Island of the Lost (36 page)

At times a good guide for deciding the true order in which things happened was to see what the sea lions were doing at the particular times described. Their breeding pattern is described in
Preliminary Results of the Auckland Islands Expedition 1972–1973
, compiled and edited by J. C. Yaldwyn, and printed by the New Zealand Department of Lands and Survey in 1975. The papers relevant to sea lion breeding cycles were “Report on the Natural History and Behaviour of Hooker's Sea lion
at Enderby Island, Auckland Island, 1972-73,” by H. A. Best (pp. 159–70); “Observations on the Breeding Cycle of Hooker's Sea lion on Enderby Island, 1972–73,” by B. J. Marlow (pp. 171–75); and “Report on the Collection of Anatomical and Osteological Material of Hooker's Sea lion during the Auckland Islands Expedition 1972–73,” by Judith E. Marlow (pp. 176–82), this last being a charming dissertation, which I briefly quoted in the discussion of sea lions in
Chapter 6
.

I am indebted to Creative New Zealand for a grant I received in the year 2000 to research the history of sealing in the subantarctic islands, and to the J. D. Stout Fellowship for a year's tenure (2001) at the Stout Centre for New Zealand Studies, an institute that still provides a great deal of intellectual support. The job of comparing the various editions of the two books was carried out in the reading room of the J. C. Beaglehole Library, at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, where I was greatly assisted by the librarian, Nicola Frean, and her assistant, Tracey Williamson. They were not only helpful but enthusiastic, even organizing a most valuable panel discussion of the two publications.

Their volume of
Les naufrages
is an 1870 edition, and is a large, splendid book with a handsome crimson cover and gilt-edged pages. The English translation I used is an enlarged facsimile of an 1880 reprint by T. Nelson and Sons, printed in 2003 by Roger Steele, of the Wellington publishing firm Steele Roberts. This edition is augmented with commentaries on the Auckland Islands; François Edouard Raynal and his book; Alphonse de Neuville, illustrator; Captain Th omas Musgrave; and the influence of Raynal's
Wrecked on a Reef
on Jules Verne's novels, all researched and written by Verne scholar Christiane Mortelier.

There is a third edition of Musgrave's book. In 1943 the New Zealand publishing firm A. H. & A. W. Reed produced a version with almost the same title,
Castaway on the Aucklands: the wreck of the Grafton, from the private journals of Th omas Mus-grave, Master mariner, edited by A. H. and A. W. Reed
. However, though the reader is not warned by the foreword, it is by no means a true reproduction. Instead, in an inappropriate effort to make Musgrave's plain, workmanlike writing more accessible to the ordinary reader, the editors paraphrased his account—replacing his “I went to bed” with “I turned in,” for instance. As I could not comfortably quote from this, it was set aside.

The Macpherson collection (MSX-4936) at the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, includes three letters, one fragmentary, written by Musgrave to Macpherson; a letter of thanks from Mrs. Musgrave to Macpherson; an unsourced newspaper clipping, dated October 20, 1865, reprinting Andrew Smith's account from the
Glasgow Mail
; a statement of accounts from the
Grafton
Relief Fund; a recipt for Mahoney's gravestone (£3); and the review of Raynal's book, mentioned earlier. Additionally, a notebook kept by Musgrave on the island is held by the Queensland Maritime Museum. However, if it were not for Captain Greig's detailed description of what he found at Epigwaitt, which was printed on page 5 of the
Daily Southern Cross
on November 27, 1865, after the return of the
Southland
, it would be easy to believe that both
Les naufrages
and
Castaway
are largely works of fiction. Questions were certainly asked—the Macpherson collection includes a copy of a letter from the Geneva branch of Librairie Hachette, dated February 11, 1870, and signed by Nancy Coulin, which asks John Macpherson for authentication of the wreck, saying that while
Hachette publishers have no doubt of Raynal's veracity, during a lecture tour doubts were expressed by some who heard him.

The ordeal of the
Invercauld
survivors, which runs in such terrible parallel to that of the
Grafton
castaways, is described in detail in a book called
Wake of the Invercauld
, which was published in Auckland in 1997 by Exisle Press. The author, Madelene Ferguson Allen, was Robert Holding's great-granddaughter. An adopted child, she discovered her birth family in 1984, and at the same time learned about her remarkable ancestor. Upon reading the memoir Holding had begun in 1926, a handful of years before his death in January 1933, she was inspired to embark on a mission that included two trips to the Auckland Islands, and ended in the publication of her book, which encompasses a complete transcription of Holding's journal, with a running commentary of her journeys and researches.

Painstakingly researched,
Wake of the Invercauld
authenticates everything he wrote—as long as allowance is given for the fact that Holding started his chronicle on an old Remington typewriter at the age of eighty-six, sixty years after the actual events. Natural lapses in recollection are particularly apparent where nautical details are confused; for instance, Andrew Smith, the mate, said the
Invercauld
had single topsails, while Holding described a ship with the new (at the time) double topsails. In the text, I have glossed over these inconsistencies, and am grateful for the technical advice given by Captain Nick Burningham. The credit is his; the mistakes are mine.

Holding's descriptions of both Smith and Captain Dalgarno are derogatory, but seem to be justifiably so. The inescapable conclusion is that if Holding had held rank, and had been allowed to take control, more of the
Invercauld
group would have
survived. Though he did not know about the part that Holding played, Th omas Musgrave confirmed this, writing to Macpherson on November 9, 1865, that Dalgarno's account “proves that there has been no unity amongst them, neither has the Captain attempted (or he has not been able) to hold any authority or influence over them; to which cause I atribute [
sic
] a great number of their deaths.” It must be added, however, that while Musgrave's moral strength and Raynal's ingenuity played a large part in the survival of the
Grafton
group, they were fortunate in that they were stranded in the early summer when the sea lions were gathering to pup, and that they were able to cannibalize the wreck to make a sturdy house. Though they were just novice sealers, they were mentally prepared to kill the animals, which the survivors from the
Invercauld
were not. (The
Grafton
's real mission was almost certainly to scout out sealing grounds; as Bob Braithwaite, a Wellington geologist, confirmed to me in a helpful discussion, the fabled silver-tin mine can be dismissed as just that, a fable.)

Captain Dalgarno's
Narrative of the Wreck of the “Invercauld” among the Auckland Islands
is an appendix in Raynal's book. Evidently, Raynal kept the newspaper that carried the story, and it was translated into French to be added to
Les naufrages
. Then, when
Wrecked on a Reef
came out, Dalgarno's narrative was translated from the French back into English. Consequently, the phrasing is unlikely to be exactly the same as the original. Unfortunately, Raynal neglected to tell his readers the name of the newspaper, and it has been impossible to track it down since.

There are just a few other published sources. In 1866 the official journals kept by Musgrave and Captain Norman on board the
Victoria
were printed in Melbourne by F. F. Baillière, with
the title
Journals of the voyage and proceedings of H.M.C.S. Victoria: in search of shipwrecked people at the Auckland and other islands, with an outline sketch of the islands
. This was bound into the copy of the Melbourne edition of
Castaway
that was presented to John Macpherson, but I read it as a separate volume at the National Library, Wellington.

The strange little book that Musgrave used to navigate the
Flying Scud
into Port Ross was
A history of gold as a commodity and as a measure of value: its fluctuations both in ancient and modern times, with an estimate of the probable supplies from California and Australia
. Written by James Ward, and published in 1853 by the London firm of William S. Orr, it devotes chapter five (pp. 81–90) to the Auckland Islands. As mentioned in the text, Ward himself had never been there, but instead related what he had been told by the surgeon of the
Earl of Hardwicke
.

This unnamed fellow could well have been one of the three doctors whose drunken frolics were noted with such despair in the daybooks of two of the unfortunate officials who administered the settlement, William Mackworth and William Munce. These can be read in
Enderby Settlement Diaries: Records of a British Colony at the Auckland Islands 1849–1852
, edited by P. R. Dingwall, C. Fraser, J. G. Gregory, and C. J. R. Robertson, and published by Wild Press and Wordsell Press (Auckland and Wellington) in 1999.

Because of the lack of documentation, the seven-year effort by the Ngati Matunga chief Matioro and his people to colonize Auckland Island has never been described, though it was significantly more successful than any other attempt, leading to the successful introduction and acclimatization of the New Zealand flax,
Phormium tenax
. I thank Wilford Davis for sending me a short account of one of those colonists, his
great-grandmother Kurapa, which was originally published as “Captives on the Auckland Islands,”
NZ Genealogist
, November/December 1999: 375.
Coastmaster: the story of Captain James B. Greig
, by John McCraw, was published by Silverdale Press (Hamilton, NZ) in 1999. The story of the
General Grant
castaways, begun by Madelene Ferguson Allen, and completed after her death by Ken Scadden, was published by Exisle Press (Auckland) with the title General Grant'
s Gold
, in 2007. The enthralling story of the
Dundonald
castaways is documented in the book
The Castaways of Disappointment Island
by H. Escott Inman, published by Partridge & Co. of London in 1911. It was here that I learned that eating
Stilbocarpa
bleaches the teeth. Plant information is from the
Plants for a Future
species database, a Web search engine by Rich Morris that is linked to
www.ibiblio.org
. Many other dietary details come from J. C. Drummond, with Anne Wilbraham,
The Englishman's Food: a history of five centuries of English diet
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), and Donald S. McLaren,
Nutrition and its Disorders
(Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1976). The
Grafton
castaways were suffering from an abnormally elevated concentration of ketones in the body tissues and fluids, the result of their fat and protein-high diet, plus carbohydrate deprivation and deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals.

There are remarkably few books about the history of the Auckland Islands, most of them outdated and out of print. Roger Carrick's
New Zealand's Lone Lands: being brief Notes of a Visit to the Outlying Islands of the Colony
, was published in Wellington by Didsbury in 1892. More balanced and reliable is Fergus McLaren's
The Eventful Story of the Auckland Islands
, published in Wellington by A. H. & A. W. Reed in 1948. Two comprehensive accounts of the subantarctic islands that include the
Auckland Islands are Allan W. Eden,
Islands of Despair
(London: Andrew Melrose, 1955) and Rosaline Redwood,
Forgotten Islands of the South Pacific: the Story of New Zealand's Southern Islands
(Wellington: Reed, 1950).

The story of the scientific coastwatchers during World War II was written up from their journals by Graham Turbott and published as a monograph by the Department of Conservation in September 2002, under the title
Year Away: Wartime Coast-watching on the Auckland Islands, 1944
. Though out of print, it has been partially digitalized, and can be read on the Department of Conservation Web site,
www.doc.govt.nz
. Also of great interest is I. S. Kerr,
Campbell Island: A History
(Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1976). A particularly beautiful book is Conan Fraser's
Beyond the Roaring Forties: New Zealand's Subantarctic Islands
(Wellington: Govt. Printing Office, 1986). Extremely useful is a revised and updated edition of
New Zealand's Subantarctic Islands
(originally edited by Tim Higham and published in 1991), edited by Tom O'Connor and published with the same title by Reed in 1999, under the auspices of the Department of Conservation.

A useful summary of shipwrecks on the Auckland Islands and the establishment and provisioning of castaway depots was provided by Rachael Egerton, officer with the Southland Conservancy of the Department of Conservation. For those interested in seals and sea lions, the department posts information on its Web site, as does the New Zealand Forest and Bird Society. The birds mentioned are all described on
www.nzbirds.com
.

Apart from those people already acknowledged in these notes, thanks are due to my husband, Ron, who listened patiently to endless repetitions of the technical parts of the book and gave valuable advice; Roger Steele; Christiane Mortelier;
Paul Dingwall; Brett Fotheringham; Ken Scadden; Dr. Simon Nathan; the publishers at Algonquin; my editor, Antonia Fusco; my loyal agent, Laura Langlie; and the fellow historian to whom this book is dedicated—Roberta McIntyre, whose early encouragement could not have been more well timed.

Today, the Auckland Islands is a World Heritage Area, UNESCO having assigned the group the highest possible conservation status. The island group supports the world's largest populations of wandering albatross and mollymawk and protects the breeding ground of the New Zealand, or Hooker's, sea lion, now one of the world's rarest seals.