The Bottom of the Map
By: Ken Wollenberg
Chapter VIII.
Islands Found by Accident on the Way to Somewhere Else:
The Chatham Islands,
the Kermadec Islands, and
Lord Howe Island
The Chatham Islands are 535 miles from the New Zealand mainland. An excellent map in a book by Sheila Natusch includes comments such as "a burning peat bed" and "abrupt cliffy shore wooded." There are five islands-Chatham, Pitt, Rangatira, Mangere and The Fort (Little Mangere). The highest elevations are 930 feet on Chatham and 750 on Pitt.Seal hunters from Australia arrived in 1804, followed by whaling ships. The slaughter was total and thoughtlessly without regard for the future. Peat was set on fire and continued to burn for decades. The Glory was shipwrecked on Pitt in 1826. Six of its men sailed 800 miles in a longboat to be rescued, but Jacob Tealing decided to stay. He set up a supply base on Chatham and sold food and supplies to whaling ships for 28 years. Including 400 on Pitt, the Moriori population reached a maximum of 2000. Due to inbreeding and syphilis, it was not a healthy population. Sailors generally found the Morioris docile, easy to push around, and willing to work for low wages and sell whatever they had cheap.Then in 1835 real disaster struck the Morioris: the Maoris arrived. The Maoris from the New Zealand mainland were not at all peaceful like the Morioris. Some Maoris served as sailors on ships that visited the Chatham Islands. They told their friends that food was plentiful in the Chatham Islands, a land ready to be conquered since its "inhabitants are very numerous, but they do not understand how to fight, and have no weapons." (Shand, p. 155.) The Maoris boarded a ship called the Rodney or the Lord Rodney, which belonged to Cooper and Hold of Sydney. They told Captain Harewood they were chartering his ship for an invasion of the Chatham Islands whether he liked it or not. They would pay him with a herd of pigs. In case he had second thoughts, they would keep his second mate as a hostage ashore. On November 17, 1835, five hundred Maoris arrived at Chatham Island on the Rodney. The ship was overcrowded, short of water, and vulnerable, but the Morioris did not attack. The Rodney brought four hundred more Maoris on December 5, 1835. The Maoris made slaves of the Morioris. They beat and slaughtered those who resisted. Once they killed and roasted fifty Morioris. Another time they covered a beach with 150 bodies and they may have killed as many as 300. The Maoris were complete masters of the island they called Rangikohur, except when they made the mistake of tangling with Europeans, who resembled pirates even more than they did. When Jack Coffee, a seal hunter, was asked to say grace, he responded,
"We eat and drink to please us,
We shit and piss to please us
And that's the truth by Jesus." (King, p. 75.)
In 1838 Maoris went on board the French whaler Jean Bart. A fight broke out. The French locked Maoris below deck and set out to sea. The Maoris found guns and broke out. The French abandoned ship and were lost at sea. Four of the Maoris knew enough about handling a sailing ship to sail it back to Chatham Island, but wrecked it when they arrived. Captain Ray, a trader bound for the New Zealand mainland, told French authorities there what had happened. The French sent the warship Héroine, which "heroically" bombarded two villages, killing one woman and taking one prisoner. The prisoner committed suicide before he could be tried. The Maoris avoided further clashes with Europeans, but by 1842 the Chatham Islands "... had a terrible reputation as the home of cannibals, convicts and all the scum of the earth." (Chudleigh, p. 13.)
The Chatham Islands and their Moriori population thus began a long slow decline. In 1840 at least 50 whaling ships visited the Chatham Islands. Bill Tennant, an American sailor from the shipwrecked Erie, was saved by a woman named Karete after violating a taboo by walking through a graveyard. It was a New Zealand version of the Pocahontas story. In the 19th and 20th centuries there were about 100 shipwrecks in the Chatham Islands. In l840 the Maoris in the Chatham Islands did not sign the treaty of Waitangi ceding New Zealand to the British. Taking advantage of this loophole the New Zealand Company bought Chatham Island and began negotiating a sale to Germans. The British government got wind of this and declared the original purchase invalid. In 1842 they made the Chatham Islands, the Bounty Islands, the Antipodes, the Auckland Islands, and Campbell Island officially part of New Zealand. Frederick Hunt became the unofficial king of Pitt Island. He made employees take his name. There are still families named Gregory-Hunt and Langsdale-Hunt. Hunt raised pigs and potatoes for sale to whalers. He even advertised in a New Bedford, Massachusetts, newspaper. Farms in New Zealand eventually proved to be too much competition. There were212 Morioris left, and the first New Zealand official was appointed. He was generally ignored. An 1861 census showed 46 Europeans, 413 Maoris, 160 Morioris and 17 half-castes. In 1863 New Zealand officials forced the Maoris to give up their last Moriori slaves. By this time German missionaries led by Johannes Gottfried Engst had established a mission. They had good solid buildings, but few converts. In 1866 some 180 Maoris were sent to the Chatham Islands as prisoners of war from the Maori Wars in New Zealand. They expected to go home after the war, but the New Zealand government seemed to forget about them. In 1868 Te Kooti escaped to avoid becoming a permanent resident. E. R. Chudleigh, a missionary around 1900, reported there were 27 nationalities on Chatham Island, none of whom cared much about his preaching. He said gooseberries and apples were the only fruit that grew in this miserable climate. A typical diary entry on a really exciting day would be something like this:
"There are twelve blackfish (or pilot whales) stranded at Taupeka each about 20 ft. long, a calf amongst them and a high smell." (Chudleigh, p. 403.)
The Chatham Islands became a county in 1901. They did not bother to hold elections until 1925. Black Australian swans were imported to replace the eight species of water fowl including a swan that had been hunted to extinction. In 1924 a tidal wave knocked George Clough off his horse. He survived by clinging to a fence. By 1928 seals had been driven off to the Bounty Islands and the Auckland Islands, and whaling was no longer big business. That same year the first truck was imported. The owner did not know how to drive. He read the manual, drove off, and promptly got stuck in the mud, a good metaphor for the Chatham Islands economy. It was a time of depression, diseases, and bad prices. There were no ships because of irregular exports; there were no exports because of irregular shipping. These roaring forties islands were definitely in the doldrums.
Chatham Islanders are New Zealand citizens, but don't always feel like they are. They often refer to "New Zealanders" as if they were a foreign nationality. Outwitting "mainland" authorities has long been a local hobby. As far back as 1892 a Moriori leader named Hirawanu Tapu liked to tell tall tales to anthropologists. He once claimed descent from a shipwrecked Portuguese sailor. Another time he claimed that in prehistoric times giant ostriches lived in the Chatham Islands. When Tommy Solomon imported five gallons of whisky and twelve bottles of port contrary to liquor laws, Constable Fry wanted to arrest him. Solomon claimed he ordered five gallons of vinegar and a case of tomato sauce, and the liquor was sent by mistake. Fry wrote to the supplier to check the story. Solomon telegraphed Forbes and Company of Lyttleton, New Zealand, to back up his story. They gladly did and Solomon was not arrested.A man who claimed to be the last full-blooded Moriori died in 1933. Others disputed his claim, but the press ignored them. The story about the extinction of a whole tribe was too good to pass up. In World War II, New Zealand paid little attention to the Chatham Islands until the German raider Orion sank the Holmwood on November 25, 1940. The 1938 population of 702 went down to about 500 after the war. For many years there were no movies and no cars. A visitor in 1971 said there was no central power or water supply and complained about the noisy diesel generators. The missionaries were strict and quarrelsome and not very successful, although the modern population of about 750 does include 206 Anglicans, 174 Catholics, 34 Ratana, 28 Presbyterians, and 11 Methodists. A modern map shows one town, Waitangi, with paved roads leading west, east and north. The average yearly temperature is 51°F, with a high of 57.6°F in January and a low of 45.5°F in June. The annual rainfall of 40 inches is spread out throughout the year. The wind is usually from the southwest. The climate is so cold and damp that there are no bees. A tidal wave hit the village of Tupangi on August 15, 1968. A crayfish business flourished from 1964 to 1970 but is now almost gone. The Chatham Islands get a page or two in New Zealand guide books and are a good place for deep-sea fishing. They can be reached by plane from New Zealand, making them the most accessible place in this book. They appear in the news only when an around-the-world yacht race passes by.Unlike Lt. Watts, French Rear Admiral A. R. J. de Bruni d'Entrecastreux in 1793 was on a true voyage of discovery, a scientific expedition to fill in some of the blank spaces on the map. After discovering Raoul Island and naming it after his quartermaster, he sailed 68 miles to Macauley Island and 22 more to Curtis Island. These he recognized as Lt. Watts' discoveries. Sailing fifty-two miles further in his flagship La Recherche, he found a small island he named l'Esperance Rock in honor of the second ship in his fleet. Although the islands were spread out over 142 miles of ocean from 29°10' to 31°30' south and from 171°45' to 179° west, d'Entrecastreux considered them as one group, which he named the "Kermadec Islands" after his second in command. In 1796 Colonel Collins aboard the Britannia thought he made a discovery and called it Sunday Island. He later learned that his Sunday Island was d'Entrecastreux's Raoul Island. The name Sunday Island is still occasionally used, charts often showing "Raoul (Sunday) Island." Neither Britain nor France bothered to formally claim the islands which seemed nothing more than useless curiosities.For forty years the Kermadec Islands were visited only by whalers and once in a while by a scientific expedition such as the French one led by Dumont d'Urville in 1827. No one tried to live there until 1837 when two New Zealanders, Baker and Reid, moved in with their Samoan wives and children. They hoped to grow a few vegetables and raise a little livestock for sale to passing ships. In 1838 a geographer named Polack said the Kermadec Islands were a popular whaling spot;
"... no less than thirty sail of shipping has been seen from one islet called 'French Rock', employed in the sperm fishing. A few sailors reside on the islands." (S. P. Smith, p. 3.)
Polack also claimed that a Maori plan to colonize the islands failed when they were unable to charter a ship as they had in the Chatham Islands. In 1840 U. S. Navy Commodore Wilkes visited the islands in his ship the Vincennes. In 1848 Baker and Reid gave up and abandoned their colony. In 1850 an American named Halstead moved in. Like Baker and Reid he chose Raoul Island. The Kermadec Islands have a total area of 13 square miles. Raoul Island accounts for 11.3 of that and is the only one with a dependable water supply, two freshwater lakes and a small stream. In 1851 Halstead welcomed Henry Cook, a New Zealander with a Maori wife, and two Maori families as settlers. In 1854 H. M. Denham of HMS Herald surveyed the island. In 1861 a slave ship dumped a cargo of "Tokelau natives" because of an epidemic. Typhoid killed about 200 slaves as well as half of the local population. Those who survived abandoned the island in 1869 due to volcanic activity. Once the volcano quieted down, the Covat family moved in. A sailor named Sterndale reported,
"In the early part of the year 1872 the water in the little fresh-water lake on Sunday Island began to boil furiously, which was followed by a column of fire spouting up from the side of it." (S. P. Smith, p. 15.)
Once more Raoul (Sunday) Island was abandoned.
In 1874 HMS Challenger reported that Raoul Island appeared to be habitable again. That was fortunate for Captain Bezer of the Vibelia, who was marooned there in 1876. His first mate stole his ship and sailed away, while the captain was ashore getting fresh water. Later in 1876 Dr. Stockwell of New Zealand camped there for a few days. He apparently had unusual ideas about what constituted a good vacation. In 1878 the Bells moved in. The Bells were a determined pioneer family, a kind of real life Swiss family Robinson. There is a photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Bell with eight children and a dog. Actually they had nine children, so the ninth must have been taking the picture. The Bells named one child Raoul Sunday Bell. The Bells stayed through the hurricanes of 1879 and 1880 and the earthquake of 1881. New Zealand formally annexed the Kermadec Islands in 1887 on the grounds that both the first settlers-Baker and Reid-and the current inhabitants-the Bells-were New Zealanders. The Bells were there to greet the government surveyors when they arrived on the steamer Stella.Not before, but after, they annexed the Kermadec Islands, the New Zealand government decided they should find out exactly what it was they had annexed. The New Zealand government sent surveyor S. Percy Smith, assistant surveyor H. D. M. Haszard and T. F. Cheeseman of the Auckland Museum to the Kermadec Islands on the steamer Stella to make a report. When they first passed Curtis and Macauley Islands, the weather was too rough for a landing. They proceeded to Raoul Island, where they met the steamer Richmond, whose crew was gathering firewood. Smith reported that the volcanic rocks on Raoul Island were so porous they would not hold water. He noted the small colony of settlers led by the Bell family. He said Raoul Island, maximum elevation 1723 feet, had good soil and fresh water. There were many goats and cats and even a few pigs running wild on Raoul Island. Macauley Island, maximum elevation 781 feet, is 11/4 miles long and 1 mile wide. Smith said it had a small herd of goats, one dog, and no people. He described the Curtis Islands only as "remarkably rocky islets" (S. P. Smith, p. 27.) with a maximum elevation of 450 feet. Smith managed to get ashore at least once on each of the four main islands for a formal flag-raising ceremony. This was especially difficult on l'Esperance Rock, which is 250 yards long and 250 feet high. Smith said, "The rock could be put to no possible use...." (S. P. Smith, p. 29.) Indeed, he seemed to feel that way about the Kermadec Islands in general. He suggested that the New Zealand government plant a few trees, set up emergency supply depots for shipwrecked sailors, check the depots once or twice a year to see if any supplies had to be replaced or any sailors rescued, and otherwise just leave the Kermadec Islands alone and forget about them. The New Zealand government followed his advice for the next thirty years.The Kermadec Islands were the end of the line for one of the greatest heroes of World War I. Count Felix von Luckner "was one of those rare men who neither feared nor hated, who by nature made friends of his enemies." (Hoyt, p. viii.) In an age of steel-plated coal-powered dreadnoughts with torpedoes and huge guns, von Luckner proposed going to war in a sailing ship! This charming and persuasive navy officer convinced the German Navy that his idea made a strange kind of sense. An armed sailing ship would be "just what the British would not expect to see" (Hoyt, p. 2.) and the Germans happened to have an ideal sailing ship available. The Pass of Balmaha, built in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1888 was 245.4 feet long and 39 feet wide with a draft of 22.5 feet. Under American ownership she was carrying cotton from New York to Archangel, Russia. America was still neutral, but Russia was an Ally. That made the ship fair game for the U-boats. The German submarine, U-36, captured the Pass of Balmaha in June, 1915, and sent her to Cuxhaven, Germany, as a prize of war. If this ship could be armed and somehow got past British patrols, von Luckner could sail to remote places, attack Allied shipping, and force the British to spend time, money, men and ships trying to track him down.Preparations for the cruise were careful, thorough and top secret. Norway was neutral and von Luckner spoke Norwegian, so he decided his ship and crew would pass as Norwegian. As a civilian tourist, von Luckner went to Copenhagen in neutral Denmark. He boarded the Maletta, a Norwegian ship nearly identical to the Pass of Balmaha, and stole the ship's log. The Maletta had a crew of twenty-seven men. German Naval Intelligence made sure that out of von Luckner's crew of seven officers and fifty-seven men, there were twenty-seven men including von Luckner who spoke Norwegian at least well enough to fool the British. They were provided with clothes purchased in Norway, photographs of Norwegian families, and letters from "home" written by female interpreters of Norwegian in Berlin and Hamburg with forged Norwegian postmarks. Von Luckner even had his shirts and underwear embroidered "Knudsen", the name of the Maletta's captain. Concealing the rest of the crew who spoke only German would be no problem. The space below deck was now a maze of secret compartments and doors cut through closets leading into secret passages. There was even a secret hydraulic elevator that could drop a whole saloon down a deck as a trap if British inspectors had tried to take over the ship. German shipyards had also added two 500-hp diesel engines, four 80-ton fuel tanks, and two 4-inch guns, all carefully concealed. There was also a 360-ton water tank and, most important of all, bunks for 400 prisoners with a separate section for 100 officer prisoners. The Germans expected to keep prisoners for a long time to keep the armed sailing ship a secret as long as possible. Killing unarmed prisoners or sinking neutral ships was never seriously considered. It was simply not the way a civilized country made war.On December 21, 1916, the newly-named Seeadler (Sea Eagle) sailed from Hamburg. Von Luckner had lumber on deck and documents showing he was carrying a cargo of lumber from Norway to Australia. As expected, the ship was intercepted by a British patrol. This happened north of the Shetland Islands in miserable weather. Captain "Knudsen" gave orders in Norwegian and his "Norwegian" crew lowered the sails. A British officer came aboard for an inspection. Captain "Knudsen" expressed his regrets that the rough weather made his wife too seasick to greet the inspector. Seaman Hugo Schmidt was relieved that he did not have to put on a dress and a blonde wig and play the captain's wife. He had been rehearsing just in case. Captain "Knudsen" showed his documents and apologized for the condition of the log which looked as if it had been soaked in sea water and coffee (which is exactly what von Luckner had done.) The British officer told him not to worry about it; he could see by the log that the ship had been through some rough weather in the last few months. The "Norwegian" ship passed her inspection. The Seeadler was free in the North Atlantic. Let the hunt begin.In the days when radio was still a novelty, ships had a custom which would be most useful to von Luckner. It was called "speaking a ship." In the log of an old sailing ship, a typical entry would be, "Spoke the Betsy Ross, nine days out of Nantucket." This meant that when two ships passed at sea, the captains would bring the two ships as close together as they could without risking collision, come out on deck with speaking trumpets (a sort of megaphone), and shout back and forth to exchange the latest news. Von Luckner knew that captains would be both suspicious of unidentified ships and eager for the latest news of the war. When the Seeadler's lookout spotted a ship, the basic procedure was this. First, and most important, make sure it was not a warship. Warships would almost certainly belong to the enemy, and a wooden ship with two 4-inch guns would not be a match for any modern warship. Once certain it was a merchant ship, the next job was to determine its nationality. If it was a steamship, the company insignia would be on the smokestack. If it was a sailing ship, an experienced seaman could make a good guess as to nationality by the color of the sails, the setting of the rigging, the design of the ship, and a dozen details that would mean nothing to a landlubber. The next step was to raise a Norwegian flag or a French flag or whatever von Luckner thought would get the ship to raise their flag in response and come alongside for speaking the ship. Then he would lower the foreign flag, raise the German flag, uncover the guns, and make the capture. Next he would send a team of sailors called a prize crew aboard the enemy ship. Their job was to verify the nationality of the ship, check the cargo manifest for any useful supplies, and check the galley for any food to add to the Seeadler's menu. With the aid of the enemy crew, at gunpoint if necessary, they would transfer the supplies and food to the Seeadler and bring the enemy crew aboard as prisoners. Then, if possible without wasting ammunition, they would sink the enemy ship either by drilling holes in the bottom or by setting it on fire. Transferring men and supplies from one ship to another at sea may sound easy. It is not. There is little a ship captain can do that requires more skill in ship handling. Just ask anyone who has participated in a rescue at sea. Von Luckner would have to do it regardless of weather and always as quickly as possible, because if an enemy warship caught him in the act of robbing a ship, his career would be over.Von Luckner sailed south, well away from land, to get clear of the North Atlantic shipping lanes. The last thing he needed was an encounter with another warship or a heavily armed convoy. The first two ships he captured were British-the Gladys Royal and the Lundy Island. The third ship was French, the Charles Gounod. Von Luckner said it was a joy to capture and sink a steamship, but it made him sad to sink a sailing ship like the Charles Gounod. Next was the Perce, a British ship. The captain's wife became the first female prisoner. The Perce was followed by the Antonin (French) and the Buenos Aires (Italian). After that came the Pinmore, a British ship well known by von Luckner. In peacetime he had served on the Pinmore on a 285-day voyage from San Francisco round Cape Horn to Liverpool. Count von Luckner visited his old quarters on the Pinmore and then with deepest regrets sank her too. The wife of the captain of the British Yeoman became the second female prisoner aboard the Seeadler.Sailing further south von Luckner next caught two French ships-La Rouchefoucault and the Dupleix. As the captain of the Dupleix was brought aboard, von Luckner introduced him to the other three French captains. "Mon Dieu!" he exclaimed, "Tout la France." (Hoyt, p. 103.) The French ships were all carrying saltpeter used in the manufacture of gunpowder, thus von Luckner "was responsible for saving thousands of German lives." (Hoyt, p. 103.) The Horngacth presented a problem von Luckner had not encountered before: it had a radio. Radios were not common and ships modern enough to have them were much more likely to be on North Atlantic routes. Von Luckner had to open fire with his 4-inch guns to prevent a radio message. This British radio operator was the only man von Luckner had to kill on his entire cruise.The Seeadler now had as prisoners 262 men and two women. Besides being a drain on food and water supplies, they outnumbered the crew more than four to one. When von Luckner captured the Cambronne, a French ship, he had a perfect solution for his problem. He cut the Cambronne's masts down almost to the deck to make it really slow. Then he transferred all his prisoners to the Cambronne and told them they were free. He knew it would take them from ten days to two weeks to reach Rio de Janeiro. As a goodwill gesture and propaganda move he paid the wages of all prisoners for all the time they spent on the Seeadler. The next ship he stopped was the Viking. Unfortunately she was Danish (neutral) and he had to let her go. Thanks to the Cambronne and the Viking, his armed sailing ship was no longer a secret. Von Luckner knew that every ship the British had in the South Atlantic would be after him. It was time to try another ocean.With at least seven British ships in pursuit, von Luckner kept sailing south. He steered well to the east of the Falklands. As he sailed over the site where the Battle of the Falklands was fought two years earlier, he ordered a large iron cross, made of metal from captured Allied ships, dropped overboard in memory of Count von Spee and his fleet. As they rounded Cape Horn a lookout on the Seeadler spotted the Otranto, an obsolete old British cruiser, a survivor of the Battle of Coronel. The Seeadler turned away quickly before anyone on the Otranto saw them. The Seeadler was free in the Pacific. It was a whole new hunting ground with two new enemies. Far to the north was an excellent modern Japanese fleet which had proved more than a match for the Russians twelve years earlier. Japan had been an Ally since the beginning of the war. Of more immediate concern were the Americans, who had at last joined the Allies and declared war on Germany. Von Luckner soon added three American ships to his list of victims. They were the A. B. Johnson, the R. C. Slade, and the Manila.On August 1, 1917, Mother Nature accomplished what the Allies could not. A tidal wave wrecked the Seeadler on the island of Mopeha in French Polynesia. There was no loss of life, but the ship was a total wreck. The sixty-four Germans and their twenty-nine prisoners were marooned. The Germans quickly convinced the local population, all three of them, that resistance was futile. Besides, to the Polynesians, World War I was a bizarre if not insane European tribal event that could not have interested them less. Von Luckner "claimed the odd honor of ruling over the last German colony in the world." (Hoyt, p. 121.)Count Felix von Luckner had no intention of ending the war as colonial governor or king of a tropical island, although the idea surely must have had some appeal to his crew. On August 23, 1917, von Luckner with three officers and two seamen sailed away on the best lifeboat, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, an open 18-foot boat with only 14 inches of clearance. The German plan was to take over whatever ship stopped to rescue them or whatever ship they could find unguarded in a remote harbor, return to Mopeha, pick up the rest of the crew and get back in the war. On August 25, von Luckner arrived at Atiu in the Cook Islands; he successfully pretended to be Dutch. Next he went to Aitutaki in the Cook Islands. He had heard there was a real Dutchman there, so he went back to being Norwegian. A suspicious British official demanded to inspect the boat. Von Luckner pulled a hand grenade and announced they had just passed the inspection. The British official admitted the logic of his argument and let him go. Then he hurried back to his concealed radio and broadcast a warning that his remote outpost had briefly been invaded by six armed Germans in a lifeboat. Von Luckner sailed to Niue and then to Katafanga in the Fiji Islands, still without finding a suitable ship to steal. Next he went to Wakaya in the Fiji Islands, where his Norwegian act got a terrible review. It closed on opening night, as British officials arrested the six Germans and shipped them to New Zealand as prisoners of war.Meanwhile, back on Mopeha, three officers, fifty-five sailors and twenty-nine prisoners including one woman were waiting anxiously for word from von Luckner. A deadline set by von Luckner came and passed. They would have to make other plans. On September 5, 1917, a French ship, the Lutèce, arrived at Mopeha. The Germans seized it and sailed away toward the rising sun, leaving the prisoners behind. The prisoners were free, the island was back under French rule, but the Americans from the A. B. Johnson, the R. C. Slade and the Manila, now joined by the French crew of the Lutèce, were just as marooned as they had been under the Germans. They were soon rescued by a Japanese cruiser, the Usuma.The Lutèce, which the Germans renamed the Fortuna, was much less of a prize than she had seemed at first. She was such a rotten leaky ship that the Germans were fortunate to make it to Easter Island where they sank in the harbor. Easter Island belongs to Chile. Chile was neutral. The laws of civilized warfare were quite strict. Combat troops who for any reason end up in a neutral country must be kept until the war is over. Chile sent the Germans to Talcahuano, Chile, where they were "interned with the greatest possible freedom, and they lived out the rest of the war among the German colonists of Chile." (Hoyt, p. 155.)Von Luckner was taken before a board of inquiry investigating the disappearance of the Wairuna. Von Luckner convinced them that he honestly knew nothing about that ship. The truth, which came out much later, was that the Wairuna had been sunk and her crew taken prisoner on June 2, 1917, near the Kermadec Islands by another German raider, the Wolf. Von Luckner and his men were sent to Motuihu prison near Auckland.What von Luckner admired most about the prison was the warden's boat, a trim 12-foot craft called the Pearl. Von Luckner asked the warden, Lt. Col. Turner, for permission to put on a Christmas show with nine men. He said it would be good for German morale and the warden approved.
"Since von Luckner described elaborate scenery, no one was suspicious when they saw his men sitting about the tents day after day, sewing on canvas (making sails), working with tin cans, (making bombs), putting together odd contrivances of wood and steel (a sextant), making flags (a war flag) and fabricating an artificial machine gun. (Hoyt, p. 160.)
One guard had his doubts when he saw them making a pistol holster, but apparently they were able to convince him there were things he didn't know about German Christmas traditions. On December 13, 1917, the ten Germans cut the phone lines, started a fire as a diversion, stole the warden's boat and escaped. Von Luckner was right about one thing: his Christmas show was excellent for German morale.
For two days the Germans hid out on the coast not far from the prison while local authorities launched a massive manhunt. Then they captured the Moa, a two-masted sailing ship. Von Luckner decided to sail to the most remote and unlikely place he could imagine, the Kermadec Islands 600 miles northeast of New Zealand. On December 21, 1917, von Luckner arrived at Curtis Island and sent five men ashore to pick up supplies from the emergency supply depot set up for shipwrecked sailors. His plan was to maroon the prisoners from the Moa on Macauley Island where a similar supply depot would insure their survival and then "sail off into the Pacific on a new adventure." (Hoyt, p. 162.) It would have worked, if he had not run into the New Zealand steamship Iris. The Germans were prisoners of war once again.This time the New Zealanders had the good sense to separate von Luckner from his crew. Von Luckner and his first officer, Kircheiss, were sent back to Motuihu, perhaps on the theory that the same men could not escape from the same prison twice, especially if you didn't let them put on another Christmas show. At Motuihu they met Dr. Schultz-Ebarth, the former governor of German Samoa. The three began plotting their next escape. They would steal supplies in amounts too small to be noticed and stockpile them until they had another chance to escape. World War I ended on November 11, 1918. Once von Luckner was convinced Germany had really lost the war, he led the warden to a small cave. He showed him a stockpile of supples including a folding boat! He told the warden he would have been ready to escape in two or three weeks, but if the fortunes of war required the Allies to give him a free trip back to Germany on a comfortable ship, he could live with that.After the war von Luckner became a hero, even among his former enemies, thanks to his engaging personality, a book by Lowell Thomas, and the fact that he made a living giving lectures about his wartime adventures. It was true that other German raiders such as the Emden, the Moewe and the Wolf sank more ships than the Seeadler, but
"in terms of adventure the exploits of this sailing ship, fighting in a world of steam and submarines, comprise one of the most romantic and exciting stories of World War I. There never was a more gallant ship to sail the sea, never one whose men fought with more gentility, and never one which saw so much action and yet inflicted so little human casualty."(Hoyt, p. 163.)
The next invaders of the Kermadec Islands were not nearly so charming. They were rats of the shipwreck Columbia River on Raoul Island in 1921. These European rats (Rattus norvegicus) proved to be prolific and tough competition for the New Zealand rats or kiore (Rattus exulans) that were already there. In 1908 W. R. B. Oliver, a naturalist, had predicted that a combination of goats, cats and rats would be disastrous for local plants and birds. A recent report states that "... indigenous bird life has been largely exterminated on Raoul Island." (Kermadec Island Sites, p. 7.) Cats have been on the island since about 1850. Goats were released on Macauley and Raoul Islands as early as 1836 as
"emergency food for shipwrecked sailors. They have been eradicated. Unfortunately cats and rats are still found on Raoul, where they have destroyed successful nesting by the majority of seabirds."(Kermadec Islands Visitor, p. 2.)
The New Zealand Forest Service eliminated the goats on Macauley Island in 1970. On much larger Raoul Island hunting goats was an annual event from 1972 to 1984. A survey in 1985 confirmed that there were no goats left on the island. The Kermadec pigeon is extinct. The Kermadec parakeet is gone from Raoul Island, but there are still a few on Macauley Island. The Kermadec Islands have a local species of centipedes and 69 species of butterfly of which "sixteen have been recorded only once, with ten not seen since 1908." (Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 8.) Scientists have found 145 species of fish and 165 species of marine algae. There is archeological evidence of fur seals and possibly leopard seals, although these animals are not found there now. Raoul Island has 35 species of birds, of which five are found only on that island. A really thorough scientific study of the birds has not been done since the Ornithological Society Expedition on 1966/1967 which cost $371,600. Raoul Island has 23 species or subspecies of plants, of which 12 are threatened with extinction. One species (Hebe brevincemosa) is represented by a single specimen. The Kermadec Islands all together have 113 species of plants of which 21 are found only in the Kermadec Islands.
"The terrestrial and marine communities found within the Kermadec Archipelago are found nowhere else in the world." (Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 12.)
As for the human species,
"... the last settlers left Raoul in 1937 when a Government party arrived to establish radio and meteorological stations on the island."(Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 5.)
Either the Columbia River rats were becoming too much of a nuisance or else the settlers decided the island was getting too darned civilized.
Since 1937 the Kermadec Islands have been strictly run by the New Zealand government. During World War II they sent lookouts called coastwatchers to the islands. They found that the Japanese had enough other islands to keep them busy without ever bothering the Kermadecs. After the war the staff was reduced to the meteorologists with occasional other visiting scientists usually studying either flora and fauna or volcanoes. One government report called the Kermadecs "... one of the most active earthquake zones in the New Zealand area...." (Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 3.) Another report stated, "The whole area is volcanically active and earthquakes are an almost daily occurrence." (Kermadec Islands Visitors, p. 5.) In 1964 the island was abandoned due to volcanic activity. The station was reopened as soon as it was safe.In 1989 the meteorological station was automated. The New Zealand government briefly considered evacuating Raoul Island, but decided against it. The Defence and Security Committee
"noted that staff removal would have security implications. With abandoned buildings and plant in usable condition there would be a risk of squatters and illegal landings from local and foreign shipping.
... Staff on the island continue to provide the Defence Department with reports of suspicious shipping activity around Raoul Island."(Kermadec Islands Sites, pp. 16-17.)
Current practice is to station four rangers on Raoul Island,
"occasionally supplemented with volunteers when Navy or other shipping scheduling allows stop-overs of between 2 to 10 weeks. The frequency of these volunteer programmes varies by (sic) they generally occur every one to two years." (Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 18.)
Supplies on Raoul Island are restocked and the staff is changed once a year unless the New Zealand Navy happens by sooner. Supplies are usually unloaded by helicopter.
"Facilities at the station include a hostel and annexe capable of accommodating up to 16 people, food storage facilities including a walk-in freezer and chiller, a small `hospital', a workshop and a diesel engine power generation facility, and a meteorological office."(Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 18.)
There are 10 km. of roads, a few trails and four huts for overnight stays if you can't make it back to the main camp. Visiting scientists have included teams from France and Russia. The short airstrip "does not meet Civil Aviation standards," (Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 18.) but could be used to evacuate personnel in a medical or volcanic emergency. A plan to improve the airport was rejected. It was considered a little too extravagant to spend $1,000,000 to improve an airport for four people. In a modern version of the old lifesaving supply stations, helicopter fuel is stored on Curtis Island and l'Esperance Rock. A helicopter unable to get back to a ship could land there, or one which lacked the range for a round trip from New Zealand could land, refuel, pick up passengers on Raoul Island and return to New Zealand.
Besides maintaining the meteorological station, the roads, the trails and the buildings, keeping an eye out for trespassers, and welcoming legal visitors, the rangers have other duties. For the New Zealand Institute of Geological and Nuclear Science they measure the level and temperature of the lake in a volcanic crater.
"The volcanic monitoring was given prominence recently when a period of seismic and volcanic earthquakes and raised lake levels raised fears of an imminent eruption. This activity has since subsided, however, the risk of eruption remains reasonably high."(Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 16.)
As part of an international program, the rangers also measure carbon dioxide levels. The New Zealand government recommends the reduction or elimination of 15 species of introduced plants. The worst pest is the Mysore thorn. These weeds
"present a significant threat to the indigenous plant community on Raoul Island and, left unchecked, have the potential to radically alter the structure of the forest." (Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 26.)
Rangers spend up to a quarter of their time spraying and pulling weeds. Volunteers, usually from the New Zealand Navy, who come for two to ten weeks are often assigned full time to weed control. Weeds have "been contained, but no significant progress has been made toward eradication in the past three years." (Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 26.)
The Kermadec Islands are now officially a Nature Reserve and a Marine Reserve, because of their fragile ecology. The forest on Macauley Island was destroyed in the early 19th century.
"The purpose of Nature Reserves is the protection and preservation 'in perpetuity of indigenous flora and fauna or natural features that are of such rarity, scientific interest or importance that their protection and preservation is in the national interest.' In that the Kermadec Islands constitute a unique assemblage of New Zealand's biological riches and contain endemic species of flora and fauna and indigenous associations which are found nowhere else in the world, this is an appropriate classification."(Kermadec Islands Sites, p. 12.)
Deep sea fishermen still sail to the Kermadec Islands once in a while. The waters can be dangerous. The Korean tuna boat, the Kina Maru, was wrecked there in 1985 and an unnamed yacht wrecked in 1990. If the fishermen or others want to land, they need landing permits from the New Zealand government. The government often denies permits for the three smaller islands. Permits for Raoul Island are usually granted. Although rain quickly drains away in the volcanic soils, Raoul Island does have a dependable water supply, a forest, four rangers, and even some housing if you make arrangements in advance. Visiting archaeologists have identified 12 sites of human habitation. They are convinced that Maoris visited the islands from about the 10th century to the 14th century. Charcoal from Macauley Island has been carbon dated to the 15th century. Other evidence is the presence of New Zealand rats or kiore reported by some of the first Europeans. It is considered unlikely that the rats ever swam 600 miles from New Zealand by themselves. The archaeologists believe the Maoris never had a permanent settlement on Raoul Island. The island their legends call "Rangitahua" was just a rest stop and occasional fishing camp. For the Maoris, as for the Europeans, the Kermadec Islands were just someplace they bumped into on the way to somewhere else.
"... for the next 80 years the island was an oceanic larder, a stop for scurvy-ridden sailors heartily sick of British naval cooking." (Doubilet, p. 130.)
A National Geographic writer called it a "laboratory for naturalists" and began his article like this:
"Some islands are merely dreams of land in the mist of distant oceans. Lord Howe Island is such a place, a seven-mile-long sliver in a strange and empty quarter of the sea." (Doubilet, p. 130.)
He included a photograph of Ball's Pyramid, a jagged rock nearby, 1811 feet tall. Lord Howe Island itself reaches an elevation of 2871 feet. Its first permanent settlers arrived in 1834. They were former whalers with Maori wives who made a living by raising livestock and vegetables to sell to passing ships. Potted palms were a fad in 1900. Islanders grew palm trees and exported the seeds. In 1918 the shipwreck Makambo brought an invasion of rats which were not brought under control until after World War II.
Flying boats brought some of the first tourists in 1947. The island still has neither casino nor hotel, only guest cottages. Its 280 year-round residents can accommodate about 390 tourists. One attraction is the world's southernmost coral reef. A modern travel writer called Lord Howe Island "... an isolated pinpoint of pure paradise." (Wright, p. 43.) He began his article with a photograph of a bikini-clad blonde feeding ducks. He found that the shape and depth of a reef were shown accurately on his chart, but the location was off by nearly a mile and a half!
"Any sailor from more civilized waters who places total reliance on existing charts of the Coral Sea, many of which are based on British Admiralty surveys from the 1800s, could come to grief on the lonely coral reefs that sprinkle the area." (Wright, p. 79.)
Administered by Australia, 370 miles away at the closest point, Lord Howe Island became a permanent park preserve in 1981, with no non-resident permitted to own land. (Wright, p. 80.) Of all the islands in this book, Lord Howe Island may be the most idyllic.
"You get the feeling that anyone foolish enough to discard a cigarette package carelessly would be lynched, and island homes are left unlocked." (Wright, p. 80.)
The islanders are determined to keep their home a "magic island, in a far and perfect corner of the sea." (Doubilet, p. 146.)
Chapter X.
Other Empires: Macquarie Island, Heard and Macdonald Islands, the Kerguélen Islands, Amsterdam and St. Paul Islands, the Crozet Islands, the Prince Edward Islands, and
Bouvet Island
Island "... one of the most inaccessible parts of the earth's surface...," (Caine, p. 1337.) while another said it was "... desolate and miserable to an extent that cannot readily be conceived." (Eden, p. 171.) The Campbell Macquarie shipwrecked there on March 22 or June 10, 1812, depending on which source you believe. Twelve Europeans and thirty-two Lascars (sailors from India) were marooned. One European and four Lascars died. The thirty-nine survivors were rescued by the Perseverance on October 11, 1812. The seal hunting ship Mary and Sally hunted on Macquarie Island in December, 1813, and again in March, 1814, without a shipwreck. On October 31, 1815, an earthquake hit the island. On November 17, 1820, the Russian scientific expedition led by Captain Bellingshausen arrived. He found thirty seal hunters deeply disappointed that neither the Vostok nor the Mirnyi was their own ship coming to take them home. A modern writer called seal hunters "... the very refuse of the human species...." (Eden, p. 183.) To them Macquarie Island was little more than a thirty-acre penguin roost with a slaughter house for seals on the beach. The Carolina shipwrecked on March 17, 1825. Survivors were rescued by the Wellington on August 30, 1825. The Faith in 1829 picked up seal hunters whose ship had either abandoned them or been lost at sea elsewhere. These hunters had lived on Macquarie Island for nearly two and a half years with the loss of only one man, the cook. In 1838 the shipwrecked crew of the Lord Nelson was marooned for two years. In 1851 there were no survivors from the Countess of Minto. In the 1860's the crew of the Eagle survived two years. In 1877 the Bencleugh was lost with all hands. On January 2, 1891, the Kakanui left Macquarie Island and disappeared. In 1898 the crew of the shipwrecked Gratitude was rescued after only three months. On December 12, 1910, the Jessie Nicol went down with all hands. "She was not insured, as Lloyd's refused cover on a sailing vessel working in those waters." (Eden, p. 199.) The next victim was the Clyde, with no survivors on November 14, 1911. In general the shipwrecks on Macquarie Island were not as famous or as well documented as those on other islands, but no doubt they were every bit as miserable.Australians had rushed to claim Macquarie Island before New Zealanders could get their hands on it. Now they were not sure it had been worth the effort. At 54°37' South it was right in the "furious fifties" with miserable weather, almost in Antarctica, and what did Antarctica have to offer besides 90% of the world's ice? Captain Cook once said,
"Should anyone push farther south than I have done, I shall not envy him the fame of his discovery, but the world will derive no benefit from it." (I. Bennett, pp. 14-15.)
On the other hand Charles Darwin thought the study of the flora and fauna of remote islands had great scientific value. A modern naturalist called Macquarie Island "... surely one of the most fascinating and unique animal sanctuaries in the world today." (I. Bennett, p. 19.) Scott was there in 1901 and Shackleton in 1909. A modern scientist said,
"Scientific research on the subantarctic islands often appears to be the poor cousin of that on the Antarctic continent." (Caine, p. 1337.)
A scientific station opened in 1911, but scientists closed it in 1914 when the ship Endeavour sunk with most of their supplies. It was re-opened in 1947. About fifteen scientists a year still go there, mostly meteorologists, geologists, and biologists. All indigenous animal and bird life depends on the sea. The only exceptions are imported cats, rats, and rabbits. Some of them escaped and some were turned loose on purpose over the years and their descendants drive scientists crazy, especially those concerned with native birds and vegetation. A London Times reporter who probably never set foot on Macquarie Island called it one of Australia's "... minute and strangely enchanting chips of rock... ; (Times Literary Supplement, October 16, 1992, p. 32.) a Royal Marine, Captain Douglass, who got a good look at the place said, "... nothing could warrant any civilized creature living in such a spot...." (Eden, p. 183.)
In 1933 Australia stopped issuing seal hunting licenses and declared their subantarctic islands to be wildlife sanctuaries. Since then the only visitors to Heard Island have been occasional scientific expeditions.
"It is the only possible breeding ground for birds and seals in an area of the sea larger than the United States of America." (Gilham, p. 24.)
Mary E. Gilham, one of the scientists, admitted she could not remain "rigidly anthropomorphic" when studying penguins. (Gilham, p. 15.) She also called elephant seals "excruciatingly ugly and endearingly stupid" and said they have delayed reaction if you kick or scratch them. (Gilham, p. 29.)
The only places more obscure than Heard Island, in fact the most obscure places in this book, are the Macdonald Islands and Shag Island. You can go to a great library and find no stories of shipwrecks, no eye-witness descriptions, and no scientific reports. If someone asks what you learned about the Macdonald Islands and Shag Island, all you can do is point to a map and say, "There they are." Reader, if you like a challenge....
"Waterfalls descending from the cliffs are intercepted in mid air, and driven backwards in continuous clouds of spray to the hills, from whence they leap down, leaving the stream bed empty below...." (Royal Society, p. 4.)
The fjords of Kerguélen are
"long reaches of still, blue waters dotted with green islets looking as lonely and detached as clouds, nearly all of them untrodden by man." (Tilman, p. 135.)
A modern sailor said the courage of the early navigators was no match for their ignorance and that their vague charts bore "little resemblance to reality." (Rallier du Baty, p. 19.) Still, they must have seen that an island with "a veritable mob of sea elephants," (de Brossard, v. 2, p. 61.) an island called "the paradise of birds," (Reppe, p, 147.) an island with its own peculiar kind of cabbage, and two or three good harbors might possibly be of some use.
From 1776 to 1840 neither ship of war nor scientific expedition visited Kerguélen; it was scarcely known except to seal hunters. In 1825 John Nunn boarded the sealing ship Royal Sovereign bound for Kerguélen. His memoirs included a fine description of a storm, of outrunning a pirate ship, and advice on how to kill seals and sea elephants. Nunn was in a whaleboat that was shipwrecked on Kerguélen. The four men were found two weeks later by another whaleboat from the Royal Sovereign.Nunn said he had nightmares about being shipwrecked. The nightmares came true on December 26, 1825, when he was shipwrecked a second time on the same island with three other sailors and about two weeks' worth of food. Two of the men-James Lawrence and James Stilliman-were also in the first shipwreck. John Manning was a replacement for John Richardson. As first mate, Lawrence was in command and was the only one Nunn called "Mr." in his memoirs. Stilliman was only 16 years old. This time the Royal Sovereign crew did not find them, although they looked nearly four weeks. Remember that Kerguélen Island is roughly the size of Rhode Island. Nunn described their survival on an island where the climate was "exceedingly severe, damp and unsettled...." (Nunn, p. 81.) The men constructed a crude hut and lived at first mainly on penguin eggs and ducks. Nothing they killed could be left unguarded for a second. The "nellies" (sooty albatrosses) were much too efficient as scavengers. Common hazards included quicksand and mud holes. Nunn described a sailor they pulled out of a mud hole:
"He might have been a sea elephant or a man; he looked like a moving pyramid of mud, which was as black as pitch and almost as tenacious!" (Nunn, p. 91.)
Later they found pitch and repaired their boat. They went out to sea to try to sight a ship or perhaps find a better place to camp. Twice a whale came up under their boat and lifted them clear out of the water. The sailors decided they were safer back on the island having a hearty meal of elephant seal soup. It was made from the flippers and nose. They also ate the tongue, heart and kidneys. The sailors made purses from seals' feet and joked about selling them as souvenirs.
Slowly the sailors improved their survival techniques. They learned that fish sometimes got tangled in kelp (seaweed) and were practically delivered gift-wrapped on the beach. They learned how to make a leopard seal coat by stretching the hide on the ground, hair side down, scraping it with knives, and rubbing it with sand. They learned to kill a whole flock of ducks at once by stretching a rope across a pond, slowly herding the ducks to one end, and then bashing them with clubs. They cleaned the ducks and salted them to store as emergency rations on days when the hunting or the weather was bad. The whole crew had only one musket, three pounds of powder, and some shot and did not want to waste it. They made pipes from elephant seal teeth and albatross wing bones and carefully rationed their tobacco. Once on a hunt they found the grave of Captain Matley of the ship Duke of Portland. He had died of natural causes in 1810. His wife had sent a headstone on the next ship to Kerguélen Island with as fine an epitaph as a sailor could want:
"Farewell, vain world, I've seen enough of thee,
And now I'm careless what thou say'st of me:
Thy smiles I court not, nor thy frowns I fear,
Since my head's at rest and I'm quiet here:
What faults you've seen in me, take care to shun;
Look thou at home-enough there's to be done." (Nunn, p. 144.)
The sailors must have wondered if it would be their epitaph as well.
Wherever they went on Kerguélen the sailors set up boards saying where their camp was. They made a cart from a box using axles from the boat and wheels made from whale vertebra. It immediately got stuck in the sand. John Nunn liked penguin eggs cooked in seal oil. If the shell broke cleanly he could put a message in it, seal it with pitch and launch it in the sea along with the more traditional note in a bottle. The sailors also considered notes attached to model boats or even to an albatross, but these schemes never got off the ground. Suddenly they found elephant seals killed with lances and knew they had not done it. Someone else was on the island! Sailors from the cutter Lively sailing with the sealing ship Sprightly had found one of their message boards and started a search. John Nunn and the others were rescued two years and three months after they were shipwrecked. Captain Distant of the Sprightly had the shipwrecked sailors teach his men how to hunt and what to eat on Kerguélen Island. It turned out he had spoken to John Nunn's father just before he sailed from London and had promised to make a really thorough search. He had been searching for three weeks. He needed to catch more seals and maybe a whale to make a profit and then he would gladly take them back to civilization. Captain Distant's men harpooned a whale, were towed 30 miles in three hours, and lost the whale. They left the Royal Sovereign survivors on Kerguélen Island while they finished hunting seals around the Crozet Islands. Then they returned and gave them a lift to Capetown. In Capetown the Royal Sovereign survivors were celebrities. They sold seal skin purses as souvenirs and rarely if ever paid for a drink or a meal.Kerguélen is a French island, but for many years it was Americans who knew it best. Captain Joseph J. Fuller was sometimes called the "master of Desolation," referring to the name Captain Cook had given the island. Captain Fuller was born on Tristan da Cunha, the last island in this book, in 1839. When he was fifteen, his family emigrated to America, where he began a long career at sea, often serving in sealing or whaling ships sailing in subantarctic waters. When he first saw Kerguélen Island, he "thought it a very hard looking country." (Fuller, p. 18.) He learned that penguin blood is a cure for scurvy, leopard seal is delicious, and elephant seal heart with sage is better than beef. He noted that Kerguélen cabbage looked like cabbage, but tasted more like spinach, while another island plant made a decent cup of tea. He saw one sailor chase a rockhopper penguin into a pile of rocks, crawl in after it, and get bitten on the nose. About the men who sailed with him, he said, "Ex-convicts, jailbirds, and refugees from the law are as a rule found in the crews of whalemen." (Fuller, p. 85.)On April 22, 1880, Captain Fuller set sail from New London, Connecticut, in command of the Pilot's Bride. His orders were to carry cargo to Capetown and then hunt seals at Kerguélen. He left Capetown on April 2, 1881. On October 2, 1881, the Pilot's Bride shipwrecked in a blizzard on Kerguélen Island. Four men were killed and twenty-two made it ashore with one year's food supply. It was not unusual to be carrying so much food; sailors on whaling or sealing ships were often away from ports for eighteen months or more, eating only what they carried plus what they caught. This crew also ate nighthawks (petrels), a kind of sea bird that burrows into the ground to make its nest. There were also plenty of rabbits which earlier hunting expeditions had turned loose as an emergency food supply. They started fires with wood and also burned seal blubber, which made a lot of soot. Portuguese sailors in the crew made wooden shoes which Fuller said were no good on wet rocks. It was an unusually quarrelsome crew, generally with the Portuguese and the three Americans against all the others, and with a man named Chipman getting on everybody's nerves. Captain Fuller arrested six of the worst troublemakers, took them to nearby Atlas Island, and left them there with one third of the provisions. One American and one Portuguese used their share of the wreckage to make a small boat. They returned to Fuller and talked Fuller into bringing back two more of the troublemakers. Things got so bad that Fuller had to chain the lifeboats to prevent their unauthorized use or theft. A sailor named Reed was banished from the main camp after striking Captain Fuller. Fuller said, "It seemed as if we were living over an active volcano and we did not know when it would break out." (Fuller, p. 243.) When they were finally rescued on September 11, 1882, Fuller wrote,
"And I think if our friends had seen us at that time they would said why they have all gone crazy, and they would have been about right, we was crazy, crazy with joy, for we knew that we was going to hear from home, from wife, mother, father, sister, and brother, from those that we had not heard from for over two long years" (Fuller, p. 250.)
Boarding the rescue ship Francis Allyn, Captain Fuller saw that they had already picked up the troublemakers from Atlas Island. He also learned they had a letter for Mr. Chipman from his wife telling how a spiritualist had described the shipwreck, the survivors, and their camp in detail! Fuller said his own wife burst into tears when she received a telegram announcing his survival. He learned that Captain Williams on the Trinity had been hunting on Heard Island from October, 1880, to February, 1882, and that a ship called the Marion, looking for the Trinity, had stopped a day at Kerguélen Island without spotting any of the Pilot's Bride crew or bothering to look even though they were known to be missing. Captain Glass offered the Pilot's Bride crew one third of the catch if they would join his crew. Only Captain Fuller and six others, including the two troublemakers from Atlas Island, accepted the deal. On February 13, 1883, the Francis Allyn reached Capetown. The United States Consul arranged passage home for the crew, but said the shipping company would have to pay for Captain Fuller and the officers.
The company sent them to Southampton, England, and from there home on the Warren. On that ship they were treated as celebrities. At home Fuller found that Captain Glass was refusing to give him his share of the profits for his work on the Francis Allyn. He was prepared to sue, but Captain Williams of the Trinity used his influence to get an out of court settlement of $1000. Captain Fuller, a Union navy veteran, was invited to speak at a G. A. R. (Grand Army of the Republic, a Union army Civil War veterans group) meeting. He told them Kerguélen cabbage made good cole slaw and he would like to try sauerkraut. He said that of all penguins, the king penguin is "... the most prepossessing and handsome. The other varieties are mere pygmies alongside of this bird." (Fuller, p. 302.) He said little about why the crew was so hard to handle after the shipwreck. Perhaps if you were an "ex-convict, jailbird and refugee from the law" who signed on for a voyage to a remote island with a captain who claimed to be "master" of the place, only to have him shipwreck you there for eleven months, you would be a little hard to handle too. Captain Fuller did say something about giving the speech that would apply just as well to the actual shipwreck. He said, "I... was jolly glad when I got through with the whole thing." (Fuller, p. 280.)In 1879 the Royal Society of London reported an active volcano and hot springs "resorted to by the sea elephants for the purpose of recreation at certain seasons of the year." (Royal Society, p. 2.) The Society said swampy ground and mud holes made Kerguélen a difficult island to explore.
"Measurements of the map afford no very trustworthy bases for estimates of the time needed for a journey of a given length in a certain direction."(Royal Society, p. 3.)
The Society added, "The climate of Kerguélen is tempestuous, chilly, and wet." (Royal Society, p. 3.) They told their readers that petrels (nighthawks) which burrowed in the ground were the favorite food of skuas and that the skuas were "much puzzled when they saw rabbits come out of Petrels' holes." (Royal Society, p. 112.) In old times when their worst enemy was the leopard seal, the instinct of a frightened penguin was to head for land. Now after a century of contact with man, a penguin in panic would head for the sea.
Raymond Rallier du Baty was a veteran of Dr. Charcot's 1903-1905 French Antarctic expedition. In 1908 Rallier du Baty bought a 50-foot boat, named it the J. B. Charcot, found two Bretons, one Basque, and two fellow Normans to complete his crew, and set sail for the subantarctic. Well aware of the history of the area, he prepared a "shipwreck sack" of emergency supplies and never went ashore without it in case anything happened to his boat. Fortunately nothing ever did. On Kerguélen Island he discovered coal. Like others he also found quicksand and mud holes forty or fifty feet deep. He compared the famous Kerguélen cabbage to horseradish and said he had to boil it twice to make it edible. He found a small house built by a German scientific expedition in 1902 and compared the discovery to Robinson Crusoe finding footprints. Rallier du Baty and his crew did some seal hunting to help pay for their trip. He compared the crew fighting elephant seals to cave men fighting mammoths. Rallier du Baty found Kerguélen Island surprisingly crowded. In addition to the Norwegian ship Jeanne d'Arc, there were two French ships: the Carmen and the Éclair.
"You may imagine that when two French seamen get together, and one of them has been on a desert island for ten months of loneliness, and the other has come straight from France with the latest news of Paris there is much to say." (Rallier du Baty, pp. 312-313.)
Rallier du Baty said Kerguélen's weather was "as worrisome as you will find anywhere in the world." (Rallier du Baty, p. 324.) Once when he had eight straight days without gale force winds, he wrote, "I think this must have been a record for the Island of Desolation." (Rallier du Baty, p. 38.)
Kerguélen Island attracted a little attention in the rest of the twentieth century. Raymond Rallier du Baty made another cruise in subantarctic waters in his new boat, the Curieuse. The French opened a sheep ranch in 1907 and abandoned it in 1932. A whaling station lasted from 1909 to 1929. In World War II three German raiders, the Atlantis, the Komet, and the Pinguin, used Kerguélen Island as a base and sank 200,000 tons of Allied shipping. The French laid mines to discourage their return. You might want to check if the mines were swept before sailing in the area. In 1949 the French set up a permanent weather station at Port-aux-Français on Kerguélen Island. It is still used as a scientific station and is at least big enough to show up on most maps of the world. H. W. Tilman, who visited the station in 1961 on his yacht Mischief, reported that the French scientists were raising cows, pigs, chickens, ducks and geese He said they served a great meal including tomatoes, lettuce and radishes grown on the island. They were aware of the coal on the island, but were not mining it. It was cheaper, more convenient and less damaging ecologically to import their own fuel. Another tourist on a yacht, Xavier Reppe on the Aurore, had the good fortune to see Kerguélen Island from a helicopter in clear weather. He said it was the most colorful and spectacular landscape he ever saw "in his long career as a nomad." (Reppe, p. 73.) Reppe said if Captain Cook had seen Kerguélen Island like this he never would have called it Desolation Island.The days of wooden ships and iron men gave way slowly to iron ships and steam engines. The first steamboat in the British Navy was the tugboat Monkey, launched in 1821. At first steam engines were considered auxiliary power on sailing ships. The first Atlantic crossing entirely under steam was in -0.01>1838. Iron hulls were used mainly on canal boats. William Fairbairn of Kelso, Scotland, who built canal boats, decided to open a shipyard in London and build iron ships for ocean-going travel. The advantages of iron were first that it was cheaper than wood and had more value as scrap, second that an iron ship had more carrying capacity than a wooden ship of equal size, and third that, at least in theory, an iron hull was stronger than a wooden one. The disadvantage was building iron ships was a bad business in which to be first and discover all the unforeseen expenses and design flaws the hard way. Fairbairn lost money, went bankrupt, and finally sold out to Alfred and Henry Oliver Robinson. Fairbairn's yard built over 100 ships. HMS Megaera, built as a frigate for the Royal Navy, was one of the last and largest.0>HMS Megaera was launched on May 22, 1849. She had a length of 207 feet, a beam of 37 feet 8 inches, a depth of hold of 24 feet 3 inches, and was rated at 1395 tons. She was one of the first iron ships ordered by the Royal Navy. The Admiralty was skeptical about iron ships and this slow ship did nothing to change its mind. She never served as a frigate. The Admiralty immediately ordered her converted to a troopship and storeship. On her maiden voyage as a troopship on June 7, 1851, HMS Megaera broke down and had to be towed back to port. She tried again January 3, 1852. She was poorly designed for a storeship. For example, she had no lockers. She was a storeship with no place to store things. HMS Megaera was refitted and sailed again. She was ordered to use sails to conserve coal.
"The Megaera was not a popular ship with passengers and she seems to have earned her reputation for discomfort on the maiden voyage." (Hayward, p. 52.)
HMS Megaera at last became an operational ship in the Royal Navy and made several trips to the Crimea, but she was not anyone's favorite ship.
In 1871 HMS Megaera was assigned to transport Royal Navy recruits to Australia to replace crew members on the Blanche and the Rosario. HMS Megaera left England on February 22, 1871. She was damaged in a heavy storm and went to Queenstown (Cobh), Ireland, for repairs. Officers complained that the ship was carrying too much baggage and riding too low in the water. There was an article in the London Times, questions in the House of Commons, and eventually an inspection resulting in the removal of 127 tons of cargo.Then the real adventure began. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine reported,
"Listen then, ye landsmen and brother sailors, and you shall hear of hairbreadth escapes and stirring adventures, the like of which perils, though many may encounter, yet few live to relate." (Hayward, p. 72.)
On May 28, 1871, HMS Megaera left Simonstown, South Africa. Aboard were 42 officers, 44 marines, 180 sailors of HMS Megaera's crew, and 67 recruits on their way to Australia. On June 9,1871, one of the marines fell overboard and drowned. Then sailors found 17 inches of water in the hold. The old rust bucket had sprung a leak! Manning the pumps, the sailors lowered the water to 13 inches and began to look for the leak. It took them five days to find it and it was a bad one. Captain Arthur Thomas Thrupp had to make a tough decision. He was in the Indian Ocean half way between Africa and Australia in a slow leaky ship. He had no way of knowing if St. Paul was inhabited, although he may have known that fishermen from Réunion had camped there in the 18th century and again from 1843 to 1855. He surely would have known that shipwrecked sailors had survived. Most of all he knew that St. Paul was unquestionably the closest land and that he had to get the ship to a quiet anchorage to see just how bad the damage was. On June 15, 1871, Captain Thrupp changed course to head for St. Paul. Two days later they anchored at St. Paul in 14 fathoms of water. A diver went overboard to check the damage. Then the anchor broke and the diver was hauled aboard before he could inspect anything. HMS Megaera drifted off and then sailed back to the anchorage and dropped a second anchor. On June 18, 1871, the anchor cable snapped. HMS Megaera dropped a third anchor and the divers were finally able to make a thorough inspection. After hearing twelve reports from divers and the opinions of three engineers, Captain Thrupp made his decision. He announced that HMS Megaera was going nowhere: they were shipwrecked on the island of St. Paul. Three hundred and thirty-one sailors and marines burst into applause.
A French admiral once said St. Paul has a "generally sinister aspect", (de Brossard, v. 2, p. 509.) but these sailors and marines thought it looked a lot safer than the Megaera. They were greeted by the entire French population of St. Paul, all two of them. Using a Jersey man as interpreter, the sailors explained that they were abandoning ship and would unload as much of the cargo as they could. Then the third anchor broke. The sailors struggled to keep the ship more or less in one place as they unloaded her. Finally they ran her aground. They did not completely abandon the ship until 11 days later, when Captain Thrupp declared the dangerous wreckage off limits. They succeeded in unloading about two-thirds of the cargo. Unfortunately this was no whaling ship with an 18-month food supply. It was a troopship with enough food for the trip to Australia and a few weeks more. The two Frenchmen ran a supply station for whaling ships, but the main supply they had to offer was fresh water. There were three ponds on St. Paul which filled up every time it rained and that was rather often. The Frenchmen filled barrels with fresh water and had them ready to sell. They were rather vague about what had happened to a third member of the company, an African. Hungry British sailors joked that maybe they ate him. Three hundred thirty-two sailors and marines must have used up the French water supply rather quickly. Fortunately they salvaged from their ship condensing apparatus for making fresh water from salt water. They made about 360 gallons a day. They tried eating penguins and thought they tasted terrible. Once in a while they caught a goat, but their main food was fish. One day they caught 700 pounds of fish. Another day they caught one fish that weighed 811 pounds. A normal day's catch was 120 to 180 pounds, which made skimpy rations for 332 people. Local vegetation proved inedible except for one plant that could pass for spinach (probably Kerguélen cabbage). Using tents and boards from the ship's cargo, as well as sails and wood from the wreckage, the crew constructed a reasonable facsimile of a Royal Navy base. One group of marines found that the floor of their hut was always warm, a reminder that they were on a volcanic island. Sailors found a hot springs with a temperature of 175°F. The camp had a garbage collection once a day. Of course, all they did with the garbage was dump it in the ocean. Captain Thrupp ordered them to erect the highest flagpole they could in hopes of attracting a passing ship.On July 16, 1871, Captain Visier of the Dutch ship Aurora spotted the flagpole. He knew there were no trees on St. Paul and sailed closer to investigate. Lt. Lewis Jones boarded the ship to explain the situation. It would take more than one small ship to rescue 332 people. Captain Visier said he could take a few more passengers, but sailed away without waiting for them. At the end of July a marine fell off a cliff. He was found 300 feet down on a ledge, alive and with no broken bones! (Question for British military: Are marines a little crazier and more accident-prone than other branches of the service?) On August 1, a barrel with 3000 fish hooks washed ashore from the wreckage of HMS Megaera. "Three thousand pounds of gold would have been valueless in comparison." (Hayward, p. 97.) The Aurora reached Surabaya, Java, on August 2. Lt. Lewis Jones sent telegrams to the British Consul in Batavia (Jakarta) and to the Royal Navy Commodore in Hong Kong. The Consul arranged for the Oberon to deliver supplies to St. Paul. The Commodore ordered HMS Rinaldo to sail to the rescue. He also chartered the Malacca to pick up passengers. On August 5 a second Dutch ship took five men from St. Paul. On August 7 the captain of the English clipper Mountain Laurel wanted to be paid to rescue the HMS Megaera crew. He claimed he would have to jettison his cargo to make room for so many passengers. Captain Thrupp thought it over. His mood and language can be imagined. By this time his crew was so hungry that not even the cats on the island were safe. On the other hand his crew was remarkably healthy and not likely to run out of either fresh water or fish. He had already sent six men for help, two Dutch ships knew they were there, and help was surely on the way. Captain Thrupp told the Mountain Laurel where to go without him. If things got worse, he could count on his survival experts:
"We had among us no less than nine men who had suffered shipwreck before-in the Orpheus, Osprey, Bombay, Captain, Trinculo, Perseverance, Race-horse; one of them-an old cook-had been five times wrecked in three years." (Hayward, p. 87.)
On August 26 Lt. Lewis Jones arrived on the Oberon with the supplies and received a hero's welcome. The entire crew went on full rations including, no doubt, foods they had seen only in their dreams for the last ten weeks. On August 29, 1871, the Malacca and HMS Rinaldo arrived. In bad weather they almost became shipwrecks themselves.
HMS Rinaldo was bound for England and the Malacca was bound for Australia. It took until September 5 to get all the men and what they could salvage of the cargo aboard the two ships. The Frenchmen were sorry to see them go. They found the British sailors and marines "... more amusing than the companionship of penguins and rats...." (Hayward, p. 112.)When Captain Thrupp got back to England on HMS Rinaldo, he was court-martialled, standard procedure in the Royal Navy when a captain lost his ship. After a lengthy and thorough investigation, Captain Thrupp was honorably acquitted. In 1893 the French set up unmanned survival stations on their subantarctic islands similar to the ones set up by New Zealand. In 1928 Breton fishermen set up a crayfish canning factory on St. Paul. Although it once employed nearly 100 people, it eventually failed, and St. Paul was abandoned. The island went back to being a geographical curiosity, a footnote in history and geography, and the long forgotten site of one of the most populous shipwrecks of all time.In 1820 the Prince of Wales (some say Princess of Wales) shipwrecked. Elephant seals made survival possible. The sailors used sealskin for the roof of their hut. They made sealskin blankets and sealskin moccasins. Apparently an elephant seal is as useful to a shipwrecked sailor as a buffalo was to a native American on the Great Plains. The sailors burned seal blubber for warmth and even bathed in elephant seal blood. Later they found a hut built by American whalers in 1805. The American frying pan was better than theirs, so they broke the handle off their old pan and made a lance head to kill more elephant seals. The elephant seals were the only food except for Kerguélen cabbage, which had to be boiled three or four hours to remove the bitter taste. Eight men on East Island were unaware there were other survivors until they moved their camp to Possession Island and ran into the main part of the crew. Details on this shipwreck are scarce. H. W. Tilman, who wrote about it in 1961, did not say how many men survived, how long they were there, or who rescued them. In 1825 John Nunn sailed past the Crozet Islands. About seeing birds, he wrote,
"We could not observe these feathered tribes in their busy flight without feelings of extreme pleasure, and we regarded them as one traveling over a dreary desert would view the inhabitants of some city widely separated from the rest of the world. (Nunn, p. 12.)
In 1837 a French ship rescued some shipwrecked Americans. In 1840 the Ross expedition was unable to land. In 1871 Joseph J. Fuller landed on Hog Island. He "experienced much trouble getting ashore, as the beach is very rugged and uneven," (Fuller, p. 31.) Later he was one of twelve men whose whaleboat crashed on Hog Island. Four were killed. The eight survivors caught and ate an albatross. Fuller said it tasted like seal. They found a small house, moved in, then accidentally set it on fire and burned their clothes. Another boat from the Pelot's Bride rescued them. For Fuller it turned out to be good practice for the eleven months and five days he later spent stuck on Kerguélen.
Few people have visited the Crozet Islands. In 1874 the crew of the Challenger was unable to land. A German scientific expedition was also unable to land, but an American expedition got ashore for one day. "From this brief record," said H. W. Tilman, "one might conclude that the only way to spend any time on the Crozet Islands was to be shipwrecked there." (Tilman, p. 28.) In July 1875 the Strathmor was shipwrecked. There were 40 people killed and 44 survivors including one woman. Four men died and the forty survivors were picked up in January 1876. In November 1876 HMS Wolverine looked for survivors, not knowing they had already been rescued in January. In 1880, determined to do something useful in the Crozet Islands, the Royal Navy got permission from the French to set up an emergency supply depot. The supplies were used up by a French shipwreck, but none of the French sailors survived. In 1887 the French restocked the supply depot. Now the Crozet Islands are deserted. "No steamer passes within a thousand miles of the Crozet." -0.01>(Tilman, p. 29.) Xavier Reppe sailed there in 1957 in his yacht Aurore, named for the wind. He complained that his nautical charts were useless ashore since all they showed was the outline of an island, its highest elevation, and a lot of blank space. He said no one went there but scientific expeditions and an occasional warship. H. W. Tilman sailed there in 1961 on his yacht Mischief. He enjoyed the wildlife, including king penguins, gentoo penguins, killer whales, fur seals, and elephant seals. He said,0>
"A sea-elephant must have a limited range of emotions and curiosity is not one of them. If he has any others he is seldom awake long enough to exercise them." (Tilman, p. 81.)
It was Tilman who caught the lonely essence of the place:
"When sailing down there in a waste of water which encircles the globe, any land seems unnatural. When it does appear it has an unreal quality, even though one has gazed at it daily on the chart. It has an air of defying the sea, as if it knew that in that vast ocean land had no place." (Tilman, p. 81.)
The Crozet Islands have been a French National Park since 1925; probably no national park in the world has fewer visitors.
"... nature was at its worst on the windswept coastline, where the cliffs, boulders, and rocky beaches made progress extremely difficult."(Crawford, p. 121.)
Among the hazards he noted rotting kelp and cantankerous elephant seals. Marion in 1772, Cook in 1775, Ross in 1840, and Gauss in 1901 all sighted Marion Island without being able to land. There is precipitation on 3ll days a year with 89 of those days having snow. There were few visitors. Whalers had a station on the island in 1802. German marines supposedly went ashore in both world wars, although the only evidence was a few German cartridges. Crawford called the weather
"... among the worst in the world and sunshine is a rare luxury. Temperatures fall below freezing in winter and snow frequently covers the whole island. It is an ideal place for a weather reporting station but not for those who man it." (Crawford, p. 126.)
Crawford and six volunteers from Tristan da Cunha were among those chosen by the South African government to carry out a secret mission in 1947 to officially claim the Prince Edward Islands for South Africa. With Lt. Commander J. Fairbairn and a company of marines from HMSAS Transvaal, the flag-raising ceremonies were a complete success and the Prince Edward Islands remain South African territory. Crawford found evidence of seal hunting in caves and wreckage from a ship called the Solglimt.
A weather station was set up on Marion Island. The island turned out to be a mile and a half south of where it was on the charts. Scientists noticed mice on the island, but no rats. When they imported cats to chase the mice, the cats naturally preferred chasing birds, although they learned to keep a respectful distance from the penguins. The scientists also kept a small herd of sheep as a food supply. The scientists considered the Prince Edward Islands to be kind of an evolutionary laboratory due to their extreme isolation. As an example they noted six species of butterflies with strong legs and weak wings on an island where constant and gusty winds made walking more practical than flying. If you want to know everything about the Prince Edward Islands down to the last rock and lichen, read the report of the 1965-1966 scientific expedition.On December 1, 1927, Norwegian whalers led by Captain Harald Hornveldt of the ship Norvegia, formally claimed Bouvet Island for Norway. In 1928 E. R. Gunther passed by in the ship Discovery. He found that engines at full speed barely kept the ship off the rocks and that pack ice prevented a landing. Also in 1928, despite objections from some Members of Parliament, Britain gave up all claims to Bouvet Island. It was not worth arguing about, especially since Norway was nice enough not to claim South Georgia, which had a mostly Norwegian population. In 1929 Norwegians set up an emergency supply depot on Bouvet Island similar to those set up by France and New Zealand on their islands, although Bouvet Island was an even more unlikely place for a shipwreck. In 1930 the Norwegian government completed the paperwork needed to claim the island. A South African scientific expedition visited the island in 1955. Three years later the U. S. Coast Guard ship Westwind discovered a beach that had not existed when the South Africans were there. The island had grown due to volcanic activity! In 1959 Italians faked an expedition, reporting exploration when they had never set foot on the place. In 1964 a South African expedition photographed Bouvet Island. They landed and found unidentified wreckage, but no human remains. In 1966 another South African expedition concluded that Bouvet Island was a totally impractical place for a permanent research station. Except for fishing rights, Bouvet Island has no apparent value. It is the coldest and least hospitable of the subantarctic islands. No matter where it is exactly or what shape it is exactly, Bouvet Island remains indisputably Norwegian.