Dawlish Chronicles

For some five decades from 1866, when the naval battle of Lissa, when victory was secured by the Austro-Hungarian fleet over its Italian enemy by means of ramming, naval architects were to be fixated on designing ram bows into warships of all sizes. They ignored the fact that victory at Lissa was possible only because of short effective gun ranges and that this factor was soon obviated by progress in gunnery and torpedoes. The ram, as a design feature, was to prove more dangerous to friends than to enemies and three of the four major disasters this occasioned have been discussed on earlier blogs (see links to these articles at the end of this one). There was however one serious ramming in which disaster did not follow, as a result of prompt and efficient damage control. This instance, which involved two British Pre-Dreadnoughts, offers interesting insights into the efficiency of the Royal Navy at the start of the 20^thCentury.

HMS Hannibal - contemporary postcard

HMS Hannibal and HMS Prince George both belonged to the nine-ship Majestic class and brought into service in the late 1890s. These 16,000-ton, 421-feet long vessels were among the most powerful afloat when first commissioned. Capable of steaming at maximum 16 knots, and with a crew of 672, they could each bring into action four 12-inch and twelve 6-inch guns as a well as many smaller weapons and five 18-inch torpedo tubes. Heavily armoured, they had one great vulnerability that would apply to all ships afloat until the invention of radar – they were blind in darkness.

On the night of 17^th October 1903 Britain’s Channel Fleet, under the command of Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, was engaged in manoeuvres without lights off Cape Finisterre. The force included both Hannibal and Prince George (the latter named in honour of the future King George V). The idea of such monsters manoeuvring in close proximity in near total darkness held the seeds of disaster – and so it proved. At 2130 hrs two off-duty midshipmen of the Prince George were playing cards in the ship’s gunroom, close to the stern, when the bows of the Hannibal’s bows came crashing through. Both young escaped without injury but the damage was serious.

HMS Prince Geroge in splendid Victorian livery

Hannibal instantly signalled, "Have collided with the Prince George," by flashing lights – radio had also not yet made its appearance – while measures were put in hand to assess the full extent of the damage. By 2210 hrs Prince George could signal that there was a large hole in her gun-room, and that the submerged steering compartment were full of water. Hannibalhad impacted at a speed of nine knots, and had caused an 18-inch deep indentation in Prince George’s side. It was in the form of an inverted pyramid, the apex at the level of the protective steel deck, the base level with the upper deck, 24 feet in height, and over 6 feet across at the upper deck, and diminishing to a crack at the apex. In the centre of the indentation was a triangular rift, over three feet long and 18-inched wide at the top.

Beresford

Admiral Beresford – a controversial figure, but never one to fail to rise to a challenge – crossed to Prince George, examined into the damage and made a general signal to the Fleet to order all hand-pumps and 14 foot planks to be sent on board.Prince George’s Captain F. L. Campbell had ensured maintenance of perfect discipline. A collision mat had been placed over the injury and the crew were already working with hand-pumps and baling out with buckets.

The most serious problem was however that the rudder was out of action as the steam-lines leading to its operating mechanism were full of water. The helm was however amidships and had the rudder jammed to starboard or to port, the fine-manoeuvring that would follow later would have been impossible. The bulkheads adjoining the flooded compartments, and all horizontal water-tight doors, were shored up with baulks of timber. Water was still entering however because, owing to the indentation in the side of the ship, the collision mat did not fit tightly.

The approach to Ferrol - the inlet's intricacy is obvious
(with thanks to Google Earth)

Beresford ordered the fleet to proceed to the nearby Spanish naval base of Ferrol. This lay about half-way up a narrow ten-mile inlet which was known for sunken rock hazards. An earlier British battleship, HMS Howe, had gone aground there in 1892 and had been rescued only with difficulty, and three lesser ships had suffered the same indignity thereafter. Beresford was taking no chances and he sent a vessel ahead to mark known rocks by buoy. A message was also conveyed to the Spanish authorities to explain the situation.

Captain Campbell of the Prince George was now responsible for a very impressive piece of seamanship. He brought the ship up the tortuous channel to Ferrol harbour, without benefit of a rudder and steered by engines alone. This involved proceeding a slow speed, sometimes with both screws ahead, sometimes astern, sometimes on ahead and the other in reverse, according to which way it was necessary to turn his ship’s head. His handling was faultless, despite the fact that during these operations Prince George was heavily down by the stern, drawing 25 feet forward and 34 feet aft. Her stern walk was flush with the water.

Prince George arrived in Ferrol harbour on 18^th October. Divers and working parties were sent to her from all the other ships, and the Spanish Government made dockyard resources available. The working parties laboured day and night for the next five days. On 19^th October the armoured cruiser HMS Hogue, was placed alongside the Prince George to make her salvage pumps available.

In his memoirs Beresford gives a fascinating insight to the measures now undertaken. The first objective was to prevent further flooding and to pump out the water already on board. He wrote that “Mats were made of canvas, ‘thrummed’ with blankets, and these, with collision mats cut up, and shot mats' were thrust horizontally through the holes in the ship's side and wedged up so that the ends of the mats projected inside and out; and the moisture, causing them to swell, closed up the holes.”

In parallel with this a cofferdam was being constructed against the side of the ship, around the rupture. This was a formed a chamber “which was filled up with all sorts of absorbent and other material, such as seamen's beds, blankets, rope, hammocks, pieces of collision mats, gymnasium mattresses, cushions, biscuit tins, etc. Thus the coffer-dam formed a block, part absorbent and part solid, wedged and shored over the site of the injury.” Beresford also recorded that the work involved 24 engine-room artificers, 24 stokers, 88 carpenter ratings, 27 divers and 16 diver-attendants. By 1903 a ship’s “carpenter” was no longer concerned with maintenance of wooden structures but with the ship’s steel framework and plating. The divers were drawn from all ships in the fleet and they, like the other staff involved, operated on a three-watch system so that the work proceeded night and day. While this was in progress over 145 tons of ammunition and stores were shifted in order to trim the ship. The total cost of the stores purchased at Ferrol was £116. 2s. 4d – one can only be impressed by the exactitude of the two shillings and four pence!

On 24^th October, just one week after the collision, Prince George departed Ferrol for Portsmouth, escorted by the armoured cruiser HMS Sutlej. The integrity of the cofferdam was attested by the fact that despite rough weather being encountered the total amount of water shipped during the voyage was estimated at one gallon.

SMS Friedrich Carl

Once repaired at Portsmouth Prince George was soon back in service. She seems to have been accident-prone as she suffered minor damage in another collision, this time with the German armoured cruiser SMS Frederick Carl at Gibraltar in 1905. She also suffered moderate damage in 1907 when she broke free from her anchorage at Portsmouth and struck the new armoured cruiser HMS Shannon. She was to prove lucky however in WW1 when she survived hits by Turkish shells at the Dardanelles and by a torpedo which failed to explode. Pieces of her still exist – she was sold to a German firm for scrap in 1921 but broke free from her tow and ran ashore off Kamperduin, on the Dutch coast. Firmly aground, she was stripped of valuable material and left in place as a breakwater of which glimpses can still be seen at low tide.

And the villain of the piece – HMS Hannibal? Judged to be useless in 1915 she was disarmed – her guns were placed on newly-built monitors – and she thereafter had a dull but worth career as a trooper and depot ship. She was scrapped in 1920.

To receive e-mail updates on forthcoming Dawlish Chronicles publications, videos and occasional give-aways, you can sign up via the box in the right-hand sidebar near the top of this article. You will be asked to re-confirm once you have submitted your e-mail address.

Click on the links below to read about other peacetime ramming incidents:

The loss of HMS Vanguard 1875

The ramming of SMS Grosser Kurfürst 1878

SS Utopia and HMSAnson 1891

In earlier articles in this occasional series we have met artists – such as Thomas Luny and Richard Paton – who had experience of life at sea before (or sometimes during) their careers as artists. One of the most renowned painters of the period, Nicholas Pocock (1740-1825), had an even greater qualification for he was qualified as a ship’s master and had served as such for many years. He was in addition present at the “Battle of the Glorious First of June” in 1794, which added even more realism to his paintings. In his lifetime he was probably the most admired of all naval artists, a fact that was confirmed by him being commissioned to produce six key pictures for Clarke and McArthur's “Life of Lord Nelson”, the two-volume official biography which was produced shortly after Nelson's death at Trafalgar in 1805

A View of Nevis from St Kitts by Nicholas Pocock, 1790
This is an area Pocock knew well from his days as master of a merchant ship

Pocock was born in 1740 in Bristol, then Britain’s second-busiest port, one which was heavily involved in the West-Indian “triangular trade”. This involved carrying manufactured goods to West Africa, exchanged them there for slaves, transported them for sale to the West Indies and on the return voyage to Britain carried sugar and molasses. In due course Pocock was formally apprenticed to his father, so learning seamanship in the most practical school possible. In 1759 his father was to die however, leaving him to care for his widowed mother and two younger brothers. In these endeavours he was sustained by the support of Richard Champion, a Quaker merchant and pioneer manufacturer of porcelain. Pocock was to command ships on Champion’s behalf, including trading to the American colonies. Given the lead that Quakers took in campaigning against the Slave Trade, one surmises that Pocock himself was not to have been involved in this shameful trade.

"The Consultation" - circa 1810. A situation Pocock would have
been familiar with as a master - heavy weather and decisions need to be made

Now a ship’s master, Pocock was in parallel showing significant promise as an artist. His first drawings date from the 1758-62 period and were mainly of Bristol privateers and slave ships. He carried this talent over into his logbooks so that were normally systematic and dispassionate recordings of events were in Pocock’s case transformed by addition of drawings. Five of these logs survive from the 1766 to 1775 period and four of them are in Britain’s National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. One such log referred to voyages to the West Indies in a ship, the Lloydprobably owned by Champion, in 1771-72. In addition to the usual bald records of position and weather most entries are supplemented by pen and wash drawings. Other voyages took Pocock to the Mediterranean, experiencing in these years every type of weather – giving insights that were later to stand him in good stead as an artist.

Pocock's log book of the Betsy 1766-67
National Maritime Museum D1784

View of Charleston, South Caroline, 1767
National Maritime Museum D2746

In this period Pocock was also gaining competence as a painter in oils and watercolours. One wonders the practicalities of this were . Did he perhaps take lessons between voyages, lessons that must necessarily have been of short duration? Was he largely self-taught? How much painting did he actually do at sea? If he did, what measures were needed to facilitate it?

A Pocock watercolour: Ilfracombe from the Eastward, 1797
National Maritime Museum PW5909

Events now pushed Pocock towards taking up painting as an alternative career to the sea. The American Revolutionary War had a devastating effect on transatlantic trade and Pocock’s employer Champion, who as a porcelain manufacturer was involved in luxury exports, was to become insolvent in 1778. Pocock had by now become known to the greatest contemporary British artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who admired his work and encouraged him. By 1782 Pocock was sufficiently respected to have work exhibited by the Royal Academy. This year was also to see Admiral Rodney's victory over the French at the Battle of the Saintes and Pocock – familiar with the area in the West Indies where it took place – was commissioned to produce a series of paintings commemorating it. This led in due course to the prestigious appointment of Marine Painter to King George III – an early example of an accredited war-artist.

The Battle of the Saintes 1782 - the end of the action
National Maritime Museum PAH952B

The Frigate HMS Triton © BHC3675

The ship from which Pocock views the Glorious First of June,
HMS Pegasus, would have been broadly similar

Pocock's approach was meticulous and his naval paintings were based on very extensive research. His background as a master mariner aided his interviews with eyewitnesses and his determination of what were the wind and sea conditions, as well as ship manoeuvres, during the actions he was depicting. He drew detailed diagrams of battles to fix relative ship-positions and made preliminary sketches of individual ships. In due course he was to be present himself on the “Glorious First of June” battle in 1794, which he viewed from the frigate HMS Pegasus. The notes and sketched he kept during the action were to provide the basis for a series of paintings depicting its various phases.

HMS Defence at the Glorious First of June
Note how smoke reduces visibility - "the fog of war" incarnate!

Pocock’s naval paintings were also strict in their demands for accuracy. The website of the National Maritime Museum quotes a letter which begins, “Sir Richard Strachan’s compliments to Mr Pocock and inform him he just recollects that the French Admirals mizzen (sic) topmast should be shot away at the time the picture is meant to represent…” and it is accompanied by a scratchy pen and ink sketch by Sir Richard who commanded the squadron which captured four French ships in November 1805.

The Battle of Copenhagen - bird's eye view by Pocock

It is hard at this remove to appreciate the intensity of the veneration felt for Nelson after his death at Trafalgar in 1805. It was widely – and correctly – realised that this smashing victory had saved Britain from an existential threat and that it was to a very great extent due to the genius and leadership of one man. The official biography mentioned earlier was one mark of this esteem, and it was an acknowledgement of Pocock’s eminence by this time that he be commissioned to illustrate it. The six key pictures were exhibited the paintings at the Royal Academy and engraved by James Fittler (1758 –1835) and reproduced in biography, four of them accompanied by plans of the action.

Pocock's "Nelson's Flagships at Anchor"

Of the paintings is considered by some as Pocock’s best – this is “Nelson's Flagships at Anchor”. This shows a scene that never actually occurred - five ships that had served Nelson in various periods shown together at Spithead in the golden light of evening.

Pocock died in 1821 and was by then one of the most respected artists of his time, the authenticity of his work based on hard personal experience of the challenges of seamanship. It was a remarkable career for a man who had commanded merchant ships at sea up until almost his fortieth birthday, and who learned his craft as a painter under the most difficult of conditions.

To see a short video interview with Antoine Vanner please click here.

Click on the links below to see earlier articles in this occasional series.

Naval Artists of the 18th Century – Part 1

Naval Artists of the 18th Century – Part 2

Naval Artists of the 18th Century – Part 3

Naval Artists of the 18th Century – Part 4

Today that concept of weather forecasting is regarded as an integral aspect of news reporting but in the mid-nineteenth century that concept was in its infancy. It took a storm of massive proportions to emphasise the value of such a system and the credit for conceiving the idea was due to Captain Robert Fitzroy (1805-1865).

Fitzroy in 1855

Fitzroy – a tragic figure, as we will see later - had been captain of the Royal Navy’s HMS Beagle on her voyages of scientific discovery with Charles Darwin in the 1830s. Fitzroy had later been Governor of New Zealand from 1842-45, a difficult appointment at a time when white settlers and Maori communities were coming into conflict over land ownership. Fitzroy’s subsequent naval career was ended by ill health and in 1854 he was appointed to head a new government department to deal with the collection of weather data at sea. As such it was to be the forerunner of the modern Meteorological Office. With a staff of three Fitzroy set up a system whereby calibrated instruments were loaned to ships’ captains for record-gathering and subsequent collation of the resulting data. He soon recognised that availability of weather information to shipping and fishing interests could avert tragedies. The first measure he implemented was provision of standardised barometers which were installed in stone housings at ports so that crews could consult them before setting out to sea.

The next logical step was to make information available on a national rather than a local basis, a concept which Fitzroy named "forecasting the weather", the origin of the modern term "weather forecast". The first daily weather forecasts were published in The Times in 1861. The availability of telegraphic communication was a major facilitator but the trigger for more comprehensive action was to be a tragic one, the storm in 1859 which became known as “The Royal Charter Storm” after its largest victim – one, regrettably, of some 130 vessels sunk and 90 damaged.

The Royal Charter in proud service

The SS Royal Charter was a modern vessel, a 2720-ton, 236-foot steam clipper built in 1855 for passenger service between Britain and Australia. She had accommodation for 600 passengers; some in luxury, and was fast in her day, capable of making the voyage in under 60 days. On 25th October 1859 she was in the Irish Sea, on the last stages of a voyage from Melbourne, Australia, to Liverpool. She carried a crew of 112 and 371 passengers, many of the gold-miners who had been successful in the Australian diggings and who were carrying large sums of gold about their persons. More gold was also being carried as cargo.

As the Royal Charter reached the north-western tip of Anglesey on 25^th October – and was about to turn eastwards towards Liverpool, the barometer was already dropping. This was the first indication of a storm of huge geographical extent. Weather had already deteriorated in the English Channel earlier in the day and significant damage had already been sustained in Devon and Cornwall. In the hours that followed the storm moved northwards, hitting the area where the Royal Charter found herself by 2000 hrs. This was only the start of the tempest – maximum force was not recorded until midday on October 26th and the storm rolled northwards towards Scotland with winds at their peak reaching force 12 on the Beaufort scale and well over 100 mph.

The Royal Charter being driven shorewards

The Royal Charter was due to pick up the Liverpool pilot off Anglesey on October 25^th but with the wind by then at 10 on the Beaufort scale this was impossible. The wind continued to rise to hurricane force during the night of 25/26th October, changing its direction as it did from East to North North East, so driving the Royal Charter towards the north-east coast of Anglesey. Unable to make way – her installed horsepower was only 200 – the decision was taken to drop anchor. The mooring held initially but first one anchor chain, then the second, snapped in the early hours of 26^th October. Now helpless, the ship was driven first on to a sandbank and then, as the tide lifted her, she was thrown on to rocks just north of the village of Moelfre on Anglesey’s east coast. Pounded by the waves, the Royal Charter now began to break up.

Royal Charter breaking up - contemporary illustration

The unfolding tragedy was close enough to be observed from the shore. In the light of dawn two workmen, Thomas Hughes and Mesach Williams, who were working to secure the storm-damaged roof of Williams’ cottage, saw what was happening. Hughes ran to the village to raise the alarm while Williams watched helplessly from the cliff top. What followed was vividly described by the novelist Charles Dickens in his “The Uncommercial Traveller”, after he had spoken to eyewitnesses when he visited the site soon afterwards:

And he (Hughes) and the other, descending to the beach, and finding the sea mercilessly beating over a great broken ship, had clambered up the stony ways, like staircases without stairs, on which the wild village hangs in little clusters, as fruit hangs on boughs, and had given the alarm. And so, over the hill-slopes, and past the waterfall, and down the gullies where the land drains off into the ocean, the scattered quarrymen and fishermen inhabiting that part of Wales had come running to the dismal sight—their clergyman among them. And as they stood in the leaden morning, stricken with pity, leaning hard against the wind, their breath and vision often failing as the sleet and spray rushed at them from the ever forming and dissolving mountains of sea, and as the wool which was a part of the vessel’s cargo blew in with the salt foam and remained upon the land when the foam melted, they saw the ship’s life-boat put off from one of the heaps of wreck; and first, there were three men in her, and in a moment she capsized, and there were but two; and again, she was struck by a vast mass of water, and there was but one; and again, she was thrown bottom upward, and that one, with his arm struck through the broken planks and waving as if for the help that could never reach him, went down into the deep."

This description has much in common with the description of the storm at Yarmouth in which Ham Pegotty dies while trying to rescue the worthless Steerforth in David Copperfield (1850) – one wonders how closely Dickens based Life upon Art when reporting the Royal Charter disaster.

Joe Rogers - brave and indomitable

Rescue by boat proving hopeless, it was resolved to get a line ashore from the ship, which could then be used to get survivors to safety with a bosun’s chair. Getting a line through the boiling surf demanded a hero and one stepped forward in the shape of a Maltese seaman, Guże Ruggier, who served under the anglicised name of Joe Rodgers. He was a strong swimmer but in the surf his progress would be impeded by a rope. He declined using a life belt and secured a line about himself, crawling out along the bowsprit before dropping into the water, disappearing into the foam and darkness. Though he could be no longer seen those on board felt the rope gradually hauled out. At length they felt it tauten, confirming that it had been grasped by those on shore. A stout rope was now fastened to the line. It was dragged to shore and a bosun’s chair was attached to it. All this time the Royal Charter was beating herself to wreckage on the rocks. The slow process of transport by bosun’s chair now commenced, one after the other, with 28 villagers hauling from shore. Twenty five persons were brought on shore in this way before the ship disintegrated, taking over 450 victims with her. Many of them were said to have been weighed down by the belts of gold they were wearing. A total of 21 passengers and 18 crew members were saved, all men, and no women or children.

"The Life Line" by Winslow Homer (1884)] - rescue by bosun's chair
Philadelphia Museum of Art

A large quantity of gold was alleged afterwards to have been thrown up on the beach. The bullion being carried as cargo was insured for £322,000, but the total value of the gold on the ship must have been much higher as many of the passengers had considerable sums in gold, either on their bodies or deposited in the ship's strong room. Dickens was fascinated by this and reported:

“So tremendous had the force of the sea been when it broke the ship, that it had beaten one great ingot of gold, deep into a strong and heavy piece of her solid iron-work: in which also several loose sovereigns that the ingot had swept in before it, had been found, as firmly embedded as though the iron had been liquid when they were forced there.”

In the light of this, the recognition of Joe Rodgers’ courage seems miserly – he was given a gold medal and a gratuity of £5 ($20 at the time) by the National Lifeboat . Dickens's friend, the painter Henry O'Neil , exhibited the picture “A Volunteer” in 1860, based on the incident, depicting Rogers about to leap into the sea with the rope around him.

"A Volunteer" - by Henry O'Neil, (1860

Though the largest victim of what came to be known of the “Royal Charter Storm”, this vessel was not the only one. The hurricane sank a total of 133 ships and damaged another 90 badly while onshore falling rocks and masonry also killed. The final death-toll was estimated at around 800. The number of lives last at sea off Britain in these two days was double that of the entire previous year.

The Royal Charter Storm and its attendant tragedies did however impel Captain Fitzroy to introduce the first gale-warning service in 1860. This was a system of hoisting “storm warning cones” at the principal ports when a gale was expected and shipping was recommended to stay in port under these conditions. It is a sad reflection of the profit-orientation of contemporary fishing fleet owners, even at the expense of life, that many objected to the posting of gale warnings. Under pressure from them Fitzroy's system was briefly abandoned after his death, though finally reinstated under pressure from fishermen themselves.

Largely remembered today only as the captain of HMS Beagle, Fitzroy was in fact one of the great Victorian heroes, and one to whom thousands would owe their lives. His own end was tragic. Beset by money problems and, as a sincere Evangelical Christian, disturbed by to the point of obsession by his erstwhile friend Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and by what he saw as its challenge to Biblical literalism, he cut his throat with a razor in 1865.

This noble man, who achieved so much for so many, deserves to be well remembered.

To see a short video interview with Antoine Vanner about his approach to writing Victorian naval fiction please click here.

I flew from Britain in mid-week and I’m currently in Penang, the island off Peninsular Malaysia's weat coast that’s now home to a city of 1.5 million. It is linked to the mainland by two bridges, one of them 15 miles (24 Kms) long. In the late eighteenth century it became Britain’s first foothold in South East Asia, a counter to the strong trading position previously established in the region by the Dutch East Indies Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or “VOC”, in the seventeenth century.

Looking out across Penang harbour today

The foundation of Penang was the second British attempt to establish a trading presence in the region – the Dutch already had a strong position in much of what is today Indonesia, and had control of important way-stations leading there, some valuable in their own right in trading terms, at the Cape of God Hope, Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) and Mauritius. In the seventeenth century the VOC was powerful enough to bring to an end British trading ambitions in the area. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century the balance of power had however shifted. Dutch global power was in decline and the VOC was ultimately to go bankrupt. By the British power was, by contrast, on the rise, with its presence in India being consolidated and extended through its own East India Company, still a private venture but one which until the mid-nineteenth century would maintain its own army. By the 1780s thoughts were once again turning towards extension of British trading interests further east.

Now enter Francis Light.

Light's statue in Fort Cornwallis

It is often said that Britain acquired an empire by accident – usually as a result of private and often officially-unendorsed initiatives by figures such as Robert, Lord Clive and Cecil Rhodes. Francis Light (1740-1794) was cast in the same mould. Probably illegitimate, the interest of a “patron” secured him an appointment as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, but in 1763 he decided to seek his fortune in India, and within two years was operating as a private trader – an opportunity that could lead to enormous riches. The opportunities Light saw were not however confined to the Sub-Continent alone and he recognised the potential of filling the gaps left by steady Dutch decline further east. By 1771, he was proposing establishment of a trading post on Penang Island, off the Malay coast as a "convenient magazine for the Eastern trade". The proposal was rejected by the East India Company but Light, who continued to prosper, did not give up on the idea.

In 1786, in a joint venture between the private company Light was associated with, and the East India Company, Light landed on Penang’s east coast, at the site of what is today’s large city and took formal possession of the island "in the name of His Britannic Majesty, King George III and the Honourable East India Company".The formal basis for the annexation was that the Sultan of Kedah – the local ruler – ceded the island in exchange for is military protection from Siamese and Burmese enemies. In the best tradition of the British merchant-adventurer Light had gone far beyond his authorisation however – the East India Company’s new governor-general, Charles Cornwallis, was not prepared to support the Sultan against any of his enemies, whether Siamese, Burmese or Malay. Light had concealed this fact but by the time the Sultan tried to recapture the island in 1790 Light was too well established to be ejected. The Sultan backed down and agreed to the ceding in return for an annual honorarium. Even today the State of Penang still pays the honorarium to the current Sultan of Kedah.

Penang in early 19th Century
Note Fort Cornwallis is top right corner

Light now established Penang as a free port to entice traders away from nearby Dutch trading posts and it grew in importance as such until it was finally eclipsed by the more favourably-situated settlement at Singapore in the mid-nineteenth century. Light also promoted settlement on Penang, promising immigrants as much land as they could clear and, according to one story, shooting silver coins from cannons into the forest to spur their efforts. Malaria remained the greatest challenge however and Penang, like other tropical settlements, especially in West Africa, achieved the dubious honour of being classed as "a white man's grave". Light himself succumbed in 1794.

The key to consolidation of the British hold on Penang was the early construction of a sizable seaward-facing fortification, Fort Cornwallis, named somewhat ironically after the governor-general who was so dubious about the venture. The initial fortification was a stockade of palm logs, a simple structure but one which, when armed with cannon, was more than capable of withstanding attack by pirates or by the Sultan of Kedah. By 1804 however, with the Napoleonic Wars shifting into high gear and French forces operating in the Indian Ocean, a more substantial structure was needed. Convict labour was accordingly drafted in from India to rebuild the fort in star-shape and of brick and stone. It remains to this day and adjoins the magnificent Victorian town-hall.

Seaward-facing bastions of Fort Cornwallis. The moat has long been filled in.
A lighthouse is position at the far corner)

I visited Fort Cornwallis yesterday. The basic structure is intact and there have been some efforts at restoration. The open interior is now used for concerts and events. The photographs below give an indication of how it is today and with imagination one can visualise how it might have looked in its prime. Armed with 32-pounders it would have been a dangerous target for sea-bombardment (Nelson’s dictum that “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort”applies). A number of Napoleonic-era cannon-barrels have been set in the embrasures.

Logo on British Cannon - no doubting that it belongs to H.M. George III

Sri Lambai bronze cannon - "Jan Burgerhuis Me Fecit"!

The most interesting gun in position is from a much earlier era. Known as the “Sri Lambai Cannon”, this is a bronze Dutch piece cast in the early seventeen the century. It carries not only the VOC logo but a Latin inscription identifying the gun-founder: “Jan Burgerhuis Me Fecit”- “Jan Burgerhuis made me”.

VOC Logo on the Sri Lambai Cannon

This weapon had a very colourful history. It was presented by the Dutch to the Sultan of Johore in 1606. It was subsequently captured by the Portuguese (who still had a limited trading presence) soon afterwards. A notice board (as per photograph below) tells of its subsequent adventures and its alleged powers in relation to fertility. I leave it to the reader to judge on probability.

I’ll return to more experiences in Penang in my next blog but in the meantime I trust that this one will be of interest. It’s a quite splendid place and one which, with its high rise condos, multi-lane highways, huge modern shopping malls, enormous container port and amazing bridges is one which Francis Light would be proud of!

To see a short video interview with Antoine Vanner about his approach to writing Victorian naval fiction please click here.

My last blog dealt with some experiences in Penang, the island off the Malaysian west coast which was the first British settlement in South East Asia. In my next blog I’ll be covering some very unlikely and little-known history but for now I’ll tell a little more about my current experiences.

Amphibious Landing (though with inadequate air cover)

While walking along the waterfront at Georgetown, the city centre of Penang, and with heavy traffic (including swarms of small motorbikes) thundering along to my immediate left, and with the water lapping ten yards to my left, I suddenly spotted a large sea otter coming out of the water. She was looking at me quite fearlessly and when I stopped and whipped out my cell 'phone to photograph her she took no further notice of me – she looked very accustomed to humans. Her presence did however attract the attention of two crows who initiated a campaign of intimidation that finally drove her back into the water – an example of the value of air-power in defeating amphibious landings!

The apparently fearless Sea Otter - until the crows arrived!

Knowing when you're beaten! Beating an ignominious retreat while crow gloats!

One of the most notable features of Georgetown are the splendidly maintained buildings of the colonial period, especially those lying along the seafront. Since I lived much of my life in the tropics I have always been impressed at how well such buildings were designed to cope with heat in the days before air-conditioning. Shaded verandahs, set-back windows and doors, high ceilings and fans (human-operated “punkahs” before electricity) all made for cool and comfortable accommodation. This style of architecture jumped continents – memories of past happiness came flooding when I saw in Penang a larger version of a house of this type I had lived in in Lagos, Nigeria.

Colonial splendour - the Governor's mansion perhaps?

A few days ago I moved to Ipoh, about 80 miles southeast from Penang, which I wrote about in my last blog. On leaving the coast much of the countryside is heavily forested. It becomes very spectacular indeed around Ipoh – a wonderful karst landscape in which steep towers of green-clad limestone rear up above the relatively level ground in between.

Limestone stacks dominate Ipoh

Some of these outcrops drop almost vertically into back gardens and they are alive with wild-life. Monkeys call sharply as they flit from branch to branch and beautiful brown-fronted herons perch on branches to spy out fish in channels or pools below. The area had been intensively mined for tin from the nineteenth century onwards and the resulting excavations have in many cases been flooded deliberately and are alive with fish.

The Edible-Nest Swiflet

View from my hosts' back garden
Note caves - ladders hard to make out

There are many caves in the exposed limestone and they are colonised by the appropriately named “Edible-Nest Swiftlet”, a blackish-brown member of the Swift family that is about five-inches long and whose most notable feature is that Its nest is made of solidified saliva. These nests are highly prized in Chinese cuisine for making – yeas, the name’s inevitable – Bird’s Nest Soup. As the caves are not easily accessible, ladders and climbing aids can often be seen set into the rock to give access. Undertaking the risks involved can be financially rewarding – prices for nests may be as much as $2,500 (US) per kilogramme.

Chinese interests were very active in tin-mining from the mid-19^th Century and conflicts between the two secret societies which dominated the industry and trade led to ferocious confrontations. Between 1861 and 1873 there were four separate “Larut Wars”. These were bloody affairs which pitted thousands of immigrant workers against each other. The scale can be imagined from the fact that in the Third War, in 1871-72, one of the factions imported 4000 mercenaries from mainland China. The conflicts, which had serious implications for the authority of Malay rulers, were finally ended through British mediation. To recognise this, Larut, the town at the centre of the upheavals, was renamed “Taiping” – Heavenly Peace, the name it goes by today. Until coming her I was unaware of these events – history which is so convoluted that I’m still trying to get my mind around it!

And that’s it for now – back with some history on Friday!

To see a short video interview with me about my approach to writing and my interest in the 19th Century please click here.

Fort Cornwallis today

In my blog last week I described Fort Cornwallis, at Georgetown, the main city on the island of Penang off the west cost of Peninsular Malaysia. Though built in the early 19^th Century to deter French attack, it was never to experience direct assault – a measure indeed of its value as a deterrent. It was however to be the witness to a spectacular battle directly before its walls over a century later, one that involved a foe that was undreamed of as a menace by the original builders. And three decades thereafter it was also to see a most unexpected naval group based in the harbour that it was designed to protect.

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Penang must have seemed to be an unlikely battleground. German and Auto-Hungarian naval power was almost entirely concentrated in European waters and though limited German cruiser units were scattered around the globe (Click here for more details), the most direct threat in the Indian Ocean, the cruiser Konigsberg, based in Tanganyika, East Africa, was quickly bottled up and neutralised, if not yet destroyed. The most powerful single German naval force overseas was the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron, based in China – which seemed very far indeed from the by-then sleepy anchorage of Penang which had been overtaken in importance by nearby Singapore. The bulk of the East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron was to disappear into the Pacific, only to reappear off the coast of Chile in late October (Click here for details of the Battle of Coronel) but one of its ships, the light cruiser SMS Emden, was detached to create havoc in the Indian Ocean.

SMS Emden - and her chivalrous captain

The Emden was a Dresden-class cruiser which entered service in 1909 and spent most of her pre-war service in the Far East. Of 4268 tons and 388 feet long, her main armament was ten 4.1-inch guns and – significantly, as it would later prove – two 18-inch torpedo tubes. For two months she ranged freely over the Indian Ocean, capturing more than twenty merchant ships, with scrupulous attention to preventing loss of life by their crews, and bombarding oil-storage tanks at Madras, India. Her “Will o’ the Wisp” appearances in the Bay of Bengal, then south west of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) towards the Maldive Islands, then south towards the Chagos Archipelago, necessitated deployment of significant British forces, supplemented by smaller French, Japanese and Russian ones, to hunt her down before she could inflict damage on troop-reinforcement convoys coming from Australia. The chivalrous behaviour of her captain, Karl von Müller (1873-1923), and his rigorous observation of internationally-recognised rules of commerce raiding so as to minimise loss of life, made him almost as much a hero to Germany’s enemies as to Germany itself.

Emden's captain

In late October Müller shifted his area of operations again eastwards, towards the coast of Malaya, with the intention of moving south towards Sumatra thereafter. His first objective was to be Penang, where his unexpected appearance could be relied upon to cause further confusion for Allied search-plans. To enhance the surprise element, and to aid uncontested entry to the anchorage there, he caused a dummy funnel to be erected. This, in addition to the Emden’s own three funnels would give a superficial resemblance to one of the British “Towns Class” light cruisers hunting her.

The anchorage off Georgetown, on Penang’s east coast, was thronged with shipping (see diagram bllow from an American newspaper of the time), including several light French naval vessels and the newly-arrived Russian protected cruiser Zhemchug (also spelled Jemchug in the western press).

The Zhemchugappears to have been one of those rare vessels that have been unlucky throughout their entire careers. Built at St. Petersburg as one of the two-vessel Izumrud class, this 3100-ton, 365-foot protected cruiser, she had entered service in 1904, just in time to join the Russian Baltic Fleet’s doomed voyage to confront the Japanese navy off Korea. Conditions on board were abysmal with extra coal stacked crew accommodation, poor ventilation, limited food, heat-stroke vulnerability and frequent machinery breakdowns. When the Russians finally faced the Japanese in the Tsu-Shima Strait between Japan and Korea the Zhemchug, scouting ahead, was to be one of the first vessels to open fire. She was to sustain serious damage, but unlike the vast majority of Russian vessels sunk or captured in this battle of virtual annihilation, she did manage to escape, ending up interned by the United States at Manila, in the Philippines, until the end of the war. By late 1905 she was back in Russian service, only for her crew to mutiny in Vladivostok as part of the failed Russian Revolution of that year. With order restored, she was to be based at this port in the following years though continuing mechanical unreliability limited her to short patrols.

Zhemchug

In May 1914 the Zhemchug was given a new captain, Commander Baron Ivan Alexandrovich Cherkassov, an appointment that was to prove catastrophic. As the Emden’s depredations spread, he and his cruiser were assigned to support Allied efforts to run her down. It was somehow ironic, given her pervious history, that Zhemchug should be partnered with the Japanese Navy’s cruiser Chikuma to search in the Bay of Bengal. Given Zhemchug’s record of poor serviceability this assignment appeared somewhat optimistic, and when she arrived in Penang on 26^th October it was for repairs and to clean her boilers.

Assuming that the Emdenmust be far off, and against the advice of the commander-in-chief of the Allied Fleet, a Royal Navy Admiral, Zhemchug’sCommander Cherkassov gave the majority of his crew shore leave, and left the ship anchored a short distance from shore. Other than twelve ready-use rounds stowed on deck, all shells were locked away and all torpedoes disarmed. Cherkassov himself then repaired to the magnificently luxurious Eastern & Oriental Hotel (still extant – I was there last week A.V.) where he was to entertain a lady who, according to some accounts, may have been his wife. Considering the lead given by their captain it can hardly be expected that the crew members remaining on board were particularly alert.

German postcard 1914 - Emden in left foreground

Just before dawn on 28^th October the Emden sailed boldly from the north into the Penang anchorage, unchallenged due to her disguise. Had she been efficiently manned, the Zhemchugcould have been a worthy opponent since her armament – eight 4.7-inch guns and four 18-inch torpedo tubes arguably gave her a slight superiority. As Emden approached the still unsuspecting Zhemchug, Captain Müller ordered the German colours to be run up and fire to be opened at point-blank range. As she passed the Russian vessel Emden launched a torpedo, hitting her aft. Limited as they were by shell-availability, the Russians opened an ineffective fire, hitting a merchant ship anchored nearby. Emden arced around to reverse course so as to leave the anchorage by the way she had entered. As she passed the stricken Zhemchug she fired a second torpedo, this time hitting her below the bridge. This was the coup de grace – the Russian cruiser broke in two and sank, taking 89 men with her and leaving another 143 wounded. As she made her escape Emden was pursued by one of the French destroyers present – their state of readiness does not seem to have been much better than the Russians’. This small craft, the Mousquet, was quickly overwhelmed by the Emden’s guns.

April 2013: Crew from Russian destroyer Marshal Shaposhnikov pay tribute to
the Zhemchug's crew at the memorial at their graves in Penang

The Emden’sretreat encountered no further opposition but her days were numbered. On 9^thNovember she was run down and destroyed by the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney at the Cocos Islands, south of Sumatra. During her three-months cruise Emden had sailed 30,000 nautical miles and had sunk or captured over 70,000 tons of Allied shipping. Karl von Müller was brought to Britain as a prisoner of war, and while there led a breakout, though he was subsequently recaptured. He died in 1923, at the tragically young age of 50, as a result of malaria-associated illness dating from his days in the tropics.

German U-boats at Penang, 1943-45 period

The Emden’s daring attack was not however to be the end of German naval involvement with Penang. In 1942, as Japanese forces advanced through the Pacific and South-East Asia, the idea was mooted in Germany of sending U-Boats to the Indian Ocean to operate together with Japanese units. The proposal may have had some value in publicity terms as regards emphasising unit of purpose within the Axis but the logistics involved were formidable. Refuelling would be essential for units sent from Germany – by necessity by the Cape of Good Hope route – and this would require stationing of submarine tankers off Brazil and surface units in the Indian Ocean. By the time that the plan was implemented in 1943 the Anglo-American navies were gaining the upper hand in the anti-submarine war and the “Gruppe Monsun” force of German U-boats was to suffer a horrific casualty rate. The first step was to send large Italian-origin submarines to establish a base at Penang and thereafter seventeen U-bats were sent to follow in two waves. Of these only five reached Penang due to Allied air attack en route and to Allied submarines stationed off Malaya in response to decrypted information on German movements. A further eight U-boats reached the Far East thereafter. At the time of Germany’s surrender in May 1945 the six U-boats still in Japanese-controlled area were taken over by the Japanese Navy. Some successes were scored by the Penang-based U-boats – including sinkings as far south as off Fremantle in Australia, but the gains were totally disproportionate to the resources squandered in what was largely a propaganda-motivated campaign.

And in Penang today no memory seems to remain of the fact that the Nazi Reichsmarine once had a base there. Sic transit…

To see a short video interview with me about my approach to writing and my interest in the 19th Century please click here.

I’m still in Northern Malaysia and today I saw not only one of the most unique – and beautiful – buildings I’ve ever seen but found also what looked like an old naval gun that ended up far from the sea!

Istana Kenangan - the "Remembrance Palace"

The Malaysian federal structure is a remarkable one. A constitutional monarchy, the head of government is the prime minister but the head of state, who has significant powers, is the King, known as the Yang di-Pertuan Agong. The method of appointment of the king is unique– he is formally elected by, and from, the nine Sultans of the Malay states (of there are thirteen in total) which have hereditary royal rulers. The appointment is for five years, after which a new king is selected.

The present Sultan of Perak succeeded his father earlier this year. The 59-year old Sultan Nazrin was educated in Malaysia, at Worcester College, Oxford and both a Masters and a PhD degree from Harvard. His wife is a chemical engineer. The Sultan’s palace at Kuala Kangsar was built in the 1930s is an imposing and dignified stone structure. It is however another palace close by – considerably smaller and initially intended to provide temporary accommodation while the new palace was being built, which is even more interesting.

The Istana Kenangan– literally “Remembrance Palace” was constructed in 1926 and was the Sultan’s official residence up to 1933 when the new, permanent, palace was completed. It was used thereafter to host receptions and accommodate palace guests. It is two storeys high with the top floor consisting of the bedchamber, family bedrooms and a dining hall. The ground floor was once used as the official royal office but is now open.

Detail of walls - hardwood structural members and fretwork edging, woven bamboo panels

Not a single nail was used in the construction. The structural members are of hardwood, and so is the fretted edging at the bottom of the top floor. Perhaps most impressive of all is the woven bamboo matting which fills in the spaces between the pillars (I hope the photographs will give some impression). It must have been a cool and airy structure in the days before air-conditioning, a superb example of traditional design responding to climatic challenge. The palace is standing up well to the challenges of age and weather (and Malaysia is a wet country, as attested to frequent very heavy showers at present!) but parts are now under attack by termites and renovations are in progress.

Any suggestions as to what it is? A British 3-inch Quick Firer?

Given my interest in naval history I was pleasantly surprised to find what looks like a small naval gun on a pillar-mounting in the garden of the Istana Kenangan. I could find no details of its origin and my guess is that it may be a British 3-inch Quick Firer of pre-1914 vintage, though I stand to be corrected. The four holes for the bolts to hold on the missing shield can be seen clearly in the photographs. Can anybody identify what sort of weapon this is? Even more interesting is how it got there – I suspect that its later use was as a ceremonial weapon for gun-salutes etc. but one wonders what its service history could have been. If only it could talk!

There was much more to see in Kuala Kangsar but time prevents me covering other sights. What a fascinating and rewarding day!

To see a short video interview with me about my approach to writing and my interest in the 19th Century please click here.

France’s entry into the American War of Independence was to prove a critical factor is assuring the survival of the United States. It did so by winning the only strategically-significant victory in all French naval history – that off the Virginia Capes in 1781, which starved British forces at Yorktown of supllies and made their surrender unavoidable. The unforeseen cost to the French monarchy of supporting this upstart republic founded on democratic principles was however to be enormous. French officers returned from America with the conviction that France’s governmental system was rotten and unsustainable. Once that fact was widely recognised revolution was inevitable and the whole bloody process would commence in 1789.

The British surrender at Yorktown - made inevitable by a French naval victory

The driver for French involvement in the war was the adage that “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” (an often dangerous assumption, as it was in this case) and the objective was to strike at Britain, the old enemy with which she had fought a long sequence of wars over the previous century. France’s supply of arms to the American rebels and her formal recognition of the United States in February 1778 made it inevitable that Britain would declare war on France in the following month. The initial confrontations had to be naval, since control of sea routes to and from North America was essential for both sides.

Admiral Keppel by Sir Joshua Reynolds

France possessed a fleet in the Mediterranean and a second, based at Brest in Brittany to operate in Atlantic and Channel waters. An important strategic decision was the Britain’s commitment to concentrating its resources in the Channel Fleet so as to blockade French forces at Brest. By doing so, attacks on merchant shipping to and from Britain, and any French attempt at mounting an invasion, could be countered. The situation changed however when a French naval force slipped out of the Mediterranean and headed for the Americas. There was no option but to detach forces from the Channel Fleet to follow this force. This still left the French and British navies in rough numeric balance in and off Brest and made a French break-out more feasible.

The Royal Navy’s Channel Fleet was commanded by Admiral Augustus Keppel (1725 – 1786), who can be described as competent but not brilliant. Like many officers of the era he had a parallel political career as a Member of Parliament and bad blood existed between him, as committed Whig, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Navy’s professional head and a committed member of the opposing group known as “The King’s Friends”. The depth of bitterness was such that Keppel feared that the First Lord would be glad for him to be defeated. Further bad feeling existed between Keppel and one of his subordinate admirals, Sir Hugh Palliser (1723–1796), another politically active officer and previously a member of the Admiralty Board, which Keppel blamed for the running down of the Royal Navy in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. These personal enmities did not bode well for mutual trust and cooperation in the heat of battle.

Contemporary image of the British line at Ushant: Note that HMS Foudroyant,
identified in print block third from right, was captained by Sir John Jervis, later Viscount St. Vincent

The clash – the first major naval action of the war – came on 23^rd July some 100 miles west of Ushant, a small island off the coast of Brittany. The numbers of ships on both sides were large and all but equal. The British force consisted of 29 ships–of-the-line and faced 30 similar French ships and two smaller ones. The French held the weather-gage – that is, they were upwind of their opponents, a usually critical advantage in the age of Sail – but this was largely nullified by the orders given to the French commander, Admiral Comte d'Orvilliers (1708 – 1792) to avoid battle. (The concept of “a fleet in being” had existed since the late 17^thCentury). The result was to pit two fleets against each other, one of which had a less than unified command while the other was commanded by an admiral who was instructed not to fight.

Battle of Ushant by Theodore Guediin, painted circa 1848
Note British and French lines passing on opposite tacks

Shifting winds and a heavy rain squall made weather conditions unfavourable as the British force manoeuvred to bring itself parallel to the French and on the same course, while maintaining a less-than perfect column – inevitable under the circumstances. The French objective was however to be escape rather than give battle. Wearing – a reversal of course – brought the French on an opposite course and still to windward. Fire was opened and the head of the British column – led by HMS Victory, whose greatest triumph was still 2 years in the future – sustained little damage but the rearmost division, commanded by Admiral Palliser, was battered more heavily as the French passed. Keppel signalled for the British column to wear so as to follow the French. For whatever reason, Palliser to not comply. The result was that the French fleet escaped. Neither side had lost a ship but the butcher’s bill was heavy nonetheless. The British lost 407 men killed and 789 wounded while the corresponding figures for the French were 126 and 413.

Bitter recriminations followed on both sides. Keppel praised Palliser in his official report but staged a campaign against him with the support of the Whig press. Palliser responded in kind such that both men all but accused each other of treason. This led to both Keppel and Palliser being court-martialled, both being acquitted, though Palliser was censured. Keppel’s political cronies ensured that he became in due course an undistinguished First Lord of the Admiralty while Palliser’s career continued with no great distinction. The whole affair had done nothing for the morale of the service or for the good of the country.

"Philippe Égalité"

The aftermath of the battle on the French side had more of farce than drama about it. One of the officers serving in d'Orvilliers’ fleet was Louis Philippe d'Orléans, Duc de Chatres (1747 – 1793), who belonged to a junior branch of the Bourbon family and thus a relative of the reigning King Louis XVI. He was to be better known to history as “Philippe Égalité” but that lay in the future when he was despatched to the Palace of Versailles with news of the battle. He arrived in the early morning hours, had the king woken, and provided a highly coloured account that represented the action as a French victory. The news spread and when de Chatres attended the opera he was greeted with a twenty-minute standing ovation, followed up by burning of Keppel’s effigy in the garden of de Chatres’ home in the Palais Royale. Glowing with pride after this reception, he returned to Brest only to find that more accurate accounts were now being issued which made it very plain that there had been no victory. Deeply embarrassed, and quickly made a figure of ridicule, he had no option but to resign from the navy. He succeeded to the title of Duc d’Orleans in 1785 and was now next in line to succeed to the throne should the direct royal line die out. He thereafter got embroiled in bitter enmity and mutual loathing with Queen Marie-Antoinette, she regarding him as treacherous and hypocritical, and he regarding her as frivolous and extravagant.

In the years leading up to the revolution that would break out in 1789 d’Orleans allied himself with the movement for reform, reinforcing the anti-royalist image he had had for some time. This might be regarded as an early example of “radical chic” and d’Orleans made his residence, the Palais Royale, available for meetings of the extremist Jacobin Club. He gained sufficient popularity that when the Paris mob invaded the Palace of Versailles in October 1789 the cry was heard of “"Long live our King d'Orléans!" In the four years of revolution that followed, a bewildering period of upheaval and shifting alliances, d’Orleans renounced his titles to become Citizen Philippe Égalité (Equality) and a member of the Constituent Assembly. When King Louis XVI was put on trial for his life in January 1793 this Philippe Égalité was to vote for his execution. For all his identification with republican ideals, Philippe Égalité was not however to survive long in the snake-pit of revolutionary turmoil. As the Reign of Terror took hold he was to be another of those consumed by the revolution they had brought about. He went to the guillotine in November 1793, doing so with a dignity and calmness that did him credit.

Execution of Louis VVI, January 1793 - Philippe Egalite voted for it
He died himself on the same scaffold ten months later

King Louis Philippe in 1842

Philippe Égalité, had he lived to know it, had the last laugh. The Second French Revolution, in 1830, brought his son (1773 – 1850) to the throne as King Louis-Philippe I, who reigned as “The Citizen King” for eighteen years until a Third Revolution, in 1848, deposed him. He lived out his last years once again in exile in England, where he had previously spent the years 1793-1815. His daughter Louise married Leopold, first King of the Belgians in 1832, so that Philippe Égalité’s bloodline runs on today through the monarch who reigns today in Brussels.

It all seems far removed from the farcical aftermath of the Battle of Ushant. One wonders however whether the 533 men killed and the hundreds wounded in it would have appreciated the ironies.

To see a short videointerview with Antoine Vanner about his approach to writing and his interest inthe 19th Century please click here.

When one thinks of the Imperial German Navy the image that immediately comes to mind is of the mighty battle-fleet that confronted the Royal Navy at the start of World War 1. In the two decades prior to this however the most active service seen by the German Navy was by small ships in far-flung corners of the globe where Germany, a latecomer to the scramble for colonies, was constructing an overseas empire. One focus was on Africa, with very large territorial holdings in South-West Africa and East Africa, and smaller ones in Togoland and the Cameroons in West Africa. The other main focus was on the Western Pacific, with holdings in Northern New Guinea (“Kaiser Wilhelmsland”), the Bismarck Archipelago and several island groups whose names were to become familiar in World War2. Germany has significant trading interests in China and this led in turn to establishment of a naval base on the Chinese coast at Tsingtao (modern Qingdao) to rival the British and Russian bases at Hong Kong and Port Arthur respectively. The distances involved in “policing” this vast area – essentially using naval power, whether for bombardment or by landing parties, to quell local unrest – required small and relatively unsophisticated vessels. These had to be capable of operating alone for extended periods, often far from reliable coal-supplies. They represented an ideal opportunity for young and ambitious officers to display initiative and seamanship in a way which would never be possible in the “big-ship navy” in home waters. The story of one such vessel, SMS Iltis, was told in an earlier blog (click here to read) while another blog deals with colonial aspirations (click here).

SMS Bussard, sister of the Geier and lead ship of the class
(With acknowledgement to the Deutsche-Schutzgebiete website)

Launched in 1894, two decades after the Iltis, SMS Geier, was a considerably more sophisticated ship. One of the Bussard class of six, all named after birds (Geier meaning Vulture) she was an 1868-ton, 271-foot, twin-screw unprotected cruiser with a maximum speed of 15.5 knots. Such speed was rarely called for and endurance was more important in view of the distances she would operate over – she was consequently designed to steam on her bunkers for 3000 miles at 9 knots without resorting to her auxiliary sail-power. Since shore-bombardment was likely to be a requirement on occasion she was heavily armed for her size, carrying eight 4.1-inch guns and several smaller weapons. Given her expected duties it is surprising that she should have in addition two 14-inch torpedo tubes. Her crew amounted to 161, allowing her to land a potent and well-disciplined force should circumstances demand.

Over the next two decades the Geier, like her sisters, was to see service in all the German colonial areas as well as in the Caribbean, where she evacuated German nationals from Cuba during the Spanish-American War. In 1900 she supported international efforts to suppress the Boxer Rising and she was to spend the next five years patrolling the China coast – a hotbed of piracy – and the German possessions in the South-West Pacific. A return to Germany for overhaul was the start of a deployment in European waters, including protection of German interests in the Mediterranean during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-12 and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.

SMS Geier in her later years, when her sailing rig had been removed
(With acknowledgement to the splendid Kaiserliche-Marine website)

Thereafter the Geier was sent east again, but had not yet reached the German base of Tsingtao when the World War broke out in August 1914. She departed hastily from the British-held harbour of Singapore only days before Britain’s declaration of war. Obsolete, slow and with inadequate coal reserves, the Geier was now one of the German Navy’s nomads (click here to see separate blog on this). Recognising that the Tsingtao base was untenable once Japan had also declared war on Germany, and was likely to capture this base quickly, the powerful German East Asia squadron was already heading south-east across the Pacific in what proved to be futile effort to return to Germany (click here for article on this). The Geier tried bravely but hopelessly to follow the squadron, even capturing but not sinking a British merchant steamer on the way, a source of coal that helped extend her range. Her machinery was now at its limits however and by early October, though she had managed to escape the extensive British, Japanese and French forces scouring the Pacific, the game was up. Making use of her last coal supplies she crawled into Honolulu and surrendered herself for internment.

Geier's crew being marched into internment by American troops at Honolulu, October 1914

The Geier spent almost three inactive years at Honolulu (not a bad place for her crew to be interned!) but when the United States entered the war in April 1917 she was seized by the American government. Renamed the USS Schurz and hastily overhauled, she escorted a convoy consisting of three submarines to San Diego, then onwards through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean. Following further maintenance she was allocated convoy duty in the Caribbean and off the United States’ East Coast. Here she was to meet her end. Rammed on 19^th June 1918 off the Outer Banks of North Carolina by one of the freighters she was escorting, the Schurz sank quickly with the loss of one crew member killed and twelve injured.

It was a fate that could never have been predicted for the Geier when she had embarked on her busy and useful career in the Imperial German Navy almost a quarter-century before.

To see a short video interview with Antoine Vanner about his approachto writing and his interest in the 19th Century please click here.

The sloop HMS Sabrina was one of 24 similar vessels of the second batch of the “Cormorant” Class. Armed with no less than sixteen 24-pounder and eight 12-pounder carronades, these vessels packed an enormous punch for their 422 tons and small 120-man crews. Launched in 1805/06, these useful ship-rigged vessels were to provide valuable but unspectacular service throughout the remainder of the Napoleonic Wars. The Sabrina saw service in the Mediterranean, in the West Indies and in the poorly-conceived and worse-executed Walcheren campaign of 1809. Her claim to fame did not however rest on battle-honours but rather on her discovery of a short-lived island to which she gave her name.

HMS Blossom - sister ship of HMS Sabrina

The Azores, the small Portuguese-held archipelago in the North Atlantic some 800 miles west of of Portugal, are volcanic in origin. They are situated at the meeting point of three huge tectonic plates – the North American, the Eurasian and the African Plate. It is not surprising therefore that the area would be seismically and volcanically active and there have been some 28 known volcanic eruptions, of which 13 were submarine, since settlement of the islands commenced some six centuries ago. Early in 1811 seismic activity commenced on and around the island of São Miguel, the largest of the group, and this included tremors onshore which were powerful enough to destroy houses as well as massive release of gasses from the seabed. The climax came on 10^th June when a submarine eruption raised a circular cone above the sea’s surface. This was some 700 yards in diameter and some 300 feet high. From an open ring at its centre smoke and debris vomited skywards.

HMS Sarrina approaches the eruption - drawn by Lieutenant John William Miles

Unaware of these events, HMS Sabrina was cruising off the Azores under the command of Commander James Tillard. On 12^th June, two days after the volcano’s appearance, the warship sighted rolling grey clouds on the horizon. Tillard assumed immediately that a naval battle was in progress and, if so, he wanted to be part of it. (One recalls the question asked by the bye-stander at the barroom brawl, “Is this a private fight, or can anybody join in?”). The Sabrina headed for the smoke and found to her surprise not a battle but a violently active volcano. Tillard was to write afterwards that ‘To give you an adequate idea of the scene by description is far beyond my powers” but he was fascinated by what he saw and stayed in the vicinity for the best part of a month.

Contemporary illustration - the island reariing up, with gasses venting in the fforeground

By 4^th July that island was judged sufficiently stable and safe for a landing to be attempted. Tillard went ashore to find a desolate landscape of cinders and ash, with white smoke drifting in “the most fanciful manner imaginable” and volcanic material still being hurled upwards to sustain the island’s growth. Tremors continued, many with a noise “like the continued firing of cannon and musquetry intermixed”. Familiar no doubt with a captain’s responsibility to remain calm even while on an open quarterdeck in the heat of action, Tillard demonstrated admirable sang-froid while he was ashore. One tremor proved sufficient to collapse a cliff face only 50 yards from the point where he was holding an impromptu picnic with his party. “So soon as our first consternation had a little subsided,” he wrote later, “we removed about ten or a dozen yards further from the edge of our cliff, and finished our dinner.”

When Tillard revisited the island some time later he found boiling water rushing from fissures. This did not deter him from raising a Union Flag and claiming the island as British, confirming it by a message lodged in a bottle at its base. He named this latest British possession “Sabrina Island” in honour of his ship.

Tillard’s claim of the island – within little more than a gunshot’s range from the island of São Miguel – had all the potential to cause a rift in British-Portuguese relations, all the more undesirable since both countries were allied at the time and prosecuting a vigorous war against France. A higher authority was however to settle what could have been an unwelcome diplomatic confrontation. When a British survey ship arrived on the scene a few months later all traces of Sabrina Island had disappeared as quickly as she had arrived.

Tillard wrote a full report on his findings to the Royal Society, but at this stage the mechanics involved were poorly understood. It was another half-century before the modern science of seismology would be born. Its unlikely origin was to be in an attempt to produce a massive siege-mortar – and you can learn about that from an earlier blog – click here to read.

To see a short video interview with Antoine Vanner about his approach to writing naval fiction and his interest in the 19th Century please click here.

The end of the Age of Fighting Sail was a process that straggled through the 1820s and 30s and 40s as steam power became increasingly reliable. The last full fleet action with sailing vessels was the Battle of Navarino in 1827, when combined British, French and Russian squadrons annihilated an entire Ottoman Turkish fleet. This victory was decisive in securing that Greece’s independence from her Turkish overlords. Britain’s last major action involving sailing vessels – albeit with steamships also present – was to follow thirteen years later with bombardments of Egyptian positions on the Lebanese coast in 1840 (click here for an earlier blog about this). Steamships were introduced to all the major navies in the decade that followed but it was not until 1853 that one steamship would face another in combat. The location for this was to be off the Black Sea coast of Turkey.

Battle of Navarino, 1827, by Ivan Aivazovaky

A constant of Russian history from 1568 to 1918 was a steady stream of wars with Ottoman Turkey – twelve in all in this long period. The common feature was a southward push by the Russian Empire, capturing land in the Crimea, Ukraine and the Caucuses which were previously under Ottoman Rule. New states – Greece, Serbia, Rumania and Bulgaria – were to gain independence with Russian support I the nineteenth century and in 1878, in the eleventh of these wars, Russian forces were to penetrate to the suburbs of Constantinople/Istanbul. It is with the tenth conflict however which we are concerned here. This war began in 1853 over an obscure argument as to who should protect Christian Holy Places in Jerusalem, and initially involved only Russia and Turkey directly. Early in the following year Britain, France and Piedmont were to be drawn in and when peace was finally negotiated in 1856 the terms were to be very unfavourable to Russia.

Admiral Nakhimov

This outcome was not however foreseen in late October 1853, when Turkey declared war on Russia. The Russian responded by sending a sailing squadron of her Black Sea Fleet under Admiral Pavel Nakhimov (1802 – 1855) to operate off the northern Anatolian coast to harass Turkish naval movements. The other area of Russian concentration was off the commercially-important mouths of the Danube and of the Bosporus. This duty was allocated to a squadron of steam frigates, six of which had been constructed in London for the Russian Navy between 1843 and 1848 – a commentary on the still poorly-developed nature of Russian industry. Paddle-driven, and thus very vulnerable to enemy fire, these vessels were reported as carrying ten guns (calibre uncertain), some of which were mounted as bow and stern chasers, a fact that was to prove critical in combat. This squadron was commanded by Fleet Vice-Admiral Vladimir Kornilov (1806- 1854) who flew his flag – most appropriately – in the frigate Vladimir. This vessel was commanded by and up and coming Captain-Lieutenant Grigori Butakov (1820-1882).

The Vladimir - contemporary illustration

In early November Kornilov shifted his operations to the Anatolian coast to link up with Nakhimov. On the morning of 5^th November the Vladimir, apparently alone, or at least out of sight of other Russian vessels, spotted the smoke of a ship apparently heading northwards. Vladimir gave chase and the unknown vessel tried to escape. Her speed was inadequate however and when the Vladimir caught up with her she was revealed to be an Ottoman steam frigate, the Pervaz-i-Bahri. The two enemies were more or less equally matched as regards armament – but with one important difference. The Pervaz-i-Bahri carried her guns on broadside only.

The battle, by Alexei Bogoliubov. Vladimir (r) raking Pervez-i-Bahri from astern

Battle was joined. The sea conditions appear to have been relatively calm and for the first time ever in ship-to-ship combat considerations of weather-gauge were irrelevant as regards manoeuvre. No sails were set and steam power was independent of wind. The fact that the Vladimir had overhauled her quarry was an indication of higher speed and this, combined with the Turkish lack of bow or stern-chasers, was to prove decisive. Butakov’s speed allowed him to keep his ship astern of the Turk, so as to be able to rake her unmercifully along her axis. Any attempt by the Pervaz-i-Bahri to bring her broadside guns to bear was frustrated by the Vladimir’s ability to remain in her blind-spot. The Turkish frigate’s steering gear was soon damaged, as were her bridge and several of the guns. The last straw was when the Vladimir moved in close to sweep the Pervaz-i-Bahri’s decks with grapeshot and her colours came down in surrender. The battle had lasted some three hours.

The disparity in the butcher’s bills confirmed just how effective the Vladimir’s tactics had been. Her casualties amounted to two dead and three wounded by comparison with 58 lost on the Pervaz-i-Bahri, including her commander. Badly damaged, the Turkish frigate was brought to the Russian base at Sevastopol, where she promptly sank. Raised again, she was taken into Russian service under the name Kornilov.

The Battle of Sinope, by Ivan Aivazovsky

Kornilov: Soviet stamp, 1989

The Valdimir’s victory was the prelude to one yet greater. Reinforced with further vessels, and with guns loaded with new and deadly explosive shell, Nakimov descended on an Ottoman squadron outside their Black Sea base at Sinope on November 30th. He had six sailing ships-of-the-line, two sailing frigates and three steam frigates to the Ottomans’ seven sailing frigates, three sailing corvettes and three steam frigates. The result was a massacre, the explosive shells wreaking havoc that the Ottomans, with their solid-shot weapons, could not match. All twelve Ottoman vessels were either destroyed or run aground in frantic efforts to escape. The Russian victory was absolute, but it was to be counterproductive. From that moment on British and French involvement was inevitable if Russian ambitions to control the Bosporus, Dardanelles and the Eastern Mediterranean were to be frustrated. Russia had won the battle but had drawn upon herself a war she could not win.

Butakov as an Admiral

And what of the ships involved? Both the Vladimir and the newly-named Kornilov were scuttled in Sevastopol at the end of the war. They had provided sterling service during its siege, which was to be the central feature of the Crimean War. No less tragic was the fate of the Russian Admirals Nakhimov and Kornilov. Both died heroically in Sevastopol’s defence. Only Butakov was to survive the war, dying as a widely-respected Admiral and mine-warfare innovator in 1882.

To see a short video interview with Antoine Vanner about his approach to writing naval fiction and his interest in the 19th Century please click here.

July 1863 was recognised both at the time and afterwards as the turning point of the American Civil War. The Union victory at Gettysburg in the first three days of the month, and the surrender of the Confederate fortress of Vicksburg in the 4^th, ensured that the days of the Southern Confederacy were numbered. Long and bitter fighting still lay ahead but from this time onwards there could be no doubt that the Union would be restored. The role of the US Navy had been crucial in gaining control of the Mississippi – the fall of Vicksburg put its entire length under Union control – and no less important was the close blockade of the southern coastline which was to strangle Confederate commerce and strategic imports. Given this concentration of US Naval power in American waters, it is surprising that one of the most dramatic naval actions in July 1863 was to be with Japanese.

USS Wyoming

The background to this action was the Union decision, from the start of the war, to maintain a six-ship Pacific Squadron to protect American interests, strategic and commercial, over this vast area. The first concern was to ensure that the Confederacy should not gain a foothold at any point on the Pacific coast. As this threat receded it was replaced by that of Confederate commerce raiders. The most successful of these, the CSS Alabama, operated on a global basis, including the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific. The American whaling fleets were considered especially vulnerable and the squadron’s patrols extended across the North and South Pacific, from Alaska to Chile and as far west as Australia and the Chinese coast, where piracy was a major problem both then and in many years to come.

CSS Alabama

Entering service in 1859, the USS Wyoming was the newest of the squadron’s vessels. A wooden-hulled steam sloop of 1460-tons and 200-foot length, she was not called after what is now the State of Wyoming (which did was not admitted to the Union until 1890) but rather after the similarly-named valley in Pennsylvania which had been the scene of ghastly massacre of settlers by British-allied Indian forces during the War of Independence. The Wyoming was heavily armed for her size – two 11-inch Dahlgren smoothbores, one 60-pounder Parrott rifle and three 32-pounder smoothbores. She could make 11-knots under steam but auxiliary sail provision made her less dependent on coal supplies and extended her range considerably.

The Wyoming’s Civil War was to open dramatically. She was at San Francisco when secession commenced and her captain, a Southern sympathiser, took her to Panama with the apparent intention of committing her to Confederate service. This was frustrated and he was dismissed. On the voyage back to California she struck a reef, was grounded for three days, and had to be dragged free. In mid-1862, now commanded by Commander David S. McDougal (1809 – 1882), she was sent across the Pacific to Malaya and the Dutch East Indies to search for the Alabama. In October of that year the Alabama received news from British and Dutch trading vessels of the Wyoming’s presence in the area. The Alabama’s captain, Raphael Semmes, wrote in his journal that he was resolved to give the Wyoming battle and that he believed the ships to be evenly matched. The game of hide and seek that followed did not however lead to an encounter.

"Expel the barbarians" poster

Trouble that would demand the Wyoming’s attention was however brewing in another quarter. Japan had only been “opened” to foreign trade and contact since 1854 and a major issue in the nation’s internal politics was to be the extent to which it should either modernise, or to continue its existing social and cultural norms while rejecting all outside influences. We know now that it was the modernisers, led in the 1860 by the Tokugawa Shogun, Iesada, who were to prevail but the issue was only decided after a long series of revolts and civil wars. The movement against both the Shogun and trade with outsiders was led by the Choshu Clan from their territory in south-west Honshu. Their policy was summed up in the slogan “Honour the Emperor and expel the barbarians." The Emperor in question had been a figurehead, and above politics in the preceding period, with political power vested in the Shogun. Now Emperor Komei broke with tradition and issued an edict supporting the “expel the barbarians” policy which was immediately acted upon by the Choshu. They were well placed for this since, with powerful shore batteries, they controlled the Straits of Shimonoseki which divide Honshu from Kyushu, the most southerly of Japan’s main islands. Soon British, French, Dutch, and American traders were coming under fire.

Following her unsuccessful search for the Alabama, the Wyoming moved north in 1863. She arrived in Yokohama to find that all foreigners had been ordered to leave Japan immediately and that the Straits of Shimonoseki had been closed to foreign vessels. On 26th June news arrived that two Choshu vessels had attacked an American merchantman in the Straits. She escaped without casualties but US ambassador and Commander McDougal agreed that the insult to the American flag was unacceptable. Immediate action was needed if further such incidents were to be prevented. McDougal, commanding what amounted to a one-ship navy, headed south.

USS Wyoming in action at Shimonseki

The Wyoming entered the Shimonoseki Strait in mid-morning on 16^th July. She was cleared for action and her guns were loaded. The Choshu coastal batteries – which included five modern 8-inch Dalghrens as well as more antiquated smoothbores – opened fire on her shortly afterwards . The Wyoming opened up in return with her pivot-mounted 11-inch Dahlgrens. She drove towards three armed Choshu vessels moored at the town of Shimonoseki, all steamers built in the United States and one of them bizarrely named the Daniel Webster after the renowned statesman . Wyoming took hits she forged ahead, one of them killing and wounding men manning a 32-pounder broadside gun. Lacking charts for these waters the Wyoming now ran aground. The Chosu steamer Lancefiled charged straight for her with the apparent intention of boarding, but Wyoming managed to break free from the mud in time to blast her attacker with her Dahlgrens. The Lancefield’s boiler exploded and she sank. McDougal now concentrated his fire on the two remaining Chosu vessels and some of the shells fired went over and exploded in the town beyond and started fires. During the action the Wyoming took eleven hits on her hull as well as substantial damage to her funnel and rigging. Losses amounted to four killed and seven wounded.

Honour was satisfied and McDougal was pleased that, in his words, "the punishment inflicted (on the Choshu leader) and in store for him will, I trust, teach him a lesson that will not soon be forgotten."This conclusion was somewhat premature for the Chosu leaders were undeterred. Four days later two French warships, the Tancrede and the Dupleix, also bombarded and landed men briefly to destroy one of the gun batteries. This was still not enough to deter the Choshu and the following year it took a larger campaign by significant numbers of British, Dutch and French warships, with a nominal American presence, to clear the strait. This larger action may be the subject of a later blog.

USS Wyoming's crew in action

Damage repaired, the Wyoming set off again for the Dutch East Indies to hunt the Alabama. They were never to sight each other, though it emerged later that at one stage they had been a mere 25 miles apart in the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java (Where the USS Houston CL-30 was to go down fighting in early 1942). The Wyoming remained in the area after the Alabama left and was later involved in the hunt for the Confederate raider Shenandoah. Her only further action was to be a punitive expedition against Formosan natives who had murdered the crew of a wrecked American merchantman. She remained in active service until 1882.

And the quarry that Wyoming hunted so relentlessly but never sighted? The Alabama had an appointment with Destiny, and with the USS Kearsarge off the coast of France tin 1864. But that is a separate story.

To see a short video interview with Antoine Vanner about his approach to writing naval fiction and his interest in the 19th Century please click here.

The Netherlands and Belgium are today two separate nations, and have indeed had separate existences, in one form or another, for most of the time since the late sixteenth century. Up until 1806, the Netherlands had a complex republican form of government, though allowing however a hereditary role to Princes of the House of Orange. The nation fell under French control in 1795 and in 1806 it became the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with the Emperor Napoleon’s younger brother Louis installed as King. What is today Belgium (allowing for frontier adjustments) was ruled through the same period as a province of the Hapsburg Empire.

King William I's son leading Dutch-Belgian forces during the Waterloo campaign

As Napoleon’s power waned, and as he was sent in exile to Elba, the great powers of Europe supported creation of a single unified state, combining both regions, and henceforth to be known as “The Kingdom of the Netherlands.” Its sovereign was to be the current Prince of Orange, who took the title of King William I and who was also made ruler, under the title of Grand Duke, of the separate state of Luxembourg. The new Kingdom was functioning when Napoleon came back from Elba during “The 100 days” in 1815, and Dutch-Belgian forces were to fight against him at Waterloo.

Belgian rebels in Brussels 1830

For the next 15 years the northern, Dutch, and the southern, Belgian, parts of the kingdom lived uneasily together. Though adherents of both religions lived in all areas, the north was predominantly Protestant and the south predominantly Catholic. The situation was further complicated by the southern provinces containing both French-speaking Walloon and Dutch-speaking Flemish communities. Tensions increased and in the south resentment grew against what was seen as the Protestant hegemony by the House of Orange and its adherents. This discontent exploded in outright rebellion in Belgium in 1830. King William attempted to restore order but was hampered by mass desertion of troops hailing from the southern provinces. Unable to restore order, despite bloody street-fighting in Brussels and elsewhere, William withdrew his forces, though he maintained a blockade of Antwerp, and appealed to the Great Powers to resolve the problem. This resulted in the London Conference of European powers which recognised Belgium as an independent country. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was installed as "King of the Belgians".

Dutch cavalry under attack in a Belgian town

Unhappy with this outcome, King William of the now truncated Netherlands – essentially the territory it consists of today – was to oppose the separation, culminating in an unsuccessful invasion of Belgium known as De Tiendagse Veldtocht ("The Ten Days' Campaign") which lasted from the 2^nd to the 12^th of August 1831. Despite initial successes, French intervention forced the Dutch to agree to an indefinite armistice. Faced with such opposition, William had no option but to withdraw, humiliated and smarting, but it was not until 1839 the Netherlands accepted Belgian independence by signing the Treaty of London. As one of its signatories, it was in line with the terms of this treaty that Great Britain entered World War I when Belgium was invaded by Germany in 1914.

van Speijk's youth romanticised
- admiring tomb of Admiral de Ruyter

Only one incident from this complex series of events is widely remembered in the Netherlands today. This was the exploit of the young Dutch naval lieutenant, Jan van Speijk (pronounced like “Spike” in English), who achieved immortality at Antwerp in February 1831. Dutch naval forces were maintaining a blockade of this important port – then as now, one of the largest in Europe, as it functioned as a commercial gateway to Germany. Van Speijk was in command of a small gunboat, one of many engaged in blockade duty, a more difficult task then than nowadays as many mouths of the Scheldt Delta, at the head of which Antwerp lies, were then open but which have since been closed off by dams.

Van Speijk’s background seems almost too good to be true for a popular hero. Born in Amsterdam in 1802, his parents died when he was a baby and he was brought up in an orphanage and subsequently trained as a tailor. Such a mundane career did not attract him and he instead joined the Royal Netherlands Navy in 1820. Thereafter he was to serve with distinction in the Dutch East Indies in the Boni Campaign of 1825 in the South Celebes.

By 1830 van Speijkwas a lieutenant – a very impressive achievement for a man who had started with such poor prospects. As the revolt in Belgium grew he was in command of Kanonneerboot Nummer 2 (Gunboat Number 2), a small sailing craft armed with a single cannon and on October 27^th he performed so effectively in a bombardment of Antwerp that he was award a decoration.

19th Century comic strip about van Speijk's life

The blockade continued through the winter and during this time van Speijk seems to have thought deeply – might have indeed been obsessed – about what he should do if his vessel were to fall into Belgian hands. In December 1830 he wrote to his niece that he would rather blow up his craft rather than surrender it, and he referred to an incident in 1606 when a Dutch captain had done just this to prevent seizure by the Spaniards. During new-year celebrations he told his crew the same and was allegedly applauded by them, though it is uncertain whether they thought that he was wholly serious.

What van Speijk feared could happen does happen- the mob storms the gunboat,
the ship's boy knows what's coming and jumps overboard and van Speijk himself goes below

The crunch came on February 5^th 1831. Caught in a north-west gale, and with a dragging anchor, van Speijk’s gunboat was thrown up on the shore. A Belgian mob surged on board. What followed was the stuff of legend, the more so since few survived to tell a coherent story. Unable to prevent the vessel’s capture, van Speijk went below and with the reported words of “Ik ga liever de lucht in” (I’d prefer to be blown up) he either fired his pistol or dropped his cigar into a keg of gunpowder.

"Ik ga liever de lucht in!" and van Speijkshoots into the keg of gunpowder

The resulting explosion wrecked the gunboat and killed van Speijk himself and 27 of his crew of 30 as well as an unknown number of Belgians. Since there were only two survivors, one of whom was boy who, seeing what was intended, had jumped overboard before the explosion, it is not quite sure how van Speijk’s final words were recorded, or indeed if he ever spoke them

The destruction of Gunboat Number 2, Antwerp in the background

The latest van Speijk

Van Speijk was immediately hailed as a national hero in the Netherlands, the admiration being led by King William himself, who within a week of his death issued an order that there should always be a ship called van Speijk in the Royal Netherlands Navy. This order has been honoured ever since and the current van Speijk, the eighth, is a Karel Doorman-class frigate launched in 1995. Van Speijk’s remains were buried with pomp in Amsterdam with the King present and his life was thereafter the subject of poems, paintings and even inspirational nineteenth-century versions of comic strips.

And the expression “Ik ga liever de lucht in!” entered the Dutch language and even today is used as a term of exasperated refusal.

--------------------

Britannia’s Reach is the second of the Dawlish Chronicles. So what’s it about?

Click here for details and to read the first chapter by clicking again on image on Amazon page

It’s 1880. On a broad river deep in the heart of South America, a flotilla of paddle steamers thrashes slowly upstream. Laden with troops, horses and artillery, intent on conquest and revenge.

Ahead lies a commercial empire that was wrested from a British consortium in a bloody revolution. Now the investors are determined to recoup their losses and are funding a vicious war to do so.

Nicholas Dawlish, an ambitious British naval officer, is playing a leading role in the expedition. But as brutal land and river battles mark its progress upriver, and as both sides inflict and endure ever greater suffering, stalemate threatens.

And Dawlish finds himself forced to make a terrible ethical choice if he is to return to Britain with some shreds of integrity remaining…

My blog posts often deal with blood and thunder, conflict and battle, but this present item deals with a middle-aged lady of poor background, who demonstrated a very high degree of heroism in peacetime without having any prior warning of what was needed.

I have been an admirer for many years of the Scots poet William McGonnagal (1825-1902) whose style was truly unique and whose command of verse can only be described as unique and unmatched. He produced an enormous canon of work and there was hardly a natural disaster, national tragedy, military victory or notable contemporary event in the late nineteenth century about which the poetic muse did not inspire him to write. Many of these happenings would probably be forgotten today were they not recorded in McGonnagal’s collected work. Some readers may remembering me quoting from him on an earlier blog (Click here). I was drawn to the subject of this present blog by a poem he wrote about it.

The event in question was not of massive national significance but it was the unexpected adventure of a quiet, middle-aged Scottish lady who came through a ghastly ordeal with courage and spirit undimmed.

In 1886 the unmarried Betty Mouat was 59 years old. She supported herself by knitting and she lived with her half-brother’s family in the tiny hamlet of Scatness near the southern tip of the main island of the Shetlands group. As will be seen from the map below it is one of the most remote inhabited locations in the British Isles and in the 1880s life would have been hard and primitive in the extreme.

Miss Moutat's background was a tragic one – her father had died six months before her birth when the whaler he was serving on disappeared in the Arctic. Her poor luck continued – a cartwheel broke her leg, and she was once shot in the head by a man hunting rabbits. She herself had suffered a stroke shortly before the events recounted below but in view of what transpired one can only assume that it was not a seriously debilitating one. In January 1886 however she had occasion to see a doctor in Lerwick, the island’s main town and about 25 miles to the north. Given the poor state of the roads, she elected to travel there in the Columbine, a small cutter-rigged sailing craft that carried mail and passengers. A short sea-passage was also preferable since she was bringing some forty hand-crafted shawls with her for sale on behalf of herself and neighbours.

Miss Betty Mouat
With acknowledgements to the Shetland Museum
(http://photos.shetland-museum.org.uk)
Photo_00106.jpg

On 30^th January the weather was deteriorating and the Columbine’s captain warned Miss Mouat that a rough passage could be expected. He advised that she might better wait. She was quite adamant however – sail in the Columbine she would. She came on board with her merchandise and with two pints of milk and two biscuits for refreshment during the expected three or four- hour passage. She went down into the small cabin and settled herself.

Disaster struck within half an hour of departure. The main sheet broke, allowing the boom to swing free and in the process of securing it the captain was thrown overboard. The craft carried two deckhands and now – with the Columbine unable to manoeuvre due to the unavailability of the mainsail – they too the decision to launch the vessel’s single row-boat and go to the captain’s rescue. Given the weather conditions it seems remarkable that they expected to get back to the Columbine. The captain could not be found but by the time they realised that their search was futile the Columbine had been driven too far off to reach. She was carrying Miss Mouat, the only passenger, with her. The two deckhands were successful in reaching shore and raising the alarm but given the communications of the time the response could not be immediate.

In his poem McGonagall devoted two stanzas to these events:

The waves washed o'er the little craft, and the wind loudly roared,

And the Skipper, by a big wave, was washed overboard;

Then the crew launched the small boat on the stormy main,

Thinking to rescue the Skipper, but it was all in vain.

Nevertheless, the crew struggled hard his life to save,

But alas! the Skipper sank, and found a watery grave;

And the white crested waves madly did roar,

Still the crew, thank God, landed safe on shore.

Back on the Columbine Miss Mouat now found herself a prisoner in the cabin. The violent movements when the boom broke free caused the steps leading down into the cabin to collapse and she had not the strength to lift them back into position. Furniture within the cabin was constantly thrown about – a hazard in itself – and there was nowhere to sit or wedge herself securely. To prevent herself being tossed about she held on to a rope hanging from the deckhead – so long, and so tightly, she afterwards recounted, that her hands became painfully blistered. Through the ordeal that followed she was unable to sit or lie down but she managed to fashion loops in the rope with which she could suspend herself. Worse still was the fact that the Columbine’s food stores were in a separate compartment near the bows, which she was now unable to reach. Her only provisions were now her milk and biscuits. Despite this desperate situation this splendid woman did not lose her nerve. She prayed, encased herself in a jacket of the captain’s and she found his watch and wound it daily to keep track of time. The poor weather continued, including driving snow, and the craft’s rolling and pitching at the mercy of the sea made broken or fractured bones a real possibility. McGonagall described the scene vividly:

Oh! think of the poor soul crouched in the cabin below,

With her heart full of fear, cold, hunger, and woe,

And the pitless storm of rain, hail, and snow,

Tossing about her tiny craft to and fro.

While the Columbine was being driven roughly north eastwards by the storm, across an area of sea now studded with huge oil and gas production platforms , attempts were being made in Shetland to get a search underway. The result was that two steamers owned by local shipping companies searched over a wide area, but without success.

The ordeal that continued over the coming days might have driven a lesser woman insane. Miss Mouat kept her nerve however, despite all that nature threw at the Columbine. Confined to her small prison, unaware of where she was, she continued to pray, to keep herself supported to avoid injury, to wind the watch, to sleep somehow and to eke out her milk and two biscuits with iron self-discipline. As the weather eased somewhat she managed to wedge a box beneath the hatchway. By standing on it she could keep a lookout.

On the evening of the eighth day of this horror, on 5^th February, as light was fading, snow-capped land came into sight. The weather drove the Columbine on and she was smashed from one rock to another through the darkness as she approached the coast. McGonnagal described what followed:

At last the Columbine began to strike on submerged rocks,

And with the rise and fall of the sea she received some dreadful shocks,

And notwithstanding that the vessel was still rolling among the rocks,

Still the noble heroine contrived once more to raise herself upon the box.

Though badly battered, and close to breaking up, the craft somehow survived – and Miss Mouat with it. As dawn broke the Columbine suddenly found herself in calm water. She was lying on her side in shallow water off the small island of Lepsoy, on the Norwegian west coast. Quickly spotted by local fishermen, Miss Mouat was carried to shore and over rough terrain to a nearby house. Here she received every kindness from good people from who she was separated by the barrier of language. Though exhausted and feverish, she seems to have recovered quickly – given the sort of woman she was this was probably not surprising. McGonnagal’s final stanza is somewhat of an anti-climax:

Still the Columbine sped on, and ran upon a shingly beach,

And at last the Island of Lepsoe, Miss Mouat did reach,

And she was kindly treated by the inhabitants in everyway that's grand,

And conveyed to Aalesund and there taking steamer to fair England.

Norwegian Fisherfolk by Hans Dahl (1849-1937)
People such assaved Miss Mouat

Miss Mouat’s linguistic isolation ended when a message was got to an Englishman living relatively close by, a manufacturer of cod-liver oil. He helped arrange a passage on a Norwegian vessel from nearby from Aalesund to Hull, and transport onwards by train to Edinburgh – the first time she had been on a train. Her story had already been receiving sensational treatment in the press and when she arrived in Edinburgh she found hundreds of well-wishers waiting at the station. A Shetland family living there had offered to give her accommodation and she was driven the house in a carriage to the cheers of the crowd. She was to remain there for three weeks, visited by the rich and curious – some of whom asked for locks of her hair. She turned down offers to recount her story on the stage, including in London, and was happy to return to her home in Scatness. A fund was set up on her behalf, one of the contributors being Queen Victoria, who donated £20.

She never left Shetland again, though on occasions tourists came to ask about her experience. She appears to have been invariable patient and courteous, as admirable on home ground as she had been at sea.

It is pleasing to record that Betty Mouat lived on to the age of 93, dying in 1918, an example not only of courage and indomitability, but of how an apparently unexceptional person can rise to the greatest heights of heroism when confronted with unexpected challenge.

A splendid woman – and worth remembering.

--------------------------------------------------

Britannia's Shark - the Third Dawlish Chronicles Novel - is available in paperback and Kindle.

It’s April 1881, a year since Commander Nicholas Dawlish returned from the brutal campaign in Paraguay detailed in Britannia’s Reach. A personal tragedy has drawn him yet closer to his beloved wife Florence and in its aftermath they welcome the opportunity to combine his duty to observe trials of a new weapon in the Adriatic with an idyllic holiday together. Neither suspects that they are about to be drawn into a nightmare…

Click here to learn more - and to read the opening chapter

It is easy, at this remove, to be entranced by the “romance” of the seaborne trade in the 19^th Century, when the numbers of ships grew explosively to satisfy the needs of the first era of commercial globalisation. Images immediately come to mind of clippers racing under full sail to carry tea from China, of square-riggers rising to the challenge of Cape Horn, of the tens of thousands of brigs and schooners which carried oceanic as well as coastal trade, of the early steamers that were to be immortalised in the writing of Joseph Conrad. The beauty of so many of these ships, even the humblest, and the skill with which they were handled in the absence of any modern aids to navigation, do however tend to blind us to the fact that life on so many of these ships was brutal in the extreme.

Wreck of the Copeland at South Shields, November 1861, by John Newington Carter

Life in the merchant service was not just nasty and brutal however – it could also be very short. Shipwrecks on an annual basis were at levels undreamed of today. The losses off Britain in one year alone is starkly illustrative: in 1873-4, 411 vessels, many small, sank around the British coast, with the loss of 506 lives. Bad seamanship and extreme weather was not responsible in many – perhaps ever a majority – of cases and ships frequently broke up or fell apart for the simple reason that they were already rotten and worn-out. Standards for structural integrity and for limits on loading had indeed been established as early as 1835 by Lloyd's Register and compliance was a pre-requisite for insurance by reputable entities associated with Lloyds. There was however no legal requirement to meet such standards and many ship-owners operated vessels that were so unsound that they became known as “coffin Ships” and which, worse still, loaded them so heavily that they were frequently incapable of surviving the first serious storm they would encounter.

How it so often ended...

Samuel Plimsoll

The situation was made worse still by the fact that once a seaman had signed on for a voyage – which on occasion poverty might force him to do without having first seen the ship itself – refusal to board could result in criminal prosecution and imprisonment with hard labour, typically for twelve weeks. In the 1850s a British prison-inspector reported that three-quarters of all prisoners in gaols in England’s south-west were such seamen. Their crime had been to refuse to sail on vessels they believed to be unseaworthy or which were inadequately manned.

This was the background to the great crusade for safety at sea waged by the coal-merchant turned activist, Samuel Plimsoll, one of the great Victorian heroes. He entered parliament to fight on this issue in the early 1870s and his efforts were to be finally rewarded by imposition of statutory safety requirements. The most notable was to be the “Plimsoll Line”, still carried on ships’ hulls, which provided visual confirmation that the ship was not over-laden. Legislation was one thing, enforcement of compliance was another, and a battle still lay ahead. A later blog will deal with Plimsoll’s campaign in more detail.

That there was still a long way to go in the 1870s was illustrated by an eyewitness account by the writer, artist and explorer Frederick Whymper (1838-1901) of crew conditions on shipping he saw departing from British ports. He noted that even on many “superior vessels” the seaman “may, and often does, wade to his bunk through water, and the forecastle is too often a miserable hole, full of dirt and filth, where the men are packed like herrings.” Whymper was particularly critical of the food, mainly “salt horse” and hard biscuit of the most inferior type. Even at this late stage scurvy was still often a problem, not least because the lime-juice that should have prevented it was frequently grossly adulterated. Whymper claimed that there was little or no scurvy in the Russian and French merchant navies because of the use of “sour wine” in lieu of lime juice. (It is not clear whether this did indeed have anti-scorbutic properties).

The reality of shipwreck

A major component of British trade was that with the West Indies. A visit to London’s West India Docks, which provided docking for vessels trading to the West Indies, showed Whymper that, though some ships involved were “large and well supplied with provisions”, the majority of the vessels in the trade were “small, with wretched accommodation, badly manned, provisions indifferent in quality and deficient in quantity”. Conditions in the forecastles where the seamen were lodged were horrific, and unhealthy. Cases occurred on “first-class ships” in which seamen’s’ chests were “black from the gas which rises from the cargo, and which smells like sewage, which is especially the case in sugar ships.” A Captain Toynbee told Whymper that he had seen a ship which “was carrying two packs of foxhounds and three horses, which received half its ventilation by a hatch which opened into the sailors’ forecastle.”

Silex Bay, Flamborough by John Taylor Allerston, 1890

Ships engaged in the Baltic trade, most of them carrying timber, tended to have high rates of “consumption, bronchitis, and other chest diseases”. Whymper noted that Norwegian, Swedish and Russian vessels not only provided superior food than their British counterparts, but tended to accommodate the crew not in the forecastle but in deckhouses with “a fair amount of space and good ventilation”. The Scandinavian ships were also apparently cleaner than British ones and Whymper was critical of British crews – “the chief fault is the extremely dirty and lazy habit of the men themselves, who allow filth of all kinds to accumulate in the deck-house and galley, without taking the slightest trouble to remove it.” The tendency to overload appears to be continuing, especially in the case of and bulky, high-volume cargo such as timber so that “the forecastle is very much reduced in size—too much so, considering the number of men that form the crew; these have either to remain on deck exposed to wet and cold, or have to breathe the foul atmosphere of a small forecastle, in which are stowed rusty chains, wet ropes, and all kinds of animal decaying matter.”

Laden collier being towed from harbour at a north-eastern English port

Though much of Britain’s coastal coal trade was bring carried in steamers by the 1870s there were still many sailing craft of 150 to 600 tons, usually rigged as sloops, schooners, or brigs, the latter being the most common. The crews to operate such vessels seem to have been wholly inadequate – which was probably a major factor in many shipwrecks. Whymper wrote that “a collier brig is generally worked by a captain and a mate, who live in a small dirty cabin, and by four men and a boy, who live and sleep in the most miserable of forecastles … so old and ill-constructed are some of these colliers, that in rough weather the forecastle is deluged with water. This condition of things is made much worse by the negligence of the sailor himself, for it seems to be a rule that the cook, instead of throwing over the side of the ship the refuse of material used for food, as dirty water, potato parings, &c., deposits these with great care in some corner of the forecastle. No attention is paid by the captain to the sanitary state of the ship; during the voyage, which is often a rough one, he is engaged in working the vessel, and while she is in harbour he is on shore waiting upon the owners of the vessel, or transacting their business in the Coal Exchange.”

A collier brig in a North Sea gale - and crew of seven to cope wiht it

The conditions could be worse still when disease struck. Whymper claimed that he heard from a sanitary inspector engaged in fighting a cholera epidemic that one cholera-victim was taken ashore from a collier after he had been “lying in his hammock for two days prostrate, and with much vomiting and purging, and during this time the captain, although on board, was not aware of the man’s absence from deck.”

This is a sketch only, but it is a reminder, when we are entranced by depictions of billowing sails, or when we read of the romance of the age of sail, of what lay beneath the attractive exterior.

Beauty is often only skin deep.

Britannia’s Shark

1881 and the British Empire’s power seems unchallengeable.

But now a group of revolutionaries threaten that power’s economic basis. Their weapon is the invention of a naïve genius, their sense of grievance is implacable and their leader is already proven in the crucible of war. Protected by powerful political and business interests, conventional British military and naval power cannot touch them…

A daring act of piracy drags the ambitious British naval officer, Nicholas Dawlish, into this deadly maelstrom. Drawn in too is his wife Florence, for whom a glimpse of a half-forgotten face evokes memories of earlier tragedy. For both a nightmare lies ahead, amid the wealth and squalor of America’s Gilded Age, and on a fever-ridden island ruled by savage tyranny …

For UK click here to get more details and to read the first chapter

For US and rest of world click here to get more details and to read the first chapter

The late 19^th Century was a period of much expanded sea trade and with this came an enormous number of shipwrecks, not least due to lack of modern navigational aids. Service in Britain’s Royal Navy was in general safer than in the merchant marine, mainly due to high levels of professionalism, training and discipline. Despite this, tragedies did occur (see links at end of this article for details of some of the most notable) and one, in 1863, remains today the largest maritime disaster in New Zealand waters. It was however to linked to a later development, a positive one, which is described in the latter part of this article.

The Wreck of HMS Orpheus 1863, by Richard Brydges Beechey

HMS Orpheus, commissioned in 1861, was a Jason-class wooden corvette of 2365 tons and 225-foot length. She had both steam and sail propulsion and carried twenty 8-inch, muzzle-loading 68-pounders in broadside mountings and a single 7-inch breech loader on a pivot-mounting. Heavily armed for her size, she was ideal for “colonial operations” – service on remote stations where shore-bombardment might well be called for, as could be the need to land armed parties from her usual crew of 258. It was to support the British colonial forces in the latest of a long series of wars with New Zealand’s Maori inhabitants that Orpheus sailed from Australia in late January 1863. She was headed for Aukland, to rendezvous with two other Royal Navy vessels already in the area. The city lies on an isthmus, between Manukau Harbour to the West and the Waitematā Harbour to the east and north. The safer approach was from the east, but for a vessel coming from Australia this would necessitate a longer course, rounding the North Cape and sailing down the East Coast of the North Island.

Already behind schedule, Orpheus’s commander decided to approach through Manukau Harbour. This is an enormous natural harbour but the mouth is little over a mile wide and a six-mile channel leads on into a roughly square basin about 12 miles across. The tidal variation can be high – over 12 feet – and the harbour is relatively shallow.

Whatipu Beach, - off which HMS Orpheus was wrecked

Orpheus approached in clear and sunny weather on 7^th February, running parallel to the coast at Whatipu Beach, just north of the inlet to Manukau. The area was known to have dangerous sandbars which had been charted twice, in 1836 and 1856 but in 1861 a pilotage guide had been updated to take account of sandbar-shifting. The Orpheus carried the outdated 1856 chart however and though the sailing master wanted to use the update 1861 instructions he was over-ruled by the captain. The 1856 chart would be used. Despite a warning signal from shore, and from the quartermaster, who was one of only two men on board to have entered the harbour before, course was maintained. Only too late was the danger recognised and last-minute attempts did nothing to avert the inevitable grounding at 1330 hrs.

The surf on the bar was strong enough to swing the Orpheus about with her port side beam-on to the waves. The pounding commenced, structural damage was sustained and the ship began to take on water. Attempts to abandon ship failed as the surf’s violence swept many away. At the same time the harbour pilot, one Edward Wing, was piloting a steamer, the Wonga Wonga, out of the approach channel. With considerable skill and coolness he manoeuvred the Wonga Wonga as close as he could dare and remained there for the remainder of the day, and through the night hours. By evening the pounding had brought down the Orpheus’s masts, killing some left on board. Thereafter there was nothing to do but pick up bodies from the water, or from the sand-dunes where would-be rescuers approached from the land side.

Of the 259 men on board the Orpheus, 189 had been lost, including the captain and the commodore who had been carried. Many of the dead were very young, boys of 12 to 18, and the average age of the crew in total was just 25.

It had been a wholly avoidable tragedy and, in terms of loss of life, it remains until today the worst disaster in New Zealand maritime history

Orpheus Newman/Beaumont circa 1900

Orpheus was to have very strange, and ultimately positive, consequences. One of the survivors of the tragedy was called Henry Newman, whose mother Mary gave birth to her youngest child, a little girl in St Helier, Jersey, in the Channel Islands seven months after the sinking. In honour of her son’s ship and of his companions, the child was called “Orpheus”. As she grew older, and obviously influenced by stories of the disaster, the little girl suffered fits of terror about drowning. These were so severe that, when she was eight years old, Orpheus’s parents took her a hypnotist to Paris to have her cured, apparently without success. In the meanwhile her brother Henry, by now discharged from the Navy, decided to return to New Zealand, where he settled on the on South Island.

In late 1871, shortly after the Paris visit, Orpheus’s father William, a ship’s master, died. Her mother decided to take her and two older children to join Henry in New Zealand. A storm during the passage appears to have helped Orpheus of her fear of drowning. The family settled in Dunedin and an elder brother, William, became a fisherman. In due course, when grown up, Orpheus married a seaman named Norman Beaumont. An ambitious man, he qualified as a master and commanded a vessel trading between New Zealand and various islands of the South Pacific. Orpheus herself accompanied him on some of these trips so that she was to gain extensive experience of the sea and its hazards.

Cork Life Jacket - 1880

Tragedy struck in 1912, when Orpheus’s brother William died at sea, but this private misfortune was dwarfed by the much greater loss of life when the Titanic sunk that same year. One consequence of this disaster was however that Britain’s Board of Trade called for improved life-saving equipment.

It seems that personal experience and family loss had already caused Orpheus Beaumont, as she now was, to think about an improved flotation aid. Existing life jackets – as are often seen in old photographs of life-boat crews – were made of solid slabs of cork. They performed adequately once in the water, but should it be necessary to jump in from any height – as was so often the case in “Abandon Ship” situations – the cork would slam into the head, and in the worst case could even break the wearer’s neck.

During her voyages with her husband to various South Pacific islands Orpheus had become aware of a waxy fluff derived from the seed pod of the kapok tree. This material – kapok – was moisture-resistant, quick-drying, resilient, and capable of supporting up to 30 times its own weight in water. She recognised it as an ideal material for a new type of life jacket – which she called the “Servus” – and she proposed this to the Board of Trade. This was the beginning of a lengthy correspondence, not only in view of the distance between New Zealand and London, but because the First World War made communications even more difficult. Various objections were made but in each case she modified the design to cope with the problems identified. In the end the Servus gained official approval, and this at a time when shipping losses during Germany’s U-Boat campaign made it more badly needed than ever. Orpheus’s efforts were crowned with a large order for the Admiralty in 1918 and with others for merchant-marine use.

Servus Life Jacket demonstrated by Orpheus Beaumont's son during WW!

In old age

A new paradigm had been set for life-jacket design. The original Servus was still in use in World War 2 and after, and in due course various other improvements, such as support for the head, led to the evolution of the soft-filled life-jacket we know today.

This splendid lady died in 1951 and had the satisfaction of knowing that her ingenuity and tenacity had led to the saving of countless lives. A childhood phobia of drowning had been converted into something positive that still benefits humanity.

Orpheus Beaumont deserves to be remembered - a splendid woman.

For details of other Royal Navy shipwrecks in the late 19^th Century click on the links below:

Training Tragedies - the losses of HMS Eurydice and HMS Atalanta, 1878 & 1880

The loss of HMS Doterel: Disaster off Punta Arenas 1881

The wreck of HMS Wasp in 1884

Britannia’s Wolf

1877: Russian forces drive deep into the corrupt Ottoman-Turkish Empire. In the depths of a savage winter, as the Turks face defeat on all fronts, a British officer is enmeshed and finds himself confronting enemy ironclads, Cossack lances and merciless Kurdish irregulars. And in the midst of this chaos, while he himself is a pawn in the rivalry of the Sultan’s half-brothers for control of the collapsing empire, he is unwillingly and unexpectedly drawn to a woman whom he believes he should not love…

Click here to read the opening via “Look Inside” on the Amazon page

Between 1902 and 1908 a total of 34 armoured cruisers were built for the Royal Navy. Expensive ships, almost all in the 10000 to 16000-ton range, they were of comparable displacement to contemporary pre-dreadnought battleships. Fast and, except in the case of the later classes, very inadequately armed for their size, they were to prove one of the most unlucky type of ship ever to enter service. Of the 34, eleven were lost by enemy action or by internal explosion while at anchor and two were wrecked. It is with one of the latter, which was lost 100 years ago on 28^th October 1915, that this article deals. (For details of losses of other armoured cruisers click here and here).

The “Bell Rock” – also called the “Inchcape Rock” – is a reef that lies some 11 miles of Scotland’s east coast, roughly in line with Dundee. Set as it is in open water, wave lashed, and below surface level for much of the time, it has represented a major hazard to shipping through human history. It got the name “Bell Rock” because of an attempt in medieval times to mount a warning bell there. This bell was quickly stolen by a pirate who, as recounted in Robert Southey’s poem “The Inchcape most appropriately got his come-uppance by being later wrecked on the same rock himself:

But even in his dying fear,

One dreadful sound could the Rover hear;

A sound as if with the Inchcape Bell,

The Devil below was ringing his knell.

By the early 19^th Century, with maritime traffic increasing, the Bell Rock was claiming an average of six ships a year. The last straw was however the wreck on it of the 64-gun ship-of-the -line HMS York in 1803. There were no survivors. Construction of a lighthouse was now recognised as essential but the technical challenges were immense. The engineer Robert Stevenson (1772 – 1850) proposed a design based on interlocking stone blocks, a technique that had already been proven on the Eddystone Lighthouse in the middle of the previous century. The greatest challenge was not however the tower – subjected to powerful waves as it would be – but provision of a firm foundation, essentially a level platform constructed on the reef itself.

Constructing the foundation

Work started in 1807 and what followed was a four-year epic, with work severely restricted by tides that on occasion submerged the rock’s surface to twelve feet. The offshore activity only proceed during the summer month, and even then only with difficulty. Poor weather in the summer of 1808 allowed only 80 hours of work were completed.

Construction work in progress - human muscle-power alone.
Note "Beacon House" partly visible at right, as base of operations

To avoid time lost in shuttling workers to and fro Stevenson built a temporary wooden “Beacon House” on the rock and this served as both a base of operations and living quarters for fifteen men. As this structure (see illustrations) was also exposed to storms during the construction period, residence on it must have in itself have been a nightmare. During the winter months Stevenson kept his crews busy ashore, dressing the individual granite blocks needed for the tower. The total number required was some 2500 and all were drawn to the dockside by one of the unsung heroes of the project, a horse called Bassey.

Nearing completion - the temporary "Beacon House" is on the left

The lighthouse came into service in 1810 and was to fulfil its purpose very effectively. Between then and 1914 only a single ship was lost on the rock, a steamer called the Rosecraig that ran aground during a fog in 1908, fortunately without loss of life. With the onset of war however in 1914 orders were given for the light to be turned off to avoid its use as a navigation mark by German U-Boats and it was only with special permission that it could be switched on. As will be seen, the procedure put in place for this proved to be woefully inadequate.

HMS Argyll

And now to HMS Argyll, one of the unfortunate breed of armoured cruisers, in this case of the six-ship Devonshire class. Completed in 1905, this 10850-ton, 475-ft long vessel was armed with four 7.5-inch (in four single mountings – bow and stern-chasers and one forward on each broadside) and six 6-inch guns and two 18-inch torpedo tubes. Her crew was over 650. She was assigned to duties with the Grand Fleet on outbreak of war in August 1914 and she was engaged in patrol work – essentially the “distant blockade” of Germany – between the Shetland and Faroe Islands and the Norwegian Coast. She captured one German freighter in the first days of the war.

At the present time, and with the availability of radar and GS aids for even small craft, it is difficult to imagine just how blind – and how vulnerable – shipping was in low visibility in the early 20^th Century. The Argyll’s fate is one instance. In the early hours of 28th October 1915, during stormy conditions, she was in the vicinity of the now-darkened Bell Rock and he signalled to shore to have the lighthouse illuminated. It seems incredible that there was however no radio on the lighthouse itself and its contact with shore was only bby boat or visual signals. Such attempts failing, the information that the lighthouse had not been alerted was not relayed to the Argyll. Assuming that the light would indeed be switched on, the armoured cruiser maintained her course. At 0430 hrs she ploughed into the reef and could not break free. Despite substantial damage to the hull, and a fire, two accompanying destroyers, HMS Hornet and HMS Jackal, managed to get the entire crew off without loss.

HMS Hornet - one of the Argyll's crew's two saviours

The Argyll was a total wreck, though efforts to remove her guns and other usable equipment succeeded. Unlucky she might have been, but considering the massive loss of life associated with the sinking of so many other ships of her type, she got off lightly!

The Dalwish Chronicles in Audio Format

The first of the Dawlish Chronicles novels, Britannia’s Wolf, is currently being recorded in audio-format by the distinguished American actor David Doersch. Watch this space for further information.

David Doersch is a seasoned narrator with dozens of audiobooks under his belt. As an actor and director, he has worked at some of the leading Shakespeare Festivals in the United States most recently playing Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Virginia Shakespeare Festival. He is also an accomplished Fight Director, which is work that has taken him to 5 continents. Currently, he works as the Casting Director and Fight Coordinator for the live touring arena stunt spectacular, Marvel Universe LIVE! He literally gets to train superheroes for a living. His favorite genre of literature is historical fiction, and as such is thrilled to be working on such a well-written piece as Britannia’s Wolf.

We have encountered HMS Blanche before, in her furious duel in January 1795, in the middle years of the Revolutionary War between Britain and France. In the process she captured the French frigate Pique, off Guadeloupe (Click here to read this earlier blog). Blanche, a 32-gun frigate, had still four years of life ahead of her before she was wrecked in 1799 and these involved considerable drama, in which two of the best known naval heroes of the era were to play a role.

End of the Blanche (L) vs. Pique action - both ships in states not unusual after such combats
Painting by John Thomas Baines with Acknowledgement to National Maritime Museum, Greeenwich

Blanche’s captain, Robert Faulknor, had been killed in the Pique action and was succeeded by a Captain Charles Sawyer, who took her to Portsmouth for a refit and thereafter to the Mediterranean at the end of 1795. This theatre was to prove a difficult one for the Royal Navy in the following year, but for Sawyer personally it was to prove a personal disaster.

The Articles of War, under which Royal Navy ships operated, were merciless as regards punishment of homosexual acts, with the death penalty itself reserved for sodomy. The offence would have been regarded as even more serious if it involved a commissioned officer. It appears that Captain Sawyer had gained a reputation among his crew for such behaviour – accusations were made as regards relations with two young midshipmen, his coxswain and an ordinary seaman. The offence was compounded by the fact that the captain of a ship at sea represented absolute authority and that there was an assumption that this would be exercised fairly and conscientiously. A captain was to be respected, as well as on-occasion feared, and in Sawyer’s case this respect was wholly forfeited as his behaviour was common knowledge on board. Discipline deteriorated to the extent that Blanche’s first lieutenant, Archibald Cowan, wrote about it to the area commodore, Horatio Nelson. This step took considerable moral courage. To criticise a superior in this way was dangerous in the extreme as it could be construed as insubordination and lead to the quick ending of a career.

In the event the matter was handled with considerable pragmatism and adroitness, with humanity also. A charge of sodomy against a commissioned officer, which would involve embarrassing evidence that would be most likely challenged and debated, would have done nothing for the prestige of the service, and might have had a terrible outcome for Sawyer personally. The charge brought against him in the unavoidable court-martial was related instead to the breakdown of discipline, specifying “odious misconduct, and for not taking public notice of mutinous expressions muttered against him". Sawyer was found guilty in October 1796 and dismissed from the service.

Nelson in 1796

Even before the court-martial was convened a new commander was required for the Blanche. This was to be Captain D’Arcy Preston, who was faced with the challenge of restoring discipline and respect for the chain of command. That he was successful in this was to be shown a few months later, in December 1796, when Blanche once more found herself in action.

During the year Britain’s position in the Mediterranean had weakened considerably in the face of French successes in Italy and Corsica. The Mediterranean Fleet commander, Sir John Jervis, took the unwelcome but realistic decision in October 1796 to withdraw to Gibraltar after evacuating British forces from Corsica and Elba. Nelson was to take charge of the latter operation and to initiate it he sailed from Gibraltar in December with two frigates, HMS Minerve and HMS Blanche. The Minerve had previously been French, having captured in June 1795 by the frigates HMS Dido and Lowestoffe. Nelson was on board Minerve and her second lieutenant was Thomas Masterman Hardy (1769-1839), who was to play a very significant role in Nelson’s life.

Capture of Minerve 1795 - Thomas Sutherland (engraver), Thoams Whitcombe (artist)

On 10th December, in the vicinity of Cartagena two Spanish frigates were spotted. These proved to be the Sabina and Matilde, each of 40 guns, fair matches for the British ships. The Sabina was the flagship of Commodore Don Jacobo Stuart, a descendent in the illegitimate line of James II of England. Minerve engaged the Sabina while the Blanche concentrated on holding off the Matilde. After a three-hour combat, during which she lost her mainmast, and had her fore and mizzen badly damaged, the Sabrina surrendered. The Minerve had also been damaged, but her masts still stood. One has the impression, as so often in the case of frigate to frigate actions, of the British gunnery being markedly superior.

The Sabrina was the boarded by a 40-man prize crew headed by Minerve’s first and second lieutenants , John Culverhouse and Thomas Hardy but her damage was such as to necessitate her being towed by the Minerve. At this point the second Spanish ship, the Matilde, re-entered the fray and attacked the Minerve. She was driven off but a new Spanish force now appeared, the 112-gun ship-of-the-line Príncipe de Asturias and two frigates. Nelson realised that there was no hope of fighting this larger force, especially not if the Minerve had the Sabrina in tow. He took the unpalatable decision of cutting the tow and abandoning the Sabrina and her prize crew to the advancing Spanish.

Lieutenants Culverhouse and Hard were to be prisoners of war for little over a month. Nelson was eager to have them back and he sent a message through to the Spanish authorities at Cartagena that he was prepared to exchange them for Don Jacobo Stuart. A pleasing statement in the letter was that “I have endeavoured to make the captivity of Don Jacobo Stuart, her brave Commander, as light as possible; and I trust to the generosity of your nation for its being reciprocal for the British officers and men.” The exchange was duly arranged and the two lieutenants arrived in Gibraltar at the end of January 1797.

Both men re-joined Minerve but on 11^th February, shortly after leaving Gibraltar to join Sir John Jervis’s fleet, she was pursued by Spanish vessels. In the course of the chase a seaman fell overboard and Hardy was dropped with a jolly boat to find him. The unfortunate man could not be found and strong currents swept Hardy’s craft far from theMinerve so that his re-capture by the Spanish now became a distinct possibility. Despite the danger of engagement with a superior force Nelson exclaimed “By God, I'll not lose Hardy! Back that mizzen topsail!” so that the Minerve could drift down on Hardy’s boat and pick him up. The manoeuvre succeeded and once sail was again made Minerve’s superior speed drew her away from danger.

During the night that followed Minerve found herself in fog and sailing between dark shapes. These were those of the Spanish fleet but ineffective lookouts did not detect her. By morning she was clear and on her way to Jervis with news of the enemy fleet’s location. The scene was now set for Jervis’s victory over the Spanish at Cape St. Vincent two days later.

The Battle of Cape Saint Vincent, Richard Brydges Beechey, 1881

Jervis’s exchanges with Captains Robert Calder and Benjamin Hallowell on the quarterdeck of his flagship, HMS Victory, were recorded as it was discovered that his force was outnumbered almost two-to-one:

"There are eight sail of the line, Sir John"

"Very well, sir"

"There are twenty sail of the line, Sir John"

"Very well, sir"

"There are twenty-five sail of the line, Sir John"

"Very well, sir"

"There are twenty-seven sail of the line, Sir John"

"Enough, sir, no more of that; the die is cast, and if there are fifty sail I will go through them"

It was on HMS Victory that Nelson himself was to die eight years later. His admiration of Hardy had grown in this time. At the Battle of the Nile in 1798 Hardy commanded the corvette Mutine and when Nelson sent his flag captain back with news of the triumph he promoted Hardy to command of his flagship HMS Vanguard. When Nelson shifted his flag to HMS Foudroyant he took Hardy with him.

In 1801 Hardy was again to be Nelson’s flag captain and he distinguished himself at Copenhagen by surveying the route whereby the British fleet would enter the Danish anchorage. The relationship continued and in the period leading up to Trafalgar Hardy was not only flag captain on Nelson’s HMS Victory, but de-facto captain of the fleet. It was a meteoric but well-merited rise.

The death of Nelson - the iconic image
Hardy takes his leave

Hardy as Admiral

Given the warmth and respect between these two men it was appropriate that Hardy should be with Nelson when he was shot down at Trafalgar in 1805. As Nelson lay dying in Victory’s cockpit Hardy brought him news of the succession of French surrenders and when they came to part Nelson’s request was “Kiss me, Hardy”, which he did on the cheek. Nelson was by this time fading and Hardy kissed him a second time, this time on the forehead. The dying man asked “Who is that?” and, when told who it was, said "God bless you Hardy"– his last words.

The young lieutenant whom Nelson had once been forced to abandon, and whom he had once risked everything to save on another occasion, had come a long way in nine years. A long, varied and honourable career awaited him after Trafalgar, culminating in his appointment as First Naval Lord, the professional head of the navy, in November 1830.

The (re)capture of HMS Minerve, aground off Cherbourg, July 1803

One other player in this drama was also to have a dramatic further career. HMS Minerve , which had been captured from the French in 1795 was recaptured by them when she ran aground in a fog off Cherbourg in 1803. She was recommissioned in the French Navy as the Canonnière and saw active service in the Philippines, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. By 1809 she was considered worn out and was sold at Mauritius for merchant service, now renamed as the Confiance. She was captured by the Royal Navy in 1810 – as she was carrying goods worth £150,000 she was an exceptionally valuable prize and must have made the fortune of many of the crew of HMS Valiant, the ship that took her. Commissioned once more into the Royal Navy, this time as HMS Confiance, she saw little further service and was disposed of in 1814.

The Dawlish Chronicles in Audio Format

The first of the Dawlish Chronicles novels, Britannia’s Wolf,is currently being recorded in audio-format by the distinguished American actor David Doersch. Watch this space for further information.

David Doersch is a seasoned narrator with dozens of audiobooks under his belt. As an actor and director, he has worked at some of the leading Shakespeare Festivals in the United States most recently playing Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Virginia Shakespeare Festival. He is also an accomplished Fight Director, which is work that has taken him to 5 continents. Currently, he works as the Casting Director and Fight Coordinator for the live touring arena stunt spectacular, Marvel Universe LIVE! He literally gets to train superheroes for a living!. His favorite genre of literature is historical fiction, and as such is thrilled to be working on such a well-written piece as Britannia’s Wolf.

I have always enjoyed George Orwell’s essays, not only for the variety of the topics and the clarity of his arguments but the simple elegance of their English. One of their charms is that he often fastens on a simple incident or social phenomenon and proceeds to build a powerful philosophical or political lesson from it. As such, though they were written over half a century ago, the majority continue to have direct relevance to our own time (Try “Notes on Nationalism”)

One of Orwell’s most interesting essays is“The Decline of the English Murder”, which has an unforgettable beginning – what could have been the opening of a novel no less than of an essay:

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder.

I remembered this when I stumbled in this cartoon from a 1849 edition of the humorous magazine Punch, which shows that the tradition was well established a century before Orwell. It shows a pater-familias in a slum lodging reading for his wife and seven children and holding them enthralled:

Punch in this period was not exactly given to punchy captions (no pun intended!) and this case was no exception as it reads:

Father of a family (reads):“The wretched Murderer is supposed to have cut the throat of his three eldest children, and then to have killed the baby by beating it repeatedly with a poker .... In person he is of a rather bloated appearance, with a bull neck, small eyes, broad large nose and a coarse vulgar mouth. His dress was a light blue coat, with brass buttons, elegant yellow summer vest, and pepper-and-salt trowsers. When at the Station House he expressed himself as being rather ‘peckish’ and said he would like a Black Pudding which, with a Cup of Coffee, was immediately procured or him.”

The incidental detail in the drawing is also notable – the Bible has been thrown on the floor and lies unnoticed, a mallet and chisel are there also, conveniently, should of this particular father decide to emulate the murderer and a cut-throat razor is prominently displayed on the mantelpiece. Above it are portraits – probably torn from a magazine – of what were often referred to as “celebrated murderers” – in this case Greenacre and Courvoisier.

Another Punch cartoon of the period is a commentary on the popularity of such portraits. A ragamuffin is purchasing an illustrated newspaper which is advertised by a poster proclaiming:

Full particulars

Dreadful Murder

Portrait of MURDERER

Another line of business associated with such crimes – especially when executions took place in public up to the mid-1860s – was the sale of alleged “Last Confessions” by hawkers who moved through the enormous crowds that gathered to watch. The illustration below shows on such vendor and his wares - notice copy on his hat!.

A good example of the genre verses referring to Francois Bernard Courvoisier, a French valet who murdered his employer, Lord William Russel, in 1840. Courvoisier’s is one of the portraits over the mantelpiece in the cartoon referred to above. The lengthy account of the crime was apparently set to music (to the Tune of “Waggon Train”, and here was a chorus in which everybody could join in – it must have made for a jolly evening at the tavern!

Interest in such crime was not confined – as the Punch cartoon implies – to the “lower orders”. High-profile trials were followed as avidly as the O.J. Simpson case was to be followed in our own time. Refined intellectuals like Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot and her partner G.H. Lewes were all fascinated by the murder-trial of Madeleine Smith murder case in 1857. The chilly bluestocking Jane Carlyle wrote at length, and breathlessly, to her even frostier husband Thomas about the same case. Both Dickens and Thackeray attended public hangings at least once (Dickens was disgusted) and even the arch-litterateur Henty James was still writing at length about the Smith case to a friend in 1914.

The tradition survives in the Sunday newspapers but it is in the endless sequences of television documentaries about crime that carry it forward most effectively into the 21^st Century. Interviews with victims’ families, with police, with local journalists and, on occasion, with perpetrators, often illustrated not just with gory photographs but with dramatized reconstructions, are in their way no better or no worse than the reading material being enjoyed in the 1849 slum.

Human nature does not change and the thirst for sensation is never slaked.

-------------------------------

The Dawlish Chronicles in Audio Format

The first of the Dawlish Chronicles novels, Britannia’s Wolf,is currently being recorded in audio-format by the distinguished American actor David Doersch. Watch this space for further information.

David Doersch is a seasoned narrator with dozens of audiobooks under his belt. As an actor and director, he has worked at some of the leading Shakespeare Festivals in the United States most recently playing Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Virginia Shakespeare Festival. He is also an accomplished Fight Director, which is work that has taken him to 5 continents. Currently, he works as the Casting Director and Fight Coordinator for the live touring arena stunt spectacular, Marvel Universe LIVE! He literally gets to train superheroes for a living!. His favorite genre of literature is historical fiction, and as such is thrilled to be working on Britannia’s Wolf.

Grace Darling by Thomas Musgrave Joy

November 15^th this year will be the 200^th anniversary of the birth of one of the great Victorian heroines. Grace Darling gained widespread acclaim for her courage, was celebrated in verse, prints and Staffordshire pottery and remained for several generations afterwards an almost legendary figure who was held up, deservedly, as an example to the young.

This lighthouse-keeper’s daughter, seventh of nine children, was raised on Farne Islands, off Northumbria, on England’s north-east coast, living in accommodation attached initially to lighthouses, initially on Brownsman Island, and thereafter to a more modern one, in a more advantageous position for assisting shipping, on the nearby Longstone Island. These islands are situated at the extreme south-west (Brownsman) and extreme north-east (Longstone) of the small archipelago.

Though the direct distance between these two islands about three and a half miles, the distance by water is considerably more due to other islands lying in between. It is therefore a tribute to the watermanship and physical strength of Grace’s father, William Darling, that he regularly rowed back from Longstone to Brownsman to gather vegetables he still grew in his former garden. The craft used was a 21-foot, four-oared “coble”, a distinctively shaped type open boat, used mainly for fishing. The design had evolved so as to meet conditions on this coast – a flat bottom to allow easy launching and landing on the region’s sandy beaches and high bows to cope with heavy surf.

William Darling's coble - on display in 1883

Grace Darling’s life was an uneventful – if hard one – in Spartan conditions until she was 23 years old but events on 7^th September 1838 were prove that she had bravery of the highest calibre. Two days before this a coasting paddle-steamer, the 400-ton SS Forfarshire, had departed from the port of Hull – further south – to sail north to Dundee on Scotland’s east coast. At this period, when the Railway Age was still in its infancy, travel by sea was an attractive – and cheaper – alternative to travel by road. The Forfarshire was carrying 63 passengers and crew as well as a substantial quantity of freight. Soon after leaving Hull the boilers began to leak, and on the next morning the weather began to deteriorate. No thought seemed to have been given to turning back and the vessel forged slowly north-north-eastwards, past the lighthouse manned by the Darling family on Longstone Island.

SS Forfrayshire - contemporary watercolour

By evening on September 6^th it was found that the boiler leakage had got worse and the storm was now so severe that water was cascading down from the deck was quenching the furnaces. Off St. Abb’s Head – some 25 miles from Longstone Island – the machinery ceased functioning and there was no option but to set the sails and run before the storm. This was to take the Forfarshire directly towards the Farne Islands. The beam of a lighthouse had been spotted and the captain, John Humble, who had his wife with him, decided that it was the Inner Farne Light at the south-west end of the islands. Should he be able to keep it off his port beam he could pass safely between the islands and the mainland – a channel known as the Fair Way. He was mistaken however – the light was that on Longstone and keeping the light to port meant that he was driving directly towards the islands.

The roar of breakers was heard just before daybreak on 7^th September. The captain tried to take evasive action but the Forfarshire proved incapable of responding to the helm. She was now wholly at the mercy of the storm. Seas were breaking over her in the darkness and she was soon driven on to a rock known as the Harcar, her bows crashing down on it, and rising with the surge, then smashing down again. Eight of the crew now rushed to a boat and lowered it lowered successfully. One half- naked and frenzied passenger jumped in after them. The storm carried this boat out into the open sea and, as it proved, to safety, for the occupants were subsequently rescued.

The ship was now in her death throes. She was still being pounded on the reef and the hull was incapable of resisting. The Forfarshire broke in two, the after half – containing the cabins, many of the passengers as well as the captain and his wife – was swept away. Though many on its deck had been washed away, the fore-half remained lodged on the rock. The tide was however falling and the continuing battering by the waves was making the wreck unstable and liable to roll over. Realising the desperation of the situation, the ship’s carpenter and one of the passengers leaped down on the rock itself and encouraged the survivors – including a mother and two children – to join them.

Grace and her father to the rescue - contemporary print

This drama was played out in darkness and though the lighthouse was only a mile away those in it – only Grace and her parents – were unaware of what was happening. Only at daylight, and through a telescope, could movement be detected on the Harcar Rock. The weather was still so stormy that William Darling doubted the possibility of rendering assistance. Grace was however adamant – they would take the coble, regardless of risk, and she herself would wield one oar. Her father yielded and with the help of his wife the boat was launched out into the surf.

Grace - the iconic image reproduced by the thousands

Intimately acquainted with the geography of the islands, William Grace took a roundabout course to approach the rock from the most favourable direction. The coble was repeatedly almost overwhelmed but her design, proven over centuries, was in her favour. It was however a four-oar boat and Grace and her father were tested to the limits of their strength as they pulled through the boiling foam. They at last came in sight of the rock, spotting nine cold, terrified and exhausted survivors. From initial observation only three or four had been expected but the number was now too much for the small boat to carry. Two trips would be needed.

Grace now took both oars and manoeuvred the coble close enough for her father to spring across. He was now faced with the unenviable task of who to take on the first trip. One of these was to be the mother, a Mrs. Dawson, whose two children had already died of privation. There was no option but to leave their bodies on the rock and to get her back to the lighthouse together with three others, one of them injured and the others able-bodied members of the crew who were able to take an oar each. They gained the lighthouse safely. Grace – who must have been exhausted by now –remained behind with her mother to comfort the bereaved Mrs. Dawson. Her father returned to the Harcar Rock with the two seamen from the Forfarshire and managed to take off the remaining survivors. The entire rescue had taken two hours.

The rescue - as painted by Thomas Musgrave Joy - the number of survivors shown is too high

Immortalisation in Staffordshire china

Grace Darling’s role in the rescue became a sensation. The story spread from the local press to the national and one article, in the magisterial Times, asked “Is there in the whole field of history, or of fiction even, one instance of female heroism to compare for one moment with this?” A subscription was set up on her behalf – the recently-succeeded Queen Victoria donated £20 – and gifts of all types were sent to her by admirers. Letters arrived by the sackful – some asking her to kiss them and return them (one wonders how effective this could be in the days before lipstick) and visitors arrived at the lighthouse in hired boats in the hope of seeing her. Paintings and drawing were made of her and were reproduced by the thousands and she was even represented in a particularly ghastly but popular art-form of the time, Staffordshire china representations intended for display on the mantelpiece. She was invited to appear on stage, and even in a circus, though she declined to do so. Songs and poems were written in her honour. Particularly memorable are the verses for which the Scottish poet William McGonagall was responsible some decades later, a sample being:

And nine persons were rescued almost dead with the cold

By modest and lovely Grace Darling, that heroine bold;

The survivors were taken to the lighthouse, and remained there two days,

And every one of them was loud in Grace Darling’s praise.

Grace Darling was a comely lass, with long, fair floating hair,

With soft blue eyes, and shy, and modest rare;

And her countenance was full of sense and genuine kindliness,

With a noble heart, and ready to help suffering creatures in distress.

Commercial Exploitation

Grace lived up to the virtue she was named for and was not corrupted by fame. She turned down every offer to exploit her reputation (though one of the survivors did, touring the country and telling his story with the aid of a “Panorama”) and she continued to live with her family. Her days were however numbered. “Consumption” – that catch-all term of the time that usually meant tuberculosis – had already taken hold.

She died in her father’s arms in 1842 just short of her twenty-seventh birthday.

============================

The Dawlish Chronicles in Audio Format

The first of the Dawlish Chronicles novels, Britannia’s Wolf,is currently being recorded in audio-format by the distinguished American actor David Doersch. Watch this space for further information.

David Doersch is a seasoned narrator with dozens of audiobooks under his belt. As an actor and director, he has worked at some of the leading Shakespeare Festivals in the United States most recently playing Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Virginia Shakespeare Festival. He is also an accomplished Fight Director, which is work that has taken him to 5 continents. Currently, he works as the Casting Director and Fight Coordinator for the live touring arena stunt spectacular, Marvel Universe LIVE! He literally gets to train superheroes for a living!. His favorite genre of literature is historical fiction, and as such is thrilled to be working on Britannia’s Wolf.

The ramming of HMS Prince George by HMS Hannibal 1903

Naval Artists of the 18th Century – Part 5

The Birth of Weather Forecasting: The "Royal Charter Storm" of 1859

Penang, Malaysia – touching history

Malaysia – an Otter, Colonial Buildings, Karst Landscape and Tin Wars

Penang – the German naval connection

To see a short video interview with me about my approach to writing and my interest in the 19th Century please click here.

A Sultan’s wooden palace – and a mystery gun!

An indecisive naval battle, a farcical aftermath, the guillotine and a “Citizen King”

A Vulture’s Odyssey Under Two Flags, 1894 – 1918

The spectacular life and death of Sabrina Island

The first battle between steamships, 1853

1863: The first American-Japanese naval battle

“I’d prefer to be blown up!” - Antwerp 1831

Miss Betty Mouat and the Colombine 1886

Life at sea in merchant service in the 1870s

Britannia’s Shark

The Loss of HMS Orpheus 1863 – and the link with the lady who would invent the modern life-jacket

Britannia’s Wolf

The Bell Rock Lighthouse and the loss of HMS Argyll 1915

The Dalwish Chronicles in Audio Format

Nelson and Hardy – the forging of a partnership

The Dawlish Chronicles in Audio Format

The Victorian Fascination with Murder

The Dawlish Chronicles in Audio Format

Grace Darling, Unexpected Heroine, 1838

The Dawlish Chronicles in Audio Format