ISLAND OF THE LOST
Joan Druett
Allen & Unwin, pbk, $33
Review by Gavin McLean
Joan Druett's Victorian-length subtitle says it all: A harrowing true story of shipwreck, death and survival on a godforsaken island at the edge of the world.
In most wrecks on the mainland, survivors were plucked to safety, or took a day or so at most to walk to town. That was simply not possible on the subantarctic islands.
Indeed, the wreck was often just the beginning of the horrors to come, leaving many of the people who escaped the waves and rocks wondering if the ones who drowned were the lucky ones.
In these bleak, isolated places, survivors sometimes eked out a miserable existence on a diet of roots, seals and shellfish for up to two years.
Starvation, thoughts of cannibalism, loneliness and madness were all part of the script.
For these and other reasons, the dozen or so shipwrecks in New Zealand's subantarctic Islands have exercised a fascination far beyond the toll they exacted in life or in treasure.
This summer, another party of adventurers was due to head south to have a crack at finding the elusive wreck of the General Grant and her cargo of gold bullion. A book and a documentary are in the pipeline.
Druett's book reprises the story of some of the earliest wrecks, the Grafton and the Invercauld. Both were lost on Auckland Island months apart from each other in 1864.
Although the island is a mere 25km long, so impassable are the cliffs that neither group of survivors was aware of the presence of the other.
It's an uplifting tale that reinforces the importance of natural leadership. The five-strong Grafton party was blessed with Captain Thomas Musgrave and the inventive Francois Raynal, who built a forge and an open boat, in which the men sailed to Bluff for rescue.
The officers who survived the Invercauld wreck, on the other hand, offered little leadership; 16 of the 19 who survived the wreck died before they were spotted by chance 18 months later.
The Invercauld's story was told by Madelene Ferguson Allen in a definitive 1997 book, and both Musgrave and Raynal published accounts, one of which inspired Jules Verne to write Mysterious Island.
Druett has drawn on these sources ably to pull together a fast-paced account of a story that reads like the best of fiction.
- Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian
