James Caithness and HMS Mars 1798

James Caithness, father of mariners James Ramsey and George Caithness, appears on the muster roll of the British warship HMS Mars in April 1798, under the command of Captain Alexander Hood.

Europe was in ferment: the French Revolutionary Wars were in progress and the Royal Navy was blockading the coastline of France off Brest.

The British fleet under Admiral Lord Bridport was crossing the Iroise Passage on 21 April when, on foreign sail being sighted to the east, three RN ships left the fleet in pursuit, led by the 74-gun ship of the line, HMS Mars.

One of their quarry was L’Hercule (the Hercules), also 74 guns, under Captain Louis L’Heritier, recently commissioned and sailing to join the main French fleet at Brest. The Mars sped to intercept. L’Heritier tried to escape through the Raz de Sein passage, but the tide was against him and he was forced to anchor, coming under heavy fire as Hood brought the Mars into position. For over an hour the two vessels lay so closely alongside each other that their guns couldn’t be run out but had to be fired from within the ships.

The furious action between H.M.S. Mars and L'Hercule
 off Brest on 21st April 1798 by John Christian Schetky

Casualties and damage were extensive on both sides, Hood himself being mortally wounded when a musket ball severed his femoral artery. He was carried below, bleeding to death.

Death of Captain Hood by James Daniell 1798

L’Hercule surrendered, her crew’s attempts to board the Mars having failed. The French casualties numbered 290 or more and the British 90 including her commander. L’Hercule was taken as a prize and conveyed to Britain, later being repaired and put to service in the Royal Navy until 1810.

This fierce battle between two evenly-matched ships was James Caithness’s baptism of fire: he had joined the complement of HMS Mars only two weeks earlier.

If his birth year as shown on various ships’ musters is accurate (1786), James was very young at the time, not yet in his teens. He may have been a powder monkey, ferrying gunpowder from the hold to the guns. Usually this task was undertaken by boys of 12 to 14 years of age, chosen for their speed and height i.e. short so that they would be hidden behind the gunwales out of sight of the enemy’s sharpshooters.

Firing the 18-pounder

The terrifying impact, noise and intense heat of this bombardment can scarcely be imagined:  two ships raking each other at close quarters, their wooden sides gaping with blackened holes, and men being blown to smithereens on the slippery decks.

James’s naval career had started with a bang. Perhaps it’s fortunate that, as he savoured the dizzy relief of survival after the engagement, he couldn’t foresee the hazardous adventures which still lay ahead of him in the service of his country.

Rope Knots
from textbook on Seamanship

Acknowledgement:
Tom Sheldon for research at TNA Kew.

http://www.rmg.co.uk/visit/exhibitions/future/nelson-navy-nation-1688-1815

Nelson, Navy, Nation: the story of the Royal Navy and the British people, 1688–1815. New permanent gallery opens at the National Maritime Museum on Trafalgar Day, 21 October 2013

Cracknore Hard: Then and Now

Cracknore Hard 1831: James Caithness snr
was ferryman here ca 1815-1820s

Similar view 20 September 2013:
the building with central chimney and white verandah uprights
 was once the Ship Inn

See Ordnance Survey Map 1851 at molegenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/09/caithness-at-eling-marchwood-and-totton.html

Photograph by Tom Sheldon

Caithness at Eling, Marchwood and Totton

Caithness family history is closely associated with the environs of Eling, including Marchwood and Totton, in Hampshire.

James Caithness (ca 1786-1826) lived at Marchwood with his wife Ann b Scorey; their five children were baptized at St Mary’s Church, Eling, between 1815 and 1826. During some of those years, James snr was waterman and ferryman at Cracknore Hard. His widow Ann Caithness lived at Totton until her death in 1889.

Ordnance Survey Map 1851 showing Cracknore Hard

Eling (the parish is recorded in the Domesday survey) has a long tradition of shipbuilding and seafaring. New Forest timber – oak and beech in vast quantities – supplied local shipbuilders from the Middle Ages onwards. Oak was used for hulls of ships, beech for masts. During James Cathness’s time, the era of the Napoleonic Wars, ships were being built here for the Royal Navy.

Action at Sea between HMS Hydra and the Furet 27 Feb 1806 

                                   Views of Magazine Lane and Marchwood village

Cracknore Hard Lane today

But there was more to Marchwood than quiet, narrow country lanes. The area was a vital strategic site: in 1812 a depot was constructed for 20,000 barrels of gunpowder. One wonders how the residents of Marchwood felt about living in close proximity to a powder keg; later generations certainly complained.

The threat of French invasion in 1779 and the advent of Napoleon on the European stage brought about reform in the way gunpowder was stored and issued in Britain. Up to that time, powder was kept in old fortifications or more recently constructed vaults in various parts of the country. In 1811 the decision was taken to increase the number of depots and to build more permanent storage. Marchwood was the largest of four new magazines.

Gunpowder at that period was stored in barrels each containing 90 lbs of powder. It was originally intended to store 20, 000 barrels at Marchwood all in one large magazine. Later, three separate magazines were constructed as far apart as possible to minimize the danger of explosion. Each held 6, 800 barrels. A canal was used to move the barrels by barge from magazine to magazine. There were also other buildings which served as receiving and examining rooms, all within a perimeter wall, and put up between 1814 and 1816.

Earth banked blast walls and high walled enclosures protected each building. An office and guard house and a barrack block were built on Magazine Lane, Marchwood. There was a rolling stage, a raised planked barrow way, built out to a landing stage in deep water. A sea wall was added fronting Southampton Water and returning along the Creek.

Old Main Gate: Marchwood Magazine

                                                         

                         

Remains of Marchwood Magazine: part of the vaulted
floor. Water flowed underneath to keep the atmosphere damp *

The depot closed briefly in 1850 but was reopened during the outbreak of the Crimean war and in 1856-57 four new and larger magazines were added. The Royal Naval Armaments Depot, Marchwood, continued in use for the storage of munitions into the 20th century. Stocks of munitions were reduced after World War II and the site was finally decommissioned and closed in 1961.**

Magazine A is the only one of the original magazines at Marchwood to survive; the others were destroyed in 1940. Today the buildings and walls are rare survivals of Georgian military works; though some require restoration they are of historic importance, a tangible reminder of the era when Britain ruled the waves.

  

It’s not impossible that among the tasks James Caithness might have undertaken when he was a waterman at Marchwood was transporting gunpowder. Whether he was involved in such risky business or kept to ferrying passengers, by the look of the contemporary advertisement below, at least he could have popped in to the Ship Inn for a ‘heavy wet’ at the end of a busy day.

*  browse the series of photos at 
   www.flickr.com/photos/r36ariadne/4197741140/in/photostream/

** www.nfdc.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2178

Google Map 
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz3Xo6QO-1_DUfCmkrelLZEtwVwitzlYW5-VBtrsFmMmWxlpM4ntwi1wj57_XYVpy5bdshMvHn1eADhz7SRgMwdocZ0Yj3DBEeJ8HW0ASIVSFxoLQRqLn-RvC91UXlsrS0NnhzsZWab92W/s1600/cracknore-hard.jpg

Acknowledgement:

Tom Sheldon

Souvenir Saturday: Caithness at Cracknore Hard

James Caithness the Ferryman

Cracknore Hard 1831 (etching by David Charles Read)

A fine view of the ferry station at Cracknore Hard in Southampton estuary on the south bank of the River Test. From here the ferry would take passengers to West Quay, Southampton.

On 20 August 1815 at the baptism of his son James (Ramsey), James Caithness snr’s occupation is given as ‘waterman’ and his place of abode as Cracknore Hard. By 1820 when his daughter Mary Ann is baptized – like her elder brothers James and George (1818) at St Mary’s Church, Eling, Hampshire – James snr is ‘ferryman’. 

The coastal landscape at Cracknore Hard at that time would have looked much as shown in this etching. James was then an experienced mariner having served on various ships before being discharged from the Royal Navy at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Shockingly, he had also been a prisoner of war in France for nine years.

After surviving for nearly a decade enduring dreadful privations, if contemporary accounts are to be believed, James must have found a welcome sanctuary in the expansive, peaceful stretches of the estuary and the comforts of home and family.

Southampton Water   1831 (etching by David Charles Read)

           

A spacious impression of Southampton Water by the same artist. No doubt James Caithness was familiar with this vista. The broad horizon and low-lying land- and waterscape is reminiscent of Holland. It's also similar to the area alongside the Solway Firth, Cumberland, where William Bell (Mary Ann Caithness's husband-to-be) was learning to be a mariner at the beginning of the second decade of the 19th c.

The Book of Trades or Library of Useful Arts 1811 offers the following:

Watermen are such as row in boats and ply for fares on various rivers. A waterman requires but little to enable him to begin his business, viz. a boat, a pair of oars and a long pole with an iron point and hook at the lower end, the whole of which is not more than twenty pounds. The use of the pole is to push off the boat from land; the hook at one end enables him to draw his boat to shore, or close to another boat.

Acknowledgement:
Tom Sheldon