Towering waves tore Captain Jean-Raymond Thomas’s family from his grasp in 1975, during one of Northland’s worst maritime tragedies.
This week, the Frenchman returned to New Zealand for a commemorative gathering to mark the demise 50 years ago of his command ship the freighter Capitaine Bougainville and 16 of its crew and passengers.
At 3.40am on September 3, 1975, Thomas gave word to his eight passengers and 29 crew to abandon ship after a fire sparked by the storm, broke out in the engine room and began engulfing the vessel.
As per tradition, the captain was last to leave the vessel, getting into a lifeboat with his wife Philippa, their infant daughter Yasmine, and Philippa’s other two children, Mua and Tano.
However, the sea was merciless.
“The lifeboat was turned over 10 or a dozen times before we drifted near the beach,” Thomas recalled.
“Each time, someone lost their grip. My children were washed away, one by one. I was supporting my wife on the keel, but around daylight, she died from the cold and exposure. I lost my grip on her.”
In what he later described as their “last kiss,” Thomas pressed his lips to Philippa’s forehead before she slipped beneath the waves.
Philippa’s body was one of seven that were never recovered.
About 150 people attended the commemorative service this week, including descendants of those involved in the disaster, local residents, Whangārei’s mayor, and emergency services personnel.
Whananaki School principal Shaun Te Pania spoke of the importance of keeping the memory alive. Stories like this grounded communities and built empathy to be passed on to future generations.
Wearing a Māori cloak gifted to him at the first commemoration in 1976, Thomas told the crowd how the place that had taken so much from him had also become the place where he was “reborn”.
Survivors who had reached the shore before him were guided through the darkness by the beacon-like glow of a single candle burning at one of only two houses on the hill at that time: the home of Ani Mihi Maki-Cross’ who had lit the candle so her 4-year-old grand-daughter could find her way to the toilet.
Thomas, who had staggered ashore alone, broken, and exhausted, stayed several weeks with Maki-Cross. He needed his mother but she was in France so Maki-Cross, he said, became his Māori mother.
The two formed a deep bond that endured across oceans until she died in 1995 but continues today among their wider families.
“I was a grown man, but at that time in your life, when you’re nearly destroyed and in so much agony, you need your mother,” he said.
“I had been through the agony of my ship, my crew, my family — and my own agony. I was still surviving, but I didn’t know what state I was in.
“But she knew. For days and days, she stayed near me and found the words to heal my wounds. She was very special. I don’t know if she had studied psychology, but she didn’t need to — she found the right words.”
Thomas said the tragedy not only changed his life, but those of Maki-Cross and other locals involved in the rescue and recovery.
Weeks later, still staying with Maki-Cross, he returned to the beach where he had come ashore — this time to swim.
“It was a way to communicate with the people who were not recovered and are still out there, including Philippa,” he said.
It was also part of a healing process that enabled him to return to his career at sea.
His recovery, Thomas said, was only possible because of all those who had stood by him.
The ship’s owners offered him another vessel when he was ready and upon returning to France, Thomas became the master of a car ferry crossing the English Channel.
“It helped me to reconstruct myself,” he said.
Four years later, he met his wife Francoise. They had three sons and now have grandchildren.
At the commemorative service, Thomas said the years had passed, but as he stood beside the memorial monument looking out on that day’s calm ocean, his memories of how different it was during that violent storm 50 years ago were vivid — “as if it was only yesterday”.
He was grateful the local community continued to commemorate the tragedy and that his own children also knew the story well.
“Six years ago, my son and his family were here, and I know they will come again. He’s now part of the Whananaki story, and the story will carry on within my family’s story,” Thomas said.
The monument, he said, was not just a marker to visit occasionally and remember those who perished, but a spiritual anchor that can be seen from the sea.
“When we are gone and this monument still stands, it will say to the ocean: you are beautiful, you attract me with your deep blue waters — but I know also that you are sometimes furious… you can be a killer.”
Sarah Curtis is a news reporter for the Northern Advocate, focusing on a wide range of issues. She has nearly 20 years’ experience in journalism, most of which she spent court reporting in Gisborne and on the East Coast.