The Ghosts of Christmases Past

There is a long tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas time in England; around the hearth, in print, on the radio and on T.V.

Our T.V. channels uphold the tradition admirably with stories of murder and mystery throughout the Christmas period. In the 1970s and later in 2005 a series called A Ghost Story for Christmas was broadcast by the BBC. The producer’s remit was to create a television version of a classic ghost story at Christmas.

M.R James

The first five films were adaptations of stories from the four books by M. R. James published between 1904 and 1925. James, an English mediaeval scholar and Provost of Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, originally told his stories to friends and selected students at Christmas to entertain them. The sixth film, The Signalman, is an adaptation of a story by Charles Dickens published in his magazine All the Year Round in 1866.

 The origins of this Christmas interest in all things ghoulish started in the second half of the 17th century when there was a profound intellectual debate concerning the existence of ghosts and witches. The idea that cold snowy days were the best for stories designed to frighten goes back Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, written in 1611 when Mamillius says: "A sad tale's best for winter. I have one / of sprites and goblins."

Surprisingly those who did not believe in these supernatural manifestations were denounced as dangerous atheists. Our ancestors, it seems believed whole-heartedly in ghost and ghouls and things that go bump in the night.

William Kent

The 18th century saw the publication of what is to be the first proper ghost story; The Apparition of Mrs. Veal in 1706. The story has been attributed to the writer Daniel Defoe although it published anonymously. Interest in ghostly matters received a boost in 1762 in case of the strange The Knockings at  a house in Cock Lane, not far from St Paul’s Cathedral in London. This story of murder set the imaginations of the London literati alight. The ghost in question was said to be that of Fanny Lynes the mistress of William Kent. Fanny’s ghost confirmed rumours that she had been poisoned by the still living Kent. The case was a sensation, attracting the attention of figures such as Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, and Oliver Goldsmith. It ended in a court case where Kent, an eminent English architect, sued for defamation.

Elizabeth Gaskell

Despite the publication of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein in 1816, the ghost or horror story was on the wane in publishing terms when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. However, writers such as Willkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell breathed new life into it with their books and short stories through the 1840s and 50s and by the turn of the century the tradition of ghost stories at Christmas was firmly established with publishers promoting the new trend.

Disney's adaptation of A Christmas Carol

The best known Christmas ghost story today is probably Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, which he wrote in 1843 to highlight the harrowing poverty of so many people in Britain at that time. It's not just a ghost story that one could tell at Christmas, but – with Scrooge sitting in his armchair as his life's story is unfurled before him – it is a story about ghost stories at Christmas, a kind of meta-Christmas ghost story, if you will.

Michelle Dockery in Turn of the Screw, BBC, 2009

In The Turn of the Screw, the US Anglophile Henry James's own take on the Christmas tale, published in 1898, operates in much the same fashion, structured as it is to position its readers by the Yuletide hearth listening to tales of horror. The tale, which relates a series of strange events that befall a young governess, centres on the supposed possession of a boy by the spirit of a hostile figure named Peter Quint.

However, M. R. James is considered the master of the Christmas ghost story by most. James redefined the ghost story for the new century and gave it what is now considered a recognisable  Jamesian structure:

• a characterful setting such as an English village, seaside town or country estate; an ancient town in France, Denmark or Sweden; or a venerable abbey or university [think Mid Somer Murders];

• a nondescript and rather naive gentleman-scholar as protagonist often of a reserved nature (think of Mr. Garrett, an employee of a university library, who becomes involved in the bizarre search for a missing will in the The Tractate Middoth); and

• the discovery of an old book or other antiquarian object that somehow unlocks, calls down the wrath, or at least attracts the unwelcome attention of a supernatural menace, usually from beyond the grave (think Spiderwick Chronicles a series of children's books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. On the first night on the Spiderwick Estate the Grace children discover a secret library. Following a clue in the form of a riddle-poem, Jared finds Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You in a secret compartment in a trunk in the attic. The Field Guide is an old hand-written describing types of faeries. The novel ends with a warning that the book is not meant for mortals..)

According to James, the story must "put the reader into the position of saying to himself, 'If I'm not very careful, something of this kind may happen to me!' His most famous story is perhaps ‘Casting of the Runes’ which has been adapted for film twice; once in 1957 as Night of the Demon (known as Curse of the Demon in the US), starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins and Niall MacGinnis. Another, looser adaptation of "Casting the Runes" borrowing elements from the earlier film is Sam Raimi's 2009 film, Drag Me to Hell.

In 2013 Mark Gatiss's adaptation of The Tractate Middoth, an M. R. James, was broadcast on BBC Two on Christmas Day followed by a documentary, M. R. James.

This year will see the revival of the BBC’s Jonathan Creek in a 90 minute Christmas special, a Jamesian style psychic detective of all things mysterious. Alan Davies’ sleuth may have slipped off his duffel coat and acquired a wife in the form of Polly Creek (Sarah Alexander) but he remains the master of the locked-room mystery.

Alan Davis and Sheidan Smith in a BBC
Jonathan Creek Christmas Special 2013

Written by David Renwick it features a glittering cast including: Warwick Davis (Harry Potter, Star Wars, Life’s Too Short), Emun Elliott (The Paradise, Game Of Thrones), Ken Bones (Dr Who, Atlantis) and Rosalind March (Calendar Girls, The Evermoor Chronicles).


This year's story finds Creek solving the mystery of the modern day manifestation of a 19th century sorcerer named Jacob Surtees; a man with the ability to call up the powers of Hell to terrorise his victims at his home, a house called Daemons’ Roost.

If you can’t wait until Christmas there will be a free Christmas Ghost story entitled, The Nanny, written by me download on 22nd December at: https://www.facebook.com/juliaherdmanbooks/

 Wishing You A Happy, Spooky Christmas 

Christmas and stockings an age old tradition

Christmas and stockings are two words forever bound together. They illustrate the magic and generosity of Christmas time. The tradition is an old one whose origins are lost in the mists of time but William Lee of Calverton, Nottinghamshire is the man who made it possible for us to hang up our modern stockings.

In 1589 he made the first breakthrough in stocking manufacture. It is said that he invented the stocking frame, a machine that knits stockings and socks for love.

One story has it that he invented it out of spite: having discovered his sweetheart preferred her knitting to his attentions, another suggests he invented it for his hard working wife who knitted stocking by hand to supplement their family income.

Stocking Frame at Ruddington
Framework Knitters' Museum

During the 18th century stocking frames quickly became the domain of men like weaving machines while the hand knitters remained primarily women. The English East Midlands, particularly in the towns of Nottingham and Leicester became the centre of stocking manufacture from the 18th century.

Tough, hand knitted
woollen blue stockings

Until the invention of nylon there were two types of stocking; the luxury ones and the utilitarian ones. Luxury stockings were made from imported silk, or the fine fibres of long-wooled sheep, on a machine by a male frame knitter in London or one of the East Midland towns. Utilitarian socks were hand-knitted, usually by poor women in the country and was made from the much coarser wool of the sheep of Westmorland, Wales, or Scotland.

Elegant, machine knitted French silk stockings

The frame-knitted silk stockings were costly
accessories worn by men and women of middling and upper rank. Without elastic they where held up by garters and ribbons. Thousands of pairs were exported and sold in the British colonies, which were bound by the mother country’s restrictions on manufacturing.
In 1767, Benjamin Franklin’s enterprising maidservant, Ann Hardy, made a reasonable second income selling socks and worsted stockings to Philadelphians from the supplies her British friends sent to her.

A racy pair of candy cane
Christmas stockings

There are no records to say when Europeans started to hang an empty stocking or sock by the fire in the hope of receiving a Christmas gift. Legend tells us that it began with a poor man who had three very beautiful daughters but no money for their dowries.

Saint Nicholas it is said heard of the man’s plight and wanted to help but knew the old man would not accept charity so he decided to help in secret. After dark, he threw three bags of gold through an open window into the house and one landed in a stocking. So the tradition of receiving gifts in stockings from a strange man under the cover of darkness was born – blimey it sounds positively saucy when put like that!

However, there is another possible origin for the practice. According to writer Phyllis Siefker, Scandinavian and German children would place their boots, filled with carrots, straw, or sugar, near the chimney for Odin's flying horse. Odin would then reward them with gifts or sweets (candy). This practice, she claims, survived in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands after the adoption of Christianity and became associated with Saint Nicholas through Christianisation. Another possible source is the Grandmother cult in Bari, Italy where grandmothers would put gifts in stockings at Christmas. This too merged with the St. Nicholas tradition.

The modern Santa

Today the Christmas stocking tradition is going strong. In our family, we always hang our stockings up on Christmas Eve and wake on Christmas morning to find them filled with chocolate money, an orange, a walnut and a little toy. (I wonder which magical person does that?). Every family has its own Christmas traditions and special magical people who make them happen - is it you?




Sources: https://katedaviesdesigns.com/2014/05/05/a-brief-history-of-british-socks/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_stocking

Picture credits:
French Medium: silk, metallic Dimensions: Length: 23 in. (58.4 cm) Accession Number: C.I.55.52.1a, b The Metropolitan Mueseum of Art
http://anextraordinaryday.net/from-sweater-to-christmas-stocking-in-12-easy-steps/
https://www.smiffys.com/candy-stripe-thigh-high-stockings-red-and-white
http://www.southernsavers.com/stocking-stuffer-round-up-1219/
The Carol Burnett Show: The Family (Merry Christmas Mama) - 1974

Love Letters

Like my hero Sinclair, the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) studied to become doctor but unlike Sinclair’s his heart was not really in it. . Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne are among the most famous love letters ever written. As next-door neighbours, they exchanged numerous short notes, and occasionally more passionate letters.

Keats trained as an apothecary at Guy's Hospital from 1815 to 1816 and attended lectures on the principles and practice of surgery by the famous surgeon Sir Astley Cooper who also makes a brief appearance in my novel. In 1816, Keats received his apothecary's licence, which made him eligible to practise as an apothecary, physician, and surgeon.

Poet and surgeon John Keats

Keats's desire to become a poet led him to abandon medicine soon after he completed his training. In his 'Ode to a Nightingale' recalls his experience of caring for the dying:

The weariness, the fever and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,

Where youth grows spectre-thin, and dies.

Ironically, it was his medical training that made him such a good carer for his brother Tom when he died from tuberculosis. In giving that care Keats became infected with the disease himself; there was no inoculation at the time, the now well-know BCG vaccine was first used in humans in 1921. Infection for Keats meant certain death but not before, he fell in love and wrote some of the world’s greatest poetry and love letters. Here is one of them.

“25 College Street, London

My dearest Girl,

This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair. I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing you from my Mind for ever so short a time. Upon my Soul I can think of nothing else – The time is passed when I had power to advise and warn you again[s]t the unpromising morning of my Life – My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love – You note came in just here – I cannot be happier away from you – ‘T is richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet – You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist: and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more – the pain would be too great – My Love is selfish – I cannot breathe without you.

Yours for ever

John Keats

Fanny, John Keat's great love

For more see:

http://englishhistory.net/keats/letters/love-letter-to-fanny-brawne-13-october-1819/

Outlander's Clair Fraser has jumped from second world war nurse, to eighteenth century healer cum witch to surgeon and that's what's great about fiction but the real story of female doctors, in Britain at least, is one of profound struggle and individual persistence. 

When Charlotte Leadam, in my up coming novel Sinclair, a story based on the real Leadam family who lived and worked as apothecary surgeons in Tooley Street from the late 18th century to the mid nineteenth century, inherits her husband's apothecary shop she was not allowed to run the shop on her own account - only men were allowed to be licensed as apothecaries.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836 – 1917) was the first woman in Britain who qualified as a physician and surgeon and she did this when in 1865, she finally obtained a licence (LSA) from the Society of Apothecaries.

Garrett's life's work was opening the medical profession to women. She started her quest by working as a surgery nurse at Middlesex Hospital, In 1860 she attempted to enrol in the hospital's Medical School. She was not accepted but was allowed to attend private tuition in Latin, Greek and materia medica with the hospital's apothecary, while continuing her work as a nurse.

She employed a tutor to study anatomy and physiology three evenings a week. Eventually she was allowed into the dissecting room and the chemistry lectures.

Gradually, Garrett became an unwelcome presence among the male students, who in 1861 presented a memorial to the school against her admittance as a fellow student, despite the support she enjoyed from the administration.

She was obliged to leave the Middlesex Hospital but she did so with an honours certificate in chemistry and materia medica.

Garrett then applied to several medical schools, including Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews and the Royal College of Surgeons, all of which refused her admittance.

Having privately obtained a certificate in anatomy and physiology and in 1862, she was finally admitted by the Society of Apothecaries who, as a condition of their charter, could not legally exclude her on account of her sex.

She continued her battle to qualify by studying privately with various professors, including some at the University of St Andrews, the Edinburgh Royal Maternity and the London Hospital Medical School.

She co-founded the first hospital staffed by women, was the first female dean of a British medical school, the first female doctor of medicine in France.

She was the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as Mayor of Aldeburgh, she was the first female mayor and magistrate in Britain.

Pictures: 1. Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) in Outlander Season Two Finale "Dragonfly in Amber"
2. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth enjoying the show in 2014.

The annual RHS Chelsea Flower Show opened today - 23rd May 2016. The RHS patron, HM the Queen, is the guest of honour at each show and this year as she is celebrating her 90th birthday there will be special photographic exhibits and a floral arch for her.The show is so popular that tickets are restricted to four per person and are already sold out.

Chelsea is probably the world’s most famous horticultural shows and is the place to see cutting-edge garden design, find new plants and new ideas to enhance your garden. The show is held in the grounds of Royal Hospital Chelsea which was once the site of the famous 18^th century Ranelagh Gardens.  

Ranelagh House and Gardens with the Rotunda (1745) T. Bowles after J. Maurer

Ranelagh was one of the great melting pots of 18th century society. Entry cost two shillings and sixpence, compared to a shilling at Vauxhall and Horace Walpole wrote soon after the gardens opened, "It has totally beat Vauxhall... You can't set your foot without treading on a Prince, or Duke of Cumberland.” Novelist Fanny Burney described how the nightly illuminations and magic lanterns ‘made me almost think I was in some enchanted castle or fairy palace’. Originally designed to appeal to wealthier tastes, pleasure gardens soon became the haunt of the rich and poor alike. 

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow at the show.

When it first opened in 1746, Ranelagh boasted acres of formal gardens with long sweeping avenues, down which pedestrians strolled together on balmy summer evenings. Other visitors came to admire the Chinese Pavillion or watch the fountain of mirrors and attend musical concerts held in the great 200-foot wide Rotunda, the gardens' main attraction where Mozart performed as a child.  Yet the novelty soon waned. In June of that year Catherine Talbot wrote to a friend that “…it is quite vexatious at present to see all the pomp and splendour of a Roman amphitheatre devoted to no better use than a twelvepenny entertainment of cold ham and chicken.” And Ranelagh soon lost out to the cheaper and more exciting Vauxhall Gardens. It probably didn’t help that the Rotunda proved to have dreadful acoustics, there was no drinking or gambling allowed and the grounds were too well lit for assignations.

Canaletto. The Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh (c1751).

However Ranelagh remained open for sixty years weathering the storms and frosts of the 1780s, London riots and the French wars until 1803.

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is organised by the Royal Horticultural Society which was founded in 1804. Today the Great Pavilion is one of main attractions covering roughly 11,775 square metres or 2.90 acres, enough room to park 500 London buses.

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch with his mother actress Wander Ventham in the Great Pavillion.

This year we can expect 2016 there will be spectacular show gardens, showcasing the exceptional talent of a handful of carefully selected garden designers. Alongside the Show Gardens are the smaller garden categories. The Artisan Gardens pay homage to traditional and contemporary artisan skills, and the Fresh Gardens category incorporate innovative materials and challenging ideas. There will be unique products for the garden and home including limited edition sculptures and gardening essentials, and in Ranelagh Gardens five artisans have been invited to dress Studios in which they will exhibit their handmade crafts.

Some thoughts on May Day

When I think of May Day I think either of Maypoles, Morris Dancing and the Jack in the Green or the old Soviet military processions in Red Square.

 

Of course the origins of May Day stretch back into the mists of time. In the late Middle Ages people in England started to dance around a Maypole (a pole with no ribbons) as a celebration of Spring and to encourage fertility in the soil and people. This was banned by the Puritans but came back with the Restoration in 1660 and has remained with ever since – the Victorians added the ribbons. 

But by the seventeenth century England was on the long march to modernity and urban living and London was well on the way to being the first great modern city in the world so May Day in London had nothing to do with May Poles or flowers.

May Day was one of a number of days of the year; Shrove Tuesday, Ascension Day, Midsummer and St Bartholomew’s Day; when disorder reigned.  Between 1603 and 1642 Shrove Tuesday riots involved apprentice boys attacking brothels, bawdy houses and playhouses to reduce temptation during Lent! In the same period there were eight May Day riots. The attacks on bawdy houses seem to peter out after the Restoration and the nature of May Day and other celebration days changes again.

In the late seventeenth century there is evidence of what are called ‘ridings’ in London and other towns. In a ‘riding’ those who are viewed to have transgressed the sexual morality of the day were harangued in the street by the mod beating their pots and pans and shouting at the tops of their voices in what was called ‘rough music.’ In June 1664 a woman appeared before a magistrate in Middlesex accused of following a woman down the street shouting, ‘whore, whore’ and clapping her hands. She was joined by others and soon there was a near riot. Those deemed to have offended their community were spat on, had dirt and stones thrown at them as well as the contents of chamber pots. In London haranguing husbands who had beaten or cheated on their wives was particularly popular as was terrorising brothel keepers and the mothers of illegitimate children.

Historian Charles Pythian-Adams has argued that during the eighteenth century May Day celebrations in London were transformed becoming socially segregated with the rich withdrawing from popular or plebeian activities, but this notion leaves out the growing urban middle class and the effects of growing religious non-conformity. As the eighteenth century progressed so did social separation (both class and gender) but it was not exclusively the elites separating themselves from the poor, the middle class were able to buy their way into urban elite culture, they may not have had a box at the theatre but they could have a seat in the stalls; and as for the poor they separated into those who chose the strictures of religious non-conformity (no pagan rituals) over the perceived laxity of the established church(pagan rituals accepted). This new urban culture was not conducive to what we think of as May Day traditions and its celebration or marking lapsed until it was re-invented and sanitised by the Victorians who gave us children holding ribbons and dancing round the May Pole in the Board School yard.

Source: The Eighteenth-Century Town: A Reader in English Urban History 1688-1820, By Peter Borsay, Routledge 2013

The Unfortunate Captain Peirce: When is a Hero not a Hero?

The wreck of the 'Halsewell', Indiaman, 1786, Thomas Stothard

Two and twenty years ago the merchant marine got its first hero; Captain Richard Peirce of the ill-fated East Indiaman the Halsewell. The ship which left Gravesend docks on the first day of January 1786 with a manifest of 240 people and was wrecked six days later of the Dorset coast with the loss of over 170 lives. The tragedy rocked the nation to its core and the ship’s captain became a national hero with stories and eulogies[1] appearing the London press and magazines like The Gentleman and The European praising his self-sacrifice for the sake of his family. The ship was not the first to go down and it certainly was not the last but this wreck captured the nation’s imagination for some reason.

Built by Wells of Blackwall in 1778 the 758 ton ship was on route to Madras armed with 12 cannon and carrying a cargo of 53 chests of small arms, 25 tons of copper plate, 500 tons of lead for shot, and general merchandise including pitch, grindstones, tar, chains and bellows but the main consignment was the men of the 2^nd Battalion and the 42^nd Regiment of the East India Company’s army who were being sent to replace men lost in Company’s war with the last mogul emperor with any clout, Hydra Ali, three years earlier.

 In addition to these soldiers the Haleswell has civilian passengers, including the two daughters Eliza and Mary-Ann; and two nieces of the captain Amy and Mary Paul, a Miss Elizabeth Blackburn,a  Miss Mary Haggard, a Miss Ann Mansell and a Mr John Shultz. The first mate, Thomas Burston, was a member of the Peirce family and was also lost in the incident. None of the women were able to escape and were among about 170 who died in the ship, which disintegrated within two hours of striking the rocky promontory. 

The Loss of the Haleswell, J.M.W Turner.

Accounts[2] given by two surviving officers Meriton and Rogers said that Peirce heroically remained with them and is shown on the right of the painting above, seated between and comforting his daughters. Meriton and Rogers stand on the left, on the point of departure, as calm observers of the group.

During the eighteenth century a number of men achieved the status of national hero, the most famous of them being the legendary Captain James Cook (1728-1779), the man who spent his life exploring and mapping; Newfoundland, Australia, the Hawaiian Islands and New Zealand for the British Crown.

During the Seven Years' War, Cook served in North America as master of Pembroke (1757) In 1758 he took part in the major amphibious assault that captured the Fortress of Louisbourg from the French, after which he participated in the siege of Quebec City and then the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. He showed a talent for surveying and cartography, and was responsible for mapping much of the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River during the siege, thus allowing General Wolfe to make his famous stealth attack on the Plains of Abraham.

In 1766, Admiralty engaged Cook to command a scientific voyage to the Pacific Ocean. The purpose of the voyage was to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun for the benefit of Royal Society inquiry into a means of determining longitude. Once the observations were completed, Cook opened his sealed orders and started the second part of his voyage: to search the south Pacific for signs of the postulated rich southern continent of Terra Australis. He sailed around New Zealand and landed on Australian soil on 19 April 1770, and in doing so his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered its eastern coastline. 

Two years later as the commander of HMS Resolution with his companion ship HMS Adventure he circumnavigated the globe at an extreme southern latitude, becoming one of the first to cross the Antarctic Circle on 17 January 1773.

On his last great voyage Cook was charged with looking for a north-west passage around the American continent. He sailed via Cape Horne and into the Pacific Ocean stopping off at Hawaii and the Sandwich Islands. Cook sailed as far north as Vancouver Island than turned back and was killed in an altercation with the local Hawaiian chief on 14 February 1779.

The Death of Captain James Cook,  Johann Zoffany, circa 1795.

So, how was it that Captain Peirce of the East India Company could be compared with the heroic Cook? 

In the latter part of the eighteenth century as tariffs were lowered on tea, brandy and other luxury goods the amount of smuggling along the coast was at last beginning to fall. Wrecks too were becoming less attractive to looters. The rescuers of the survivors were hailed by the King and the Company provided a reward of 50 guineas for their efforts. The survivors who were mainly crew had to walk all the way back to London through snow and rain, there was no reward for them. In fact the crew were lambasted[3] in some sections of the London press for failing to do their duty and for disobeying their captain and it became a commonly held view that the reason for the disaster was the lax attitude of the crew and their failure to follow their captain’s orders.

Thompson[4] argues that placing Peirce in the company of a man like Cook elevated him to an example of the national character, the embodiment of British courage and virtue in war. But Pierce was not at war and neither was he a servant of the state like Cook and other heroes such as Wolfe and Andre he was engaged in trade and a lucrative one at that. On a successful voyage a captain like Pierce could expect to make £10,000, and extra-ordinary amount of money compared to his pay which would have been something in the order of £300 a year and he was hoping to marry his daughters and nieces to rich officers or merchants along the way. But for a nation hungry for commercial success and wealth Pierce was their man, a jewel in their social crown and an example of familial loyalty and enterprise in the area of the world they were most interested in, India. “In death, Peirce becomes implicitly iconic not only for British courage and manly virtue but also the East India Company’s paternalism and its mission to form stronger bonds of affection and sociability both within British society and between Britain and its colonial dominions.

However, the legal implications of the commonly held view that the crew was the chief cause of the disaster were to have lasting significance for seamen who found themselves under the control of brutal officers, as both commercial owners and the British Crown were able to cite the example of the Halsewell as a reason for the maintenance of strict order, by force if necessary by officers on the lower orders.

The story of the Haleswell (renamed the Sherwell) inspired the beginning of my up- coming novel, Sinclair which will be available later this year.

[]] Monody, On the death of Captain Peirce, 1786.

[2] A circumstantial narrative of the loss of the Halsewell, East-Indiaman .Henry Meriton (second mate of the Halsewell.), John Rogers (third mate of the alsewell.)http://www.responsites.co.uk/halsewell/

[3]The London Recorder, January 15^th, 1786.

[4] Ship Wreck in Art and Literature, Carl Thompson, Routledge, 2013