The Ever-Widening
Mysteries of the Rachel Cohen: Part 2
[A photo of the ship should be here]
Rachel
Cohen, Devenport, Tasmania.
After
about five years of waiting, some comments came in to my Blog posting providing
new information on who Rachel Cohen was and why her name was given to an Australian
coastal schooner. Even as we add these newly retrieved details concerning her
parentage and place of origins, we are still left with the essential question
more implied than discussed at length in my original essay. Why did none of the
sailors who were rescued by the Rachel
Cohen in the Southern Ocean remark on the Jewish name of this vessel? The
newspaper reporters who recorded her activities, both as a cargo ship,
sometimes with or without passengers, or aid to explorers to the Antarctic and
the Sub-Antarctic islands did not seem to find anything unusual about the name,
and especially in a period when almost anything Jewish raised more or less mild
anti-Semitic comments. The very term “Jew” (or some variation on Heb’ or Kike
or
Yid)
had a range of intensifying negative connotations in the newspapers, magazines,
popular
fiction,
stage plays and other entertainments of the period.
Yet,
in fact, someone asked this very
question, according to Gibbons’ search of old Australian newspaper on Trove: World's News (Sydney), 28 May 1921, p.
21. A reply was then
provided under the heading "Shipping Query". The writer (with the
very Dickensian name of Madgwick; see Great
Expectations) offers a married name for Rachel Cohen herself, Mrs
Millington—the "g" is assumed since the print is unclear. Most likely
this is a different woman altogether, someone who survived into the twentieth
century, but nevertheless was close enough to the family of Salomon and
Rosetta. For reasons given below, the Rachel Cohen we are interested in was
somewhere between zero and three years old when she died. This Mrs. Millington may also have been named
Rachel, as the original name was vacated by the passing away of the infant,
though this goes contrary to normal Jewish custom. We assume, then, that Madgwick was confused when he tried
to answer the question of after whom was the vessel named,
World's News (Sydney), 11 June
1921, p. 21: J. H. Madgwick wrote in response to an enquiry: "She was
named after Mr Cohen's daughter Rachel (afterwards Mrs Millington [sic]), and
sister to Dr and Judge Cohen".
“But,” Peter Gibbons cautions, “it seems that the daughter might have
been Rachael, even if the ship was Rachel”. The variations on the Hebrew
name ﬧﬤﬥ
(Rochel) and the spelling of the most
common Rachel/Rachael may be of little significance. Any Jewish community in
the world is likely not only to have many families named ןכֹּהֵ (Cohen, Kahn, Kohan,
Kuhn, etc.) but several women named Rachel, Rachael, Rochelle or Raquelle. The
additional information turned up about a woman whose family Millingen name appears among the descendants
of Samuel Cohen suggests a family association through marriage, if this is not another
slip of the pen for Milligen. Note this
wedding announcement whuich appears several weeks later, the delay no doubt
occasioned by the Christmas/New Year’s holidays:
Sydney Mail & New South Wales Advertiser, 5 January 1878
MILLINGEN-COHEN—December
20 at the residence of the bride’s parents by the Rev. A .A. Levi. Charles,
second son of Philip Milingen, Esq., of Sydney, to Rachael, eldest daughter of
Samuel Cohen, Esq. of Ulmarra, Clarence River.
We should note here that the
honorific “Rev.” was often used by British Jews to refer to their rabbi, so
that this could be a Jewish wedding held at the home of the bride’s father and
mother, rather than at a church. This “eldest daughter” was probably born some
seventeen to twenty-four years earlier. She would hardly be the female infant
born shortly before the ship was named.
Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 1939, reports the death and the next day the cremation of Rachael Millingen. A
separate death notice gives her age as 85, so that she had to be born c. 1854.
An obituary for her own father Samuel Cohen twelve years after her
marriage has father-in-law’s name as Philip van Millingen.
Brisbane Courier (Qld), 25 August
1890.
MILLINGEN—On the 2nd August, at the residence of his
son-in-law, S. Cohen, Philip van Millingen, sen., aged 71 years.
That there were two Philip van Millingens, father and son, suggests that
this was a non-Jewish family for reasons discussed below. However, a longer
funeral notice printed two days earlier presents further mystification of who
precisely these people were:
Brisbane Courier (Qld), 23 August
1890.
FUNERAL NOTICE.—The
friends of Mr. PHILLIP MILLINGEN (deceased) are respectfully invited to attend
his Funeral, to move from the residence of his Son-in-Law (S. Cohen),
Stephens-street, South Brisbane, TO-MORROW (Sunday) MORNING, at 10 o’clock, to
the Toowong Cemetery.
Again there is no church service mentioned, the “van” is deleted from
the Millingen name, and the son-in-law is designated as “S. Cohen”, though
there is no male offspring listed among Samuel Cohen’s immediate descendants.
To add even more
confusion to the situation, there is a notice in 1903 which, when juxtaposed to
an obituary printed in 1918, suggests that we might never know who is referred
to as Rachel Cohen:
Newcastle Morning Herald, 23 September 1903
The death is announces of Mr. C.S . Millingen, a gentleman of high
standing in the commercial life of Brisbane, who was for 25 years connected with
the firm of Hoffnung and Co., and for seven years a partner in the firm of A
.M. Hertzberg and Co., and in 1895 took up the business of indenting on his own
account, and carried it on ever since. Of late years, however, he has been in
failing health.
It looks like
Brisbane had a small and highly successful community of Jewish merchants and
they not only did business with each other but also tended to intermarry. For
the principal obituary written for Samuel Cohen in 1918, the names Millingen,
Hertzberg and Cohen are tightly woven together.
Sydney
Morning Herald, 17 September 1918
The death took
place yesterday at The Chimes, Macleay-street, of Mr. Samuel Cohen, who was
within a month of 88 years of age. He married in 1851, and immediately
afterwards accompanied by his wife, came to New South Wales.
After little over a year in New Castle,
he went to the Clarence River, where he lived for 48 years, after which he
resided in Sydney. His wife [Rosetta] predeceased him by seven years. There
were 13 children, of whom ten survive—Dr. A. A. Cohen; Mr. John J. Cohen,
Speaker of the Legislative Assembly; Mr. B. Keith Cohen, solicitor (of this
city); Mr. Benjamin Cohen, merchant, of Brisbane; Mr. Julius Cohen, merchant of
Toowoomba; Mrs. C. Milligan, Mrs. J.M. Davis, Mrs. A.M. Hertzberg, Mrs. P.C .
Mitchell and Mrs. A. Hertzberg. There are 30 grandchildren living, of whom five
are fighting at the front, and there 16 great
grandchildren.
The funeral will leave The Chimes at 1
p.m. to-day.[1]
Note that there is
no second S. Cohen listed here among surviving children. There are four
sons: A.A., John, Keith and (fittingly
as the youngest and last) Benjamin. There are five daughters each nominated by
their husband’s name or initials.
Two obituaries from
1939 offer still further problems in finding out which Rachel/Rachael Cohen is
the daughter of Samuel and the woman memorialized in the ship’s name.
Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 1939
MILLINGEN.—December 18, 1939, at Khorassan, 31 Hughes Street, Potts
Point, Rachael, beloved mother of Ettie, Ruby, Enid, P.A., L.S., A.C, and H.S.
Millingen. Privately cremated. Aged 85 years.
No mention here of church services but of cremation. The daughters have
personal names, the sons apparently only initials. Her birth year was 1854, a
score of years prior to the Rachel Cohen we think is most likely to have been
the ship’s namesake.
Sydney
Morning Herald, 19 December 1939
MILLINGEN—The
Mortal Remains of the RACHAEL MILLINGEN were privately cremated YESTERDAY, the
18th instant, at the Rockwood Crematorium.
The language here
is “neutral”, meaning there is nothing specifically Jewish about it. Therefore
my tentative conclusion is that we have probably located the correct Samuel
Cohen who commissioned and named the Rachel Cohen after his daughter, but there
are remaining difficulties in identifying who she was.
Orthographical Problems and Inter-Faith Marriages
The question is did a journalist decide what the
spelling of Rachel should be? Or did
the ship get registered incorrectly? And was the married Rachel Milli(n)gen/Milligton named after the first daughter of Samuel Cohen?
The “C. Milligen” referred to among the married children of Samuel and Rosetta
is obviously the formal way of designating the wife of Charles Milligan. More
chilling, however, is the notice of a cremation, something outside of
traditional Jewish beliefs, since a complete body was considered necessary for
resurrection. By 1939, though, the Cohen and Milligen families might have taken
a “modern” decision based on current Australian practice.
Peter Gibbons
therefore makes some further connections which may suggest that Rachael married
out, and even converted to her husband’s Christian faith.
“Sydney Mail, 5 January 1878, p. 15, gives a
notice of the marriage of Rachael (sic), eldest daughter
of Samuel Cohen, Ulmarra, to Charles, second son of Philip Millingen, Sydney”[2]
Close to half a century later, when The
Sydney Morning Herald reported the
cremation of Rachael Millingen, her death coming in her 85th year,
making her birth likely to be 1854, that is, a couple of decades before the
Rachel we have seen as the daughter commemorated in the sailing vessel we are
studying. This may not be the same person whom the Rachel Cohen was named
after.
A daughter born to the Cohens at Ulmarra on 19 September 1870 (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 September
1870, p. 1) a few months before the ship was launched, and this may have been the
vessel’s namesake. The commentator of my Blog’s information thus looks to be
correct when he writes:
The Rachel Cohen barquentine was built
for Samuel Cohen (1829-1918), an [sic] hotel keeper and mayor of Ulmarra, and
named after his eldest daughter Rachel (1853-1939).
Now
we know that this brigantine was built on commission by Alexander Newton of
Manning River, New South Wales for Samuel Cohen, an inn keeper in the town of
Ulmarra on the southern banks of the Clarence River, also in New South Wales. The Wingfield Chronicle for 9 March
1951, gave a rather belated report on this event, saying that Miss Ellen
Newton, daughter of Alexander Newton, “christened the ‘Rachel Cohen” on 23 July
1871.[3]
It is not really that news travels slowly about such matters, but that at the
time when the elderly pass away obituary writers turn up interesting facts
about the past.
So
as we trace through newspaper archives now available online and as one name or
e vent leads to another, we gradually piece together the story, and unravel the
mystery—or rather the many mysteries—of Rachel Cohen. Yet even as new data
comes in and we try to digest it, it is impossible to avoid little
discrepancies, contradictions and gaps in the record. Then, just when we think
we have the problem named, in comes something from an obscure source or we
re-read some document discovered earlier in our search before we were quite
sure what we were looking for, and what we assumed was a pretty strong set of
interconnections falls apart and new mysteries emerge. At the same time, though, we cannot follow
every lead, or create ever diverging digressions with digressions, fascinating
as they may be in their own right. We are not writing the history of the Cohen
family, describing all of colonial Jewish life in Australia, re-assembling the
adventures of shipping and shipwrecks in the Southern Ocean, or a multitude of
other wonderful topics.
Additional
information at the Obituaries Australia
site consists of a list of names:[4]
·
Cohen,
Rosetta (wife)
·
Cohen,
Michael (son)
·
Cohen,
John Jacob (son)
·
Cohen,
Maud (daughter-in-law)
·
Cohen,
Bertram (daughter-in-law)[5]
·
Lipman,
Cecile May (granddaughter)
·
Cohen,
Leslie Francis (grandson)
·
Cohen,
Roy Algernon (grandson)
·
Cohen,
Errol Clarence (grandson)
A
fair bit of interesting information is provided at the site for Rosetta Cohen (1830-1910;
whose name does not feature in her husband’s obituary). The original obituary
appeared in Hebrew Standard of Australasia (Sydney), 18 November 1910, pp 9 and 10. I have divided the long report into
several paragraphs to make clear what new details are now available:
The death occured [sic]
on Monday last of Mrs. Rosetta Cohen, wife of Mr. Samuel Cohen, President
of the Montefiore Jewish Home, and mother of several influential members of the
community. Although Mrs Cohen, who was in her 82nd year, has been ailing
for some time, her end was altogether unexpected and she passed away suddenly
and peacefully.
Here finally Rosetta is named and begins to have her own
personality and history.
Mrs. Cohen, with her
husband, arrived in Australia in the early fifties and after a short stay in
Sydney and Newcastle they took up their residence in the Clarence River
district, of which they were among the pioneers and where they were domiciled
for very many years.
This
is virtually the same narrative provided in Samuel’s obituary above, although
the couple are explicitly identified as pioneers.
Despite the fact that
they were completely isolated from any Jewish community, Mrs Cohen, with the
assistance of her husband, always worthily strove to maintain and uphold the
traditions of Judaism, bringing up a large family, with a knowledge of the
tenets of the Jewish faith and stringently observing all the ceremonies of the
religion.
This is most significant, not only in identifying the
family as Jewish, but indicating their commitment to Jewish practices,
something that was difficult in such an isolated outback part of the state.
Mrs. Cohen was of a very lovable disposition
and was universally esteemed for her good acts in the district in which she
made her home. In the early days when doctors were few and far between Mrs.
Cohen was frequently appealed to for advice and assistance which she always
gave ungrudgingly to her neighbours.
This begins to expand on Rosetta’s character, putting her
in the tradition good Jewish wives, skilled in giving medical attention to
others in the absence of professionals, and thereby earning the goodwill of the
local community.
Some 21 years ago retiring from business, Mr.
and Mrs. Cohen came to Sydney, where they have since resided. This worthy
couple celebrated their golden wedding about 7 years ago.
This
again takes us to what was said about her husband reaching retirement age and
moving back to the city, Sydney this time.
Mrs. Cohen, whose
home life was always of the most happy description, had a family of thirteen
children, of whom ten are at present surviving, namely Mrs. C. S. Milingen,
(Brisbane), Dr. A. A. Cohen, Mr. John J. Cohen, M. L. A., Mr. Benjamin Cohen
(Brisbane), Mrs. A. M. Hertzberg (Brisbane), Mrs. J. M. Davis (Brisbane), Mr.
B. Keith Cohen, Mrs. P. C. Mitchell, Mrs. Abraham Hertzberg (Brisbane), and Mr.
Julius Cohen (Toowoomba).
There is no listing
of the three deceased children, one of which might have been named Rachel. Shortly
after the time she died and thus probably in 1871, that is the date her father
commissioned the building of the small coastal shipping vessel that bears her
name.
The funeral at which
Rabbi Cohen officiated, took place at Rookwood on Wednesday afternoon and was
largely attended by a representative gathering of relatives and friends.
The coffin was carried at the house and at the cemetery solely by the sons of
the deceased lady.[6]
John J. Cohen as
Speaker of the NSW Legislative Assembly merits his own entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography from
which abstract a few pertinent lines:
John Jacob Cohen (1859-1939), architect, politician and judge,
was born on 20 December 1859 at Grafton, New South Wales, third son of
London-born parents Samuel Cohen, storekeeper and pioneer in the Clarence River
district, and his wife Rosetta, née Menser….[7]
That
the Cohens originated in London and that his father was a “storekeeper” tells
us just a little more concerning her background but nothing that leads us to
the identity of Rachel Cohen.
However,
the search goes on, and in a local history of Corindi Beach, a small coastal
village near the town where the Cohens settled for nearly fifty years, we learn
that Corindi Station was sold to Samuel Cohen in 1879 and that he was the first
mayor of Ulmarra.[8]
Eight years after having the brigantine built, Samuel is wealthy enough to buy
new property near the sea, and has been mayor of Ulmarra. This information allows us to gain even more
details that help us zero in on the elusive woman who gave her name to the
ship.
Trevor
Cook posts such information in account of his own ancestors on his home page on
“Ulmarra Regattas, and the Cohen Family—Family History”:
Samuel Cohen was the first mayor of
Ulmarra and its first shop owner. Cohen was unanimously re-elected as mayor in
1873 and was re-elected for a fourth time in 1879. His home, “Silverwier”, at
17 River Street, is still used as a private residence.
The
time when Samuel was mayor of Ulmarra covers the period when he decided to go
into coastal shipping and when probably the daughter whose name he gave to the
vessel happened. But why did he name his home, still standing according to
Cook, “Silverwier.”?[9]
The search turns up some further facts, not least that “The area of Ulmarra was
settled in the 1850s and the town established in 1870,”[10]
that is, just when Cohen was at his peak.
Samuel Cohen was born in London on 14
July 1829 and died in Sydney 16 September 1918. He married Rosetta Menser (born
15 October 1830 in London) in London on 30 March 1853.They had thirteen
children. The sixth child, Benjamin, was born in Ulmarra on 1 November 1861,
the remaining children were also born in Ulmarra.[11]
A further draft of the District Plan now
records that:
….the
area of Ulmarra was settled in the 1850s and the town established in 1870. A petition
asking for the Municipal District of Ulmarra was published in the Government
Gazette on 23 June 1871. It requested incorporation of an area of about 45 square
miles with a population over 1,000. The town of Ulmarra was founded on the
banks of the Clarence River and the towns and villages of the former shire
extend to the coastal towns of Wooli, Minnie Water, Diggers Camp and Sandon.
But the mystery is finally
solved when we read in the Daily Examiner
(Grafton, NSW) of 10 July 1937 posted by
the Clarence River Historical Society on
their site Trove[12]
Samuel Cohen was born in London in 1830 and came to Sydney in 1853. From
1858 till about 1861 he kept a store in Grafton and then went to Ulmarra where
he carried on an extensive business as a store and hotel-keeper and traded
largely in cedar and maize. He had a schooner built specially for the maize
trade and named her the Rachel Cohen, after his eldest daughter. He was the
first Mayor of Ulmarra. In his business he employed pit sawyers and furniture
makers. He was the first life
member of the Maclean Hospital. Samuel Cohen's son, Judge John Jacob Cohen now retired, was formerly speaker of the
Legislative Assembly of New South Wales. Another son, Mr. Julius Cohen, is
living in Toowoomba. On the mother's side these gentlemen are first cousins of
Mr. Abraham Lipman, of Grafton.
Rachel
Cohen was Samuel and Rosetta’s first-born daughter. Without explicit statement, however, we can
take it as a given that Rachel died and to honour her memory her father and
mother named the new schooner after her.
Meanwhile, this
newspaper notice provides further details of the family business, what they
dealt in and whom they employed, and what the immediate purpose of the new
schooner was meant to serve. The Cohen Wharf in Ulmarra probably was the site
of the family shipping business.
The
Second Mystery
Yet
that only leads us to the next mystery: why throughout her career,[13]
and especially when she was used for unusual rescue missions in the Southern
Ocean and among the Subantarctic Islands, no one thought it remarkable that the
ship bore the name of a Jewish female, both the personal and the family name
being clearly Jewish—and certainly unusual then as now.
Let
me go through a private memory to show why the name matters.
When
my paternal grandfather would sing George M. Cohan’s song from the 1942 movie
musical with James Cagney playing the performer born to Irish-American parents
and singing what became his signature song: “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.
I'M A YANKEE DOODLE DANDY
George M. Cohan
I'm a Yankee Doodle
Dandy
A Yankee Doodle, do
or die
A real live nephew
of my Uncle Sam's
Born on the Fourth
of July
I've got a Yankee
Doodle sweetheart
She's my Yankee
Doodle joy
Yankee Doodle came
to London
Just to ride the
ponies
I am a Yankee Doodle
boy
Cohan
(1878-1942), of course, was not Jewish, not a Cohen or a Kahn or Kuhn or a Korn,
but it pleased my Grandpa Dave Mendel Simnowitz to think so, just as he also
explained that the patriotic tune was especially written for me since I was
born on the Fourth of July (albeit two years earlier in 1940). Perhaps many
other American Jews, and not just immigrants from the Old Country where they
had experienced pogroms and became increasingly aware in the 1930s of what was
building up to be the Holocaust, thought—because they wanted to believe—that
the original vaudeville entertainer and then James Cagney’s version of him in
the biopic that took the name of the song for its title—was Jewish. After all,
Cagney spoke Yiddish, as did many of his fellow performers on the popular
stage.
That
being so, we can pass on to another related matter: women on ships in the
nineteenth century.
Clearly
it appears that during the heyday of the Rachel
Cohen’s work no one took the name as referring to anyone or anything
Jewish, or any individual person whatsoever, just as they silently accepted
that a ship would be a “she” and called after a woman at a time when it was
still rare for a female to be on board a working-vessel in any other capacity
than as a paying passenger and rarely as the wife or daughter of the captain or
other senior officer.[14]
In a less wholesome manner, adolescent girls known as “ships’ wives,” sailed
aboard whalers and sealers, not always voluntarily.[15]
There are also occasional instances (real and fictional) of rich and/or famous
men going around the world with wives and daughters, too, as for example, the
wife of the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson.[16]
Again,
there are tales told of females dressing up as boys in order to sail away to
exotic places, passing themselves off as male for years or even their whole
lives.[17]
It was probably easier to do when they could play the role of officer, or
ship’s captain, or special scientist or artist assistant, as they would have
more opportunity to sleep alone or at least share a cabin, rather than to be
pressed up close in the hold. Whether
they fit the category of transgender, cross-dresser or asexual such instances
are rarely hinted at in sailor’s journals or memoires.
A
typical shipping notice shows not just what we mean by the non-noticing of the
name, but also just what kind of jobbing work the ship performed into the
twentieth century. The text below appeared in The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania) on 4 October 1912:
RACHEL COHEN AT MACQUARIE ISLAND.
Mr J. M. Fisher, Hobart agent, of the brigantina Rachel Cohen, received
a wire-less message on Monday slating that the vessel was discharging stores, etc,,
at Macquarie Island. She arrived there a week ago from Hobart, but owing to the
extremely, rough seas had to put out again and will wait more favourable
conditions,. She will load sea elephant oil for Hobart, and on discharge here
will load timber for New Zealand. She will take a cargo of white pine at New
Zealand for Melbourne, and after discharging at Melbourne will be fitted with
engines. She will then proceed to Macquarie Island direct.[18]
It
is fascinating to see how the Rachel
Cohen was part of a three-pronged trade between Tasmania, New Zealand and Macquarie
Island, and more so that in 1912 there were plans to outfit the vessel with
engines. At the same time, we see that
these ports of call were in touch with each other through wireless telegraphy.
The Hatch Affair
An
unfortunate side to this shipping enterprise is that in 1912 the notorious[19]
Joseph Hatch (1837-1928) purchased the Rachel
Cohen when he shifted the headquarters from Invercargill to Hobart “to run
mail and supplies for the AAE’s [Australian Antarctic Expedition] Macquarie
team, and to service his own piling gang.”[20]
The ship continued in this service until April 1919 when it “took off the last
load of oil processed station before Joseph Hatch was forced to quit Macquarie
Island.”[21]
Though
he might not have been as bad as rumour and private reports made him out to be
and as a court trial eventually decided, Hatch implicated the ship in the cruel
elephant seal oil scandal.[22]
It was believed that the men working for Hatch on Macquarrie Island beginning
in 1891; the story soon went abroad that these employees were stunned the
creatures before throwing them in a steam-pressure digestor[23]
to render them down to oil.[24]
The
aged entrepreneur, who denied the charge of animal cruelty, however, according
to Wikipedia, had two notable
supporters, the Baron Walter Rothschild and the novelist H.G. Wells, which supposedly
included a defence of Hatch in his The Undying
Fire.[25]
Unfortunately, the paragraph where Wells’ Job-like protagonist Headmaster Farr
describes what the unnamed entrepreneur was doing is anything but
complimentary. The report comes in a letter from one of Farr’s former pupils:
This old boy of mine was in great
distress because of a vile traffic that has arisen… Unless it is stopped, it will
destroy these [penguin] rookeries altogether. These birds are being murdered
wholesale for their oil. Parties of men land and club them upon their nests,
from which the poor, silly things refuse to stir. The dead are stunned, the
living and the dead together, are dragged away and thrust into iron crates to
be boiled down for their oil. The broken with the dead…. Each bird yields about
a farthing’s profit, but it pays to mill them at that, and so the thing is
done. The people who run these operations, you see, have a sound commercial
training. They believe that when God gives us power He means us to use it, and
that what is profitable is just.[26]
This
stand-in for the biblical figure of Job argues that the universe is not ruled
by a benevolent and caring God and all of life is a brief, miserable and
painful Hobbesian existence, and so Farr adds a bit later in his debate with
the rich and powerful school board trying to remove him from his position as
headmaster to shift the focus of education to practical, commercially useful
subjects—not history and philosophy, certainly not morality and ethics:
There has to be an answer, not only to
the death of my son [killed in battle during World War One, a war still raging
in 1918] but to the dying penguin roasted alive for a farthing’s worth of oil.
There must be an answer to the men who go in s hips to do such things.[27]
A
further search of relevant essays and documents, also shows that Baron
Rothschild was not a defender of Hatch and the inhumane collection of penguin,
seal and sea elephant oil. Barbara Frame imagines a public meeting in the 1920s
opposing him person when he tried to defend his actions at public debates.[28]
She reports that Rothschild, Wells and “just about everybody else” up in arms
against Hutch,
Those who
oppose and hound him, "scientists and sentimentalists", turn out to
be just about everyone from Baron Rothschild, Apsley Cherry-Garrard and H.G.
Wells to the New Zealand Government, the newspapers, manufacturers of cuddly
toy penguins, and anyone who supports workers' rights.
Someone
identifying himself as “allen.nz” in a review of A. De la Mare’s biography, Joseph Hutch and the Loss of the Kakanui (Invercargill
Charitable rust, 1990) posted on his blog that this meeting was the first time
the crusty old war horse lost control of his audience, but the tide of public
opinion had finally turned against him. To cap off the proof that neither H.G.
Wells nor Walter Rothschild had come to his defence, the blogist adds:
By 1919 the concerns had developed into possibly
the first-even international campaign to preserve wildlife, with Antarctic
explorers like [Douglas] Mawson, as well as Frank Hurley and Apsley
Cherry-Garrard getting involved. They were joined by other, such as H.G. Wells,
Baron Walter Rothschild, The Times of London, and the Seaman’s Union. By now, even
the Tasmanian government was losing interest (and face) and Hatch’s lease on
Macquarie Island was not renewed in 1920.[29]
Fred
Pearce, as recently as 2012, speaks of the “international campaign [including school
children] to put an end to the carnage in 1919,” [30] shades of our own
environmental crisis and the efforts of young people to rouse the conscience of
their elders.
Another
report, not published until 1982, concerns the establishment of radio communications
in the Antarctic and Sub-Antarctic regions. In a notice of the death of Charles
Sandell, one of the two radio operators on Mawson’s 1911-1914 expedition to the
South Pole, we are told that English-born Sandell and New Zealander set up a
base on Adelie Island and relayed messages from Antarctica to Hobart. The
pertinent information comes in the next two paragraphs:
When Mawson and his six men had to
remain in Adelie Land for a second year the Macquarie Island party was asked to
remain another year to maintain communication with Commonwealth Bay. As the expedition
s hip Aurora was laid up during the winter of 1913 arrangements were made for
the smaller sealer Rachel Cohen to take stores to the island party.
But the Rachel Cohen never reached the island.
She ran into unusually stormy weather in July and eventually reached New
Zealand badly damaged[31]
However,
in November of that year the Rachel Cohen did arrive with a load of coal to see
the radio-engineers through the rest of the time they spent on Adelie Island,
showing that the old girl could handle Antarctic seas. Too bad nobody wondered
whom she was named after.
Another
interesting character connected with the ship’s history. John (“Jock”) Cromar
in a book published in 1935 called Jock
of the Islands. Early Days in the
South Seas: The Adventures of John Cromar: Sometime Recruiter and lately Trader
of Marovo, British Solomons Protectorate, Told by Himself.”[32]
A New Zealand historian of colonial
times and journalist in the early part
of the twentieth century, James Cowan, finds
this to be “a really readable as well as authentic book,”[33]
although it does not quite match its models (such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Melville’s Moby Dick) in regard to style or depth
of perception and meditation on the persons and things seen, events engaged in
or conclusions drawn; and while Jock, boy, young man, and crusted old tar that
he becomes, he is certainly a character of interest, his authenticity as a
chronicler of historical facts leaves much to be desired. In his first years
(the 1870s) as a sailor in the Pacific and at the close of his first chapter,
the Aberdeen lad decides to work on a coastal trader, after a few trips with
emigrant ships, and in Melbourne he signs on to the Rachel Cohen, which must then have been a very new vessel:
My next surprise was meeting Paddy Hogan
again, he having been paid off from the barque Examiner which had entered port. Both of us shipped on the Rachel Cohen, which took machinery to
northern Queensland, and there loaded sugar for Brisbane. Paddy and I left the ship
then, and made our way to Sydney…[34]
What follows are Jock’s adventures on
recruitment ships, descriptions of the different kinds of European adults he
encounters and his fascination with the various natives, savages and especially
dusky maiden he ogles, many of whose naked bodies are displayed in accompanying
photographs. For the most part, Cromar describes his life among the small
islands of Melanesia, presenting himself as a practical recruiter, fair but
cunning, wary of unscrupulous and greedy fellow Europeans and cautious in
treating with the heartless savages.
This book ends when the labour recruitment ends with changes to the laws
in Queensland where most of the men and women from the islands were brought to
work. There is no evidence, however, not even a hint, that the Rachel Cohen was involved in this
nefarious traffic in people.
But
there is a further connection between John Cromar and the Rachel Cohen, one in which he is a witness to a stabbing on board the
ship.
Stabbing at Sea
Cromar’s
name does not appear in the early reports of the incident, but only when a
formal coroner’s inquest is held in Melbourne. The first report of the killing appeared
in The Mercury (Hobart, Tas.) on
Wednesday. 31 May 1882
INTERNATIONAL TELEGRAM
(BY SUBMARINE CABLE)
(PER REUTER”S AGENCY)
Victoria
Melbourne,
Tuesday
Steady rain has
been falling all day.
William
Stroobardt, a Belgian seaman, has been committed for trial for the wilful
murder of John Wallace, mate of the Rachel Cohen. Prisoner shot the mate while
the vessel was on her way from Melbourne to Brisbane
Many
details in this early report were incorrect as may be seen in a fuller account
published a fortnight later in the Poverty
Bay Herald (New Zealand),[35]
13 June 1882, in a cable first published in the Melbourne Age on 28 May. This initial version has the victim shot, while all
later reports correct that to being stabbed. The spelling of the key
characters, their nationalities, the palaces where the ship passed, and the
dates when the incident occurred are not consistent through various
journalistic accounts, and these matters are only partly clarified in the
published version of the paper.
The voyage of
the schooner Rachel Cohen, which arrived at Melbourne yesterday morning from
Queensland, was far from a pleasant one. On coming up the bay the police flag
was flying, and on the vessel being boarded by the water police at
Williamstown, they ascertained from Captain B. Brown that Mr. John Wallace, the
chief officer, had been stabbed in the back by one of the sailors, Henry
Stroonbardt. The police were not supplied with any warrant for the arrest, so
the vessel proceeded up the river to Melbourne, where the necessary authority
was obtained and the man taken into custody.
The affair
occurred on the 14th instant, about 5 o’clock p.m., when the craft
was off Cape Harp, under [illegible] mainsail. The mate was on deck, engaged,
in the company with two of the crew, honking the jib down. While Wallace was so
employed, without any intimation or warning of his murderous purposes,
Stroonbardt went behind the officer with a large sheath knife and drove the
weapon into his back under the left shoulder.
There was no
surgeon on board, but Wallace was immediately taken below and his wound dressed
as well as circumstances would permit, and later in the evening his assailant
was placed in the after part of the vessel. There is every reason to suppose
that Stoonbardt is not in his right mind. He is stated to have been one of the
survivors of the barque Glimpse,[36]
which was wrecked recently, and it is conjectured that his mind has become
unhinged by the severe sufferings he underwent before he was rescued.
On being placed
in the city lock-up he made a number of rambling and incoherent statements, to
the effect that Wallace had insulted him. He had killed President Garfield had
not Guiteau[37]
alone done so,[38]
and made use of similar extravagant statements.
Mr, Wallace went
to hospital, where he was examined by surgeons. His wound was found to be a large
gaping orifice beginning to suppurate. He was very weak from loss of blood but
at present his condition is not considered dangerous.
That prognosis was unfortunately overly
optimistic, and two days later The Sunday
Morning Herald, Tuesday, 30 May 1882 reported that
Mr Wallace, mate
of the barque Rachel Cohen, who was stabbed at sea by a Frenchman, Henry
Stoonbandt, has died of his wounds. Stoonbandt, who is now in custody on a
charge of maliciously wounding will be arraigned for murder.
The details of Stoonbandt’s national have been
changed, as has his first name. The spelling of his family name is not clear
either. But these are minor points, when
our concern is with the notoriety of the event aboard the Rachel Cohen.
Though dated to the
same period as the journalistic reports on the incident, the inquest was actually later. Delays in transmission and
frequency of publication in the oppress explain this discrepancy. Here is the coroner’s resumé from the Herald (Melbourne) 30 May 1882 (p.3). As
usual, I break apart the long unparagraphed report into smaller units to make
clear what is going on and who is speaking at this inquest. I also silently add bold letters, italics,
inverted commas and other punctuation marks where they seem needed.
THE RACHEL COHEN
STABBING AFFRAY,
THE INQUEST.
Dr. Youl, the City Coroner, held an inquest at the Melbourne
Hospital today on John Wallace, late mate on board the brigantine Rachel Cohen, who died at the
institution on Saturday inst. Henry [illegible],[39]
a native of Brussels,[40]
appeared in custody of the police charged with having caused the death of
Wallace by stabbing him. [illegible]-
Inspector Lamer watched the case for the Crown.
Peter Brown, master of the brigantine Rachel Cohen, stated: “The deceased was
my chief officer. Deceased was 31 or 32 years of age, and single. On Sunday, [illegible] May, [illegible] 40 miles S.E. of the Head. About 5 p.m.
Wallace came to me and said, "Charley has stabbed me."(The prisoner
was known on board the ship as Charley.) Deceased had a penetrating wound in
the back. It was bleeding, and the air came out of it when he breathed. The
steward dressed the wound as best he could. We had no surgeon on board. We
tried to get to Twofold Bay, but were unable to do so. We also tried to signal
to some steamer that were passing by and ask for medical assistance, but the
steamers took no notice of us and we had to proceed to Melbourne.
“The deceased
remained seven days on board the vessel after the stabbing. He was well-looked
after, and was slightly improving. Deceased was taken to the Melbourne Hospital
immediately after arrival. I heard nothing about the quarrel. I made search for
the knife, I asked prisoner for it, but he kept on saying that he had thrown it
overboard. I then locked him up. The only excuse prisoner gave for stabbing
Wallace was that “he was growling" at him. Prisoner said that Wallace did
so.”
Prisoner, who was asked whether had any
questions to ask, said: “Skipper, did I not tell everybody on board that I am a
prophet? A prophet is more than man.”[41]
The Coroner stopped the prisoner from proceeding
with his incoherent remarks.[42]
John Cromer,[43]
seaman on board the Rachael Cohen,
stated that at 5 o'clock on the [illegible] instant
they were all working under directions of the deceased. They were hauling down
the jib. They were general orders, and the mate did not address himself
individually to the prisoner. When the jib came down, and before turning round,
the prisoner stuck a knife into the mate's back. There was no quarrelling. I
heard a thud. I saw the knife in the mate's back, and the prisoner Henry [illegible]
was going to withdraw it. Prisoner was going to
place the knife into his
sheath when the deceased sang out, and witness with the mate ran aft,
James Bahilly, clerk, stated that he
.was present on Friday, 28th, in Melbourne Hospital when the dying depositions
of John Wallace were taken before Mr Panton, P.M., when Wallace deposed that he
was not aware of having given the accused any provocation whatever. About some
weeks before this, when off Cape Howe, he asked the accused for the loan of a
book, knowing that he had a few in the forecastle. He called out
"No." Wallace said, "All right. I don't want it. You may——
" or words to that effect. There was no ill-feeling shown by the accused
at the time, and no angry words passed between them up to the time he was
stabbed.[44]
Constable Hayes, who arrested the prisoner, also gave evidence.
Dr Thomas Loughrey, who made the post
mortem examination, found that the wound in the lung corresponded with the
external wound.' The cause of death was the wound in the lung, which would have
proved fatal under any treatment.
The Coroner in summing up to the jury said that
from the evidence, it appeared that on the day in question the deceased was
engaged in a peaceful occupation, and without any quarrel or the slightest
provocation, the prisoner Henri Strobardt in a quiet and cool manner stabbed
the deceased, and then coolly proceeded to replace the knife into its sheath.
There was no doubt about the facts and the cause of death. A man would, under
the circumstances, be justified defending himself, but the prisoner had used
the knife in cool blood.
A juryman: Have you noticed anything peculiar
in the prisoner's character?
The Coroner: All you have to
consider is whether the prisoner find maliciously stabbed the deceased. It was
not done in self-defence, and being
done maliciously without any cause it is wilful murder.
The jury after deliberating for a few minutes brought in a verdict that the
prisoner Henry [illegible] caused the death of John Wallace, and
was guilty of wilful murder.
The prisoner was
then committed to take his trial at the Central Criminal Court on the 15th of
June.[45]
The prisoner then made a long statement,[46]
and said: “I am Jesus. 0pen the Bible and you will find that I am a prophet. Of
course, Tichborne is a liar,[47]
the fupc is a liar, and I knew you will say that I am a liar. Look at
my arm and forehead and you will see the Southern Cross, the same as in the Heavens.
I am a prophet, and if you open the Age
of last November, you will find there that I told then the people of Melbourne
that there was a prophet in the streets of Melbourne. Ask Dr I'ttley and he will
tell you the same. I told him six months ago that I was a prophet. I was sent
by God to Melbourne to ask 'If God is nobody, or if his laws are nothing’ I am
a prophet, and nobody has a right to insult me. Wallace insulted me, and I
killed him in the same way as Moses killed. Moses was a prophet and he killed a
man because he insulted him”.
The prisoner was then removed.
Captain Brown stated that the prisoner had been
continually writing to great personages, he had written letters to the Emperor
of Russia, the Pope, and all the other notabilities in Europe. Otherwise he was
harmless and inoffensive, and never had a quarrel with anybody on board.[48]
The insult of which
the prisoner speaks is evidently the reply Wallace gave him on being refused
the loan of a book.
Further clarification and also mystification
in this news item in the Argus (Melbourne), 23 May 1882 ( p. 10):
The only reason assigned by
Stroobandt for the rash act was that the first mate had insulted him, but from
the man's general conduct it would appear that his mind had become unhinged. He
was one of the crew of the ill-fated barque Glimpse,
which was totally wrecked on the coast some time ago, when the survivors
endured very great hardships and privation before being rescued. Recently he
was heard to say that if Guiteau had not shot the late President Garfield, he
would have done so himself, and he frequently talked incoherently of having
considerable correspondence with the Postmaster General[49] and the
"Emperor" of the French.[50] The prisoner will be
brought before the City Bench this morning, and probably remanded for a week.
Remanded
for an assessment of his mental state and thus capacity to face a murder trial?
Farewell to the Rachel Cohen
It
is best that we say farewell to the Rachel Cohen by remembering her—and
honouring the child she was named after—in her best character as a rescue ship
and a cargo vessel.
In 1916 the Rachel Cohen returned from the Auckland
Island and one of the crew informed the Otago
Daily Times (Anon., 1916) that the cattle on Enderby and Rose Islands were
in very poor condition and many were dying of starvation due to overstocking
and competition from rabbits.[51]
When it all comes down to facts, we have
accumulated quite a few, and yet we are not really able to solve the questions
still remaining about the ship named after Rachel Cohen. But why go on? I think it is now a very
personal matter. My interest in the ship, the girl it was named after, the
family that ran the coastal shipping business for several decades in the late
nineteenth century, and then sold it on—and, under many owners and captains,
all the adventures we have turned up associated with the vessel, sometimes in
the cargo trade and sometimes on rescue missions in the Southern Ocean—in a
peculiar way reminds me of my own life. By some rather peculiar decisions taken
in strange circumstances, I find myself, at the end of my life, exiled to the
bottom of the world, from my origins and background as a Jewish boy from
Brooklyn, New York, and from the intellectual life I once was able to sample at
various levels in Europe and Israel.
Like my research on the Rachel
Cohen, my life is inconclusive and in many ways incoherent.
If anyone has further or more correct
information on this essay, please let the author know through the Comments
section of this Blog.
[1] “Cohen, Samuel (1829-1918) Obituaries Australia, National Centre of
Biography, Australian National University online at
http://oa.anu.ed/obituary/cohen-samuel-20504/text/31412.
[2] See Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) where Madgwick
is the convicted felon transported to Australia
where he becomes wealthy and leaves to the young hero of the novel a legacy
which are his “great expectations”.
[3] The alarm bells should start to
ring when we find this juxtaposition of cultural discourses: a Jewish name
given to a ship having a christening ceremony. It is doubtful if anyone at this
event felt such a case of ritual dissonance. Miss Ellen Newton would no more
have intended an anti-Semitic jibe than would all those nice people who used to
ask me for my Christian name and were deeply puzzled—or simply didn’t
notice—when I responded that I didn’t have
one. “But I do have an English name, as well as a Hebrew and a Yiddish name.”
[4] Names are tricky things, not
just because of orthographical variations, or because some names appear in
several generations and it is hard to pin down who is referred to; but because
journalists sometimes make errors and neighbours can’t remember exact details.
Jewish names are also special, first, in the sense, that some people have
Hebrew and Yiddish names as well as “English” names chosen for official or
social purposes; other people change their names for strategic purposes,
especially if they are migrating from the Old Country to the New World.
[5] As a “relict” of her husband,
she does not merit her own personal name or identity.
[6] 'Cohen, Rosetta (1830–1910)', Obituaries Australia, National
Centre of Biography, Australian National University,
http://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/cohen-rosetta-20505/text31414, accessed 14 July
2019.
[7] H. T. E. Holt, 'Cohen, John Jacob (1859–1939)', Australian Dictionary of Biography,
National Centre of Biography, Australian National University,
http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cohen-john-jacob-5714/text9663, published first
in hardcopy 1981, accessed online 14 July 2019.
[8] “Corindi Beach” Buy the Sea:
About Our Area at http://www.buytheseaproperties.com.au/corindi_beach.
[9] Unless there is a spelling error
here (unlikely because this name is repeated in several soruces), another
mystery opens. In Middle Dutch wier refers to seaweed, and is
related to English dialect words for ware
and Old English war. Perhaps
“”silverweir” described some elaborate ironwork on the house. Another guess
might follow Wier as a family name, common in Scotland and later often found in
America. What this would have to do with a Jewish family from London who
settled in New South Wales in the mid-19th century makes the
suggestion implausible. The building is listed as a heritage site in the
district’s draft plans (posted May 20-18)
[10] Ulmarra Draft Plans.
[11] Trevor Cook, “Ulmarra Regattas,
and the Cohen Family—Family History” (1 April 2013) online at https://trevorcook.
typepad.com/weblob/2013/04/1-boat-race-ulmarra-annual-regatta-1862.
[12]
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/193839154?
[13] This is what the first part of
this essay published on my blog five years ago outlined.
[14] Joan Druet, Hen Frigates: Passion and Peril, Nineteenth-Century Women at Sea (London:
Simon and Schuster/A Touchstone Book, 199).
[15] Shona Riddell. Trial of Strength: Adventures and
Misadventures on the Wild and Remote Subantarctic Islands (Dunedin, NZ:
Exisle Publishing, 2018) p. 14.
[16] Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, The Cruise of the Janet Nichol among the
South Sea Islands, ed., Roslyn Jolly (Seattle, WA: University of Washington
Press and Sydney, NSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2004).
[17] Riddell, Trial of Strength, pp. 36-39.
[18] The Mercury (Hobart, Tas) 4 October 1912 at Trove http:// newspaper/article/10251704\I”titleModal”
[19] Philip Matthews, “The Penguin History”
The Listener (10 March 2007) online
at https:www.noted.co.nz/ archive/listener-nz-2007/the-penguin-history. In this
review of Geoff Chapple’s Harvest of
Souls (see below), Matthews tries to balance out the harsh views of Chappel
and other known data on Hatch. Modern repugnance at the mass slaughter of
Antarctic animals and aggressive capitalism were not just marks of the late
nineteenth century, but also contested movements and attitudes of the period.
Hatch carried on the oiling trade for thirty years and yet was a popular
politician down to the end of his very long career. Chapple writes a morality
play for our time, though in a sense he shows that the opponents of Hatch were
no less creatures of their own time and culpable of many actions and attitudes
we also find reprehensible today. On the one hand, we can’t change the fact of
history but we can change how we feel; about those facts. On the other, we can
tease apart the opinions, lies, distortions that were supposed to represent
those facts, factor in other details that were consciously or unconsciously
left out, and reach conclusions that were probably impossible for anyone at the
time to have come to.
[20] Geoff Chapple, “Harvest of
Souls” New Zealand Geographic (1928)
online at https//www.nzgeo.com/stories/ harvest-of-souls.
[21] “
History of Sealing at Macquarie
Island: Nuggetts Penguin Progressing Pant” Parks
& Wildlife Service Tasmania (25
July 2008) online at https://www.parks.tas.gov.au/index.aspx?base=1831.
[22] Riddell, Trial of Strength, pp. 147-150.
[23] For a description of the steam
digester plant and how they worked, see “History of Sealing at Macquarie Island.”
“The use of steam digesters in the production of oil from seals and penguins
appears to be unique to Macquarie Island… The introduction of [a] steam
digester plant to Macquarie Island in 1899 was paralleled by its first usage
for oiling by the Norwegian whaling fleet in the same year.” None of the
ethical or political debates raised by this cruel method processing animal oil
is touched on by the official Tasmanian site.
[24] “History of Sealing at Macquarie
Island”.
[25] Riddell, Trial of Strength, p. 152.
[26] H.G. Wells, The Undying Fire (London: Cassell & Co., 1919) p. 60.
[27] H.G. Wells, The Undying Fire, p 83.
[28] “Sinking a Small Fortune: Joseph
Hatch and the Oiling Industry” The
Sealers’ Shanty 9 (1889-1919) 2.
[29] “Hatch, Victorian Villain or
Forgotten Hero” Victorian Footnotes
(18 May 2011) online at https://victorianfootnotes.net/2011/05/18/hatch-victorian-villain-or-forgotten-hero.
[30] Fred Pearce, “Boiled-to-Death
Penguins are Back from the Brink” New
Scientist (22 February 2012) https://www.newscientist.com/article.dn21501-boiled-to-death-pensguins-are-back-from-the-brink.
[31] “Charles Sandell Sent First
Polar Radio Message” Antarctic
(September 1982) 419.
[32]John Cromar, Jock of the Islands :
Early Days in the South Seas : The Adventures of
John Cromar . (Faber & Faber, 1935).
[33] J[ames].C[owan], “’Recruiting’:
Tales of the Labour Trade, Adventures in Melanesia” Auckland Star (6 April 1935) 23.
[34] Cromar, Jock of the Islands, p. 23.
[35] I have taken the liberty of
dividing this long report into a few shorter paragraphs.
[36] The schooner Glimpse wrecked on 5 November 1881, with
great loss of life, and the suffering of the survivors was reported widely. The
man known under the name of Henri/Henry Stroobardt, however, does not appear in
lists of the survivors of the Glimpse.
Further research is needed. See below for the report on the Inquest following
the stabbing of a sailor on the Rachel Cohen.
[37] Charles A. Guitaeau, a deranged
gunman, claimed the President owed him money.
[38] President James A. Garfield was assassinated
one year earlier, on 19 September 1881 at Long Branch, New Jersey, United States.
[39] The name seems never properly
settled. Neither his first nor his second name. We attempt to follow whatever
is used in the particular document cited.
[40] This seems to clarify whether
the accused was French or Belgian.
[41] The first indication here that
the murderer’s mind is “unhinged”.
[42] Here is where a more modern
coroner might call for a psychiatrist or psychologist report. Not only dos this
official attempt to silence the witness—although the prisoner does speak at
greater length later in this report—but it may explain a recommendation (not
explicit) for dismissing any further legal proceedings, the murderer deemed
unfit by reason of insanity from standing trial. He may have been committed immediately to an
insane asylum instead.
[43] John Cromar is the author of Jock of the South Seas and he here shows
his literary eye for detail and for vivid expression.
[44] This is the most dramatic moment
in the report, with persons involved in the affray arguing amongst themselves,
and with statements cut off and replaced by actions.
[45] There is a hiatus here between
the jury’s verdict and the announcement of the accused being sent to court for
a trial for murder. The options offered the jury are inadequate: for it is not
a question of guilty or not guilty, but of whether the crime was one of
malicious intent, since the accused is demonstrably unfit on the grounds of insanity.
He seems to be suffering from paranoid delusions.
[46] This long statement allows us to
see the accused mental derangement, his paranoid delusions, his megalomania,
and his lack of understanding of right and wrong.
[47] The Ticheborne Affair was a
notorious attempt by a butcher from Wagga-Wagga in Australia named Arthur Orton
to prove he was heir to the English Ticheborne family wealth and titles. He
claimed to be the scion of the family who had been shipwrecked off South
America but rescued and eventually moved to Melbourne. A few relatives believed
the claimant, including the mother of the young Roger Ticheborne was her son,
as well as a few servants and friends of the family, but most of the Tichbornes
rejected him as an imposter, as did most of his former class-mated and
associates. The case dragged on from the late 1860s through to the late
1880s. Someone during the Inquest may
have brought up the Ticheborne claims in analogy to the murderer’s assertions
of being Jesus and Moses, though obviously the pose as a divinely inspired
prophet were more preposterous. Or the prisoner may have raised the point
himself, since he seems to be a reader of newspapers (e.g., the Melbourne Age), to contrast his own true claims to
that of the false heir to immense riches.
[48] No one at the inquest brings up
the point made in earlier reports of the stabbing that the prisoner had been
one of the few sailors rescued from the ill-fated schooner Glimpse which had wrecked the previous year and was one of the men
who had suffered greatly for eight days in small boat without food or water,
while friends and associates died of exhaustion and stress around him. Today
one might approach his mental illness in terms of post-traumatic stress
syndrome.
[49] According to Wikipaedia, the gentlemen holding this
position were at this period: “Postmaster-General (Australia) · Postmaster-General's Department. The Postmaster-General of New South Wales was a position
in the government of the colony of ... 13 November 1881. Stephen Campbell
Brown, 14 November 1881 – 22 August 1882. Alexander Campbell, 30 August 1882– 4 January 1883”.
[50] With Louis Napoleon III out of
the way since the defeat by the Prussians in 1870, it is more likely that the
prisoner would be referring to the Emperor of Russia, that is, the Czar; but if
Stoobart is really insane, then he could just as well still think Napoleon
Bonaparte was l’Empereur and the first Empire still in existence.
[51] H.G. Wells, The Undying Fire (London: Cassell & Co., 1919) p. 60.
R.H. Taylor, “Influence of Man on Vegetation and
Wildlife of Enderby and Rose Islands, Auckland Islands” New Zealand Journal of Botany 9 (1970) 233.
