The doubtful Douro

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A reassessment of a well-known wreck site

The site known as the Douro has been charted since 1980 in the vicinity of the Round Rock of Crebawethan to the south-west of the Scillonian archipelago after having been discovered in the late 1960s. The site assemblage consists principally of manillas, a form of brass currency, and blue and white glass aggry beads, both known to have been consigned for west Africa. Knives have also been recovered. There has also historically been reference made to ‘a lot of pistol side plates’ and ‘hundreds of brass keyholes’ which have added an air of mystery to this wreck. [1]

An ancient, greenish bronze artifact shaped like a curved hook with pointed ends, set against a black background.
Manilla from the site known as the Douro, © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

The Charming Kitty of 1763 in Historic England’s marine records, wrecked at Howick, Northumberland, provides a useful comparator. She was bound from Hamburg to Africa, having been captured on route from St. Kitts for Senegal by a Moroccan xebec, and sent for Saffi on the Barbary Coast (now Morocco), whence the English crew were taken up by Danish and Dutch merchants. The vessel was then sent to Hamburg, presumably as part of the price of the other Europeans’ ransoming of the English crew and vessel, and was on her way therefrom when wrecked. (This in turn suggests she was significantly off course and driven north-west by a south-easterly wind.)

No armament parts are recorded, but an advertisement for the cargo reveals ‘bugle’ or trade beads, knives and padlocks [2], and these were among goods typically used as exchange cargoes for slaves.

The site was first identified as the Douro in 1971 [3] with an unsourced reference to its cargo of ‘armoury and brass stops” which has never been traced, which has further deepened the mystery over this wreck.

The Sunderland-registered Douro was built in 1839, and, as her name implies, she appears generally to have been a regular trader to Oporto and a specialist in the city’s eponymous port wine. Things changed in late 1842 with two Anglo-Portuguese treaties in late 1842, the one a commercial treaty and the other a treaty ‘for the suppression of the slave trade’, both subject to protracted negotations. ‘By the treaty relative to the slave trade, Portugal undertook to punish her own delinquent vessels’, demonstrating that there remained some Portuguese involvement in the trade, despite abolition there in 1836. The debates over the negotiations and the tariffs imposed by Portugal were known as the ‘Douro question’. [4]

A watercolor illustration of the samdbank or Bar of Oporto visible at low water from the fortified Sea Battery in Portugal (nearest the viewer in the foreground). The battery and the viewer look out across the river in the middle distance, with both local vessel types and larger European vessels plying the river, toward the hills in the background.
A familiar sight to the visiting Douro, as seen by Captain J F Boxer, RN: The Bar of Oporto from the Fog Battery, Portugal, 1836
ZBA1548 National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

So what on earth was a British vessel doing with manillas and aggry beads and other cargoes known to have been used in the purchase of slaves, when abolition had taken place in England in 1807 and in Portugal in the more recent past? Curiouser and curiouser – what was she doing, and was she involved in clandestine trade to Portugal’s former colony Brazil, which would not completely abolish slavery until 1888?

We know that the Douro left Liverpool on 18 January 1843 for Oporto. Was she then going onwards illegally (in both Britain and Portugal) to Africa?

On the night of 26 January 1843, the Douro ran ashore among the Western Rocks, Isles of Scilly, the site known as the Douro located by the Round Rock of Crebawethan. She was seen by fishermen the following morning dismasted and thrown onto her broadside ‘with the sea making a complete breach over her’, which suggests some roughness to the sea, and no one was found, which suggests likewise. It seems that the loss was due less to a storm, even in rough seas, than to ‘thick weather’. During the course of the morning the vessel ‘bumped so heavily upon the rocks that she soon went to pieces and part of the cargo came ashore. [5]

A satellite image showing Round Rock, marked with a yellow pin towards the upper left/NW of the image
Round Rock of Crebawethan, north of Great Crebawethan (r) and Little Crebawethan (l) among the Western Rocks, Isles of Scilly, a veritable ships’ graveyard.

That cargo was reported as ‘Manchester goods’ and ‘bale goods’ specified as cotton twist and printed fabrics, a cargo consistent with a Liverpool departure, and possibly at least one other vessel was lost among the Western Rocks of the Isles of Scilly that night. [6]

Was the reported cargo a cover for the illicit cargo? Did the manillas sink with the vessel while the fabrics floated away?

There is also a discrepancy in the contemporary reports for the Douro‘s loss with the site’s known position. She is consistently reported as having bumped over ‘rocks’ in the plural, and the cargo seen ‘on the rocks’, whereas the Round Rock of Crebawethan is a single large rock, not a grouping. At no time was the Round Rock specified in any contemporary reports, and the ship was reported by local boats, which implies strong local knowledge and clarity on the location. Similarly, no one reported any of the cargo that characterises the known site. This wreck becomes more and more problematic the more we look at it.

The vessel’s logbook was discovered shortly afterwards, entering her cargo, and she had ‘cleared out’ from Liverpool, indicating that she had passed Customs outbound. This would suggest that her cargo was entirely legitimate and active patrols by British ships against the slave trade would have meant that a clandestine cargo was a significant political risk. It is true that Manchester and Lancashire cotton textiles were intertwined with the slave trade, the raw materials being sourced from slave labour in the Americas and exported as textiles as an exchange cargo for people.

However, textiles were legitimately exported worldwide, including West Africa. Both textiles and manillas tapped into the existing networks established by the slave trade, repurposed for palm oil instead, and both continued to be sent to Africa post-abolition, the one as a cargo for sale, the other as a currency, both in exchange for palm oil. Other wrecks are known from this post-abolition trade, for example, the brig Hope, also among the Isles of Scilly, while bound from Ghana for London in 1830. [7]

It therefore seems unlikely on location and cargo grounds that the vessel at this site is actually the Douro. The ‘armoury and brass stops’ reference remains untraced and it appears both obscure and archaic for an 1843 cargo. It cannot be made to fit the assemblage at the site and neither works as a description for the manillas, to which they have historically been assumed to refer. Until the reference is properly sourced, ‘armoury and brass stops’ must be regarded as a red herring which sheds no light either on the site itself or on the Douro. In summary, the documentary record for the Douro corresponds poorly with the artefact evidence and raises more questions than it answers.

Only one other vessel has historically been reported as having been lost at the Round Rock, Crebawethan, the English fishing lugger Cornish Girl, in 1873, which, from the nature of its trade, can be excluded as the source of the manillas. Seven other vessels have been recorded in the wider Crebawethan area, but none are a good fit and can be readily excluded.

It is clear that in any scenario pre- or post-abolition the vessel concerned was travelling to Africa: all the clues among the cargo – the manillas, the aggry beads, and the gun plates – all point to a West African destination. While characteristic of the late 17th and 18th century slave trade, such cargoes also persisted into the post-abolition and colonial eras: post-abolition, beads were exported to Africa, as demonstrated by those sold from the Juno, bound from London for Senegal, in 1812. [8]

The cargo in itself suggests that the vessel was wrecked outward-bound, and it appears to be in an easily accessible and choherent assemblage, rather than a scattered debris trail, so that it seems most likely that the wreck event was one of rapid sinking in a ‘straight down’ event, following the initial shock of contact with a feature such as a rock – not bumping several times over more than one rock, as was recorded with the Douro. Therefore, the Douro does not fit in manner of loss either.

The mystery deepens. Who or what was the ship wrecked at the site known as the Douro?

A good candidate emerges in the loss of the barque Custos, of and from Liverpool for Bonny in Nigeria with a general cargo. On 28 August 1856, she struck on a rock in a location variously described in contemporary accounts as the (less specific) Western Rocks, or the more specific Crim Rocks, Crim Rock, and the Crim Reef., not very far from Crebawethan. [9]

A satellite view of the Western Rocks archipelago, with a yellow pin towards the NW/upper quarter of image, locating Crim Rocks
Crim Rocks, north-west of the main body of the Western Rocks, Isles of Scilly

She ‘very soon became a total wreck. The master and crew – 17 in number – took to a boat, and were safely landed, having saved very little beyond what they were wearing at the time of the vessel striking the rocks’ [10]

Variations in recording the location of loss in contemporary accounts regularly occur, while it is not at all uncommon for a wreck site, when found and identified, to lie some distance from the reported location of loss, or from where she initially struck – even where a very specific feature is reported, such as the Crim Rocks. In this case the distance between the Crim and the Round Rock of Crebawethan is 1.75 miles.

The crew survived and took to their boats, apparently landing by their own efforts (rather than local boats attending the wreck, as in the case of the Douro, or picked up at sea by another vessel). It seems probable, therefore, that the initial report of the location came from the wrecked crew, therefore, not from locals. Nor does the advertisement for sale of the salvaged cargo state where it came from other than the vague ‘here’, representing the Isles of Scilly.

In that respect it may be significant that the least specific location, the Western Rocks, comes from the most local paper, and the more specific ones, in terms of naming the location as the Crim, from the national or London press. This suggests that the position of loss as reported by the crew is the one which most probably was reported to Lloyd’s agent, and is thus the version which made its way into the national press.

In other respects, the regional newspaper contains the longest and fullest account and thus, as was usual with local wreck reports, has been synthesised from more than one source. It was published later than the other accounts, on 5 September 1856, and is therefore based partly on observation in the days following the wreck. It draws attention to the salved cargo and suggests that ‘Western Rocks’ is based on observation of the dispersal of wreckage locally; it also suggests that by that time the vessel had disappeared from view even in potentially less than 10m of water as she ‘very soon became a total wreck’. The wreck account for the Douro demonstrates how quickly this could happen.

The Custos‘ salvaged cargo included the following:

‘ . . . 31 pipes and 55 Quarter casks Rum; 25 Bales of Cotton Goods; 49 small boxes soap; 191 Muskets; 2 casks Gun flint; 136 Barrels of Gunpowder; 4 Bags of Manillas; 2 Cases of Matches; and a lot of Staves and Sundries . . . ‘ [11]

Similarly, the bulk of the salved cargo appears to be goods which would have easily floated or potentially been accessible in on a ship resting in the upper holds at less than 10m as charted: barrel (rum, gunpowder), bale (cotton) and case goods (matches), and soap, but a limited quantity of heavier goods, such as the muskets and manillas, were also saved.

The heavier salved goods may therefore represent remains from any portion of the vessel still upon the rock.

The contemporary records of the salvaged cargo are consistent with the African trade even in the post-abolition era and is also consistent with observations on site, namely the muskets, whose ‘pistol plates’ survive, and the manillas.

Further, the reference to manillas is the sole instance so far recorded among the wrecks in Historic England’s database of a contemporary reference to a manilla cargo, and thus the only vessel to be explicitly recorded with a cargo of manillas, This in itself is not necessarily conclusive, but, in tandem with being recorded in contemporary sources as less than 2 miles away, likewise on the seaward side of the Isles of Scilly, is another piece of circumstantial evidence that the wreck is not the Douro, but the Custos, particularly given the security of the evidence that manillas were associated with the wreck (contemporary salvage).

The lack of physical vessel remains is consistent with both the site environment (rocky gullies) and the reported rapidity of the Custos’ loss, and the loss event is interpretable as characteristic of a loss to a single rock at the site where it lies, rather than reef or group of rocks, which seems to have been the case with the Douro.

The rapid sinking is also consistent with the predicted ‘straight down’ loss event legible in the easy accessible and coherent assemblage from which many manillas have been recorded over at least 50 years.

The Douro therefore probably lies at Crim Rocks, which fits the description of the site of loss, and the Custos is the wreck at the Round Rock of Crebawethan, not at Crim Rocks.

The only factor preventing 100% certainty that the vessel is the Custos is the contemporary attribution to the Crim Rock(s), but, as stated above, this difficulty is not insurmountable given the proximity of the Crim Rocks to Crebawethan, and such discrepancies are characteristic of wreck identification processes in any case (see, for example, our blog on the Erard Harp, where the wreck site was some miles distant from the reported location). But, on the balance of probabilities, the likelihood that the wreck is the Custos is very high.

A satellite image of the complete Isles of Scilly archipelago, with the two yellow pins of Crim Rocks (above) and Round Rock (below) in the lower left quarter of the image, showing that they are only 1.75 miles apart
Location map of the Isles of Scilly showing Crim Rocks and Round Rock of Crebawethan, 1.75 miles apart.

The contemporary attribution may in itself be a clue to the cause of loss – navigational error – particularly as it seems that it might well have originated from the crew themselves, and that they were not properly able to identify the location of loss. For over 150 years their report has misdirected attention away from a plausible identification for the manilla site. At the same time, the Douro was lost in ‘thick weather’, indicating fog, so, again, there would not have been perfect clarity as to the location of loss.

By naming the Custos, all the mysteries have been solved: the Douro‘s name has been cleared: not a vessel engaged in clandestine support of the slave trade but a legitimate specialist in the port wine trade, as she had always been, and the Custos is now the most plausible candidate that explains the presence of manillas in the post-abolition era among the Western Rocks.

It also strikes me that this blog, together with the last two, make a complementary trio and strangely, although this wasn’t intentional, the previous two do hint at this one: the Adgillus, like the Custos, was bound to West Africa from Liverpool, for the Victorian palm oil trade. Like the Dom van Keulen, some of the cargo is in the collection of the British Museum (used to illustrate the blog) and other museums around the UK, and we have made an identification on the balance of probabilities through careful examination of the original sources.

We complete a circle as we identify a long-problematic site.

[Article based on a much longer unpublished report by Serena Cant for Historic England, 2021]

Footnotes

[1] reported from the site in the 1960s

[2] London Evening Post, 5 to 7 January 1765, No.5,655, p2

[3] Larn, R 1971 Cornish Shipwrecks: the Isles of Scilly (Newton Newton Abbott: David & Charles)

[4] See Hansard, House of Lords debate, 2 August 1842, Vol. 65, cc935-6, and 9 August 1852, Vol. 65, cc.1178; press reports e.g. the Dublin Evening Post, 4 February 1843, p2

[5] Morning Post, 03.02.1843, No.22,479, p3

[6] Lloyd’s List, 02.02.1843, No.9,017; Historic England Marine Historic Environment Record entries for the other ships lost that night.

[7] Historic England Marine Historic Environment Record entry for the Hope, 1830

[8] Historic England Marine Historic Environment Record entry for the Juno, 1812

[9] Respectively the Royal Cornwall Gazette 5 September 1856, No.2,775, p5; Lloyd’s List, 1 September 1856; Morning Post, 2 September 1856, No.25,793, p8, and the secondary source Larn R & Larn B 1995 Shipwreck Index of the British Isles, Vol.1: Isles of Scilly, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset (London: Lloyd’s Register of Shipping) which, from internal evidence, has been sourced from a contemporary inquiry into the event, not referenced in that text.

[10] Royal Cornwall Gazette, 5 September 1856, No.2,775, p5

The Dom van Keulen wreck of 1633

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A gold coin featuring Arabic inscriptions enclosed in a square on both sides.
Gold coin of Zaydan Abu al-Ma’ali al-Nasir, 1603-1628, Morocco, from the Salcombe Cannon wreck site.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

For this blog we are going to do something a little different: a conversation between Serena Cant, Maritime Research Specialist at Historic England, and Ian Friel, maritime historian and consultant, who has recently identified the designated Salcombe Cannon wreck as the Dom van Keulen, lost in 1633. He is one of the contributors to the British Museum’s 2026 publication From Morocco to the Coast of England: The Story of the Dom van Keulen and its Remarkable Cargo, available as a free download from the British Museum.

Serena: Ian, congratulations on identifying the Salcombe Cannon wreck, now known as the Dom van Keulen. Before we start, I’d just like to introduce you a little bit to our readers and talk about some of the things we have both been involved in. You have been instrumental in making a number of wreck identifications over the years.

Our paths have regularly crossed over designated wreck sites, we’ve been involved in some of the same cases, and share many of the same interests – medieval and 17th century wrecks, so I thought this would be great! I’d just like to say I come at this with an art history and forensic linguistic background, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves . . . but instead look at some of the things you have done.

For example, you identified a ‘ship-shape’ in the mud in the River Hamble as the Holigost, lying next to the Grace Dieu – making this stretch of the River Hamble a 15th century ship graveyard. This work resulted in the Holigost being incorporated into the existing designation for the Grace Dieu site in 2016, in which I played a part.

We were also both involved with the Swash Channel Wreck. When its rudder was raised in 2013, I was asked to look at the figure on the carving. I wrote a paper dating it to the 1630s stylistically, while you identified the wreck through your documentary research as the Fame of Hoorn, lost in 1631. We came to pretty much the same conclusion from different points of view, but of course you went one further and identified it!

Summarise why the Salcombe Cannon wreck site has posed such an intriguing mystery since it was discovered?

Ian: The wreck was investigated in 1995 by volunteer divers from the South West Maritime Archaeological Group, following up the discovery of a group of cannon and anchors on the seabed in Salcombe Bay, by another group of divers. SWMAG’s initial dive located a small gold ingot and some gold coins, which were duly reported to the Receiver of Wreck. SWMAG went on to survey the site in detail, eventually uncovering a remarkable collection of over 400 Moroccan gold coins and other gold items. The site was given statutory protection under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 and in 1999 the British Museum acquired the items, thanks to a grant from the Art Fund. The SWMAG divers and their archaeological advisers deserve enormous credit for their careful work recovering finds that – in a literal sense – have become national treasures.

What came to be known as the ‘Salcombe Cannon Site’ was covered in a BBC ‘Timewatch’ film (2003) called White Slaves, Pirate Gold, which made the not-unreasonable suggestion that the site represented a 17th-century ‘Barbary Corsair’, a pirate vessel from North Africa. Barbary vessels were intermittently active in North European waters from the late 1500s to the 1700s. They were notorious for kidnapping European seafarers and coastal inhabitants and taking them back to Africa as slaves. Recent research suggests that about 20,000 people were abducted in this way from the British Isles and Ireland over that period. The pirates posed a real danger in English waters in the 1630s, the date of the latest of the Moroccan coins from Salcombe.

Serena: It really illustrates the international dimension of shipwrecks, doesn’t it? The original ‘Barbary corsair’ theory was plausible, given that we also have accounts of corsairs wrecked on the Cornish coast as late as 1760 when ‘an Algerine Chebeck (xebec) of 20 guns . . . was entirely lost’. [1]

So this identification places the wreck in a very different context, at exactly the same period as the Barbary corsairs? The Barbary coast of North Africa was at one and the same time a place to be feared, but also somewhere Europeans came to trade as well?

Ian: Trade in this period offered real dangers, but some of the goods available in North Africa were so valuable – such as gold and saltpetre, a key ingredient of gunpowder – that merchants and seafarers took the risks. The Dutch, in particular, had established contacts with Morocco, and traded items such as weaponry in return for Moroccan gold and other products.

Against the high hills of the coastline under a cloudy sky, smoke rises to merge with the clouds, from a battle between a Dutch merchantman closely surrounded by smaller Barbary pirate ships, on the right. To left foreground the wreckage of a pirate ship floats upon the sea, while a group of merchant vessels hang back in the left background.
Hendrik van Minderhout, A battle between the Dutch and Barbary pirates near the coast, late 17th century. A Dutch merchantman, armed for self-defence as so many ships were, including the Salcombe Cannon site, is surrounded by Barbary corsairs: its fate will probably determine that of the other merchant ships visible in the distance. It has already sunk a Barbary ship in the foreground. BHC0876  © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

Serena: It was clearly a lucrative trade, with the Barbary ‘ducketts’ or ducats that were originally on board, and you explain that the gap between the surviving written record and the numbers of ducats discovered through archaeological excavation leaves 8,100 ducats unaccounted for. What do you think became of them?

Ian: The English sources for the wreck are quite limited, consisting of the initial commission to investigate the loss from the High Court of Admiralty (HCA, the legal body concerned with maritime affairs), the testimonies of two young Dutch merchants who were on the ship, and two arrest warrants. The lack of material rather surprised me, because in previous research I had come across HCA records of Dutch wrecks that had generated a lot of paperwork. The reason for the dearth of English sources here appears to come down to the HCA’s problems in Devon: its local Devon vice-admiralty seems to have lost control of maritime jurisdiction to various towns and individuals. The aristocratic Courtenay family claimed this kind of jurisdiction in the Salcombe area, which included ‘the right of wreck’.

The legal concept of the right of wreck went back to the Middle Ages: originally, if someone owned the right of wreck on a particular stretch of coastline, then they had a right to take whatever washed up there, shipwrecks included. (See our recent blogs on Edward III and the Paston Wrecks for medieval right to wreck.) Shipowners and merchants were given some legal protection in the 13th century, with a law that decreed if a person or an animal survived a shipwreck, it was not legally ‘wreck’, and the owners had a limited time-period in which to recover their property. Material still unclaimed after that period expired could be taken by the local owner of the right of wreck.

Alongside the legal situation, of course, there was also a huge amount of wreck looting by coast dwellers, and those further afield. Ships could contain huge concentrations of valuable items, and a shipwreck could dump such a prize almost on the doorsteps of people who had little or nothing.

The law remained pretty much unchanged for centuries, and still applied in the 1600s, leading to numerous disputes, which form one of our principal sources of written evidence for shipwrecks in the period before a widespread press.

The two Dutch witnesses who appeared before the HCA recounted the last voyage of the ship, which they revealed to have been the Dom van Keulen, lost while en route from Saffia (Safi) in Morocco to Amsterdam, commanded by a man named Dirrick Peterson. The goods on board included approximately 9,000 Moroccan gold coins, which the English called ‘Barbary ducketts’ [Barbary ducats]. The two witnesses’ testimonies were virtually identical, and the senior of the two survivors was Jacob Israel de Port, aged about 29, who said that the ship put into a foggy Salcombe Bay because it was leaking so badly, having encountered storms, and the master feared that it would sink. The crew and the two young men all got to shore safely (so the wrecked vessels and its contents were not legally ‘wreck’).

The master had taken 500 gold coins from the chest on board to provide his crew with enough cash to get them home, but had not told his men just how much gold was on board, for fear that they might cut his throat in order to get it. Neither witness saw the ship sink, but the assumption was clearly that the rest of the gold had gone to the bottom with the Dom van Keulen.

One of the arrest warrants names the owners of the cargo as two Amsterdam men called Joao de Pas and Andrea de Azevedo. This opens up some very unexpected connections with the Dom van Keulen story – both were Portuguese Jews, part of a sizeable community of Iberian Jews in the Netherlands who had fled Spain and Portugal in order to escape the Inquisition. For the time, the Dutch Republic showed a remarkable degree of tolerance for these refugees, who were also of course opponents of the Republic’s arch-enemy, the Spanish Empire. Jacob Israel de Port and his colleague, Samuel de Pas, were also evidently Jewish.

I do not read Dutch, though was able to find out something more about Joao de Pas and Andrea de Azevedo and their contemporaries from a large number of documents about the 17th-century Jewish community in the Netherlands that have been published in English.

Historic black and white etching of a man with a beard and a wide-brimmed hat swept upwards from his head, and a wide-collared shirt, typical of 1630s wear.
Rembrandt etching, the sitter traditionally believed to be Rabbi Samuel Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam, who became a key figure in the 1655 Readmission of the Jews to England under Cromwell.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

It’s an extraordinary story in many ways and shows how items found off a Devon bay can open up connections with places very far away from Salcombe in both time and space.

Serena: For me it is interesting because we have a record for the Greyhound, which stranded in another Devon bay, Bigbury Bay, in 1782 while bound for London with a very similar cargo of gum, almonds and Barbary ducats. [2] There were rumblings over ducats that subsequently went missing. Salvage of an illicit kind by what they would at the time have called ‘the country people’ i.e. local inhabitants! Is that plausible?

Ian: The English sources say nothing about what happened. With the 400 or so coins found on site, and 500 that Peterson is said to have shared with his crew, we are still left with about 8,100 coins that cannot be accounted for. One possibility is that the coin chests were salvaged from the wreck soon after the sinking. There was a Dutch salvor called Jacob Johnson or ‘Jacob the Diver’ was very active in Britain and Ireland at this period, and is known to have raised some cannon from a wreck at nearby Dartmouth in 1629. We don’t know what kind of diving equipment he used but it is very clear that he was the ‘go-to’ man for marine salvage in England at this time. However, Dutch sources (below) give a different account of what took place.

Serena: In the book you allude to the fact that the records fizzle out to an extent: we don’t really know why that is?

Ian: The lack of records is probably down to two things, the HCA’s problems in enforcing its writ in Devon, and – if, as seems likely, the gold was stolen – the need of the perpetrators to keep things quiet.

Serena: For me, it is one of the frustrations of shipwreck research: documentation is often extensive, but only up to a point! For example, I know of a Portuguese merchant who insisted on recompense for theft from a wreck over nearly two decades in the early 14th century, but the records then die out and we don’t know the outcome. [3] I rather suspect that the case fizzled out because most of the people involved had died after that length of time!

Ian: My research on the Salcombe finds was just a part of the work on the project. The British Museum commissioned extensive researches by a group of expert archaeologists, numismatists, jewellery specialists and others, and this was published by British Museum Press this year, as you say in the introduction.

I remarked in my chapter that more information might well be available in the Dutch archives, which has proven to be the case. The publicity about the identification of the Salcombe wreck reached the Dutch media, leading to a response from the Stichting Maritieme Historische Databank (Marhisdata) in the Netherlands. Their project focuses on systematically researching historical shipwrecks through archival sources, transcribing and translating original documents using specialised software. They have information on the Dom van Keulen from Dutch sources, which contradicted what the two young men said to the HCA, and accused one of them of a crime.

I haven’t had a chance yet to examine this information in detail, but the upshot is that the insurers of the voyage accused Peterson, his crew and Jacob Israel de Port of deliberately scuttling the ship by boring holes in the bottom. It was they who initiated the arrest warrants in England.

However, this dramatic allegation seems to be no more than that – an allegation, without actual evidence of a crime. None of the timbers or planks of the Dom van Keulen survive on the seabed, so there is no way of looking for forensic evidence in the way of hull boards with holes where there should not have been holes.

It is not impossible that the ship was scuttled – there was no shortage of seagoing criminals in the 17th century – but one cannot help but think that it was easy for the merchants and insurers to put the blame on those who were on the ship for the loss and to cast them in the worst light possible.

There does not seem to be any evidence of what happened to Peterson or Israel de Port. The HCA issued warrants for the arrest of Peterson and the ship’s pilot (navigator) Jacob Clausen, but neither man seems to have been apprehended, and no sign has been found of a warrant for arresting Jacob Israel de Port. The HCA had officials or semi-official ‘commissioners’ it could instruct to carry out tasks, but no actual police force of any kind, and it was probably quite easy for fugitives to disappear, especially if they were sailors who could sign aboard another ship with few questions asked. We will probably never know the full truth of what happened in the Dom van Keulen case, though I hope that more documents might emerge in British or Dutch archives to shed light on the story.

Serena: It’s one of the joys and frustrations of documentary research, isn’t it? What sources did you use, and how easy are they to access and use?

Ian: The main cache of High Court of Admiralty records is at The National Archives in Kew. Researching there is open to anyone who can prove their identity and address, so it’s open to a much wider range of people than just academic researchers, and many people go there to pursue family history or some other kind of personal research.

In order to tackle the 17th-century HCA records firsthand, though, you need to be able to read the handwriting and to understand both Latin and the English of the period. It’s possible that in the future AI will be able to transcribe and translate it, as is being done in the Netherlands, but I’m not aware of a programme of this kind at the moment in the UK. That said, volunteer researchers contributing to the Marine Lives project have put a lot of transcriptions and studies of 17th-century HCA material online.

The documents vary a lot in physical terms. Some consist of individual documents, others are in leather-bound volumes, while yet others consist of groups of documents attached to each other, like big 17th-century jotters. Some of the HCA records are indexed, but there is often no substitute for ploughing through a vast amount of material in a search for relevant evidence. It took me a long time to find anything about the Dom van Keulen, and I was greatly relieved when I spotted the word ‘Salcombe’ in a document!

One general thing I will say about researching the identities of wrecked ships is that it can be a case of trying to balance probabilities. You need the best possible archaeological evidence and the best possible written evidence: in the case of the Dom van Keulen, the upshot of the testimony was that the ship sank near Salcombe in 1633 while carrying a large number of Moroccan coins. The Salcombe Cannon Site was clearly the wreck of a ship from the age of sail that contained hundreds of Moroccan coins, the latest of them minted in 1632. The probability that the Dom van Keulen and the Salcombe Cannon Site were one and the same was so high as to be, essentially, a ‘no-brainer’ once the HCA evidence emerged.

This is far from the case with all wrecksites discovered by archaeologists and others. The number of shipping casualties was horrifyingly high in the 19th century, when we get the first systematic government statistics about marine losses. There are no absolutely certain statistics before that date (except, for naval shipwrecks, which recorded because they were stated property. The further one goes back into the past, broadly speaking, the amount of written evidence declines. This means that anyone researching the identity of a ship has to take an absolutely forensic approach to the evidence, and accept that, in many cases, it may not be possible to conclusively identify a vessel. It can be a frustrating process, but it is also intensely interesting.

Serena: As you rightly say in the book, the name and affiliations of the ship form something of a mystery. Keulen is the Dutch spelling for Köln, Cologne in English. Why would a Dutch ship be named after the Dom of Cologne, i.e. Cologne Cathedral? Do you think it is a German vessel in origin? It’s so different from other Dutch ship names of the era.

Ian: The origin of the ship is still uncertain. The Dutch sources show that is was a vessel of around 200-240 tons, but don’t say anything about where the ship was built. Cologne Cathedral was a Catholic institution, and to name a Dutch ship after it was unusual in the largely Protestant Netherlands. In a 1631 list of 91 Dutch warships, only six had overtly religious names, so the Dutch may not have been keen on the practice in any case.

One thing I would say about this is that it was not at all unusual for ships of this period to have more than one name during their service careers. Names could change on new ownership, or to disguise a vessel that had been used for piracy, and sometimes ships were recorded with their aliases, like the English ship Swan of 1653, alias the Bunch of Blackberries.

Historic oil painting of a street in Cologne on a sunny day with clouds in the sky and the sun casting shadows on calm scenes of isolated people going about their business. The unfinished tower of the cathedral can be seen to centre right, with the crane on top of the tower a recognisable feature of the city for centuries.
Jan van der Heyden, A View in Cologne, about 1660-5, showing the half-built Dom or Cathedral that would not be completed until 1880. The Dutch artist Jan van der Heyden is known to have travelled at least twice to Cologne, and to have painted several views of the city. Other Dutch artists such as Lambert Doomer did the same, suggesting that there were cultural as well as trade contacts between the Netherlands and Cologne in the 17th century. [4]
National Gallery, London, NG866 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0
Historical oil painting of a light and bright but plainly adorned church, with Gothic arches and prominent columns on which hatchments (heraldic devices) are displayed. To the left a man stands in a pew, dwarfed by a column, with a dog jumping up in front of him, and he faces a beggar seated at the plinth of a column to the right.
Pieter Saenredam, The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem, 1636-7, illustrates in both name ‘Grote Kerk‘ (not Dom or Kathedraal, both ‘cathedral’ in Dutch) and the ordering of the physical space the change towards Protestantism in the Netherlands, having formerly been Haarlem’s cathedral in the Middle Ages.
National Gallery, London, Salting Bequest, 1910 NG2531 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

Serena: I agree with these observations: Dutch names such as Eendracht (Unity) were common and popular, reflecting general virtues, rather than saints or holy places. For me the name of the ship is almost the most fascinating thing about it. Ship names might not tell us about the wreck process, but they yield so much other contextual information.

I’ve never come across a name like the Dom van Keulen in the 17th century in over 30 years‘ maritime research: the nearest I can think of in contemporary Dutch sources are names such as Wapen van Edam (Arms of Edam), which reference civic pride in Dutch cities, but never a feature belonging to another political entity. Wapen van Edam was anglicised when captured by the English to Black Bull (the main feature of the arms of Edam), as it was meaningless in English otherwise, and wrecked in the Anglo-Dutch Wars in 1666, so that ties in with what you’ve said about the changes in ship names.

Dom van Keulen seems to me to be a very modern concept somehow – the sort of name that would be bestowed on ships by the great 19th and 20th century shipping lines, named after the places they enabled passengers to reach. It’s really intriguing!

So adding the identification of the Dom van Keulen has closed one chapter – a concrete identification for a wreck that has long puzzled specialists – but opens up another fascinating trail.

Will further research on the wreck continue?

Ian: I have no personal plans for further research on this, but there may be more to be learned from Dutch and English sources, if anyone would like to pursue it. It also strikes me that, in the right hands, this open-ended story could become the basis for a good historical novel!

With many thanks to Ian for participating in this interview and sharing with us the latest instalment in a mystery nearly 4 centuries old!

Footnotes:

[1] Newcastle Courant, 11 October 1760, No.4,385, p1

[2] Sherborne Mercury, 22 April 1782

[3] Navis de Jehsu Christi: Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward II, Vol.3, 1317-21, and Edward III, Vol. 3, 1334-38; Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, Edward II, October 1320 (British History Online)

[4] For a view of Cologne Cathedral by Lambert Doomer, and the background to cultural connections between Cologne and the Netherlands, see Stefes, A 2025 ‘Expedition Zeichnung: Research on Netherlandish Drawings in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud’ Codart online See also the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum’s 17th century gallery of Netherlandish art, with a view of Cologne on the Rhine by Doomer (1 of 10 views in the rotating online gallery)

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are

~ Serena ~ Leave a comment

(Joan Didion, Los Angeles Notebook, 1968)

The wreck of the Adgillus

The wreck of the Adgillus, a 415-ton wooden barque that foundered on 21st October 1874 en route from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa, lies 50 nautical miles NNW of Liverpool. [1]

Given that the usual shipping route to West Africa would be south out of Liverpool, why this seemingly unusual location?

Map highlighting the route from Liverpool to West Africa using dark yellow dots as reported by shipping in various locations: it shows that ships just did not round the northern tip of Ireland but proceeded due south in the Irish Sea and out into the Atlantic
The usual route for sailing ships heading from Liverpool to West Africa.
Map generated using data from the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750–1854 (CLIWOC, https://historicalclimatology.com/cliwoc) and from  https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

Here we explore the materiality of an encounter with the wind, through the loss of Adgillus in 1874. 

October 1874: Adgillus is in Queen’s Dock, Liverpool, loading a general cargo of salt, gunpowder, household ceramics and clay pipes [2] Bound for ‘Old Calabar’ (now Calabar, capital of Cross River State, Nigeria) this will be her second such voyage, and only her third altogether. There’s a story to be told in the trade of manufactured goods from Britain for palm oil from west Africa [3] but for this blog, at least, we’ll continue to follow the wind.

Built in 1873 by Oliver, Québec, under special survey, her sale notice describes this ‘beautiful new barque’ as 143 3/10 feet in length, diagonally iron strapped and entirely metal fastened, with double topsail yards, and patent pumps and windlass, “one of the best finished ships ever built in the colonies”. [4] It also notes she’s fast, sailing from Quebec loaded with grain in just 22 days.

Adgillus changes hands via shipbroker CW Kellock and Co, passing to new owners T Harrison & Co of Liverpool by the end of March 1874 [5] at a cost of £16 a ton. [6] Fitted out for another £1000, Adgillus completes her first voyage to Old Calabar, sailing from Liverpool April 5, arriving by July 18, and returning to Liverpool by 21 September the same year. [7]

It must have been a lucrative venture as her owners plan a second voyage for October 1874, though with a last minute change of Master, from a Mr Brett to a Mr A. Thompson. On the 20th, on 6am high tide and with a fresh SSW wind, Adgillus leaves Liverpool for the second time. [8]

Towed by a tug to the North-West Lightship, NW of Liverpool, the intention is to set the pilot ashore at Point Lynas, Anglesey, before continuing south to Calabar. [9]

Adgillus can be seen to the north of Liverpool (lower right of image, captioned NW Lightship) and to the south-east of the Isle of Man (to upper right of image).
Map showing the location of the North West Lighship, where Adgillus was left by a tug on the night of the 20th October 1874; Port Lynas, where the pilot was to be set ashore, and the the final location of the wreck of Adgillus. Under normal circumstances she would have proceeded south after landing the pilot
Map data from https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright.

The weather for the preceding week has been good, and at 8am the wind is set fair for Adgillus’ passage at SW force 3. The predicted WNW force 5 wind would have been better, but has not materialised. Instead, something completely unexpected happens. As the Met Office weekly summary for October 18-24 1874 states: “even the readings at 6pm showed no indication of what was approaching.” [10]

A hurricane is coming, the worst storm to hit the British Isles since the great storm of January 1866 in which at Torbay alone 40 vessels and over 70 sailors were lost [11],  and Adgillus is about to sail right into it.

Adgillus is still in the vicinity of the North-West Lightship. Around midnight a strong and increasing breeze sets in, blowing from the northwest. Reducing the sails can’t stop the foresail blowing away at around 3am; at 4am the foretopmast-staysail is ripped away too, followed shortly by the mizzen staysail. [12]

The sea starts breaking over the vessel and by 8am a hurricane is blowing from the WSW: Adgillus is helpless with her lee (opposite the wind) side underwater, demonstrating how forcefully the wind is pushing her over. The crew manage to right her, but her patent pumps are now found to be full of water.

In a final attempt to save her, the crew discharge the cargo, but it’s no use and at 2pm she begins to founder. The crew rush to the longboat, now floating from the deck, and all but one make it on board: Antoine Natal, from Malacca, is caught in the rigging and goes down with the ship. [13]

By ‘drugging’ the long boat the crew manage to keep her bows on to the incoming waves and nine hours later, despite the ‘terrific’ sea, Captain Thompson, First Officer Richard Jones; Second Officer Thompson; Pilot William Parry; Carpenter David Robinson and the 12 remaining crew make it safely to Morecambe Bay Lightship. [14]

Though Adgillus has been lost, the master, officers and crew have been luckier than many at sea that night. The inquiry, held the following month, commends the captain and the loss is attributed solely to the ‘force of the gale’, or, as one of the witnesses put it in the usual language of the time, ‘stress of weather’. [15]

The inquiry into the loss gives the sinking position as ‘about 18 miles NW of Morecambe Bay Light Vessel’ (in 1991 recovery of her bell would confirm her position as 54.04722N 003.80764W). In the 14 hours wrestling with the storm the crew had been blown over 50 miles off course. [16]

Wind direction, force and speed are critical factors not only in explaining how shipwrecks occur, but where they end up – whether off course at sea, or forced ashore in a specific location on land (See our earlier blog Sea Adventure for the effects of the wind just north-west of the Wash on the opposite coast of England.)

For sailing vessels, the wind that filled the sails could transform into a terrifying mechanism of destruction at any moment, particularly at a time when weather forecasting was less accurate than it is now.

A dramatic seascape featuring a tall ship battling strong waves under a stormy sky, lit by a gap in the clouds above, but surrounded by dark clouds and a small boat which has also lost its sails in the troughs of the waves to the left.
A Ship on the High Seas Caught by a Squall, known as The Gust Willem van de Velde (II) c.1680 is a depiction of a British warship in distress in a gale, with a sail blown out, showing us the wind direction, and heeling under the onslaught. The small sailing vessel to left has also lost her sails. This painting by one of the major marine artists of the 17th century, illustrates the forces with which seamen had to contend during the Age of Sail: some are climbing the rigging at imminent peril of their lives.
© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam SK-A-1848

The wind still powers Britain’s maritime interests, which have undergone a transformation – from harnessing the power of the wind as a dominant naval and trading power during the Age of Sail, to harnessing the power of the wind to become a leading player in the offshore renewable energy sector in this era of climate change.

This week’s guest article comes courtesy of the Marine Data Exchange Heritage Accelerator (MDEHA), led by Historic England and is the result of a collaboration between Lara Band, Marine Data Analyst (MDEHA), and Serena Cant, Maritime Research Specialist.

By redeploying marine development data into The Crown Estate’s Marine Data Exchange and Historic England’s Marine Historic Environment Record (MHER), MDEHA is making high‑quality heritage information available to support strategic planning for offshore wind and contribute to cleaner energy delivery. In this ongoing cycle of wind shaping both past losses and present and future energy needs, today’s harnessing of wind to mitigate climate‑driven change in turn generates new data that can help conserve sailing ships lost through earlier storms. This data can help to bring to life stories of losses at sea like this one, adding context to the remains that survive on the seabed. MDEHA forms part of the Offshore Wind Evidence and Change (OWEC) programme, led by The Crown Estate in partnership with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

Footnotes:

[1] See Adgillus    https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-gateway/results/record/0d636742-8028-4a8c-8b7c-e1f9aaf2d338/0429bdbb-9d14-445a-ad43-e20dbeb8b636

[2] Ibid.; Liverpool Shipping Telegraph and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 11 November 1874, p4

[3] Samuel, I. 2026. ‘The Oil Economies of Pre-colonial West Africa: Palm Oil and the Industrial Revolution (1800-1891)’ https://www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-oil-economies-of-pre-colonial

[4] Liverpool Journal of Commerce, 27 December 1873, p8

[5] Liverpool Journal of Commerce 21 March 1874, p7; Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 26 March 1874, p4

[6] Lancaster Gazette, 14 November 1874, p2

[7] Liverpool Journal of Commerce, 7 April 1874, p5; Liverpool Shipping Telegraph and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 18 July 1874, p4; Daily Telegraph & Courier (London), 22 September 1874, p6

[8] Lancaster Gazette, 14 November 1874, p2;  Liverpool Shipping Telegraph and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 20 October 1874, p1; Meteorological Office Daily Weather Reports 1st July – 31st December 1874, 20 October https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/IO_f5bd9ddb-b885-4edb-ae77-7c5890960bb7/

[9] Lancaster Gazette, 14 November 1874, p2

[10] Meteorological Office Daily Weather Reports 1st July – 31st December 1874, Summary of weather in western Europe from Oct 18th to Oct 24th 1874 https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/IO_f5bd9ddb-b885-4edb-ae77-7c5890960bb7/

[11] Daily Telegraph & Courier (London), 22 October 1874, p3; ‘The wrecks in Torbay during the gales of the 10th and 11th January, 1866’ The Lifeboat: Journal of the National Life-boat Institution Vol VI, No 61 2 July 1866, p191. Of these wrecks 41 are noted in the records of Historic England.

[12] Lancaster Gazette, 14 November 1874, p2

[13] ibid.; Hull Daily News, 31 October 1874, p7

[14] ibid.

[15] London Evening Standard, 13 November 1874, p2

[16] ibid; Lancaster Gazette, 14 November 1874; estimate of 50 miles off course based on data from the Lancaster Gazette and the record for Adgillus held by Historic England (see note 1)

The Paston Wrecks

~ Serena ~ Leave a comment

One family’s involvement in wrecks

Modern colour photograph of recumbent effigy of man in armour lying on a pillow on top of a tomb, seen in side profile view. Below his wife can be seen carved facing right. The image is partly obscured by the blue altar frontal covering the altar to the right, which also demonstrates that Sir Clement was buried as close as possible to the holiest location in the church.
Chest tomb of Sir Clement Paston (1508-1597) at St. Michael’s Oxnead, who features in the story below, navy man whose prior experience of ships was wrecks on his family’s lands.
The church is listed Grade II* in no small part due to this fine alabaster monument, which features his wife as a kneeling ‘weeper’.
Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0

One of the key landmarks of surviving English medieval letters is exactly that – a remarkable collection of letters sent to, from, and between members of the Paston family between 1422 and 1509. For such a collection of letters to survive from one family is remarkable enough. For that collection to survive from the Middle Ages makes the collection even more significant. Among the jewels of the collection is the first Valentine in English, sent by Margery Brews in 1477 to her betrothed, one of the Paston family. They illustrate Middle English in current use by real people, not literary English as we might think of it from staple texts such as the Canterbury Tales or Piers Plowman, for example.

Another remarkable aspect of the collection is that it contains the first surviving account of a shipwreck in a letter in English – most of our medieval wrecks are known from official, usually legal or Parliamentary sources, or from material such as chronicles or accounts written by historians, which were often written either retrospectively or at second-hand, or both, sometimes also encompassing hearsay or more than a whiff of legend.

So when we read the words of William Pekoc (Peacock) written ‘in hast’ on 19 November 1477 to his ‘ryth worschepffull master’ [William consistently spells ‘right’, then often riht, ryht as ryth] Sir John Paston (John Paston II, 1442-1479), we see a description in the words of a witness, not couched, as so often, in legalese, by those hearing plaints at one remove. This is a servant speaking to his employer about something he has seen with his own eyes:

Also there is a grete chyppe go to wrekke be for Wynterton, and there came up on your several grownd gret plente of bowe stawys and waynescotte, and clappalde grete plente. [1]

[‘Also a great ship has been wrecked before Winterton, and an abundance of bowstaves and wainscot boards were washed up on your various lands, and also an abundance of cask staves’: translated into modern English by the author]

This brief snippet of information yields a great deal of detail – the cargo of worked timber and tar suggested that the voyage had originated in the Scandinavia/Baltic area. There is a useful parallel in the wreck of Le Cristofre, bound from Gdansk for Bristol with a cargo that included tar, boards, staves, and other goods such as pitch and wax, lost in 1389 near Great Yarmouth, not far from Winterton. What this also tells us is that both the wreck on the Paston lands at Winterton and the earlier wreck of Le Cristofre were also operating within the aegis of the Hanseatic League.

William Peacock hasn’t just seen the wreck for himself, he’s doing something about it, hiring carts to carry away the wreckage into town. He also lets John Paston know that his right to the wreck is being challenged: ‘Mastras [Mistress] Clere hath sent down hyr men’ to carry away the wreckage – as John’s tenant, she is claiming right of wreck, but, as William advises his master, ‘There is no maner in Wynterton but your; lesse your ryth now and lesse it for ever’. The manorial right to wreck was not in question in terms of whether it existed or not, but the question of who benefited was certainly a bone of contention: the tenant or the landlord.

William also urges John to issue a writ of trespass against the men of nearby Scroby who have taken barrels from the wreck, ‘or ellis it wool do yow meche harm here after’. William has also appraised the potential of the timber cargo: ‘The bordes had ben good for wyndowes and dores’.

Two weeks later this faithful servant, writing ‘ryth werey’ [‘right weary’] has sent word again to his master, naming the local men responsible for abstracting wreckage from the ship and exactly how much it was worth. He also appears somewhat – but not unduly – concerned, that there is a potential spanner in the works as there are five survivors from the ship. These survivors made it legally not a wreck, even though physically it was one.

In other words, as there were persons alive who could claim the wreck, or make claim on behalf of others, strictly speaking the wreck and its cargo were neither unclaimed nor unclaimable under medieval wreck law. Therefore, although there were clearly manorial rights to the wreck, neither John Paston nor ‘Mistress Clere’ had any real claim upon the wreckage, or at least not without enquiring further into the matter. It would have been different if there had been no survivors . . . but William Peacock refers to the survivors almost as an afterthought! [2]

Medieval wrecks usually survive in the documentary record because they were contentious in some way, often because of disputes over right to wreck – and this wreck is a case in point, even though it is recorded in private letters and not in official documents. William’s letters have left us a valuable trace in the records and all the more for what is unsaid as well as said – in his time, the vessel would have been easily recognised as a ship from the Hanseatic League, but it takes knowledge of trading patterns to recognise this feature, so typical of historic documentary records, which tell us things that were obvious to the reader at the time and so were not explicitly said. The cargo leads us to the implied voyage and origins of the ship, and the circles in which she was operating, and we recover much more detail.

Though the surviving letters stop in the early 16th century, members of such a literate family jealous of their rights and unafraid to exercise them were also bound to turn up in the official record, and they do. In documents that bring half-remembered history lessons at school to life, we learn that the Pastons and the Cleres resorted to the law over the right to wreck with cases heard in the Court of Star Chamber under Henry VIII. Both documents are undated: just at the point the letters peter out, Henry VIII has come to the throne and the two cases could refer to any time during his reign from April 1509 to January 1547.

The first case is clearer: Sir John Clere (1511-1557) brought a case against Sir William Paston (1479-1554) and others, including Sir William’s son Clement Paston (1508-1597) [4] for ‘forcibly obstructing him from enjoying his rights of wreck in the manor of Winterton’, so it seems that this feud between the two families had spilled over into another generation. [3] Sir John Clere succession to his father’s estates in 1529 seems a reasonable terminus post quem for the date of the incident, thus effectively halving the potential date range of the document: we now know the wreck must have taken place between 1529 and 1547.

If we accept the 1508 date for Clement’s (later Sir Clement’s) birth then he would have been 21 in 1529, so it is feasible for him to have been involved from that date onwards. Some of the later dates discussed elsewhere for his birth may make the 1529 date tricky – it is difficult to see him involved in his early teens but his later teens, perhaps. 1529 onwards seems secure, however, and perhaps a little later, as Sir John would not have mounted a challenge without legal title to his father’s estate.

A second case, this time brought by Sir William Paston against Sir John Clere, does not specify the location of loss, but as the two families had butted heads previously over wreck at Winterton in 1477 and in the other Star Chamber Case, it is reasonable to suppose it concerns right to wreck at the same manor, which is also a well-known location of loss with many wrecks historically documented there. [5] It is clearly a different wreck, as different persons are named outside the two principals (a counter-claim would have involved the same ‘supporting cast’, albeit in reversed roles) and must date to the same period – perhaps, if the numbering for the Star Chamber records is anything to go by, slightly later. This time there was an ‘assault on the plaintiff’s servants, arising out of dispute as to wreck.’ A possible terminus ante quem might be provided by Clement Paston’s biography in that he was at sea in the navy by 1544 and was therefore, no longer in Norfolk. [6]

Framing the chronology for the two wrecks in this way clarifies that Clement’s involvement in the first case has the hallmarks of youth and a young man still knocking around at home, so to speak and that 1529-ish is reasonably secure in the first case, and somewhat later in the second.

We therefore have three securely recorded wrecks involving Paston lands, but there may be more wrecks with a Paston connection – not involving their lands, but possible active involvement in what we would today class as piracy. These wrecks are securely recorded – it is simply that we can’t directly pin them on one of the Paston ancestors.

The Paston ancestry is shrouded in some obscurity, as the family was of peasant stock and worked its way up into the ranks of the gentry through education and marriage alliances. The first securely recorded Paston is William Paston (1378-1444) but the 1904 edition of the Paston Letters references a Constantine de Paston, who, in 1330, was part of a group of people engaged in inter-communal rivalry and piracy between Southwold and Dunwich. In two distinct events, at least, this group attacked at least five ships of John de Claveryng [7] and another ship belonging to a widow, Anastasia But [8], and some of these ships were wrecked or sunk. Anastasia’s was certainly sunk, and a detail in the Anglo-Norman texts of John de Claveryng’s complaint also indicates that his ships were wrecked: the word naufrerent is used – ‘they wrecked’ (cf. naufrage, ‘shipwreck’ in modern French), a detail lost in summarising the records.

It’s impossible to say whether Constantine de Paston was in truth one of the Paston ancestors (if so, he illustrates the Paston talent for controversy!) but these stories illustrate that local rivalry, whether of competing ports or adjoining landowners, enables preservation in the documentary record (and possibly also, in the Claveryng and But cases, causes them!) Of ordinary fishing vessels, ships without lucrative cargoes, or of other significance, or those that simply did not give rise to disputes, during the Middle Ages, we tend to learn very little.

This makes the preservation of a wreck record of 1477 in letters in ordinary everyday English that was neither literary nor legalese all the more precious. Without William Peacock we would know nothing about this particular wreck at all, and in all the cases we discover more when we read between the lines, or go back to the original language to see something ‘lost in translation’.

Footnotes

[1] Letter 807, repr. in Gairdner, J [ed] 1896 The Paston Letters, Vol. III, 1471-1509 [Westminster: A Constable and Co.]

[2] Letter 808, repr. in Gairdner, J [ed] 1896 The Paston Letters, Vol. III, 1471-1509 [Westminster: A Constable and Co.]

[3] Catalogue entry for STAC 2/10/25, Court of Star Chamber: Proceedings of Henry VIII, Folio 50, held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C7122306

[4] Clement Paston’s life is dated 1508-1597 in the family tree published on the Paston Footprints website, a collaborative endeavour between the University of East Anglia, the Paston Heritage Society, and Collisions Theatre, and represents the most recent available information; his biography in the History of Parliament Online states that he was born by 1523, which must be the earliest secure reference to his life; his tomb monument states that he lived ‘Twice fortie yeares & somewhat more’, which, if true, places his birth as 1516 at the latest. All this has ramifications for the date of the wreck involved in the subsequent discussion.

[5] Catalogue entry for STAC 2/29/121, Court of Star Chamber: Proceedings of Henry VIII, held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3978192

[6] Sir Clement Paston, MP for Norfolk, 1563, in History of Parliament Online

[7] Catalogue entries for SC 8/39/1929, in Petitions to the King etc., held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9062132 ; SC 8/178/8857, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9294725 ; SC 8/256/12800 Petitioners: John de Claveringg (Clavering). Name(s): de Claveringg (Clavering),… | The National Archives; Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, Vol. 2, 1330-34, p199; p235=6; Gairdner, J, (ed.) 1904 The Paston Letters 1422-1509, Vol. II, accessed online via Project Gutenberg

[8] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, Vol, 2, 1330-34, p62, pp134-5; catalogue entry for SC 8/39/1929 in Petitions to the King etc., held at The National Archives, Kew, accessed via https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9062132

Jolani: from Chance Purchase to Community Enterprise

~ Serena ~ Leave a comment

The Story of a Swedish barque wrecked off Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1916

Modern colour oil painting of barque in port view on a calm blue sea against light grey clouds, dwarfing smaller sailing vessels around her
The Jolani under full sail, by Christer Hägg, former Captain of the Royal Swedish Navy, RSwN, ret, 2026. © and by kind permission of Christer Hägg

We welcome back Maritime Research Specialist Tanja Watson, who writes:

Built in Germany, registered in Hawaii, community-owned for a period in Sweden, and eventually wrecked off the Northumberland coast in November 1916, the barque Jolani had a 40-year career that spanned multiple owners, registries, and oceans. This article traces the vessel’s history from her construction in 1876 to her loss in 1916, exploring how one ship became associated with global trade networks, maritime enterprise, and local memory.

Ship origins and a Hawaiian Connection

Constructed in 1876 at the Johann Ahlers shipyard in Elsfleth, Germany, Jolani was built for tropical service and was notable for her unusually refined construction and fittings. Constructed from pitch-pine with fittings of teak, beechwood, and ebony, she possessed unusually elegant proportions, with the form and grace more commonly associated with a clipper than a working cargo vessel. Measuring approximately 52 metres in length, 9.5 metres in breadth, and 5.5 metres in depth, she was 798 net register tons, 1,400 gross.

The vessel was commissioned for Bremen shipowner H. Hackfeld, whose commercial interests were closely connected to Hawaii. For economic reasons, much of Hackfeld’s fleet operated under Hawaiian registry, and Jolani was accordingly registered in Honolulu, despite being German-owned. The ship’s fittings reflected these Pacific associations. The elegant salon gave her an almost yacht-like character, while a large, signed portrait of King Kalākaua displayed aboard encouraged a long-standing belief that the ship had once belonged to Hawaiian royalty.

Historic black & white portrait photo of indigenous Hawaiian with black curly hair and a curly beard and moustache in a European-style braided military uniform covered with extensive regalia
Hawai’i State Archives image of King David Kalākaua (reigned 1874-91).
By James J. Williams – Hawaii State Archives. Call Number: PPWD-15-4.018, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10830218

That story persisted for decades but appears to have been incorrect. Research undertaken in the 1950s demonstrated that royal ownership was unlikely. Instead, the Hawaiian imagery seems to have functioned as both tribute and commercial branding. Even the vessel’s name reflected these connections: Iolani is linguistically closer to the Hawaiian spelling, as the letter J does not exist in Hawaiian. The name has been interpreted as meaning “God of Heaven,” although alternative translations exist.

Arrival in Sweden and the Viken Years

Jolani entered Swedish ownership in 1884: local tradition says that Captain P. A. Andreasson Lilja suddenly decided on a whim to purchase the vessel at auction in Hamburg for 75,000 kronor. Financing such a vessel, however, required far broader support, and ownership quickly developed into a community-backed venture involving 25 guarantors from the seafaring community of Viken on Sweden’s south-west coast.

The purchase reflected wider developments in Swedish maritime history. During the 1880s, locally organised shipping partnerships flourished during the height of the bondeseglation (“farmer-sailing”) era, when communities pooled capital, labour, and risk to participate in expanding global trade. Within this context, Jolani became one of the best-known vessels associated with Viken, serving as the town’s flagship between 1884 and 1897.

The vessel’s significance extended beyond ownership structures. Captain Andreasson Lilja commanded the ship until 1896 and appears to have developed a particularly close attachment to her, naming a son who was born shortly after the purchase “Jolani”. That son would later pursue a maritime career himself.

Trading Across Oceans

Under Swedish ownership, Jolani entered trading networks extending far beyond Scandinavia. Voyages regularly passed Germany, Holland, and England before continuing towards Mauritius, the Far East and India, South Africa, and South America, with occasional voyages reaching North America.

Although the vessel rarely returned to Sweden, her links with Viken remained visible. Whenever Jolani passed near the town, the large Hawaiian flag retained aboard was reportedly hoisted from the home of principal owner Tufve Pettersson. Measuring almost six metres in length, the flag became a memorable sight above the village’s low buildings—a reminder that this locally owned vessel spent much of her working life on distant oceans.

Historic sepia photograph reprodced in newspaper, so not hi-res, of twelve men arranged in three rows (6-4-2), with the front two holding a lifebelt with the ship's name. All the men are in working clothes with hats.
Photograph of Jolani‘s crew in 1908, with captain Lars Göransson in the centre. Published in Swedish newspaper Kristianstadsbladet, 5 January 1956.

New Owners and the Final Voyage

After leaving Viken ownership in 1897 under Captain Nils Pettersson, Jolani continued under Swedish ownership while passing through several ports of registration. She transferred first to Malmö, later to Åhus in 1907, and finally to Stockholm in 1916.

Her final voyage began in Gothenburg during November 1916, still under Captain Lars Göransson. Bound for Newcastle-upon-Tyne with pit props and railway sleepers, the ageing vessel encountered severe weather in the North Sea. The storm destroyed her sails, smashed the lifeboats, and left the barque increasingly unmanageable before she stranded near Goswick Bay on the Northumberland coast on or around 19 November 1916 with 14 crew aboard. (Becoming unmanageable in severe weather was a not uncommon fate for vessels with railway sleepers as part of the cargo – if they broke loose, due to their size and weight, they were a significant liability.)

Modern internet map of the North Sea with the UK to left (west) and Denmark and Sweden to right (east)
Google map centred on Viken, Jolani‘s homeport until 1897, depicting the intended voyage from Gothenburg (upper right) to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (lower left)

Rescue at Goswick Bay

The Holy Island lifeboat crew were alerted to the disaster and hauled their lifeboat, Edward and Eliza, some 4½ miles across the sands towards Goswick using six horses. Conditions remained extremely difficult, with rescuers wading waist-deep through the swollen channel known as the Gut before launching into the foaming surf. (For more on horse-powered RNLI launches, see this RNLI article.)

Repeated attempts to reach the wreck failed as darkness, heavy seas, and powerful surf drove the lifeboat back towards shore. Nevertheless, the rescuers persisted through the night. Eventually, ropes and lifebelts enabled contact with the wreck, and all fourteen crew members were brought safely ashore during the early hours of the morning. Contemporary descriptions vividly portray the disintegration of the vessel, with masts collapsing and gradually breaking up as rough seas crashed over the hull.

An account published in a Swedish newspaper in 1956 equally vividly described the conditions aboard (translated from Swedish):

The river rose, so that no one could get ashore. It was a difficult time for the 14 people on board. Huge rough seas constantly crashed over the ship. The fore and main masts snapped and went overboard. The planks were literally torn away from the hull, and the stern was torn off just before the cabin. The mizzen rig remained standing, however, and those on board clung to it, while the ship was gradually ground to coffee grounds in the cauldron of rough seas. It was not until nightfall that the coast guard, with the help of rocket launchers, was able to get out its lines and rescue everyone on board. (Kristiansbladet, Thursday 5 January 1956, p11)

Members of the lifeboat crew were later recognised by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for their actions during the rescue and the Jolani is a good example of a wreck lost during wartime that was not lost to war causes.

Artefacts and Legacy

Today, much of Jolani’s history survives through the collections of Viken’s Maritime Museum. Preserved artefacts include four original logbooks, photographs, literature, a silver leaf artwork from Cape Town depicting the vessel, and an armchair from the captain’s cabin donated by descendants of the Lilja family, as well as paintings by Allan Fröjd, T. G. Purvis, and Christer Hägg.

Open wooden sea chest with a portrait of the ship Jolani painted inside the lid in a half-moon set against a painted orange background, and inside the body of the chest three closed dark wood compartments
Hand-painted sea chest belonging to Jolani’s last captain. © Vikens Sjöfartsmuseum (Viken Maritime Museum), Sweden, June 2026

Interest in Jolani continues today through ongoing research and public engagement. This blog is published to coincide with a presentation at the Viken Maritime Museum on 26 July 2026 by marine artist and former captain in the Royal Swedish Navy, Christer Hägg exploring the history of the vessel alongside two newly completed paintings inspired by Jolani and her long maritime career, and celebrates the international connections that make research into our wrecks possible.

With many thanks to Vikens Sjöfartsmuseum and Christer Hägg for their very kind help and an interesting collaboration and exchange of ideas: for our part, we were able to provide more details on the vessel’s fate and contextualise her type by reference to other vessels of the period wrecked in our waters. And, of course, once again many thanks to Tanja for writing this blog!

References

Illustrated Berwick Journal, “Details of Wrecked Vessels”, Thursday 23 November 1916, p. 5

Kristianstadsbladet, “Julseglats med kungaskeppet Jolani”, by Orvar Nilsson, Thursday 5 January 1956, p. 11

Lloyd’s List, Friday 24 November 1916, p. 7

Liverpool Journal of Commerce, https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?206803, accessed 2 June 2026 

South Wales Daily News, Friday 24 November 1916, p.6 Top of Form

The Times, “Casualty reports”, 24 November 1916, p. 14

Vikens Sjöfartsmuseum, https://vikensbyaforening.se/fartygshistorik/, accessed 2 June 2026 [in Swedish]

Email correspondence with Vikens Sjöfartsmuseum and Christer Hägg, June 2026.

A Summer Trip to the Sea

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Historic sepia photograph of a two-masted ship to centre of the image, ashore in the surf, with visitors on the beach to foreground and beside the wreck at centre right
The brig Avance ashore
JRC01/01/122/030 Source: Historic England Archive

We have a close relationship with the Historic England Archive, source of some of the excellent images which tell a maritime story in many of these blogs – very often we are able to collaborate and tell a story that has never been told before, such as finally locating the last known images of Cretehawser and Cretestem at Hendon Dock in WWII.

Sometimes we are approached to identify a wreck image from newly-acquired or -identified collections. This was the case with the image showcased here, from the Janette Rosing Collection acquired by Historic England as part of the UK Government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme in 2025.

The only written clues that we had to go on were that the ship ashore was the brig Avance and the location was the Yorkshire coast. No date, no precise location, no nationality or cargo: just the ship’s name, a type, a rough location on a lengthy stretch of coastline, and the internal evidence within the photograph.

It clearly couldn’t be earlier than the medium of photography itself, so that ruled out a date before around 1850-1860: the clothes worn by the people in the photograph suggested a date in, perhaps the last 20 years of the 19th century or perhaps at most the first 10 of the 20th: stylistically a little earlier, around 1885-1895, I felt was probably a good guess.

The first port of call was to search within Historic England’s National Marine Heritage Record for any wrecks called Avance, but the three wrecks of this name could all be eliminated on the grounds of location, date, vessel type and manner of loss: the Avance schooner of 1815, from an East Prussian milieu, is the wrong type, is too early, and was wrecked in Chale Bay, Isle of Wight; a British fishing vessel of this name was captured and sunk by German submarine off Portland Bill in 1917; and the last ship known as Avance was a Swedish steamer torpedoed and sunk off Flamborough Head in 1918 – certainly off Yorkshire, but in deep water, and the wrong vessel type in any case.

The wreck looks fresh, as if it had newly occurred: the vessel doesn’t look greatly the worse for wear – although appearances can sometimes be deceptive on that score – but it is enough to tell us that the wreck is recent. The bows of the ship are to the right of the photograph, which, combined with the knowledge that the location is said to be on England’s east coast, suggests a southbound vessel, i.e. bows pointing south. The ship is broadside on to the shore and clearly lies in the inter-tidal zone with the sea partly surrounding her – the photo has been taken at the point that the stern is in the water but the bows remain dry – so we can tell that this is a stranding or a grounding (vessel temporarily ashore, later recovered).

The numbers of visitors suggest fine weather, warm and dry enough for what is presumably a family group sitting on the sand, and a larger group of men, women and children approaching the wreck. Indeed, one man and a boy at the bow end are very close to the wreck – they don’t seem to be concerned about her collapsing on them – but the further group seems more aware of the photographer than the family nearest the camera, as most people are turned or turning towards the camera (the older young lady in the group nearest the viewer seems to be laughing into the camera, however).

The whole is redolent of a summer visit to the seaside with the stricken ship as an attraction in, perhaps, the last two decades of the 19th century, judging from the clothes. The cartouche visible astern (to the left of the photograph) suggested a possible Norwegian origin for the ship, as do her lines and colour scheme. At that stage this was a hunch built on experience rather than anything concrete, but the ship’s own name supports this idea in that two of the three wrecks with this name in our records came from a Scandinavian/Baltic context.

For tourists to visit the wreck, it must have been in the news – and in the late 19th century, shipwrecks were newsworthy, filling up many column inches in the specialist (Lloyd’s List), regional, and national presses. So it was to the British Newspaper Archive I turned, in order to find this particular needle in a haystack. It wouldn’t be any good looking for ‘Yorkshire’, for example, as the wreck was likely to be reported from the actual place of loss or a nearby town, which at this stage was still unknown. At least this ship wasn’t a Friends or Two Brothers (the Smith and Jones of the maritime world).

I tried a basic keyword search first: brig + Avance, trusting to the fact that the name was sufficiently unusual + narrowed down by vessel type for hits to be readily identifiable immediately, but without unnecessarily narrowing it down, perhaps incorrectly, with the hunch it might have been Norwegian. This brought up the following from the Hornsea Gazette:

Very early on Wednesday morning [24 June 1891], the Norwegian brig Avance of Risor [Risør], 211 tons, Captain O. Olsen, laden with pit props and birch, and bound from Carlscrona [Karlskrona] to Hull, came ashore during a fog, about 100 yards south of the pier. . . The vessel was lying broadside to the sea, driving up on the rising tide . . . The vessel continued to drive up until high water at six o’clock, and when the tide fell again, she was left high and dry. [1]

I knew we had our ship: Norwegian, as I had surmised; southbound from Sweden for Hull, broadside on to the sea, in the inter-tidal zone, on the Yorkshire coast, in summer, and within the last 20 years of the 19th century. The vessel ‘fell over on her bilge’ on Thursday 25 June, which is the state in which we see her in the photograph. The crew started to throw the deck load overboard in order to lighten the vessel, but there was some difficulty getting locals to assist since the pit props were ‘worth little in this locality’ – being consigned after all for the South Yorkshire coalfields via Hull – but eventually ‘a few young men worked through the night’ to salvage the cargo. There is no sign of the deck cargo in the photograph, so it must have been taken after that point.

On Friday 26 June an attempt was made to tow the ship off but her position was ‘more unfavourable’ and it was unsuccessful, blamed on the delay in unloading the cargo. ‘She is an old vessel, having been built in 1857, and as the tides are falling off, it will probably be some time before she is got afloat, even if she ever sails the seas again.’ As there is no sign of the deck cargo in the photograph, it was probably not until after this attempt on Friday 26 June that the photograph was taken, so that narrows the date range by another day.

It must be have been taken before two tugs from Hull attempted to refloat the brig on Sunday 5 July. This attempt was unsuccessful and a third tug had to be sent for from Hull to accomplish the task, with £90 at stake from the underwriters for successful completion of the mission. At high water on Monday 6 July ‘their perseverance was rewarded . . . by a series of cleverly-managed rushes or jerks gradually dragging her over the shallows.’ [2] The operation was watched by ‘the residents and visitors, and there was no little cheering and waving of hats from the large gathering . . . ‘ so the Avance was a tourist attraction from first to last – a twelve days’ wonder for the summer season at Hornsea in 1891. No wonder the ship looked relatively unbattered and a ‘fresh wreck’, as I thought when I first saw the photograph.

No wonder, too, that the ship was unrecorded in our database, since she did not, after all, end up a wreck! On the other hand, we have confirmed that the minimal documentation associated with the photograph is correct, provided a fairly narrow date window and precise location for it, and helped our Archive colleagues.

Interestingly, the newspaper report places the wreck in relation to a now-vanished pier built in 1880, but bedevilled by financial and structural problems from the outset, being demolished in 1897. It was exactly contemporary with this photograph, which was clearly taken from a vantage point south of the pier looking towards the wreck, but of the pier too no trace remains. What we see is a summer photograph that is a snapshot in time for late Victorian tourism in Hornsea.

Our blog A Detective Story tells the story of another image identified for the Historic England Archive, which also became a tourist attraction, and for another that drew the crowds over the Easter holidays in 1919, see A Tourist Attraction. With many thanks to our Archive colleagues for bringing this to our attention and for their collaboration over many years.

Footnotes

[1] Hornsea Gazette, 27 June 1891, No.1,470, p4; details of the vessel and her build are in confirmed in Det Norske Veritas: Klasseregister over Norske Skibe 1890 (Christiania (Oslo): Carl C Werner & Co.) in both Norwegian and English, although the port of registry is stated as Østerrisør, the former name of Risør.

[2] Hornsea Gazette, 11 July 1891, No.1,472 p4

The Life and Loss of the Finnish Barque Vanadis (1874–1903)

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Oil painting of the ship under full sail, bows to the right of the image, on a stylised blue sa and under grey-blue skies
A 19th-century oil painting of the Vanadis under sail, by unknown artist, courtesy of Pietarsaari (Jakobstad) Museum, Finland. Between 1809–1917, when Finland was a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, Finnish ships used the Russian national (civil) ensign for merchant purposes. The Russian white-blue-red tricolour was also the official flag of the Grand Duchy.

Introduction

As part of the Nordic Shipwrecks project my colleague Tanja Watson, Maritime Research Specialist, has taken a look at a Finnish shipwreck on the north-west coast. Finnish wrecks form a rather unusual nationality sub-group in Historic England’s National Marine Heritage Record (NMHR), [1] where Finnish vessels currently account for just under 3.5% of England’s records of over 1,600 Nordic shipwrecks.

This is the story of a regular cargo vessel, Vanadis, wrecked in bad weather on 22nd February 1903 in Morecambe Bay. The remains of the wooden hull lie embedded in the sand in a small, shallow embayment called Half Moon Bay on the Heysham coastline in Lancashire, north-west England. Occasionally exposed to beachgoers by weather and changing sands, they serve as a reminder of the elegant three-masted ships that sailed this coastline some 120 years ago.

Vanadis (Vanadís) is an epithet for Freyja – the Norse goddess of love, beauty, fertility, war, and magic. [2] For almost thirty years the Finnish sailing vessel crossed the world’s oceans, carrying coal, timber, and trade between Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. Built in 1874, it survived hurricanes, volcanic catastrophe, collisions, and the loss of crew at sea – only to be lost in the comparatively confined waters of Morecambe Bay – due to extreme weather, mechanical failure, and difficult navigational decisions – but thankfully without any loss of life.

Construction

The Vanadis was built in 1872-74 by master shipbuilder Johan Löfhjelm (1816-1878), at the Carlholmen shipyard in Jakobstad (now called Pietarsaari), on the west coast of Finland. It was one of three built for Otto August Malm of The Malm Trading House, one of the most prosperous shipping magnates at the time. Launched on 19 September 1874, the vessel was constructed as a full-rigged, three-masted wooden fregattskepp or frigate [3] copper- and iron-fastened, carvel-built, and sheathed with felt and yellow metal. It had one deck and was roughly 56 metres in length, 11m in breadth, and 10m in height (185 ft × 35 ft 1 in × 33 ft 3 in), with a carrying capacity exceeding 1,000 net register tons. It was one of three large frigates built at the yard for Otto Malm, the other two were called Equator and Europa. [4]

By the late nineteenth century, the Vanadis had been converted from a full-rigged ship to a barque, reflecting changes in crewing practices and economic conditions. (A barque retained much of the speed and cargo capacity of a full-rigged ship but was easier to operate, requiring fewer crew.)

Eventful voyages

Throughout its career, the Vanadis demonstrated both the resilience and vulnerability of wooden deep-sea sailing ships – captured in letters written by its crew members, held by Pietarsaari (Jakobstad) museum and compiled by Jukka Mikkola. [5] These track passages to Singapore, Java, Hong Kong, New York, South Africa, and later repeated timber runs between North America and Europe.

Its first voyage to England took place two months after its launch, on 12 November 1874, destined for Hull. Some particularly eventful voyages are recorded for the following years:

1882: Tragedy struck the frigate on 7 December, while en route from Cardiff to Singapore, the frigate encountered a severe storm in the English Channel. Heavy seas swept across the deck, carrying five crewmen to their deaths; a sixth later died of stomach trouble. The ship sought refuge in Falmouth before continuing its voyage.

1893: In August, Vanadis was sailing near Krakatoa, Indonesia at the time of the catastrophic volcanic eruption. Ash fell onto the vessel, a thick layer of pumice floated on the sea, and the ship sailed for a week half buried in debris from one of the most violent natural disasters in recorded history.

Historic black and white photograph of explosion of Krakatoa, seen from the sea: large clouds of dust and smoke rise up in the air. The image has been historically retouched and enhanced in a fashion typical of late 19th to early 20th century photos to bring out the key subject.
De uitbarsting van de Krakatau, University of Leiden, public domain
https://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:788817

1894: In July, the Vanadis was struck by a hurricane as it sailed towards the Florida coast. The ship was battered for many hours by storm force winds but arrived in Pensacola, despite all sails having been blown to shreds and severe damage to masts and rigging.

1898: On 25 August the Vanadis left Plymouth heading for the north American coast to pick up a cargo of timber. On 2 October they were hit by another massive hurricane north of the Bahamas. The main top sails were torn to pieces and the mast was destroyed. Somehow the crew survived and set to work to put up masts out of the wreckage left on the decks and rig up the sails and get the ship sailing again. In a letter to his wife, first mate Frans Hägglund described this hurricane as so devastating the Vanadis could easily have been ‘lost with all hands’. But after a few more days at sea the ship was able to limp into the city of Savannah in Georgia. The Vanadis stayed there until early 1899 as repairs took many months. [6]

On 27 July 1899 the vessel was sold to Captain John Andersson and his partners Victor Sundman and K A Karlsson, of Mariehamn, Åland (now part of Finland). Under new ownership, it continued to trade primarily in timber, making repeated transatlantic voyages between Georgia and northern Europe.

Mechanical failure

Vanadis set off on what was to become its final voyage on 12 January 1903, departing Darien, Georgia, for Fleetwood, Lancashire, with a cargo of pitch pine and softwood logs. The passage was difficult for the fifteen-strong crew. The vessel was reported overdue to Lloyd’s of London before finally being sighted off Rathlin Island (Northern Ireland). After 41 days at sea, it finally reached Fleetwood about 5pm on Sunday 22 February 1903. The weather at the time was exceptionally mild (14°C). A “spectacular dry dust fall”, likely originating from the Sahara, had darkened the skies earlier that day and covered everything on land with yellow sand, while there were storms at sea. [7]

Pilot Albert Iddon boarded the barque at the Morecambe lightship and anchored it, with sails furled, in Lune Deep near Wyre Point. Gale-force winds from the southwest rapidly worsened. During the night, the ship’s windlass failed on the starboard side, placing enormous strain on the anchor cables. The chains were torn from the hold, resulting in the loss of both anchors and cable, leaving only a spare anchor without cable. [8]

Later testimony from Jakobstad museum records indicates that the windlass had not been properly maintained by the new owners, a fact agreed upon by both captain and pilot as the primary cause of the wreck. The windlass was a critical, heavy-duty mechanical device located on the forward deck (forecastle) used to raise the anchors and manage anchor chains. By the turn of the 20th century, these mechanisms had evolved from simple manual devices into sophisticated, often steam-assisted, machinery.

Sepia pen and ink drawing of seven men pulling on a windlass aboard ship: six men, three on either side, operate the windlass, while the 7th man in left foreground pays out the chain. The image is canted at an angle to right, suggesting the movement of a ship at sea, while seagulls fly in the sky.
Print of a wooden windlass in use, from Dr. Isaac I. Hayes, Cast Away in the Cold: An old man’s story of a young man’s adventures as related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner (Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers: 1892) Public domain: Wikimedia Commons

Heysham Rescue

The pilot advised the Master, Karl Oskar Karlsson, to head for the sandbanks at Heysham, as this was considered the safest area in Morecambe Bay: anywhere else was too risky. The vessel reached a position at 54.3N, 2.54W NNE of Heysham Pier with high tide at 8.07pm.

According to Pilot Iddon, the ship experienced a calm night with very little rolling. However, at 3am, one of Vanadis‘ lifeboats was launched carrying five crew members and Pilot Iddon, reaching the shore just 100 yards away without difficulty. The men then walked to the Higher Heysham post office, arriving at around 4am. As there was no immediate danger, the captain and nine crew members remained aboard the Vanadis. They would have been able to disembark at low tide since the vessel was lying level; however, as the tide rose, the gale intensified and by dawn it was making signals of distress. At 7:30am, the lifeboat station at Fleetwood fired a gun after harbour authorities received a telegram confirming that Pilot Iddon and five crew members were safe. The lifeboat crew launched the lifeboat Maude Pickup at 8am, setting sail towards the Vanadis 12 miles away, in very rough seas, reaching the vessel in under an hour, and rescuing the remaining 10 crew. The ship had run aground on Sunderland Bank at the entrance to the River Lune, but with no effective anchoring capability and conditions deteriorating, it floated off the bank and drifted up past the entrance to the new Heysham Harbour (not open to ships until 1904). [9]

Breaking Up

Newspaper and maritime reports from February and March 1903 documented the vessel’s rapid deterioration. The Vanadis had missed stays, had sprung a leak, and was full of water. It lay partially submerged and slowly sinking deeper into the sand close to the pier at Heysham, having unshipped its rudder. By 25 February it lay almost dry but was unfavourably positioned; a day later, embedded in sand, it was losing ground as strong westerly winds drove water into its hull. It was condemned as a total loss. [10]

Once condemned, a hole was cut in the stern to access the hold. The cargo of softwood logs was hauled out by horses and carts and sold to the highest bidder. The hull was partially stripped for scrap metal, while masts, decking, and superstructure were cut away. Over time, the remains slowly broke apart on the beach until “virtually nothing was left” above the sand. [11]

Historic black and white photograph of the Vanadis, seen in port bow view with her masts having collapsed over the side. An inset at top right shows the detail of the figurehead from the same photograph.
The stranded Vanadis with broken masts, and figurehead still intact. The figurehead [inset] may still exist: it was displayed in the rose gardens of Heysham Head until it closed (date unknown). It was a carved full-length figure of a woman in a long dress with large collar, painted in pale colours, with dark, pinned hair, standing on a plinth. Image courtesy of Lancaster Maritime Museum.

Today’s remains

Modern digital colour photograph of the 'ship shape' of the exposed hull timbers full of sand and pools of water, looking out towards the sea.
Remains of the Vanadis, taken by Ian Taylor, 12 February 2010
Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Photographs of Vanadis aground are preserved in Lancaster Museum and Heysham Heritage Centre, while archaeological investigation has confirmed the extent of dismantling and loss. Although largely buried, elements of Vanadis continue to surface on re-exposure due to the shifting sands, a feature common to the several other ships also known to have been lost in the area over the last few centuries.

A three-foot long cannon was recovered from the wreck in 2005 by two Heysham locals, believed to date from the ship’s earlier service in eastern seas when defensive armament was common against pirates. The cannon is displayed at the Heysham Heritage Centre, along with the ship’s bell and several other items salvaged from the site.

Modern digital colour photograph of a black cannon displayed indoors on a black wheeled gun carriage
The Vanadis cannon, displayed on a modern gun-carriage. Photograph by Graham Dean: image by kind permission and courtesy of Heysham Heritage Centre



Footnotes

[1] At the time of writing in 2026, the NMHR is currently publicly accessed via the Heritage Gateway portal

[2] Vanadís – as Vana dís – occurs as an epithet for Freyja in the Skáldskaparmál within the Prose Edda, compiled by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) in Old Icelandic: cf also the element vanadium, named after Vanadis by the Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström (1787-1845). It seems to have been a reasonably popular name in contemporary Scandinavian circles – see, for example, four Norwegian ships of this name in Det Norske Veritas 1879, p405, and HM Fregatt Vanadis (HSwMS Vanadis), commissioned 1862.

[3] Although a cognate, the English word ‘frigate’ does not accurately convey the vessel type, as in English it has historically predominantly referred to a warship during the age of sail or later. In the Nordic languages fregatt or fregattskepp (and variants) instead refer (by transference from the form of warship so called, which was also the initial primary meaning) to a three-masted full-rigged fast-sailing ocean-going vessel such as the Vanadis: see Store norske leksikon: fregatt. Although by no means an exact equivalent, the English-language clipper ship such as the Cutty Sark is both contemporary with, and better conveys the function of, the non-naval Nordic fregattskepp in English.

[4] Larn, Richard & Bridget. Shipwreck Index of the British Isles, Volume 5: West Coast and Wales. Section 2, Lancashire, 2000; ‘Vanadis’, by Jukka Mikkola. https://www.jamikko.fi/Purjelaivat_Vanadis.htm, accessed 14 Jan 2026; ’Jakobstad’, Uppslagsverket Finland, https://www.uppslagsverket.fi/sv/view-170045-Jakobstad, accessed 14 Jan 2026; wrecksite.eu, ‘Vanadis’: UK Hydrographic Office Wreck Report and information from Lloyd’s Register, compiled by Chris Michael. https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?65359, accessed 14 Jan 2026 [subscription required].

[5] ‘Vanadis’, by Jukka Mikkola. https://www.jamikko.fi/Purjelaivat_Vanadis.htm, accessed 14 Jan 2026. This is the source for all the voyages described.

[6] ibid; “Shipwreck still interests Heysham inhabitants”, The Visitor, published 8 Nov 2007. pdf, , accessed 14 Jan 2026     

[7] wrecksite.eu; ‘Weather – Feb 1903’, https://community.netweather.tv/topic/99882-february-1903-exceptionally-mild-a-dustfall-and-a-great-gale/, accessed 19 Mar 2026

[8] Åland Newspaper Report, 25-FEB-1903, No.16, pp 2, 4.

[9] The Visitor

[10] Åbo Underrättelser [in Swedish] 03-MAR-1903, No.60, p 3; 04-MAR-1903, No.61, page 3; 06-MAR-1903, No.63, page 4; Historic England Archive, Archaeological Diving Unit, Report No. ADU 97/04: Vanadis, Half Moon Bay, Heysham

[11] ibid; ‘Weather – Feb 1903‘

Edward III – a keen interest in wrecks

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Historic mid 20th century photograph in black and white in close-up side view of the effigy head of Edward II, showing his long, wavy hair and beard, a prominent nose, and well-defined eyebrows
Detail view of the gilt bronze head of Edward III on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, believed to have been based on his death mask, photographed by Eric de Maré. AA98/06219 © Historic England Archive

Two wrecks from the 1350s

The medieval wrecks project and what we know so far

Our ongoing research project into medieval wrecks seeks to provide a sounder documentary knowledge base for future finds such as those of the designated Mortar Wreck dating to the mid 13th century, particularly in understanding patterns of trade and the discovery of new shipwreck events to close the documentary gaps.

As predicted from previous research into medieval wrecks, the strongest evidence comes from the reign of Edward III (1327-1377). The records for the fifty-year span of his reign comprise exactly one-third of our known records for the nearly 5 centuries between 1066 and 1540 traditionally accepted as the medieval period. Undoubtedly record creation and survival play their part, as does the sheer length of his reign, but there is equally no doubt that here was a king particularly interested in matters of rights to wreck, whether they pertained to himself or his queen, Philippa of Hainault, or whether restoring goods to shipwrecked merchants who had seen them ‘taken into safe custody’ by local inhabitants.

In this he followed in the footsteps of his father, Edward II (1307-1327), who seems to have been similarly interested, with 11% of our documented wrecks over a 20-year reign. Therefore records under those two kings between them account for 44% of our known shipwrecks for the Middle Ages, or over two-fifths.

Edward III’s successor, his grandson Richard II, reigned for a similar length of time as his great-grandfather, Edward II, in fact slightly longer (1377-1399) but only 8% of our known wrecks for the Middle Ages derive from his reign. In the following reign, that of Henry IV (1399-1413), interest appears to have fallen off a cliff, accounting for 3.5% of our documented wrecks for the medieval period and that pattern would be repeated thereafter.

Although it is true that there is a dearth of documentary evidence for shipwrecks from the 11th and 12th centuries, we can see that a later date does not necessarily equate to more records: royal interest played a crucial part.

Rights to wreck – a source of dispute and a source of records

Rights to wreck were the principal reason for the appearance of wreck events in the record: essentially, if no-one escaped alive to land, the right to wreck went to the crown – and was a lucrative source of revenue and goods. However, if there were survivors, then they were entitled to reclaim their goods. Merchants who survived shipwreck naturally asserted their rights, and it must have taken some tenacity to do so, after being in peril of their lives and ending up in a foreign jurisdiction. To then have had their goods taken away – whoever claimed them – must have been the final straw, particularly when there were assertions that that the goods had not been duly ‘cocketed’ for export and the threat of having to pay customs dues all over again hung over them.

Some of the shipwrecked merchants were, of course, Englishmen, but dialects at the time were not necessarily wholly mutually intelligible – see William Caxton’s famous story printed in 1490 about an English merchant asking for eggs and only being understood when he asked for eyren in Kent, which incidentally took place when forced to put in by the weather en route from London to Zeeland. Others most likely spoke English or French well as a second language due to repeated contact and at a time when the language of the court and government was in Anglo-Norman (though it would be Henry IV before a king of England spoke English as his first language). Others still would have had to depend on interpreters and legal assistance to fight their cases.

It therefore follows that disputes over the right to wreck, for example between local landowners, or between landowners and the crown, tended to make it into the record, and more straightforward wrecks did not, so there is a strong selection bias in record creation in the first place. This selection bias is further compounded by the fact that squabbles inevitably arose over lucrative and richly-laden wrecks – they were the ones worth claiming – and cases were then brought by those who had the means to do so, who of course were the ones engaged in those lucrative cargoes, and out of those, only those who were very determined and/or very wealthy or very well-connected persisted. For these reasons, we very rarely hear, if at all, of the loss of minor coasting or fishing vessels.

These issues are compounded by the variety of legal sources in which wrecks could be entered – the Close Rolls, Patent Rolls and Inquisitions Miscellaneous – which, as the name implies, covered a variety of enquiries into all sorts of cases. Our two cases today illustrate that it is sometimes by interrogating more than one source that we finally flesh out the details of a wreck.

One wreck at Coatham, not three

In our first example, we have recently realised that a cluster of wrecks in Coatham, south of the Tees, over the best part of a decade, were all variant reports of the same wreck, not a product of assiduous local reporting. In fact, it isn’t uncommon for legal wrangling over the right to wreck to persist for many years – we have one wreck where the dispute continued for two decades, and across the reigns of Edward II and Edward III, without an apparent resolution: either the document finally resolving the case disappeared long ago, or was never made, as everyone involved had died. I suspect the latter but the merchant involved was certainly more determined than most. [1]

Today’s first case is rather less extreme, only covering the years 1352 to 1359, but it illustrates the potential for wrecks to escalate to the level of diplomatic incidents – another very good reason for them to enter the record, but, again, we do not quite know how this case ends. It is quite tantalising.

However, it is clear that all three references, to 1352, 1358, and 1359, pertain to the same wreck, from the circumstances of the wreck, the description of the ship and its cargo, the location of the wreck, and the names of those involved. The ‘ship of Lescluse in Flanders’ [now Sluis, Netherlands] was ‘lately freighted with goods and merchandise to the value of 1,700l’ (worth around £1.5m to buy today, but other calculations are available: see measuringworth.com). The issue was that the goods were consigned for Scotland by Scottish merchants. It was initially thought that ‘some evildoers carried away the same, which should pertain to the king as forfeit to him’. [2]

It therefore looked initially as if local inhabitants had plundered the wreck and robbed the king of his due. However, the issue was more complex than that. The merchandise belonged to the ‘enemies of the king of Aberden [sic] in Scotland’. By 1358 the merchants are recorded as hitting back: they complained that goods ‘to no small value’ were carried away and that they had been arrested and imprisoned for six months ‘and more’ in York, being further deprived of their goods while unable in prison to do anything about it. They pointed out that the wreck and subsequent events happened during the time of truce between Scotland and England, so a state of war was not a legitimate excuse for their being deprived of their lawful merchandise. The king ‘commanded their bodies to be released from arrest and the goods delivered to them’, but the ‘evildoers’ had ‘carried away the goods while so under arrest and refused to make restitution of these to them’. [3]

In 1359 there was a further twist to the story. The merchants alleged that they had been forced to sign over their goods ‘through fear against their will’. Henry de Greystok, one of the accused, counter-claimed that the Scots had signed over their goods to be sold and the remainder were to be made over to the king ‘without this that any of the goods came to the hands of Henry or to his profit or that he imprisoned the said petitioners’. [4] It further emerged that the mayor of York had refused to affix his seal to the commission to the attorney to sell the goods: whether that was in support of the merchants, or in support of those who had carried away the goods, we are not quite clear, as we know nothing further save that the king was appointing two juries to enquire further into the matter. History is silent on the outcome, but Edward III clearly felt he had to get to the bottom of the matter. [5]

All we can deduce is that it was a significant headache to uncover the truth at the time, but that effort then has practical implications for our record now, which is dynamic and one of subtraction as well as addition: we can add new wrecks that we discover, and flesh out the information we have for those we already know about, but our research also allows us to use new evidence to consolidate records that we now see clearly hang together.

A 1354 dispute with a twist in the tail

In a similar-but-slightly-different vein, in 1354 a London ship foundered off Scarborough ‘by the violence of the sea’ while bound from London for Berwick-upon-Tweed. The case came before the king twice in 1356, as noted in the Calendar of Patent Rolls: in September that year a merchant named John de Boulton complained that, while he and the mariners ‘came to land alive’, a couple of named local men had carried away the goods that were cast ashore. [6] A wreck was then reported to the king in November as one ‘of which no-one came to land alive, whereby the goods should pertain to the king as wreck of sea, and that these goods have been occupied and concealed from him by some men of the parts adjacent to the said town’. [7]

It therefore looked as if there were two distinct wrecks, one with a happy outcome and one involving considerable loss of life, near Scarborough in the same year. That would have been completely plausible given the amount of trade on the North Sea. However, research in the Calendar of Close Rolls revealed that in 1357 a further complaint was made by John de Boulton about the ‘malefactors’ who had taken away ‘those goods and chattels and committed other enormities’. This complaint brought the matter to the fore again and there was a dawning realisation that ‘the ship contained in the two commissions is the same one’ as the circumstances were otherwise identical. It looked as if ‘the malefactors’ had tried to cover up their concealment of the goods by pretending that they had reserved them for the king.

However, the feature which broke open the case for Edward III, and which those who had carried away the goods apparently hadn’t realised, was that John de Boulton was the king’s own clerk, and John was able to use this fact to his advantage. It must have been an uncomfortable situation for king and clerk to realise that they were being played off against each other by those who had abstracted the goods. Again, we don’t know the outcome, but it must have backfired spectacularly for the ‘malefactors’. For us in 2026, this feature of the case also made us realise the two wrecks were one and the same, and needed to be consolidated, but it was only finding the reference in the Calendar of Close Rolls that enabled us to make that judgement.

An accident of survival in a corroborating source becomes a wonderful illustration of how making texts available online facilitates research. We will never be able to recover all the wrecks of the medieval past, but at least we can do our best to ensure tbat we understand them as best we can and that we have not artificially inflated the figures since we now have digital access to the major legal sources for these wrecks.

Historic oil painting of King Edward III, featuring the bust of a crowned figure with a white beard, wearing a white ermine furred robe trimmed with gold and jewels. The facial features, hair and beard are very similar to those on the tomb effigy in the previous picture. .
Portrait of Edward III: anonymous workshop portrait, not contemporary, but dating to the late 16th or early 17th century, based on his tomb effigy
NPG 4980(7) © National Portrait Gallery, London CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Footnotes

[1] Navis de Jehsu Christi de Portu, of which the first mention was in 1318. It was a richly laden vessel and it is probably testament to the wealth of the principal merchant in this voyage that he was able to insist on his rights. It must have taken considerable means to do so, particularly in a foreign jurisdiction. For more detail on this particular vessel, see Cant, S. 2013: England’s Shipwreck Heritage: from logboats to U-boats (Swindon: English Heritage)

[2] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1350-54, p38, membrane 13d, p38

[3] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1358-61, membranes 6d (p79) and 21d (pp218-9)

[4] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1358-61 membrane 21d (pp218-9)

[5] Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, Edward III, Vol. III, 1348-1377, No.375, p135

[6] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1354-58, membrane 6d

[7] Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III, Vol. 10, 1354-1360

The Cordelia, a West Country smack embayed in the Bristol Channel (1874)

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Historical black and white photograph of a coastal harbour looking down from the top of the cliff to the water below, centred on a sailing ship leaving harbour. Beyond the harbour in the background can be seen encircling hills and cliffs sheltering the harbour from the open sea beyond.
Ilfracombe Harbour, Devon. Elevated view looking west across the harbour and Lantern Hill towards the buildings of Ilfracombe. Photograph taken 1850 – 1920
Source: Historic England Archive (ref: OP07458). https://historicengland.org.uk/education/schools-resources/educational-images/the-harbour-ilfracombe-10092

For this blog we welcome my colleague Tanja Watson, Maritime Research Specialist, Historic England, who introduces us to the loss of the Cordelia in the Bristol Channel in 1874 and the specific wreck process of embayment on a lee shore.

Tanja writes:

The hazards of the Bristol Channel

Today’s blog explores the hazards faced by sailing vessels in the Bristol Channel. Sailing smacks such as the Cordelia were a common feature of 19th-century coastal commerce in Britain, particularly in the Bristol Channel. These vessels were typically small, single-masted, and fore-and-aft rigged – designed to be sturdy and versatile for both fishing and the transport of goods. Some larger smacks were ketch-rigged, while smaller ones retained the traditional gaff cutter rig.

These smacks, though modest in size, represented a type of vessel essential for the local economy. They could navigate the Channel’s strong currents, unusually large tidal ranges (12-14 metres) [1], and frequently unpredictable weather with small crews, achieving average speeds of 4 to 7 knots (nautical miles per hour), depending on wind conditions.The Bristol Channel is known for having one of the highest tidal ranges in the world, second only to the Bay of Fundy in Canada. [2] It has a complex, irregular coastline, creating conditions in which vessels can easily become embayed or trapped in a bay or coastal recess.

The combination of tides, winds, and coastal geography in the Channel can quickly limit a vessel’s manoeuvrability and push it towards a lee shore – a stretch of shoreline lying downwind of the ship, where wind and waves drive it steadily closer to land. The term lee denotes the side of a vessel sheltered from the wind, as opposed to the windward side, which faces into it, and thus a ship being driven onto a lee shore is being driven by the wind onto the shore.

The loss of the Cordelia

On 30th November 1874, the Barnstaple-registered Cordelia set off from Ilfracombe Harbour for what should have been a routine voyage up the Bristol Channel to Newport on the River Usk, to collect a cargo of Welsh coal. This West Country smack, built around 1855 and with a tonnage of 32 register tons, was crewed by two men and a boy (the captain’s son). [3]

Map of the Bristol Channel, featuring its coastal towns such as Cardiff, Swansea, and Newport, with an inset map showing the location of Bristol and London.
Map of the Bristol Channel, England/Wales. Combination of CIA World Factbook map and Demis Map Server (http://www2.demis.nl/worldmap/mapper.asp) data with additional annotations and modifications by the ChrisO – Public Domain

At first, conditions seemed favourable, with a light north-north-westerly breeze. But as the Cordelia passed the hamlet of Watermouth, just two miles east of Ilfracombe, the wind veered sharply to the north-east, catching the crew off guard. Several attempts to tack failed, and the decision was eventually made to return to port. Nearing Beacon Point, however, the wind shifted once more – this time to the north-west – before dropping away altogether. Unballasted and at the mercy of the tidal currents, the ship began to drift helplessly toward the rocky shoreline.

Contemporary newspapers describe the unfolding crisis:

‘[The Cordelia] proceeded some distance, but the wind having shifted, they let her drift back with the tide. Late in the day she was observed from the shore to be off Lantern Hill. After this, with a turn of the wind, she again went up Channel, but not far, for she was next seen in Hele Bay, and from this spot appeared unable to get clear, being ‘embayed.’ . . .

‘The course taken appears to have been too close in—too short a cut in fact was attempted. The Cordelia struck on Beacon Point, and there stopped. It was seen that nothing more could be done, and that it must be abandoned. A very heavy sea was running, but the men providentially were able to effect their escape in Stephen Brown’s boat.

‘When the fact of the smack having gone ashore became known at the quay—it was between seven and eight o’clock when it struck—the three gigs, the Try, the Tiger, and Brilliant, were at once manned and pulled out to the point, but they could give no assistance, as they were unable to tow the vessel off the rocks; indeed they could not get within any reasonable distance because of the heavy swell which was continually breaking around her.

‘[The Cordelia] soon fell over on her side, and held that position for a while, one of her lights being seen after the crew had landed. In about an hour’s time, the light had disappeared, and nothing was afterwards visible in the black darkness from the pier.’ [4]

Aerial view of a coastal town with the sea to the left of image, showcasing a mixture of residential buildings, hills, and rocky shoreline with agricultural land in the background.
Aerial view of Ilfracombe
© Chris, contributor to geograph.org.uk CC-BY-SA 2.0

An account from another newspaper:

‘Floating like a bladder on the water, there being no ballast in her, she was quickly carried by the flowing tide and ground sea on to the west of Beacon Rock [Point], when, seeing there was no hope of saving her the crew got into the boat, and shortly afterwards the timbers of the smack were floating about like an upset box of matches. Had the smack been in ballast there is every probability that the disaster would not have occurred. It is not at all unusual for vessels to run between Ilfracombe and the Welsh coast without ballast, and it is to be hoped owners will now see the folly of this penny wise and pound foolish economy.’ [5]

(At this period coal was sufficiently profitable that it did not require trading for an exchange cargo, so it was common for ships to run ‘light’ (without cargo and ‘in ballast’) to collect a cargo of coal. The lack of ballast is almost unheard of in the wreck record.)

Fortunately, Captain Thomas Vound and his crew were rescued from their night-time ordeal by lifeboatman Richard Souch in the Olive Branch shortly before the vessel struck at about 9pm. All their belongings were lost. [6]

One week earlier, storms had struck the nearby Hele Bay with considerable force, and had this incident occurred then, their chances of survival would have been far slimmer, as pointed out by the newspapers.

Services interrupted

Cordelia’s owner, John Tucker Bament (1840–1876), a local coal merchant in Ilfracombe [7], lost his entire investment that night. He had just paid for Cordelia’s refitting with new sails and repairs in preparation for the winter season. However, he had decided not to, or could not afford to, pay for either the ballast she should have carried, or the insurance of the vessel. It is possible Bament supplied coal to Ilfracombe or Barnstaple, or the newly opened Barnstaple and Ilfracombe Railway, which had begun operation just four months earlier (20 July 1874). [8]

Historic sepia photograph showing a train travelling along to right with a noticeable head of steam, with a station and buildings in centre background, set in a rural landscape of rolling hills beyond.
Picture postcard of Ilfracombe railway station around 1900.
public domain image

(The strong links between maritime and rail transport have recently been covered in this blog in a three-part special by my colleague Serena Cant, see Railways 200: a maritime perspective.)

In the master’s own words

Further slight variations on these reports were published in contemporary newspapers, including the captain’s report, which was published five days after the event:

‘CORDELIA – Report of Thomas Vound, Master of the smack CORDELIA, of Barnstaple, 32 tons, from Ilfracombe for Newport: On Monday, the 30th November, at1 P.M., tide half ebb, weather fine, wind N.N.W., light breeze, the ship was about half a mile N.E. of Capston[e] Hill [Ilfracombe]. We proceeded as far as Watermouth, when the wind shifted to the N.E., with a fresh breeze. The vessel missed stays on several occasions. Bore up for Ilfracombe at 7 P.M. Reached as far as Beacon Point, the wind then shifted to N.W., with a light breeze. Heavy ground sea on. The vessel drifted ashore at 8 P.M. on Beacon Point on the rocks, and immediately began to fill with water, the water being over the cabin sheets. The vessel began to break up when I left her, about 8 30 P.M. – Ilfracombe, Dec. 1.’ [9]

And so we conclude with an insight into the processes of wreck, with specific reference to the combinations of wind, tide and sea state: a local vessel lost on her local shores, compounded by an unusual and locally-adopted cost-cutting measure, which ultimately cost her owner more money.

Footnotes:

[1] Generally cited as mean spring range12.2m to 12.3m at Avonmouth but reaches 14m in the Severn Estuary specifically: Associated British Ports (nd) ‘Bristol Channel Tides’ ABP South Wales; HM Government, Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2010: Severn Tidal Power: Feasibility Study Conclusions and Summary Report gov.uk

[2] Gao, C and Adcock, T 2017 ‘On the Tidal Resonance of the Bristol Channel’ International Journal of Offshore and Polar Engineering 27(2): 177-183 https://users.ox.ac.uk/~spet1235/ijope-27-2-p177-as19-Gao.pdf

[3] Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 05 December 1874, p10

[4] Ilfracombe Chronicle, 05 December 1874, p9

[5] Western Morning News, 02 December 1874, p3

[6] Moore, J (nd) On the Hele Shipwrecks. https://johnhmoore.co.uk/hele/shipwrecks.htm; Western Times, 04 December 1874, pp7–8; Lloyd’s List, 03 December 1874, p8

[7] Find a Grave: John Tucker Bament (1840–1876). https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/227351890/john-tucker-bament; North Devon Advertiser, 04 December 1874, p4

[8] Spong, G, ‘Combe Rail’, Ilfracombe Branch Project. http://www.combe-rail.org.uk/history/#:~:text=The%20Ilfracombe%2DBarnstaple%20line%20was

[9] Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 05 December 1874, p10

Thrice shipwrecked

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Black and white photograph of an impression from a medieval seal, featuring a sailing ship enclosed in a roundel of Gothic text
Seal of Thomas Beaufort as Lord High Admiral, c.1416-26 depicting a single-masted clinker-built ship.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence

Sometimes the research goose lays a golden egg that you just have to share straight away, and this is one of them.

A number of wrecks in the record involve historical personages one way or another: Henry VIII witnessed the loss of theMary Rose; Daniel Defoe recorded the wrecks of the Great Storm in 1703, and is one of our best sources for that storm, as well as writing Robinson Crusoe; in Mrs Mary Roberts and Charles Lightoller, we have relatively ‘ordinary’ people who acquired a degree of fame as prior survivors of the Titanic and later went on to be involved in other wrecks in English waters. Sometimes, too, there are accounts of celebrity survivors – a violin virtuoso and his celebrated Stradivarius, both of whom fortunately survived.

On this occasion we have an unexpected connection with a historical figure – though, when you pause to think about overseas trade in the Middle Ages, it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise.

A piece of research in the Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous – summaries of Chancery documents for the 13th to 15th centuries – proved to be more interesting than anticipated. These are enquiries by royal officials known as escheators – who worked at local, usually county, level – into a wide variety of matters of life and death, hence their name, the Inquisitions Miscellaneous. They are now in the National Archives and were summarised – or calendared – in published volumes in the 20th century. Along with the Calendars of Patent Rolls (copies of letters patent, or open documents) and the Close Rolls (copies of letters close, or sealed) the Inquisitions Miscellaneous forms one of our principal sources of medieval wreck records.

One such document concerns a ship freighted with wine at La Rochelle for Nieuwpoort, Flanders (now in West-Vlaanderen province, Belgium) in 1400. This voyage was never intended to touch the English coast at all, but it did, ‘by the bad piloting and default of the master’ – in other words, it was significantly off course when it was wrecked at Shoreham-by-Sea. Wrecks of ships on the English Channel coasts while bound from Atlantic ports in France to the northern coast of France or Flanders are not at all uncommon, and nearly always driven by southerly or south-westerly winds onto the Sussex or Kent coastlines. [1]

In this case though, there is none of the usual ‘tempest’ or ‘stress of weather’ but an accusation of navigational incompetence: behind those words ‘bad piloting’ and ‘default’ we sense the exasperation of the merchants who were now involved in an administrative and legal headache.

As the documents show, this headache was caused by tracking down their goods in a foreign country: the wine was stolen by local men. Again, this isn’t an uncommon story throughout history – wine and spirits were attractive in their own right, and lucrative. We discover the names of some of these men – tuns of wine which had been unlawfully taken up and hidden, instead of being turned over to the merchants or the authorities, were located in the cellars of two men called Simon Benefeld and William Hulle. Simon Benefeld had dealings with a cloth trader named John atte Gate – who was part owner of a ship named La Nicholas of Shoreham. All three men were MPs – Benefeld and atte Gate successively representing New Shoreham, and Hulle Salisbury, so we start to gain a sense of the rising power and dominance of the mercantile classes in the 14th century but also a sense that they weren’t averse to a side hustle when opportunity arose. [2]

They led us to our man. In 1407 La Nicholas was freighted by a London mercer (dealer in cloth) with wool from Chichester for Calais – this is not a shipwreck, but it is important evidence for a close network woven between the mercantile classes of London and Sussex, and it was worth following the documentary trail for these connections.

The same London mercer was Mayor of the Staple of Calais through which wool was exported from England – La Nicholas fits entirely into this pattern of regulated trade at a time when Calais was under English control, so he was a significant figure on both sides of the Channel. Our mercer joined together with two other merchants, William Marchford and Thomas Aleyn, in 1413 to ship some more wool from Chichester to the Staple of Calais in three ships. It was a considerable quantity of wool, some 20 sarplers or 20 tons. Alas, these three ships were ‘submerged by a tempest near the coast by Shorham’, and the wool ‘driven ashore by the same town’. [3]

Our London mercer? None other than ‘Richard Whytington’, thrice Lord Mayor of London (appointed, then elected, both in 1397, again in 1406, and for the last time in 1419), and thrice finding his trade shipwrecked in this one incident. It isn’t often we find such a well-known figure behind a historical wreck incident. The pantomime based on the folk tale often tells us of the vicissitudes the young Dick Whittington experienced, but even as the real-life wealthy and established merchant it is clear that he also had his share of setbacks.

The gaps in the medieval record are significant – we essentially have nearly as many records for medieval shipwrecks as there are years between 1066 and 1540. Oh no, they aren’t evenly distributed at all: there isn’t anything like a even match of one wreck per year but instead we have several missing years and great variability around the numbers of wrecks recorded. The wrecks around 1413 are a case in point: we have no records for 1410-11, two for 1412, one other besides Whittington’s wrecks for 1413, none for 1414, one each for 1415 and 1416; seven in 1417, with three for 1418 and a decline towards one each for 1419 and 1420. It isn’t a case of more tempests in a particular year, but instead issues of record creation and record survival. Wealthy merchants like Richard Whittington were simply more likely to leave a documentary trail.

Oh yes, we now have 3 more records for the year 1413, to add to the one we already had, and Richard Whittington is behind them!

An historical black and white engraving of Sir Richard Whittington, depicting an older man with a beard wearing a hat and fur coat, holding a cat, with a border frame and the legend 'Sr Rich. Whittington' at the bottom
Sir Richard (‘Dick’) Whittington, after unknown artist, early 19th century engraving
NPG D240668
 © National Portrait Gallery, London



Footnotes

[1] Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, Vol. 7, 1399-1422 No.172

[2] History of Parliament Online, Simon Benefeld and John atte Gate

[3] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry V, Vol. 1. 1413-1416, p149; History of Parliament Online, William Marchford