Ocean adventures in a canoe

Last week I promised to give you three yachting stories to make up for missing the Sydney-Hobart race. I started with Joshua Slocum, who was on the Gippsland coastline in December 1896, on the first solo circumnavigation of the world.

It was a slow circumnavigation by today’s standards because he headed off the Boston to go through the Suez but came back went south and then around Cape Horn into the Pacific.

Again, he intended to pass through the Great Australian Bight, but at the last minute decided to go south, around Tasmania and north to Cape York.

None of that has to do with this week’s story, except that Slocum’s fame apparently inspired Captain John Voss and his mate, for a time, Norman Luxton. Voss bought an Indian dugout canoe that was about thirty five feet long and about forty years old. This was in 1901. The boat was named Tilicum, a Chinook word for “friend”.

Voss and Luxton modified the canoe greatly, adding three short masts in a sort of schooner rig, adding decking and a bowsprit and reinforcing the cedar log with ribs. They raised the sides of the hull and added a heavy load of ballast and a keel. It was still called a canoe but it no longer looked anything like one.

They sailed from Victoria. On Vancouver Island, the capital of British Columbia, on May 20, 1901.

The trip across the Pacific was terrible. Nearly five months out and still well short of Australia, the Tilicum struck a reef and Luxton was thrown into the water. Voss got him back on board but he was badly cut by the coral – and coral cuts usually fester. On October 17, 1901, in Fiji, Luxton left the Tilicum.

A new mate, Louis Begent, fared worse. On 25 October he was lost overboard in heavy seas, taking with him the compass, and he could not be rescued. There is a suggestion that his ‘fall’ might have been assisted. Luxton, who’d come on to Australia in a steamer, said that Voss drank far too much and had a very violent temper when drunk.

Nonetheless, when the Tilicum entered Sydney Harbour on November 19, 1901, Voss and Luxton were feted and gave talks to many organisations, though Voss spent some time in hospital recovering from illness.

I don’t know quite when he sailed from Sydney but he was off Wilson Promontory on about February 17, 1902. A man named Hamilton was on the boat when it reached Gippsland waters, but he was only one of ten mates Voss went through during the voyage.

The Tilicum had run into three days of continuous gales when rounding the corner of the continent into Bass Strait and her rudder was badly damaged.

When he worked the boat around Wilson Promontory he turned north into Waratah Bay, seeking shelter but he came up the exposed eastern side of the Bay and was left with no choice but to enter Shallow Inlet for shelter, a tricky business at the best of times. The channel is narrow and sometimes shifting, and it cannot readily be seen because of the line of breakers as one approaches from seaward. I’ve “touched” on the crossing more than once.

Voss had shortened sail as much as possible and streamed a sea anchor, and he made it through the breakers – and then ran aground. The tide was running out and soon the Tilicum was high and dry. Voss and Hamilton actually walked around on the sand to stretch their legs, rather welcome after the journey they’d had.

Mother Nature is a tricky old lady and not always merciful. She is always resourceful. The tide began to come in again and Voss confidently waited for the Tilicum to float free and into calmer water.

Instead, the wind rose again and created a choppy sea which rocked the Tilicum sideways and back on her keel, before she floated.

The current was swirling sand around her now and building it up against her lee side. The rocking stopped. Tilicum was held fast and the water was rising around her. Worse, as the water deepened the waves grew larger.

The situation was getting desperate, and Voss and Hamilton were getting ready to abandon ship and make for the shore, which was very close, when a “seventh wave” lifted Tilicum bodily from the sand trap and flung her into the deeper, calmer water of the channel. She was now properly inside Shallow Inlet, but she was damaged.

This was on or about March 1, 1902, long after the Pilkingtons had settled at Sandy Point. Indeed, they have been there so long and played such a part in the life of the place that it should really be called Pilkington’s Inlet. I mean that.

On that day brothers Fred and Dan Pilkington decided to knock off early and do a little fishing. Two friends came with them, on horseback. They left the horses in the shelter of the scrub and scrambled through the dunes on foot.

The entrance area is called Sandy Point for good reason – there are countless dunes in a vast area, though the prevailing westerlies are slowly moving the sand to the eastern side and the dunes are getting smaller all the time.

They were amazed to see the Tilicum sitting stuck on the sand. She was, after all, a fairly large boat for these waters, with three masts and nearly 12 metres long.

The Pilkingtons hailed the boat and offered both assistance and hospitality, as they have always done down there. For a week Voss and Hamilton worked on the boat, with the Pilkingtons, until she was again ready for the Strait. Hamilton had been dreadfully seasick all the way down from Sydney and the week on dry land brought his colour and his appetite back.

The Tilicum’s stranding was on what the Pilkingtons called the “new entrance”, where the sea had opened a new channel into the Inlet. The Pilkingtons discovered this in August 1901, and so it would not have shown on any chart Voss carried.

The Tilicum completed her circumnavigation decades late and not in the way Voss had intended. I’ll explain that next week. She still had to get out of the Inlet and up to Melbourne and there, like Slocum, Voss needed to make some money to continue his voyage.