Dunbar (ship)
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The Dunbar was a three-masted Blackwall frigate that carried passengers and cargo from Great Britain to Australia in the 1850s for British ship owner Duncan Dunbar , mainly transporting emigrants . On August 20, 1857, at the entrance to Sydney Harbor , aboard the Dunbar, due to strong winds and heavy rainfall, a navigational miscalculation occurred , so that the ship hit rocks near the shore and shattered. Of the 122 people on board, only a single crew member survived.
The ship
The full ship Dunbar was built in 1853 in the shipbuilding yard James Laing and Sons in the north-east English port city of Sunderland . Laing was known to mainly use teak , which was also used for the planking and masts of the Dunbar . British oak was also installed below deck . The Dunbar was 61.5 m long, 10.6 m wide and had a draft of 6.9 m. With 1,321 gross register tons, she was one of the largest merchant ships of her time and one of the largest ships built by James Laing.
The ship was commissioned by the prominent London shipowner, wine merchant and millionaire Duncan Dunbar (1803-1862) and was also registered in London. She was a Blackwall sailing ship that flourished between the 1830s and 1870s. The construction of the ship cost £ 30,000 in monetary terms at the time and took 16 months.
The Dunbar ran in November 1853 by the stack . Before she could start her service as a passenger and cargo ship , however, she was requisitioned by the Royal Navy and used as a troop transport in the Crimean War. It was not until 1856 that the Dunbar made her first crossing to Australia. The ship went from London to Sydney and mainly had emigrants on board who wanted to settle in Australia. Due to the gold rush in Australia in the middle of the 19th century, gold diggers also traveled on the ship.
Downfall
On Sunday, May 31, 1857, the Dunbar left Plymouth under the command of Captain James Green for only her second crossing to Sydney. There were 63 passengers and 59 crew members on board. The cargo included machine parts , furniture, coins, cutlery, groceries and spirits . First class passengers included many well-known Sydney citizens returning home from visiting England. Among them were Mary Egan, wife of city parliamentarian Daniel Egan; the Cahuac couple, son and daughter-in-law of the former Sydney Sheriff; and the two sisters of Robert Hunt, a noted British-Australian scientist and photography pioneer. Also on board was Captain John Steane, Designated Commander of the Royal Navy's Australia Station , as well as the captain's wife and two children.
On Thursday evening, August 20, 1857, after a journey of 81 days , the Dunbar reached the entrance of Port Jackson , Sydney Harbor. As the ship approached the port from the south, heavy rain and strong winds made navigation difficult. In the storm and in the darkness the country could not be identified. The lights of the lighthouse Macquarie Lighthouse were in port sighted, so Captain Green was thought to have already passed the headland at the southern end of the input. It is also believed that Green mistook a nearby bay called The Gap for the harbor entrance. He changed course accordingly and set a blue signal light to indicate the arrival of the Dunbar to the Port Jackson pilot .
Shortly before midnight, the ship was only about six nautical miles from the port. When huge breakers were sighted directly ahead, additional scouts were posted. On board it was recognized that they were too close to the shore, so a maneuver was initiated to move away from the land. However, too few sails were set and there were rugged rocks on a direct course. Before the Dunbar could venture offshore, it hit the rocks south of Sydney Heads between Macquarie Lighthouse and The Gap. The force of the impact was so great that the Dunbar almost capsized and the bar was torn away. Several massive walls of water rolled over the starboard side one by one, dragging people, lifeboats and the masts with them.
The ship lying on its side was literally smashed by the force of the churned sea and the storm. Water seeped into the hull and drowned passengers in their cabins before they could rush to deck.
Aftermath
The only survivor was crew member James Johnson. He was washed into the water by a wave from the deck and managed to climb the cliffs, where he was found two days later. Johnson later became a harbor pilot in the Australian city of Newcastle , where he helped rescue the only survivor of the sinking of the Cawarra in 1866 . The remaining 121 people on board were killed in the accident. At daybreak, the coastal steamer Grafton, under the command of Captain Charles Wiseman, reached the scene of the accident without knowing about the disaster. It was only when the ship steamed through a carpet of rubble, corpses and mailbags that Wiseman realized that a larger ship must have crashed there.
The next day, the first reports of mutilated bodies washed ashore reached Sydney. The news of the sinking caused a lot of excitement in the city. In the days following the incident, thousands of townspeople made pilgrimages to the scene of the accident and witnessed the rescue of James Johnson, the recovery of the dead and the retrieval of some of the cargo that revealed that the sunken ship was the Dunbar . From Mosman Spit to Taylors Bay, the shoreline was covered with bodies, boards, boxes, clothes and the personal effects of the passengers. Some of the fatalities showed traces of shark attacks . The recovered bodies were interred on August 24, 1857 at St Stephens Church in Camperdown Cemetery in O'Connell Town (now Newtown), a suburb of Sydney. It is estimated that around 20,000 people took part in the funeral procession to the cemetery. The identified victims were given individual graves, while 22 unidentified victims were buried in a mass grave. There is still a memorial for the victims in the cemetery today, next to which a salvaged anchor was placed.
The day of the funeral was declared an official day of mourning. Banks, offices and shops remained closed and the flags of the ships in the port were waved at half mast. Newspapers and magazines printed reports and published pictures of the calamity. There were also several songs and poems in which the event was processed. The city was deeply affected by the extent of the disaster. The sinking of the Dunbar was one of the most devastating shipping accidents in New South Wales history .
The wreck
In 1910 an anchor , cables, coins and other items were recovered in the area. The exact location of the wreck itself was not known until 1955, when divers found the scattered remains of the ship at a depth of nine meters. In the following years, many valuable items such as jewelry and other coins were recovered and disappeared in private collections.
It was not until 1991 that the Dunbar was placed under the protection of the Historic Shipwrecks Act, which came into force in 1976, and is therefore listed .
literature
- Kieran Hosty: Dunbar, 1857. Disaster on Our Doorstep. Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney 2007, ISBN 978-0-9775471-1-1 .