Under Full Sail

by Rob Mundle

  The gale persisted and conditions further deteriorated, so, with the ship becoming increasingly difficult to control, the captain called for more sails to be taken in. Before this, Reed, who was at the helm, had found Dalhousie ‘lively and manageable’, but two hours later, that circumstance changed dramatically:

  From the morning of the 19th the ship began to lurch deeply into the sea, going a long way over on her broadside, she seemed unable to recover herself when she rolled. I began to suspect there must be a considerable amount of water in her and mentioned it to one of the shipmates, that the vessel seemed waterlogged.

  By 5.30am, Dalhousie would not respond to the helm, and despite carrying virtually no sail, she rolled over onto her starboard beam ends and remained there at the mercy of the gale. In no time, waves were beginning to break over the ship and passengers and crew were being washed overboard. Reed managed to cut a spar free, but while he remained with the ship, the captain, second mate and another seaman jumped overboard and clung to it. Reed’s story continues:

  Many of the people had by this time been drowned, but others remained holding on as they best could on the weather side of the wreck. She lay thus for about ten minutes after Captain Butterworth had left her and then sank, going down head first.

  As Dalhousie was submerged, Reed scrambled aft to the mizzenmast, which he scaled as the water rose towards him. When he reached the mizzentop yard, he discovered the ship’s surgeon already there.

  With the ship continuing to sink, Reed took his only option for salvation: to leap into the water and grab a large piece of timber that was drifting by. ‘My companions gradually perished one after the other, and I was repeatedly washed off my frail support,’ he said.

  ‘Towards 4 o’clock [pm] a brig hove in sight to windward, towards where I was floating. I made signals to her with my handkerchief in the best way I could, which were fortunately seen on board the brig and she bore down to me.’

  The crew of the brig managed to heave a line to Reed and drag him aboard: ‘when I reached her deck, I was nearly senseless’. He was taken to Dover Roads, and it was soon recognised that there were no other survivors from Dalhousie. Reed then travelled to London to relate the story of the wreck to the ship’s owners.

  *

  Just a few months later, the sinking of Tayleur a mere two days out from Liverpool was an even bigger tragedy for her ambitious charterers.

  Being almost four times larger than any ship previously built at the Warrington shipyard near Liverpool, Tayleur was the centre of considerable attention from the locals. The 225-foot-long, iron-hulled, clipper carried square sails on all masts, as well as the customary fore and aft sails, including jibs and staysails. Once she was afloat, a comment regularly heard around the waterfront was that her masts appeared to be positioned further apart than the norm, and that this might affect her balance when under sail. Ironically, this would prove the least serious of her many design flaws.

  The White Star Line quickly negotiated a contract to charter this vessel, then set a schedule for her to set sail on her maiden voyage in January 1854 – just twelve weeks away. Such a timeframe would have been a tight turnaround for any well-seasoned ship, so to impose a similar schedule on a ship that had just been launched, and had not undergone sea trials, could be considered an unreasonable expectation. Her captain, twenty-nine year old John Noble, was highly experienced, yet because of the tight timeframe his crew was hastily assembled, and many of them had little or no sea time to their credit.

  Still, with competition from their rivals at the Black Ball Line being so intense, there was no stepping back for the White Star Line’s founders, John Pilkington and Henry Threlfall Wilson. The midwinter departure date of 19 January 1854 would stand.

  When the big day arrived, crowds lined the shore to farewell this mighty vessel, the pride of British shipbuilding. At the allotted time, the paddle-wheeler steam tug Victory took Tayleur under tow, easing her away from the dock then down the River Mersey towards the open waters of the Irish Sea.

  Because of the absence of an accurate manifest, the actual number of passengers and crew on board is uncertain, but the figure was somewhere between 600 and 660. Tayleur had her hold loaded from stem to stern with a massive quantity of cargo, including ploughs, wine, beer, 15 tons of fencing wire and thirty blank tombstones.

  The vast majority of passengers were heading to Australia for the first time in search of a new life, great wealth or both, while others were preparing for a fresh beginning – like emancipated convict Samuel Carby, who had recently married his sweetheart, Sarah.

  More than a decade earlier, Carby had been sentenced in England to ten years’ transportation to Van Diemen’s Land for killing a sheep while drunk. At the time of the offence he had been with a friend, celebrating the fact that he was about to marry Sarah, with whom he had already had a baby son.

  Inevitably, the marriage didn’t occur. Instead, Carby was shipped out to the penal settlement. After being pardoned early for good behaviour he joined the gold rush and made himself a considerable amount of money. Then, after an absence of twelve years, he returned to England with the intention of marrying the now thirty-seven year old Sarah then taking her and their son Robert, now aged thirteen, back to Australia aboard Tayleur. The marriage took place within days of Samuel’s return to his home village of Stamford, then he, Sarah and Robert headed for Liverpool to join the ship.

  When Tayleur reached the entrance to the Mersey, the pilot who had gone aboard to guide her safely downriver is believed to have advised the captain that he considered the compass readings to be inaccurate: they did not relate to the actual course he knew the ship was then holding. Captain Noble would no doubt have acknowledged this information, while at the same time accepting the fact that he was unable to make any corrections: it was not a simple procedure, because the degree of accuracy would have been different on all points through 360 degrees.

  It is highly probable that this problem occurred because of the hurried departure: the pressure of time had become paramount, so ‘swinging the compass’ to check for accuracy was one of numerous things overlooked. Tayleur actually carried three compasses, and all gave different headings when checked simultaneously. The fact was that the compasses were operating in the worst possible environment: the compass needles would have been greatly influenced by the magnetic attraction of the iron hull and the three iron masts.

  Once Tayleur was on the open sea and able to make her own way under sail in a light breeze, the tow was dropped. The tug then went alongside to collect the pilot and ‘those parties who had gone out to see their friends off’. Back in Liverpool some days later, after the Tayleur tragedy had unfolded, the pilot related a story of ‘extraordinary circumstance’ that took place when the tug was alongside the ship:

  An Irishman, a passenger, in the confusion and noise that occurred when this steamer went alongside the ship, thought something was radically wrong, and for self-preservation he jumped on board the tug. It was quite dark at the time the tug left the ship, and when the steamer had receded some distance on her course to Liverpool, someone observed a person standing on the paddle box and said to him ‘Come down out of that’, to which he replied in amazement, ‘Where are we going?’ and they told him the steamer was going to Liverpool. He appeared to be dreadfully confused and said he wanted to go to Melbourne. The steamer was then put about with a view to putting him on board the ship, but she was going so fast that we could not catch her, and the man was therefore brought to Liverpool as he stood, leaving his clothes and all he had on board – an accident to him, but one which probably saved his life.

  Once underway on the Irish Sea, Tayleur’s sails were set to suit a course that would have her head west and leave Holyhead on her port side. When well clear of that landmark, it was the captain’s intention to turn south-west towards the Atlantic.

  However, while the wind was light and conditions most suitable for sailing, additional problems were surfacing. The
most alarming of all was the captain’s realisation that the ship was not responding to the helm as would be expected. He immediately had crew check the steering system and it was found to be fully operational. This meant there was only one possible cause: the rudder was too small.

  Whether it was the pressure that had been exerted on him by his superiors in what was such a highly competitive passenger market, or a belief that the problems could be managed or rectified to some degree as the ship progressed, Noble chose not to turn back, but to press on.

  It proved to be a fateful decision.

  While the ship sailed into the night, the passengers tried to gain their sea legs and settle into an alien lifestyle in a claustrophobic environment below decks. It was little different for the crew: they were still literally learning the ropes as Tayleur continued on.

  The first real cause for concern came in the middle of the night: the wind Tayleur had been riding so effortlessly and swiftly seaward suddenly faded to the faintest of puffs. This could mean only one thing: a weather change was coming, and it would more than likely be severe.

  The frontal system struck like an explosion just minutes later, before the sailors had time to prepare for it by lowering sails or going aloft up the ratlines to reef them. Suddenly sails were either aback or flogging so wildly they sent shudders through the entire ship, while back on the poop deck the helmsman was trying desperately to regain control via a rudder everyone knew by then lacked the size to be effective in such a circumstance. Making matters considerably worse was the inability of the majority of the crew to respond to the orders being shouted by the bosun, simply because they didn’t understand what he wanted: of the seventy-one man crew only thirty-seven were trained seamen, and of that number, ten, who came from China and India and were ‘working their passage’ to Australia, could not comprehend orders at all because they could not speak English.

  While men aloft and on deck tried to contain the thrashing sails, the spray blasting over the bulwarks, combined with the driving rain, led to more problems for the untested ship: many of the new halyards, sheets and lines used to raise, lower and trim the sails were swelling so much from the water that they jammed in the pulley blocks. As a result, what should have been an easily executed manoeuvre became a most challenging and dangerous experience. This single problem meant it was taking an hour and a half to furl a sail instead of just fifteen minutes.

  Tayleur laboured on through the night while the hundreds of passengers below deck were hanging on and trying not to be thrown out of their bunks each time a large wave caused the already heeling ship to buck and toss.

  Daylight the next morning, 20 July, brought no respite. Apart from the fact that it was a bitingly cold winter day, a dense fog had developed on the Irish Sea, and with that came considerably greater challenges for the captain. Because of the heavy cloud, he was unable to use his sextant to take sun sights and accurately calculate the ship’s position, so he was forced to use dead-reckoning for navigation. At best, this procedure was a ‘guesstimation’. Noble obviously believed the ship was on a safe course in the middle of the Irish Sea, but when making his estimations he had no way of knowing exactly how imprecise his compasses were.

  The fog magnified his problems by a considerable margin. It was as if he were sailing blindfold; it would not be possible for the lookout to sight land until the ship was a very short distance from it.

  With the storm still delivering testing conditions, Tayleur continued on through that day and into the night. At some stage – probably around 9pm – the captain called for a course change to the south in the belief that his ship would then be heading on a safe track towards the Atlantic. But because of the error with the compasses and a dead-reckoning miscalculation, the new course was not to the south; it was still very much towards the coast of Ireland. Also contributing to this mistake was the fact that Noble had not taken into consideration a strong, north-flowing tidal current that was prevailing at the time.

  The first source of genuine alarm for the captain and crew came at around 10pm. With the fog having lifted somewhat, land was sighted unexpectedly in the distance off Tayleur’s starboard side. A short time later, the lookout let out a shout that was full of fear: ‘Breakers on the starboard bow!’ The message was rushed back to the captain, who ordered the helmsman to put the helm down hard and change course away from the danger.

  But it wasn’t enough. Because this was such a hasty manoeuvre, the crew had no time to react, so the sails were not trimmed to suit the new course; instead, Tayleur turned broadside to the danger and stopped making headway.

  Once he realised that the ship was drifting sideways towards the now very obvious mass of raging white water off to leeward, Noble shouted for both anchors to be released. It was an action that proved to be totally ineffective: the anchor chains snapped like carrots, and Tayleur’s agonisingly slow drift towards the rocks continued unchecked.

  The inevitable followed in the early hours of 21 January. One huge wave lifted the entire ship and dropped her near 4000 tons onto the rocks with such violence that she shuddered from stem to stern.

  Minutes later, while women and men screamed in terror, Tayleur was destined for destruction. Her iron hull was no match for the force of the huge seas breaking onto the rocks. With the ship already heeling dramatically towards the shore, the hull was breached and icy-cold water burst through the interior. Tayleur had struck the eastern end of Lambay Island, just north of Dublin and only 2 nautical miles off the coast of Ireland. She had travelled a mere 100 nautical miles due west from Liverpool.

  The respected Irish newspaper Freeman’s Journal published a dramatic report of what became a terrible maritime tragedy. The paper told its readers that after the initial impact, Tayleur ‘rose on the next wave and drove in rather broadside on; and when she struck again, still heavier, the sea made a clean breach over her amidships, setting everything on deck afloat. After three or more shocks, the ship began to sink by the stern, and the passengers rushed up the hatchways screaming and imploring help.’

  The three cook’s assistants and three other crew members managed to jump ashore from the bow, and soon afterwards ‘a rope and a spar were got across and by this means a number of lives were rescued. Those who attempted to escape by the bows of the vessel, all or nearly, met a miserable fate. The moment they fell into the water, the waves caught them and dashed them violently against the rocks, and the survivors on shore could perceive the unfortunate creatures, with their heads bruised and cut open, struggling amidst the waves, and one by one sinking under them.’

  The story also recognised the gallant efforts of the ship’s surgeon: ‘amid the dire confusion and dismay that prevailed, Surgeon Cunningham was everywhere seen trying to restore confidence and courage among the passengers and endeavouring to preserve order and coolness’.

  However, tragedy loomed for this brave man:

  He was seen crossing the perilous means of escape with his little child on one arm, supporting the infant still more securely by holding its dress in his mouth. The ship heaved on the surge of the sea, the rope swerved, and he was swept from his hold, and his child was torn from him by the force of the sea and perished. He himself sank twice, but at last made good his grip on a projecting point of rock. While in this precarious position, a drowning woman swept by him – he grasped her, and was observed to raise her up, and hold her above the water. He put her hair back from her eyes and seemed to encourage her; but a heavy wave tore her from his grasp, and she perished. Mr Cunningham then seized hold of a rope ladder hanging over the side of the ship, by which he hauled himself on board, hand over hand, and soon after appeared, carrying his wife for the purpose of rescuing her. He nearly succeeded in getting her across the spar by means of the rope, when another heavy wave rushed on and swept off this devoted man and his wife, who were both swept out in the under tow, and drowned in sight of the survivors.

  As soon as Tayleur was pounded onto the rocks, an attempt was made to laun
ch one of the longboats carried on deck, but the instant it hit the water it was picked up by a massive, surging wave and smashed into splinters. By then, there were hundreds of passengers and crew clinging to the bulwark on the shoreward side of the steeply sloping deck, hanging on for their lives each time an icy wave broke over them.

  It was reported later that it appeared the majority of female passengers remained below, in total darkness, in the belief it was safer to be there awaiting rescue than be amid the mayhem on deck. However, when water began surging through the accommodation areas of the now badly holed ship, it was too late for most of the women to make good their escape: Tayleur was by now slipping back into deeper water and slowly submerging.

  One of the most graphic eyewitness accounts of the tragedy was published in the northern English Wakefield Journal on 6 February 1854. It quoted Edward Tew Junior, a banker’s son who had been aboard the ship. He said that despite the chaos on deck when Tayleur went aground he had no time to be frightened; he knew that if he were to survive he had to retain his senses. Unlike the majority of passengers, he went to the port side of the ship, away from the shore, to plan his escape:

  I sat down for about half a minute and made up my mind to swim a rather different direction in order to avoid the dead bodies. I then dropped quietly down a chain into the water, and had not swum above a couple of yards when I saw a boy about ten years old clinging to a piece of wood. I immediately made to him; he was crying, and told me his mother was drowned. He said it was no use my trying to save him, for he should be drowned. However, I . . . took him by the collar and placed him on the top of a large spar, and made him take hold of a piece of iron which was standing out. I still had hold of his collar with my right hand, and kept the broken pieces of wood and spars off with my left hand. It was then I experienced difficulties which required almost superhuman efforts to overcome.