Admiralty Easytide

20. Genuinely Wreck of this Week!

~ Serena ~ Leave a comment

I answer PastScape enquiries if they have a maritime flavour, and earlier this week, a member of the public with an interest in maritime history got in touch via the PastScape comments log to tell us that our record for the Ann in 1802 had the incorrect master’s name and that she had more information.

Incidentally, this one was one researched and put on the system in the first instance, as she does not appear in the Shipwreck Index of the British Isles.

Quite why we have the wrong master’s name turned out to be quite clear in one way, but a bit of a mystery in another way. It’s not uncommon, if a ship is wrecked on her first voyage with a new master, for the earlier master’s name to be quoted in contemporary newspaper reports, particularly if it is a vessel with a quick turnaround on a regular route, as was the case with the Ann.

This lovely correspondent kindly typed up some further background information from copies of original documents she had obtained from the National Maritime Museum for me: it turned out that on this voyage the master was Bittleston, not Grant, she was 243 tons, and owned by a man who specialised in the east coast coal trade, so the Ann was most likely a dedicated collier. She is utterly typical of ships in that trade, a brig, and about the usual tonnage for a smaller brig of c.250 tons. Not unusually for a collier brig, she was lost off Great Yarmouth by getting on the Scroby Sand.

What was interesting was the level of detail after the ship struck the Scroby. The master’s attempts to get the vessel off continued until the planks started, when it became clear she wasn’t going to come off; the salvors were circling like vultures to start stripping the hull, and a bill was presented to W D Palmer, shipwreck agents at Great Yarmouth, for efforts to attend the ship. According to my correspondent, apparently some of the sails which were supposed to have been salved were stolen.

In these cases, the vessel was normally stripped of all her materials, which were advertised for sale by auction in situ, or taken back within 2-6 weeks, to be sold by auction at her home port, depending on how quickly the materials and stores could be salved and the availability of a suitable vessel to take the materials back. The wrecks of Shields colliers were often sold back at Shields in this way. For example a ship appeared in the arrivals list at Shields with “wrecked materials” from Saltfleet, following the loss of a vessel at Saltfleet in 1810.

The tide times in the contemporary sources don’t stack up. I had a look on Admiralty Easytide and high water on 14 September 1802 at Great Yarmouth itself was at 9.29 so two hours after high tide would have been circa 11.30. As the Scroby is not that far offshore, the discrepancy is surely too great to be owing to the location? There are other things which are slightly odd. Mrs Thompson told me that the mate had been arrested on the previous voyage by the Customs on arrival at Shields, but was bailed, and two days after the wreck he wrote to the former captain: My Dr. Friend That you were not Master of the Ann when this Misfortune came upon us I heartily rejoice.

Curiouser and curiouser. It was suggested that there was some “pong” about the whole thing. Was there a reason the master was replaced, so that the original master had an alibi?

The thought of insurance fraud did cross my mind, but against that is the whole issue of a spike in 1802 of ships lost on the Scroby with 4 ships lost that year, one only a couple of weeks previously. Interestingly, the weather conditions are not mentioned at all in any of those four cases, suggesting that they were unremarkable, so the weather was probably not particularly a factor in the case of the Ann, i.e. not driving her onto the sand. As with most sandbanks, there are fairly discernible patterns where the numbers of wrecks rise in a particular year which must be owing to sand movement. The vessel struck at 9pm on the 13th in company with another vessel, near enough to high tide at 9.30pm, according to Admiralty Easytide, This suggests that the two ships were expecting a clear navigable channel around the Scroby. The other ship was more fortunate in getting off, perhaps because she might have been nearer the edge of the sand and able to float off more quickly as the tide reached its height. The number of Scroby losses in that year without ascribing any responsibility to the weather suggests that perhaps the sand was encroaching unexpectedly on the navigable channel, which was therefore narrower than usual.

Does anyone else have anything to add or any other suggestions? In the meantime, however, this is a really good example of a record which is hugely improved following collaboration with a PastScape visitor.

9. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

~ Serena ~ Leave a comment

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: