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| 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
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 2nd Battalion and the 42nd
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.
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| The Loss of the Haleswell, J.M.W Turner. |
Accounts
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.
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| 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
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
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.
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/
Ship Wreck in Art and Literature, Carl Thompson, Routledge, 2013
