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Octopusses in my garden are courtesy of Blix
www.asteroi-d.blogspot.com

The Wreck of the Hesperus

Henry Wadswoth Longfellow


It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.
Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.
The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his month,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.
Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.
"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast.
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.
Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.
"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.
"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,
O say, what may it be?"
"'Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!"--
And he steered for the open sea.
"O father! I hear the sound of guns,
O say, what may it be?"
"Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"
"O father! I see a gleaming light
O say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.
Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.
And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.
And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.
Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!
At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.
The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!

Lighthouse Gallery I

Antikythera in the sea

The Story

More in the NY Times

Tall ships in trouble

The wreck of the Royal Charter - the ship that never reached home.



HAVING safely travelled thousands of miles by sea from Australia, the passengers and crew of the steam clipper Royal Charter must have relaxed, knowing they would shortly land in Liverpool.

Many on board were former miners who had made considerable fortunes in the Australian gold rush and the ship was also carrying a cargo of gold.

After leaving Melbourne 60 days earlier (a fast journey in those days), her 371 passengers and 112 crew were more than ready to enjoy the next chapter in their lives. But it was not to be.

Having survived the Indian Ocean, Cape Horn, the long haul up the forbidding south Atlantic and with a call at Queenstown (now Cobh) behind her, terrible disaster struck almost within sight of home.

On October 25, 1859, as Royal Charter sailed along the north west tip of Anglesey, the barometer suddenly started dropping and severe weather was looming. It was claimed later by some passengers that the master, Captain Thomas Taylor, was advised to shelter in Holyhead, but decided to make for Liverpool, as the ship had ridden well through the stormy Southern Ocean.

Capt Taylor had failed to pick up the Liverpool pilot at Port Lynas, as the gales rose to Beaufort Force 10 and the sea was rising, whipped up by the wind.

Then Royal Charter was suddenly hit by an exceptional tempest: the wind rose to full hurricane force (Beaufort scale 12) and the wind suddenly changed direction, from east to north-east, then north-north-east, with nowhere for the ship to go but on to the rocky shore.

At 11pm Capt Taylor anchored the ship, but at 1.30am on October 26 the port anchor chain snapped, followed by the starboard chain an hour later. In spite of cutting the masts down to reduce the wind-drag, Royal Charter was driven inshore with her steam engine unable to make headway against the gale.

The ship initially grounded on a sandbank, but in the early morning the rising tide drove her onto the rocks at a point just north of Moelfre on the eastern coast of Anglesey.

She was battered against the rocks by huge waves, whipped up by winds roaring over at more than 100 mph.

Incredibly, just 10 yards of boiling angry water lay between ships and shore. A Maltese seaman, Joseph Rodgers, got a line ashore for a bosun’s chair with help from Moelfre villagers. But conditions were so rough that only about 16 passengers and 29 others survived.

Others were said to have drowned, weighed down by the belts of gold they were wearing around their bodies. No women or children survived. Some 459 lives were lost, the highest death toll of any shipwreck on the Welsh coast.

Most were not drowned, but were crushed or pounded to death when the ship broke up, or when the waves swept them off rocks.

This shipwreck was the worst of some 200 ships wrecked that night in what’s known as the Royal Charter Storm.

Much gold was rumoured to have washed up on the coasts near Moelfre, making some families literally rich overnight.

The gold bullion cargo was insured for £322,000, but the total value of the gold onboard must have been much higher.

Many of the bodies recovered from the sea were buried at Llanallgo churchyard nearby, where their graves and a memorial can still be seen. Another memorial is set on the Anglesey Coastal Path, on the cliff above the rocks where the ship struck.
Almost immediately, salvage teams went to work on the wreck. The ship’s carcass lies close to the shore in less than 20ft of water.

The remains can be seen in the form of iron bulkheads, plates and ribs which are revealed and then immersed again in the shifting sands.
Gold sovereigns, pistols, spectacles and other personal items have been found by divers and more serious salvage attempts searching for treasure have taken place in the last couple of years.

A Dickens of a disaster

The Liverpool Daily Post
June 29, 2008

Lost in the North West

Inuit oral stories could solve mystery of Franklin expedition

Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service Published: Wednesday, June 25, 2008

More than 150 years after the disappearance of the Erebus and Terror -- the famously ill-fated ships of the lost Franklin Expedition -- fresh clues have emerged that could help solve Canadian history's most enduring mystery.

A Montreal writer set to publish a book on Inuit oral chronicles from the era of Arctic exploration says she's gathered a "hitherto unreported" account of a British ship wintering in 1850 in the Royal Geographical Society Islands -- a significant distance west of the search targets of several 19th- and 20th-century expeditions that have probed the southern Arctic Ocean for Canada's most sought-after shipwrecks.

Dorothy Harley Eber, author of the forthcoming Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers, says the new details about Sir John Franklin's disastrous Arctic voyage in the late 1840s emerged from interviews she conducted with several Inuit elders at Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

The Inuit account -- passed down from 19th-century ancestors who witnessed the British expedition's failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage -- describes "an exploring vessel" that anchored off the Royal Geographical Society Islands during the winter of 1850 because "they were iced-in and had no choice."

Evidence of the expedition's presence on the islands, according to Inuit oral history captured by Eber, can still be seen during the summer months in greasy deposits along the shore where "the ground is soiled by rendered seal oil blubber" used by stranded crewmen to fuel fires for cooking and warmth.

"When I recorded it, and first heard the information, I didn't have a map with me and I wasn't actually quite sure what I was hearing," Eber told Canwest News Service on Wednesday. "But I later had the material translated two or three times and I realized it was very important."

The Royal Geographical Society Islands lie between Victoria Island and King William Island where the Victoria Strait reaches the Queen Maud Gulf north of mainland Nunavut.

The location of the iced-in ship described by the Inuit is nearly 100 kilometres to the northwest of a stretch of water between O'Reilly and Kirkwall islands -- close to King William Island and the mainland Adelaide Peninsula -- that has emerged as the prime search area for Franklin shipwreck hunters.

University of Toronto Press, which is publishing Eber's book this fall, is billing the book as a must-read for Franklin aficionados, in which "new information opens up another fascinating chapter" on the tragic Arctic voyage.

Franklin himself died in June 1847, with the two ships at his command frozen in sea ice somewhere west of King William Island. The 105 surviving crew members battled bitter cold and ice-choked seas before succumbing to hunger and disease over the following few years.

A series of searches in the 1850s gripped the British nation and its Canadian colonies, and much of the Arctic archipelago was mapped and claimed for the British Empire as a result.

Various artifacts from the Franklin Expedition and the remains of several crewmen have been discovered over years, but the ships have eluded searchers -- including those on a major Canadian government-sponsored expedition in the 1990s.

The man who headed that search -- Robert Grenier, chief of marine archeology for Parks Canada -- said he discussed the new account of the Franklin ship earlier this week with Eber, calling the Montreal author's findings "very interesting."

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.. National Post - Canada

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/franklin/franklin.html

http://www.mysteriesofcanada.com/Nunavut/franklin_expedition.htm

Thoreau on Shipwreck

(21) The verses addressed to Columbus, dying, may, with slight alterations, be applied to the passengers of the St. John:

"Soon with them will all be over,
Soon the voyage will be begun
That shall bear them to discover,
Far away, a land unknown.

"Land that each, alone, must visit,
But no tidings bring to men;
For no sailor, once departed,
Ever hath returned again.

"No carved wood, no broken branches
Ever drift from that far wild;
He who on that ocean launches
Meets no corse of angel child.

"Undismayed, my noble sailors,
Spread, then spread your canvas out;
Spirits! on a sea of ether
Soon shall ye serenely float!

"Where the deep no plummet soundeth,
Fear no hidden breakers there,
And the fanning wing of angels
Shall your bark right onward bear.

"Quit, now, full of heart and comfort,
These rude shores, they are of earth;
Where the rosy clouds are parting,
There the blessed isles loom forth."

Cape Cod - Henry David Thoreau

Complete accounta at:
The Shipwreck (St. John)

Interesting references to Thoreau in Cape Cod at:
"Why Thoreau came to Cape Cod"

Much more on Shipwreck of the St. John

Sunk

Deep, deep down in the dark of drunken water,
in the swirling wine of a pirate’s last wish,
lies a treasure box lost for a thousand years.
Full of gold so soft,you can squeeze sunlight
from bubbles of rainbow coins
as they tumble droplets of pearls
into an ocean of diamonds
where emerald waves crash
on a world of shipwrecked secrets.

The sea in its salt sorrow
cries crocodile tears for
the foolishness of divers
that never resurface
and there is no map or compass
that can take you there,
only the wind whispering through the sails,
the mocking laughter of mermaids
murmuring in the deep, deep belly of a whale,
on the other side of Atlantis,
where all plank walkers finally wake.

by Aoife Mannix

For Applecart, a colloboration between Oily Cart and Apples & Snakes, commissioned by Theatre Is
http://www.applecart.wordpress.com/
http://www.aoifemannix.com/