A seascape only ever tells a partial story. The atmosphere above is visible, but no one knows quite what exists beneath the water. It makes for a half-empirical, half-imagined reality upon which a ship is suspended, like a reader midway through a novel: knowing much, imagining more. ‘In mari multa latent’ – In the ocean many things are hidden, wrote the Danish author Erich Pontoppidan in The Natural History of Norway (1755).1 ‘In the hot Summer days’, like those when the Earl of Pembroke sailed, what was hidden sometimes revealed itself. Pushing a score of miles off the coast, Norwegian fishermen would be sounding the seabed when the depth sharply rose from a hundred fathoms to thirty. They knew this was not natural geography. These were not shoals, rising like the contours of a hill. Rather the fishermen believed, Pontoppidan wrote, their lead had struck the body of a kraken, a round, flat creature, ‘full of arms or branches’. ‘At these places they generally find the greatest plenty of Fish’, especially cod and ling tempted from the sea floor. Fishermen were glad to fish above a kraken. But they had to beware. Keeping to their lead lines, they sometimes noticed the depth growing shallower – from thirty to twenty to ten fathoms. ‘They find that the Kraken is raising himself nearer the surface, and then it is not time for them to stay any longer; they immediately leave off fishing, take to their oars, and get away as fast as they can.’2
Telling stories about kraken or Leviathan, as much as showing his apprentice sailors how to heave a rope or to bend a sail, was part of everyday life for veteran masters like Thomas Milner, the first owner-master of the Earl of Pembroke. They were the keepers of knowledge and lore as much as wielders of authority. They knew a spirit of play or an hour’s storytelling was as adhesive for a crew as strict discipline. For Milner these truths would have been learned over many years. Born in Whitby in 1709, at fifty-five he was one of the older mariners in the town in 1764. His career had run in time to the rise of Whitby, her fleet and shipyards. He would have been a young boy when the Coates yard had gathered momentum at Bell Island, and he would have been established as a sailing master by the time Fishburn outflanked them.
Now in the open sea – the anchor dripping on the cathead, the red ensign flying above – in July 1764 Milner had his first chance to assess the qualities of his new collier, to hear the creaks she made, to feel her agility, the way she rolled and pitched or gathered way. In an age before standardisation, every ship was different. The mass of the wood, the curves of the hull, the height of the masts: subtle distinctions in any of these generated the peculiarities that made character. Sailors sometimes spoke of a ship ‘talking’. More often they discussed a ship’s trim – her set on the water, whether by the head or stern or on an even keel. The best of ships were pronounced weatherly, as the Earl of Pembroke certainly was. It was later reckoned that the Earl of Pembroke’s best trim was ‘Three or four Inches by the Stern’.
Her best sailing is with the Wind a point or two abaft the beam she will then run 7 or 8 Knots and carry a weather Helm … No Sea can hurt her laying Too under a Main Sail or Mizon ballanc’d … She is a good Roader and Careens easy and without the least danger … She behaves as well under her courses as most ships … (In a Top Gallant Gale) [She] Steers well and runs about 5 Knots.3
Feeling the first tug of wind in the sails, Milner was at least sailing in tranquil waters again. It was now more than a year since the Treaty of Paris had brought a formal end to the war between Britain and France. Since then the old seaways between the Baltic and Newcastle had filled up. Intended for the coastal trade, surviving records show that the Earl of Pembroke’s maiden voyage was to call for coal at Newcastle before doubling south to London. It meant the collier’s first run would be for ten or eleven leagues north-west – an easy stretch on a summer’s day – until they reached the mouth of the River Tyne.
Now in motion, Milner’s skills were both instinctive and reactive. He was, in that fine phrase of Robert Middlekauff’s, ‘a mechanic of the sea’.4 His task was catching the elemental energy, harnessing it, using it to his best advantage. The rasp of the breeze on his cheeks; a creak from the mizzen; a furtive flutter of a topgallant; the undertow of an eddy: all were hints to be decoded. Like the flinch of a card player or the darting eyes of a Fleet Street thief, the surest signs may be the subtlest. His game was to anticipate, to out-think nature before she played her hand.
There were other stories to tell on the Earl of Pembroke. The English had always considered themselves the masters of the seas. As far back as the reign of Edward III coins had borne devices celebrating the prowess of English ships. In 1764 there were more glorious victories to reflect upon. No story glimmered like that of Admiral Edward Hawke’s 1759 victory at Quiberon Bay. Then, with Britain threatened by France, the most powerful and prosperous European nation, the only obstacle that had stood between Admiral Marshal Conflans and invasion was the navy’s Western Squadron commanded by Hawke. After months of panic at home and cat-and-mouse off France’s Atlantic coast, a storm had blown Hawke away from his station. It had presented Conflans with a chance to escape from the French ports, where he had previously been penned in, to join the French land and sea forces at Quiberon Bay and sail towards Britain.
Blown into port at Torbay in foul weather, Hawke had seemed helpless. A French fleet of twenty-one line-of-battle ships had sailed from Brest on 14 November with the news reaching Britain two days later. A race over the gale-lashed Atlantic had ensued. Conflans had been given a 200-mile head start as he hurried towards Quiberon Bay. But Hawke’s seamanship had been exceptional. By 19 November Hawke’s twenty-three battleships were bearing down on the French fleet. Conflans had no idea Hawke was so close. But even when the British were sighted, Conflans retained his cool. Quiberon Bay lay ahead as a sanctuary into which no enemy could sail. An Admiralty memo of 1756 had advised commanders that Quiberon Bay was a place ‘we dare not follow them’.
Nevertheless on 20 November 1759 Hawke, riding a fierce November gale, chased Conflans among the half-tide rocks and shoals of the bay. Hawke risked everything. ‘We crowded after him with every sail our ships could carry’, he wrote. ‘Probably no British admiral has ever risked battle in such dangerous circumstances’, one historian wrote, ‘no one who saw the “gallant and swift-winged Hawke” go into action … ever forgot that day’.5 Stories of what had happened had been told and retold on quarterdecks and forecastles ever since. There were the forty-knot winds, the French disinclination to fight, HMS Magnanime engaging the warship Héros, killing 400 of her crew before she struck, and Hawke’s Royal George confronting Conflans’ flagship Soleil Royal, getting off broadside after broadside before the marshal’s flagship ran aground and was burnt. The Battle of Quiberon Bay had gone down as one of the most audacious and thrilling victories in British history. Having lost just two of his vessels, Hawke had destroyed the French fleet and killed thousands of its men. It would take the French navy years to recover.
The Whitby merchant fleet had an extra reason to take pride in Hawke’s achievement. In the months before the battle he had adopted an innovative strategy, keeping the Western Squadron victualled at sea. The usual custom had been to relay to port to resupply exhausted stores. But instead merchant vessels had sailed out to provision Hawke in the Atlantic. Among these vessels were a number from Whitby. Hawke’s policy had been successful. Not only had he been able to pen the French in at Brest, but his men had remained unusually healthy. On the day of battle just twenty sailors in the squadron had been listed sick, an astounding figure. The French, meanwhile, had been beset with typhus and dysentery.
Taking naval contracts like those to victual the Western Squadron at sea were part of a new wave of opportunities presented to Whitby’s master mariners. The Seven Years War (1756–63) was unlike the wars of old. It wasn’t centred on a single battlefield, a specific point of water, or even on a particular geographic territory. Considered by many as the first world war, in reality it was a matrix of interconnected conflicts, in India, Europe and North America, where it was called the French and Indian War. As much as a contest of battlefield tactics, the war was a challenge of logistics. Ferrying weapons, transporting troops, maintaining supply lines; these wartime perennials became acute from 1756 onwards. In London it had not taken the Admiralty long to realise Whitby’s merchant fleet offered a solution. With their massive storage capacities and ability to probe into rivers and coastal shallows, the masters and owners of Whitby colliers were being courted by the Admiralty with generous contracts. Milner was among those to profit. In 1759 he was supplying Plymouth dockyard with masts and spars. The next year he was crossing to France. In 1762 he was carrying troops home from the port at Williamstadt. For the willing, there was money to be made. Milner, it seems, was among those to prosper.
If the conflict generated opportunity for the town’s sailors, for those back on the Yorkshire coast it had been a disquieting time. Not long after war was declared against France on 8 July 1756, a letter had appeared in the Caledonian Mercury reporting that a ‘very small Vessel. Foreign built’, had been sighted off the Whitby coast one dawn. On board were seven hands, sounding the approaches to the harbour. They ‘continued so doing until they came close to the Pier Head; and when the People upon the Pier expected that she would have entered the Harbour, she suddenly tacked about and drove along the Shore’.6
Within a year the northern ports of Whitby, Scarborough, Sunderland, Hartlepool and Tynemouth Castle had agreed on a series of flag signals to be hoisted on the sighting of similar suspicious vessels. It wasn’t long before they were needed. In 1758 French privateers captured two Scarborough ships near the coast at Whitby. In February 1760 another privateer began harrying the coastal trade on the east coast, making prizes of two brigantines, plundering their stores, before ransoming them for £300. In January 1761 a twenty-gun vessel was sighted off Whitby. In May the same year, the Otter, a transport, was chased into the harbour by two Frenchmen, who, missing their original target, seized another.7
Milner had sailed in these sanguine waters. After the Capture of Belle-Île off the Brittany coast in 1761 – a brilliant amphibious assault devised by William Pitt, the political hero of the war – Milner was among the transports supplying the troops with cargoes of sheep and bullocks from Cork. The return passage across the Celtic Sea was a dangerous one. On a recent crossing a Whitby-owned vessel called Lion had been separated ‘by a gale of wind’ from the others. The Lion’s captain wrote a letter home, relaying subsequent events. It was post-dated 6 November 1760:
In our passage from Quiberon bay to Corke, being parted from our convoy, by a gale of wind, I was attacked by the St Teresa privateer of St Malo’s, capt Noel Tromythe, of 240 tons, 16 guns, eight swivels and 68 men, but fought seven guns on one side. After a smart engagement for three hours, and monsieur’s boarding me twice, he thought proper to make off, leaving in our ship two of his men killed, and the third captain wounded, who thinks their first captain and a great number of their men were killed. I, together with five of my people, were wounded, and two balls went through my hat. Most of our masts and rigging were quite shattered, all our sails full of shot holes, and our larboard side is very full of musket and cannon balls. His Majesty’s ship the Speedwell has assisted us with twelve men to refit our ship. I had only six guns and twenty people, at most, men and boys.8
The letter captures not only the hostility of the European seas during the early 1760s, it also conveys the depth of patriotic duty sailors felt. The war had changed them. Already competent, the conflict had disrupted their normal rhythms, taking them far from the familiar sea routes. Their outlook had been recalibrated too. Everyone knew about the execution of Admiral John Byng for negligence in March 1757. The circumstances – that Byng had failed to satisfactorily engage a French opponent off Minorca – had been much debated in the coffee houses. On the quarterdecks of men-of-war the lesson had been digested rather more readily. It reinforced an existing hardness in British sailors, encouraging what would ripen into a celebrated blend of qualities: a determination to seize the initiative, a disregard for personal safety, an ironic-detachment from events. Sailors would learn to react to stimuli with opposites. They would respond to danger with indifference, to tragedy with humour, victory with magnanimity. While zigzagging through the perilous shoals, sandbanks, and incisor-like rocks in the St Lawrence River in the celebrated manoeuvre that set the stage for Wolfe’s victory at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, ‘old Killick’, master of a transport Goodwill, was said to have called to his mate, with laudable sangfroid, ‘D— me, if there are not a thousand places in the Thames fifty times more hazardous than this; I am ashamed that Englishmen should make such a rout about it.’9
Beyond pure honour, for merchantmen there was an economic motive too. Into the 1760s, few colliers were insured, a fact that meant the loss of a cargo often resulted in the ruin of a career or the fortunes of a family. Those like Milner who doubled as owners and sailing masters had all the more reason to take care of their ships. They ‘generally had such a high sense of honor’, wrote one of his peers, ‘that no hardships or danger appeared to them so formidable, as an imputation on their conduct as seamen. Had they lost a ship, and it was supposed to be owing either to ignorance, or carelessness, it was long before they were intrusted with the charge of another.’10
We know almost nothing about Milner. We don’t know his height, whether he was dark or fair, round or lithe, loquacious or gloomy. He exists, historically, only in hazy hologram form. Equally, all we need to know is documented in statistics. For if sailing colliers and bringing them safely home was a test of character, it was one Milner passed time and again. The decades from the 1720s to the 1750s brim with accounts of lost transports, vessels striking against Whitby Rock or bilged on the Black Middens off Shields. Yet Milner’s name does not appear once. We know he was given command of a vessel called Mary Ann when he was nineteen. From then, in 1728, throughout his career, there is no documented case of Milner being involved in an accident. It is a reminder that the finest of Whitby’s sailors were those who left the scarcest of traces. All to be found is a laconic record of commands: the Triton in the 1740s, Friends Glory not long after, Neptune in the 1750s and the Earl of Pembroke.11
Milner had a spartan approach to the running of his ships. One way to calculate the workload on the Georgian seas is to compare the ratio of enlisted sailors to registered tonnage. A man-of-war commonly had a ratio of three tons per man. On an East or West Indiaman it was fifteen tons a man. But labour was hardest of all in coasting merchantmen like Whitby colliers, with the sailor-to-tonnage ratio rising to as much as thirty tons per man. In real terms this meant more effort was demanded from each sailor. Managing the ship when she was underway was only the beginning of it. In addition to this, sailors on lightly manned colliers were faced with an endless and exhausting list of duties: hauling anchors, spinning yarn, patching sails, caulking seams, shifting ballast, swabbing timbers.
On occasion masters drove their men too hard. In 1758 a merchant had arrived in the Isles of Scilly, ‘which had been out so long that her bottom was quite green and her rigging and sails bleached white. The crew were so emaciated with continual fatigue and their strength so much exhausted that they could scarcely hold themselves on the yards, and one of them was so weak that he fell from the mainyard as the ship came into the Sound.’12 Nothing like this was ever said against Milner but the facts reveal a picture. On his maiden voyage in the Earl of Pembroke, the ratio stood at twenty-eight tons a man. This tells us several things: Milner was parsimonious, or he had a calculating shrewdness at any rate; he was willing to run his men hard; and he was confident in his ability to pull through in a crisis. Milner’s path to riches was neither paved nor straight. His wealth had been amassed through incrementalism, the gathering together of little profits from long voyages on the northern seas.
The one tangible trace of Milner’s physical presence is retained in a bill of receipt from December 1748. The scrap of paper contains no compelling information at first glance. It only tells us that it was signed at Scarborough and that Milner acknowledged a debt of £1 15s, owed to a John Richardson. At the bottom of the receipt is an intriguing detail. The signature ‘Thos. Milner’ is not signed but written. And within the signature is a half-florid, half-timorous letter ‘M’. The ‘M’ starts confidently with an extravagant loop. But within a fraction of a second the writer loses their confidence. What begins as a deft shape ends with a rushed downward stroke. Perhaps Milner had been resting on a moving surface – there were no shortages of these in his life – but the ‘M’ is more evocative than that. Printed beneath the ‘M’ is the word ‘Mark’, conclusive proof that Milner was illiterate.13
This frail detail opens up Milner’s wider biography. There were many divisions in Georgian society, between titled and common people, men and women, masters and servants. One of the sharpest distinctions was between those able to read and those ‘whose culture was still essentially oral’.14 Milner was of this latter class. His knowledge was practical and instinctive rather than cerebral and learned. For Milner, even the basic practice of dead reckoning – measuring speed in knots with a chip-log and plotting progress on a chart – would have been fraught. That he thrived for so long with this disadvantage speaks of his vigilance. ‘The best navigator is the best looker-outer’, as Pepys said. Whitby sailors knew this only too well. The unusual geography of the town left them naturally cautious. To the east of the piers a treacherous shale shelf, known as Whitby Rock, lay concealed below the waterline. At some point, a channel had been cut across the rock. Known as the Sled or Sledway, it was just wide and deep enough to allow a vessel to pass at high tide. To Whitby’s captains, running the Sled, as the practice was known, became a matter of pride as much as practicality. The channel was entered from the harbour by aligning the rose window of the north transept of the abbey with a starboard bow, and letting ‘it roll along the cliff top’ as a vessel made east.15
This was a typical piece of traditional wisdom, one invested with local meaning that could be handed down from the masters to mates, from servants to apprentices, one generation to the next. To make details memorable, directions were often smoothed into verse: ‘First the Dudgeon, then the Spurn, Flamborough Head is next in turn, Filey Brigg is drawing nigh, Scarboro’ Castle stands on high’, ran the doggerel that pointed the sea path from London to Newcastle, ‘Whitby Rock lies out to sea, So steer two points more northerly’:
Hartlepool lies in the bight,
Seaham Harbour is now in sight.
The ‘Old Man’ says: ‘If the weather’s right,
We’ll be in the Tyne this very night.’16
These mantras, allied with observation, moon-lore and the North Star, Polaris, accompanied Milner wherever he went. Unable to write, he could not commit to the record an eyewitness account of his spell as master of the Earl of Pembroke. But as he sailed out of Whitby, one of his contemporaries was not far away. Unlike Milner, Henry Taylor could write and he captured the life of a Whitby master-mariner in a memoir. ‘I have not been very solicitous about the choice of language, but have endeavoured to write the whole in that plain stile I am accustomed to use in common conversation’, Taylor wrote, ‘and to represent facts as they really were.’17
‘The genius of the inhabitants of Whitby has a most surprising turn for the sea’, Charlton had written in his History. ‘Children as soon as they are capable of action, endeavour to get upon the water, to handle the oar, to manage the sails of a boat, and to steer. Hence it comes to pass, that when they are sent to sea, at the age of thirteen or fourteen years, they are already more than half sailors, and understand every thing belonging to a ship.’18
Henry Taylor had been one such apprentice during Charlton’s early years in Whitby. Raised by a lone parent, there had not been enough funds to send him to school. But even had there been, there was little chance he would have gone. ‘I always had a strong inclination [of a seafaring life]’, he later wrote, ‘and notwithstanding the entreaties of a tender parent, to choose a less dangerous employment, I could not be prevailed on.’19
In 1750, at the age of thirteen, Taylor was bound into a six-year apprenticeship. These were years of drudgery in the coal trade, scarping and dubbing decks, mending sails, caulking the hull with oakum; heaving the ballast, sleeping in doghole hatches before the mast, and subsisting on a diet of beer, Stockton or Suffolk cheese, salted beef, oatmeal and the occasional ox’s head. Meditating on his apprenticeship years later, Taylor decided it was the making of him. The secret, he reckoned, lay in order and routine. Obedience bred discipline. Everything ran to a strict hierarchy: master, mate, carpenter, sailors, apprentices. This chain was further shaded by age and experience. ‘Each one’, wrote Taylor, ‘had some part of the ship’s stores under his particular care, which he was bound to have in readiness whenever called for.’ The sailors were rarely beaten. Instead of blows or abusive language, ‘mates contrived to substitute shame and degradation’. Little challenges were set: the first to turn out of a morning, the best at shining the deck, the strongest at the windlass palls. These ‘were objects contended for by men and boys as points of honor’.20
The surface of the ship was separated into three sections – the forecastle, the main deck and the quarterdeck – all of which were places of different work, that admitted different people, and had different rules. Time was divided into moons, days, tides, watches, the hour it took for grains of sand to empty from one side of a glass to another. Days and nights would merge and vanish in an endless round of heaving anchors, shifting berths, manning braces, bending sails, rummaging the hold and fishing masts. Apprentices ‘never durst go on shore without leave of the mate’, recalled Taylor, and leave was rarely given more than once a week. Instead these boys were to be the energy of the ship, their movements the whim of the captain. This was Taylor’s life for six years. Only on three occasions in that time did his master choose to leave the safety of the coasting trade for something else: deep-water voyages, once to Norway and twice to Stockholm.
Taylor wrote a memoir of these years that committed to history a picture of the Newcastle coal trade. He emerges as an able, industrious hard-headed young man. Having been released from his apprenticeship, he left the coal trade, finding work on a Hull-owned ship bound for the Baltic. Taylor thought the management of this vessel slack from the outset. The master was a lazy fellow, ‘proud and supercilious’, and his mate, ‘though he knew his duty’, was a drunken sop. Sailing before the mast with a set of inexperienced sailors, Taylor watched as disharmony ripened into frequent quarrels. The ship loaded coals at Newcastle and then crossed to Lübeck. It was a well-known but challenging route, weaving between Denmark, Sweden and the splintered islands that guarded the entrance to the Baltic Sea. Each night the master slipped beneath to his cabin to sleep, while the mate drank himself senseless. Alone on deck the young apprentices were abandoned to chart whatever course they wished. Twice they almost foundered.
On returning from Riga, and turning through between the Dwall Grounds, and the main, with a press of wind, the master was so inconsiderate as to go to sleep. It was night, standing in for the land at the rate of five or six knots; the mate, standing on the windlass-end, fell asleep; a young man at the helm, who had often been at Riga, said to me, ‘We are running too far in’; I immediately snatched up the lead, and finding little more than three fathoms, cried out, ‘Hard-a-lee, Tom.’ The helm was immediately put down, the sea being smooth, the ship came quickly about; but so stupidly drunk and asleep was the mate, that we were hauling the head yards about before he awoke.21
This willingness to seize control marked Taylor out. By the next year, at the age of twenty-one, he was offered command of a collier. He was nearly the same age that Milner had been when he had been appointed a master. But Taylor turned down this opportunity, believing himself inexperienced. After another season as a mate, Taylor was again offered command. This time he accepted. It was now the late-1750s, the Seven Years War was in contest. Taylor spent these years sailing the same transport routes as Milner, carrying horses to the River Weser in Germany, armaments to Belle-Île off Brittany, and bullocks and sheep from Cork to the French coast.
Still in his early twenties, Taylor took the lessons of his apprenticeship and moulded them into his own distinctive leadership style. He was firm, frank, sometimes belligerent. At Belle-Île he provoked a diplomatic squabble with the bilious captain of a sloop-of-war whom Taylor accused of rash seamanship. No accusation was as venomous to a naval officer. The incident ended up with the captain boarding Taylor’s collier, catching him by the collar, then making off with his mate. Taylor, obstinate as ever, still refused to desist. He believed a level of inflexibility was vital in the management of a ship. ‘Whenever I got any new men, I took an early opportunity to inform them’, he explained, ‘that I admitted no cursing, swearing, or the like, in my ship; that I would as long as they sailed with me treat them with tenderness and humanity; but unless they governed themselves by the rules which I had prescribed, I would take the first opportunity of discharging them.’
‘The power of emulation, united with sobriety and an ardent application’, Taylor believed, would deliver a sailor from both temptation and an early death on the seas. ‘It has always been my maxim’, Taylor elaborated, ‘To love all men, and fear none.’ And along with his memoir, Taylor may have left behind a tattered cash book belonging to one of the town’s coal colliers which was unearthed among the archives of Barclays Bank in Whitby in the mid-twentieth century. Half-destroyed, the book was once owned by a master called ‘Blash’ Taylor, who had sailed in the 1750s. ‘Blash’, a nickname, was obscure. But Henry was the only Taylor known to have been working in the coasting trade in these years.
The cash book contains the history of a lost trade, a history conveyed by numbers. It shows Taylor’s ship made thirty-four voyages from Newcastle to London during a five-year period, an average of just under seven trips a year. The total cost of the ship when it was purchased was £1,887 9s 7½d, which was divided into the usual sixty-four shares of £29 9s 10d, of which Taylor was the owner of one.22
The book charts the items sourced in fitting out the vessel. There were spars, oars, a topgallant mast, elm board, junk or old rope, ‘coyles’ of twine, hundredweights of rope, ‘skeins’ of Murlin wool. The food for the voyages is tallied too. Suffolk cheese was twelve or thirteen shillings a hundredweight. Salt beef was a staple and was bought for eighteen shillings per hundredweight. Sometimes there would be a bushel of peas (sixteen shillings), a hundredweight of potatoes (eighteen shillings), or a similar measure of raisins (eleven shillings) and several firkins of flour (£1 6s 8d), enough to bake a raisin pudding. To all of this was added a steady flow of alcohol, mostly beer at seven shillings a barrel but sometimes a mixture of brandy and sugar too, to toast special occasions.
But most revealing is the book’s record of interactions at Newcastle. It was there, at Shields, that the Whitby mariners would conduct their business with a representative from the collieries, men known informally as ‘crimps’. The cash book reads:
|
Brandy and sugar for delivery |
|
10s 0d |
|
Master’s bill and lightermen |
|
2s 0d |
|
Ballast heaving |
|
17s 6d |
|
Crimp’s bill and labour |
|
£130 6s 6d |
|
Crimp’s man |
|
2s 6d |
Contained in this list is the whole interaction at Shields. It marks the meeting between master and crimp; the master treating his contact to brandy. There’s another bill for the lightermen – those who sculled the coal up the Tyne in keels – the bluff-bowed sailing craft, forty foot long and twenty foot wide, steered with a great oar. Next the ballast is heaved over the side of the collier and exchanged for the coal, freshly mined from the pits around Durham and Sunderland. Once loaded, the crimp issues his bill. A tip is laid aside for his man. Then the collier is ready for the tide and the wind.
J. M. W. Turner depicted this moment of exchange in his landscape Shields on the River Tyne (1823). Although painted two generations after Milner and Taylor, the scene would have hardly changed. The painting is a dreamy nocturne. A huge, lambent moon shines in the east, its iridescence casting a dazzling blue light that gleams across the black water. The coolness is offset by a flaming fire that burns between two brigs that are being loaded from keels. The coal is heaped high on the crafts. On top of one pile stands a tall figure, throwing a spadeful through one of the ports. Two sailors lean over the starboard rail, idling, risking the ire of the master. In the foreground there is the outline of a lady in conversation with one of the sailors: carrying food, maybe, or enquiring after a ship. The night seems the ideal setting to portray this obscure, mostly forgotten history. The tides have lifted the keels level with the colliers, the crimp has struck his bargain, and the hopes for a profit are at their peak.
This is the scene Milner and the Earl of Pembroke sailed into in July 1764 on their maiden voyage. Loading would take several hours with the rattle of coal clattering against the oak floors: carbon rubbing against wood, the crackle and leap of a fire outside, the shriek of gulls and the cool breeze of a summer’s night.
By the beginning of August 1764 the Earl of Pembroke was doubling back to the south. This was the peak of the sailing season and she was not alone. Making the passage from Newcastle to London alongside her was John Bernard in Amity’s Encrease, William Russell in Neptune, Trews Dobson in George and Mary, Edward Robson in Henry, William Bain in Duke of Cumberland, Theodorus Ambrose in Rockwood, and a dozen others who for the next ten days would become a band of brothers cruising along the coastal route to London.
Colliers travelled in convoys like flocks of birds for protection and navigation. Although this was a passage every master in the coal trade had made dozens of times, it carried an element of danger. While the wars had concluded, there lingered the possibility a rogue privateer might be preying on commerce somewhere in the sea. Then there were the navigational advantages of being one among many. The collier fleets rarely, if ever, stopped at a port. Taylor reckoned some of them ‘have gone seven years, eight or ten voyages each year, and never in all that time put into harbour by the way.’ Almost always afloat, the fleet would progress from one roadstead to the next, mewed up close, their masters keeping them fast at single anchor. ‘I have known upwards of one hundred sail lie wind-bound in Yarmouth-roads’, Taylor wrote, ‘two or three weeks in perfect safety.’23
Once the Earl of Pembroke had passed Whitby’s piers and the broad, rocky expanse of Robin Hood’s Bay, a series of landmarks would pass the starboard bow. There would be Scarborough, where the idea of seaside was beginning, with its castle high on the prow of the cliff and its bathing machines in the shallows. Next would be Filey with its rocky brig darting into the sea, so some fancied, like a dragon’s spine. From there the golden sands of its pancake-flat beach, one of the finest in England, curved in a graceful arc to the chalk cliffs at Flamborough, where gannets nested in crevices and the sea wore hollows in the cliff bottoms. After this was the harbour of refuge at Bridlington, then Spurn Head, before the thickening of the coastal traffic as the colliers passed Hull and the River Ouse.
On a summer’s day this would have been fair sailing, in thirty-five even fathoms. But beyond Hull the waters became treacherous. A Chart of the Sea Coast from London to Flamborough Head (1743) by G. Woodhouse marks the collier’s path with a pricked line. After Hull, the comfortable thirty-five fathoms narrows to an undulating ten or twelve, shallows well capable of throwing up a short, boisterous sea. Where before there had been open water, there were now sandbanks off the Lincolnshire and Norfolk coasts: Burnham Flatts, the Dudgeon Shoal, Hasborough Sand, Orrey, the Lemon. By the opening days of August the collier fleet had passed Yarmouth, rounded the headland at Orford and entered the Thames Estuary. The northern seas were now behind them. Mingling in this, England’s most famous artery, were the seventy-four-gun three-deckers of the Royal Navy with their lines of gun ports and towering masts; the suave, fast-sailing sloops, East Indiamen, and traders from far-flung oceans. Not many days before, a thirty-two-gun frigate, Dolphin, commanded by John Byron had passed through these waters, beginning a voyage of circumnavigation that, ludicrous as it would have seemed to Milner, one day his collier would follow.
All of these cast the Earl of Pembroke, in prime condition on her maiden voyage, into anonymity. But for the customary glance of a naval officer, to check that she had struck her topsails as she was required on passing one of the king’s ships, no one would have noticed the Whitby collier, crouching low in the water with her belly full of coal. In the lower reaches of the Thames, Milner and his mate, John Brown, needed all of their experience. Sea room was narrow. Beating upriver into the westerlies without running foul of a ship was always a challenge. Colliers often ghosted in on the flood tide, a natural conveyance that lifted ships, carrying them past Tilbury, Graves, Dagenham and the horseshoe bends in the Thames at Barking and Greenwich and, finally, to the wharves and Customs House at Wapping. Hundreds of colliers clustered up the narrowing river on a single tide at the height of the season with London, dark, powerful, teeming, unfurling around them.
Opening the Public Advertiser on Tuesday 7 August 1764, and running their eyes down the column headed ‘SHIP NEWS’, a London merchant might have just noticed the earliest recorded trade of Milner’s new collier. At the foot of a subsection titled ‘COLLIERS from Newcastle’, she emerges from obscurity in five neat words: ‘Earl of Pembroke, Thomas Milner.’24
To stroll along the Strand in 1764, London’s chief commercial thoroughfare, was to see the world in miniature. Here almost every one of the elegant four- or five-storey town houses that lined the route had a shop on its ground floor. Glass-fronted, neatly ordered and brightly lit, nowhere on earth showcased such a variety of goods. There was tea from China, coffee from Arabia, cocoa and sugar from Jamaica, cottons and silks from Madras, tobacco from the plantations in Virginia and the Carolinas, furs from New York, and ladies’ stays made from the bones of whales hunted in the bleak northern oceans.
It was this cosmopolitanism that had prompted Joseph Addison, fifty years before, to dub London ‘a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth’.25 Having outpaced Paris at the start of the century, London’s population had climbed to about 750,000 by the 1760s. It now stood poised to become the first European capital since ancient Rome to reach a million inhabitants. ‘The city is now what ancient Rome was’, the London Guide had proclaimed. From the Strand to the opulent streets of Mayfair, the wealthy could peek into windows, hunt out exotic items and indulge in an early incarnation of the modern concept of ‘shopping’. ‘There was never from the earliest ages’, Samuel Johnson wrote, ‘a time in which trade so much engaged the attention of mankind, or commercial gain was sought with such general emulation.’26 The papers did their best to advertise any merchandise as it became available. And on 11 December 1764, four months after Milner sailed up the Thames, they carried news of a different arrival. ‘On Monday evening last’, the London Chronicle announced, ‘the ingenious and much-esteemed Dr Benjamin Franklin, arrived here from Philadelphia.’27
At fifty-eight, Franklin was recognised as a writer of great eloquence and wit, talents displayed in his wildly popular Poor Richard’s Almanac. But his celebrity came most of all from his fearless electrical experiments, when he had astonished the world by taming lightning with a conducting rod. Celebrated across America and Europe as an intrepid ‘electrician’, Franklin had received honorary doctorates from the universities of St Andrews and Oxford, as well as the Royal Society’s Copley Medal. He was now back in London, a city he knew and loved. His earliest visit had come four decades earlier when, as a hearty lad of twenty, he had made himself conspicuous in the capital, swimming gracefully up and down the Thames – skills pioneered in Boston harbour. Now a stout sage, there would be no swimming on this, his third visit to London. It had taken him just a month to cross the Atlantic on a turbulent passage from Philadelphia to the Channel. On 9 December he had reached Portsmouth and a night more had seen him to his old lodgings off the Strand at Craven Street, where Mrs Stevenson the housekeeper had been ‘a good deal surpriz’d to find me in her Parlour’.28
Franklin was happy to be back. A year before he had written to the Stevenson family from Philadelphia:
Of all the enviable Things England has, I envy it most its People. Why should that petty Island, which compar’d to America is but like a stepping Stone in a Brook, scarce enough of it above Water to keep one’s Shoes dry; why, I say, should that little Island, enjoy in almost every Neighbourhood, more sensible, virtuous and elegant Minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 Leagues of our vast Forests.29
In his merry way, Franklin was reflecting on one of the geographical truths of the Georgian world. It was increasingly vast, yet it remained tiny at its core. A one-mile radius from Mrs Stevenson’s parlour, Franklin knew, took in the homes of so many of the age’s leading lights. The artist Joshua Reynolds lived at 47 Leicester Fields. The actor David Garrick lived at 27 Southampton Street. A short distance from there was Covent Garden, home to the composer Thomas Arne, and the elocutionist Thomas Sheridan. Closer still to Craven Street, at the far side of Hungerford Market, were the York Buildings where the maker of scientific instruments, John Bird, worked on his much-desired brass telescopes, quadrants and sextants. Near to Bird was Beaufort Street, where Tobias Smollett had written Roderick Random in 1748. A minute’s walk more would take Franklin away from the lusty commercialism of the Strand into the earthy practicality of Fleet Street and its adjoining maze of courts and alleys – Flying House Court, Hanging Sword Alley, Red Lion Court – home to journalists, pamphleteers, poets and writers, among them Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson.
The proximity of the writers of Fleet Street, the actors of Covent Garden, the politicians of Soho or Westminster and the aristocrats of Mayfair made it all the easier for them to cluster into their own intellectual tribes. ‘Man is a sociable being’, Franklin had once written, a pithy distillation of his conviction that ‘there is a sociable affinity based on the natural instinct of benevolence among fellow humans’.30 Back in the heart of the hive, from December 1764 onwards Franklin would merge into the genial environment that he found so stimulating. London was filled with clubs, debating societies and coffee shops, where friends could gather to chew over the political happenings of the day, debate philosophical schemes or propose projects that may be of benefit to themselves or wider society.
The ‘clubbable’ culture – as Johnson termed it – was in many ways the realisation of an ambition declared by Addison in the Spectator in 1711, of bringing ‘Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges’, and allowing it ‘to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables, and in Coffee houses’.31 There existed clubs of all political stamps and social backgrounds, but often their outlook was pragmatic and humanistic, with emphasis on the Enlightenment virtue of ‘improvement’. Johnson’s ‘Club’ – including Edmund Burke and Joshua Reynolds – met on Monday nights at the Turk’s Head in Greek Street, Soho. Franklin preferred the company of practical men of science. He was a member of the Royal Society Club, styled ‘The Royal Philosophers’, who congregated weekly at the Mitre on Fleet Street, where they blended philosophical conversation with a pint of wine and a formidable menu of fowls and exotic fruits. Franklin would attend whenever he could. ‘I find I love Company, Chat, a Laugh, a Glass and even a Song, as well as ever; and at the same Time relish, better than I used to do, the grave Observations and wise Sentences of Old Men’s Conversation’, he wrote.32
This was ‘Old Men’s’ conversation in the main. But many things had happened in the interval between the end of Franklin’s last visit, in 1762, and the beginning of this new one. Among them was the unexpected appearance of an erudite, intriguing female voice, ‘The Celebrated Mrs Macaulay’. Virtually unknown, in 1763 Catharine Macaulay had delighted the literary world with the publication of the History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line. ‘The History of England by a Lady seems such an extraordinary phenomenon, that every one eagerly asks the reasons of its appearance’, ran a review in the London Chronicle.33 Macaulay was in her early thirties. She was recently married and lived in fashionable St James’s Place, near the palace, an address that belied her political opinions. She was no timid historian. Instead her History of seventeenth-century England was really a long meditation on the question of ‘liberty’ and it emphasised the abuses of political power by a tyrannical ruling elite. Macaulay was not finished yet. She would continue publishing more volumes of her history, along with the odd political tract. In one, Loose Remarks (1767), Macaulay would articulate her preference for democracy, ‘the only form of government which is capable of preserving dominion and freedom to the people’.34
Macaulay’s emergence came at a time when Britons were once again questioning the role of the government in their lives. The last century had seen a development in the apparatus and reach of the state and Franklin, as much as anyone, would have been able to appreciate the massive reach of Britain’s growing empire. The same Union Jacks that fluttered everywhere over London’s skyline had taken on new symbolism in the last few years. It depicted Britannia reborn: boisterous, vast, brawling, brave, glorious, striving, undaunted, favoured, free. This same Union Jack, with its jet blues and fiery reds, flew not only over London and Franklin’s Philadelphia, but ever since the Treaty of Paris had been signed on 10 February 1763 it was aloft in places incomprehensibly distant. In the ‘scratch of a pen’, as Francis Parkman would put it, France had ceded to Britain all its possessions in Quebec, the Great Lakes Region and everything to the east of the Mississippi. While Spain had taken Louisiana in the geopolitical horse-trading, Britain had swapped Florida for Havana. William Pitt had observed that Britain had ‘over-run more world’ in the war than the Romans had conquered in a century.
Franklin approved of Britain’s expansion. As a precocious boy in Boston he had got hold of a copy of Defoe’s An Essay Upon Projects. He had lived to see the brisk, mercantile society Defoe had envisaged take shape. Everywhere London was being improved, by glittering lights, neater pavements and elegant squares. New Westminster Bridge had opened in 1750, costing £389,500. Another bridge had opened at Kew and one at Blackfriars would follow. Land was being turned to profit. A ‘small piece of ground in Piccadilly’, ran a report in 1764, had been sold for £2,500 having been bought a generation before for a mere £30. Charles Dingley, known as the projector of roads, had built the New Road that ran from Edgware to the Angel at Islington, giving London a new outer boundary and plenty of room for expansion. By 1764 Dingley was nurturing ideas for a ‘wind-powered’ sawmill that would eventually open in Limehouse in 1767, winning him a gold medal from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. ‘The folly of projection is very seldom the folly of a fool’, Johnson had reminded his readers in the Adventurer, ‘it is commonly the ebullition of a capacious mind, crowded with variety of knowledge, and heated with intenseness of thought’.35
To enhance the feeling of a nation on the rise was the still-recent accession of George III in October 1760. If Britain was the new Rome, George could hardly be said to be a Sulla or a Caesar – he was known to enjoy gardening too much for either of those comparisons to stick – but he was young, sober and dedicated to his role as sovereign. ‘Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Britain’, he had flattered his audience in his accession speech to Parliament. With thriving trade, a new king, a young optimistic population and a release of pent-up energy after years of conflict, the outlook could hardly have seemed rosier. Already the newspapers were trotting out the cliché ‘a time of profound peace’ to describe the political environment in 1764, as the Earl of Pembroke entered the Thames. But by the time Milner came alongside and made for the Customs House to pay the duty of five shillings a ton on his load of coal, the first signs that this was not going to be a golden age of peace and prosperity were already present. It was well known that the war had been financially ruinous. On 5 January 1763 – a month before the Treaty of Paris was signed – the British national debt stood at the quivering figure of £122,603,336, a sum which generated an annual interest of £4,409,797.36
Concerns about the debt had already influenced British politics. In 1761 Pitt had resigned, having failed to convince his colleagues to declare war on Spain. In May 1762 his long-time colleague and the government’s figurehead, the Duke of Newcastle, had followed Pitt, having fallen out with the king. On 29 May 1762, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, had become First Commissioner of the Treasury. Bute was a problematic character. Just shy of fifty, capable and charming in conversation, Bute had virtues. But many considered him toxic. Since 1755 he had tutored the young prince – now king – George, and there was a general feeling that he had a dangerous ascendancy over him. There were rumours the king could not operate without Bute’s counsel and that a full-length portrait of him hung in the monarch’s private closet. Bute’s pungency was intensified by the fact that he was a Scot at a time when the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 – supported by Highland clans – remained fresh in memory. Unfortunate for Bute, too, was his surname ‘Stuart’, a named loathed by the English. That a Stuart had supplanted a Pitt as Britain’s premier decision-maker was hard to stomach. When it became known that Bute was an advocate for peace – again in contrast to Pitt – many felt that he was acting too hastily, ending a war that was progressing in Britain’s favour. After Bute ascended to power, the dash towards peace had intensified. Following the peace of 1763, the general feeling was that France had been treated too timidly. Rather than ending years of conflict, the peace set a new series of events in motion.
This was the world the Earl of Pembroke entered on her first voyage to London. By 1764 it was possible to glimpse the powerful forces that would shape her life in the years ahead. Resentment towards Bute was one of these. The profound dislike for him as the king’s favourite had been engendered by the most polarising political figure for decades. In 1762 John Wilkes had been in his mid-thirties. As the MP for Aylesbury he had sat on a few committees and supported the Pitt faction, but he had never risen to high office and if he was known for anything at all it was for his scandalous personal life. Famously ugly, with a projecting bottom jaw, uneven teeth and wandering eyes, in a peacock society these disadvantages may have kept Wilkes far out of fashionable circles at home in the shires. But with his sparkling wit, Wilkes had turned his physical appearance into a part of his peculiar, rakish allure. He boasted that he could explain away his face to a woman in thirty minutes. Horace Walpole declared him ‘Abominable in private life, dull in Parliament, but, they say, very entertaining in a room.’37
In 1762 Wilkes had embarked on one of the most outrageous episodes in British political history. As a writer he was a master of devious satire and fiery invective. Loathing Bute and aiming to have Pitt reinstalled, Wilkes had devised a subversive publication he called the North Briton. Conceived in reaction to a pro-government title called the Briton, Wilkes was the chief writer and editor of the North Briton, which he wrote in the voice of a gleeful, smug, provocative Scotsman. For a year Wilkes had used the North Briton as a way of abusing Bute and undermining his political authority. In an early edition Wilkes had his ‘North Briton’ ‘heartily congratulate my dear countrymen on our having at length accomplished the great, long sought and universally national object of all our wishes, the planting of a Scotsman at the head of the English Treasury’.38 Tapping into popular dislike and mistrust of the Scots, Wilkes had invented a spoof publication, The Future Chronicle. Set at some point in the not so distant future, it contained the following news items:
Yesterday morning the two new-raised regiments of Highland guards were reviewed in Hyde Park by his grace the duke of Inverness, who was pleased to say, ‘They kenn’d their business right weel, and went through their exercise very connily.’ … Some time since died Mr John Bull, a very worthy, plain, honest old gentleman, of Saxon descent. He was choked by inadvertently swallowing a thistle, which he had placed by way of ornament on the top of his sallad. For many years before he had enjoyed a remarkable state of good health.39
For ten months the North Briton had progressed in a cocktail of jibes, flouts and jeers at Bute, or as Wilkes put it, ‘good combustible material’ that was served up to its rowdy readership. Although the government soon found out the paper was chiefly produced by Wilkes, they could not prosecute him for libel as he cloaked his authorship in anonymity. As his paper became infamous Wilkes grew ever more intrepid, accusing Bute of ‘incapacity or villainy’ over his handling of the finances. By the time of Franklin’s return in 1764 the North Briton was defunct. Wilkes had finally overreached himself in the infamous edition No. 45, when he had accused the king of lying to Parliament. Months of legal wrangling had followed, but eventually Wilkes was chased into exile and declared an outlaw. ‘This compleated the ruin of that unfortunate gentleman, who engaged for some time so great a part of the public attention, and whose wit, spirit, and good humour, if not carried to such unwarrantable excess, merited, and would, probably, have met with, a very different fortune’, concluded the Annual Register.40
Wilkes had gone, but he had toppled Bute before he left. Replacing the king’s favourite was a new ministry led by George Grenville, Pitt’s assertive brother-in-law. Still aiming to resolve the debt problem, Grenville had continued Bute’s policies. As well as persevering with the Cider Act he looked across the Atlantic for additional sources of income. At the time of the Treaty of Paris the relationship between Britain and her American colonies had seemed robust. ‘Never did England make a Peace more truly and substantially advantageous to herself’, Franklin had written to a friend, ‘for here in America she has laid a broad and strong Foundation on which to erect the most beneficial and certain Commerce, with the Greatness and Stability of her Empire. The Glory of Britain was never higher than at present, and I think you never had a better Prince.’41
But over the months following Franklin’s return to Craven Street, he saw the harmony between the British government and the American colonies erode. Derided as ‘the grand financier’ by Burke, Grenville was firmly of the mind that the colonies should contribute towards the cost of their defence. The colonies, he knew, paid far less in taxes than their British equivalents and the general feeling was that they had benefited enormously from British protection during the Seven Years War. Grenville had immediately started tinkering with the system. He introduced a levy of £7 a ton on the fine Madeira wine that sold so well in the colonies. At the same time he commanded the royal customs officials to do a more rigorous job of collecting existing taxes. On top of this he implemented a new duty on Caribbean molasses, a vital ingredient in American rum.
These measures had been passing through Parliament in 1764 as Fishburn was at work on the Earl of Pembroke. Known collectively as the Sugar Act, one governor reported that the new legislation ‘caused greater alarm in this country than the taking of Fort William Henry did in 1757’.42 A constitutional principle was at stake: the right of Parliament to tax the American colonies without their consent. The tax coincided with a post-war slump in the colonial economy, aggravating its reception. But worse would soon follow in 1765 as the Stamp Act became law. This would levy duties on all stamped documentation including letters, legal papers, college degrees, liquor licences, mortgages and newspapers. Franklin did not anticipate the venomous reaction. But he soon heard about it. Reports reached London of an explosive release of aggression, with raucous mobs in Virginia and Massachusetts. In the tiny Rhode Island colony the invective was as sharp as anywhere. Having seen himself burnt in effigy, one ‘Tory’ supporter of the British government, Dr Thomas Moffat, was outed as one of ‘these infamous Traitors at the first Glance’. ‘I think no Man ought to be hanged for his Looks’, seethed one resident in Newport, Rhode Island, ‘but I am thankfull to Providence, that the Dispositions of some Men are so strongly express’d in their Countenances that they only need to be seen to be despised.’43
The fury found coherence in Boston with a band of dissidents calling themselves the ‘Sons of Liberty’. Colonial buildings were torched and the distributors for stamps were harassed and attacked. One was nearly buried alive. For Franklin himself, who followed reports from the heart of imperial London, the Stamp Act signalled the beginning of his transformation from loyal subject of the king, to revolutionary Patriot warrior.
These cross currents of politics and economics would soon lead to an equally complete transformation for the Earl of Pembroke, which, between 1764–7, lived the most settled years of her life. Milner’s movements, plying the coastal trade, were captured in notices in Lloyds Evening Post and the Public Advertiser. She was in the Pool of London in August 1764. On 20 September she had arrived again from Newcastle. On 19 December she was back on a late-season dash. She returned on 21 March 1765 as the Stamp Act was being passed in Parliament, and then again in June and in October. In 1766 there are gaps – signs possibly of a Baltic cruise or a trip to the Royal Dockyards. Or perhaps the Earl of Pembroke was caught up in the gale of January 1767, a storm as cruel as any Henry Taylor ever saw. Both the Earl of Pembroke and Milner appear again in July 1767. She makes her final appearance in the newspapers on 25 August 1767.
By that time Franklin had met the figure who was to have a more direct influence on the Earl of Pembroke’s life. Franklin was always attracted to ambitious thinkers. In the mid-1760s he had come to know one of the brightest of these, an adventurous young projector who had a specialist knowledge of the East and eloquent insights into Pacific geography. A prickly, clever Scotsman, Alexander Dalrymple was twenty-eight and was already being spoken of as ‘a more romantic person than our modern cold times have produced’. ‘Bred a merchant on dry land’, his brother had written, ‘he has become an able navigator, and if he lives will be an author voluminous and vast.’44
For years Dalrymple had been nurturing ideas about how British trade could be expanded in the east. Most of all, though, he was armed with fresh intelligence about an ancient geographic riddle: the presence of an undiscovered southern continent. Arriving in London in 1765, Dalrymple began to gather friends in support of his scheme. Franklin was one convert; the political theorist Adam Smith was another. In February 1767 the Earl of Shelburne, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, received a letter written by Smith on Dalrymple’s behalf. Smith informed Shelburne that Dalrymple was finishing a manuscript ‘of all the discoveries that have yet been made in the South Seas’. Whether a southern continent existed, Smith acknowledged, ‘may perhaps be uncertain; but supposing it does exist, I am very certain you will never find a man fitter for discovering it, or more determined to hazard everything in order to discover it … The ship properest for such an expedition, he says, would be an old fifty-gun ship without her guns. He does not, however, insist upon this as a sine qua non, but will go in any ship with a hundred to a thousand tons.’45
At intervals Lionel Charlton may have glimpsed Fishburn’s collier as she passed Whitby’s piers. As much a lubber as anyone, even he must have been able to distinguish a Whitby ship. Milner may have brought the Earl of Pembroke home at times, for winter stretches of rest with his wife, in search of crew or supplies or stores. But by the beginning of 1768, now fifty-nine, he was on his familiar passage south again. A seascape by Thomas Luny frames the scene, The Bark ‘Earl of Pembroke’, Later ‘Endeavour’, Leaving Whitby Harbour in 1768. It is a bucolic image: calm, soothing. The Earl of Pembroke glides into a flat, settled sea. A warm light shines overhead. A few stray sailors stand on deck – it is satisfying to think of Milner among them – while on the foreshore two knots of people chat disregarding the bark that ghosts out into the sea behind them.
If the execution of the picture is unremarkable, the choice of moment is inspired. This seascape has a potent narrative force. Events are primed, yet everyone is ignorant. This would be the last the Earl of Pembroke ever saw of her home port. As she slid into the German Ocean events were in flux. In London, Dalrymple’s plans were developing. In Paris, John Wilkes was plotting a sensational return to Britain. And then, high above the ship, high above the clouds, into the heavens and towards the firmament of fixed stars, the planet Venus was travelling on its orbit, soon to intersect the space between the earth and the sun.