Stockwin's Maritime Miscellany (3 page)

Personally bold and adventurous, Cochrane nevertheless took great pains to ensure the safety of his men and was greatly admired by them. To his ship’s company he was a second Nelson and they were intensely loyal to him.

Cochrane once risked his life for a dog. Having lit the fuse on a fireship packed with explosives he was being rowed away when he remembered the ship’s pet was still aboard. He hastily turned the boat back and rescued the dog. Ironically, had he not been delayed by the rescue his boat would have been directly under the falling wreckage and all aboard probably killed. As it happened, the deadly debris flew right over the top of them
.

Cochrane’s kindness could extend to the enemy. In command of the frigate HMS
Pallas
he captured the Spanish ship
La Fortuna
laden with gold and silver and valuable merchandise. Troubled when he heard of the hardship that would be caused to the Spanish captain and his merchant passenger in losing their entire private fortune that was aboard the vessel, Cochrane gained the agreement of his officers and seamen that the two Spaniards should be given 5,000 Spanish dollars each so that they and their families would not be ruined.

As the ship was about to engage the enemy, Captain Thomas Hardy’s clerk Thomas Whipple was checking some details with a midshipman on the deck of HMS
Victory
when a cannonball slammed by. Whipple dropped dead instantly without even a bruise on his body, but his companion remained completely unhurt. This phenomenon had a variety of names – ‘wind of ball’, ‘wind of the shot’, ‘
vent du boulet
’ and ‘breath of the cannon ball’. It is a form of blast injury caused by a rapid change in pressure, particularly in air-containing organs of the body. One naval surgeon in Nelson’s time described it as a ‘peculiar accident… common in engagements at sea’, and went on to explain:

If a cannon ball in its flight passes close to any part of the body, that part is rendered livid and benumbed for some time. It is most dangerous when it approaches the stomach and has often in such cases proved instantaneously fatal without the least mark of injury. At other times marks of violence are conspicuous. What is remarkable is this, that the wind of a ball had never been fatal on the head.

JURY RIG – something assembled in a makeshift manner.
DERIVATION
: in sailing ships it was sometimes necessary to improvise a temporary replacement for an item such as a damaged mast or a disabled rudder and thus enable the vessel to keep going until the nearest port could be made and the stop-gap replaced. The origin of ‘jury’ is not known, but it has been suggested that sailors coined it as a shortened form of ‘injury-rigged’.

In command of the rickety old galleon
Revenge
Sir Richard Grenville was separated from the rest of the English fleet off the Azores in 1591. He could have fled but he chose to stand and fight the Spanish, outgunned and outnumbered 53 to one. Despite these insane odds
Revenge
battled all through the night and the next day and, beating off all attempts to board her, destroyed two Spanish ships. At one stage Grenville ordered his own ship to be sunk, rather than see her go to the enemy, but then relented on condition that the Spanish spare the lives of his crew. Grenville, who had been gravely wounded, died aboard the Spanish flagship several days later.

Revenge
lived up to her name – less than a week after the battle, with a 200-man Spanish prize crew aboard, she was lost with all hands in a vicious storm. The ship’s valiant deeds have ensured that she is one of the most renowned in naval history, and a number of ships have proudly borne her name, including one at the Battle of Trafalgar. The most recent
Revenge
was a Polaris submarine launched in 1969 and retired several years ago.

Tennyson celebrated Grenville’s bravery in his poem ‘The Revenge: a Ballad of the Fleet’, which includes this exhortation from Grenville:

‘At sea or ashore

We die – does it matter when?

Sink me the ship, Master Gunner – sink her, split her in twain!

Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!’

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard’s oldest surviving building is the Porter’s Lodge, built in 1708. Ellis Markant was its first occupant and lived there until his death. He was the public face of the dockyard, the daily interface between the inside and outside communities. One of his most important duties concerned the dockyard muster bell; if it didn’t ring the town wouldn’t wake, shops wouldn’t open and men wouldn’t get to work on time.

His job was ‘to be constantly attending at the gate to open and shut the same for all comers and goers into and out…’ He had to guard the dockyard and its contents, allowing ‘no person to pass out of the dock gates with great coats, large trousers or any other outer dress that can conceal stores of any kind’.

There were some perks to the job; Markant could sell small beer in the summertime, ‘such as is fit to quench the parties thirst that drinks thereof, and to enable them to better to perform their labour, and not such as will distemper them’. His garden produced medicinal herbs such as feverfew (for headache) and thyme (used as a tonic) as well as vegetables for the ships.

AT LOGGERHEADS – in a state of serious disagreement, a sort of metaphysical butting of heads!
DERIVATION
: a loggerhead was an implement used aboard ship in caulking the seams in deck timbers. It consisted of a hollow iron sphere at the end of a shaft. The sphere was heated in a fire and then plunged into a bucket of pitch. This melted the pitch, which was then applied to the seams. A hot loggerhead was definitely something to keep away from…

The last time a hanging, drawing and quartering punishment took place in Britain was on 24 August 1782, at Portsmouth. Scottish spy David Tyrie had been convicted for carrying on a treasonable correspondence with the French. A contemporary account records that he was hanged for 22 minutes and then his head was cut off and his heart cut out and burned. He was then emasculated and quartered, his body parts put in a coffin and buried in the pebbles at the seaside. Immediately after the burial sailors dug up the coffin and cut the body into pieces as souvenirs.

On 26 January 1796 Captain Edward Pellew of the frigate HMS
Indefatigable
, dressed in splendid full dress uniform, and accompanied by his wife, was on his way to a formal dinner in Plymouth, a thriving port town near one of the Royal Navy’s most important naval bases. Their route took them past the open space above the sea cliffs known as the Hoe, with its magnificent view over the harbour – where Francis Drake had famously played bowls in the face of invasion by the Spanish Armada.

Despite stormy weather crowds were gathered on the Hoe gesturing excitedly out to sea. Pellew stopped his carriage and went to investigate. It soon became clear that
Dutton
, a troopship bound for the West Indies, had run on to rocks. Lying broadside against smashing waves she had lost her masts and was listing badly; the imminent loss of all aboard seemed in no doubt.

Pellew urged the onlookers to help (including the officers of
Dutton
, who enraged Pellew at having abandoned the passengers to their fate) – but nobody was willing to risk his life in the seething waters. The situation was desperate, so Pellew decided to go it alone. Quickly discarding his fine attire he threw himself into the sea and seizing the hawser (a large ship’s rope) that the officers had used to save themselves, and which was still attached to the ship, hauled himself hand over hand out to the stricken vessel. On the way timbers from the wrecked masts slammed into his back, but he ignored the pain. When he reached
Dutton
he clambered on deck and drew his sword. Assuming command, he told the frightened passengers three things: that they would all be saved if they quietly obeyed his orders, that he would be the last to quit the wreck – and that he would run through anyone who disobeyed him.

Order was swiftly brought to the chaos aboard, despite the fact that many of the soldiers, believing their end was near, had resorted to drink and were in a sorry state of inebriation. Pellew managed to get two additional hawsers ashore and contrived an ingenious endless rope cradle to convey passengers to safety. Others were taken off in boats that rescuers had eventually managed to bring alongside.

All of the some 500 men, women and children aboard were saved, including a three-week-old baby. Shortly after Pellew left,
Dutton
broke up and sank.

Pellew served the Royal Navy with great distinction for 50 years. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest fighting captains of the Napoleonic wars but has been somewhat overshadowed by Horatio Nelson. He died in 1833, a vice-admiral of the United Kingdom, peer of the realm and holder of many foreign honours.

The Right Honourable Edward Russel was captain-general and commander-in-chief of His Majesty’s forces in the Mediterranean. On 25 October 1694 he served a rather special punch from a marble fountain in his garden at Alicante, Spain. The ingredients
of
the beverage were 4 hogsheads of brandy, 8 hogsheads of water, 25,000 lemons, 75 l of lime juice, 560 kg of fine white Lisbon sugar, 3 kg of grated nutmeg, 300 toasted biscuits and a pipe of dry mountain Malaga. Russel had a large canopy constructed to keep off the rain, and a ship’s boy rowed around the fountain in a mahogany boat, filling the cups of the 6,000 assembled guests. When the poor lad became overcome with the fumes, another took his place.

CUTS NO ICE – makes little or no impression.
DERIVATION
: from an ineffective vessel that could not make much progress in the autumn pack ice of the Baltic.