In 1864, two ships wrecked on opposite ends of Auckland Island. A frozen, abandoned archipelago south of New Zealand. The Grafton's five-man crew built a cabin, held elections, and taught each other languages for eighteen months. Twenty miles away, the Invercauld's twenty-five-man crew collapsed into starvation and cannibalism, and the one sailor who fought to keep them alive was erased from every published account.
TW: Cannibalism, mention of animal hunting
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SOURCES
AUCKLAND ISLANDS
Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the End of the World by Joan Druett. 2019. Accessed via kindle.
Two Groups of Castaways on the Same Island
Shipwrecks of Two Crews with Different Outcomes
Captain and Mate by George Delgarno. Newspaper account in 1865
Loss of the Invercauld also by George Dalgarno. A letter to the ship’s owners from the Captain. Also available in Wikisource.
Robert Holding, later in life (written about in 2013).
Holding’s granddaughter, Madelene Ferguson Allen, wrote Wake of the Invercauld (pub 2005), using her grandfather’s diaries as reference. Unavailable as an ebook, but hardcover via Amazon.
Grafton Wreck and Epigwaitt Hut – NZ historic places
Auckland Island Shipwreck’s Tale of Survival
https://theapartproject.com/aucklands-1
Compilation Accounts from a blog:
TRANSCRIPT
On May 10th, 1864, a ship crashed off the coast of an abandoned island south of New Zealand. But that’s just the beginning of the story
What followed was months and months of in fighting, cannibalism, and a plot twist that I still can’t believe, so you’ll want to stick around until the end.
This is heart starts pounding, I’m Kaelyn Moore, and if you like my shirt, It’s available in our merch store now! Our special limited edition Dark Summer shirts are now live, make sure you go get yours while you still can. And if you like dark history, misadventures, and plot twist true crime stories, you’re in the right place you’re just like me. I upload once a week so hit subscribe
Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding, dark summer edition. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
There’s nothing more summery than an Island. Sitting on the beach, wind in your hair, nothing but ocean for miles on either side of you.
But today, we’re going to flip that image on it’s head. Because I want to tell you about an abandoned island, floating in uncharted waters in the south pacific, and the ship that crashed onto it’s shores. I want to tell you about the horrors that unfolded after the fact, and the plot twist ot this story that no one saw coming.
But before we get into that, The High council on patreon voted that our bonus episode this month is going to be all about Dark Tourism. I have just started the research and I cannot believe what people travel around the world to do. It’s a perfect topic for dark summer and if you want to help pick our bonus episodes, you can join the high council tier on patreon. And if you just want to listen, you can join apple podcasts subscriptions OR patreon with a free trial. It’s a good time over there. We also just announced that our book club which meets on the patreon free tier is meeting on August 7th at 12pm pacific. We’re reading Incidents Around the house by Josh Malerman if you want to come chat.
Alright, I’ll see you over there after this episode, but for now, let’s get into it
Off the southern coast of New Zealand lies a small archipelago — eight islands of varying sizes, the largest of which is simply called Auckland Island. It's about twenty-six miles end to end, with deep inlets, rocky coves, and mountain ridges that disappear into clouds for weeks at a time.
Nobody lives on the Auckland Islands. The sub-Antarctic weather is relentless, — freezing rain, battering wind, temperatures that rarely climb above the low forties even in summer. A few species of seal and sea lion haul out on the southern beaches, but otherwise, the island is as close to uninhabited as land gets.
People have tried. In the 1840s, a small group of Māori from the Chatham Islands settled there briefly. European colonists followed in 1850, building a settlement called Hardwicke. It lasted less than two years. By 1856, the island was fully abandoned. A place that the world had tried and failed to hold onto.
Until 1864, when two ships, four months apart, wrecked on opposite ends of the same island. Neither crew knew the other existed. One lost nearly everyone. The other lost no one.
This is the story of both.
This is Heart Starts Pounding, I'm your host Kaelyn Moore, and today we're going to one of the most remote islands on earth,where two shipwrecks became one of the strangest survival stories ever recorded.
[CONTENT WARNING] Heads up this episode deals with shipwreck, starvation, death by exposure, and a brief mention of cannibalism. If you want full content warnings before listening, they're in the description.
It was just past sundown on May 10th, 1864, and this was about to be the worst day of Robert Holding’s life.
He was standing on the deck of the Invercauld, a giant wooden ship heading from Melbourne, Australia to Peru. the fog was so thick that the sea and the sky had become the same gray nothing. The voyage would be rough, and vomit inducing, but by the end of it Robert would be able to make it back home to England. Holding was twenty-three years old, English, and he'd been aboard the Invercauld for exactly one week. He didn't really know the other sailors. They were mostly Scotsmen, and they'd sailed together long enough to have their own rhythms, their own jokes. Holding was the outsider, just looking for a ride home.
The Invercauld was a substantial ship — over 800 tons, three iron masts, wire rigging instead of rope. She was built to haul freight across rough seas, and her crew of 25 had every reason to trust her. Captain George Dalgarno knew the weather was turning, so he cranked the wheel around to try to get out of the worst of the oncoming storm. But that’s when he heard someone scream from the bow, in a panicked voice.
Land!!
To the side of the boat, materializing out of the fog like a wall, were sheer cliffs, and the boat was heading straight towards them.
Captain Dalgarno had estimated they were near the southwestern tip of Auckland Island, a cluster of sub-Antarctic islands roughly 290 miles south of New Zealand. He ordered First Mate Andrew Smith to turn hard to starboard and clear the island altogether.
But the captain had guessed their position wrong by twenty miles. They weren't south of the island. They were north. And now they were heading straight for the rocks.
Every man rushed to the deck. Robert was thrown across the deck with each wave, barely keeping his feet. The rain started coming down hard sideways and freezing, and the current was dragging them broadside closer and closer to the cliffs. Dalgarno sent sailors into the rigging to unfurl every sail they had. They needed all the pull they could get to claw away from the coast.
But It wasn't enough.
Captain Dalgarno screamed for the anchor to be dropped, a last effort to hold position. It was Too late.
The hull struck the reefs, hard. The keel caved in. The three iron masts collapsed onto the deck, and the weight of them — hundreds of pounds of metal — dragged every inch of rigging and sail into the water. The Invercauld broke apart fast.
The last thing Robert Holding saw on the worst day of his life was the icy water meeting his face.
Or so he thought. Robert’s head bobbed above the water, he wasn’t dead afterall. He dragged himself onto a narrow beach in the dark. A blanket of dense fog was covering everything. For a moment, he thought he was the only one alive. Then shapes began to appear and he could see men pulling themselves from the surf, one by one. Second Mate James Mahoney. The cook. A pair of cabin boys. Captain Dalgarno and Andrew Smith, both barefoot, having kicked off their boots to swim free.
Robert counted the group in his head. Nineteen men had made it to shore. Which meant Six went down with the ship.
Now, The beach they were on was a strip of sand backed by a cliff face that rose straight up and vanished into the clouds. They couldn’t see it, but this was what this whole horrible island was like. Rugged cliffs that dropped straight into the water. It would have been impossible to cross.
The only thing left of their ship was a fragment of the stern, barely visible.g A search of the shore turned up two pounds of waterlogged biscuit and three pounds of salt pork. That was it.
Nineteen men. Five pounds of food. Stuck on an abandoned island ships tried to avoid. Great.
It would have been easy for Robert to have just sat down and given up in that moment. But depression hates a moving target, so in a burst of survival driven adrenaline he got to work. He collected driftwood, and built a shelter against the overhang of the cliff — five feet by eight. All nineteen men crammed into it. Next, they needed to build a fire.
Two matchboxes had survived the wreck. Most of the matches were soaked, and when someone tried to dry them by the fire, the whole box caught at once.alf their supply was gone in a flash. Holding grabbed the remaining box out of the first mate's hands before he could try the same trick. And that’s when he came to the terrifying realization that, not only was he stranded on an island, but most of these guys were idiots.
But, he thought, that would be ok because they at least had their leader, Captain Dalgarno. Sure, he was kind of the reason they were there in the first place due his navigational guestimates, but maybe he could help the men organize until help somehow found them.
But Five days passed. Then six. And Captain Dalgarno gave no orders. No instructions. He didnt even try to come up with a plan. Instead, Robert watched as He sat against the cliff face with the other officers while the crew scattered along the beach, scraping snails off rocks, chewing kelp, drinking from a nearby waterfall. This was going to be Every man for himself.
This made something harden inside of Robert. He was just a sailor — the newest man aboard, with no friends in the crew and no authority to give orders. But the officers weren't leading. Dalgarno hadn't lifted a finger since they washed ashore. If someone didn't do something, they were all going to become seagull food.
He'd spotted a crack in the cliff face — a rough seam in the rock that might work as a path. If they could get to higher ground, maybe they'd find animals. Sheep, even. Every hillside like this back in Australia had sheep on it. He'd spent summers prospecting around Melbourne, and there were always sheep.
The climb was two thousand feet, near-vertical, sheeted in freezing rain. Halfway up, Robert’s hands stopped feeling like his own — just numb shapes gripping rock. But he kept going. He told himself there would be a whole flock at the top, fat and stupid sheep, easy for his ship mates to catch, and they'd all eat tonight.
He pulled himself over the ridge.
And there was just…Grass. Scrub. Icy Wind. Not one living thing as far as he could see. To the south, mountain ranges vanished into clouds. To the east, more scrub, stretching to the horizon. No sheep. No animals at all.
He climbed back down.
The scene on the beach was worse than he'd left it. Men slumped against the cliff, staring at nothing. Others had wandered off. Captain Dalgarno sat where Robert had last seen him, in the same position, like he hadn't moved.
Robert couldn't order these men to do anything. He knew that. But he also knew they couldn’t just wallow on the beach. He needed to convince everyone to start moving up over the cliff's edge to the other side of the island. Maybe there would be more resources there. Maybe seals or something to eat. So he went to work the only way he could — moving man to man, talking quietly, persuading them to stand up, to try the cliff path. It was slow. Some men could barely walk by that point. They had been at sea far longer than Robert had and they were already malnourished. So Robert helped them, offering a hand where he could to help guide them up the cliff.
But it wasn’t easy. Halfway, a man lost his footing and fell. The others couldn't stop. They kept climbing, leaving him behind. When they reached the top, most collapsed where they stood.
For two weeks, the survivors tried to head east across the rugged terrain to search for resources. Robert kept turning around to see the group smaller than the day before. He couldn't have said when the cook stopped being among them. No one announced it. He just looked around one evening, counted faces, and he wasn’t there.
But on this walk, Robert noticed something that made his stomach turn. Captain Dalgarno, First Mate Smith, and Second Mate Mahoney were ordering the the youngest men in the crew to fetch water from a nearby stream. The officers drank from the boys' boots while the young men laid down and caught their breath, totally winded from the short journey.
Once, a group caught a small pig…. the only wild animal they'd seen since the seabirds on the beach. Split between that many hungry men, it was gone in minutes.
The days blurred into each other. Wake before light. Rummage around for food with the energy you had. Collapse in the scrub. Shiver through the night pressed against other men for warmth. Wake up. Do it again. The only way Robert could track the passing time was by the faces that stopped appearing at the fire each night.
Robert joined a splinter group led by the bosun (bow-sun). He was restless and honestly, sick of the leaders. It was Six men who wanted to head back toward the wreck to check if anything else had washed ashore.
Nothing had. The beach was as empty as they'd left it, except for the carcass of a pig that had been on the ship, already starting to spoil. In desperationThey cooked it anyway. Rancid meat was better than another night with nothing.
That night, huddled around the fire in the lean-to, the bosun said what many of the men had already been thinking. It had been over twenty days. There was No food left and no hope of finding more. It was time. One of them had to die so the others could eat. They should draw lots.
Robert panicked. He had been trying to prevent this exact thing from happening. He wanted to keep looking for food and plus, all of the other guys knew each other way better, and Robert was the least malnourished. He objected — immediately, passionately. And then he looked at the other men's faces.
They were nodding.
Every man in that circle was agreeing with the bosun. Cannibalism was preferable to starvation. They’d decide in the morning.
The six men lay down to sleep. But not Robert. He lay in the dark, listening to the others breathe, convinced that the moment he closed his eyes someone would crack his skull with a rock and feast. He stayed awake the entire night.
At the first gray light of dawn, he got to his feet without a sound. Walked out of the lean-to. Went straight for the cliff and climbed.
He never saw any of them again.
Robert found the main group a day or so later, higher up on the island, still pushing east through thick scrub. Minus the dead and the missing, there were nine of them now. Only a few could still walk properly. The most able-bodied were Captain Dalgarno, First mate Smith, Second mate Mahoney, one of the cabin boys, the ship's carpenter, and a seaman named Fritz
As they moved further east, something changed. The bush looked neater. More orderly. Almost as if someone had once tried to cultivate it.
Then, on June 5th, First Mate Andrew Smith spotted something over the next ridge.
A chimney.
The men ran. After a month of starving, of watching each other die, the sight of a chimney meant people, meant food, meant rescue.They ran into the skeleton of the small house that the chimney belonged to, only to find it long abandoned. The survivors of the Invercauld didn’t know it at the time, but they had stumbled into the ruins of Hardwicke — a European settlement that had been attempted on Auckland Island a decade earlier and had failed in under two years.
The weather had been too harsh for farming. Even potatoes grew hard and small in the frozen soil. A small epidemic of scurvy, several murders, and a string of corrupt administrators had finished the rest.
Robert knew what this meant. People had tried to live here, but the island had said no.
The nine survivors set up amongstthe ruins with five crammed in a lean-to Robert found, and four in what was left of the house. It was better than the exposed beach.
Captain Dalgarno and the others refused to leave the house, so Robert scouted alone. Venturing toward a nearby cove turned up more snails and the occasional seal, but it wasn’t nearly enough to support the men.
When he returned from one of these trips, he found that both cabin boys and the ship's steward had died.
25 had become Nine, and now nine had become six.
But the image of The cabin boys frail dead bodies really horrified Robert, he couldn't get past it. They had been so honorable on this journey. They spent so much time fetching water and building material for the captain and his officers, wearing themselves to the bone.
After the latest deaths, Robert went with First Mate Andrew Smith and two of the remaining sailors — Fritz and a man named Harvey — to search again for food along the coast. One night, as they camped, Fritz came to Holding's tent and asked if he needed water. Robert said no and sent him back to the tent he shared with Harvey.
As Fritz entered, Harvey shoved him. Fritz went face-first into the ground.
He didn't get up.
The next morning, Fritz's body was frozen stiff. A few days later, Robert sent Harvey back to fetch the captain's party. After Harvey left, Robert and Smith found what he'd left behind.
Harvey had been eating Fritz.
Harvey never came back. When Robert eventually returned to Hardwicke to find him, all he found was Dalgarno and Mahoney, nursing a fire in the hearth. Harvey was dead, they told him. The carpenter had collapsed while foraging. The pieces of Fritz he had consumed had not been enough to sustain him.
And now, there were just four. Robert. Captain Dalgarno and his two little cronies, Smith and Mahoney.
Robert was the only one who wasn't an officer,and this caused problems
When Mahoney ordered Robert to fetch him some roots, Robert refused. He was done taking orders from someone who'd let every man under his command die without showing a single sign of leadership. Who sat on his butt while men died trying to bring him water.
Mahoney pulled a knife on him, but he was so weak he wouldn’t have been able to drive it into Robert, who turned his back and walked away.
A few days later, Captain Dalgarno and Mahoney made the trip back to Hardewick, but only Dalgarno came back. Mahoney was gone. The captain said the second mate was still recovering. He had wrapped his foot up and would follow when he was healed and could walk again
The three remaining men settled into a bitter, uneasy truce. They needed each other to survive, but Robert had no interest in pretending the officers still had authority over him. They argued constantly. Months passed, Spring finally came, and the island offered up just enough to keep them alive — more seals on the beaches, more birds in the scrub. But the cold never really let go. It just retreated enough to remind them that winter was coming back.
Robert had been on the island longer now than he'd previously known any of these men. Longer than his week aboard the Invercauld. Longer than any stretch of work he'd done in Melbourne. He suggested they move camp to a better vantage to spot passing ships. It took him until February to convince the other two.
By the time they moved, it had been ten months. Can you imagine being on an island like this with just the worst bosses you’ve ever had.
On May 22nd, 1865 — a year and twelve days after the wreck — Captain Dalgarno spotted sails on the horizon.
The ship was the Julian, a Portuguese vessel that had pulled into a nearby bay to repair a leak. She was far from ideal — she'd come from China carrying laborers to South America, and a plague aboard had killed a number of them. But the three survivors of the Invercauld would rather take their chances on a plague ship than spend another night on Auckland Island.
Before the Julian's boats reached shore, the Captain pulled Robert aside. Stay quiet, the captain told him. Let me do the talking.
Robert was too overwhelmed to argue. And by the time he understood what was happening, it was too late. Dalgarno and Smith — the officers — were given new clothes, comfortable quarters, the treatment their rank entitled them to. Robert, who had done more to keep them alive than either of them, was sent below decks with the crew. But after everything, he was just happy to be alive.
Three men walked off that island. Out of twenty-five.
Dalgarno wrote his account of the shipwreck first, published in August of 1865. Smith followed a year later. Neither man mentioned Robert Holding in their accounts.
And dear listener, maybe you thought this is where the story would end. What a sad ending, right? That sucks for Robert.
But I’m about to twist the knife in even deeper. Because Robert Holding was lost to history, but he wouldn’t have been if everyone had just listened to him.
Robert wanted to head to the other end of the island, it was like something was pulling him in that direction and he was trying to get everyone to follow him.
It wouldn’t be revealed until years later, but on the other end of Auckland island, at the exact same time, there was another shipwreck. Another group of stranded mne. Only, their story ended VERY differently.
Her name was the Grafton. She was a 56-ton schooner. Barely a tenth the size of the Invercauld.
Five men made it ashore.
All five of them lived.
It was the night of January 2nd, 1864. 5 months before the Invercauld sank. The Grafton was a schooner so small you could fit her inside the Invercauld's cargo hold and shewas sheltering from a storm in Carnley Harbour, a bay off the southern coast of Auckland Island.
The voyage had already been a failure. The ship was chartered by a French prospector named François Raynal and her captain, Thomas Musgrave, with the goal of scouting the sub-Antarctic islands for tin. They'd sailed for two months and found nothing. Not to mention, Raynal had been sick since almost the day they left Sydney — a relapse of an illness from his years in the Australian gold fields. They'd turned to hunting seals to salvage the trip financially, which is how they ended up sheltering in the bay.
Late that night, one of the two anchor chains snapped. The remaining chain held, but it didn't matter. The storm dragged the Grafton toward the rocky shore.
At midnight, Captain Musgrave felt the hull strike rock and then the awful grinding shake as the keel cracked open and the sea poured in.
But here's the thing: for how dire it seemed at first the Grafton didn't sink.
The ship was caught on the rocks, but the water wasn’t that deep. It wasn’t going to sail again, but they had time to escape.
All five men made it to shore. Musgrave and Raynal, plus two sailors — the 20-year old Englishman George Harris, a 28-year-old Norwegian Alick Maclaren and a Portuguese cook named Henry Forgés, who had charmed Musgrave with fantastical stories of his colorful past.
Even Raynal, weak as he was, made it to the beach. While the others went to work on the ship, he started a fire under a makeshift tent of sails and kept it burning through the night.
The Norwegian Maclaren proved the most immediately useful. He dove into the freezing water with a line of rope, swam it to shore, and rigged a pulley system between the ship and the beach. With that system, the crew worked fast — recovering chests belonging to Musgrave and Raynal, cooking utensils, over 150 pounds of biscuit, flour, tea and coffee. about 30 times more than what was recovered by the much larger crew. They also salvaged Navigation instruments and books, including a Bible. And Raynal's hunting rifle, which he'd brought on a whim.
They had something else the crew of the Invercauld never did: the wreck itself. Because the Grafton hadn't sunk, she was a warehouse of timber, rope, canvas, sailcloth, and scrap metal. Over the next few days, the crew stripped the ship down to her bones.
But that first night, huddled under damp sails around Raynal's fire, the five of them understood their situation clearly. They'd told no one they were coming to the Auckland Islands. Musgrave and Raynal had made their business partners promise to send a rescue ship if they didn't return, but the partners didn't know where to look. And unlike the Invercauld, which had wrecked on an exposed northern coastline, the Grafton was tucked inside a bay surrounded by land. No passing ship would see them.
They knew that this was where they would be for the foreseeable future, and they acted accordingly
The first sign that they could make it came from the wildlife. On the northern coast, where the Invercauld's crew would later starve, there was almost nothing to hunt. But the southern coast was a different ecosystem entirely. Sea lions, elephant seals, and fur seals congregated in the bays and laid out on the rocks in numbers. Raynal's rifle became the single most important object on the island.
And from the jump Every man worked. Musgrave led hunting parties. Raynal threw himself into designing their shelter, despite the fact that he had trouble standing. He'd spent years in the Australian gold fields, and he knew how to build with almost nothing. He figured out that if you superheat seashells, the calcium oxide they produce can be mixed with sand to make a crude cement. So that's what they did — burned shells, mixed mortar, and used it to build a proper stone hearth. Then they assembled timber from the Grafton's remains and the surrounding forest to build a cabin around it.
Within thirty-one days of the shipwreck, they had a home.
The cabin measured twenty-four by sixteen feet, split down the middle — the northern half for the expedition's owners, the southern half for the three sailors. They built shelves for their tools and the handful of books they'd salvaged. They had a stone chimney that actually drew properly. They had a door that shut.
They called the cabin Epigwaitt. Musgrave claimed it was a Native American word meaning "near the Great Waters."
And now, With the immediate crisis of survival handled, the three sailors pushed back against the rank that they had all had on the ship.
They decided they would democratically elect the leader of their group.
Together, all five men drew up a code of conduct and wrote it on a blank page of Musgrave's Bible. Raynal nominated Musgrave — not as ship's captain, that title had sunk with the Grafton — but as leader of their settlement.
He was elected unanimously.
Now: boredom. After dark, the five men had nothing to do but eat seal meat, stare at the fire, and contemplate the possibility that no one was ever coming. Someone — Musgrave and Raynal both claimed credit later — suggested they start teaching each other. Musgrave taught the sailors to read and write. Raynal taught French and mathematics. Maclaren taught Norwegian. Forgés taught Portuguese. They sat around the hearth in the evenings, five men from five countries, conjugating verbs in each other's languages. I eat seal. You eat seal. He/she/they eat seal.
Raynal carved chess pieces from driftwood. He fashioned a full deck of playing cards by pasting pages from an old logbook together with flour paste.
Forgés at one point caught a pair of parrots that became pets for the crew. In his diary, Musgrave wrote about the birds with an affection he didn't always extend to his human companions. Small comforts. Small routines. That was how they survived.
They were doing all of this while on the other side of the island, a group of men were dwindling in number and resorting to cannibalism.
By the time the first anniversary of the wreck arrived — January 1865 — they had to face what they'd been avoiding. Rescue wasn't coming. If they wanted to leave this island, they'd have to do it themselves. And so, they started to form a plan
They had timber, sailcloth, scrap metal, and Raynal — who, by this point, had already built a stone hearth, a cement kiln, and a functional cabin. Building a boat wasn't a question of skill. It was a question of tools.
Raynal built a forge. Using the ship's cooking bellows, he heated scrap iron from the Grafton until it glowed, and hammered out nails. Then he tried to make a boring tool, to drill the holes to fasten a hull together. He tried and failed. Tried different techniques. Failed again. Weeks of work at the forge, and he could not manufacture the boring tool. Without one, they couldn't build a hull from scratch.
Meanwhile, the seals were growing scarcer. Their second winter on the island would be leaner than the first. Starvation — which had never been a serious threat for the Grafton crew — was now creeping into their minds.
So They pivoted. Rather than build a new vessel, they'd modify the twelve-foot dinghy that had been aboard the Grafton. They’d lengthen it, add a mast and a small deck, and make it seaworthy enough for an open-ocean crossing to New Zealand. About 465 km (289 miles) north. They named the boat ‘the Rescue’.
The work took months. And when it was done, they faced the hardest decision of the entire ordeal: the dinghy could hold three men. There were five.
Two would stay behind.
Musgrave and Raynal had to go — they were the ones who could negotiate with a shipping company to fund a return trip. Of the three sailors, they chose Maclaren: strong, experienced, nearly silent, the best seaman among them. George Harris and Henry Forgés would stay at Epigwaitt and wait.
On July 19th, 1865, eighteen months after they’d wrecked, they lowered the modified dinghy into Carnley Harbour and the chosenthree climbed aboard and pointed it toward the open Southern Ocean, hoping for the best
The voyage was brutal. Two hundred and fifty miles of open ocean. The Southern Ocean is one of the roughest stretches of water on earth; waves build across thousands of miles of unbroken water between Antarctica and New Zealand, and in winter, the swells can run forty feet high. The Rescue was just twelve feet long.
It took them five days to reach Stewart Island, the southernmost inhabited land in New Zealand. From there, Musgrave and Raynal had to spend weeks persuading anyone that a return trip to the Auckland Islands was worth funding.
Public donations from crowdsourcing eventually raised enough money to charter a schooner called the Flying Scud, under Captain Cross. Musgrave went aboard as navigator. He was going back for his men.
Nearly one month later, on August 24th, 1865 the Flying Scud sailed into Carnley Harbour.
Harris and Forgés were alive. Barely. Their seal meat had run out weeks earlier and they'd been surviving on rats caught inside the cabin. They'd also stopped speaking to each other — weeks of silence, the camaraderie that had held the group together finally buckling under the weight of two men alone with nothing but waiting.
But when the ship appeared in the harbor, the silence ended.
All five men of the Grafton were going home.
Musgrave gathered the crew and their belongings, unable to believe the miracle that had occurred. But before they left, he saw a thing column of smoke rising somewhere further up the island. Concerned there might be other shipwrecked survivors, he told the group they needed to search, and so they headed miles into the forest looking for any sign of life.
What they found were the ruins of a settlement. Old buildings, collapsing. A place that had clearly been abandoned years ago.
Inside one of the buildings, Musgrave found a body.
A man, or what was left of him. He had clearly died long ago. But Musgraves could see that One foot was wrapped in woolen rags. The man was lying near a roofing slate — the kind used in construction — and scratched into the surface of that slate, in handwriting that was almost completely illegible, was a single word Musgrave could make out.
A name. James.
Musgrave had no idea who the man was. He didn't know how he'd gotten there or how he'd died. He didn't know that the settlement he was standing in was Hardwicke — the same ruins that the Invercauld's crew had stumbled into eight months earlier. He didn't know about the Invercauld at all.
He recorded the discovery in his journal: a body, a slate with scratched writing, a name he couldn't connect to anything.
And they sailed for New Zealand.
The man on the floor was James Mahoney. Second Mate of the Invercauld. The man Captain Dalgarno had left behind at Hardwicke with a bad foot.
But what’s even more wild is Musgrave and Raynal had NO idea about any of this. No one told them about the Invercauld.
It wasn't until November 8th, 1865 — months after the rescue — that Musgrave encountered Raynal in Melbourne. he showed him something he'd found in the newspaper the previous evening: a story entitled "Narrative of the Wreck of the Invercauld on the Auckland Islands, by Captain Dalgarno."
Two shipwrecks. Same island. Same year. Twenty miles apart. And the only place the two stories ever touched was a building of a previously abandoned community and the body that had been left behind.
And of course, because they had read Captain Dalgarn’s account, neither knew about Robert.
Two ships on the same island at the same time, and two totally different outcomes
Sure, the Grafton got lucky, they had more resources at the start and more food available than the Invercaulds, but they had something else that the Invercauld didn’t have
Friendship
Ok, I’m kind of kidding, but I’m also kind of not kidding! The men kept morale high and looked out for each other, they didn’t cling to their stupid ranks from before, which is partly what did the Invercauld in. So it was friendship but also 30 times the amount of resources
Robert was the newest, lowest-ranking man aboard, an outsider in a Scottish crew, and the officers refused to follow his lead even as their own inaction was killing everyone around them. and Dalgarno never recovered from losing his ship. He clung to his rank as if it were a life raft, and it turned out to be an anchor instead. I’m going to keep the ship metaphors going
The Grafton crew worked together to built a cabin, a forge, a government, a school, and a boat. At the end of a year on the island the only thing the Invercauld crew built a lean-to.
This story is smeitmes called the "tale of two shipwrecks" and it gets put in powerpoints by management consultants and business schools as a leadership case study, which is maybe a bit too simplistic of a way to lok at it, but I think there is a good lesson to be learned here. Maybe it’s the friends we make along the way. Or maybe its having access to a gun and more seals…
But what do you guys think? How would you have faired on an expedition like this, you can comment wherever you listen.