Dundonald (ship)

A contemporary print of Dundonald
History
United Kingdom
Name:	Dundonald
Owner:	Kerr, Newton & Co., Glasgow
Builder:	Workman, Clark & Co. Ltd., Belfast
Launched:	1891
Fate:	Wrecked and sunk, 7 March 1907
General characteristics
Type:	Barque
Tonnage:	2,205 GRT
Length:	284 ft 2 in (86.61 m)
Beam:	42 ft (13 m)
Depth:	24 ft 4 in (7.42 m)
Sail plan:	Full-rigged ship
Crew:	28

Dundonald was a steel, four-masted barque of 2,205 tons launched in Belfast in 1891. She was wrecked in 1907 in the New Zealand Subantarctic Islands. Only 15 of her 28 crew survived; they were rescued seven months later by a scientific expedition.

After setting sail from Sydney, Australia, on 17 February 1907, bound for Falmouth, England, with a cargo of wheat, she was forced onto rocks during a squall on 7 March 1907 on the west coast of Disappointment Island, 5 miles northwest of the Auckland Islands, 180 miles south of New Zealand, and sank.

Only 17 members of the 28 crew managed to escape the wreck and reach shore. One man, Walter Low, made the shore but slipped off the cliff back into the sea and was never seen again. Another, the mate Jabez Peters, died of exposure on 25 March 1907, eighteen days after the disaster. He was buried in the sand, but in November 1907, members of the Hinemoa's crew exhumed his body and re-interred it at the Hardwicke cemetery at Port Ross, in Erebus Cove, in the Auckland Islands; Peters' father and brother were also lost at sea in New Zealand waters.

The crew included:

The survivors lived for seven months on Disappointment Island, a barren outcrop three miles (4.8 km) long and two miles (3.2 m) wide. For the first three days they ate raw mollymawks until their supply of matches dried enough to get a fire going. They kept the same fire burning for the rest of their stay on the island, burrowed into the ground for shelter. The island had limited timber and the canvas tent they had could not withstand the constant storms that struck the island, so they improvised by digging into the ground and roofing over the hole they made with sod and shelter. The survivors also improvised clothes and tools from materials salvaged from the wreck or made from seals and the limited number of trees they found on the island.