IT was a fine, clear Adelaide morning when the steamship Admella began it’s trip down the gulf on August 5, 1859.

At 200ft long and equipped with two powerful steam engines, the ship was not only one of the most luxurious vessels working the intercolonial trade routes, it was also the fastest.

There must have been a feeling of excitement and anticipation among the 113 passengers and crew on board on that sunny Saturday as the ship sailed past Kangaroo Island and pointed its bow towards Port Phillip Bay.

Even a large, rolling Southern Ocean swell couldn’t put a damper on the mood — the Admella (named after Adelaide, Melbourne and Launceston — her three ports of call) had been through much worse.

She was capable of sailing from Adelaide to Melbourne in a little over 40 hours, and everyone would soon safely in Victoria.

Of course they could never have known that they would soon be wrecked on Carpenter Rocks, smashed by raging seas, unable to be rescued, slowly dying, one by one.

They could never have foreseen that the Admella would become a byword for tragedy, that the incident would be the largest loss of European lives in South Australian history.

And they had no idea that of their hapless group of 113 souls, only 24 would live to see their loved ones again.

When Adelaide author Carol Lefevre was approached by the South Australian Maritime Museum to design a walking tour through the West Tce Cemetery called Drowning, Not Waving the story of the Admella immediately sprang to mind.

If you wanted a South Australian tale of the perils of the sea, well they didn’t come much better than this one.

“The museum wanted a tour that focused on maritime history, and when you think about nearly all of Adelaide’s early history has a maritime link because people got around by boat,” Lefevre says.

“But the Admella was a particularly harrowing event.

“There are so many awful stories, like the cabin boy volunteering to swim to an upturned lifeboat and someone dropping the rope that he was tied to and this brave boy being swept out to see.”

Lefevre says that people were stranded on the wrecked steamship for so long that they went mad from thirst, inspiring acts of foolishness among the desperate passengers.

“There’s a story of a passenger lowering his boot into the sea and bringing up seawater to drink,” she says.

“Eventually he went into the sea himself. There are so many small stories within the larger story of the Admella.”

The tragedy and the huge loss of life rocked the young colony, a fact Lefevre says can be observed by the many paintings of the incident hanging in the Art Gallery of South Australia.

“It was huge news,” she says. “When you think how small the colony was in 1859, nearly everybody knew someone of was related to someone on that ship.”

Newspaper reports from the day talk of hundreds of people gathering around telegraph offices in Adelaide hoping for a snippet of good news, and specially produced editions of The Advertiser and other papers sold out faster than they could be printed.

It was just before dawn on August 6 that the hull of the Admella first touched the treacherous reef known as Carpenter Rocks.

Just minutes later the ship had split in two places, leaving three pieces stuck fast in a rising sea.

As day broke, several passengers who were clinging to the mast were thrown into the sea by the huge waves. Some managed to scramble back on board, many were lost.

In her book Quiet City: Walking in West Terrace Cemetery, Lefevre talks of the increasing desperation on the broken deck of the Admella as hours stretched into days, and then a week, with no sign of rescue and no drinking water.

“A woman with two broken legs clung to her dead baby; when the child’s body was consigned to the waves, she threw herself in after it,” she writes.

“A lad who was on board as a cabin boy, an excellent swimmer, volunteered to swim to one of the lifeboats that had floated away a great distance. Fearful of sharks, and of the pointless loss of a young life, the passengers argued against it. But the boy insisted that he could swim the distance, and they tied a rope to him and watched as he battled towards the boat. As the boy swam further from the wreck, more lengths of rope were found and tied together.

“As the last piece was added and the boy was almost in reach of the boat, the person holding the rope let it go. The boy was swept away, along with their hope of retrieving the lifeboat, and in the midst of an already dire situation, the watchers were overwhelmed by grief.”

A woman, Miss Clendinning, driven mad by grief or fear or thirst or all three, went down into her waterfilled cabin to eat her dinner, which she insisted was ready.

Another attempt to reach an upturned lifeboat failed when knots in the rope gave way, and seaman Soren Holm was seen floating atop the boat for the next day and a half. Those dying on deck were committed to the sea with little ceremony, their clothes handed out to the survivors for warmth.

Not every body, however, was thrown into the sea.

“ … one chilling detail was the exception made for the last victim, James Hare, the chief steward, ‘reserved lest terrible necessity should have prompted that which a timely rescue happily prevented’.”

Two men — John Leach and Robert Knapman — finally made it ashore on a makeshift raft, raising the alarm with the lighthouse keeper, who set out for Mt Gambier on horseback. He was thrown from the horse, and a local station owner Peter Black continued the ride.

When rescuers finally arrived they were confronted by an horrific sight. One lifeboat captain described those left on board as, “Huddled together, staring at us with pitiful looks … more like statues than human beings; their eyes fixed; their lips black, for want of water and their limbs bleached white and swollen through exposure to the relentless surf, which roared around like a hungry demon waiting for its prey.”

Shipwrecks are hard to beat for pure, unadulterated drama, and Lefevre says the wreck of the Royal Charter in the same year was also darkly fascinating.

“Some of the passengers on the Amdella would have been travelling to Melbourne to pick up the Royal Charter and sail back to England,” she says.

“I tell the story in my book of one man who was supposed to be on the Admella. When he read about the wreck he thought, ‘thank goodness’ and caught the next available charter to Melbourne to get the Royal Charter.

“That ship got all the way to Wales before going down in the fiercest storm. He dodged the first bullet, but got the second one.”

Loaded with millionaires returning from the Victorian gold fields with their newly-made fortunes, many perished after they refused to let got of their precious ore. Around 450 people died.

“They had belts of gold around their waist and the like, and they just went straight to the bottom,” Lefevre says.

“And the literary angle that appeals to me is that Charles Dickens read about it in the paper and he travelled to the coast of Wales in time to see them still recovering bodies and laying them out in the church.

“His book The Uncommercial Traveller has a whole chapter devoted to the wreck of the Royal Charter.”

Gold coins and nuggets were still being recovered from the wreck as recently as 2011.

Also in West Terrace Cemetery is a memorial to one William Easther, who died on the Gothenburg, a ship sailing from Darwin to Adelaide in 1875 when it was wrecked by a fierce storm off the north Queensland coast.

“That went down on the Barrier Reef, with the added drama of sharks circling,” Lefevre says.

“And in the captain’s cabin was a huge trove of gold, which was later recovered.

“Sharks were also later caught and found to contain human bones and jewellery.”

While shipwrecks grabbed the headlines, Lefevre says there were plenty of less dramatic ways to drown in the young colony where children were often left to fend for themselves and very few people could swim.

“There were so many drownings in the River Torrens that I couldn’t possibly write about them all,” Lefevre says.

“There’s one story about two little boys, the Ethridge brothers who were seven and nine years old.

“They went down to the river by themselves. It’s hard to imagine now, but you have to put yourself in a different social time.

“Their father was a bootmaker and he was probably working. Neither of the boys could swim.

“When the youngest one went into the water he sank like a stone, and his brother went in to save him and drowned too. It’s a very sad little story.”

Join Carol Lefevre, author of Quiet City, on a stroll through West Terrace Cemetery’s sea of sun-bleached headstones on May 19 and 26. Many reveal tragic tales of watery misadventure — drownings in the River Torrens, capsizes off our coastline and deaths in some of the state’s most notorious shipwrecks. cost is $12 per person and bookings can be made at historyfestival.sa.gov.au