Adventures and misadventures on the wild and remote subantarctic islands

Thursday, 27 September 2018

Shona Riddell's great-great grandmother was born on Auckland Island during a short-lived and disastrous 19th-century settlement. In 2016, Shona visited her ancestor's remote birthplace, and was inspired to write a book about New Zealand's subantarctic islands and their dramatic human history.

The story, as I first heard it, begins in 1849 when a young married couple named Isaac and Sarah Cripps sailed across the world from England with their three children to be part of a brand new, ill-fated whaling and agricultural settlement on the isolated Auckland Islands, 465 kilometres south of Bluff.

The subantarctic township of Hardwicke was the vision of Charles Enderby, of the Samuel Enderby & Sons whaling and shipping empire.

Enderby had never been to the Auckland Islands but had read reports of their potential from Antarctic explorers such as James Clark Ross, who had visited the islands in 1840.

With government approval, Enderby hired a few dozen men, including labourers, farmers, blacksmiths, carpenters, an accountant and two doctors, who were all promised a better life with mild weather and abundant pastures.

**READ MORE:

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* Little wonder subantarctic islands uninhabited

* Treasure hunters solve 180-year-old mystery**

In August 1849, three ships sailed from England carrying 60 men, women and children, some livestock, and prefabricated buildings for the new settlement. Two of the ships made it to the Auckland Islands in early December.

The third ship (the Fancy, which didn't live up to its name), with my ancestors on board, arrived three weeks later and almost sailed right past the islands due to heavy fog and an inept captain, who was immediately fired on arrival.

To everyone's surprise, the islands that were thought to be uninhabited already had a settlement of Ngāti Mutunga Māori and their Moriori slaves from the Chatham Islands, who had been living there for seven years.

The British settlers quickly got to work, clearing the rough-barked rātā trees in Davis Cove, Port Ross, and constructing buildings and pathways. Isaac was employed as a 'general servant', and Sarah became the colony midwife.

Their fourth child, my great-great grandmother Harriet, was born in 1851 on Auckland Island – an unusual birthplace – and she was added to Hardwicke's official registry (there were 16 births, five weddings and four deaths recorded during the settlement).

Life was incredibly difficult at Hardwicke. It rained almost constantly, strong south-westerlies buffeted the islands, their crops failed to flourish in the boggy soil, very few whales were caught, and there was heavy drinking and discontent.

The flimsy cottages barely provided adequate shelter from the elements. Unsurprisingly, Hardwicke collapsed in 1852, and most of the disillusioned settlers either shifted to Australia or returned to England. A few families, including my ancestors, moved to New Zealand; Sarah had been bedridden by seasickness on the four-and-a-half-month journey from England and refused to sail any further than necessary.

The world's subantarctic islands circle the lower part of the globe, below New Zealand, Australia, South America and Africa, in the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties latitudes. They are tiny specks in the middle of vast oceans and are lashed continuously by wind and rain. They contain endemic plants and wildlife, and most have a history of sealing, whaling, exploration, and shipwrecks.

New Zealand's subantarctic islands (the Aucklands, Snares, Bounties, Antipodes and Campbell) are all uninhabited these days but have had their share of visitors and settlers from around the world.

The variety of stories (some triumphant, some not) is astonishing: European explorers and astronomers, plundering sealers and whalers, settlements, shipwrecks, castaway search and rescue voyages, farming attempts, scientists, wartime coastwatchers … and, more recently, conservation triumphs and adventure tourism.

While researching my family history, I turned to all the books I could find about the Auckland Islands. However, there weren't many, and most were old and out of print. Piles of papers and conversations started to feel like a potential book of my own, but I knew I couldn't write one without going there.

I'd always felt a pull south because of my family connection, and yet I was uncertain about travelling via ship over the turbulent Southern Ocean and stepping foot on remote islands, where it hails in the summer and where you don't turn your back on barking sea lions. I was particularly wary of visiting a location previously known as the 'Islands of Despair'.

I was directed to Rodney Russ, a conservationist and then-owner of Heritage Expeditions, a tourism company based in Christchurch. Russ had spent decades travelling to the Auckland Islands, so one day on a whim I emailed him to explain my family history and my wish to write a book.

That casual email changed my life. Within minutes I found myself on the phone with Russ, who offered me a spare berth on his ship Spirit of Enderby, which was about to depart for the Auckland Islands. Terrified but excited, I said yes, then no, then yes again.

I boarded a few days later with 50 other passengers, ranging in age from students in their early 20s to retirees, and mostly from New Zealand. Everyone was kind and friendly, and I felt immediately comfortable.

Word quickly spread of my Hardwicke 'lineage', and one night I found myself standing up to give a talk in the ship's lecture room (the biggest laugh came when I described the town surgeon, Doctor Rodd, who was so fond of the bottle that he was regularly confined to nearby Shoe Island, a tiny offshore islet with only a barrel for shelter, which quickly became known as 'Rodd's Castle').

However, it wasn't all smooth sailing. Conditions were rough on our first night, and as soon as we exited the port of Bluff, the ship started rocking like a seismic event. Having naïvely expected a bit of side-to-side motion, the pitching and rolling made me lose both my equilibrium and my dinner.

But rolling over the giant waves of the Southern Ocean was part of the adventure. We were surrounded on all sides by the open sea and flanked by albatrosses as we headed south, and I felt a growing awareness of what my ancestors must have experienced.

We reached the Aucklands after 36 hours, and after a wonderful day trekking across Enderby Island and meeting the NZ sea lions (rāpoka), the yellow-eyed penguins (hoiho) and the giant-leafed megaherb plants, it looked like I would miss out on a Hardwicke visit when the clouds rolled in and the winds began to pick up.

But Russ wasn't about to let that happen; he put me in a Zodiac and personally zoomed me across the harbour to visit the Hardwicke site (now overgrown with Southern rātā trees and with bricks half-buried in the peaty ground), and also pay my respects at the local cemetery with its six grave markers: two Hardwicke-born infants, one sailor and three castaways.

When I returned to the ship (soaking wet but never happier), I was greeted with hugs and applause from the other passengers. Almost 165 years later, I had made it to my great-great grandmother's remote birthplace.

After heading further south to Campbell Island, I returned home with hundreds of photos and a renewed sense of purpose. What had started as merely a wish to retell forgotten stories became more of a tribute to the islands themselves, their rare and endemic plants and wildlife, and the people who have lived and worked there.

Despite their isolation and decades' worth of conservation work, much of the wildlife is still vulnerable for reasons that include predation, shifting air and water temperatures, fisheries and diseases.

Today, New Zealand's subantarctic islands are all UNESCO World Heritage sites. Instead of being exploited, as they were in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they are guarded by the Department of Conservation. (Subantarctic Macquarie Island is Australian territory and still has a staffed research station.)

Awareness of New Zealand's subantarctic islands is growing thanks to media coverage of the ongoing conservation work.

Many will be familiar with the recent Million Dollar Mouse project on Antipodes Island and will have seen drone footage of southern right whales or tohorā, which breed in the harbours of Auckland and Campbell islands, but most people would probably still struggle to identify the islands on a world map.

It felt like the right time to tell the old stories from a 21st-century perspective, include women's stories as more than just an historical footnote, and share photos of the islands in all their drama and glory.

I also wanted to describe what it's like to go there as a modern-day adventure tourist, with quarantine procedures and thermal gear – and how it feels to visit a far-flung location devoid of people, buildings, traffic and wi-fi.

In a nutshell: incredible.

* 'Trial of Strength: Adventures and Misadventures on the Wild and Remote Subantarctic Islands' by Shona Riddell. Exisle Publishing, on sale from 1 October. Hardcover, $39.99.