The Fork: A fine reminder of the doomed diners

On the emigrant ship in the age of sail, travellers recreated the customs of land at sea, with their delineations of class and expectations of formality.

A silver fork found in the shipwreck of the Dunbar, sunk in 1857 off Sydney Heads.

On the emigrant ship in the age of sail, travellers recreated the customs of land at sea, with their delineations of class and expectations of formality.

These customs included dining, even if the produce tended to be the kind that kept well, given that provisions were required to last two to three months: salted meats and preserved potatoes, suet and tongue, jam and raisins. For the main meal at noon, the saloon of the well-appointed clipper Dunbar had its own monogrammed cutlery. Dunbar was a popular ship. It made eight passages to and from the colonies. Its captain, James Green, gained such a reputation for benevolence that he was presented by passengers in September 1856 with a purse of sovereigns as “a trifling mark of the respect and esteem in which you are held by us”.

The text of their testimonial lavished him with praise: “Your character as a seaman and navigator is far too well known in Australia to require any eulogy at our hands; but we are anxious to express our unqualified approbation at your untiring zeal, your urbanity of manner, and your kind attention to all our wants and wishes during the whole time that we have had the pleasure of being passengers on board your fine ship.”

As that fine ship stood off Port Jackson nine months later after an 81-day journey, however, Captain Green made a fatal error peering through the darkness in the teeth of a southeasterly gale, apparently mistaking The Gap for the entrance to the port. The Dunbar ploughed into South Head; this self-contained ocean-going world shattered like matchwood.

The sixty-three crew were swept over the side. The fifty-nine passengers were, as the maritime historian Jack Loney put it, “drowned like rats in their bunks”. The solitary survivor was a seaman lucky enough to be propelled by the impact onto the cliffs, hardy enough to cling there for two days until his discovery. Twenty thousand – two-fifths of Sydney’s population at the time – silently lined George Street for the funeral procession of seven hearses and 100 carriages.

An anchor was retrieved in 1910, which the Royal Historical Society caused to be placed on Gap Road. But the wreck lay otherwise undisturbed for more than a hundred years, whereupon skindivers such as scuba pioneer John Gillies made it a favoured site. Unencumbered by boilers and machinery, clippers had capacious holds: the Dunbar was a trove of Victoriana. Gillies claimed even to have come across a skeleton, although the encounter did not dissuade him from using explosives to crack the hull open, shipwreck protection then being unheard of.

Gillies accumulated more than 5000 items, from everyday coins and buttons to elaborate gold denture plates, some complete with teeth, and sturdy ovens, destined never to be lit.

When a group of recreational salvage divers who had formed the Maritime Archaeological Association of NSW finally prodded the Carr government into legislating the preservation of shipwrecks in 1993, Gilles took advantage of a general amnesty to declare his collection, now in the custody of the National Maritime Museum. The cutlery, fine and intimate, evocative of the order and ordeal of life under sail, still looks fit for use.

Every object tells a story, sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure, usually independent of that item’s appearance. In his Object Lesson column, Gideon Haigh takes a commonplace object encountered in my travels, and draw from it an otherwise hidden tale.