HMAS Sydney (I). Photo Courtesy Australian War Memorial.
In late 1914 HMAS Sydney was accompanying the first convoy of AIF troops leaving Australia to fight in the First World War. However, a few days after the convoy left Albany WA, the Sydney was ordered to investigate the presence of a suspicious vessel near the Cocos Islands. The ship turned out to be the German Cruiser Emden which had been terrorising Allied shipping across the Indian Ocean since the beginning of the war.
On 9 November 1914 the Sydney found the Emden and immediately went into action. A few days later Stoker Henry Nielsen wrote a letter to his mother living in Rockhampton, Queensland, telling her of their great victory. The account below has been taken from his letter which appeared in the Morning Bulletin newspaper on 6 January the following year.
Emden before she was destroyed by HMAS Sydney at Cocos Keeling Islands in Nov 1914.
“Just a line to let you know I am still alive and kicking in spite of the Emden. I have nothing to write about except our scrap with the Emden. We got a wireless message from Cocos Islands about seven o’clock on the 9th instant saying that there was a German warship lying there with a collier. We were about fifty or sixty miles away from there, and we altered course and made for Cocos at full speed.”
“We came up with the Emden about 9.30 am and she let go a shot at us at 11,000 yards. We let go a ranging shot immediately after, and then both ships went at it hammer and tongs. … Our shots told far more than theirs as we were only slightly damaged and our shots carried away her bridge, foremast, and three funnels in quick succession. Early in the fight the Emden caught fire and continued to burn throughout.”
“One of their shots wrecked our range-finder and killed the men who were working it.”
Emden at Cocos Keeling Islands viewed from a HMAS Sydney boat dated 9 Nov 1914. Courtesy State Library of NSW, FL541160.
“The action lasted an hour and thirty-six minutes. The Emden got an awful doing and the captain beached her on South Keeling Island. She continued to fire for a short time after she was aground, but we soon silenced her. …”
“She was still flying the German flag, and when signalled would not reply so we put another broadside into her and she fired another couple of shots. However, they did not want any more as they pulled the flag down. … It was late in the afternoon when the Emden hauled down her flag and we went out to sea and cruised about outside until morning. … We then went back to the Emden to see what we could do for the wounded. We were there all the remainder of that day fetching off German wounded, and prisoners. …”
“From mainmast to stern she is just a shell, there being only the deck and hull left, all the rest being burnt out. Her three funnels are lying over the top of one another. Her foremast is down and her bridge is blown away. The starboard side of her deck is full of great holes, and she is torn up everywhere. There are holes in the side that you could walk through. …”
Postcard commemorating the Sydney’s victory..
“During the action we made the best speed the Sydney ever did. We got just on thirty knots out of her. Pretty good going!. … When we had finished with the Emden’s wounded we came on to [Colombo, Sri Lanka], arriving here last Sunday.”
Stoker Nielsen survived the war and was discharged from the Navy in 1919.
Wreck of the Brig Maria with the New Guinea Expedition. Source: Australian Town and Country, 9 Mar 1872, p. 17.
If ever there was a cautionary tale warning of the perils of going to sea ill-prepared, it is that of the tragic loss of the Maria in 1872.
A Marine Board inquiry would blame the captain’s poor navigation and equally poor character for the loss of the ship and so many lives. However, the underlying causes of the disaster dated back to the ship’s purchase and a litany of poorly thought-through decisions made by a committee of young and ambitious men. They had become fixated on seeking adventure and fortune in the wilds of New Guinea and were willing to cut whatever corners necessary to see their plan come to fruition.
In late 1871, the more adventurous sons of some of Sydney’s leading families banded together to travel to New Guinea, where it was said that gold could be found in abundance. Brought up on stories of Australia’s earlier gold rushes, they wanted to leave their mark on the new frontier. They formed a committee and founded the New Guinea Gold Prospecting Association, charging newcomers £10 to go towards the expedition’s costs. Eventually, they signed up 70 men eager to try their luck.
The committee’s first task was to find a ship that would take them to New Guinea so they could prospect for gold in that largely unexplored part of the world. When no one would lease them a ship for the amount of money they could afford, they purchased an aging brig called Maria.
Expedition members onboard the Maria before sailing from Sydney. Photo Courtesy SLQ.
The Maria was over 25 years old, and her glory days were long behind her. She had been seeing out her final days hauling Newcastle coal down the coast to Sydney. Her only redeeming quality was her price. In fact, after a month of searching, she was the only ship they could afford. William Forster, one of the expedition’s survivors, later summed up the state of the vessel thus. “It would, perhaps, have been difficult to find a more unseaworthy old tub anywhere in the southern waters.”
When they were eventually ready to sail the Maria out of Sydney, the port authorities refused them clearance to sail under the Passenger Act because she was overcrowded, unseaworthy, and the passengers, all paid-up members of the prospecting association, were not adequately provided with safety equipment or provisions. Things might have turned out differently had the young men heeded the warning and remedied the shortcomings. But rather than do that, the committee signed on most of the passengers as members of the crew, so the Passenger Act no longer applied.
Alarm bells should have rung out loud and clear when, at the last moment, the captain they had hired refused to take the ship to sea. Feigning illness, it seems he had begun to doubt the wisdom of taking the overcrowded, unseaworthy old tub on a 3700 km passage through the Coral Sea during the North Australian cyclone season.
Then, rather than waste any more time recruiting another qualified master mariner, the committee accepted the first mate’s offer to captain the ship. It was put to a vote, and he was immediately elected to the post with barely a moment’s thought given to whether he was actually up to the task. Though he was officially the Maria’s captain he was more of a sailing master, unable to make decisions without first getting approval from the committee.
The Maria finally sailed out through Sydney Heads on 25 January 1872 with 75 people crammed on board. The first few days passed uneventfully, except for some emerging friction between the prospecting association’s members. They broadly fell into one of two groups: well-heeled, well-educated adventurous young gentlemen from some of the colonies’ leading families, and working-class miners and labourers hoping to make money on the new goldfields. It was probably the first time either group of men had spent time with the other, more or less as equals, and the mix proved volatile at times.
Wreck of the Maria. Image Courtesy SLQ.
Then, when they were only a few days away from reaching New Guinea, the Maria was caught in a ferocious storm. She was tossed around for five days and sustained serious damage. Water poured through gaps in the deck down into the accommodation, soaking everyone and everything. Her old sails were torn to shreds, rotted rigging snapped under the strain, and a rogue wave tore away a length of the bulwark. They lost all control of the ship for a time after a second rogue wave unshipped the tiller and destroyed the associated steering gear. After one-third of the expedition members signed a petition pleading to be put ashore, the majority voted to turn around and head for Moreton Bay to disembark those who had had enough and make repairs.
But, the badly damaged Maria struggled to make headway against the prevailing southerly trade winds. Captain Stratman decided to make for Cleveland Bay (present-day Townsville) instead. However, he would need to find his way through the Great Barrier Reef guided only by a general coastal chart with a scale of one inch to 50 nautical miles (approx. 1 cm to 40 km). Such a small scale would have provided him with little detail and no doubt less comfort that they would reach Townsville unscathed.
With a lookout stationed high on a mast above, watching for submerged hazards, the Maria gingerly made her way west and soon became entangled in the giant maze of coral reefs and shoals. Thinking they were approaching Magnetic Island and the safety of Cleveland Bay, the captain was unknowingly approaching the coast some 90 km further north. Then, in the early hours of 26 February, their luck finally ran out. The Maria ran onto Bramble Reef off Hinchinbrook Island and began taking on water. A few hours later, she sank to the bottom until just her masts showed above the surface of the water.
Before that happened, Captain Stratman, with a handful of others, had already abandoned the ship in one of their three boats, leaving everyone else to their fate. The class divide separating the expedition members made it almost impossible for anyone to coordinate their efforts. No one would take orders from anyone else. Some eventually made it to Cardwell in the two remaining lifeboats. About a dozen men were last seen clinging to the rigging but they had vanished before rescuers finally found the wreck.
Others had taken to two makeshift rafts, but many of them drowned, and of those who reached land, half were massacred by local Aborigines. Of the 75 people who sailed out of Sydney on the Maria, almost half, 35, lost their lives.
The full story is told in A Treacherous Coast: Ten Tales of Shipwreck and Survival from Queensland Waters available through Amazon.
In January 1918, Donald Mackenzie found himself marooned on a tiny uninhabited island after his vessel sank during one of the most powerful cyclones to cross the Central Queensland coast.
The tough 56-year-old Scott was a seaman on the coastal auxiliary schooner Orete, which had sailed from Maryborough bound for Mackay with a cargo of sawn timber. She was heavily laden. Once the hold had been filled, more timber had been stacked on deck, pushing her deeper in the water. The captain thought the tough little vessel could handle it and set off down the Mary River, where its mouth opened into Hervey Bay. Even as they crossed the usually calm waters protected by Fraser Island (K’Gari), they could see that the weather was deteriorating. As they bore north, the sea conditions got progressively worse. These were the days before ships carried radios, and little did they know a massive cyclone was forming ahead of them. By the time they reached the Percy Islands, and were only 200 km from their destination, the barometer plummeted. Huge seas pummelled the overloaded vessel. Rather than continue to sail into the encroaching storm, the captain decided to anchor in the lee of Pine Islet to ride it out.
However, as the cyclone approached the coast, the wind shifted, and the anchors began to drag. The Orete was blown from her anchorage under bare poles. They tried cutting away the deck cargo to lighten the load, but in the process, the captain broke his leg when the timbers moved. Then the mate tried to launch their lifeboat, but it was washed away before they could board it. In the end, the captain, the mate and two crewmen huddled below deck to see out the storm. Unfortunately, the schooner soon foundered, trapping all four men in the cabin to go down with the ship. Mackenzie and another sailor were only spared because they had been on deck when the schooner capsized. Both men were plunged into the heaving sea, but Mackenzie wore a life belt tied around his waist. He swam to a floating cabin door and held on as the storm raged around him. His mate was not so lucky and was never seen again. After four or five hours, Mackenzie washed up on a beach surrounded by flotsam from the wrecked ship.
Orete survivor, Donald Mackenzie (right) holding his life preserver. Source: The Queenslander Pictorial Supplement, 9 March 1918.
When the weather subsided, Mackenzie took stock of his situation. He had no idea where he had landed; he would later learn it was Tynemouth Island. The foreshore was littered with timber and other debris, but among the mess of litter, he found a few onions and pumpkins. They would be his sole source of food for the coming days. Perhaps key to his ultimate survival, he also found a crate of kerosene cans.
A quick search of the small uninhabited island had revealed no permanent supply of water. So he emptied the kerosene cans of their contents and filled them with fresh water before the puddles dried up. Looking out from the east coast, Mackenzie could see another island, and he thought he could see several buildings. That would later prove to be Iron Islet.
Without the means to make a fire or attract attention, Mackenzie resolved to build a raft to cross the expanse of water. He broke apart the kerosene crate and salvaged the nails. He then used them to fix long planks together to form a raft. After ten days, Mackenzie was ready to make the crossing to Iron Islet.
That time had not come soon enough. Hunger and the blazing hot conditions were taking their toll on him. Several days had passed since he had eaten the last of the raw vegetables, and he had been subsisting on shellfish smashed from the rocks ever since. During the day, there was no respite from the searing tropical sun. And, at night, he was tormented ceaselessly by mosquitoes and ants, making sleep all but impossible.
Donald Mackenzie’s raft. Source: The Queenslander Pictorial Supplement, 9 March 1918.
Mackenzie dragged his raft into the water and started towards Iron Islet using a broad timber plank for a paddle. But he was soon caught in a strong current ripping through the passage separating the two islands. He was swept along by the current, which threatened to take him out into the vastness of the Coral Sea. Mackenzie made the difficult decision to abandon his raft and swim back to Tynemouth Island while he still had a chance of reaching land.
Disheartened as Mackenzie was, he knew he was growing weaker by the day. If he was ever going to survive, he had to build another raft. This one took him eight days to complete. Then, on Sunday, 10 February, he dragged his cumbersome craft into the water, straddled it, and started paddling away from shore.
He was caught in the strong current for a second time. He used every ounce of strength his fatigued muscles could give him and inched the raft across the passage. After an almost super-human effort, Mackenzie reached the southern end of Hunter Island, north of Iron islet. There, he rested before setting off again to cross the one-kilometre channel that now separated him from his destination. Again, he was caught in a powerful current. This one was even stronger than the last. He paddled furiously, but it was hopeless. He had no control over the craft, and as he looked back he could see the buildings of Iron Islet disappearing from sight.
Mackenzie’s approximate course,
At one time or another, most people experience that sinking feeling when success—so close at hand—slips away and all seems lost. This was Mackenzie’s darkest moment. He had survived the wreck that had claimed the lives of his shipmates. He had been cast away, Robinson Crusoe-like, on a deserted island for 19 days, suffering from hunger and exposure. He had built two rafts with his bare hands and escaped. But it had all been for nothing. Mackenzie was rocketing out into the vast Pacific Ocean, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He was mentally exhausted, and the most recent frenzied paddling had left him physically spent. But as the channel widened, the current slackened and the raft’s headlong progress slowed.
Mackenzie looked towards an island to his right and could not believe his eyes. There he saw sheep grazing in a field. With renewed spirit, he drew on his last reserves of energy and paddled towards shore. As he got closer, he saw the distinctive outline of a cottage roof partly obscured by trees. He kept paddling until the prow of the raft ran up onto a sandy beach, where he waded ashore on unsteady legs. He would soon learn he had landed on Marble Island. Most importantly, he had survived; his ordeal was over.
The full story is told in A Treacherous Coast: Ten Tales of Shipwreck and Survival from Queensland Waters available through Amazon.
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.
Tales from the Quarterdeck 