Disappointment Island castaways

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33775, 22 February 1975, Page 11

Disappointment Island castaways

I Contributed by the Canterbury Museum)

In the Colonial Settlement Hail is an exhibit which will make its home in the Hall of Antarctic Discovery in due course.

This deals with the ordeal of the 15 survivors of the four-masted sailing barque, Dundonald, which was wrecked in the subAntarctic against the ctiffs of Disappointment Island on March 6, 1907.

The display centres on the framework of the coracle in which the survivors crossed five miles of open sea to reach the s h i p-wrecked sailors’ depot on the mam Auckland Island in early October of that year. For the previous seven months of the sub-Anta retie winter they had survived as castaways — thrown ashore with no belongings except their clothes, some knives, a single box of wax matches and some rope and canvas which they salvaged before the masts of the submerged ship sank beneath the sea. Recently the writer met the last survivor, 80-year-old Albert Roberts, of Levin, whose longing as a 12-year-old for the tall ships of the Cardiff docks caused him to run away to sea m the Dundonald in 1906. Because his first captain was short of crew he was rated as an able seaman, not a cabin boy. Distress menage The distress messages, punched out with nails on sheets of zinc from tea chests, and launched to sea on plank floats, were made only at the depot while awaiting rescue. The museum’s coracle frame, taken on board the Hinemoa on November 28, 1907. at Disappointment Island was the first three-man craft in which Marino, Ellis and Pul crossed to the main island in mid-July. »n return in disgrace after

failing to cross rugged terrain to the Port Ross depot. Two other coracles, including the one in which Knudsen, Walters, Grattan and Eyre succeeded at last in early October, were both smashed beyond repair. The plank paddles, shown with the museum's coracle, were also made only after arrival at the depot. To cross the fivemile strait to the main island, they improvised paddles from forked branches of the shrub-like hebe (Veronica elliptical oversewn with canvas. Gnarled branches of the same wind-bent shrub served as the coracle frame-work, and great skill was required to cover this with shaped and sewn canvas.

NeecHe improvised Roberts brought a •‘sewing palm” ashore, but no one had a needle. Improvised from the hollow wing-bone of the smaller petrels, these were passed through boles stabbed with stouter awls of larger bone and wood. Blankets, one over and one under, were made from shaped squares of feathered birdskin, sewn edge to edge. Jackets and trousers were shaped from tough sail-cloth canvas and sea! skin, and caps from bird skin. They kept healthy and free of scurvy on a diet of fresh bird and seal meat — the latter rare, and involving nasty encounters in caves and on the beach boulders. Their greatest achievement was to keep dry. They made huts largely devised to shelter dug-out sleeping pits, excavated to three feet, with a 2ft “mattress” of twigs and fern above the saturated peat-soil. Heavily thatched inside and out with tussock

grass, they resembled abandoned haystacks. Without soap and basins for water, they washed with the underside of a freshly removed bird skin and dried off with the feather side. Albert Roberts recalls that their skins remained perfect and body-lice disappeared.—R.S.D.