THE COSPATRICK.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 32, 1 October 1912, Page 3

THE COSPATRICK.

NEW ZEALAND'S GREATEST SHIPPING DISASTER. EMIGRANT SHIP BURNT. Now that public interest has been ' focused so intently and so sadly on the-greatest maritime tragedy the world has known, it is not untimely to recall the most thrilling sea-story in the history of New Zealand’s overseas traffic. This tragedy was not the wreck of the Tararua, or the Wairarapa, nor that old-time steamer which went down somewhere about Cook Strait with a great many'diggers on board; but the loss of one of the oldstylg sailing ships, the Cospatrick, carrying emigrants from London to New Zealand, nearly thirty-eight years ago. It was attended by far greater less of life than the wrecks of the Tararua and Wairarapa A# put together. There were 473 souls on board thei sliip, and only three were saved. The story is one of the most poignantly tragic that scaadventure has'ever given to the world. Just as in the case of the Titanic, the life-saving equipment of the Cospatrick was altogether inadequate. In the old sailing ship days, as at the present day, the shipping companies took the risk of disaster by fire or ice, knowing full well that there would be no chance of saving all hands if they failed to “bluff the eternal sea.”

The Cospatrick was a beautiful ship of the olden somi-frigate-built order. A picturesque description of such a ship may be read in a novel called “Act of God,” written by Robert Elliot, and published three or four years ago by Messrs Duckworth and Co. It is a really fine sea book, written by a man who evidently knows the sea and ships. The Young Pretender, the old East Indian in that story, which was burned at sea with the loss of nearly all her passengers and crew, is the Cospatrick all over; and the incidents of the' tragedy, even to the details of the fire, and of the awful acts of cannibalism in one of the boats, seems to have been founded from the horrors of the Cospatrick’s raid-ocean end.

The Cospatrick 9 teak-built ship, constructed at MouSmein, in British Burma, in 1856, and for the first few years of her career she was employed as a troopship sailing to and from the East Indies. She was a full-rigged ship of 1220 tons burden. Duncan Dunbar, the great tship-owner, was the owner for a while, and in the early seventies she was purchased by Messrs Shaw, Savill and Co., of London, who had contracts with the New Zealand Government for the conveyance of emigrants to this colony. She made one voyage out here, and on September 11th, 1874, she sailed from London on her second (and Inst) voyage to New Zealand, bound to -Auckland with 429 passengers and 44 of a crew.

A picture of the Cospatrick, published in the Illustrated London News of January 9th, 1875, shows her under sail, a shapely, lofty-sided ship, with painted ports, the old-fashioned square stern windows, and a single mizzentopsail, though on fore and main mast she carried double topsails. From her yard-arms projected the studding-sail-booms, which every ship carried in those days. Under st’n-s’ls in the Trades she must have been a thing of beauty. The same paper gives a picture of her commander, Captan Alexander Elmslie (a well-known ship captain in the New Zealand trade), and of his wife and little son. All three were lost with the ship. I The New Zealand Government cmi- ' grants on board for Auckland were chiefly of the agricultural labourer class, from the Midland and Eastern I counties‘bf England. They consisted j of 177 men, 125 women, 58 boys, 53 ■ girls, and 1G babies, and there were also four saloon passengers. Everyone of these was lost. The Ship on Fire.

All went well with the Cospatrick until she had got well down into the South Atlantic and was preparing to run her casting down cross the great Southern Ocean. She was something over 37 degrees south of the Lino, and in longitude 12 degrees 25 minutes east—several hundred miles west by

south of the Cape of Good Hope, when fire broke out on board. This was at midnight on November 17th. The fire, it was believed, began in the boatswain’s locker, which contained oakum, tar, paint, and oils and other inflammable material. Near this there was some' kerosene oil; in the forcpcak there were seventy tons of coals, and there were about 40 tons of spirits on board. The officers and crew, with the passengers helping them, worked like mad fighting the flames, but the fire quickly mastered them. The sails on the foremast caught fire, and when they were burned the ship ran up into the wind, and the fire quickly travelled aft. Then awful scenes occurred. The three survivors told something of what happened, but the full horrors of that burning will never be known. The boats first lowered were capsized and sunk with all in them. In one of these boats—the long-boat —there were eighty persons, mostly women. Two lifeboats -kept afloat, with thirty-two persons in ono and thirty' in the other. The port lifeboats was in charge of Mr C. Romaine, chief mate. The other was under the second mate, Mr Charles Henry Mac-

donald, of Montrose, Scotland—this was the one boat which was picked up. The former boat was never heard of again. As for the captain, he threw his wife and child and himself into the sea, with Dr. Cadle, the surgeon, when there was no more hope of. (saving the ship. Sailors Turn Cannibals. The most dreadful sufferings that the sea can inflict upon its victims befel the thirty people in Second Mate Macdonald’s boat. There were no women in the forlorn party, which was just as well. They had no food, no water, no mast or sail, and only one oar. A girl’s petticoat—no one knew where it came from—was rigged upon the oar for a sail, and they drove along before a cold southerly

wind. Day after day went by, and night after night, and every day and even night men died in the boat. Some went mad before they died. There were a number of passengers, and most of these died first. Hunger and thirst and exposure killed them quickly. At first the bodies were thrown overboard as soon as life had left them, but as the went on, and the agonies of

thirst grew greater, the surviving sailors got out their sheath-knives and cut out the livers from some of the corpses, sucked the blood and ate the flesh. Horrible to tell of, but no man can be held responsible for what he may or may not do under such frightful circumstances. The blood of their dead comrades saved the lives of three men. There wore five living out of thirty when, on the ninth day after the loss of the Cospatrick, the boat was picked up by the British ship Sceptre, of Liverpool. Two out of the five—one a, passenger, the other a sailor—died on the British Spectre. Captain Jahnke, of the rescuing ship, put into St. Helena, and landed the three survivors there, almost dead after their terrible experiences. Ono of the survivors was Second Mate Macdonald; the others were a quartermaster named Thomas Lewis, and a youth of eighteen, an ordinary seaman named Edward Cotter. These were all that were left of the 473 people that made up the old Cospatrick’s company. The other boat, the chief mate’s lifeboat, from which Macdonald’s boat parted in a gale three days after the lire, was never heard of again. The news of the Cospatrick’s burning created much sorrowful discussion in London. Dr. Featherston, of Wellington, who was then Agent-Gen-eral for New Zealand, took the evidence of the three survivors in an official form for his Government. A Mansion House fund was raised for the relief of those left destitute by the disaster, and to this fund the New Zealand Government Agency subscribed £IOOO. Such is the story of a great sea tragedy which, although not occurring in New Zealand waters, had close and intimate concern for this country; one which will always bo remembered as having involved a greater loss of life than that in any other colonial-bound vessel which has come to grief on the high seas.