Month: November 2017

Diary of the War: November 1917

~ Serena ~ 1 Comment

SS Belém

I am pleased to welcome as my guest blogger for this month my colleague Stuart Churchley, Marine Planning Archaeological Officer at Historic England. Although this month’s wreck was not lost to war causes, she nevertheless illustrates a little-known aspect of the First World War in the English-speaking world, that of Portugal’s involvement in the war. Stuart writes:

The name of a wrecked vessel can often hold clues not only to its origin, but also the historical context in which it served: today’s wreck, lost 100 years ago on 20th November 1917, is just such a wreck with the potential for a far larger story.

At around the same time as the British Army famously used their tanks on the western front at Cambrai on 20th November 1917, a little-known merchant vessel, the SS Belém, was wrecked at Menachurch Point, just north of Northcott Mouth, Bude.

When I first started researching the SS Belém, my first thought was that this vessel must have been inadvertently lost: an isolated wrecking case on the very periphery of the war action, participating in no known convoy for the area, miscalculating a notorious stretch of coastline like so many others had previously, whilst avoiding the threats of unrestricted U-boat attacks and mines alike.

Locally it is well known and has captured the imagination of visitors and artists, becoming a recognisable feature of the landscape. The wreck itself was photographed at the time of its loss oriented facing south, running parallel to the coastline overlooking to the east.

Black and white photograph of stranded ship, seen in profile broadside on to the beach, with rocks and stones visible in the lower half of the image. The ship is dry with the tide at the top of the image just lapping at the bottom of the vessel.
Contemporary photograph of the Belém ashore, 1917, seen from the overlooking cliffs.

A brilliant eyewitness account of the ship’s stranding from the perspective of Arthur Madge, can be found within an online pdf produced by a local historian, Audrey Aylmer, which also includes photographs of the site in 1997, 80 years after the Belém came ashore. (1) As an eight year old boy in 1917, Arthur had been awoken at his boarding school by the sound of the distress signals in fog from the stranded Belém (so she had certainly not been lost to war causes).

Today, when tides and wind work in tandem, a mixture of metal features can be revealed on the beach. It’s easy to see that the coastline of shale and sandstone known as the ‘Bude Formation’ and heavy westerly winds has caused the ship to become severely disarticulated, mangled and a little bit hazardous underfoot. The intertidal sand has formed a protective layer over what remains of the wreck, comprising a long subtly curved hull structure, a boiler cracked open like a an eggshell, large elements with rivet patterns and flanges, and the propeller itself sitting serenely within a bowl of scoured sand. The site is very clearly seen from above by drone in some excellent 2015 images published by Martin Busby online. (2)

 

Three groups of dark metal elements of a wreck sitting in pools of water on a sandy beach, against a backdrop of grey mist.
Boiler and propeller shaft of wreck, Menachurch Point in mist, 2007. CC-BY-SA/2.0 – © David Hawgood – geograph.org.uk/p/411088

Tracing back why a vessel owned by the Portuguese government came to be here is not easy. However, looking at the wider historical background can be a fruitful and interesting undertaking.

Portugal was pretty much neutral for the first half of the war, but was faced with a challenging period due to the limiting – and almost total loss – of trade with its pre-war European neighbours to the Atlantic north and within the Mediterranean. As relations gradually soured, Imperial Germany declared war on Portugal on 9th March 1916, as a result of a multitude of factors, most notably the capture and confiscation on 23rd February 1916 of the 72 German ships interned in Portuguese ports on or since the outbreak of war. (3)

These seized vessels comprised roughly 10% of all German vessels holding out in neutral ports at this time, and equated to a tonnage double the Portuguese merchant navy before the war. (4) Such a scenario therefore would have proved tempting to both the Portuguese and British authorities, during an ever-growing shipping crisis, with the potential for some form of agreement along the lines of those made with other nations as the ripples of the war spread ever outwards. (5)

What is all the more interesting is that the British had made just such a secret agreement with the Portuguese high command in Belém Palace, Lisbon, on 5th February 1916, leading up to the capture of the 23rd. In doing so the captured vessels would be divided between Britain and Portugal, with 80% of these ships sent to British war effort, and 20% being retained by the Portuguese. (6) (In previous posts we have looked at the fate of interned German vessels in British service; German shipping company property in England, and the secret Tonnage Agreements with Scandinavian countries.)

This decision to seize the German ships in Lisbon would also have far-reaching consequences for Portugal, with the German Navy laying mines in and around the mouth of the Tagus, and the subsequent arrangements for the Portuguese army to be transported to Brest, whence they would advance to the Flanders fields to support the British army. (7)

Could it then be that the SS Belém was one of the 14 vessels transferred to Portugal out of the original 72 internees?

To know this conclusively would take much greater research than has been undertaken here, but from what we know about the Belém, it would seem likely that she was one of that group. Previously named Rhodos, the ship was built in Flensburg in 1890 by Flensburger Schiffsbau Gesellschaft. The Rhodos was possibly very familiar with Portuguese ports, given her original owner, the Deutsche Levante Linie A.G.

However, records document that she came into the ownership of the Transportes Maritimos Do Estado (Portuguese State Steamship Line), in 1916, consistent with the events leading up to the famous prize capture, while other vessels similarly seized by Portugal are known to have ended up in the same ownership, suggesting that the company was formed to account for these ships. (8)

This certainly tallies with the source from Audrey Aylmer which details that the Rhodos, which she suggests was seized in Lisbon in 1916, and later loaned to Italy to bring coal from England, while her return cargo would generally be sulphur from Sicily to England for munitions. In other words, she would work a reasonably familiar route.

Furthermore Audrey Aylmer’s narrativegoes on to say that there was no sulphur ready on the Belém’s final voyage so the vessel came back to Benjaffa, Oran, North Africa, to load 2500 tons of iron ore for Cardiff.

After she was wrecked, holes were cut in her sides to throw out the cargo, and the swell caused large holes in the ballast tanks. The Belém is believed to have been later sold to the shipbreakers, with what remained of the cargo salvaged. (9) This would suggest that the remains represent possibly a combination of natural and human factors, but are no less fascinating for that.

The Belém is a rare archaeological witness in English waters to this pivotal event in Portugal’s involvement in the First World War. Strangely, there is another not far away, another ship also belonging to the Transportes Maritimos do Estados, the Brava (ex-German Togo) torpedoed off Trevose Head in 1918, while inbound to Cardiff with pit props.

What became of some of the other 71 vessels is unclear: many are thought to have been destroyed by German submarines in route to British ports, certainly the fate of Tungue (ex German Zieten), which was torpedoed by UB-51, another Transportes Maritimos do Estado vessel, which was chartered by Britain on her final voyage.  (10) Given the Belém‘s destination of Cardiff with iron ore, chartering to Britain might well explain why she was said to have had two Royal Navy gunners aboard, who were rescued along with the other crew. (11)

However, it has been pointed out that one of the minor successes of this decision to bring about formal entry into the conflict was the agreed return of the surviving captured German ships from Britain and France, which would form the basis of Portugal’s post-war merchant fleet in the 1920s. (12) The Belém is an excellent illustration of how profoundly the First World War changed shipping around the globe, and with what long-term effects.

Aerial view of a brown seashore with items of wreckage showing as darker areas standing proud of the sand, particularly towards the lower right of the image.
Aerial photograph of the Belém site in 2013, by kind permission of the Coastal Offshore and Archaeological Research Services (COARS), University of Southampton. The site is dynamic: previous views in 2006 and 2010 have shown less wreckage.

Thank you very much to Stuart for writing this fascinating post!

 

(1) Aylmer, A. date unknown (after 2011); The Demise of the SS Belém

(2) Busby, M. 2015 http://budeandbeyond.co.uk/ss-Belém-by-drone/

(3) de Oliveira Marques, A. H. 1986, História de Portugal. Lisboa: Palas Editora, p.235.

(4) Brandão, M. C., 2016. German Submarine war in Portuguese Waters: Esposende – a Smuggling Network. University of Oporto, Portugal

(5) Marder, A. J., 2014, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: Volume IV 1917, Year of Crisis. Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing.

(6) Brandão, M. C., 2016. German Submarine war in Portuguese Waters: Esposende – a Smuggling Network. University of Oporto, Portugal.

(7) Salgado, A. 2016. “British Naval Aid to Portugal During the First World War”, The Mariner’s Mirror, 102:2, 191-202.

(8) National Record of the Historic Environment, Mon No: 1585637, https://www.pastscape.org.uk/hob.aspx?hob_id=1585637; http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/portstate.shtml

(9) Aylmer, A. date unknown, (after 2011), The Demise of the SS Belém

(10) https://uboat.net/wwi/ships_hit/6158.html; http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/portstate.shtml

(11) Aylmer, A. date unknown (after 2011), The Demise of the SS Belém

(12) Brandão, M. C., 2016. German Submarine war in Portuguese Waters: Esposende – a Smuggling Network. University of Oporto, Portugal.

 

A mysterious cargo

~ Serena ~ 5 Comments

With this week (31 October 2017) seeing the commemoration of #Reformation500 I decided to have a look at records of German vessels wrecked in England around the time that Martin Luther published his 95 Theses that led to the Protestant Reformation, a legacy which still resonates today.

Black and white print of man with dark hair and dressed in black, facing left and holding a hat in one hand. A badge is in the background beside his head to the right, text to the left, stating his age in Latin, and further text below the image.
Martin Luther, after Lucas Cranach the Elder, etching (1525). NPG D47378. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND

Records for this period tend to be rather vague. We don’t actually have any wrecks we can firmly date to 1517 itself, although there is a series of records for wrecks 1516-18 in Cornwall, based on eyewitness evidence given to officials, mostly by very old men, which conjures up a wonderful picture and says a great deal about their powers of recollection.

There are many gaps in the record, which is nothing to do with the seas being safer or the weather being calmer in those years, and everything to do with the lack of record survival. The Reformation unleashed by Martin Luther had much to do with that from the English point of view, as records were destroyed in the Dissolution of the Monasteries which characterised the English Reformation – while the passage of time is another factor.

However, we do have a German vessel wrecked on these shores in 1524, so not too long after the 95 Theses that shook Europe. It’s a single standalone reference, lacking the ‘before’ and ‘after’, the background and the ‘what happened next?’, and key details of the ship and her voyage: all of which is completely typical of wreck records until well into the early modern period. It is actually a letter of complaint from Hamburg officials on behalf of certain merchants of that city to Henry VIII himself.

‘The Burgomasters of Hamburg to Henry VIII.

Ask for the restitution of a ship laden with resin, “oszemundt”, wax, ale etc., belonging to Fred. Ostra, Peter Rode, John Hesterberch, Conrad Meyricke, Hen. Statius and Joachim Schernewkouw, citizens of Hamburg, which went on shore on the coast of Norfolk, on the way to London. Hamburg, 16 May 1524.’ (1)

We don’t know the name of the ship, but we can tell that she must have been wrecked some time before 16 May 1524, allowing time at least for the news to reach Hamburg and for the letter to go out again. Communications at the time were, of course, ship-borne, with none of the media or information technology at our fingertips today, nor had newspapers yet been invented.

The vessel came ashore on the North Sea coast short of her destination of London, so it is reasonable to suppose that her voyage was from the eastward, which appears to be corroborated by the involvement of Hamburg merchants.

Ale is a fairly standard product which could originate anywhere. Wax was also widely imported into England, but the cargoes and voyage details of wrecked vessels tend to mirror the ebb and flow of trade routes pretty well. In the Elizabethan period the Baltic was a key source of wax for English buyers, while another wreck of 1582 laden with deals, wax, and copper, also suggests a common Baltic origin for all three cargoes, since deals and copper were characteristic Swedish exports. This suggests that the Baltic may well also have been the origin of the wax aboard the 1524 wreck. (2) Resin may similarly refer to Baltic amber.

This suggests that Baltic goods are in question, either transhipped via Hamburg as an entrepôt, or originating directly from the Baltic, almost certainly from Sweden. It is in this context that we must set the mysterious oszemundt which is not otherwise attested in the wreck record in England, and which the original editor of the Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic had not explained in a footnote (presumably he was unable to do so!) We find references to this under various spellings in documents from mercantile contexts: one of 1494 (in Swedish) and another of 1532 (in German), suggesting that it was possible, for example, to settle payment of debt for an inbound cargo with osemund as an exchange or return cargo. (3)

A number of sources suggested that it was some form of iron, specifically ‘Swedish iron’, which is certainly consistent with known Swedish exports at that time and with the wrecks in our database laden with Swedish iron. (4) But what form did that iron take? Was it ore, bar, cast or wrought, or pyrites? I finally tracked down a reference explaining that osemund referred to iron cast in balls or spheres, for which Scotland was apparently the principal export market in the Elizabethan period: it was a relatively unusual import for England. (5) No wonder, therefore, it was very difficult to find out what it actually was!

Lump of grey iron on a stand in a museum display, against a brown wooden background.
Lump of osemund, Burg Altena museum. Photographed by Frank Vincentz. Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0

This one mysterious word has illuminated a rare cargo from the past. It also illustrates the reach of the shipping networks of the North Sea, including the Hanseatic League, which at this time traded across the Baltic and North Sea with King’s Lynn and London, and which had a key port at Hamburg. (To this day Hamburg is Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg.) I suspect, therefore, that it is very likely the complainants in the letter were Hanse merchants. So this wreck record is the rarest of the rare: surviving documentation for medieval wrecks in England is sparse, and of these there are only a dozen records with clearly demonstrable links to the Hanse over the period 1377-1546. (6)

Bust-length portrait of a bearded man dressed in black, with white collar and cuffs, facing left, with his hands crossed in the lower register of the image. He is set against a dark green background.
Portrait of a Hanseatic Merchant, Hans Holbein, 1538. Yale University Art Gallery. The German artist Holbein, who spent two extended periods in England, was commissioned to paint portraits of Hanseatic merchants at their London Steelyard guildhall (and indeed also painted the iconic portraits of Henry VIII, with whom the English Reformation is indelibly associated). The artist and subject together suggest the rich cultural and economic connections at this time between England and Germany, a milieu receptive to the exchange of new religious ideas.

It is also a reminder that ideas and texts, as well as cargo and people, were circulated by ship.

One of the most far-reaching changes of the Reformation was the idea that any Christian should be able to access the Bible in their own language, rather than filtered through the traditional language of Latin, which had been the common language of the Christian Roman Empire but had long been accessible only to the educated elite. Vernacular translations were not a new idea, but previous examples, such as the late 14th century Wycliffite Bible, were suppressed and banned. It was in that same year as our wreck from Germany, 1524, that the latest scholar to espouse an English translation, William Tyndale, was forced to set sail for Germany, and produced a translation of the New Testament within the orbit of Martin Luther. Copies of Tyndale’s translation were smuggled into England on board ship, in casks of wine and bales of wool. (7) 

These clandestine consignments must have added the fear of discovery to the constant dread of shipwreck. Did any ever miscarry on their way to England, I wonder? There’s a contemporary parallel for this: it is traditionally held that the rarity of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible is partly owing to many copies perishing in a shipwreck while en route to Pope Leo X in Italy in 1521. (8) So a single wreck in England can be set against the backdrop of an entire cultural, economic, and religious milieu, and its record enhanced, and all because I was intrigued by an unidentified cargo.

I would like to thank my colleagues at Historic England for their help with this article: Angela Middleton, Conservator, and Tanja Watson, Knowledge Organisation Specialist.

Painted image of seated man in black against a dark background. His name, in Latin, is painted in gold to the right of his arm, which holds a Bible. His left hand points to the Bible above a white text. Below the portrait is an inscription in gold lettering, also in Latin..
Called William Tyndale, by unknown artist, late 17th or early 18th century. NPG 1592. © National Portrait Gallery, London Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0

(1) Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 4, 1524-1530, ed. J S Brewer (London, 1875), pp. 139, No.339. British History Online [accessed 1 November 2017].

(2)  Zins, H (translated Stevens, H). 1972 England and the Baltic in the Elizabethan Era. Manchester: University Press

(3) Swedish: Styffe, C. 1875 Bidrag till Skandinaviens Historia ur utländska arkiver. Stockholm: P A Norstedt & Söner. German: Ebel, W (ed.) 1968 Lübecker Ratsurteile, Band III, 1526-1550. Göttingen: Musterschmid Verlag

(4) Heß, C, Link, C, and Sarnowsky, J, 2008. Schüldbücher und Rechnungen der Großschäffer und Lieger des Deutschen Ordens in Preussen. Köln: Böhlau Verlag. For the wrecks in the database: National Record of the Historic Environment, Historic England, as accessed on 1 November 2017.

(5) Zins, H. 1967 “Znaczenie Strefy Bałtyckiej dla angielskiego budownictwa okrętowego w drugiej połowie XVI wieku“, Rocznik Lubelski 10, 125-137; Zins, H. (trans Stevens H) 1972 England and the Baltic in the Elizabethan Era. Manchester: University Press

(6) Source: National Record of the Historic Environment, Historic England, as accessed on 1 November 2017.

(7) There were other, partial, English translations earlier than Wycliffe, including the 10th century Old English interlinear gloss in the Latin of the Lindisfarne Gospels, but its purpose was to assist the reader in their understanding of the Latin text, not act as a substitute for it. For more on Tyndale and his smuggled Bibles: “Melvyn Bragg on William Tyndale: his genius matched that of Shakespeare”, Daily Telegraph, 6 June 2013

(8) García Pinilla, I. n.d. “Reconsidering the relationship between the Complutensian Polyglot Bible and Erasmus’ Novum Testamentum” in Basel 1516: Erasmus’ Edition of the New Testament