Shipwrecks

Wreck of the Week No.30: The Staff of Life

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Our Daily Bread

Recently a colleague challenged me to name wrecks with an obscure cargo, thinking that bread would be too difficult to find. Off the top of my head – as we were in a respectable hostelry at the time! – I mentioned a number of local ships I knew of, laden with provisions to take to market, some of which must surely have involved bakery goods as well as groceries and livestock. However, back in the office, I thought I’d better do some digging.

One good example is a wreck that has come down to us only as “Owner Owen’s Trow“, belonging to Gloucester, which sank after colliding with a larger vessel in the Severn in 1751, “which greatly damaged her cargo” of “grocery”. Local papers at this time seem generally to refer to Severn trows by owner rather than by any name the vessel may or may not have had.  For an image of what a trow looked like, have a look at the signboard of the Llandoger Trow pub in Bristol.

I suggested also the raw material of wheat, for example the wreck of the Caledonia in 1842, again inbound to Gloucester with wheat from the ‘bread basket of Russia’ at Odessa. Keeping with the pub theme, to this day there is an Odessa Inn at Tewkesbury, which is on the Severn and must refer to this trade.

Well, as they say, an army marches on its stomach. Virtually every time I found a mention of bread or provisions, it was in relation to victualling a campaign or a fleet. We have a number of such records from the Middle Ages, the earliest being in 1296 at Lytham, “with goods and victuals for the castles in North Wales”. This one was followed in 1302 by another victualler feeding Edward I’s army, lost off Hartlepool, while in 1305 another ship was lost off Cumbria, laden with corn and other provisions for “the maintenance of the king’s subjects in the war” in Scotland.

We only have three specific mentions of bread. One was the Rebecca, exporting bread from Stockton-on-Tees for Barbados, lost at Boulmer, Northumberland, in 1691. The Charming Sally was outward-bound to victual the English army at Quiberon Bay in 1760, when she was lost in the Cattewater, just as she was leaving Plymouth. This shows the support for one of the most famous British campaigns of the 18th century, one of those that shaped modern Canadian history.

Likewise the Swift victualler was lost in convoy off Portland, similarly bound for Canada, in 1776, laden with what every sailor needed: rum and bread. “Oh! dreadful sight!” wrote a witness, as she was consumed by fire.

The long distances involved in all three cases shows us that in all likelihood we are probably looking at the famous hard tack or ship’s biscuit. Have a look at one here.

Wreck of the Week No.29: The Supposed Svodohy

~ Serena ~ 1 Comment

It’s All Greek to Me

Welcome back to WOTW following a little summer sabbatical. I trust you are all enjoying the weather!

Profiling a group of wrecks recently, I spotted one called the Svodohy, said to be a Greek brig lost off Lundy in 1883. The name didn’t seem at all Greek to me, but was reported as such in the Board of Trade Casualty Returns (the Victorian annual statistics for shipwrecks). I smelt a rat and called up 19th Century British Newspapers Online (most local libraries subscribe, a hugely useful resource).

Contemporary newspapers revealed various versions of her name, together with equally various versions of her home port, and likewise the master’s name varied from the BOT report. The one thing that they all said, however, was that she was Greek. Usually when this sort of thing happens, it’s a sure sign that foreign lettering, whether on the ship’s side, or as entered by the master in official records, hasn’t been read properly, in this case the Greek alphabet. The most convincing version came from her departure port at Cardiff where they would surely have had access to the port records: hence this report called her Zoodochos (Pigi). I realised that in Greek letters it must have read, probably all in lower case, ζωoδοχος; most likely probably if painted cursively it bore an even closer resemblance to Svodohy, with, for example, the unfamiliar final letter ‘s’ looking like a loose ‘y’. Zoodochos Pigi is one of the epithets of the Theotokos (Mother of God) in Greek Orthodoxy, so this seems on the right track, as, of course, saints’ names have historically always been very popular for ships.

There is a similar case with a 1946 Greek vessel charted as the OHPA, and mysteriously untraced, which, of course, was easily traced once Greek ΘΗΡΑ was transliterated as Thira, unlocking access to further references in the contemporary press..

I find both errors slightly odd during a period when far more people learnt Greek at school than they do now, even if they promptly forgot it as soon as they left . . . !

Such access to a Classical education had its effects on ship names at an earlier date in England. An 1808 wreck rejoiced in the pseudo-learned Greek name of Chrononhotonthologos. 

In fact, it is a name from the English-speaking world, inspired by ‘the most tragical tragedy that ever was tragediz’d’ by Henry Carey in 1734, republished as one of ‘the most esteemed farces on the English stage’ in 1786. It was performed as far afield as Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1818, so the ship operated during the currency of the play. Why the owner named his ship thus is anyone’s guess, and there’s probably a very good story here we know nothing about.

At least it was certainly more distinctive than your average Betsey and probably jumped off the page in arrivals and departures lists, which was always good news for people looking for ‘when their ship came in’.

23. Dunking the Witches

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I promised you more on ‘unbooked passengers’ last week, and if you were anticipating stowaways, that’s a story for another day. Today’s wreck in 1667  is included more for the completeness of the record (because it appears in shipwreck lists elsewhere) rather than bearing any very close relationship to reality. It is certainly a very good candidate for the strangest wreck record I have ever come across: the letter in which it appears, although one of the State Papers (1) appears to be relaying little more than local gossip and is somewhat garbled.

The sequence of events appears to be as follows: the correspondent wrote from Harwich, ‘They tell a strange story at Ipswich of one of their ships that was lost in the late storms’. Two Ipswich ships met one another at sea, suggesting that they were crossing one another,  perhaps northbound and southbound respectively in the North Sea (possibly colliers). Instead of exchanging news, ‘speaking’ as it was called at the time, the crew of the first ship gave their love to all their friends and relations at home, as they had given themselves up for lost.

On being asked why this was so, ‘the first ship replied that they had long laboured to free their maintop, where sat a couple of witches, but by all that they could do, could not remove nor get them down, and so they were lost people.’

At least one passenger had taken ship on this vessel, having previously been on board a ship lost at Scarborough Roads (so he might have been a nervous passenger anyway) but interpreting the place of loss as between Scarborough and Ipswich begs more questions than it answers.

The request to ‘send their love’ suggests the doomed vessel was outbound from Ipswich: for this to be a plausible request the second vessel taking the message home must have been inbound to Ipswich. Yet the passenger had lost his ship in Scarborough Roads, so it seems strange that he was apparently outward-bound from Ipswich.

Possibly, instead, the two ships had crossed north of Scarborough, and the second vessel was homeward-bound from somewhere like Newcastle: the place of loss would then have been further north, between Scarborough and Newcastle. This conjecture, however, is simply based on the prevalence of the collier trade on the east coast in the 1600s, and recorded, for example, by Defoe.

This isn’t the strangest thing about the supposed wreck, though. This is a unique – in English waters anyway – example of a ship being said to be lost to witchcraft. Some of those on board survived, since the supposed witches were then clapped into jail. Possibly they were arrested simply because they survived their dunking in the sea – after all, witches were supposed to be guilty if they floated, and innocent if they sank! This was rather hard on all the innocent people who suffered under the notorious 17th century Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, who, of course, was active in northern Essex in the 1640s. One wonders whether this ‘wreck’ is a legacy of Hopkins’ reign of terror.

Update 14.02.2014: While running a query today I came across another wreck with a tinge of the supernatural which I just had to add to the blog. The events a hundred years later seem to be real enough, and there is nothing unusual in a ship being cast ashore ‘in the late storm’ in 1766 on an area of the coastline that was fairly well-known for wrecks. Something was clearly preying on the master’s mind, and he (or, as the original source implies, if you read it carefully, his ship, which gives the story an even greater supernatural tinge!) decided to lay the blame for the wreck at the feet of a supernatural ‘woman’ who ‘belonged to the merchants of Hull’, to which port he was bound.

‘Newcastle, Sept. 27 . . . We are informed that the sloop William and Ann, of Port Seaton, James Scott, master, from Hull for Leith, with bale goods, which has been drove ashore at Blyth, in the late storm, went [sic] on the 11th inst. to one of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the county of Northumberland, and made the following deposition, that on Monday the 8th, being about 10 leagues from the land, he went into the cabbin, where he found a woman standing; and on enquiry how she came there, she said she came out of the hold, and belonged to the merchants of Hull: on which he offered to lay hold of her, when she vanished. He then came on deck, where he saw a man come out of a block, and another on the mast, with feet as big as hogsheads, blowing the sails, and legions of the devils floating about the ship, who carried her over an exceeding high rock, where she was wrecked, and the crew with difficulty saved. Quere, if the ship was insured?’ (2)

Rather than a supernatural apparition, it seems likely to be a psychological manifestation of some concerns about his reception on arrival at Hull.  The newspapers may have had something of this nature on their minds: by ostensibly asking if the ship was insured against supernatural peril, might they have been poking a bit of fun at the owners and gently hinting at insurance fraud and a guilty conscience?

(1) Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Charles II, 1667-8, 2 November 1667, No.27

(2) Newcastle Courant, 27th September 1766, No.4,697, p2