At Sea, Lat 22° 20'S, Long 72° 07'E, 14–16 March 1809

Sir Edward Pellew was not a fanciful man. He was, though, warm-hearted and emotional – even sentimental when it came to his boys. He thought anger his worst vice. ‘I would at times wish to believe myself possessed of a good heart but, alas, it is hidden among rubbish and vile passion of temper,’ he once wrote.1 He was, in fact, a man of imagination and some sensitivity, and in the long hours of the storm, when he thought it quite probable that he was about to die, he may well have reflected on the fate of his late enemy, Sir Thomas Troubridge. On the night of 14 March, Culloden was on her own with the fleet in her wake. She was also on the same latitude and now just a few degrees to the east of where Troubridge’s flagship had gone down in another screaming gale two years earlier. The uncanny similarity of their circumstances was not lost on Pellew. Nor was the irony that he, widely thought to have destroyed Troubridge, was now seemingly going to meet an identical fate.

Rear-Admiral Troubridge, a great favourite of Nelson and St Vincent, had been sent to India in 1804 to share the Indies command with Pellew in an old settling of political scores. Pellew was the senior man, and the appointment was a clear affront. He went out on a limb, refused to acknowledge Troubridge and wrote to the Admiralty: ‘I would rather command a frigate with her bowsprit over the rocks of Ushant all my life than command here on such terms. For heaven’s sake, call one of us home.’2

Troubridge, whose high sense of honour was tarnished by a terrible temper, went almost mad with rage and brooded on plans for revenge, including challenging his foe to a duel. The feud resolved itself when – despite conduct that had left him open to a capital charge – the Admiralty came down on Pellew’s side. Troubridge was transferred to the Cape. He fled India in frantic haste, in HMS Blenheim, an old 74 that had been nearly wrecked a year earlier and was falling to pieces, ignoring Pellew’s intention to give him another ship. Blenheim was last seen in a gale south-east of Madagascar, settling low in the water and flying signals of distress, on 1 February 1807.

A legend arose that Pellew had contrived Troubridge’s death for, as his biographer noted, ‘the picture of Pellew resolutely pushing his enemy into a sinking ship was more than imaginative minds could resist’. But Pellew bore Troubridge no malice, lamenting: ‘Brothers could not agree as we were placed.’3

How they would marvel at home now, those idiots. As Culloden fought for her life, Pellew reflected thankfully that, unlike Blenheim, she was in good condition. But if she went down, here would be more fertile material for chatter – Pellew lost in the same manner as his old foe: two fighting admirals who were undone not by the enemy but hurricanes in the Indian Ocean. Had he, indeed, been a fanciful man, Pellew might have imagined Troubridge’s ghost in the seas that flogged Culloden.

*

The first crisis occurred soon after the middle watch took over at midnight on 14 March, when a rogue wave, perhaps sixty feet high, smashed over Culloden’s stern. Its force was such that the ship, charging before the wind, was in immediate danger of broaching to – being turned broadside on to the wind and sea. As Pellew put it, she was

poopt going 11 knots & had all her boats and quarter galleries washed away and lost her mizzen mast. Culloden’s after beams fell in on the Tiller & they could not steer the ship till 6 inches of the beams were cut away.4

Eliza Pellew was in her bed when the quarter gallery exploded in a spray of glass shards and sea that swept through the cabin. She remained composed, sitting up in her nightdress while having six men bailing water from under the bed, and the admiral remarked approvingly that ‘she did not betray any feminine weakness, on the contrary was very heroic.’ Her husband noted proudly, ‘Eliza behaved amazingly well.’ In contrast, her companion, the widow Mrs Cotton, was said to have been utterly terrified.

At daylight men were sent up to cut away the mizzen topmast, but before they could do so it blew off, carrying with it the gaff, the spanker and the whole of the mizzen rigging; and as the wreckage went over the side, it dragged away the boats on the starboard quarter. Soon afterwards it was reported that cannons on the lower deck were in danger of breaking free from their breechings; this threat, at least, was neutralised before it could create havoc.

Over the next twenty-four hours the weather followed a curious pattern. From the logs kept by Captain Pellew and the master, it would seem that there were periodic breaks in the storm, when the Culloden’s crew were able to start clearing some of the debris – and were rewarded with an extra allowance of beef and half a pint of arrack for their stout efforts – only for the blow to resume. At six in the evening Pownoll recorded ‘More moderate with less sea’, but then again at eight, ‘Strong gales with rain at times’.5

Somewhat belatedly, Pellew’s thoughts turned to the Indiamen. During one of the lulls, at daylight on 16 March, he ordered that the ship be brought to ‘to await the convoy’. None of the Indiamen had been seen since the evening of 14 March and as Culloden had been flying along at around nine knots it was plain that they had been left behind. Pellew had no way of knowing that the hindmost group were in fact well over a hundred miles to the east. The storm had passed over them at dawn the previous day and they were now in the clear. But far from dissipating, the wind had acquired a new force, and was now bearing down on Culloden.

The second onslaught was signalled by a typical feature of hurricanes, a sudden and complete shift of the wind’s direction – in this case from east-south-east to north-west. The Culloden’s crew was caught unawares and the ship was in immediate danger of broaching to. While they were still trying to bring her about, another giant wave came out of the lumpy grey sea and smashed over her stern, this time on the larboard side, and washed away the other quarter gallery.

There is no mention of how Eliza Pellew and her terrified friend, Mrs Cotton, responded to this second inundation of their quarters. But during the course of the night even Pellew started to entertain doubts as to whether the Culloden could take much more. Having so far believed this to be ‘a most violent gale’, he now revised his opinion. ‘I may indeed call it, rather a hurricane,’ he wrote.6

Rain came on harder than ever and as the wind strengthened it chased flying streaks of white foam across the sea until at some point the whole ocean seemed to turn white; the wind’s force was tearing the crest off the waves. One who sailed through such a storm wrote: ‘It became difficult to make out where the surface of the sea began or ended.’

It required a great deal to sink a wooden ship. As some of the First Fleet ships had demonstrated, a three-masted square-rigger could broach to and stay down on her beam ends for hours – could have water seven feet deep swirling around below, and still survive. Accounts from ships that did founder in mid-ocean are, obviously, rare. In one instance, however, HMS Centaur, a Third Rate caught in a gale in the West Indies in 1782, was kept afloat for days after being laid on her beam ends and smashed to pieces internally by loose cannons. Only when her pumps became choked was her fate sealed and on the seventh day she settled steadily in the sea, so that for a while she ‘appeared little more than suspended’, before finally foundering.*

On Culloden, the chain pump – a cyclical device that drew water up in buckets – was still in working order, as were the hand pumps. But she had taken a terrible pounding over the past three days. Late that night she ‘strained and laboured in every part of the upper works and decks’. This created a new danger. Hull timbers were being worked apart and the caulking that sealed them breached. She was taking water in at various points, not only on to the orlop but in the lower gundeck.

The men were near the end of their collective tether. A number would certainly have suffered injuries of greater or lesser severity.† The ship was close to collapse as well. Pellew confided later: ‘Had it continued six hours longer with the same violence, I believe she would have closed all our accounts in this life … Had not the old Culloden been in good condition, she must have gone down.’7

Instead, one final furious burst just before dawn on 17 March signalled the end. The wind started to moderate. Around noon, the hands again began setting the ship to rights. The sky cleared and the sea dropped and that night, for the first time in weeks, the Culloden’s crew could point to the brilliance above them, the Southern Cross dazzling on the larboard beam, and the sea, gone from black and malevolent to a luminous phosphorescence. Extra casks of beef were broken out, and an additional ration of grog was ordered for every man.

Celebrations in the stern were no less heartfelt. Mrs Cotton became intensely gay and promptly fell in love with another of Pellew’s guests, an Army officer named Cochrane, who gave every indication of responding equally to her ardour.8

A course was set for the Cape. Thinking of the Indiamen, Pellew asked to be brought news of any sightings. Just after midnight on 24 March, under a bright moon, a lookout reported two strange sails, but they turned out to be American whalers. Ten days later, when they passed Cape Agulhas, the southern tip of Africa, he still had no intelligence of the fleet.

*

Four Indiamen had been close to Culloden at the onset of the storm and had tried to keep up with her. The Calcutta was sailing alongside to windward with the Bengal in her wake. Some way behind were the Lady Jane Dundas and the Jane Duchess of Gordon. All had up close-reefed main topsails and foresails and were going along fast.

That was on the evening of 14 March, and it was the last that was ever seen of them.

There was a curious if crude symmetry about each pair of ships: the two named after titled ladies, the largest in the fleet at 826 and 822 tons, disappearing together into the gloom; and the two named after Company possessions, near-identical products of the Wells yard – launched within a year of each other and with only two inches in length between them – and both deeply laden by the head. That symmetry would extend to the mystery of what happened to them. Most of the surviving Indiamen captains – who had hove to and therefore escaped the worst – concluded that they had simply been overwhelmed:

Which is all well enough; but it assumes that all four ships made it through the night of 14 March. In fact, the other ship last seen running with them, HMS Terpsichore, almost went down herself that night – despite being strongly crewed – after being blown down on her broadside for several hours. All in all, the notion that four Indiamen stayed together in the rough vicinity of the Culloden until 16 March, while the rest of the fleet was dispersed over hundreds of square miles, is too pat.

One view offered at the time attracted little attention, perhaps because it came from one of the less-experienced captains. But Nesbitt of the Huddart had also been close to Culloden on the evening of 14 March, had been the last to see the missing ships, and had questioned Captain Gordon of the Terpsichore. At first he found it hard to imagine that the four finest Indiamen could have gone down when his own much-maligned ship had survived, but had his opinion ‘entirely altered’ by what he heard from Gordon.10 Nesbitt’s theory, expounded at the subsequent inquiry, forms the basis of the following account.

*

The Lady Jane Dundas and the Jane Duchess of Gordon followed Culloden into the black, mountainous crests of the night of 14 March. Like others they were ill-manned, but otherwise in good sailing trim and neither had the loading problems of Bengal and Calcutta.

In the stern of the Lady Jane Dundas, General Macdowall contemplated death. Since daylight the dreadful, vast shape outside the rear gallery had been rising and falling, growing steadily larger in the distance between the crests and the troughs, and although this evolution was almost imperceptible to the eye, it was felt in the increasingly violent blows that fell upon the ship. No dinner could be served and when darkness closed around them, Macdowall and Capper clung to chairs cleated to the floor as she shuddered, twisted and fell, their faces now illuminated only by a flickering candle. Capper would have been less than human had he not been cursing his last-minute decision to leave Madras and join his friend.

Similar scenes were to be found in each compartment of the great cabin, and, above it, in the roundhouse, where Colonel Orr huddled with his wife and two children and Captain Macpherson with his wife, and in steerage where the four Wintle children, William, Emily, Augusta and Harriet, were terribly alone.

That night, as the gale neared its ferocious peak, Captain Eckford decided to stop scudding. He had lost sight of the flagship late in the afternoon, so there was no longer any question of keeping up, and the longer the Lady Jane Dundas ran, the greater was the chance that she would broach to. As most captains had already done, he gave orders for the close-reefed main topsails and foresails to be taken in and everything made snug. Topmen went aloft, handed in the sails, and the Dundas slowed rapidly from around nine knots.

As she did so, the Jane Duchess of Gordon, which had been following under the same press of sail, came up out of the dark.

There was no visibility until the last moment, so there was no warning. In an instant, the impact of one wooden juggernaut, surfing down a wave into another, brought about their mutual destruction. In the shattering shock of the collision, masts snapped like sticks and the great oak timbers of the hulls splintered. Inside the ships, bulkheads collapsed with a series of thunderous cracks. Both went rapidly to pieces.

Though this ensured the death of everyone on board both ships, it was not necessarily sudden. Even after breaking up, sections of ship might stay afloat for some time, most typically the high stern quarter where the cabin passengers found themselves, suddenly and curiously, exposed to the tempest, drenched and wind-blown. For some time they were borne up in a part of the ship that was still vaguely identifiable by its shape but no longer familiar as their surroundings of these past weeks. Finally, piece by piece it disintegrated, until they found themselves floating and entangled among bits of wreckage.

On the Jane Duchess of Gordon, about a hundred and fifty souls were lost including twenty-seven cabin passengers. William Hope would not in the end build a great house in the country and lord it over his social betters. At the last, the nabob of Madras was reduced again to a humble station; although he was far the richest man on the ship, when the passenger list was published later, his name, totally unknown in England, was at the bottom, below eleven army officers and two gentlemen, John Hayes, Esq., and J.P. Moore, Esq. He was simply Mr W. Hope.

A similar number died on the Lady Jane Dundas, among them General Macdowall and the two colonels, Orr and Capper. In the minutes left to him after the ship broke up, Macdowall had enough time to reflect that he was being spared scandal and disgrace and, for a military man of his time and connections, death may have been preferable. He would not hear the damning verdict of the Directors: that he had ‘encouraged a spirit of discontent and insubordination which it was his duty to repress’, nor that his conduct had ‘imperiously demanded our most prompt and decisive animadversion’.11

Arguably worse for Macdowall than any censure, however, would have been the consequences of his actions. A few months later, when Madras was on the brink of civil war, one of his old acquaintances in the settlement, unaware of his death, wrote savagely:

He must be cursed by the Army as the chief cause of this disgrace and if he has a grain of feeling must reproach himself to the last hour of his life for the misery he has occasioned.12

To the last hour of his life, whatever agonies of conscience he did suffer, Macdowall was spared that.

*

Meanwhile the Calcutta and Bengal had continued to scud through the night. They had been closer to Culloden and were oblivious to the calamity that had occurred in their wake. Captains Maxwell and Sharpe had concerns enough of their own. Both feared their ships had been too deeply laden with saltpetre. On the other hand, they were the finest Indiamen of their type, beautiful products of the Wells yard. Somehow they had avoided the navy press, and in Maxwell and Sharpe they had the ablest commanders in the fleet.

Maxwell tried to keep his passengers’ spirits up. All Indiamen captains strived for a confident demeanour – for, as one of them noted, ‘landsmen are adrift at sea at the best of times, but in bad weather their ignorance magnifies the peril in their eyes; much depends on how the captain conducts himself’ – but Maxwell was known for his way with anxious civilians.13 That was just as well because there was no trace in Calcutta now of an Austen-like comedy of manners. The presence of Emilia Scott only made matters worse. Even if the term Jonah was never used, her previous brushes with death gave rise to what a captain sensitive to the mood in the cuddy called ‘a general feeling of superstitious despondency’.14

Nothing could have prepared poor Emilia for the past twenty-four hours. Who could have imagined that she should find herself caught up in another Indiaman disaster? Certainly not her old acquaintance William Hickey.

Hickey was at his home, Little Hall Barn in Beaconsfield, some months later, writing his memoirs and recalling old India days, when he heard what had befallen many of his friends in the Second Fleet. It sent him back to his own experiences and the time when he was bound for Calcutta, a lawyer with a young wife, and a ferocious Indian Ocean storm blew up. His account is a compelling one, and we may picture him, an old man, adventures and travels over, rereading it and wondering at the final hours of his friends.

In great tribulation I returned to my cabin, telling Mrs Hickey to secure anything she was particularly anxious about and prepare herself to undergo severe trials. At seven each of us swallowed a dish of tea, the last and only refreshment we had for many subsequent hours.

At eight in the morning it began to blow hard, torrents of rain pouring down, rendering it almost as dark as night. Then was an order first given to take in top-gallant sails and reef topsails. The order was too late; the instant the sails were lowered they were blown to atoms. The sea suddenly increased to an inconceivable height, the wind roaring to such a degree that the officers on deck could not make themselves heard by the crew by the largest speaking trumpets. Between nine and ten it blew an absolute hurricane. The entire ocean was in a foam as white as soap suds. The ship began to roll with unparalleled velocity from side to side, each gunwale, with half the quarterdeck, being submerged in water each roll, so that we every moment expected she would be bottom uppermost or roll her sides out.

Thus buffeted about on the angry ocean, I told my poor Charlotte, whom I had secured in the best way I could and was endeavouring to support, that all must soon be over, it being quite impossible that wood and iron could long sustain such extraordinary and terrific motion. The dear woman, with a composure and serenity that struck me most forcibly, mildly replied, ‘God’s will be done, to that I bend with humble resignation, blessing a benevolent providence for permitting me, my dearest William, to expire with you, but oh! My dearest love, let us in the agonies of death not be separated,’ and she clasped me in her arms.

The ship was apparently full of water, and seemed to be so completely overwhelmed that we all thought she was settling downward. Nevertheless the velocity and depth of her rolling abated nothing, tearing away every article that could be moved; not a bureau, chest or trunk but broke loose and was soon demolished, the contents, from the quickness and constant splashing from the one side to the other of the ship, becoming a perfect paste.

By two in the afternoon every bulkhead between decks except that of my cabin had fallen from the violent labouring. The folding door that opened into the great cabin was torn off its hinges and broken to pieces, exposing to our view the foaming surges through the great cabin’s stern windows. If we look round the miserable group that surround us no eye beams comfort, no tongue speaks consolation, and when we throw our imagination beyond – to the death-like darkness, the howling blast, the raging and merciless element, expected at every moment to become our horrid habitation – surely, surely it is the most terrible of deaths!15

In Hickey’s case, the seemingly impossible occurred. The wind abated, the sea fell.

On Bengal and Calcutta, something similar happened. Two days of turmoil passed. By the evening of 15 March they were still in Culloden’s vicinity. Like her, they experienced a lull; like her too they had lost masts and were awash below. But as Maxwell and Sharpe surveyed the damage, optimism rose. The worst, it seemed, was past.

Those hopes were swiftly and savagely dispelled. The hurricane’s sudden return from the north-west had caught Culloden unawares and caused severe damage. On the two Indiamen the effect was fatal. Manning was probably a factor: laid down on their leesides, they were unable to pump out water quickly enough and were gradually overwhelmed.

Their death throes were more prolonged than those of Lady Jane Dundas and Jane Duchess of Gordon. As water rose on the gundecks, passengers did what others had in similar circumstances – they joined the seamen and stood shoulder-to-shoulder at the pumps, hauling for all they were worth, drenched and exhausted.

In extremis, seamen often went below to break into the liquor stores, but that stage had been passed on Bengal and Calcutta. Everything below was already in pieces. There may have been an attempt to launch the ship’s boats, although in all likelihood they were in pieces too. The upper deck was certainly awash and to retain their position men had to catch hold of ropes and stays, all in a last, dim hope that the wind would shift and allow the wreck to spring upright. Clinging for life to the slippery surface, they were mute as waves broke over them. From time to time a sea greater than the last would catch a man in an exposed position – and he would disappear over the side, a ghastly face in a flurry of limbs.

The ladies and gentlemen had retreated to the roundhouse, the highest internal point of the ship. At some point the water intruded. The sea was not cold, felt, rather, surprisingly warm. At first it churned around their feet, then washed away, only to return, and this time higher. Chairs had been cleated to the deck, but bureaus and tables were now being borne around the cabin. It made an odd sight. The stern windows were gone.

Contemporary accounts of ships in their death throes referred to ‘the sufferers’ praying, weeping and crying out for help. The truth may have been more prosaic. Robert Eastwick, a captain who spent a lifetime in Indian waters, left a record of his closest experience of drowning that is as convincing as it is understated. He was among a group of men, lying drenched and mute with fear, awaiting the inevitable on a sinking ship.

That expression of a human instinct for bodily contact at the last has a compelling ring of truth. In an image of the roundhouse on another doomed Indiaman – the Halsewell, lost in 1786 – the artist Thomas Stothard represented in a way neither facile nor sentimental, a company facing certain death. Individuals are displayed around a grim, dark little space. No one looks at anyone else; vacant, distracted gazes are fixed on another place. Some of the figures are defined by their isolation – a man, his face averted in horror, a young woman seated on the floor, her arms crossed in shivery dread. Others cling to one another for comfort – Captain Richard Pierce enfolds his two daughters. And, in a corner, a recumbent man, his face a mask of resigned despair, supports another lying across him. Stothard based the painting on survivors’ testimony and though it is melodramatic for modern tastes, it chimed powerfully with an age that had knowledge of these things. Perhaps in this tableau we may glimpse something of the last hours of the Calcutta: Emilia Scott clutching on to the husband whose illness had brought them to this pass; and Harriett Arnott and Frances Parr, the widows united by the murder of their husbands and now sharing their final moments.

Hickey thought it the most terrible of deaths, but surely the most terrible thing about drowning was the fear of it. They had spent many hours imagining the unimaginable, so when the seas finally dragged them from timbers and ropes, and took them away into an immense place, it did not feel so strange after all. Their real sufferings were behind them. There was a final struggle and a brief agony gasping for breath, then just the salt water that had become everything and was the last thing of all.

Notes

1. Parkinson, Pellew, p.367

2. Ibid., p.359

3. Ibid., pp.373 & 364

4. Cardew, Appendix D, Pellew to Barlow, 14 April 1809

5. ADM 51/1866, log of the Culloden

6. Cardew, Appendix D, Pellew to Barlow, 14 April 1809

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. L/MAR/1/23, narrative of Missing Ships

10. Ibid., narrative of Capt Nesbitt

11. E/4/904, despatch to Fort St George dated 15 September 1809, British Library (APAC)

12. MSS Eur F151/20, Munro papers, Thackeray to Munro, 2 September 1809

13. Eastwick, pp.260–1

14. Ibid.

15. Hickey, Vol iii, pp.19–22. This is an edited version

16. Eastwick, p.72

* Captain Inglefield of the Centaur was among eleven men to escape in a pinnace and sail to safety. The remainder of a crew of around five hundred died with the ship. See Duncan, The Mariner’s Chronicle, pp.173–89.

† All the ships suffered casualties among their crews but only fatalities are mentioned in the logs.