Island of the Lost (34 page)

However, Raynal's health was as precarious as ever. In 1888 he was forced to take sick leave, and was never well enough to work again. On August 18, 1889, he was granted early retirement on medical grounds. Less than a decade later, on April 28, 1898, he passed away at the age of sixty-eight, his remarkable life finally over.

AFTERMATH

U
nknown to any of the
Invercauld
survivors, the discovery of the corpse of their erstwhile shipmate, James Mahoney, had led to a great deal of interest in the Auckland Islands, which resulted in the ultimate provision of castaway depots for the survivors of future shipwrecks. Because of the death of the second mate of the
Invercauld
, their awful ordeal was eventually to be the inspiration that saved the lives of many others.

Back on October 14, 1865, while Captain Norman and the surgeon of the
Victoria
were busily disinterring the remains of James Mahoney, the paddle wheels of the steam tug
Southland
churned up mud and water as she turned around and then chugged out of Invercargill. Her captain was James Greig, a flamboyant Scotsman who had arrived in Southland in 1862 after several years on the Australian goldfields, and who currently held the position of harbormaster. A remarkably energetic man, he not only completed his allotted task, but also produced a long and chatty statement that was published in the New Zealand papers—much of it highly irritating, as Captain Musgrave confided to Macpherson in a letter.

In this gossipy account, after reporting that he had seen
nothing but “the ordinary accompaniment of sea fowls and porpoises” on the passage south, Greig announced that he had arrived at Port Ross at four in the morning on October 21—to find a notice carved on a tree informing him that the
Victoria
had beaten them to it, along with a message in a bottle, signed by Captain Norman, giving all the particulars of their search. Well, as he candidly confessed, this surely did have the effect of “considerably dampening the enthusiasm” of everyone on board the
Southland
. However, he and his men searched on, undaunted, and in the process turned up traces of past occupation that the
Flying Scud
and
Victoria
parties had missed.

The first was the “frame of a boat, made of small sticks woven together, and lashed together with strips of seal skins.” Without realizing it, Greig's men had discovered the coracle that Holding, Smith, and Dalgarno had constructed in November 1864, almost exactly twelve months earlier, and abandoned after they had built a wooden boat. The second was the hut Holding had lived in by himself while ostracized by Smith and Dalgarno—“A thatched hut about nine feet square,” which, Greig deduced, had been built by someone “who had no axe, and who subsisted on limpets, to which fact a large pile of shells bore testimony.” A track led from this to a promontory, where they found a tall pole with a bunch of white grass attached to the top, which had fallen down in the meantime.

Having noted all this, Greig then turned to another piece of business—to dig up Mahoney's body yet again. Dr. Monkton, the Invercargill surgeon who was with him, inspected what was left of it and came to some conclusions that were truly remarkable, as Th omas Musgrave tartly remarked. Indeed, as he ironically commented in a letter to Macpherson after reading the
newspaper account, he wondered if they had dug up the same body.

Dr. Monkton declared that the deceased had been no ordinary seaman—that, judging by his clothes, he had never been accustomed to hard labor. The dead man's hair was “medium” brown, not light, the way Musgrave had described it, “cheekbones not high, nor chin pointed.” He was similarly derisory about Musgrave's conclusion that the deceased had been Catholic, saying that a small heart-shaped locket with some kind of token hidden inside was poor evidence of any such thing.

Having dug Mahoney up for the second time, the
Southland
crew then buried him for the third time—in a coffin, which they had carried for that purpose. As well as this, they had prepared a board, which read:
ERECTED BY THE CREW OF THE P.S. ‘SOUTHLAND,' OVER THE REMAINS OF A MAN WHO HAD APPARENTLY HAD DIED OF STARVATION, AND WAS BURIED BY THE CREW OF THE ‘FLYING SCUD,' SEPTEMBER
3, 1865. Having set this up at the head of the grave, they left their own message in a bottle, and then made steam and chugged down the east coast of Auckland Island.

On October 28, having stopped to shoot pigs and sea lions every now and then, they dropped anchor in Carnley Harbour. In the course of the following survey, they slept two nights in Epigwaitt—“a very comfortable sort of place about 12 feet by 18 feet, with a large stone chimney,” Greig decided. “The only objectionable feature,” he went on, “was the slightness of the rafters, which bent so much to a gale we experienced the second night, that some of the nervous ones of the party, before turning in formed a complete network of rope between the wall-plates
to catch the roof if it fell”—which, as he went on to comment, created a strangely mysterious effect in the firelight.

“We found a quantity of smoked shags and pieces of seal inside the house,” he went on; “and a variety of little articles, evincing the expenditure of a considerable amount of patience and ingenuity in their construction.” The bush had been cleared all about the house, and there was “an old forge, charcoal pits, tannery, &c.,” too—an important confirmation of the achievements Musgrave and Raynal described.

Greig himself was not particularly admiring—“Musgrave's party appear to have had no garden whatever, and to have cut very few tracks in the bush,” he criticized. He had heard that Musgrave considered the forest about Carnley Harbour “
impenetrable
.” Well, he reckoned, if Musgrave ever lived in New Zealand, he would learn what “
impenetrable
” forest was really like.

Finally, on November 7, after some exciting days of hunting sea lions—and being chased by more than a few infuriated sea lion bulls—the crew of the
Southland
raised the anchor and set course for New Zealand, Greig having come to the firm conclusion that there was no one left alive in the islands. “Having now seen all that is to be seen of this group, it is obvious that no one at present exists thereon, or, with the exception of Musgrave's party, have existed on any of these islands for some time past,” he wrote. Obviously, it was a big surprise to him when he arrived back in New Zealand and learned about the
Invercauld
castaways.

I
N
J
ANUARY
1868, public interest in the Auckland Islands was electrified again when the papers broke the story of the American-built 1,200-ton
General Grant
, which on May 13,
1866, crashed into the cliffs of the western side of Auckland Island and became a total loss.

“Wreck of the ship ‘General Grant'—sixty-eight dead—ten survivors confined for eighteen months upon a desert island,” ran the heading in the
Sydney Morning Herald
. “On the morning of the 10
^th
of January, a telegram announced the arrival at Bluff of the whaling ship
Amherst
, Captain Gilroy, having on board ten persons (one of them a woman), the sole survivors of the crew and passengers of the ship
General Grant
, which sailed from Melbourne for London in May 1866, with a valuable cargo of wool, skins, and gold.”

According to the riveting report that followed, the ship sailed into “a deep crevasse of volcanic origin, against whose sides the hull was shattered before foundering,” and only fourteen men and one woman (the stewardess) survived, the captain going down with his ship. They rowed in the two unscathed ship's boats to Port Ross, where they lived in the ruined house at Hardwicke—the same house where the corpse of James Mahoney had been discovered a few months earlier—after closing in the sides to render it more weatherproof.

The goats and pigs Captain Norman had liberated were still running around, and they managed to kill one or two of these. However, their main food supply was sea lion. In the pupping season of January 1867, having collected a good store of meat, the first officer, Bart Brown, set off for New Zealand with three other men in one of the ship's boats, which had been decked over and loaded with skins of fresh water as well as the provisions. Unlike Musgrave's
Rescue
, this boat was never seen or heard from again.

The remaining ten men and one woman struggled on. On
September 3, 1867, one of the men, sixty-two-year-old David McLellan, died. On October 6, a sail was sighted, but though fires were lit and the day was clear, there was no response. Like Robert Holding earlier, the castaways decided that they should move to an island that was closer to the open sea, and the whole party was ferried to Enderby Island in the remaining boat, only to see another ship pass without seeing their signals. Just two days after that, however, on November 21, 1867, the colonial whaling brig
Amherst
called by, and Captain Paddy Gilroy carried them to New Zealand, to relate their dreadful tale.

The resulting public uproar led to a government decision to establish castaway depots on both Campbell Island and Auckland Island, and the
Amherst
was sent out with building materials, livestock, and provisions. Paddy Gilroy was again in command and a justice of the peace, Henry Armstrong, was on board to keep an official record. The first depot they established was at Port Ross, where they strengthened the house at Hardwicke and left a strongbox with supplies. On the lid of this Armstrong wrote,
THE CURSE OF THE WIDOW AND FATHERLESS LIGHT UPON THE MAN WHO BREAKS OPEN THIS BOX WHILST HE HAS A SHIP AT HIS BACK
.

Then they steered for Perseverance Harbour on the same mission, with a large spar in tow, Captain Gilroy being determined to hoist a flagstaff? on treeless Campbell Island so that those in need could fly a signal of distress. They arrived at the mouth of Perseverance Harbour on February 14, 1868, but for some days the wind blew so hard from the interior that it was impossible to enter, and so it was not until the twenty-fourth that they were able to drop anchor. There were no traces at all of the animals the
Victoria
had landed, so they released some
more. Then they erected the spar a hundred yards from the notice board that had been set up by the
Victoria
, and put a strongbox and a spade at its foot.

At the same time, they stumbled across the grim sight of six graves and, alongside them, the skeleton of a man, evidently the remains of the crew of some ship that had been wrecked since the
Victoria
had left. Further impelled by this ghoulish discovery, they fixed up a hut that had been built by these unknown castaways. It was about ten feet long and eight feet wide, with overlapping deal boards and a pitched roof, with thatch that they repaired. Then, after placing a chest of provisions inside, Gilroy and Armstrong sailed away, their mission in the dangerous subantarctic seas accomplished.

T
HESE DEPOTS, OCCASIONALLY
checked and restocked by navy ships and government craft, were to save the lives of many shipwrecked sailors. Eight of these were survivors of the
Derry Castle
, which foundered off the north coast of Enderby Island in 1887. The men knew there was a castaway hut at Port Ross, which gave them the courage to live in rough shelters made out of tussock while they constructed a boat from the timbers of the wreck. Having crossed the channel, they lived on the stores and what sea lions they could catch until rescued by the
Awarua
, which was sealing illegally, as by that time the trade had been banned by the New Zealand government.

In March 1891, the ship
Compadre
caught fire to the north of the islands, and after finding the situation was hopeless, her captain deliberately steered for the rocks of a cape off Port Ross. All fifteen crew climbed onto the jibboom, and when she hit they jumped for it, landing battered and bruised, but alive, on
the shore. One man died during the first night, but the rest survived on the stores they found, until saved by the schooner
Janet Ramsey
on June 30, in what the newspapers called a remarkable state of good health, considering the privations they had endured.