In 1864, two ships--the Invercauld and the Grafton--were wrecked on opposite ends of Auckland Island. This island is 290 miles south of New Zealand. It's one of the uninhabited Subantarctic Islands, and it's one of the most isolated places on Earth. The island is 26 miles long and 16 miles wide.
Although the crews of the Invercauld and the Grafton were on the island at the same time, 26 miles apart, neither group was aware of the other. On January 3, all five people on board the Grafton reached land on the southern end of the island; and all five survived until they were rescued two years later. On May 11, nineteen of twenty-five crew members on the Invercauld made it ashore, on the northwestern end of the island; and only three survived for over a year until they were rescued. How do we explain this difference in survival rates--the entire crew of the Grafton survived for two years, while most of the crew of the Invercauld were dead one year after they landed?
In his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Nicholas Christakis has explained this by saying that the crew of the Grafton organized themselves into a naturally good society that reproduced the social capacities of our evolved human nature that favor human survival and flourishing, while the crew of the Invercauld failed to exercise those evolved social capacities. In my previous writing on Christakis (here, here, and here), I have said that his reasoning suggests that Friedrich Hayek was right about there being a convergent evolution towards the free society as the naturally best society. I see this confirmed in Christakis' account of how some shipwreck societies are more successful than others.
Christakis claims that the evolved social nature of human beings manifests a "social suite" of eight natural desires expressed in some form in every human society:
1. The capacity to have and recognize individual identity
2. Love for partners and offspring
3. Friendship
4. Social networks
5. Cooperation
6. Preference for one's own group (that is, "in-group bias")
7. Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism)
8. Social learning and teaching
To test the reality of this social suite, Christakis generates ten kinds of falsifiable predictions. One prediction is that when people are accidently thrown together into communities, we should see the social suite emerge in those communities that are successful. To test this prediction, Christakis surveys the history of people stranded in isolated spots after shipwrecks. Survivor camps established after shipwrecks are natural experiments in living, and by comparing them, we can see whether some ways of organizing social life are more successful than others because they conform better to our evolved human nature.
The castaway story about people stranded on an uninhabited island has been a popular fictional narrative for a long time--as in Shakespeare's Tempest, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, or television's Gilligan's Island. There has also been a popular literature of real-life stories about people who survive disasters that force them to live together as a community. In the nineteenth century, there was a lot of this adventurous storytelling about shipwreck societies.
Such stories fascinate us because they show us what human beings are like in the state of nature--where there is no established system of government and laws to regulate their conduct, and so they are free to express their natural tendencies to fight or cooperate with one another. Christakis observes that these stories can highlight either Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idyllic state of nature displaying peaceful harmony or Thomas Hobbes's state of nature displaying violent conflict (Blueprint, 26-27). The struggle for survival in the state of nature can drive people to fighting, murder, and even cannibalism. Or it can move people to cooperate for mutual benefit.
In setting up this contrast between Hobbes and Rousseau, Christakis ignores the possibility that John Locke's state of nature might be the complete picture that combines the partial truths of Hobbes and Rousseau, because Locke sees that the state of nature is a state of peace that easily becomes a state of war, which shows the tense two-sided complexity of human nature as inclined to either cooperation or conflict, depending upon the physical environment, the social circumstances, and the individual personalities in a group. (I have written about this here, here, and here.) The stories of shipwreck societies collected by Christakis conform to this Lockean depiction of the ambivalence of human nature as both good and evil.
Christakis has identified thousands of shipwrecks from 1500 to 1900. In most of these, everyone drowned. In some cases, survivors continued at sea in small vessels. In only a few cases did survivors make landfall and set up camp in uninhabited areas. For his purpose of studying natural experiments in social living, Christakis found twenty shipwrecks where at least nineteen castaways were stranded on some isolated land for at least two months.
For example, on July 22, 1821, the Blenden Hall--sailing from England on its way to India--wrecked on Inaccessible Island, an extinct volcano rising out of the South Atlantic Ocean.
Of the 84 people on board, all but two made it to shore. One party of six left on a boat, on October 19, attempting to reach Tristan da Cunha, an inhabited island twenty miles away; but they were never heard from and presumed dead. On November 8, another party in a boat reached Tristan da Cunha; and they arranged for those remaining on Inaccessible Island to be rescued, almost four months after the wreck. Therefore, of the 84 people who sailed on the Blenden Hall, 76 were saved. (Christakis mistakenly says that seventy of the eighty-two people on board were saved.)
This high rate of survival indicates the success of this shipwreck society. But that success was marred by violent fighting and factional divisions.
There were at least four reasons for their success. First, the survivors were able to salvage a lot of resources from the ship--such as wood and canvas for building shelters and boats. Second, they had access to fresh water and food (such as penguin meat and wild celery). Third, they were able to cooperate in sharing food. And, finally, and perhaps most importantly, the captain of the ship--Alexander Greig--showed shrewd leadership in organizing work parties and keeping the peace when conflicts arose.
This community might have fared even better, however, if it had not been weakened by group divisions. At one point, when food supplies were dropping, the crew threatened to attack the passengers and steal their food. Greig told the male passengers to arm themselves with clubs, and he led them in suppressing the crew's mutiny. Greig ordered the flogging of the crew, but he relented after one of the women begged him to show mercy.
Group divisions also emerged when Greig tried to organize the cooperative building of boats to leave for Tristan da Cunha. Three separate groups competed with one another in building boats.
While the people in this community were often cooperative, they were also divided into competitive groups that showed the universal human tendency to in-group bias, one of the traits in Christakis' social suite.
A more cooperative and more successful shipwreck society arose after the wreck of the Julia Ann. This ship left Sydney, Australia, on September 7, 1855, with 56 people on board sailing for San Francisco. On October 4, the ship smashed into a coral reef in the Scilly Isles in the South Pacific, about 200 miles west of Bora Bora, which is in the Society Islands archipelago. Four people drowned, but the 51 survivors were rescued after being stranded on an island for two months.
Society Islands
The ship crashed into a coral reef during a dark night at about 8:30 pm. With high winds and pounding waves, the ship began breaking up on the rocks. There was no land in sight. Captain Pond took command of the situation. He asked a crew member who was a good swimmer to swim to the reef and fasten a rope to a rock. Pond then began sending the women and children to the reef holding onto the rope. He told the other passenger to remain in the ship's cabin until their names were called.
Pond gave his navigational equipment (including his quadrant, nautical almanac, and epitome) to the first man to go to the reef, telling him that everyone's survival would depend upon preserving this equipment. This did indeed prove crucial to their being saved.
At first daylight, the survivors on the reef could see no land. They knew that if they could not reach land with fresh water, they would all die within days. Later in the day, some crew members sighted land about eight miles away. The quarterboat had been saved by the crew, and they quickly repaired it with copper and canvas, although it could hardly float. Captain Pond and a few crew members rowed the boat for eight miles, and then searched some tiny islands until they found an island with drinking water.
Once everyone had arrived on the island, Captain Pond called them all together and said: "As they were cast upon a desolate island, a common brotherhood should be maintained, and every man should hunt birds and fish for our common substance." All consented to this. One passenger later reported: "We divided ourselves into families, built huts, and thatched them with the leaves of the pandanus tree. All the provisions found were thrown into one common stock, anad equally divided among each mess every morning, and we gradually became reconciled to our sad fate." In effect, they had consented to a social contract for organizing their shipwreck society under Pond's leadership.
With his quadrant taking observations from the sun, Pond determined that they were three hundred to five hundred miles from the nearest inhabited island of the Society Islands. Their only hope of rescue was to repair the quarterboat and then to row it to a populated island. To repair the boat, they had to make nails and ironwork with a forge and a smith's bellows constructed from materials salvaged from the ship.
But then when the boat was ready, they saw that the trade winds were blowing from the east, the direction of the Society Islands, so that rowing the boat eastward against the winds seemed hopeless. So they decided to head to the west to the Samoan Islands. But the distance--over 1,500 miles--was discouraging.
Finally, Pond decided that they would have to row eastward, towards the Society Islands, against the winds. He persuaded the crew to accept this, but the Chief Officer Coffin disagreed. On December 3, almost seven weeks after the wreck, Pond with nine other men began rowing the boat east. Initially, the westerly wind favored them. But then the wind blew up again from the east, and a violent storm began. Pond and the others, exhausted from rowing night and day, thought their situation was hopeless.
Then, after four days of rowing, one of the crew members cried out "land!" They had reached Bora Bora. There they found a ship that would sail back to the Scilly Isles to rescue the castaways.
28 of the 56 passengers on the Julia Ann were Mormon converts headed to what they called Zion (the Salt Lake Valley in Utah). Previously, in 1854, the Julia Ann had sailed from Australia to San Pedro, California, with a full load of 63 Mormon passengers headed to Zion. This was part of a global migration of Mormon converts to Utah. Captain Pond, who was part owner of the Julia Ann, was so pleased with the orderly conduct of the Mormons on the first trip that he told the Mormon mission leaders in Australia that he would be happy to arrange for a second voyage to America for other Mormons. The moral character and communal spirit of the Mormon passengers probably contributed to the cooperativeness of the group. Captain Pond said that they were "so easy to be governed" and "always ready to hear and obey my counsel." The Mormon passengers and the Mormons who wrote about the wreck of the Julia Ann explained the amazing survival of the 51 castaways as the work of Divine Providence. (See John Devitry-Smith, "The Wreck of the Julia Ann," Brigham Young University Studies 29 [2] [1989]: 5-29; and F. E. Woods, Divine Providence: The Wreck and Rescue of the Julia Ann [Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 2014].)
If that is true, then Divine Providence worked through the leadership of Captain Pond. Esther Spangenberg, one of the passengers who was not a Mormon, said:
"Next to God, our thanks are due to Captain Pond, his officers and crew, for their noble exertions on our behalf. They fearlessly risked their lives in endeavoring to do all in their power to save the passengers. For one moment neither the Captain nor his officers ever lost their presence of mind. Had they done so, the loss of life would have been great" (quoted by Devitry-Smith, 26).
Comparing the shipwreck societies from the Blenden Hall and the Julia Ann points to many of the factors that determine the success or failure of these societies. Even more instructive, however, is the comparison of the two communities on Auckland Island in 1864.
I will examine them in my next post.
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