Tales from the Quarterdeck

Tag: Peri

  • Tales from the Quarterdeck

    Sixty bite-sized stories from Australia’s maritime past

    The melancholy loss of H.M.S Sirius off Norfolk Island by George. Raper. Source National Library of Australia 136507434-1

    I have just launched a new book titled Tales from the Quarterdeck: Sixty bite-sized stories from Australia’s maritime past. Sixty of the most popular posts have been reedited. In some cases, I’ve rewritten a couple and updated a few where new information has come to light since first writing them.

    For those who would value ready access to the stories in their bookcase, Tales from the Quarterdeck is available in Kindle ebook and paperback formats through Amazon.

    The stories are organised in chronological order, starting with the Tryall shipwreck off the Western Australian coast in 1622, and finishing with the Second World War exploits of the Krait. See below for a full list of the stories covered in the book.

    Sydney Gazette 22 May 1808, p. 2.

    1622 – The Tryall: Australia’s earliest shipwreck

    1629 – The Batavia Tragedy

    1688 – William Dampier: Navigator, naturalist, writer, pirate

    1770  – The Endeavour’s Crappy Repair

    1788 – Loss of La Astrolabe and La Boussole, a 40-Year Mystery                        

    1789 – Bligh’s Epic Voyage to Timor

    1789 – HMS Guardian: All Hands to the Pumps

    1790 – The Loss of HMS Sirius

    1790 – Sydney’s First Desperate Escape

    1791 – HMS Pandora: Queensland’s earliest recorded Shipwreck

    1791 – William Bryant’s Great Escape

    1797 – The Loss of the Sydney Cove

    1803 – Loss of HMS Porpoise

    1808 – Robert Stewart and the Seizure of the Harrington

    1814 – Wreck of the Morning Star

    1816 – The Life and Loss of HMSC Mermaid

    1824 – The Brig Amity’s Amazing Career

    1829 – The Cyprus mutiny 

    1831 – The Caledonia’s perilous last voyage

    1833 – The Badger’s Textbook Escape

    1835 – The Loss of the Convict Ship Neva

    1835 – The Post Office in the middle of nowhere

    1835 – The Tragic Loss of George III

    1845 – The Cataraqui: Australia’s worst shipwreck

    1846 – The Peruvian’s Lone Survivor

    1847 – The Foundering of the Sovereign

    1850 – The Loss of the Enchantress: A first-hand account

    1851 – The Countess of Minto’s brush with Disaster

    1852 – The Bourneuf’s Tragic Last Voyage

    1852 – The Nelson Gold Heist

    Woodbury, Walter B. (Walter Bentley), 1834-1885. Hamlet’s Ghost, Sourabaya [Surabaya], Java [Boat with Passengers and Crew], ca. 1865. Walter B. Woodbury Photograph Collection (PH 003). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries

    1854 – Bato to the Rescue 

    1854 – HMS Torch and the rescue of the Ningpo

    1856 – The Loss of the Duroc and the Rise of La Deliverance

    1858 – The Loss of the Saint Paul and its Horrific Aftermath

    1858 – Narcisse Pelletier, An Extraordinary Tale of Survival

    1859 – The Indian Queen’s Icy Encounter

    1859 – The Sapphire and Marina

    1863 – The loss of the Grafton: Marooned for twenty months

    1864 – The Invercauld shipwreck

    1865 – The CSS Shenandoah: Victoria’s link to the American Civil War

    1866 – The Loss of the SS Cawarra: Bad luck or an avoidable tragedy?

    1868 – The Bogus Count and Hamlet’s Ghost

    1871 – The Mystery of the Peri

    1872 – The Loss of the Maria, A Cautionary Tale

    1875 – The Tragedy behind the Gothenburg Medals

    1876 – The Catalpa rescue

    1876 – The Banshee’s Terrible Loss

    1878 – The Loch Ard Tragedy

    1884 – The Macabre case of the Mignonette

    1885 – The Douro and its Piratical Captain

    1889 – The Windjammer Grace Harwar

    1891 – The Spanish Silver of Torres Strait

    1893 – The Foundering of the SS Alert

    1895 – The Norna and the Conman Commodore

    1899 – Cyclone Mahina

    1911 – The Loss of the Mandalay

    1918 – The Orete’s Robinson Crusoe-like Castaway

    1935 – The Life and Loss of  the SS Maheno

    1943 – Surviving the Centaur Sinking

    1943 – The Amazing Krait

  • Queensland’s Ten Worst Maritime Disasters

    The wreck of the Steamer Gothenburg. Source: Australasian Sketcher, 20 Mar 1875, p. 13.

    TEN: SOVEREIGN, 1847.

    The Sovereign. Image courtesy Stradbroke Island Heritage Museum.

    The paddle steamer Sovereign, with 54 persons on board, sailed from Moreton Bay via the southern channel on 11 March 1847.   As she ploughed through the large swells funnelled into the passage between Moreton and Stradbroke Islands, her engines failed at a critical moment.      The force of the breaking waves quickly drove her onto a sand spit projecting from the southern point of Moreton Island, where she broke up.    Forty-four people lost their lives.   The owners of the vessel would later claim the engines had been working fine and blamed the captain for the loss.     

    NINE: MERSEY, 1804.

    On 24 May 1804, the 350-ton merchant ship Mersey sailed from Sydney bound for Bengal, India, via Torres Strait.     In mid-June she was wrecked while trying to negotiate the dangerous waters of Torres Strait.   Neither the location or the circumstances of the tragedy are known, other than the captain and either 12 or 17 of the crew took to the longboat and made it safely to Timor Island to report the loss.   She reportedly sailed with 73 hands which means 56 or 61 people lost their lives.

    EIGHT: PERI, 1871.

    HMS Basilisk and the Peri. Image Courtesy the British National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

    In early February 1871 HMS Basilisk discovered a schooner, later identified as the Peri, adrift and seemingly abandoned a short distance off the Queensland near Cardwell.   When a boat was sent across to investigate, they discovered 14 emaciated Solomon Islanders, three corpses, no food or fresh water and five feet of putrid seawater in the hold. The Peri had last been seen about six weeks earlier in Fiji carrying around 80 or 90 blackbirded Islanders bound for Fijian cotton plantations.   It seems that the Islanders had overpowered their kidnappers and taken control of the schooner.   They then sailed or drifted west across almost 3,000 km of open ocean, withstood at least one severe tropical storm, and passed through a gap in the Great Barrier Reef before being found.      As many as 75 people likely died during the ordeal.

    Map showing 10 worst maritime disasters off Queensland. Courtesy Google Maps

    SEVEN: SYBIL, 1902.

    The labour schooner Sybil disappeared sometime after leaving the Solomon Islands on 19 April 1902 bound for Townsville with a fresh batch of South Seas labourers.    By August, grave fears were held for the Sybil, for the voyage should not have taken more than two or three weeks.    Searches were made of the islands along the outer Great Barrier Reef and in the Coral Sea but no trace of the vessel or any of those on board were found.   She had a crew of 12 and on the previous two voyages, she had carried 90 and 98 labour recruits, so it is thought no less than 100 lives were lost.

    SIX: GOTHENBURG, 1875

    Gothenburg. Photo Courtesy SLQ

    The steamer Gothenburg sailed from Darwin on 17 February 1875 bound for Adelaide via Australia’s east coast.   On 24 February the Gothenburg was steaming down the coast in the vicinity of Cape Bowling Green.   Bad weather meant they could not see the regular landmarks to aid their navigation. The captain was unaware strong currents were pushing the ship towards the Great Barrier Reef until it was too late. The Gothenburg ran aground on Old Reef.   The ship and all aboard her would likely have been saved but for a powerful cyclone bearing down on them.   As the storm worsened, the captain ordered the evacuation of the passengers, but as the women and children were being loaded into the lifeboats a succession of huge waves swept over the ship.    Only 22 people survived.  As many as 112 passengers and crew lost their lives.  

    FIVE: YONGALA, 1911

    S.S. Yongala. Photo Courtesy SLQ.

    The Yongala sank during a tropical cyclone near Cape Bowling Green on 11 March 1911 with the loss of all 122 people on board.    When the ship failed to arrive in Townsville as scheduled, concerns were raised.   Then, wreckage began washing ashore along the coast as far away as Hinchinbrook Island.   However, there was no sign of the ship or any hint as to where she might have sunk.   Nearly half a century would pass before the final resting place of the Yongala was conclusively located. 

    FOUR: QUETTA, 1890

    RMS Quetta. Photo courtesy SLQ

    While the Mail Steamer Quetta was steaming through Torres Strait on the night of 28 February 1890, it struck an uncharted rock pinnacle as it passed Adolphus Island.   The Quetta had departed from Brisbane bound for London carrying nearly 300 people comprising the passengers and crew when disaster struck.   The collision tore a gaping hole in the hull from bow to amidship, and the ship sank in just three minutes.    One hundred people made it safely to Little Adolphus Island where they were later rescued.   Dozens more were pulled from the water the following day.    133 people lost their lives in the tragedy.

    THREE: AHS CENTAUR, 1943

    AHS Centaur. Photo Courtesy State Library of Queensland

    At 4 am on 14 May 1943, the Australian Hospital Ship (AHS) Centaur was torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine.    The Centaur was about 35km off Moreton Island having departed Sydney with medical staff from the Army’s 2/12 Field Ambulance bound for Port Moresby.   In all, there were 332 people on board.   268 lost their lives.   64 survived by clinging to debris and two damaged lifeboats until they were rescued 36 hours later.

    TWO: CYCLONE MAHINA, 1899

    Cyclone tracks for Cyclone Mahina.

    On the night of 4/5 March 1899, a powerful cyclone crossed the coast at Bathurst Bay on Cape York Peninsula. Lying directly in its path was the North Queensland pearling fleet which had sought shelter there.     Nearly 60 vessels – from large schooners to pearling luggers – were sunk or driven ashore with horrendous loss of life.    Between 300-400 people died in what is no doubt Queensland’s worst natural disaster.    The loss was most keenly felt on Thursday Island where the pearling fleet was based.

    ONE: GRIMENEZA, 1854

    Artists impression of the Grimeneza . Image Courtesy SLQ

    The worst shipwreck off the Queensland coast occurred on 3 July 1854.   The Peruvian ship Grimeneza was sailing from China with some 600 Chinese labourers bound for the Callao guano mines in Peru.   When they struck a reef at Bampton Shoals in the Coral Sea, the captain and six others immediately abandoned the ship leaving the rest of the crew and the passengers to their fate.  The rest of the crew tried to back the ship off, but when that failed, they too took to the lifeboats and were picked up 12 days later.   Miraculously, the Grimeneza floated off with the next high tide.   The labourers sailed the damaged ship west towards the Queensland coast with the pumps being worked around the clock.   But after three days of exhausting work, she foundered.   Six men were found clinging to a piece of wreckage 300 km off the coast a few days later.   The rest had all drowned or been taken by sharks.

    © Copyright, C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2024.

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  • The Mystery of the Peri

    HMS Basilisk overhauls the Peri off the Queensland coast. Courtesy: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich London.

       In February 1872, the crew of HMS Basilisk found 14 men barely clinging to life on a derelict schooner adrift off the far north Queensland coast. The vessel’s name was not immediately apparent, and none of the survivors spoke English. It was a mystery as to how the ship came to be in those remote northern waters, and one that would take some time to solve.

       The side paddle steamer HMS Basilisk was steaming up the Queensland coast on a three-month cruise around Torres Strait. They were to deliver stores to the government settlement at Somerset, chart several recently reported navigation hazards and generally show the flag in that remote part of the continent.

       When the Basilisk was in the vicinity of Hinchinbrook Island, a lookout sighted a small fore-and-aft schooner off in the distance. It was rare to come upon another ship in those waters, so Captain John Moresby called for his telescope and examined the ship more closely. It was immediately clear to the master mariner that not all was as it should be with the strange vessel.

       Moresby noticed that the schooner sat heavily in the water as she sluggishly rode the long, smooth swells. His first thought was that her crew must have abandoned her for some reason. As the Basilisk drew closer, Moresby could see that her weather-beaten sails were poorly set and flapping loosely in the light breeze. The rigging was slack, and there was no sign of anyone on deck.

    Illustration of the Basilisk’s discovery of the Peri. Source: Illustrated Australian News for Home Readers, 29 Feb 1872, p. 53

       When the Basilisk raised her ensign, signalling to the strange vessel to identify itself, they got no response. But as they drew nearer still, a couple of Pacific Islanders armed with muskets staggered to their feet near the schooner’s stern. Moresby then spotted several more men lying scattered on the deck. He sent two boats across to investigate.

       What the sailors found is best summed up in Captain Moresby’s own words: “… they were living skeletons, creatures dazed with fear and mortal weakness. As our crews boarded, other half-dead wretches tottered to their feet, fumbling too at rusty, lockless muskets. … They were dreadful to look at – being in the last stage of famine, wasted to the bone; some were barely alive, and the sleeping figures were dead bodies fast losing the shape of humanity, on a deck foul with blood.”

       The boarding party found several dead and decomposing bodies on the deck. There was five feet of putrid water sloshing about in the hold. The cabin had been ransacked, and the deck bore the marks of numerous axe strokes. Parts of the deck were also stained brown by large pools of what appeared to be dried blood. And, there was no fresh water or food anywhere to be found. All the evidence, Captain Moresby later recalled, pointed to a violent and tragic incident having taken place on board the schooner.    Moresby held a funeral service for the dead and buried them at sea. He then steamed towards Cardwell, 40 km away with the schooner in tow. He landed the 14 survivors, none of whom spoke any English, but for the word “Solomon.” Moresby assumed they meant they were from the Solomon Islands. He then continued North towards Torres Strait, leaving Midshipman Sabben in charge of several sailors and the schooner. He would collect them in a couple of months on his return to Sydney.

    HMS Basilisk commander – Captain John Moresby. Photo sourced from his autobiography Two Admirals.

        The pieces of the puzzle would slowly come together over the next weeks and months. After Sabben’s men had scrubbed the headboards clean, they discovered the schooner was called the Peri. The Peri had recently been reported missing in Fijian waters. On 27 December 1871, she had sailed from Viti Levu with approximately 90 “indentured” Pacific Islanders bound for a cotton plantation on Taveuni, 100 km away, but she never arrived.

       About 30 of those 90 men had been kidnapped in the Solomon Islands and taken to Levuka in Fiji. At the time, the South Pacific was in the midst of a cotton boom, and the white plantation owners struggled to find enough field workers or kanakas to tend their crops. Many Islanders fell victim to more unscrupulous “recruiters” who stopped at nothing to fill their quotas.

       At Levuka, kanakas were disembarked and sold to plantation owners to serve three-year contracts. At the completion of their time, it was the plantation owners’ responsibility to pay off their workers and return them to their home islands. The kanakas themselves were supposed to have willingly agreed to the arrangements and be appropriately compensated for their labour; however, that was not always the case.

       In this instance, the kidnapped Solomon Islanders were sent to an Australian plantation owner on Taveuni Island. But while in transit, they seized control of the cutter and escaped. The vessel was later found aground on a small island in the Yasawa group, and most of the men were recaptured a couple of weeks later.

       The other 60 or so Islanders who had been on the Peri had likely also been recently kidnapped. They had fallen into the clutches of a notorious blackbirder named Captain McLever. By December 1871, both groups of kidnapped men had been transferred to the Peri and were about to be sent to work on a plantation on Taveuni Island.   

    It is not entirely clear what happened next, but it seems the 90 kanakas rebelled, killed the captain and crew and seized the ship. Over the next six weeks, they sailed or drifted nearly 3500 km west until they were found by the Basilisk off the Australian coast. From the water in the hold and the general state of the ship, Moresby believed they had weathered at least one severe tropical storm during their passage. And judging by their emaciated state, food and water had run out long before they were rescued. The blood stains and axe marks led some to speculate that the survivors may have resorted to cannibalism, but that was never conclusively proved, and none of the bodies found showed signs of having been butchered.

    Approx track of the Peri.

    By the time the Basilisk‘s crew boarded the schooner, there were just 14 men still alive. One more would succumb soon after being put ashore at Cardwell.

       The remaining 13 Solomon Islanders were taken to Sydney by the Basilisk on her return from Torres Strait and eventually sent back to Fiji on HMS Cossack so they might be repatriated. However, eight jumped ship when the Cossack stopped briefly at Matuku Island, perhaps fearing they were being returned to Fiji to be punished. When the last five Peri survivors were finally questioned through an interpreter in Levuka, they told the British Consul that they had been kidnapped. They described how, when they paddled out to Captain McLever’s ship, their canoes were sunk and they had been beaten and locked in the hold.   

    McLever was arrested, and the Solomon Islanders were taken back to Sydney so they could testify at his trial. However, no one had thought to send a translator, and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. The Islanders were sent back to Fiji, but what happened to them after that is unknown.

    1.Moresby. John RN, Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea and D’Entrecasteaux Islands, John Murray, London, 1876, p.4.

    © Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2022.

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