The history books record that the 9-year-old New Zealand-bred gelding Moifaa won the 1904 Grand National, thereby becoming the first horse bred outside the British Isles to do so. Moifaa was owned by Spencer Gollan, trained by James Hickey, in Epsom, and ridden by the unheralded Arthur Birch, deputising for the injured Benjamin Ellis. A hard-pulling giant of a horse, who stood 17 hands high, Moifaa was sent off at 25/1 at Aintree but, despite a bad mistake at the fence before Becher’s Brook on the first circuit, was left alone in the lead at the same point on the second circuit, when Dearslayer fell. Thereafter, he was never seriously threatened and came home eight lengths ahead of Kirkland, who would return to Aintree to win the National the following year.
However, the bare facts aside, several popular myths, which have been perpetuated down the years, grew up around Moifaa. Legend has it that, en route from Auckland to Liverpool, the steamship on which Moifaa was being transported was wrecked in the Irish Sea and the horse was lost at sea, presumed dead. Neverless, he turned up alive and well on an unnamed island in the Irish Sea some days later, having purportedly swum, or been carried, 25 or 50 miles to safety and, once recovered, continued his journey to England.
Unfortunately, this story is hokum. Moifaa did travel to England aboard a steamship, SS Marere, but did so without incident; SS Marere was, in fact, sunk by a German U-boat during World War I. The confusion appears to have been caused by the fact another horse that ran in the 1904 Grand National, Kiora, had indeed been shipwrecked, not in the Irish Sea, but in the Atlantic Ocean, off Cape Town, South Africa, some years earlier. Kiora was presumed dead, but had, in fact, escaped the wreck and swum ashore at nearby Mouille Point, from which she was subsequently rescued. Kiora was an early faller in the 1904 Grand National but, in the romanticised version of the tale, the ‘shipwrecked’ horse became the winner, Moifaa.