ANOTHER WRECK AT AUCKLAND ISLANDS.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume XIII, Issue 545, 23 January 1868, Page 3

ANOTHER WRECK AT AUCKLAND ISLANDS.

SEVENTY-THREE LIVES LOST, TEN SURVIVORS RESCUED AFTER 18 iuOn TilS* XSI ' r> HISOxN miINT. (From tbe Nelson Examiner, 16th January.) On Sunday night last, nine men and one woman, the survivors of the crew and passengers of the American ship General Grant, eighty-three in number, who sailed from Melbourne on the 4th of May. 1866. were landed at Bluff Harbor by the whaling brig ; Amherst, having been rescued from the Auckland Islands on the 21sc November last, where the General Grant was wrecked upwards of ' eighteen months previously. The General Grant, bound to London with a cargo of wool, sighted Auckland Islands on the 13 ch of May, and the weather being thick, got too near the land; there being no wind, 1 a strong current carried her the following day on the rocks on a bold ' shore, where she got jammed, and broke up. In attempting to land, 1 sixty-seven lives were lost by the ! swamping of the boats. After remaining on the island till the 22nd | of January last year, the chief officer and three of the crew left in a boat | with the intention of endeavoring to 1 make the coast of New Zealand. The names of the survivors brought off by the Amherst are;—Mary Anne Jewel (stewardess), Joseph Jewel, j William Ferguson, Patrick Coughey, Nicholas Allen, Cornelius Drew, James Teer, A.M. Sangilly, A. Harpman, and David Ashworth.

The intelligence of another shipwreck at the Auckland Islands, the presumed loss of seventy-three lives, and the imprisonment of the ten survivors in that inhospitable island region for upwards of eighteen months, cannot but be read with painful interest. It appears scarcely so long a time since the wrecked seaman of the Grafton and the Invercauld—the one a schooner belonging to Sydney, and the other a homeward-bound ship, from Melbourne—were released from their long imprisonment on the AuckI lands; the one by sending a boat across to Stewart’s Island, where a schooner was met with; and the other by being taken off by a home-ward-bound vessel: or that the Government of Victoria and New Zealand despatched search-parties to the Aucklands, from a report that a fire had been seen on the western side of the Islands, and from the body of a man having been found on the beach. On referring to the particulars of these melancholy disasters, published by us at the time, we find by that the visits of the steamers Victoria and Southland were made to the Auckland Islands in October. 1865, seven months before the wreck of the General Grant. Months and years thus roll away without our taking note of time, when to the poor wretches whose rescue we are speaking of, the eighteen months spent in idle looking out for the sail that was to bear them away from their captivity, must have appeared an age.

It is terrible to think of the sufferings of these poor castaways, and we repeat the question put by us when we became acquainted with those experienced by the crews of the Invercauld and Grafton —Has the Government of New Zealand no duties resting upon it in respect of islands which are a part of its territory, and so often the scene of shipwreck and disaster ? Wo pointed out how admirably adapted the Auckland Islands were for a penal settlement; and a removal from many Provincial gaols of prisoners, sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, would be an immense gain to all parts of the colony. A commission has been appointed to consider the subject of a general penal settlement, and we sincerely hope the Auckland islands may bs selected tor the purpose, in which case there would be a chance of the crews of vessels shipwrecked there finding succour.