The General Grant — Wrecked in a sea cave, marooned for eighteen months
Summary
On the night of 13–14 May 1866 the three-masted ship General Grant, bound from Melbourne to London under Captain William Loughlin, drifted in light winds onto the towering western cliffs of the main Auckland Island, in the subantarctic ocean some 460 kilometres south of New Zealand. The ship was carried into a great sea cave; her mainmast struck the rock roof and was driven down through the hull, and she filled and sank in the cave with most of the 83 people aboard still trapped inside. Sixty-eight drowned. Only fifteen reached the shore of one of the loneliest archipelagos on earth, and of those, ten would live to be rescued eighteen months later.
The survivors landed with almost nothing and faced a climate of near-constant rain, wind and cold. Their lives turned on fire and food. They learned to keep a fire burning continuously, having no reliable means to relight it, and they lived on seals, sea birds and their eggs, wild pigs descended from animals left by earlier visitors, and roots, eventually moving to better ground on Enderby Island. The Auckland Islands lay far off any shipping route, so no rescue could be expected to come looking; the castaways' only hope was endurance or their own escape. After nine months, four of the strongest men set out in a small boat to reach New Zealand without compass or chart. They were never seen again.
The General Grant is remembered as one of the great subantarctic castaway ordeals, and as a lesson in the lethal isolation of the southern islands. One more survivor, David McLelland, died of illness on the island before the end. The remaining ten were found in November 1867 by the brig Amherst, by chance rather than by search, after eighteen months of marooned survival. The wreck — and a cargo that reportedly included gold — has drawn salvage expeditions ever since, but the ship has never been certainly relocated within the cave, and the bones of those who drowned lie there still.
Timeline
The voyage and the cliffs
The General Grant was a sound American-built ship of about 1,000 tons, registered in Boston and chartered for the long emigrant-era run between the Australian colonies and Britain. She left Melbourne on 4 May 1866 with 83 souls aboard — 58 passengers, many of them returning diggers from the Victorian goldfields, and 25 crew — along with wool, hides, and a quantity of gold that would later feed a century of treasure-hunting. Her course took her south of New Zealand toward Cape Horn, across a stretch of the Southern Ocean studded with the subantarctic islands, fog-bound and poorly charted.
On the night of 13 May the wind died. Becalmed and set by current and swell, the ship drifted helplessly toward the high western cliffs of the main Auckland Island, sheer walls rising straight from deep water with no shoal to give warning and no anchorage to hold her. The crew could do nothing to claw off in the failing air. In the dark the General Grant was carried into the mouth of a vast sea cave that pierced the cliff. There her mainmast struck the rock roof of the cave, and as the swell worked the hull up and down, the masthead was driven down like a ram, splitting the deck and forcing the mast through the bottom of the ship. She filled and sank within the cave. Most of the 83 aboard, unable to escape the dark interior in time, drowned where they were trapped; 68 died, and only 15 got away in the boats. Captain Loughlin went down with his ship.
Surviving the subantarctic
The fifteen who reached shore had escaped one death into a slower one. The Auckland Islands are among the harshest inhabited-by-accident places on earth: latitude near 50 degrees south, swept by westerly gales, drenched by rain on most days of the year, cold without being frozen, and utterly without permanent human habitation. The castaways came ashore with little more than the clothes they wore and what few tools the boats held. Their first and most relentless problem was fire. Lacking a dependable way to make flame, they kindled a fire and then guarded it without letting it go out, tending it through wind and downpour as the single thread of warmth and cooking on which their lives hung.
For food they turned to what the islands gave. Seals hauled out on the rocks and could be killed for meat, fat and skins; sea birds and their eggs could be taken in season; and the islands held wild pigs, descended from stock landed by earlier ships to provision future castaways, which the survivors hunted with improvised hooks and snares. Some accounts record them cultivating a few potatoes and gathering roots. As the seals near their first camp thinned, the survivors moved to Enderby Island, where game was more abundant. They built rough shelter, made clothing from skins, and settled into the grinding routine of staying alive in a place that no rescuer had reason to visit. The islands lay far off the trade routes; no ship would pass by design. The castaways understood that they would have to wait to be found by accident, or save themselves.
The boat that vanished and the rescue that came
By early 1867 the strain of indefinite waiting pushed the survivors to gamble. On 22 January, four of the fittest men launched a small boat and set out to reach New Zealand, more than 400 kilometres of open, storm-prone Southern Ocean to the north, with no compass, no chart and no navigational instrument of any kind. It was an act of desperate courage and almost no chance. They were never seen again, and are presumed to have drowned at sea. Their loss reduced the marooned party and ended any hope of a quick deliverance brought by their own hands. The remaining castaways could only endure and keep their fire and their signals ready.
The toll of the islands continued even among the survivors: David McLelland died of illness on 3 September 1867, leaving ten. Their rescue, when it came, owed nothing to any search — no one in the wider world knew where the General Grant had been lost, or that anyone still lived. On 21 November 1867 the whaling brig Amherst, working the subantarctic grounds, noticed the castaways' signals and took the ten survivors off. They had endured roughly eighteen months marooned at the edge of the inhabited world. The disaster, and others like it on the same islands, helped drive the later establishment of provisioned castaway depots in the subantarctic, stocked with food, clothing and the means to make fire, so that the shipwrecked of the southern ocean would not again be left with nothing.
The Five Factors
Aftermath
Of the 83 people aboard the General Grant, 73 died — 68 drowned in the cave on the night of the wreck, four lost in the boat that sailed for New Zealand, and one of illness on the island. Ten survived. Their eighteen-month ordeal on the Auckland Islands became one of the most famous subantarctic castaway stories, recounted in the survivors' own testimony and in colonial newspapers, and it sharpened official awareness of how completely the shipwrecked could be abandoned in the southern ocean. In the years that followed, New Zealand authorities maintained and stocked castaway depots on the subantarctic islands, leaving provisions, clothing and fire-making gear for future survivors.
The wreck has never been definitively relocated. The sea cave, the deep water and the violent western coast have defeated repeated salvage attempts, several drawn by the gold the ship is said to have carried, and at least some searchers have died in the effort. What is certain is that the General Grant lies somewhere along that cliff, and that the remains of the 68 who could not escape the cave lie with her. The survivors are remembered for the discipline of their fire and their hunting, and for the four men who rowed north into the Southern Ocean and were never heard from again.
Lessons
- Give a lee shore that offers no anchorage the widest berth; a coast with no room to recover allows no mistakes.
- Treat loss of steerage near a hard shore as a primary emergency, not a delay; a ship that cannot maneuver is already in danger.
- Where rescue cannot reach you, plan as though no one will come, because no one will.
- Identify the single capability your survival depends on — here, fire — and guard it above all else.
- Weigh a desperate bid for help by its real odds, not by the strain of waiting; the open-boat gamble killed the men who tried it.
References
- Wreck of the General Grant NEW ZEALAND HISTORY (NZHISTORY.GOVT.NZ)
- General Grant (sailing ship) WIKIPEDIA
- Castaway depot WIKIPEDIA
- Shipwrecked: the enduring mystery of the General Grant RADIO NEW ZEALAND