A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (27 page)

The
Santo Cristo di Castello
was not the only Genoese ship to leave Amsterdam in 1667 with works of art that were lost – the bills of lading for the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
show that Captain Basso shipped among his own private merchandise ‘
una cassetta con un Quadro grande dell'Angelo Custode
', ‘a case with a large painting of the Guardian Angel'. Surviving correspondence elsewhere refers to this painting, by the Antwerp painter Pieter van Lint, and to the fact that Basso had ordered no fewer than fifty-five paintings from Antwerp on that occasion – most of them lesser works of modest value, including twenty-four images of the Sibyl and a series showing the Apostles worth only 6 guilders each. The correspondence seemed to indicate that Basso had ordered the
Angelo Custode
to be despatched direct from Antwerp to his agent in Spain, but this bill reveals that it had been brought to Amsterdam and was in his own ship, explaining – as
with the Rembrandts commissioned by Sauli – how it disappeared from history, with no record of its fate after the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
was captured by the English. The value listed by Basso for this painting, 40 guilders, was not inconsiderable, but was nothing like the price tag of more than 1,000 guilders that Rembrandt put on his two paintings – showing how much Rembrandt valued his work, and also highlighting the distinction between the art trade at that level and the trade represented by the bulk of Basso's consignment.

The correspondence shows that Basso intended to sell the paintings on his next trip to the Canary Islands and the Spanish colonies of the Americas. Religious and devotional paintings by Lint and his Antwerp contemporaries, often copies after Rubens, found a ready market in Spain and the Americas, especially small images on copper, which was favoured as a medium for its durability in the humid climate and its shiny finish. The geographical reach of this trade is shown by paintings from Amsterdam and Antwerp in the Church of San Pedro Mártir in Juli on the shore of Lake Titicaca in Peru, a place seemingly on the edge of the European economic world and yet really at one of its focal points – it was nearby Cerro Rico, the fabled ‘silver mountain', that enriched Spain and Europe generally at this period, leading to the bills of lading for the
Santo Cristo di Castello
and the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
being valued in ‘
peze de otto
'– silver pieces of eight – and ultimately giving patrons the wealth to commission great works from painters such as Rembrandt.

The ‘Golden Age' of Dutch art in the seventeenth century was fuelled by maritime trade – through merchants drawn to Amsterdam by the goods of the East India Company, men who were quick to see the lucrative returns of the art trade and who came to regard themselves as part of a cultural process, as active participants in the elevation of art. The availability of great works to purchase in Amsterdam and Antwerp was a function of the fluidity of the market, with a high turnover driven by overseas demand and with frequent wars and plagues as well as financial exuberance leading to bankruptcy and liquidation of stock among artists and dealers. Merchants not only supplied works of art for their patrons but also acted as patrons themselves, purchasing art for their own pleasure and investment as well as for trade. It is possible to imagine a merchant-captain such as Viviano on the verge of such status, still bound to his patron Sauli, but hoping that the successful transport of his cargo – including the Rembrandts – might
allow him the financial means to cross the threshold and become a collector and patron himself.

What did the two Rembrandt paintings look like? They were
modelli
for larger works, but it is clear from the time spent on them and from Rembrandt's own comments – he had ‘thrown himself into the work heart and soul'– that they would have been considerable works in their own right, probably the size of large easel paintings such as Rembrandt's
The Jewish Bride
of the same period. The best-known Assumption painting of the seventeenth century is that of 1626 by Peter Paul Rubens for the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, showing what had become the conventional iconography for the scene – the twelve apostles around Mary's tomb, Mary being lifted heavenwards by a choir of angels and a burst of light above. Like the Rembrandt commission, this was for a huge altarpiece and was based on a
modello
that survives in the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, giving an excellent idea of the relationship between
modelli
and finished works that may help us to imagine the scale and appearance of the Rembrandts. The Rubens
modello
is only one fifth the size of the final painting – the altarpiece is almost 5 metres high – but is widely admired for its pictorial brilliance, its ethereal quality and the dynamism of the brushstrokes.

Rubens also figures in this story because it is his collection of plans in the
Palazzi di Genova
of 1622 that allows us to see how close the church of Santa Maria Assunta in the seventeenth century was to its present-day layout, and therefore to imagine how Sauli envisaged the Rembrandts being displayed. The model for the chapel in the sixteenth century was the recently completed Basilica of St Peter's in Rome – the grandest vision imaginable for one of the up-and-coming families of Genoa. Its dome was to be visible from far out at sea and provide a platform for viewing the harbour, reinforcing the connection between the family's fortunes and the maritime trade of Genoa. This sense of grandeur was undoubtedly in Sauli's mind when he decided to embellish the church with great works of art and use it to celebrate his kinsman Alessandro Sauli, a sixteenth-century priest whom the Sauli family wished to see beatified.

From the French sculptor Pierre Puget he commissioned four huge works for the pillars that supported the central dome. Two of these sculptures were in place by 1668 – a San Sebastiano looking
heavenwards and a striking image of Alessandro Sauli, his body twisting up towards the light. Five of the eight paintings that can be seen today in the alcoves were in position by that date too, all of them major works by leading Italian artists – a Madonna by Procaccini, a Pietà by Cambiaso, a Maddalena by Vanni, an image of San Francesco d'Assisi by Il Guercino and an image of Alessandro Sauli by Fiasello. The Assumption painting and the other Rembrandt were meant to be seen in this context, illuminated on the high altar by light coming down from the dome and surrounded by other works of art that were the best that Sauli could buy.

In December 1667 Rembrandt was visited in his house in Amster- dam by Prince Cosimo de' Medici, the future Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had come to see the ‘
Pittore famoso
'. Rembrandt must have envisaged an upturn in his fortunes with the anticipated arrival of the
Santo Cristo di Castello
in Genoa about the same time and his two paintings leading to more commissions in Italy. Learning of the ship's fate must have been a blow, but it does not seem to have affected Rembrandt's confidence in himself as an artist. The greatest work of his final period is the
Self-Portrait with Two Circles
, completed not long before his death in 1669 and now displayed in Kenwood House in London. Much has been made of the ‘unfinished' nature of the painting as a mark of artistic quality, an idea that goes back to the Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder – ‘The last works of artists and their unfinished pictures are more admired than those which they finished, because in them are seen the preliminary drawings left visible and the artists' actual thoughts' – and the sixteenth-century Italian art historian Vasari: ‘Many painters achieve in the first sketch of their work, as if guided by a sort of fire of inspiration, something of the good and a certain measure of boldness, but afterwards, in finishing it, the boldness vanishes.'

This is suggestive of the quality of the two lost
modelli
, sketches like the Rubens
modello
that may have shown spontaneity and brilliance, but they may also be seen in the two enigmatic circles behind Rembrandt that give the portrait its name. Some see them as a reference to the fourteenth-century painter Giotto being asked to create the perfect work of art, which he did by drawing in one motion a flawless circle. By recreating Giotto's circle, it is argued, Rembrandt was showing his detractors that he was easily capable of the precision that they criticised him for lacking. But another possibility is that they
also represent Rembrandt's two lost paintings – the circles hang like empty frames in the background, while we see the artist with his brush and palette getting on with a new work. Rembrandt may therefore have been challenging us to see in those circles the greatness of his art, but also remembering his lost
modelli
, in a masterpiece that might never have been painted that way had the
Santo Cristo di Castello
not been wrecked off Cornwall in October 1667.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC holds a painting by Ludolf Bakhuizen entitled
Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast
. It shows three Dutch merchant ships in a storm, one of them already wrecked and the other two missing their masts. Bakhuizen – one of the most accomplished marine painters of the seventeenth century – completed the painting in Amsterdam in 1667, the very year that the
Santo Cristo di Castello
was wrecked. It was a common narrative device to depict three ships in various stages of peril – a similar painting by Jan Blanckerhoff from the 1660s is in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich – and these paintings were meant partly as allegories of the human condition, with the ships being overwhelmed by the elements and the scale of the drama providing a medium for the artist to show his skills. Often they represented the real-life experience of the painters or their informants, men who had been shipwrecked and returned to Amsterdam with harrowing tales of the storms from which they had been lucky enough to escape.

Just as in the painting, it was a rocky foreshore that was to doom the
Santo Cristo di Castello
, with the ship probably being destroyed within a very short time. As Captain Viviano made his way ashore with the other survivors he may have reflected on the clause in the bills of lading that he would have made all of the merchants sign –
menandomi Dio a buon salvamento con detta mia Nave
, ‘trusting to God for the safe passage of my ship'. Both his cargo and that of Antonio Basso in the
Sacrificio d'Abramo
were a write-off, though for many of the merchants involved – hedging their bets by splitting their consignments between different ships – the losses were absorbed and they continued to prosper. That may not have been the case for Viviano and Basso, who probably had a higher proportion of their wealth tied up in their ships through part-ownership and had taken all of their personal merchandise in their own holds. In the following year Viviano was captain of another Genoese ship, the
Santa Rosa
,
but she too was unlucky, grounding on a shoal off Cadiz. Even so, he fared better than Basso, who died in London of plague in 1668. Their patron Sauli became Doge of Genoa near the end of his life almost thirty years later – the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta without the Rembrandts that he had hoped for as a centrepiece, but filled with great works of art that continue to embellish the church to this day.

For me, the survival of Santa Maria Assunta and the context for the paintings has opened up a new vista on the wreck, allowing me in my mind's eye to translate the interior of the church to the site at Pol Glas. Swimming into the inlet as I first saw it, and then with Molly and Mark, became like entering the church, with the cliffs rising up like the sides of the nave and above me the orb of the sun like the dome, illuminating the wreck just as it does the art in the church. The fact that the two paintings by Rembrandt once existed in this place – however fleetingly, before being destroyed by the elements – means that every artefact seems touched by their presence, making this one of the most beguiling shipwrecks that I have ever investigated.

My first dive on the wreck of the
Royal Anne Galley
was one of the most challenging of my career. Located off the end of the Lizard Peninsula at the most southerly point in Britain, the wreck lies among rocks and reefs that tore the bottoms out of many ships going to and from the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. Even the names of the rocks in the ancient Cornish language were enough to strike fear in anyone attempting to round the point: Vellan Drang, the Mulvin, the Maenheere, the Ennach, the Crenval, the Vrogue. Twice a day the tide covers the rocks, racing at up to five knots through the shallows and forming dangerous eddies and back currents. For navigators and divers alike, this is one of the most hazardous and challenging places to be on the sea anywhere in the world.

I had come in search of one of the most enticing shipwrecks in these waters. Launched in 1708, the
Royal Anne Galley
was a galley-frigate of the Royal Navy, designed with oars to help her chase the Barbary pirates of North Africa who were terrorising sailors and coastal communities in Europe and taking many people as slaves. On her final voyage in 1721 she was under orders to take the new governor out to Barbados and then to chase down another kind of pirate – including the most notorious still at large, ‘Black Bart', Bartholomew Roberts. When she was wrecked off Man O'War rock only a few days into her voyage, just three of some 210 people on board survived. Tales of lost treasure abounded; the body of one man was said to have been found with a thousand pounds on him. The horror of the wrecking, only a stone's throw from shore among jagged rock and swirling currents, made it part of folklore. In 1848 the Reverend Charles Johns in his book
A Week at the Lizard
wrote how dogs in the parish were held in ‘great detestation' because they had devoured bodies that were washed ashore, and how local people were still afraid to pass through the meadow where bodies were said to have been brought up and buried.

That winter I had stood on Lizard Point watching the storm waters batter the coast, sending spray 20 metres or more above the rocks. To me the Lizard seemed like the snout of some giant beast, and the rocks like dragon's teeth sticking out of the sea. I saw the power of the ebb tide as it ploughed against the prevailing south-westerlies, creating a maelstrom of whirlpools and clashing seas. Diving at that place seemed out of the question, but then a few days of preternatural calm in early spring brought the idea back into focus. I spoke to fishing-boat skippers and old-time divers to find out all I could about conditions off Man O'War rock, knowing that each sector of reef held its own hazards. I learnt an alarming fact that could not have been guessed from the tide charts. Normally dives are planned for slack water between the tides, with low water being preferred as the sea is up to 6 metres shallower. But off Man O'War rock the tide runs in both directions at once at low water, with the flood already coming in from the west. Worse still, the flood splits as it hits the rock, with the main flow carrying on eastwards towards shore but another going through a channel in the rocks and back out to sea. The wreck lay at the apex of the split, where to stray a few metres too close to the channel could be fatal. Timing my dive to return before the flood began would be essential.

I kitted up in my wetsuit and scuba gear on shore below Lizard Point and began the long swim out to the site, with the cliffs to my right and the rocks and open sea beyond to the left. It was only 9 degrees Celsius, but the adrenaline and movement kept me warm. The great jutting reef of Vellan Drang had been exposed as the tide dropped, showing that the ebb had been cut off and would be wrapping itself around the outer reaches of the rocks, heading off into the Atlantic. The visibility underwater was excellent, up to 10 metres, and as I swam through a bed of weed a pair of grey seals came up to me, pulling at my fins and looking into my eyes, their speed and agility a reminder that this is not our natural environment, however skilled and well-equipped we might be. My first test of nerves came when I reached a stretch of open water known as the ‘Dead Pool', with Man O'War rock a jagged black profile some 200 metres ahead. The Dead Pool was so named because it becomes calm as the tide drops and it is protected from the ebb by the Vellan Drang, but even so, the name was not reassuring – it was here that many of the victims from the
Royal Anne Galley
were drowned, as well as sailors from numerous
other wrecks whose artefacts were strewn on the seabed beneath me.

I had checked the tide table repeatedly to make sure I would be on site a good time before low water, and as I did so again I had in my mind's eye an extraordinary image of the wreck that had been printed at the top of a broadside ballad shortly after the event, based on the accounts of survivors. It showed the ship in three stages of destruction, with the rocks to the left and the cliffs to the right, exactly as I was seeing them now. As the narrative moves from left to right it shows the ship striking the rocks, floating across the Dead Pool and then being driven into the shore. The stark depiction of sky and sea and rocks gives an accurate sense of the terror of the place, where the tidal race, the Atlantic swell and the wind can turn the sea into a fearsome cauldron. The image moves from light to darkness, from the world of the living to the world of the dead, and in that sense is true to the idea of a sea voyage ending in wreck being an analogue of the journey through life itself. One of the figures cast into the sea looks like Edvard Munch's
The Scream
, his white face staring with open mouth, transfixed in horror; to the right, three figures still in their nightrobes – looking like shrouds – seem to be suspended in the air like the souls in a medieval image of Purgatory. That alone would have evoked strong emotions in the viewer, as one of the terrifying consequences of death in shipwreck for a Christian was that bodies might not be buried in consecrated ground, with the souls of those who had died left eternally in limbo between Heaven and Hell.

I felt as if I were about to swim into that image, a daunting prospect that took a large effort of will to overcome. Ten minutes later I had reached the edge of Man O'War rock, with the channel where the current split only 20 metres ahead and the wreck somewhere before that. The weed near shore had given way to thick beds of kelp, a dark mass some 8 metres below me that concealed the rocky seabed beneath. The kelp reached the surface as it became shallower, entangling itself in my gear. As I pulled myself loose I faced my second test of nerves, knowing that I was dependant on the accuracy of the information that I had been told about the water movement at this spot. Slowly I swam on, keeping the rock within reach in case I should feel the tug of a current. Some 10 metres before the channel I decided that I should go no further, that the risk was too great. Below me to the right I could see the base of the rock dropping off in a series of gullies and fissures, the kelp obscuring any wreckage that might still be there.

I removed my snorkel, put in my regulator and emptied my buoyancy compensator. A rogue wave pushed me back against the rock and then pulled me forward over the slope, sucking me down as it rebounded. I held on to thick stems of kelp until it subsided and then followed a fissure down. The kelp was up to 2 metres tall, and progress beneath it was difficult. I pulled myself along, trying to stop the fronds from entangling and ripping off my mask. At first all I saw was broken rock covered with spider crabs, extending off in both directions. Wreckage of this age can be difficult to spot in such a high-energy environment, but this was more challenging than most. I pulled myself further along, and then to my excitement saw something spherical and orange – a rusted cannon ball. It was loose among the rocks, but just beyond it a mass of cannon balls lay concreted to the seabed. The evening before, I had read the first detailed account of a diver visiting the site – the pioneer diver Captain William Evans, who had brought a boat here only a few years after the wreck, anchored against the current and attempted to salvage it using a primitive diving barrel. Among the artefacts that he raised were numerous nine-pound cannon balls, fitting the size of the guns that I knew from documentary evidence had been the main armament of the ship. I took out my scale and measured the balls in front of me, confirming their size. After all of the trepidation and planning, I was elated: I was on the wreck of the
Royal Anne Galley.

That dive in April 2021 marked the beginning of archaeological investigations under my direction that have carried on ever since. Another discovery by Captain Evans in 1732 was moidores
,
the Portuguese gold coins that were common currency in England at the time. Gold was reported by local diver Rob Sherratt who rediscovered the site in 1991, and the gold that has been recovered since then – coins, both English and Portuguese, parts of pocket watches and jewellery – has made the
Royal Anne Galley
one of the richest wrecks to be excavated off this coast. Together with documentary and archival evidence for the ship, the crew and the passengers, these finds help to paint a vivid and detailed picture of a vessel that played a role in the pivotal events of the early eighteenth century – the conflict with France that propelled Britain to a dominant position in global trade, the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland in 1715, the war against piracy, and the backdrop of the transatlantic slave trade and its place in the developing economies of the New World.

In London in late 1721 or early 1722, the readers of broadside ballads – the precursors of today's tabloid newspapers – were treated to a ‘sad and dismal story'. Beneath the woodcut showing the ship foundering on rocks, the headline read:

The Unhappy Voyage: Giving an Account of the
Royal Anne Galley
, Captain Willis Commander, which was split to pieces on the Stag Rocks on the
Lizzard
, the 10th of
November
, 1721, having on board the Lord
Belhaven
, who was going as Governor to
Barbadoes
, with several other Persons of Distinction, the whole number on board being 210, out of which there were only three saved; whose names are
George Hain
,
William Godfrey
, and
Thomas Laurence
, a Boy.

Beneath this were two hundred lines of verse set to a popular tune and telling the full story of the tragedy:

What a Scene of dismal Horror,

There was seen when this was o're,

Bodies floating on the Ocean,

By the Waves were drove on Shore,

And the Country People running,

Striving who should get the most,

Stripping all without Distinction,

'Tis the Custom of the Coast.

One Gentleman was drove on Shore,

'Bout whom they found a thousand Pound,

Whose Name's supposed to be Crosier,

By Writings in his Pockets found:

Likewise they say the Lord Belhaven,

Having on a Diamond Ring,

His Shirt mark'd B, the floating Ocean,

Did to Shore his Body bring.

The story of the
Royal Anne Galley
had many of the ingredients that drew a rapt public to tales of shipwreck: the game of chance played by navigators, the whimsical fate that could see fortunes turn with the wind and the indiscriminate deaths of the high and mighty as well as common people, everything that made shipwrecks a perennial
fascination in newspapers and broadsheets at a period when disease could take a loved one in a day and the hand of fate could seem fickle and cruel. Shipwreck had been the main event in the first great English novel, Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
, published only two years before. Just as the mythologised Wild West was to be for Hollywood, shipwrecks were a stage on which people could be seen at their best and their worst, where morality was tested and where dignity and bravery could be imagined in the face of certain death. Tales of wreck could also be enveloped in the supernatural. In 1724, a Scottish minister and historian named Robert Wodrow wrote that the morning before the departure of the
Royal Anne Galley
from Plymouth, a mysterious woman in a mantle and hood had approached Lord Belhaven in his chambers:

he believed she was either a god or a devil, for she had warned him not to go aboard the ship, for he would never return; and, as a sign, she told him many secret passages of his life, which he was sure no body but himself could know. They asked, what he would do then? He said he would go on in his designe, come what would! And went that day to the ship, and in a litle the ship perished, and he in her.

Fortunately, the reports of the three survivors to the Admiralty, published in the
London Gazette
, give a sober and detailed account of the events on which the ballad was based. It was clues in that account that led Rob Sherratt to be certain that he had found the wreck after he saw cannon on the seabed off Man O'War rock in 1991, and then found objects that clinched its identity – silver cutlery bearing the family crest of Lord Belhaven. Excavation carried out by a small team under his direction over the next decade produced more than 600 artefacts, complemented by further artefacts recorded by myself and Ben Dunstan since 2021. The finds are a unique assemblage for an English warship of this period, not least because a number of them are high-value items reflecting Lord Belhaven and the other well-to-do passengers heading out to Barbados – including sherds of wine glasses and decanters as well as the gold. Almost half a century after the loss of the
Santo Cristo di Castello
, and only five nautical miles down the coast, the
Royal Anne Galley
sheds fascinating light on a world that had now moved into the Age of Enlightenment, one in which the Royal Navy had emerged from the European conflicts of the seventeenth
and early eighteenth century as the dominant force on the world's oceans.