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Wrecked on a Reef

[Wreck of The Ship General Grant]

The following narrative of the loss of the General Grant has appeared in the New Zealand journals. The details of cargo and passengers are extracted from the Melbourne papers:

Once more we have received information of a disastrous shipwreck, attended by loss of life, in the Auckland Islands. On the morning of the 10th of January, a telegram announced the arrival at Bluff of the whaling ship Amherst, Captain Gilroy, having on board ten persons (one of them a woman), the sole survivors of the crew and passengers of the ship General Grants which sailed from Melbourne for London in May 1866, with a valuable cargo of wool, skins, and gold.

The story told by the survivors resembles, except the terrible struggle with the elements, that other frightful maritime episode, the loss of the London. * Owing to one of those strange combinations of circumstances which human skill is powerless to overcome, a noble ship, manned by an excellent crew, drifted like a raft on the coasts of the Auckland Islands, not to dash herself to pieces against the almost interminable ramparts of rocks which surround them, but to sink in a deep crevasse of volcanic origin, against whose sides the hull was shattered before foundering.

A terrible shriek arose, says one of the survivors, and they were no more. He spoke of forty or fifty living beings. It is supposed that the most valuable portion of the cargo of the General Grant will be saved, the water which fills the cavern being sometimes comparatively calm. The loss of the page 206ship is attributed to the circumstance that her anchors and cables were stowed away in the hold.