The Auckland Island Shipwrecks

Join Kelli as she tells the story of two shipwrecks that took place on Auckland Island in 1864, at the same time, though neither knew the other was there. One wreck tells the tale of a group that banded together in the face of adversity and used their creativity and strength to survive. The other wreck is more like an adult version of Lord of the Flies; the situation quickly devolved into chaos, with most survivors dying of starvation. Let's find out how and why two shipwrecks, on opposite sides of the same island, had such vastly different outcomes.

Sources referenced:
Island of the Lost by Joan Druett

Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric

Want to start your own podcast?
Click this link to get set up with Buzzsprout and you'll get a $20 credit to sign up!

The Fairview Social Podcast

Discussing beer, kids, life, neighborhood drama with people you don’t know. 

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Chapters

• 0:28 Intro
• 3:01 Historical Context
• 10:42 The First Wreck
• 20:41 The Second Wreck
• 20:42 [Ad] The Fairview Social Podcast
• 21:31 (Cont.) The Second Wreck
• 36:05 A Tale of Two Ships
• 42:26 Outro

Transcript

The Auckland Island Shipwrecks

Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.

If you’ve been listening to my show, you may have guessed by now that I’m a big fan of naval disasters. Well, that and cannibalism, apparently. I don’t know why, but it’s 50/50 whether or not the stories I tell have cannibalism in them - sometimes I don’t even know it ahead of time! It just happens, I swear!

But another thing I love is a good shipwreck story. It’s probably because my husband was in the British Royal Navy, but I find ships, naval stories, and wrecks just immensely fascinating. I’ve already explored the mystery of the Ghost Ship Mary Celeste, which was found floating adrift, its crew just, you know, *gone*.

I also taught you about the lost Franklin Expedition. You know - the one where John Franklin led the HMS Terror and Erebus up into the Arctic, searching for the Northwest Passage, but the ship got stuck in sea ice and all of the men died in the frozen wastelands around King William Island.

So today, we’re going to explore more naval disasters. And I do mean disasters, plural, because we’re going to talk about two shipwrecks that occurred on the Auckland Islands in 1864. And the craziest part? They crashed on opposite sides of the Aucklands and had no idea the other was even there!

One wreck tells the story of human ingenuity and what men will do to survive.

The other shows what happens when men panic and don’t work together.

And though both ships wrecked on the Aucklands in the same year, their stories are vastly different.

So today, I’m going to tell you the story of the Grafton and the Invercauld. How can two ships crash on the same island without knowing the other was there? Why were they there in the first place? And why did they have vastly different experiences?

As usual, I’ll dive into the historical context of the period to help explain why the Auckland Islands attracted these ships and why some men made it out alive while others perished. To have two ships wrecked on the same island, at more or less the same time, is a crazy coincidence - so let’s break it down and get to the bottom of what happened with the Auckland Island shipwrecks.

Historical Context
The Auckland Islands are roughly 300 miles south of New Zealand. It’s made up of two main islands - Adams Island, to the south, and Auckland Island, to the north. There’s also a small rock off the northwest coast called Disappointment Island which is probably my favorite name ever. Disappointment Island! I love it.

So interestingly, the Auckland Islands have a bit of a history prior to the shipwrecks we’ll talk about today, in addition to many other shipwrecks that happened afterward as well. Side note- there were so many wrecks here that people eventually put caches and chests full of survival supplies that they would refill periodically for any castaways.

But anyway - the Auckland Islands are preeeeetty remote. Even famed British explorer Captain James Cook, in his several voyages of discovery across the South Pacific in the 18th century (that’s the 1700s), never found them - though to be fair, Cook didn’t sail too far into the waters directly below New Zealand.

The Aucklands were first discovered by Europeans at least in 1806 by Abraham Bristow, a whaler who sailed there on the whaleship Ocean looking for, you guessed it, whales! The Maori peoples of the South Pacific had most likely popped by the Aucklands before that.

Later, the also-famous British explorer James Clark Ross sailed to the Aucklands on November 20th, 1840. Does his name sound familiar? It should if you’re a fan of the APHOUT podcast. Or of British naval history. Or the Terror miniseries on AMC. James Clark Ross was one of the earlier explorers to the Arctic looking for the northwest passage through Baffin Bay - you know, the venture that ended up claiming the lives of Sir John Franklin and his men on board the HMS Terror and Erebus.

But you know what’s super neat and coincidental about that?

James Clark Ross sailed to the Aucklands on the Terror and Erebus!  Yeah! 5 years before the ships went missing and sank off the Arctic coast of King William Island, they were sailing the South Pacific with James Clark Ross on one of his many adventures! I swear I don’t plan these things. It’s all just a crazy coincidence. Anyway, Ross’ stop at the Aucklands was part of his super famous journey to Antarctica, from 1839 to 1843.

While on the Aucklands, Ross released pigs, rabbits, and hens on the island. This was common practice for sailors to do in the early days - the idea was to get a natural population of animals going, and once they reproduce enough, there will be an abundant food supply for future expeditions. But hey, listen, this is a really super bad thing for the environment - it’s not a good idea to release a foreign plant or animal in a new environment, as you may end up with a horrible invasive species problem. Like right now in NJ, where I currently live and am recording this podcast, it’s about the season for spotted lanternflies to start coming back, and those things are a horribly invasive species that suck the literal life out of trees. So that sucks.

Anyways, in addition to the animals, Ross planted gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, turnips, cabbages, and currants - to be honest, it sounds like a hobbit’s dream. But he didn’t stay long, and from there, set sail south for Antarctica.

By this point, news of the Aucklands is spreading, and a whaler named Charles Enderby decides to set up a settlement there. He arrives at the tail end of 1849 and the beginning of 1850. Accompanying Enderby are 150 men, women, and children - together, they set up a settlement called Hardwicke.

I won’t get too into Hardwicke here, because it’s not the point of our story today, but just know that it was a disaster and was abandoned 3 years later. The soil was touted as being rich and fertile, but in reality, it was acidic and just, awful, really. In addition to the garbage soil, the Aucklands have bad weather - I mean, considering they’re located 50 degrees south of the equator… yeah. A rough climate to be sure. They are almost constantly soaked with a barrage of wet winds and waves, and the only stable populations are sea birds like albatrosses as well as sea lions.

Now sea lions are known to habit the Aucklands as well as whales. In fact, it’s the reason why one of our shipwrecked crews came here in the first place - the market for sea lions and seal fur was pretty good in the early- to mid-19th century.

Let’s do a quick lesson on the difference between a sea lion and a seal because I think a lot of people wouldn’t know the difference and might use the terms interchangeably.

Seals, and in particular I’m talking about fur seals here, have longer, shaggy fur that is brown in color - for both males and females.  They have small ear holes with no external flaps or anything. Their nose is more pointy, and they have whiskers. So if it’s brown and fuzzy with cute long whiskers, it’s probably a fur seal.

Sea lions are closely related to fur seals but have a few different distinguishing characteristics. Unlike their seal cousins, sea lions have ear flaps. They are also typically larger, though without a side-by-side comparison, this isn’t that helpful of a thing to know, I guess. Sea lions have broader, blunter noses, unlike the seals’ pointy ones. The bulls, or males, are brown. But the females are very different; their coat is more caramel colored with a striped or spotted pattern. Sea lions are also the ones that use their hind flippers as little feet, sorta, where they can do something resembling walking.  Seals can’t do this, they have to scoot around on their bellies while on land. Ooh, also, sea lions are the ones that bark.

On the Aucklands, our crews will encounter sea lions. In addition to the whaling nearby, the sea lions were a good draw for explorers and ship crews looking to make some extra money - the skins and oil fetched a good price.

So now we’re a bit more familiar with the Aucklands - remote islands visited by a handful of Europeans over the span of a few decades in the early 19th century, that’s the 1800s. There’s not much here for sustaining a settlement, as evidenced by Hardwicke failing after 3 years, but there is abundant natural life. It’s not necessarily life that can sustain humans, but life exists there regardless. The weather is rough, so prolonged settlement is probably not a good option. Which is unfortunate, of course, because it’s on these wild little islands that two ships, the Grafton and the Invercauld, wrecked in 1864, and it’s crews had to scrounge to survive on sea lions and whatever else they could get their hands on.

So let’s get into the first wreck.

The First Wreck
In November 1865, a schooner named the Grafton set sail from Sydney, Australia. On it was a crew of five captained by Thomas Musgrave.  Musgrave, along with his friend Francois Raynal, decided to buy the Grafton and set sail for Campbell Island, even further south than the Aucklands.

The idea was to mine for argentiferous tin, which means silver-bearing tin. Campbell Island was said to have loads of it. So Musgrave and Raynal set off for the island with an English seaman named George, a Norwegian seaman who went by Alick, and a cook from the Portuguese Azores named Henry. The trip was meant to be a reconnaissance trip - they wanted to survey the island to see if the tin was indeed there, and if it was, they could outfit the ship for a larger, second expedition.

The trip to the Campbell Islands was fraught with a bit of dangerous weather, and Raynal fell ill, but overall it was fine. They didn’t find any tin, though, so the trip was a waste. In a last-ditch attempt to salvage this wasted mission, they decided to swing around to the Auckland Islands on the way back home. I mean it was kinda on the way back anyway, so it made sense.

The Auckland Islands, as you may recall from earlier, were home to sea lions; their pelts would fetch a decent price. Even if they could only get a couple of them, it would still be better than returning home with nothing. Captain Musgrave approached the southeast corner of the islands and decided to venture into Carnley Harbor, which is not actually a harbor, but a strait - a narrow waterway that separates the two main chunks of the Auckland Islands. Inside Carnley Strait, he saw sea lions and decided to camp out for a few days. But as he sailed in, the wind picked up. Fearing the Grafton would be beached, Musgrave moved further into the strait; he was looking for a safe place to anchor.

A quick word about his anchors - to be blunt, they were crap. His ship has two anchors, but he skimped out on the chain a bit. To find a decent place to anchor the Grafton, Musgrave had to take the ship about 10-12 miles into the strait. He ended up finding a small inlet pointing north into Auckland Island where he anchored up right in time before a storm rolled in.

On January 2, 1864, the starboard anchor chain snapped. Starboard, by the way, is the right side of the ship when looking towards the front, or bow. The left side is port.  Port and starboard. So the other anchor chain, not enough to keep the Grafton still, started to drag as the storm whipped up the waters around them. The Grafton was creeping dangerously close to the rocks. But unfortunately for the men, there was little to stop the inevitable. At midnight, January 3rd, 1864, the Grafton smashed into the reefs deep in the Carnley Strait.

The Grafton didn’t sink, though. It was smashed up on the reef, but not completely gone. The men used the boat’s launch, the smaller boat meant for quicker ferrying trips to and from the Grafton, to get clear of the wreck. Without getting too heavy into the details, they managed to salvage enough gear to set up a makeshift camp on the nearby beach. They also recovered 6 pounds of tobacco, a few pieces of salt meat, 12 pounds of sugar, 2 pounds of tea, 3 pounds of coffee, 50 pounds of flour, and about 100 lbs of ship’s bread, which would last three weeks if rationed properly amongst the five men.

Now I know ship’s bread as hard tack. It’s barely bread, really. It’s more of a dense cracker thing made from flour and water mixed together. If you’re lucky, there’s salt in there too. Hard tack can last a long time, you see, so it’s good for long voyages. It’s also a pretty cheap thing to put together. It may not be the most nutritious thing in the world, but it’ll fill your stomach.

So, if you’ve been listening to any of my podcasts, particularly the one on the Ghost Ship or the Lost Franklin Expedition, then you may also be wondering about scurvy - how did the men prevent that?  Well, after the wreck they’d have to scrounge around for some fresh foods, but they did initially leave with things like potatoes, peas, and beans - things that had enough Vitamin C to help prevent scurvy.

Ooh here’s a fun little tangent - I was digging into whether or not they brought lime juice on board like John Franklin did on the doomed Terror and Erebus expedition. And the research wasn’t clear, so that’s not my tangent here. But a few years after the events of today’s story, the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867 required all Royal Navy and Merchant Navy ships to carry lime juice on board - a daily ration of one pound to help prevent scurvy. So that’s cool! At least they recognized that fresh fruits and veggies would prevent it, and they knew that lime juice was a cheap enough thing to bring in bulk. It’s certainly better than those lead-tainted cans that poisoned the poor men of the Terror and Erebus.

But anyway, back to our story.

The men had it pretty rough, but they were determined to get back home alive. After a few days of camping out on the beach, lamenting their situation, they rallied round and decided to build a proper, weather-proof cabin. There was a hill not far from the beach and the wreck which would be a perfect place - it was 40 feet above sea level, so no need to worry about flooding. There were also sea lions hanging about, so for the time being there would be access to food. After pinching more supplies and materials from their wrecked ship, they got to work.

Now one thing they had to contend with was the local flora. The trees on the Aucklands were not suitable for building, like, American-style log cabins, which was their first idea. The wood was too gnarled and twisted. So instead, they settled on using whatever wood they could harvest in a more vertical arrangement. After a lot of hard work, they ended up making a 24-by-16-foot rectangular cabin. Broken masts were used as corner posts, cross beams were put in to help make it stable, and they even installed a fireplace and chimney using sheets of copper from the wreck. All told, it was a pretty impressive construction for a bunch of castaways on an overgrown island in the middle of nowhere.

The brains behind this was Raynal. He was sickly, but smart. Though he was a gold surveyor by trade, he was also clearly a skilled inventor who would draw up plans and create some really impressive devices and structures. Musgrave, the Captain, became the group’s natural leader. The men worked equally as hard, because to survive, they’d all have to work together.

Now was it always sunshine and roses between them? No. Of course not.

Musgrave wanted to maintain some modicum of social order - as Captain, he was above his inferiors. We saw this play out a handful of times - once the cabin was built, he and Raynal were at one end, while the seamen and cook were at the other. It caused tension. The men felt like they should be equal with their Captain given the circumstances, but Musgraves was reticent to give up the social hierarchies that governed his life in the Navy.

But despite some minor squabbles, the men banded together remarkably well. To entertain one another, they set up a school - each man would teach, but would also be a student. Raynal, a Frenchie, would teach his language and mathematics to the others. Alick and Henry were illiterate, so they started to learn reading and writing in this makeshift school. In exchange, they taught the others how to speak Norwegian and Portuguese, respectively.

They even named their new home - it was called Epigwaitt, a North American indigenous term meaning Near the Great Waters or A Home by the Wave. I’m not sure which particular tribe or nation the term comes from - it was never made clear.

To keep from going completely insane, they stuck to a routine. They got up at 6 am every morning to collect firewood and maintain the fire. On some days they’d work on the house, getting all the thatching up on the walls and ceiling to help insulate the cabin. On other days they’d spend the time hunting sea lions to replenish their stocks of food. They also found a big plant known as stilbocarpa - the stem of it is a sweet, starchy edible thing that the men ate in massive quantities.  In fact, I’d say without it, they probably would have died.

Raynal continued to make things, like soap for instance, to improve their quality of life. Though it was becoming increasingly clear that they’d have to spend the winter here in their new Epigwaitt settlement, they kept busy and worked together for their mutual survival.

Most of you out there listening to this podcast live in the Northern Hemisphere. So don’t forget - a Southern Hemisphere winter is from June to August. As the months went by, the men were gearing up for a cold winter on this remote island, far from civilization, in the South Pacific.

And unbeknownst to the men holed up at Epigwaitt, another ship was about to crash on the other side of the Aucklands.

The Second Wreck
A square rigger ship called the Invercauld left Melbourne [MEL-BUN], Australia, on May 3, 1864. It was heading East to Collao, Peru, in South America. Unlike the little schooner Grafton, the Invercauld was much larger and had a crew of 25 men, but no passengers. Its mission was to pick up fertilizer. By this point in history, Peru was an independent country that made its money with silver mines high up in the Andes Mountains, and with guano which made an excellent fertilizer. Guano, by the way, is essentially bird and/or bat poop. I mentioned it briefly in the episode on the London Cholera Epidemic as a cheaper alternative to, uhh, human waste fertilizer? At any rate, Peruvian guano made its way across the world, and the Invercauld was heading there to pick some up.

The captain of the Invercauld, George Delgarno, estimated they were relatively close to the Aucklands on May 11, 1864. They were using dead reckoning to estimate their location.

Dead reckoning is an old maritime way of determining your new position based on a series of factors. First, you need your known initial position. Let’s call it Point A. From here, you need to know your speed and direction. So let’s say you are at Point A, heading south at 6 knots. I’ll explain knots a bit later. If you are continuing south at exactly 6 knots, then you should be able to determine the new position, Point B, because you know where you started, you know your speed, and you know your direction. All important things for navigating.

Let me phrase it in a different way that doesn’t involve sailing.

Let’s say you are walking around your town. You start at your house and head directly east down the road, and you know that you walk at exactly 3 miles per hour. Given a map, you should be able to plot where you’d be after one hour of travel, right? Exactly 3 miles east of where you started. And I’m sorry in advance for giving you a word problem there; only masochists actually like math word problems. My bad!

Simply put, dead reckoning was a way for navigators to estimate their future position based on knowing where they started, how fast they were moving, and what direction they were moving in.

Nowadays we don’t need this, though, right? We have GPS tracking. Your phone is a GPS receiver. It uses satellites to pinpoint your exact location at all times. So when you open up google maps, or apple maps, or whatever, it tells you where you are, and you can track your movement in real time.  Assuming you have signal.

But out on the ocean, in the middle of nowhere, in the 19th century, they didn’t have that luxury. They did have maps, compasses, clocks, and an astrolabe to help them chart their position, but those are all subject to human error.  And the maps of the Aucklands were kind of garbage, anyway, since only a handful of people had been there.

This is very unfortunate for the Invercauld because human error with dead reckoning is exactly what led to their shipwreck. They did not properly estimate how far away from the Aucklands they were. They knew they were close, but made moves assuming the wrong starting position of where they were. They were 20 miles away from their Point A, so to speak. Their initial position. So when they made their calculations, they were all totally off. They ended up sailing into the northwestern cape of Auckland Island, a really dangerous stretch of coastline so rough it’s named the Jaws of Hell.

Captain Delgarno and his crew got stuck in the surf and fought for about two hours against it before their boat just gave in. The keel, which is a flat blade usually running down the middle of the underside of a ship, broke. The keel, in essence, weighs the boat down so it can’t be blown completely sideways in windy or rough weather. It’s got other functions too, but I’m trying to keep it simple. A ship needs a keel. The Invercauld’s keel caved in and sank. The Invercauld is toast.

The masts and rigging were also all broken up and sank.  The ballast, extra weight added to help keep the ship stable when there was no cargo, also sank. Now at this point in the 19th century, ballast was still solid materials like iron, rock, or sand. Nowadays, water can be used kept in special compartments, and added to or drained as needed to help maintain balance. But the Invercauld’s solid ballast all sank. The ship was basically completely destroyed. It’s gone. Forget about it.

Of the 25 crew members, only 19 survived the wreck. Ten seamen, the captain, 2 officers, the cook, the steward, the boatswain, the carpenter, and 2 ship’s boys. You may not have heard the term “boatswain” before - a bosun is a warrant or petty officer responsible for taking care of the ship’s rigging, anchors, sails, launch boats, flags, and other things like that. Even though it’s pronounced “bosun” it’s spelled B-O-A-T-S-W-A-I-N, phonetically said as “boatswain.” It’s just another English word that isn’t pronounced the way it should be, which is a bit silly, to be honest. As far as I’m aware, bosun is a bastardization of middle english that’s just become the accepted pronunciation of the word now.

Anyways, this new crew washes up on what is essentially an empty, desolate beach. The back of the beach was 300-foot tall cliffs with a lovely waterfall, though the water that pooled at the bottom was brackish, not fresh, as it mixed with seawater on the beach. Brackish means slightly salty.

The only visible part of the wreck at this point was the stern, or the back of the ship. But soon enough that sank too. And unlike with the Grafton, there were far fewer resources found floating afterward - the only food they could recover for 19 survivors were 2 pounds of soggy biscuits, two pounds of salt pork, and 2 boxes of matches. But it’s worth noting that the chef managed to burn an entire box of matches up, like almost immediately, so the other box was snatched up by someone more competent.

Also unlike the Grafton, and this part is really crucial, Captain Delgarno of the Invercauld did not step up as a leader. Quite the opposite, in fact; he was so shocked from the incident that he was more or less paralyzed and just sat despondently on the beach, waiting to die.

The man who did the most to ensure everyone’s survival was a seaman named Robert Holding. 

Now this group sat on that desolate little beach at the bottom of a 300-foot cliff for five days. In that time, they had built a tiny little 5x8 lean-to. 5 by 8. 19 guys in a 5x8 open-air shelter on a  beach with no food, and no proper leader. Sounds like a winning recipe, eh?

There were no sea lions on this little stretch of beach, so the only food they could scavenge was little shellfish clinging to rocks. They also discovered the sweet starchiness of the stilbocarpa plant, the same one the Grafton survivors were eating in copious amounts.

On the sixth day, some realized that they would all starve to death here, so they started to make plans to climb up the cliff and escape the beach. Several went, but one kinda fell halfway and knocked himself unconscious on the rocks. He died a few days later. But the ones who did make it came back to report that on top of the cliffs were tussocks and animal tracks - signs of life!

A tussock is a big, clumping grass. Like a little grassy pom-pom. So in this context, the sailors saw grasslands atop the cliff peppered with these massive clumps of grass. Look it up - I’m sure you’ve seen it before.

Upon hearing the good news, Holding went up himself to investigate. He was able to determine that the tracks belonged to pigs, which were likely descendants of the ones released by Ross when he stopped over here in 1840, 24 years prior.

Now, Holding was a prospector, an explorer used to analyzing geography for mineral deposits. He took a good look at the land from up here on top of the cliff and determined that the mountainous areas to the south looked too inhospitable, so they should all head to the northern slopes and camp out waiting for rescue.

That’s a shame, really, because had they headed south, Holding and the Invercauld survivors may have run into Musgrave, Raynal, and the Grafton crew, who were doing a pretty good job of surviving, to be honest.

But actually, who knows? Part of the reason the Grafton crew survived for so long on the Aucklands was that they worked so well together. They had a clear leader, balanced each other out, and supported each other. The Invercauld crew… not so much.  When one would find shellfish back on that desolate beach, they would eat it down greedily instead of stockpiling and sharing with the whole group. These are not the actions of a group with a clear leader, working together for the mutual benefit of the whole. These are the actions of individuals who will die because they refuse to pool resources.

Holding comes back and gets the rest to scale the cliffs, except that one who fell, who was left behind and died soon after. But again, Captain Delgarno here is not being a leader. As a result, the men start fracturing off into small groups. Holding tried to organize everyone to follow him to the north, but two things prevented that from happening:

One, he was a seaman, not a higher rank, so the men didn’t feel the need to listen to him. You know, despite the circumstances.

Two, the group was in total shambles without a proper leader. It was like an adult version of lord of the flies with this group - total, unorganized chaos that ended in a lot of death.

A handful of hunters, along with the cook, went out in search of pigs. The cook, tired, wet, and cold, sat down amongst the tussocks and refused to come back with the hunters, which wa a bad move because the cook died overnight of exposure. The average temperatures at night in the Aucklands in May can drop below freezing. And consider that they aren’t properly dressed for this, and it rains a lot. And most of them didn’t have shoes - they kicked them off in the wreck so they wouldn’t sink. Sleeping alone, barefoot, soaked, and cold, on an exposed, windy grassland - no wonder he died. This is why shelter is important for survival.

Anyways, now we’re down to 17 men.

To make things worse, the two officers that accompanied the captain on board the ship refused to really do anything, instead forcing the young ship’s boys to run around and do things for them, like fill up their boots with water so they could drink. And by ship’s boys, I literally mean boys. Ship’s boys could range in age from 8 to 16.

Now with the Grafton, there were some occasional spats that occurred because of Captain Musgraves’ attempted adherence to social order and rank. But over time, though he was still undoubtedly the leader, Musgrave realized that they had to all be more or less equals to get out of this - in particular, the Norwegian seaman Alick was the strongest of the bunch, so his skills were needed in killing and hauling around huge sea lion carcasses for food. But with the Invercauld officers, they were just so used to being better than everyone else in rank that they didn’t budge, and to be honest, their refusal to treat the group as equal in this survival situation is what led to a lot of the deaths. They were clinging onto their past life on board the ship, when in reality, they were all castaways just moments from death at any minute - if that’s not the time to rally together under a leader and work together for the common cause of, you know, SURVIVAL, then I don’t know what is.

Anyhoo, like I said, the Invercauld crew is fracturing. Annoyed, Holding lost patience and decided to go back to the beach to see if any other things washed up on shore while they were messing around in the tussocks. The boatswain went with him. So they climbed carefully back down to the beach, but all they found was the body of that one guy who fell.

Eventually four other guys joined Holding and the boatswain, and they camped out. And ready for this? And I swear I didn’t know this before starting my research - it was a Donner Party situation. Holding, the boatswain, and the four other men drew lots to decide who should die to feed the others. The Donner Party Snowshoe party did the same thing with strips of paper if you remember. The Irishman, Patrick Dolan I believe, drew the “short paper,” though they didn’t go through with it. They just wanted until he died from hypothermia before making the decision to roast his flesh and eat him up.

So Holding and these other dudes are talking about sacrificing one of them for food, but Holding remarks that he would never kill a man and eat him - but as soon as he said that I think he got a distinct impression that he was about to be killed and consumed, so he fled. The boatswain kept awkwardly trying to come with him, which gave him huge red flags, so Holding just, like, ran away and scaled the cliff as quickly as possible. Once he got to the top he just, like, ran away across the tussocks. The boatswain and the other four guys were never seen again, so we don’t know what happened. But I’d like to believe they Donner Partied, for sure. And later, in another, unrelated situation, Holding notes that he saw one seaman named Harvey eating the dead remains of his fellow seaman Fritz.

Sorry, I just really can’t seem to get away from cannibalism. Totally unintentional. But that’s it for this story, at least!

A Tale of Two Ships
So let’s talk about how they eventually make it off the island. I won’t go into great detail about all this, because we just don’t have the time, but if you are interested in reading about this in more depth, I highly recommend you check out Joan Druett’s Island of the Lost. She just gets right into the story in a really accessible way, and it’s a great read. I’ve linked to her book in the podcast description.

Now as I’ve hopefully made clear by this point, there was a clear difference in how each crew responded to this crisis - the Captain and crew of the Grafton banded together and made it work. They had camaraderie, used their skills, and luckily were handy and inventive enough to eke out a tolerable existence while they either waited for rescue or decided to rescue themselves. But the captain of the Invercauld never stepped up, and as a result, there was no camaraderie. No sharing of ideas, no inventiveness, no collectiveness. Just some individuals trying to survive - some putting in more effort than others. And as a result, all but three men in the Invercauld crew died - the only survivors were Holding, the Captain, and one of the officers.

Druett, in her book, argues that perhaps the reason why it was the captain and officer that survived alongside Holding was that since they did so little for themselves and their own survival, they weren’t exhausted and dying of hunger. it’s certainly feasible. But one by one, members of the Invercauld castaways started dying of hunger. They could only get their hands on nominal amounts of sea lions, shellfish, and the occasional small rodent.

Now on this north end of the island, where the Invercauld crew are, was also Hardwicke. After convincing everyone to head north to a beach to wait for rescue, Holding and the rest saw the remains of Hardwicke! But it wasn’t really good news - the place had been abandoned over a decade ago, so it was just ruins by this point. But it still made better refuge than the open air of the tussock grassland, so they camped out here for a while.

Meanwhile, in the south, the Grafton crew are awaiting the summer weather again in hopes they can see and flag down some whalers, or perhaps other ships looking for sea lions. But unfortunately for them, no rescue came. By October, I think Musgrave knew it wasn’t going to happen, so he focused the Grafton crews’ energy on planting a garden for another year of survival. They also started making plans to fix their schooner, or if that wouldn’t work, build one out of the wreckage to sail north to New Zealand.

Back to the last three survivors of the Invercauld. They decided to build a rudimentary raft and head for a tiny island that they called rabbit island, and you can guess why. They figured that it was the best place to be spotted and - turns out - it was a fine place to be spotted.

On May 22, 1865, Captain Delgarno yelled to his officer and to Holding that he saw a ship. After 12 months and ten days for the Invercauld crew, they were finally rescued. The Spanish ship Julian, coming from China to Collao, in Peru, sailed past the Aucklands and spotted them on rabbit island. They sent out a launch boat to rescue them, and they were saved.

The Grafton crew, though? The ones who had been there even longer, who had banded together and used straight-up human ingenuity to survive in this wild place, were not found by the Spanish ship. It didn’t help that they were 12 miles up the strait; I mean, who would find them all the way up there?

So the Grafton crew focused their efforts on building a boat to sail to New Zealand for themselves. And after months and months of hard work, they managed to do it!  Three men - Captain Musgraves, Raynal, and Alick - set sail for NZ while George and Henry remained behind and awaited rescue.

Musgraves and his little crew and boat traveled the 300 nautical miles separating the Auckland Islands and New Zealand. Nautical miles are used to measure the distance traveled through water - a nautical mile is slightly longer than a land mile, coming in at 1.15 nautical miles per land mile. If you’re wondering, like, why though, it has to do with the Earth’s latitude and longitude coordinates - one nautical mile is one minute of latitude. And when you’re sailing on the open ocean and all you have is latitude and longitude to figure out where you are, it makes more sense to use a measurement system based on coordinates.

They traveled an average of 6 knots, by the way. A knot, which is another nautical measurement, is one nautical mile per hour. One knot is equivalent to 1.15 miles per hour. So Musgraves and his crew in their little dinghy were going six knots, or six nautical miles an hour, which is about 6.9 miles per hour. I know that sounds slow, but please consider they are sailing in a tiny little boat bobbing around in the South Pacific.

I’m glazing over this part here, but the three men in the little boat did eventually make it to safety in NZ about six days later, and the two left behind were picked up 7 or so weeks after that. The entire crew of the Grafton survived the ordeal.

The Auckland Island shipwrecks of 1864 is an interesting story because it gives us a chance to compare how two different groups fared in a survival situation - clearly, the winning group here was the Grafton crew, who banded together under a strong leader, was collaborative, relied on the fantastic knowledge and inventiveness of the Frenchie Raynal, and ended up surviving together.

My takeaways from this are the following:
Work together in a survival situation, don’t go at it alone, because you’ll probably die otherwise
Learn about the world around you and know how to do things instead of relying on the internet to give you answers
Have backups and contingency plans in place in case something goes wrong
And as always, don’t engage in cannibalism. That rarely works out.

Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of the Auckland Island Shipwrecks. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen! 

I referenced episode 10 a lot today, the Lost Franklin Expedition. Go give that one a listen if you haven’t already. If you’d like another naval tale, then give episode 5 a listen - the Ghost Ship. You can try to solve the mystery alongside me before I reveal what actually happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste.

Be sure to follow my podcast, wherever you listen, so you know when new episodes are dropped. And stay tuned to get a popular history of unpopular things.