Chapter 7
Beating the cruel sea
The first time Eva and Tom met she was in her nightdress, in his arms. Around her were the dead and the doomed, and Tom, she knew, was her only hope.
They were teenagers. She was 18, he was 19. Theirs is one of the sea’s most romantic, dramatic and noble stories; a true story that picks up where the Titanic movie theme music swells up over the concluding credits scroll. Unlike the Titanic, this story had a happy ending, though not the one their adoring public demanded.
The story of Eva and Tom and the wreck of the Loch Ard began in the last days of sail. The Loch Ard, 90 yards, 1500 tons, one of the last and fastest of the clippers that raced between England and Australia, was beautiful to behold and it could cut through the oceans at 14 knots – 16 miles an hour. But like all sailing ships she lacked the manoeuvrability of the steam-powered rivals who were destined to make them obsolete. That inability to quickly change direction – that and a lot of bad luck – was the undoing of the Loch Ard.
The Loch Ard, in May 1878, was at the end of an 80-day voyage that had taken her 18 passengers, a crew of 36 and a fortune in cargo – £53,000 – from the English port of Gravesend to within a few hours of landing in Melbourne. Among the passengers were the Carmichael family from Ireland, Dr Emery Carmichael, a GP, his wife, and six of their seven children. The seventh, William, had quarrelled with his parents and like so many disaffected or disappointed young men in those days, went to Australia to seek a new life. He had decided, however, to reconcile with them and took ship to return home as they were coming out: ships that pass in the night.
The Carmichaels, like all the passengers, planned a new life in Australia, and looked forward to it with optimism and excitement, tinged with a little trepidation. Eva Carmichael, for instance, feared falling into the hands of the Aborigines: like thousands of others in Britain and Ireland, she had heard and been terrified by melodramatic accounts of the awful fate that befell Mrs Eliza Fraser, the white woman shipwrecked and held captive by savage Aborigines half a century before.
On the afternoon of Friday 31 May, the Loch Ard was preparing for her arrival in Melbourne. The weather was fine, there was a good breeze filling the sails and all on board were celebrating the end of a successful voyage. Captain George Gibb started to reduce sail and set his course for Cape Otway. He anticipated that the Loch Ard would arrive there at around 3 a.m., on Saturday morning. And from Cape Otway he needed to ‘thread the needle’ – sail the narrow passage into Bass Strait between the Shipwreck Coast and the west coast of King Island, the treacherous stretch where the Cataraqui had sunk with the loss of more than 400 lives in 1845. After that tragedy they had built a lighthouse at Cape Otway and it was this light that Captain Gibb expected to see within 12 hours.
When that time came, however, the flashing light was not to be seen in the darkness and Captain Gibb began to be concerned. He calculated that he was miles from land. But how many miles? He couldn’t see. The weather had turned and a bank of fog lay ahead. But, strangely, above him he could clearly see the stars. At four o’clock the fog bank north of the Loch Ard cleared and Captain Gibb understood. The fog bank was coming off land and the land – towering cliffs that rose steeply from the sea – was less than a kilometre away. They were about to sail headlong into those cliffs.
The Loch Ard had a slim hope.
Gibb knew that if he could turn the ship south and sail it back into the wind. He needed all sails hoisted at once.
Tom Pearce, apprenticed to the Loch Ard, told the Steam Navigation Board inquiry some weeks later, ‘Our watch was going below – some had gone – when I heard the order to hoist up the staysails, and at the same time the captain ran forward ordering all hands on deck. We got sail on her as quickly as possible by hoisting the main and mizzen topsail, set the spanker, and hoisted the upper mizzen topsail.’
The three-masted clipper was now sailing fast towards the cliffs – Captain Gibb wanted her to have all the momentum she could gather before turning into the eye of the wind. At the last possible moment Gibb gave the order: ‘All hands ready about!’
The Loch Ard turned away from the cliffs and began coming back into wind. She couldn’t do it. ‘The ship just came up head to wind,’ Pearce said, ‘and then commenced to fall off again, as there was not enough sail on her to bring her around.
‘As soon as the captain saw she was beginning to fall off again, he ordered both anchors to let go…we were among the broken water…we could soon see the anchors were not holding for every time the ship lifted with the sea she brought the anchors home. We gave her a little more cable, but could not give her much as we were afraid of a rock astern to which we’d gone very close.’
Captain Gibb now tried to tack out to sea but though the Loch Ard was gathering speed she was being taken inexorably towards the cliffs, and then, said Tom Pearce, ‘…she struck. Her starboard quarter appeared to strike a ledge that was just awash. It was not far from the land and at every roll of the sea her yards would strike against the cliffs…I believe the rock made a great hole in her bottom, for she was bumping very heavily.’
They were about to sink in the icy waters. From both sides waves were crashing over the decks and Eva Carmichael heard the Captain tell someone, ‘If you should be spared to see my dear wife, tell her that I stuck to the ship to the last, and went down with her like a sailor.’
He was true to his word. Tom Pearce said, ‘I saw the captain on the poop. The ship seemed to be gradually sinking by the stern. I saw several of the seamen clinging to a portion of the upper main-topsail yard which had been broken by striking against the cliffs. The spars were falling in every direction, so much that some of the sailors got into the cabin with the passengers in order to save themselves. I believe some ladies had put on cork jackets and were going on deck, when they at once washed away.’
Pearce and the lifeboat were also swept into the sea. ‘When the order was given to clear away the boats, I and five others went to the lifeboats…There were six of us in the boat. I cut the after-gripe, and just then a sea came onboard and washed us all away…When the sea struck the lifeboat and knocked it overboard it capsized and I was underneath it. I never saw any of the others who were with me. I was under the boat for some time…The boat floated very high and there was plenty of air under her.’
Eva Carmichael, meanwhile, had found the most unlikely lifesaving device: an empty hencoop – a wooden cage for hens. She was one of the ladies who put on cork jackets – there were only six – and had come on deck in her nightdress, only to be immediately washed overboard. She almost drowned then, as she narrated in an account of the disaster written by Richard Bennett in 1878: ‘One of the strings of my lifebelt broke and the belt shifting up and down forced my head under the water several times, which almost cost me my life. Seeing a hencoop I swam towards it. God taught me to swim in my blessed plight, for I never swam before. I succeeded in getting hold of the hencoop and so did Arthur Mitchell. This hencoop had been an object of ridicule among the passengers on board; but I felt thankful for it in the water.
‘By this time Loch Ard had disappeared under the waves. Seeing a spar, I let go of the hencoop and made for it. In a few minutes Mitchell and Jones were clinging to the spar also. Mitchell began to shiver frightfully, and to despair of ever reaching the shore. He had a lifebelt: but poor Jones kindly took off the life-buoy that was around himself and put it around Mitchell.
‘Poor Jones and Mitchell soon let go the spar, and after swimming some little distance they disappeared, and I saw them no more. I was now left alone, and could see nothing but the waves rolling and a rock at a little distance. I let go the spar and made for it. The waves dashed me against the rock, and then sent me spinning round its point. I went down under the waves three or four times and began to despair of life. In a few minutes after turning the point of rock I saw Tom Pearce standing on the beach.’
Tom Pearce picks up the story. ‘I suppose I was under the boat for about three quarters of an hour, but it seemed much more. The backwash, together with the ebb tide, must have taken the boat out to sea. When I came from under the boat I could see nothing of the ship, nothing but a lot of floating wreckage. I could not see anybody else floating. I went under the boat again, and the flood tide must then have drifted me in shore again, as the first thing I was aware of was the boat striking against a rock at the entrance of an inlet. This righted the boat but as she was floating in I still kept to her; but when about halfway up the inlet she struck against the sides of the cliff and threw me out. I then struck out for the beach, which I reached and found it covered with wreckage.’
Tom found a cave and threw himself on to its floor, exhausted. After resting, he went looking for something to eat – there seemed no hope of getting off the beach in the dark and under the sheer cliffs. ‘I then heard someone calling out and at first thought it was somebody on the cliffs above me, but I could not see anybody. I heard a second cry, and then looked out to sea and saw a lady clinging to a spar.’
It took Tom an hour, Eva believed, before he could get her safely in to the beach. He half carried her to his cave, found a case of brandy, ‘broke the neck of one of the bottles and made me swallow almost all of its contents, after which he swallowed a drop himself. Cold and exhausted – for we must have been in the water for about five hours – we lay down on the ground. I soon fell into a state of insensibility and must have been unconscious for hours.’
Tom Pearce had enjoyed two strokes of luck that saved them both. He had accidentally found the shelter of the upturned lifeboat, and the lifeboat had drifted into the only possible landing spot for many kilometres – the gorge now known as the Loch Ard Gorge. While Eva lay unconscious he set out to get help. He started to climb the cliff face, finding a point where it was at its lowest and least dangerous. After several attempts, when he almost fell, he finally made it to the top. There he had a third, crucial piece of good luck. All around was a wilderness of scrub. He chose, for no reason, to go west and quickly stumbled on a rough track that brought him, an hour or so later, to the sound of two young station hands out mustering sheep.
While the two rode furiously back to the Glenample Station to rouse their boss, Hugh Gibson, Tom staggered back to the cliff. Halfway down he was stranded, and then Gibson arrived and helped him. Gibson, alerting Eva that rescue was at hand, gave the Australian bush call – ‘Cooeeee!’ Eva, now awake and wondering where Tom was, ‘heard a strange noise. I imagined it to have been the war-cry of the Aborigines.’ She crept from the cave and hid in the scrub. Then she heard someone say, ‘Yes’ and she cried out, ‘I’m dying.’
The survival of the two, and the story of their heroics, thrilled Melbourne. They were seen to hug, Eva called Tom ‘my saviour’ and the newspapers were almost demanding a marriage. It wasn’t to be. The two remained friends in the weeks Eva took to recuperate, and Tom was there to see her off when she sailed back to Ireland. She didn’t want to stay in Australia. She wanted to be with her brother and her granny, all that was left of her family.
She went on the Tanjore, a steamship. Eva married, had three sons and lived in England, where she died in 1934. Tom married the sister of one of his mates – an apprentice, like him, on the Loch Ard. Both his sons – like Tom’s father – lost their lives at sea. Tom Junior was on the Loch Vennacher when it disappeared off Kangaroo Island in 1905, and his other son, Robert, was commanding a ship in a convoy bound for Malta when it was sunk in World War Two. Tom himself died of illness in 1908.
The curse of the Lochs
Eighteen of the 24 ships operated by the Loch Line went to the bottom of the ocean. The Loch Ard tragedy was just one of an extraordinary series involving ships with the name beginning ‘Loch.’ Eighteen years before the Loch Ard’s last voyage the Loch Maree vanished in the same notorious seas, in Bass Strait. Three years later, in the Atlantic, the Loch Earn took 226 passengers and crew with her when she went down in the Atlantic. In 1883 Loch Fyne was never again seen after sailing from New Zealand for England. Loch Long was only three hours out of Melbourne when she too disappeared in 1903. Tom Pearce Junior’s Loch Vennacher disappeared two years later and three years later, in 1908, Loch Lomond, en route from New Zealand to New South Wales, disappeared. During World War One Loch Carron sank in the Atlantic and Loch Awe, Loch Torridon and Loch Groom were sunk by German submarines.
Small wonder that many sailors, superstitious at the best of times, regarded sailing with the Loch Line as signing their death warrant.
‘A man on the rocks! There he is!’
He must have had the nightmare many times: that he was in a wild, drenching squall on a pitch black night, the wind shrieking as it tried to tear him from the tiny ledge halfway up the sheer cliff face and hurl him down into the sea below where broken bodies swirled and crashed among the rocks. In his dream he’d been there for many hours – days it seemed – and he could hold on no longer. He was going to fall like the others!
He was falling!
Then he’d wake and realise again that he’d lived his nightmare and survived.
James Johnson, an Irish sailor, spent 36 hours on the cliff face near the Gap, the awesome entrance to Sydney’s harbour. He had been left on the cliff with three others. Weakened, one by one, his companions fell from the cliff during that first black night. He was the sole survivor of the wreck of the Dunbar, one of 122 men, women and children who had sailed on her from England to Australia. After that he was known as ‘Lucky Jim’. It was an uninspired, absolutely accurate, nickname.
Lucky Jim’s survival and his subsequent account of what happened on the night of 20 August 1857, ensured that what might have been a mystery – how the clipper Dunbar came to be dashed and shattered on the cliffs at the base of the Gap – was seen to be an understandable, if tragic, error on the part of her captain.
The Dunbar’s captain, James Green, an experienced master well known and well liked in Sydney, had sailed her from Plymouth on 31 May. She was carrying 63 passengers, many of them families, a crew of 59 and 1,980 tons of cargo valued at £22,000. She enjoyed a swift passage and after just 82 days – almost two months faster than the average time for the trip – Dunbar was approaching Botany Bay at around 7 p.m. James Johnson was about to come on watch.
Captain Green took it slowly. The weather was worsening. A gale was blowing from the east-south-east; the ship was wallowing in rough seas; squalls and rainstorms and the encroaching darkness of the night made it difficult to see. But through the breaks in the weather Captain Green and his officers could see land. They were from six to eight miles out, they estimated. But then the darkness closed in and all that could be seen, now and then, was the revolving beam from South Head lighthouse.
‘When night came on we kept on course and shortly afterwards we saw the Sydney Light,’ Johnson later told the Dunbar inquest. The lighthouse was on the cliff tops close to South Head and the inexperienced – Captain Green was not – might think it was directly on South Head: the entrance into Sydney Harbour, however, was a significant distance further north.
Slowly Green took the Dunbar towards the light. Aboard the clipper few thought he intended to take her into the harbour. They would have to wait until morning; surely, the seas would be calm then. The captain of a passing steamer saw the Dunbar and hardly gave it a second thought. ‘I considered the ship perfectly safe,’ he told the inquest, though, ‘It was blowing heavy squalls, the weather stormy, with torrents of rain; there was a very heavy sea on…I am sure the captain of this ship could not have seen the Heads.’ And James Johnson, on watch, corroborated: ‘We could not see a hand before our face…we could not see the land but only the Light occasionally…nobody ever thought that the Captain would have tried to get in that night.’
But the Captain did try. He had calculated that his ship was about six miles from land, but in fact it was much closer – just two miles. And she was making so much leeway, he reckoned, that unless he could run her into the shelter of the harbour and anchor her the Dunbar would be driven ashore.
Only one survived the wreck of the clipper Dunbar. ‘Dead bodies by dozens were every minute being dashed upon the rocks…hurled in the air some 60 or 70 feet by the violence of the waves.’
Johnson finished his watch at midnight and as he prepared to go below noticed that the sails were set. The ship, he believed, was keeping a good distance from land, squaring away. ‘…there was no opening that I could see that would lead anyone to believe [we] were going into port.’ Then he heard ‘a faint cry from the second mate on the fo’c’sle head, “Breakers ahead!” Captain Green called to the steerman to put the helm hard aport.’
It was too late. Green had mistaken the inlet of the Gap for the entrance to the harbour. The clipper was heading straight for towering sandstone cliffs. Next, Johnson heard a frightful grinding sound: ‘She struck the rocks below first, and then bumped heavily over them’ to smash against the base of the cliffs, ‘shiver’ and break up.
‘And then the screaming began,’ Johnson recalled, ‘The passengers running about deck screaming for mercy. The captain was on the poop; he was cool and collected; there was great confusion and uproar on the deck with the shrieks of the passengers…I made for the cabin, but the sea was coming down there enough to smother one…saw some of the young ladies, when going into the cabin, running about in their chemises, screaming, screeching and crying…I was washed away with planks and broken timber upon a shelf of rock but immediately on the sea receding I got up a bit higher out of the reach of the back current.’
Johnson had been incredibly lucky. Below deck most of the passengers and crew were quickly drowned when the seas swamped in. Those on deck were washed helplessly into the swirling waters and pounded against the rocks. The Dunbar itself was shattered and scattered. But Johnson and three other men were swept onto the cliff face. By morning, precarious on a small ledge about 50 metres up, he was looking down on the disaster, the only survivor.
In the darkness the calamity went unnoticed by those few who lived around the Gap. The lighthouse keeper, however, had had a bad night. He had been kept awake by his agitated dog. It cried constantly, and, later, he saw it had worn a fresh path going to and from the cliff edge. In the morning, tired and irritable, he listened as his wife told him she had a nightmare about a man drowning. The man, she later told the inquest, was the image of James Johnson.
Dawn revealed a macabre scene. Bodies – scores of them – were swilling in the sea, washing in the foam around the rocks. ‘By three o’clock,’ said Bradshaw’s Narrative of the Wreck of the Dunbar, ‘some hundreds of cabs from Sydney, as well as several omnibuses, loaded to excess, had brought people to view the heart-rending scene of destruction going on at the Gap. Dead bodies by dozens were every minute being dashed upon the rocks by each wave, mountainous in themselves. Presently bodies without hands, legs, arms, bale goods, bedding, beams and every imaginable article was being hurled in the air some 60 or 70 feet by the violence of the waves.’ Bradshaw reported that cargo littered the beach. Beer casks branded Tooths, bits of bodies, flooring timber, the corpse of ‘a little boy, quite naked, and apparently about four years of age, with black hair, was picked up; also a cow, red with white spots, and short horns, was floating near this spot, surrounded by sharks, who were devouring the animal.’
There were hundreds of people – ghouls – now at the wreck. Looking down from the cliff tops, showered with spray, the Sydney Morning Herald’s man wrote, ‘We found the residents of that locality watching with great horror the dead and mutilated bodies as they were thrown upon the rocks, the succeeding waves washing off again the naked remains…the bodies were thrown up on the ledges of the rocks and again taken off by the violence of the surf.’
All but one. Clinging to the cliff high above the seething mass of bodies and wreckage, calling for help and waving a handkerchief as vigorously as he dared without risking a fall, was ‘Lucky Jim.’ And still no-one noticed him.
On Saturday morning a fifth of the population of Sydney – 10,000 people – were at South Head. ‘I, like most of the spectators, mingled in the general excitement then prevalent,’ said the Herald’s reporter, ‘when, behold, the joy of everybody was expressed by a shout of “A man on the rocks! A live man on the rocks. There he is! There he is!”’
For days after, bodies, mangled beyond identification, were washed ashore on the beaches of Middle and North Harbour along with the wreckage of the ship. Thousands lined the route as the bodies were taken to Campbelltown and buried in a common grave.
Jim Johnson’s evidence at the inquest on August 24 helped clear Captain Green’s name and a joint statement from the masters of 35 ships then in port supported the jury’s finding: ‘There may have been an error in judgment in the vessel being so close to the shore at night in such bad weather, but they do not attach any blame to Captain Green or his officers for the loss of the ship.’ It seems a kind finding.
Jim Johnson stayed on in Australia, and was working on the Newcastle lighthouse, when on 12 July 1866, the steamship Cawarra, with 60 people aboard, was wrecked trying to enter the port during a gale. There was only one survivor, Frederick Hedges. He was saved by ‘Lucky’ Jim Johnson.