wrecks in 1869

A Tale of Two Billyboys

~ Serena ~ 1 Comment

The Swan and the York Merchant

It is my pleasure once more to welcome Jordan Havell for a third blog on his local heritage.

Here he focuses on two Humber billyboys which were lost on routine voyages which ended disastrously on the Lincolnshire coast. Jordan has been honing his research skills in going back to original newspapers on the British Newspaper Archive and trying to trace the history of the ships involved through the Guildhall Library, two of the most important sources of information for any shipwreck historian.

He has helped identify one vessel – the York Merchant – and discovered another – the Swan – and seems to have caught the research bug!  So I would like to thank Jordan very much for passing this information on to us. Potentially one or the other of these two vessels, or perhaps another one that we haven’t yet discovered more about, might tell us where fragments of wreckage recently washed up near Jordan could have come from.

Over to Jordan:

My blog this time relates to the Swan billyboy that was lost at Huttoft on 17th Oct 1869.

I had asked about another vessel – a billyboy that had been listed in Historic England records as a wreck 05.11.1858 carrying shingle. I have now, with the help of The Guildhall, London, been able to name that wreck as the York Merchant of Yarmouth. She was lost along with 3 crew and 3 passengers. The story is told in varying newspapers: the Stamford Mercury, 12 Nov 1858; Leeds Times, 13 Nov 1858; Morning Advertiser 16 Nov 1858, as well as the Dundee Courier Weds 17 Nov 1858 and The Bucks Herald Sat 20 Nov 1858.

There were similarities between the two vessels (the York Merchant and the Swan). Both the vessels had been classified as billyboys. Both had set sail for Gainsborough, Lincolnshire – one carrying wheat, and the other carrying shingle. Both had been hit by severe weather and had both been carrying the family of the masters aboard – sadly in the case of the York Merchant it is known there were fatalities.

I was finding pieces of stranded wood on my local beach over recent weeks. I got in touch with Serena Cant at Historic England as we had been in contact before. She, along with Andy Sherman of Museum of London Archaeology, looked at my photos etc. Andy said the some of the pieces may have come from a billyboy ship.

This, in turn, relit my interest in shipwreck history. We started visiting the library locally and the RNLI records to see if any of these vessels had been wrecked in this area. We found the Swan – a record from a book called Mablethorpe and North Lincolnshire Lifeboats. The vessel had been en route from Boston to Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, when she was caught in a violent gale. She was made of wood and was carrying a cargo of wheat believed to be about 200 quarters, of which only 14 was saved. We found reports in various newspapers in The British Newspaper Archive including the Lincolnshire Chronicle and Manchester Courier, as well as the Hull and Eastern Counties Herald that confirmed the story.

The Master is named as Mr John Would. The owners are named as Nicholson and Burkitt of Retford. The crew is listed as 2, and 3 passengers were aboard at the time. They were saved by the National Lifeboat called the Birmingham. A quote taken from the Mablethorpe and North East Lincolnshire Lifeboats reads: “The only other effective service by the Birmingham Number 1 came on Oct 17th 1869, when she rescued the master, his wife and 2 children plus a man and a boy from the billyboy Swan of Hull.”

The saved master and crew were taken to the Jolly Bacchus – which we now know as the Bacchus Hotel – owned at the time by Mr Simons, from one of the newspaper stories of the time. One of the newspaper quotes read ‘the boat (referring to the lifeboat) was happily the means of saving the shipwrecked persons’. An interesting point was that the cost of this lifeboat when built was £190, the funds having been raised in Birmingham, hence its name.

The Lloyd’s Agent was named as Mr Bradshaw.

I have been in contact with the Guildhall Library in London. They have tried to help me find a record for the Swan. The nearest they could find was Swan of Hull, official number 26882, 37 tons, owned by Henry Robinson, 21 Waverley Street, Hull. There were 3 other vessels called Swan, but all appear to be from Goole, so am I assuming that this one above may be the one.

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Jordan’s post brings out some interesting history. As his last paragraph shows, it can be very difficult to trace small ships in the registers: we can eliminate some, but we can’t always be sure that what is left is the ship we are after. Even experienced researchers like me – and I have been doing this for over 20 years – can come up against a brick wall, but that’s part of what makes it so fascinating.

We can also see that similar ships shared a similar fate on the same stretch of coastline just a few years apart, so this is the type of wreck that could be said to be fairly characteristic of the east coast – you won’t find Humber billyboys on the west coast or Mersey flats on the east coast, because they were generally short-range coasting vessels (though some ships do turn up wrecked in odd places, having been sold out of their local area). The fact that one of the billyboys is called the York Merchant demonstrates that it was intended to serve Yorkshire and to be capable of travelling upriver as well as sailing coastwise.

Another similarity is that on board both vessels the master’s wife and family travelled with him, which shines a light on the role of women on board ships in Victorian Britain. We don’t often read much about this – it’s an under-represented area of history – so well done to Jordan for finding out more.

We also see the importance of community – the local community rallied round and put the shipwreck victims up at the nearby inn. Finally, it is interesting to see that people from the wider community, from inland Birmingham in fact, cared enough to raise money for a lifeboat at Sutton, following the terrible storms of a few years previously.

Here’s some interesting pictures of billyboys – one of 1875 from the Yorkshire Waterways Museum, Goole, showing wheat being unloaded from a billyboy whose voyage was more successful than the Swan, also laden with wheat. Here is another from Goole Museum, painted before 1910, of the Masterman. 

Just like Jordan, I’ve been following all sorts of clues. If Jordan hadn’t written this article, I wouldn’t have been looking for billyboy images to illustrate it with. When I found the Masterman, I realised that she, too, was a wreck which we hadn’t yet recorded. Like the Swan, she was wrecked with her master’s wife and children, who died, like those on board the York Merchant. So thank you again Jordan – because of you I too have found a new wreck for the records!

 

 

No.60 Sombrero

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Phosphate cargoes

This week we will have a look at wrecks from one of our most picturesquely-named departure points, revealing Britain’s connections with Sombrero or Hat Island in Anguilla, and taking a look at a typical 19th century cargo whose true nature is often hidden behind agrochemical euphemism – nitrates, phosphates, fertilizer.

The island once looked like a three-dimensional sombrero: vaguely hat-like in shape, it once also reared out of the sea like the crown and brim of a sombrero, until the crown was diminished by quarrying from the 1850s onwards. The reduction can already be seen in this contemporary print from the heyday of the Sombrero trade in 1865, depicting ships crowding round this little island of only 92 acres. It also shows the source of the island’s natural resources, the seabirds wheeling in the air whose accumulated guano provided rich phosphate fertiliser for farming.

As so often with wrecks of ships involved in a particular trade, our wrecks date from the zenith of Britain’s guano interests in Sombrero, very nearly contemporary with the print. Two barques illustrate what must have been a typical route, lost in the Bristol Channel, bound for Gloucester: the Caravan in Walton Bay in 1869, and the Cornwall, sunk following collision off Lundy in 1871. By 1890 the island was effectively ‘quarried out’: centuries of seabird ‘resources’ had been rapidly depleted and dispersed to fuel the needs of American farmers in the 1850s and British farmers thereafter.

We know of 30 wrecks laden with guano, which was normally sourced from bird cliffs and bat caves. I cannot resist telling you, however, that a couple of other wrecks lost in English waters homeward-bound from Islas Lobos de Afuera or Islas Lobos de Tierra off Peru would appear more likely to contain guano from a less common source: from seals.

5. Our Four-Legged Friends

~ Serena ~ 1 Comment

Dogs in Shipwrecks [Post updated August 2020]

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)

Black and white engraving of a large dog against a rural landscape
‘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 Chief barque 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’!

Oil painting of a dog lying on a quayside against an evening sky, with seagulls wheeling in the air to the right.
A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society, exhibited 1838, Sir Edwin Landseer, bequeathed by Newman Smith, 1887. Photo © Tate. In this painting another dog stood in for the elusive ‘Bob’, who was said to have survived a shipwreck off the east coast of England, and subsequently famous for his rescues, and an honorary member of the Humane Society. The tale may have grown in the telling but Landseer depicted several Newfoundlands associated with shipwreck and lifesaving, particularly black and white Newfoundlands, which have since become known as the ‘Landseer’ type.

Footnote:

(1) Bewick, T. 1790 A General History of Quadrupeds (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Hodgson, Beilby & Bewick)