Makambo (ship)
 The Makambo at anchor
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The Makambo was a steamship that was first owned by Burns Philp & Company, Limited in Sydney , New South Wales . It was built in Port Glasgow and named after an island in the Solomon Islands . It carried both passengers and freight and was mainly used on the routes between eastern Australia and the islands in Melanesia and the Tasman Sea . Between 1910 and 1931 she drove the regular route between Sydney and Port Vila in the New Hebrides with stops on Lord Howe Island and the Norfolk Island . In 1939 it was acquired by Okada Gumi KK of Osaka , Japan and renamed Kainan Maru . On June 12, 1944, she was torpedoed and sunk by the British submarine Stoic off the Thai island of Phuket .
Stranded off Lord Howe Island
On June 15, 1918, the Makambo ran onto a sandbar near Neds Beach at the northern end of Lord Howe Island . A passenger drowned when a lifeboat capsized while the passengers and crew were being evacuated. The Makambo was only temporarily stuck. After nine days, the repairs were completed and the ship was able to continue its voyage.
This incident made it possible for the ship rats to enter the remote Lord Howe Island between Australia and New Zealand as an invasive species . In the following environmental catastrophe , some bird and other animal species were exterminated within a few years due to the stalking by the rats and the kentia palm farmers were brought into existential poverty by the loss of the seedlings. To cope with the plague of rats, New Holland owls were introduced to Lord Howe Island between 1922 and 1930 . However, adding another predator to the fragile ecosystem only made the problem worse. Between 1919 and 1928 the Lord Howe Island Thrush , the Lord Howe Gerygone , the Lord Howe Star , the Lord Howe Gray Fan Tail and the Lord Howe Spectacled Bird became extinct. The Lord Howe cuckoo owl was ousted by the New Holland owl . The breeding colonies of numerous seabirds on Lord Howe Island, including the pycroft petrel ( Pterodroma pycrofti ), have been wiped out. The tree lobster , a giant species of ghost that had been thought to be extinct on Lord Howe Island since 1930, was rediscovered in 2001 on the offshore island of Ball's Pyramid . The rats were also responsible for the decline and extinction of endemic lizards, land snails and beetles.
Makambo Rock, north of Malabar Hill on Lord Howe Island, was named to commemorate the ecological catastrophe caused by this stranding.
literature
- The Makambo Stranding. Captain Fainted on Bridge In: Argus (Melbourne, Victoria). Wednesday, August 7, 1918. Online
- Fuller, Errol (2000): Extinct Birds , ISBN 0-8160-1833-2
Footnotes
- ↑ Breckon, Richard. (June 2006). Mail links to the “last paradise” - a postal history of Lord Howe Island. Gibbons Stamp Monthly.
- ↑ Shipping Times: SS Makambo ( Memento of May 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ A b Maritime Heritage Online - New South Wales
- ↑ Hindwood, KA (1940). The Birds of Lord Howe Island. Emu 40 : 1-86.
- ↑ Naturalis: Turdidae (Thrushes) - Lord Howe Thrush ( Memento from January 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ a b Garnett, Stephen T .; & Crowley, Gabriel M. (2000). The Action Plan for Australian Birds 2000 . Environment Australia: Canberra. ISBN 0-642-54683-5 PDF, online ( Memento of January 8, 2009 in the Internet Archive ).
- ↑ Fauna News: Beetle extinctions on Lord Howe Island.