Artist’s impression of the Grimeneza lost on Brampton Shoals. Courtesy: State Library of Queensland.
On 3 July 1854, the Peruvian ship Grimeneza struck a reef at Bampton Shoals in the Coral Sea. The Captain, first mate, ship’s surgeon, and four sailors immediately abandoned the ship leaving the rest of the crew and about 600 Chinese passengers to their fate.
Twenty-eight days later Captain M.H. Penny and five others reached safety at New Ireland after a gruelling 4,000kms passage in an open boat. They had suffered severely from hunger, exposure, and disease, but they had survived their ordeal. The first mate was not so fortunate for he had been killed at New Britain when they stopped seeking food.
Captain Penny reported that the Grimeneza had been sailing from Shantou in China bound for Callao (present day Lima) in South America when its voyage was cut short. The night his ship crashed onto the reef it was blowing a gale. He claimed to have done all that was possible to ensure the safety of everyone on board before he and the others were forced to abandon the ship. Justifying his hasty departure, Penny said the Chinese passengers panicked and had tried to attack him and the rest of the crew. And had no one else made it off alive, that is all anyone would have known of a disaster that claimed over 600 lives.
The Courier (Hobart), 5 Mar 1855, p. 2, Shipping News.
But others also survived. One was the second mate, who later reported that the captain fled the ship immediately after she struck the reef stopping only to secure the hatch’s leading to the hold where the passengers were accommodated. After the captain’s departure, the remaining crew tried to back the vessel off the reef but when that failed, they too left in the remaining two lifeboats leaving the passengers to their fate. After six days at sea without food or water the castaways contemplated killing a 12-year-old cabin boy for food to keep the rest of them alive. Fortunately, they were discovered by a passing ship and the boy’s life was spared.
Back on the Grimeneza, the Chinese passengers eventually broke out of the hold to find they had been deserted. Sometime after that the ship slipped off the reef on the high tide and immediately started filling with water. The passengers manned the pumps and baled for all they were worth to keep the vessel afloat. For three days they toiled as they sailed before the wind towards the Queensland coast. They could have come within a few hundred kilometres before disaster struck. After three days of unrelenting effort, everyone was exhausted, and some began giving up. They could not or would not keep going. The sense of common purpose that had got them thus far broke down. A few began plundering what they could from the ship as water filled the hold. Others made preparation for the inevitable.
Map showing Grimeneza’s likely sailing route. Courtesy: Google Maps.
The Grimeneza soon foundered. A few men took to small rafts they had hastily built, others jumped into the sea with nothing more than a single timber plank to keep themselves afloat. According to one of only six Chinese passengers to survive, most drowned or were soon taken by sharks. The lucky few were rescued by a passing ship after several days in the water. They were cared back to health and taken on to Madras where their appalling story came to light through the aid of an interpreter.
Captain Penny briefly touched in Melbourne on his return to South America but was never held to account for his callous actions. Years later it was revealed that the Chinese “coolies” had boarded the Grimeneza believing they were being taken to the Californian goldfields. Instead, they had been bound for Peru to work in the Chincha Island guano mines as indentured labourers.
In 1890 the Quetta sank bow first in just 3 minutes. Courtesy: State Library of Queensland.
In 1890 Queensland experienced one of its worst maritime disasters when the passenger steamer Quetta sank in Torres Strait in just three minutes with the loss of 133 lives.
The R.M.S. Quetta was a 3,300-ton coal-powered, iron-clad steamer measuring 116 metres (380 feet) in length and could travel at a top speed of 13 knots (24 kms per hour). She was built in 1881 and on this voyage from Brisbane to London she carried nearly 300 people – passengers and crew.
At 9.14 on the evening of 28 February a sharp jolt and a shudder ran through the Quetta as she was being piloted through the Albany Passage. Initially, the pilot and captain were more perplexed than alarmed. The pilot was sure they were miles from any known hazards and it didn’t feel like they had hit anything substantial. None-the-less Captain Sanders followed protocol and ordered the engines stopped, the lifeboats got ready and the carpenter to sound the wells.
The Quetta Saloon from The Illustrated London News, 1881.
Moments later the carpenter cried out “she’s sinking.” Water was pouring into the ship at an unimaginable rate. What no one realised at the time was they had struck an uncharted rock pinnacle right in the middle of the main shipping channel through Torres Strait. A gapping hole had been torn in the Quetta’s hull from bow to midship one to two metres wide.
The ship was already starting to settle by the bow as Captain Sanders ran aft encouraging passengers to make their way there. At the time many of the first-class passengers were in the saloon rehearsing for an upcoming concert and were oblivious to what was taking place outside. The crew were still frantically trying to get the lifeboats out when water began lapping at their feet only a minute or two later.
Then the stern reared up out of the water and the ship plummeted below the surface of the sea spilling scores of people into the water. Many others were trapped in the saloon, their cabins or under the ship’s sun awnings and drowned.
RMS Quetta showing the sun awnings covering the decks. Photo courtesy SLQ
The Quetta sank in just 3 minutes. Most of those who survived were already on the aft deck when the ship sank or were lucky to swim clear as she slid below the surface.
All was confusion in the water as people thrashed around in panic trying to find something to keep themselves afloat. Eventually a measure of order was restored and one of the lifeboats, now floating free, was used to rescue as many people as it would hold. A second lifeboat, though damaged, was filled with people and they all made their way to land a few kilometres away.
About one hundred people made it to safety on Little Adolphus Island where they spent an uncomfortable night but they were alive. Captain Sanders was among them. The next morning he set off in the lifeboat manned by some of his men and made for Somerset to report the loss of the ship and get help for those still missing. Apart from the people he had left on the island without food or water, there were many others who had washed up on other islands or were still clinging to pieces of wreckage out in the Strait.
When the news reached authorities on Thursday Island a government steamer was dispatched to search for survivors. Fishing boats from Somerset also combed the waters in the days that followed. In all, about 160 people were saved, many had stories of lucky escapes.
The full story of the Quetta’s loss is told in A Treacherous Coast: Ten Tales of Shipwreck and Survival from Queensland Waters, available as a kindle eBook or paperback through Amazon.
Wood engraving published in The illustrated Australian news for home readers. Photo courtesy SLV.
On 24 February 1875 the steamer Gothenburg ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef and sank during a ferocious storm with the loss of over 100 lives. A fortune in gold also went to the bottom.
That the Gothenburg had sunk with 3,000 ounces (93 kgs) of gold belonging to the English, Scottish and Australian Chartered Bank did not go unnoticed when the ship was reported lost. Brisbane salvage diver James Putwain partnered with the owner of the small coastal steamer and the two started steaming towards Bowen as quickly as they could.
There, Putwain hired a small fishing boat and some local men to help with his air pump. By noon on 7 March, they were at the wreck site, only six days after hearing of the disaster. The steamer continued north, leaving Putwain and his team to bring up the gold.
Putwain first tried diving from the fishing boat but a strong current prevented him from reaching the wreck. He then built a platform attached to the wreck’s mainmast and set up his diving apparatus on that. Donning his heavy diving suit and helmet, he climbed down the rigging to the sunken ship’s deck and soon made entry into the captain’s cabin. On this first attempt his air hose became entangled in the wreckage. Putwain had some anxious moments until he cleared it and returned to the surface to give more explicit instructions to his new and inexperienced assistants.
S.S. Gothenburg docked at a wharf. Photo Courtesy SLQ
His third descent met with success. Putwain found the safe containing the gold in the remains of the cabin and had it hoisted to the surface. Before leaving the wreck he tried descending further into the ship but only got a little way before running out of hose. But there, he saw the haunting vision of two women suspended in the water seemingly embracing. Unable to get close enough to identify the bodies, he returned to the surface with the macabre image burned into his memory.
With the gold secured he returned to Bowen to report his find to the Harbourmaster and deposit the precious metal in the local bank.
Then the enterprise got mired in legal wrangling. The English, Scottish and Australian Chartered Bank offered James Putwain and his partner £1,000 for retrieving the £9,000 worth of gold. Putwain and his partner felt £4,000 was more appropriate compensation. The case went to the Vice Admiralty Court in Brisbane, where Putwain claimed he had spent nearly £500 in the salvage operation, that it had been a risky endeavour and that the box was found in a precarious position where it could have easily plummeted into deeper, inaccessible, water to be lost for ever.
The bank argued that the amount demanded by the salvors was excessive and Putwain’s account of the salvage operation was exaggerated. Nonetheless, the judge found in favour of the salvors, awarding them approximately one third the value of the gold, £3,000.
Not happy with the verdict, the bank appealed the decision before the Privy Council in London. Almost two years after the Gothenburg sank the Privy Council found in favour of the salvors and upheld the original judgement, ordering the bank to pay Putwain and his partner.
A second salvage operation was mounted in the weeks after the Gothenburg was lost. The diver Samuel Dunwoodie arrived on the wreck on 14 March, a week after Putwain, unaware that the gold had already been retrieved. Nonetheless, Dunwoodie recovered much of the cabin luggage and many of the personal effects belonging to the passengers. His team also removed the ship’s two steam winches before the weather turned foul, forcing them to abandon the wreck.
The tragic story of the Gothenburg shipwreck is told in A Treacherous Coast: Ten Tales of Shipwreck and Survival from Queensland Waters, available as an eBook or paperback through Amazon.
In 1851, two men accomplished a sailing feat that few thought was possible. They had been the only hands on board the barque Countess of Minto when she was driven from her anchorage during a violent storm. The captain and the rest of the crew were left stranded on a remote desert island. Everyone thought the ship had foundered in the storm, but four weeks later, she sailed into Sydney Harbour. To everyone’s astonishment, the two men had survived and sailed their ship over 1000 kilometres to safety.
On 25 August 1851, the 300-ton Countess of Minto was anchored off Lady Elliot Island on the Great Barrier Reef to collect guano, a valuable commodity at the time. John Johnson and Joseph Pass had just returned to the ship after taking the captain and the rest of the men ashore to dig for guano. Soon after the pair returned to the ship, the weather began to deteriorate.
By midday, the wind was howling through the rigging, the seas boiled around the ship, and the deck was being lashed by torrential rain. It was now far too dangerous to take the jolly boat ashore to join their shipmates on the island. Johnson and Pass had no choice but to ride out the storm where they were.
The two seamen let out the anchors as far as they would go, hoping they would remain firmly dug into the seabed. The ship surged and the chains strained with each powerful swell, and for a time they held.
Then, around 11.30 that night, a very thick squall struck. The force of the wind and the seas was too great, and the anchors started dragging along the sea floor. The barque was swept out into the deep water of the Coral Sea, somehow missing the island and the nearby reefs. Johnson and Pass had no control over the ship as it bucked and tossed in the tumultuous seas. They could only pray that the vessel would not founder and they might survive the night.
Johnson was the ship’s carpenter, and Pass was the steward. Neither was part of the regular sailing crew, but it is evident that one or perhaps both men possessed a wealth of sailing experience. And, at least one of them knew how to navigate using a sextant and a chronometer.
The pair survived the wild night, and by the next morning, the wind had eased and the men could take stock of their situation. Lady Elliot Island was nowhere to be seen. In fact, no land at all interrupted the horizon in all 360 degrees. They checked for damage to the sailing gear and hull and were relieved to find the Countess of Minto had survived the storm with only superficial injury. The hull, masts, and sails were intact, but they were now drifting aimlessly under bare poles at the mercy of the wind and current.
Both anchors were still dangling at the ends of 45 fathoms (90 metres) of chain. The deck was littered with ropes and other gear that had broken loose but had not been washed overboard. The longboat had been swept off the forward hatch and was now full of water and being dragged along behind the ship. The jolly boat, likewise, was trailing behind.
They released the anchors after being unable to haul them up on their own. They set up a boom with a block and tackle and retrieved the two boats. Then they tidied up the deck. At midnight, they pumped eight inches of water out of the bilge and continued working through til dawn.
They finally hoisted some canvas from the main mast and bore towards the south-east. For the first time since being swept from their anchorage nearly 36 hours ago, they had control of the ship.
Sydney Morning Herald, 25 Sept 1851, p. 2.
On Wednesday evening, 27 August, the winds picked up again after a day of blowing a gentle breeze. They now tried to set a north-westerly course so they could return to Lady Elliot Island and rescue their shipmates. But in the face of contrary winds and hampered by a lack of manpower, they struggled to get back.
For the next eight days, the pair battled the wind and the seas, trying to make it back to Lady Elliot Island. However, despite their efforts, the ship continued to be pushed southward and away from the coast. The winds were blowing from the north, and each time they tried to beat to windward, they would be pushed further south. By Friday, 5 September, Johnson and Pass were utterly exhausted and were now further away from their shipmates than ever.
They finally decided to go with the wind and make for Sydney so they could get help. Now with the wind behind them ,they made good time. The Countess of Minto was off Port Macquarie four days later and only had another 300 km to go before reaching Sydney. There, they fell in with another ship, and its captain came over to see what assistance they needed. Stunned to discover there were only two men on board, he offered to crew the ship and take it the rest of the way to Sydney as long as they officially handed control to him. Johnson and Pass refused, knowing full well that the captain would then be entitled to claim salvage rights. Despite their exhaustion, they figured that they could make it the rest of the way by themselves. The captain left and later returned with a few of his men, offering their help with no strings attached. This time, Johnson and Pass accepted.
Approximate course of the Countess of Minto.
On 20 September, the Countess of Minto sailed into Sydney Harbour to be greeted by their captain, who had just arrived and reported his ship lost. Johnson and Pass were commended for their “meritorious conduct,” and the insurance underwriters rewarded each of them with £10.
As fate would have it, the Countess of Minto would be lost a couple of months later after striking ground off Macquarie Island as the captain sought to finish filling his hold with guano.
The Countess of Minto’s incredible story is told in A Treacherous Coast: Ten Tales of Shipwreck and Survival from Queensland Waters, available as an eBook or paperback through Amazon.
James Morrill. Source National Library of Australia 136099157-1.
In July 1846, word reached Sydney that a ship, the Peruvian, had been discovered abandoned on the remote Bellona Shoals far out in the Coral Sea. No one knew what had happened to those who had been on board. As the months passed with no word of any survivors, it was presumed they had all been lost at sea when the ship was wrecked or in a desperate attempt to reach land. Then, 17 years later, a naked lone survivor walked out of the bush with a remarkable story of survival.
His name was James Morrill, and he had been 22 years old in late February 1846 when the Peruvian sailed out of Sydney Harbour on her way to China. Morrill had only joined the crew a couple of days before they sailed. Captain Pitkethly and his crew, including Morrill, numbered 14. Pitkethly’s wife, Elizabeth, six passengers and two stowaways sailed with them. In total, there were 23 people on board.
The Peruvian had fine weather for the first three days and made an easy time of it sailing north under full sails. But during the third night at sea, the weather started to turn. The next morning, the ship was in the grip of a powerful storm. For the next several days, the Peruvian was blown north under bare poles. Then, after nearly a week, the weather began to ease again. Sail was heaped back on, and they started making up for lost time. Then, in the early hours of 8 March, an ominous line of white caps materialised out of the pitch black night directly in their path.
The Peruvian slammed into the reef before there was any chance to change course. The waves lifted the damaged ship onto the reef, where she stuck fast. Seawater swept the deck, washing away the lifeboat and the unsuspecting second mate who had just emerged from below deck.
The morning revealed an unbroken reef awash with turbulent white foaming water as far as the eye could see. No islet, sandbar or refuge of any sort lay in sight. Only jagged rocks jutted from the sea’s surface. Captain Pitkethly made the difficult decision to abandon his ship. When the crew lowered the jolly boat over the side, it was immediately smashed to pieces. They now only had one boat left. It was loaded with supplies and lowered away. Then the ropes got tangled and the boat filled with water. The first mate jumped in the boat to try to save it, but before he could bail it out, the stern broke away. The damaged boat plummeted into the water, and a strong current swept it away from the side of the ship. Resigning himself to his fate, the man bid the captain and crew farewell and was soon lost from sight.
Their situation had become dire with the loss of all three lifeboats. The ship could break apart at any time, and they were stranded over 1000 km off Australia’s east coast. But Pitkethley was not about to give up. The Peruvian’s masts were brought down, and cross planks were lashed and nailed in place, forming a platform. Then the remaining 21 castaways boarded the raft for a very uncertain future.
The raft drifted with the north-westerly current towards the Australian mainland. The days passed slowly under the blazing tropical sun. Water and food were carefully rationed, making thirst and hunger constant companions. Morrill would recall that one day blurred into the next. Had the captain not recorded the passing of each day by carving a notch into a piece of timber, no one could have said how long they had been adrift in that empty sea.
Morrill would later recall that after they had been adrift for a little over three weeks, they had their first casualty from the raft. Captain Pitkethly prayed over the man’s body, and it was lowered into the water. To everyone’s horror, as the body floated away, it was attacked by sharks and torn to shreds. The feeding frenzy, according to Morrill, only ended when the body was completely devoured.
By now, they had probably left the open ocean and were among the shoals of the Great Barrier Reef. Fish could be seen in the crystal clear water, and they were able to catch some with a lure they fashioned from a fish hook, a piece of tin and a strip of canvas. Nature also answered their prayers for fresh water when the skies opened up. Rainwater was collected in a sail, and they could fill their water container for the first time since abandoning the ship. However, their good fortune did not last.
Four weeks of starvation, thirst, and exposure to the elements had taken their toll on everyone. The castaways started dying in rapid succession. “At this time they dropped off one after the other very rapidly, but I was so exhausted myself that I forget the order of their names,” Morrill would later recall.
James Morrill. Photo courtesy State Library of Queensland.
By now, the raft was continuously circled by sharks drawn by the regular supply of corpses. Half-starved and desperate to fill their aching bellies, the survivors resolved to catch one of their tormentors.
“The captain devised a plan to snare them with a running bowline knot, which we managed as follows,” Morrill would later claim, “We cut off the leg of one of the men who died, and lashed it at the end of the oar for a bait, and on the end of the other oar we put the snare, so that the fish must come through the snare to get at the bait. Presently, one came, which we captured and killed with the carpenter’s axe.”
And so Morrill and a few others clung to life. After being adrift for about five weeks, they sighted land for the first time. When Captain Pitkethly examined his chart, he took it to be Cape Upstart. But with no way to steer the raft, they could only watch and pray that they reached shore sometime soon.
“Two or three days afterwards we saw the land once more, and were driven towards Cleveland Bay,” Morrill recalled, “but just as we were preparing to get ashore, in the hopes of getting water, a land breeze sprang up and drove us out to sea again.”
Then, around midnight, the raft washed ashore, likely on the southern point of Cape Cleveland. After so long at sea, no one had the strength to do anything but drag themselves off the raft and collapse on the beach. In the early hours of the morning, it began to rain. Morrill and the other castaways quenched their thirst by drinking directly from shallow depressions in nearby rocks. Cold and wet, they huddled together and waited for dawn.
They had been adrift on the raft for 42 days according to the captain’s tally of nicks in the piece of wood. Only seven of the 21 people who had left the Peruvian were still alive, and two of those would die from exhaustion within hours of reaching land.
For the next couple of weeks, the survivors sheltered in a cave and foraged for shellfish among the rocks. One of the castaways found a canoe pulled up on the beach one day. He would set off south in it alone after Morrill and everyone else refused to join him. Morrill would later learn that his emaciated body was found by Aborigines not far from where he had left.
Memorial to James Morril, the last survivor of the Peruvian shipwreck who lived with Aborigines for 17 years. Bowen Cemetery.
As their strength slowly returned, the castaways began ranging further afield in search of food. And their presence soon came to the attention of the local Aborigines, the Bindal and Juru peoples. One evening after Morrill and Captain Pitkethly had returned to the cave from a day’s foraging, they heard strange jabbering and whistling sounds. When they went to investigate, they found several naked black men staring at them with keen interest.
“At first they were as afraid of us as we were of them,” Morrill later said. “Presently, we held up our hands in supplication to them to help us; some of them returned it. After a while, they came among us and felt us all over from head to foot. They satisfied themselves that we were human beings, and, hearing us talk, they asked us by signs where we had come from. We made signs and told them we had come across the sea, and, seeing how thin and emaciated we were, they took pity on us. …”
By now, only Morrill, Captain Pitkethly, his wife Elizabeth and a young apprentice were left. They were taken in by the Aborigines and assigned to different groups. The captain and his wife never fully recovered and struggled to adapt to the arduous life among the Aborigines. They died within a few days of each other and were buried together. Morrill would also later learn that the apprentice had also died.
. Morrill would live among the Bindal people of the Burdekin region for the next 17 years. Every so often, his new friends told him that they had sighted a ship out on the ocean, but he was never close enough to try signalling for help. But the sightings served to remind him of his past life.
By 1863, the frontier of European colonisation had reached the lower Burdekin River. By then, he was nearly 40 years old. One day, Morrill approached a hut, calling out to its occupants, “What cheer, shipmates?” The shepherds came out, one of whom was armed with a gun, to find a naked, dark-skinned man standing before them. “Do not shoot me, I am a British object, a shipwrecked sailor,” Morrill yelled. He was invited inside and told the shepherds his story in broken English. He only then realised how much he wanted to return to his old life. Morrill made one final visit to his Bindal family and friends, begging them not to follow him. Aborigines were frequently shot on sight if they seemed to pose a threat, and Morrill did not want that fate to fall on his loved ones.
Morrill would eventually be taken to Brisbane, where he met the Governor. He asked that the Aborigines be allowed to live on their land unmolested by settlers, but his plea went unheeded. He was given a job as an assistant storeman in Bowen, where he married, fathered a child and became a much-liked member of the local community. But the hardships he had endured over the years had taken a toll on his body. An old knee wound, which had never properly healed, became inflamed, and he died, probably of blood poisoning, just two years later. A modest memorial to the last survivor of the Peruvian shipwreck can be found in the Bowen Cemetery.
James Morrill’s full story is told in A Treacherous Coast: Ten Tales of Shipwreck and Survival from Queensland Waters.
