Portrait of Mr & Mrs Jewell

This is a portrait of Joseph and Mary Ann Jewell (née Hewitt), a couple from Victoria, Australia, who had been on the General Grant when it was wrecked off the Auckland Islands in May 1866 en route to London. The couple are wearing the seal skin garments that Mary Ann  and James Teer, a miner, fashioned for the survivors, using needles carved from albatross bone with a penknife.

The Jewells and eight others were rescued in November 1867, and landed in Bluff in January the following year.  When Catherine Ralfe, a dressmaker, met Mary Ann she marvelled at her seal skin clothes, writing:

‘I saw the garments in which she landed in New Zealand . . . [they] consisted of a gored skirt, & dainty jacket, with a natty little cap, & shoes with the fur towards the feet; she also had an undergarment with the fur turned inside for the cold was great; all these were very neatly sewn.’ (Catherine Hester Ralfe, Life in New Zealand, pp. 73-74. ATL, MS-Papers-1129)

The Jewells lost the fortune they had massed in the Victorian goldfields in the disaster, but they found a profitable use for Mary Ann’s unique clothes. She is said to have earned as much as £600 delivering lectures about the ordeal while dressed in her sealskin outfit.