Cason reconciled himself to the fact that slaves serving in the Turkish fleet, children being raised in local households and older boys who had converted to Islam and moved to Alexandria and further east would not be included in the group purchase. Many owners wanted to hang on to their slaves, valuing them higher than the purchase price. Some probably even liked their slaves, an affection that was reciprocated in many instances.
The slaves for purchase were usually women-and-children combinations, or buy-one-get-a-child-free packages that cost Carson £50 each. These could have been sold on in the market for £100,98 so the Algerians were being reasonable. Skilled slaves such as coopers, carpenters and surgeons cost £32 each plus port charges of 61s. 6d. per head, making them about £35 each. Cason wanted to negotiate a one-price-fits-all rate but the owners rejected this, arguing the merits of individual slaves belonging to them.
By simple arithmetic, Carson worked out that he had only enough funds to redeem 250 of the total of 650 slaves on offer. Therefore, he had to choose who would go and who would stay behind. He had orders to prioritise his selection based on class, and to rescue as many posh ones as possible. But Cason was unusually egalitarian for the times. He tried to ignore that order. Instead, he selected those whom he thought he “should have for cloth”. It is not clear what this phrase means but it may be that whoever had clothes to travel in would be prioritised. In all, he rescued 264, two of whom were from Baltimore: Joane Broadbrook and Ellen Hawkins, who I assume were the best dressed of the eligible Baltimore slaves. Joane had two children and was pregnant when she was captured, but there is no record of any of her children returning with her.
We also have no record of what kind of a reception the two women received back in Baltimore after a fifteen-year absence. At fundraising events that were organised to raise money for ransoms, ex-Algiers slaves were put on show and were obliged to wear chains that were usually heavier than the real things. Perhaps Joane and Ellen had to clink their way round Cork for the next fifteen years. I am confident that they must have often regretted going home.
Dying to See the World
Thomas Legge (d.1808) reached parts of the world that no other traveller had been to in his lifetime. He was the son of a ship owner but he refused to follow his father into the business. Instead, he ran away to sea on someone else’s boat when he was sixteen.
He sailed on the Swallow to Madras in India in 1775. There he promptly deserted ship and set off as a beggar to explore India. In six years of wandering, supported only by charity, he travelled to the Sindh region, and crossed the Indian desert and Rajasthan province. He retired from begging in favour of a career casting cannon for regional despots. He spent the following twenty years casting cannon all over India, Afghanistan, Badakhshan and Uzbekistan.
He was the first European, perhaps since Alexander the Great, to travel in those parts of the world. During his extensive journeys, Legge learned Indian culture and myth, languages, alchemy, healing and divination using sheep’s bones. He claimed to have found the Garden of Eden in the Hindu Kush. The garden was in a cave guarded by an angel with flaming wings. It contained the expected fruit trees along with unexpected heaps of gold and silver, which in his beggar’s imagination must have meant eternal happiness. I wonder why he didn’t stay. Clearly Eden bored all three people that we know were there – not a propitious advertisement for heaven.
Legge eventually returned to Jaipur, where he married a politically influential woman of Portuguese descent. Her family got him the command of a battalion in the local Maharaja’s army, despite his having no experience of military matters beyond making cannons. This lack of experience quickly proved inconvenient because, in his first contact with an enemy, he was shot through the thigh and skewered with a pike. Despite his knowledge of healing, his wounds failed to mend, so he moved into a deserted Mohammedan tomb to spend the remainder of his life as a living corpse. He became a Muslim Sufi ascetic, or fakir, living on alms. He lasted several months in the mausoleum before putting it to its intended use by dying.
Exceptionally Stupid Wars
At those times in history when we didn’t have our own navy, we sometimes started new navies for other countries. This is what William Brown (1777–1857) did. Brown is arguably our most successful Irish sailor, ever, because he became admiral-in-chief of the Argentine Navy.
In 1780 he was a midshipman in the British Navy before transferring to the merchant marine, and then serving on a privateer99 in the West Indies. By 1806 he had made enough money from his life as an official pirate to settle in Buenos Aires as a trader in fruit and hides. At that time, the Spanish were blockading trade out of the River Plate, which is a large estuary between Argentina and Uruguay. In 1814, Brown was invited by the Argentine Government to take charge of a rebel naval squadron to contest control of sea trade with the Spanish. Probably bored with fruit and animal hides, he agreed.
He organised a fleet of nineteen ships into a naval force that paid unusual attention to the welfare of ordinary seamen. He defeated a superior Spanish force in March 1814. Later in the year, when he beat the Spanish again, their control of the coast collapsed. The war ended. But Brown was obviously enjoying fighting more than trading skins, so he continued to raid Spanish targets until he was captured by the British in Barbados in 1816 for breach of international trade rules – rules established by the British Navy. The people who owned his ships were understandably anxious about his continuing to fight in them. They wanted him stopped while their ships were still intact.
Illness and lengthy but, unusually, successful litigation kept him away from Argentina until 1818. On his return, instead of receiving a hero’s welcome, he was first cashiered for disobeying orders, then reinstated and finally forced into early retirement. He was so disappointed with the attitude of the Argentine authorities that he tried to kill himself. The attempt failed and it took him years to recover.
He returned to the fruit and skins business, swearing to have nothing to do with the Argentine Navy ever again. Until the next time they asked him for a favour.
In 1825 the Government gave him back his command because war had broken out with the vastly superior Brazilian Navy. Brown accepted and quickly took the fight to the Brazilians. In 1827 he won a series of victories in the Battle of Juncal. By 1828 there was peace with Brazil. Brown was one of two Argentinean delegates to actually sign the peace treaty.
He retired again but his retirement was interrupted by civil war in 1828. He retired once more in 1829, in disgust at the Government. This time he swore he would have nothing to do with them ever, ever again. This time he really meant it, during peace time anyway.
In 1841 he came out of retirement to take charge of the navy in a war against Uruguay, which he described as “a stupid war”. That conflict must have been exceptionally bad by the standards of South American wars at the time. He was winning the stupid war until French and British fleets interfered in 1841, capturing his squadron and bringing the obtuse war to an end. Despite, or maybe because of, his being at sea for long periods, his wife had nine children.
Fortunately, the British Navy was always happy to take any Irish with a desire to live at sea. As luck would have it, Britain’s allies kept defecting so there were countless opportunities for stupid wars. Dubliner James Spratt (1771–1853) joined the merchant navy before transferring to the Royal Navy100 in 1796 as a first-class volunteer in time for the notable naval battles of the Napoleonic Wars. He was on HMS Bellona at the Battle of Copenhagen, when Horatio Nelson led the main attack on 2 April 1802 on board HMS Elephant. The ship’s gun exploded, killing the entire gun crew except Spratt; he wasn’t even scratched.
He transferred to HMS Defiance and fought at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. During that battle, Captain Durham of the Defiance decided to board the French Agile. In naval warfare, “boarding” is the relatively genteel term for the invasion of one ship by the savage sailors of another, often wiel
ding clubs, axes, swords, pistols or anything that could inflict a fatal wound. But the wind had slackened and he couldn’t bring the Defiance alongside. Spratt volunteered to swim across with a boarding party. He dived into the sea, probably with a cutlass between his teeth, calling on his hearty shipmates to follow. None of them did, so he popped up on his own beside the Agile. He boarded at the stern ports and singlehandedly fought his way to the poop deck,101 as you do. He was set upon by three French grenadiers.102 He disabled two of them and broke the neck of the third. By now some of his shipmates had actually fought their way on board beside him. He saved the life of a French officer, as you should do, and took a musket ball in the leg, as you shouldn’t, just before the Agile struck her colours and surrendered.
Back on board the Defiance, Spratt refused to allow the surgeon to amputate his leg, and was taken to the naval hospital at Gibraltar. There the “surgeons” reset his leg but it wouldn’t knit together properly because he was thrashing around the hospital bed with a fever. They came up with the idea of setting his leg in a wooden case in order to allow it time to mend. A few days later, he began to complain of a gnawing sensation in his leg that was inside the box. When it was opened the surgeons discovered that hundreds of enormous maggots had eaten three inches off his leg.
For his actions at Trafalgar, he was promoted to lieutenant and awarded £50.103 He recovered from his experience with the voracious maggots. While this was before the invention of counselling, it was also before the invention of post-traumatic stress disorder. In effect, people happily didn’t know when they had been driven mad by an occurrence. He retired to a signal station in Devon. There he invented a “homograph”, a signaling device that was the basis for the later semaphore system. The Society of Arts awarded him a medal for this invention.
Spratt was a remarkable swimmer. During his service with the navy he saved the lives of nine men who had fallen overboard, not all at the same time. In 1831 he swam fourteen miles for a bet with his different length legs. His son, Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt, who was surely destined to become historically notable with such a name, became a vice-admiral, hydrographer, archaeologist and author.
Life on Ice
William Coppin (1805–1895) was a successful sailor, shipbuilder and marine inventor who, amongst many other accomplishments, built one of the first ever ships to use an Archimedean screw propeller.104 He also salvaged over 140 sunken ships after his own shipyard burnt down in 1846. Coppin and his wife, Dora, had two sons and four daughters. In 1849 their third child, Louisa, known affectionately as “Little Weesy”, died when she was five years old. Soon after her burial, she appeared to her family as a “ball of bluish light”, prophesying the, as yet undiscovered, location of Sir John Franklin’s vanished 1845 polar expedition. The fate of that lost expedition, which had set out to chart the Northwest Passage sea route, became one of the most gripping mysteries of the nineteenth century. There was enormous public interest in the disappearance of Franklin, his entire crew and his two ships Terror and Erebus.
Coppin told Lady Franklin about Little Weesy’s occult message in May 1850. Four hundred and thirty Liverpool merchants and bankers petitioned the Admiralty to look where Little Weesy suggested. A search in 1859, in the Fox, a yacht owned by Lady Franklin, found remains on King William Island, just where dead Little Weesy had indicated they would be.
Francis Leopold McClintock (1819–1907), of the Fox, was originally from Co. Louth. He went on four polar expeditions, all of which were in search of Franklin’s missing ships. If initially he had resorted to occult instructions, he would not have had an excuse to return three times and become a polar authority in the process. Finally, on his fourth attempt, he found human and material remains. Naturally he denied using paranormal advice, as we all do. He claimed that the local Inuit guided him. He might have asked them on his first trip. He subsequently wrote a bestselling book about his experiences in the Arctic. He eventually achieved the rank of admiral in 1884.
McClintock experimented with photography and collected a vast number of zoological and fossil specimens, many of which can be seen in the Natural History Museum in Dublin. This is my preferred Irish museum. It contains a huge number of stuffed animals, including the last wildcat in Ireland complete with the bullet hole in its head where the curator shot him for his collection. We should be grateful that, in the nineteenth century, zoologists who were concerned about possible extinctions shot and stuffed everything that moved, wiggled, swung from trees or slithered along the ground, all for our future enjoyment and edification.
There were more Irish connections with the Franklin mystery. McClintock found a document under a cairn on King William Island that told the fate of the doomed expedition. Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier (1796–1848), from Co. Down, was the author of the document. Crozier, who was second in command of the Franklin expedition, wrote about how they were forced to abandon the ships when the ice trapped them in 1846. Franklin died in 1847, leaving Crozier in charge. As rations ran short, Crozier took the weakening crew of 105 men south on 26 April 1848. That is the last known record of them – they all died sometime after that date. Modern forensic tests on the skeletal remains show that vitamin deficiency and lead poisoning from canned food contributed to the deaths. Early cans, patented by inventor Nicolas Appert, were sealed with lead soldering, which caused lead poisoning. Many believe that Crozier was one of the last of the expedition to die. Maybe Little Weesy told them.
On his first search mission, McClintock became iced in but made a 760-mile journey by sled. Over the years, he developed entirely new methods of sledding from his Arctic experiences, and was a rare authority on freezing Arctic conditions. He became an inspiration to those famous explorers who came after him, especially Captain Robert Scott. Roald Amundsen, who was Scott’s contemporary in exploration, eventually learned the advantages of using dogs rather than people to pull sleds. This breakthrough, which he learned from the Inuit, famously helped him to beat Scott to the South Pole by just five weeks in 1911. Scott, being British, preferred to inflict the cruelty of sled-pulling on his men and himself, rather than on blameless dogs, a decision that contributed to his freezing to death on his way back from the Pole in 1912.
Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922), from Kildare, was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve in 1901. However, as he had already grown bored with the routine of sailing, he volunteered for Captain Robert Scott’s National Antarctic Expedition on the Discovery in 1901–1904. Boredom was the principal motivation behind much exploration. But Shackleton was also desperate to impress the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). He was appointed third officer on the Discovery, and sailed away to the frozen Antarctic in 1901.
Shackleton was at ease with all ranks, and comfortable with command. Scott wasn’t. Scott didn’t like Shackleton because he was jealous of his natural charm and leadership qualities. Everyone else loved the saintly Shackleton. In November 1902, together with Scott and Edward Wilson, Shackleton reached a southern latitude of 82º 28’. This was the furthest distance south that anyone had ever attained. Their dress was supplemented by woollen underpants and several pairs of socks on their hands and feet, and they dragged all of their supplies themselves on sleds, as advised by McClintock. At that time Europeans hadn’t a clue about the cold in the polar regions. Nowadays, even I could get to the poles in the standard all-over thermal suit with heated underpants, and packets of high-energy toothpaste-like food in my pockets. Back then, the explorers had to stop every mile or two to brew up more tea. To Scott’s great relief, Shackleton became ill and was sent home in 1903. Many Irish people are suspicious of Scott’s good fortune and wonder what he might have put in the tea because we know Scott was worried that Shackleton might have proven to be the better explorer.
The following year, Shackleton realised a dream by being elected secretary to the RGS. In 1907 he sailed back to the Antarctic, this time on the Nimrod, with his own exploration party. On
this expedition, a team reached the summit of Mount Erebus, the second highest volcano in Antartica, and another party reached the Magnetic South Pole. Shackleton made an attempt on the South Pole; he reached latitude 88º 32’, which was just 97 miles short. When he eventually got home in 1909, he was given a hero’s welcome and treated as an Englishman. This is typical of what happens to successful Irishmen. He was awarded a knighthood and given a medal by the RGS. Parliament gave him £20,000105 towards his costs. This works out at slightly over £1 per mile in expenses. He wrote the popular The Heart of the Antarctic in 1909, and went on the lecture circuit in Europe and America to raise funds for his next expedition.
In 1914 he sailed again for the Antarctic with a plan to cross the continent, something not actually achieved until 1958. His ship, the Endurance, became trapped in ice in January 1915, and by the following November it had been crushed and sunk between large floes. Shackleton and his crew camped out for months on a drifting ice floe before launching their three lifeboats for Elephant Island. From there Shackleton sailed to South Georgia Island, 800 miles away, in the largest of their three tiny boats. After seventeen days sailing with little water, he landed on the west side of the island, forcing him to make a 36-hour crossing of the frozen mountains with Frank Worsley and fellow Irishman Tom Crean (1877–1938), who was famous for his endurance. For this mountain climb they had only one rope and no proper food or gear, just the standard damp woollen underpants and socks. They drove brass screws into their boots to act as crampons. After three attempts, Shackleton succeeded in reuniting his entire crew who had been left behind at various places along the way. However, he did manage to lose Mrs Chippy, the ship’s cat, and all the sledging dogs.
Poet, Madman, Scoundrel Page 16
