Children’s book tells tale of shipwreck and survival
Gordon Campbell is a former teacher who lives on the Kāpiti Coast. Apart from writing he enjoys woodworking, gardening and travel. His recent children’s book The Island of Sunken Treasure is about the shipwreck of the General Grant in the Auckland Islands, far to the south of New Zealand.
Where do you look for writing inspiration?
I look to events that have happened in the past. Maybe when someone has done something especially interesting, or outstanding, or when a person, or group, has a problem that needs to be solved, and actions they take to solve it. I like to keep close to the facts around what I am writing about, so I do a lot of research beforehand.
How did you first learn about the shipwreck on which your latest book is based?
I was brought up in Southland and every few years there would be an expedition leaving Bluff to try to find the wreck in order to recover the gold that was on board. The expeditions were quite high profile and I remember news stories about Kelly Tarlton going south to try to locate the wreck.
Why did it captivate you so?
The Auckland Islands claimed a number of ships in the 19th century, but it was the gold, being carried from the Victoria goldfields, that added an extra dimension to this wreck.
It is the lure of this gold that has drawn divers to this remote, windswept island. Diver Bill Day has been down five times in the past 35 years, so it is a wreck that continues to captivate people. There was also the ordeal of the survivors, who were stranded in such a remote and inhospitable place for 18 months. Their story is fully told in a book called The Wreck of the General Grant, written in the 1970s by Otago Daily Times journalist Keith Eunson.
It was this book that gave me a context to the news items that appeared whenever an expedition went south.
If you were shipwrecked on an island, what's the one item you’d want to have with you?
Presuming the island is uninhabited, and there are several other survivors with me, the one item I would find most useful would be a boat – maybe the lifeboat that brought me ashore from the wreck. A boat could get you around the island to pick up useful items that could have washed ashore, or been left by previous inhabitants.
The General Grant survivors had two such boats, which they used to explore their surroundings and transport themselves to different sites, to hunt food and pick up useful items for their camp.
One of these boats set out for New Zealand, with four men, on an unsuccessful rescue mission. With no map or compass, they sailed into the vast ocean and were never seen again.
What do you hope children will take away from the book?
How strong the will to survive is, and how resilient these survivors were.
They ended up on an uninhabited island, hundreds of kilometres from any form of help. No-one knew their fate, and the islands were avoided by ships because of the danger they posed. Any help that came would be purely by chance. The weather at those latitudes – low temperatures, even in summer, strong winds, rain and frequent storms – made life extremely difficult.
The group had virtually nothing, some didn't even have shoes. They were totally reliant on their own resourcefulness. Making a shelter was a top priority and finding food was an ongoing task.
Curing sealskins and sewing them with a bone needle and sinew to make clothes helped them stay warm in the hostile climate.
They also tried a number of ways to let the outside world know of their plight.
I hope that children pick up on the ingenuity these castaways showed in such difficult circumstances.