A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (29 page)

Researching in The National Archives in Kew has much the same excitement as an archaeological excavation; documents ordered usually come in modern cardboard boxes, but the bundles of papers and volumes within sometimes have not been opened for centuries and doing so can quite literally bring up a waft from the past, with the dust and the smells still there. I had come looking for the logbook of the one diving operation known to have been successful on the
Royal
Anne Galley
in the eighteenth century, a decade after the expedition of Rowe and Lethbridge. The box in front of me contained High Court of Admiralty ‘Instance Papers' from 1738, relating to various court proceedings involving the Admiralty that year. I knew that in 1738 a case had been brought against one William Evans for unpaid wages by several sailors, and that in evidence of his occupation as a diver Evans had submitted a logbook encompassing the year 1732 when he had gone with his own version of Lethbridge and Rowe's ‘Engine' to the Lizard.

I opened the box and began working through bound bundles of papers that had clearly not been seen by modern researchers before. After half an hour I still had no success and began to steel myself against the possibility that it was not here after all. But then at the very bottom was a notebook with an old marbled cover and scuffed corners, and opening it up I saw that it was what I had wanted to find: ‘The Journal kept by me William Evans on board the
Eagle
Augusti Primi 1732.' Evans was a ship's carpenter from Deptford and had gone with Rowe in 1727 to salvage the Spanish Armada wreck
El Gran Grifón
in the Shetland Isles, and the Dutch East India vessel the
Adelaar
off the island of Barra. The two men had parted ways after a financial dispute, but Evans had made enough from the silver and gold recovered to finance the construction of his own sloop, the
Eagle
, setting off for the Lizard in May 1732 – clearly rating his chances higher than those of Rowe and Lethbridge a decade earlier.

The log kept by his son William provides an extraordinarily vivid account of the three days they spent diving on the
Royal Anne Galley
, and of the difficulties they encountered with tides, currents and wind that would be familiar to anyone who has attempted to dive in these waters today – and they did it from vessels powered only by sail and oar. On Saturday 1 June, this day ‘fine clear settled weather and calm, but a great swell from the SE':

about 8 Clock this morning we went down to the Yaule and Row'd to the Great Boat, slipt the Bridle of the moarings and tow'd her to the Stagg Rocks on the Wreck of the Royal Ann Galley, my Father went down in the Engine wherein he stay'd near two hours the first time and brought up at several times 3 five pound shot and some small shot with 3 Moidres, we hoisted him in and shifted the boat to another place, where he perceived some shot, we lett him down
again in the Engine and at Several time brought up some shot, but could not discover anything else the flood being made we took him in …

The next day being Sunday they did not work, but the following day ‘… went in the Yaul to the
Royall Ann Galley
Wreck where we cut all the weed to clear the place, it being impossible to see under watter, they being so thick…', after which they returned to the
Royal Anne Galley
for their second and last day of diving there:

Wednesday the fifth: Fine clear gentle weather all this day little wind at N – NNW and NW about 1 Clock afternoon we went to our great boat and towed her to the Royal Ann Galley wreck and at half hour after 3 my father went down in the Engine several times and in several places, took up a brass candlestick without a foot, and abt seventeen 9 pound shot, James Lardant went down after him, to clear a place that my Father had found and took out of it 86 nine pound shot a pewter plate entirely spoiled, and a silver tea spoon, he lost a great many shot in the said place, night coming on we unmoared, and towed the great boat to her proper moarings, and about 9 Clock we got home in our Yaule …

It was this account that I had in my mind when I first dived on the site myself, struggling with the kelp just as Evans had done and then seeing the 9-pound cannonballs that clinched the identity of the wreck for me. Evans went off soon afterwards to Spain and the Cape Verde Islands to salvage wrecks in easier locations, and this was to be the last time that anyone dived on the site for more than two and a half centuries – and yet his account of the wreck and especially of the ‘moidres', Portuguese gold coins, makes his expedition remarkably vivid, with similar coins found on the wreck in recent times linking the ship to wider aspects of trade and economics in the early eighteenth century.

As well as coins and rings, the gold from the wreck includes components of pocket watches that are among the finest examples of goldwork to survive from the eighteenth century. These include a dial face and three exquisite roundels naming the watchmakers, all at the top of their trade in London at the time: Joseph Windmills or his son Thomas, David Hubert and Richard Colston. Joseph Windmills was
Master of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in 1702, and his son Thomas in 1718; together they are considered among the finest watch and clock makers of the period. David Hubert was a Huguenot refugee from Rouen who had fled France following the revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, which had protected Protestants in the country. A member of his family was the clockmaker Robert Hubert, the ‘foreigner' unjustly scapegoated for starting the Great Fire of London in 1666 and dismembered by an angry mob – one of the more horrific events in the history of this period.

The Clockmaker's Company had been chartered in 1631, reflecting the development of clockmaking as a specialised craft in England only from the early seventeenth century. Joseph Windmills was among the first to make a watch with a balance spring, adopting the invention of Thomas Tompion, the ‘Father of English Clockmaking', and Robert Hooke, both Fellows of the Royal Society and central figures in the English scientific Enlightenment. It was this development that transformed pocket watches in the late seventeenth century from ornaments to accurate timepieces and saw them become
de rigueur
in the pockets of well-to-do gentlemen, along with gold retaining chains, which were also found at the wreck site.

The presence of these watches on the ship touches on the most pressing navigational issue of the day: the question of how to determine longitude. In 1707, only two years before the
Royal Anne Galley
was launched and less than 30 miles from the wreck site, the Royal Navy suffered its worst peacetime disaster when four ships and more than 2,000 men were lost in the Scilly Isles as a result of an error in calculating longitude. In 1714 the British Government offered a ‘Longitude Prize' to anyone who could solve the problem, at a time just after the War of the Spanish Succession when Britain's maritime reach was expanding and there would be many more voyages – such as that undertaken by the
Royal Anne Galley
across the Atlantic – where precise position-fixing was essential. Mariners were aware that the solution lay in timepieces that would allow Greenwich Mean Time to be known accurately while making celestial observations to determine the time at the position being fixed, the difference between the two allowing longitude to be plotted. Although pocket watches at the time of the
Royal Anne Galley
did not have the accuracy required, their spring mechanism and small size – making them less subject to the ship's movements than larger clocks – provided the basis for the
marine chronometer that was eventually perfected by John Harrison in 1761, winning him the prize and revolutionising navigation at sea.

The three mourning rings from the wreck are also exquisite examples of the goldsmiths' art. Two of them are by the same maker, Joseph Collier of Portsmouth, and all of them are cut around the outside in the shape of a skeleton, two of them set with stones of jet and one with white and black enamel in the shape of a skull. These images reveal the origin of mourning rings as
memento mori
, reminders of mortality, by the early eighteenth century bearing the inscribed name or initials of the deceased and the date of death on the inside. It was common for rings to be itemised in wills and distributed at the funeral or within the mourning period; Samuel Pepys, for example, arranged for 128 rings worth over £100 to be distributed at his death. Gold rings such as these were not solely the preserve of the wealthy – John DeGrusty, the ship's sailing master, bequeathed a gold ring ‘value one pound Sterling' each to his sons Daniel and John in his will.

One of the rings from the
Royal Anne Galley
, inscribed
memento mori
, is for a child, J. Trebell, who died aged four on 11 July 1721 – only a few months before the ship was wrecked. Another is inscribed to D. Williams, D.D., who died on 12 January 1715, aged seventy-two. The date is in the Julian calendar – used in Britain until 1752 – in which the year began on 25 March, so would be 1716 in the Gregorian calendar that we use now. Daniel Williams, Doctor of Divinity, was an eminent Presbyterian theologian whose substantial legacy included Dr Williams's Library in London, a centre for research on non-conformists and religious dissenters. It is fascinating that someone on the
Royal Anne Galley
should have had this connection. Whether these rings were being worn or carried as keepsakes, they are poignant reminders of mortality from a site where those who possessed them all died in the wreck.

John Hamilton, 3rd Lord Belhaven and Stenton, was forty or forty-one at the time of the wreck and had already made his mark as a statesman and courtier. His father, the 2nd Lord, had invested heavily in the ill-fated ‘Darien scheme' to set up a Scottish colony on the Isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s and had then spoken passionately and at great length against the union of England and Scotland, provoking a satirical response from Daniel Defoe – who then came to Belhaven's defence when he was unjustly accused of supporting a
French invasion planned in 1708, a year after the Act of Union that formed the Kingdom of Great Britain. Many of the Scottish nobility who had opposed the union were Jacobites, supporting the claim of James Stuart to the throne, and Belhaven had opened himself up to that suspicion by his speech. The stress of his imprisonment told on him and may have been a factor in his early death in June 1708.

The 3rd Lord therefore had a particular reason to make clear his loyalty to the Crown, and evidently succeeded in doing so. On 3 March 1715 at the Royal Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh he was one of sixteen peers chosen by the sixty-five peers of Scotland to sit as their representatives in the new parliament in Westminster, following the General Election that month. On 21 June he was made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to George, Prince of Wales, the future King George II, who had come to London from Hanover in late 1714 when his father succeeded to the throne on the death of Queen Anne. The rather quaint title belies its significance, with ‘Gentlemen' being trusted confidants who could wield great influence. His fellow Gentlemen appointed in the same year included John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, who commanded British forces against the 1715 Jacobite rising in Scotland; Philip Stanhope, the future Earl of Chesterfield, a Cambridge-educated man of letters who had completed a ‘Grand Tour' of Europe and became a distinguished statesman; and Henry, Lord Herbert, the future Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, an Oxford graduate known for his interest in architecture and future Fellow of the Royal Society. Lord Belhaven was active in this role for the Prince as well as in Parliament, with the House of Lords
Journal
for the next few years showing that he was present on many occasions for debating and passing legislation. He further proved his loyalty during the 1715 Jacobite rising, being present at the Battle of Sheriffmuir on 13 November in command of a troop of horse from East Lothian, the district of his estate at Belhaven and Stenton – at the same time that the
Royal Anne Galley
was patrolling offshore attempting to blockade the coast of Scotland from attempted landings by Charles Stuart and the French.

Belhaven was appointed Governor of Barbados in April 1721, ‘our Captain General and Governor in Chief in and over our Islands of Barbados, St. Lucia, Dominico, St. Vincents, Tobago and the rest of our Charibbee Islands lying to windward of Guardaloupe in America', with his appointment to be taken up on his arrival in the
Royal Anne
Galley
later that year. The position came with an annual salary of £2,000, the equivalent of over £300,000 in today's money, as well as a sum ‘settled on him by the Assembly of the Island as they think proper'. His orders included the arrest of the President of the Council of Barbados for misconduct, and instructions to settle the island of Tobago. Barbados had become the main exporter of sugar from the Caribbean, with a population of some 18,000 Europeans – many of them the descendants of indentured Irish labourers – and 55,000 enslaved Africans. Managing the plantation owners, securing British government interests and countering piracy would have required a strong hand. As a Scot, his loyalty to the Crown would have put him at particular odds with the pirates, whose Jacobite sympathisers – whether through true conviction or cussedness – included Bartholomew Roberts, who named one of his ships the
Royal James
after the pretender James Stuart. Had the
Royal Anne Galley
not been wrecked, there might have been a showdown between Belhaven and Roberts in the Caribbean in which the
Royal Anne Galley
could have been centre stage, with her orders being to hunt pirates, and her armament and manoeuvrability being superior to any pirate vessel at the time.

Belhaven was married with four sons, one of whom succeeded to the title. A portrait exists of him in armour by William Aikman, the leading Scottish artist of the period who painted many of his fellow noblemen and women – the only known image of an individual who died in the wreck of the
Royal Anne Galley
. Apart from the cutlery from the wreck with his crest, the only surviving objects known to have been in his possession are two books with his nameplate bearing the same crest and motto ‘Ryde Through' – Patrick Abercromby's two-volume
The Martial Achievements of the Scots Nation
, published in 1711 and 1715. The subject of this work, including lives of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, shows the depth of interest in their own history that inspired Scottish nobles of this period, whether Jacobite or loyal to the British Crown, and gives a glimpse into Lord Belhaven himself and his interests at a time when book production and reading was greatly on the rise.