Last year katie’s review of Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World put it on my radar. I was in a run of adding “bad things happen to good boats” to my reading diet (Madhouse at the End of the Earth, Ghost Ship) and this fell right into that book category. Joan Druett’s book chronicles the two different ships that wrecked on the Auckland Islands south of New Zealand in 1864. However, the available primary sources (and more interesting survival story) means that her work is more heavily about the Grafton and its five-man crew who all survived their nearly two years on the island. It is contrasted against the story of the Invercauld which wrecked in a much worse position about 20 miles north of the Grafton crew.
The subantarctic Auckland Islands are treacherous places to be wrecked, and in the 19th century it all but guaranteed death. The islands are rugged and mountainous with deep valleys between several steep cliffs which border the shore with little plant or animal life to help sustain people. Several attempts were made over the years to set up settlements on the islands, and they all failed due to the climate and poor soil quality. So, the fact that the men of the Grafton (Captain Thomas Musgrave, Francois Raynal, Alick Maclaren, George Harris, and Henry Forges) managed to survive – and how they did it – is inherently interesting.
Druett’s delivery of the information is where the book falls down a little for me. For most of the first half of the book (and the entire first third) she focuses exclusively on the history of the Grafton and its expedition to Campbell Island. What that means in execution though is that by the time she gets to incorporating the history of the Auckland Islands, the failed settlements and other wrecks, and the story of the Invercauld’s wreck and the terrible fate of its crew it all feels a bit secondary. She also over focuses in later sections on the minutiae of the hunting that the crew undertook – it doesn’t change, and I found myself skimming a bit. But this is still a fascinating book about an incredible case of survival, and how this wreck helped change efforts to prevent future deaths.
