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Generally, whistling was discouraged in ships. When becalmed, scratching a backstay and whistling softly might entice a useful breeze, but it was to be avoided if the weather was threatening to get dirty; it could annoy Saint Anthony, the patron saint of wind, and a strong blow could come on.
In the Royal Navy whistling was banned at sea, as it could be confused with orders given by the bosun’s whistle. There was one exception to this, however. When making the boiled pudding known as duff, the ship’s cook was traditionally made to whistle so that he could not surreptitiously eat the raisins destined for the popular treat.
St Elmo’s fire strikes a ship.
WITCHCRAFT OVER THE WATER
Witches, taking the shape of waves, have ever been the nemesis of sailors. They stop ships, turn the wind and raise general havoc, often using cats as familiars. Witchcraft was sometimes attributed to people who had good reason to feel malevolence against the ship, such as landladies whose bill had not been paid by some of the men on board.
When Anne of Denmark was crossing the North Sea in 1589, en route to marry James I of England, a coven of witches at Leith in Scotland raised a storm that interrupted the voyage. A witch hunt was instigated, and under torture a number of Danish and Scottish women confessed to sorcery. One claimed that she had taken a cat and christened it and then bound several parts of a dead man to it. In the night she and her fellow witches threw the unfortunate animal into the sea.
It was popularly believed in Scotland that the Spanish Armada met defeat on account of the witches on the island of Mull who brought the storms that scuttled many of Philip’s ships.
On trial in 1684, Edward Man of the merchant vessel Neptune attempted to explain his incompetence in bringing her to Milford Haven instead of London by telling the court that he had been bewitched by the ship’s cat and that it was ‘the Divell had brought them thither’.
Sometimes witches sold mariners special powers in the form of knotted cords so they could personally influence the weather. As the knots were loosened the wind increased, until at the untying of the last knot a gale arose.
Witches raise a storm at sea, sixteenth-century engraving.
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CHOCK-A-BLOCK – completely full. DERIVATION: when a block and tackle has reached the point where the two blocks come together it cannot go any further.
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SALUTING THE QUARTERDECK
Custom dictates that in any naval ship the quarterdeck (the upper deck from the main mast to right aft) symbolises the Service and is the focus for its ceremonial. In the Middle Ages a crucifix was placed in this area, and was the first object seen when boarding a ship. Officers and men would remove their headgear at the figure of Christ, and this probably explains the practice, which survives today, of saluting the quarterdeck. A salute is also given on entering a ship, for in the days of sail coming aboard over the bulwarks would place you on the quarterdeck. The Royal Naval College at Dartmouth has a large hall, somewhat churchlike in appearance, known as the Quarterdeck, which lies at the heart of the college.
DENIZENS OF THE DEEP
Below the thunders of the upper deep
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth…
Tennyson’s poem tells of the legendary sea monster said to inhabit the waters off the coast of Norway and Sweden. It was a creature of enormous size which would wrap its arms around the hull of a ship and drag it down. Sometimes it lay on the surface of the sea like an island; when a ship approached it submerged and the resulting whirlpool sucked the ship to its doom.
Other sea monsters sighted have included sea dragons and sea serpents, which could be slimy or scaly and often spouted jets of water.
Sir Henry Gilbert claimed to have encountered a lion-like monster with glaring eyes on his return voyage to England from Newfoundland in 1583.
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A Very Terrible Sea Animal
Hans Egede, a missionary on a voyage to the western coast of Greenland in July 1734, reported: ‘[There] appeared a very terrible sea-animal, which raised itself so high above the water that its head reached above our maintop. It had a long, sharp snout, and blew like a whale… on the lower part it was formed like a snake… it raised its tail above the water, a whole ship length from its body.’
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Perhaps the most famous sighting occurred on 6 August 1848, when HMS Daedalus was on passage to England from the East Indies. Midshipman Satoris reported seeing something very unusual in the sea to officer-of-the-watch Lieutenant Edgar Drummond. The two came to the conclusion that they had seen a sea serpent and informed the captain.
The ship reached Plymouth on 4 October. Someone on board leaked the story to the press and The Times printed a lively account of the sighting. Until this time the captain of Daedalus Peter M’Quhae had kept silent, nervous no doubt of the reaction of the navy to such a tale, and for this reason the incident had not been logged officially. However, he was ordered to report to Admiral Sir W.H. Gage, who demanded an explanation of what he had read in the newspaper. M’Quhae produced Drummond’s journal and a picture of an enormous serpent with head and shoulders about a metre above the surface of the sea. The creature was described ‘as nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our main topsail yard would show in the water, there was at least 60 feet of the animal à fleur d’eau, no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the water… It passed so close under our lee quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance, I would have easily recognised his features with the naked eye…’
Daedulus and the sea serpent.
The sighting caused a stir in the scientific community. Sir Richard Owen, curator of the Hunterian Museum, argued that it was a seal. Others suggested an upside-down canoe or a giant squid.
Could those aboard Daedalus have met a living creature of some unknown species?
THE BUZZARD’S CODE
Olivier Levasseur was a French pirate nicknamed La Buse, meaning the buzzard, for the alacrity with which he threw himself at his enemies. His greatest prize was the capture, in 1721 off the island of La Réunion, of Nossa Senhora do Cabo, a Portuguese vessel loaded with gold and jewels belonging to the retiring viceroy of Goa. The booty included a magnificent solid gold cross, 2 m high and encrusted with diamonds, emeralds and rubies, known as ‘The Fiery Cross of Goa’.
The 17-line cipher.
It is believed that La Buse concealed the treasure somewhere along the north eastern coast of Mahe, the principal island of the Seychelles archipelago.
Nine years after this incredible haul Levasseur was captured and hanged. But he did not depart from life without some drama. Legend has it that at the gallows he threw out some parchment maps and documents identifying the location of where he had buried the treasure. They were in code, however, and he called to the crowd, ‘Find my treasure, he who may understand it.’
Several copies were made of these papers, which included a cipher containing 17 lines of Greek and Hebrew letters.
The hunt was taken up in the 1950s by Reginald Cruise-Wilkins, a former Coldstream Guardsman, who eventually believed he had broken much of the code and that the hoard lies somewhere in the vicinity of Bel Ombre on Mahe. Before his death in 1977 he passed the treasure hunter’s baton to his son, John, who continues the search for what is perhaps the greatest treasure ever to fall into the hands of a pirate. Its value today could exceed several hundred million pounds.
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IN THE OFFING – about to happen. DERIVATION: a ship would be trapped against the land if an enemy came out of the offing. This was the sea area beyond anchoring ground but visible from the coast.
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FAMOUS LAST WORDS
Nelson’s last words were neither ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ nor ‘Kismet, Hardy’. Both versions have a wide currency, but in fact Hardy was not even present at the
moment of the admiral’s death as he had been called back on deck.
When Nelson was wounded and carried below, Hardy remained on the quarterdeck directing the battle. It was well over an hour before he could clamber down to see his friend. Hardy was able to tell Nelson that they had taken 12 or 14 of the enemy vessels, and then he returned to his post.
Another hour passed before Hardy could find time to visit Nelson for a second time. They shook hands and Nelson told Hardy to be sure to anchor. After reminding him to take care of ‘poor Lady Hamilton’ he said, ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’ Hardy responded with a kiss on the cheek and then, after a brief reflective pause, a second on the forehead. Nelson’s last words to his captain were ‘God bless you, Hardy’. Hardy then withdrew and returned to the quarterdeck.
Nelson’s life was by now draining fast and he was drifting in and out of consciousness. With his eyes closed he murmured softly, ‘Thank God I have done my duty.’ These were his last words.
WHEN PORT ROYAL, Jamaica, ‘the richest and wickedest city in the world’, was swept into the sea in 1692, many saw it as retribution for an immoral existence. But the sea is not an agent of revenge, nor is it cruel; it is indifferent, an elemental, primal force. The seaman turned novelist Joseph Conrad once said, ‘If you want to know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm.’ And the poet Lord Byron described the sea as ‘dark-heaving, boundless, endless, and sublime. The image of Eternity…’
Since the early days of sail countless brave souls who have set forth on the bounding main have not returned. It might be supposed that sea battles have taken the largest toll in human life, but this is not the case. During 20 years of war between 1793 and 1813 approximately 100,000 men in the Royal Navy died – 6.3 per cent from enemy action, 12.2 per cent from shipwreck and other disasters and 81.5 per cent from disease or accident.
Fire at sea was particularly feared by sailors. In ships made almost entirely of combustibles – wood, canvas and tarred cordage just waiting for a flame – a small blaze could very quickly become an inferno. One of the unforgettable images of the Battle of the Nile is the fire aboard L’Orient, the massive French flagship. Such was the amazement on both sides at the intensity of the conflagration and the resulting explosion that the entire battle actually stopped for a short time. But of all the causes of death at sea one looms above all the rest – scurvy. The dreaded affliction was responsible for more deaths at sea than all the other causes combined, and it probably killed two million sailors during the Golden Age of Sail.
‘The Shipwreck’, a nineteenth-century engraving.
‘AN ERROR OF HIS PROFESSION’
It should have been a glorious homecoming after successful operations against the French at Toulon, but it became one of the worst disasters in the history of the Royal Navy. In October 1707 the Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell in HMS Association set sail from Gibraltar bound for England.
As they neared the English Channel bad weather made them unsure of their position. The admiral consulted his navigators, who believed they were west of Ushant (Ile d’Ouessant) off the Brittany peninsula, well south of any hazards – but in reality they were 160 km north. Shortly afterwards Association, Romney and Eagle were driven on to rocks off the Scilly Isles and sank with the loss of all on board except the quartermaster of Romney. Over 1,300 perished, all down to a combination of bad weather and the inability of mariners in those times to determine their position with accuracy.
Many tales have endured over the centuries about this tragic event, ranging from Shovell hanging a seaman who tried to warn him of impending danger to a local woman murdering the admiral when he was washed ashore in order to steal a large emerald ring that he wore on his hand.
Shovell was initially buried in a simple grave at Porth Hellick, a small community on one of the Scilly isles, but his body was later exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey. One newspaper of the day commented, ‘It was very unhappy for an admiral, reputed one of the greatest sea commanders we ever had, to die by an error of his profession.’
Some good did come out of this tragedy – the Admiralty instigated a search for a way of calculating longitude. In 1714 they offered a prize of £20,000 for a solution, but it was many decades before a way was found of determining an accurate position with a chronometer (see here).
THE PIRATE CITY THAT WAS SWALLOWED BY THE SEA
Port Royal on the southern coast of Jamaica was claimed by England in 1655 and soon earned the title ‘the richest and wickedest city in the world’. Its location in the middle of the Caribbean made it an ideal base for trade, and buccaneers too were attracted to its large harbour, which was perfect for launching raids on Spanish settlements. Among its most notorious pirates was Henry Morgan, who in a seventeenth-century version of poacher turned gamekeeper was appointed lieutenant-governor of Jamaica in 1674.
By the 1660s most of the 6,500 residents of Port Royal were buccaneers, cut-throats and prostitutes. There was one drinking house for every ten residents, along with all manner of merchants, goldsmiths, artists – and even several places of worship.
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Den of Iniquity
Outrageous behaviour was rife in Port Royal. Men paid 500 pieces of eight just to see a common strumpet naked. Some bought a pipe of wine, placed it in the street and then obliged passers-by to drink. Prostitutes with names like No-Conscience Nan, Salt-Beef Peg and Buttock-de-Clink Jenny could hold their own in the rough male company – and amassed fortunes. The most famous was Mary Carleton. A contemporary wrote of her: ‘A stout frigate she was or else she never could have endured so many batteries and assaults… she was as common as a barber’s chair; no sooner was one out, but another was in.’
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In its heyday there were around 1,000 residences in Port Royal, many of them large houses with multi-storey brick structures. It was said that the splendour of the finest homes was comparable to those in London.
On the morning of 7 June 1692 Port Royal fell victim to a series of natural disasters, beginning with a massive earthquake. The town was built on the sandy Palisades spit, which was intrinsically unstable, and the western side of the settlement was swallowed by sea, along with all the buildings and inhabitants. Then came an enormous tidal wave which swept away more of the town. When the water subsided only 10 hectares of Port Royal remained. Around 2,000 lost their lives instantly, and a further 3,000 succumbed to injury and disease over the next few weeks.
One astonishing tale of survival concerns Lewis Galdy, a French Huguenot who had settled in Jamaica. The inscription on his tombstone relates: ‘He was swallowed up in the great earthquake… and by the providence of God was by another shock thrown into the sea and miraculously saved by swimming until a boat took him up.’
Port Royal, Jamaica.
‘LIQUID FIRE’
A lightning strike aboard a sailing ship could have horrific consequences – fire, explosion, even the incineration of hapless sailors. Some, who weren’t killed outright, suffered paralysis, terrible burns or blindness. On 21 November 1790 the naval town of Portsmouth in southern England experienced an extraordinary storm. Lightning rolled along the ground ‘like a body of liquid fire’. The 74-gun ship of the line HMS Elephant was moored in the harbour and narrowly avoided complete destruction when she was struck by the lightning. The maintopmast exploded, but it did not plunge through the quarterdeck, as it was still held by the top ropes.
Lightning could strike anywhere around the world. Because of his command of languages, the Revd. Alexander Scott, who was later to serve as Nelson’s private secretary aboard HMS Victory, sometimes undertook duties outside the normal remit of a naval chaplain. In 1802 he was aboard a former French prize Topaze in the West Indies, having been sent to St Domingo (now Haiti) to gather intelligence from French officers. While returning from this assignment he was involved in a freak accident.
One evening just after midnight the vessel was struck by lightning during a severe thunderstorm.
It split the mizzenmast, killing and wounding 14 men, then descended into the cabin in which Scott was sleeping. He suffered an electric shock and the hooks suspending his hammock melted, flinging him to the ground. Simultaneously the lightning caused an explosion in a cache of small-arms powder stored above him. The resultant blast knocked out several of Scott’s teeth, injured his jaw and affected his hearing and eyesight. For a time he was paralysed on one side of his body. Scott did recover from these injuries, but for the rest of his life he suffered from ‘nerves’.
A study in 1851 of ships in the Royal Navy catalogued the extensive damage caused to the fleet by lightning. One six-year period, from 1809 to 1815, saw 30 ships of the line and 15 frigates disabled. And the merchant marine also suffered; there were vivid reports in the press of the loss of shipping and valuable cargo.
Lightning conductors were not entirely trusted at first; they were believed by some to draw down upon a ship more ‘electric fluid’ than they could transmit safely to earth. Trials in 1831 demonstrated the utility of these devices, but they did not always prevent disasters. Tragedies continued to occur, especially when the ship was at an angle and other spiky protuberances such as the bowsprit and the driver boom end could attract lightning.
Stockwin's Maritime Miscellany Page 15