Blackest hour of NZ seafaring

By RUSSELL STONE

Exactly 140 years ago New Zealand experienced what remains to this day its worst maritime disaster. In the early afternoon of February 7, 1863, HMS Orpheus, a brand-new steam corvette, flagship of the Australia squadron of the Royal Navy with a complement of 259 men, ran aground on a sandbank near the mouth of the Manukau Harbour.

The ship was coming from Sydney on an emergency visit to Auckland where its commander, Captain W.F. Burnett, head of the Australia station, intended to rendezvous and confer with certain captains of Her Majesty's ships in New Zealand waters.

On the morning of the 7th, signalman Edward Wing, who was on duty at the signal station on the northern head of the Manukau Harbour sighted the Orpheus. As the ship neared the station, he gave the signal "Take the bar".

After some preliminary manoeuvrings, Captain Burnett ordered the steersman of the Orpheus to turn the ship due east, confidently expecting that it could now safely negotiate the northerly channel through the difficult Manukau bar.

When the ship thus turned, signalman Wing was horrified, for the vessel was now directly on course to strike the northern part of a huge shoal of ironsand.

He hoisted a fresh signal "Keep vessel off shore. Danger". But the steersman on the Orpheus did not have time to act on this warning. And so at 1.30pm, the ship, with a full head of steam on, and at the speed of 8 knots, ran aground on the shoal and stuck fast.

The Orpheus broke up with alarming suddenness. After the 16ft screw, which the commodore ordered the engine room to set at full steam astern, failed to budge the ship, it slewed around and broached to. By so doing it turned broadside on to the powerful Tasman rollers which were sweeping towards the coast.

In no time these waves smashed the bulwarks on the port side of the ship, and burst open the hatch covers, allowing a huge quantity of water to cascade down into the lower decks.

With the decks awash and heavily weighed down with water, the ship bumped violently against the seabed and, veering over at a perilous angle, began to break up. The crew scrambled up the rigging in the forlorn hope of rescue.

In the late afternoon, however, the commodore, realising that the position had become hopeless, shouted to the men to say their prayers, and gave permission to those who could swim to try to save themselves. A few did so.

Some survived when two small boats lying a short distance away in the lee of the ship picked them up. These boats periodically deposited the exhausted survivors in a small coastal steamer called the Wonga Wonga, which had anchored nearby.

Towards midnight the small craft and the Wonga Wonga abandoned their search for survivors.

Over the next fortnight, naval ratings and groups of volunteers comprising settlers and Maori combed the coastline for bodies, many of which had been borne by the sea far from the scene of the wreck.

Only 70 crewmen survived. When the true extent of the disaster was revealed, grief and shock numbed the infant capital of Auckland.

Two aspects of the foundering of the Orpheus made the loss of life particularly poignant and hard to bear for the people of Auckland.

The first was the youth of those who drowned. The average age of the crew was 25. Many who perished were midshipmen training to be officers, or boys (an official category encompassing lads aged 13 to 18) training to become full Jack Tars.

The second cause of popular distress was that the disaster seemed inexplicable at the time, as, indeed, it seems to us today. After all, the ship ran aground on a fine summer day, with excellent visibility, and with (at the time the ship first ran aground) no more than a moderate southwest wind.

Obviously there had been a catastrophic blunder. But by whom? It does not surprise that the loss of the Orpheus gave rise to more exhaustive inquiries than any other disaster in 19th-century Auckland.

There was a ministerial inquiry, a wide-ranging coroner's inquest, a court-martial conducted at Portsmouth on board HMS Victory, Admiral Nelson's old flagship, a report by the Admiralty Hydrographer, as well as a number of searching local investigations. And the passionate debate lingered until about 1930, ending with the death of Edward Wing, regarded by the Royal Navy as a kind of prime suspect.

The prolonged wrangling yielded no consensus. Some people, it seemed, were more anxious to line up scapegoats than to arrive at the truth (parallels to the inquiry into the Air New Zealand Erebus disaster may suggest themselves to the modern reader).

Simplifying greatly, let it be said that attributing responsibility for the wreck of the Orpheus is not easy. But in some measure the following people and public bodies must bear responsibility.

Commodore Burnett, a strong-minded if not wilful man, who was in charge of the course of the Orpheus, clearly failed to use up-to-date charts that recorded the northward drift over the previous 10 years of the shoal on which his ship foundered.

Or did the Royal Navy fail to provide Burnett with these necessary charts? The Admiralty Hydrographer certainly had the opportunity and time to do so.

Further, it has been reasonably argued that the signals flown at the signal station were tardily displayed and ambiguous. It must be said that the equipment Wing had to use was inadequate, largely thanks to the provincial Government.

Local authorities failed to provide a lifeboat and crew to respond to such an emergency. Nor had they placed buoys that adequately marked the two main channels through the bar.

Thorough documentation of the inquiries is available in most main public libraries. But the best single source is an excellent book by Thayer Fairburn, who devoted a lifetime's study to the disaster.

* Russell Stone is Auckland University's emeritus professor of history.