Man's greatest survival story EVER - Grafton shipwreck 1864

foreign Tales Grim tiles many of them we just don't know about because nobody survived absolutely uh you can rest assured that the story of pretty much every shipwreck that's ever happened the same kinds of things will have surrounded them but of course with no one left to bring the stories back we just don't know them some of the places we're going to talk about and we'll talk about the Auckland Islands shortly there have been a heap of shipwrecks there and there may have been shipwrecks that no one even knows about because the great Stories the stories of the greatness of the people who were involved just haven't reached us well let's talk about New Zealand to begin with before we focus on the Auckland Islands to kick off with there are shipwrecks all around the world but we have some pretty spectacular ones in our own local history we sure do I guess that's partly because we're a maritime Nation uh the very first people to settle New Zealand the Maori came here by sea and everyone subsequently came by sea until the Advent of long-distance aircraft of course and you can't devise a means of Transport without also having to put up with the um the systems failures where transport comes unstuck and then the days of ships that was shipwrecks the Maori even have stories about ShopRite some of their stories around our coasts commemorate uh great shipwrecks down at moireki for example there are stories of one of the canoes meeting a pretty spectacular face just off offshore there so as long as ships have been visiting New Zealand Shores there have been shipwrecks it's the nature of the Beast some of them are as good as stories you'll find from anywhere else in the world really I suspect shipwrecks are happening Castaways continue to happen today even with the Advent of GPS better Communications and more seaworthy vessels the sea will often win and because of the vastness especially of uh the great oceans that Castaways and shipwrecks will still happen yeah it's bound to be happening even as we speak in many ways I guess where people are driven to see of necessity and the way that boat people are and you often hear stories of Pacific Islands fishermen who have driven out to sea and extraordinary Tales of survival there at times yachtsmen but then all it takes is to get a great big Ultra Modern ocean liner with a slightly faulty Captain aboard such as happened in the Mediterranean recently and you've got a recipe for disaster there straight away as well uh let's kick off with the Auckland Islands now this is how many miles or kilometers south of Stewart Island to give people a bit of an atlas in their head yeah if you go straight South basically from Stewart Island for 285 nautical miles or 400 kilometers for land lovers you'll strike the Auckland Islands now the significance of them in the history of seafaring is that in the days when people were sailing to Australia they would sail what was known as the great circle route the idea being that because the bottom of the world is pretty much uncluttered with land you get this belt of Westerly winds that just roar ceaselessly around the circumference of the globe and in the days of winds uh born vessels that of course was like a super highway so you duck down this into the higher latitudes and pick up the westerlies and sail around to the point where you wanted to go and then duck up again to your destination sounds really simple of course that's the Southern Ocean and those latitudes aren't known as the Furious 50s for nothing the westerlies are incredible as are the Seas that they kick up in the Southern Ocean which also happens to be bloody cold so not for the faint-hearted relief but that was the standard route for vessels sailing up from England to Australia or a little bit later on New Zealand Travelers if you're sailing from Tasmania to Cape Horn it if you looked south of New Zealand you can see the sub-antactic islands there one group is called the snares and one group's called the traps and after that they actually get just slightly nastier and worse and the Auckland Islands were the worst of the lot is that why they're called the snares and The Traps because they sneer and trapped ships that um in the middle of the night don't know they're there that's right cook named the traps because yeah someone sailing around that piece of land would seriously risk running into them and then 50 odd years later when the snares were discovered George Vancouver who was their Discoverer recognized again that anyone sailing to New Zealand or sailing from Australia had better look out for these things because they were laid almost as though someone was trying to trap shipping with them funnily enough though it was the aucklands that were the the real ship killer there are a number of reasons for that first thing is they were first discovered in 1806 and they were quite accurately chartered by a man named Abraham Bristow but then after that the only people who had any business calling there really were Sailors and Whalers mostly sealers and of course when you've discovered a bit of a gold mine sort of crawling and bouncing with seals flopping around on every available space you're not going to declare to the world exactly where you found it so it seems as though one of the influential charts used in the early days of shipping in this area chartered them 25 to 30 miles out of position another one of course is that the Southern Ocean being very cold it's frequently closed in and clogged up and overcast and Misty so in the days when you needed to see the sun in order to work out where you were you were quite often sailing blind and that could go on for days it's fine if it's a day or two but say four or five days and all you've got to go on is your last position and a bit of educated guesswork that area of uncertainty becomes pretty wide so you've got these islands right on your route and the weather's been closed in for four or five days you don't know where you are and the chart is showing you they're actually 35 miles out of position it's not hard to see why there's 11 shipwrecks on the coast of the Auckland Islands this isn't like being stranded on a tropical island the the weather there is just atrocious you can get the odd nice day but mostly it just gets strafed with hail and sleet and snow and rain in a fairly High rotation it's absolutely pounded by these Westerly winds that we've mentioned before because it's about the only thing in their way those westerlies kick up the most enormous Seas which just smash into the West Coast which is completely perpendicular I've had the privilege of being there and it really is the most extraordinary landscape if you stand on say Queen Street or outer key and look at the skyline of the city and imagine that that Skyline was just rock Black Rock it has just a bit of a feel for what the west coast of the aucklands was like the cliffs are up to a sort of seven eight hundred feet high even higher in places and it's just one continuous Rampart and so you're sailing along not really knowing where you are four or five days after your last sighting you know you're roughly in the vicinity of land but you think you're well clear to the South or the North and then suddenly out of the Mist this is what you see and the shock of that line would be enough to to carry away a few faint-hearted Souls I would think and a strong Westerly battering you into it means uh there's no reverse for this right these ships did not have a reverse they didn't have engines and they didn't sail to weather that means they couldn't go into the wind very well so generally speaking what happens is once they were in that situation nothing could save them the wind in the sea was all conspiring to push them into the cliffs one of the most astounding stories there are many but I don't think I'm that alone in saying that this is peculiar uh is the story of the Grafton and the invercold because these two wrecks both on Auckland Island at the same time and yet they never met up they never knew the other was there it was quite extraordinary utterly extraordinary I think in World terms as well which is what makes this one of the great stories yeah uh listeners interested in finding out more about it could read John druitt's book it's called Island of the lost and that tells these two stories together that's a terrific book it does make you feel rather comfy when you're lying in bed reading those sort of stories they're lying a warm baths employ you appreciation yeah the Grafton was a small vessel really she was a schooner so she had two masks she's about 90 tons so it was probably about 80 or 90 feet long she was made of the wreck of a Spanish man of war interestingly which is why why quite a lot of the Shipwreck Still Remains at Auckland Island but she was sailing out of Sydney in 1864 under the command of a man named Thomas Musgrave and with only four crew aboard their plan was to go prospecting on Campbell Island where it had long been suspected there was tin in Copper and where there's copper there's quite commonly gold so they were out to make their Fortune they thought by discovering the motherload Somewhere In The Deep South they failed they got to Campbell islands and they found nothing of any Valley whatsoever and they also discovered that their plan B which was to to knock a few seals on the head and take the Skins back to defray expenses was no good either because everyone had been there before them and the seals were all gone too so plan C was to head across to the Auckland islands and do a spot of ceiling there just to try to get something in return for their investment so off they went they sailed across it was a pretty rough Crossing by the time they reached Conley Harbor which teachers in the south of Auckland Island group they were pretty glad to see land and they dropped anchor in what looked to them to be the perfect Anchorage High Cliffs around them come Waters completely shut off so they thought from the wind and then to their ashahara the wind switched to the north west and it was roughly hurricane Force as they estimated and they dragged their anchor in the ship was driven ashore and wrecked she wasn't wasn't a total wreck she wasn't smashed to lips but she um she couldn't be solved the holes knocked on the side were too great to come down she went they blunder the shore all sides of them they managed to sell the Jiffy bits and pieces significantly they had a box of matches though they didn't know it when they got ashore they had some flowers some biscuits some salt mate some tobacco some sugar and a couple of cooking utensils and subsequently they were able to go back and pull a few other bits and pieces off the wreck as well could they stay in the boat or were they out in the open they were out in the open initially when they first got ashore they did so by stringing a line with their their 12-foot dinghy ashore in one Brave man swimming the line onto the beach in this pounding surf uh once they got ashore they put a sail cloth up and they sort of handle paddled under that and the and the far from Clement weather until the morning and then after that they began to take stock what did they set about doing to try and survive would they have been hopeful that anyone would come around the corner soon yeah now that's a really good question because of course so far as anyone knew they were on Campbell Island so yes that they've they knew that someone might mount a search in a month's time but they knew that that person would be looking in the wrong place there are two journals have survived from the Shipwreck one by a man named Francois a Frenchman um I won't continue to attempt to pronounce his name because my French was awful so I'll call him Rhino and uh there was Thomas Musgrave Rhino was sort of the Paul McCartney to Musgraves John Lennon uh Reynold was an optimist in Musgrave appears to have been a real misery guts actually he could be forgiven for that given the circumstances but whereas the others sort of bore up and got on with it and rainel in particular managed to be optimistic at pretty much all times poor old Musgrave had real bouts of depression which he recorded the amusement of posterity in this journal the first thing they had to confront when they got ashore was the Pretty Natural tendency to despair completely that they would be rescued Reynold had his moment he wandered off from the rest and he reckons despair completely overcame him but then he uh he just managed to shake that off and then he never seems to have suffered another moment's doubt he was just pretty clear that if they weren't rescued they would rescue themselves from that moment forward Musgrave was initially yeah just a bit stunned and shocked I think and then he just completely lost it but Reynold managed to talk him around pretty much that's the way this group of five men got on for the next 18 months that they were assured what they did is they just fed off one another's resources and by resources it wasn't just physical it was also their own mental strength their ability to Jolly one another out of this awful situation the level of organization that Musgrave put in place has me scratching my head having region Drew its book I was just amazed to hear that there was a plan we will make a proper Hut and they spent ages making a proper Hut before going in it and in the meantime just surviving in the little bits of branches and stuff yeah that's right they had their little bivouac but they decided that if they were going to survive they needed a decent hat they were there in the summer and it was awful so what what they needed was this is summer we better get ready that's right that's right and so they were very fortunate in that they had in their midst a do-it-yourself God in the form of Reynold he saved their bacon with his Ingenuity there's just no doubt about it and the list of his accomplishments is just unbelievable when you look at the nandy pamby people they throw onto islands and film them called Survivor and you compare and contrast this humble little Frenchman uh it's yeah there's they're different species as you say organization was a big part of it they divided their labor and so while Reynold was busy devising a way of making cement out of seashells the rest of them were busy exploring and hunting as best they could to try to build up a bit of a stock of food that they could use while they were completely engaged in the business of building the Hut why was Reynold making cement well they knew they needed a fire and the best way to the safest way to have a fire and a hutch was going to be to have a decent chimney so away they went they um they made cement they built this great big huge pyramidal chimney using bits and pieces from the ship but mostly homemade cement in the rocks with which Auckland Island abounds so they built this huge chimney and then they built a Hut about 24 feet by 16 feet and that was their their home for the next 18 months how long did it take for them to make this thing while they were out there in the misery cold and getting wet and being bitten by sandflies and absolutely tormented by Blue bottles which apparently snack up on you and laid grape and touches and maggots and whatever crevice they can find which is not a happy thought no no they were in those conditions for around a month and of course every now and then a great big storm had come through and they couldn't do anything but huddled them tried to survive will they huddle while they were starting up this building site they were huddled just on the ahead of the beach really with the Grafton lying there taunting them with her smashed up remains just off the beach and the the building site was about 40 meters it's a surprisingly short distance from the water actually you just walk up the hill and it's not a not a steep hill and there's a small clearing where these days there's just a pile of rocks marking where the chimney was but in the meantime yes they were just bivou act in the bush and what does that mean in the bush what was over their heads a bit of sail cloth weren't really ferns or anything they could they could use to any great effect as as flooring so basically it was just the soft damp peasy soil of Auckland Island they were all immensely dissatisfied with their tint which leaked as you would expect and uh they couldn't wait to get this this hat finished the hat once that initially finished that of course was a big disappointment too they've all commented that they both commented and their um their journals that let in the wind very effectively it was just made of canvas over a over a Timber and what they call lathe frame just thin bits of of wood uh so they they thatched it eventually with tussock grass which was an epic Endeavor in its own right and eventually it got so comfortable that they had bookshelves for their four books they had spaces for their own belongings they had a table they had a desk and they even had a couple of little windows made of glass that they salvaged from the rig that's incredible resourcefulness they would have been not got a great diet here I don't think what were they eating what was their physical condition it's through which they struggled and built this Hut yeah they were pretty much exclusively uh eating seal meat and by that I mean sea lion meat but they all had a very violent intestinal reaction to a to a diet that consisted of sort of fat fried and fat over an open fire they were fortunate and that they discovered a plant that grows on most of the sub-antaractic islands called stillbocarpa which the sealers and the Whalers knew as Macquarie Island cabbage because sealers and Whalers quite commonly found themselves having to subsist on whatever they could find and this one was quite a handy starchy sort of root that gets scurvy at Bay rain will actually managed to distill Brandy from it but having discovered he was capable of it then threw it away and told the others he'd failed because he was afraid of what would happen if he introduced demon drink here I Reynold again again again but again all the while all the while that this was happening they've got their hearts they've got themselves installed in it there's just this nagging Despair and there's the interpersonal relations to be managed you've got five people who knew each other pretty well but there was this awkwardness because Musgrave was their Captain but the men now that Musgrave was the captain of nothing because he'd lost his ship we're getting a bit antsy they didn't like being told what to do because they felt they were doing most of the work and he was lying around basically scratching in his journal about how miserable he was so rain will manage that one as well he persuaded them all that it would be great if they held elections and elected themselves a leader and the others all agreed to this although the the ordinary seaman put in a writing Clause saying that if he was no good at it they could vote him out again and then they had the selection Reynold nominated Musgrave and he was unanimously elected so that small problem was brilliantly managed it really was and after that they had no further problems with leadership or insubordination it would have been a hard time on the anniversary of their wrecking and they kept a calendar they knew when that was a year had gone yeah um it was particularly hard because the anniversary came in the summer which was when they most expected or hoped to be rescued and of course when that anniversary came and went and there was no sign of anyone coming to rescue them despair was was biting pretty hard at that point and of course that's when they they started first contemplating the idea that they might have to rescue themselves poor old Musgrave did it particularly hard unlike the others he was married and had children reading his journalists it's heart-wrenching the way he he frequently finishes a passage that began somewhere completely differently just with a there's a lamentation about how hard his family must have it stay tuned to hear how this outrageous story of suffering and survival turns out winter is pretty Blake there are not that different to Summer it snows and it sleeps and it hails and it blows so it's pretty much like the summer the average temperature goes right down the hobbits just above zero for large periods of time and probably the worst thing about the winter is in the latter half of the winter the sea lions their staple food need to gain condition for the breeding season so they disappear off to Sea so these poor guys straggling out facing weather that that made it dangerous to venture out in the first place discovered that they could walk for up to 10 miles and not see a single seal pretty desperate times and they would have been starving they were starving they came pretty close there were times when I think it just came down to the fact that one or two of them had more energy than the rest that enabled them to to happen upon a stroke of lack one lazy seal that happened to be hanging around when it should be at Sea that kind of thing and they managed to keep between them and they managed to keep a fire going the entire time yeah from a box of matches that one of them happened to discover in this pocket and when you read these Castaway stories that that's the constant refrain that they're all looking around saying we need fire and they're all going well there's no Flint here there's no iron how are we going to make a fire and then someone will say hang on a minute and pull out a box of matches and of course the matches are always wet that's that's very important for your Castaway story that always went uh they they tried striking five before one finally caught and burned and after that of course they were never gonna let that fire go out it would have been a source of anxiety as well yeah don't let us go out just in case you needed another source of anxiety yeah yeah exactly yeah a second winter oh my goodness just to think okay after a second winter they had decided look no one's going to come and get us but but how does one contemplate getting out of there you haven't got a ship what are they gonna do swim yeah there you go they um they looked at each other and they knew that no one was coming to rescue them that summer so that meant another winter and Prospect and none of them could face that so they all decided they had to save themselves um Reynold's suggestion was to pull the Grafton apart and build up another smaller vessel and that all saved themselves in that so of course the men who'd made homemade soap he'd discovered a way of telling the um the seal skin so that they could make shoes uh he'd also made clothing out of it we've already seen him making cement of course uh he thought well I'll build a forge and so that's what he did of course everyone knows how to build a forge all you need is a furnace and Bellows and then you need to make charcoal and everyone knows how to make that he did it he he built a forge he managed to make charcoal out of the router he built his Forge and then he set about building himself some carpentry tools with his Forge they had lots of iron he built a forge to make tools to make a boat that's right yes freezing and you're hungry and you're miserable that's right and you're faced with the prospect of a winter where food is going to be even scarcer as well so even all this effect was a luxury expending the effort to rescue yourself was a luxury but yeah he said about it he built a saw he built hammers for various sorts they had to build every nail and every bolt they proposed to use and infect their plan to build a schooner came unstuck when Reynold found he was just completely unable to make a hand drill in auger he just couldn't temper a tip that would stay there when you were trying to drill through this hard Timber so that that plane was an object failure so he had to announce this to the group the fact that plan a was not going to work so he needed a plan B and as Plan B was that they would modify the ship's boat which they still had after all this time everyone was a bit of ghast at that because they looked at their poor old leaky wobbly 12-foot dinghy and thought 285 miles across the most turbulent oceans on on Earth in that no thank you but of course they had no auction so that became Plan B and that's what they did in order to make it seaworthy that they lengthened her so from a 12-foot boat they lengthened the Keel out to about 17 feet and then raised the gunnels raised the sides of the boat by a couple of feet as well and then decked her over it's remarkably similar in fact to what yeah these epic boat Journeys this one is right up there with them they um modified The Vessel so that she was roughly seaworthy they filled her with ballast which was mostly rocks and iron and then they all piled merrily aboard to sailor back to the place where they proposed stocking up and leaving from and discovered that she just wouldn't sail with five people aboard she would barely float so then they head to the side who got left behind Musgrave decided he could take two people with him and in fact it would be unsafe to take any fewer so that meant too you had to stay behind so he chose the only one who said that there was no way he was hitting foot in that boat to make that Journey he chose him to stay behind and then the bloku got on best with him so those two poor guys were left in the Hut while the others 27th of June 1865 pushed the boat out um Twisted the sail and disappeared into the mess was raining yeah they must have felt was Reynold was on the boat uh Musgrave of course was on the boat in the Norwegian Seaman by the name of Alec or they called him Alec his real name was Alexander McDonald those three went uh leaving the poor old Portuguese cook the noseless Portuguese cook and a man named George ashore and I I just wonder what thoughts must have gone through the heads of those guys as they saw the others disappearing into the Mist it's one thing to be sailing maybe to your death maybe to rescue but at least doing something it's quite another to resigning yourself to even Bleaker prospects of survival if the others fail and they headed for Stewart Island yep they headed for Stewart Island they were lucky they had navigational instruments they also knew where New Zealand was so that placed them at a considerable advantage to another crew we'll talk about in one of these boat Journeys later they set off they were immediately engulfed in the storm as happens and they got turned turtle at least once they were all pretty sure they were going to die but the boats ended up after the wave had broken over them setting up right and just bailing furiously it took them to the 24th so five days and five nights during all of which Musgrave was at his post and then they sailed into Port Adventure on Stewart Islands 11 o'clock on a very fine morning much to the amazement of all the shore on what a site they must have been they were a pretty ragged bunch in their seal skin clothes yeah beard haven't slept for five days haven't eaten properly for the best part of 18 months yes they would have looked quite aside and then to go back I mean it's it's a perilous Journey for anyone they had to go back and rescue their mates that's right they happened upon a fellow by the name of Tom cross who owned an oyster boat called the flying scad at Port Adventure he took them over to invercargill and announced what was happening down on the aucklands and was immediately voted the man most eligible to go down and rescue the other two so they had a crack but they kept getting turned back by the weather by a faulty Compass by all sorts of things and it was a month before they got to the Auckland Islands and that's plenty long enough for those two sitting there on the aucklands to think to themselves well we haven't seen them for a month I think we can pretty much get up all the hope of seeing them alive again and now 19 months I understand that their condition was perilous as well their physical condition was really falling yeah as as when you think about it it had to be with the boat they'd barely managed to keep the five of them alive with the boat gone the opportunity to travel anywhere any great distance from the the Hut was just about well it was completely taken away they managed to build a raft and they did get about a bit but yeah the effort of keeping two alive was far greater than the effort of keeping five alive so they were just about gone poor buggers it's hard to imagine what it must have felt like for those people to see each other again that's right Musgrave and Reynold and the other one and to go back and actually find these guys what were they like what was just described there yeah it was a misty morning it was August the 24th and uh the flying scud came out of the Mist and anchored just offshore from the beach they couldn't see any sign of the others they went ashore and they walked up towards the hutch and they saw the youngest of the party uh I believe it was George standing outside and he apparently just went white as though he'd seen a ghost and he couldn't speak he practically collapsed they found the poor old I keep calling him the noseless Portuguese cook inside and apparently all he could do was pump musgrave's arm up and down and say captain Musgrave how are you how are you how are you as you would yeah I think the two were just about demented with disbelief and uh and relief and whatever else you would feel at that moment and something I think so honorable is that Musgrave went around looking for other Castaways but having experienced 18 months there he thought maybe there's somebody else let's go look isn't that extraordinary year you would think that they just couldn't wait to shake whatever passed for dust of the aucklands off their feet you just want to get the hell out of there and as safe as you could as quickly as you could but on the way in they spotted smoke they thought from The Cliffs about eight miles north of where epiguate which is the name of their Hut was and Musgrave was haunted by that and rather than just think of his own safety he thought if there's any other poor bugger on this island I'm going to take him off and they did quite an extensive search of the East Coast looking for any traces but they didn't find anybody did they well they found one corpse up at Port Ross they um which is at the other end of the island they found a corpse lying in the remains of a hat the man who'd clearly died from starvation and this was in fact the mate the second mate from the info called and that was the first inkling they had that they were not alone the whole time they were there we'll have to leave that story for another day but the legacy of marsgrove went on to set up those little stations with supplies in them as well uh for for Castaways that's right agitation was pretty intense in both New Zealand and Australia that Depots should be set up for anyone else who should find themselves in the situation once the news of the invercalled and the Grafton reached civilization again um can you recall the notice the writing the the sign that's on the front of them I found it quite compelling yeah I love this one it's um it was in fact the person who went searching for Castaways from the General Grant the possibility that the uh the General Grant survivors who set off in their own small boat to try to be rescued just in case they were back on Auckland Island there was an expedition sent to find them and then also to stalker Castaway Depot so yes he built this Depot and he put a notice on it which reads something like a curse of the Widow and the fatherless light on he who opened us these doors when he had a ship at his back yeah it is compelling because the thought of having a ship at your back is just what those Castaways dreamed of every day and in the case of the Grafton 18 19 miserable months what an achievement what a storybook of survival Crystal thank you very much incredibly after 19 months as Castaways on the Auckland foreign

Channel: Epigwaitt History

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Length: 33min 18sec (1998 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 08 2022