In an example of the “history begins yesterday” approach the recording of post-1945 wrecks began in 2010, when something like 500 modern wrecks were input onto the National Record of the Historic Environment (now under the aegis of Historic England, but at the time when this post was originally written, part of English Heritage).
That old joke about the Swiss Navy isn’t quite as far fetched as you might think: in the 20th century there was, and indeed into the 21st there remains, a Swiss mercantile marine not confined to the shores of Lake Geneva!
Today’s wreck is the Nyon, a Swiss ship which foundered off Beachy Head with a cargo of Mercedes cars following a collision with the Jalazad in 1962. Not only was she Swiss-registered, she is unusual for another reason.
In fact, she is a double wreck, in fact, because part of her had been left behind when she was hauled off the Byrips off St. Abb’s Head, Scotland, in 1958, and so is in the records of the Canmore database (Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of Scotland) as a wreck. She was repaired and re-entered service until her final loss in the 1962 incident. This form of double wrecking in different locations at different times, though rare, does occasionally happen and we signpost as appropriate to other records, as in this instance.
Similarly landlocked at first sight are the ships which used to belong to Austria-Hungary, but the Austro-Hungarian Empire was formerly much greater than the borders of the eponymous constituent countries today, and had an outlet to the sea at Trieste in modern Italy and at ports on the Croatian coast.
We know of at least 60 ships which either belonged to Austria-Hungary at the time of loss or had borne an Austro-Hungarian nationality at an earlier period. One of the latter was the Elmcrest, torpedoed in 1940, having formerly borne the Hungarian name of Auguszta Főhercegnő (Archduchess Augusta). In other words, within our records is a body of evidence for ships registered in countries that have never had (Switzerland), or formerly had (Austro-Hungary), an outlet to the sea.
Wrecks on Christmas Day are somewhat inevitable when the prime ‘wrecking season’ is between October and March in our northern hemisphere. There are numerous instances of such wrecks, so here are a few representative examples – there are far more in our records than I can possibly include here. However, it does show that it is possible to mine the database for the same day regardless of year, as well as a specific date.
Plymouth in particular seemed really rather dangerous on the 25th December in the late 17th century: on 25th December 1675 the George and Spread Eagle, both from Bordeaux with wine, were lost west of the Citadel, as was a Dutch ship, the St. Job of Naarden. On 25th December 1689 a similar event happened, resulting in the loss of the Centurion, Henrietta, Blade of Wheat, Dover Prize, Eendracht and two unknown French prizes which had been sent into Plymouth. However, accounts are probably skewed by Plymouth’s status as a naval base and importance as a port, making it one of the premier ‘reporting ports’ for the few newspapers at this time.
In 1810 a gale on Christmas Day accounted for four wrecks in various locations, two of them in Liverpool. The wind conditions on that day were reported at Deal as ‘West, blows hard, a tremendous gale in the morning.’ On the same day a year later, the crew of the Giertru Chrestiane from Drammen in Norway were picked up in their boats after striking the Leman and Ower off Norfolk on Christmas Eve.
On 25th December 1814, the Valetteschooner went to pieces off Warkworth, Northumberland, with what sounds like a very Dickensian cargo of toys and clocks from Rotterdam. In 1830, the German brig Anna, bound for her home port of Hamburg with coal, came ashore at Mundesley, Norfolk, on Christmas night at 9pm in a ‘strong gale and a very severe frost’.
One hundred years later, the crew of the Norwegian collier Eli, bound from Blyth for Rouen with coal, had a most un-festive shock when their ship was mined on 25th December 1914 off Scarborough – a reminder that while the Christmas truce was holding across much of the Western Front, mines could strike at random.
Happily all the crew were saved, hopefully to enjoy the remainder of their Christmas!
‘Twas the night before Christmas . . . not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse . . .
We wouldn’t expect to receive newspapers on Christmas Day nowadays, but it was not uncommon in the past for Lloyd’s List to be published on 25th December. I shall focus on 25th December 1753. Two wrecks were reported in this issue in the south-west of England. One was the Union, from Cork for Bristol, on the Bristol Channel coast.
There was also the Jeffrow Edia Maria [sic]. Lloyd’s List reported a ‘Dutch Dogger from Galipoly to Amsterdam lost off the Ram he[. .]’ with the loss of the master and four men. The Sherborne Mercury also said: ‘They write from Plymouth that on the 23rd inst. a Dutch dogger from Gallipoli for Amsterdam is wrecked at Ramhead. The captain and men drowned, and the vessel and cargo lost. The Jeffrow Edia Maria, of and from Amsterdam for Gallipoli, Jacob Sume master, is lost on Ramhead. The master and four men drowned.’
This is a perfect example of the confusion which occurred in contemporary newspapers with information being ‘split down the middle’ between variant accounts, often in the same paragraph as correspondence from different sources arrived to hand. The vessel also turns up in a Dutch paper, where: ‘they write from Ramsey, an Island and Haven in the Irish Sea, that the richly laden merchant vessel the Juffrauw Ida Maria was lost on the cliffs at that harbour with man and mouse’. (The latter is Dutch idiom for ‘with all hands’.)
There are no cliffs at the entrance to Ramsey, Isle of Man, but this description fits the profile of Rame Head, which is near Plymouth. The Dutch version suggests that Lloyd’s List was the medium of transmission, Dutch editors struggling to make sense of the missing letters in Lloyd’s List. They evidently settled on Ramsey rather than Rame Head, but the loss of all hands in that account suggests that the Dutch dogger and the Edia/Ida Maria were one and the same.
I discussed the wreck Seynt Cristofre from 1386 with the local HER (Historic Environment Record) officer last week. He kindly supplied me with further information from the Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, which has enabled me to enhance the record further. It was the final outstanding reference, so it is a very good example of harnessing the work of HER officers.
It is an exceptionally detailed record for a wreck from the Middle Ages, both in terms of containing information from several different sources – as we saw with the ‘tin ship wreck’ a couple of weeks back, three references were exceptional even several centuries later – and in the level of detail concerning the ship and circumstances of loss. The ship’s name, date of loss, manner and location of loss, master, owners, cargo and voyage details are all present. A hit rate of perhaps three of these details would be considered good going for documentary evidence of a medieval wreck, from my point of view. Unusually, the paper trail starts with the wreck event – quite often, the first record commissioning an enquiry or “inquisition” is missing from the surviving documentary evidence, and we pick up the trail some time later, so the name, for example, which might have been present in that first mention, isn’t recoverable.
We do not always get to find out what happened subsequently, since the trail often runs cold due to the lack of extant documents before the matter was concluded. You could say that medieval wrecks are often lost twice over – once in the wrecking process, and again through the haphazard survival (at best) of contemporary records.
Here we have a very specific date of loss – on the eve of All Saints; moreover, since the cargo was carried away on that day, the wreck must have occurred sufficiently early in the day for arrangements to be made to hire the carts by the master, which then seem to have been diverted, embezzled, or what you will! The survival of the crew and quantity of goods carried away suggests a location at some fairly accessible point of the inter-tidal zone – at the least, accessible at low tide. Looking at Admiralty Easytide, high water on that day was just after noon, at 12.08pm, which would appear to lend weight to this suggestion. It would be easy to conjecture that at some time that morning the vessel was lost before the tide reached its height in order for the carts to be hired and the goods taken away before it became dark.
The question was, therefore, whether the peck of pickled peppers was picked by the Prior of Prittlewell, or by Pultere his bailiff on his behalf! Claim and counter-claim ensued as Pultere was accused of embezzling some of the goods and the carters of diverting some of the rest. Mismanagement was clearly seen all around, since the wreck was blamed on the seamen’s ‘carelessness’. This seems a little harsh, given the circumstances of a storm.
William Camden, writing in the 1600s, describes the local topography of Shobery Nesse:
Heere by reason that the bankes on both sides shrinke backe, the Tamis at a huge and wide mouth rowleth into the sea.
[William Camden, Britain, or, a Chorographicall Description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: George Bishop and John Norton, 1610) Copyright 2004 by Dana F. Sutton. This text was transcribed by Professor Sutton, of the University of California, Irvine, from Philemon Holland’s 1610 translation] accessed here.
A Vision of Britain has some nice historical maps – click here for a map of Shoebury:
With the stormy weather continuing until earlier this week, giving rise to the usual media reports wondering whether it is unprecedented/is evidence of global warming, maritime archaeology does indeed give us a perspective that reassures us storms in late November are by no means unusual.
The ultimate example is, of course, the Great Storm of 1703, 309 years ago. Many readers familiar with maritime archaeology will know the three certainly-identified Designated Wrecks arising out of the storm, the Northumberland, Restoration, and Stirling Castleand another Designated Wreck which may be the remains of a fourth, the Resolution. The havoc wrought by similar storms during the same period in other years is also well documented.
However, today I’d like to draw attention to a documented wreck event arising from the storm, a little ship laden with tin. She was driven helplessly before the wind out of Falmouth and scudded along all the way to the Isle of Wight in 8 hours.
This was remarkable enough in itself. What was more remarkable was that such a small vessel, which would otherwise have been overlooked in contemporary records on both social and economic grounds, should survive at all in the documentary record. Even more remarkably, she was included in three separate reports collated and published by a young journalist struggling to make his name in a ground-breaking work of early journalism, The Storm, 1704. One surviving report from this period per wreck is often about as good as it gets.
Was it a question of ‘never letting the facts get in the way of a good story’? I had my doubts as to the time frame, since in the text the repetition of ‘next morning’ (Freudian slips, or careless editing?) suggested two consecutive mornings, rather than 8 hours; perhaps a period of 30 hours. When I initially blogged this story, a modern-day sailor got in touch to say that he felt that in 8 hours the vessel would have been making an extraordinary number of knots, but over 30 hours a more credible number of knots and a sailing speed fast enough to have caused comment at the time would be plausible. So we have arrived at a similar conclusion from forensic examination of language and a hands-on sailing perspective!
This little wreck, however, also illustrates how specialist knowledge can lift a documented wreck off the page into the realms of archaeological potential. I have not only the modern sailor to thank, but a diver who used his local knowledge to suggest an excellent location for the wreck in Freshwater Bay which fulfilled all the criteria as described in the original sources.
This ground-breaking work was eclipsed at a later date by another, one of the earliest examples of the novel form. The journalist was, of course, Daniel Defoe, and his novel, also centred on a shipwreck event – Robinson Crusoe. It is fascinating to speculate how much he gathered from the accounts of the 1703 storm, and other stories he must have heard, for, of course, Robinson Crusoe was based on a real-life castaway, Alexander Selkirk.
Things are a little bit different this week (November 2012) with severe flooding having affected my railway line, preventing me from reaching my office, so trains under water naturally sprang to mind.
Today’s wreck contained five locos. The St. Chamondwas torpedoed in 1918 while moving locos as deck cargo, consigned to France for the war effort. Wrecks such as these form part of a landscape of war, destined for another landscape of war, where British industrial output directly affected the French landscape. The British required coordinated transport between the ports and the Western Front for men and munitions, and of course, a rapid reverse flow as casualties were cleared and sent back home for recuperation, my own grandfather among them. Some of these ambulance trains were actually built at the Swindon Works, part of which is now the EH Swindon office. (Follow this link for history on the Swindon army base; Chiseldon Camp)
Here are some fabulous Futurist images by Gino Severini of trains speeding into or out of Paris during WWI:
Such wrecks, containing rolling stock and other items, such as railway sleepers, are fairly common, and illustrate the export of British railway engineering worldwide from the early days of the industry. The latest wreck containing rolling stock, as far as I know, may be that of the Fort Massac on 1 February 1946.
I came across a reference to a Darlington loco consigned for South Africa lost in the Thames Estuary in 1946 in the latest issue of my husband’s Railway Magazine. It just goes to show that you can find wreck information in the unlikeliest of places, buried deep among accounts of terrestrial infrastructure! The unnamed wreck in the article fits the profile of the Fort Massac in date and place of loss, and the fact that the vessel was outward-bound from Middlesborough.
To date, however, I have found no reference to a loco in either the UKHO record for the wreck site or in the contemporary press. There were certainly references to her ‘vital’ export cargo: the vessel was ‘loaded with the products of Britain’s export drive – silverware, bicycles, blankets, silks, steel manufactures and chemicals. It had taken nearly a month to load her.’ (1) Elsewhere her cargo was described as ‘a shop-window cargo of silks, taffetas, worsteds and silverware for the South African market.’ (2) These loads suggest that Yorkshire products were being specifically showcased, for example from the textile mills of West Yorkshire and the steel mills of Teesside.
So if there was indeed a loco on board, where did it come from and why wasn’t it newsworthy enough to be mentioned among what was admittedly a cargo that would have been accurately described as ‘general’? Both Hunslet of Leeds and Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns of Darlington built locos for the South African market and were sited in the ‘catchment area’ for the cargo: the former had a history of building smaller locos for the sugar trade such as at Gledhow in 1942, the latter supplied Class 19D locos for South African Railways after World War II.
Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns lost engine 2734, works no. 7247 consigned for South Africa off the east coast of England, but this is noted as 1947 (3); however, we can tell from profiling our other wreck records that there are no other vessels which fulfil the criteria of being lost off the east coast during the period 1946-1948, while bound to South Africa, other than the Fort Massac. Can anyone tell us more about her cargo?
(1)Hull Daily Mail, No.18,789, 02 February 1946, p1
(2)Shields Daily News, 02 February 1946, p8
(3) Holland, D F (1972) Steam Locomotives of the South African Railways. 2: 1910-1955 (1st ed.). Newton Abbott: David & Charles. pp. 93–96
– or, don’t expect a Cyrillic nameboard to turn up!
Recent update work has included adding documentary evidence to both sites and casualties resulting from the Great Storm which took place 18-20 November 1893. One is the “Russian” casualty Venscapen but why does it matter that she wasn’t Russian?
Getting it right enhances retrievability of vessel name and nationality and allows the vessel to be traced through documentary sources.
It was a dark and stormy night, as Snoopy might have said: all too frequently, the nameboard wasn’t visible, was lost, or not legible; the survivors couldn’t speak English; they passed on their ship’s name to their rescuers, fishermen with strong regional accents; by the time it reached the Lloyd’s agent it was hopelessly garbled.
It’s also true that the English coastline was so frequently strewn with wrecks that foreign ships lost here were of relatively little interest to the English press. Conversely, they made big news back home. These days with online digitization, such resources are easy to find and use.
One of the great strengths of the database is that it permits profiling of wrecks against each other – it could be as simple as spellings, or as complex as statistics for particular areas, cargoes or vessel types. I had a theory based on previous experience . . .
My first port of call was the Finnish National Newspaper Library. An excellent high-res digitization with an English interface, it permits fuzzy searches, a great help with phonetic spellings: Venscapen brought back the correct spelling Vånskapen, a Swedish-language name with a Swedish master’s name (Johansson). Curiouser and curiouser. Definitely not Russian . . .
Like many “Russian” barques of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, she was registered in Ahvenamaa, or the Aaland Islands, part of Finland. In 1893, Finland’s mercantile classes were Swedish (Aaland remains Swedish-speaking today) but Finland was also a Grand Duchy of Russia, hence the “Russian” nationality. This vessel is therefore now indexed by her nationality as expressed at the time, and her current nationality – as well as the right spelling!
The exceptionally interesting Aaland ships cornered the market in the last of the sailing barques, which by the 1930s were only economical on very long-distance routes where bunker coal was unavailable. They thus specialised in the Chilean nitrate trade and the Grain Race to Australia. Herzogin Ceciliewas one of the last Aalanders, but Historic England also holds pictures of others in their very final days after the Second World War, including Pamir.
Today’s records are in a slightly lighter vein . . . dogs associated with wrecks.
Dogs may not be able to talk, but sometimes they can bear witness to a wreck, as in this case when a dog arrived home at St. Ives, the first indication that anything was amiss with the Charles, lost off Portreath in November 1807, the sole survivor and the sole witness. If only they could talk . . .
For a dog to be a sole survivor of a wreck event was not uncommon. Unsurprisingly Newfoundlands featured quite regularly in such accounts, such as those who swam ashore from the wrecks of the Cameleon transport on the Manacles in 1811, while bringing home soldiers from the Peninsular War, or the Edouard in 1842 off Kimmeridge in Dorset.
Another dog also became the sole survivor of the steamer Prince, wrecked in 1876 off the Tyne.
Thomas Bewick, in his 1790 General History of Quadrupeds, illustrated the Newfoundland not only with one of his celebrated woodcuts but also with an anecdote which seems to relate to the story of the Shields collier brig John, lost in 1789 near Great Yarmouth. From that ship, lost with all hands, a log book came ashore. How it came ashore was evidently part of a tale circulating in Shields and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where Bewick lived and worked and had his books published:
‘ . . . a Newfoundland dog alone escaped to shore, bringing in his mouth the captain’s pocket-book . . .’ According to Bewick, the ‘sagacious animal’ refused to drop his ‘charge, which in all probability was delivered to him by his perishing master’ until he saw a man whom he liked the look of, and he gave him the book before returning to the shore. He then ‘watched with great attention for everything that came from the wrecked vessel, seizing them, and endeavouring to bring them to land.’ (1)
‘The drawing for this dog was taken from a very fine one, at Eslington in the county of Northumberland’ Thomas Bewick, A General History of Quadrupeds (1790) Wikimedia Commons: public domain
Though several other records also report the sole survivor as being canine, more happily, there were other accounts where some or all of the members of the crew, human and canine, were rescued. In 1869 a two-year old Newfoundland was rescued from the Highland Chiefbarque on the Goodwin Sands, having stayed behind on the wreck with 12 humans, waiting for the Deal boatmen to come to them (the five men who trusted to the ship’s boat were never seen again).
The crew of the Reaper of Guernsey were taken off by breeches buoy in 1881, in another rescue off the Tyne, including a somewhat vocal animal: ‘Above the shouts of the men could be distinctly heard the yells of a fine terrier dog’ reported a local newspaper. When the Wandsworth also struck off the Tyne in 1897 another dog, also rescued by breeches buoy, ‘gave token of being exceedingly thankful for its rescue’.
We wonder if the rescuers were licked to death!
In 1868 a ‘very fine retriever dog’ kept calm in an emergency and doggy-paddled off to save itself from a wreck. It knew where to go, and, ‘no doubt attracted by the brilliant Gull light’ swam up to the Gull lightvessel off the Goodwin Sands after the collision between the Lena and Superior, which sank the latter. The dog had swum for nearly a mile before reaching the lightvessel, and seems to have been made quite a fuss of, being called a ‘sagacious animal’ and ‘noble creature’.
In 1858, a ‘much exhausted’ black Newfoundland was picked up at sea ‘half a league from the pier head’ at Mullion the morning after two ships in harbour were driven out to sea and smashed onto the shore west of Mullion.
Somewhat more famous was Monte, the St. Bernard plucked to safety by the greatest lifeboatman of all time, Cox’n Henry Blogg, from the Monte Nevoso aground on Haisbro’ Sand in 1932. Monte is the star of the RNLI Henry Blogg museum where a photograph of Monte can be seen with his rescuer and owner (shown in the link). A pet dog also made the news when rescued from the wreck of the Terukuni Maru, mined in the Thames in 1939.
Dogs could also be the rescuer rather than the rescued and it is no surprise that a Newfoundland was involved in the following incident in 1815. The breed became famous for its lifesaving capabilities and instincts, a reputation which persists to this day. The ‘sagacious canine perseverance’ of one Newfoundland who doggedly (sorry . . . ) swam ashore with a lead line resulted in a successful rescue operation from the Durham Packet off Cley-next-the-Sea, Norfolk.
From this we have learnt not only of the part that dogs, especially Newfoundlands, have played in our wreck heritage, but also that the word of choice was ‘sagacious’!
I can’t promise that every wreck will be topical – after all, in the northern hemisphere the prime ‘wrecking season’ is between October and March, and I also want to make the selection fairly random! However, this week features the Rohilla, a hospital ship which struck the coast of Whitby on 30 October 1914, i.e. 98 years ago this week.
Rohilla is one of a number of hospital ships which were lost during World War I, but she is the only one who is almost certainly not a war loss (the initial cause of loss was thought to be a mine explosion).
Of course, the cause of women’s rights was greatly advanced by the shipboard nurses who faced danger on the high seas, as well as the other women who stepped into wartime roles. One nurse on board Rohilla had had previous experience at sea as a stewardess, when she was rescued from the most famous wreck of all time, so our topicality extends to this year’s centenary of the loss of the Titanic.
For more on Rohilla, please see ‘one I made earlier‘: including a link to genuine amateur footage of the rescue operation, redistributed by Pathé.
Rohilla was not the only wreck to carry a Titanic survivor who also survived a second wreck. Another wreck was HMS Falcon, in 1918: which was commanded by Charles Lightoller, the senior surviving officer on board the Titanic – again, he survived. As you can see, we try and tell a story and make links to events and people of cultural and historic interest to contribute to scholarship and drive public engagement with heritage. Charles Lightoller is also entered as a Person of Historic Interest, so all monuments linked to a particular person can be searched for.
If you know of any more Titanic survivors on other wrecks, please let me know – and I can update our records.
I realised today that I’m now one of the dwindling number of *ahem* slightly older people for whom the expression coals to Newcastle, to describe a pointless endeavour, is current!
Today’s wreck is the wonderfully-named Light of the Harem which was driven on the infamous Black Middens at the mouth of the Tyne during a snowstorm in 1870, along with a number of other vessels.
Thereby hangs a tale. Secondary accounts of the story say that coal was pillaged from the Light of the Harem as she broke up, an example of never letting the facts get in the way of a good story.
There was pillage from the other wrecks, but not from the Light of the Harem, because further research shows that she was inbound for the Tyne from her home port of Lowestoft, and can’t therefore have been carrying coals to Newcastle! Typically colliers entered the Tyne in ballast – the trade in ‘black diamonds’ was so profitable that an exchange or return cargo was usually unnecessary.
The crew were rescued by the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade, who operate to this day outside the auspices of the RNLI, together with their counterparts at South Shields. The TVLB has an interesting little museum where you can see artefacts from shipwrecks, including the Light of the Harem.
You’re probably wondering why she had such an exotic name for the Victorian period, when the other vessels involved had the much more prosaic, and unexceptionable, names of the Anne, Helena, and Susannah. It derives from a section in Thomas Moore’s “Oriental” romantic poem Lalla-Rookh, published in 1817, which became a sensation and a popular 19th century classic, inspiring music and art. Here is Frederick Lord Leighton’s painting of the subject. We also have three other 19th century wrecks called Lalla Rookh, showing how much the theme took hold in the Victorian imagination.
