Dive team seeks to solve
200-year shipwreck mystery
An expedition led by the Australian National Maritime Museum in the next two weeks will attempt
to solve one of the more intriguing riddles in the nation’s maritime history.
When two British sailing ships were wrecked together on a remote reef 450 km off the
Queensland coast in 1803, the survivors crawled to safety on a tiny island… only to find the
remains of an earlier shipwreck.
“This was very early in the history of the colony of New South Wales,” says the expedition leader,
curator and maritime archaeologist Kieran Hosty. “Nobody knew anything about the earlier wreck
back then, and we still know nothing now.
“There’s absolutely no record of a British or colonial ship being wrecked out there. It could have
been American, Portuguese … or Spanish perhaps… we simply don’t know…”
The expedition will be mounted by the National Maritime Museum in collaboration with
Silentworld Foundation*, a part of Silentworld Ltd, an Australian shipping company.
It will depart Gladstone on Monday evening (30 November) to explore the waters around Wreck
Reefs, searching for objects, fragments or materials offering clues to the identity of the
mysterious pre-1803 vessel.
This is the same dive team that earlier this year, in January, located and identified the elusive Flora
Reef site, 20 km out from Cairns, where the government schooner Mermaid was wrecked in 1829.
While the timbers found on the island in 1803 are still shrouded in mystery, the drama of the two
British ships getting wrecked on Wreck Reefs is well documented.
Three ships – HMS Porpoise, a 10-gun Royal Navy sloop, Cato, an armed cargo ship, and
Bridgewater, an East India Company cargo ship – were travelling in convoy on a northerly route
through what is now known as the Coral Sea but some 200 km east and clear of the Barrier Reef.
Close to midnight on 17 August Porpoise, commanded by Lieutenant Robert Fowler and having
Commander Matthew Flinders on board as a passenger, struck an isolated and uncharted reef and
immediately fired a cannon to warn the two following vessels.
Cato and Bridgewater both changed course, but towards each other. When it became clear what
was happening, Captain Park on Cato ordered his ship off the wind to avoid collision. With this,
Cato too went up on the reef, just two cable lengths (370 metres) from Porpoise.
Bridgewater ignominiously continued on its way to India, with no heed for the plight of the men on
the other two ships.
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The 92 survivors managed to reach a tiny (200 m x 80 m) treeless sand island inside the encircling
reef. After a little more than a week, Flinders, Park and selected sailors set out in one of the ship’s
boats and successfully navigated 800 km back to Port Jackson.
Six weeks after the small boat left the island, the ship Rolla and two schooners Cumberland and
Francis arrived to rescue the survivors.
By this time though the timbers from the pre-1803 ship had gone. Ironically, the marooned sailors,
on their first full evening on the island, put this evidence of earlier misfortune to the torch,
building themselves a fire for comfort on the desolate and isolated cay.
There’s no doubt however that the timbers were there. The discovery is well documented in
Flinders’ and Fowler’s accounts of the voyage.
The museum-led expedition, with three museum maritime archaeologists, a fourth museum diver
and more than 25 volunteer divers and other support personnel in two research vessels, will
remain at sea for two weeks.
In the Wreck Reefs area the team will seek to locate and positively identify the wreck site of the
Cato and all other historic shipwreck sites on Porpoise Cay and surrounding reefs, survey and
assess the lagoon to the north of Porpoise Cay for shipwreck material, survey and assess
associated land sites, particularly on Bird Islet - a slightly larger island about 8 km from Porpoise
Cay.
Although all vessels wrecked in Australian waters more than 75 years ago are protected under the
Historic Shipwrecks Act the expedition’s archaeological surveys will be used to develop
management and conservation plans for this important site.
Two marine biologists from the Sydney Institute of Marine Science (SIMS) – one of them Dr. David
Booth, a coral bleaching specialist – will participate in the expedition, studying the health of this
remote and relative inaccessible reef system.
You can follow the dive team’s progress on the Australian National Maritime Museum’s blog at
* Silentworld Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation established to further Australian
maritime archaeology and research, and to improve Australia’s knowledge of its early maritime
history.
27 November 2009 media information, Bill Richards 0418 403 472
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