When the storm hit Timaru on Sunday 1 September 1878, the sea was already running dangerously high. According to the Lyttelton Times of 3 September, the anchorage was a scene of drifting vessels, parted cables and collisions as ship after ship struggled to hold position. The barque Melrose, the ship that young Irish seaman Arthur Connelly served on, dragged her anchors and collided with the ketch Palmerston. Both vessels were swept about in the heavy sea before the Melrose was driven ashore and broke apart in the surf.
The same report describes how the rescue unfolded. The first people into the water were not part of any organised service. They were local men on the beach who tied ropes around themselves and went straight into the surf to try to reach the sailors being washed from the wrecks. The newspaper describes “numerous volunteers” knocked back again and again by the force of the waves and the wreckage rolling through the breakers, though some did manage to pull survivors in.
The crew of other vessels tried to help as well. The Lyttelton Times records that the captain of the Palmerston, believing his own ship was sinking, jumped overboard and attempted to swim to the Melrose. He “swam strongly for some time” and nearly reached a lifebuoy that had been thrown to him, but a heavy roller caught him and he disappeared. His death was the first of the night and stands as one of the clearest examples of how desperate and uncoordinated the rescue efforts were.
Once men began to reach the beach, medical help followed. Captain Kenny of the Melrose was carried to the hospital unconscious. The Lyttelton Times notes that Dr McIntyre examined him and reported favourably on his condition, and that several other crewmen arrived with broken ribs and severe bruising from the timbers and spars washing around them.
What the reports do not mention is also telling. There is no reference to a lifeboat launch or to the involvement of any rocket apparatus. At this date Timaru did not possess a rocket brigade, and although the town had owned a lifeboat since the 1860s, launches in heavy surf were rare and always recorded. The silence in the newspapers confirms that the rescues were carried out entirely by volunteers on the beach, by crew from nearby vessels, and by anyone who happened to be close enough to try.
The Lyttelton Times identifies only two deaths from the wrecks that night: the captain of the Palmerston and a young man on board the Melrose who “was in a delicate state of health and was unable to fight his way on shore when the vessel went to pieces.” The paper names him as Arthur Connelly, aged twenty-two and a native of Ireland. His body washed ashore the next morning.
Two days later, his funeral notice appeared in the Timaru Herald of 4 September. It invited “the friends of the late Arthur Connelly, of the late barque Melrose” to accompany his remains from the Melville Hotel to the Timaru Cemetery. With no family recorded in the district and no means to purchase a private grave, he was laid to rest in Row 0 of the Free Ground, where many young working men, sailors and newly arrived migrants were buried.
That is the full extent of what the newspapers tell us: a violent wreck in an exposed anchorage, volunteers doing what they could in impossible conditions, a captain lost while trying to help, and a young seaman who did not have the strength to reach the shore. The reports explain completely how Arthur Connelly came to be buried in the earliest and simplest part of the Timaru Cemetery.
Compiled by Roselyn Fauth