Trying to find out information about Rachel Cohen is an almost
impossible task. It reminds me of the
old joke in my neighbourhood of Boro Park in Brooklyn back in the 1950s: if you
walked into the street and shouted “Shulamit”, there would be at least fifty
girls who turned around. So too with
Rachel Cohen: type in the name on Google, and you can’t begin to count the
number of entries there are. Even if you
add sub-categories like New Zealand or Australia or nineteenth century, the
notices flow out. Who was she?
But I am not looking for a particular woman, at least not in the first
instance. The Rachel Cohen was a ship—a cutter, a whaler, or other vessel—that
sailed in the Southern Ocean in the last quarter of the nineteenth and the
first quarter of the twentieth century (between 1871 when she was built and
1924 when she apparently burned and then sank in Darwin Harbour, never again to
be found).
Her name pops up in accounts of whalers sailing into the sub-Antarctic
waters, where she rescues sailors wrecked on various small islands of the
Southern Ocean, involved with whalers and shark-hunters, and noted by explorers
and naturalists who ventured into these frozen seas. But while it is nice to read of this Rachel
Cohen carrying out such heroic and humanitarian duties, it remains very strange
to find a ship of this sort christened (what a word!) after a Jewish
woman. Although vessels often changed
names when they were sold, and they were named after the builders, owners,
share-holders, captains, or lost crew members, as well as mothers, sweethearts,
wives or daughters, a Jewish name is most unusual. Yet no one seems to about this peculiarity of
a Jewess working in the waters of the Aub-Antarctic Sea.
The Rachel Cohen was
constructed by Alexander Newton, one of the prominent builders of sailing
vessels, the Pelican Shipping Company on the Manning River near Darwin in the
Northern Territory of Australia in 1871.
It is variously described during its career as a wooden schooner, a
barquentine, a sealing ship. She was burnt and broke up in Darwin Harbour on 15
January 1924 and is now lost in or near Francis Bay.[i] But the Rachel Cohen’s career is
distinguished when, as a sealing vessel, she made many rescue missions around
the Sub-Antarctic Islands, thus appearing in many accounts by shipwrecked
sailors and surveyors in the region.
Thus, in an almost casual way, the Otago Daily Tiems for 2 July 1914
reports on current shipping news:
The Antelope and Gisborne are
operating in the immediate vicinity of the Sounds and Stewart Island, and the
Rachel Cohen has a party for Auckland Islands.[ii]
So far as this provincial newspaper cares just prior to the outbreak of
World War One, one ship is like another, their names of no significance
whatsoever: one can be named after an animal (the Antelope), another a city in New Zealand (the Gisborne), and a third after someone’s wife or sweetheart for all
they know (the Rachel Cohen), the
definite article objectifying the name and neutralizing any human or social
associations. What matters is where they are, where they are going, and
sometimes who their captain is, and then their cargo and private commercial or
government mission. The newspaper report thus continues:
The Rachel Cohen’s party are
under orders from Henderson & Co., and will be landed by that vessel on the
Aucklands, where they will be picked up again at the end of the season.
Two years later, in regard to a similar assignment on Enderby and Rose
Island, two of the Aucklands, the Otago
Daily Times reports on what the men dropped off in these remote territories
of New Zealand—still somewhat ambiguously British and New Zealand: “that the
cattle…were in poor condition and many were dying of starvation due to
overstocking and competition from rabbits.”[iii]
More usually, however, during its service as a sealer, the Rachel Cohen left supplies at various stations in the sub-Antarctic
islands and picked up castaways and other shipwrecked men, as well as agents
and explorers waiting to be rotated home.[iv] Yet the ship did not always arrive on
schedule, even after the establishment of radio communications. George
Frederick Ainsworth (1878-1950)[v]
gives a passage from Sir Douglas Mawson’s The
Home of the Blizzard[vi]
that he and two surveyors, Blake and Hamilton, in 1913 waited at the end of a
two-year assignment or the arrival of the Rachel Cohen on Macquarie Island and
learned to their disappointment that the sealing vessel was held up for repairs
in Hobart, Tasmania and would not arrive for another two months.[vii] They were eventually picked up by the Aurora.[viii]
There are many tales associated with the Rachel Cohen, some of them adding as much mystery to her career as
they do illuminate her history. One tale
has to do with the quest for the prehistoric giant shark Carahardon megalodon. The
elusive creature of the deep, thought to be a denizen of the deepest, darkest
waters of the pacific Ocean, occasionally appears in sailors’ reports, sighted
in various places, rising up for the depths, almost wrecking fishing vessels
and drowning all those aboard, and yet never captured. In one version, often
cited in somewhat dubious collections on sea monsters and the gullibility of
sailors, involves “the Australian cutter Rachel
Cohen…
While in an Adelaide dry dock
in March 1954, workers found 17 teeth embedded in the ship’s wooden hull that
reportedly resembled those of the white shark.
Unlike the white shark, however, the teeth were said to have been 8 cm
(3 inches) wide and 210 cm (4 inches) high….The teeth were arranged in a
semi-circle (typical of a shark bite) about 2 m (6 ft) in diameter, and the
“bite” was near the propeller. The
propeller shaft itself was bent. The Rachel Cohen’s captain recalled a
shudder the boat experienced one night during a storm near Timor, Indonesia…[ix]
While Ben S. Roesch dismisses this report as a delusion based on the
scientific lack of verifiable evidence and the unlikelihood of a fish that size
surviving where and how it supposedly did, an anaonymous article on the
blogsite of thr National Dinosaur Museum finds, in addition to the dubious
details of size and consistency of the story, a difficult question in
identifying the ship into whose hull the giant prehistorical shark bit its
teeth. The horrible event took place in
1954 off the coast of Timor Island and that is thirty years after the Rachel Cohen burned and sank in Darwin
Harbour. There are then two
possibilities: either the ship was not lost as everyone supposes—after all, the
wreck has never been found, and the fire was reported in January 1924 by two
sailors on-board who may have been drunk or lying for some other reason; or
some other vessel was built or renamed Rachel
Cohen, and of this so far there is no evidence to support the theory. There are reasons why those who served on her
or who were rescued by her would want to preserve her name by assigning it to
another vessel—she had a good reputation, she had performed historical duties,
and she was a fine old ship. Were there
any other reasons to continue the name in regard to the original woman named
Rachel Cohen?
The man who built the ship and probably named her for reasons we have
been unable to discover was Captain Alexander Newton (1847-1938). He was born in Chippendale, New South Wales,
and heir to the Pelican Shipping Yard founded by his father, also Alexander
Newton, and William Malcom, on the Manning River. He went to sea in 1876 and later retired as a
farmer in 1884. He was respected as a good and active citizen.[x]
The Manning River, known to the Aboriginal tribe that lived and owned
its stories, the Birpai people of the Bundjalung nation, knew it as
Boolumbahtee, “a place where brolgas played”—the dancing birds of the
Dreamtime—is along with the Nile River the only other in the world that has
permanent debouchments into the sea. It
was named by an early nineteenth century surveyor Henry Dangar after the then
Deputy Governor of the Australian Agricultural Company, William Manning, and
the river was used to mark out the northern boundary of the New South Wales
colony.[xi] The site where the Rachel Cohen was born,
then, was not just “a kaleidoscope of activity ranging from ship building,
through cargo and passenger handling, traders, boats, recreation, triumph and
tragedy,” Eric Richardson puts it,[xii]
but a confluence of ancient Aboriginal myths, colonial legends and commercial
narratives. Like the young girl who
oversteps the bounds of propriety and dances where and when she is forbidden to
do, in the men’s ritual world, receiving for her efforts the curse of being
transformed into a bird who can never marry but only dance forever around the
world, so the Rachel Cohen spends her
entire life among the sealers, the whalers and the sailors of the Southern
Seas—and yet earns a name that is respected wherever she goes.
Did Alexander Nawton or his associates know this? Or any of the captains
or hands on the ship? Or those who were rescued from the isolated, frozen
nearly waste islands of the Sub-Antarctic Ocean? Hardly a chance. Nor did they ever guess or dream that their
vessel was named after an otherwise unknown Jewish woman. No more so, we can be reasonably sure, that
than Captain Cook and his contemporaries were able to track down the elusive
“colony of Jews” supposedly there in New Zealand or some other of these specks
beyond the hopes of civilization.[xiii]
If
we find out any more about Rachel Cohen, we shall revise and correct this
little speculative essay and expand it accordingly. If anyone has information, please send
references to me.
[i] Jennifer McKinnon, “Wreck Inspection Report of
the Francis Bay Wreck, Darwin Harbour, NT” online at http://www/academia.edu. See
esp. pp. 2731. Also David Nutley, “A
River in Time: Following the Course of Influences on Manning River History”
online at http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/heritagebranch/
maritime/ARiverinTimeManning and Anon., “Northern Territory Shipwrecks” online
at http://oceans1. customer. netspace.net.au/nt-wrecks.
[ii] Otago Daily Times (2 July 1914) online at
http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/100-years-ago/307812/night-riders-targeted.
[iii] Cited in R.H. Taylor, “Influence of Man on
Vegetation and Wildlife of Enderby and Rose Island, Auckland Islands” in New Zealand Journal of Botany 9:2 (1971) online at http://dx.doi.org/a0.1080/0028825X. 1971.10429139.
[iv] For the fullest account of this episode in her
history and a photo of the Rachel Cohen
being towed to New Zealand for repairs, see the unsigned essay “The Wireless
Crew” in The Science Observer : A Journal
of Stories about Scientists on Maquarie Island 4 (1911-1913).
[v] Ainsworth was a meteorologist in Melbourne and
was chosen by Sir Douglas Mawson to set up a weather station on Macquarie
Island during the exploration of Antarctica.
[vi] Douglas Mawson, The Home of the Blizzard: being the Story of the Australian Antarctic
Expedition, 1911-1914, vol. I (reprinted by Nabu Press, 2010).
[vii] Cited in “Out and About: In their own Words, Mason’s Hut Foundation (July 2014) online at http://
mawsonshuts.antarctica.gov.au/cape-denison/at-home.
[viii] Anonymous report available online at
http://www.mawsonshuts.antarctica.gov.au/macqarue-island/the-people/george-frederick-ainsworth,
[ix] Ben S. Roesch, “A Critical Evaluation of the
Supposed Contemporary Existence of Carcharodon
megalodon” The Cryptozology Review
3:2 (1998) 14-24; online at http://web/ncf.ca/bz050/megalodon. Also see Greig Beck, Megalodon—Search for the
Dinosaur Shark” Thriller Central (12
February 2013) online at http://
thrillercentral.blogspot.co.nz/2013/02/the-dinosaur-shark-search-for-megalodon. Beck passes on the tale with no comment.
[x] G.D., “ A Seafaring Family: Newtons of
Pelican. Eldest Son’s Career,” obituary
in The Sydney Morning Herald (27 May 1938) available from the National Library
of Australia online at http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17468876.
[xi] Unsigned Wikipedia
entry “Manning River” (seen 17 October 2014).
[xii] Eric Richardson, “Shipping on the Manning,” Manning Valley Historical Society (1998) online at
http://www.manninghistorical.org/P&E5
[xiii] David Miller, “Early Voyages to New Zealand:
Episodes Associated with Captain Cook” Nelson
Historical Society Journal 1:1 (November 1955) p. 2; online at
http://nzet.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-NHSJ01-t1-body-d1.
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The Rachel Cohen barquentine was built for Samuel Cohen (1829-1918), an hotel keeper & mayor of Ulmarra, and named after his eldest daughter Rachel (1853-1939).
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ReplyDeleteI am the direct female descendant of Rachel Cohen and understood the barque was named after her and Sam's Mother, called Rachel.Rachael married Charles Samuel Van Millingen but the family dropped the "Van". He and his father Phillip are buried in the Jewish section of the Toowong Cemetery, Brisbane.I have photos of Rachael holding my mother and her sister as babies (Brisbane)and one of Rosetta Cohen (Menser).I am fascinated with your research Norman but not familiar with how to make contact
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