Five of them are buried here in Lyttelton's Anglican cemetery, a husband and wife, and three small children, one aged six, one four, one two. They were the whole family of Captain Edward Culmer, and they all died in one hour one morning in November 1884, within a hundred yards of the shore they could not reach.
The _Clyde_ was a wooden barque of 552 tons, a well-built ship that had cost £13,000 when she was launched in New South Wales ten years earlier. She had come across from Mauritius with a cargo of sugar, dropped most of it at Dunedin, and on 5 November 1884 left for Lyttelton with about 150 tons more and nineteen souls aboard. Captain Culmer was taking his wife Margaret and their children with him on the short coast run. He knew this coast; for years he had commanded the schooner _Edith May_ up and down these waters.
In the small hours of 6 November the weather was foggy and the sea heavy. The watchman called out land on the lee bow. All hands were roused to put the ship about, but she missed stays, she failed to come through the wind, and the captain could not wear her off in time. She struck amidships on the Snuffle Nose, a long low reef the whalers called "Snuffy Nose," running out from the head of Horseshoe Bay, seven miles from Akaroa Harbour. She went to pieces quickly.
A boat was lowered and the captain ordered his wife and children into it. The ship's lee rail came down on the boat's stern and swamped it before it could pull clear. The woman and children were dragged back aboard. The mainmast was falling. A seventeen-year-old apprentice, George Gibson, dived clear and watched from the wreckage as the sea did its work. He saw the captain, stunned and bleeding, floating on the flooded deck with two of his children. Gibson pulled them out, got them into a second boat, which swamped among the wreckage. He grabbed one child from the water as she floated past, and a heavy sea tore her from his hands. He did not want to survive. He survived anyway, washed ashore on a drifting deckhouse.
By eight in the morning Gibson was on the beach. He walked several miles overland to a house near Duvauchelle Bay and sent the word that became a headline: _The Clyde is ashore near Akaroa Heads; only myself saved as yet._ When the steamer reached the wreck, the top of a mast was all that showed. Eighteen people died that morning.
The bodies came ashore slowly. Herbert Bohle, a fourteen-year-old ship's boy making his first voyage to find out if he liked the sea, was buried at Akaroa. An unidentified man with red whiskers and a missing finger was never claimed. Captain Culmer's body was found in an almost inaccessible place; the inquest found he had been killed by a falling spar. When they buried him here, the shipping in port flew their flags at half-mast, and Gibson, the only survivor, stood at the grave. So did the captain's wife's mother, who had come down to the port planning to meet her daughter.
The newspapers drew the lesson plainly: vessels clearing Banks Peninsula from the south had to keep well off the shore, for there was an insidious current that set a ship in toward that iron coast. The only lifeboat at Akaroa was a miserable old boat that leaked to the men's knees the day she was launched to help. Five headstones in Lyttelton are what the lesson cost.
Source
Globalmaritimehistory