The Mystery of Rachel Cohen

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.

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NOTES

[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.