The General Grant — Wrecked in a sea cave, marooned for eighteen months

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.