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Wake of the Invercauld (Shipwrecked in the sub-Antarctic: A great granddaughter's pilgrimage)
Madelene Ferguson Allen
Exisle

The Wreckers
Bella Bathurst
HarperCollins
Reviewed by Lindsay Wright (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

Robert Holding, a 23-year-old English deckhand, was one of 19 survivors from the barque Invercauld of Aberdeen when she drove on to a reef in the Auckland Islands during filthy weather in May, 1864.

Twelve months later, when Holding and two others were rescued from the remote Southern Ocean outcrop, they were the only ones left alive. Holding went on to settle in Canada and ended up working as a machinist at a railway workshop until his death in 1933.

This lavishly illustrated book is written by his geographer great-granddaughter, who died in 2003, and is a gripping tale of drama at sea and ashore. Allen, a Canadian school teacher and writer, came across the tale while researching her family history.

She went to Melbourne where Holding had signed on board the barque after a fruitless stint in the goldfields. Even here is a great yarn - of a time when young men sailed halfway round the globe before the mast, on the off-chance they might strike it rich.

Invercauld's demise, and the ensuing 12 miserable months, are described in detail. Freed from the rigid hierarchy and familiar routine of the ship, the officer class breaks down and the natural leaders take over. Told in part from Holding's diaries, the tale unfolds into an extraordinary account of conflict, cannibalism and cunning.

It is easy to draw parallels with Wrecked on a Reef (Twenty Months Among the Auckland Isles) about the wreck of the Grafton, by Francois Raynal. While the Invercauld men slipped into despair and death, the resourceful Grafton crew, wrecked at the same time at the southern end of the islands, were busy rebuilding their ship's boat to sail to Stewart Island. But Grafton was a much smaller vessel, and wrecked where her crew could retrieve materials and fittings.

Allen obtained a Department of Conservation permit and chartered the yacht Evohe for the Auckland Islands leg of her odyssey. I sometimes found her lack of nautical know-how frustrating but she more than made up for that with the wealth of information about the geology and flora/fauna of the islands.
 
Wake of the Invercauld is not only a family historical narrative. It is a warm, human story of a teacher and mother surviving stormy seas in the Southern Ocean and hiking (read tramping) along the same spiny ridges her great-grandfather stumbled on.
 
A feeling of wonder, awe and delight for the rugged islands that almost cut short her ancestry glows through the text, as does admiration for the people who work to conserve them.
 
The Wake of the Invercauld is an engaging read for adventurers, armchair or otherwise, and a valuable reference for anyone interested in our sub-Antarctic islands. The top-quality photographs, maps and illustrations also make it easy to pick up and peruse over coffee.
 
The subtitle for The Wreckers claims that it's a "story of killing seas, false lights and plundered ships". Stirring stuff, the sordid history of the business of pillaging ships that came ashore in the United Kingdom, but also a meticulously researched record of a way of life that has all but disappeared...maybe.
 
"For a fully-laden general cargo vessel to run aground in an accessible position is more or less like having Selfridges crash-land in your back garden," Bathurst writes, "a Selfridges with all the price tags removed."
 
She goes on to record Bacchanalian shoreline orgies fuelled by recently plundered liquor and trade goods; parties so wild that few of the participants survived until daylight; the rock hovels of Scottish crofters where silver candelbra hung in the smoky gloom or grand pianos gathered dust in corners.
 
There's a difference between availing oneself of the sea's bounty by helping yourself to the cargo of a stranded ship and intentionally luring vessels on to the beach. The Cornish traditionally held sway in the wrecking business; ships' crews were brutally murdered and the goods spirited away to be sold to the genteel at knock-down prices.
 
Bathurst's book pares the romance from the business of ship-wrecking to reveal an ugly world of avarice and brutality. Life in England was tough for the working people and, besides offering the opportunity to accrue a few luxuries, a shipwreck was also a means of striking a blow against the ruling classes.
 
Bathurst has engaged me before with The Lighthouse Stephensons, her well-written book about that ingenious family's Scottish lighthouse designs and construction. The Wreckers relates the antithetical side of life around Britain's coastline; a side dedicated to ship  destruction, not salvation. It's an equally fluent work with a livelier topic.
 
It still pays to "watch the wall my darlings, while the gentlemen go by."