'Australia's Titanic'

And the Solomon Brown Mystery

o cite this page:

Australian writer, John Larkins, and English

researcher, Patricia Jennings, are conducting,
finally, an enquiry into why 399 people, including
170 children, died in a shipwreck 165 years ago.
They're looking for your opinions. And they'd
also like ideas on a more prominent memorial to
the victims. Just contact John Larkins at
jlarkins@australianquotes.com

IN THE early hours of 4 August, 1845, the 900-tonne Melbourne-bound

immigrant sailing ship, Cataraqui, foundered on rocks on King Island, in
Bass Strait, south of the Australian mainland, with the loss of 399 English
and some Irish lives.

One immigrant, Solomon Brown, survived. His wife and four daughters
drowned. His strange story is just one aspect of the tragedy.
Cataraqui left Liverpool on 20 April, 1845. She carried 367 emigrants,
mostly working-class farm people from the East Midlands area of
England. There was also a cargo of slate which was in great demand for
the roofs of Melbourne.

The Canadian-built vessel (hence the North American indigenous name,

also spelled Cataraque) was owned by William Smith and Sons. She
was a cargo ship converted for the burgeoning and profitable emigration
trade. Her captain was Christopher Finlay and she had a crew of forty-
four.
Cataraqui's passengers included thirty-one single women, all listed as
farm servants, a very valuable commodity in Melbourne, a bucolic town
of 13,500 people, the majority of whom were single men under the age
of thirty-five. Anyone older was referred to as 'Old So-and-So'.

(This was well demonstrated by a builder, Thomas Sutherland, who,

having wooed and won a pretty immigrant, 'Miss Jones' in 1839, built
and furnished 'the object of his affections' a house in just fourteen days!)

The site of Melbourne had basked in pre-European bliss until 1835 when
it was occupied illegally by buccaneering British entrepreneurs who'd
sailed 300 kilometres across Bass Strait from Van Diemen's Land (later
Tasmania). They were 'squatters' on Crown Land, but the British
Government was pleased, secretly, that these free market operators had
saved it the establishment costs of a new colony.

The aborigines had previous occupancy for 40,000 years or so, but
neglected to arrange formal written title before the Brave Young Pioneers
appeared over the horizon, waving their looking glasses, beads and
spurious treaties.

The Cataraqui immigrants were brought to Australia under the Bounty

system. Their passages were paid by the sale of colonial Crown Lands
which, until recently, had been free aboriginal hunting ground.

The Bounty scheme was a British Government response to the shortage

of labour after convict transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840.
The immigrants were sometimes bound to their sponsors for a limited
period.

This ship was the last to be employed under this scheme in which 206
voyages were made (safely) to Australia with 42,000 free emigrants from
1837 (compared with 150,000 convicts to New South Wales over 42
years).

The Cataraqi immigrants would have been among the lucky ones ... six
years after their arrival the vast Victorian goldfields were revealed and
the population of Victoria soared from 97,000 to 540,000 in ten years.
Most Goldrush arrivals came safely from Europe by way of Bass Strait.
Many Californian gold miners entered the Strait from the west around
Wilson's Promontory, southernmost tip of the Australian mainland.

But such good fortune was not to be for the Cataraqui immigrants ...
The ship had a fairly uneventful voyage down the Atlantic, around Africa
and across the Indian Ocean, and then Southern Ocean south of the
Australian continent. Five babies were born, five died and a seaman was
lost overboard.

Then came the 'Shipwreck Coast', leading into Bass Strait between
Victoria and Tasmania. The entrance to the safety of Port Phillip Bay and
Melbourne was more than 100km away.

In 1845, there were no lighthouses (as there are today) on Cape Otway
or the northern tip of King Island.The Neva, a convict ship carrying 240
Irish women and their children from Cork, had already gone down off the
northern tip of King Island in 1835. All were lost. But since they were (a)
Irish, and (b) convicts, the British Government did not suffer the loss as
severely as the Cataraqui ten years later.

In Britain, after the Cataraqui disaster, the Admiralty recommended that

no more passenger ships should pass through Bass Strait until it was
properly lit. Emigrants were showing a distinct preference for Canada or
the United States. largely as a result of the wreck..

In response, the top colonial administrator in Melbourne, Charles La

Trobe, led an overland party blazing a track to the tip of Cape Otway.
The lighthouse there opened in 1848 ... just in time for the hundreds of
ships arriving for the Golden Age from 1851.

And poor Solomon Brown, aged thirty, the survivor who probably wished
he hadn't ... What became of him?

The worst-affected parish was centred on Tackley, in Oxfordshire. As

many as 41 of the parish's poorest people died on that cold 4 August,
1845, 20,000km from home. Their emigration was organised, largely,
from the vestry of St Nicholas' Church, in Tackley, whose well-to-do folk
were glad to see the backs of their surplus population.

Today, the grand people of the district are the heirs of the first Duke of
Marlborough, John Churchill, and several more recent landowners,
including the Saudi royal family and the socialite heiress, Jemima
Goldsmith.

Some of the drowned and forgotten folk of 1845 once trod the grounds of
their sculptured parks ...

The ship encountered poor weather for most of its three-month voyage
from Liverpool and Captain Finlay, unable to take a dead reckoning from
the stars, decided to heave to on the evening on 3 August.

He believed he was about 80km southwest of Portland and in a clear

position for the run home to Port Phillips Heads and, Melbourne at the
head of the Bay.

In fact, he was 100km further south and standing off the jagged rocks of
south King Island.

All information about the captain's thoughts would have come from
the Chief Officer, Thomas Guthrie, the only 'gentleman officer' who
survived.

It was apparently on Guthrie's information that Captain Finlay

decided to proceed after prolonged 'baiting' from the impatient
chief doctor, Charles Carpenter.

Here's what happened ... Captain Finlay ordered the ship to resume
sailing on the morning of 4 August, believing it was a straight forward
course northeast to Port Phillip Heads.

The Cataraqui struck rocks in a squall about 4.30am (winter and dark).
More than half of the immigrants, men, women and children, in their
night attire, were trapped below decks and drowned.
Another 200 clung to the wreckage during the day (the 4th), but towards
nightfall, the ship broke in two and slid beneath the waves. At dawn on 5
August, about 30 remained alive on the remnant wreckage. Finally, nine
men made it to shore.

A party of sealers, the only occupants of the island, fed them and kept
them alive until the cutter, Midge, called by chance at the island on 13
September and took them on to Melbourne.

The Melbourne meeting blamed the NSW Government (Port Phillip, later,
Victoria, was still part of NSW) for failing to provide lighthouses. It was
also a useful part of the 'Separation' movement from NSW, which was
achieved with Queen Victoria's Assent in 1850.

The Melbourne meeting voted Solomon Brown a sum of money for the
ordeal he had undergone. Edmund Finn wrote in his Memories of Early
Melbourne that he thought Brown had drowned in a creek north of
Melbourne in 1848.

There is the vexing death certificate from the Ballarat gold diggings on
21st December, 1874, that says a Solomon Brown, correct age from
Bedfordshire, died of cancer in the Benevolent Asylum. There was no
family to support him.

Today, there is a scroll commemorating the Cataraqui disaster in St

Nicholas' Church, in Tackley, and a memorial on King Island. We think
they should be honoured more appropriately.

ENDS.