A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (31 page)

The Inquisition has a direct bearing on the story of Brazilian gold and helps to explain one of the great maritime movements in history, the spread of Sephardic Jews – named after the Hebrew word for the Iberian Peninsula – around the world. One of the Portuguese Jews who profited from the Brazil trade was an ancestor of mine, Francisco Rodrigues Brandão, a merchant based in Porto at the time of the first voyages of the
Royal Anne Galley
. Like many Jews in Portugal his ancestors had been expelled in 1492 from Spain, where they had lived since fleeing Judaea in the Roman period – the beginning of the diaspora which saw Jews from Portugal settle around the Mediterranean, in north-west Europe and in Jamaica, where they acted as brokers for the pirates during the ‘Golden Age'. In Portugal itself they were forced to live as
conversos
, ‘New Christians', adopting Portuguese names though remaining true to their faith in private, and living in constant fear of persecution, which included a ban on fleeing the country. By the time that Francisco was a young man in the 1690s many Jews in Portugal had been brought before the Inquisition, with several hundred having been burnt at the stake and thousands more forced to recant their faith in the
auto-da-fé
, the act of penance, often having endured years of imprisonment beforehand. Francesco's own grandmother had been imprisoned, leading his father to flee to France, and both Francisco and his children were to suffer the same experience – eventually leading his son João to settle in the mid-eighteenth century with his family in London, where they were able to readopt Hebrew names and practise their faith openly.

Porto was a gateway for trade with Brazil as well as with England, allowing a Jewish merchant such as Francisco not only to thrive on Portugal's existing maritime commerce but also to develop new trade with family members who had fled abroad. The wealth that this created made him more vulnerable to persecution, and he was eventually brought before the Inquisition at Coimbra. The trials of this period have proved a boon for historians as the Inquisition kept detailed records that have mostly survived. In Francisco's case, they show that he was involved in both routes of trade from Porto – he exported brandy, wine and manufactured goods to Brazil in return for hardwood and tobacco, and from England he imported textiles. Some of the textiles would probably have gone for sale in Brazil, but others
were marketed locally – in one fair in Portugal he sold fabrics worth half a million
réis
, the equivalent of about 120 of the gold moidores found on the
Royal Anne Galley
. To purchase these he would have used the gold which by the late 1690s was coming from the new mines in Brazil. Fascinatingly, the documents also show that he was shipping gold to England to keep it from being confiscated – he sent 250 ducats of gold, the equivalent of about 80 moidores, to a relative in London. A priest came to his house and found a record of the shipment, evidence that Francisco himself was intending to flee, and despite Francisco ‘tearing up the papers and throwing them out of the window' when a maid told him of this, the damage was done – on 8 December 1698 the Inquisition came for him.

The horrors of the slave trade and the Inquisition are a reminder that the Age of Enlightenment may have been one of philosophical and creative flowering, but it was also a time of extreme racism and religious prejudice. For Portuguese Jews such as Francisco's family, the maritime world that they were able to inhabit away from the clutches of the Inquisition was more welcoming, inclusive and tolerant than their European homeland had been, even in places of sketchy morality such as Port Royal in Jamaica. Nevertheless, the
bandeirantes
, pirates and slave-traders of this story show that this was not a world in which economic rationality and the march of progress always held sway, and where men might easily be tempted by the pleasures and freedom that always seemed to exist beyond the horizon – something that people in England at this time were beginning to associate with India and the trading stations of the Far East, but was evident much closer to home. Lord Tyrawly, British ambassador to Lisbon, observed in 1729 that the Lisbon Factory – the main British mercantile community in Portugal – were ‘a parcel of the greatest Jackanapes I ever met with: Fops, Beaux, drunkards, gamesters, and prodigiously ignorant, even in their own business'. Only a few years before and a few miles to the south, the English colony of Tangier in North Africa had become a byword for degeneracy and squandered opportunity, lamented by Samuel Pepys as ‘that wicked place'.

Even to sailors of the Royal Navy such as those on the
Royal Anne Galley
, constrained by discipline, loyalty to the Crown and a strong sense of purpose, there were temptations against which they had to fortify themselves – the notorious pirate ‘Long Ben' Avery after all had started off his seafaring life as an officer in the Royal Navy. This
was the world into which the
Royal Anne Galley
had sailed when she went to the Guinea coast, and to which she was returning as she headed towards the Caribbean on that fateful final night off the Lizard Peninsula in November 1721.

In an era of proliferating newspapers and the rapid dissemination of news, word spread quickly of the wreck of the
Royal Anne Galley
. Only a few days later papers around the country reported that:

… dead Men come ashoar [sic] daily, some in one place, and some in others, as far Westward as Porleaven: the Country People run daily to catch what they can find; and if a man with Jewels or Money drive ashoar, they bury him; if not they let him drive with the Tide.

Provision for the burial of unidentified shipwrecked mariners in churchyards did not come until the Burial of Drowned Persons Act of 1808, itself arising from the wreck of another Royal Navy vessel off the Lizard Peninsula, HMS
Anson
in 1807, when a local solicitor had been dismayed by the sight of so many bodies cast ashore and left strewn on the beach for days afterwards. Prior to that, the custom had been to bury the dead without coffin or shroud near to where they were found, resulting in numerous burials along the foreshore and clifftops – many unmarked and lost to history but others occasionally revealed by erosion along the Lizard coast.

Seeing those remains in the cliffs, and the image of bodies cast away in the woodcut illustration of the
Royal Anne Galley
, is a reminder of the proximity of death at sea to those living where wrecks were frequent – something which continued until the Second World War along this coast, when sinkings by U-boats and the downing of aircraft resulted in bodies being washed ashore, as we shall see in the final chapter of this book. For the local people, shipwrecks provided a brush with the wider events of history that might otherwise have passed them by – with far-off wars and exotic lands, with wealth and wonders and objects they often took themselves from wrecks and reused. But the most lasting impression was probably in the existential struggles that they witnessed, in the pitting of individuals against the forces of nature and ‘malign Providence'. The memory of these events could be passed down through families, with the wreck of the
Anson
for example still being recalled today by the descendants of those who
had tried to help at the scene, and older stories passing into folklore.

By the mid-nineteenth century it had become fashionable to do walking tours of Cornwall, and a trip to England's most southerly point was de rigueur; there, visitors would be told of the wreck of the ship carrying a governor to a distant land and the burial of the victims in nearby Pistil Meadow, which the novelist Wilkie Collins wrote in 1850 the locals regarded ‘with feelings of awe and horror, and fear to walk near the graves of the drowned men at night'. Those who endured the distress of recovering the victims of wrecks rarely knew their names, but the archaeological and documentary evidence allows us to bring some of their stories to light. There are few more poignant wreck discoveries than the mourning ring for the child, telling of an affection held dear, and perhaps in the final thoughts of the one who wore it. In his will, another of the passengers, Thomas Whaley, ‘late of the City of London and now bound for Barbados', left everything to ‘Mrs Constance Moor of Hatton Gardens London Widow to whom I am engaged in a contract of marriage on my return and for whom I have the greatest affection and true sense of her inimitable worth and virtues'. The emotional power of lives cut short and dreams unfulfilled still seems to linger at a wreck site where few would have been prepared for the shock that befell them, and there was too little time to understand and accept their fate.

The aftermath, too, is part of the story, and nowhere more so than in the case of Eunica, ‘widow of the late Lieutenant Joseph Weld of the
Royal Anne Galley
', who lost not only her husband but also their son John – a volunteer seamen – in the wreck, ‘being drowned upon the rocks of the Lizard'. In a petition to the Admiralty, being ‘wholly unprovided for and reduced to unfortunate circumstances', she hoped that His Majesty would grant her a pension, but it was turned down, as only persons slain in action with an enemy were eligible. Her fate is unknown, as there is no further reference to her in the records. These individual experiences become better documented the closer we get to modern times, and become part of our collective historical memory by the time of the expedition that forms the story of the next wreck in this book – the
Terror
.

When I was a boy my grandfather gave me a massive leather-bound volume containing the 1854 issues of the
Illustrated London News
, the weekly magazine famed for its woodblock engravings copied from sketches and photographs. The news that year was dominated by the Crimean War, the first major war involving the European powers since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, and especially by the Charge of the Light Brigade – the disastrous charge of the British cavalry against the Russian artillery during the Battle of Balaclava glorified by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his famous poem written six weeks later: ‘Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die / Into the Valley of Death Rode the Six Hundred'. The charge had been on 25 October 1854, with the first illustration of the aftermath appearing on 18 November, but what most caught my imagination was a full-page spread published two weeks earlier on 4 November. Entitled ‘Franklin Relics', it showed
the first material evidence of another failure that was to be painted in heroic terms – not least by Tennyson himself – but had a dark side that was to horrify Victorian sensibility.

For years the fate of Sir John Franklin and the 128 men who had accompanied him in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic had captivated the British public. The most extensive evidence was found in 1859 in an expedition led by Francis Leopold McClintock and privately financed by Franklin's wife, Lady Jane, after the Admiralty had given up hope of finding the men alive. As well as the message in the cairn, reproduced above, they found a 28-foot-long ship's boat mounted on a sledge with two skeletons and a large quantity of personal belongings inside. The message showed that the men had deserted their ships and headed south overland – and that Franklin and many others had already died. But the discoveries that first brought home the enormity of the disaster were artefacts acquired in May 1854 by Dr John Rae of the Hudson Bay Company from local Inuit people, including a silver plate engraved with Franklin's name, as well as the Inuit account of discovering the bodies of those who had set out overland. What was not contained in the
Illustrated London News
article, but had been passed on to the press by the Admiralty, was the awful conclusion of Rae's report: ‘… a fate terrible as the imagination can conceive … From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource – cannibalism – as a means of prolonging existence.'

Thirty years after first poring over that volume I was fortunate to travel to the Canadian Arctic and to stand on the shore of Beechey Island, the desolate place where Franklin had spent his first winter and where three of his men lie buried – men whose faces preserved in the permafrost captured the public imagination when they were exhumed for study in 1984. I was fascinated to see hundreds of tin cans still left where they had been discarded that winter, knowing that lead-poisoning caused by solder used to seal the tins may have hastened the men's demise. Almost a century and a half after John Rae's report, both his account and that of the Inuit were vindicated when the analysis of bones of men from the expedition found scattered on King William Island showed clear evidence of cannibalism. More research has led to a better understanding of the causes of the disaster, including the misfortune of being caught in a very severe winter when the ice was
more extensive than usual, the debilitating effects of scurvy and over-reliance on survival strategies that were not well-adapted to the Arctic. The picture that archaeology has provided from the ‘debris trail' of the final trek overland has been hugely augmented by the discovery of the two expedition ships – HMS
Erebus
and HMS
Terror
– and the image this has given of seafarers pushing the boundaries of endurance in the quest for discovery and knowledge.

In contrast to the sombre tones of the 1854 article, in which the relics from the Arctic were arranged in the woodcut like the artefacts in a Victorian ‘cabinet of curiosities', the account in the
Illustrated London News
of the departure of the Franklin expedition in 1845 shows a fascination typical of the period with the details of provisioning and technology. Of great interest was the fitting out of
Erebus
and
Terror
with ‘the most approved Archimedean screw propellors' driven by steam engines. ‘In one of the trials on the Thames, the
Terror
made such excellent progress that she cast off her towing steamer and proceeded down the river without any additional assistance whatsoever.' The installation of auxiliary engines was part of an extensive refit in advance of the expedition, including reinforcement of the hulls with iron plating and the decks with cross-planking. The engines were taken from locomotives of Stephenson's ‘Planet' design that had been used on the London and Greenwich Railway, the first steam railway in the capital; the screw propellors were based on a design by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the brilliant engineer whose ship the SS
Great Britain
– the first iron-built screw-steamer passenger vessel – had been launched in 1843. The fitting out of
Erebus
and
Terror
in this way therefore reflects an extraordinary period of technological innovation, with the railway about to make a huge impact on travel and commerce in Britain, North America and around the world, and the steam engine about to revolutionise shipping and maritime transport – among other advantages, making ships less dependent on the wind and less likely to be wrecked.

In outward appearance, however, the two vessels were still sailing ships of a design originating in the period of the Napoleonic Wars some forty years earlier. Both were built as ‘bomb vessels', with heavy mortars mounted mid-deck and robust frameworks to withstand the recoil – the reason they were chosen in the 1830s for conversion to polar research vessels, as this was thought to make them stronger against
sea-ice.
Terror
was the older of the two by thirteen years, having been launched at Topsham in Devon in 1813 as one of three vessels of the appropriately named ‘Vesuvius' class, with a burthen of 334 tons, a gundeck of 102 feet and a crew of 67, and armed with two mortars, six 24-pounder carronades and two 6-pounder guns. The first known depiction of
Terror
is not as a polar exploration ship but as a ship of war, in an engraving showing the bombardment of Fort McHenry near Baltimore during the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States – a war as we shall see in which John Franklin also took a prominent part, though in a different theatre over a year later.
Terror
was one of five bomb vessels – the others named
Volcano
,
Meteor
,
Devastation
and
Aetna
– that lobbed hundreds of mortar shells into the fort on 13 September 1813, in an action that became famous for inspiring one of those present in the fort, Francis Scott Key, to write the poem that became the ‘Star Spangled Banner'.

Another unexpected image of
Terror
, this time with
Erebus
, is in a painting in the National Maritime Museum by John Wilson Carmichael showing the expedition under Sir James Clark Ross to Antarctica in 1839–42. The ships are shown not in ice but off New Zealand, with a lush backdrop of palm trees and beaches and being approached by Maori rafts and canoes. The image is one of unease and disjunction, with the apparent tranquillity of the scene set against Ross's account that the Maori were ‘prepared to seize any opportunity of regaining possession of their lands and driving the Europeans out of the country'. Ross named two volcanoes in Antarctica Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, meaning that
Terror
had features named after it in both polar regions – the other being Terror Bay in the Canadian Arctic, the inlet of King William Island where the wreck was discovered. An image of
Terror
more fitting to her final role is a painting by George Back during his expedition to the Arctic in 1836–7 showing
Terror
anchored beside a towering iceberg in Baffin Bay, with walruses in the foreground and the horizon tinged pink by the sun – an image of Arctic grandeur that may have been in the minds of those anxiously awaiting news of Franklin's expedition a decade later, but was at odds with the flat landscape and desolation several hundred miles to the west where the survivors spent their final days.

The beautiful technical drawings of
Terror
that survive in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, made during repairs after her return from the Arctic in 1837 – when she was badly damaged by
ice, and nearly sank – and again during the refit prior to the 1845 expedition, provide a detailed image of the ship and its construction. With the message in the cairn showing that the ships had been deserted in 1848, after almost two years icebound, their locations were lost until Inuit knowledge led to their rediscovery in 2014 and 2016 in shallow water to the south of King William Island –
Erebus
off the mainland in less than 12 metres depth and
Terror
off the island in 24 metres. Both wrecks were in a marvellous state of preservation in waters too cold for the wood-boring shipworm to thrive, and still contained everything that had been left by the crews. The area was designated as a National Historic Site in 1992 by the Canadian Government and the wrecks have been investigated since 2014 by the Parks Canada underwater archaeology team, with major recovery of artefacts beginning in 2019 and both wrecks having been mapped using sonar and 3-D photographic modelling.

Video taken in 2019 by Parks Canada underwater archaeologists and a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) provides a breathtaking view of
Terror
and her contents. The ship sits upright and intact on the seabed, showing less crush damage from ice than might have been expected. The bowsprit extends out to its full length and the features of the deck are the same as in the technical drawings, including the ship's wheel still in position and the probable vent tube rising from the locomotive engine that drove the screw – a discovery that helped to identify the wreck as
Terror
. A boat lying off to one side where it has fallen from its davits was probably similar to the boat discovered by McClintock on King William Island where it had been dragged and abandoned by the men in their final days. The footage taken by the ROV as it penetrated the living spaces in the lower deck provides an experience akin to an archaeologist setting foot in an undisturbed tomb – as it entered the forecastle living area I could see jars, cups and plates still sitting on shelves, the blue-and-white patterning characteristic of the Victorian period and identical to porcelain that my grandparents and many of their generation still used. Travelling back through the ship, the ROV peered into officers' cabins, their beds and shelving still intact, into storerooms with bottles in niches and firearms still hanging on the walls and then into Captain Crozier's cabin at the stern, his desk and chair still there as he left them in 1848. The closed drawers of the desk allow the tantalising thought that they might contain an account deliberately left for rescuers, perhaps giving details of the death of
Franklin – whose burial place somewhere on King William Island has yet to be found, though it too had been known to the Inuit.