Site of the wreckage of the Sydney Cove, charted by Matthew Flinders in 1798. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

It’s a small footnote in Australian nautical history, but nonetheless an important one – Bass Strait, once a land bridge between the continent of Australia and the island of Lutruwita/Tasmania, was crossed by 17 desperate men and boys in a longboat in March 1797. This was the first recorded navigation of the strait by non-Indigenous people.

Their ship, the Sydney Cove, sailed from Calcutta loaded with Bengali rum and supplies for the fledgling colony of Sydney. It had met with serious trouble off the east coast of Tasmania and was forced to run aground on a sandbank.

They had struck what they then dubbed Preservation Island, one of the southernmost islands of the Furneaux chain, just north of Tasmania. (The Palawa, the Traditional Owners of Preservation Island, call it Waytakupana). The crew stored the precious liquid cargo on a nearby smaller island, which they unimaginatively named Rum Island.

Now with the ship’s longboat, five British men and twelve Indian sailors (known as Lascars), some of whom it is thought were children as young as ten years old, intended to sail direct to Sydney to bring help back for their shipwrecked crewmates left behind on the island.

There were more than 30 men stranded and sick on the island – not to mention 7000 gallons (35,000 litres) of alcohol. The 17-strong longboat crew were tasked with saving their shipmates’ lives….and the precious liquor.

The wreck of the Sydney Cove still lies on a sandbank off Waytakupana/Preservation Island. Pictured is a diver working over the Sydney Cove’s exposed timber hull as part of an archaeological excavation in 1992. The wreck was largely forgotten for almost 200 years until divers rediscovered it in 1977. Archaeological excavations were undertaken by the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service in conjunction with the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG) and many artefacts were recovered. Image courtesy of QVMAG. All rights reserved.

Led by Scottish merchant William Clark, those chosen for the journey did not even know that there was a strait of water ahead of them. They believed they would encounter some islands as they voyaged north, followed by an actual land bridge. James Cook, when he first entered these waters, had wrongly presumed that Tasmania and the mainland were connected. All the subsequent charts of this part of the world repeated this error.

If the 17 had been here 20,000 years earlier, the charts would have been correct.

After leaving Preservation Island they could see in the distance (what would eventually be called) Flinders Island – the largest island in the strait. Before they could get there, they had to navigate numerous smaller islets, including the later named Great Dog, Little Dog and the Tin Kettle Islands.

They could not quite believe what they saw at Prime Seal Island. As the name suggests, it was thick with seals. It was standing room only.

Some of the islands were large, others no more than rocky outcrops. Around these were the least visible remnants of the ancient land bridge – the many reefs dotted around the islands. The crew successfully threaded their way through them all.

As they approached Flinders Island they saw an undulating series of beaches strewn with giant boulders, and there were rocky promontories behind which lay a dense green hinterland. A mountain range ran north along Flinders’ spine. They rose up as great buttresses of rocks, with small gullies and high culverts, leading to a tower of pure granite.

To the men and boys on the passing longboat the scenery looked as alpine as any they had seen in the northern hemisphere.

Along the beaches, they noticed uncountable numbers of seals vying for space and skies filled with tens of thousands of mutton birds. The many huge boulders they saw were flecked with orange lichen. One giant rock on Island’s western shore would later be known as Castle Rock. It was a huge orange beacon visible even against the night sky.

Their passage was relatively uneventful among the Islands, but within a day or so, the weather deteriorated. The sea was lumpy, the wind gusting up heavily from the Southern Ocean. The strait, with its irregular wind and current patterns, was about to show them why it still counts among the most feared passages of water in the world.

The Southern Ocean is the only body of water to run uninterrupted around the globe, its waves fuelled by the freezing Antarctic winds that cut in at latitude 40 degrees. A combination of waves and current that has travelled around the Southern Ocean at a depth of around four kilometres enters Bass Strait and passes over a ledge – part of which is the old land bridge – which is only on average 60 metres below the surface. The waves hit this giant platform, breaking the sea’s momentum, and corralling the waters into a heady, riotous soup.

And so it was that their boat passed over the old, submerged land bridge – which was, in its way, influencing their voyage. The longboat was lurching up, down and sideways. The current was moving one way, the wind and waves counter to it. By the second night of the voyage, they were bailing water furiously to keep afloat.

​Map of the overland journey of the 17 men and boy sailors who set out to seek rescue for their stranded fellow shipmates of the Sydney Cove in 1797. Illustration by Clare Ainsworth. ©Clare Ainsworth. All rights reserved.

Governor Hunter sent out two boats, the Eliza and the Francis, to rescue the remaining men (and alcohol) on Preservation Island. On the return trip, one of the ships, the Eliza, was lost in a gale, most likely in Bass Strait. It was a tragic loss, after these men had survived for so many months on the island. It is believed that eight lascars died.

On the second ship, the Francis, a number of lascars and the captain, Guy Hamilton, returned safely to Sydney. There is no exact record of the total number of survivors from Preservation Island, but it is thought that less than twenty of the 50 or so people initially stranded there, survived.

The tale the survivors told would lead to exploration of the south, including the ‘discovery’ of Bass Strait, Tayaritja/the Furneaux Group of Islands, and the island of Lutruwita/Tasmania by Europeans. Clark also discovered what would become Australia’s first two export industries – coal and seal skins.

He and his men may have been starving and wretched, but they walked further on Australian soil than any non-Aboriginal person had walked before them, witnessing at first hand more than Cook, Banks, Flinders and Bass combined. It was Australia’s first ever non-Indigenous overland expedition.

Australian fur seals on a rock off the east coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania. The Sydney Cove shipwreck brought sealers to the Bass Strait in 1798, drawn by the news of abundant seal populations. Seals were hunted for their fur to the point of near extinction, but Australian fur seal numbers grew again after sealing ended. Sealer men often had Aboriginal wives (some married willingly, some abducted forcibly). Bass Strait islander sealer families became strongholds of Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) culture. Today Tayaritja/the Furneaux Group of Islands, which include the location of the Sydney Cove shipwreck, are important cultural homelands of the Palawa. Photograph by JJ Harrison. CC BY-SA 3.0.