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Campbell Island, New Zealand

Campbell Island (Motu Ihupuku) is a remote, sub-Antarctic island of New Zealand and the main island of the Campbell Island group. Campbell Island proper is located at . It covers 115 km² and is surrounded by numerous stacks, rocks and islets like Dent Island, Folly Island (or Folly Islands) and Jacquemart Island, the latter being the southernmost extremity of New Zealand. The Island is mountainous, rising to over 500 metres in the south. A long fjord, Perseverance Harbour, nearly bisects it, exiting to the sea on the east coast.

Campbell Island is inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage list together with the other sub-Antarctic New Zealand islands in the region as follows: 877-005 Campbell Island S52.33 E169.09 11331 Ha 1998

Weather

Campbell Island's weather can be summarised as cool, cloudy, wet and windy. The island receives only 650 hours of bright sunshine annually and it can expect less than an hours sunshine on 215 days (59%) of the year. The peaks of the island are frequently obscured by cloud. It has an annual rainfall of 1450 mm, with rain, mainly light showers or drizzle, falling on an average of 325 days a year. It is a windy place, with gusts of over 50 knots (96 kph) occurring on at least 100 days each year. Variations in daily and annual temperatures are small with a mean annual temperature of 6° C, rarely rising above 12°C.

History

Campbell Island was discovered in 1810 by Captain Frederick Hasselburgh of the sealing brig Perseverance, which was owned by the Sydney-based company Campbell & Co. (whence the island's name). It became a seal hunting base, and the seal population was almost totally eradicated.

On the 4th of November 1810 the island's discoverer Captain Hasselburg (or "Hasselburgh", there are several spellings), who had returned from Sydney, was drowned in Perseverance Harbour, together with Elizabeth Farr, a young woman born at Norfolk Island, and a twelve or thirteen year old Sydney boy George Allwright. Farr was probably what would now be called a "ship girl" but the presence of a European woman at this distant place in those remote times gave rise to the legend of The Lady of the Heather the title of a romantic novel developing the incident into a story about a daughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie stranded on the island by William Stewart namesake of Stewart Island in New Zealand. The accident happened when William Tucker was present, on the Aurora, another unusual character in the sealing era who became the source of a legend and a novel. The remoteness and striking appearance of the sealing grounds, whether on mainland New Zealand or the sub-Antarctic islands, and the sealing era's early place in Australasia's European history, supply the elements for romance and legend which are generally absent in the area's colonial history.

The first sealing boom was over by the mid teens of the 19th century. The second was a brief revival in the 1820s. The whaling boom extended here in the 1830s and 40s. In 1874 the island was visited by a French scientific expedition intending to view the Transit of Venus. Much of the island's topography is named after aspects of, or people connected with, the expedition. In the late 19th century the island became a pastoral lease. Sheep farming was undertaken from 1896 until the lease, along with the sheep and a small herd of cattle, was abandoned in 1931 as a casualty of the Great Depression.

During World War II a coast guard station was operative at Tucker Cove at the north shore of Perseverance Harbour. After the war the facilities were used as a meteorological station until 1958, when a new one was established at Beeman Cove, just a few hundred metres further east. This station was manned permanently until 1995 when a fully automatic station was established. Today, human presence is limited to periodic visits by research and conservation expeditions.

Nature conservation

In 1954 the island was gazetted as a nature reserve. The feral Campbell Island Cattle were eliminated by about 1984. The feral Campbell Island Sheep were culled during the 1970s and 1980s, with their eventual extermination in 1992. In 2001 Brown Rats (Norway rats) were eradicated from the island nearly 200 years after their introduction. This was the world's largest rat eradication. The island's rat-free status was confirmed in 2003.

Since the eradication, vegetation and invertebrates have been recovering, seabirds have been returning and the Campbell Island Teal, the world's rarest duck, has been reintroduced.

Other native landbirds include the New Zealand Pipit and the Campbell Island Snipe, a race or species of the New Zealand snipes only discovered in 1997 and as yet undescribed. The snipe had survived on Jacquemart Island and began recolonising the islands after the rats had been removed.

The area is one of five sub-Antarctic island groups designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.