Read Room
Is this the best historical novel of the year?
In February of this year, a random stranger (me) shipwreck expert Bill Day sent a bottle of champagne and an unedited novel, printed and spiral bound at the Warehouse Stationery: Mrs. Jewell and the wreck of the General Grant†
The general subsidy is a ship that was wrecked in the Auckland Islands in 1866 with a cargo containing an unspecified amount of gold and 83 passengers. Eighteen months later, 10 survivors were rescued by a whale brigade and taken to Invercargill, where they told their story to a delighted audience. The wreckage was never found.
Mrs. Jewell and the wreck of the General Grant is my fictionalized interpretation of what happened to the 14 men and one woman who survived and lived as castaways on a bleak and stormy sub-Antarctic island. The woman was Mrs. Jewell, who returned to England from Melbourne with her new husband, with gold from the mines stitched into the folds of their clothes.
As I researched and wrote the novel, I became aware of the powerful hold this story still has on people’s imaginations. And then one day, as can often happen with historical stories, the history I was researching jumped up and bit me.
One hundred and fifty six years after my story took place, shipwreck hunter, diver, businessman, all-round expert in everything General Grant-y, Bill Day, went to the Aucklands to look for the wreckage. Hence the champagne and the book, and a bold suggestion that if he found what he was looking for, he might write the final chapter.
I subsequently learned that many random people contact Bill Day with advice on treasure hunting and suggestions on how to carry out his adventures. He is good natured about it all, realizing how compelling his real “boys own” life is for armchair lovers and understanding their burning desire to live the story and be a part of it.
Nevertheless, he took my book (the champagne probably helped) and read it in the stark isolation of the Auckland Islands while his ship lay tucked away, waiting for a break in the relentlessly difficult weather. He passed the copy around to his crew.
“I loved the book and what a privilege to read it while I was in the Aucklands searching for the wreckage,” he wrote to me, followed by a lively discussion between us about our mutual admiration for the Irishman James Teer, hero of the castaways, who had kept the survivors alive with brute strength and courage.
This gave me the historic collywobbles. I had written a fictional account of an event that happened in Victorian times, and the day it was edited with my publisher, there were divers reading the story on location and bringing it back to life from those bleak waters.
Not many people have been to the Aucklands. It’s an inhospitable place. The weather is relentlessly ferocious, the sea fog covers the islands almost all year round, the rocks are hard, trees stunted and there is something about it all that almost Wuthering Heights romance
Bill Day describes the location in melancholy terms: the cliffs that rise hundreds of meters from the tide to the sky, the soaring birds with broad wings, the extraordinary marine life. He’s dived the many dozen caves and crevices that could potentially hide the shipwreck, worked in frigid temperatures, and swam through the kelp with sea lions. He makes it sound exciting.
Bill and his team work with facts. They are serious explorers with advanced equipment and technology. They took a magnetometer to the island, carefully calibrated it against two known wrecks before towing it all along the west coast. They will find the ship, or not (and it’s not that far but I’m holding my breath), with science and facts.
I, on the other hand, am looking for a story, in which I examine what is known of each of the castaways and society of their time and class, where they lived and died after the rescue and filled the gaps left by me for to imagine what, plausibly, could have happened. We are both swallowed up by the same historical legend, but we approach it from very different angles.
When Bill and I spoke after he returned from his adventure, we found that our facts and fictions are not so clear. We have access to the same source documents, and there are few enough, and neither of us dares to label them fact or fiction, although our different interpretations enrich both of us.
Three of the survivors left testimonies, recorded in newspapers, letters and diaries. These have inconsistencies, but also some eerie similarities that give the suspicious “what goes on tour” feeling of rebuilding. Three survivors made a trip back to the island, which was of little use; there are obvious gaps in the story and unexplained motives.
The source material about the story of the shipwreck and its survivors has been merged into a kind of history. The general subsidy wreckage is even plotted on the LINZ Topo50 map, but she is not there. Which begs the question: How true were the survivors’ memories? The memory of a series of events can be notoriously unreliable, especially months later and after a trauma.
Also, how strong was the stimulus of the General Grant survivors for secrecy? If they intentionally screwed up the story – because they intended to return for the gold or for some other reason – is it possible that their secrets have been kept hidden all along? Without the physical evidence of a wreck, or the subsequent evidence of sudden inexplicable wealth for the survivors, what exactly can we declare as historical truth and what the realm of fiction?
Either way, our factual and fictional sides of the story match the agreement that the General Grant is a better adventure story than you could ever imagine: shipwreck and treasure, castaways, trauma, desolation, heroism, survival. To be Treasure Island, Lord of the Flies, Titanic and Put away rolled into one. Part of the story is true and part is not. We’re just not sure which one is which.
For me and my fiction, that just adds to the mystery. But I can’t help but think that Bill Day still wants to pull some shining princes out of the sea.
Mrs. Jewell and the wreck of the General Grant by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, $37) is available in bookstores nationwide.