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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 19th 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.
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| The mouth of the Annan and Solway Firth, Skiddaw in the Distance: engraving by Wm Miller after C Stanfield |
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| 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 19th 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.**
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| 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.
** spotted by Marion Abbott
Acknowledgement:
Derek Ellwood
