Island of the Lost (4 page)

Recognizing the futility of spending any more time and energy at Campbell Island, Captain Musgrave made up his mind to return to Sydney as soon as Raynal was fit to travel. The anchor was weighed on December 29 and the schooner made sail and scudded down the long inlet toward the open sea and home. Fatefully, however, Musgrave—who commenced his journal the following day—had decided to call at the Auckland Islands to assess the seal population there.

T
HE
A
UCKLAND
I
SLANDS
group is made up of two hilly, windswept landmasses and a multitude of islets. The larger of the two main islands, named Auckland, lies to the north of the smaller one, Adams, and is separated from its southern neighbor by a body of water called Carnley Harbour, which is actually a strait. The western coast of the group presents a forbidding rampart of tall precipices, while the eastern shores are broken up into headlands, outcrops, and reefs that extend
hundreds of feet into the ocean. The islets lie mostly about the northern shores of Auckland Island, where there is another fine harbor, though one large rock, named Disappointment Island, lies off the cliffs of the western coast.

Because of their remote location, the Auckland Islands escaped the notice of explorers like James Cook, and weren't sighted until August 18, 1806. Their discoverer, Captain Abraham Bristow of the South Seas whaleship
Ocean
, was in the employ of the London oil merchant firm of Enderby and Sons. Because he was on the way back to England, and his ship was full of oil, he did not drop anchor, pausing only to name the group after Lord Auckland, a family friend. Returning the following year, this time in command of the whaleship
Sarah
, he anchored in the harbor in the northern part of Auckland Island, calling it Sarah's Bosom. After taking formal possession in the name of the crown he released pigs for future hunting parties, and then departed to spread the news of this rich new seal fishery.

In Sydney, the tidings led to a lot of excitement. Local merchants hired an American sealing skipper, Rhode Islander Samuel Rodman Chace, put him in command of the 185-ton
King George
—the largest vessel ever built in the colony—and gave him the job of freighting men, tools, and provisions to the islands, called Bristow's Islands by the sealers. Others streamed in his wake, leading to a vicious competition for furs that took place at set times of the year.

There were two recognized sealing seasons. The first began in April and extended over the early southern winter, when newly weaned calves were taken. Their soft, chocolate brown furs, once dried, were intended for the lucrative Chinese market, where they were purchased for trimming ceremonial robes. The second
killing took place over the southern summer, starting in December, when older seals, both male and female, were assembling on the rookeries to calve and mate over the next four months.

In the weeks before each of these seasons, gangs of men would be set on shore with casks, cauldrons, clubs, and knives, and left to stockpile skins and oil (taken from the layer of fat beneath the skin, and used both for lamp oil and to lubricate machinery), ready for the sealing captains to collect as the killing time came to a close. With no thought for the future, all seals within reach were killed and skinned, and their pelts salted, packed in barrels, and shipped to London. There they were processed for the clothing trade, which turned the best furs into sleek, full-length coats much in demand by both ladies and gentlemen and made waistcoats and hats from the rest. It was like the lumber industry today, where beautiful timbers like mahogany, rosewood, and ebony are used to make fine cabinetwork, while trees of lesser quality are processed into mass-produced furniture or even pulped for paper.

However, like the tearing down of primeval rain forest to make way for roads, the sealing trade was ultimately doomed, because it squandered natural resources without any thought for the future. No one seemed to take into account the fact that if all the cows and bulls were killed off in the southern summer, there would be no pups the following autumn. Initially, the catch was enormous, with just one ship reporting a take of thirty-eight thousand pelts in the first four-month season alone—at the cost of many more than thirty-eight thousand seals, because a lot of the skins were damaged during the attack, or spoiled by mold and vermin. Within just a dozen years, unsurprisingly, the seal population had been reduced to the extent
that it was not worth dropping a gang at the Aucklands anymore.

Then, in 1823, to everyone's surprise, Captain Robert Johnson, commander of the New York schooner
Henry
, reported taking about thirteen thousand fine furs at Enderby Island, in the north of the Auckland Islands group. As the sealers realized that the seal population had recovered, another rush commenced, but this one was even more short-lived than the first. The following year, sealing captains reported taking only two thousand pelts; and in November 1825 the Sydney sealer
Sally
lost two boats and six men in the struggle to get just two hundred skins. In January 1830, during the breeding season four years after that miserable excursion, Captain Benjamin Morrell of the Connecticut discovery schooner
Antarctic
dropped anchor in Carnley Harbour—to find no fur seals at all.

For some time after that, though the whaleships hunting the New Zealand ground occasionally called there to forage for firewood, fresh water, and edible vegetables, the island group was of interest only to discoverers. On March 7, 1840, the gun-brig
Porpoise
, one of the six ships of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, called at Sarah's Bosom on the way to New Zealand, and left three days later, after her officers and crew had roamed about the landscape and planted a signboard announcing the date of their arrival and the identity of their ship. Captain Ringgold of the
Porpoise
later reported to Charles Wilkes, the commander of the expedition, that his men had found a little hut that had been built by a French whaling crew, a grave with a wooden cross, and a small garden of turnips, carrots, and potatoes—to which they had added a few onion plants—but no other sign of human life at all.

Just one day after the
Porpoise
left, Wilkes's rival, the French explorer Dumont D'Urville, arrived to find a Portuguese whaleship riding at anchor in Sarah's Bosom while her boats hunted the sea around the islands for whales. D'Urville and his men read the Americans' signboard with interest, and then explored in the pouring rain. They also fished, but the catch proved to be inedible, as it was full of worms. They painted a signboard of their own, and set it up next to the
Porpoise
one, and then, after pausing to record that the grave belonged to a French whaling captain, M. Lefrançois, who had committed suicide in a fit of depression—ostensibly triggered by his failure to invent a gunharpoon, but perhaps because of the unrelenting weather—they, too, set sail for New Zealand.

Eight months later, on November 20, 1840, the eminent English explorer James Clark Ross arrived with two naval vessels, HMS
Terror
and HMS
Erebus
, which were later to be lost in Sir John Franklin's ill-fated Arctic expedition. Extraordinarily handsome and lionized by London society, Ross was also distinguished by an abundance of energy. After reading both signboards, he organized the setting up of an observatory. Over the next three weeks, measurements were taken and charts drawn. With blithe disregard of possible effects on the natural environment, the party released pigs, rabbits, and hens, and planted gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, turnips, cabbages, and currants. In a final flourish, Sarah's Bosom was renamed Port Ross (though Ross's personal preference was Rendezvous Harbour). Then they took the observatory down and sailed away for Campbell Island and the Antarctic.

This last visit was to have ramifications. After getting back to Hobart, Tasmania, Ross suggested to the authorities that the
Auckland Islands would make a capital penal colony, now that New South Wales and Tasmania had outrun their usefulness in that respect. Instead, Charles Enderby, scion of the firm of Enderby and Sons that had owned the ship whose captain had first sighted the group, decided to colonize the islands as a whaling settlement.

In the southern summer of 1849–50, Enderby arrived with one hundred fifty men, women, and children to set up a village called Hardwicke, in Erebus Cove, Port Ross, and try to eke a living from soil that had been touted as rich and fertile, but turned out to be acid, salt, and unthrifty, in a climate that was eternally dismal. Within three years, daunted by the isolation, the weather, and the lack of whales, it was decided to abandon the experiment. The pioneers departed, some going back to England, while others headed for the Australian gold rush.

Once more the Auckland Islands were uninhabited by man, known only as a graveyard for ships sailing the Great Circle route from Australia to Cape Horn. Then the
Grafton
arrived.

THREE

C
aptain Musgrave started his journal on Wednesday, December 30, 1863, by noting, “Commences with fresh breeze and dark cloudy weather. At 6
P.M.
made the Auckland Group, bearing N.W. about 25 miles distant. Midnight, same weather; all sails set; water smooth under the lee of the island.” Morning dawned with an unsteady breeze, and unsettled, threatening weather. The sky was thick with rushing clouds, and the barometer was falling fast. “Every appearance of N. gale,” he noted in the log at noon, and added, “I think that Mr. Raynal is a little better since we left Campbell's Island.”

The following day they had a sudden squall from the west; then the wind veered about between northwest and southwest, with a very nasty sea cutting up. “I have never seen a sea so agitated,” wrote Raynal after paying a brief visit to the deck; “it looks as if it were boiling, and heaves around us in every direction.” Musgrave had the
Grafton
on a southward course, being anxious to keep well away from the surf breaking on the reefs directly beneath the tall cliffs—and wisely so, because in the late afternoon a thick fog descended, mixed with drizzling rain.

For François Raynal, back in the cabin, time dragged miserably. Light seeped dimly to his berth, and the sounds of the wind in the rigging and the rhythmic crash of the sea were almost as nerve-racking as the constant jerk and tumble of the hull. When night came the lamp dashed to and fro on its hook, casting wild shadows. The long hours seemed endless, but as the New Year dawned both sea and wind were moderating, and the weather was surprisingly pleasant.

Noted Musgrave: “At 8
A.M.
all sail set, and at 9
A.M.
made Auckland Islands again.” The coast of the southernmost island was again in sight, still about twenty-five miles away. The schooner scudded toward a magnificent vista of great stone ramparts. The scene was so awe-inspiring and the air so warm that Musgrave called François Raynal, who was “much better today,” to come up and look. Because of his weakness the Frenchman had to be half-carried, but once he was settled on the deck, propped up against a hatch, he fervently agreed that the view was worth the trouble. The schooner was just two miles from the massive cliffs, and he could distinctly discern the waves breaking at their feet. Every now and then a wave washed into a cavern, and was swallowed up “with a roar like a report of artillery.” He could see the rainbows tossed up by the spray, and a multitude of waterfalls that leapt out in a mist of vaporized water.

As the schooner passed the southeast end of Adams Island, the eastern coast of Auckland Island could be seen. It was rugged, rough, and broken up by a succession of promontories, and several lines of reef. Before they had sailed many miles north, however, they found a magnificent bay, lying between two great headlands set about two miles apart. It was the entrance to Port Carnley.

“At 3
P.M.
entered a harbour,” Musgrave recorded. He had to beat against the westerly wind to get inside, but otherwise everything seemed tranquil. The English seaman, George, was at the tiller, steering. Harry, the Azorean with the colorful past, was in the galley peeling some of the last of the schooner's stock of potatoes for dinner, while Alick, the quiet, strong Norwegian, was perched on the bow dropping the lead line at regular intervals to find out the depth of water beneath the schooner. Musgrave, on the quarterdeck with his telescope, carefully scanned the beaches to the north.