The Loss of HMS Orpheus 1863 – and the link with the lady who would invent the modern life-jacket

The late 19^th Century was a period of much expanded sea trade and with this came an enormous number of shipwrecks, not least due to lack of modern navigational aids. Service in Britain’s Royal Navy was in general safer than in the merchant marine, mainly due to high levels of professionalism, training and discipline. Despite this, tragedies did occur (see links at end of this article for details of some of the most notable) and one, in 1863, remains today the largest maritime disaster in New Zealand waters. It was however to linked to a later development, a positive one, which is described in the latter part of this article.  

HMS Orpheus, commissioned in 1861, was a Jason-class wooden corvette of 2365 tons and 225-foot length. She had both steam and sail propulsion and carried twenty 8-inch, muzzle-loading 68-pounders in broadside mountings and a single 7-inch breech loader on a pivot-mounting. Heavily armed for her size, she was ideal for “colonial operations” – service on remote stations where shore-bombardment might well be called for, as could be the need to land armed parties from her usual crew of 258. It was to support the British colonial forces in the latest of a long series of wars with New Zealand’s Maori inhabitants that Orpheus sailed from Australia in late January 1863. She was headed for Aukland, to rendezvous with two other Royal Navy vessels already in the area. The city lies on an isthmus, between Manukau Harbour to the West and the Waitematā Harbour to the east and north. The safer approach was from the east, but for a vessel coming from Australia this would necessitate a longer course, rounding the North Cape and sailing down the East Coast of the North Island.

Already behind schedule, Orpheus’s commander decided to approach through Manukau Harbour. This is an enormous natural harbour but the mouth is little over a mile wide and a six-mile channel leads on into a  roughly square basin about 12 miles across. The tidal variation can be high – over 12 feet – and the harbour is relatively shallow.

Orpheus approached in clear and sunny weather on 7^th February, running parallel to the coast at Whatipu Beach, just north of the inlet to Manukau. The area was known to have dangerous sandbars which had been charted twice, in 1836 and 1856 but in 1861 a pilotage guide had been updated to take account of sandbar-shifting. The Orpheus carried the outdated 1856 chart however and though the sailing master wanted to use the update 1861 instructions he was over-ruled by the captain. The 1856 chart would be used. Despite a warning signal from shore, and from the quartermaster, who was one of only two men on board to have entered the harbour before, course was maintained. Only too late was the danger recognised and last-minute attempts did nothing to avert the inevitable grounding at 1330 hrs.

The surf on the bar was strong enough to swing the Orpheus about with her port side beam-on to the waves. The pounding commenced, structural damage was sustained and the ship began to take on water. Attempts to abandon ship failed as the surf’s violence swept many away. At the same time the harbour pilot, one Edward Wing, was piloting a steamer, the Wonga Wonga, out of the approach channel. With considerable skill and coolness he manoeuvred the Wonga Wonga as close as he could dare and remained there for the remainder of the day, and through the night hours. By evening the pounding had brought down the Orpheus’s masts, killing some left on board. Thereafter there was nothing to do but pick up bodies from the water, or from the sand-dunes where would-be rescuers approached from the land side.

Of the 259 men on board the Orpheus, 189 had been lost, including the captain and the commodore who had been carried. Many of the dead were very young, boys of 12 to 18, and the average age of the crew in total was just 25.

It had been a wholly avoidable tragedy and, in terms of loss of life, it remains until today the worst disaster in New Zealand maritime history

  Orpheus was to have very strange, and ultimately positive, consequences. One of the survivors of the tragedy was called Henry Newman, whose mother Mary gave birth to her youngest child, a little girl in St Helier, Jersey, in the Channel Islands seven months after the sinking.  In honour of her son’s ship and of his companions, the child was called “Orpheus”. As she grew older, and obviously influenced by stories of the disaster, the little girl suffered fits of terror about drowning. These were so severe that, when she was eight years old, Orpheus’s parents took her a hypnotist to Paris to have her cured, apparently without success. In the meanwhile her brother Henry, by now discharged from the Navy, decided to return to New Zealand, where he settled on the on South Island.

In late 1871, shortly after the Paris visit, Orpheus’s father William, a ship’s master, died. Her mother decided to take her and two older children to join Henry in New Zealand. A storm during the passage appears to have helped Orpheus of her fear of drowning. The family settled in Dunedin and an elder brother, William, became a fisherman. In due course, when grown up, Orpheus married a seaman named Norman Beaumont. An ambitious man, he qualified as a master and commanded a vessel trading between New Zealand and various islands of the South Pacific. Orpheus herself accompanied him on some of these trips so that she was to gain extensive experience of the sea and its hazards.

Tragedy struck in 1912, when Orpheus’s brother William died at sea, but this private misfortune was dwarfed by the much greater loss of life when the Titanic sunk that same year. One consequence of this disaster was however that Britain’s Board of Trade called for improved life-saving equipment.

It seems that personal experience and family loss had already caused Orpheus Beaumont, as she now was, to think about an improved flotation aid. Existing life jackets – as are often seen in old photographs of life-boat crews – were made of solid slabs of cork. They performed adequately once in the water, but should it be necessary to jump in from any height – as was so often the case in “Abandon Ship” situations – the cork would slam into the head, and in the worst case could even break the wearer’s neck.

During her voyages with her husband to various South Pacific islands Orpheus had become aware of a waxy fluff derived from the seed pod of the kapok tree. This material – kapok – was moisture-resistant, quick-drying, resilient, and capable of supporting up to 30 times its own weight in water. She recognised it as an ideal material for a new type of life jacket – which she called the “Servus” – and she proposed this to the Board of Trade. This was the beginning of a lengthy correspondence, not only in view of the distance between New Zealand and London, but because the First World War made communications even more difficult. Various objections were made but in each case she modified the design to cope with the problems identified. In the end the Servus gained official approval, and this at a time when shipping losses during Germany’s U-Boat campaign made it more badly needed than ever. Orpheus’s efforts were crowned with a large order for the Admiralty in 1918 and with others for merchant-marine use.

A new paradigm had been set for life-jacket design. The original Servus was still in use in World War 2 and after, and in due course various other improvements, such as support for the head, led to the evolution of the soft-filled life-jacket we know today.

This splendid lady died in 1951 and had the satisfaction of knowing that her ingenuity and tenacity had led to the saving of countless lives. A childhood phobia of drowning had been converted into something positive that still benefits humanity.

Orpheus Beaumont deserves to be remembered - a splendid woman.

For details of other Royal Navy shipwrecks in the late 19^th Century click on the links below:

1877: Russian forces drive deep into the corrupt Ottoman-Turkish Empire.  In the depths of a savage winter, as the Turks face defeat on all fronts, a British officer is enmeshed and finds himself confronting enemy ironclads, Cossack lances and merciless Kurdish irregulars. And in the midst of this chaos, while he himself is a pawn in the rivalry of the Sultan’s half-brothers for control of the collapsing empire, he is unwillingly and unexpectedly drawn to a woman whom he believes he should not love…