In early September 1865, at Port Ross on the northern end of Auckland Island, Captain Thomas Musgrave and the crew of the cutter Flying Scud found the body of a man lying beside the ruins of a house. He had been dead for some time, and one foot was wrapped in woollen rags. Next to him lay a roofing slate with marks scratched into it. Musgrave thought the man had perhaps written them as he was dying, but the only thing the crew could read was the first name James.
Musgrave had his own reasons to look closely at a castaway’s last words. He had just spent more than eighteen months stranded on the same island, and he had come back only to collect the last two of his own men. The dead man was a stranger to him. Who he was, and how close he had been, would only become clear later.
Musgrave was born in Durham, in north-eastern England, went to sea at 16 and settled with his family in Australia in 1858. In 1863 he took command of the Grafton, a small schooner hired by a group of investors, among them a Frenchman, François Édouard Raynal, who had spent eleven years in the Australian goldfields. They planned to search for tin on Campbell Island and to hunt seals. When the tin was never found, they sailed on to the Auckland Islands for seals. On the night of 2 January 1864, during a heavy gale, the anchor chains broke in Carnley Harbour, at the southern end of the main island, and the schooner was driven onto a rocky beach.
All five men got ashore. They saved tools, food, Raynal’s gun and some canvas, and although they had supplies for only two months, they lived on seal meat, birds and fish. With only a few simple tools, Raynal, who had built huts in the goldfields, showed them how to raise a solid cabin with a stone chimney. In the evenings Musgrave taught the men to read.
He also kept a journal, and it is not the record of a calm man. “I shall never forgive myself for coming on this enterprise,” he wrote on 21 February 1864, thinking of his wife and children in Sydney, who, he was sure, believed he was dead. By September he admitted that waiting for a ship had almost driven him to a kind of madness, and that he was working far harder on a new building than necessary, just to keep dark thoughts away. On 1 January 1865, a year after the wreck, he noted: “I have got quite grey-headed.” Hard work, he decided, was the only medicine the camp had, and he kept the men busy.
No ship came. The men first tried to build a new vessel from the wreck, but without the right drill they had to give up. With seals growing scarce and another winter coming, they turned instead to the Grafton‘s small dinghy, raising its sides and covering it with a deck, while Musgrave cut sails from the old canvas that had covered the cabin roof. Raynal worked late into the night at his anvil, making bolts and nails for a voyage of 240 miles across a stormy ocean.
The finished boat was too unsteady to carry five, so Musgrave left two men, Harris and Forgés, behind. He, Raynal and McLaren sailed on 19 July 1865. They were barely 20 miles out when a gale hit them, and for five days and nights, Musgrave wrote, he stood on deck, holding a rope with one hand and pumping water out of the leaking boat with the other. They reached Port Adventure on Stewart Island on the morning of 24 July. There Captain Cross of the Flying Scud gave them a meal, a warm bath and a night’s sleep, and money raised by the public in Invercargill paid for Cross to take Musgrave back for the two men left behind.
They found Harris and Forgés alive. Then came the body at Port Ross, a seaman who had clearly died of starvation. The crew of the Flying Scud buried him on 3 September 1865.
What Musgrave did not know was that for most of his time on the island, other castaways had been living at its far end. The Invercauld, a ship sailing from Melbourne to Peru, had struck the north-western tip of Auckland Island during a severe gale in May 1864, four months after the Grafton. Six of her 25 men died in the wreck. The survivors had saved very little and lived on roots and shellfish, and one after another they died of cold and hunger. The two groups never learned of each other while they were there. The starved man beside the slate is now identified as the Invercauld‘s second mate, James Mahoney.
By the time Musgrave found him, the Invercauld‘s story on the island was already over. In May 1865, a Portuguese ship called the Julian, which had sprung a leak, sent a boat ashore at Port Ross looking for help with repairs. It took off the only three men still alive, Captain George Dalgarno, the mate Andrew Smith and the seaman Robert Holding, and carried them to Peru. All five Grafton men survived; of the 25 on the Invercauld, only three did.
None of this had reached Australia when Musgrave arrived in Melbourne. He explained to the authorities why he thought there might still be people on the island, and a government steamer, the Victoria, was sent to search, with Musgrave on board, even though he had not seen his family since November 1863. Only after it had left did the mail from England bring news of the Invercauld.
Musgrave, reunited with his family in 1865, promised his wife that he would never go far out to sea again. He kept lighthouses on the Victorian coast for the rest of his life, ending at Point Lonsdale.