HUNDRED YEARS AGO

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 January 1939, Page 3

HUNDRED YEARS AGO

MAROONED SAILORS RESCUED

ORDEAL ON AN ISLAND.

WHALING FIRM’S ENTERPRISE,

It was one hundred years ago. Jan-* nary 10. 1839. that the Eliza Scott sighted the Campbell Islands two hundred and ninety miles south of New Zealand. The Eliza Scott was engaged on a private exploring venture on behalf of that old and enterprising firm of shipowners, Messrs Enderby, of London, who were ever on the look out for new whaling and sealing grounds. With the 154 ton Eliza Scott sailed the 54 ton cutter, Sabrina, later lost with all hands. The expedition was a failure as far as the discovery of new fisheries went, but it accomplished some Antarctic exploration and gave.four miserable castaways cause to bless it. Captain Balleny of the Eliza Scott, the leader, recorded in his journal on January 10, 1839, that when a party went ashore to try for a few skins on the island, they had no luck with the seals, but instead found four peoplethree men and a woman—“who had been left four years in a most wretched plight.” They had been landed on the Campbell Islands early in 1935 by the Sydney ship which bore (and disgraced) the name of New Zealander. Of course, it was quite a habit for sealing ships to forget the gangs they had left on these remote islands for months and years at a time. Sometimes they forgot them altogether. Thus in 1813 a’ boat' had picked up five men marooned on the Solanders. They had been left by two different vessels, some in 1808. but although they had given up hope of ever being retrieved, they had made the best of things, making clothes and roofing huts with the skins of the seals on which they lived. A similar band of three stranded seamen had been rescued from the Snares in 1817. They had been left in 1810 by a London ship. They had got potatoes to grow in the rocky soil, so that the whole side of the island appeared to be covered with them when an American whaler providentially happened to call. It is interesting to recall that these southern islands were temporarily inhabited by white men years before runaways made their homes with Maori tribes in New Zealand itself, the quest for seals sending men to scour these icy seas. PRUDENT CHARITY.

Captain Balleny made his four castaways enter into a regular signed agreement when he took them on board. They had to sell the 170 sealskins they had collected to Messrs Enderby at a flat rate that allowed the firm a pleasantly wide margin for any possible fluctuation of the market. Further Balleny agreed with the objects of his singular generosity to pay them, in lieu of wages, a “lay” or share in the gross produce of the voyage from the time of their joining the ship. “In doing this I have been guided by a wish to relieve the wretched and to attend to the interest of my employers at the same time, and I trust the transaction may be viewed in this light.” As the voyage had already been diversified by furious quarrels over grog and victuals, by desertions and the theft of stores, the addition of a little extra manpower may not have been altogether unwelcome on board the two boats. ENDERBY’S LONG RECORD. The firm of Enderby had an interest of long standing in whaling and sealing and, through it, in these southern islands. By a curious coincidence just before Balleny and his party sailed from the Campbell Islands they spoke another ship, the Emma from Sydney, commanded by the same Captain Biscoe who had in 1831 led the first Enderby southern exploring expedition. Now he was competing with the Enderbys. “I find Captain Biscoe is in search of land as well as ourselves.” Enderbys had been engaged in whaling for more (han a century, trading with American whalers in the years before the War of Independence. Indeed it was an Enderby ship which took the tea to the celebrated Boston tea-party. In 1850 Charles Enderby led an expedition in person to establish a colony on the Auckland Islands. It was an Enderby ship which had discovered the Islands in 1806, so Charles Enderby must have felt he had special rights in the site of his proposed whaling station settlement. The colony failed and the colonists were removed next year. Enderby, full of the ardour of his ancestors, never lost faith in the enterprise and attributed the defeat to the cold feet of his partners. HUGE SEAL CATCHES. The Campbell Islands, the scene of Captain Balleny’s rescue, consist of wild, high moorland grazing some thousands of sheep. It is only a few years since these flocks were abandoned. The islands were discovered in 1810 by a Captain Hasselborough, who named the group after his owners. Campbell Brothers. In the first rush these southern islands returned huge catches of seals. An American ship took over 60,000 skins from the barren rocky I Antipodes Islands. But soon the indiscriminate slaughter annihilated the supply. Even as late as the 1870’s there were seals to be caught on the islands, but. the few seals taken by our castaways who needed them for food, indicate a sharp decline in the seal population. Seals are wholly protected in New Zealand, but it is only occasionally that strays on the beaches serve to remind us of the days when sealing was a major New Zealand industry and cold rocks in the far south produced more wealth than the land of the Maori.