27 November 2022: Thanksgiving (in the U.S.) is done, the last of the turkey and stuffing, cranberry sauce and potatoes consumed (one way or another!) and Christmas looms! Getting out of breath just thinking about it! Anyway, since we wrote last time about a mystery, we will continue with the theme this week, but on the other side of the world. From Umlad News:
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Archaeologists have discovered a mysterious shipwreck filled with
treasures that has sat beneath the waters of the Yangtze river for 150 years.
The 125-foot ship was raised from its resting place on the bottom of Asia’s longest river, and some of
the haul that has lain inside it has now been revealed.
What it probably looked like
Obviously, the team behind it are very excited.
They’ve catchily titled it ‘Yangtze Estuary No. 2’ and declared it one of
the best preserved and largest shipwrecks ever found in China.
On the ship, the archaeologists
found a load of Chinese-made crockery, including pots and bowls, as well as a
number of other finely-crafted artefacts.
The state of preservation that the ship is in, as well as the items they’ve
found on it, are of huge significance to those interested in the study of the
history of shipbuilding, ceramics in China, and the shipping industry.
The shipwreck was actually discovered back in 2015, but they’ve spent years
painstakingly examining and exploring the underwater site.
On November 21, they finally raised it from the deep.
According to local media, the whole lot weighed 8,000 tonnes.
The vessel is largely intact and is 33-feet wide with 31 cabins, according
to the sonar scanning beforehand.
The mysterious boat has been sat just 5.5 metres beneath the Yangtze near to
the end of Hengsha Island close to the Chongming district of Shanghai.
This time they’ll have the added benefit of the ship not being on the silty
floor of a busy river.
It will be taken to a dock at a former shipyard in Shanghai where the
scientists and archaeologists will be able to have a proper look and truly
uncover the details of what happened to the ship.
In the end, it could even be turned into a shipwreck museum as part of a
cultural heritage plan organised by the city of Shanghai.
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So, that's pretty neat, right! While I doubt there will be more news on this, should it show up and we see it, we'll pass it on.
20 November 2022: Almost the end of November - my how the time does fly! 2022 is getting thin and 2023 looms. Let's hope the next one is better - across the board! We might have written about the Mary Celeste one time before, but not sure if or when that was. In any case, here is the tale (maybe again?), from History Hits.
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On 4 December 1872, an American-registered merchant brigantine called the Mary
Celeste was spotted adrift near to the Azores Islands, off the coast of
Portugal. Originally intended for Genoa, the ship had set off from New York
carrying the captain, Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife Sarah, their 2-year-old
daughter Sophia and eight crew members.
The perplexed crew of a nearby ship boarded the Mary Celeste.
There, they encountered a mystery that still confounds sleuths today: everyone
on board had vanished, seemingly without a trace.
Insurance fraud and foul play were immediately theorised. Equally popular
was a theory that the crew had abandoned the ship hastily, believing it about
to blow up or sink. In the time after, everything from murder, pirates
and sea creatures have been suggested as possible explanations, all to no
avail.
So what happened to the ill-fated Mary Celeste?
Mary Celeste was built in 1861 in Nova Scotia, Canada. Originally it was
named the Amazon. [ed: maybe because it was delivering products? - Sorry - couldn't resist!] Upon being launched in 1861, it experienced
a number of issues: the captain on her maiden voyage caught pneumonia and died,
and the ship was later damaged multiple times.
In 1868, it was sold and renamed the Mary Celeste. Over coming
years, it underwent many significant structural changes and was eventually sold
to a group that included Captain Benjamin S. Briggs.
The Mary Celeste set sail from New York on 7 November 1872. It
was laden with more than 1,700 barrels of alcohol, and was destined for Genoa.
The log book indicates that the ten people on board experienced harsh weather
for the next two weeks. On 4 December of the same year, the ship was spotted by
the crew of British ship Dei Gratia.
Upon boarding the ship, the crew discovered that it was entirely abandoned.
Upon closer inspection, it was discovered that the ship contained six months’
worth of food and water, and the belongings of the crew and passengers were
almost entirely unmoved. Aside from water in the hold and a missing lifeboat,
there were very few clues as to what could have caused them all to disappear.
Yet more mysteriously, the last entry of the captain’s logbook, dated 25
November, stated that the ship was around 11km from the Azores. However, the crew
of Dei Gratia discovered Mary Celeste some 500 miles from
there. With no sign of the crew of the Mary Celeste, the crew of the Dei
Gratia sailed the ship to Gibraltar,
some 800 miles away.
Gibraltar, a British vice admiralty court convened a salvage hearing, which
normally entailed determining whether the salvagers – the Dei Gratia crewmen
– were entitled to money from the Mary Celeste’s insurers.
However, Frederick Solly-Flood, Attorney General of Gibraltar suspected that
the crew may have been involved with the disappearance, even suggesting that
the crew had murdered the Captain and his family. However, this theory was
largely disproven when stains around the ship were discovered to not be blood,
and it was re-emphasised that nothing valuable had been taken.
However, after three months of deliberation, the court found no evidence of
foul play. Nonetheless, though the salvagers did receive a payment, they only
received a sixth of what the ship and its cargo had been insured for, which
suggests the authorities still suspected that they were somehow involved.
A number of theories immediately began to circulate about what could have
happened to the ship. A popular theory is that Captain Briggs ordered everyone
on board to abandon ship.
This could have been for various reasons. The first belief is that he perhaps
believed that the ship was taking on too much water, and was going to sink.
Indeed, a sounding rod, which is used to measure how much water is in the hold,
was discovered on the deck, suggesting it had been recently used. Additionally,
one of the ship’s pumps showed signs of issues, since it had been disassembled.
It is therefore possible that a faulty sounding rod combined with a non-working
pump proved enough for Briggs to order the crew to leave in the lifeboat
immediately.
Another theory points to alcohol vapours from the barrels in the ship’s
hold, which could have been powerful enough to blow off the ship’s main hatch,
prompting those on board to fear an imminent explosion and abandon ship
accordingly. Indeed, the log makes note of many rumbling and explosive sounds
from the hold. However, the hatch was described as secure, and no fume smells
were reported.
Finally, the lifeboat appeared to have been used in a hurry since the rope
tying it to the boat was cut rather than untied.
Despite being perceived as unlucky, the Mary Celeste remained in
service and was passed through a number of owners before being acquired by
Captain Parker.
In 1885, he deliberately sailed it into a reef near Haiti as a means of
claiming insurance on it; however, it failed to sink, and the authorities
discovered his scheme. The ship was damaged beyond repair, so was left on the
reef to deteriorate.
Discovery of Mary Celeste wreck
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And still, no one knows why she was left adrift some 800 miles from Gibraltar; doubtful it will ever be known, but it has given rise to a plethora of both fanciful and potentially accurate theories. Make up your own mind!
Until next time, and a happy Thanksgiving to those of you who participate!
14 November 2022: Half way through November already and the holidays loom. My goodness, where has the year gone?! As promised last week, this will conclude our series on the prison hulks of the 18th and 19th centuries and perhaps shed some light on the use of these despicable vessels in the United States. We left off discussing the attempts to escape; it was not pretty:
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One convict was shot from a distance
of about 10 metres. “The bullet,” so the report revealed, “entered the left
side of his head, which drove part of his skull and brains into his hat: he
instantly fell lifeless to the ground.” Some of the rioters did escape, but
others were rounded up by the Royal Artillery. Such desperadoes faced a
flogging of up to 100 lashes, or being thrown into the hulk’s “black hole” – an
isolated cell – with reduced rations.
In 1811, The Times reported
that 37 convicts had escaped together from a vessel at Woolwich. Using
makeshift tools and saws stolen from the dock yards, the men “cut through the
ceiling and timbers of the hulk just under her bends [and] made a hole
sufficiently large for a man to creep out”.
Taking advantage of a low tide
leaving the ship beached on mudflats, the men waded through the mire to the
shore and headed south of Woolwich in the direction of Shooter’s Hill, a place
commonly associated with highway robberies. Fifteen of the men were recaptured.
The testimony of Michael Cashmin
highlights the horrors of the floating prisons. In April 1778, Cashmin escaped
a hulk at Woolwich but was apprehended near Tottenham Court Road, still
sporting part of a fetter on each leg.
According to the Newgate Calendar,
Cashmin was sent back to the hulks for a further 14 years, despite arguing at
the Old Bailey that: “I was almost starved to death when I was there; there is
never a man there but would escape from that place if he could: I would rather
be hanged than be there.”
In 1778, a large uprising erupted in
the dockyards at Woolwich during a planned mass escape. Late one after noon,
some 150 men (of 250 convicts working on the Thames at the time) abandoned their
wheelbarrows and grabbed pikes from a nearby ship.
Having armed themselves, the mob
took up spades and carpenters’ axes, proceeding to the waterside to attempt
escape via the sea wall. There they hurled showers of stones at the 20 armed
militiamen who tried to stop them, and who eventually subdued the would-be
escapees.
Newspapers printed detailed
descriptions of fugitives to alert the public. After John Mason escaped the Justitia
in 1836, the Morning Post labelled him a “notorious and desperate
burglar”. Describing him as stoutly built, with “scars on the right side of his
head and on the back of his hand”, the newspaper advised civilians to look out
for a man in the “grey dress of the hulks, with a piece of iron on one of his
legs”.
Prison uniforms stood out, so many
escapees donned disguises. Michael Brothers, who escaped the Defence in
1856, disguised himself with a stolen hat and long overcoat – but his trousers,
hastily sewn together from old bedding, aroused suspicion and he was soon
recaptured.
Perhaps the most famous convict to
abscond from the hulks was fictional. In Charles Dickens’ novel Great
Expectations, serialised from 1860, the protagonist, Pip, helps convict
Magwitch to escape. This “fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on
his leg… who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled” was recaptured on
the Kent marshes and returned to the hulks, which Pip called “wicked Noah’s
arks”.
By the 1830s and 1840s, hulk
officers feared that influxes of “Swing Rioters” – disaffected agricultural
workers – and Chartists demanding political reform
would provoke mass mutiny and escape attempts on hulks. Less violent protests
took the form of petitions asking for release or better rations. In 1800, a
group of convicts on the Lion hulk at Portsmouth spoke of the “barbarity
we receive from the officers on board”, and said that they were “starving for
the want of provisions”.
Some prisoners asked for early
pardons in recognition of injuries sustained in the dockyards; others tried to
take up posts in the army and navy. Good behaviour didn’t guarantee success in
such efforts, but in some cases it paid off. In 1834, 12-year-old David Brough
from Dundee, given a positive character reference from bricklayers and masons
in Woolwich dockyard, was pardoned.
Hulks had always had their critics
but by the 1840s, with a new nationwide emphasis on reform and rehabilitation,
they appeared ever more outmoded. In 1847, the hulks at Woolwich hit the
headlines. It was feared that illegal dissections of dead prisoners were taking
place on board; inmates felt they were being “allowed to die for the sake of
their bodies to go to the school of anatomy”. The system was labelled “a
disgrace to any country calling itself… civilised and Christian” by MP Thomas
Duncombe.
In 1848, the Daily News
singled out the hulk system as corrupt and negligent, observing that the system
“continued, not withstanding its disastrous consequences: and it still
flourishes – if that which only stagnates, debases, and corrupts, can be said
to flourish”. This appraisal argued that hulks had “no redeeming feature”, and
that the sole reason the system continued to operate was because convict labour
was still of use to the government.
When Mayhew and Binny visited the Defence
in 1855, they remarked with wonder that “a state of things so scandalous could
last”. Two years later, the Defence burned down; its remaining inmates
were moved to nearby prisons.
That same year, 1857, the hulk
system ended in Britain, though hulks continued to be used as prisons in
overseas colonies for several more years. A system of incarceration that was,
Mayhew and Binny pointed out, as rotten as the wooden timbers of the Defence
was finally consigned to a watery grave.
[ed: so ends the story of the hulks in England. what follows discusses of the use of them and one specific hulk in New York Harbor during the American Revolution]
One story of the American War of Independence has eluded the popular
imagination: the British prison ships in New York’s East River.
Inside the prison ship Jersey.
Docked in Wallabout Bay, near what would become the Brooklyn Navy
Yard, these ships held American prisoners in hellish conditions.
Sometimes called “floating dungeons” or “ghost ships,” the prison ships
were nothing less than watery concentration camps, responsible for
thousands of deaths. The 16-odd prison ships included HMS Falmouth,
Scorpion and Hunter. But the most notorious was the Jersey. In its day,
the mere mention of its name was enough to send shivers down the spine
of an American patriot.
HMS Jersey in Wallabout Bay
More than two centuries later, little remains of the Jersey and the
ghastly fleet once anchored in Wallabout Bay. In the years after the
war, the prison ships were something nobody cared to remember.
“This ship, the Jersey, the ‘ghost
ship,’ it was the single bloodiest conflict of the entire Revolutionary War,”
states an authority on the war, Robert P. Watson in his terrifying new history, The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn: An Untold Story of the American Revolution. “Not Saratoga, not Trenton, not Yorktown, not
Germantown. The single bloodiest conflict was on board this one ship.”
How bloody was it? We’ll never know
the precise number of men who died on the ships, but most scholars estimate the
death toll at 11,500.
“This was the statistic that knocked
me out of my seat,” Watson says. “Twice as many Americans died on this one ship
than died in combat during the entirety of the Revolutionary War, from 1775 to
1783.”
Once a warship of the Royal Navy, by
1770 the Jersey was put to nautical pasture and “hulked.” Its guns and masts
were removed, and it was converted into a sort of warehouse in the East River.
In 1779, it was turned into a prison.
One internee said of the Jersey,
“Without ornament, an old, unsightly hulk, whose dark and filthy external
appearance fitly represented the death and despair that reigned within.”
The conditions on board the Jersey
were by any measure appalling. Prisoners were locked in dark, overcrowded holds
for days on end, often with no room to lie down. They were given brackish water
and moldy food, if anything at all, and were kept company by lice, fleas and
rats. For toilets, there were great barrels, overflowing with waste. The smell
was unimaginable, the air so thick with filth that candles would not light. And
pervading it all was a sense of terror from the guards, who showed no mercy.
Most prisoners had little hope of ever leaving, and little hope at all.
The British and Americans
occasionally exchanged prisoners, although the British did not consider most of
the prison-ship population to be legitimate soldiers. Many of the men
imprisoned in the East River ships were privateers — crews from small
rebel-friendly ships that raided British merchants in the Atlantic. By
disrupting British trade and diverting royal resources, privateers were
valuable to the revolutionary effort, but they were not officially part of the
small Continental Navy. To the British, they were criminals, rebels. And in the
calculus of prisoner exchange, one privateer hardly compared to a member of the
British army.
There are rare accounts of prisoners
escaping. More likely, they’d die. Smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, dysentery,
gangrene, starvation and murder by guards ensured that end for many prisoners.
Some six to 12 died every day. Every morning, guards would greet their charges
by shouting, “Rebels! Turn out your dead!” The bodies of those who had died the
night before were brought up to be buried in the marshy riverbank. Sometimes
the dead were left in the hold for days.
None of this was by accident. For the British, there was a
purpose behind the Jersey. Watson says the British “saw this ship as a
psychological weapon of terror.” They thought “so many Americans will die on
this ship, that it will deter patriots from picking up arms against them . . .
They designed this and nurtured this.”
The Jersey held its ghastly cargo to the very end of the
war, with the last prisoners leaving in September 1783. With the war over and
the British gone from New York City, the rotting hulk of the Jersey was allowed
to sink into the muck of the Wallabout Bay. In the excitement of the new
nation, the Jersey was a nightmare many wanted to forget.
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Some of you may recall an earlier post on this subject; if so, the above includes some new material. A horrible treatment of our fellow man, indeed.
