November 1883
Letter in a bottle
Dear reader,
My name is Fay Huit and I am nineteen years old. Among me is my elder sister Cassetty who is twenty-one and my younger sister Felicity who is seventeen. Unfortunately we have been shipwrecked and we are stranded on an island. My sisters and I come from Dundee but we weren’t at all happy living there so when we heard about the clipper Duntrune we set off for Australia. There were a large number of passengers going, about up to five hundred. Our journey was fine and then after travelling quite a distance we stopped off at Madeira. When we boarded our ship again everyone realised we were about to face our most difficult part of the journey and it was going to be a rough ride. Until the fourth day the weather had been lovely and couldn’t be any better but that afternoon a huge black cloud could be easily seen on the horizon heading towards the ship. It all happened so quickly but also seemed like a lifetime. One minute it was fine and the next the whole ship had been upturned. Only a few people managed to survive including us. Luckily my sisters and I managed to cling onto some wreckage of the ship and then we got washed ashore on this lonely island.