The Burning of the Fiery Star

THE BURNING OF THE FIERY STAR

The logbook of Chief Officer William Sargent showed that the Fiery Star took twelve days to reach the south end of New Zealand, passing by on the 12th of April 1865. The journey had been proceeding as planned, although strong seas had destroyed two of the longboats on the 17th of April.

On 19 April, a strong smoke smell was reported to the captain on the 19th of April. He opened the hatches to check, and found the entire lower hold was filled with smoke. A fire had broken out below and was being fuelled by the Fiery Star‘s combustible cargo. The hatches were quickly battened down to try to contain and starve the fire, but the following day, the fire’s heat and the arsenic-tinged smoke had driven the passengers from their cabins.

There are two accounts of what occurred on board the Fiery Star – the published extracts from William Sargent’s logbook, and the letters from crew members in reply to some of the press coverage.

George Maber was the ship’s engineer, and described the scene on April 20, as Captain Yule took all but one of the passengers, and the majority of the crew, to the boats in windy, squally weather:

About 6 o’clock she burst out the port side, forward, and Captain Yule and four seamen, and a few lady saloon passengers got into the lifeboat and went away before I knew anything about it. The gig was the next boat that left, and was taken charge of by the second mate, Mr. Addy. The next was the jollyboat, crowded to a great extent. Then the waist boat, which had her sternpost knocked off, and only had a piece of canvas nailed to keep the water out, and she kept two men continually at work bailing her out.

The four boats were supposed to lie alongside the Fiery Star overnight, then set out for the Chatham Islands in the morning. But when the sun rose on April 21, the four boats had disappeared. No trace was ever found of the boats or their passengers.

Left on board the burning ship were seventeen crew members and passenger John Omand, and they set to work to fight the fires under the command of Chief Officer William Sargent, who was reported to have said, “Well, lads, I’ll stick by you, if you’ll stick by the ship, and we’ll go to work and keep down the fire.”

Artwork: The Burning of the Fiery Star, by Frederick Gross, State Library of Victoria.

George Maber wrote of the effect the fire had on the ship around April 25:

I was  five days and nights constantly pumping water on the fire, and never lay down or had any rest. Then I volunteered to go down the forehatch, with a rope around my body and a handkerchief round my mouth, and I saw the state of the foremast, which was burnt through within about seven inches. Here I scrambled to the port side, and the knees and stringers were all gone, and she was like a shell for several feet. I was exhausted, and came up to get some fresh air. I went down again with a man named Marshall, a quartermaster, to put the hose into a tank of water, which we could not do, as the lid was on the tank, and crawling over the hides, I felt myself sinking fast. On gaining the deck, I and Marshall fell insensible for a considerable time.

The cargo below had long since perished from fire and smoke, and the heat on deck was unbearable. The seas were wild. The crew survived on rations, and on the caged chickens on deck. Every bit of spare wood was used to fuel the pumps, even the pigsties. The distressed pigs, no longer able to be penned, ran amok in the heat and smoke on the deck, and had to be destroyed. A raft was built but was deemed – wisely – too flimsy for the open sea. Nobody slept. The crew had lost everything they owned. All they could hope for was to somehow reach land or fall in with another ship.

Miraculously, a ship called the Dauntless appeared on May 11, and sent a lifeboat over to the Fiery Star. Captain Moore of the Dauntless went aboard the Fiery Star on the morning of the 12th, at Sargent’s invitation, and checked to see if the ship could be saved. Moore agreed that there was nothing further that the weary crew could do for her. The men boarded the Dauntless at 4 pm that day and watched as the Fiery Star finally succumbed to the flames at 10 pm.

The approximate location where the Fiery Star burned.

AUCKLAND

May 1865

On 15 May 1865, the Port of Auckland was expecting a ship named the Dauntless, Captain Moore, which had sailed from Dublin on December 30, 1864. The Dauntless did indeed arrive that day, and it brought with it the exhausted crewmen and the information of the loss of the Fiery Star.

An Auckland newspaper, the Daily Southern Cross of 16 May 1865, provided details of the voyage of the Fiery Star, taken directly from Chief Officer Sargent. All of the subsequent reports of the shipwreck would be drawn from this report.

On the 16th of May 1865, the Auckland Chamber of Commerce met to consider, and of course endorse, a subscription to reimburse the losses of the survivors of the Fiery Star. The crewmen and Mr Ormand had only the clothes they were standing in. Some of the poorest were provided with accommodation at the Customs House for a short time. Some received wages, but not poor Mr. Ormand.

William Sargent was considered to be the hero of the hour. Captain Moore of the Dauntless considered that Sargent had done everything he could in the circumstances, and that his conduct had been exemplary.

By the 23rd of May, the sum of £165 had been subscribed, and the Chamber of Commerce met again to consider how to distribute it. “The next question which arose was as to how much they should give Mr Sargent, and how much to the crew – whether they should give £3, £4 or £5 each to the crew, and the remainder to Mr Sargent. The crew, he believed, generally speaking, were not so badly off as the people had been led to believe.”

Captain Moore (Dauntless) suggested that each rescued seaman should be given £3 for their “courage and good conduct.” Moore was further moved to suggest £10 each to the three “boys” who had nothing. He thought that the other survivors had managed to save some belongings after having their clothes brought to his cabin for examination. Further, Captain Moore said, some of the crew had refused his offer of shipping home with him (to England, afterwards). To work their passage, no doubt.

Thus, Mr William Claude Sargent walked away with 80 sovereigns, and the crew and one saved passenger got a few quid.

The crew of the Fiery Star understandably felt somewhat miffed at the lionisation of Sargent, and the pittance they received from the subscription drive. George Maber, the engineer, was the first to write to the New Zealand Herald, to tell the story from the crew’s point of view. Maber, who lost his son in one of the lifeboats, disputed Sargent’s account of the rescue. Maber claimed that the Fiery Star had either reached or neared land prior to meeting up with the Dauntless but was steered away by Sargent.

Maber’s letter was followed by one signed by George Maber, David Herriott (the writer), James North,
John Hargett, Charles Applequist, John Smart Mullen, Charles White, William Marshall and Knight Stevens. The men described their clothes – all they had left – being taken and retained by Captain Moore, without explanation. Those clothes had been worn constantly for 22 days, but hygiene was not the reason. Moore, it was later revealed, was looking through the clothing to see if the crew had nicked anything from the Fiery Star. The remaining crew were told that they would not be given food unless they worked on the Dauntless, despite their protests that they were worn out. Both letters ended with the statement that the crew believed the Fiery Star should have been lying in Auckland Harbour, but for the direction that William Sargent had given them.

The letters were poorly received in New Zealand and Australia, because Captain Moore had become ill with intermittent fever, and passed away in Auckland. Further, in William Sargent, the press and public had found a man they could trust and believe in.

The news reaches brisbane

On May 27, 1865, the Courier carried the bleak news of “The Burning of the Fiery Star.” Telegraphic news had been sent from Sydney and had reached the town on the previous afternoon. As the Courier said, “it was hoped that the next news we should receive of the good ship would be her safe arrival at her port of destination.”

There were no tidings of the passengers and captain, and it was sincerely hoped that they had reached land and were awaiting rescue. Apart from the stories telegraphed from Auckland via Sydney, the families of passengers had no idea whether their loved ones were alive, or even being searched for. On June 3, the logbook extracts were published in Queensland, together with the information that a steamer named the Brisk had been sent to search for survivors on 16 May.

The long delays in receiving news were common at the time – although the electric telegraph was in use, sea travel, and reporting news about it, was still majestically slow.

The Brisk returned without finding any trace of survivors, despite a thorough search of the sea, and all of the islands in the vicinity.

AFTERMATH

Fitful reports from the islands near New Zealand continued to raise faint hopes in Queensland. Politicians and letter-writers tried, with varying degrees of success, to raise funds for an expedition to the Chatham Islands to find out the fate of the passengers once and for all.

“Captain Musgrove reports seeing a dead body on Auckland Island, and smoke on another island, thus raising hopes that the survivors from the Fiery Star may have arrived there and be still living.”

September 27, 1865. Queensland Times.

“We can vote £1000 to search for Dr. Leichhardt, of whose existence there is only a dim distant probability, but we lack public spirit to follow up the traces of our near friends — those who have but recently left our doors, and who are now perhaps located upon some barren island, eking out a scanty and precarious subsistence.” Letter to the Editor, Brisbane Courier, 2 October 1865

The civil lawsuits began in October 1865. An agent for Mr. Cameron tried to sue to recover the cost of a piano. The magistrate was unable to make a decision at that point, because it couldn’t be proven whether Cameron was alive or dead. Decision reserved. Possibly indefinitely.

The Acclimatisation Society of Great Britain wrote sorrowfully to its Queensland counterpart in December: “The loss of your valuable consignment, we of course much regret, but by comparison with the great calamity it appears small, as we have not yet heard any authentic news of the safety of those who got clear of the ship by the boats. Had the birds arrived in safety we should have fulfilled your suggestions literally as to their distribution.” Having passed on from the deaths of humans and scrub turkeys, the British Society had become rather interested in the curassow’s breeding potential in the U.K., and would Mr. Bernays be kind enough to consider consigning them a few specimens?

The currasow was proposed as an addition to the dining tables of England.

John Ormand

The lone passenger to survive the Fiery Star, John Ormand, had endured a long and traumatic journey home to England.

Ormand had worked tirelessly with the crew of the Fiery Star to keep the vessel afloat, then found himself put to work on the Dauntless. He managed to work a passage to Brisbane, where he went to the agents of the Black Ball Line to seek a refund. The Brisbane agents very kindly referred him to their head office in Liverpool. England.

The rather broke and no doubt exhausted Mr. Ormand worked his way back to England in another Black Ball Line ship and laid his claim to recover his initial passage on the Fiery Star, as well as money for the labour he’d put in on her.

The County Court ruled that the Fiery Star had proceeded on her journey and had only been stopped by a catastrophe, so no refund of the fare. And as for the labour, it sniffed, “under such circumstances it was the duty of all men to exert themselves to the utmost.”

Rumours and Legal Action

Little more was said of the shipwreck until 1867, when another wild rumour blew through Brisbane to the effect that survivors had been found in the Chatham Islands. Sadly, the rumour proved to be untrue.

In December 1867, the Supreme Court granted probate in the estate of Maria Cameron, being satisfied that no trace of the passengers of the Fiery Star had been found.

The following year, the estate of Augustus Hoppe was being worked out in the old country, and the Prussian Consulate advertised in the Courier, seeking confirmation that Mr. Hoppe had indeed left the colony in that vessel in 1865.

One of Queensland’s longest cases to that time was played out in the Supreme Court between May 1879 and February 1880. John Clune, brother to Maria Clune, later Maria Feeney, later Maria Cameron, sought to recover possession of the Prince of Wales Hotel in Edward Street, Brisbane. Clune wanted to establish his right as heir-at-law by overturning Maria Cameron’s will, made just before departing the colony on the Fiery Star. In so doing, Clune managed to prove that his sister was not legally married to George John Arnold McKenzie Cameron at the time of her death, by virtue of the first Mrs. George Cameron being (a) still alive, and (b) still mightily annoyed, in New South Wales.

A parade of Old Brisbanites filed through the Court to give evidence about the Clune family and the Cameron wedding, and what Maria had known about her marital status at the time of making her will. Maria Cameron had drafted her will with care, referring to herself as “Maria Cameron, otherwise Feeney,” to cover any challenges. After nearly a year of adjourned hearings, John Clune’s case was thrown out, with all costs.

Captain Sargent returned to England for some time but made his way back to Brisbane, where he felt most at home. Sargent took over a ship chandlery business and became a well-known Brisbanite. He was interviewed by the Sketcher in the Queenslander in 1896. The article made much of Captain Sargent’s burgeoning figure and made heavy use of extracts from the 1865 articles. The author found him to be a true old British sailor, a man who had no need of “municipal or political honours.” He passed away in Brisbane in January 1904. His daughter took over his defence in any subsequent newspaper correspondence speculating about the fate of the Fiery Star.

Captain Sargent in the fullness of his years. The Sketcher, 1896.

Related post: The Fiery Star in Brisbane