, with 150 female convicts, nine wives of convicts, 55 children and 26 crew. The voyage was uneventful; there were three deaths and one birth and slow, easy sailing—until the weather worsened approaching Bass Strait.
When the sextant reading was taken at noon on 12 May, the ship was running before a strong wind and huge seas, at a position Peck calculated as 90 miles west of King Island. He set course to pass well to the north of the reefs at the island’s northern tip. Land was seen on the horizon ahead, so Peck changed course to head even further north, but all too late. Three hours later breakers were seen ahead and the Neva struck a submerged rock and lost her rudder.
The ship was carried onto the main part of the Harbinger Reefs, rudderless and broadside, with such force that the hull buckled and the prison section below was sprung open.
With the giant surf breaking over her decks, the Neva filled with water and stuck fast on the reef. Cutting away the masts made no difference. As the ship broke up on the reef, some of the women broke open the rum store and quickly became drunk. Such was the panic that the ship’s boats and longboat were overcrowded and sank as they were launched.
When the ship finally fell apart and sank, two sections of the deck floated to the surface and were used as rafts by those left alive. The Chief Officer and eighteen others were carried right onto the beach on one raft, while the other, with Captain Peck aboard, had part of the mast still attached, and became grounded almost a mile from shore. Only Peck and two others made it to safety.
During the first night ashore, four women and a boy died of exposure. The next day two more died from the effects of drinking rum from a full cask that washed ashore. The fifteen who survived stayed alive using food washed ashore until found by sealers and finally rescued in June.
An inquiry exonerated Peck of any blame and stressed the dangers of navigating Bass Strait.
The loss of a ship carrying convict women was tragic, but it took a tragedy of even greater proportions—involving the loss of settlers coming of their own free will, and over 180 children—to finally prompt the building of lighthouses in Bass Strait.
On 12 March 1845 the secretary of the Colonial Land and Emigration Board, Mr Walcott, wrote to the relevant naval officer, Lieutenant Henry in Liverpool, as follows:
Sir,
The Messrs. W. Smith & Sons having apprized the Board that they propose to take up for the conveyance of emigrants on bounty to Port Phillip, the barque ‘Cataraque’, 712 tons, O.M., and that she will be placed in the graving-dock next week, I am to instruct you to make a strict and thorough examination of the vessel while in dock, and to request that you will report the result to the Commissioners, and whether you consider her in every respect eligible for the intended service. You will also report the number she can legally carry.
The number was set at 260 adults, and on 20 April 1845 the Cataraqui sailed from Liverpool for Melbourne with 369 assisted emigrants. The number of adults was well within the legal limit set, as over 180 of her assisted migrants were children under sixteen. There were 62 families, 33 unmarried women and 23 single men.
The Cataraqui had a crew of about 46, under the command of Captain Christopher Finlay. She was a good strong ship, just five years old, built in Quebec and named after a Canadian River.
The Cataraqui had a relatively safe passage until she reached the Southern Ocean. Only five infants had died en route of natural causes, one crewman was lost overboard and several babies had been born—all fairly normal for that number of people on a voyage of 100 days in 1845.
The Cataraqui approached Bass Strait in a raging ‘Roaring Forties’ storm, which pushed her relentlessly towards her destination for ten days. It was probably what we would class today as a ‘one-in-ten-year’ event. Modern equipment has measured waves exceeding 20 metres in storms like the one in which the Cataraqui was caught. Another captain who sailed through the same storm called the weather that week ‘fearful’.
In the early nineteenth century, navigation had been much improved by the use of chronometers to calculate longitude. In the very early years of the century, a chronometer was often almost as expensive as the ship itself, but by 1825 all British naval ships had them, and migrant ships were also inspected to ensure they were well equipped with navigational aids.
Accurate navigation for latitude still relied on sun and stars. The angle of the sun and stars measured by sextant gave latitude when used in conjunction with accurate charts. But even with a good chronometer, a ‘fix’ was needed on the sun at noon to calculate longitude. In poor weather, with cloud cover obscuring sun and stars, navigation was a matter of ‘dead-rec
koning’.
Dead-reckoning was more or less guesswork based on distance travelled, which was calculated by the compass and by measuring the ship’s speed by timing how long she took to pass a floating object.
To make his way into Port Phillip Bay, Captain Finlay had to take the Cataraqui into Bass Strait between Cape Otway and King Island. His problem was that he had not seen the sun or stars for over a week. He knew that using dead-reckoning in the conditions he was sailing in was madness—guesswork at best—but he had nothing else to go by, apart from an ‘indifferent observation’ on 31 July, by which he made a calculation, noted in the ship’s log, which he obviously didn’t trust as accurate.
There is a gap of about 90 kilometres between King Island and Cape Otway at the entrance to Bass Strait. There were no lighthouses in Bass Strait in 1845, and fearful of the ‘shipwreck coast’, Finlay did not want to risk being too close to Cape Otway, so he took the Cataraqui southward.
Still unsure of his position, and unwilling to risk the lives of his crew and the assisted migrants on their way to a new life in Melbourne, he stood off for eight hours, holding his ship against the wind through the night, hoping that dawn might bring him some sight of land. He expected to sight Cape Otway sometime on 5 August, hopefully after the storm abated and visibility returned.
The situation, however, was dire. The ship was in a cauldron of wind and massive waves, and Finlay feared she would go down. But at 3 a.m. on 4 August, the storm abated slightly and Finlay decided he had to sail east.
As he had suspected, his calculated position was completely wrong. The Cataraqui crashed without warning onto jagged rocks, 150 metres offshore near Fitzmaurice Bay, on the desolate southwest coast of King Island.
Finlay attempted to drive the vessel over the rocks, thinking it was a hidden reef. The ship stuck fast on the rocks, and was slowly smashed to pieces by the massive waves. The crew managed to get all the emigrants on deck, but about half were swept overboard, and were drowned or battered to death on the rocks. The masts were cut away in the hope that the wreck would clear the reef and be driven ashore, but the Cataraqui was full of water and remained fast on the rocks.
The crew struggled to launch the longboat in the teeth of the howling wind and raging sea. As they were about to do so, an enormous wave hit the ship, sweeping away the boat and the crewmen and all in front of it.
Daylight found about half the ship’s passengers and crew still alive. Several hours later, with the storm still raging, the ship’s last remaining boat was launched in an attempt to get a line ashore, but it immediately capsized, drowning the six men who were in it. Captain Finlay was still alive and he ordered some of the crew to descend into the hold and find ropes. Then an attempt was made to float a line to the shore, attached to an empty barrel, but it was caught up in the kelp about 20 metres short of the shore.
By this time the Cataraqui was breaking up and splitting slowly into two halves across the deck. Those left alive were trapped at either end of the vessel. The remaining crew strung ropes as best they could so that the survivors had something to cling to or tie themselves to the wreck with, but huge seas continually swept the decks and washed scores of passengers overboard; those who did not drown immediately were dashed to their death on the rocks by the massive surf.
Sometime in the afternoon the ship’s hull parted across the middle of the deck, and half of those still clinging to life were swept away. During the second night, quite close to dawn, the stern section of the vessel collapsed into the sea and completely disintegrated, leaving alive only those on the front section of the wreck.
By dawn on 5 August, just 30 survivors remained. Captain Finlay then attempted to swim ashore and secure a line, but the waves and fierce current forced him to turn back as the line was again fouled by kelp.
The ship was slowly disintegrating and, when the front section broke in two and the bowsprit was washed away, Captain Finlay made his final decision. The only hope of staying alive was to try to swim or float to shore on the wreckage. He ordered the lines securing survivors to the wreck to be cut: it was ‘everyone for themselves’.
Some attempted to make it; others remained on what was left of the front section of the Cataraqui and awaited their fate.
The ship’s chief officer, Thomas Guthrie, crawled to the front of the ship and tried to swim to the bowsprit section, which had broken away and was nearer to shore. He reached it, and then made the shore, clinging to some planking. He found two men already there: a crewman named John Robertson and Solomon Brown, an emigrant; both had been washed ashore clinging to wreckage during the night.
Some crewmen who were still alive on the wreck saw that Guthrie had made it and leapt into the sea to follow. Six made it ashore, exhausted and bruised from the rocks. Then, as they watched, the remaining section of the wreck collapsed and the Cataraqui disappeared forever beneath the waves.
The nine castaways, who assumed they were on the mainland somewhere west of Cape Otway, were lucky to be found two days later by one of the island’s only four inhabitants, seal-hunter David Howie, an ex-convict who had secured a lease of ten acres on the island. He and another sealer named Oakley and two Aboriginal women, known as Maria and Georgia, were living at Yellow Rock sealing station some forty kilometres away from the wreck site.
Howie had leases on several other islands, but was himself marooned on King Island at that time. Having lost his own small boat in a storm, Howie was waiting for the arrival of the 10-ton cutter Midge, which regularly visited the island.
Attracted to the scene of the tragedy by the large amount of wreckage drifting past their camp at Yellow Rock sealing station, Howie set out and found the survivors in such a poor state that they could not walk to the hut. Howie, Oakley, Maria and Georgia made several round trips with food and Howie left a note on the hut door explaining the situation.
It was five weeks before the Midge arrived at Yellow Rock on 7 September and her master John Fletcher read Howie’s note. He set off immediately to find the wreck and the survivors. In his account of the tragedy, published in the Melbourne Courier after the group arrived at Port Melbourne on 13 September, Fletcher described the scene of the tragedy quite vividly.
He stated that the entire west coast of King Island was the ‘wildest and most dangerous that can be imagined’, and described the area where the Cataraqui struck as one where ‘you find reefs extending nine miles seaward, and at this distance off one or two of the points, a wall of enormous rollers breaking towards the shore’.
Fletcher was able to approach the wreck site only with extreme caution, and it took him three days to get the survivors safely aboard. At one point he managed to get onto the forty-foot high rocks that formed a part of the reef, over which some of the wreck had been lifted and thrown.
‘Perhaps in the annals of shipwreck,’ Fletcher stated, ‘a more calamitous event is not to be found.’ He described the coast for five miles as being strewn with wreckage and bodies.
The Midge recovered what bodies it could from the reefs and the beaches. Many of the dead had been buried by the survivors and the four inhabitants of the island while awaiting the arrival of the Midge. David Howie was contracted to return to the island and find, identify and bury what bodies could be found. Eventually 342 victims of the tragedy were buried in four mass graves.
With a death toll exceeding 400, the wreck of the Cataraqui is still Australia’s worst civil maritime disaster.
Ironically, while the nine survivors of the wreck were being rescued by the Midge, the New South Wales Legislative Council was listening to the member for Melbourne, Joseph Robinson, on 9 September, attempting to put forward a motion to have lighthouses built in Bass Strait.
By 1850, lighthouses had been built in Bass Strait at Cape Otway, Deal Island, Goose Island, Swan Island and Cape Wickham on King Island. The King Island light was replaced in 1861, and another was built further south on King Island in 1879.
Today the Cape Wickham lighthouse, wh
ich warns ships that they are approaching the southernmost point of Bass Strait and the treacherous coast of King Island, stands sentinel as the tallest lighthouse in the southern hemisphere—and a solemn reminder of our perilous past.
‘Break, Break, Break’
Alfred Tennyson
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, Oh Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
Oh, well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
Oh, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But Oh for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, Oh Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
There’s a 90 per cent chance people coming here will die, will drown, 10 per cent they will make it . . . it’s good, it’s peaceful, it’s a good country, rich country. But don’t come on boat like me . . . It’s no different dying in Afghanistan or dying on a boat.
Abbas Nikzada, abattoir worker, Kilcoy, Queensland,
formerly a passenger on the Palapa
Full up: The voyage of the Palapa
DAVID MARR AND MARIAN WILKINSON
WHEN THE RED DOT first appeared on the horizon, no-one stirred. They had been disappointed too often in the days since their engine failed to be roused by the sight of a ship in the distance. One boat had already sailed by, ignoring them. Australian planes had circled overhead, but left them to wallow in the sea. The shape they saw on the horizon was so small some of those on the KM Palapa thought it might be another boat like theirs, crammed full of people making for Christmas Island. But when that small red dot turned into a cargo ship, people climbed onto the roof to wave and shout.