Area and History
The Auckland Islands (maori: Motu Maha or Maungahuka) are an archipelago of the New Zealand subantarctic islands and include Auckland Island, Adams Island, Enderby Island, Disappointment Island, Ewing Island, Rose Island, Dundas Island and Green Island, with a combined area of 625 square kilometres (240 sq mi). They lie 465 kilometres (290 mi) from the South Island port of Bluff, between the latitudes 50° 30' and 50° 55' S and longitudes 165° 50' and 166° 20' E. The islands have no permanent human inhabitants. Ecologically, the Auckland Islands form part of the Antipodes Subantarctic Islands tundra ecoregion. The main island features many sharply incised inlets, notably Port Ross at the northern end.
History
Some evidence exists that Polynesian voyagers first discovered the Auckland Islands, possibly in the 13th century. A whaling vessel, Ocean, rediscovered the islands in 1806, finding them uninhabited. Captain Abraham Bristow named them "Lord Auckland's" on 18 August 1806 in honour of his father's friend William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland. Bristow worked for the businessman Samuel Enderby, the namesake of Enderby Island. The following year Bristow returned on the Sarah in order to claim the archipelago for Britain. The explorers Dumont D'Urville in 1839, and James Clark Ross visited in 1839 and in 1840 respectively. Whalers and sealers set up temporary bases, the islands becoming one of the principal sealing stations in the Pacific in the years immediately after their discovery. By 1812 so much sealing had occurred on the islands that they lost their commercial importance and sealers redirected their efforts towards Campbell and Macquarie Islands. Visits to the islands declined, although recovering seal populations allowed a modest revival in sealing in the mid 1820s. Now uninhabited, the islands saw unsuccessful settlements in the mid-19th century. In 1842 a small party of Māori from the Chatham Islands migrated to the archipelago, surviving for some 20 years on sealing and flax growing. Samuel Enderby's grandson, Charles Enderby, proposed a community based on agriculture and whaling in 1846. This settlement, established at Port Ross in 1849 and named Hardwicke, lasted only two and a half years. The Imperial Parliament at Westminster included the Auckland Islands in the extended boundaries of New Zealand in 1863. The 1907 Sub-Antarctic Islands Scientific Expedition spent ten days on the islands conducting a magnetic survey and taking botanical, zoological and geological specimens. From 1941 to 1945 the islands hosted a New Zealand meteorological station. Several introduced species have come to the islands; ecologists eliminated or allowed to go extinct cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, possums and rabbits in the 1990s, but feral cats, pigs and mice remain on Auckland Island. The last rabbits on Enderby Island were removed in 1993 through the application of poison, also eradicating mice there.
Campbell Island was discovered in 1810 by Captain Frederick Hasselborough of the sealing brig Perseverance, which was owned by shipowner Robert Campbell's Sydney-based company Campbell & Co. (whence the island's name). Captain Hasselborough was drowned on 4 November, 1810 in Perseverance Harbour. The island became a seal hunting base, and the seal population was almost totally eradicated. The first sealing boom was over by the mid teens of the 19th century. The second was a brief revival in the 1820s. The whaling boom extended here in the 1830s and 40s. In 1874 the island was visited by a French scientific expedition intending to view the Transit of Venus. Much of the island's topography is named after aspects of, or people connected with, the expedition. In the late 19th century the island became a pastoral lease. Sheep farming was undertaken from 1896 until the lease, with the sheep and a small herd of cattle, was abandoned in 1931 as a casualty of the Great Depression. In 1907 a group of scientists spent 8 days on the Island group surveying. The 1907 Sub-Antarctic Islands Scientific Expedition conducted a magnetic survey and also took botanical, zoological and geological specimens. During World War II a coastwatching station was operative at Tucker Cove at the north shore of Perseverance Harbour as part of the Cape Expedition program. After the war the facilities were used as a meteorological station until 1958, when a new one was established at Beeman Cove, just a few hundred metres further east, now unmanned and fully automated.
Campbell Island has a maritime tundra climate with consistently cool, cloudy, wet and windy weather. The island receives only 650 hours of bright sunshine annually and it can expect less than an hour's sunshine on 215 days (59%) of the year.
The legend of The Lady of the Heather
The Lady of the Heather was the title of a romantic novel by Will Lawson. The novel is a mixture of facts and fiction elaborating on the incidents surrounding Captain Hasselburg's death on Campbell Island. The story is about a daughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie, exiled to Campbell Island after she is suspected of treachery to the Jacobite cause. Her character was inspired by Elizabeth Farr. Farr was probably what would now be called a "ship girl", which is a prostitute that worked on board docked ships, but the presence of a European woman at this remote place, and her death, gave rise to The Lady of the Heather story.The accident happened when William Tucker was present on the Aurora. Tucker was another unusual character in the sealing era who became the source of a legend and a novel. The remoteness and striking appearance of the sealing grounds, whether on mainland New Zealand or the subantarctic islands, and the sealing era's early place in Australasia's European history, supply the elements for romance and legend which are generally absent in the area's colonial history.
