Caithness and Woodriff at Simon's Bay 1803

Daniel Woodriff, born in 1756, went to sea at the age of six as servant to master gunner George Woodriff, his uncle. In December 1767 he was admitted to the Royal Hospital School Greenwich and later apprenticed to a merchant captain in the Jamaica trade. In 1778 Woodriff was pressed into the navy, and by 1782 was promoted lieutenant. After eleven years on the American Station and in the West Indies he returned to England. He made his first trip to Australia in 1792 in the ship Kitty, with supplies and convicts, and reported on Port Jackson’s naval defences. He was promoted commander and 1803 saw him once again bound for Australia: he had been appointed to command HMS Calcutta on Daniel Collins’s expedition to found a British settlement in the Bass Strait.

Page from Woodriff's log

During the first leg of this voyage, his ship had separated from her companion vessel, Ocean, at Tristan da Cunha and by 15 August 1803 Woodriff noted in his log that the Calcutta was moored in Simon’s Bay near the Cape of Good Hope, having made the run from Rio in 24 days. His meticulous account brings into sharp focus the everyday activities on board, reminding us that a ship was a floating village and that crew members were versatile in their skills.

On 16 August, it was business as usual, the people ‘employed in watering and brooming. Carpenters building pens and stables for cattle. Sailors making bags for hay. Sail’d the mercht ship Thomas of London for Desolation* … Deserted John Brown and R Southey Seamen … Received fresh beef and bread.’

Evidently Woodriff ran a tight ship and didn’t flinch from maintaining discipline in the best naval tradition. His log entry for 21 August reveals that Brown, the seaman who had deserted, was promptly returned to the vessel having been apprehended by a party of soldiers whom Woodriff paid forty shillings for their trouble, the amount being charged against the deserter on the Ship’s Books. Further reprisals were visited on Burgess, a seaman, and a Marine named Woolley, who received 12 lashes each for neglect of duty.

At this point synchronicity comes into play.

'Received 6 Seamen being British subjects from the Johanna Magdalena ....'

Monday 22 August: ‘Moderate Breeze and clear. Employed receiving and pressing of hay and getting ready for Sea. … Died Mr Richard Wright, Master … Received 6 Seamen being British subjects from the Johanna Magdalena and procured the Wages due to them.’

One of these men was James Caithness. Robert Knopwood’s diary, written during the same voyage, also mentions the British volunteers who were taken on to Calcutta’s complement at Simon’s Bay. However, Woodriff provides an important additional detail - that these six seamen, including Caithness, had previously been on the Johanna Magdalena. This vessel was originally known as the Prince William Henry but had a change of name and flag when she was taken over by the Dutch. 

If James Caithness hadn’t been at Simon’s Bay while Calcutta was at anchor he would have missed out on an exciting adventure to Australia and a chance to sail round the world. On the other hand he wouldn’t have been among those captured on Calcutta in 1805 and sent to a French prison. The lives of Woodriff and Caithness were linked by Fate.

The useful reference to the ship Johanna Magdalena (aka Prince William Henry) in Woodriff’s log offers an avenue for further research into James Caithness’s career.

Simonstown: Then and Now

 * Possibly Kerguelen Islands in southern Indian Ocean.

Acknowledgement:
Tom Sheldon

Caithness at the Cape 1803

Simon's Bay, Cape of Good Hope

Among the duties with which James Caithness would have assisted on joining the crew of HMS Calcutta at Simon’s Bay was loading five cows, one bull, and twelve sheep destined for the new settlement at Port Phillip. Fresh provisions including bread and beef for the ship's company were also taken on and the vital water casks filled for the next lengthy leg of the voyage. The weather continued moderate and fair but the political climate was less than salubrious.

Captain Daniel Woodriff, portrait,
National Library of Australia

The Dutch demanded the surrender of Calcutta and her contents. Captain Woodriff, not easily intimidated, prepared his ship for a fight. With the men standing to their guns Woodriff suggested that the Dutch ‘come and take her if they can’. 

Opinion on shore swiftly veered in favour of allowing the Calcutta to remain for 24 hours before departing the bay and removing the shipload of convicts from the vicinity.

Lieutenant James Hingston Tuckey of the Royal Navy, who accompanied the expedition, has left us an account of the voyage of HMS Calcutta. For an explorer and geographer he seems to have taken rather more than a scientific interest in the female population of the places visited en route and his descriptions of scenic beauties are equally fulsome, punctuated by poetic extracts. However, he gives us a glimpse of the Cape as James Caithness saw it at the time, though whether James had leisure to walk through the streets of Cape Town, as Tuckey evidently did, is doubtful.

Cape Town is one of the handsomest colonial towns in the world; the streets, which are wide and perfectly straight, are kept in the highest order, and planted with rows of oaks and firs. The houses are built in a stile of very superior elegance, and inside are in the cleanest and most regular order. They are not, however, sufficiently ventilated, to dissipate the stale fume of tobacco, which is peculiarly offensive to a stranger.

Shipping off Table Bay, Cape of Good Hope

Simmon's Town [sic] is situated on a small bay of that name, and contains about one hundred and fifty well-built houses; the inhabitants chiefly subsist by supplying ships with refreshments, during the months they are unable to lay in Table Bay. The English built a small block-house, with a battery enbarbet, to the eastward of the town. 

 A detachment of three hundred troops are stationed at Simmon's Town, who would in the event of an enemy's landing, retreat to Cape Town, which is garrisoned by three thousand troops, chiefly Swiss, particularly the regiment of Waldeck, which having served under the English banner in the American war, remembers with partiality the food and pay of its old masters, both of which, in the Dutch service, are wretched enough. 

The Dutch government is endeavouring …by the strictest economy to make the colony pay its expences. These measures are exceedingly unpopular, and have already caused upwards of one hundred real or fictitious bankruptcies. Hence the partiality with which the English are viewed here. Their return is openly wished for, even by those who were formerly their greatest foes. In fact, the Dutch government at the Cape, as well as at home, is entirely under French influence; and it is probable that in the boundless ambition of the Corsican usurper, he considers the Cape of Good Hope as one of the steps by which he intends to mount the Asiatic thrones.

Napoleon I
cameo by Nicola Morelli (1771-1838)

Tuckey compares the Cape unfavourably with Rio de Janeiro, where ‘the lofty spires of innumerable churches arise in every point of view’ while ‘at the Cape of Good Hope, two churches and two clergymen are enough for the inhabitants, and at Simmon's Town there is no trace of the peculiar appropriation of the sabbath to religious duties; all here are employed in making money’.*

Presumably, then, with the unfriendliness of the Dutch an additional irritation, Tuckey and all on board Calcutta were pleased to make sail on 25 August, trusting to a fine breeze from the N.W. for a speedy passage to the coast of New Holland. James Caithness was about to get his first view of Terra Australis.MCa

  

* A Voyage to Establish a Colony at Port Phillip in Bass's Strait On the South Coast of New South Wales, in His Majesty's Ship Calcutta, in the Years 1802-3-4: Tuckey, James Hingston (1776-1816)

Caithness and HMS Calcutta 1803 at the Cape

Action at sea: French Revolutionary Wars by Louis Philippe Crepin

In August 1803 James Caithness joined HMS Calcutta and a new chapter opened in his career. He was about to visit Australia and circumnavigate the world, an adventure beyond his wildest dreams.

Calcutta was an ex-East Indiaman bought by the navy in 1795, converted into a 56-gun fourth rate and used as an armed transport with the famous Captain Bligh in command. By the end of 1802 the ship had been refitted to carry convicts to New South Wales, under Captain Daniel Woodriff. She sailed from Spithead on 28 April 1803, in company with another vessel, Ocean, with 308 convicts as well as civil personnel, a detachment of marines and a crew of 150. The intention was to found a settlement.

Calcutta arrived at Rio de Janeiro on 19 July and the Cape of Good Hope on 13 August, 1803. Remarkably, a contemporary diary by Robert Knopwood reveals that HMS Calcutta, being short of crew, took on seven men at Simon’s Bay (Simonstown, Cape) on 16 August.*Musters for the vessel confirm

that James Caithness was one of the seven added to the complement.

Page from Knopwood diary: 'HM Ship Calcutta at Anchor in Simon's Bay ... 13 (August)
at 9 Saluted the Battery with 11 Guns which was returned ... found an English whaler and two ships riding in the Bay under Dutch colours** ... 16  AM Received 842 lb of fresh beef and 400 lb of soft bread. 
Received 7 British Seamen/Volunteers ...'

James Caithness listed on muster of HMS Calcutta 1803

Further research should establish when he was discharged from HMS Mars and give a clue as to why he turned up at Simon’s Bay in August 1803.

 

Map of the Colony of Good Hope, c 1800

Interestingly, HMS Mars, after refitting at the Hamoaze anchorage, Plymouth, at the end of February 1803, was involved in the fruitless pursuit of some foreign ships supposedly headed for the Cape of Good Hope under the Dutch Admiral de Winter.

*  The diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood, 1803-1838 : first chaplain of Van Diemen's Land edited by Mary Nicholls

** By the Treaty of Amiens 1802 between England and France, the Cape Colony was returned to the Netherlands and came under the rule of the Batavian Republic from February 1803 to 1806 when the 2^nd British Occupation of the Cape commenced. It’s likely that the presence of Dutch ships at Simon’s Bay came as a surprise to those on board HMS Calcutta.

Acknowledgement:

Tom Sheldon