Wellington author John McCrystal became obsessed with shipwrecks and treasure as a boy. He still is. In his new book, Worse Things Happen at Sea, McCrystal recounts incredible tales of tragedy, heroism, and survival, and how he meticulously solved the mystery of the “half-crown wreck”. Mike White reports.
Nobody knows what happened to them. How they died.
For the 19 sailors and passengers aboard the small ship, the possible options for their end are all equally wretched.
They might have drowned in midnight panic as their ship blundered into the sheer cliffs of the Auckland Islands, 460km south of Bluff.
They might have somehow abandoned the wreck in longboats, yet perished from injury or cold on some unforgiving beach that offered no escape or sustenance.
READ MORE:
* New Zealand shipwrecks you can visit
* Mystery around wreck find off Wellington coast
* You can now dive into history on an Ancient Greece shipwreck
* Earthquake reveals the reefs that claimed so many around Cape Campbell
Or perhaps a few made it to relative safety on the island, only to succumb to illness or starvation.
All we know is, there was precious little left of their catastrophe. No survivors, no bodies, no cries for help etched into rock walls or scratched on wooden flotsam.
Just a handful of coins. And a button, that nearly 200 years later, solved the mystery of the ship’s name, and left the rest of her story to darkest imagination.
John McCrystal’s imagination was lit by the idea of shipwrecks and treasure from very early. When he was six, his brother told him the story of the General Grant, which also struck the Auckland Islands, and went down laden with gold, never to be found.
McCrystal had no idea where the Auckland Islands were, but couldn’t help but immediately be seized by the prospect of discovering and uncovering sunken treasure.
And besides, “kids are fascinated by death and disaster and survival,” says the Wellington writer.
For a while, he had to make do with beachcombing, a scrap of copper prised from an abandoned Auckland ferry, and snorkelling around a scuttled hulk. As soon as he was old enough, McCrystal learnt to scuba dive, allowing him to truly investigate rusted wrecks further afield and more distant from the surface.
“There aren’t many frontiers in the world any more. Finding stuff underwater is one of those frontiers. And I think human curiosity drives us towards frontiers, in the end.”
But gradually, McCrystal realised it wasn’t so much the treasure that fascinated him, but the stories associated with the shipwrecks; the human experiences from horror to heroics, the imperceptible crack between ghastly death by drowning, and deliverance.
Years later, McCrystal appeared on a weekly radio show, Shipwreck Tales, with broadcaster Graeme Hill, telling salty tales of disaster and derring-do.
And now he’s written a book about some of those tragedies, Worse Things Happen at Sea, chronicling more than 20 shipwrecks and mysteries from New Zealand’s coast and around the world.
“The sea inspires awe, and respect, and a little bit of dread at times. And things can go wrong. And when they go wrong, they go spectacularly wrong.”
Included is the unbelievable story of the American cruiser Indianapolis, which was sunk by torpedoes from a Japanese submarine in 1945. Somehow, 316 of the 1195 crew survived the blast, nearly five days in the water, and what is considered the worst mass shark attack in history. The ship’s captain was one of them, but later shot himself.
Then there’s the Birkenhead, whose soldiers stood to attention as the paddlewheel steamer broke beneath them and sank, spawning the order, “women and children first”.
And the little-known Mignonette, whose crew of four escaped from their sinking yacht clutching only two tins of turnips, which led to the inevitable during their 24 days adrift. The survivors’ subsequent trial became a test case for the “law of necessity” and cannibalism at sea.
While many will be well aware of doomed New Zealand ships like the Wahine, they won’t know much about the Orpheus, the steam corvette which foundered at Manukau Harbour’s heads, with 189 dying in our worst maritime disaster.
Or the collier Kaitawa, which struck a reef near the tip of the North Island in 1966, leaving the families of the 29 victims, including five widows who gave birth within six weeks of the disaster, with no answers from the ship’s broken last message, which has never been properly deciphered.
One of the best-known wrecks is that of the Russian cruise ship Mikhail Lermontov, which sank in the Marlborough Sounds in 1986, after unfathomably sailing through a passage so narrow, the predictable happened and its hull was gashed by rocks.
For decades, conspiracists murmured the ship had been deliberately sunk as an act of geopolitical sabotage during the Cold War. (The captain’s first words on realising what had happened were, “Get me Vladivostok,” the Soviet Pacific fleet’s base, and there were known to be KGB officers aboard.)
But McCrystal says this theory doesn’t stack up.
Only one person is responsible for what happened: Captain Don Jamison, the Marlborough Harbourmaster and Picton chief pilot, who inexplicably ordered the 150m Mikhail Lermontov to alter course to try to squeeze between the mainland, and the jutting outcrop of Jackson Head, to give passengers a thrilling closeup of the coastline, as he had done several times earlier that day.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt. I think it was a monumental f...up,” insists McCrystal. “Just an act of sheer flamboyance that went horribly, horribly wrong.”
McCrystal says it’s staggering a ship like that could have been sunk, and a crewman killed, and nobody held to account.
There was no full investigation into the disaster, and Jamison has never spoken publicly about what happened that afternoon.
“But for a well-regarded seaman to have made such a terrible error, you wouldn’t go talking about it afterwards, I don’t think,” says McCrystal.
It was miraculous only one person from the 738 aboard the Mikhail Lermontov died. Most times such calamities occur, the ratio isn’t so good.
Amid the confusion and shock and terror of a ship sinking beneath them, or being plunged into the sea, there have been great acts of bravery. And an equal number of self-serving cowardice.
McCrystal details the extraordinary feats of pregnant Ada Hannam, whose desperate efforts to save her four children when the Penguin sank off Wellington’s south coast in 1909, ultimately failed. However, she rescued teenager Ellis Matthews. (Hannam’s son, born six-months later, became a seaman.)
But then there was Nicky Allen, who abandoned his pleading wife and children on the fast-sinking General Grant without a backward glance, and struck out for safety. Allen’s reward was survival, but eternal public ignominy.
Inevitably, McCrystal has pondered how he might react in such circumstances, with death beckoning and crewmates thrashing.
“Whether I could be heroic, and do what the victims of so many of these shipwrecks have done, and actively chosen to die so others would live – I don’t know if I’ve got the moral fibre or not. Probably for my family. But for a stranger? I don’t know, I just don’t know.”
But McCrystal stresses pondering these things isn’t fanciful – shipwrecks aren’t consigned to history pages, and maritime tragedies continue, even in an age of superior construction, advanced technology and better weather forecasting.
He points to the sinking of giant cruise ship Costa Concordia in 2012, when its captain took it too close to shore in a fateful display of gross exhibitionism. Or the deaths of 74 people when the criminally unseaworthy ferry Princess Ashika sank in Tonga in 2009.
“People are often increasingly desperate and inclined to go to sea in circumstances where prudence probably says they shouldn't go.”
McCrystal says refugees, fishermen, and even tourist operators offering extreme experiences were putting themselves, and rescuers, at enormous risk.
“It’s the unexpected that gets us. And when we don’t provide for the unexpected as much as possible, it gets us at sea.”
An over-reliance on computers and automation continued to result in collisions and crisis, McCrystal says.
“Radar is fine. But the best technology is still just looking out the bloody window.”
Down a metal hatch, down a wooden ladder, lie the remains of the Rifleman.
In 1986, an expedition searching the Auckland Islands for the General Grant, happened across debris on the seafloor in a small and picturesque cove.
Between this and another expedition 10 years later, numerous artefacts were found, including two cannons, the rim of a ship’s bell, a deck light, parts of a toilet, brass nails and copper bolts. And some gold sovereigns and 63 silver half-crowns, which led to the ship being dubbed “the half-crown wreck”.
The fact the most recent coin was minted in 1832, along with other clues, ultimately ruled out this being the General Grant, which sank in 1866.
But the mystery of what ship it was, remained, and when McCrystal heard about it, he began a search that obsessed him for months.
Some had suggested it might be the Rifleman, a 300-ton sailing ship that left Hobart in April 1833, bound for London with 19 crew and passengers aboard, as well as a cargo of wool, seal and kangaroo skins, and whale oil.
But researchers soon discovered newspaper reports indicating the Rifleman had delivered mail sent with it to England, meaning she couldn’t be the Auckland Islands wreck.
McCrystal remained unsure, however, and kept digging in old newspapers and shipping registers, and discovered later articles saying reports of the Rifleman’s arrival in England were wrong, and the ship was feared lost.
“I tried to do it scientifically. Once I had the theory, I tried everything I could to disprove it.”
So he began looking for any reference to the Rifleman’s crew and passengers being alive after 1833.”
He knew one of the Rifleman’s passengers was naval surgeon William Porteous, and that one of the artefacts discovered at the wreck site was a button from a naval surgeon’s uniform.
However, when McCrystal came across a William Porteous entering a home for retired seamen in Greenwich, around 1838, “I thought, bugger, that’s it, the Rifleman did make it back, and I just can’t find any reference to her.”
But further digging revealed there were two naval surgeons called William Porteous, perhaps a father and son, with one able to be tracked to his retirement.
The other simply disappeared from naval registers and newspapers around 1833, the tiny button plucked from the seabed south of New Zealand, the telltale clue of his fate.
And when McCrystal found a notice saying an insurance company had paid out on the Rifleman’s cargo, he felt sure the ship had never made it back to England, instead coming to grief on the Auckland Islands.
Solving the riddle of the Rifleman was a thrill, but also a relief for McCrystal.
“Because once I got involved in it, it was just a bloody obsession. I was compulsive. I just wanted to know every little detail. I couldn't leave it alone.”
Many of the Rifleman’s artefacts are now in a laboratory on board the Hikitia floating crane on Wellington’s waterfront, where they are being conserved by the Maritime Archaeological Association of New Zealand.
Its committee member Malcolm McGregor is adamant the Rifleman’s fate would still be unknown if it wasn't for McCrystal’s work.
There are bronze deck spikes bent by the ceaseless sea; a brass deck light with its glass scoured by sand; a set of bronze scale weights; parts of a toilet flushing mechanism; and something they initially thought was a cake decorating implement.
It was, in fact, a pewter vaginal syringe, part of William Porteous’s surgical kit.
For McCrystal, seeing these objects is a childhood dream come true. It’s as close as he’ll get to those boyhood fancies of finding treasure, or the General Grant’s elusive gold.
But they’re also fabulous history, brought to life, right there in his hand.
Increasingly, however, it seems debatable whether such history will continue to be uncovered.
Recent restrictions on investigating shipwrecks mean it’s now virtually impossible to take anything from them. And if anyone did discover a wreck, it often resulted in an intemperate response from officials, issuing warnings and threats of sanctions.
This occurred when the Ventnor was discovered in 2012, off Northland’s coast. Carrying the bodies of 501 Chinese miners back to their homeland, the Ventnor sank in nearly 150m of water in 1902.
But when a group of enthusiasts located the ship and dived on it, retrieving several objects to help identify it, they were rounded on by authorities, and accused of desecrating a grave.
Such events have dampened the enthusiasm of those investigating the more than 2000 New Zealand shipwrecks, and only encouraged secrecy if something was stumbled upon, McCrystal says.
He stresses that wrecks disappear reasonably quickly, smashed by swells, corroded by salt, and their history is quickly erased, unlike normal archaeological sites.
Under today’s laws, nothing could have been salvaged from the Rifleman and countless other wrecks, and the chance to learn what these ships were, and what happened to them, would almost certainly have been lost.
Usually, only amateur explorers had the enthusiasm, equipment and money to investigate wrecks.
Those who already had artefacts from wrecks, largely kept quiet about it for fear of being accused of vandalising sites. This risked items not being properly conserved, and never being publicly shared, McCrystal says.
“The main driver of searching for shipwrecks is curiosity. And that’s a constant. But it would be better if there was a more sympathetic approach from the authorities to the fact people are naturally curious.
“Most people want to do the right thing when they find something, and they would love to work in partnership with the authorities.
“But the whiff of prosecution hangs in the air. And it’s not hard to imagine it happening now, and the book being thrown at someone. The book’s certainly been waved around, already.”
McCrystal has no shipwreck gold or jewels to show for his years of fascination and searching. The stories are the real treasure, for him.
And sometimes worthless things can mean the most.
One day, when investigating the shoreline near where the Wahine foundered in Wellington, his five-year-old daughter found a rusted and encrusted object in a rocky crevice.
When they got it home, McCrystal discovered it was the remains of a handbag, almost certainly one of the hundreds that washed ashore after the ferry’s sinking in 1968.
As they examined it, McCrystal couldn’t help but notice how much his daughter looked like Alma Hick, one of the Wahine’s youngest victims, whose tragic story he knew well.
His daughter, delighted at their discovery, looked at her father holding what was left of the handbag.
“Why are you crying?” she asked.
Worse Things Happen at Sea, by John McCrystal, (Bateman Books, $34.99) is published on October 15.
No comments:
Post a Comment