18 Jun 2015

The Orpheus Disaster

From Afternoons, 2:20 pm on 18 June 2015

It was, and still remains, this country's worst maritime disaster. In 1863, 189 people were killed when the HMS Orpheus hit a sandbar off the coast of West Auckland. Local Waitakere historian Bruce Harvey speaks about what went wrong, who came to rescue 70 of the crew, and who spent most of their life being wrongly blamed for the disaster.