The Wreck of the General Grant

A famous Gordon Lightfoot song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” says that Lake Superior never gives up her dead.  The Auckland Islands, bleak, lonely and windswept, have a certain cavern that never gives ships back either.  Especially ones filled with gold.  True story.

The ship was the General Grant, built right after the Civil War and named for Ulysses S. Grant. It was a three-masted barque that was 179.5 feet long, 34.5 feet wide, and drew 21.5 feet.  She left Melbourne, Australia, commanded by experienced Capt. William H. Loughlin, bound for London by way of Cape Horn at the tip of South America. The day she left was autumn in the southern hemisphere, May 4, 1866.  She carried 58 passengers, many of them successful miners, and 25 crew.  She also carried a cargo of wool, skins, 2,576 ounces of gold and reputedly “nine tons of zinc spelter ballast”. At least that is what the manifest said, but a ship supposed to transport gold, the London, had not made it out to New Zealand, so the gold had been waiting to go by the next available ship.  The General Grant was the only ship leaving Melbourne, Australia at that time.

Nine days later they were 300 miles south of New Zealand.  On the utterly calm but foggy night of May 13, 1866, the captain posted lookouts, and the Auckland Islands were sighted off the port bow at 10:30PM.  The ship tried to turn away from them, but a shockingly strong current began to carry the ship directly toward the island.  Every sail possible was hoisted, but with light wind, the crew was unable to turn the ship, and the ship glided through the fog towards the cliffs.  The currents were considered hopelessly strong and a small boat launched to row them away would have been futile.  Even though a mere puff of wind could have saved them, they collided with the cliffs on the western shore.  The ship swirled and turned, pushed northward, hitting rocks on shore and turning helplessly around and around. At 1:30 AM on May 14^th, the ship was pushed up a small cove. The crew lit lanterns to see what lay before them, and it was said that the walls were so sheer that there wasn’t even a space for a bird to perch. 

Then as sleepy passengers in dressing gowns, robes, and hastily donned coats watched in horror, the ship was drawn toward the great black maw of a cavern.  The fore topmast broke and the passengers heard the sickening sound of squealing wood on rock as the ship was thrust into the inky cavern.  The masts knocked off pieces of rock which smashed through the fo’c’sle deck and through the starboard deckhouse.  The royal foremast broke off, as well as the topmast and lower mast, leaving only stumps.  Soundings were taken and under her stern they had 25 fathoms, which is 150 feet, but all the while, the boat was being further jammed into the cave.  The waves rumbled deep in the cavern and added to the cacophony of questions shot at the crew.

There was little anyone could do in the black of night, and as the ship was not going anywhere, the captain thought it best to wait for dawn.  When it got light, it became apparent that the situation was becoming worse.  The rising tide and increasing wind and waves pushed the ship up against the roof of the cavern, causing the main mast to be forced through the hull of the ship.

On board were three lifeboats, which consisted of two quarter-boats, each 22 feet long with a 5 foot beam, and a long boat of 30 feet with a 7 foot beam.  The two quarter-boats were launched with some crew members, passengers, and tins of food.  The quarter-boats were supposed to land, get people ashore and come back for more.  Unfortunately, there was no place to land, so the boats fought their way outside the cavern battling heavy seas.

The long boat was filled with 40 crew and passengers, but there was no need to launch it, as the General Grant sunk and the long boat floated off the deck.  The heavy waves lashed at the long boat, and it swamped and capsized.  Three of the long boat’s passengers were able to swim through the pounding surf to the quarter-boats.  Most of the passengers, including the captain, went down with the ship.  A total of fifteen people, consisting of nine crew members and six passengers, including one woman, Mrs. Jewell, clung to life in the quarter-boats, unable to save any of the screaming passengers who were quickly overcome by heavy seas.

The island, Auckland Island, was sheer cliffs on its western side.  They rowed and bailed all day, trying to get to Disappointment Island, about six miles to the west, but then gave up, deciding instead to try to round the north shore of Auckland Island and hope that there would be a beach rather than sheer cliffs. Night overtook them, and they were able to land at a little rock about a mile and a half northeast of Disappointment Island, where they spent the night trying not to get blown out to sea again.  The next day they again tried to make for the main island, but after an hour were blown back to Disappointment Island.  Later that day, the wind calmed and they were able to make it back to the main island and around the north shore to Port Ross, an abandoned whaling ship stop.  They found two huts at Port Ross. 

The survivors had some matches, and managed to get one of them lit, then were shocked that they had not thought to supply it with tinder.  After it went out, they laid dry wood and tinder, and struck match after match to no avail.  Finally they got one to light, got the fire started, and never let the fire go out the whole time they were on the island.

It was late autumn, and the subantarctic winter would be descending upon them, meaning no sealing or whaling boats would be coming past.  The fifteen survivors would very likely be spending months on the island.  Wearisome days followed, no ships passed by.  The men carved primitive little ships, detailing their location, the name of their lost ship, and gave each little boat a piece of tin for a sail, hoping that the reflection of it on the water would attract a ship, then launched them into the trackless seas.  Some carved information on pieces of driftwood and launched them attached to inflated seal bladders.  The currents carried away the messages, but no help came.

Seals proved to be plentiful, and their meat was the castaways’ main food and clothing.  They also ate limpets, bird eggs, and found pigs and rabbits on Enderby Island nearby.

By summer, eight months after their shipwreck, four of the crew decided to attempt to sail to New Zealand in one of the quartermaster boats.  They covered it with seal skins, figuring that they had to head east-northeast, which was incorrect.  New Zealand lies nearly 300 miles to the north.  They had no compass, charts, nor guiding nautical equipment, but set sail on January 22, 1867.  They were never seen again.  Autumn came, then deep winter.  Months later, in early spring, September 1867, 62 year old David McLelland died of illness.  

That left ten remaining survivors, who decided to leave the island where they had lived for eighteen months and move to smaller Enderby Island, where they might be nearer the shipping lanes.   On November 19^th, they sighted a cutter, the Fanny, but she did not see their signal smoke, or she did, ignored it.  Two days later, November 21, 1867, another ship passed by, the brig Amherst, and she did see her signals and came to the rescue.

Three years later, one of the survivors, David Ashworth, mounted an expedition to find the wreck of the General Grant.  He set sail aboard the schooner Daphne on March 26, 1870.  He knew exactly where the islands were, and arrived off the west shore of Auckland island. On a clear, calm day he, the captain of the Daphne, and four of the crew set off in one of the Daphne’s quarter-boats.  Three of the crew remained onboard the Daphne.  The quarter-boat did not return. Although the remaining crew waited and waited, the quarter-boat never returned.  They searched everywhere and never found her, returning to their home port when all hope was lost.

Did the small boat from the Daphne get sucked deep into the cavern and couldn’t get out?  Was David Ashworth, who escaped from the cavern once, doomed to drown in it? 

No one has ever been able to find the wreck of the ship. Rumors say that the ballast, listed as zinc spelter, was actually gold.  Perhaps only David Ashworth knew for sure.