Shipwrecked!: Deadly Adventures and Disasters at Sea

Preface

Since human beings first lashed together the trunks and branches of trees, tested their buoyancy on a body of water, set a tentative foot on the result and pushed off, there have been great rewards. And great dangers. The only way to ensure a safe voyage was to remain in port.

But that doesn’t speak to the imagination. There were whole worlds out there, after all—and they screamed for exploration. There were food sources, too. And new lands to conquer. There was money to be made. What stood between this shore and the next was a limitless swelling wilderness of water. We can imagine early humans cupping their hands to their eyes and staring out over that vast swell, scared of what lived within but pulled nevertheless by what lay beyond.

As the centuries passed, humans became especially adept at creating efficient vessels. From the tiniest kayak carrying the solitary hunter to do battle with a whale, to the floating cities that carry goods all over the world—the earth’s major waterways are pocked with boats. But all the carriers on the planet congregated in one ocean would barely make a dent in its vastness. Indeed, if the ship fails, there’s hardly a more helpless feeling. But when the vessel begins to sink, often that is only the beginning of the story.

Through the last half of the second millennium, the printed word allowed dissemination of incredible tales of shipwreck and their aftermath. Not surprisingly, there was a great hunger for such stories. They were so dramatic as to be almost unbelievable. Today’s modes of concentrated conveyance also sometimes give us tragedy, of course. And their calamity is no less severe. But today’s air crashes, for example, are more efficient, leaving little chance for escape. When the hold of yesterday’s ship began to crack and the saltwater made its way inside, the responses were as varied as the wide spectrum of human emotions. There were bravery and heroism, cowardice and incivility.

But universally, there was horror. The Calcutta lawyer and memoirist William Hickey wrote in 1810, Death by shipwreck is the most terrible of deaths . . . In a storm at sea, in a miserable cabin on a filthy wet bed where it is as impossible to think as to breathe freely, the fatigue, the motion, the want of rest and food, give a kind of hysteric sensibility to the frame, which makes it alive to the slightest danger. If we look round at the miserable group that surround us, no eye beams comfort, no tongue speaks consolation, and when we throw our imagination beyond—to the death-like darkness, the howling blast, the raging and merciless element—surely, surely it is the most terrible of deaths!

This book presents fifteen such tales of the raging and merciless element, spanning the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, and covering almost every corner of the world.

A note about the organization of this book: Shipwrecked was a difficult book to write. That is because as I was researching one wreck, there would inevitably be a reference to another, even more interesting wreck story. This happened so many times that I had to check myself from writing a 10,000-page work covering all the drama of the sea. There are simply too many incredible stories.

Eventually, I settled on the fifteen you’ll see here. I grouped them by theme, providing an organizing principle that allowed me some control over the material lest I lose myself once again to all the astonishing drama. Working within a particular frame proved to be something of a check against that impulse. In the end, I settled on five themes, placing three wrecks within each. The five themes are: The Custom of the Sea (Cannibalism); Conflicting Accounts; Incompetence, Disorder, and Evil; On Foreign Shores; and Extraordinary Survival.

No doubt the reader will notice quite a bit of overlap among these categories. For example, the wreck of the Stirling Castle off the coast of Australia in 1836 could have logically gone into the On Foreign Shores chapter; there are also hints of cannibalism in that amazing story. However, it is the variation in the accounts of the wreck that makes it resonate even today. Further, the other two wrecks in the Conflicting Accounts chapter (the Nottingham Galley and the Francis Mary) have tales of cannibalism; however, I reserved the three wrecks in the Cannibalism chapter for those stories that involved the Custom of the Sea, or the drawing of lots to see who would be killed and then eaten by desperate shipmates. As you will see, it’s an important distinction—one that made all the difference to friends and relatives of the shipwreck survivors who were reduced to eating their shipmates to survive. These three tales include the wrecks of the Peggy, the Essex (inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick), and the Mignonette.

The wrecks in the On Foreign Shores chapter include those incredible tales of wide-eyed and often grossly misinformed Europeans finding themselves in lands where images of mythical monsters, animals—and savage people—dominated. There were places often represented on maps by fabulous beasts, and human beings only a rung or two above. For an uninformed European, the prospects were terrifying. And the results were astonishing. Here we have three tales of cultural misunderstanding and hostility, slavery, and even assimilation: these are the wrecks of the Grosvenor in southern Africa, the Commerce at the western Sahara, and the Degrave on the exotic island of Madagascar.

In addition to all the stories of heroism and bravery in the aftermath of a shipwreck, there are also tales of terrible cowardice and mismanagement where dozens or even hundreds of lives ended unnecessarily. Often, the appalling and cowardly decisions led to the wreck themselves, and behavior afterward was even more abysmal. Certainly this is the case for the French frigate Medusa, which inspired one of the world’s great maritime paintings. Also here are the stories of the Batavia, still considered Australia’s largest mass murder, and the Karluk, stuck deep in the Arctic.

Last, there are some success stories. Even though the ship went down, the unfortunate mariners managed to live through it and the extraordinary ordeal that followed. Here we see maroons (Pedro de Serrano, Alexander Selkirk, and Philip Ashton) scratching out a living on desert isles, dozens of men trudging for years through the terrorizing climate of the Antarctic (the Endurance, led by the indomitable Ernest Shackleton), and the story of four Russian men who gave us one of the most amazing—if little-known—survival stories in history.

—Evan Balkan

THE CUSTOM OF THE SEA: CANNIBALISM

Perhaps no survival accounts excite the Western imagination more than those that involve cannibalism. With a shuddering of revulsion, we have been taught to be repelled by the very thought of it. It’s certainly no stretch to say that much of this disgust stems from the deep-seated understanding that faced with the choice of consuming human flesh—of a recent fellow traveler, at that—or die, most of us would choose cannibalism. In other words, appall us though it may, we realize we are a mere survival scenario away from partaking in the great taboo ourselves.

In 1201, an Egyptian doctor, Abd al-Latif, described widespread cannibalism during a famine: The poor . . . reached the stage of eating little children. The commandant of the city guard ordered that those who committed this crime should be burned alive . . . The corpse was always found to have been devoured by the following morning. People ate it the more willingly, for the flesh, being fully roasted, did not need to be cooked. Once the practice began, the ordinary disgust with which it was once regarded disappeared. Al-Latif continued, The horror people had felt at first entirely vanished; one spoke of it, and heard it spoken of, as a matter of everyday indifference.

Cases of survival cannibalism—even in societies where the practice is one of the greatest taboos—aren’t all that uncommon. The famous stories attending the Uruguayan rugby team in the Andes in 1972 (immortalized in the book and movie Alive!) and the Donner party in 1846–47 in the American West attest to this. Those reduced to eating their acquaintances to survive even deserved special sympathy, while the act itself was only whispered about. In the cases of survival cannibalism at sea, those hushed undertones often graduated to open discussion. The men who had undertaken the act were driven to it by extreme desperation. There was one catch, however; there needed to be a lottery. If each man stood the same chance of drawing the short stick, those who came back home weren’t murderers.

At least two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Cicero wrote of two men in a boat for whom the circumstance of one eating the other arises. In a meditation on morality, Cicero concludes that One will give place to the other, as if the point were decided by lot. By the nineteenth century, tales of drawing lots were commonplace, and weren’t met with much indignation. That said, acceptance of the practice surely didn’t make it very easy for those who were forced to do it, as we shall see in this chapter.

Peggy (1765–66)

The brig Peggy sailed from New York in 1765 and reached the island of Faial in the Azores, where it unloaded its cargo and then filled up with wine and brandy for its return trip to North America. The crew left Faial on October 24. They enjoyed five days of good sail before getting battered by a strong storm. It would prove merely a harbinger. For the next month, the Peggy endured fierce gales, one coming on top of the previous in rapid and unrelenting succession. By the end of the month, the Peggy was still afloat, but she had all of her sails torn off but one, and several leaks were discovered in the hold. By the beginning of December, the weather had improved, but the Peggy had been blown far off course, and the damaged state of the ship meant there was little means for steering her aright. The captain, David Harrison, described the ship’s wretched condition:

The conflict which our vessel had so long maintained against waves and winds had by this time occasioned her to leak excessively, and our provisions were so much exhausted that we found it absolutely necessary to come to an immediate allowance of two pounds of bread a week for each person, besides a quart of water and a pint of wine a day. The alternative was really deplorable, between the shortness of our provisions and the wreck of our ship. If we contrived to keep the latter from sinking we were in danger of perishing with hunger, and if we contrived to spin out the former with a rigid perseverance of economy for any time, there was but little probability of being able to preserve our ship. Thus on either hand little less than a miracle could save us from inevitable destruction. If we had an accidental gleam of comfort on one hand, the fate with which the other so visibly teemed gave an instant check to our satisfaction and obscured every rising ray of hope with an instant cloud of horror and despair.

Despite their hopeless situation on the open sea, they weren’t alone out there. Other ships skittered along the far horizon, but the relentlessness of the weather made communicating the Peggy’s dire situation impossible. Towering waves kept the Peggy from reaching the other ships, and each successive wave revealed that would-be rescue ships were getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared altogether.

Now five weeks at sea, their food and water depleted, the crew fell into a more desperate state, beginning the slow and excruciating process of withering away from starvation. Despite this, they had to continue to work feverishly at the pumps just to keep the Peggy sailing, so badly damaged was she that neglect would have meant her sinking. All that was left the men now was the store of wine and brandy they had picked up in the Azores. The crew, against Captain Harrison’s wishes, broke into the alcohol and consumed it in vast quantities. Their various states of drunkenness held one thing in common: it made them defiant, mean, and unwilling to listen to the intended calming entreaties of their beleaguered captain. It was only the sighting of another ship, on Christmas morning, that allowed the captain to finally breathe easy. Seeing the sail suddenly transported [the crew] with the most extravagant sensations of joy.

There are many accounts of such meetings on the high seas that relate tears from the eyes of the captain seeing fellow seamen afflicted like those of the Peggy. But the captain of the ship now aside the Peggy had an opposite and perhaps far more common reaction. Crew and captain, contending with limited stores of their own, often faced the prospect of having to take on and feed an entirely new crew as a potential death sentence. What if the would-be rescue ship should fall under the same distress that befell the Peggy? What then, with an inflated crew and limited space? Harrison, though clearly a man who would have helped had the roles been reversed, nevertheless understood the mean rules of the open sea. He swore to the opposing captain that if he could take on his crew, the men of the Peggy would not eat any of the food on board. They merely wanted safe passage home. The captain steadfastly refused, but he did relent on one point: he would give the crew of the Peggy some bread. He merely had to finish his noon nautical observation first; then he would send the biscuit over.

Harrison, satisfied but extremely exhausted, went belowdecks to rest. He was soon awakened by his excited crew telling him that the other ship was sailing away. The other captain had merely used the pretext of an observation to buy time so he could make his escape. Harrison literally crawled across the deck, watching first the retreating sail of the quick ship and then turning his attention to his deflated crew: As long as my poor fellows could retain the least trace of him they hung about the shrouds or ran in a state of absolute frenzy from one part of the ship to the other. They pierced the air with their cries, increasing their lamentations as he lessened upon their view and straining their very eyeballs to preserve him in sight, through a despairing hope that some dawning impulse of pity would yet induce him to commiserate our situation and lead him to stretch out the blessed hand of relief.

Shipwreck in a Storm. (1629) Willem van Diest.

Courtesy of The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland

It wasn’t to be; the men watched until the ship disappeared, never to return. If things were desperate before, here they took an even harder turn. According to Archibald Duncan, in his The Mariner’s Chronicle (G. W. Gorton, 1834), No language is adequate to describe the despair and consternation which then overwhelmed the crew. Enraged, and destitute of hope, they fell upon whatever they had spared till then. Harrison, however, didn’t change his outlook. Desperate, yes. But bitter and contemptuous, as his crew had become—never. In fact, in his subsequent account of the ordeal, The Melancholy Narrative of the Distressful Voyage and Miraculous Deliverance of Captain David Harrison (London, 1766), Harrison declines even to name the captain or his ship, writing that he would not offer him up to universal detestation or infamy . . . to the reader. Instead, he would keep his faith in God’s workings upon that man’s conscience. But while Harrison maintained his capacity for humanitarianism, his crew had utterly given up. It was time for more bold and decisive action. As far as they were concerned, the good captain would just as soon let them drift forever until each died a slow and agonizing death.

Amazingly, the crew had gone all that time without killing three sources of meat already on board (sources that wouldn’t excite revulsion): two pigeons and a cat. But as Duncan noted, they now fell upon what they had previously spared. The birds went first, then the cat soon after. Still angry with their captain, but showing begrudging respect for his position, the crew included Harrison in its division of the beast by tossing him the cat’s head. Initially shuddering in disgust at the prospect of consuming the cat head, he soon tried it and thereafter could hardly contain himself: The piercing sharpness of necessity had entirely conquered my aversion to such food, and the rage of an incredible hunger rendered that an exquisite regale which on any other occasion I must have loathed with the most insuperable disgust. He picked the skull clean, devouring the eyes, leathery tongue and nose, and spongy brain matter, sucking out the minuscule fluid still lingering in the tip of the spinal cord.

The animals provided a reprieve, but it obviously didn’t satisfy for long. It had been some eighteen days by this point since they had eaten the last of their store of food. For the next few days, the crew continued to drink and eat whatever was within reach: candles, oil, leather, buttons, until there was literally nothing left. This was December 28. By some miracle, they were all still alive two weeks later; to quote Archibald Duncan, It is impossible to tell in what manner they subsisted. What is known is that on January 13, the men entered Harrison’s cabin, where he lay suffering from a severe case of gout, and trying to stave off the embrace of death by thinking of his family. They had a shocking proposal. Duncan’s Chronicle recounts the ordeal of the Peggy by beginning this way: Famine frequently leads men to the commission of the most horrible excesses: insensible on such occasions to the appeals of nature and reason, he assumes the character of a beast of prey; he is dead to every representation and coolly meditates the death of his fellow-creature. Sure enough. The men’s proposal was simple: they intended (they weren’t asking, but rather informing the captain) to draw lots to see who would die so that the rest may feast off him and survive.

Captain Harrison attempted to hold them off. He first appealed to their sense of fraternity, telling the men that they were to regard one another as brothers. If they were to carry through with the terrible deed, they would sink to the level of beasts and forever after resign themselves to the reputation that such a state entailed. His argument didn’t work. The men persisted, wild and barely contained in their anger and hunger.

Harrison reminded them that they were desperate and not given toward rational thought because of the deplorable circumstances. Perhaps, but those same deplorable circumstances, they reminded him, meant that the normal hierarchy had been abolished and they would go on without him. For all they cared, he could stay cooped in his cabin and continue his fight with the gout. True, the captain was by this point incapacitated. However, unbeknownst to the men of the crew, he kept a pistol handy in case they tried to drag him out and make him their first victim. The crew, still somewhat torn between a faint sense of duty to their captain (after all, it wasn’t his fault they were in this predicament) and fuming at his overt attempts to shame them, returned to his cabin, telling him that they had drawn lots and he would be invited to eat the victim.

The loser, described by Harrison as that poor Ethiopian, was hardly surprising. The Ethiopian was actually a black slave, part of the ship’s cargo. Harrison, still belowdecks, didn’t witness the drawing of lots, and the time between the crew’s stated intention and their return with the slave was just too speedy to believe that the lots weren’t fixed—or that they hadn’t really been drawn at all. Even writing in 1834, some thirty years before the abolition of slavery, Archibald Duncan noted, It is more than probable that the lot had been consulted only for the sake of form and that the wretched black was proscribed the moment the sailors first formed the resolution.

The black man burst into Harrison’s bunk and pleaded with the captain to save his life. He was dragged off, fighting and pleading all the while. Harrison crawled out only to watch the man momentarily escape to the other side of the deck before he was wrestled down and shot in the head. The fire had been started even before the man was killed.

A crew member, James Campbell, so ravenous and out of his head, immediately began to carve up the body. He cut open the chest and torso and, spotting the liver, reached in and devoured it raw. The rest of the men were more temperate, waiting for the body to be cooked and then savoring their share throughout most of the evening.

By morning, the men, somewhat becalmed by their full bellies, went back to the captain and asked what his orders were for the remaining pieces of flesh. Harrison’s only response was to raise his pistol and threaten the asker with a death like that of the slave. The crew members decided to cut the rest of the body into pieces to be parceled out in time. The men got at their grim task, all the while muttering about the self-important captain whose example served to try and shame them when in fact they had only done what they did to save themselves. The truth was, Harrison couldn’t have eaten anyway. The odor of the burning man, coupled with his illness and perpetual fear that he would be the next victim, had the effect of completely overwhelming any ravages of hunger. As the men cut and cooked, their captain writhed in agony below, awaiting the next confrontation, sure that if he dared give into the drop of his heavy eyelids, he would either slip into death or be awakened by the bloodthirsty crew. In his semiconscious state, Harrison distinctly heard the men agreeing that the captain should be the next victim; his obstinacy and haughtiness had become a source of great irritation—better him dead than us, they proclaimed. Even with his pistol, he would be hopelessly outnumbered.

Actually, the opportunity to eat another man aside from Harrison did present itself. Three days after eating the slave’s raw liver, James Campbell completely lost his mind, no doubt afflicted with the toxins the liver held. His death came only after a period of ranting and raving that made the general conditions on the Peggy even worse, if such a thing