At Sea, Table Bay and the Downs, 15 March–12 July 1809

Why that tiny island was so productive of turmoil, nobody was sure. To sail past Ile de France in the south-west monsoon was to see a gem of the Indian Ocean, lustrous and green with a high interior of mountains shaped curiously like the stupas of oriental temples, or a row of jagged teeth. Some navigators said it was these peaks, protruding amid an empty ocean, which disrupted the monsoon wind when it switched to the north-east, thus setting in motion the forces that culminated in a Force 12 on Admiral Beaufort’s scale. Others maintained that there was a wind unique to the island, a northerly monsoon, and it was this which – in passing over its adjacent warm and immensely deep waters – stirred its demons. Still others, plain superstitious, would have looked at that odd skyline again, shrugged, and concluded that it was simply a place that no seamen should go near.

It was a sight that had become familiar to Corbet and the Nereide, and in mid-March they were approaching it again. Three weeks had passed since their departure from Table Bay to resume the blockade and the prospect of spending the months ahead in zigzag cruising off Port Louis oppressed the ship. Corbet’s promise of a new regime, the assurance to his court martial that ‘the weeds of dissatisfaction having been rooted out, the soil will now bear more gentle tillage’, was the subject of bleak humour at mess tables. Between 6 and 11 March, two men received twenty-six lashes each for drunkenness, six got twenty-four for neglect of duty, and two a mere twelve for insolence. One man was given six – although for what, only Corbet knew.1

There had been no beatings for four days when the Nereide encountered what the captain described at first as ‘strong gales & dark gloomy weather with a heavy sea’. That was on 15 March. She was 370 miles south-west of Bourbon, and the hurricane was racing towards her from the east.

It arrived at about four the next afternoon, having destroyed four Indiamen in its wake a few hours earlier. Corbet’s log records:

Corbet later averred that any other frigate would have capsized and there is no reason to doubt him, for whatever his failings, seamanship was not among them. The wind was blowing ‘harder than ever I had before seen it,’ he wrote.3 Nereide was so far down on her beam ends that the lee side of the quarterdeck was under water. The greatest danger now was of the remaining masts going over the side and, with the weight of wreckage, dragging her down. Corbet ordered the mainmast to be felled, and she righted.

Just after noon the wind dropped and for an extraordinary few minutes the air was calm. The sea, however, was not. A wave surged out of it, smashing in Nereide’s entire stern. Corbet, anticipating that the wind was about to return, had the fore-topmast cut down as well. Of the three masts and their network of rigging, only the lower section of the foremast now remained standing.

The captain, surveying the object of his pride, noted with horror: ‘Thus in a quarter of an hour was the ship, from being in a most perfect state, become a wreck.’4

As in the case of all the ships to have been assailed by the hurricane, the wind came back suddenly from the north-west. The Nereide was driven along at eleven knots under a single bare pole, directly into a sea running vast from the south-east. Corbet could still barely believe it himself when he wrote to Bertie at the Cape: ‘This, Sir, will give you some idea of the gale. I was in great alarm for the danger of scudding against the tremendous SE sea, but to my astonishment the NW wind so completely overpowered it that we did not feel any inconvenience from it.’5

In this fashion the frigate ran at between ten and eleven knots for almost twenty-four hours, until noon of 17 March when the hurricane blew itself out and the Nereide’s crew, exhausted and dazed, bent and set a new foresail. In the process, a topman named David Phillips was overcome, fell into the sea and was drowned. He had been a model hand, or at least an invisible one, being one of the few never to feel Corbet’s lash. Apart from the ‘Black Boy’ mentioned in the log, seemingly some hapless lad taken on at the Cape, Phillips was the only death.

They spent days at anchor, clearing wreckage, and were still repairing the ship when a lookout sighted five strange sails. They were the battered remnants of the Second Fleet.

*

It would have been bad enough for any navy captain to be found in such a state by Indiamen. For one with Corbet’s mania for smartness it was utterly galling, especially as they were from a group that had come through the storm in considerably better shape than Nereide. When Captain Graham of the William Pitt came on board and asked if he would convoy them, Corbet appears to have been somewhat ungracious. Graham recorded in his log that Corbet initially refused, ‘in consequence of the disabled state of his ship’, before agreeing ‘as long as our sailing did not detain him’.6

Corbet later put it differently to Admiral Bertie. ‘I conceived it my duty to see them in safety as far as my way was theirs and accordingly took charge of them,’ he wrote. The benefit was, in fact, mutual as the Indiamen provided the wounded frigate with much-needed spars and hawsers. Once she had rigged a jury mast, they set a course for the Cape – the Nereide, followed by the William Pitt, Huddart, Harriet, Euphrates and the American Atlantic.

In all the thousands of square miles traversed by ships since the storm, it was almost uncanny how scattered ships continued to encounter one another in that vast space. On 25 March, four more of the Indiamen were sighted, Indus, Sovereign, Lord Eldon and Northumberland. They too fell in with the convoy, and at some point the captains were invited to join Corbet on the Nereide.

He became quite garrulous, telling them that in twenty years at sea he had never experienced such a storm and had believed Nereide to be doomed. As they talked it became plain that the further west a ship had been when the first gale came on, the more she had suffered, and as the Nereide had been in the most westerly position of all Corbet may have been feeling less touchy as they proceeded down south-east Africa. It pained him that he had been forced to turn back from Ile de France yet again, but Admiral Bertie had always been most amiable towards him – looked on him with great favour.

Another admiral had anchored in Table Bay, however, and he did not look on Corbet with favour. Sir Edward Pellew had just found out about the mutiny on Nereide, and he had a score to settle with her captain.

*

Lord Caledon, the young governor at the Cape, did not often receive distinguished visitors and when HMS Culloden came into Table Bay on 5 April with the daughter of a former Governor-General of India he made a tremendous fuss of her. The Pellew entourage were swept up to the Castle where Eliza and her husband were installed in a chamber with a splendid view of Table Mountain and treated with ‘the most marked attention and hospitable kindness’.

Pellew in the meantime made it his business to find out what had happened on the Nereide since her departure from Bombay in November. He noted that instead of proceeding directly to the Cape, as he had ordered, Corbet had diverted to Ile de France. There was nothing to be done about that; his own orders had been superseded by those from Bertie. But the affair still left a foul taste in his mouth. The Nereide mutiny could and should have been averted.

Then Pellew read the court-martial proceedings, and what he found made his blood boil. All the suspicions roused by the petition to him were confirmed. Corbet, moreover, was not only a tyrant but deceitful. It turned out that at the court martial, he had misrepresented what passed at Bombay by producing a selective version of his correspondence with Pellew – one that omitted the admiral’s marks of displeasure.7 Pellew lost no time in pursuing the matter with Bertie.

It was bound to be an awkward business. The two admirals had been rivals in the same ocean. Bertie, moreover, had a reputation for being surly and brusque, and he had been irritated when Pellew tried to detain one of his most energetic captains at Bombay.8 After what would seem to have been an icy meeting, Pellew wrote to Bertie on 8 April.

Sir, While the Nereide was in India I had great reason to be displeased with the disrespectful style of Capt Corbet’s correspondence which I expressed to him in a letter of which a copy is enclosed for your perusal. Since my arrival here I find he produced a part of that correspondence on his late trial, accompanied with expressions of a similar tendency.

Had the Nereide been in port I should have called him to a publick account for his conduct, so derogatory to the duty he owed to his superior officer. Upon reading over the whole correspondence which is now before you it will appear that Capt Corbet’s conduct has been well deserving of judicial animadversion which his absence only has exempted him.9

This letter was purely for form’s sake. Pellew expected no support from Bertie and was keeping his powder dry for the Admiralty. At this stage, both believed that Nereide was still cruising off Ile de France.

*

The first survivors limped in two days later – the Hugh Inglis and Earl St Vincent with HMS Terpsichore. The frigate in particular bore marks of the storm and Captain Gordon related what would become a familiar litany, of a very narrow escape after being blown down on her broadside for several hours. Both the Indiamen had also broached to, the Hugh Inglis being especially fortunate to have survived in her leaky state.

The following day, eight Indiamen were sighted off Table Bay and paused for Captain Graham of the William Pitt to write to Pellew, giving their names and a brief résumé. They had just parted from HMS Nereide, he wrote, and were sufficiently patched up to proceed to St Helena. The exception was the Indus which needed further repairs.

Corbet, in the meantime, had broken off short of Table Bay and put in at the other side of the Cape peninsula. Simon’s Bay, actually a cove within the larger False Bay, was also about twenty miles distant from Capetown, and Corbet stayed there. He was fully occupied with repairing his ship; it is also quite possible that, hearing of Pellew’s presence in town, he was keen to stay out of the way.

But although they did not meet, Pellew had no sooner heard of Corbet’s return than he wrote to him, excoriating what he called ‘your contumacious conduct’.

This blistering epistle was signed, a touch ironically, Your Very Humble Servant.

Corbet, as ever, was far from contrite.

So fully conscious am I of the rectitude of my intentions and the respect continually paid to my superiors, both in India, and ever, that I have to regret much the want of a sufficient number of members for legal animadversion, as I cannot suppose that any court martial could in justice pass a reprimand couched in as strong and severe terms as yours is.11

Significantly, however, he did not write this letter until four days after Culloden sailed and in that time he kept his head down. When he emerged, it was to send a bleating note to Bertie, accusing Pellew of ‘an abuse of power, as well as most severe cruelty to a young officer’.12

Corbet always had a subjective notion of cruelty. Since the execution of Joseph Wilkinson, his bête noire had become a seaman named James Maxfield, who rarely got less than thirty-six lashes, whether for gambling, drunkenness or insolence. Another regular, Joshua Atherton, was given twenty for ‘provoking gestures’, so a spirit of defiance remained alive among the Nereide’s seamen.

But Bertie could not protect his protégé for ever. Pellew was about to forward a record of his dealings with Corbet to the Admiralty, including the men’s original petition. While drawing attention to ‘the improper tenor of Captain Corbet’s language to a superior officer’, his main intention was to expose him for the kind of brute who no longer found favour in the Navy. ‘Their Lordships’, he wrote with emphasis, ‘should be acquainted with the facts in the petition.’13 Their Lordships would indeed take note.

*

Pellew’s vigour in pursuing Corbet was not matched by an equal concern for the Indiamen. Once the lame ducks of the fleet had appeared – the Huddart, the Indus and the leaky Hugh Inglis – Pellew’s fears for the others were too easily assuaged. On the day Culloden left the Cape, he wrote to Sir George Barlow.

You will be glad to hear that we have escaped with our convoy from the effects of a most violent gale (I may indeed call it, rather, a Hurricane) by which we were assailed on the 14th, 15th and 16th of March in Lat 23° 30'S, Long 61° 00'. A total separation took place and every body shifted for themselves, looking only to their own preservation, and more or less every ship suffered. The Culloden did not escape without great injury and loss; the particulars I have no doubt Eliza will convey to Lady Barlow. She had six men for a whole night bailing water from under her bed.14

Eliza, it transpired, had suffered some mishap, possibly a miscarriage, but was now ‘well, cheerful and happy, and I believe in a way to repair her loss’. She and Pownoll rode out with a party of gentlefolk to the rolling vineyards around Constantia, source of the only Cape wine thought palatable by British visitors, and declared it all delightful – ‘the weather, remarkably fine, adding to the beauty of the scene’. The widow Mrs Cotton was by now ‘much adored by Capt Cochrane and adoring him’. Pellew remarked indulgently: ‘Whether it will end in matrimony, I will not venture to say, and as both are past the days of imprudence, I have not thought it proper to interfere.’15

Having emphasised the severity of the storm, he then made light of the missing ships, telling Barlow blithely, ‘they are, I consider, gone on to St Helena, which was the second rendezvous’. It was not long before he was disillusioned. The Culloden left Capetown on 14 April with the ships that had required most repairs and reached St Helena eleven days later. Seven Indiamen were at anchor, but of the Calcutta, Bengal, Lady Jane Dundas and Jane Duchess of Gordon there was still no sign. Now seriously worried, Pellew stayed another ten days in the hope that they might yet appear.

He was still there when ‘Pandora’s Box’ came racing in. The Sir Stephen Lushington, bringing George Buchan with Barlow’s dispatches from Madras, had departed more than two weeks after the Second Fleet but had caught up with them by sailing non-stop from Madras to St Helena in seventy-nine days. In crossing the Indian Ocean, she had regularly put 170 miles behind her from noon to noon, before slowing to around 60 miles a day as Captain Hay negotiated the treacherous passage around south-east Africa. On the final approach to the Cape, a fresh gale blew up in the south-east, sweeping them round it and into the Atlantic Ocean in a single exhilarating day when they logged 245 miles.16

Buchan went to see Pellew directly. Both were Barlow’s allies and each was able to add something to the other’s knowledge. Buchan learnt that the Lady Jane Dundas, on which he had been due to sail, had not been sighted for weeks. Pellew heard about the growing turmoil in Madras. He dashed off a note to Barlow, promising to join ‘your confirmed friends’ Buchan and Dick in opposing the ‘incendiaries and malcontents’ arrayed against him. ‘We move off for England tomorrow … This will give us a good month the start of Macdowall and prepare every subject for the consideration of the Directors.’

The fleet sailed again on 9 May and now as the days passed pulses quickened. When a strange sail under English colours was sighted in the north, she brought recent news from Europe which Pellew sent around the ships: ‘Austria at war with France. Spain going on well. King of Sweden dethroned.’ Another stranger brought news of the Navy’s victory at the Battle of Aix Roads and when they met a trio of whalers off Ascension, Pellew sent across to obtain a pair of large turtles for a celebratory dinner.*

In the Indiamen cuddies there was a growing sense of homecoming as the days grew longer and an English summer beckoned. They had passed from one world to another and towards the end, on 5 July, when passengers came out for their quarterdeck promenade, it was to a stiff, salty breeze which flecked with white an ocean so dark, so different in its grey essence from the one they knew under the saffron-yellow evenings of the East, that it might have been a different element. With all sails filled, masts tilted and bows churning, the fleet covered 153 miles that day, rounding Ushant and leaving an unusually calm Bay of Biscay.

They scented England before sighting it – a heady, earthy, verdant smell. It brought joy, apprehension, anticipation, all the emotions of returning to the mother country after what, for many, had been decades away. At last on 12 July, with cheers from every deck, they came into the Downs, the anchorage off Deal in Kent, where most passengers disembarked.

In a typical ship’s log, the moment of parting appears as a prosaic event:

Sunny. Bright airs and calms. At half past 1pm the Purser went on shore with the Hon Co’s despatches. The passengers left the ship at the same time.

But it was, nevertheless, a curious business – leaving these quarters where they had faced death and known deliverance, bidding farewell to people with whom they had experienced intimacy of a kind known to few. What they had seen as their dank smelly quarters had acquired the familiarity of homes. The wife of a junior officer cooped up in a horrible canvas partition in steerage for five months wrote:

Now, suddenly, in the way of human affairs, that all came to an end. Passengers left their ships and parted, never to meet again. The caravan had moved on.

Those leaving the Hugh Inglis included the twenty-nine child passengers, among them the three little girls evacuated from Bengal by Mrs Sherwood. Having completed one bewildering and frightening journey, they were just starting another in this strange new land.

Not everyone disembarked. On the Lushington, a man named George Halyburton, of whom nothing is known beyond the fact that he was a Madras merchant and had come home on his own, died in his cot at 10 p.m., having held on just long enough to see England again.

*

It took months for the full human cost to emerge. The seven ships lost in the two fleets had taken down with them about 1,200 lives. They included well over 800 seamen, perhaps 200 steerage passengers and some 140 cabin passengers. Among the latter, the largest category was children. At least forty-three of them had died, among them no fewer than six Moores on the Bengal, and the four Wintles on the Lady Jane Dundas.

Several individuals had, Hickey thought, been ‘peculiarly marked by misfortune’. He had in mind Emilia Scott, seemingly destined to die at sea, and the widows, Harriett Arnott and Frances Parr. The same might be said of their ship. If any Indiaman ought to have been lost it was Hugh Inglis, but she had survived while Calcutta, the well-manned, shipshape Calcutta, had gone down. Small wonder seamen were a superstitious tribe. Calcutta might have been visited by the kind of witchy siren evoked by John Masefield in ‘Mother Carey’:

She’s a hungry old rip ’n’ a cruel

For sailormen like we,

She’s give many mariners the gruel

’N’ a long sleep under the sea

She’s the blood o’ many a crew upon her

’N’ the bones of many a wreck;

’N’ she’s barnacles a-growing on her

’N’ shark’s teeth round her neck.

A fate no less whimsical had spared others, notably in the case of the Lady Jane Dundas. George Buchan would often reflect on how Barlow’s plea for help had prevented him from sailing on the doomed ship. Also counting his blessings was Alexander Johnston whose place on her had been taken by General Macdowall.†

There was another group who had been preserved, and theirs was perhaps the most paradoxical fate of all. All seven of the doomed Indiamen had had hands pressed from them. At the time these men must have cursed what seemed a malign fate. Instead of going to certain death, however, they had been preserved. They would serve and fight, experience defeat and victory, in the battles for the Indian Ocean still to come.

*

Admiral Pellew’s homecoming was spoilt by the Customs House whose officials swooped on his trove aboard Culloden. His live leopard escaped attention, and was subsequently much admired at Hampton House; but the affair made quite a flurry in the papers and the diarist Hickey, who had a deeply malicious streak, chortled that ‘the gallant Admiral did not make a successful smuggler, having contraband to the amount of several thousand pounds’. What these items were was not specified. However, it made no great difference to Pellew. His fortune was intact.

He returned to find that the Admiralty, alive once more to the danger of Ile de France, was dusting off his old invasion plan. It must have frustrated him that he would have no part in carrying it through. He was honoured, taking the title Lord Exmouth, but he knew that the East Indies had not been his most distinguished command. And the Ile de France taunted him. There is no certainty that he had put the fleet at risk in the hope of encountering Hamelin’s frigates, but if that was not the reason, he was more culpable still for the loss of the four Indiamen.

There was much muttering at the India House. Captains who gave evidence at the subsequent inquiry made it clear they believed Pellew had sailed too close to the wind. For all that, other factors had contributed to the disaster as well. Pellew was a national hero and the Company’s debt to him for the Dutton rescue was still remembered. The findings of the Shipping Committee were vague. There were no further repercussions.

Far more satisfying for Pellew was the outcome of the Nereide affair. Having considered the evidence, the Admiralty wrote a scorching rebuke to Corbet on 4 August, expressing ‘high disapproval of the manifest want of management, good order and discipline’ on his ship. The Sea Lords, having noted Corbet’s belligerent defence at his court martial of ‘starting’, then went on to denounce the practice as ‘unjustifiable and extremely disgusting to the feelings of British seamen’.18 Beating men to their stations was prohibited once and for all. Costly though it had been, the Nereide’s crew had won a victory for all seamen.

An Admiralty broadside like this was usually enough to destroy a career. Had Corbet been in England at the time he would probably have lost his ship and that would have been an end of him. Instead, at the Cape, he was under the wing of an admiral who regarded him as indispensable. In the months ahead, Corbet and the Nereide would be constantly deployed as the momentum began to gather for an invasion of Ile de France.

Notes

1. ADM 51/2590, log of the Nereide

2. Ibid., 16 March 1809

3. ADM 1/161, Corbet to Bertie, 11 April 1809

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. L/MAR/B 184J, log of the William Pitt, 21 March 1809

7. This is apparent from the letters in ADM 1/5392, Corbet’s court martial, and the complete correspondence sent subsequently by Pellew to the Admiralty

8. Bertie wrote to the Admiralty complaining that as a result of Pellew’s measures ‘it must be a matter of great uncertainty when I am joined by the Nereide, if she comes at all’. ADM 1/60, Bertie to Pole, 12 December 1808

9. ADM 1/61, Pellew to Bertie, 8 April 1809

10. ADM 1/61, Pellew to Corbet, 12 April 1809

11. Ibid., Corbet to Pellew, 18 April 1809

12. Ibid., Corbet to Bertie, 16 April 1809

13. ADM 1/181, Pellew to Pole, 25 June 1809

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

15. Ibid.

16. L/MAR/B 274F, log of the Sir Stephen Lushington, 19 April 1809

17. Sherwood, p.245

18. From J.K. Laughton’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography

* In February 1809 a fleet led by the daring Captain Thomas Cochrane used fireships to attack a French squadron anchored near Rochefort in the Bay of Biscay, destroying four ships of the line and a frigate.

† George Buchan’s second Indiaman escape – he had previously survived the Winterton disaster off Madagascar – struck him as proof of divine intervention on his behalf. He became most devout, following up his best-seller on the Winterton with a little volume entitled Practical Illustrations of a Particular Providence (With Observations Applicable to Different Classes of Society).
   Alexander Johnston’s survival had a more material outcome. He went on to make the recommendations on which Ceylon’s future administration was based. Universal popular education was set in train, slavery was abolished and trial by a jury of peers established for all religious groups. As Sir Alexander Johnston, he would return to Ceylon as a far-sighted and benign governor, and it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that the consequences of his voyage home with the Second Fleet proved crucial to the way Britain’s relationship with that lovely island evolved in an atmosphere of relative harmony, tolerance and respect.