Madelene Ferguson - The General Grants Gold: Shipwreck and greed in the Southern Ocean

First, thanks to all of those people who helped Ferg but are not mentioned below. Please accept this as an acknowledgement of your assistance.

Australia: Berta Mansourian, La Trobe State Library of Victoria; Jane Rumbold, Monash University, Victoria; Jan and John Zelones, Western Australia; Robin Bailey, Melbourne; the Jewell family.

England: Mark Meyers, Bude Maritime Museum, Cornwall; Bryan Fred Dylan, researcher and diver; Esme Lucas Havens; Paul Havens; G.P. Dyer, Royal Mint.

New Zealand: Marianne Foster, Invercargill Public Library; Stephanie Gibson and Kate Button, Te Papa; Dr Anna Petersen, Hocken Library; Jeremy Cauchi, Trish McCormack and Alison Midwinter, Archives New Zealand, Wellington; Peter Miller and Aimee Brown, Archives New Zealand, Dunedin; Johannah Massey, Southland Museum; Wendy Adlam, Museum of Wellington City and Sea; Peter Attwell, Nigel Murphy Shona Beck and Joan McCracken and the staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library; Mary Rooney of the West Coast Historical Museum; and the staff of the Port Chambers Museum.

Bill Day, Conon Fraser, Malcolm Blair, John Dearling, Rosemary Tarlton, Joe Sheehan, Steve Locker-Lampson, Lynton Diggle, Dave Moran, Stan Kirkpatrick, Ian Church, Ruth and Lance Shaw, Duncan Somerville, Harry Goer, John Jones, John McCrystal, Bob Addison, Laurie Raines, Tim Galloway, Keith Eunson and Kristina Scadden-Gentsch.

A huge thank you to Ian Watt of Exisle Publishing for his faith, guidance and editorial support.

Macau: Tony Havens

Sweden: Emma Wising, Carl-Gunnar Olsson and Hans Orstdius, Swedish National Maritime Museum.

United States: Nathan Lipfert, Maine Maritime Museum, Bath; Christine Michelini and George Schwartz, and Dan Finamore, PeabodyEssex Museum; Tom Heard, Texas a descendant of Aaron Hayman.

Special thanks to Conon Fraser for permission to adapt and reproduce the map of the Auckland Islands (page 47) from his book, Beyond the Roaring Forties, and to Mark Roman for creating the maps on pages 39 and 60.

Finally, thanks to Jack Duggan for permission to use extracts from three of his poems, The Islands of Despair, Then Came the Little Mermaid and The General Grant Gold And Those Who Seek It, first published in Dance of the Stranger (Moana Press, Tauranga, 1988).

Exisle Publishing and Ken Scadden are grateful to Bill Day for his financial assistance towards the production costs of this book.

Part One

For over 150 years, the saga of the General Grant has tantalised and tempted. The tale, as all good tales do, has grown over the years into legend; its characters have become larger than life. But even after the facts are distilled from hundreds of newspaper articles, interviews and discussions, letters and reports yellowed with time, this remains a thrilling story of heroes and cads, heartbreak and loss, hope and despair. The ship, the wild ocean, the desolate subantarctic Auckland Islands, the plight of the castaways and the modern gold seekers all these come together in a compelling narrative.

Chapter 1

Without a doubt, the most important characters in this tale are the Auckland Islands. Desolate, wild, beautiful and forbidding, they are lost in the vastness of the great Southern Ocean, where the winds and waves sweep around the globe uninterrupted by any land mass. The largest, Auckland Island itself, is only 25 miles long and 17 miles wide at its widest point; fiords cut deeply into the eastern coast, leaving only two or three miles to a high saddle. Adams Island to the south, Disappointment Island to the west, Rose and Enderby Islands to the north-east and several islets make up the rest of the group.

The Aucklands are all that is left of two ancient volcanoes: Disappointment Island is the plug of the northern peak, Carnley Harbour the remains of the southern. The flat-topped hills rise to 2000 feet and cirque-crowned valleys run from the tops to the eastern shore. The often fog-bound tops are a wild region of bog, rocky outcrops and spiky, cutting poa grass. To the west, the land plummets 1500 feet in a sheer wall of basaltic black rock to the sea. Their very location, between latitude 5030' to 50 60' south and longitude 166 to 166 20' east, puts the Auckland Islands in what sailors call the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties and the Screaming Sixties. Even on the rare, relatively calm days, the long swells of the Southern Ocean surge in with all the force of the wide Pacific behind them, carving sea caves and overhangs. Only a few tiny sea-stone shelves offer the slightest possibility for a determined, desperate climber to reach the top and relative safety. There is an overwhelming sense of being on the fringes of the planet, utterly alone with sky and sea. In a storm, this area is terrifyingly dangerous: the waves build and build until they reach almost unimaginable heights. The highest wave ever reliably recorded 120 feet high was encountered there.[1]