Presentation: The Last Days of Rotherhithe Shipbuilding: The Clipper Ships

The clipper Coonatto in Port Adelaide.  Built by Bilbe and Perry
at Nelson Dock, Rotherhithe, in 1863
Source: Trove PRG 1373-2-6

Many thanks to the Rotherhithe and Bermondsey History Society (http://www.rbhistory.org.uk/) for a very warm welcome on one of the coldest days I can remember.  It was great to meet old friends, chat to some lovely people that I have only talked to on email before, and of course great say hello to a lot of new people.  I can only apologize for the late start - nothing to do with the weather, but because I was at the wrong venue!  My sincere thanks to Robert who was also at Time and Talents rather than Surrey Quays shopping centre, for doing such a good job of navigating us from one place to the other in double quick time.

If anyone who missed the talk last night would like to see the PowerPoint, or if anyone at the presentation would like a second shot at it, it is available for download for the next few weeks at:  http://teaclippers.wordpress.com.  I have saved it both as a PDF and as a PowerPoint presentation (for the latter you will need PowerPoint installed, or you can download the PowerPoint Viewer - the link for that is on the above page).

A great night at the Docklands History Group

Enormous thanks to the Docklands History Group (www.docklandshistorygroup.org.uk) for inviting me to speak tonight at the Museum of London Docklands. My subject was the last days of clipper ships and the end of shipbuilding on the Thames.

What a wonderful set of people! I was very nervous about being an amateur on the subject amongst people with serious expertise in this field, but they were so nice and welcoming and I had a really good time. As I have a real fear of public speaking, which has been hard to conquer, the fact that I enjoyed myself is really saying something. Super, super people. 

If you are interested in the history of the maritime London, you might be interested in this group, which meets on the first Wednesday of every month, with each lecture lasting approximately an hour. You might also want to check out group member Peter Stone's new book "The History of the Port of London: A Vast Emporium of All Nations."

Stuart Rankin's Rotherhithe shipbuilding books are available online for the first time

After many years, Stuart Rankin has now managed to secure the copyright on the booklets that he wrote many years ago about shipbuilding and shipyards in Rotherhithe, at a time when the fringes of Rotherhithe were laced with shipbuilding and shipbreaking yards.  Even better, he has made them available online for download.

Stuart's work is the result of years of trawling through archives for original documentation in order to track the history of individual people, ships, buildings and properties, and as a result his research boasts a high level of accuracy.  At the same time, the booklets are very digestible, with many maps and illustrations, and together they provide a brilliant background to Rotherhithe's complex past.

Every one of my own shipping and history posts starts with Stuart Rankin's booklets, and without them I would never have got started.  It is great news that they are now available to everyone.  

Shipbuilding in Rotherhithe – Bull Head Dock to the Pageants – Parts 1 and 2, The Nelson Dockyard, Greenland Dock and Barnard’s Wharf [ebooks]. £5.55 for all four booklets (a bargain).  A payment of 5p per order is made to Help The Heroes.
Here's the link:
http://www.britishtransporttreasures.com/product/shipbuilding-in-rotherhithe-bull-head-dock-to-the-pageants-part-i-to-part-4-ebooks

Ropewalks in Rotherhithe and Bermondsey in the 1800s.

1811 Map showing the
Rotherhithe rope walk

I have always been fascinated by rope walks so it's surprising that it has taken me so long to sit down and write something about the ones I noticed a long time ago on Rotherhithe and Bermondsey maps of the 19th Century.  There were several of them in Rotherhithe and Bermondsey.  Rope making was an essential part of British naval and commercial ship building activities between the 15th and 19th Centuries.  Ropes were also essential to maritime commerce, particularly for the great full-rigged tea clippers.  The standard length for a naval rope, for example, was 1000ft.  Even when steam was very first introduced for sea-going vessels, most ships still retained masts and sails to enable them to save on fuel when there was sufficient wind to travel under sail. The bigger the ship, the more rope was required for rigging. Warships and tea clippers were major consumers of rope.  The longer the rope required, the longer the rope-making premises (ropewalk) required.
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Every time I see a particularly long and very straight piece of road set back from the river in a former shipbuilding area I suspect it of having  been a former rope walk.  These were the Roman roads of the maritime world.

Rope walks were long alleys where rope was manufactured, and they could be open or sheltered. The materials used to make the rope had to be laid the full length of the walk, so whatever the desired length of the finished rope, that was the the length that the ropewalk had to be. There were various rope walks in the area.  If you look at the Cutty Sark next time you're in Greenwich you will see not just how many ropes she has, but how long many of them needed to be.  She was re-rigged in 2012 and the company that were responsible, TS Rigging and Heritage Marine, provided the following statistics:

The Cutty Sark’s rigging extended 11 miles long, her original sail area was 32,000 sq. ft. (2,976 sq.m.), and her main mast stood at 152ft (47m). Fair trade winds gave her the famous parametric of over 17 knots which would have been achieved with most of her 32 sails set. So famous for her speed at sea, it was deemed she would under-go a full restoration and be granted full public access as part of the Maritime Museum Greenwich, London.  Jim and a team of young tall ships crew and engineers immersed themselves in the huge task of stripping down and re-rigging the Cutty Sark. Andy Hodder-Smith, the project manager on the job orchestrated work undertaken on 2.5 km of wire standing rigging, 14km rope for running rigging, 400 wooden blocks, 700 shackles, 41 spars, 9 mast sections, 17 yards, including one as spare for the Cutty Sark.

Chatham ropewalk
Photography by Clem Rutter. CC-BY-2.5

Fortunately we don't have to use our imaginations to know how the rope walks looked and worked because a small number of rope walks have been thankfully preserved, and some are even still operational, with a particularly good Victorian example dating to 1790 forming part of the museum at the Historic Dockyard at Chatham (see http://www.thedockyard.co.uk/plan/plan-your-day/victorian-ropery/). It is 1135ft long and when it was built it was the longest in Europe. The basic procedure begins with converting hemp, sisal, coir, manila or manila-hemp, and a range of other natural fibres, into something that can be turned into rope.  First it is "hatchelled" or combed into manageable strands, and then it is converted into yarn by spinning it. Next, the spun strands of yarn are are fed through a plate with holes in it, a "register plate" and compressed through a "die."  Finally the rope is "closed" as follows.  Attached to a moving a moving trolley, and laid along the ropewalk the prepared strands are organized into pairs into pairs of three, separated by a pine-cone shaped wooden block with ridges in it, a bobbin.  They are kept off the ground by being laid over hurdles all along the ropewalk and are fastened to hooks at the other end of the walk.  The hooks are either hand or machine operated and turn the pairs to form twisted stands and as  the length of the rope shortens due to the strands being combined, the trolley moves along.  These pairs are in turn combined by the same technique to form a single length of rope. When the rope has been formed it is coiled, either manually or by machine, ready for transportation. Have a look at the You Tube video Making Rope - Medieval to Edwardian technique to see a manually operated ropewalk in operation, describing and demonstrating parts of the process in detail.  Two other videos are shown in Sources at the end of the post.

The same Rotherhithe
ropewalk in 1868
(click to enlarge)

The longest ropewalk in Rotherhithe was at Downtown, set back from Rotherhithe Street, where it ran behind the terraced houses alongside Acorn Yard.  I have picked it out in pink on the 1811 map at the top of the post, where it is marked as "Rope Walk" and on the 1868 Ordnance Survey (Godfrey Edition) map to the left, where it is marked as "Ropery,"  it is easy to see how long it was on the 1868 map - each of the little rectangles bordering it was a terraced house and its yard.  It extended all the way from the rear of the Trinity Church churchyard to beyond Nelson Dockyard to its north.  The Downtown rope walk is shown on maps dating to 1811 and 1868, but it had been removed by 1914.

Another two ropewalks can be seen on the borders of Rotherhithe and Bermondsey, where two ropewalks marked  as "Patent Rope Manufactory" are shown on the 1872 Ordnance Survey map of Bermondsey.  They are shown on the 1843 Davies map where it is clear that there are several ropewalks but unclear how many there area (see the maps at the end of the post).  Comparing the 1843 and 1872 maps, it is possible that some of the other radiating streets in that cluster were ropewalks in a previous life due to their length and uncompromising straightness and the fact that, like the Rope Manufactorys, they run towards the Thames and terminate in wet and dry docks.  Another possibility, of course, is that one or more were always terraced streets, their trajectory confined by the presence of the ropewalks. 

Between them, the Rotherhithe and Bermondsey ropewalks were feeding the never-ending demand for rope for Naval and commercial ships in one of the busiest ship-building and repairing stretches along the Thames. 

Prisoners picking oakum for caulking at the
Coldbath Fields Prison in Clerkenwell

The rope walk in Rotherhithe had been removed by 1914, and seems to have been converted to a walkway along the side of Acorn Pond, connecting the Upper Acorn Yard with the vast Acorn Yard running along Lady Dock to the south.  Similarly, the Bermondsey ropewalks had been converted into roads and housing by 1914.  The ropewalk on the 1872 map to the west became a Peabody Building and the one marked to the east was built over with more terraced housing and yards. If the 1843 map is anything go to by, earlier ropewalks had already become streets by 1872.  This makes a lot of sense because although the docks were in full swing, this was now the age of steam, the last big sailing ship to be built on Rotherhithe, Lothair, having been launched in 1870, a year after the launch of the comparable Cutty Sark in Blackwall.  Today the area has been transformed so much that it is impossible to see exactly where this intriguing fan of roads was located, but it is clear that Bevington Street and Farncombe Streets are survivors of this cluster of Bermondsey ropewalks.   

After the ship building industry collapsed along the Thames, and the ropewalks had closed, ship breaking continued to be profitable and even when rope was old and spent and was removed from ships being broken up (or from ships being repaired and their old ropes being replaced by new ropes) old rope still had a value.  Rope that had deteriorated to the point where it could no longer be used as rope was sold to prisons and workhouses where it was dismantled into its original fibres and reconstituted into a new material. This product was known as "oakum," which was tarred and used as "caulking," to seal the gaps in joints of ships' planking, both in the hull and on deck, to make them watertight. The payment for the redundant rope gave rise to the phrase "money for old rope."

The ropewalks are commemorated in a modern Rotherhithe street name:  "Ropemaker Road," although it is sadly nowhere near to where the old ropewalk actually ran.

The orange sections are ropewalks marked on the 1872 Ordnance Survey
map of Bermondsey. Those in blue were possibly ropewalks from
a previous period turned into terraced housing by this time
(click to enlarge)

Principal sources:

• Godfrey Old Ordnance Survey Maps of Rotherhithe 1868 and 1914
• Godfrey Old Ordnance Survey Maps of Bermondsey and Wapping 1872 and 1914
• B.R. Davis map of London 1843
• Victorian Ropery, Chatham Dockyard http://www.thedockyard.co.uk/plan/plan-your-day/victorian-ropery/
• Master Ropemakers, Chatham http://www.master-ropemakers.co.uk/process-i-31.html
• Video: Making Rope - Medieval to Edwardian technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By8K5mKSwDA
• Video: How Rope Was Made on a Rope Walk by Ken Howarth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaHQUvG8jzA
• Video: Chatham Rope Walk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M5mo2I2c0Q

Were Rotherhithe notables slave owners? Were your own ancestors slave owners?

I am very glad that I joined the Port of London Study Group, which meets weekly at the Museum of London Docklands.  Every week we have two one-hour or one two-hour lecture about some aspect of the Port of London.  Research is conducted within the group, and external speakers are invited too.  I have only been a member for a few weeks but I am loving it. 

This week's visiting speaker was Dr Nicholas Draper from the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project.  He was superb.  The first talk put London's docks into the economic context of the slave trade, explaining how the trade helped to finance the eastward growth of the West India and London Docks on the north banks of the Thames, and how the trade operated.  One of the concrete outputs of the  Legacies of British Slave Ownership project is the database.   When slavery was abolished it was decided that slave owners needed to be compensated for the loss of their workers.  £20million was allocated to the compensation.  Over a period of four years the money was allocated and detailed records were made of who were compensated when their slaves were freed.  The Legacies of British Slave Ownership project allows you to search under various different parameters but perhaps the most interesting for some people will be looking up their family name to see if their ancestors were compensated in the past for the loss of their slaves, and were therefore slave owners.  An uncomfortable thought.  I must be safe on my father's side but I do worry about my mother's canal-building ancestors!  I haven't yet investigated that possibility. Here's the database address if you want to take the plunge and find out if your own family history includes slave trading: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

My head has been fizzing ever since with linkages, with the vast and complex network of different commercial interests and innovations, with the perception of that world becoming smaller by the day, with no ambition being too big, with the sense of the drive that adapted itself so painlessly to the idea that foreign people could be treated as commodities like sugar, tobacco, rum or pack animals.   Realities like the Empire and the slave trade are things that as a nation we are often embarrassed to talk about, but in tandem with other ventures, the slave trade was one of the complex enterprises that established the commercial foundations on which our economy and culture were built.  As mortifying as it is today to recognize the less honourable parts of our past, we cannot ignore that those financial successes helped to form the nation that we have inherited today.  Understanding how the slave trade fitted into the viability of the country as a commercial entity is essential to understanding our history.  The  Legacies of British Slave Ownership project is looking explicitly at some of the outcomes of the slave trade, at the contributions it made in a set of different but related areas, the "legacies" of the project's name.  See the Legacies website for more about these. 

What I am excited about from the point of view of this blog is that I am terribly uninformed about the slave trade, and I now know that there is an awful lot of research that I can pursue in the future with respect to Rotherhithe.  For example, now that I know that slave trade incomes helped to finance the docks on the north banks of the Thames opposite Rotherhithe, I am going to use the database to see if local ship builders, ship owners, ships' captains and local notables were involved in slave ownership and how that impacted the social and economic life of the peninsula.  It is almost certain that those who ordered East and West Indiamen from Rotherhithe builders had some interest in the slave trade, so that will be interesting to look into.  The Rotherhithe docks were very under-developed prior to the 1833 Abolition, although the Howland Great Wet Dock (1696) was funded partially by one family’s East India profits and was used at least partly as a winter base for East Indiamen, so that’s another avenue of investigation. 

But even after the abolition of slavery in 1833, dirt-cheap labour was still being transported from where it was in ready supply to where it was needed, and I want to learn more about that too.  For example, I posted a piece about the tea-clipper Borealis, built by Thomas Bilbe in 1864, well after the abolition of slavery, and that will now need rewriting.  Bilbe was involved in the movement of Chinese “coolies” to Cuba as cheap labour, and I really need to go back and rethink the piece in the light of what I learned today (not to mention that it wasn't my best piece of writing ever!). 

Today's lecture makes me look at everything I have been writing about Rotherhithe in a highly critical way and with a real sense of annoyance, although not for the first time.  One of the eternal and irritating problems of blogging history is that it is fragmented, pulled ruthlessly from its context.  It is the best way of using the time I have available to me, but I am always aware that the bigger picture is always lost in my blog.  Ships, buildings, people, all lifted from their social and economic past and presented like excavated pieces in an Edwardian museum.   I need to do something about that before too long.

So it's a huge thank-you to Dr Draper and the Port of London Study Group for giving me a lot of food for thought, and now it's back to my day job for the time being!

Don't forget to visit the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ and you can see one of Dr Draper's talks on the subject of slavery and its impact on London on Youtube: What does London owe to slavery? (26 Oct 2010)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzUxQwez9fM

Strikes and the HMS Ajax scandal - the beginning of the end for Thames shipbuilding 1786-1813

1811 map showing the locations of the
Nelson Dock shipyard (at the top, still in
grounds of the Hilton Hotel today)
and the Greenland Dock South shipyard.

As usual with ship building stories, I am indebted to Stuart Rankin for introducing me to this sequence of interwoven events that contributed significantly to the slow but inevitable demise of ship building along the Thames.  Other very helpful references are listed at the end.

The full story involves two closely related Rotherhithe companies and their two shipyards.   John Randall Esq. had been based at Nelson Dock since 1755 (the year he was awarded the contract for HMS Tartar)  and at Greenland Dock as well since 1767.  In 1770 he went into business with John Brent and John Grey at the Nelson Dock.  Later John Grey left the business, but the relationship between John Randall, father and son and John Brent and Brent's sons Daniel and Samuel, both survived for a long time.  John Randall senior retired in 1775.  Randall and Brent was apparently a partnership between the younger John Randall and his father's business partner John Brent.  John Brent retired in the 1790s but both his sons, Daniel and Samuel followed him into the business in Rotherhithe.  All of the various partnerships were very successful businesses, building ships for the Royal Navy and the Honourable East India Company under private contract.

In June 1795 the Navy Board ordered a 74-gun third rate ship of the line from Randall and Brent.  This was a major and valuable contract for Randall and Brent, the largest type of ship that would ever be entrusted to a private ship builder.  The keel for HMS Ajax was laid in September 1795 at the Greenland Dock South shipyard.  Greenland Dock South lay downriver from the lock entrance to the dock, just behind the site of the 1904 lock-office that survives today, and where the Prince's Court development now lies.  There had been a shipyard here since the late 1600s, recorded on Kip's engraving of the Howland Great Wet Dock. 

HMS Ajax was launched on 3rd March 1798 at the cost of £57,000 (in today's money £1,833,690 according to the National Archives Currency Converter).  She was the first of her type, an Ajax-class design based on the design of  the 1747 HMS Invincible, but lengthened by 11ft before launch, and provided with a different type of stern, near to vertical and uninterrupted by galleries with very few carvings. The new stern design became the standard for future naval ships. 

Ship's knees on HMS Victory

However, this was just the start of the story.  Ajax had not long been in naval service when she was sent home for repairs, first in December of the same year with serious internal damage due to build defects, and then in April 1802, for more repairs.  The most basic and unforgivable of errors had been made.  Wooden ships of the period were equipped with "knees," bracket-shaped timbers that held the hull together and were responsible for the ship's structural integrity. The knees on Ajax had been cut with the grain, instead of across it, with the result that they began to break, undermining the entire structure of the ship.  It was an inconceivable error, inexplicable.  Even had the fundamental error not been noticed by one of the shipwrights, and even had it passed all internal shipyard inspections, the ship should have been surveyed independently by a Royal Dockyard official, who should have picked up on defective knees and failed the ship.  This step was a basic part of the handover of the ship from shipyard to Navy Board. The three errors - the initial build flaws, the failure of internal checks to pick up on them and the failure of the Royal Docks officer to report the problems - resulted in the ship going into service in a sub-standard condition.   The repairs cost a staggering £44,000 (£1,415,480 today) of public money.   The matter became a national scandal, picked up by the newspapers and debated at the highest political levels. 

Earl St Vincent. By John Hoppner.
National Maritime Museum

It is a shame that there is not more available about the legal aspects of the case, because it must have hit a very murky legal area.  The ship had been built (with a change of length requested during the build), someone at the Royal Dockyard must have rubber-stamped the hand-over from ship builder to Royal Navy, payment had been made, and the ship was taken in to service.  In theory, the shipyard's responsibility for the ship should have ended with the Royal Dockyard's approval, but this is not what happened.  Although the original bad workmanship certainly lay with Randall and Brent, the fact that the ship passed into the Royal Navy without challenge puts a certain amount of blame on whichever official accepted Ajax into service. It is all the more surprising as Ajax was the first of her class, with the 11ft added to her length part way through the build, and a new stern design, and it would be expected that the Royal Dockyard officials would have taken particular interest in her progress and in the quality of the final product.

The Admiralty was unsurprisingly disgusted and, in the outraged form of First Lord of the Admiralty, Earl St Vincent, Admiral John Jervis,  took steps to prosecute Randall and Brent.  Earl St Vincent was notorious for his attempts to identify and fight corruption within the dockyards and naval administration, believing that huge amounts of public money were being haemorrhaged due to theft, "waste, malversation and pure carelessness."   He particularly mistrusted private shipyards and the underhand practice of over-ordering and syphoning off raw materials for personal use.  It must have been a real blow to Earl St Vincent's sense of professionalism, honour and an insult to his ongoing fight against this very type of bad practice to be presented with such faulty goods.  HMS Ajax was the absolute poster-child for all the issues he detected in the management of naval shipbuilding as a whole.

I wonder what John Randall was thinking throughout the scandal.  He and his father had produced beautiful and reliable ships for the Royal Navy, some of them very well known.  The Randall name carried with it a promise of quality, of longevity, and it must have been a horror story for him when his reputation was put on the line by the disastrous build quality of Ajax.  I would love to know what went wrong at the shipyard during her build.

HMS Ajax.  Artist Unknown. National Maritime Museum.

By the summer of 1802, when Ajax was repaired for the second time due to the build defects, John Randall had already had a thoroughly bad year.  But matters were to deteriorate further.  In the summer of 1802 a series of other problems also came to a head.  The hiatus between the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802) and the Napoleonic Wars that followed immediately afterwards (1803-1815) had caused a significant drop-off in naval as well as commercial orders.  The result was that throughout Thames shipyards wages were cut to peacetime rates by nearly two shillings a day.  Shipyard workers reacted badly, responding with strikes and by placing embargoes on stocks of English timber.  The strikes and timber embargoes meant that the ships that were sitting in private yards awaiting completion were becoming more and more delayed.  The East Indiamen depended on the trade winds to carry them safely to their destinations.  Missing the trade winds would mean the loss of an entire season's trade.  With pressure mounting on the government from the East India Company, which had a number of orders waiting to be completed for trade journeys that year, the government responded by assigning Royal Dockyard shipwrights to private yards to complete the outstanding contracts.  Needless to say, the intruders were denied access by most of the strikers and a naval warship was assigned to deter further violence.  Writing a century later in 1907, Canon Edward Josselyn Beck, writing in his book about his Rotherhithe parish (Memorials to Serve for a History of the Parish of St Mary Rotherhithe) tells how John Randall went in person to try to reason with his workers at the Greenland Dock shipyard on 22nd August 1802, a confrontation that resulted in his death:

In his time, the shipwrights mutinied, and not only refused to work themselves, but laid violent hands on those who were sent to work in their place.  This worthy man entreated them to desist and return to their duties, but in vain.  And being himself struck by one of his workmen he retired from the scene and was so greatly distressed at the events he had witnessed that he throw himself out of his window and was killed by the fall." 

The Ajax affair, however, continued even after Randall's death. Public money had been wasted on Ajax, and as a faulty ship she continued to need ongoing repair work.  She became a bone of contention, a political football.  The debates about the correct course of action in response to the shoddy workmanship were raised not only in the Admiralty but in the press, including The Times.  Under normal circumstances the case would have been brought before a jury, but for political reasons it was determined that a jury would be incapable of judging al the intricacies of such a case.  On 23rd February 1804 the matter was adjourned until someone could be appointed to investigate and produce a report into the case.  This caused considerable upset at all levels and the newspapers were quick to suspect a cover-up.  In spite of all the scandal, it seems as though the report was never written or, if it was, the records have never been published.

Admiral Charles Middleton, Lord Barham.
By Isaac Pocock. National Maritime Museum.

In spite of the fact that the company of Randall and Brent were apparently never sued as Earl St Vincent had wanted, the impact on private contracts with the Navy Board was immediate.  Understandably concerned about the future repercussions of faults identified in, or claimed to exist in ships accepted into service by the Royal Navy, private contractors on the Thames insisted that once final payment was made they should be indemnified from any future action.  The onus would then be placed squarely on the Royal Navy to ensure that ships were built to specification and to their required standards, and if they accepted ships that later proved to be flawed this would not come back to haunt the ship builder.  This made Earl St Vincent, still smarting from the recent strikes and the difficulties of acquiring suitable wood to complete ship construction projects, even more determined to cut private shipyards out of the loop.  He rejected this attempt of shipbuilders to, as he saw it, indemnify themselves from the results of their own inferior workmanship.  His solution was to reorganize the Royal Dockyards so that private contracts could be avoided for all of the larger and most important and expensive ships of the line.  Only smaller ships were trusted to private shipyards, and only when necessary.  But things did not go quite as Earl St Vincent planned.  Although his reforms paved the way for future improvements, his successors in the Admiralty found that the nation was short of ships and it was forced to make new contracts with private yards, on their terms, at very inflated prices. St Vincent was replaced first by Lord Melville in 1804 and then by Lord Barham in 1805

Unfortunately for the private yards, their insistence on new binding contracts, their imposition of high prices and the impacts of the 1802 strike and timber embargo all led the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Barham, to conclude that the Royal Navy was excessively dependent on private shipbuilders.  Like St Vincent he believed that the solution was the reorganization of the Royal Dockyards, but unlike St Vincent he was successful and succeeded in doubling their output between 1805 and 1813, significantly reducing the number of contracts given to private yards.

East India House in Leadenhall Street after its 1801
reconstruction. By Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, 1817

Adding to the agony of the Thames shipbuilders at this time, the Honourable East India Company had been torn in two by a dispute about freight charge during the late 1780s, and Thames shipbuilders took sides, refusing to build ships for one or other of the two factions.  John Randall himself had agreed to build a ship for one ship owner but then changed his mind because the contract would have broken faith with the older ship owners that Randall and Brent supported, a breach of verbal contract that did his reputation no good at all.  The eventual outcome of the ship builders involving themselves in the freight rate dispute was that commercial ship owners began to move their ship building activities away from the Thames, eventually transferring most of their ship building activities elsewhere, most notably to India where they established their own shipyards.  This was another blow for the Thames ship builders.

The eventual outcome of the Honourable East India Company's freight rate dispute, the Ajax scandal, and the 1802 strikes was the decline of ship building on the Thames.  There was a brief rise in demand when ships were needed in a hurry for the Crimean War, but the last to be built for the Royal Navy in Rotherhithe were the steam-powered Hind and Jackdaw in 1855.  Serious ship building in Rotherhithe only survived until 1870, when the gorgeous tea clipper Lothair, the last big sailing ship built in Rotherhithe, was launched.

In spite of all the repairs, HMS Ajax herself went on to have a reasonably successful but short career, itself ending in tragedy. She won awards at the Battle of Cape Finisterre and the Battle of Trafalgar, and saw service in a number of naval engagements, but on 14 February 1807 she burned and exploded, not in the line of duty, but due to a fire started in the bread room.  250 lives were lost.  There is a well referenced account of her vital statistics and her full history on Wikipedia. 


Sources used in this post:

Main source: Stuart Rankin.  Shipbuilding in Rotherhithe - Greenland Dock and Barnard's Wharf.  Rotherhithe Local History Paper No. 3. 1997

Reverend Edward Beck. Memorials to Serve for a History of the Parish of St Mary Rotherhithe 1907
James Earle. Commodore Squib:  The Life, Times and Secretive Wars of England's First Rocket Man, Sir William Congreve, 1772-1828. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2010
Brian Lavery. The Ship of the Line. Volume II:  Design, construction and fittings. Conway. 1984
Philip MacDougall. London and the Georgian Navy. The History Press 2013
Roger Morris. The Royal Dockyards during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Leicester University Press. 1983
Stuart Rankin. Shipbuilding in Rotherhithe - The Nelson Dock. Rotherhithe Local History Paper No. 2. 1996 
Rif Winfield. British Warships in the Age of Sail 1793-1817. Design, Construction, Careers and Fates. Seaforth Publishing. 2005

Plan of HMS Ajax

John Randall's 1797 HMS Acasta built at Nelson Dock, Rotherhithe

Model of HMS Acasta 1795. Photograph taken
in the Museum of London Docklands.

HMS Acasta was built in 1797 by John Randall at Nelson Dock in Rotherhithe (265 Rotherhithe St, London SE16 5HW).  Nelson Dock (at the time known as Cuckold's Point) is unique in being the sole surviving ship-builders' dry dock in Rotherhithe, preserved in the grounds of the Hilton Hotel. Randall was by no means the first tenant of the dock, which had been occupied since at least 1687.

In the late 18th and throughout the 19th Century Rotherhithe's river front was dotted with these small ship-shaped docks and their yards.  Some were used exclusively for private contracts, but the main form of income came from the Royal Navy and the East India Company.  Although first and second rate ships of the line were built in the Royal docks, third rate ships and below were farmed out to private ship builders to Royal Navy designs, sometimes under they eye of a Royal Navy surveyor.  The hull and its interior fittings were the job of the sub-contractor and ships were usually taken elsewhere to be fitted with masts and rigging and, at another location, with armaments.  Rotherhithe had a busy ship building industry and produced vessels of all sizes from the 17th Century onwards.  The first ship that I know of to be built for the Royal Navy in Rotherhithe was the fourth rate 1654 HMS Taunton.  The last ships to be built for the Royal Navy in Rotherhithe were the steam-powered gunboats HMS and HMS Jackdaw, both launched just over two centuries after Taunton in 1855.

John Randall was a big name in Thames ship-building, building almost exclusively for the Royal Navy.   Randall was based at Nelson Dock in different sections and in different partnerships between 1755 and 1803.  This long period of time is accounted for by the fact that there were two John Randalls, father and son, with the father retiring sometime around 1775.  John Randall Senior was trusted with many high profile ship builds, including a number of prototype designs.  John Randall, father and/or son, had yards at both Nelson Dock and Greenland Dock.  Although most ship building, like later dock work, was supplied by casual labour, the bigger ship builders would sometimes provide tied housing for their more important employees, and at some point the Randalls provided housing of this sort along the passageway now known as Randalls Rents. 

A view of Cuckold's Point, where Nelson Dock was
located.  By Samuel Scott, c. 1750-60

Business partnerships into which the Randalls entered included Randall, Grey and Brent and later Randall and Brent,  but at the time of Acasta's build the lease of Nelson Dock is listed simply under John Randall Esq, probably John Randall Senior's son.  Given that John Randall Senior is thought to have retired in around 1775, the Acasta contract must have been made with John Randall Junior.

In 1802, only five years after Acasta's launch, the Peace of Amiens provided a pause in the wars with France, and new ships were no longer required, causing shipyards to drop wages and shed employees.  This resulted in strikes and escalating violence.  Writing in 1907, Canon Edward Josselyn Beck tells a really tragic story of the younger John Randall, writing in his excellent book Memorials to Serve for a History of the Parish of St Mary Rotherhithe (1907):

In his time, the shipwrights mutinied, and not only refused to work themselves, but laid violent hands on those who were sent to work in their place.  This worthy man entreated them to desist and return to their duties, but in vain.  And being himself struck by one of his workmen he retired from the scene and was so greatly distressed at the events he had witnessed that he throw himself out of his window and was killed by the fall." 

Randall had already had a thoroughly bad year by this time (the summer of 1802), his business being the centre of a scandal surrounding the build of HMS Ajax, which found Randall and Brent being taken to court (and which I'll cover on a future post).  It is certainly clear from the records provided by Stuart Rankin, taken from the Rotherhithe Poor and Parish Rate records, that Randall and Brent Esq and Company was ended in 1803, and Messrs Brent were now listed at Nelson Dock instead.

HMS Acasta was built for service in the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802) and later saw action in the Napoleonic Wars that followed immediately afterwards (1803-1815).  According to Rif Winfield, she was a 5th rate frigate fitted with 40 guns on two decks, built to the design of Sir William Rule.  She was the first frigate to have 30 main guns (18 pounders) on her upper deck.  She was launched on the 14th March 1797, having been fitted out in Deptford.  Her first captain was Richard Lane and her first long distance voyage was to Jamaica in 1798, where she immediately took several privateers.

Frigates had been in use in the Royal Navy since the mid 1600s.  The term was applied to a variety of designs but the role of the frigate was always the same - to move at speed, with sufficient fire-power to defend herself and cause problems for others, but not as well armed as much slower but larger warships.  They were classed as fifth or sixth rate ships, depending on the number of guns they carried.  Frigates were used as scouts for the main fleet, and in battle they would assist disabled ships and take command of captured ships.  She could also take on ships of comparative size and fire-power.  Independently, they were sent to foreign seas to capture pirates and foreign privateers in order to protect British commerce.  The 28-gun ships were phased out during the early 19th century - in 1794 there were 22 of them but by 1814 there were none remaining in service. 

HMS Acasta is in the foreground in this painting of the 1806
Battle of San Domingo. By Thomas Whitcombe, 1817,
National Maritime Museum.

Rather than going through the fine details of Acasta's past, I thought I would pull out some of the more interesting features of her career.  There is very little point providing a blow by blow history of the ship here here because she has been so thoroughly covered on the HMS Acasta page on Wikipedia, with plenty of references to The London Gazette, so readers are referred to that article for the details.  Details of Acasta's ship's crew are also available, together with her vital statistics and a year by year chronology of her activities and naval engagements on the HMS Acasta website: http://www.hmsacasta.com/p/ship.html.  However, there are some features of her career that merit further inspection.    

First, it is worth noting a recurring success story in her career that says a lot about maritime preoccupations during 18th Century naval wars.  Anyone who has read any of the Jack Aubrey books by Patrick O'Brian will be familiar with the concept of prize money.  It's a bit like banking bonuses today - ships' captains were encouraged to capture opposition ships so that the could be reprocessed, either used for parts (particularly their guns) or renamed and re-employed in the Royal Navy.  Privateers were a favourite target of Royal Navy ships. Privateers were ships authorized by governments to target naval vessels whilst not being naval ships themselves.  They were never employed in naval engagements but were highly effective as adjuncts to naval activities because their main role was to cause disruption.   Many naval and privateer ships carried valuable cargo, and this too featured in the reward system of prizes.  Prizes were split unequally between the crew members, and it was a significant motivation to sailors, many of whom had been pressed into service, to safely secure opposition ships rather than destroy them. Rewards could make crew members very wealthy.  Acasta is remarkable for the number of prizes that she won, described on the above Wiki page.  Well worth a read.

It is also worth drawing attention to the fact that she underwent surprisingly few refits.  All ships of the line that were engaged in active service went through a hard live.  Made of wood, powered by sail, and held together by rope rigging, they were highly vulnerable not only to fire-power but also to the weather and natural decay, as well as the effects of wood-consuming organisms in the sea itself.   However, in her 24 year career Acasta was apparently brought in for one major refit in Portsmouth, in 1802, which probably had more to do with the temporary peace afforded by the Peace of Amiens, which provided a brief pause in hostilities.  War broke out again in 1803.  HMS Acasta was then paid off in both 1811 and then 1815, and at both times her crew would have been paid, free to find other ships on which to work, and the ship would have been repaired and refitted for whatever future service awaited her. 

Acasta was broken up at Woolwich in 1821 after 24 years of service, which is not a bad life span for a wooden war ship of the period.

Plan of HMS Acasta on the HMS Acasta website.

HMS Taunton 1654, the first ship known to be built on Rotherhithe for the Royal Navy

London in the 1600s, showing a mainly rural
Rotherhithe at far right

Rotherhithe was a major ship-building centre from at least the 17th Century until the late 19th Century.  The superb shipbuilding heritage of Rotherhithe is often forgotten, but it was the main industry in Rotherhithe for 150 years and defined the Rotherhithe peninsula during that time.  The fact that its shipbuilding heritage has vanished so completely from Rotherhithe's landscape and memory is so sad.  There are of course traces - inlets here and there along the Thames frontage that mark the places where shipbuilding docks once operated, and the still intact Nelson Dock, where both naval and commercial ships were built for over a century.  But most of the story of Rotherhithe's shipbuilding past lies in the records that remain of ships built along the foreshore, their careers, the people who served on them, the battles in which they served and the places with which they traded.  With England at war throughout much of the 18th Century, all parts of the country were impacted, and it is easy to forget that war and warships were front-line activities for London shipbuilders.

HMS Taunton is one of a handful of 17th Century ships built in Rotherhithe of which I have been able to find a record.  She was the first warship known for certain to have been constructed at Rotherhithe and was launched by William Castle in 1654 and lasted for a truly impressive 65 years, seeing considerable naval action during her lifetime. Brothers William and Robert Castle appear to have been well established by the time that Taunton was built.  HMS Taunton is the first of their ships to be recorded in Rotherhithe, but others were also built at the yard including three 8-gun yachts, Monmouth, Navy and Kitchen in 1666, 1666 and 1670 respectively, a 25-gun fireship called Griffin in 1690 and the 10-gun ketch Hart in 1691.  The exact location for the shipyard remains elusive.  The Castle Shipbreaking site has this to say on the subject:

The first we learn of the Castles occupying land on the Thames at Rotherhithe is from a map belonging to the Earl of Salisbury dated 1610. The exact location of the Yard is not easy to pinpoint but it is known to be a shipbuilding facility which William Castell was operating.  Most of the land shown on the map is located to the east of the Neckinger thus placing it fairly close to the site of the well-known Cherry Garden Stairs. It is certainly clear that the family were probably active in the shipping business during the late Elizabethan era.

Research has shown that William Castle was born in 1590 and was probably responsible for building up the business at the Rotherhithe site.  His father John who may have negotiated the terms of the tenancy in the early 1600s more likely achieved the acquisition of the site.

HMS Taunton or HMS Dover, both built by
William Castle

This description is consistent with the 1600s maps of Rotherhithe (see, for example, the Blome 1673 map at the top of this page), which show all the Thames frontage activity at Rotherhithe village or upriver from it;  downriver there appears to be very little activity at that time.

The Castles were well attested in records of the time, and are mentioned several times in the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who considered William Castle to be an expert in the production of 3rd Rate ships of the line.  Although perhaps most famous for his diaries, Samuel Pepys was Chief Secretary to the Admiralty, and his opinion mattered.  William Castle's warships were characterized by the unusual feature of having one more port on the upper deck than the lower deck.  The Castles were deeply embedded in the London shipping scene, and very well connected. William Castle married the daughter of Sir William Batten, Surveyor of the Navy.  For more about the Castle shipbuilding and breaking family see the Castles History Project website. 

HMS Taunton was originally designed as a 40-gun two-deck 4th-rate 545-ton full-rigged frigate, a ship of the line built in 1654, three years after the end of the English Civil War, a year into the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell and a year after the outbreak of the First Dutch War. She was one of the ships ordered in the "Thirty Ships Programme" issued by the parliament in 1652.   HMS Taunton was 104ft long (measured along the keel), with a 31ft 8in beam and a hold depth of 13ft.  She cost £3484 (according the the National Archives Currency Converter, in 1650, £3,484 0s 0d would have the same spending worth of 2005's £263,251.04). Like most ships of her time she was modified during her career, with alterations that significantly changed her vital statistics.  Ships are often described in terms of the classes to which they belonged, a designation that refers to specific designs made by often famous ship designers, and Taunton was a Ruby Class ship.  The first Ruby Class ship was HMS Ruby, built by Peter Pett II in Deptford in 1651.  Taunton was the ninth of the Ruby Class Fourth Rates.  The model of her above is a photograph from Riff Winfield's "British Warships in the Age of Sail 1603-1714" and is probably either HMS Taunton or HMS Dover.  It shows an additional port on the upper deck mentioned above, a characteristic of William Castle's warships. 

This painting is actually from 100 years after Taunton was
sunk and shows the Battle of Chesapeake, but is a  useful
illustration of how ships engaged in the line of battle

The First Dutch War was fought mainly with small ships, with only 11 out of 103 having ships of over 50 guns.  Most had between 30 and 44 guns. Ships of the line were rated from 1 (the biggest, most prestigious, heavily armed and expensive, but also the most ponderous and least manoeuvrable) to 4 (5th and 6th rates were never used as ships of the line).  The rating system was based on the number of men that a ship could hold.  Ships of the line all had the same basic job, which was to present arms in the so-called the line of battle. As with many land battles, this was a tactic of open confrontation.  Warships on opposing sides lined up from bow to stern to present their broadside guns to each other.  The first single-deck frigates built in Britain were constructed in the 1640s in response to a need for smaller, faster ships, but were found to be too small to accommodate sufficient men for battle conditions and in the late 1640s and early 50s some were given an extra deck.  After the First Dutch War it was determined that larger ships were far more advantageous in battle, and in the future bigger and stronger ships were commissioned which were better able to withstand the stresses of battle and were more difficult to board. 

The Battle of the Texel, 11–21 August 1673 by Willem van de Velde I

The Protectorate lasted until 1959, when it was dissolved, but the commonwealth only lasted another year and in 1660 the monarchy was restored to power under Charles II. Presumably in celebration, Taunton was renamed HMS Crown. Under her new name HMS Crown participated in a number of placements and engagements, listed by Riff Winfield in "British Warships in the Age of Sail 1603-1714" as follows, under a number of different commanders.  I've listed them just to show how a warship of the period was deployed:

• With Sandwich's squadron at Tangier 1661
• With Lawson's squardon in the Mediterranean in 1662
• With Allin's squadron in the Mediterranean in 1665
• At the Four Days Battle  in 1666, with 8 killed and 15 wounded
• At the Battle of Solebay in 1672
• At the Battle of Schoonveld 1673
• At the Battle of Texel, also in 1673
• In the Mediterranean 1674
• In the Mediterraneqan in 1680
• In home waters in 1685
• In the Turkey convoy in 1687
• Rebuilt at Woolwich in 1689

By 1666 she had been fitted with a further eight guns to take her up to a total of 48 and was manned by a crew of 170.  She was rebuilt again in 1689.  In 1704 following the outbreak of war in 1702 she was refitted at Deptford by shipwright Fisher Harding, and relaunched as a 552 long tons 4th-rate ship of the line with 50 guns, again a fourth-rate ship of the line.  She was 126ft 8in (measured along the gundeck) with a 34ft 5.5in beam and a hold of 13ft 6in (4.1m) deep.  She was again full-rigged.  She sailed from Deptford under Captain Thomas Lyell and again travelled widely under a number of different commanders:

• In the North Sea 1704
• In Barbados 1706
• In 1708 with Baker's squadron on the Dutch coast
• In the Channel 1709, and from there to Lisbon and then Jamaica in the same year
• In Jamaica 1710
• Back to England in 1711
• In the Mediterranean in 1712
• Major repair at Woolwich in 1717 costing £2007.
• Recommissioned 1718

There is some confusion about who commanded HMS Taunton during which periods. Different accounts from the period place different commanders in charge of her simultaneously.  It seems clear that she was launched under Captain Richard Lyons and was soon under the command of Captain Thomas Vallis when she was at Tunis with Blake's fleet in the Mediterranean.  She came under Lyons again in 1655, after which he resigned and was than assigned once again to Blake's fleet under Capitan Nathaniel Brown.  She was back on the Thames in 1656 but was once again under Blake, this time taking part in the Battle of Santa Cruz in 1657.  She had numerous other commanders in her 65 year history, some of whom are listed on the threedecks website.

HMS Crown was "bilged and sunk" (Riff Winfield 2009) on 21st January 1719 under St Julian’s Fort at the entrance to River Tagus in Portugal.  At 65 years of age she had a long life, always a challenge for a wooden warship in active service. She was awarded battle honours, and had a successful and worthy career.

The Four Days Battle of 1666, in which Taunton (by then HMS Crown)
took part.  By Pieter Cornelisz van Soest.

Built in Rotherithe: Argonaut 1866, the last clipper built by Thomas Bilbe

Nelson Dock, 1868. Click to see the full-sized image

Thomas Bilbe built Argonaut in 1866 with his partner William Perry.  Bilbe was based at the Nelson Dock shipyard from 1850 until the late 1860s.  It was one of Rotherhithe's biggest shipyards. As well as tea and wool clippers, Bilbe built a ship that was armed and designed to operate in the illegal opium trade, he transported Chinese coolies as cheap labour, and pioneered a new method of hull framing and invented a mechanical slip, which he patented.   The slip can still be seen today immediately next to the Hilton Hotel's car park on Rotherhithe Street, its engine house preserved immediately behind it, facing onto Rotherhithe Street.

The site is now located within the grounds of the Hilton Hotel on Rotherhithe Street (today's postcode SE16 5HW - see the location on Streetmaps.co.uk) and is one of the few places in Rotherhithe to preserve any of the physical infrastructure of the area's shipbuilding past.   The dry dock was incorporated into the hotel complex when the Scandic Crown Hotel first owned the site.  It is the only one to be preserved on Rotherhithe.  Bilbe's patented mechanized slip and the slip's engine house also survive to the west of the dry dock, also part of the Scandic Crown's original estate.  The engine house was opened as a museum during the regeneration of Rotherhithe in the 1980s, but to as far as I know has not been open to the public in the last 20 years.  

Nelson Dock in 1862, by Stuart Rankin from his 1996
booklet "Shipbuilding in Rotherhithe - The Nelson
Dockyard." Rotherhithe Local History Paper no.2. 

Thomas Bilbe was a remarkable character, and I have said something about him on my earlier post about Wynaud.  Other Bilbe ships that I have written about are Borealis, Orient,and Yatala.  Thomas Bilbe was responsible, either on his own or with his business partner William Perry, for the construction in the 1860s of the clippers Orient, Florence Nightingale, Red Riding Hood, Whiteadder, Wynaud, Coonatto, Borealis, Yatala, and Argonaut at Nelson Dock.  Like William Walker, discussed on previous posts, Thomas Bilbe specialized in composite ships.  His first composite was Red Riding Hood, and thereafter all his ships were composites, made of wood planking on an iron framework, a design that provided additional strength to the structure of a ship, and made much of the internal woodwork that had formerly been required redundant, providing additional room for cargo.  

Argonaut was built for Bilbe and Perry's own use, unlike some of their earlier ships, which had been built for the Orient Line.  Clippers built in America and Britain in  the earlier and mid 19th century had been constructed for the tea trade from China, and Argonaut was built for this trade.  The Thames shipwright strike of the 1860s was one of the final nails in the coffin of Thames clipper building, diverting most of the new contracts to the Tyne and Clyde. The rising dominance of steam ships and the opening of the Suez Canal also doomed the age of commercial sail.  Argonaut was the last of Bilbe and Perry ships, and William Walker's Lothair (launched in 1869, the year that the Suez Canal opened) was the last clipper to be built on Rotherhithe. 

Argonaut

Argonaut had a net tonnage of 1073, was 206ft long, 33ft wide and 26ft deep.  David R. MacGregor describes her as "sharp in the ends" with "a long floor."  She had three masts and sported a magnificent set of sails and was fitted with two cannons for defence against pirates.

It was of critical importance to ship owners that their cargoes arrive at their destinations as soon as possible, because the first cargoes back earned the best prices.  There was always, therefore, a race between the great sail clippers to return to port ahead of ships that were owned by competitors.  Andrew Shewan described Argonaut as "a galloper" and commented that her first captain, Sandy Nicholson, who was her master for many years, was "noted as a sail carrier," meaning that he liked to deploy as much sail as possible for the prevailing conditions.

Argonaut on an Angry Sea. By Henry Scott

Argonaut's first voyage was to Foochow in China on a tea run.  Leaving Foochow with her cargo of tea on 10th July 1867 she arrived back in 111 days, arriving in London on 29th October.  It was an exceptional maiden voyage, only 8 days behind that of the famous Ariel and the same number of days as another well known fast ship, The Fiery Cross.  In the following year she took 113 days to return from Shanghai to London improving her time in 1869 with a run of 109 days on the same route.  MacGregor, in his book The Tea Clippers,  says that in 1872 Captain Nicholson had "sailed through the dangerous Paracels on a moonlit night and did not have to tack till of the Cochin China coast.  The Paracels were known to be dangerous, and had not been surveyed, and taking them at night was a particularly risky short cut to the Java Sea."   

There's a great incident involving Argonaut that is described by Basil Lubbock in "The China Clippers," whilst she was in Shanghai.  Lubbock explains that most clippers were equipped with an armory of hand weapons as well as two or more cannons that could be deployed both for defence against pirates, as well as ceremonial purposes:

Shanghai Bund in 1860. Peabody Essex Museum. Click to see full size.

Regarding the use of the cannon for saluting purposes, an amusing incident occurred in Shanghai in 1868. Several of the tea clippers were moored in the river, discharging, etc., before proceeding to Foochow, when the Leander, having finished, unmoored and towed to the sea.  Her departure was signalised by a general solute from the other clippers present.  And it so happened that just as the Argonaut fired one of her guns from the starboards side of the poop, a Chinese man-of-war junk happened to be sailing past.  the wad, which had been made purpose hard of old rope in order to raise a loud report, went right through the junk's mainsail and landed on the quarter of another ship near by, knocking away some of the gilt carving on her stern.  The men on the junk fell flat on the deck with fright when the gun went off, and it knocked a hole in her sail large enough to drag a wagon through. 

Apparently the story did her a lot of good, because pirates operating in Chinese waters considered her to be a force to contend with!

I love the comment of Andrew Shewan about her ensign:  "Everywhere the British Ensign waved supreme.  It was sometimes worn at the peak, but more often on a flagstaff over the taff rail . . . . But it should be a full-sized ensign, not the insignificant mockery of a thing which some masters affected for economy's sake . . . the Argonaut, some three hundred tons bigger than the Norman Court, with a full poop and a long flagstaff, flew an ensign not much bigger than a large pocket handkerchief.  It completely spoilt the appearance of the ship and looked ridiculous, like a cock robin perched on an elephant."

Bilbe and Perry had an agreement with Jardine Matheseon and Co in China for Argonaut.  According to David R. MacGregor in his book The China Bird, Thomas Bilbe was one of the few sail ship owners and agents who understood that steamships were taking over at a terrifying speed from clippers, whilst many others maintained a blind optimism about the situation, even whilst steamers filled the Chinese harbours.  He quotes a letter from Thomas Bilbe and Co to Jardine Matheson on July 29th 1870:

"We are duly in precept of your esteemed favour of the 2nd ulto and have perused it with grate interest, the state of matters as regards the loading of the teas ships is, oar rather will be we fear, pretty much as we have anticipated.  In fact we will think ourselves well off in the face of the competition of you are able to get the Argonaut loaded at 30s with fair despatch.  Of course we don't mean that such a rate pays, but only that we will look upon it as a fair get out under the circumstances."

Argonaut hove-to with her mainsails clewed up, waiting for
the arrival of a pilot.  By James Burr. From David MacGregor's
"The China Bird."

In 1873 Argonaut was involved in an unfortunate incident when under the command of Captain Nicholson.  She was loaded with 1,465,000 cases of tea and left Foochow on 9th August 1973, headed for London. MacGregor tells a story with a less successful outcome than his earlier tale, which took place in the following year:  "In 1873, anxious to carry the somewhat westerly monsoon for as long as possible, Nicholson kept on too long and stranded on the Pescadores, being forced to jettison 300 tons of tea before getting off."  MacGregor concludes that episodes of this sort "were frequent amongst the hard-driven ships."  Even with the delay she made the trip in 111 days. 

In 1874 her new commander, Captain Cameron, was only able to achieve the trip in 128 days. It was the end of her China career.  Like so many tea clippers Argonaut was ousted from the China tea trade by the dominance of steam and the ability of steam ships to make use of the Suez Canal, which had opened in 1869.  Steam ships, which at that time required refuelling stations, were unable to cover the Australian route, giving the sailing ships a last lease of life and an important role and many of the tea clippers were reassigned to the Australian wool trade. 

In 1877 she was sold to Anderson, Anderson and Co (later the Orient line, which was eventually amalgamated into P+O).  Bilbe and Perry had built several successful ships for Anderson, Anderson and Co. for the Australian trade, and this was added to their fleet. In 1883 Anderson, Anderson and Co. sold Argonaut to Jacob Brothers of London.  They in turn sold her to Jacob Brothers of London in 1883.  Argonaut only survived another five years under Jacob Brothers.  In 1888 she put in to Port Natal (Durban, South Africa), taking on water en route from western Australia to Hamburg.  She was condemned, and her sailing life was over.

The photograph below shows Nelson Dock today.  The barriers at its Thames end are painted with the name of one of its early 1900s owners, Mills and Knight, and is now filled with water and blocked off from the Thames.   Grade 2-listed, the Nelson Dock passed into the ownership of the Hilton Hotel when the hotel chain purchased the property from the Holiday Inn, which had purchased the site from the group that owned the Scandic Crown.  For several years, rather incongruously, it was fitted with a fountain, and still has an artificial heron and real water lilies.  But it looks loved, and where heritage preservation is concerned, that's what is important. At the time of writing the Hilton Hotel is about to be upgraded to become a Doubletree, so it will be interesting to see what they do to the dock and to the patent slip and its engine house in the redevelopment process.  It would be lovely if the former engine house museum were to be re-opened.

Nelson Dry Dock at the Hilton Hotel.
Photograph by Christine Matthews.