Books: "Remains of ... Unhappy Creatures"

On Thursday the 11th, the U.S. Coast Guard published the findings of its inquiry into the sinking of the HMS Bounty off the Atlantic coast in October of 2012. According to the evidence available, the Coast Guard found the Captain and a too small, too green crew to be at fault. From the NBC News article:

Specifically, the choosing to navigate a vessel in insufficient material condition in close proximity to an approaching hurricane with an inexperienced crew was highlighted. 

A similar situation occurred some 160 years ago in January of 1854 when the brand new iron clad merchant vessel named RMS Tayleur encountered foul weather on her voyage from Liverpool in England to the far away shores of Melbourne. In her new book, The Sinking of RMS Tayleur, author and psychologist Gill Hoffs tells the sad tale of the sinking of a "Victorian Titanic".

As Hoffs tells us, both candidly and engagingly, Tayleur had everything going for her on her maiden voyage. She was a massive vessel, 230 feet long and displacing over 1,700 tons. Her holds were 30 feet deep and she would carry 650 souls toward a new life in New South Wales. Her Captain, John Noble, was a veteran seaman with a laundry list of successful voyages and happy owners under his belt. No one seemed to doubt his capability to select a crew and run and tight ship.

No one bothered to scrutinize the fact that the crew of Tayleur had quite literally been foisted on Noble without his consent, or that the Captain himself had taken a horrible fall from one of Tayleur's masts only days before she was to get under weigh. The persistent hurry of her owners, specifically Pilkington and Wilson and collectively the White Star Line, to get her out onto the open sea overshadowed these issues. Along with the unfortunate havoc that Tayleur's iron hull was playing with her three compasses and the "patent rudder" - not built for a ship as fast and large as she was - that she shipped, anyone well versed in the art of sail would have wondered at her speedy launch.

Speedily launched she was, however. This to the utter calamity of all aboard her.

Hoffs walks us through the terrible tragedy of that January night when, after apparently steering in the wrong direction due to those ill-working compasses, Tayleur found herself in the middle of a frightening Irish Sea storm on a rocky lee shore with sails wide open to the brutal wind and her rudder unable to answer. The incompetent crew, despite help from more than one seaworthy passenger, could not rescue the ship from her fate. Captain Noble himself, seemingly dazed to unresponsiveness by consecutive sleepless nights, made no decisions at all. Precious moments ticked by as Tayleur inched toward her doom.

Her passengers panicked; men trampled women and women stumbled over children in a desperate attempt to save themselves. Some made it to land, only to cling to the cold, wet shore in desperation. 360 people, including most of the 70 crew members and the gallant, heroic ship's surgeon Robert Cunningham along with his wife and children, would go to their death in or around the wreck. Survivors spoke of seeing bloodied bodies in nightclothes sloshing on the surface of the water. Battered body parts, ripped apart by the force of waves and shore, would be found along the coast for weeks to come.

The sinking of this "unsinkable" iron clad sent shock waves through English society. In total, four inquiries were heard and it was found that the crew, and particularly the Captain of Tayleur - who himself had survived her demise - were at fault. The White Star line was also soundly castigated for rushing Tayleur to sea with a hold full of innocent lives. The company went bankrupt and was reinstated again only to produce another tragic vessel: RMS Titanic.

Hoffs telling of the sad story of RMS Tayleur is energetic and insightful. The author is at her best when she is painting vignettes of the people whose lives were effected by the mighty ship and its sinking. There is the sad Dr. Cunningham who lost one of his sons while trying to save him, returned to the ship for the other and lost him as well, all while his wife watched. Then there is the man transported for theft who returned to the mother of his child after ten long years. He married her and planned to take his family back to Australia where they would grow rich in the gold rush, only to see them all drown.

Her most intriguing point, however, and one that I have not been seen before, regards Captain Noble himself. Did his fall just before Tayleur's launch cause damage to his brain that did not have time to heal and was then exacerbated by long nights of stress on his ship's deck? Did this unfortunate chain of events lead an historically solid Captain to tragic decision making - or lack thereof?

Thoughts worth pondering just as much as the book is well worth reading. Find the book at Amazon or your local bookseller.

* I believe I have to add that Ms. Hoffs' publisher, Pen & Sword, provided me with a copy of  The Sinking of RMS Tayleur for the purposes of this review. Hopefully I did that right; I'm used to buying the books I review so this is quite the thrill.

Seafaring Sunday: Rose Hill Packet

November 6, 1789: The first vessel built by Europeans in Australia was launched in Sydney Harbor.  Known as the Rose Hill Packet or "The Lump", she was crafted by convicts and worked under both oars and sails.  She would have had one mast and looked a little like a smaller version of the lugger above (via geograph.org.uk)

Horror On The High Seas: The First Fleet

Now we have looked at a voluntary monster in Ned Low and a bad seed in Dona Ysabel. But what of the victims of cruelty? Men and women who simply, out of need, took what wasn’t theirs and found themselves in the most miserable situations possible due to their government’s unwillingness to deal with the social problems piling up around it like cord wood. The story of the First Convict Fleet to leave England for Botany Bay in May of 1787 is an excellent example of many average people being guilty by association, or in the wrong place at the wrong time, or just unfortunately hungry.

In a time when stealing a loaf of bread regardless of your poverty could get you hanged, Britain had developed a simple way of dealing with her dredge: transportation. At first, people were sent to the Americas and to the colonies that would become the U.S. in particular. While transportation to Canada was not unheard of, it was less common and the U.S. becoming an independent nation put an end to that out. The whole thing became a serious annoyance by the mid-1780s.

Convicted criminals who had their sentences commuted from death to transportation were squirreled away in rotting prison hulks anchored along the Thames while the courts decided where to send them. When the forgotten ships began to deteriorate and the stench became overwhelming (ah, August on the Thames), the citizenry of London demanded redress. And that the hulks and their occupants be gotten rid of.

This is when the High Court hit upon the idea to send the people who were rotting with the ships around them to what would become Australia. Botany Bay had, of course, already been explored by Captain James Cook and the judges saw an opportunity to get rid of their criminals and turn a profit for the state. The lot of them would be packed into ships, sailed to the South Seas and put to work farming for the greater good of Britain. Of course there were “oversights”; no one bothered to provide the “colonists” with tools for farming or even building shelters. Then too there was the fact that 95% of those heading out were city dwellers from birth who had no notion of farming or livestock or even fishing.

Ignoring these rather gaping holes in their plan, the judges sent eleven ships carrying 560 male and 191 female prisoners off to Botany Bay. The new Governor, Arthur Phillip, was a sea captain by trade and had no more knowledge of working the land – or for that manner running a penal colony – than the unfortunate criminals he was to oversee. 211 marines were also along to guard the prisoners and men and women were separated aboard the ships by an iron fence on deck and stout bulkheads below. None of the ships were exclusively male or female as far as prisoners went, and over ten children and two infants who would be born during the passage accompanied their mothers on the journey.

Trouble began early. Keeping the prisoners separate was one thing but it seems as if no attempt was made to keep the sailors away from the women. Drunkenness was a surprisingly large problem on all the ships, with sailors sneaking extra grog rations and offering them to the women in return for favors. Those discovered at this type of sport were flogged mercilessly, sailors and women alike. Repeat offenders, at least in the female category, would have their heads shaved. Further trouble would lead to being chained below deck, denied food and/or the wearing of thumbscrews for inordinate periods including up to two weeks.

The daily conditions were brutal aside from ongoing punishments. The ships were, for the most part, brigantines and they were packed full. Each ship averaged 110 prisoners plus sailors, officers and marines. The facilities were no more than would be expected on any Royal Navy cruise in a ship of such size and because of stored rations and water, space was at a premium. And still the prisoners continued to act up. As Philip put it in his log while writing about the female prisoners, “… punishment could [not] deter them from making their way through the bulkheads to the apartments assigned to the seamen.”

Better behaved prisoners were given privileges including more time on deck. Some prisoners were even allowed to marry, which was considered good for the issue of fornication and good for Britain; marriage would mean more hands to labor in Botany Bay. There must have been a number of prisoners who were overwhelmed by the situation. Suicide attempts, and two actual suicides, occurred more than once.

The brutal eight month journey must have made many a prisoner look forward to his or her destination. Even without knowing what they were in for, two feet on dry land with open space all around must have seemed like heaven. What a crushing disappointment it must have been to drop anchor in Botany Bay on January 18, 1788 and find a virtual desert awaiting you. Philips would not allow his prisoners to disembark but sent shore parties to scout out a more favorable location. On February 2nd the fleet put in at what was then Port Jackson, the future site of Sydney, Australia.

Sailors, marines and male prisoners rowed for shore and began erecting a makeshift tent city. Four days later the women were told they would be taken ashore and many of them treated the occasion like a holiday. They primped as best they could, combing their hair and putting on what clean clothes they had. As the sky above them darkened and a driving rain began to pour down, the female prisoners made landfall just before sunset.

Their joy was short lived as the male prisoners, who had for the most part been left out of the sexual license aboard the ships, rushed the women and threw them down on the mud and sand. The remaining 188 girls and women were repeatedly and savagely raped by over 500 men. Doubtless some of the sailors joined in and the abuse, according to Philip who gave no thought to trying to stop it, continued throughout the night.

The horror did not stop there. Starvation and misery awaited the new colonists and Philip, much like many of the Governors who would follow, became a martinet who would happily allow his men to dole out 500 lashes on a whim. Escape was close to but not impossible; in fact a very small number of people did manage to get away from Port Jackson. But that is another story for another time.

Header: Prisoners awaiting transportation via history.org

Lady Pirates: Transported To Australia

In an act of mass hypocrisy, the 19th century British were fond of wagging their fingers at the U.S. for her continued dependence on slave labor. Meanwhile, they were transporting their criminals - particularly those undesirable, subhuman Irish - to their new "colonies" in Australia and New Zealand. The actual details of these voyages, which are many times very similar to the African experience of the middle passage, are best left to Horror on the High Seas week. For our purposes today, though, suffice it to say that transportation was frequently a fate worse than death and that people would do just about anything - from selling their souls to suicide - to escape.

In 1806 Catherine Hagerty arrived on the shores of Port Jackson. The Port would eventually become the city of Sydney but when our heroine first gazed upon it, there was nothing but a shanty town. In April, she was aboard the brig Venus when in dropped anchor. The ship's Captain, an American named Chace, did not seem particularly thrilled to be hauling human cargo. He was a humane commander, however, and he allowed his captives to roam the ship unlike some who chained men, women and children in the hold for the entire voyage. To his further chagrin this kindness came back to bite him. Our lady pirate managed to seduce his first officer and the man neglected his duty over her.

Catherine is somewhat of a mystery. There is no surviving documentation as to why she was sent down, but what information we do have about her explains eloquently why she was able to seduce the officer away from his watches in order for her to obtain her freedom. Catherine, it is said, was "much inclined to smile" with a "fresh complexion", blond hair and a husky voice. The word "nubile" is used for Catherine more than once and it isn't hard to imagine that her favors were at the very least promised in exchange for help.

The ship was bound for Tasmania as it's final destination, where an even less hospitable "settlement" awaited Catherine for life. Between the stop over in April and the arrival of Venus at Tamar harbor in June, Catherine's plan began to take seed. She enlisted a fellow convict named Charlotte Badger, convicted of picking pockets, to help her. Charlotte was a thick set woman, less attractive than Catherine and the mother of an infant. Still, it is not hard to imagine that Charlotte also used her femininity to pull crewmen over to the notion of helping the transportees escape. By the time the ship had reached Tamar, Catherine's First Lieutenant was accusing loyal crewmen of infractions against the ship and Catherine herself had somehow managed to obtain ship's papers - possibly the sentences against she and Charlotte - and throw them overboard. Open mutiny was in the offing.

As if unaware of the trouble, Chace allowed shore leave on June 16th and pulled across to spend the night aboard another ship. While he was gone, Catherine's plan went into affect. By now she had three loyal sailors willing to do just about anything for her. They locked up the officer of the watch, Second Lieutenant Richard Edwards. The remaining seamen aboard - eight in all - were given an ultimatum at gunpoint. Three chose to join the mutineers. The remaining five were forced off the ship. Edwards, for some reason, decided to join the group as well and by dawn they had Venus under sail heading out of port for New Zealand. Captain Chace must have been flabbergasted to see his own ship baring away when he came up on the deck of his host the next morning.

The sailors were now just as criminal as Catherine and Charlotte but for most of them it seemed that the whole thing was great sport. They dropped anchor at the Bay of Islands in New Zealand and further deliberation followed. Here Catherine prevailed once again. She and Charlotte were allowed to leave the ship. Along with them came the First Lieutenant, a convict named Lancashire who may, by that time, have been attached to Charlotte and of course Charlotte's baby. They would set up huts above the Bay and live free and easy off the land. Or so they imagined.

Those who did not come ashore sailed off aboard Venus and began a series of raids on local villages, kidnapping Maori women and subjecting them to sex slavery until they were tired of them. They would then sell the women to other Maori's ashore and start the whole process over. This, as one might imagine, incurred the wrath of the native New Zealanders but the seaman and convicts aboard Venus seemed oblivious to the creeping doom they were bringing down on themselves.

No one in our story came to a good end and by 1809 all but one of them was accounted for. Venus was captured by Maoris while taking on water. The men aboard were slaughtered and the ship was dragged ashore and burned. The First Lieutenant and the convict Lancashire were seized by two separate British ships and returned to England for hanging. The Lieutenant informed his captors that Catherine Hagerty, with her ready smile and blond hair, had died of disease soon after arriving on shore.

Only Charlotte Badger managed to escape, or so it seems. What became of this bit player in the great drama can only be speculated at for she was never properly heard from again. An American whaling captain claims to have come across a white woman in Tonga living with a native man. He says she told him she was Charlotte Badger but we've no way of knowing. All we know now is that plump Charlotte, who seemed to simply have followed nubile Catherine's lead, has come down to us with the moniker of Australia's first female pirate.