East Coast Shipwrecks – Jim Watt

Rose Chapman: I’d like to introduce our speaker, whom I’m sure a lot of you already know; it’s Mr Jim Watt, a past president of the Duart House Society and still on our committee He’s going to speak to us about shipwrecks and [the] maritime history of [the] east coast. And Jim has had a very long-standing interest in all things maritime; in fact as someone said, he’s got salt in his veins. Right through his family history he’s had an involvement with shipping and that kind of thing which he will explain to you more fully. So without further ado, I’d like to hand over the floor to you, Jim; thank you very much. [Applause]

Jim Watt: Well good morning, everybody. Thank you for coming on a nice, sunny morning; it’s a pity to be inside in a way, isn’t it?

When Rose initially asked me to give this talk it was going to be on the Hawke’s Bay shipwrecks, and I mulled that over for some time. And I thought, ’Well, there are other things that actually, I’ve researched more myself.’ The shipwrecks of Hawke’s Bay are fairly well recorded and they’re all published; and it’s been the tradition of these talks more to be on work that is current, and research that people are doing at the moment. However, I realised that probably there are two talks here, and I have suggested that maybe sometime in the future I might give the second talk which will be aspects of maritime history that sort of lead on from shipwrecks, or let shipwrecks introduce us into the topic. But right at the moment I just want to confine our discussion to the wrecks on the east coast of the North Island, and we’ll look at ten of them that are of particular interest and see where that takes us.

I know these maps are not very clear to you, but that’s East Cape. And this map actually sits underneath that one, so it’s East Cape to Gisborne; Gisborne down through Napier to Cape Turnagain, and Cape Turnagain down to Cape Palliser; so anyway, here’s the east coast of the North Island. I need to say that I’m really just recapping what’s already published, and if any of you don’t know the book of Lynton Diggle’s ’New Zealand Shipwrecks’, then I recommend it to you. It’s all the shipwrecks for the last two hundred years. This is the eighth edition of a book that was first published by Ingram & Wheatley. Charles Ingram was a fireman in Dunedin who got interested in ships, and he brought out the first edition. But this is the eighth edition – it just came out a couple of years ago, and there’s a ninth edition currently being worked on. New information comes to hand, so some of the records get re-written, and of course there are new wrecks to be added as things progress. Anyway, if you want information about a wreck on the east coast of the North Island, you’ll find it in here. And it’s arranged chronologically from 1795. So that’s the bible of shipwrecks; and all I’m doing today is picking out a few, as you can see, which I think are of particular interest.

Other sources of information of course, are Stevenson’s book on the Port And People [Century at the Port] of Napier; there’s the Port to Port book [by Don Wilkie], and also the book of ‘Richardsons of Napier’ – this is Gavin McLean’s book, published 2005, I think it was. It was a re-write of Sydney Waters’ book of the same title which came out twenty years earlier. But this … again, if you want to know anything about Richardsons and the trade out of Napier servicing the ports of the east coast, down to Wellington and up to Auckland, this is the book to get; plenty of photographs and all the technical information that you want. So those are the sources of information; and they exist, and if anybody wants more information that’s where to look for it.

By way of introduction too, I thought just by making an observation, that those who are living today are probably more disconnected from the sea than any previous generation. And I think that’s probably a truism – the sea doesn’t matter so much to us; if we want to go travelling we catch a plane or we hop in the car, ’cause we’ve got the infrastructure in the country now to do it.

But prior to 1900 transport around the country was all by sea. You had to catch a boat; you had to catch the ’Wollomai’ at Napier if you wanted to go to Wellington, or you had to catch one of the more local steamers if you were wanting to go up to Gisborne, or up to Wairoa, or Nūhaka or any of those places … Waikokopu … up the coast. So the sea was very, very much on everybody’s mind, and I remember, even back in the 1940s, I remember us at church singing ’For Those in Peril on the Sea’; and at Boys’ Brigade, ’Will your Anchor Hold?’ [Chuckles] I mean … and those have more or less dropped out of our conversation now, because those are not the key issues of the day. But they were, right through the Second World War. What I’m suggesting to you is that as a generation, we’re probably fairly remote now from the sea, and as remote as any of our previous generations have been.

And on that tack, I might ask if anybody has experienced a shipwreck personally?

Comment: Had a relation who was on the ‘Wahine’, but …

Jim: Thanks, Bill. Has anybody got a shipwreck in their family history? Kirsty?

Kirsty: Yes, a ship’s bell from the wreck of the ‘Tongariro’ at Māhia – that hung at the end of the verandah of the home up the east coast where I [was] brought up. And it was rung with great vigour by my mother to call us to meals when we were wandering over the hills. We would come when that bell rang; we knew we had to come. But somehow my grandfather had acquired that bell, and it was given to my father to keep on the farm.

Jim: Do you know where it is now?

Kirsty: Yes, one of my nephews has it; he lives on the Tiniroto Road out of Gisborne. Beautiful brass bell … big solid thing.

Jim: Bill has brought us this morning too, a seat off the wreck of the ‘Northumberland’ at Napier.

Comment: That fabric is called moquette.

Jim: We’ll come back to this, because the flotsam and the jetsam and the bits of wrecks are still around; and here’s some examples. Somebody asked me what was the difference between flotsam and jetsam – well there’s actually three things, there’s flotsam, there’s jetsam and there’s lagan. The flotsam is what floats ashore and you pick up on the high tide mark; it’s just the floating material. The jetsam is stuff that has actually been jettisoned … it’s been thrown off a ship; so it’s been deliberately heaved off to lighten the ship to try and perhaps lighten the load and to be able to salvage the ship, because it then floats high in the water. Bales of wool for example would be jetsam, because they’d been thrown overboard in an effort to lighten the ship. And it’s what you do on a ship if you run aground, particularly if the tide’s coming in – throw everything overboard, and hopefully you’ll become lighter and still be able to float and get off.

That’s an aspect of maritime history that I’d like to develop a little bit in the future, because you can have near-wrecks, or your can have strandings; these are wrecks that would’ve been, had things gone wrong; they’ve been situations where things have come right and the ship has been saved, and it’s disappeared over the horizon and out of people’s memory. But the strandings have sometimes equally interesting stories as total wrecks, except there’s no cargo left on the beach. [Chuckle]

Question: So what was the third item that you mentioned?

Jim: Lagan. Lagan is stuff that is thrown overboard but which is buoyed; it has a rope with a marker on it, like a flag or something like that, or a float. So it is tagged, and if you go back through history you’ll find that the laws pertaining to wreck and the recovery of artifacts from wreck change from time to time, but anything that is marked as it comes ashore is in a different category altogether; it’s already spoken for. So that’s lagan – buoyed jetsam, if you like.

Question: Jim, I haven’t been in a wreck, but when I was a child the weekend visit to Westshore which is where the airport is now – we always went out towards the inner harbour to look at the wreck of the ‘William Wallace’, which was sticking up from the water. Do you know about that one?

Jim: I don’t; I’ve heard the name, yeah.

If you want more information of course, you go back to the newspapers of the day and see what the reporters were writing. And you’ll find the early reporters were very good, and gave very factual and detailed information. So if you’re interested in a particular wreck, it’s always worth hunting back through Papers Past and getting the reports of the day. Sometimes you can even get the results of the Court of Enquiry that was held, because most wrecks hold a Court of Enquiry afterwards.

Our family has a shipwreck that I’d like to tell you about some time; it concerns a ship called the ‘Avalanche’, a Shaw Savill ship. She had three masts and she was square-rigged on all three. She was coming out of London and into a storm in the Dover Straits, and another outgoing ship going to Canada ran straight into her. It was a straight collision at night in a storm, and the ‘Avalanche’ sank within three minutes; the Canadian ship capsized and was still floating three or four days later. There were some survivors, but the family interest is that my great-aunt was on board. She was the sister of my grandfather; and so we lost Margaret on that occasion. And the history of the ‘Avalanche’ off Portland Bill [Lighthouse] has been very much part of our family history, and because a number of families in Whanganui and in Wellington were involved, the ‘Avalanche’ keeps turning up in terms of … there was a centennial service held in Whanganui for it, and the families still get together. But that’s the story of the ‘Avalanche’, and it’s quite a [an] interesting tale to tell about that. But I think you’ll find many families in New Zealand do have stories in their family history relating to wrecks, or of near rescues, or of loss of life even. If that happens it’s always good to be assured that these things are written up and that they are recorded in family histories.

Turning to the east coast of the North Island, Diggle fortunately has a locality index at the back of here, [book] so if you want to find the wrecks of Cape Kidnappers you can look up Cape Kidnappers in the back, and it’ll tell you that there were three wrecks around Cape Kidnappers. The trouble is your place of interest may not be the same as Lynton Diggle’s, so sometimes you find that the wreck you’re interested in is actually under ‘Hawke’s Bay – Other’. [Chuckles] Or ‘East Coast – Other’. [Chuckles] But sometimes you’re lucky, and you find that a particular site is referenced.

But going through that, I can tell you that there are one hundred and sixty-eight recorded wrecks on the coastline between East Cape and Cape Palliser. Some of them have been well recorded; there’re probably a few wrecks that aren’t even included; they’ve escaped notice or pre-dated the record keeping. But of those a hundred and sixty-eight, we’re not going to deal with all of them today but I’ve picked out one or two of particular interest; and we’ll work from the north down.

Right up near East Cape on Horoera Point – when you take the road out from Te Araroa out to the East Cape lighthouse, close to the sea is Horoera Point – and that was where the ‘Port Elliot’ went ashore in 1924. So that’s our northernmost wreck of the day, if you like. [Chuckle] ‘Port Elliot’ … she was about seven thousand tons gross; four hundred and seventy-one feet long. She was a four-masted steamer, which is a bit unusual; it more or less indicates that she was built as a sailing ship, and then had engines placed later. But she may have been built with both … probably built with both. But she’s recorded and registered as a four-masted steamer. It is one of the good wrecks, and I call it a good wreck because it really was nobody’s fault. The ship was coming down from Auckland; it was a foggy night, fairly calm. Coming down off the coast here the Captain had noted that there was a tidal rip that comes through this way that would’ve driven him onto the shore there, and he adjusted the course of the ship to counteract the drift of the tide and retired to his cabin for night, and left the third mate in charge on the bridge. The third mate, when they were about in that position, [indicates on slide] in the fog he kept seeing a light ashore, and he assumed that that was the East Cape lighthouse; but it kept coming and going because it was a foggy night, and you [he] didn’t have continual visibility so he couldn’t get a good fix on it. But they assumed it was the East Cape lighthouse, and they altered course to their right as they were coming down, and ran ashore because they’d turned to starboard too early; they turned south and went straight onto the rocks. As you know, the general quality of a lot of the east coast of the North Island … we have this wave-cut platform about low tide level; it’s covered at high tide, but at low tide there’s quite a platform of rock carved into the mudstone by the wave action. She came in on the half-tide, and the tide was going out; and in the morning, there she was sitting high and dry up on the wave-cut platform.

Well, the ‘Tūtānekai’ – which was the government ship run by the Marine Department and it was used for servicing the lighthouses and for taking ten members of parliament to Wellington and other official duties – the ‘Tūtānekai’ came five days later and took everybody down to Wellington. She was carrying two and a half thousand tons of cargo, and they were mostly motor cars. Well, the good news was that the two coasters, the ‘Fanny’ and the ‘Ruru’ managed to salvage one hundred and seven of those motor cars, and they took them down to Wellington along with eight hundred tons of fittings that they managed to take off the wreck. The wreck was in pretty good order, so it was a fairly straightforward matter of stripping her; she wasn’t a new boat, and she had been in trouble before too, so the decision was made to abandon her on the site. And a significant enquiry was held; it was decided that there was no wrongful act performed, and all of the certificates of the officers were returned; and that’s why I say it was a good wreck. [Chuckle] They salvaged most of the cargo; nobody was in error or had made a blameful decision; it was a [an] innocent misidentification of the light in a foggy situation. The light ashore proved to be a bush fire – somebody was burning off, and of course in the fog at night, it was mistaken for the East Cape light. So that was the ‘Port Elliot’.

While we’re up there off East Cape, I’m going to claim something for Hawke’s Bay, and that’s the wreck of the ‘Rangitāne’. That wasn’t a wreck; that was a casualty of war, and it was very close to our own shores. This happened in 1940; it actually happened three hundred miles out to sea. She was bound from Auckland heading for Cape [?Gordon?]; she was two days out from Auckland and was intercepted by the German raider ‘Orion’, and her two supply ships, the ‘Komet’ and the ‘Kulmerland’. [Several websites show two German raiders, ‘Orion’ and ‘Komet’, with one supply ship, ‘Kulmerland’] So the three ships were involved; they put a salvo across her bow. She didn’t stop. The Captain immediately radioed that he was under attack and then his wireless equipment was immediately carried away by a salvo of fire. And the Germans opened fire on the ship because the Captain hadn’t stopped. The end of the story was basically that there were three hundred and three survivors. There were quite a number of people killed – certainly five passengers killed, and five crew. So we know of ten, but there may have been more as well; but there were three hundred and three survivors. The Germans took them all on board and took them up to an island [Emirau] in the German [Bismarck] Archipelago and put them ashore on the opposite side to one of the copra growers there, so they had two days’ walk before they could get word to the world that they had survived.

Interestingly, a couple of days beforehand the same German raiders had taken the ‘Holmwood’, bound from the Chathams for Wellington; but it was intercepted. I had the good fortune some years ago of knowing a Fred Abernethy who lived in Manakau on the Manawatu coast. He was the Chief Engineer on the ‘Holmwood’ at the time, and one day he pulled out his diary which he had kept because they were on the German boats for about two weeks before they were put ashore again. Basically they were well-treated; and of course a bit of an embarrassment for the Germans, because they had three hundred more mouths to feed every day, [chuckles] so the faster they could put them ashore somewhere the better.

Fred Abernethy gave me his diary, and together we later published it in the Ship & Marine Society Journal, and that gives a whole account of the ‘Holmwood’ interception; the ‘Rangitāne’ intercept; and then what happened to the survivors. Again, it was a reasonably happy outcome if you can forgive them for the fact that there were ten people killed in the gunfire, and if we acknowledge the fact that this was going on not very far away from home. So I think, being only three hundred miles east of East Cape, we can claim it as an East Coast casualty, if not a wreck in the conventional sense.

Coming down the coast we come past this little bay here near the mouth of the Waiapu River, just south of Port Awanui. That was a staging point for steamers; they would call in there and pick people up. There was a hotel on the shore there; it was surveyed as a township. Ivan Hughes, who sometimes comes to our meetings – he and Stephanie wrote this book, ‘Port to Pasture’, which is the history of Port Awanui. If you go there now it’s just a green paddock; in fact you’d have difficulty realising that anything of interest had gone on there in the past. But I give full credit to Ivan and Stephanie for researching this and publishing it so that it’s available information. But this would fall into the category of one of the ports of the past; this is a port that survived for a number of years, but technology improved and the need for the port subsided. The roads went in, and there was no further point in having a calling point on the coast at Port Awanui.

Coming south to Gisborne – 1912 we have the ‘Star of Canada’. Now I mention the ‘Star of Canada’ because if you go to the museum in Gisborne and go down the long alleyway there and out the back, you’ll finish up on the bridge of the ‘Star of Canada’. It’s still there; they’ve reclaimed that. It was in private ownership but it’s now been handed over to the museum, and it’s now central to the maritime section of the museum. She was one of these misfortunate boats that dragged her anchor while in the roadstead; in other words, she was standing off Gisborne at the time. Midnight on 23rd June 1912 it happened; very wild night; gales and squalls, and she started dragging her anchors, and the short story is that she finished up on Kaiti Beach, broadside on to the rollers. ‘Hipi’, the Gisborne tug, went out to help, but she was a seven thousand ton ship, four hundred and seventy feet long. She was one of the ‘Star’ ships; similar size to the ‘Port Elliot’ that we were talking about earlier. She was broadside on to the waves, and of course on a sandy beach with a [an] onshore wind, it’s a pretty tricky thing to get a big boat off and I doubt even a bigger tug would help.

I’m not sure where the tug got it’s name, ‘Hipi’, but I noticed up in Gisborne that the name of the dredge, or the dumb barge that they use as a dredge, is the ‘Pukunui’. Now puku is tummy, and pukunui is big tummy; but I think it’s rather a brilliant name for a dredge. [Chuckles] Somebody’s got a sense of humour in Gisborne.

On July 3rd it was confirmed that the ship had broken her back, and once that happens there’s no hope of salvage at all. The crew were exonerated and, in the terms of the day, “without the slightest stain on their professional reputations”. So everybody did what they should do, or could do, but again, this was a misfortune; and we could say that it was simply a case of the power of the sea overwhelming the ship in the circumstance; neither anchor were [was] able to hold her in the circumstances. So that’s the ‘Star of Canada’.

I want to come down now to the Māhia Peninsula; and there’s several – as all down the coast here there’s a hundred and sixty-nine wrecks to explain, so I’m missing a few on the way. But I’m going to mention here the ‘Falco’ on this little point here off the Māhia Peninsula, 1845, and it’s probably one of the earliest and important wrecks. ‘Falco’ was a brig … a brig is a two-masted ship with square sails on both masts, not the triangular fore and aft sail, but the square sails … so she had the full rigging of a bigger ship. She came from America, and she was sailing from Wellington to Auckland. And she had on board the American Consul for New Zealand – probably the first Consul. Now he had quite a number of things with him, including quite a lot of specie – specie is the term given to coinage, or money – and there were several cases of coinage on board; presumably it was American currency. He had been given it by the government. Well anyway, they put into Table Cape for provisions and had anchored off; but again, a north gale blew up and blew them onto the rock cut platform. With a heavy sea running, pitching heavily, the windlass was carried away … the windlass that was holding the anchor … so they tied the anchor to the mast, but then the mast was carried away and the ship ended up again on the wave-cut platform; tide went out, and there she was, bold and beautiful. Well they managed to get the American Consul and his moneybags, or cases of money, ashore and take him to the home of Mr Brown; but there the story finishes. So we don’t know what Mr Brown and the Consul got up to [chuckles] after the wreck. But while so doing, the master and the officers were hemmed in on the quarterdeck, and the hatches were broken over [open] by the European and the Māori whalers. They broached the entire cargo; they opened all the mail that was on board; and in the course of the next few days they eventually stripped the hull of all the copper that was on her bottom; all the sails, all the rigging – everything they could lay their hands on.

Now you could say, “Well that’s a bad wreck”; [chuckle] that’s an example where total pillage happened at the mercy of the locals. But again, it depends on which side of the fence you’re sitting. When you are more or less in survival mode and living hand to mouth [day] by day; with families … most of them would’ve been married with half-caste children ashore … well, most of the whalers were married; things were pretty grim at times, so having a ship like this arrive on your back door with all these goodies was very much of a temptation.

And if you go back to English history again you’ll find that the English, being on an island like we are, were quite adept at picking off wrecks, and even causing wrecks when things got tough. And as Bathurst says in her book, ‘The Wreckers’: ‘For a fully laden general cargo vessel to run aground in an accessible position is more or less like having Selfridges crash-land in your back garden.’ So if you’re in survival mode when a wreck happens, then there is a lot of booty to be had. And as [in] the case of the ‘Falco’ here, it was the copper sheathing; it was the rigging, the ropes; it was the sails – all these things were most welcome [chuckle] in the whalers’ camp. On the other hand, if you were the owner or the skipper or a member of the crew of the boat, you’d have a different perspective on it.

That book, ‘The Wreckers’, [quote] … ‘The book examines the myths, the realities and the superstitions of shipwrecks, and uncovers the darker side of life on Britain’s shores’. And it certainly is an interesting book and you realise just how desperate some people were; and if you could lure a boat ashore when you were in starvation mode, that was a good thing for the local community. And they did this by changing the lights on the headlands; putting out false signals; all things like that. And things got pretty grim too, in terms of … there could be arguments on who got the wreck into shore. [Coughing] There was a time when any survivor off a wreck could make claim to the wreckage that washed ashore; but the locals cottoned on to that, and it’s recorded in some instances [that] the locals would go out into the surf and drown the survivors as they came ashore so they could not later claim the cargo. There is a darker side to it all – again, it depends on which side you’re viewing the position from.

Leaving the ‘Falco’ which is a wreck of a particular interest, we come down here to Napier, and I just want to mention the ‘Montmorency’, 1867. The [coughing] ‘Montmorency’ under Captain Josiah Hudson [coughing] McKenzie; was about seven hundred tons, about a hundred and sixty-eight feet long. She was built in Québec as a Black Ball liner … the Black Ball Shipping company. [Line] She was remarkably roomy, and she was a great favourite for immigrants because of the extra space that you got. I came across a passenger ticket the other day – £18 for a steerage passage with ten cubic feet of storage space to come from England to Napier. But anyway, the ‘Montmorency’ had arrived in Napier; all the passengers had gone ashore; all the luggage was ashore, there was just the general cargo still to be brought in when again, a northerly gale came up. She went on fire; and one suggestion was that the crew were so happy with the girls ashore that they thought they might stay, so they set fire to the ship deliberately! But you know, that’s down in the conspiracy theory department. [Chuckle] It was never resolved exactly how the fire started, but it appeared to have been started, and it lingered in the hold for some days before it actually got away. And the gale would’ve just exacerbated the whole thing, and by midnight she was heavily ablaze, anchored out there off Napier, pitching heavily. They tried to beach her; that’s when she ran aground, but that was not possible ‘cause the ship had been burnt to the water line.

The ‘Montmorency’ was a ship, so she was three or four-masted with square sails on all; she was an immigrant [ship] … there is a photo of her in one of the books, I notice; a good looking boat and fairly beamy, and she had this reputation of plenty of space. But you’ll find a lot of the early immigrants will trace their arrival to one of the trips of the ‘Montmorency’; this wasn’t the first trip by any means. It surprises me a little bit that there isn’t a painting of her on fire off the Napier heads, because it seems to me it would be a little snippet of history. It happened at night, so she would’ve been quite spectacular as her masts went up in smoke and flame. Eventually she was stripped; all the copper, the sails and rigging were taken off. So that was the ‘Montmorency’, one of the immigrant ships that we lost here.

The other ship that we have was some years later … twenty years later in fact … the ‘Montmorency’ in 1867, and we have the ‘Northumberland’ in 1887. The ‘Northumberland’ was a [an] iron full-rigged ship under Captain Richard Todd; he’s a well-known Napier skipper. She was formerly a steamer, but she’d converted back to sail which is interesting, but that sort of thing happened, and she was owned by the Shaw Savill & Albion [Steamship] Company. She was wrecked on the Bay View beach on 11th May 1887, and she’d arrived two days earlier from London and Lyttelton. She had a thousand tons of cargo on board, including a lot of material for the Wairoa road bridge that was being built at the time. She also had four thousand bags of wheat which she’d taken on board for [at] Lyttelton which would’ve been going back to Europe. In the gale on 10th May, the cables parted; the spare anchor was put out … seemed to hold, but it started dragging again in the late afternoon. By the time night time came, they’d tried to put a tow line across to her, but the tow line broke and the ship went on into the breakers. There was another ship involved at that time, the ‘Boojum’, which was a much smaller seventy-foot boat belonging to the Union Steamship Company; she went to her aid but got caught in the rolling sea on the beach, and capsized. The engineer was saved, but four crew members were lost. So in the ‘Boojum’ attempt at providing rescue for the ‘Northumberland’ crew she herself was wrecked. Bill has got an interesting thing here – an artifact from the ‘Northumberland’, and you might like to tell us about that, Bill?

Bill: I bought this at auction about one and a half years ago; this is a chair off the ‘Northumberland’. It’s got a heavy steel base which I guess would be screwed to the floor. There’s a couple of these around – there’s one in [the] Faraday Centre museum. I think we decided it was probably made about 1871, and the other one I’ve seen has got the same material.

Jim: Which was?

Reply: Moquette.

Bill: So is that for the pattern or the actual type of material? [Cut moquette]

Reply: The type of material. Like, my grandparents I remember from my childhood, they had [a] sofa and chairs upholstered in moquette, which was very like that.

Bill: [‘Cause] up until a couple of days ago this seat was covered in a black material, and I just started poking around and I was very pleased to find that I had the original material that matched that, ‘cause I bought this for $200 at Maiden & Fosters’ auction. So I think having this original material sort of increases the value of it somewhat, and I’ll probably hang onto it myself now. But obviously, they got a lot of stuff ashore, ‘cause when you walk round there – I suppose most of you’ve walked round there, have you? And looked out to see the remains of the ship there?

Jim: Quite a lot was exposed during the ‘31 earthquake apparently. But yeah, you’re quite right – there’re still bits and pieces that can be seen at low tide in the right circumstances. Well I guess the ‘Boojum’ was there too. [Chuckle]

Bill: I’ve had a good poke around on the beach to see if I could find anything, but I didn’t see anything … couple of bits of wood. I don’t know if they were off that or not.

Jim: Keep looking, ‘cause [chuckle] every tide contains things. The ‘Northumberland’ was built in 1871, and she also had this figurehead which graced a garden in Carlyle Street for some years, and was later seen in Whakatu. But that figurehead has sort of dipped below the horizon now; it probably fell to bits …

Question: Who was it of, the figurehead?*

Jim: It looks like a Viking gentleman … probably a Northumberland man. [Chuckles] Off my head, there’s usually some association between the figurehead and the name, but not necessarily. Yeah, the figureheads are another topic altogether; the art of ship carving … there were figureheads, and there was scrollwork, and there were stern plates that the ship’s carver did. If you go to Adelaide you’ll find the museum is packed full of figureheads because they were one of the few retrievable items that they managed to get; and of course there were lots of shipwrecks along the South Australian coast. Due to the difficulty of navigating in winter, hang a left to go into Adelaide or hang a right to go into Melbourne; if they did it too soon they ended up on the shore. Lots of wrecks there.

And there are a few figureheads left in New Zealand still, but they are few and far between. There was a collection in the Navy Museum at Devonport, but they were left out in the rain and they mostly have weathered and disappeared, and the two remaining ones are in the Museum. I think they’re great, but are part of the maritime art, and there’s not a lot of maritime art left now. But they’re quite unique; there’s lots of myths and stories associated with the figurehead, and if ever you see one it’s worth trying to find out a bit more about the ship that it came from. So that’s the ‘Northumberland’ and the ‘Boojum’; we could put the ‘Boojum’ up there, 1887. But if we go round here to Cape Kidnappers, we have the little coastal steamer, the ‘Go Ahead’ that also went ashore in that same year; so I’ve chosen three wrecks there – the ‘Northumberland’, the ‘Go Ahead’, and the ‘Boojum’, all in the same year.

The ‘Go Ahead’ was a smaller steamer. She’d been built in County Lanark in 1867; she was twenty years old, which is getting quite old for a ship. She went ashore at Rāngaiika which was where the whaling station was … Morris’ Whaling Station … in very thick weather. Everybody got ashore in the lifeboat all right, except the fireman, who said he wasn’t going to trust his life to a lifeboat. But his bets were in the wrong place, [chuckles] and he lost his life. The interesting thing about the ‘Go Ahead’ is that you can still see the boiler; if you go out to Cape Kidnappers and out onto the Rāngaiika coast and look down onto Rāngaiika where the New Zealand dotterel are now breeding, and it’s low tide, you can see a rusty old boiler [coughing] out there, and that’s [from] the ‘Go Ahead’.

Going further south to Ākitio, out from Dannevirke … [indicates map] now there’s Cape Turnagain, there’s Castlepoint, and Ākitio; anyway, the ‘Pleiades’ – and this is a ship that intrigues me a bit – happened in 1899, this wreck; an iron full-rigged ship belonging to Shaw Savill & Albion, under Captain Thomas Burton, ran ashore on 31st October 1899. At daylight she was found to be dangerously close to land, and efforts to “wear” her were unavailing. Being a sailing ship they couldn’t work her off with the way the wind was blowing; it was an east-southeasterly gale, and the Captain decided to beach her to hopefully save the ship and to save the cargo and passengers. The first mate went up in the rigging, and from there he directed the helmsman towards a sandy beach. So they were off Ākitio here, coming up this way; he spotted the beach at the Ākitio River here and he could see there was sand there, so he thought that would be a good place to try and take the ship. Miraculously they went straight over the reef off Ākitio; there is a gap in the reef and they managed to get the boat in the gap, through the reef and up to the beach. Avoiding the reef was quite miraculous. Well, she took to ground at eight o’clock in the morning in an upright position. The crew landed by lifeboats, and twenty were later taken back to Wellington on the ‘Himitangi’. She was not worth the expense of refloating; she was thirty years old, and thirty years is a very elderly sailing ship, so she was dismantled as far as possible. The Court of Enquiry found that the master was quite right in beaching her but he was guilty of negligent navigation, and he was given a six-month suspension and ordered to pay half the court costs; and the Chief Officer was ordered to pay the other half of the court costs, so there was a fair bit of blame put on the men responsible on the bridge.

The interesting thing is that if you go to Ākitio at low tide, you can still see something sticking out of the water. It may be the stem of the boat; it may be some other part of one of the masts or something. It’s not visible at high tide, but it is visible at low tide so you still can see the ‘Pleiades’. But the second interesting thing is that if you go to the community centre, Ākitio was a pickup point for Richardsons – they used to pick up wool from there on their coasters, by loading the wool by bullock wagon through the surf. And to store the wool there was a shed there; the shed was still there in the early 1970s – I remember seeing it. It was used for parties and socials and so forth, but it got to the point of becoming a hazard. They pulled it down, but they’ve rebuilt a very good community centre there with accommodation, and a big hall above it just behind the school. And if you go there you’ll find the bell of the ‘Pleiades’ in a point of prominence in the hall. It’s nicely mounted and all polished up. That’s what happened to the bell of the ‘Pleiades’. She also had a figurehead, and for some years it was believed that she was in the custodianship of the Armstrongs in Ākitio here, but I’ve not been able to locate that figurehead; and the last report I had was that somebody thought that it had got beyond repair and had been thrown in the river. That may be as may be, but if any of you happen to hear about the figurehead of the ‘Pleiades’, it’d be interesting. There is an unknown figurehead in the Maritime Museum in Wellington that could possibly be off [from] her, but nobody has been able to substantiate that.

And our last little wreck is another little ship at Ākitio … a little ship called the ‘Katherine Johnson’, and this is a ship that I have some affection for because it belonged to my great-grandfather. It didn’t belong to him at the time of the wreck, he had sold it a few years previously. But the ‘Katherine Johnson’ was built in Sydney. When William Watt and Thomas Taylor were in Sydney in 1840 they purchased the ‘Katherine Johnson’ from the builder, and together they stocked her up with everything they thought they could sell in New Zealand. The family record is that great-grandfather, William, left Sydney with a ship full of cargo and half a crown [two shillings and sixpence] in his pocket. And they subsequently came to Auckland and then finished up trading successfully between Whanganui and Wellington and Nelson; sort of a triangle route there, with the occasional foray back across to Sydney. This little ship, ten tons, thirty-one feet long; she was a cutter rig. They actually took her back to Sydney a couple of years after buying her, and had the builder lengthen her and then brought her back to New Zealand. So she has three crossings of the Tasman to her credit, which is pretty good for a thirty-one foot boat. So that’s the story of the little ‘Katherine Johnson’, and that brings the whole story of these shipwrecks, for me anyway, to a personal note in that – here’s a bit of our family history – my brother has spent the last twenty years building a boat in Port Chalmers, and you can imagine the name he has given it. [Chuckle]

Those are ten examples of the hundred and sixty-nine I could’ve talked about, but I think they’re all of special interest. And if we just go back and look at them chronologically, we’ve got the ‘Falco’ which was the first one; but then the ‘Katherine Johnson’ was actually the second wreck. The ‘Montmorency’, and then in 1887 we have the ‘Northumberland’, the ‘Boojum’ and the ‘Go Ahead’, that little group of boats; 1899 down to the ‘Pleiades’; the ‘Star of Canada’ up at Gisborne; the ‘Port Elliot’ up at East Cape; and of course the Rangitāne during the Second World War.

And if we look at the reasons for those wrecks, we can see that on some occasions it was simply that the ships were overwhelmed by the sea or by the wind, or by both. We can say that the ‘Katherine Johnson’ was overwhelmed; Captain Armstrong of the Armstrong family had taken her in. He was bringing her out to return to Wellington, and as he was coming out over the bar he got caught in the breakers and was unable to turn the ship and catch the wind, and get himself out. So he got what they call ‘caught in the stays’; it was in a position where you’ve got your bow into the wind and you can’t turn to the left to get out, and he couldn’t turn to the right ‘cause he would’ve gone onto the beach. So that was the end of the ‘Katherine Johnson’, but you could say she was overwhelmed by the circumstance. We had the war casualty, the Rangitāne; you could have errors in navigation, and I think we could put the ‘Go Ahead’ in that category, and the ‘Pleiades’, too – she was obviously too close to land. And in fact my little suspicion about the ‘Pleiades’ was that she was conveniently wrecked. Suppose I could be taken to court for saying that in public, but this does happen – when a ship gets old and is worthless, and is going to cost you money [coughing] to get rid of … why not wreck it and get the insurance? And here we have the ‘Pleiades’, a thirty year old ship which was past her use by date, conveniently beached on a beach that had access to it – not really a formed road in those days, but at least there was access to [for] getting the wool out of the whole Dannevirke area. I just wonder if there was a bit of skulduggery went on there. Wrecks weren’t always innocent things; they were sometimes deliberate. We have examples of fire here with the ‘Montmorency’; we have examples of wanton destruction and plunder as in the ‘Falco’ up at Māhia. And all those things contribute to the wreck saga on the east coast.

The other aspects of maritime history that this opens up … I’d like sometime in the future perhaps, to tell you the story of HMS ‘Osprey’, one of Her Majesty’s Brigs of War which in 1842 went aground up near the Hokianga. And that’s interesting because there was always a bit of a suspicion there that she was actually wrongly signalled. There was a flag put on the beach by the pilot to enter the Hokianga Harbour if the bar was sufficient depth across. Now just north of Hokianga there’s another little harbour called Herekino, and from the sea she [it] looks very similar; she [it] has the same relief in the hills behind, and could be mistaken. And a flag was put out on the beach at Herekino, and so they assumed, “Oh, yeah, we’re at Hokianga – let’s go in”; straight into the lap of the shore. So that’s an interesting little story, and that was researched by a wife [of a] dairy farmer, [Jane Foster], in the Waimate area up in the north, and she’s written this wonderful little story ‘Ship on Shore’; and it’s the story of how [a] couple found this wreck on the beach … in recent years, you know, last twenty years … and through their curiosity and persistance they managed to unravel the whole story, this wonderful story of the wreck of the HMS ‘Osprey’.

There are other things too, that I mentioned before, that wrecks bring up; a wreck is a very definite full stop for a ship, if you like, but there are also ships that do hit the land in strandings, but then get towed off. And often the circumstances of that stranding and the consequences are really interesting, and as interesting as the wrecks themselves. They weren’t wrecks because they managed to be salvaged; I would call them the ‘nearly wrecks’. I can tell the story of a couple of them, too, where circumstances were right and the ship was saved.

And then of course there’s the whole question of ships that never made it at all, and I mentioned to you before the ‘Avalanche’ that sailed from London to Whanganui and Wellington, and didn’t get past Portland Bill. And okay, that was a wreck in a sense, but it was a collision at sea.

But there are other boats; one particularly I’ve done research on a ship called the ‘Britain’s Pride’ – Captain Linklater, in 1876 – which set off from Hobart for Wellington and was never seen again. It had the two daughters of the owner on board. Linklater was one of the most respected captains on the coast at the time. Boat never arrived, and so there’s a great big question mark, you know – what actually happened? She was obviously overwhelmed in the sea, and lost without trace. But there are other ships like that, and a friend of mine in Dunedin is actually writing a book on the forgotten ships … the ones that left but didn’t get here.

This brings up the interesting issue too, of the ports of the past; the ports that were of significance, like Wairoa, Mohaka … you’d never think they got ships in at Mohaka when you go and look at it now; Waikokopu … very important when they were building the railway to Gisborne. But all around the New Zealand coast are ports that survived for a little while, particularly during the early days when there were no roads or rail, but are now forgotten. And Port Awawnui was one example of ports of the past.

It’s interesting too to look at the cargoes of these early ships because there you have the whole economy of the country, sort of explicit in the manifests – what they were taking and what they were bringing. In the early days it was pork and potatoes; from Whanganui and from Napier the ships would take that to Wellington, and they’d bring back all the goodies that were necessary – calico, ironware, pots and pans, sugar, tea – and so you can get a lot of the early history just from reading the manifests of these early boats. And then of course there’s the issue of genealogy – when you get all the ships lined up and you know who the masters and the owners were, then you’ve got a rich source of information about the owners and their families.

We’ve touched on the impression of ship art and the figureheads and the carvings on a ship, which is another interesting topic. But those we will leave for another day. Thank you for your attention. [Applause]

Bill, you had a bottle of whisky?

Bill: Yeah – this is a bottle of Hennessy Brandy that came off the wreck of the ‘Rangitoto’, which wrecked in 1873 at Cape Jackson at the entrance of Queen Charlotte Sound without loss of lives. At the time of the sinking the locals were reported to have stocked up on [chuckles] booze for years to come. [Chuckles] And here’s a photo of artifacts [that had] come from the vicinity of the wreck, like the empty booze, so this might be one of the few bottles around that hasn’t been emptied. So I don’t know what it’d taste like, but I guess that’s a wax seal, is it? So it’s kept it in good nick. So I don’t know how many bottles would’ve been on board, but that’s something I bought at Percy’s auction about twelve years ago.

Comment: Well Jim, when we came I think most of us here, like me, thought we were going to hear about a couple of three or four hundred ton ships that pranged. Your definition of a wreck, and then a hundred and sixty-eight … see that’s why not too many of us want to have salt in our veins [chuckles] … it’s more dangerous than cars. The one I like particularly was your family one … a ten ton ship; I thought, ‘That’s a good exaggeration.’ I thought, ‘A boat, three times across to Australia’ … you’ve got some mad people in your family, Jim. [Laughter] But thank you so much for the interest you’ve created in this, and I’m sure that we’ll always think of different things about shipping, and especially our own coast; that’s the biggest surprise to me, that I’ve lived here all my life and I didn’t know any of this. Thank you very much. [Applause]

Jim: Has anybody got a burning question that they’d like to ask?

Question: Were you in the Navy in the Second World War?

Jim: No, no. No, I was still a schoolboy.

Reply: My father was on the ‘Achilles’, and in the Navy from 1943 through to 1946, and probably one of the wrecks that he was on was the ‘Achilles’ got badly hit in 1943 up in the Pacific, and they had to transfer to the ‘Gambia’.

Question: The two boats that were [?fired on?] by the Germans – were they scuttled?

Jim: Basically. Well, in the case of the ‘Holmwood’, I think the Germans actually opened the seacocks, but then did some artillery practise on her afterwards. [Chuckles] So she was deliberately sunk. And the same with the Rangitāne, there was no intent to take the ship; they were embarrassed enough by the number of people rescued. [Chuckles] There was another ship too, taken in the Tasman Sea by those German raiders. And now the records from the German side are coming out, and we’re getting the diaries of the crew and the officers of those German ships at the time.

Question: What reason did they give to go down so close to our shores?

Jim: Oh, it was deliberate; trying to sabotage supply ships. They knew that this was the source – you know, Australia and New Zealand – ships were leaving here with meat and dairy produce; yeah, basically food materials I guess, and wool. And they were trying to intercept; they laid mines off Wellington and they laid mines off Auckland, and a lot of the mines took the ‘Niagara’; the ship hit the mines going out of Auckland. So they were quite active, and it was just … yeah, trying to make a nuisance of themselves, and also put the wind up us. I remember Dad going round in Dunedin when we used to have air raid or blackout practice, and we had the hill up Otakou that overlooked the harbour and out to St Clair; the practice was always to put up the plywood shutters so the lights could not be seen at sea. And that was in response to either the Germans or the Japanese possibly coming.

Question: And also, the submarine that was meant to’ve come into Napier – was that true?

Jim: Oh, I think it’s pretty true.

Question: I’d like to know why has there been so much secrecy about the ‘Mikhail Lermontov’, and Captain Jamison was never brought to charge?

Jim: Good question. Richard Prebble [New Zealand Minister of Transport at the time] was in Havelock [North] about three or four years ago down in the Community Centre, so I heckled him. [Chuckles] I didn’t harangue him, I heckled him. He was Minister of Marine at the time, and my question was why there were documents in the National Archives which had a one hundred year freeze on them that related to the ‘Mikhail Lermontov’, read. So the Enquiry was held, but the official record of that Enquiry has been, like all court cases, in custody for about a hundred years. It’s got a long way to go. But I didn’t get a reply; he just said, “Oh, if you believe in conspiracy theories, you believe in conspiracy theories.” So there is no answer to that question … what the real circumstances were or what the outcomes were. Russia actually owed us a heck of a lot of money for exports, and there was a question of whether there was a political problem of … if we’d got stroppy with the wreck, that the Russians would’ve refused to’ve paid. So I think there are still interesting issues about the ‘Mikhail Lermontov’.

Thank you, everybody, for coming.

Audience: Thank you.