Campbell Island’s mystery woman
Our sub-Antarctic Islands hold many a mystery, perhaps the strangest being that of a young woman who supposedly lived alone on Campbell Island around 1810.
Remote, rugged and windswept, few places in the whole world could be more inhospitable to inhabit. Our southernmost island lies 700km south of the South Island and 270km southeast of the Auckland Islands.
The earliest whalers were the first to report of her presence, ‘‘tripping along the shores of Campbell Island wearing Stuart Tartan, Paisley shawl, shoes with silver buckles, and in her Glengarry bonnet, a sprig of Scottish heather’’.
It was said she lived in a sod hut which had a clump of Scottish heather at the door, her white pebble path leading down to Camp Cove in Perseverance Harbour.
The legend grew and soon it became almost accepted fact that she was the banished daughter or granddaughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie of Scotland, more correctly Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender who led a futile quest to save the Jacobean soul of Scotland from the dominance of Protestant England.
Despite initial successes, Charles was roundly defeated in the decisive 40 minute battle of Culloden Moor in 1746, forcing him to eventually flee to France, but not before he fell head over heels for a woman called Meg Walkinshaw, with whom he would sire a daughter in France.
The story goes that this girl was eventually treated as a traitor to the Jacobite cause, suspected of being a spy for England, and handed over to whaler and sealer Captain William Stewart (Stewart Island is named after him) who whisked her away to the bleakest of exile on Campbell Island.
Another version says the young woman was Marie Almand, Charles granddaughter, which makes the dates fit far better.
Two novels written about the subject seemed to consolidate the myth, one by Australian author Will Lawson was called The Lady of the Heather (1945), the other by New Zealand writer Carlyle Ferguson (1913), was titled Marie Levant.
The latter author even claimed to have bought, at a Dunedin leftluggage sale, a box which contained a confession of ‘‘someone’’ who knew the whole story. Interspersing real people and true events, both books, not to mention a plethora of articles, have all served to make the myth surprisingly plausible.
The crux of these and other stories share a common theme, that upon arrival at Campbell Island, Captain Stewart’s whaling crew built the young woman a hut which they stocked with provisions. She planted the pot of heather which she’d brought out in her cabin.
They even supposedly built her a shrine and left her a ship’s bell so she could ring the Angelus during her lonely hours, then just sailed off leaving her to her fate.
Another version has sealers visiting her hut a year or two later to find her skeleton lying on the earth floor, the bones of her fingers till clutching a sprig of heather.
That heather bush no longer exists on Campbell, although it was well known up to relatively recent times.
But the grave of this mystery woman is still there, not far beyond the foundation remains of the sod hut at Camp Cove.
So what is the truth behind the legend? It was a story that would take me to Norfolk Island to eventually find out the real truth.
It all begins in 1810 with the ‘‘discovery’’ of Campbell Island by Captain Hasselburgh of the sealing brig Perseverance. Keeping new sealing grounds secret was normal procedure, so word did not get out about the new island which he named after his Sydney employer, it being simply recorded that his ship had returned to Sydney for provisioning on August 17, 1810 ‘from southwards, having left part of the crew for the purpose of securing skins’.
A young woman named Elizabeth Parr, aged 13, was certainly on the next voyage back to Campbell Island to pick up the sealers, if not the first voyage there as well, having previously joined the ship at Norfolk Island.
Records in the archives there have her born on October 1 1796, her mother an Irish convict there by the name also of Elizabeth Farr (nee Clark). How she ended up on Hasselburgh’s ship is open to speculation, but likely she became the captain’s ‘ship girl’ to escape her dreary existence of her mother’s life in a penal colony.
Volume 2 of The Sealers Shanty – A journal of Sealer’s Stories, records the tragedy that befell the captain and her on their return to Campbell in late 1810.
‘‘When the Perseverance was moored at Campbell Island, Hasselburgh decided to take the rowboat ashore to check on some barrels of oil left by his sealing gang. He launched a jollyboat and rowed ashore.
‘‘Elizabeth Farr, ‘a young woman’, and a ‘native of Norfolk Island’, was in the Jollyboat. So too were James Bloodworth, the ship’s carpenter, George Allwright, a 12 year old boy from Sydney, another boy from New Zealand, and a sailor by the name of Richard Jackson.
‘‘The sea was rough and the weather cold. Hasselburgh saw his oil casks were safe and started to head back to the Perseverance. Then a sudden wind overturned the Jollyboat.’’
Jackson and the New Zealand boy made it ashore, but Hasselburgh was wearing his heavy overcoat and high boots which dragged him under. Young George Allwright also sank beneath the waves. Bloodworth held onto Elizabeth, swimming with her through the waves. Only when he got ashore did he realise she had not survived his rescue effort.
The bodies of the captain and Allright were never found, but Parr was given a decent burial by her shipmates, not far from the sealers sod hut they had constructed on the earlier visit. Farr was 14 at the time of her death.
Almost certainly the legend of Bonnie Prince Charles marooned daughter or granddaughter began with the burial of young Elizabeth Parr.
And every one of the elaborations can be traced back to the facts of that time. Colourful histories can be so concocted, and in time they become the historical record.