In early September 1865, Captain Thomas Musgrave and the crew of the Flying Scud, a small sailing ship called a cutter, landed at Port Ross, at the northern end of Auckland Island. Beside the ruins of a house they found the body of a man. He had clearly been dead for some time. One of his feet was wrapped in woollen rags. Next to him lay a roofing slate with marks scratched into it. Musgrave described it as “a slate on which were scratched some hieroglyphical zig-zags, perhaps written by the poor fellow when dying, but of which we could decipher nothing further than the Christian name James.”
Musgrave had personal reasons to study the last marks of a castaway with care. He had just spent more than eighteen months stranded on this same island. He had returned only to pick up the last two of his own men. He did not know the dead man. Who the man was, and how near he had been all that time, would only become clear later.
Musgrave was born in Durham, in the north-east of England, and went to sea at the age of 16. In 1854 he married Catherine Halcrow Sinclair in Canada, and in 1858 he settled with his family in Australia. In 1863 he became captain of the Grafton, a schooner of 56 tons. It had been hired by a small group of investors. One of them was a Frenchman, François Édouard Raynal, who had spent eleven years in the Australian goldfields. The group planned to search Campbell Island for a mine of tin that contained silver, and to hunt seals as well. They never found the tin, so they continued to the Auckland Islands to hunt seals. On the night of 2 January 1864 a heavy storm struck while the ship lay in the north arm of Carnley Harbour, at the southern end of the main island. The anchor chains broke, and the schooner was driven onto a rocky beach.
All five men reached the shore safely. They saved tools, food, navigation instruments, Raynal’s gun and some canvas. Their supplies would last only two months, but they survived by eating seal meat, birds and fish. Raynal had built huts in the goldfields, and he showed the others how to put up a solid cabin. They had only four tools: an axe, an adze (a kind of cutting tool for shaping wood), a hammer and a gimlet (a small hand drill). Even so, the cabin had a stone chimney, a dining table and a writing desk. Musgrave suggested a name for it, “Epigwaitt”, which he believed was an American Indian word for a home beside the water. In the evenings he taught the men to read.
Musgrave also kept a journal, and it does not show a calm man. On 21 February 1864 he wrote: “I shall never forgive myself for coming on this enterprise.” He was thinking of his wife and children in Sydney, and he was certain that by then they believed he was dead. If only the old chains had held, he thought, he could have filled the ship with seal skins within a month. By September he admitted that waiting for a ship had driven him close to madness. He confessed that he was putting far more effort into a new building than it needed, just to keep dark thoughts away. On 1 January 1865, one year after the wreck, he wrote: “I have got quite grey-headed.” He decided that hard work was the only medicine the camp had, and he made sure the men always had something to do.
No ship arrived, so the men decided to build their own from the wreck. Raynal made a pair of blacksmith’s bellows out of metal, wood and sealskin, and used them to make new tools. However, he could not make an auger, the large drill they needed, and they had to give up on the ship. By now there were fewer seals than the year before, and another winter was approaching. So they turned to the Grafton‘s small dinghy instead. They built up its sides, added a false keel underneath and covered it with a deck. Musgrave cut sails from the old canvas that had served as the cabin roof. The editor of Musgrave’s journals later wrote of hearing “the clink of Raynal’s anvil far into the night”. Raynal was making bolts and nails for a journey of 240 miles across a stormy ocean.
When the boat was finished, it was not steady enough to carry five men. Musgrave therefore left two of them, Harris and Forgés, on the island. He, Raynal and McLaren set sail on 19 July 1865. They had gone barely 20 miles when a storm from the south-west caught them. According to Musgrave, for five days and nights he stood on deck. With one hand he held on to a rope, and with the other he pumped water out of the leaking boat, while the other two men took turns steering. On the morning of 24 July they reached Port Adventure on Stewart Island. There Captain Cross of the Flying Scud gave them a meal, a hot bath and a night’s sleep. People in the town of Invercargill then raised money so that Cross could take Musgrave back to rescue the two men left behind.
They found Harris and Forgés alive. On 23 August 1865, as they sailed north again, Musgrave and others on board believed they saw smoke rising on the eastern coast, but they were unable to go and look. After that came the discovery at Port Ross: the body of a sailor who had obviously died of hunger. An inscription later found on his grave says that the crew of the Flying Scud buried him on 3 September 1865. Two days later Musgrave went for a walk in the hills. He wrote that he passed “the grave of the departed stranger” before the cutter sailed for home.
What Musgrave did not know was that, for most of his time on the island, another group of castaways had been living at its other end. The Invercauld was a barque, a ship with three masts. It was sailing from Melbourne to Callao in Peru, carrying no cargo, only weight to keep it steady. At 2 a.m. during a violent storm in May 1864, four months after the Grafton was lost, it hit the north-western point of Auckland Island. Six of its 25 men died in the wreck. The survivors had saved very little. They lived on roots and shellfish, and one by one they died of cold and hunger. One of them, a sailor named Robert Holding, later said that a man had eaten part of a dead shipmate. While they were on the island, the two groups never found out about each other. Today the starved man found beside the slate is identified as James Mahoney, the Invercauld‘s second mate.
By the time Musgrave found him, the Invercauld men’s time on the island had already ended. In May 1865, two months before the dinghy set off, a Portuguese ship called the Julian had started to leak. It sent a boat ashore at Port Ross, looking for a place to make repairs. The boat rescued the only three men still alive: Captain George Dalgarno, the mate Andrew Smith, and Holding. The Julian took them to Callao. In the end, all five men from the Grafton survived. Of the 25 men on the Invercauld, only three did.
None of this news had reached Australia when Musgrave arrived in Melbourne. He visited J. G. Francis, the Commissioner of Trade and Customs, and explained why he believed people might still be living on the island. Several ships that had left Melbourne were known to be missing, so Francis ordered the government steamer Victoria to search. It left on 4 October with Musgrave on board, even though, as his editor pointed out, he had not seen his family since November 1863. Only after the steamer had sailed did the mail from England bring news of the Invercauld. The Victoria carried pigs, rabbits and goats, which were to be set free on the islands for future castaways to eat. The New Zealand correspondent of The Times reported that the islands had been searched thoroughly. No sign of any people, dead or alive, had been found, and food had been left for anyone shipwrecked there in the future.
The grave was still there. A later expedition, in a report published in German, described finding a skeleton. Its clothes suggested a sailor of higher rank, probably a captain or a mate. In the pockets were a wooden spoon and a small heart with stitched markings, like something kept for sentimental reasons. Next to his collapsed hut lay an enormous pile of shells, which suggested that he had lived there for quite a long time. The visitors fixed a board to the grave. It said that the grave held the bones of a man who had probably died of hunger.
In 1865 Musgrave was reunited with his family, and he promised his wife that he would never again sail far out to sea. He became a maritime pilot at Lakes Entrance, Victoria, guiding ships into port. In 1869 he was put in charge of the Wilsons Promontory Lighthouse. For the rest of his life he looked after lighthouses on the coast of Victoria: at Gabo Island, Cape Schanck, Cape Otway and, last of all, Point Lonsdale.