A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (28 page)

The woodcut in the broadsheet ballad is also of great value for providing the only known image of the ship. Such illustrations might not be expected to show great accuracy, but comparison with a painting of the similar
Charles Galley
by the distinguished marine artist Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707) suggests that the woodcutter was familiar with ship types. Launched at Woolwich in 1708, the
Royal Anne Galley
was 127 feet long and 21 feet in beam, displaced 511 tons, was armed with 42 6-pounder and 9-pounder guns and had a nominal crew of 182. From a distance she would have appeared a typical three-masted frigate, except that beneath the row of gunports was a further row of fifty small ports on either side for oars or ‘sweeps'. As a galley she was part of a long tradition that stretched back to the oared triremes of classical Greece, and it was the relatively benign sea conditions of the Mediterranean that explained her design – she was one of a number of galley-frigates built for the Royal Navy to counter the Barbary pirates of North Africa, corsairs based along the coast of Morocco who captured merchant ships and enslaved their crews and passengers, and whose galleys could only be pursued by warships with similar manoeuvrability and speed. Among her early operations she was ordered in November 1712 to protect vessels against the ‘Rovers of Sallee', pirates operating from the port of Salé, Morocco; in the following year she delivered presents from Queen Anne to the Emperor of Morocco in return for the freedom of captives, and to secure the newly acquired British possession of Gibraltar – ceded by Spain as part of the Treaty of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, bringing peace to Europe after a decade of war and leaving the Royal Navy virtually unopposed on the world's oceans.

The active life of the
Royal Anne Galley
encompassed the final years of the reign of Queen Anne, after whom she was named, and the first years of the Hanoverian King George, a distant relative who was named as her successor in 1714 in order to keep the line Protestant and prevent Anne's Catholic half-brother, James Stuart – the so-called ‘Old Pretender' – from taking the throne. The ship took part in the only serious attempt by James at the throne, the 1715 uprising by his Jacobite supporters in Scotland, blockading the east coast of Scotland from attempts by the French to land reinforcements in support of the
rebellion, and in January 1716 forming part of a squadron of ten ships appointed to cruise the coast and the Firth of Forth ‘for suppression of the rebels'. After a period of inactivity she was sent in 1720 to the Guinea coast of Africa to pursue English pirates and protect slave traders, an episode for which the ship's log survives and which is examined in detail below.

On her return she was ordered to take Lord Belhaven to the Caribbean, with the newspapers reporting on 9 May 1721 that Belhaven had ‘kissed his Majesty's Hand, in order to set out for his Government of Barbados'. Barbados was one of Britain's most lucrative colonies at the time, its sugar plantations worked initially by indentured labourers and prisoners, but then by thousands of African slaves. Over the summer and early autumn at Portsmouth the crew of the
Royal Anne Galley
were preparing for the voyage, taking on supplies and ammunition, training new crew and making arrangements to convey passengers, a number of whom were returning residents of Barbados. Taking into account the vagaries of the weather, with the south-westerlies gaining strength in autumn, Captain Willis might have planned for a voyage time of some six to eight weeks, logging perhaps 100 to 150 miles a day over the 4,200 miles between England and Bridgetown in Barbados – not a long voyage by the standard of ships going to the East Indies, but still a daunting prospect for those on board who may have been new to the sea.

From the ship's final muster list in The National Archives we know the names of many of the men who perished that November, including Captain Francis Willis, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Navy who had begun his career as a volunteer in 1696, and his three lieutenants. Many wills for crew were drawn up just before they left Portsmouth, where there was a thriving industry in providing wills for departing seamen – in the case of the
Royal Anne Galley
, men who knew full well the risk of death at sea from illness and privation from their arduous voyage just undertaken off the coast of West Africa, and who knew what a voyage to the Americas might bring. Many of these wills for men ‘bound out to sea' were prepared ‘considering the perils and dangers of the Seas and other uncertainties of this transitory life'. Those probated soon after the wreck included the armourer, a cook and the ship's sailing master, John DeGrusty, whose belongings may have included a pair of navigational dividers from the wreck bearing the initials J.D. Among the passengers, two others in addition to Lord
Belhaven bore the surname Hamilton, though they were unrelated: William Hamilton, eighteen-year-old son of the Earl of Abercorn and a ‘Volunteer in the Sea Service', and Thomas Hamilton, aged twenty-six, a former student of Oriel College, Oxford and the eldest son of Sir David Hamilton, Fellow of the Royal Society, physician to Queen Anne and a diarist who wrote a vivid account of her final five years up to her death in 1714 and the accession of King George I.

These, then, were the individuals on the ship whose lives we can glimpse through the historical and archaeological evidence. As they sailed out of Spithead off Portsmouth on 29 October – within cannon-shot of the wreck of the
Mary Rose
– Captain Willis would have opened his orders from the Admiralty and read them through, undoubtedly with excitement as well as some trepidation:

… for proceeding with the Lord Belhaven, his servants and equipage to Barbados; from there to the Leeward Islands, Jamaica; to take, sink, burn or otherwise destroy pirates around Barbados; then to deal with pirates in the Leeward Islands; then to Jamaica to put himself under the command of the captain of ships there; then to convoy home ships from there via the windward passage; then along the coast of North America from North Carolina to Newfoundland; again hunting pirates; then back to England by late next summer.

Rob Sherratt and his team were not the first to dive on the
Royal Anne Galley
. In early December 1721, only a few weeks after the wreck, the newspapers reported that ‘Several Enginers (sic) and Engines are ordered to be got ready, to go down to Falmouth, in order soon after Christmas to endeavour to Fish up the Guns &c. of the
Royal Anne Galley
, her upper Teer being all Brass.' At the end of the month the papers reported that ‘The
Jolly Batchelor
(sic) and the
Henrietta Yatcht
(sic) are going down to the Lizzard, with a new invented Engine, to Fish upon the Wreck of the
Royal Anne Galley
.' The ‘Enginers' were the pioneer divers Jacob Rowe and John Lethbridge, and they spent from early January to late March 1722 at the Lizard. This was one of the first attempts to salvage a wreck using a diver encased in a primitive form of suit rather than swimming from a diving bell, and therefore marks a technical breakthrough in the investigation of wrecks that can be traced to the present day.

The invention of the diving ‘Engine' was part of the scientific and
technological revolution of the Enlightenment. None other than the astronomer Sir Edmund Halley became involved, creating a diving bell in 1698 supplied with air from weighted barrels and using it to salvage a wreck off the south coast of England. He was inspired by the success of the treasure-hunter Sir William Phips, showing that even the most academic of minds were not immune to the lure of treasure – Phips had been knighted in 1686 after using a diving bell to recover more than 34 tons of silver off Hispaniola from the
Nuestra Señora de la Concepción
, the first of many expeditions to wrecks of the ‘Spanish Main' that continue to this day. But it was the invention of a new type of machine that makes this period so significant in the history of diving. In a letter in the
Gentleman's Magazine
of 1749 reflecting on his career, John Lethbridge wrote that ‘Necessity is the parent of invention, and being, in the year 1715, quite reduc'd, and having a large family, my thoughts turned upon some extraordinary method, to retrieve my misfortunes; and was prepossessed, that it might be practicable to contrive a machine to recover wrecks lost in the sea…' In 1720 he demonstrated his machine for the East India Company in the Thames in London, where he met Jacob Rowe, another Devon man, who had developed his own very similar machine probably based largely on Lethbridge's design. They decided to work together and had great success recovering more than three tons of silver from the wreck of the English East Indiaman the
Vansittart
in the Cape Verde Islands. On their return, another towering figure of the Enlightenment, Sir Isaac Newton, enters the story – as ‘Master of the Mint' he was responsible for weighing out the king's one-tenth share in the presence of Rowe, and for seeing that it was melted down and minted into coin of the realm.

Lethbridge is better known today than Rowe because after the two men eventually parted ways he had more success – an inscription of 1736 stated that he had:

by the blessing of God, dived on the wrecks of four English men of war, one English East Indiaman, two Dutch men of war, five Dutch East Indiamen, two Spanish galleons, and two London galleys, all lost in the space of twenty years; on many of them with good success; but that he had been very near drowning in the Engine five times.

Rowe's name has only come to wide attention through the publication for the first time in 2000 of his
A Demonstration of the Diving Engine; its Invention and various Uses
, the earliest known treatise on diving in English. This shows that his and Lethbridge's devices were fundamentally the same – a type of diving barrel, always known as an ‘Engine' by the inventors. The barrel was a tapered cylinder of oak staves bound by iron, though Rowe's treatise shows how a version could be made of copper or brass. It had a glass viewing port, plugged holes at the base for drainage and for replenishing air at the surface with bellows and sleeved apertures of greased leather for the diver's arms; it was lowered from a yardarm and held slightly everted to keep the viewing port above any water that might come inside. It was uncomfortable and dangerous, with the air soon becoming stale, the barrel leaking and the difference between the atmospheric pressure inside and the water pressure outside squeezing the diver's arms.

In his letter Lethbridge described how he lay ‘straight upon my breast, all the time I am in the engine, which hath many times been more than 6 hours, being, frequently, refreshed upon the surface, by a pair of bellows,' that he had stayed on the bottom ‘many times, 34 minutes', and that he had been ‘ten fathom deep many a hundred times'. These figures suggest that he would have been at considerable risk of the bends – decompression sickness caused by nitrogen build-up in the blood – and may have been the first diver ever to experience this, though if he did have joint pains and other symptoms he would not have known the reason. Constriction of the arms was a bigger problem: in his book
A Course of Experimental Philosophy
, John Theophilus Desaguliers – experimental assistant to Newton, and like Halley and Newton a Fellow of the Royal Society – published an account by Captain Irvine, one of Rowe's divers in a later expedition to a Spanish Armada wreck off Tobermory in Scotland, who reported that:

… the depth of 11 fathom he felt a strong Stricture about his Arms by the Pressure of the Water; and that venturing two Fathom lower to take up a lump of Earth with Pieces of Eight sticking together; the Circulation of his Blood was so far stopp'd, and he suffer'd so much, that he was forced to keep his Bed for six Weeks. And I have heard of another that died in three Days, for having ventured to go down 14 Fathom.

By the end of August 1722 the newspapers had reported that at least twenty-one guns, several anchors, cable and ship's stores had been brought up from the
Royal Anne Galley
. Much of this would have been recovered by other vessels using the traditional salvor's tools of grapnels, tongs and drags, with Rowe and Lethbridge perhaps concentrating on the recovery of smaller, more valuable items for which the ‘Engine' had been designed, and as described by Irvine at the Tobermory wreck. They would have assumed that Lord Belhaven had been taking a quantity of gold out with him for Barbados; one of the men with them at the Lizard, an agent of the Crown who had also been present with Newton in dividing out the spoils from the
Vansittart
, described himself as overseeing ‘the fishing for treasure'. It is unclear how much success they had, if any; the site would have been very challenging in the early months of the year when the storms are often at their worst, with the
London Journal
noting that Captain Rowe would sail to the Lizard in the
Henrietta Yacht
‘as soon as the Weather is settled and fit for it'. The rocks are a dangerous place to bring a boat at any time, and the two vessels used by Rowe were far larger than anything that we would consider taking to the site today – the
Jolly Batchelor
was a sloop of twenty guns, and the
Henrietta Yacht
, a former Royal Navy vessel, was 62 tons burthen with a crew of thirty, so any diving would have had to be from smaller boats.

Even in calm weather the strength of the tide off the Lizard is a danger, an experience that may be reflected in the space that Rowe devotes to this issue in his treatise including a detailed illustration of a boat anchored over a wreck with the direction of the tide shown by arrows beneath. Despite the constraints, discomforts and perils of their enterprise, these early divers had a tenacity and passion that makes it easy for us to relate to them today, seeing the underwater world as nobody had ever done before from their ‘Engine for the taking up of wrecks'.