The Shipwreck and Eventual Rescue of the Crew of the Bark Trinity

The whaling bark Trinity set sail from New London, Connecticut, on June 1, 1880, under Captain John Williams. It was doomed to founder on a lee shore and its crew to be marooned for fifteen months.

The voyage was not for whales, but for seal oil. Seal oil was less valuable, but whales were getting scarce by 1880. Hunting seal was a recognized alternate strategy. Its destination was Heard’s Island (now usually rendered “Heard Island:” I use the period form here) in the South Indian Ocean. Never heard of Heard’s Island? There is good reason for that. Imagine a triangle with the southwestern tip of Australia at one corner, the southern tip of Madagascar at another, and the bottom corner at the South Pole. Heard’s Island is roughly in the middle of this triangle. It is about 200 miles southeast of Kerguelen Island (which also shows up on Google Maps as “French Southern and Antarctic Lands”). Kerguelen was better known at this time to American sailors as “Desolation Island.” Desolation Island served as the stop-over on the way to Heard’s Island, which was smaller and considerably more desolate.

Heard’s Island was discovered by Captain John Heard in 1853 while sailing from Boston to Melbourne. He initially thought that it was a floating island, because he knew that he had sailed through the same spot multiple times previously. It was later determined that the island is a volcano, and Captain Heard was a lousy navigator. It was heavily populated by seals in the summer, presumably as a breeding ground, so from 1855 it was an occasional destination for whalers slumming after seals.

The island is 142 square miles, which doesn’t sound that bad, but there is a 9,000 foot mountain in the middle, complete with glaciers. About 80% of the island is permanently covered with ice. To complete the picture, that mountain is an active volcano, with intermittent lava flows. Harbors? It is to laugh. You anchor offshore and hope for the best. Hence our tale.  Here is this scenic wonderland:

The plan was to land small groups around the island to spend the summer hunting seals and rendering the blubber into oil. The voyage started out well. The Trinity set sail with 16 hands and in 25 days made the Cape Verde Islands. There it picked up 19 “Portuguese negroes” to round out the crew. It had a rough trip from there, but arrived at Desolation Island on September 4. There they deposited three month’s provisions. I’m not entirely sure why, but Desolation Island has a real harbor. (It even has a modern permanent population, manning a satellite tracking station.) My guess is that the plan was to return in the fall, with the bottom of the hold filled with casks of oil, and reload the provisions atop the cargo, and they wanted a sheltered spot to do this. From Desolation Island, the ship sailed to Heard’s Island. The crew deposited the first four-man hunting party with four months’ provision, then sailed to a different part of the island. Then disaster struck.

It is an old, sad story: a howling gale, a lee shore, anchors dragging. We all know the routine. They were heading for the rocks, so the captain determined their only chance was to slip the anchor cables, set a judicious selection of sail, and pick the best spot to run aground. They made the best of it, grounding within swimming distance of the shore. The weather was too high to row a boat, so a volunteer took a line and swam to land. With this they were able to run a boat back and forth, landing the crew and some provisions.

Now for your shipwreck pro tip: In all the stories, our marooned hero goes back to the ship once the storm has passed, ferries supplies and equipment to the island, and sets up housekeeping. The problem with this strategy is that it assumes that the ship is going to be there the next day. Yes, I know you are battered and exhausted and suffering from hypothermia. I don’t care. Unload the damn ship! Don’t, as our did our heroes, light a fire and take a nap. The upshot is that they had little equipment and only two or three months’ provisions.

The good news is that there were several shacks on the island, built by previous sealing expeditions. The officers took one, the white sailors another, and the Portuguese a third. The other good news was that seal meat is edible, in a pinch (and if this doesn’t qualify, nothing does), and the oil is suitable for the bonfire we all know to prepare as a signal. There also were penguins and, in season, penguin eggs. Last of all, there was a species of plant described as a “wild cabbage.” By all accounts, it was quite noxious, but edible with enough boiling, and undoubtedly responsible for the absence of scurvy.

Hunting was the crew’s main activity. The penguins were initially easy to catch, but eventually figured out what was what, and it “became very difficult and tiresome to catch them, as they propelled themselves over the ice and snow with a sliding, jumping motion, and there were days that, despite desperate hunting, only one or two penguins represented the entire catch of the various parties.” This image is absolutely adorable! Except for the starvation part, of course. This also accounted for the only two deaths (which is quite remarkable, considering), when a party was caught in a storm and two died of exposure. There were some scarce periods, particularly late in the winter, but the situation was more or less sustainable more or less indefinitely. The real horror was on June 14, 1881, when the last of the tobacco ran out.

They figured out pretty early on that they were going to spend a year there, but they had high hopes for another expedition the following summer. This would be expected early in the summer, so as to get a full season’s sealing in. There was disappointment when no ship appeared. They did see a boat in December of 1881. This was the party of four that had been the first hunting camp. They had worked over the previous summer, but the Trinity never showed up. Walking cross country over glaciers was out of the question, so they constructed a makeshift boat to hunt up the main crew. Following the reunion, the four decided that conditions were better at their own camp, so they went back.

Then on January 12, 1882, arrived the US Navy corvette Marion under Captain Silas W. Terry. The Marion had been in Montevideo, Uruguay, preparing to return to the United States, when on November 10, 1881, it received orders to proceed to Heard’s Island to search for the crew of the Trinity. It is not clear what the source of the tip was. Desolation Island had a drop box where the Trinity had left mail on its way to Heard’s Island, so some passing ship might have picked that up. My guess is that the Trinity’s owners in New London put in a request to the Navy. Heard’s Island had been its destination all along, so that was the obvious place to look.

There follows an amusing anecdote: the Marion’s orders include a delightful bit of bureaucratic wackiness. They named the island and gave its latitude and longitude. That last, however, substituted “west” for “east.” The Marion nearly went on a cruise of the numberless islands off Tierra del Fuego when some unnamed navigational hero produced a private chart that showed Heard’s Island’s actual location.

The Marion had the advantage on the Trinity in that it had steam engines. This was the transitional era before steam had the range for really long-range voyaging. Long-range ships still relied on sails, but the engines came in handy when close to shore. Whalers like the Trinity lacked such fripperies, of course – hence the shipwreck on a lee shore – but a vessel such as the Marion had no such worries.

The Marion’s appearance was accompanied by all the usual excitement: frantic waving of arms, fear that the ship would sail on, and the lighting of the bonfire. It was too late to land a boat, so the Marion hove to and the next morning sent in a boat to a joyous reception. You will be happy to learn that yes, they also stopped and picked up those other four crewmen. Captain Terry ordered the survivors’ clothing be thrown overboard and issued new clothes from the ship’s stores. The Marion arrived in Capetown just in time to assist the British ship Poonah, which had managed to run aground in Table Bay. So a good time was had by all. The Trinity’s crew was turned over to the American consul.

The captain and the two mates took sail for England in a mail packet. Captain Williams and Mr. Keeney, the first mate, had some means to pay for their passage. The second mate, John Esmond, was impecunious, but under the circumstances the captain of the packet gave him free passage to Southampton, and a letter of explanation that got him on a steamer from there to New York, arriving April 2, 1882, and from there traveling to Boston, arriving on the 5th.

The story attracted a lot of attention. This post is compiled from Esmond’s story, as reported in the New York Herald of April 7, 1882, and the Boston Herald April 6, 1882; Captain Terry’s initial dispatch, published in the San Francisco Chronicle of April 3, 1882; and an account by Ensign W. I. Chambers in the March 1883 issue of the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. There was also an account by a Lieutenant W. Winder in the December 1885 issue of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, but the story clearly was “improved,” and I doubt the reliability of any detail not mentioned elsewhere.

Now, I know what you are thinking at this point: “Gosh, Richard! That is a rip-roaring tale, apart from the disgraceful absence of cannibalism. But what does it have to do with baseball?” I’m glad you asked. How did the castaways pass their time? They had saved a few issues of Harper’s Weekly, plus some navigational and religious books, so they had their lending library. But what else?

…a baseball club was organized, and on one sunny day the first of a series of the national game was inaugurated. There was some little difficulty at first because one of the Portuguese was appointed referee and was not posted on the rules of the League, but it was finally arranged by putting the colored man in the field, and appointing the cook to the responsible judicial post, which he filled to the satisfaction of all, notwithstanding the dinner was somewhat late in consequence. It was a queer sight when the wooden ball prepared by the carpenter after a vast amount of consultation flew from the bat, and was chased by a number of bearded and hairy-coated fielders. The game was a success and was followed by others.

Sadly, this detail is almost certainly bullshit. It appears only in the New York Herald account. The U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings is by far the most detailed account, and includes descriptions of how they passed their time. Nothing like this appears there. Baseball was in a boom period in 1882, so this story would be thought an improvement to the tale. It falls into the “seems too good to be true” category, and we know how those usually play out.

It is still a great story. I think we can all agree on the moral: if you are going to be shipwrecked, aim for this place: