Qualla: Duncan Dunbar (ship)

Duncan Dunbar (ship): Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She struck at about half past eight in the evening, at high water, running for Sydney with 117 people aboard. The obstruction was a reef the charts called Las Roccas — today the Rocas Atoll, the only atoll in the South Atlantic — a ring of coral and red algae some 260 kilometres off the Brazilian coast whose highest point is a six-metre sand dune. In October 1865 nothing marked it; no lighthouse would be built there for another sixty-eight years. What happened over the ten days that followed is the reason anyone still remembers the Duncan Dunbar. Everybody lived.

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Duncan Dunbar (ship): The Largest Thing Ever Launched on the Wear

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She went down the ways on 18 May 1857 from James Laing's yard at Sunderland, the twelfth ship Laing had built for Duncan Dunbar & Company and, at that moment, the largest vessel ever launched on the River Wear. A crowd turned out for it, and Mrs W. R. Robinson of Silksworth did t...

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Duncan Dunbar (ship): Twenty-Thirty Hours, 7 October

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She left London on 28 August 1865 and cleared Plymouth on 2 September, bound for Sydney under Captain Swanson. Five weeks out, in darkness, she came onto the reef. Rocas is a difficult thing to see and an easy thing to hit: an oval barely 3.7 kilometres by 2.5, ringed by coral th...

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Duncan Dunbar (ship): A Pint of Water at 112 Degrees

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For the first two days each person had a pint of water a day. The temperature on the sand was recorded at 112 °F — 44 °C. There was no shade worth the name, no fresh water, and no reason to think anyone ashore knew where they were. A hundred and seventeen people, among them the p...

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Duncan Dunbar (ship): One Hundred and Twenty Miles in an Open Boat

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 11 October, four days after the wreck, Captain Swanson put out in a lifeboat and set a course for Pernambuco on the Brazilian mainland. He had covered about 120 miles when the American ship Hayara picked him up. Word travelled from there, and the Royal Mail Steam Packet Compan...

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Duncan Dunbar (ship): The Other Dunbar

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a coda, and it is a grim one. Eight years earlier a different ship, simply the Dunbar, had been driven onto the cliffs of South Head at the entrance to Sydney Harbour on 20 August 1857. Of the 122 aboard — 59 crew and 63 passengers — 121 died. One able seaman, James John...

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