Expensive though her passage was, the light and seaworthy bark Julia Ann provided impressive service to Latter-day Saint immigrants on an 1854 voyage.
Her crew showed "every kindness" to the Great Basin-bound Australians. Her captain, in turn, was impressed with the orderliness of the converts on the voyage.Tragedy deepened this mutual respect.
When the Julia Ann arrived in Sydney July 24, 1855, for a second voyage, 28 members, including some of the founding families of the Church in Australia, were prepared to emigrate. They joined 28 others, including crew. The ship was burdened by a cargo of 350 tons of coal as well. Julia Ann cast off on a rainy, windy afternoon of Sept. 7, 1855, bound for San Francisco.
As the voyage began, passengers gathered to sing a traditional embarking song, "The Gallant Ship is Under Weigh." But with the prospect of a nearly 3-month voyage ahead, remembered Andrew Anderson, the effort came out "more like a funeral hymn than the occasion it was." Strong head winds and rough weather made harsh going, and many passengers became seasick.
Some 27 days out, on Oct. 3, Captain Benjamin Franklin Pond appeared to be deeply concerned as the ship approached the uninhabited Scilly Islands. The islands were surrounded by dangerous reefs that were poorly mapped. After a nerve-wracking day, Captain Pond presumed the dangerous reefs were past and went below for rest. Neither stars nor moon were visible in the dark night. At about 8:30 p.m. was heard the cry: `Hard down the helm!" At that moment, the heavily laden Julia Ann thundered headlong into a coral reef. A gaping hole widened beneath; heavy waves pounded the vessel sideways against the reef.
Indescribable confusion followed as "mothers holding their undressed children in their arms as they snatched them from their slumbers, screaming and lamenting," Captain Pond later described. The vessel was not sinking - it was breaking up on the reef.
Two girls, Mary Humphreys and Marian Anderson, were washed off the deck and seen no more. Other passengers, bruised and soaking wet, clung to the deck. Wildly swinging booms smacked some of them.
"The scene that presented itself to my view can never be erased from my memory," recalled passenger Esther Spangenberg. "Mothers screaming, and children clinging to them in terror and dread; the furniture was torn from its lashings and all upturned; the ship was lying on her beam ends; the starboard side of her was opening and the waves were washing in and out of the cabin."
Captain Pond left the sails up so winds would drive the ship higher on the reef. Minutes and hours passed with no relief.
Elder John McCarthy, a missionary, said, "I saw mothers nursing their babes in the midst of falling masts and broken spars while the breakers were rolling twenty feet high over the wreck."
The life boats, useless in the rocks and waves, were torn loose. A crew member volunteered to swim to the reef in search of firm footing. He managed somehow to fasten a rope to a rock. Women and children were evacuated on the rope. The first was plucky Rosa Clara Logie, a 17-year-old mother and convert. She made her way, hand-over-hand to relative safety of the chest-deep waters of the highest point of the shark-infested reef. Others followed to the reef. Eliza Harris strapped her 6-month-old son, Lister, to her breast to go to the rocks when "an awful sea struck the ship, tearing up the bulwarks, threatening death and destruction to everything within reach." The Julia Ann broke in two across the hatch. Eliza and her son were swept from the deck and drowned. Martha Humphreys, the mother of Mary, was swept from the deck and drowned as well. Just before drowning, she pleaded that her children be protected and taken to Great Salt Lake City.
Captain Pond ordered his Second Mate Owens, who had hauled a bag with $8,000, to drop the sack and carry a girl. History records to his credit, "The child was saved, but the money was lost."
At a critical point, the ship slipped back toward the ocean. The rope snapped and those on the ship appeared doomed. Providentially, the ship broke up further. The deck separated from the heavy cargo hold and washed high on the rocks.
This ordeal had lasted three hours. The 51 survivors waited out the night. When morning came they despaired seeing no land on the horizon.
As the sun rose, they saw a distant barren island - essentially a large sand bar - and crew members managed to reach it on a badly leaking lifeboat that they recovered and patched. Others waited on the reef, without drinking water, faces swollen, clothing nearly torn off, and encircled by sharks. After the women and children were carried by boat to the island, the remaining men walked and bobbed towing rafts along the miles-long underwater reef. They swam over gaps in the reef. They scrambled on the rafts when sharks came too close. On one occasion, they counted 20 sharks. After hours of struggle and a day and a night and a day without drinking water, they arrived on the island.
Children led them to holes in the sand where seeped fresh water. For two months the survivors lived on this island. They subsisted on turtle meat and eggs, shellfish and sharks. Water was collected in coconuts and a barrel embedded in shallow wells. The women made a kind of pancake from shredded coconut, and turtle eggs mixed with flour.
Captain Pond had wisely saved his navigational instruments and used them to determine their location. They were far from ship routes and inhabited islands. He estimated the island to be 300-500 miles west of the nearest of the Society Islands (now French Polynesia). Rescue was out of the question. They would have to go for help. The boat was repaired and stocked with meager supplies.
Because of heavy easterly winds, they at first planned to go west some 1,500 miles to the Navigator Islands. For two days they searched for a break in the lagoon through which they could enter the open sea.
The night before they were to embark, a typhoon raged over the island and blew away the boat. Captain Pond calmed their hopelessness and started a search. The boat was nearby, swamped but intact. At the last minute, Captain Pond changed his mind and decided to row against the wind to the east. A double crew of 10 rowers was selected. On the day of departure, the winds shifted and came from the west. After four days of hard rowing, against shifting winds and deep swells, the party reached Bora Bora.
Here the crew split up in search of a rescue vessel. A schooner, Emma Packer, docked at Huahine awaiting a cargo of oranges, was diverted to the Scilly Islands. On Dec. 2, 1855, 60 days after the shipwreck, the survivors sighted the schooner.
The shoeless, nearly bare, destitute company arrived in Tahiti Dec. 19 where they were cared for by the United Order of Masonic Lodges.
The crew that had split up included missionary John McCarthy. He borrowed two small schooners and also returned to the island. The boats arrived after all of the remaining 41 survivors had been removed. But McCarthy preached to the schooners' crew and baptized an interpreter, through whom he preached to the natives. Others were baptized by him as well.
All the original survivors of the wreck eventually found passage from Tahiti and the members made it to San Francisco. Most trekked east to the Great Basin.
Captain Pond, whose bravery and presence of mind are largely credited for saving many lives, eventually made it to San Francisco where he wrote an account of the ordeal.
John S. Eldridge, a returning missionary, expressed his feelings: "I need not attempt to describe our feelings of gratitude and praise which we felt to give the God of Israel for His goodness and mercy in thus working a deliverance for us."
