Tales from the Quarterdeck

Tag: Rescue

  • Four Years in Torres Strait: The Extraordinary Tale of Barbara Thompson

    HMS Rattlesnake circa 1848. Courtesy State Library of NSW.

    In 1845, a small cutter quietly slipped out of Moreton Bay, supposedly bound 300 km up the coast to salvage whatever they could from a ship reported to have been wrecked in that vicinity.  The three-ton vessel and her crew were never heard of again, at least not for nearly five years. Then, in late 1849, sailors from HMS Rattlesnake were ashore near the tip of Cape York when they were approached by a white woman seeking their protection.  In halting English, she claimed to be Barbara Thompson, the only survivor from the missing cutter. This is her remarkable story.

    Born in Aberdeen in the late 1820s. Barbara Crawford arrived in New South Wales with her parents as free settlers on the convict transport John Barry. Her father, a tinsmith by trade, had left Scotland to start a new life for himself and his children in Sydney. By 1845, Barbara had left the family home in Pyrmont, married a man named William Thompson and was living in Moreton Bay.

    Around the middle of 1845, it seems William Thompson thought he had found an easy way to make some money. He had learned that a ship filled with whale oil had run aground on Bampton Shoals, over 1,000 km away in the vast expanse of the Coral Sea. Despite having no salvage rights to do so, he decided to search for the ship and take as many barrels of oil as his tiny vessel could carry.

    A year earlier, in June 1844, the American whaler Clarence had run aground at Horseshoe Reef in the Bamptons. Unable to get his off, the captain made the difficult decision to abandon her and make for Moreton Bay in the boats.    Salvage rights to the Clarence and her valuable cargo were sold at auction in Sydney to a man named Cole. He quickly dispatched the schooner Elizabeth, under the command of Captain Riley, to Bampton Shoals to make good on his investment.   Purchasing the salvage rights to any wreck, sight unseen, in such a remote and dangerous part of the world, was always risky. Cole would have to wait to see if his gamble would pay off.

    Background map courtesy National Library of Australia.

    After Captain Riley arrived at the wreck site and carefully examined the damage to the Clarence, he was convinced he could not only retrieve the whale oil, but he could also save the ship and sail it back to Sydney.  So, he loaded the Clarence’s more valuable stores onto his schooner and sailed for home with the good news. He then returned to Bampton Shoals with a couple of shipwrights and the necessary equipment to repair the whaler’s hull and refloat her. However, Riley’s luck took a turn for the worse in January 1845, when a ferocious storm swept the Elizabeth from her moorings and out to sea. Captain Riley and six of his men were now stranded, having taken shelter on the Clarence during the storm. After waiting six weeks for the Elizabeth to return, Riley accepted that his schooner had likely sunk during the storm.  He had the shipwrights prepare their longboat for the hazardous open-ocean voyage to the Australian mainland by raising the freeboard and building a temporary deck. Once work was complete, they set sail for Moreton Bay with just an old hand compass to guide them. The passage would take them 37 gruelling days.

    At Moreton Bay, Captain Riley sold the longboat to William Thompson, who named the three-ton cutter-rigged vessel America. By now, it was mid-1845.   Thompson told people that he intended to salvage the remains of a ship Captain Riley said he had spotted aground on the northern end of Fraser Island (K’Gari).  In reality, Thompson planned to sail to Bampton Shoals and fill his hold with the Clarence’s whale oil before continuing through Torres Strait and on to Port Essington with his spoils.   While Thompson had bought the Elizabeth’s longboat, it’s unlikely he had also bought the salvage rights to the Clarence and her cargo. They would still have belonged to Cole.

    The America set sail from Moreton Bay around August or September 1845.  Joining Thompson were his young wife Barbara and four crew, one of whom was likely a man named Harris who had been on the Elizabeth and said he knew where to find the Clarence.  

    It seems to have been an unhappy vessel.  They were plagued by foul weather, and according to Barbara, there was much “quarrelling on board.”  Two of the crew even drowned during the voyage, though the circumstances remain a mystery.  As it turned out, Harris was unable to find the Clarence or even Bampton Shoals, for that matter. With their provisions almost depleted, Thompson abandoned the search and made for Port Essington via Torres Strait. Somewhere along the way, he put Harris ashore under circumstances that are not entirely clear.  Harris would spend eight months as a castaway somewhere on Cape York before being rescued by a passing ship and taken on to Hong Kong.  

    Meanwhile, Thompson, his wife and one remaining member of the crew cleared the tip of Cape York, but the America struck a reef off the eastern end of Prince of Wales Island (Muralag) during bad weather.  Thompson and the seaman drowned when they tried to swim ashore through the surging seas.   Barbara was left trapped on the cutter until she was rescued by Islanders returning from a turtle hunt after the weather had moderated.

    One of her rescuers, a man named Boroto, claimed Barbara as his wife, something she had no say in. Despite this, she also later claimed she had been well-treated by the Kaurareg. Her place in the community was assured after an elder declared that Barbara was the reincarnated form of his deceased daughter, Giaom. Barbara was renamed Giaom in her honour.

    Giaom, as she was now called, lived with the Kaurareg for the next four years. She learned their language, customs, and way of life. She shared their good times and bad and seems to have been well-liked. That is not to say her life was easy. Life with the Kaurareg would have been challenging for any white person of that era to adapt to. But adapt she did.  

    The only restriction placed on her was that she was barred from communicating with any of the scores of ships that passed through Torres Strait each year. It is quite likely that she always harboured a dream to return to her former life, and a few years later, she got her chance.

    In October 1849, a friend told her that a ship had stopped near the tip of Cape York.  She enlisted the help of several female friends, and they made the crossing to the mainland. She had assured them that she only wanted to meet the white men and shake their hands. Actually, she had already decided to leave the Kaurareg and hoped to do so on that ship. She figured this might be the only chance she had to make it back to Sydney to see her family again. When her husband, Boroto, was told what she was up to, he and several of his mates set off in pursuit.

    HMS Rattlesnake at anchor circa 1850. By Capt. Owen Stanley.

    On 16 October, Barbara Thompson and her friends stumbled on a party of seamen from the British survey ship HMS Rattlesnake.  Barbara was not immediately recognised as a white woman. For though naked but for a fringe of leaves strung around her waist, her skin was so deeply tanned and blistered by long exposure to the tropical sun as to make her indistinguishable from the other Aboriginal women. Barbara was reportedly “wretched in appearance,” and blind in one eye, and it was only when she spoke a few halting words that they realised she was a British subject. “I am a white woman. Why do you leave me?” she pleaded, wanting to be taken back to their ship. She was clearly awkward about her nudity in the company of white men, so the sailors gave her two shirts to cover herself and then took her back to the Rattlesnake.

    It was not long before Boroto was alongside in a canoe demanding that she be returned to him.   Meanwhile, Captain Owen Stanley had listened to her story and told her that the choice to stay or go was hers alone to make.  She chose to remain on the Rattlesnake. Captain Stanely remained at Cape York for several more days, and during that time, many of Barbara’s friends came out to visit her. Even Boroto was allowed on board to speak with his wife. At first, he tried using soft talk and promises to convince her to change her mind and come back home. When that didn’t work, he grew furious and threatened to kill her if she did not do as she was told. Boroto finally stormed off the ship empty-handed.

    While on the Rattlesnake, Barbara AKA Giaom was befriended by the Rattlesnake’s naturalist, John MacGillivray. Barbara proved to be a godsend when it came to understanding the ways of the local peoples. She added several hundred Kaurareg words and their English translations to his dictionary, and she also helped him to understand how Kaurareg grammar worked. She also freely shared her knowledge of the manners, customs, and daily life of her adopted people, giving MacGillivray insights he could never have gained on his own.   MacGillivray’s account of the Rattlesnake’s expedition, Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake, published in 1852, is dotted with references to Giaom’s contributions on the Kaurareg people of Torres Strait.

    Barbara Thompson’s health improved with medical attention and a return to a Western diet. The Rattlesnake arrived back in Sydney in February 1850, where Barbara was reunited with her parents.

    © Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2026.

    If you would like to be notified of future blog posts, please enter your email address below.

  • Marooned for twenty months: the loss of the Grafton 1863.

    The last of the Grafton castaways are rescued. Source: Wrecked on a Reef, Raynal, 1874..

    On 12 November 1863, the 56-ton schooner Grafton sailed from Sydney on a sealing expedition among the islands of the Southern Ocean. Six months, 12 months, then 18 months passed without any sighting of the ship or its crew. Most people had given up hope of seeing them again, presuming they had been lost in that vast expanse of freezing ocean wilderness to Australia’s south. Then, on 27 July 1865, three of the lost mariners stepped ashore at Invercargill, New Zealand. Their leader was the missing ship’s captain, and he reported that his other two shipmates were still stranded on a remote island to the south. This is their remarkable tale of endurance and survival against the odds.

       The Grafton was ostensibly on a sealing expedition funded by a consortium of Sydney businessmen. But it also had a more secretive mission to investigate if tin could be found on Campbell Island. The Grafton was to visit the isolated scrap of land some 650 km south of New Zealand and determine if the rumoured tin was there in mineable quantity. An experienced master mariner named Thomas Musgrave was appointed captain of the Grafton, and one of the business partners, Francois Raynal, served as his first mate. Two seamen and a cook rounded out the five-mancrew.

       The weather was atrocious for most of the voyage south through the roaring forties and then into the furious fifties. During one particularly heavy gale, the Grafton was laid over on her side by the force of the wind. But after three weeks of hard sailing, they finally reached Campbell Island, at latitude 52.6°S.  

    Illustration of the Loss of the Grafton on Auckland Island, 1863. Source: Wrecked on a Reef, Raynal, 1874.

       Prospecting for tin came to nothing, and there were few seals to be had. After a month, they had little to show for their time there. They had been gone for almost two months and had consumed nearly half of the four months’ worth of rations they had left with. Captain Musgrave decided it was time to start heading for home. No one disagreed. They departed Campbell Island on 27 December 1863 with the wind blowing hard from the northwest. As they approached the Auckland Islands, Musgrave found that he could not sail past them without getting dangerously close to land. He decided the safest course of action would be to find shelter in one of the inlets and wait for the wind to shift. They dropped anchor in what they would later learn was Carnley Harbour on 31 December. But soon after arriving, their haven turned out to be anything but when it was lashed by a powerful storm. On the night of January 2, the wind shifted and blew at hurricane strength, as the seas foamed and grew mountainous around them.  

    Site of the Grafton wreck site, Auckland Island. Courtesy, Google Maps.

        For a time, the Grafton rode out the maelstrom. Then one anchor chain snapped, and the second anchor began to drag. At midnight, the schooner was driven up onto a rocky beach. “Within fifteen minutes, she was nearly full of water, with heavy sea breaking over her,” Musgrave later wrote of the ordeal.   

    The crew gathered provisions and warm clothing and piled it all on deck. Then everyone found shelter where they could, and waited for daylight as the storm raged around them. Francois Raynal had fallen ill sometime earlier, but his shipmates looked out for him during that bleak night. In the morning, they climbed into their small dinghy, which was already filled with supplies. Captain Musgrave tied a rope to the Grafton and slowly let it run out as the overloaded dinghy was pushed towards land. When they were close to the beach, one of the seamen, Alexander McLaren, jumped into the surf holding a rope tied off to the boat’s bow. He waded ashore and then wrapped the rope around a tree. As Musgrave let his line out, McLaren pulled his in, and the boat made it through the surf to land safely on the beach. It was that level of simple cooperating that would stand them in good stead during the months that followed.

    Captain Thomas Musgrave. Source: Castaway on the Auckland Islands, 1866.

        The castaways spent that night sleeping on the cold, wet ground, but were no doubt grateful that they had made it off the wrecked schooner alive. As for the Grafton, she was pounded to pieces, with no prospect of being repaired and refloated. After the weather had cleared sufficiently, they returned to the wreck. Their priority was to salvage the sails and timber spars, enough to build a small hut so they had shelter from the harsh elements. Despite being marooned on a remote island, Captain Musgrave and the others believed it would only be a matter of time before a ship passed by and they would be rescued.

       But as the months rolled by, their hopes of being found ebbed away and finally vanished completely. The small amount of water-damaged sea biscuit and salted pork they had saved from the schooner had run out long ago. Then, for the next 18 months, they survived on a diet comprised mainly of seal meat. Raynal, who over time recovered his strength, was able to brew a passable ale, which he believed would help keep scurvy at bay.

    Inside the hut on Auckland Island. Source: Wrecked on a Reef, Raynal, 1874.

         The castaways strengthened their hut, built a fireplace and chimney, and furnished it with stretchers, a table, and stools. Lanterns fuelled with seal oil gave the interior a warm, comforting glow. When not out procuring food and water or keeping vigil for any ship that might pass by, Musgrave taught his illiterate sailors how to read. The castaways also passed their time playing chess and dominoes with bone pieces Raynal had carved by hand. They also played cards for a time, but Raynal eventually destroyed the pack when it became evident that Musgrave was a poor loser. As their clothes deteriorated, they were replaced with seal-skin garments. In short, they made their home as comfortable as circumstances would allow.   

    After spending a second summer on Auckland Island without ever seeing another soul, the castaways decided to wait no longer to be rescued. It was now around March 1865, and another freezing winter was fast approaching. They considered constructing a new vessel from the Grafton’s wreckage, and they even built a forge to assist them. However, the venture was abandoned for want of an auger to drill holes through the timbers. Instead, they turned to making their twelve-foot (3.6 metre) dinghy more seaworthy. They extended its length by 76 cm, built up the sides and furnished it with a deck. When it was finished, Musgrave found it was so unstable that it would have been too dangerous to call all five of them to safety.

     

    Preparing the dinghy to escape from Auckland Island. Source: Wrecked on a Reef, Raynal, 1874.

       On 19 July 1865, Captain Musgrave set off in the dinghy with only two men, Francois Raynal and Alexander McLaren, promising to return quickly to rescue George Harris and the cook, Henry Brown. After five days of hard sailing through foul weather, they reached Stewart Island, 450 kilometres to their north. They put into Port Adventure and fell in with the Flying Scud. The next morning, Musgrave and his mates were taken the final 50 km across Foveaux Strait to Invercargill on New Zealand’s South Island.   

    After sufficient funds were raised by the good folk of Invercargill, a ship was chartered to take Captain Musgrave back to Auckland Island to retrieve his two shipmates. The Grafton’s story is a testament to what can be accomplished when a group of resourceful individuals, aided by a measure of good fortune, work together for their common good.

    As chance would have it, the survivors of another ship, the Invercauld, had washed up on the northern end of Auckland Island around the same time.   Unfortunately, theirs is a far different story and is the subject of a future blog.

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

    Please enter your email address below to be notified of future blogs.

  • The Loss of the Duroc and the rise of la Deliverance

    The French steamer Duroc wrecked on Mellish Reef. Source: Wikicommons.

       On the night of 12-13 August 1856, the French Naval steam corvette Duroc was wrecked on Mellish Reef about 800 km off the Queensland coast. After the ship ran aground, her passengers and crew, numbering 70 people, made it onto a small sand cay where they were safe for the time being. However, they were stranded far from regular shipping channels, and the chance of their being rescued was remote. Captain Vissiere thought their only chance of getting off the islet was to build a new boat from the wreckage of the old.

       The Duroc had set off from Port de France (Noumea), New Caledonia, five days earlier, but on that night she ran aground on a submerged coral reef and could not get off. Each passing swell pounded the hull onto the reef, and she began taking on water. Fearing the ship might break apart during the night, Captain Vissiere ordered the crew to start bringing all stores, provisions, and water casks up on deck. He also had the four lifeboats prepared in case they had to abandon ship during the night. Then Vissiere had an anxious wait until morning, when he could better assess their situation.   

    Daylight revealed the ship was well and truly lodged on the reef, and they were surrounded by breaking seas. But about four kilometres away, there was a small, low-lying sandy islet which seemed to offer a place of refuge. So began the laborious task of ferrying all the ship’s stores and personnel to dry land. Over the next 10 days, they stripped the Duroc of its masts, bowsprit, sails, spars, blacksmith’s forge, a water distillation plant and the cook’s oven. By 23 August, they had emptied the stranded vessel of anything useful and established a comfortable camp on the tiny cay. Captain Vissiere was satisfied that their immediate survival was assured, but they were stranded nearly 800 km from the nearest land, and rescue seemed unlikely.

    Survivors of the wrecked Duroc on Mellish Reef building the La Deliverance. Source: Wikicommons.

       Vissiere prided himself on being a competent master mariner, and he could not account for how his ship had run aground. He took several unhurried astrological observations on the island and would later claim that the reef he had struck was, in fact, some distance from where it was laid down on his chart. Feeling vindicated, the captain then turned his mind to finding a way back to civilisation, for not only was he responsible for his crew, but his wife and baby daughter accompanied him.

       Captain Vissiere felt that his best course of action would be to make for Australia’s east coast, where he could expect to find help from a passing ship. However, the lifeboats could carry only a fraction of those stranded on the small island. So, Captain Vissiere opted to send his First Mate, Lieutenant Vaisseau, off with the three largest boats and about half the crew. He would remain on the island with his wife, daughter, and about 30 others. They would construct a new vessel from the timber they had salvaged from the Duroc and make their escape if no one had come for them in the interim.   

    The three boats set off on 25 August with instructions to make for Cape Tribulation, where, with any luck, they would meet a British ship sailing the Great Barrier Reef’s inner passage. Cape Tribulation was probably chosen because it was easily recognisable and it was where the reef pinched in close to the coast, funnelling any passing ships close to land.

    Mellish Reef. Courtesy Google Maps

       After setting off from Mellish Reef, the three boats encountered rough weather, which threatened to capsize the heavily overloaded craft. Lt Vaisseau tried tethering the three boats together so they would not become separated, but in the rough seas, this proved dangerous, and the lines were cut. After weathering the conditions for two days, Vaisseau decided they should jettison everything non-essential to lighten the load and raise their freeboard.

       Then, one day, while Lt Vaisseau was taking his noon observation, his boat was struck by a rogue wave, tossing him into the sea. Unable to swim against the current to make it back on board his lifeboat, he would have drowned had another boat trailing astern not been able to come close enough to rescue him. Vaisseau had a lucky escape, for he was only plucked from the water as his strength was beginning to fail him.

       After five days at sea, on the evening of 30 August, they crossed through the Great Barrier Reef near Cape Tribulation and anchored in calm waters for the night. The men thought the worst of the ordeal was behind them, and they would soon fall in with a passing ship. Lt Vaisseau noted they still had 72 kgs of sea biscuits, 20 litres of brandy and 60 litres of wine when they reached the Australian coast. However, shared among 36 hungry men, that would last them only another few days.

       The next day, they made land, filled their water casks, and then bore north, hugging the shore, pushed along by the prevailing southerly winds. They stopped each night in the lee of islands, foraged for roots, greens and shellfish, and cast out lines hoping to catch fish. They only delved into the supply of sea biscuits when their efforts failed to find enough food.

       By 9 September, they had reached Albany Island in the Torres Strait. They continued sailing past Booby Island, unaware that there was an emergency store of food and water there to aid shipwrecked sailors. Having sighted not a single ship while off the Australian coast, they ventured out into the Arafura Sea. Lt Vaisseau decided they should head for the Dutch settlement of Kupang on Timor Island. The three boats finally arrived on the evening of 22 September, and not a moment too soon, for their food had run out several days earlier.

    Construction of a new vessel La Deliverance from the wreckage of the Duroc on Mellish Reef. Source: Wikicommons.

        Meanwhile, Captain Vissiere and the remaining men had been kept busy constructing the new vessel, which they named La Deliverance. Under the directions from the ship’s master carpenter, they sawed the Duroc’s lower masts into planks and fixed them to a frame. The new craft measured 14 metres in length and was completed around the time Lt Vaisseau and his party reached Timor Island.

       On 2 October, La Deliverance was launched, and they sailed away from the island they had called home for the past six weeks. Captain Vissiere intended to make for the Australian mainland, just as his lieutenant and the three boats had done. Once off land, he would decide whether they should head north, through Torres Strait and on to Kupang, or turn south towards Port Curtis (Gladstone), which was the most northerly settlement on the east coast at the time. When he reached the Australian coast, he found the same southerly trade winds that Lt Vaisseau had.

       Despite the seemingly optimistic start, the passage was arduous, hampered as it was by unpredictable weather. Prolonged calms left them stranded for days at a time. The doldrums were only relieved by violent storms that lashed them mercilessly and threatened the safety of the vessel. By the time they were rounding Cape York, the boat was leaking alarmingly. Captain Vissiere pulled in at Albany Island so urgent repairs could be made before they left the relative safety of the Australian mainland. Once the leaks were plugged, they got underway, ready to cross the Arafura Sea. On 30 October, four weeks after setting off from Mellish Reef, La Deliverance sailed into Kupang harbour.   

    Though they suffered greatly during the ordeal, Captain Vissiere did not lose a single person as a result of the wreck or the 4000 km voyages undertaken by the survivors to reach Kupang.

    © Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2023.

    To be notified of future blogs, please enter your email address below.

  • Bato to the Rescue – 1854

    Shipwreck survivors take to their boat.. Source: Tales of Shipwrecks and Adventures at Sea, 1856.

       In 1854, the fully-rigged Dutch ship Bato rescued not one, not two, but three separate parties of shipwreck survivors whose ships had come to grief in separate mishaps in Australia’s northern waters. In the space of a few weeks, these three ships all ran aground while attempting to navigate the treacherous waters of the Great Barrier Reef and the Torres Strait.

       The first casualty was the 521-ton ship Fatima. On 3 June, the Fatima left Melbourne bound for Singapore via Torres Strait. She made good time sailing up the east coast until, on 26 June, she was within sight of Raine Island. The low-lying island and its distinctive 20-metre-tall tower marked a channel through the Great Barrier Reef and the start of a well-charted passage through Torres Strait.

       Then, just 12nm (20 km) south of Raine Island, her voyage ended abruptly and violently when she crashed into the Great Detached Reef. The Fatima could not be saved, and her captain and crew were forced to take to the boats to save their lives. A refuge of sorts was close at hand, so they struck out for Raine Island off in the distance. There they remained, subsisting on a plentiful supply of seabird eggs while they waited to be rescued.

       A couple of days after the Fatima left Melbourne, the 391-ton barque Elizabeth also set sail from that same port. She was bound for Moulmein, Burma, and also intended to pass through Torres Strait by the Raine Island passage. However, disaster struck on 28 June when the barque ran aground on a small coral outcrop about 28nm (55 km) south of Raine Island. Fortunately, no lives were lost, and after a considerable amount of effort, the crew managed to get the ship off the reef and back into deep water. However, the hull had been breached, and Captain Churchill realised that his ship was taking on more water than the pumps could remove. Churchill made the difficult decision to abandon his ship, and he and his men took to the boats. They made their way through Torres Strait and arrived at Booby Island five days later. The island was marked on charts of the day as a haven for shipwrecked sailors where a supply of food and fresh water could be found.

    The Wreck of the Thomasine. Courtesy State Library of Queensland.

       The third ship, the Thomasine, departed Sydney on 8 June bound for Batavia. She also intended to cross through the Torres Strait. But she ended her northerly run up the coast on 19 June when she struck an uncharted reef about 270 km east of present-day Port Douglas.

       Her master, Captain Holmes would later recall that around 8 o’clock on the evening of the 19th, the ship grazed a submerged reef where no such obstruction should have existed. He had been on deck at the time and had immediately gone to his cabin to consult his chart, to confirm what he suspected. While he was standing at his chart table, still consulting his map, the look-out called, “Breakers ahead.” Captain Holmes raced back on deck to the daunting sight of a long line of breaking waves ahead that extended around to his left and right, almost completely encircling the ship.

       Holmes and his crew kept the Thomasine from running aground during the night by tacking back and forth in the open water between the reefs. The next morning he saw how dire their situation was. The ship was trapped by an almost unbroken ring of breaking waves, denoting the presence of submerged coral reefs. Reefs that were absent from the charts but have since been added and bear the name Holmes Reefs.

       The wind began to rise and Holmes realised his only chance of escape was to try to make it through one of the narrow gaps he could see in the otherwise extended line of surf. He selected one, hoping it would allow his ship to reach the safety of deep water beyond. Unfortunately, the channel proved too shallow, and the Thomasine struck heavily, becoming stuck. Unable to get the Tomasine free, the captain made the difficult decision to abandon ship. The crew then readied two boats with as much food and water as they dared carry.

       Captain Holmes was doubly concerned as they tried to escape the ship and the surrounding reef. Not only did he feel responsible for his crew, but he was also accompanied by his wife and three children, the youngest of whom was just four months old. He divided his crew evenly between the two boats for the voyage north to Booby Island and a cache of stores. However, one sailor died during the struggle to get the boats through the roiling seas surging around the ship. Holmes   

    Over the next fortnight or so, the 18 castaways steadily made their way north, surviving on short rations and less than one litre of water per day from a small cask taken from the ship. But by 6 July, they had covered about 800 km and had reached Bird Island in the Torres Strait. Captain Holmes calculated that it would only take them another one or two days to reach Booby Island.  

    Map showing location of the three shipwrecks in Torres Strait. Courtesy Google Maps.

       It was around this time, the Dutch ship Bato was passing through the same waters. She had sailed from Hobart on 10 June and steadily made her way up the east coast of Australia. As Captain Brocksmit approached the Raine Island entrance, he sighted the Fatima castaways camped on the island. Ten men were taken on board while the rest followed in the Bato’s wake in their own boat until they had reached the Middle Bank well inside the Great Barrier Reef.

       The next day, 6 July, the Bato’s captain came across the survivors from the Thomasine off Bird Island and made room for them on his ship as well. Finally, the following day, the castaways from the Elizabeth were spotted on Booby Island, where they had landed four days earlier.

       Now carrying as many as 60 additional people, the Bato put the dangerous waters of Torres Strait behind her. Captain Brocksmit made his way along the Indonesian archipelago, arriving in Batavia on 25 July 1854. The survivors were disembarked, and the captains were faced with the unenviable task of notifying their respective ship owners of their losses.

    © Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2023.

    To be notified of future blogs, please enter your email address below.

  • 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.

    To be notified of future blogs, please enter your email address below.