HMS Pickle (eBook)

The Swiftest Ship in Nelson's Trafalgar Fleet

Peter Hore (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015 | 1. Auflage
216 Seiten
The History Press (Verlag)
978-0-7509-6659-7 (ISBN)

Infos

The curiously named HMS Pickle was the second-smallest British ship in Nelson's fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar. She acquired enduring fame, however, as the ship that carried Lord Collingwood's dispatch announcing the death, in the midst of battle, of Nelson. A topsail schooner and deemed too small to take part in the line of battle, Pickle and ships like it were essential in the transmission of communication. Relaying messages between admiral and Admiralty, the rapid movement of these ships pioneered an early worldwide web of information that helped secure a British victory over Napoleon. In this revised and updated edition, Captain Peter Hore describes the Pickle's beginnings as a civilian vessel, her arming for naval use and the pivotal role she played in Admiral Cornwallis's inshore squadron keeping watch over the French and Spanish. This full and captivating history narrates a colourful story of one small ship and the courage and resolution of her determined crew.

PETER HORE is an award-winning author and journalist. He served a full career in the Royal Navy, spent ten years working in the cinema and television industry, and is now a Daily Telegraph obituary writer and biographer. His other books include Nelson's Band of Brothers and News of Nelson: John Lapenotiere's Race from Trafalgar to London. In 2011 he was elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Textauszug

1

Seymour’s Sting, 1799–1801

The Sting was ‘a clever, fast-sailing schooner of about 125 tons’ which would become better known as HMS Pickle, the ship that brought the news of the British victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, and of the death of Nelson; she was bought for the Royal Navy in December 1800 by Vice-Admiral Lord Hugh Seymour, the Commander-in-Chief at Jamaica.

Tom-Tit Cruisers

According to Steel’s Elements of Mastmaking, Sailmaking and Rigging, published in 1794, a schooner was:

A small vessel with two masts and a bowsprit. The masts rake aft, but the bowsprit lies nearly horizontal. On the bowsprit are set two or three jibs; on the foremast a square foresail; and, abaft the foremast, a gaff or boom-sail; and above those a topsail. Abaft the main-mast is set a boom sail, and above it a topsail. The main-stay leads through a block, at the head of the foremast, and sets up upon deck by a tackle. By these means, the sail abaft the foremast is not obstructed when the vessel goes about, as the peek [sic] passes under the stay. Schooners sail very near the wind, and require few hands to work them. Their rigging is light, similar to a ketch’s, and the topmasts fix in iron rings, abaft the lower mast-heads.1

At the beginning of the Great War of 1792–1815 the schooner as a type was new to the Royal Navy, and naval officers were sceptical of their design. In the 1760s the Navy had purchased some schooners in New England, where they were useful against smugglers and privateers, but in Europe the rig was not regarded as suitable for serious fighting vessels. Square sails could be backed, which made square riggers handier in battle, and their yards endowed some redundancy and thus resistance to battle damage, whereas the loss of a boom would render a schooner unmanageable.

In 1796 two two-masted sloops of 400 tons, Dasher and Driver, were built in Bermuda for the Royal Navy, but the fore-and-aft rig was not well established in Britain before 1800. Then two new schooners, Express and Advice were introduced; at 88ft long and 178 tons, with a crew of thirty and armed with six 12-pounder guns, they were designed for speed but proved unsuccessful. Next, a new schooner design was produced by a commercial builder in Bermuda. The model for what became the Ballahou class was the Virginia pilot boat Swift of 1794: they were of 54ft length and 72 tons, had a crew of twenty and carried four to six guns. Armed, however, with 12-pounder carronades, they were much criticised; William James called them ‘tom-tit cruisers’ and he excoriated the schooner.2 Others pointed to their poor survival rate: of the seventeen Bermudabuilt Ballahou-class and twelve Bird-class schooners built in England, all but eight were wrecked or captured. In 1806 the Admiralty’s Bird class in particular was criticised by Admiral the Earl of St Vincent, when Commander-in-Chief in the Channel, who called them ‘a plague and burthen to all who have them under their orders’, and they were, he wrote, ‘no more like Bermudian vessels than they are like Indian prows’. What naval officers wanted were fast ships, he wrote, ‘similar to a Bermudian despatch boat’.3

Naval officers did not want the bastardised designs produced by the Admiralty, and, while the Admiralty was building faux schooners, the fleet was capturing real ones. By the end of the eighteenth century there were some dozen American and French schooners in the Royal Navy; soon Sting would join them.

There is no proof, but probably the first Pickle (1800–4) and Sting, which became the second Pickle (1801–8), were both built in Bermuda, though the name Sting has suggested to some writers that she may have been American-owned. Since the seventeenth century there had been a shipbuilding industry on Bermuda, with ships built of the indigenous cedar tree, juniperus Bermudiana, which once covered the islands at a density of 500 trees to the acre. During the seventeen and eighteenth centuries islanders had developed light, two-masted ships which excelled at sailing close to windward. Working by trial and error, Bermudians experimented with using the rigs of other Atlantic vessels and invented the triangular sail or Bermuda rig. They also changed the hull form and adjusted the rigging. The hulls had sharp bows and fine lines which minimised drag and made less leeway. Bermudian sloops and schooners also carried huge mainsails on long booms, the masts were raked backwards, and the bowsprits raised so that they would not be buried in head seas when under full sail. The sails included jibs, spritsails, staysails (or trysails), ringtails, square topsails and stunsails (or studding sails). Their frames and planking below the waterline were made of Bermudian cedar, which was light in density and – being resistant to rot and worm – was regarded as the best shipbuilding timber. Better still, the local cedar grew from seed to usable size in only twenty to thirty years and did not require seasoning. Other woods, including mahogany, were imported from Central America for keels, and white pine and oak came from North America for masts, spars and decks. The fine lines of Bermudian sloops and schooners reduced the ’tweendecks space available for cargo, and, to save weight, Bermudian skippers dispensed with guns and relied on speed to escape any pursuer.4

Two Pickles

Little is known accurately about the appearance of the first Pickle, but there are two contemporary paintings of the second ship of the name. Robert Dodd and his brother Ralph lived and worked in Wapping, London, where their marine pictures were admired as much for their ability to capture the atmosphere of battle and storm as for their technical accuracy. Robert Dodd moved to 41 Charing Cross Road (now Whitehall), which he advertised as being ‘six doors from the Admiralty’. Naval officers after visiting the Admiralty used to call on Dodd to commission or buy from him pictures of their ships, or perhaps to sell information to him. This apparently is what HMS Pickle’s commander, John Richards Lapenotiere, did in November 1805 after he had delivered Collingwood’s dispatches, enabling Dodd to scoop the first paintings of the battle and the victory off Cape Trafalgar. One of a pair of watercolours painted in November 1805, and sold at Bonham’s in 2003, clearly shows Pickle standing by the burning French ship Achille. The appearance of Pickle fits Steel’s description, but if Dodd used Steel as a crib, he presumably also had Lapenotiere leaning over his shoulder to remind him of what she actually looked like.

Other officers returning from Trafalgar had their views of how the battle had developed and wished to contribute their knowledge, and, early in 1806, Dodd altered his original watercolours and turned them into a set of four engravings. The second picture of the second pair, The Victory of Trafalgar, shows a smoke-shrouded melee about 4.30 p.m. on 21 October; the French van is escaping but Pickle, diminutive compared to the ships of the line, is shown on the edge of the picture.5

The second near-contemporary picture of Pickle has only recently been identified. The Scots-born John Christian Schetky was, successively, drawing master at the Royal Military College at Great Marlow, professor of drawing at the Royal Naval Academy, Portsmouth and at the East India College, Addiscombe. George IV made him Marine Painter in Ordinary in 1820 and Queen Victoria confirmed this title in 1844. Again Schetky had an eye for composition as well as a reputation for technical accuracy. He painted many ship portraits and reconstructions of sea battles from the age of Nelson, including the Loss of the Magnificent, 25 March 1804 – and on the extreme right of this picture is Pickle, assisting in the rescue of the crew.6

Just a little more is known about Pickle from the occasional draught marks entered in her master’s log. For example, an entry in her master’s log for 21 February 1802 notes that her draught forward was 7ft 7in (2.3m) and aft was 11ft 7in (3.5m). The dimensions usually given for Pickle are length on gun deck of 73ft 0in (22.25m), length of keel for tonnage 56ft 3¾in (17m), breadth 20ft 7¼in (6m), depth in hold 9ft 6in (2.8m) and tonnage 127 tons. An examination of her several master’s logs confirms the suite of sails which she carried. It is important to remember that although Sting, later Pickle II, was pierced for fourteen guns and is frequently described as such in contemporary literature, she did not carry more than ten guns, and that even then she was top heavy; one of Lapenotiere’s first orders after he took command in 1802 was to place four of these guns in the hold to improve stability and sailing performance.

Lord Hugh Seymour

Lord Hugh Seymour first chartered Sting at the rate of £10 per day to augment his fleet in the West Indies. Seymour, who had been appointed Commander-in-Chief at Jamaica on 9 May 1800 and had arrived at Jamaica in August that year to take up his command, was the scion of a noble house. Though a contemporary of Nelson, he was never one of Nelson’s fabulous band of brothers. Indeed, the two men were as unalike as it were possible to be: whereas Nelson was a poor parson’s son from Norfolk and the single spark in all the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.10.2015
• Vorwort: Andrew Lambert
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Natur / Technik ► Fahrzeuge / Flugzeuge / Schiffe ► Militärfahrzeuge / -flugzeuge / -schiffe
• Themenwelt: Natur / Technik ► Fahrzeuge / Flugzeuge / Schiffe ► Schiffe
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Schlagworte: 1804 • 1805 • admiral cornwall's inshore squadron • battle of trafalgar • cadiz harbour • cape finisterre • captain john lapenotiere • falmouth bay • Favorite • HMS Magnificent • Horatio Nelson • napoleonic wars • Nelson • royal navy warrant officers • schooner • Ship • Sting • the swiftest ship in nelson's trafalgar fleet • topsail schooner • vice admiral horatio nelson • vice admiral nelson
• ISBN-10: 0-7509-6659-9 / 0750966599
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7509-6659-7 / 9780750966597