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. One foot was bound with woollen rags. Next to him lay a roofing slate with marks scratched into it, which Musgrave described 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 his own reasons to look closely at a castaway’s last marks. 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, married Catherine Halcrow Sinclair in Canada in 1854 and settled with his family in Australia in 1858. In 1863 he took command of the Grafton, a 56-ton schooner hired by a small group of investors, among them a Frenchman, François Édouard Raynal, who had spent eleven years in the Australian goldfields. Their plan was to look for a mine of silver-bearing tin on Campbell Island and to hunt seals. The tin was never found, so they sailed on to the Auckland Islands for seals. On the night of 2 January 1864, during a heavy gale, the anchor chains parted in the north arm of Carnley Harbour, at the southern end of the main island, and the schooner struck a rocky beach.
All five men got ashore. They saved tools, food, navigation instruments, Raynal’s gun and canvas, and although they had supplies for only two months they lived on seal meat, birds and fish. With only an axe, an adze, a hammer and a gimlet, Raynal, who had built huts in the goldfields, guided them in raising a solid cabin with a stone chimney, a dining table and a writing desk. Musgrave suggested its name, “Epigwaitt”, which he took to be an American Indian word for a dwelling by the water. In the evenings he 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, had by then given him up for lost. If only the old chains had held, he reflected, he could have filled the ship with skins within a month. By September he admitted that waiting for a ship had brought his mind close to a state of frenzy, and that he was taking far more trouble over a new building than was needed, simply to keep away dark thoughts. On 1 January 1865, a year after the wreck, he noted: “I have got quite grey-headed.” He prescribed hard work as the only medicine the camp had, and he kept the men busy.
No ship came. The men decided to build one from the wreck. Raynal made a pair of blacksmith’s bellows from metal, wood and sealskin and forged new tools, but he could not make an auger, the drill they needed, and the vessel was abandoned. With seals scarcer than the year before and another winter coming, they turned instead to the Grafton‘s small dinghy, raising its sides, adding a false keel and decking it over, while Musgrave cut sails from the old canvas that had covered the cabin roof. The editor of Musgrave’s journals later wrote of hearing “the clink of Raynal’s anvil far into the night” as he made bolts and nails for a voyage of 240 miles across a stormy ocean.
The finished boat was too unsteady for 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 before a south-westerly gale reached them, and for five days and nights, Musgrave wrote, he stood on deck, holding a rope with one hand and pumping out the leaking boat with the other while the other two took turns at the helm. 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 public fundraising in Invercargill paid for Cross to take Musgrave back for the two men left behind.
They found Harris and Forgés alive. On the way north again, on 23 August 1865, Musgrave and others on board thought they saw smoke rising on the eastern coast, but they were not able to explore it. Then came the body at Port Ross, a seaman who had evidently died of starvation. According to the inscription later found on his grave, the crew of the Flying Scud buried him on 3 September 1865. Two days later, after a walk in the hills, Musgrave recorded that he passed “the grave of the departed stranger” before the cutter left for home.
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 three-masted barque sailing in ballast from Melbourne to Callao in Peru, had struck the north-western tip of Auckland Island at 2 a.m. 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 little and lived on roots and shellfish, and they died one after another of cold and hunger. One of them, the seaman Robert Holding, later reported that a man had eaten part of a dead shipmate. 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, two months before the dinghy sailed, the Julian, a Portuguese ship that had sprung a leak, sent a boat ashore at Port Ross in search of repairs. It took off the only three still alive: Captain George Dalgarno, the mate Andrew Smith and Holding, and carried them to Callao. All five Grafton men survived; of the 25 on the Invercauld, three did.
None of this had reached Australia when Musgrave arrived in Melbourne. He called on J. G. Francis, Commissioner of Trade and Customs, and explained why he thought there might still be people on the island. Several ships that had left Melbourne were known to be missing, and Francis ordered the colonial steamer Victoria to search. It sailed on 4 October with Musgrave on board, although, as his editor noted, he had not seen his family since November 1863. Only after it had gone did the mail from England bring word of the Invercauld. The Victoria carried pigs, rabbits and goats to release for future castaways, and The Times’ New Zealand correspondent reported that the islands had been thoroughly searched, with no trace of human beings, dead or alive, and that provisions had been left for anyone wrecked there later.
The grave remained. A later expedition, in an account published in German, described finding a skeleton whose clothing suggested a seaman of higher rank, probably a captain or mate. In his pockets were a wooden spoon and a small heart with stitched markings, like a keepsake, and a huge pile of shells beside his collapsed hut suggested he had lived there for quite a long time. On the grave the visitors fixed a board stating that it stood over the bones of a man who had probably died of hunger.
Musgrave, reunited with his family in 1865, promised his wife that he would never go far out to sea again. He became a maritime pilot at Lakes Entrance, Victoria, and in 1869 he was put in charge of the Wilsons Promontory Lighthouse. He kept lights on the Victorian coast for the rest of his life: Gabo Island, Cape Schanck, Cape Otway and finally Point Lonsdale.