The Catamaran Coal Mining Company purchased the James Craig in late 1925 and towed the hulk to Recherche Bay to serve as a bunker for the coal brought to the wharf. Within two years the vessel was found to be unsuitable for this function, so she was towed up to Coal Pit Bay and anchored near the French anchorage of 1792.

The James Craig, then named the Clan Macleod, New York, 1890. Sydney Heritage Fleet.

James Craig was built at Sutherland in 1873 as the Clan Macleod. Launched a year later, this square-rigger iron barque is a heritage item today, a rare survivor of the iron ships of the Clipper era. The nine decades that separated her construction from that of the Recherche reflect the immense technological progress within that period, even though the design harnessed wind power.^[7]

The ship was constructed of wrought iron plates riveted on to iron frames and stringers. While her mizzenmast was pine, the two mainmasts and bowsprit were of iron; the tallest reached 35 metres. The interior of the iron plates was covered with cement as protection. Almost 55 metres long, the vessel’s beam was nine metres and its hold was 5.5 metres deep. Access to the hold was gained through three hatches.

During the first quarter century, Clan Macleod sailed the world’s trade routes carrying coal or general cargo. Her first voyage to Australia in 1879 carried British general cargo to Brisbane. As the years passed competition increased from coal driven steamships, which were faster and more reliable timewise.

An Auckland merchant and ship owner, J. J. Craig, bought the vessel in 1899, but he only renamed it after his son, James Craig, in 1905. Her first voyage was to take Australian Newcastle coal to Auckland. She made 34 trans-Tasman voyages until 1911, when she was purchased by the British New Guinea Development Company, and converted into a storage hulk in Port Moresby harbour.

The James Craig hulk resting in Recherche Bay in the 1960s, before its rescue during the early 1970s. Sydney Heritage Fleet.

James Craig regained some standing because of World War 1 shipping shortage, when she was refitted and rerigged. A normal trading life seemed likely when she was purchased in 1918 by Henry Jones and Company, of IXL food. Unfortunately, she suffered damage en route to Sydney and was towed to port. A bad voyage to New Zealand followed. Then she was towed to Recherche Bay to await cargo, but none came. So she lay there at anchor. Eventually sold to the Catamaran Coal Mining Company and stripped down to her hull, her life as a coal bunker proved short. The derelict vessel was towed up the harbour and abandoned. Her second-last misfortune was to break her cable and drift. Then came disaster. As she was a hazard to other ships an enterprising fisherman blew a hole in her stern. She settled on the sandy and muddy bottom which d’Entrecasteaux had once judged excellent for holding the anchor. The stern was in five metres of water, while the prow stood high above the water. Sheltered in the harbour and its hull preserved below the seabed, James Craig survived there for nearly 40 years.

The hulk suffered senseless indignities during those forgotten decades. Vandals blew holes with gelignite in over a dozen places and an arsonist destroyed the decking; the above water iron plates rusted into a maze of holes. Recherche Bay slumbered as a vacation fishing harbour and on a favoured walking track south from Cockle Creek. This was the same path worn by generations of Aboriginal Tasmanians and followed by Labillardière’s party to the south coast.

A Sydney group of historic ship lovers knew of the James Craig and feared that she might be refloated and taken to the San Francisco Maritime Museum. This was a time when modern technology offered a challenge to heritage ship lovers and maritime archaeologists to investigate or refloat sunken wrecks. The world looked on in wonderment when, in 1970, television screens showed Isambard Brunel’s leviathan, the wrought iron Great Britain brilliantly rescued and refloated in the Falkland Islands. Viewers saw it being towed up the river from Avonmouth to the Bristol dry dock in which she had been built 130 years earlier.

Australian waters around 1970 also provided exciting discoveries. First came the retrieval of James Cook’s Endeavour cannons from the Barrier Reef. Off Western Australia, Dutch shipwrecks were located and excavated beneath the sea. The first ship was Vergulde Draeck in 1972 and the Batavia followed.

It was March 1972 when James Craig’s challenge was accepted by a group of Sydney and Tasmanian volunteers who patched holes and made a sandbag coffer dam near the stern to negate the three metre wide hole blasted in the stern. The long task of pumping out the water from this leaky hull commenced.

A salvage team arrived in October 1972 and the ship gradually started to rise from the natural moorings in which she was embedded. By May 1973 the hull was in a sufficiently repaired condition to stand the strains of towing. The tug Sirius Cove nudged the ship out of her Recherche Bay homeport and towed it to Hobart.

Funding restoration and a place where she might be permanently berthed proved to be difficult and changing problems over many years. Eventually James Craig was towed to Sydney. The decision by the Sydney Heritage Fleet organisation to totally restore the vessel so that it was capable of sailing with passengers posed problems. How authentic? Compromises were necessary without changing the basic appearance, using some excellent historic photographs of the vessel in her heyday. Mild steel substituted for wrought iron for those plates that required replacement; to meet contemporary regulations engines, shafts and propellers were fitted. This seems a practical solution to endow a rusty hull with decking, masts and people, but ‘authenticity’ is questionable.

The 1873 owner-financier of Clan Macleod would be intrigued, however, to learn that the restoration of his craft cost 12.5 million dollars. It is a reflection on the preconceptions or bias of Australian society that material objects — houses, ships, city landmarks — readily attract supporters, defenders and fund raisers. The preservation of the heritage values of the cultural landscape at Recherche Bay are more intangible — symbolic friendly racial contact, descriptions of lost Aboriginal lifeways, a landscape symbolic of the first European experience and their philosophical preconceptions, archaeological sites hidden within forests — but are they any less important or worth funding because they are more elusive and thought-provoking?