Tag: maritime history

The Shipwreck Coast

The Shipwreck Coast

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Why are shipwrecks so attractive?

I don’t mean a shipwreck unfolding before our eyes – I’m sure that would be a horrific thing to witness. Yet many people are fascinated by the legacies of shipwrecks – the stories they generate and the physical evidence they leave behind.

From the beautiful 16thcentury sailing ship Mary Rose to the magnificent 20thcentury steamer Titanic, wrecked ships have been objects of widespread interest, speculation and downright obsession. We love to hear their tales of heroism, tragedy, miraculous escapes and sunken treasure.

Loch Ard Gorge, along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, is associated with a famous nineteenth-century shipwreck.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I visited the area of southwestern Victoria known as the Shipwreck Coast. This section of coastline, which runs for about 130km from Cape Otway to Port Fairy, is part of the Great Ocean Road, one of Australia’s most popular national and international tourist destinations. The Great Ocean Road is famed for its spectacular views of jagged shoreline hugging the mighty Southern Ocean. The Shipwreck Coast commemorates the ships that foundered on that same combination of rugged rocks and whirling waters.

The rock formations known as the Twelve Apostles are the scenic jewel in the crown of the Great Ocean Road

Over 200 wrecked ships have been discovered along this section of coast, and the number lost is believed to be much higher – probably more than 600. Many of these ships were heading for the city of Melbourne. To reach it, they had to ‘thread the needle’ between Cape Otway and King Island. (An 80 km gap might sound wide enough to us, but using the navigational instruments of the time it could be difficult to locate accurately.) Ships headed to Sydney also used this route, taking advantage of the strong westerly winds known as the ‘Roaring Forties’ to speed past the southern edge of the continent before turning northwards along the coast of New South Wales.

A simple but effective display at the Shipwreck Museum in Warrnambool conveys the sheer numbers of ships lost.

 Failure to ‘thread the needle’ was one notorious cause of shipwrecks along this coast. Others were the high winds and huge seas that built up over the thousands of kilometres of unbroken ocean between here and Antarctica, poor visibility due to frequent fogs, and the treacherous nature of a stretch of sea studded with submerged reefs. 

The geology of the seabed has a lot to do with the difficulty of safely navigating this shoreline.  The same kinds of limestone protuberances that create the dramatic, tourist-pleasing scenery of the Great Ocean Road also caused hundreds of shipwrecks. We realized this while looking at the famous Twelve Apostles – those iconic limestone stacks emerging from the water between Princetown and Port Campbell – but we received an even stronger sense of maritime danger at a lesser-known site further along the road, the Bay of Martyrs. 

The Bay of Martyrs

This is a truly weird seascape, which I urge visitors to the Great Ocean Road not to miss. It may not lend itself to the perfect Instagram shot in the way that the Twelve Apostles do, but it shows even more clearly how crowded the ocean here is with submerged reefs and islets, which are intriguing to the imagination but deadly to shipping. A beautiful four-masted iron barque, the Falls of Halladale, was wrecked here in 1908, almost at the end of its voyage from New York to Melbourne. The wreck lies in only ten metres of water, and now hosts a wide variety of marine plants and creatures.

Rocks and reefs in the Bay of Martyrs

The ill-fated voyage of the Falls of Halladale is one of the later shipwreck stories told at the excellent museum in the Flagstaff Hill maritime heritage complex at Warrnambool. Mostly, the museum is concerned with wrecks from about 1840 to 1880, and in particular with one of the most famous shipwrecks in Australian history, that of the clipper Loch Ard in 1878.  

Wreck of the Loch Ard, oil painting by William Short, dated 21 June 1878; this photographic reproduction was sold as a postcard, also in 1878. State Library of Victoria.

In storm and fog, in the early hours of the morning of 1 June, 1878, the Loch Ard ran into a reef off Mutton Bird Island, near Port Campbell. Having left London three months before, the ship was less than a day’s sail from its destination, Melbourne. Of the 54 passengers and crew on board, only two survived: midshipman Tom Pearce, and a young Irish girl called Eva Carmichael, who was immigrating to Australia with her parents and five siblings, all of whom lost their lives.

Engraving in The Australasian Sketcher, 3 August 1878. State Library of Victoria.

The Australian press lapped up the story of the Loch Ard and a quick search of the newspaper archive Trove uncovers many contemporary accounts of the disaster. The two survivors, who were both eighteen years old, became instant celebrities, and there was a general feeling that the perfect ending of the story would be for them to get married – after all, they had spent part of a night together in a cave after reaching the shore! (It’s said that Tom politely proposed to Eva and she politely declined.)

The survivors, Tom Pearce and Eva Carmichael

Another layer of the story is that the ship’s captain, 29-year-old George Gibbs, had himself been married only six weeks before the voyage began. His wife remained in Scotland, and never saw her husband again. No blame seems to be attached to Captain Gibbs for the disaster – in fact, the survivors praised his courage and seamanship.

The tale of the Loch Ard has everything we appreciate in great shipwreck stories. It’s a story of luck, both bad and good; of romance, or the possibility of it; and of heroism (Tom Pearce was awarded a medal for his actions in rescuing Eva from the surf). Above all the story has a kind of cosmic irony, a sense of ‘so near and yet so far’. 

There’s something ironic, too, in the display that is the centerpiece of the Shipwreck Museum at Warrnambool: the improbable, beautiful ‘Loch Ard Peacock’. This much larger-than-life-sized ceramic statue of a peacock, a magnificent example of majolica ware from the Minton pottery in Staffordshire, was on its way to Melbourne to be shown at the Great Exhibition in 1880. Incredibly, it came through the shipwreck unscathed.

The Loch Ard Peacock

The almost insolent beauty of the Loch Ard Peacock seems to mock our human scale of value. On the night of the wreck, the sea claimed 52 lives, yet threw this fragile, human-sized art object safely onto the beach. 

Peacocks traditionally symbolize pride, and many shipwreck stories have an element of ‘pride going before a fall’. (The Titanic exemplifies this.) Nothing has the power to humble human pride like the ‘brute’ or ‘impersonal’ forces of nature. Whether it’s an iceberg, a mighty storm, a deceiving fog, or a microscopic virus, nature has a way of turning our best-laid plans upside-down and revealing how illusory our sense of control over life really is.

In Quarantine!

In Quarantine!

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The old quarantine station in Sydney

How would you feel if you found out you had to go into quarantine? 

Would you feel angry, resigned, regretful, afraid? Would concern about your health override all other feelings? Or could there be a part of you that might enjoy the enforced rest and extra time off work? 

How would you pass the days? Would you value the chance of some time out, or would you be itching to get back to the world and resume your normal responsibilities and activities? 

As the residents of Wuhan in China enter their second week of coronavirus lockdown, and foreign nationals evacuated from China face periods of up to fourteen days in isolation facilities, I thought I’d take a look at a practice that has been part of the travel experience for nearly seven centuries: quarantine.

Venice harbour, where the modern system of quarantine was first introduced. Painting by Canaletto, 18th century. Public Domain.

The word comes from the Italian quaranta– forty – because early disease-control practices in Europe mandated a forty-day period of isolation before ships coming from plague-affected areas were allowed to enter ports in ‘safe’ areas. It’s not clear exactly where the practice originated, but it was the Republic of Venice, a major trade hub during the medieval period, that in the fourteenth century created the first government-regulated quarantine. Many other Mediterranean ports copied the Venetian example, followed in time by countries all over the world.

1885 cartoon from Harper’s Weekly depicting the importance of quarantine for keeping cholera, yellow fever and smallpox out of New York.

Travellers these days do NOT expect to find themselves in quarantine, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was a routine part of the tourist experience. It wasn’t just plague but also, increasingly, cholera that countries wanted to keep out, and in the effort to do so they often subjected foreign visitors to quite arduous quarantine conditions. 

The historian John Pemble, in his book The Mediterranean Passion, notes that for travellers in the nineteenth century the ‘cumulative delay’ caused by multiple quarantines could be considerable. ‘For example, tourists visiting Egypt, the Holy Land, Turkey, and Greece in that order had a minimum of three quarantines: one at Beirut for having been at Alexandria, one at Constantinople for having been in Beirut, and one in Greece for having been in Constantinople.’  Travellers who wanted to visit ‘the East’ or move around the Mediterranean were resigned to spending lengthy periods in detention along the way.

Malta, View of the Quarantine Area. Etching by M-A Benoist, c.1770. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

Quarantine was such an accepted part of tourism that guidebooks included information on the different quarantine stations or ‘lazzarettos’, as they were also called. Pemble quotes the 1884 edition of Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Greece, which rated Corfu, Piraeus and Malta as having the best quarantine facilities, with Malta being ‘the least inconvenient and best regulated purgatory of them all’. 

Several famous British writers were ‘guests’ of this particular quarantine station during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Poet Lord Byron, theologian (and later saint) John Henry Newman, and novelists Walter Scott and William Makepeace Thackeray were all detained there. For each of them, the great question was how to pass the time while waiting to be released. 

The poet, Lord Byron

Let’s just say that Byron didn’t handle it very well when he was quarantined at Malta for 18 days in the spring of 1811. Having too much time and no pleasant distractions, his thoughts turned inwards, and not in a good way. He obsessed about all the things that were wrong with his life – health, finances, relationships – and wrote a list of negative thoughts in his diary. Like prisoners from time immemorial, he carved his name on one of the walls. He decided that his career as an author was just ‘vanity’ and not worth pursuing. He came to believe that his confinement was making him ill. Afterwards, he wrote the poem ‘Farewell to Malta’, which contained the lines: ‘Adieu, thou damned’st quarantine, / That gave me fever, and the spleen [bad temper].’ Not his finest poetic hour, but you get the picture.

The harbour at Valetta, Malta, where many 19th century travellers underwent quarantine.

In contrast, when John Henry Newman was confined at the quarantine station at Malta in 1833, he knew he had to be careful not to become depressed. As he wrote home, ‘to one who has been employing his mind actively for years, nothing is so wearisome as idleness’. So he and his travelling companions decided to keep busy and use the time of enforced leisure to their advantage. He wrote to his family:

I assure you we make ourselves very comfortable. We feed well from an hotel across the water. The Froudes draw and paint. I have hired a violin, and, bad as it is, it sounds grand in such spacious halls. I write verses, and get up some Italian, and walk up and down the rooms about an hour and a half daily; and we have a boat, and are allowed to go about the harbour.

With meals brought in from a local hotel and a boat for skimming about the harbour, no wonder Murray’s Handbook rated this the best quarantine station in Europe! But my point is, Newman turned his imprisonment to his advantage, and did everything he could to dispel tedium and keep his spirits up.

John Henry Newman

Talking of spirits – bad pun – Newman was convinced that the lazaretto was haunted by the souls of previous occupants. He wrote home about the ‘mysterious night visitants’ he heard prowling about his room and the stairs outside, and said that other travellers detained there corroborated his reports.

Quarantine burial ground, Port Jackson. Engraving after A. William. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

There seems to be a thing about quarantine and ghosts. Q Station Sydney, a unique accommodation and conference venue located on the site of the old quarantine station at North Head on the edge of Sydney Harbour, offers nightly ghost tours of ‘what is reputed to be one of Australia’s most haunted sites’. From the 1830s to the 1980s, migrants and overseas visitors suspected of carrying disease had to undergo quarantine here before they could enter the city or its hinterland. Some of those who succumbed to illness and were buried here still haunt the grounds and buildings, creating paranormal phenomena … or so the story goes.

Accommodation at Q Station, Sydney.

But not all who were detained here were restless, unhappy or doomed. One passenger who sailed to Australia in 1935 on a ship carrying smallpox left a charming record of an unexpected summer holiday in one of Sydney’s most picturesque locations. Her poem is now displayed at the Q Station entrance and makes a good case for the upside of enforced medical isolation– as long as the location is right!

I wonder what the people going into quarantine this month on Christmas Island will make of their stay there. The political irony of Australians being placed in mandatory offshore detention is pretty striking, and perhaps foreshadows a future in which we’re all liable to become refugees of one sort or another. In the mean time, will the individuals sent to Christmas Island be Byrons, sinking into depression, or Newmans, keeping busy and finding interest in their situation? Time – and, presumably, those emerging from quarantine – will tell.