The town of Whitby stands at the mouth of the River Esk on the north-eastern corner of the Yorkshire coast. Bordered by the moors to the south and west and the North Sea to the north and east, for centuries Whitby had existed like an island community, a secluded outpost from the society of York or markets at Pickering. But for the sanctuary of its inner harbour, Whitby may have had few visitors at all. Yet here the Esk, a cold salmon river, wound its way off the heights and broadened as it threaded between two steep cliffs to meet the sea. In the shallows beyond, fishermen had worked since ancient times, casting for cod, mackerel or haddock. Over the centuries Whitby had become known as a haven on a dangerous coastline.
In 1764 it was half a century since Whitby’s harbour piers had been extended. Now they stretched north into the sea, the west pier longer by a third than the east so they took the form of a crab’s claw. It was out of the bleak northern horizon, a millennia before, Norsemen had come. Townsfolk would have watched from Whitby’s Saxon monastery on the east cliff: sleek, sharp-prowed longships, dragonheads on their bows, forty or fifty oars swinging as one, cutting white holes in the slate-grey water. The Norsemen had left their mark. Their legacy survived a thousand years on in the flinty local character and a dialect marked with hard consonants. A beck was a stream. A hagg was a sloping parcel of woodland. A carr was marshy ground, dangerous underfoot. Ghauts – pronounced ‘goats’ – described the alleys that cut between Whitby’s houses, diving to the shore. Whitby folk dug with a mattock, but graved with a spade. A donnaught was an idler who skulked by the piers. Food was either plentiful or scarce. ‘A Scarborough warning’ meant no warning at all, but ‘a sudden surprise’.1
There was an other-worldliness about Whitby. On hallowed earth on the east cliff stood the crumbling walls of its monastery. Long ago Benedictine monks had prayed here seven times a day, between cockcrow and vespers, and Cædmon the first English poet had been blessed with the gift of song. Beneath, the foot of the east cliff had long been a favourite site for hunting ammonites, known as ‘sea snakes’ by locals. John Leland, Henry VIII’s antiquary, had heard of them and possibly collected some himself. ‘It is a wonderful thing to see the Serpents’, he wrote, ‘twisted into circles, and by the mercy of heaven, or as the monks relate by the prayers of St Hilda, converted into stone.’2
This tale, that St Hilda – the monastery’s founding abbess – had turned serpents into stone, was a well-rooted one. But it did not account for the many other curiosities to have been pulled from the scaur or scarr, the local name for the rocky foreshore. In about 1710 the petrified arm of a man had been dug up, ‘in which all the bones and joints belonging to the hand and arm were very visible’.3 In 1743, an entire petrified human skeleton was unearthed. Then in 1758, one of the town’s sailing masters, William Chapman, felt impelled to write to the Royal Society with the news that the bones of an ‘Allegator’ had been chanced upon. The remains – ten feet in length – had been entombed in the black, flaky rock. They were, Chapman observed, certainly those ‘of the lizard kind’.4
This mysterious world, revealing itself by degrees, fascinated some. Lionel Charlton, a schoolmaster in the town, was among those who felt a latency in Whitby. The crocodile was ‘an animal that was never known in our seas’, he wrote, baffled. Charlton – a self-styled ‘philomath’, or lover of learning – knew science offered no settled answer. Some, Charlton later recorded, believed the petrified remains in the scaur were produced by a fermentation in the alum shale that abounded on the coast. Others considered them ‘antediluvian animals’ imprisoned in the earth’s crust at the Flood. Charlton remained unconvinced by either explanation. Hearing several pieces of petrified wood had been found, he examined them himself. ‘These are not to be distinguished by the eye from real wood’, he wrote, ‘and that species of wood generally appears to be oak. In some of it I have observed, very distinctly, the bark, the inner rind, the fibres, the grain, the knots, and every thing else pertaining to oak timber.’5 Just how the oak had come to be there, old and hard and cold as stone, Charlton could not say. But in touching the objects he felt a divine force. Looking at the neat strata of the cliffs, seeing ‘the most exact symmetry and order’, he concluded, ‘the whole fabric has in it the marks and characteristics of an Almighty Architect where nothing has undergone any considerable change since its first creation’.6
At the beginning of 1764 Charlton was forty-four years old. He had lived in Whitby for sixteen years, supporting himself with jobs as a land surveyor and schoolmaster. But he retained the eye and the status of an outsider. He had been born further north, near the hamlet of Hesleyside on the banks of the River Tyne, into an old Northumbrian family. The Charltons had inhabited their land since the reign of Edward IV and recently a Charlton had served as High Sheriff of Northumberland. After a grammar school education he travelled to Edinburgh where he enrolled at the university for several terms’ tuition. He soon crossed the border to England, settling at Whitby in 1748, a man of twenty-eight. Coming from the north, avoiding the moorland tracks, the romantic picture has Charlton arriving by water, climbing timorously from a collier into the rolling belly of a harbour boat. Soon he would step ashore and enter a place he grew to love.
Among the fishwives, the footloose apprentices and well-heeled merchants, Charlton stood out in Whitby. He brought ‘the guttural accent, and pronunciation of his native country’ to the town with him.7 The sight of him shambling through the streets around the market square was memorable. One of his hands was lame, ‘shrunk up’, wrote a resident, ‘a circumstance which probably induced his parents to procure him a classical education’. One of Charlton’s legs, too, was ‘halting’, giving him a sloping, heaving gait.8 Soon after arriving, Charlton leased a premises called the Toll-booth or ‘Town’s House’ from the Lord of the Manor, and established a day school. He advertised himself as a ‘Teacher of Mathematics’, and the early pupils at the Toll-booth school would long remember the presence of their dominant master at the head of the class. He ‘had a harsh and withered countenance, and was (at that time) of a severe disposition as a pedagogue’, wrote one.9 A hint, perhaps, of Charlton’s asperity is to be found in a poem written later by another of his pupils:
No longer trudge with shining face to school,
There to be call’d a blockhead, and a fool;
The formidable birch no longer dread,
That oft has threatened this devoted head.10
Hostilities between Charlton and his pupils travelled in both directions. His ‘peculiarities’, one of them later confessed, ‘offered a constant fund’ to their satirical talents. And if the strict, disfigured, chiding schoolmaster was to be compared with anyone, then perhaps his contemporary Samuel Johnson – who established an academy at Edial in Staffordshire a decade earlier – would be a better choice. Johnson, who like Charlton mellowed as he aged, would respond memorably to the question of ‘how’ he had come to such an ‘accurate a knowledge of Latin’. ‘My master whipt me very well. Without that, sir, I should have done nothing’, he shot back.11
Charlton would prove more successful than Johnson as a schoolmaster. In the 1750s he established himself at the Toll-booth as not merely the geographical centre of the port but also its lucent, intellectual heart. His surveying work is also significant. With it he brought to Whitby a fashion for mapmaking that was spreading throughout the Western world (across the Atlantic George Washington was striking out as a land surveyor at this time). One such survey survives today. An exact Plan and Survey of a Farm of Land lying in the Cars near Ruswarp belonging to Mr J Mellor (1761) shows Charlton bringing geometric precision to the undulating landscape. Charlton divides the property eleven ways, into various pastures, closes, carrs, garths, banks and gardens. Despite the irregular dimensions of these zones, Charlton reconciles each into acres, roods and perches. The confidence of his penmanship is striking. There’s something seductive, elegant and fresh in his execution of a task that must have attracted attention in the neighbourhood: the schoolmaster, knocking his flags into the wet earth, hobbling up an incline and defining an angle with a theodolite. There, too, is the picture of Mr Mellor, absorbing the survey; experiencing a pang of pride that he knows his ‘Hollow Car’ is not merely a fair-sized field, but is ‘three acres, three roods and seven perches’ in all, the fifth largest of his plots.12
Charlton’s skills did not stop at this. In addition to mathematics, he knew Latin and ‘had some acquaintance with the French’.13 In a town where many remained illiterate, these skills opened up new worlds, ancient Rome or enlightening Paris. By the 1760s the earliest of Charlton’s alumni would be graduating into the world, among them the writers Francis Gibson and William Watkins. In the years to come ‘a number of excellent scholars’ followed.14
If Charlton’s school on the eastern bank of the Esk symbolised intellectual enquiry, then the western side was an earthier, practical place. Here was the centre of Whitby’s shipbuilding industry. A chain of busy yards clustered on the edge of the river around a tidal stretch of ground called Bell Island. Dry at half ebb, Bell Island afforded Whitby’s shipbuilders all they needed. It was close to the harbour, yet sheltered from the barrel swell of the sea behind a bridge, in a tidal stretch that acted as a natural lever for lifting heavy objects.
It was here at Bell Island, next to a moorland stream called Bagdale Beck, that Jarvis Coates had established his yard in the early 1700s. Coates was Whitby’s first shipbuilder of any scale, and for four decades he had dominated the trade. Coates’s vessels were tough, weatherly and pragmatic. They were designed as vehicles to transport huge volumes of coal from the mines at Newcastle to the markets in London and as more pits had been sunk in the north and more coal was needed in London, Coates had thrived as a go-between. By the 1730s he had been firmly established among Whitby’s leading gentlemen with a property at 23 Baxtergate in the commercial centre of town, a minute’s walk from his yard.
Jarvis Coates had three boys who followed him into the family business: Jarvis Jr, Francis and Benjamin. The boys had been raised as the Coates’s fortunes rose, and when the elder Jarvis died in 1739 it must have seemed that he had bequeathed a lasting legacy. Now their own masters, Jarvis Jr had proved the most ambitious. He converted the Baxtergate property into an elegant townhouse, four bays wide and three storeys high, and expanded the old shipyard into adjoining land. As he concentrated on the new yard, the younger son, Benjamin, assumed control of the old one. Ostensibly the brothers were thriving, but in reality they were hamstrung by the terms of their father’s will. He had decided to split his yard four ways – between Jarvis, Francis, Benjamin and his daughter Hannah – but none of the siblings was to inherit until the death of their mother, Mercy Coates. What might have been intended as an even-handed gesture turned out to be an aggravating one. By 1743 the younger Jarvis was bankrupt, unable to fund his expansion plans. Benjamin and Francis continued in business throughout the 1740s, but none of them would live to inherit. By the time Mercy Coates died in 1759, all her sons had predeceased her. Within twenty years of Jarvis Coates’s death in 1739, the family’s wealth and influence had dispersed.15
The Coates’s misfortunes provided opportunity for others. While Mercy retained ownership of the yards in the 1740s and 1750s, the sites were occupied by aspiring shipbuilders who had the requisite capital and drive. By 1748 – the year Charlton arrived in Whitby – the new yard built by Jarvis Jr was being ‘occupied’ by a shrewd thirty-year-old, Thomas Fishburn. Tradition has it that Thomas had begun his working life as an apprentice to the Coates family, but little else is known of the man who, in the 1760s, was poised to set out on one of the great careers in English shipbuilding. Fishburn, like his peers, did not consider himself a shipwright – that was considered a demeaning term (‘the proper Business of a Shipwright is counted a very vulgar Imploy, and which a Man of very indifferent Qualifications may be Master of’16, one complained) – instead he styled himself as a ‘Master Builder.’ He was already referring to himself as one in 1750 in his son’s baptismal papers. By then he was busy with commissions, one of which was Liberty and Property. The vessel would bear all Fishburn’s hallmarks. It was a tough, durable Whitby collier that would still be sailing the North Sea trading routes 102 years after its launch in 1752 – a vessel launched before Johnson’s Dictionary was published, still afloat during the Crimean War.
One measure of Fishburn’s ambition was his efforts to build a dry dock. Dry docks allowed for year-round work, recaulking battered seams, replanking enfeebled hulls and amending designs during the fallow winter months. It had been a proud moment for the town when a conglomerate calling itself the Dock Company had successfully opened Whitby’s first stone-lined dry dock in 1734. The event had been announced with fanfare in the Newcastle Courant:
This is to give notice, To all masters of Ships, That at Whitby in Yorkshire are lately made two extraordinary Dry Docks … The Ship Whitby of Whitby about 350 Tons, Mr John Linskill, Owner, is now repairing in the said Dock, where any others may be served in their Turns, at reasonable Rates.17
The word ‘extraordinary’ was hardly overplaying it. There were precious few dry docks outside of London, and for most merchantmen this meant anything more than running repairs required a wait in the Thames, for a slot at the Globe Stairs in Rotherhithe or at St Saviour’s Docklands opposite the Tower. The Whitby dry dock offered an alternative on the busy coastal route. Whether Fishburn’s young eyes had passed over this advertisement or not, an ambition for his own dry dock became a defining objective of his early career.
Fishburn was ten years at Jarvis Jr’s yard before he raised the capital to begin his project. There is no certain evidence on the location for Fishburn’s first attempt, though it seems likely he tried to build in front of the Coates yard. ‘When nearly completed’, one local later recalled, ‘it sunk down in one night, the ground below being quite a bog.’ This episode must have been financially painful for Fishburn, but by 1757 he had found a location upstream. This lay at the unpromising-sounding Water Stand Lane, at the even more unpromisingly titled hamlet of Boghall. This second attempt proved successful. A hint of the great inconvenience and expense that Fishburn had been put to was captured by his own advert, which he must have submitted with pride to the Public Advertiser in London in December 1758:
THOMAS FISHBURN, Ship-builder, at Whitby, having at a great Expense erected a Dry Dock, fit for the Reception of Ships of any Burden, begs Leave to acquaint Owners and Commanders of Ships, who will please to favour him with their Commands, that they may be assured of having their Business done on the most reasonable Terms.18
Fishburn’s advert ran for three consecutive days. Surrounded by news from the Marine Society and notices from patent-medicine manufacturers, it stands out as a brave statement from a provincial tradesman, hoping to catch merchants’ eyes in the capital. Fishburn’s fortunes were turning. Soon after Mercy Coates died in 1759, he took complete ownership of the yard. He was now overseeing a substantial business on the western banks of the Esk. Trade was brisk. ‘Hence it comes to pass’, one resident wrote, ‘that our docks are oft filled with ships from distant parts of the coast.’ Owners, ‘being convinced they nowhere else can be so well served’, would ‘apply to the master-builders at Whitby, and frequently agree for a turn on our stocks a year or two before their work can be done’.19 Rising to the summit of the flourishing trade was Fishburn. Married to Alice and with three growing children, in the years to come Fishburn would build Esk House as a symbol of his status in the town. It was a trim and handsome Georgian design, replete with spacious gardens that backed down to his dockyard. Of all the shipbuilders’ houses, Fishburn’s, it was later commented, was ‘the most elegant’.20
Later in life Fishburn would be described by one of Whitby’s scholarly set as ‘a gentleman of considerable professional reputation, and highly meritorious for his unimpeached integrity, and benevolent disposition’.21 This appears an even-handed appraisal, free from literary snobbishness towards a practical man. More hints come in Fishburn’s designs, any creation bearing some trace of its maker. They were robust, dependable, economically productive and wholly traditional sailing vessels. No verified portraits of Fishburn are known to survive, though something of his physical appearance can be guessed at through a portrayal of his son – a high forehead, mutton-chop whiskers, flushed cheeks – an elegantly turned out Yorkshire gent, sat on a moorland rock holding a gun and with the hills stretching out behind him. Flanked by his hounds, the Fishburns’ son emerges not unlike one of Gainsborough’s Tory squires, proud of their patch of England and with a side of beef and a glass of Madeira waiting on the table at home.
Fishburn’s focus in the spring of 1764 was seeing through the construction of a new vessel, ordered by one of Whitby’s master mariners for work in the Newcastle coal trade. At some point, most probably in the course of the preceding year or two, a Whitby man called Thomas Milner had approached Fishburn with plans for this. New commissions were usually agreed upon with a list of critical dimensions: the length of the keel, the extreme breadth, the depth of the hold, the height between the decks and the waist. All Fishburn needed was at hand. The yards maintained a steady supply of essentials like oak, elm for keels or stern posts, Baltic pine for spars, deal, tallow, brimstone, pitch and varnish. Anything else could be purchased at the raff yards at Baxtergate or Spital Bridge or Thomas Boulby’s rope yard across the river. But it is unlikely Fishburn wanted for anything. The order was not unusual. It was for a coastal vessel, broad and rugged, about 360 tons. The kind he knew best.
Fishburn’s rise in Whitby would have been watched by Lionel Charlton, whose arrival in the town in 1748, coincided with the date of Fishburn’s occupation of Jarvis Jr’s yard. Though the two men were divided by class, occupation and the breadth of the River Esk, there was much for Charlton to admire in the ships Fishburn built, in their proportionality, strength and geometric simplicity. Charlton’s passion was for mathematics. He was variously described as an ‘ingenious mathematician’ and ‘a man of considerable mathematical knowledge’. Born at the time of Newton’s great celebrity in 1720, Charlton had grown up when thinkers like Bernoulli and Euler were unpicking Nature’s secrets with numbers. When Charlton set up his school at the Toll-booth he advertised himself as a ‘Teacher of Mathematics at Whitby’, an indication to prospective customers that algebra, fluxions, geometry, trigonometry, physics, mechanics, astronomy and gunnery were to form the backbone of his classes.
The appetite for mathematics was not confined to schoolrooms or the universities. A striking example of its general popularity was The Ladies Diary, an almanac that went on sale in 1704. Capitalising on the coronation of Queen Anne, the editor of The Ladies Diary, a Coventry schoolmaster named John Tipper, had designed a publication to appeal to ‘the fair sex’ with a specially prepared collection to ‘suit all conditions, qualities and humours’. ‘Nothing shall be inserted that is mean and trifling; nothing to raise a Blush, or intimate an evil Thought. To conclude, nothing shall here be, but (what all Women ought to be) innocent, modest, instructive, and agreeable.’22 The mainstay of Tipper’s almanac was intended to be recipes, stories and advice to young ladies on manners and deportment. So it had continued until a chance, rhyming ‘arithmetical’ question, posed by a male reader in 1707, proved so popular that Tipper decided to replace the recipes with ‘enigmas’ or knotty mathematical puzzles.
Tipper’s Ladies Diary soon developed a mixed readership who joined in an ongoing contest, setting and solving teasing arithmetical riddles. Women and men vied over algebraic or trigonometric solutions, an unusual and entertaining intermingling of the sexes in an intellectual pursuit. One North Yorkshire lady, Jane Squire, caught up in this numerical culture, would write of her love for mathematics, ‘I do not remember any Play-thing, that does not appear to me a mathematical Instrument; nor any mathematical Instrument, that does not appear to me a Play-thing: I see not, therefore, why I should confine myself to Needles, Cards, and Dice.’23 In time the Ladies Diary’s enigmas developed their own suggestive narratives, going further than the mere solving of sums. They teased, often playfully, often suggestively:
I WISH I could such a fair Charmer disclose,
I’d gladly another Equation propose,
Which the best Algebraist should never untye,
Tho’ he puzzled for ever with v, x and y.24
This was the type of intellectual puzzle Charlton relished. In the 1760s the name ‘Mr Lionel Charlton, of Whitby’, appeared in The Ladies Diary, which by then had changed its name to The Woman’s Almanack.25 With an annual run of 30,000 copies, the almanac had become a prominent and popular place for an intellectual challenge. Charlton’s participations in these pages were well remembered in Whitby, and it tempers somewhat the image of him as a haughty or a proud man; rather it reveals another, zealous in his use of numbers yet keen to join in the collective spirit of intellectual enquiry.
Almanacs like The Woman’s Almanack might have provided a forum for theoretical competition, but they also encouraged the practical application of the art too. They would advise readers how best to measure eclipses and other celestial events. In the much-anticipated run-up to the Transit of Venus in 1761 – when ‘the most brilliant planet Venus will pass over the glorious body of the Sun’26 – The Gentleman’s Diary, Or Maths Repository, spent several pages explaining the unusual significance of the event to its readers. Venus was the brightest star in the night sky, but she was poised to make a daytime appearance, too. Earlier in the century Edmond Halley, the British astronomer, had predicted that twice during the 1760s Venus’s orbit would see her cross the face of the sun. An unusual event – transits happened in eight-year pairs, then not again for more than a century – the transits of the 1760s yielded a rare opportunity to science. If observations were gathered from various, dispersed places, ‘the Parallax of the Sun may be ascertained; and by that Means the Distances of the Earth, and Planets from the Sun.’ All that required was to apply Johannes Kepler’s mathematical formula and a solution to ‘this noble Problem, one of the highest in Nature’27 would be revealed: a numerical appreciation of the dimensions of the solar system. It was all to be unlocked by observation and mathematics.
No question could be greater than that. It showed how far mathematics had come since the century before, when the Savilian Professor of Geometry, John Wallis, had written ‘Mathematicks … were scarce looked upon as accademical studies, but rather mechanical: as the business of traders, merchants, seamen, carpenters, surveyors of the lands, or the like.’28 And in his own way, Thomas Fishburn was just as advanced in his mathematics as Charlton was in his. By the 1760s the craft of building wooden sailing ships had progressed to a state of high sophistication and elegance. From Elizabethan times mathematical curves had been absorbed into the design of hulls, leaving them sleek yet sturdy. Shipbuilders had long accepted Archimedes’ theory that displaced water produces an upwards force on a vessel. Into the eighteenth century, shipwrights had increasingly studied the shapes of mackerels, dolphins and ducks, rendering them in eloquent, curving lines, in a bid to streamline the hulls. It was common for them to be fitted with a ‘cod’s head and mackerel’s tail’, meaning the hull was at its broadest towards the head and that it tapered inward as it ran to the stern. They knew that while a ship sustained an infinite number of stresses, the two key motions it underwent were pitching (rocking back and forth on its length) and rolling (rocking side to side). A hull could withstand rolling far better than it could pitching, so moderating its pitch became a task as tangled as one of Charlton’s enigmas. All these stresses were played out against the sea, a constantly shifting base. What every shipbuilder and every sailor sought, as the Australian writer Ray Parkin has argued, was harmony:
Many sailors over many hundreds of years, without ever arguing it, have known this simple fact: that the sea, the ship and the wind are not in conflict but are merely trying to live together under common circumstance. This is not to argue a fine philosophical point; it is choosing between sanity and megalomania. The sea smashing against the ship is as much smashed against by the ship; the wind howling through the rigging is powerless to do otherwise, and may just as well be howling in anguish as in anger. The sea, the air, and the ship are only seeking equilibrium.29
To make the whole coherent, master builders like Fishburn had come to look at hulls dispassionately, narrowly, rationally. ‘Our master-builders’, Charlton wrote, ‘understand their business extremely well, and know the exact geometrical proportion all the parts of a ship ought to have with regard to each other.’30 Once derided as mere ‘tradesmen’, shipbuilders would come to be appreciated in a fast-industrialising society. John Ruskin, the aesthete and art critic of the Victorian age, gazed wondrously back at the practical genius of the Georgian shipbuilders, a talent that found ultimate expression in the ships of the line he saw in J. M. W. Turner’s paintings. ‘Take it all in all, a ship of the line is the most honourable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced … Into that he has put as much of his human patience, common sense, forethought, experimental philosophy, self-control, habits of order, and obedience, thoroughly wrought hard work, defiance of brute elements, and calm expectation of the judgment of God, as can well be put into a space of three hundred feet long by eighty broad.’31
The British waters of the 1760s were filled with sailing crafts of many types and sizes, each built to suit a specific purpose. The various classes of fighting ships of the Royal Navy were most usually seen in the Solent Sea and the anchorage of Spithead off Portsmouth. They were either designed for sheer power – as in the case of the ships of the line – with enough stability to mount heavy guns and balance an even firing platform, or for speed and dexterity with svelte underwater bodies as in the case of the new class of frigates. Vessels carrying the treasures of the East India Company – known as East Indiamen – combined spacious holds with sufficient firepower to make them formidable opponents should any privateer be tempted to prey upon them. Other merchant sailors, whose work was limited to British or European waters, required none of the East Indiaman’s defensive capacities. Instead they were built expressly for economy. In many cases their design could be reduced to a simple proposition: how to transport the maximum bulk of cargo with the fewest number of sailors. The merchant fleets of modern Europe had evolved to meet this challenge, filling the northern seas with stout vessels like hagboats, flyboats, pinks, cats and barks.
Distinguishing one of these types from another required more than a landsman’s eye. In the eighteenth century, that great era of classification, vessels were divided from one another based on the length and shape of their hulls. These were at once very simple and highly complex, and to understand them required an artful and specialised vocabulary that emphasised their subtleties. Catching sight of an inward-bound merchantman, Fishburn might run through a mental checklist that considered the length, stem (foremost piece of the bow), stern (the back or after part of a ship), the midship section, burthen (the number of tons it will carry at proper sea trim) and the draught (the depth of water a ship displaces). A frigate would be instantly noticeable with a figurehead on its bows and its square-stern. But few of those needed to call at Whitby. Far more familiar were the two-masted brigs and snows; or the larger lumbering cats, with their tapering, overhanging sterns and their deep waists at the waterline; or the barks, the plainer, rugged sibling of the cat, with its flush-deck and broad stern – quite different to the cat, without the swagger of the projecting stern.
The brigs, snows, cats and barks defined Whitby’s profile: a practical place, not flaunting. Often difficult to taxonomise, to avoid dispute it was easier to fall back on the catch-all term ‘colliers’, which referred to any vessel carrying coals, a staple cargo. And in reality Whitby-built vessels were not built to fit a perfect type – they might blend different attributes, depending on the materials available in the yards at a particular time – but they were built to serve a purpose. For Whitby’s coasting vessels, that meant transporting the maximum quantities of coals, as safely, and with as little labour, as possible. It was with this in mind that an onlooker had to analyse any of Coates’s or Fishburn’s vessels. The hulls were broad and uncluttered with interior decks. The bottoms were flat, giving them a shallow draft and the threefold advantage that they could be sailed close to shore or up shallow estuaries to take on cargo, that they could stand upright on dry land at low tide – making them both easy to unload and scrub clean – and that their hold was free of the awkward spaces formed by a sleek underwater body. The flat-bottomed, open holds were encased in a reinforced oak shell, equal to the task of heaving the hundreds of chaldrons of coal while meanwhile shouldering the thrashing waves and wicked winds of the open sea. The reinforced hulls were not glamorous. Colliers were known for their bluff, rounded bows that did not even display a figurehead. But they were designed to last rather than to dazzle. They might stay out for months at a stretch, having their hulls ‘grieved’ (to have the filth burnt from the bottom) or ‘careened’ (tilted to one side as the other is trimmed and caulked) at low tide, but otherwise living in the coastal roads for years at a stretch without ever having to visit port.
To stand at Whitby’s favourite lookout post, on the east cliff, in the 1760s, was to gaze over a dynamic scene of trade and transport. The maritime highway to London ran straight by the port before it swung to the south. On any given day it would be filled with Scottish smacks ferrying passengers towards the city, brigs or snows serving the alum works, brigantines or schooners, the maids of all work, skimming over the waves with every stitch of canvas set. Between them all, lumbering like the elephants in Hannibal’s army would sail the colliers. They were a typical enough sight but looking out from the east cliff on a brisk spring day with the wind in the east, even they exuded an aesthetic appeal: the interplay between their glossy, varnished hulls and their coarse matt sails, the pleasing curve of the wind pressing into the canvas. Benjamin Franklin would write about the appeal of this form. ‘A ship under sail and a big-bellied Woman, are the handsomest two things that can be seen common.’32
Frail as colliers might appear at a distance, seen close up in Whitby’s harbour or out in the roads outside the piers, their strength and rigidity was plain. But such was the productivity of Whitby’s shipbuilders by the early 1760s that these hulls did not take long to assemble. In the space of a handful of months, with properly seasoned timber, Fishburn’s yard would run through a well-worn process. First an elm keel – elm used for its ability to stand constant submersion – would be laid the length of the yard. This formed the backbone of the collier. In 1764 the keel was ninety-one feet long and one foot broad, dimensions dictated as much by the shape of Fishburn’s yard and the availability of materials as the fancy of the buyer. Once the keel was in situ two other great pieces of structural timber would be scarfed into it: the stem at the front, and stern post at the back. Held in position on the blocks, the frame of the collier was then built from the ground upward. From the front the carcass of the collier resembled a U shape: a keelson reinforced the keel from above; floor pieces were driven in and fastened to futtocks – the ribs of the ship – that curved around and upward in three sections. To them were added the top timbers. The keel excepted, all these structural pieces were of oak, and after several weeks of hauling, hammering, fastening and locking, the whole would be girdled into a rigid frame with a series of knees – angle brackets shaped from compass timber – and wales that ran the length of the hull.
The surviving plans of the vessel Fishburn created during the spring of 1764 fit mostly with the profile of a bark, with its broad stern, bluff bows and broad body, though a Deptford Yard officer in London would soon generate several centuries of confusion by describing her, in an inverted tangle, as a ‘Cat-built Bark’.*33 This nebulous line – as confusing to Fishburn as a ‘goat-shaped sheep’ might be to a farmer – would wrong-foot many in years to come, but for Fishburn in 1764, the precise classification of his collier was probably not foremost in his mind. More materially, his efforts would have been directed into making her as strong and seaworthy as he could with the materials available to him. At this point in the building process the collier’s naked hull resembled nothing so much as a giant ribcage. To unknowing eyes, it might have seemed as if some new antediluvian creature had been dug out of the sands. For Whitby people, though, this sight was as familiar as a sedan chair might be to strollers in Pall Mall. Charlton later produced a map of Whitby, which as well as the geography and buildings of the town also depicted Bell Island crowded with the outlines of ships in frame on the stocks. Within the space of 300 yards seven hulls are in various stages of construction. Most are stripped carcasses, but two at least seem to be near completion, with the frames planked back and forth, or in the sailors’ language, fore and aft. These would be fastened onto the frame with trennels or tree nails, oak dowels an inch and a half thick and three and a half feet long that were scattered about the hull haphazardly so as not to create lines of weakness.
The transformation of the oak timbers into a coherent body was a task that spanned, at the very least, several weeks with the workers in the shipyard from ‘five in the morning till seven every evening’. The changing appearance of the collier, slowly rising out from the sands, contributed to this sense of Whitby as a place of transformation. Whitby stood not only at the boundary between the land and the sea, it also had its monastery as a gatepost between the divine and temporal worlds. Where before there had been the chapter house and seminaries, it now had its shipyards and schools, symbols of the new enlightening world that was replacing the old spiritual one. They made the raw materials of nature transform into something neat, useful, even beautiful, in a process of ordering, assigning, measuring, sawing and fastening.
While undergoing this process at the yard, the timbers underwent a second, gendered, change. Alive in the countryside, trees were regarded as a symbol of male strength. In Sylva, Evelyn habitually referred to living trees under the masculine pronoun – ‘Chuse a Tree as big as your thigh, remove the earth from about him’, runs a typical passage.34 The outline of a tree in the landscape fitted with contemporary notions of masculinity: stoic, weathered, constant. Artists knew this too. Squires would pose before favourite trees on their estates, a fashion epitomised by Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews or Reynolds’ Master Thomas Lister. But at the dockyard, as the raw materials were shaped, they were reassigned. As a living tree, he stood in the landscape. As timber, it lay at the yard. Preparing on the stocks, she was being built, a graceful figure, made eloquent out of the products of the earth.
There were more transformations at Whitby. There was Bell Island itself, emerging and vanishing twice a day with the tides. And then there was the meeting of distinct communities. There were the landsmen and the sea folk, or the lubbers and the jolly sailors as each derided the other. To a visiting merchant from York or Pickering, the language and nomenclature was alienating. Muddling a brig for a snow, they might be politely corrected or be silently condemned a fool. More obviously out of their context were the sailors, portrayed as off kilter on terra firma without their rigid routines, and betrayed by their profanities. In cities like London the sailors lived in their own quarters, places like Broad Street or the Old Gravel Road in Wapping. These were towns within towns, liminal zones that ticked at a higher tempo, offering a profligacy and danger not to be found elsewhere. It became an easy, favourite Georgian pastime, to ridicule these ‘lusty young fellows’ adrift on dry land mistaking cues, unsettled by a draught in a tavern or starting up at the sound of a pipe. Tobias Smollett did this most outrageously in Roderick Random (1748), assigning Roderick – the novel’s bungling hero – a buccaneering uncle who ‘had been long abroad, lieutenant of a man-of-war’. The uncle was an extravagant caricature. A hanger was slung from his belt, curses flew from his lips. ‘Damn you, you saucy son of a bitch, I’ll teach you to talk so to your officer’, he bellowed at one antagonist. Eyeing a pretty girl, he leapt up as if he’d spied land. ‘Odds bobs, Rory! here’s a notable prize indeed, finely built and gloriously rigged.’35
In Whitby there was always an echo, however faint, of this in the streets and taverns, and most of all by the piers. Sailors with their striped flannel jackets, canvas trousers, rusty blue great coats and pointed hats, belonged almost to another world. To pass from dry ground into a ship was to cross a barrier where time was even counted differently, with ship’s time running twelve hours in advance of the civil clock.
Whitby was a place of beginnings and endings, of changes and boundaries. Snakes were turned into stones, bodies were turned into souls, timber was turned into ships. The truth did not escape the Irish author Bram Stoker who visited a century later. Struck by Whitby’s atmosphere, he decided to use it as a backdrop for a Gothic novel. Stoker’s tale told how a single schooner, flying fast before the wind, appeared out of a North Sea storm, with sails set and straining. The schooner made like a dart between the piers. The town’s folk, watching, could not make out a single sailor on deck. There was just the corpse of the helmsman, lashed to his wheel.
There was … a considerable concussion as the vessel drove up on the sand heap. Every spar, rope, and stay was strained, and some of the ‘top-hammer’ came crashing down. But, strangest of all, the very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow on the sand.36
This dog, of course, was not a dog at all. Safely arrived in this town of transformations, Dracula would soon reveal himself.
The worst North Sea storms were called ‘Widow Makers’. One of these had struck Whitby on the night of 1 December 1763. It was ‘a most violent storm of wind and rain’ that continued into the next day.37 Its effects were felt across England. Houses were blown down in London. At Wells in Norfolk, residents woke to find the quay and neighbouring streets strewn with cables, boats and ships ‘some in halves’. More than 1,500 sheep were said to have perished in the Norfolk countryside as the saturated marshland had flooded. Twenty miles from Whitby, at Scarborough, a ‘most dreadful hurricane’ had blown all night.38 Twelve ships were wrenched from their moorings, driven against the foreshore then consumed by the pounding waves. Bodies had been cast up in the bay. ‘The coast between this town and Flamborough is lined with wrecks’, a Scarborough resident had written, ‘and castaway sailors throng here in great abundance, half naked.’ The anguished letter, which was published by the Caledonian Mercury, continued:
The whole town being so alarmed, the people sat up all night, many of them expecting every minute to be their last. It was dismal to hear the many cries that were poured forth in the dead of the night (through speaking trumpets) by persons going down to the deep and no relief could be had.39
It was reckoned the worst storm since November 1740, and Whitby was not spared. ‘The wind raged so furiously’, ran a report in the Scots Magazine, ‘and the land floods rushed down so rapidly, that almost all the houses near the river were either driven away or damaged.’40 Many of the ships in the harbour were damaged, and even those in the dry docks were dislodged. More saddening still was the damage to Whitby’s abbey. Its whole western wing, which for centuries had been supported by ‘twenty strong Gothic pillars and arches’, was blown to the ground. One to survey the wreckage was Lionel Charlton. Little was left of the original structure, except the north wall of the cloisters and part of the west end wall. ‘But it will not continue so for many ages’, Charlton predicted, ‘the whole being in so ruinous a condition that in another hundred years it must be entirely reduced to a heap of rubbish.’41
If the abbey was to be levelled as Charlton envisaged, it would mean the severance of a last bond with that ancient Christian community. And it was this dread of impending loss that inspired him to begin work on what would become his life’s project, the first modern, comprehensive history of Whitby. From Hilda and Cædmon in the Saxon monastery, to the shipbuilders of the modern day, Charlton’s History of Whitby would be an ambitious effort to both rescue the past and to capture the present. ‘All will readily own that it would be a great pity to have so many noble remains of antiquity moulder away into dust’, he wrote, ‘without being communicated to the world, and preserved for the benefit and satisfaction of future generations.’42
Charlton’s interests were not confined to the distant past. He was aware, too, that something unusual had happened to the community over the past century. When Henry VIII had plundered the monastery in the 1540s, Whitby had contained no more than ‘thirty or forty’ cottages, home to perhaps a few hundred souls. By the 1650s this number had risen to about 2,500, most of whom subsisted off the local herring trade with their twenty clinker-built cobles. Much of the third part of Charlton’s History dealt with the century of progress that followed the Restoration in 1660. That same year, Charlton recorded, Whitby was ‘ornamented’ with a ‘large new pendulum clock’ that was installed at the Toll-booth in the market square where he would later establish his day school.43 In Charlton’s narrative, the arrival of the clock heralds a brave new era in Whitby’s history. It meant precision, science, progress. And the pages of the History filled with accounts from 1660 onwards, of new streets, better piers, bigger ships, grander churches and neater gardens. In 1725 the first sash windows were installed in houses and they were regarded with amazement. The town swelled in these years to one of ten thousand. Twenty boats rose to almost 200 ships. The anonymous fishing village at the far side of the moors, fed by the tiny river, began its upward trajectory as a shipbuilding centre, soon to outdo Liverpool, Glasgow and Bristol.
Whitby’s rise coincided with a time the writer Daniel Defoe would term the Age of Projects. Spanning some forty years, from 1680–1720, England (later, after the Act of Union, Britain) was, Defoe argued, overcome by the ‘Humour of Invention’.44 Defoe proposed his idea in a publication called An Essay Upon Projects. The country of Defoe’s youth had been filled with bold inventions and schemes. There had been engines for quenching fires, the London Penny Post, pioneering types of metal, ‘Floating Machines … wrought with Horses for the Towing of Great Ships both against the Wind and Tide.’ Then there had been the designs for ‘Planting of Foreign Collonies, as William Pen, the Lord Shaftsbury, Dr Cox, and others, in Pennsylvania, Carolina, East and West Jersey, and the like places.’45 In An Essay Upon Projects, Defoe put the rise of the ‘projecting spirit’ down to inventive minds, attempting to right their personal losses after the Nine Years War (1688–97). ‘These, prompted by Necessity, rack their Wits for new Contrivances, New Inventions, New Trades, Stocks, Projects, and any thing to retrieve the desperate Credit of their Fortunes.’ Equally motivating was the story of William Phips, ‘whose strange Performance set a great many Heads on work to contrive something for themselves’. Phips had been born the son of a shepherd in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in about 1650. Naturally ambitious, Phips had first set up as a shipbuilder but soon he had started hunting for treasure along the American coast in the 1680s. Defoe wrote:
witness Sir William Phips’s Voyage to the Wreck; ’twas a mere Project, a Lottery of a Hundred thousand to One odds; a hazard, which if it had fail’d, every body wou’d have been asham’d to have own’d themselves concern’d in; a Voyage that wou’d have been as much ridicul’d as Don Quixote’s Adventure upon the Windmill: Bless us! that Folks should go Three thousand Miles to Angle in the open Sea for Pieces of Eight! why, they wou’d have made Ballads of it, and the Merchants wou’d have said of every unlikely Adventure, ’Twas like Phips his Wreck-Voyage.46
No one was sure quite how much money Phips had salvaged, and Defoe settled on a high-flown figure, ‘near 200,000l. sterling, in Pieces of Eight, fish’d up out of the open Sea remote from any shore, from an old Spanish ship which had been sunk above Forty Years’. The whole was carried off with such éclat, Defoe suggested, a thousand imitators appeared overnight.
In the years that followed Phips’s find, ‘the projector’ became a recognisable and much derided type, the confidence tricksters of the day. From the start it was a derogatory term, ‘The Despicable Title of a Projector’, Defoe called it. For novelists, projectors were a gift, ludicrous, bombastic, swelled up and prattling with self-regard. Jonathan Swift savaged them in Gulliver’s Travels. The Academy of Lagado became a nest of projectors trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. The projectors’ infamy only worsened after the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. And yet, in his Essay Upon Projects, Defoe sought to curb prejudices against them. The existence of projectors, he argued, was merely a consequence of a society marching forwards. While some contrived to hoodwink the vulnerable, ‘Others yet urg’d by the same necessity, turn their thoughts to Honest Invention, founded on the Platform of Ingenuity and Integrity … new Discoveries in Trade, in Arts and Mysteries, of Manufacturing Goods, or Improvement of Land, are without question of as great benefit, as any Discoveries made in the Works of Nature by all the Academies and Royal Societies in the world.’47
This was the backdrop against which the progress at Whitby happened. Jarvis Coates may well have been called the projector of his shipyard, or Fishburn the projector of his dry dock. But Whitby enjoyed several advantages over the scheming alleys of London, where the mass of projectors were to be found. The population was fixed rather than transient, meaning people had a local character to uphold, and there was the secondary advantage of a fixed community to invest in new enterprises. The culture of the town, too, was distinct. Many of Whitby’s trading families were Quakers, a nonconformist strand of Protestantism that valued clean-living, hard work and good bookkeeping. A generation before Charlton, a Quaker school had provided an early education for both boys and girls, who were both taught the maxim that industriousness and godliness went hand in hand. The school could only help to enfranchise Whitby’s women who – like Mercy Coates and her daughter Hannah – would not only have financial control of some shipyards, but they would also be significant shareholders in Whitby merchant ships. Shares were often split into sixty-four parts, so the ownership of a single collier was diverse. For those on the make, opportunities appeared weekly in the Newcastle Courant:
One 64th Part of the Hopewell of Whitby, William Biggins Master
One 32nd Part of the Henry and Mary of Whitby, Henry Atkinson Master
One 64th Part of the Walker of Whitby, William Walker Master
The arrangement made for a complex scale of ownership. Speculators could pick their favourite ship and master, or spread their money to lessen the risk. The sea was a market open to everyone and the bigger players would rise to own entire ships themselves. Once funded, Whitby’s vessels tended to operate in two distinct markets. There was the coal trade between Newcastle and London, and there were Baltic voyages, where coals were carried to ports like Lubec or Riga and cargoes of timber and tar were brought home. The coal trade was most dependable. Between 1700 and 1750, London’s demand for the fuel rose from 800,000 tons each year to 1.5 million tons, meaning there was almost always a buyer to be found at Wapping or Shadwell on the Thames’s north bank. Baltic voyages involved greater risk but attracted higher potential profits. They could last for months at a stretch, the Whitby colliers sagging low in the water, sailing east among the ice drifts, under the circling ospreys, past Moon Island, right to the banks of the Russian Empire. In the coal market, in particular, Whitby ships did well. By 1751 one in five ships entering the Port of London from the Baltic were Whitby-owned. In 1755 Whitby-owned ships were making more than 600 trips to the staithes at Newcastle each year, about a quarter of the total. And by the 1790s Whitby’s shipbuilding would have expanded to such a degree that, by total tonnage, it ranked as the third biggest in Britain.
This story of progress was the one Charlton would distil into the third part of his History of Whitby. From an anonymous fishing town Whitby had risen to become a vibrant mercantile hub. ‘From Holland we import flax, wainscot-boards, tarras, brandy, geneva, and canvas’, Charlton wrote, ‘From France we have brandy, and part of our wine. From the East Country we have hemp, flax, iron, timber, masts, deals, oak-plank, capravens, pipe-staves, lath-wood, battens, tar, spruce-beer, and several other articles. From America we import rice, pitch, tar, turpentine, pine boards.’ By 1750 the town’s population had climbed to about 5,000. In 1764 a theatre was opened, bringing metropolitan sophistication and art to the provincial town. The maritime boom had created a paradox. While Whitby remained geographically isolated from York and Pickering, the main towns in its terrestrial hinterland, it was increasingly bound to faraway ports. From the Baltic to Baltimore, a merchant might encounter a Whitby ship. Charlton underscored this theme:
that so long as a spirit of industry and temperance prevails among us, our trade will flourish, and we shall be a rich, opulent, and happy people; but if ever we suffer ourselves to be enervated, and become a prey to idleness, luxury, and intemperance, our riches will vanish, our trade will leave us, and we shall insensibly dwindle away into obscurity.48
When published in 1779, Charlton’s book stretched on for 362 densely packed, trenchant pages, each one bristling with facts and dates and names and figures. Accompanied by a plan of the town and full of much original antiquarian information, it attracted more than regional interest. Five hundred and thirteen people subscribed 551 copies of the book on publication, among them Dr Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the lawyer and antiquary Sir Daines Barrington. In these years Charlton also came into correspondence with Thomas Pennant, the naturalist and antiquarian, who sat at the heart of a wide network of philosophically minded figures, including Gilbert White in Selborne and Joseph Banks in Soho Square. For them all, Charlton would become the Whitby correspondent for the Enlightenment network of philomaths, transmitting news of strange fossils, petrified oaks, singing monks and trading ships.
Endeavour was not mentioned in Charlton’s book. This is a strange omission but perhaps no historical clarity had yet settled on Fishburn’s bark that, in 1764, had begun life yards from Charlton’s school. There survives a picture of Bell Island showing the final stages in the building of a collier. Teams of caulkers would have crawled over the frame, driving oakum into the seams and then ‘paying’ them by pouring over a compound of burning pitch and Stockholm tar. There was no interior deck running the length of this collier. Instead there was a foremost fall in the bows – a cramped, low space for sailors to sleep and stores to be kept – and the afterfall or steerage in the stern, a space reserved for the master and his mates. In the days to come she would be fitted with three masts – a fore, a main and a mizzen – that ran the length of the deck. Below the waterline a viscous mix, ‘black stuff’ – a compound of goat or cow hair, tar, brimstone and pitch – would be payed or cleamed outside the hull as a protection from sea water. All this would mingle with the salt air, the stench of tar and tang of paint to create that distinct aura that clung to the yard. The rest of the deck furniture would have been shipped too: a capstan for heaving heavy objects, the bowsprit, the catheads on which the anchors hung clear of the hull, the windlass and the knightheads.
These words seem exotic to us today, but they come from a language as precise and rich to sailors, as Latin was to scholars. ‘Giving a wide berth’, ‘hard to fathom’, ‘mainstay’, ‘knowing the ropes’, ‘to be on an even keel’, ‘taken aback’, ‘to the bitter end’; some sailing terms had cross-pollinated into landsmen’s speak. Other phrases would remain enigmatic. Knightheads and catheads had variously ascribed origins. One explanation for ‘catheads’ told that shipwrights had formerly been in the habit of carving a cat’s face into these timbers. Fishburn did not do this. His ships would not be known for decorations. But there was a carving on this specific vessel. It was the face of a wise old seaman that stared across the deck from the windlass. Sailors who looked over this ship would notice other things about her too. One was a confused overlapping of decks around the main mast. Another was that the bark was versatile. Fishburn had cut five ports in her side through which coal could be shovelled from the keels or loading crafts, and there was a slot in her bows through which timber could be posted.
As Fishburn’s new bark had progressed on the stocks, the cold northern winds of winter had subsided. In his Rural Economy of Yorkshire, William Marshall had plotted the march of the season: ‘The sallow in full blow,—5 April. One swallow, near water,— 12 April. White-thorn foliated,— 18 April. Swallows about houses,—27 April. Cuckow first heard,—6 May. Swifts,—12 May. Oak foliated,—29 May. Hawthorn blowed, 10 June. Ash foliated,— 11 June.’49 The ship rose along with the season. Tracing Endeavour’s earliest life is always a process of working backwards from the first recorded mention. And by doing this we know that sometime in June 1764, perhaps not long after King George III’s birthday on 4 June, she was completed for her owner, Thomas Milner. By now she would have been fitted out with her iron anchors and a stove, all three masts would have been rigged with halliards and braces, her hull would have been cleaned and tallowed, ready for loading with sails, stores, ropes, enough ballast to make her seaworthy, and, ultimately, men. Twelve were engaged to sail under Milner’s command on this maiden voyage. He would be joined by a mate called John Brown, a cook called Robert Cuthbertson, six sailors and four servants.50
Just one thing was wanting: a name for the new vessel. In the navy the name of a ship often suggested its size – the Badger of fourteen guns seems appropriate, as does the Dorsetshire of seventy guns – or its intended purpose: the first-rate 104-gun Victory was being readied in 1764, the fast frigate Greyhound was already at sea, the fireships Blast, Blaze and Etna had been active in the Seven Years War and the Elephant would be an appropriately named transport in a war to come. Not every name was as dashing as these. Hugh Palliser, a Yorkshire officer, had made his name cruising on French privateers in the sloop HMS Weazel. In the merchant fleet there was a greater diversity of names. Whitby’s Quaker roots ensured an abundance of Brotherly Loves and Friendships. Wives, daughters, sweethearts and names of gods or classical heroes supplied other inspirations, populating the harbour with Marys, Janes, Nymphs and Neptunes. Often a name revealed something, an allegiance, a friendship or an aspiration. Sometimes they were deployed artfully as, no doubt, Milner’s chosen name was intended. He decided to tap into a patriotic strain still alive in Britain after the victories of the Seven Years War. The newspapers in April had carried reports that Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, had been elevated ‘to the command of the 1st regiment of dragoons’, a prominent army posting.51 The news must have caught Milner’s attention, for he selected Earl of Pembroke as his ship’s name.
With so many ships emerging from the Whitby yards, it’s unlikely the departure of the Earl of Pembroke merited any attention at all. She was merely the latest off a busy production line, being sent to work in the coal industry as scores had been before her. There are later reports of Whitby’s shipwrights gathering on the piers to mark maiden voyages, throwing hats into the sky as a vessel passed. Coleridge’s ancient mariner would describe the view from the deck: ‘The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, / Merrily did we drop / Below the kirk, below the hill, / Below the lighthouse top.’52
Crossing the bar and catching a breath of sea air, the hull beneath Milner’s feet was at last in motion, the waves slapping her side. Before him a great vista would have opened up: a summer sun glinting off a sea that stretched for leagues and leagues in front of the bark’s rounded bows, until at some point in the very distance it met the sky.