Ships and Mariners: 19th c Cape and Natal 11 Falconer

James Falconer
Captain of the Ealing Grove

In all likelihood William Falconer served his apprenticeship (from 1828-1832) on his father James Falconer’s ship the Ealing Grove, 383 tons, built at London in 1792. The Ealing Grove was sheathed with copper over boards, the copper being repaired in 1829.

She covered many sea miles, trading until the mid-1830s between that city and places such as Demerara - a colony in the Guianas on the north coast of South America, famous for its sugar. 

The experience gained by the young Falconer during these years under his father’s guidance would have been invaluable. It was through no fault of William’s that his barque Johanna, 275 tons, lying at Algoa Bay, was driven on to the rocks when her cables parted on 5 April 1848. A comparatively new ship, built in 1843, she had been to Algoa Bay without mishap the year before under Falconer’s command and he had had 19 years’ sailing as a merchant mariner. She became another victim of the infamous south-east gales at this Cape port. Johanna was a total wreck but no lives were lost. The Spectator (London), reported on 10 June 1848 that Falconer’s Johanna was not alone in her disaster: the Martha under Capt W Woolley, from London, was wrecked in the same gale at Algoa Bay; her crew was saved.  

Alexandrina: Ship's Bell

At this date (1848) the Falconers had left the Colony and were residing at Wapping: William had returned to his area of origin. We can track his upward mobility by his subsequent changes of address: in 1851 he was of 34, Albert Sq., Ratcliff, Stepney; between 1853 and 1858 the family had moved to King Edward’s Villas, Hackney. William was by then a successful Ship Insurance Broker and Ship's Agent, with offices in Leadenhall Street in the City, operating under the name Falconer and Mercer. 

On 30 October 1856 William Falconer was granted the Freedom of the City of London.* 

William and Ann had fourteen children. For further details about this family see: 

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=haydencowan&id=I1339

Alexandrina: another painting of William Falconer's ship
By kind permission of Michael Cocks

Acknowledgement:

Lorna Cowan

Michael Cocks


*London, England, Freedom of the City Admission Papers, 1681-1925
Ancestry.com. London, England, Freedom of the City Admission Papers, 1681-1925 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010.
Original data: Freedom admissions papers, 1681 – 1925. London, England: London Metropolitan Archives. COL/CHD/FR/02. 

William Falconer item: London Metropolitan Archive; Reference Number: COL/CHD/FR/02/1904-1905.

Ships and Mariners: 19th c Cape and Natal 10 Falconer

William Falconer 1812-1877

William Falconer, an interesting Master Mariner in his own right, acquires further importance through his marriage to James Scorey’s step-daughter, Ann, on 24 June 1841 at Port Elizabeth. The ceremony took place ‘at the house of Captain Scorey’.* 

Ann Falconer 1823 -1891, step-daughter
 of James Scorey,
wife of William Falconer

The network of colonial connections becomes ever more intricate: among the witnesses at the Falconer/Scorey wedding was William Smith, who with his wife Mary Ann Frances b Mallors had been present at William Bell’s marriage to Mary Ann Caithness in June 1838. The Smiths’ son would later marry Maria Sisson Falconer. James Tobias Mallors was yet another Master Mariner.

Ann Scorey, previously Robinson, ca 1793-1843;
wife of Capt James Scorey, and mother of Ann
Falconer.

To be continued ...

*See a copy of the marriage record and other details at:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~haydencowan/Falconer/Falconer%20William/Captain%20William%20Falconer%201812%20and%20family.pdf 

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=haydencowan&id=I1339

Acknowledgement:

Lorna Cowan

Ships and Mariners: 19th c Cape and Natal 9 Falconer

Among the coterie of Master Mariners known to Bell was William Falconer, who is recorded in 1838 as captain of the schooner Velox, carrying a cargo of sundries from Ceylon via Mauritius to Table Bay, the voyage taking from 5 July to 22 August.

St George in the East, Stepney

Falconer’s story provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of a 19^thc merchant mariner. Born 29 July 1812 in Stepney - a place of strong maritime character - and baptized at St George in the East, William served his apprenticeship under his mariner father, James Falconer, between 1828 and 1832. Under the terms of this contract, James agreed to pay his son thirty pounds of lawful money of Great Britain over a period of four years as well as teach him and supply him with sufficient meat, drink and lodging. 

Part of William’s indenture would have been served at sea, gaining practical knowledge in ‘working’ a ship, from the basic skills of splicing and knotting to keeping a reckoning of a course, making observations and learning about winds and tides. After completing his apprenticeship William would enter a long and successful career, acquiring a Trinity House certificate of competency in 1848 and his Master Mariner’s ticket in 1851.

For two years and four months he was master of the Alexandrina, a 294 ton barque employed in the Foreign Trade and built by the firm of Alexander Duthie. The vessel was registered in London in 1849, when Falconer is recorded as both owner and master. Duthie’s yard built several famous Aberdeen clipper barques, including the Ocean Queen, 349 tons, which Alexandrina resembled.

In the painting below Alexandrina shows quite a sharply raked ‘Aberdeen bow’. She has three masts, square rigged on the fore and main masts, fore and aft rigged on the mizzen. There is only one jib-sail set (she probably has three), the fore mast has course, top-sail and topgallant-sail set but no royal, likewise the main mast although the course is probably in the process of being set. The mizzen mast only carries a spanker (a top-sail is not set) with the Red Ensign (Red Duster) flying from the gaff. There are no stay-sails or gaff-sails set fore and aft between pairs of masts. She isn't under a great press of canvas, and she is apparently off the Dover coast.

William Falconer's barque, Alexandrina

To be continued ...

Acknowledgements:

Lorna Cowan
Arthur Hayden

Derek Ellwood

Mariners: The First Rung of the Ladder

Map showing Bowness-on-Solway, Glasson, Easton and Drumburgh:
places along the shores of the Solway Firth associated with William Bell and family

Merchant mariners of the 19^th c often had the sea in their blood, i.e. they came of seafaring communities and families. This was not an invariable rule, of course. William Bell’s father wasn’t a mariner but a labourer, still working as such in the Bowness-on-Solway area of Cumberland in 1841.

The mouth of the Annan and Solway Firth, Skiddaw in the Distance:
engraving by Wm Miller after C Stanfield

Bell family information, an unreliable source, would have it that William ‘ran away to sea at an early age’. There was no need for him to do so. The sea was ever-present throughout his childhood; the salty tang pervaded the low-lying shores of the Solway Firth and church registers recorded documentary evidence of maritime occupations for the majority of the neighbourhood’s breadwinners – many of whom had the surname Bell.

Solway Firth, Cumberland

Bell’s parents may not have had the wherewithal required to start William off on the first rung of the maritime ladder but it’s likely that some family member or contact was either in shipbuilding or shipowning or both in some degree (there was an extremely successful shipbuilder named William Bell operating in Bowness at the time though his relationship to young William hasn’t been established) and would be able to put in a good word for the boy when it came time for him to be apprenticed – in William’s case probably around 1820.

For this is how most mariners began their career: being indentured like any other apprentice to a trade, contracted to work for a period of seven years usually starting at the age of 12 to 15 and emerging qualified to earn a living as a seaman. During that time the apprentice would live, eat and sleep anything and everything to do with ships, including building them and sailing them, in theory and in practice – ‘learning the ropes’ has come down to us as an expression from this world and for the seafaring apprentice it covered much more than its literal meaning.

Becoming a mariner was a hands-on process: one learned by experience and had hard knocks along the way. Training was much the same for future masters as it was for the average AB (Able Seaman). The sea was a great leveller as a man, regardless of his origins, could ascend through the ranks based on his own practical ability and intelligence. 

In the early 19^th c, then, apprenticeship was an accepted form of maritime education; later, the numbers dropped. We’ve seen that this route was taken by William Falconer and he provides an example of a boy apprenticed to his father who was a master mariner.* Such an arrangement frequently would have been informal, with no indenture papers kept. Despite intensive searches, no apprenticeship record has emerged for William Bell, who was indentured to Ritson of Ritson’s shipbuilding company, Maryport. This fact is known purely by accident – a brief but welcome reference in a Cumberland newspaper.**

Maryport Pier as Bell might have known it:
perhaps he stood watching from the sea wall much like the boys in this picture

A well-known maritime researcher working regularly at The National Archives, UK, states that though the impression is given that there are 10% of indenture records surviving, the actual proportion is much smaller. 

In any case, if your mariner’s career pre-dates 1835, records are scarce because the government wasn’t particularly concerned with individual merchant seafarers. There are sources of various kinds, mostly kept for reasons other than the mariners’ activities per se, e.g. customs books, port books, High Court of Admiralty records etc, but these are diffuse, not easy to research and often not that useful for family historians. Occasionally a rewarding nugget comes to light.

*  http://molegenealogy.blogspot.com/search?q=william+falconer

**  spotted by Marion Abbott

Acknowledgement:

Derek Ellwood

Souvenir Saturday: Ocean Queen and 19th c Clippers

The Ocean Queen is a good example of an Aberdeen clipper barque, similar to William Falconer's Alexandrina.* Ocean Queen was built in 1846 by John Duthie and was of 349 tons. She has a large forward rake to her stem, the 'Aberdeen clipper bow'. Alexander Duthie took over the family firm in 1837 and with his brother John managed it and supervised construction until 1860. They built several of the famous Aberdeen clipper barques. Painting by Whitehaven artist Joseph Heard (Parker Gallery).

A clipper indicates a 19^th c sailing ship designed for maximum speed, with forward-raking bows and a large expanse of sails which allowed the vessel to ‘clip’ along at a rate – about 250 miles a day - unimagined by earlier mariners. Narrow for their length, they had three or more masts and were square-rigged. The world was their oyster: clippers sailed on all the trade routes between Britain and its colonies in the east and across the Atlantic bringing vast profits to merchant owners.

By 1843 the so-called tea clippers were in increasing demand for more rapid imports of that commodity from China – tea needed to be delivered fresh. But it was the discovery of gold in California and Australia in 1848 and 1851 that brought the greatest boom years of the clipper era. Primarily built in British and American yards, though other nations did produce some, clippers led the way for the development of the great emigrant ships and the burgeoning of Colonial trade.

The Cape of Good Hope was an important waypoint on the clipper route. A change of era would come in 1869 when the Suez Canal was opened but until then the clipper was indeed queen of the ocean.

 *molegenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/08/ships-and-mariners-19th-c-cape-and_15.html

  molegenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/08/ships-and-mariners-19th-c-cape-and_18.html

 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ClipperRoute.png map showing clipper route

The Waratah Storm 27 July 1909

Disaster Strikes

On the 27^th July 1909, at 7.30 pm, the SS Harlow was steaming north-east for Durban under the command of Captain John Bryce, when he saw a large steamer coming up astern of his ship at about 10 miles away when off Cape Hermes. At that time, flashes of light were seen astern and suddenly the steamer’s lights were no longer visible.  Might this have been the Waratah on her way back to Durban, having come about due to the bad weather? Had she broached in the large swells and the flashes caused by the ship rolling and the boiler fires exploding out of the funnel? However, if this was not the case, the Waratah might still have been heading for Cape Town.

The Waratah was lost at sea with all hands!

All over the world, debate and argument, theories and a search for proof has persisted for the past 104 years to understand and locate the SS Waratah, but no substantiation of what really happened that fateful night has emerged.

On her final port departure from Durban Harbour on Monday 26^th July at 8.00 pm, she turned south past the Durban Bluff, headed for Cape Town. Captain Ilbery and his crew knew a heavy southerly storm was blowing up from the Cape and they would soon be confronted by enormous seas. This stretch of the South African coastline was notorious and treacherous, because it took ships close to the Continental Shelf, which generated gigantic swells, especially with strong winds opposing the south-running coastal current.

The Waratah had not been well-received by many passengers on the earlier Adelaide to Durban run, when moderate seas manifested her top-heavy promenade deck design being the cause of her insecure righting motion and large cracks opening up between the structural joints on the superstructure. Would Captain Ilbery and his more senior officers have felt apprehensive in anticipation of this wild storm ahead of them?

As they progressively headed into stronger winds, at around 6.30am on 27^th July the following morning, Waratah‘s last communication from Latitude 31.36 degrees South and Longitude 29.58 degrees East, positioned her due East of Cape Hermes near Port St. Johns, where abnormal waves are at their worst. Had she later tried to come about and broached, or had she continued a further 100 kilometers down the coast to a position due east of the Mbhashe (Bashee) River mouth (near the Xhora River mouth) where it is widely speculated that the Waratah disappeared?

As with many sea tragedies, there is a twist in the tale. One of Lund’s Masters, Captain Pidgeon had joined W. Lund’s service as a boy of just 15 years of age on the Catalina. He was given his first command before he was 30 and had remained in Lund’s service for 21 years. As fate would have it, before the Waratah left London for the last time, Captain Pidgeon almost had the misfortune to be in command of her on that fateful voyage.  Captain Ilbery had been ill and the company looked for another Master to relieve him for the voyage. Captain Pidgeon, who had been Captain Ilbery’s Chief Officer on the Narrung and Wakool when they were new ships, was the only Master available and held himself ready to take command. However, Captain Ilbery recovered and took command of his ship before she sailed.

Fifty years after the loss of the Waratah, in 1959, Captain S.A. Pidgeon, RNR, penned his account of what may have led to the loss of the Waratah, which provided an insight that centered on the ship in Durban. 

   ‘The Waratah had taken on a certain amount of frozen mutton to be discharged in Durban and whenever we had a cargo for Durban, it was the custom in Lund’s ships to stow it in the square of No. 1 hold, sometimes right from deck level, to the bottom of the hold. Any cargo for London was stowed in the wings and at both ends. After the Durban cargo left the ship, the remaining slippery cargo of frozen carcasses had to be well shored-up, to prevent them from sliding everywhere. We usually lowered big skids into the empty space and at both ends. These were kept in place by heavy beams, 6 x 6, which were placed across the empty space left by the Durban cargo and were jammed by wedges, which were placed and hammered home by carpenter and crew.

    If this operation was faithfully performed, the remaining cargo was quite secure and could not move into the empty space in the centre, no matter how great the pitching and rolling of the ship. Captain Ilbery trusted his executive officers implicitly and left daily inspection at sea to the Chief Officer, Surgeon and Purser, who did the rounds together.

     The Chief Officer of the Waratah had been my Chief in Warrigal and was a very fine seaman.  The Chief Officers in Lund’s ships were always entirely responsible for placing the skids in No. 1 hold and seeing that they were securely in position.  If they were forgotten, or if they were not made completely fast, the result in a tender ship like the Waratah would be disastrous.

     It seems quite possible that the skids were forgotten on this occasion, or that the work was not adequately supervised.  The weather was not good as the Waratah sailed, and on those coasts, there are seas and cross-seas which are a menace to a labouring ship.

     It would all have happened in a matter of seconds. The Waratah, caught in a heavy roll, would pause at the end of it.  If a cross-sea dumped a huge wave on her forehatch, smashing it in, thousands of tons of water would rush down into the lower hold and find its level in the side of the ship, held in the roll. With the cargo insecurely held back, thousands of carcasses would break loose from the wings and join the mass of water, adding to the enormous weight.  Another huge sea, breaking aboard, would finish the ship and she would roll right over, never having had a chance to right herself.’

We can only imagine what thoughts might have swirled around in Captain Pidgeon’s head when he was informed of the loss of the Waratah and the close circumstances that nearly led to his command.  Might he have acted differently in the face of the weather and the condition of the ship?  Might he have done something different that was possibly overlooked on that fateful voyage?

Speculation will persist. Questions will continue to be asked. Doubts will always be raised, but one of the most evocative questions remains: why did a number of Senior Officers, Engineers and the Chief Steward, hastily take out life insurance policies before the Waratah left Australian waters? Was it premonition, or were they genuinely concerned about the Waratah’s sea worthiness during their outbound voyage?

Most haunting of all, is how the passengers and crew would have faced their terrifying imminent doom. They would have been hurled about the ship as she hit the wave and rolled and we can only hope that their demise was quick, with perhaps no time to realise what was happening, before the thousands of tons of water poured in to drag them helplessly into the depths of the Continental Shelf

May those unfortunate souls forever rest in peace.


Guest post by
Suzanne-Jo Leff Patterson

Waratah Flower

Down on the vale of Death, with dismal cries,
The fated victims shuddering roll their eyes
In wild despair; while yet another stroke
With deep convulsion, rends the solid oak:
Till like the mine, in whose infernal cell
The lurking demons of destruction dwell,
At length asunder torn, her frame divides;
And crashing spreads in ruin o'er the tides. 

William Falconer