Castaway depot

A castaway depot is a store or hut placed on an isolated island to provide emergency supplies and relief for castaways and victims of shipwrecks. A string of depots were built by the New Zealand government on their subantarctic islands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were kept supplied and patrolled until modern technologies and alteration in trade routes rendered them unnecessary.

Shipping in the subantarctic

The standard trade clipper route from Australia and New Zealand to Europe took a line-of-latitude route in the Southern Ocean. Ships would drop below the Roaring Forties (40°S latitudes) to make use of the prevailing westerlies which carried them around Cape Horn. These winds could be strong and the waters treacherous; moreover, the smattering of islands was often poorly charted. For example, in 1868, Henry Armstrong of the Amherst notified the New Zealand government that the commonly used chart prepared by James Imray in 1851 placed the Auckland Islands 35 miles south of their true position. Regardless of the charts' accuracy, the cloudy weather predominant in the area made navigation by sextant difficult. The uninhabited Auckland Islands lay directly within the standard route. In the event of a shipwreck on any of these islands, due to their subantarctic climate they offered little natural sustenance or provisions to castaways.Thomas Musgrave, captain of the Grafton, which was wrecked on the Auckland Islands in 1864, described the "incessant gales, constant hail, snow and pelting rain" that plagued the survivors.