April 10, 1968: The Wahine disaster 50 years on
Tuesday marks the 50th anniversary of the Wahine tragedy, which claimed the lives of 53 people when the ferry ran aground in Wellington Harbour. Martin Johnston and Alice Peacock report.
loved her baby Gordon. She believes his short life was a good one. But when he was revived from the brink of death, after going over the side of the sinking ferry Wahine wrapped in an oilskin cloth, nearly 50 years ago, she was angry.
Angry that he wasn’t allowed to die. Angry that she hadn’t been asked.
Shirley, of Shannon, near Levin, had taken three of her children on the ferry at Lyttelton, near Christchurch, for the journey home. They had delivered her son Peter, 7, to the School for the Deaf at Sumner.
Her 3-year-old daughter, “blonde, beautiful Alma”, dressed in a red coat and a red velvet dress, drowned in the ferry tragedy of April 10, 1968. She was washed across to the far side of the Wellington Harbour entrance from where the Wahine capsized and sank. Son David, 6, was traumatised but survived.
“A male passenger came round … and he took Alma off,” Shirley told the Court of Inquiry soon after the tragedy. “I don’t know what happened [to her] … As far as I know this man took her and put her into a liferaft or a lifeboat.”
Alma had been put into an adultsized lifejacket that came down to her knees and was later taken off before she left the ship.
David had been screaming and immovable until a steward tied up the youngster’s lifejacket, picked him up and slid him down the steeply angled deck to another steward, who put him into a liferaft.
Shirley had an orange lifejacket put over her head, jumped into the sea, and was picked up after 90 minutes by a lifeboat from another ferry, Aramoana. After a big wave washed people out of the boat, she was hauled back on and held by crew members until rescued by a fishing trawler.
Before she left the ship, she had asked a steward, Brian McMaster, to take 1-year-old Gordon. It was his birthday. The steward initially refused, saying, “No, he might die in my arms,” but he relented, wrapped the baby in what looked like an oilskin and left the ship.
McMaster told the inquiry a lifejacket was placed over the child.
“I floated on my back with the child on my chest … I would say the child died while I had hold of it. He vomited and then foamed at the mouth. Unfortunately the child was then washed out of my grasp by a wave.”
Within minutes McMaster was picked up by a longboat. The seemingly dead child was already on it.
Three days later, under the heading “Baby brought back to life”, the Herald reported that Gordon had been “dead” — his heart had stopped — when he was plucked from the surf at Seatoun, the suburban beach close to where the ferry sank.
A doctor on the beach found he was still alive and rushed him to Wellington Hospital in an ambulance while giving CPR.
Sadly Gordon had suffered severe, permanent brain damage.
“I hit the roof,” 78-year-old Shirley told the Herald in the lead-up to Tuesday’s 50th anniversary of the disaster. “To make Gordie breathe and come back to life … my exact words were, ‘What the f*** have you done there.’ I said, ‘That is my baby. You should have asked permission.’ And their reply was, ‘Oh, we had to save a life’.”
Gordon couldn’t talk or walk and couldn’t feed himself. “All he could do was roll around the floor.”
But Shirley says Gordon had a good life. “I made sure he did. I just loved him and so did the other kids. He was very happy. To me it was a wonderful thing to think that I had kept him alive for all those years.”
Gordon, however, continued to have breathing problems and other health troubles. He died in October 1990, making him the disaster’s 53rd fatality. Fifty-one people died at the time of the tragedy, nearly all from drowning although 26 of them had also suffered head injuries. An elderly woman died several weeks later from her injuries.
and her children had walked on to the Wahine for the overnight trip to Wellington, she was told to expect a rough trip, but had no inkling of the tempest that would spiral down the North Island overnight.
Ex-tropical cyclone Giselle, among the worst storms to have hit the country, whipped up the strongest wind measured in New Zealand, gusting to 269km/h at a recording station near Wellington’s coast.
Many homes lost their roofs, windows were smashed and several houses were blown down by the wind. Torrential rain caused flooding in many parts of the North and South islands and thousands of farm animals drowned.
As well as the Wahine casualties, the storm killed three people in Wellington.
The sinking of the Wahine isn’t New Zealand’s worst shipwreck — that was in 1863 when 189 died after the Orpheus foundered on the Manukau bar.
But the Wahine is branded into many New Zealanders’ memories through the black-and-white images
of the survivors, rescuers and the capsizing ship broadcast on the country’s infant television service; and through their Wahine moment — where they were and what happened to them on that day.
The MetService forecast the night before the disaster, warned of a “severe tropical depression” which was expected to cause rain and poor visibility in Cook Strait and inflict average wind speeds of up to 117km/h and gusts of up to 176km/h.
The vehicle and passenger ferries Wahine and Maori worked the Wellington-to-Lyttelton route as the Union Steamship Company’s Steamer Express service. Wahine had started on the service just over 18 months before the disaster.
WITH 734 passengers and crew, the Wahine left Lyttelton at 8.43pm on its final voyage. It was due to reach Wellington the next day. In the run up the Canterbury and Kaikoura coast and across Cook Strait, conditions deteriorated. The ferry entered the funnel of the Wellington Harbour entrance to be hit by Giselle’s high, strengthening winds and towering waves, later estimated at up to 12m.
The ferry’s master, Captain Gordon Robertson, then 57 and the survivor of a 1929 shipwreck off the South Otago coast when he was an 18-year-old seaman, told the inquiry the Wahine storm was the worst he had experienced in 40 years at sea.
He had never been in such strong winds with zero visibility and restricted room to manoeuvre a ship.
About 5.45am Robertson arrived on the bridge to take control from the senior overnight officer, having earlier been given a 5am report from the Beacon Hill Signal Station overlooking Wellington Harbour entrance. The wind there was blowing at up to 93km/h. It was about the same in Cook Strait, where there was a considerable swell and it was raining. Sight of the harbour lights and readings from Wahine’s radar showed the ship was on course.
“Do we understand it that you were not worried about the weather?” asked Richard Savage, the lawyer for the Minister of Marine at the inquiry.
“That’s right,” said Robertson. As the ship passed Pencarrow Head at 6.10am, which Robertson considered the last point for actively choosing to turn tail and head for the relative safety of the open sea, he saw no reason to do this.
Union Company masters were hired to get their ships into port in all but the most extreme weather and ex-tropical cyclone Giselle did not fit that description. Except that just minutes later, arguably, it did, at least on Robertson’s account. But it was too late: Wahine was then in the harbour entrance and struggling for survival.
After that, the accounts from the bridge diverge on key points. But they do agree that, at just before 6.10am, the ship, engines on half-ahead, veered off course to the left — what mariners call a broach. Robertson said it was by up to 30 degrees and left the ship pointing at Barrett Reef, the rocky outcrop to the left of the harbour entrance route. The radar navigation system failed, the wind speed doubled to about 185km/h, according to estimates on the ship, and visibility through the rain, cloud and sea-spray dropped to zero.
Robertson ordered the rudders hard to the right. This had no effect. He ordered the engines to full ahead. Still no effect. In big seas, the two rudders and two propellers could often rise out of the water. The ship had turned left side on to the wind. Wahine was in trouble.
Next Robertson planned to use the engines — left full ahead, right full reverse — to help screw the ship back on course to the right.
But then a huge wave violently rolled the ship over to the right — by as much as 45 degrees according to a later analysis which was commissioned by Robertson’s godson, Murray Robinson.
Robertson was thrown 22.5m through the air from the left end of the bridge to the right. He hit the radar set on the way. Others on the bridge and elsewhere on the ship were tossed about too, apart from helmsman Ken McLeod, who had hold of the wheel.
The 148m-long ship was now drifting at the mercy of the south-southwest storm pushing it up the 1.2kmwide harbour entrance, which has steel-piercing rocks on either side.
Robertson said his plan now was to continue the ship’s own turn to the left to get back out to sea. But without a radar fix and without visibility, he was completely disoriented — navigating on “instinct and feeling”, as he told the inquiry.
He tried to wrestle the ship around to the south and nearly made it, according to retired Cook Strait ferry master Captain John Brown, who studied the inquiry evidence.
Brown reckons that after the swing towards Barrett Reef, Robertson reversed the ship while the wind and sea pushed it up the harbour for 16 minutes. He swung it to the left and was on his way forward to success. But then a new shock: the murk lifted briefly and a light-buoy was spotted ahead, several hundred metres south of the reef ’s southern end.
. “He would have gone out and sunk the buoy but he would have saved the ship,” Brown told the
Herald. “But, instinctively, you see a buoy up ahead … the last thing a mariner would want to do is sink it.”
Robertson had both engines put into full reverse for about five minutes. The ship resumed its northward drift with the wind and sea and at 6.41am the unthinkable happened: Wahine was thrown on to Barrett Reef. The ship’s 3.7m-diameter, fivetonne right propeller and part of its engine tailshaft snapped off like a twig. Water rushed in and the left engine soon died, leaving the ship without propulsion.
A mayday message was sent ashore: “SOS, going ashore near the heads.”
AS WAHINE began to drag along the eastern side of the reef, suffering more damage to the hull, its two anchors were dropped — something critics later argued should have been done at the start of the crisis.
The ship began to pendulum back and forth on the anchors, nearly running aground again at Point Dorset on the mainland north of Barrett Reef. The storm intensified as the ferry continued its slow drift up the harbour.
Reassuring messages were broadcast to passengers, who had been called up to a muster station and were told to put on lifejackets.
Water from flooded compartments in the bottom of the rolling ship slopped up on to the main vehicle deck through ventilation shafts and over the sills of closed doors. It couldn’t drain out through external valves because the ship was now sitting several metres lower in the water than usual. Gradually the water built up, despite efforts to control it, threatening the ship’s stability.
About 11.30am, the tug Tapuhi ventured near enough to attach a tow line — an 11.4cm-diameter steel cable that had to be hauled on to the ferry by hand, because electricity to the winches had failed. The line snapped.
Near Steeple Rock and just 400m from the beach at Seatoun, Wahine swung around to be left-side on to the wind as the storm began to ease and the water earlier pushed into the harbour by the gale started flowing out again.
The unstable ferry, which had tipped slightly to the right, fell into a steep list and at 1.25pm, Robertson gave the order to abandon ship.
Only the four lifeboats on the lower right-hand side of the ship could be used.
People had to negotiate the steeply sloping deck to get into the boats or jump off the ship.
One lifeboat was swamped, then capsized in the surf on the eastern side of the harbour. One made it safely to a beach on that side and two to Seatoun.
The ship also carried more than 30 inflatable life rafts. They were “one of the calamities of the Wahine”, says Robinson, an author who has researched and written extensively on the disaster.
“They were described as flying spectacularly like kites in the air,” he told the Herald. “Only about a third of them, correctly inflated, right side up, were able to be used.
“There are horrendous stories of survivors standing on these partially inflated liferafts, on the bottom of them because the thing is upside down, in water up to their chest, huddling together.”
THE ABANDONMENT of Wahine was a
tale of two coasts.
A report in the Herald said that on the “Seatoun side of the harbour, lifeboats carried passengers, often in dry suits, 400 yards to safety.
“On the other side of the harbour was the horror. Corpses lay strewn along the jagged rocks of Palliser Rd, near Eastbourne.”
The waves crashing on to the rocks were up to 6m high. In all, 223 survivors landed on the eastern shore and lived. Forty-seven bodies were retrieved there, of whom 12 had come ashore alive.
Two of Wahine’s lifeboats, two from Aramoana, and many liferafts ended up on the eastern side.
Eastern rescue efforts were hampered by the remoteness and landslips blocking the coastal road until earthmoving machines could be brought in.
Rick Ellis believes it was pure luck that drove his liferaft into a bay on the Pencarrow coast, rather than tossing it on to the treacherous rocks.
“You’d like to think that if anything happened like that again that they would have surf lifesaving teams or something out there. Because that’s where people were dying,” says the 72-year-old retired teacher from Hawke’s Bay.
“There were two or three instances where people seemed like seaweed. They were still alive but they didn’t quite have the strength to drag themselves up out of the water. A wave would wash them in and the tide would drag them back out.”
He and his mates hauled others out of the water. He kept thinking “help must be coming soon”. But it didn’t, so Ellis and others persevered, trying to save as many lives as they could.
“Thinking back it was probably the first time in my life I had seen a dead person.”
Aged 23, he was a member of the University of Otago cricket team, which was travelling across the Strait to the New Zealand Universities Easter Tournament. He recalled being woken in his cabin at about 6am by a steward bearing a steaming cup of tea and news of “unbelievably big seas”. He bypassed the cuppa and raced to the top deck for a look.
“The ship was sort of wallowing. It was going to and fro and at that stage I saw some rocks, which turned out to be Barrett Reef, only about 40 or 50 metres away.
“Unbeknown to me, there were rocks that were even closer and soon the ship would actually go up on to the rocks that I hadn’t seen.”
After the grounding, the team joined the throng of passengers in one of the ship’s lounges for several hours. Then the mood suddenly changed.
There was a violent movement as the ship listed knocked people from their feet and tipped chairs on their sides.
There was worse to come as people had to slide down the steep, slippery deck on their backsides, some suffering broken limbs.
“That’s how quite a few of the injuries happened, people sliding from the high side to the low side on the wet deck were smashing into the side rails of the boat,” says Ray Hutchison, one of the cricketers.
The young men had to choose between the long lifeboat queue and the rubber liferafts.
“The waves were absolutely enormous,” says Ellis.
“There were a lot of people in the water and they were frantically blowing the whistles on their lifejackets trying to get our attention.”
FOR SHIRLEY Hicks, her memories of the Wahine are never far away.
Alma and Gordon are buried in the Shannon Cemetery, a kilometre from her home. She has attended Wahine remembrance services in the past, but is now mostly housebound. She does her remembering at home.
“I think about it every day. I live it every day. I’ve got things here I had when Alma was alive, the toys, the beautiful photos of Alma and Gordie.
“I’m a tattooed, tough little girl — I’ve got tattoos all over me, I’ve got the Wahine tattooed on my back, across the centre of my back.”
I’m a tattooed, tough little girl — I’ve got tattoos all over me, I’ve got the Wahine tattooed on my back.
Shirley Hicks