185. Shipwreck: A Tale Of Survival and Cannibalism

In 1864, two ships wrecked on opposite ends of Auckland Island. A frozen, abandoned archipelago south of New Zealand. The Grafton's five-man crew built a cabin, held elections, and taught each other languages for eighteen months. Twenty miles away, the Invercauld's twenty-five-man crew collapsed into starvation and cannibalism, and the one sailor who fought to keep them alive was erased from every published account. TW: Cannibalism, mention of animal hunting Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@heartstartspounding?lang=en and⁠ Instagram⁠ https://www.instagram.com/heartstartspounding/ for a daily dose of horror.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kaelyn Moore?

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• 0:45Kaelyn Moore?

  but our listeners can now get an additional 20% off plus free shipping with code HSP at J I Y U skin dot com. That's J I Y U skin dot com and use code HSP for an additional 20% off. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. This episode is brought to you by Toyota. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal from your local Toyota dealer. Make a smart buy on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or get a Corolla Sedan, packed with the latest features, advanced tech, and head-turning style. Take a test drive in two of Toyota's most popular SUVs: the spacious, family-friendly Grand Highlander and adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid

• 1:30Kaelyn Moore?

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• 2:03Kaelyn Moore?

  Welcome back to another episode of Hearth Soars Pounding, Dark Summer Edition. As always, I'm your host, Kaelyn Moore. Before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who listened to our Alpine divorce episode from last week and reached out. I heard so many stories from a lot of you about being on hikes with someone who tried to leave you behind, and it was honestly terrifying. One story I got was from someone who wrote, "I haven't experienced the Alpine divorce while hiking, but my ex-partner would frequently leave me behind walking after we had a baby. One time I was carrying the baby and walking our little dog on a leash when my partner decided to cut through a private property during a walk. I followed because he was familiar with the area, but he quickly sped off.

• 2:44Kaelyn Moore?

  The property owner's dogs attacked my dog and I got bitten while holding my baby over my head. The owners came out and looked at me like I was crazy for suddenly appearing in their yard. I was confused and scared and had jerked my dog up by her neck with the leash to save her. He also disappeared while walking with me at a music festival while I was pregnant in Canada. We lived in Virginia, not even in the same country. Needless to say, I stopped going anywhere with him without my own car and eventually stopped going anywhere with him." Wow, you guys have truly been through a lot, but thank you for listening and thank you for sharing your stories. Now, for today's episode, there's nothing more summery than an island. Think sitting on the beach, wind in your hair, nothing but ocean for miles on either

• 3:29Kaelyn Moore?

  side of you. But today, I'm gonna flip that image on its head a little bit, because I want to tell you about an abandoned island floating in uncharted waters in the South Pacific and about the ship that crashed onto its shores. I want to tell you about the horrors that unfolded after the fact and the plot twist to this story that no one saw coming, not even me. But before we get into it, I wanted to announce that the High Council on Patreon voted that our bonus episode this month is going to be all about dark tourism. I've just started the research on this and I cannot believe what people travel around the world to do, and I don't think you'll be able to believe it either. It's a perfect topic for summer, and if you want to help pick our bonus episodes every month, you can join the High Council tier on Patreon. And if you-

• 4:12Kaelyn Moore?

  You want to listen, you can join Apple Podcast subscriptions or Patreon with a free trial. I've set up free trials for both, so it's a great time to join. We also just announced that our book club, which meets on the Patreon free tier, is meeting on August 7th at 12:00 PM Pacific. We're reading Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman, which is going to be Other Mommy. You know, the trailer just came out for that movie. You might have seen it. Come, join us, chat with us. It's going to be a good time. Okay, I'll see you guys over there after this episode. But for now, let's get into it.

• 4:44Kaelyn Moore?

  It was just past sundown on May 10th, 1864, and this was about to be the worst day of Robert Holding's life. He was standing on the deck of the Invercauld, a giant wooden ship heading from Melbourne, Australia to Peru. The fog was so thick that the sea and the sky had become the same gray nothing. The voyage would be rough and vomit inducing, but by the end of it, Robert would be able to finally make it back home to England. He was 23 years old, English, and he had been aboard the Invercauld for exactly one week. He didn't really know the other sailors on this ship. They were mostly Scotsmen, and they had been sailing together much longer than Robert had been on the ship. So Robert was a real outsider, and he was just

• 5:26Kaelyn Moore?

  looking for a ride home. The Invercauld was a really big ship. It was over 800 tons. It had three iron masts, wire rigging instead of rope. She was built to haul freight across really rough seas, and her crew of 25 had every reason to trust her. That day, Captain George Delgarneau knew that the weather was starting to turn, so he cranked the wheel around to try to get out of the worst of the oncoming storm. But that's when he heard someone scream from the bow in a panicked voice. Land. To the side of the boat, materializing out of the fog like a wall, were these big sheer cliffs, and the boat was now heading straight towards them. Captain Delgarneau had estimated that they were near the southwestern tip of Auckland Island,

• 6:10Kaelyn Moore?

  which was a cluster of sub-Antarctic islands roughly 290 miles south of New Zealand. He ordered First Mate Andrew Smith to turn hard to starboard and just clear the island altogether.

• 6:23Kaelyn Moore?

  Had guessed their position wrong by about 20 miles. They weren't south of the island. They were north and now they had turned straight into the rocks. Every man rushed to the deck. Robert was thrown back and forth with each wave. He could barely keep on his feet. The rain started coming down hard. It was sideways. It was freezing and the current was dragging them closer and closer to the cliffs. Every single moment. Captain Del Gano sent the sailors to unfurl every sail they had. They needed all the pull they could get to get away from the coast. But it just wasn't enough. Captain Del Gano screamed for the anchor to be dropped in a last effort to avoid the cliffs. But it was too late. The hull struck the reefs hard. The front of the ship caved in.

• 7:08Kaelyn Moore?

  The three iron masts collapsed onto the deck and the weight of them, hundreds of pounds of metal, dragged every inch of the rigging and the sail into the water. The invercald broke apart fast. The last thing that Robert saw on the worst day of his life was the icy water meeting his face. Or so he thought. Robert's head bobbed above the water and he realized he wasn't dead after all. He dragged himself onto a narrow beach in the dark. A blanket of dense fog was now covering everything. And for a moment, he actually thought that he was the only one who had survived. But then these shapes began appearing on the coast and he could see men pulling themselves from the surf one by one. And he recognized a couple of them.

• 7:51Kaelyn Moore?

  There was second mate, James Mahoney, the cook. There was a pair of cabin boys. There was also Captain Del Gano and Andrew Smith. Robert counted this group in his head. 19. 19 men had made it to shore, which meant that six of them had gone down with the ship. Now, the beach that this crew found themselves on was a strip of sand that was backed by a cliff face that rose straight up into the sky and then vanished into the clouds. They couldn't see it, but this was basically what the whole horrible island was like. Just rugged cliffs that dropped straight into the water. It's an impossible island to cross by foot. And the only thing that this crew had left of their ship was a fragment of the stern.

• 8:34Kaelyn Moore?

  It was barely visible and a search of the shore turned up two pounds of waterlogged biscuits and three pounds of salted pork. That was it. 19 men and five pounds of food. All stuck on this abandoned island that ships intentionally tried to avoid. Great. It would have been easy for Robert to have just sat down and given up in that moment, but depression hates a moving target. So in a burst of survival-driven adrenaline, he got to work. He collected driftwood, he built a shelter against the overhang of a cliff, five feet by eight, and all nineteen men crammed into it. Next, he needed to build a fire. Two matchbooks had survived the wreck, but most of the matches were soaking

• 9:16Kaelyn Moore?

  wet. And that's when first mate Andrew Smith had the bright idea to dry these matches by the fire. And of course, half of the box caught fire and was destroyed immediately. Robert was able to grab the remaining matches out of Smith's hand, but that's when he came to the terrifying realization that not only was he stranded on this island, but most of these guys were idiots. But, Robert thought, that might be okay, because at least they all had a leader, Captain Del Gano. Sure, he was kind of the reason they were there in the first place due to his navigational guesstimates, but maybe he could help the men organize until help somehow found them. But five days passed, and then six, and Captain

• 9:58Kaelyn Moore?

  Del Gano gave no orders, no instructions. He didn't even try to come up with a plan. Instead, Robert watched as he sat against the cliff face with the other officers while the crew scattered along the beach, scraping snails off of rocks, chewing kelp, drinking from a nearby waterfall. This was going to be every man for himself. And that really hardened something inside of Robert. He was just a sailor, he was the newest guy aboard, he didn't have any friends in the crew, and no authority to give any orders. But the officers weren't leading. Del Gano hadn't lifted a finger since they washed ashore, and if someone didn't do something, they were all going to become seagull food. So

• 10:39Kaelyn Moore?

  Robert spotted a crack in the cliff face, a rough seam in the rock that kind of worked as a path. If they could get to higher ground, maybe they would find animals on this island. There could even be sheep here. Every hillside like this back in Australia where they had come from had sheep on it. And Robert spent summers prospecting around Melbourne, and there were- Always sheep. And so Robert started climbing this cliff. It was 2,000 feet. It was nearly vertical. It was freezing rain nearly the entire time. Halfway up, he said that his hands went numb, but he kept going. He told himself that there was going to be a whole flock of sheep at the top. Fat, stupid sheep, easy for his idiot shipmates to catch.

• 11:20Kaelyn Moore?

  And everyone was going to eat that night. He finally pulled himself up over the top ridge and saw that there was just grass, not one living thing as far as his eyes could see. To the south, there were mountain ranges that vanished into the clouds. To the east, there was more scrubs stretching all the way to the horizon, but no sheep, no animals at all, actually. And feeling pretty defeated, he climbed back down. The scene on the beach was even worse than he had left it. Men were slumped against the cliff staring into nothing. Others had totally wandered off. Captain Del Gano sat where Robert had last seen him in the same position, like he had not moved. And Robert couldn't order these men to do anything. He knew that they weren't going to listen to him.

• 12:03Kaelyn Moore?

  But he also knew that he couldn't just wallow on the beach. He needed to convince everyone to start moving up over that cliff's edge to the other side of the island. Maybe, just maybe there would be more resources there, like seals or something to eat. So he went to work the only way he could. He started going man to man, talking quietly, persuading them to stand up and try to climb the cliff with him. It was really slow. Some of these guys could barely walk by that point. They had been at sea for far longer than Robert had, and they were already really malnourished. So Robert helped him however he could. He offered them a hand. He would lift them up over that cliff path. But it was not easy. Halfway up, one of the guys lost his footing and fell about 1,000 feet.

• 12:48Kaelyn Moore?

  But the rest of them just kept climbing. And when they finally reached the top, most of them collapsed where they stood. And for the next two weeks, the survivors tried to head east across the rugged terrain to search for resources. Robert kept turning around to see that the group was smaller than the day before. He couldn't have said, when the cook stopped being among them, no one announced it. He just turned around one evening, counted faces. And saw that he wasn't there anymore. But it was on this walk that Robert noticed something that made his stomach turn. Captain Del Garno, First Mate Smith, and Second Mate Mahoney were ordering the youngest men in the crew to fetch water from a nearby stream. The officers drank from the boys' booths while the young men laid down and caught their breath, completely wiped from just the short journey.

• 13:33Kaelyn Moore?

  I mean, not only was the leadership totally useless, but they were making the younger guys do all the work for them. Eventually, they caught a small pig, but everyone was so hungry it was gone in just a few minutes. The days all started blurring into each other. They would wake before light, rummage around for food with the energy they had, collapse in the scrub, shiver through the night, pressed against into the other men for warmth, then they would wake up and do it again. The only way that Robert could track the time passing was by the faces that stopped appearing at the fire each night. But eventually, Robert got really sick of the leaders. And so he formed this splinter group. It was him and five other men that wanted to head back towards the wreck just to see if anything else had washed ashore, any food that they didn't see before.

• 14:17Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, unfortunately, nothing had, and it was pretty demoralizing. So that night, they huddled around a fire in a lean-to. And that's when one of the guys said something that I think a lot of the men had already been thinking. It had been over 20 days at that point. There was no food left, no hope of finding more. It was finally time. One of them had to die so the others could eat. "They should draw sticks," he said. Now, Robert really started panicking at this. He had been trying to prevent this exact thing from happening. He wanted to keep looking for food, and plus, all the other guys knew each other way better. Robert was the least malnourished of the group because he had been on the ship the least amount of time.

• 15:01Kaelyn Moore?

  And so it was pretty much going to be him on the spit. So Robert rejected this idea, but the rest of the group was already nodding in agreement. Cannibalism was preferable to starvation.

• 15:14Kaelyn Moore?

  They would decide who would go in the morning. The five other guys laid down to sleep, but not Robert. He laid there in the dark, listening to the others breathe, convinced that the moment he closed his eyes, someone was going to crack his skull with a rock and try to eat him. He stayed awake for the entire night. And at the first light of dawn, he got to his feet without a sound and he walked out of the lean-to and he went straight for the cliff and started climbing again. He never saw any of those men again. Robert found the main group a day or so later, higher up on the mountain, still pushing east through that thick scrub. Minus the dead and the missing, there were just nine of them now. Only a few of them could still walk properly. The most abled body were, you guessed it, Captain Del Gano, First Mate Smith, Second Mate Mahoney,

• 15:59Kaelyn Moore?

  but also one of the cabin boys and the ship's carpenter, who was a seaman named Fritz. As they moved further east as a group, something really changed. The bush started looking neater, more orderly, almost like someone had once tried to cultivate it. And then, on June 5th, First Mate Andrew Smith spotted something over the next ridge. A chimney. The men just started running. After a month of starving and watching each other die, the sight of a chimney meant people. It meant that there was food out there, maybe rescue. They ran into the skeleton of this small house that the chimney belonged to, only to find that it was this little abandoned community. They had actually stumbled into the ruins

• 16:43Kaelyn Moore?

  of a settlement called Hardwick. It was this old European settlement that had been attempted on Auckland Island a decade earlier, but it had failed in under two years. The weather was way too harsh on the island for farming. Even potatoes grew hard and small in the frozen soil. There was a small epidemic of scurvy, several murders and a string of corrupt administrators. And that just finished off the entire settlement. Robert saw this and he knew exactly what this meant. People had tried to live here, but the island said no. The nine survivors set up camp amongst the ruins with five people crammed into a lean to that Robert had found. There was also four that stayed in what was left of the house. It was better than being down on the exposed beach at least.

• 17:27Kaelyn Moore?

  Captain Del Gano and the others refused to leave this house. So Robert decided he was going to go scout for food alone. He found a cove that had a couple more snails and an occasional seal, but there was not enough food in this area to support all these guys. When he returned from one of these trips looking for food, he found that both cabin boys and the ship steward had died. Twenty-five had become nine, and now that nine had become just six people. But the image of the cabin boys' frail dead bodies really horrified Robert. He couldn't get past it. They had been so honorable on this journey. They spent so much time fetching water and building materials for the captain and his officers. They wore themselves down to the bones for these guys. And then one night when the group was camping here,

• 18:12Kaelyn Moore?

  Fritz came into Robert's tent and asked if he needed any water. Robert said no, he didn't want to make someone go out and get him water. So he sent him back to the tent that he was sharing with Harvey. And as Fritz entered the tent, Harvey shoved him, and Fritz went face first into the ground and just didn't get up. The next morning Fritz's body was frozen stiff. And a few days later Harvey went out to search for more food. And that's when Robert saw what he had left behind. Harvey had slowly been eating at Fritz's frozen body. But that must have not have been enough to sustain him, because when he went out to search for food that night, he never returned.

• 18:55Kaelyn Moore?

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• 19:40Kaelyn Moore?

  are stone washed and get softer with every wash. Really beautiful for a bedroom refresh. Go to siJohhome.com and use code HSP to get 20% off your first order. That's S I J O H O M E dot com and use code HSP for 20% off at checkout. So now there were only four. Robert, Captain Del Garno, and his two little cronies, Smith and Mahoney. Robert was the only one who wasn't an officer, and this caused a lot of problems. When Mahoney ordered Robert to fetch him some roots, Robert refused. He said, no, he was done taking orders from someone who let every man under his command die without showing a single sign of leadership, who sat on his butt while men died trying to bring him water.

• 20:24Kaelyn Moore?

  Mahoney didn't like this answer. He pulled a knife on Robert, but he was so weak, he wouldn't have been able to drive it into the man. And Robert just turned around and walked away when he was threatened. And then a few days later, Captain Del Garno and Mahoney made a trip out, but only Del Garno came back. Mahoney was gone. The men decided to leave Hardwick and search for food elsewhere. There was nothing left on this island. However, Mahoney stayed behind. He had a really bad blister on his foot that was preventing him from walking. And so he wrapped it up and he said that he would follow when he was healed and could walk again. So now there were just three. The remaining three men now settled into this uneasy truce. They needed each other to survive, but Robert had no interest in pretending that the officers still had authority over him.

• 21:10Kaelyn Moore?

  The group argued constantly. Months passed. Spring finally came, and the island had a little bit more to keep them alive. There were a few more seals on the beaches, a couple more birds that they found in the scrub, but they could never really relax or feel optimistic. They always knew that the next winter was right around. Around the corner. And Robert knew that they were going to die there if they didn't do something. And he didn't want to die with these two terrible men. So he convinced them that they should pack up their things and move to a spot that would be a better vantage point for passing ships. Maybe one of the small rocky islands just off the coast of Auckland Islands. It took him until February to convince the other two. And by the time they moved, it had been 10 months that they had been on this island. Can you imagine being on an island like this with the two worst bosses you've ever had?

• 21:55Kaelyn Moore?

  On May 22nd, 1865, a year and 12 days after the wreck, Captain Delgarneau screamed. He spotted sails on the horizon. The ship was called the Julian. It was a Portuguese vessel that had pulled into a nearby bay to repair a leak. She had come from China carrying laborers to South America and actually a plague that was on the ship killed a number of the crew. But the survivors of the Inverkold would rather take their chances on a plague ridden ship than spend another night with each other on Auckland Island. Before the Julian's boat reached the shore, the captain pulled Robert aside. And he told him, stay quiet, don't say anything. Let me do all the talking. Robert was too overwhelmed

• 22:37Kaelyn Moore?

  and too weak to argue. And by the time he understood what was actually happening, it was too late. Delgarneau and Smith, the officers, were given new clothes, comfortable quarters, and the treatment that their rank entitled them to. Robert, who had done more to keep them alive than either of them was capable of doing, was sent below deck with the crew. But after everything, he was just happy to be alive. Three men walked off that island out of 25 that were originally on the ship. Now, Delgarneau wrote his account of the shipwreck first. He published his story in August of 1865. Smith followed a year later, writing his own account. And neither of these men mentioned Robert in their writings. If you

• 23:21Kaelyn Moore?

  read about their experience on the island, they never mentioned Robert. And, dear listener, maybe this is where you thought this story ends. What a sad ending, right? It totally sucks for Robert. But I'm gonna twist the knife a little deeper because Robert Holding was lost to history, but he wouldn't have been if everyone had just listened to him. Because Robert wanted to head to the other end of the island. It was like something was pulling him in that direction and he was trying his best to get everyone to follow him despite the rugged terrain, despite how much everyone was dying, he really wanted to keep forging ahead. And it wouldn't be revealed until much later, but on the other end of Auckland Island,

• 24:04Kaelyn Moore?

  at the exact same time that the Invercald crew was there, there was another shipwreck. Another group of stranded men, only their story ended very differently. That ship was called the Grafton and she was a 56-ton schooner, barely a tenth of the size of the Invercald. Five men made it ashore and all five of them lived. It was the night of January 2nd, 1864, five months before the Invercald sank. The Grafton was a schooner so small you could fit her inside the Invercald's cargo hold and she was sheltering from a storm in Carnley Harbour, a bay off the southern coast of Auckland Island. The voyage had already been a total failure.

• 24:47Kaelyn Moore?

  The ship was chartered by this French prospector named Francois Reynal and her captain, Thomas Musgrave, with the goal of scouting the sub-Antarctic islands for tin. They had sailed for two months, they didn't find anything, not to mention Reynal had been sick almost since the day they left Sydney. It was a relapse of an illness from his years in the Australian goldfields. I can't even imagine what you're probably catching there. They switched the trip to a seal hunting trip just to try to make some money on their voyage and that's how they ended up sheltering in the bay. Late that night, one of the two anchor chains snapped and the storm that was coming started bringing the Grafton towards the rocky shore. At midnight, Captain Musgrave felt the hull strike rock and then heard the awful grinding

• 25:30Kaelyn Moore?

  sound as the keel cracked open and the ocean just started pouring into the boat. But here's the thing, for how dire it seemed at first, the Grafton didn't sink. The ship was caught on the rocks, but the water- Where it was wasn't very deep. The ship wasn't going to sail again, but at least the crew had time to escape. And all five men aboard made it to the shore. Musgrave and Reynal, plus two sailors, a 20-year-old Englishman, George Harris, a 28-year-old Norwegian named Alec McLaren, and then a Portuguese cook named Henry Forgias. Even Reynal, who was very, very weak from his illness, made it to the beach. The others went to work on the ship, and he stayed back and started a fire under a makeshift tent of sails, and he kept it burning through that entire first night.

• 26:14Kaelyn Moore?

  The Norwegian, McLaren, proved to be very useful right away. He dove into the freezing water with a line of rope. He swam it to shore and rigged a pulley system between the ship and the beach. With that system, the crew worked really fast. They were able to recover chests that belonged to Musgrave and Reynal. They got cooking utensils off of the boat and over 150 pounds of biscuit, flour, tea, and coffee. That's 30 times more than what was recovered from the much larger crew. They also salvaged navigation instruments and books, including a Bible. And they also got Reynal's hunting rifle, so they had something to go hunting with. And they had something else that the crew of the Invercauld never did. The wreck itself, because the Grafton hadn't sunk.

• 26:59Kaelyn Moore?

  She was this warehouse of timber, rope, canvas, sailcloth, and scrap metal. And over the next few days, the crew stripped the ship down to her bones to use what they could get from it. And that first night, when they were all huddled together around Reynal's fire, the five of them understood the situation very clearly. They hadn't told anyone they were coming to Auckland Islands. Musgrave and Reynal had made their business partners promise to send a rescue ship if they didn't return, but the partners didn't know where to look. And unlike the Invercauld, which had wrecked on an exposed northern coastline, the Grafton was tucked inside a bay that was surrounded by land. No passing ships were going to see them. So they knew that this is where they were going to be for the foreseeable future, and they all acted accordingly. They hunkered down, and they got to work.

• 27:44Kaelyn Moore?

  First with hunting. Now, on the northern coast, where the Invercauld's crew would later starve, there was almost nothing to hunt. But on the southern coast, it was a different ecosystem entirely. There were sea lions, elephant seals, and fur seals all in that water. And they had Reynal's rifle, which helped them actually catch these seals. And from the jump, every guy worked, no matter how injured or how sick they were. Musgrave led these hunting parties. Reynal threw himself into designing their shelter, despite the fact that he couldn't even stand at that point. He actually figured out that if you superheat seashells, the calcium oxide that they produce can be mixed with sand to make a kind of cement. So that's what he did. He burned shells, he mixed mortar, and he used it to build a proper stone hearth.

• 28:27Kaelyn Moore?

  And then he assembled timber from the graftons' remains and the surrounding forest to build this pretty decent cabin. Within 31 days of the shipwreck, they had a home. And they also started interior designing this place. They built shelves for their tools and the handful of books that they still had. They built a stone chimney that actually worked, and they had a door that they could open and shut. They called this cabin Epic Weight. And now, with the immediate crisis of survival handled, the three sailors pushed back against the rank that they all had on the ship. They decided that they were going to democratically elect who was going to be the leader of the group, and it didn't necessarily have to be the captain of the ship. They also drew up a code of conduct and wrote it on a blank page of Musgrave's Bible,

• 29:12Kaelyn Moore?

  and Reynal nominated Musgrave to be the leader of their settlement. And he was elected unanimously. And then they came up with a plan to deal with their boredom. After dark, they didn't really have anything to do but eat seal meat, stare into the fire, and contemplate the possibility that no one was ever gonna come save them. So they decided that they were gonna start basically a makeshift school inside of this cabin. Musgrave taught the sailors to read and write. Reynal taught French and math to everyone. McLaren taught Norwegian. Forges taught Portuguese. They would sit around the hearth in the evenings, these five guys from five different countries, teaching each other how to conjugate verbs in each other's languages. Like, "I eat seal." "You eat seal." "He, she, they eat seal."

• 29:56Kaelyn Moore?

  Reynal even carved chess pieces from driftwood. He fashioned a full deck of playing cards by pasting pages from an old logbook together with flower paste that he had made. And it gets even more ridiculous from there, too. Forges went out and he found a pair of parrots that became pets for the crew. And they loved these birds so much that they wrote about them in their diaries, sometimes more than they would write about each other. They had these really small comforts and these small routines. And that is how this group survived. They were doing all of this while on the other side of the island, a group of men were dwindling in numbers and resorting to cannibalism. By the time the first anniversary of the wreck arrived in January of 1865, they finally had to face the fact that rescue was not coming. If they wanted to leave the island, they were going to have to do it themselves.

• 30:41Kaelyn Moore?

  And so they started to form a plan. They had timber, sailcloth, scrap metal, and they had Reynal, who at that point had already built a stone hearth, a cement kiln, and a functional cabin. Building a boat wasn't a question of skill. It was going to be a question of tools that they had. First Reynal built a forge. He used the ship's cooking bellows and heated scrap iron from the grafton until it glowed bright, and then he hammered out nails. Then he tried to make a boring tool to drill holes and fasten a hole together. He tried and he failed. Different techniques failed again. Weeks of work on this forge and he could not manufacture the proper tools to build it. But the seals were growing scarcer. They knew that by the time the second winter came, there was going to be way less food than the first.

• 31:29Kaelyn Moore?

  So they decided they were going to pivot. Rather than build a new vessel, they were going to modify the 12-foot dinghy that had been aboard the grafton. They would lengthen it, add a mast and a small deck, and make it seaworthy enough for an open ocean crossing to New Zealand. That was 290 miles north, about 465 kilometers. And they named this boat the Rescue. The work took months and when it was done, they faced the hardest decision of the entire ordeal. The dinghy could only fit three men and there were five of them. Two were gonna have to stay behind. Musgrave and Reynal had to go. They were the ones who could negotiate with a shipping company to fund a return trip.

• 32:11Kaelyn Moore?

  And of the three sailors, they chose McLaren because he was strong and the most experienced and the best seaman among them. George Harris and Henry Forges were gonna have to stay at Epigwait and wait. July 19th, 1865, 18 months after they had wrecked, they lowered the modified dinghy into Carnley Harbor, and the chosen three climbed aboard and pointed it towards the open Southern Ocean and hoped for the best. The voyage was absolutely brutal. The Southern Ocean is one of the roughest stretches of water on Earth. There's waves that build across thousands of miles of unbroken water between Antarctica and New Zealand. And in winter, the swells can run up to 40 feet high. The rescue was just 12 feet long.

• 32:56Kaelyn Moore?

  It took them five days to reach Stewart Island, which is the southernmost inhabited island in New Zealand. And from there, Musgrave and Reynal had to spend weeks persuading anyone that a return trip to Auckland Island was worth funding. Public donations from crowdsourcing eventually did raise enough money to charter a schooner called the Flying Scud under Captain Cross, and Musgrave's one aboard as its navigator. He was going back for his friends. Nearly one month later, on August 24th, 1865, the Flying Scud sailed into Carnley Harbor. Harris and Forges were alive, barely, though. The seal meat that they had collected had run out weeks earlier, and they had been surviving on rats that they caught inside their cabin.

• 33:39Kaelyn Moore?

  But now, all five men were going home. Musgrave gathered the crew and their belongings, unable to believe this miracle that had occurred. But before they left, he turned around and took one good look at the island. And he saw that somewhere further up the island, there was a column of smoke rising from it. And he got this feeling that there might be someone else there on the island, maybe another group of shipwreck survivors. So he told the group that they needed to delay the trip home just a little bit longer and go search the island. And so they headed miles into the forest looking for any sign of life. And what they found when they went searching were the ruins of a settlement. Old, small houses collapsing,

• 34:23Kaelyn Moore?

  a place that had clearly been abandoned years ago. And inside one of those buildings, Musgrave found a body. It was a man, or at least what was left of him. He had clearly died a while ago, but Musgrave could see that one foot was wrapped in these woolen rags. The man was laying near a roofing slate, it was the kind that you use in construction, and scratched onto the surface of that slate, and handwriting that was almost completely illegible was a single word that he could make out. It was just a name: James. Musgrave had no idea who this man was. He didn't know how he got there, or how he died. He didn't know that the settlement he was standing in was Hardwick, the same ruins

• 35:06Kaelyn Moore?

  that the Invercauld's crew had stumbled upon eight months earlier. He didn't know about the Invercauld at all. He recorded the discovery in his journal, the body, a slate with a scratched name written into it, and then he and his men sailed back to New Zealand. Now, I probably don't have to tell you this, but the man on the floor was James Mahoney, second mate of the Invercauld's, the man Captain Delgarneau had left behind at Hardwick with a bad foot. But what's even more wild is Musgrave and Reynal had no idea about any of this. No one had told them about the Invercauld when they went back to New Zealand. It actually wasn't until November 8th of 1865, months after their rescue, that Musgrave encountered Reynal in Melbourne. He showed him something that he had found in a newspaper the previous evening.

• 35:48Kaelyn Moore?

  It was a story entitled "Narrative of the Wreck of the Invercauld on the Auckland Islands", by Captain Delgarneau. Two shipwrecks, same island, same year, 20 miles apart, and the only place the two stories ever touched was a building of a previously abandoned community and a body that had been left behind. And of course, because they had read Captain Delgarneau's account, neither of them learned anything about Robert. Two ships on the same island at the same time, and two totally different outcomes. Sure, the Grafton did get lucky, they had more resources from the start, and a lot more food available than the Invercauld, but they had something else that the Invercauld's just didn't have. Friendship. Okay, I'm kind of kidding, but I'm also kind of not kidding.

• 36:33Kaelyn Moore?

  The men kept morale high and they looked out for each other. They didn't cling to their stupid ranks from before, which is partly what did the Inver called in. So it was friendship, but also about 30 times the amount of resources. Robert was the newest. He was the lowest ranking man aboard, an outsider in a Scottish crew, and the officers refused to follow his lead, even as their own inaction was killing everyone around them. And Delgarneau never recovered from losing his ship. He clung to his rank as if it were a life raft, and it turned out to be an anchor instead. I'm going to keep this ship metaphor going. The Grafton crew worked together. They built a cabin, a forge, a government, a school, and a boat. And at the end of a year, on the island, the only thing the Inver called crew built was one lean to.

• 37:16Kaelyn Moore?

  This story is sometimes referred to as the tale of two shipwrecks, and it gets put in PowerPoints by management consultants and business schools as a leadership case study. But that's maybe too simplistic of a way to look at it. I do think though, that there is a good lesson to be learned here. Maybe it's the friends we make along the way, or maybe it's having access to a gun and more seals. But what do you guys think? How would you have fared on an expedition like this? You can comment wherever you listen to episodes. I love hearing from you all. You know that. And that's all I have for you today. I will be back next week with another episode of Heart Stars Pounding for all of you. And once again, if you want to shop our merch, you can look at shop.hardspounding.com. We have our dark summer, our light summer,

• 37:58Kaelyn Moore?

  and bandanas there now, as well as our evergreen merch. You can take a look, get something you like, get something for a friend, and I will see you here next week. All right. Until next time, stay curious.

• 38:14Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Stars Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Stars Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research and writing by Rob Teamstra. Sound design and mix by Redrum Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jordan again, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request, check out heartspounding.com.

• 38:39Kaelyn Moore?

  Do you want more Darkly Curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven-day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com/hartstartspounding. Well, whatever you do, stay curious.