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CHAPTER 1

MADE IN WALES

7 June 1826, Pembroke, Wales: it’s the sixth year of the reign of George IV, eldest son of George III and Queen Charlotte. He is sixty-three, with a quarrelsome marriage, a flauntingly extravagant lifestyle and an interest in architecture and the arts. Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, a Tory, has been Prime Minister since 1812. The Zoological Society of London has just opened its doors. British explorers are out and about, and not just in the Arctic. Alexander Gordon Laing reaches Timbuktu in August, only to be murdered a month later by local tribesmen for refusing to relinquish his Christianity. In north Wales two great engineering achievements are being celebrated, as two of the world’s first suspension bridges, the Menai Bridge and the Conway Bridge, open within a few weeks of each other.

At the other end of Wales, in an estuary near the old fortified town of Pembroke, people are gathering on this early June morning for a somewhat smaller celebration. Cheered on by a crowd of engineers, carpenters, blacksmiths, clerks and their families, the stout, broad-hulled warship they have been building for the past two years slides, stern first, down the slipway at Pembroke Dockyard. The cheers rise to a roar as she strikes the waters of Milford Haven. She bounces, bobs and shakes herself like a newborn waterfowl. Her name is Erebus.

It wasn’t a cheerful name, but then she wasn’t built to cheer; she was built to intimidate, and her name had been chosen quite deliberately. In classical mythology Erebus, the son of Chaos, was generally taken to refer to the dark heart of the Underworld, a place associated with dislocation and destruction. To evoke Erebus was to warn your adversaries that here was a bringer of havoc, a fearsome conveyor of hell-fire. Commissioned in 1823, HMS Erebus was the last but one of a type of warship known as bomb vessels, or sometimes just ‘bombs’. They were developed, first by the French, and later the English, at the end of the seventeenth century, to carry mortars that could fling shells high over coastal defences, doing maximum damage without an armed landing having to be risked. Of the other ships in her class, two were named after volcanoes – Hecla and Aetna – and the others after various permutations of wrath and devastation: Infernal, Fury, Meteor, Sulphur and Thunder. Though they never achieved the heroic status of the fighting warships, their last action, the siege of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour in the War of 1812, came to be immortalised in the American national anthem, ‘The Star Spangled Banner’: ‘the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air’ refers to the fire from British bomb ships.

It was a proud day for the shipbuilders of Pembroke when Erebus went down the slipway, but as she was steadied and warped up on the banks of the Haven, her destiny was unclear. Was she the future, or did she already belong to the past?

The defeat of Napoleon’s armies at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 had brought to an end the Napoleonic Wars, which, with a brief lull during the Peace of Amiens in 1802, had preoccupied Europe for sixteen years. The British had been central to the allied war effort and, by the time it drew to a close, had run up a national debt of £679 million, twice her Gross Domestic Product. The Royal Navy had also incurred huge costs, but had outperformed the French, and were now undisputed rulers of the waves. This brought increased responsibilities, such as patrolling of the slave trade, which Britain had abolished in 1807, and operations against the pirates off the coast of North Africa, but nothing on the scale of her war footing. In the four years from 1814 to 1817 the Royal Navy’s numbers therefore shrank from 145,000 men to 19,000. It was traumatic for many. Numerous unemployed sailors had to take to begging on the streets. Brian Lavery, in his book Royal Tars, gives the example of Joseph Johnson, who walked the streets of London with a model of Nelson’s Victory on his head. By raising and lowering his head he would reproduce her movement through the waves and so earn a few pennies from passers-by. An ex-Merchant Navy man who could only find work on a warship was distraught: ‘for the first time in my life [I] saw the monstrous fabric that was to be my residence for several years, with a shudder of grief I cannot describe’.

There was heated debate about the future of the Royal Navy. Some saw the end of hostilities as an opportunity to cut defence expenditure and begin to pay off some of the vast debt that the war effort had accumulated. Others argued that peace wouldn’t last for long. The defeated Emperor Napoleon had been taken to the island of St Helena, but he had already escaped from incarceration once, and there were nagging doubts as to whether this latest exile might be the end of him. Precautions should be taken to strengthen the Navy just in case.

By and large, the Cassandras won. The government authorised expenditure on new dockyards, including a large complex at Sheerness in Kent and a much smaller yard at Pembroke in Wales. Four warships, Valorous, Ariadne, Arethusa and Thetis, were soon under construction in the hastily excavated yards dug out of the banks of Milford Haven.

The dockyard where Erebus was built still exists today, but is now less about shipbuilding and more about servicing the giant Milford Haven oil refinery a few miles downstream. The slipway from which Erebus was launched in the summer of 1826 lies beneath the concrete floor of the modern ferry terminal that links Pembroke with Rosslare in Ireland.

When I visit, I can still get a sense of what it must once have been like. The original layout of roads, running past the few surviving slate-grey terraces built in the 1820s for the foremen and bosses, is quietly impressive. These terraces look as strong and proud as any London Georgian town houses. In one of them lived Thomas Roberts, the master shipwright who supervised the construction of Erebus. He arrived in this distant corner of south-west Wales in 1815, when the shipyard was then just two years old.

Sharing responsibility with Roberts for running this new enterprise were Richard Blake, the Timber Master, and James McKain, Clerk of the Cheque. They were not a happy team. McKain’s clerk, Edward Wright, claimed in court to have been assaulted by Richard Blake, whom he accused of ‘wrenching my nose several times and putting himself in a menacing attitude to strike me with his umbrella’. Roberts quarrelled incessantly with McKain over allegations and counter-allegations of corruption and malpractice. By 1821 McKain could take no more and left to accept a new post at Sheerness Dockyard. He was replaced by Edward Laws. The poisonous atmosphere had begun to clear when the news broke on 9 January 1823 that the Navy Board had shown its continued confidence in the Pembroke yard by placing an order for the construction of a 372-ton bomb vessel, designed by Sir Henry Peake, one-time Surveyor of the Navy, to be named Erebus.

She was not to be a big ship. At 104 feet, she was less than half the length of a standard man-o’-war, and at 372 tons she was a minnow compared to Nelson’s 2,141-ton Victory. But she was to be tough. And more like a tugboat than a sleek and fancy ketch. Her decks and hull had to be strong enough to withstand the recoil from two big onboard mortars, one 13-inch, the other 10-inch. She therefore had to be reinforced with diagonal iron bracing bolted to the planking in the hold, strengthening the hull whilst reducing her weight. She also had to have a hull capacity wide and deep enough to store heavy mortar shells. In addition, she was to be armed with ten small cannons, in case she should need to engage the enemy on the water.

Erebus was built almost entirely by hand. First the keel, most likely made of sections of elm scarfed together, was secured on blocks. To this was attached the stem, the upright timber in the bow, and at the other end of the ship the sternpost, which supported the rudder. The frame, made of oak from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and shipped on barges down the River Severn, was then fitted around these heavy timbers. This task demanded a high level of skill, as the shipwrights had to find exactly the best part of the tree to match the curvature of the boat, whilst taking into account how the wood might expand or contract in the future.

Once the frame was in place, it was allowed time to season. Then 3-inch planking was fitted from the keel upwards, and the deck beams and decking boards were added.

Erebus was not built in a hurry. Unlike her future partner, HMS Terror, built at Topsham in Devon in less than a year, it was twenty months before she was ready to go down the slipway. When the work was completed, the Master of the Cheque sent a bill to the Navy Board for £14,603 – around £1.25 million in today’s currency.

In all, 260 ships were built at Pembroke. Then, almost exactly a hundred years after Erebus rolled down the slipway, the Admiralty decided that the yard was superfluous, and a workforce of 3,000 was reduced, at a stroke, to four. That was in 1926, the year of the General Strike. There was a temporary reprieve during the Second World War when Sunderland flying boats were built there, and more recently warehouses and distribution businesses have moved in to use some of the space in the old hangars, but, as I take a last walk through the grand stone gateway of the old yard, I sense with regret that the glory days are over and will never return.

After her launch at Pembroke, Erebus was taken, as was common practice, to a different Admiralty yard to be fitted out. Not yet equipped with a full rig of masts and sails, she would likely have been towed south-west, around Land’s End and up the English Channel to Plymouth. There, at the busy new dockyard that would eventually become the Royal Navy’s Devonport headquarters, she would have been transformed into a warship, complete with ordnance: two mortars, eight 24-pound and two 6-pound cannons, and all the machinery for storing and delivering the ammunition. Her three masts would have been hoisted, the mainmast towering 140 feet above the deck.

But after this flurry of activity came a prolonged lull. Though armed and prepared, Erebus was stood down In Ordinary (the term used to describe a ship that had no work). For eighteen months she rode at anchor at Devonport, waiting for someone to find a use for her.

I wonder if there were such things as ship-spotters then: schoolboys with notebooks and pencils recording the comings and goings around the big yards, as I used to do with trains, in and out of Sheffield. I imagine they could have become attached to the brand-new, chunky-hulled, sturdy three-master that seemed to be going nowhere. She had a touch of style: her bow ornately carved, her topside strung with gun-ports, and at her stern more decoration around the range of windows on the transom, and the distinctive projecting quarter-galleries housing water-closets.

If, however, they’d been about early in the dark winter mornings at the end of 1827, they would have been rewarded with the sight of something stirring aboard HMS Erebus: covers being pulled back, lamps lit, barges pulling alongside, masts being rigged, yards hoisted, sails furled. In February 1828, Erebus made an appearance in the Progress Book, which kept a record of all Royal Navy ship movements. She was, it noted, ‘hove onto Slip, and took off Protectors, coppered to Load draught’. These were all preparations for service. Hauled out of the water onto a slipway, she would have had the protective timber planking on her hull removed and replaced with a copper covering, up to the level at which it was safe to load her (what was soon to be called the Plimsoll line). Since the 1760s the Royal Navy had been experimenting with copper sheathing to try and prevent the depredations of the Teredo worm – ‘the termites of the sea’ – which burrowed into timbers, eating them from the inside out. Coppering meant that a voyage was imminent.

On 11 December 1827 Commander George Haye, RN stepped aboard to become the first captain of HMS Erebus.

For the next six weeks Haye recorded in minute detail the victualling and provisioning of his ship: 1,680 lb of bread was ordered on 20 December, along with 23½ gallons of rum, 61 lb of cocoa and 154 gallons of beer. The decks were scraped and cleaned and the sails and rigging made ready as the crew, some sixty strong, familiarised themselves with this brand-new vessel.

The first day of Erebus’s active service is recorded, tersely, in the captain’s log: ‘8.30. Pilot on board. Unmoored ship, warped down to buoy.’ It was 21 February 1828.

By the next morning they had passed the Eddystone Lighthouse, which marked the wreck-strewn shoal of rocks south-west of Plymouth, and were headed towards the notoriously turbulent waters of the Bay of Biscay. There were early teething troubles, among them a leak in the captain’s accommodation that merited plaintive mentions in his log: ‘Employed every two hours bailing water from cabin’, ‘Bailed out all afternoon’.

For a broad, heavy ship, Erebus made good progress. Four days after setting out, they had crossed the Bay of Biscay and were within sight of Cape Finisterre on the north coast of Spain. On 3 March they had reached Cape Trafalgar. Many on board must have crowded the rails to gaze at the setting of one of the British Navy’s bloodiest victories. Perhaps one or two of the older hands had actually been there with Nelson.

For the next two years Erebus patrolled the Mediterranean. From the entries in the log that I pored over in the British National Archives, it seems that little was demanded of her. Headed ‘Remarks at Sea’, the notes do little more than laboriously and conscientiously record the state of the weather, the compass readings, the distance travelled and every adjustment of the sails: ‘Set jib and spanker’, ‘Up mainsail and driver’, ‘Set Top-Gallant sails’. One never senses that they were in much of a hurry. But then there was not a lot to hurry about. International rivalry was between rounds. Napoleon had been knocked out, and no one had come forward to pick up his crown. True, in October 1827, a few months before Erebus’s deployment, British, Russian and French warships, in support of Greek independence from the control of the Ottoman Empire, had taken on the Turkish Navy at Navarino Bay, in a bloody but ultimately decisive victory for the allies. But that had proved a one-off. Amongst the Great Nations there was, for once, more cooperation than conflict. The most that merchant ships in the Mediterranean had to contend with were Corsairs – pirates operating from the Barbary coast – but even they were less active, after a naval campaign against their bases.

All Erebus had to do was show the flag, remind everyone of her country’s naval supremacy and annoy the Turks, wherever possible.

Erebus sailed from Tangier along the North African coast to Algiers, where the British garrison marked her arrival with a 21-gun salute, returned in kind by Erebus’s own cannons. Here, Commander Haye notes, rather intriguingly, six bags were taken on board, ‘said to contain 2652 gold sequins and 1350 dollars, to be consigned to several merchants at Tunis’. As they left Algiers, there is the first mention of punishment on board, when John Robinson received twenty-four lashes ‘for skulking below when the hands were turned up’.

Laziness, or failing to jump to orders, was considered a serious breach of discipline, and Robinson would have been made an example of, in front of the entire crew. He would have had his shirt removed and been lashed by his wrists to a grating put up across a gangway. The boatswain would probably have administered the whipping, using the feared cat-o’-nine-tails, a whip with nine knotted flails that scratched like a cat.

Some men took pride in surviving a flogging, preferring ten minutes of pain to ten days in prison below deck. Michael Lewis, author of The Navy in Transition 1814–1864, even suggests that ‘there was a certain art in being flogged . . . a fine marine in good practice would take four dozen with a calmness of demeanour which disassociated the operation of the lash from the idea of inflicting pain by way of punishment and warning, and connected it up in people’s mind with the ordinary and routine’. But change was in the air. Just a few years later, in 1846, following persistent efforts by the MP Joseph Hume, every flogging at sea had to be reported to the House of Commons. This had an immediate effect. More than 2,000 floggings were meted out in 1839; by 1848 this had been reduced to 719. Use of the cat-o’-nine-tails was outlawed in the Navy in around 1880, though corporal punishment with the cane was administered until well after the Second World War.

Robinson’s whipping apart, time passed uneventfully, each day being a ritual of eating, sleeping, manning the decks and endless scrubbing and washing. The obsession with ‘scrubbed hammocks and washed clothes’ was, of course, more than a matter of cleanliness. It was a matter of routine, for without routine there was no discipline.

Occasionally something more interesting would happen. On 7 April 1828 the captain’s log reports a ship bound for New York from Trieste being boarded and searched. On 24 June, ‘1 Russian Line of Battle Ship and a Brig came in sight. 13 gun salutes were exchanged and a covered Jolly Boat took the captain across to what turned out to be a Russian Admiral’s flagship.’ On the same day the log notes: ‘Jolly Boat returned. Opened cask of wine, No 175. 24 and one-eighth gallons.’

Once Erebus was on station around Greece and the Ionian islands, the ‘Remarks at Sea’ read more and more like a holiday brochure. Endless days of ‘Light Breeze and Fine Weather’, and an itinerary to die for: Cephalonia, Corfu, Syracuse, Sicily and Capri. Erebus’s posting could hardly have been more idyllic. Unless you were Caleb Reynolds of the Marine Artillery, given twenty-four lashes for ‘uncleanliness and disobedience of order’; or Morris, Volunteer First Class, given ‘12 lashes over the breach for repeated neglect of duty and disobedience of orders’. Considering where she was, Erebus doesn’t sound to have been a happy ship.

Things began to change as she entered her second year of duty in the Mediterranean, with the appointment of Commander Philip Broke. The son of Rear-Admiral Sir Philip Bowes Vere Broke, who made his name with the audacious capture of the USS Chesapeake in 1813, his approach seems to have been rather different from Haye’s. Certain rituals continued much as they had before – the log continues to record the mundane details of washing and cleaning and holy-stoning of the decks, the state of the provisions, wind directions and reefing of the sails – but the beatings appear to have declined. Broke had a different way of instilling discipline in the ship’s crew, or at least a different set of priorities for his ship. Weekly, and latterly almost daily, the log is now filled with artillery exercises. On 13 April 1829: ‘Exercised a division of seamen at the Great Guns, and Marine Artillery at small arms.’ On 20 April, off the island of Hydra: ‘Exercised a division of seamen with broadswords.’ On 6 May: ‘Exercised a division of seamen firing at a target with pistols.’ Whether it was just another way of dealing with the perennial problem of boredom or in response to some specific instruction from the Admiralty, Broke seemed more keen than his predecessor to see Erebus as a fighting machine. But he never had the chance to show what she could do, for by May 1830 Erebus was on her way home, having never fired a gun in anger.

Two rather heart-warming late entries follow: ‘Lowered a boat for the ship’s company to bathe’ and, on reaching Gibraltar on 27 May, ‘Hove to, to bathe.’ Bathing, rather than flogging, seemed to be more to the liking of the crew’s new captain.

Three weeks later Erebus was within sight of the Lizard Lighthouse. On 18 June her artillery and Great Guns were rolled out by Commander Broke for the last time, and on 26 June 1830 she reached Portsmouth, furling her sails and lowering her flags in respect for King George IV, who had died that morning. (Respect that was not afforded to him by his obituary in The Times: ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king. What eye has wept for him. What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow.’) He was succeeded that day by his younger brother, who became William IV. William’s ten years in the Navy had earned him Nelson’s praise and the affectionate title of the ‘Sailor King’.

As the British Crown changed hands, Commander Broke and the crew of Erebus were paid off. Despite her captain’s best efforts at mustering his men to roll out the Great Guns and flash their broadswords, Erebus would never again be a warship.

A triumphant moment in polar exploration: James Clark Ross’s discovery of the North Magnetic Pole in 1831.