Stockwin's Maritime Miscellany (14 page)

The Matthew Walker, the first knot to bear a man’s name, is used to keep the end of a rope from fraying. It is tied by unravelling the strands of a piece of rope, knotting the strands together, then laying up the strands together again. It may also be used for tying several separate cords, in order to keep them together in a bundle.

We may never know who Matthew Walker was but the story goes that he was a boatswain in the Royal Navy who found himself sentenced to death by a judge who had once been a sailor himself. For some reason the judge offered Walker a full pardon if he could show him a knot that he could neither tie nor untie. Walker called for 10 fathoms of line and retired to his cell, unlaid the rope halfway, put in a special knot and then laid up the rope again to the end. The judge was unable to undo the rope and Matthew Walker happily secured his freedom.

John Schank was a British sailor who was very skilled at mechanical design and constructed a cot fitted with pulleys that allowed it to be adjusted by the person lying in it. This won him the nickname ‘Old Purchase’, from the navy term for using a block and tackle to gain mechanical advantage.

Schank was one of the tiny handful of sailors who made the transition from the lower deck to flag rank. He joined the Royal Navy at an early age as an able seaman and ended his career as an admiral. As a young lieutenant during the American War of Independence he was placed in charge of local building of ships to battle the revolutionaries on the Great Lakes.

He was the first person in the western world to advocate the use of a keel that would slide through the centre of the boat and could be raised when not in use. On his return to England, Schank convinced the navy of the value of adjustable keels, and a number of vessels incorporating this feature, most notably
Lady Nelson
, were built. She was sent on a two-year expedition to chart the southeast coast of Australia, and was involved in the founding of a number of settlements there, including Melbourne and Hobart.

However, the sliding keels did have some problems with leakage and jamming, and for a time they went out of favour. Captain Molyneaux Shuldham came up with some modifications in 1809. He was a prisoner of war held by the French in Verdun, but he smuggled out a model of what he called his ‘revolving keel’. It was exhibited at the Adelaide Gallery in London, where it came to the notice of three brothers from New Jersey, who in 1811 patented it in the US as the ‘centre-board’.

This was quickly taken up and became a standard feature on 80 per cent of America’s enormous coastal fleet. In due course American yachts-men saw its advantages, but few British racers took it on. An accident in 1876 was a tragic setback, however.
Mohawk
, a 43-m schooner, had her precarious 1.8-m draught made safe by a gigantic 9.5-m centre-board. Anchored off Staten Island during the preliminaries of the America’s Cup, she was just setting sail for a leisure cruise when she was hit by a squall. Her centre-board had not been lowered and she capsized and sank; the vice commodore of the New York Yacht Club and all his guests died.

More improvements came over the years, and now the centre-board, based on Schank’s pioneering idea of a sliding keel, is standard fitting on yachting craft.

Schank died on 6 February 1823, Fellow of the Royal Society and Admiral of the Blue. Mount Schank and Cape Schank, Australia, were named in his honour in 1800 by Lieutenant James Grant during his exploratory voyage while commanding
Lady Nelson
.

WINDFALL – an unexpected stroke of good fortune.
DERIVATION
: a sailing ship close in to land could sometimes encounter a strong gust of wind blowing down and away from high land. Canny captains would try to take advantage of this to maximise their speed.

The first submarine attack in the world occurred in 1776, against HMS
Eagle
, Lord Howe’s flagship, while it was anchored in New York harbour. It was carried out by a one-man submarine called
Turtle
.

The submersible craft was the invention of American patriot David Bushnell and was an egg-shaped barrel built of oak reinforced with iron bands and fitted with an observation dome. The craft’s dimensions were 2.3 m by 1.8 m. Once in the water the turtle floated just below the surface with its small conning tower exposed. It was propelled manually, the operator steering with his right hand while with his left he turned a crank connected to the propeller. The turtle had an oversized wood screw sticking up from the top with its handle inside the vessel’s chamber. Attached to this screw was a waterproof fuse leading to a mine fastened to the outer hull.

On 7 September 1776 Sergeant Ezra Lee boarded
Turtle
. The plan was that he would manoeuvre the submarine under the warship and then manually drill the screw deep enough into the keel of the enemy ship to anchor it, detach both the screw and the mine, set the fuse burning and move away as quickly as possible.

But the mission was not successful; Lee was unable to penetrate the copper-plated hull of the ship.

Bushnell abandoned
Turtle
and concentrated on other inventions. In 1787 he mysteriously disappeared from his home. It was not until nearly ten years later that he was discovered to have moved to Georgia and become a professor, using the name David Bush.

A replica of
Turtle
was made for the 1976 US Bicentennial.

There have been many outstanding maritime explorers – Columbus had great practical skill, Magellan pushed the bounds of discovery to unknown lands, Dampier was a keen observer of natural history and native peoples of the regions he visited. But in Captain James Cook these skills were united to a degree unmatched by any other in history.

Cook was born in very humble circumstances in 1728; his father was an agricultural day labourer. Cook had the good fortune of having a benefactor in Thomas Skottowe, the local lord of the manor. He helped with his education and later with an introduction to the Admiralty. Cook initially went to
sea
in the merchant navy and then joined the Royal Navy, where he worked his way up to the position of master in 1757.

Cook’s brilliant work in charting the entrance to the St Lawrence River was crucial in the success of the British assault on Quebec. It allowed General Wolfe to make his famous stealth attack on the Plains of Abraham and helped bring Cook to the attention of the Admiralty. This led to his commission in 1766 as commander of HM Bark
Endeavour
for the first of his famous voyages.

The three voyages of discovery that he made between 1768 and his death in 1779 set new standards in navigation and surveying. He dispelled the myth of a Great Southern Continent, established that New Zealand was two islands and discovered and charted the eastern coast of Australia to a high degree of accuracy. The many scientists and artists who accompanied Cook collected invaluable data for numerous branches of study.

Cook was a wise and respected captain and his contributions were widely recognised during his lifetime. In 1779, when the American colonies were at war with Britain, Benjamin Franklin wrote to captains of American warships at sea recommending that if they came into contact with Cook’s vessel to:

‘not consider her an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, not obstruct her immediate return to England by detaining her or sending her into any other part of Europe or to America; but that you treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness… as common friends to mankind.’

Cook was killed ashore in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, in a fight with the natives. His body was burnt and the flesh stripped from the bone, following local funerary rites for a tribal elder. His skull and some arm and leg bones were later buried at sea, but many smaller bones were taken as prized artefacts. In 1824 King Kamehameha II repatriated Cook’s remains to Britain, together with an arrow allegedly carved from one of Cook’s leg bones. However, DNA tests have proved that the arrow is of animal, not human origin.

The legacy of Captain Cook lives on in his charts, which were adopted in their entirety by the Admiralty Hydrographic Department and have only ever been refined since then.

Francis Drake was born on a small farm in Devon in about 1540. He became one of the great Elizabethan sea explorers and adopted as his motto ‘
Sic Parvis Magna
’ – great achievements from small beginnings.

In person he was stocky, with red hair and beard, and the ability to talk straight to anybody. Some called him an arrogant upstart but he was immensely courageous and energetic, and an inspiring leader of men. At one point he famously proclaimed to his crew: ‘I must have the gentlemen to haul and draw with the mariners, and the mariners with the gentlemen.’ This established professionalism at the core of the Royal Navy.