Matthew Flinders had already circumnavigated Australia and was sailing home to England as a passenger, his charts and plant collections stowed in the Porpoise's hold. Three ships had left Port Jackson together; the Bridgewater, ahead in the dark, saw the disaster unfold and chose to sail on, abandoning the others to the reef. The Porpoise fell luckily, toward the coral rather than away, so her hull shielded her crew from the worst of the waves. The Cato had no such mercy. Several seamen were battered against the rocks, and three young lads drowned in the breakers. One of them, a boy who had been shipwrecked three or four times before, clung to a spar beside his captain through the dark and cried out that he was a persecuted Jonah who carried misfortune with him everywhere. Sometime in the night he lost his grip, was swept into the surf, and was never seen again.

By morning roughly ninety survivors had gathered on a low sandbank in the center of the reef, salvaging what the sea gave back: casks, sailcloth, salt pork, a few weapons. They raised a flag, pitched tents from spars and canvas, and set about the business of staying alive. Searching for firewood, they turned up an older mystery, a rotten, worm-eaten timber that the Porpoise's master judged to be the sternpost of a ship of some four hundred tons. Flinders wondered if it came from one of the lost ships of the French explorer La Perouse. It did not, though it deepened the sense that this anonymous reef had been swallowing vessels long before anyone wrote it down. Coins and timber from a Spanish vessel would later be found embedded in its sands, sheltered and preserved by the very coral that had killed it.

Flinders refused to wait passively for a rescue that might never come. On 26 August he took the Porpoise's largest cutter, a six-oared open boat the men christened Hope, and with Captain Park and twelve others set out for Sydney, more than 1,100 kilometres across open ocean. He navigated the little boat by the same skill that had mapped a continent and reached Port Jackson on 8 September. Governor King immediately dispatched a small relief fleet. Sailing south again, Flinders came back over the horizon some six weeks after the wreck, to the joy of men who had spent that time on a sandbar smaller than a city block. While he was gone, they had not been idle: his old officers had supervised the building of a small decked vessel from the wreckage, fittingly named Resource. It is one of the great survival-and-leadership stories of the age of sail, and it nearly broke Flinders all the same. Sent home in a leaky schooner, he was forced to put in at Mauritius, where the French detained him for more than six years.

Wreck Reef did not stop with the Porpoise and the Cato. The American whaler Lion went down here in 1856; her forty crew rowed for four days before reaching the mainland coast. The schooner Lone Star was a total wreck within an hour of striking in 1870. For a strange interval in the 1860s and 1870s the reef even sustained a small industry, as crews camped on Bird Islet and dug guano, the accumulated dung of countless seabirds, to ship back to Tasmania as fertiliser. They worked only outside the summer hurricane season and still lost ship after ship to the coral. In 1965 the divers Ben Cropp and Jiri Hrbac located the Cato and the Porpoise after extensive research and, famously, just fifteen minutes of actual diving. Today the reefs are a protected historic wreck site, the cays once more left to terns and turtles, the surf still breaking white over the bones of everything the place has claimed.