Dacre, Ranulph.

The ship 'Valetta' was beached at Scawfell Island (near Cape Gloucester), near Bowen, Queensland, after striking rocks, July 1825. There are conflicting reports concerning her ultimate fate. One suggests she was abandoned after attempts had been made for three weeks to repair her. Another states she was refloated only to be lost at the Pelew Islands about a year later. While surveying the Whitsunday Islands in 1848, a seine net snagged on the remains of an old ship lying off the head of Port Molle. The net was manned by sailors from HMS Rattlesnake, under Captain Owen Stanley. Cannon balls were picked up on the nearby beach and coins and cutlery found on Long Island. Aborigines said the ship went back several generations. In June 1983 however the wreck was identified as being that of the Valetta, Sydney to Manilla, 1825. From the Encyclopedia of Australian shipwrecks.

Dacre, a master mariner and entrepreneur, was a passenger on the merchant vessel Valetta which was beached at Happy Bay, Long island in 1825 in a futile attempt to effect repairs to damage sustained earlier at Scawfell Island. Dacre and ten crew members set out from Happy Bay in a small boat and reached Sydney where he attempted without success to convince the British Government to assist the 46 Bengali sailors wrecked on the island. He returned separately in another small craft but when he arrived back at Happy Bay found all had been rescued and only the remnants of their occupation greeted him. He wrote a long and detailed account of his mission which sheds a great deal of light on the Valetta story. Ref. from Ray Blackwood 'History of the Whitsunday Islands' (online).

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