The sinking of HMNZS Manawanui off the Samoan island of Upolu on October 6 was a disaster for the navy and the environment but without loss of life, unlike New Zealand’s worst disaster at sea almost 150 years ago.
Every day for many years in the 19th century, and well into the 20th, daily newspapers published shipping lists showing which ships had arrived in the past 24 hours, which ones had sailed, which were due to leave, and which ones were expected in port.
On August 25, 1874, there appeared for the first time in the New Zealand Herald’s “Vessels expected” list the name “Cospatrick”, with no other detail bar “ship, London”. That meant it had left London and was on its way, or soon would be, to New Zealand. In the following months, the names on the list kept changing as hundreds of ships expected to arrive in Auckland duly did so; but the Cospatrick was a constant – until January 11, 1875, when it disappeared from the list.
Not because it had safely arrived but because news had reached the Herald by telegraph (belatedly, as news did in those days) that the ship had met a dreadful disaster two months earlier.
By official count, 360,000 mostly British and Irish people emigrated to New Zealand in the 20 years between 1871 and 1891 – the most intensive period of immigration in the country’s history. But what of those who set out on the long sea voyage across the world and never reached Aotearoa?
Despite the intensity of emigration in the 1870s, it was quite possible to make the entire voyage without seeing another ship.
According to one estimate, at least 30 19th-century migrant ships were wrecked on their way to Australia and New Zealand, so the number of migrants who never made it would certainly be in the thousands. Some barely got started – 60 passengers drowned, for instance, when the New-Zealand-bound Avalanche collided with another ship in the English Channel in 1877. The Lastingham just about got through in 1884 but, right at the end of a three-month voyage, went down off Cook Strait with the loss of 18 lives. Some ships, like the Trevelyan in 1888, completely disappeared en route and no one ever found out what had happened to them.
No emigration disaster, however, comes near that of the Cospatrick, which sank with the loss of life of almost all on board on November 18, 1874, en route to Aotearoa.
As the great marine historian Henry Brett once wrote, the news of it “caused a thrill of horror throughout the Empire and particularly in Auckland, for which port the vessel was bound”. Still today, the horror resonates. Of the 477 people believed to have been aboard, only three survived, and we know what happened only because of the subsequent testimony of those three. It may have been self-serving (they were all crew members) but it remains to this day the only version of events.
A calm start
The Cospatrick, a three-masted wooden sailing ship owned by the Shaw Savill company, had left London on its second voyage to NZ on September 11, 1874, with 44 crew and 433 passengers, most of them assisted emigrants described at the time as being of the “agricultural labourer class”, and many of whom had been nominated by friends in Auckland under the Immigration Act.
The ship sailed south without incident for several weeks, following the usual route that would take it down the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope and east across the southern Indian Ocean to pass south of Australia and come up the Tasman to Cape Reinga, reaching Auckland ideally no later than Christmas.
Travel times varied widely, however, depending on sea conditions: if Tangaroa was kind, you might make it to New Zealand in three months, but some unlucky passengers were stuck aboard in deteriorating conditions for five or six months. So, even by early January there would have been no particular alarm that the Cospatrick hadn’t been sighted. Despite the intensity of emigration in the 1870s, it was quite possible to make the entire voyage without seeing another ship; and of course there was no radio or onboard telegraph then.
Still, by January in Auckland, the Cospatrick was being looked for at any hour, as they used to say then. Signal stations (such as on Devonport’s Mt Victoria) used to hoist flags indicating the approach of a vessel, and people in port towns regularly scanned the horizon for the glimpse of a sail. In fact, it was late at night on January 10, 1874, when, as the Herald reported next morning, “two persons called at this office to inquire whether a vessel in sight was known to be the Cospatrick”. Not so; the paper was about to go to press with the terrible news that it was not and never would be the Cospatrick.
Hopelessly inadequate
Around midnight on November 17, fire had broken out in the forepart of the ship, which was then several hundred miles from land, southwest of Cape Town. First mate Henry Macdonald, one of the survivors, later testified that the fire spread rapidly from a stores locker containing flammable substances such as varnish, paint and tar. Such firefighting equipment as the ship carried was hopelessly inadequate, and in any case a decision to raise a big foresail to save it from the fire sealed the fate of the Cospatrick, as it caused the stern to swing round, redirecting the wind-driven flames towards terrified emigrants crowded on the upper deck.
There were far too few lifeboats for those aboard – the so-called regulations of the day did not require capacity to match complement – and the panic-stricken effort to launch the six boats the ship did carry proved so shambolic that only two made it clear. And even those two, which could have held 60 people each, carried barely that total between them. All men. And mostly crew. With virtually no food or water.
Those in them, having pulled clear, saw the ship go down in 90 minutes. Helpless to assist, wrote Henry Brett, they “watched the tragedy to the bitter end. The main and mizzen masts fell, and many of those who had crowded aft were crushed to death. Then the stern was blown out. That was the end; the shrieks of the survivors were silenced suddenly in the roaring flames.”
The Cospatrick’s captain, Alexander Elmslie, had stayed on deck until the last possible moment, before throwing his wife and child into the sea and jumping after them. All three drowned.
It is hard not to feel the tragedy of those deaths by fire or water, of emigrant dreams cut short, of plans for a new life ending in panic and terror.
The two lifeboats maintained sight of each other for three days or so but became separated in a gale and one of them was never seen again. The other started out with about 30 men aboard, but by the time a passing ship (the British Sceptre) spotted them 10 days later, only five remained alive – and two of those subsequently died on board the Sceptre. More might have survived had the fates favoured them, because, as Macdonald testified, after nine days adrift “a boat passed close to us. She was not more than 50 yards away. She was a foreigner. We hailed but got no answer. I think she must have heard us”.
The three who survived were Macdonald, quartermaster Thomas Lewis, and 18-year-old seaman Edward Cotter, who was working his way to New Zealand, where he intended to join his brother. The tale they had to tell, when they’d recovered sufficiently to tell it, was one of madness, desperation, intolerable thirst and, inevitably, cannibalism. To survive, they ate the livers and drank the blood of the dead, some of whom had died in delirium from drinking seawater.
Of course, there was an official inquiry into the fire but, as Charles R Clark notes in his excellent 2006 book Women and Children Last, the inquiry panel “laboured under difficulties similar to those of a coroner’s inquest in the absence of a body”. It reached the unprovable conclusion that someone pillaging cargo must have started the fire accidentally with a naked flame, but it had little to say about the shortage of lifeboats; it took the Titanic disaster 38 years later for a rule requiring lifeboat capacity to match passenger numbers was laid down.
By Clark’s estimate, there were 82 married couples, 100 single men, 43 single women and 126 children among the passengers aboard the Cospatrick. The list of their names makes sad reading. Here were Baileys, Bentleys, Bradleys; Carrolls and Chapmans; Farrells and Fitzgeralds; Joneses, Reillys, Thomsons and Turners. Welches, too. It is hard not to feel the tragedy of those deaths by fire or water, of emigrant dreams cut short, of plans for a new life ending in panic and terror.
In wilder or perhaps more wilful flights of the imagination, we might even picture the ghosts of those hundreds of emigrants still coming on to New Zealand, still crossing the ocean, still making landfall, still settling here, still moving among us all, among the living and the dead. Still looked for at any hour.
