Stockwin's Maritime Miscellany (33 page)

The fate of the remains of Jack the Painter, as he became known post humously, is uncertain. Rumour has it that sailors took down the skeleton and used it to pay an ale-house debt. A mummified finger supposedly cut from his hand was used as a tobacco stopper for many years in Portsmouth.

HAND OVER FIST – financial gain due to a rapid ascent up the ladder of success.
DERIVATION
: a skilled seaman developed great speed and agility for climbing aloft into the rigging. This involved considerable upper body strength, with the free hand passing over the fist in which the rope was clenched as he swarmed up the rigging.

HMS
Royal George
was a first-rate of 100 guns that had served in many battles including the American War of Independence. Flagship of Rear Admiral Richard Kempenfelt, and captained by Martin Waghorn, she was anchored at Spithead on 29 August 1782. Almost the entire crew were on board, together with many visiting women and children as well as dockyard craftsmen.

At 7 a.m. in the morning stores tenders arrived carrying dockyard plumbers and carpenters to install a cistern pipe to provide water for washing the decks. In order for this to be done the ship needed to be heeled over so that a hole could be bored into the side. The lower deck larboard guns were run out and the starboard guns pulled back inboard. Unfortunately this did not give a sufficient heel for the plumbers and shipwrights to work, so the upper deck guns and some of those on the middle deck were repositioned.

After breakfast Captain Waghorn was on the upper deck when the carpenter announced that the ship appeared to be settling in the water. Orders were given to move the guns to right the ship, but suddenly she sank so quickly that over 900 people perished, including the admiral.

Around 300 survived, among them Captain Waghorn. Many of those who lost their lives in the wreck were laid to rest in the old burial grounds of Haslar Hospital at Gosport, possibly including the remains of Kempenfelt himself.

The cause of the tragedy was never established. One theory was that the hull was so rotten that it gave way while being worked on; another possible reason put forward was that the carpenter introduced too much heeling, bringing her gunports below water. At the subsequent court martial evidence supported both arguments but failed to rule out either.

The tragedy inspired the poet William Cowper to write a lament, entitled ‘Toll for the Brave’:

Brave Kempenfelt is gone

His last sea fight is fought

His work of glory done

It was not in the battle

No tempest gave the shock

She sprang no fatal leak

She ran upon no rock

His sword was in his sheath

His fingers held the pen

When Kempenfelt went down

With twice four hundred men.

Bass Strait, separating mainland Australia from Tasmania, is among the most lethal stretches of water in the world, twice as rough as the English Channel. The infamous strait has claimed hundreds of ships and more than 1,000 lives, but many ship captains risked the dangerous passage in order to shorten by weeks their voyage time from the west.

Sydney Cove
was wrecked on Preservation Island in Bass Strait on 28 February 1797. A party of 17 men led by first mate Hugh Thompson set off in the ship’s longboat, heading for Port Jackson, 645 km away; the rest of the crew, including the captain, set up a rough shelter ashore to await rescue. After a few days at sea Thompson’s boat was wrecked and the seamen found themselves cast ashore in a totally unknown land with few provisions. Their only hope was to try to reach Port Jackson some 600 km away by foot, following the coast. Finally, in May the last three survivors, near death, managed to signal an offshore fishing boat which took them to Sydney. Two ships were dispatched to collect the men remaining on Preservation Island, but on their return journey one of these
vessels
was wrecked with the loss of the crew and eight of the
Sydney Cove
survivors.

The female convict ship
Neva
sailed from Cork, Ireland, on 8 January 1835 bound for the penal colony of Sydney. Four months later she entered Bass Strait with a gale on her port quarter. In the early hours of 14 May the dreaded cry rang out, ‘Breakers ahead!’ She struck rocks and her rudder was carried away, then her bow hit the main reef and she swung broadside on. Heavy seas broke over the ship. The straining of the hull caused prison stanchions to give way and the terrified female prisoners and children swarmed on deck. Some of them were washed overboard; others broke into the rum stowage and drank themselves insensible. Four hours after striking the rocks the ship broke up and sank. Of the 240 who had left Cork only 15 survived.

Cataraqui
was a barque transporting assisted emigrants from England to Port Phillip (present-day Melbourne) in the colony of Victoria. She set sail under the command of Captain Christopher Finlay on 20 April 1845 with 376 emigrants and 41 crew. As the vessel entered Bass Strait after six long months at sea, those on board were eagerly looking forward to making land, having been tossed about by a storm for several days. Suddenly, the ship struck on rocks and quickly sank. Eight crew and one emigrant managed to reach shore by clinging to wreckage. Daylight presented the horrible scene of hundreds of bodies strewn along about 3 km of beach. The castaways were stranded for five weeks, living with a party of seal hunters, before they were rescued by a cutter and taken to Melbourne. The loss of
Cataraqui
is Australia’s worst peacetime sea disaster.

The French flagship
L’Orient
was a three-deck floating fortress of 4,500 metric tons and with a crew of 1,100. At the Battle of the Nile she first came under attack from the guns of HMS
Bellerophon
, then HMS
Alexander
and HMS
Swiftsure
continued a savage bombardment.

Aboard the flagship Vice-Admiral Brueys showed the utmost personal courage. Already suffering from a head wound, he was hit by a cannonball that blew off both his legs. Refusing to go below, he had a tourniquet bound around the stumps and, propped up in a chair on the quarterdeck, he continued to issue orders. Brueys was spared the final ignominy of seeing his ship destroyed when a roundshot took off his head.

By about 9 p.m. the ship was ablaze aft, and fire spread up the rigging and mast like a gigantic torch illuminating the battle. The French gunners courageously continued firing, although they must have known their fate. Ships tried to move away to what they hoped would be a safe distance. At about 10 p.m. the fire reached the magazine and
L’Orient
exploded in an incredible spectacle, with blazing parts of the ship hurled hundreds of metres into the air.

After the explosion both sides fell into a stunned silence for about ten minutes and an eerie light pervaded the scene. The noise had been heard over 30 km away. The whole of Aboukir Bay seemed covered with mangled, wounded, scorched bodies. Of
L’Orient
’s crew only 100 or so survived by swimming from the blazing wreck; they were plucked from the sea by British sailors.

All the while Napoleon Bonaparte and his military staff were grimly watching the battle from a tower in Alexandria, 14 km away.

According to legend, Luc, the young son of Commodore Casa Bianca, the captain of
L’Orient
, obediently stayed at his post waiting for his father’s order to leave the ship – an order that never came, as he was lying unconscious below deck.

Felicia Hemans would later write the poignant verse:

The boy stood on the burning deck

Whence all but he had fled;

The flame that lit the battle’s wreck

Shone round him o’er the dead…

In the aftermath of the explosion a survivor appeared on the quarterdeck of
Swiftsure
, naked except for a cocked hat. ‘Who the deuce are you, sir?’ snapped Captain Hallowell. ‘Je suis de
L’Orient
, monsieur,’ came the response. He was Lieutenant Berthelot, who had managed to escape the flames by leaping into the sea. He had removed his heavy clothes before doing so and then realised that without them he would not be recognised as an officer. Hastily climbing back aboard, he fought his way back to where he had left his clothes, retrieved his hat and then jumped overboard again
.

Australian National Maritime Museum

2 Murray Street

Darling Harbour

Sydney

New South Wales

Telephone: +61 2 9298 3777

Open: daily except Christmas Day

The words of the country’s national anthem celebrate ‘a land girt by sea’ and Australians have always had a special connection with the water. Located on the largest natural harbour in the world, the Australian National Maritime Museum has seven main galleries of permanent exhibitions, including the early navigators who mapped the great continent and the long sea voyages of the first settlers. Of special significance in the wonderful fleet of ships and boats maintained by the museum is the replica of James Cook’s
Endeavour
. This vessel returned to Sydney in 2005 having completed 11 years of voyaging around the world and from time to time still takes to the water to bring alive eighteenth-century square-rig seamanship.

http://www.anmm.gov.au/site/page.cfm

Bermuda Maritime Museum

The Keep

Royal Naval Dockyard

Sandys Parish

Telephone: 1-441-234-1418

Open: daily except Christmas Day

Bermuda’s largest fort, the Keep, was originally constructed to defend the Royal Naval Dockyard. Today this 2.5-hectare fortress is home to the Bermuda Maritime Museum, which chronicles the island’s maritime history from the early sixteenth century. The complex comprises seven bastions and eight buildings filled with artefacts and historic exhibits. On the lower grounds, in the cavernous Queen’s Exhibition hall, 4,860 kegs
of
gunpowder were once stored and the building’s floor is made of non-sparking bitumen. The crown jewel of the museum is the Commissioner’s House, which was completed in 1827. It was the world’s first cast-iron building; its girders, red brick and flagstones were shipped from England in the 1820s, while its 1-m thick walls consist of limestone quarried from the dockyard.