Faiella - Ate the dog yesterday maritime casualties, calamities and disasters

Ate the Dog Yesterday

Published by

Whittles Publishing Ltd.,

Dunbeath,

Caithness, KW6 6EG,

Scotland, UK

www.whittlespublishing.com

2015 Graham Faiella

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Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-84995-206-4

T his is the story of the true-life dramas and chronicles of the perils and misfortunes of numerous deep-sea sailing ships and sailors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; of the constant dangers they faced; and of the battles they waged, and all too often lost, against the hazards of the sea.

Shortly before a visit to Bermuda by Edward, Prince of Wales in October 1920, the hulks of two deep-sea sailing ships, the British Emily A Davies and the Norwegian-flagged Norrkping, were beached together at a small cove known as Black Bay in the parish of Southampton of that mid-Atlantic island. The rusting hulks were considered unsightly in the harbour at St. Georges, at the east end of Bermuda, where they had lain for more than a decade. Better, it was thought, to hide them away and out of sight of royal sensibilities at the inconspicuous little Black Bay.

Both vessels had been brought into Bermuda as casualties of heavy winter weather in the North Atlantic: the Emily A Davies in the winter of 190102, and the Norrkping in February 1908. Both had been three-masted iron barques. Both were built in the great shipbuilding centre of Sunderland, on the northeast coast of England: the Norrkping (launched as Runnymede) in 1869, the Emily A Davies in 1876.

Both ships hauled their common, often dirty and sometimes dangerous freight across all the oceans of the world for the best part of three decades. Thousands of other deep-sea commercial sailing ships of that era did the same.

Life was tough for 19th century sailors in sail. Shipboard work was hard. It was often and routinely dangerous. Crew members could be and frequently were maimed or even killed by the sea, or by any number of routine dangers they faced while working their ships. And it was the same for crews in all merchant sailing ships of that time: nothing out of the ordinary, except for the extraordinary hardships that sailors bore as nothing more nor less than their duty to obey their captains and drive their ships to a safe port to discharge or take on cargoes.

The Bermudian historian William Zuill wrote in his 1946 guidebook Bermuda Journey that Black Bay was hideously marred by two disintegrating iron hulks.

But the Emily A Davies and the Norrkping, like countless other sailing ships and sailing men (and some women) of their time, had lives much like the rest of us: mostly routine, highlighted occasionally by incidents of tragedy or coincidence, but generally unacknowledged, unremarked and, to the rest of the world, unremarkable.

These, amongst untold many others, are their stories.

N OTE

All the extract narratives that follow are from the Casualties columns and pages of the daily shipping newspaper Lloyds List. All date from within the lifespan of the two Black Bay ships, from 1869 up to the early years of the 20th century the heyday of deep-sea commercial sail, transitioning into the steamship era.

The dated extracts are for the issue of Lloyds List in which they appeared. Any other supplementary material is dated and by-lined according to its source.

T he daily shipping newspaper Lloyds List has recorded news of ships and shipping, and the worldwide port movements of merchant ships, since the late-1600s. The title Lloyds List derives from Edward Lloyds coffee house in London that he opened in 1691 and which became a meeting place for shipping merchants and insurance underwriters.

In 1692 Lloyd began to publish a weekly report of shipping news with the rather ungainly title of Ships Arrived at and Departed from several Ports of England, as I have Account of them in London[and] An Account of What English Shipping and Foreign Ships for England, I hear of in Foreign Ports.

From the 1770s this weekly report became abbreviated as Lloyds List. From 1 July 1837 it began to be published six days a week, which it has continued to do to this day. In July 1884 it was merged with the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette (published since 1838), becoming the Shipping Gazette and Lloyds List. (In reports, this was commonly cited by abbreviation to the Shipping Gazette.)

(The association of marine insurance underwriters who met at Mr. Lloyds coffee house was incorporated as the Corporation of Lloyds, or Lloyds of London, in 1871. From June 1914 the Corporation took over the publication of Lloyds List until 1973, after which it was published by Lloyds of London Press Ltd.)

The voyage passages of the two Black Bay ships, along with thousands of other vessels, were recorded in Lloyds List as a series of their movements from port to port: vessels were reported arrived at a particular port, on a particular date, from another port; or departed from a port, on a certain date, to sail to the next port as named. (A passage was a run from one port to another. A voyage was, technically, a complete run of passages from and back to her start port or nearby, which might take three years or more. In practice, however, the terms were used interchangeably to mean any run from one port to another although a passage could never be a round-trip or multi-port voyage.)

Each recorded movement of a vessel was listed under a particular port of arrival or departure, or sometimes a waypoint along the coast of Britain or Ireland (Gravesend, for example, at the entrance of the Thames estuary for ships coming from and going to London) or elsewhere (the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic was a busy mid-ocean waypoint for ships passing by to report themselves there).

The information on a vessel included all or some of the following: her name; the type of vessel she was, in brackets (for example, a barque, abbreviated as barq. or bq.; schooner, abbreviated as schr; brigant. for brigantine (and brig, kept as is for brig); or ship, which meant