March 2015 1 Guest Edited by Ray Fordham
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98 The Newsletter of the SOUTH WEST MARITIME HISTORY SOCIETY ISSN 1360-6980 CONTENTS –NO. 98 – March 2015 1 Guest edited by Ray Fordham FUTURE MEETINGS AND OTHER EVENTS 3 EDITORIAL 4 ARTICLES The Portuguese Maritime Museum Tim Bass 5 Floating Around…(with Mike Bender) 9 Shipshape and Bristol Fashion Ray Fordham 14 REVIEWS The Maritime History of Cornwall rev. Michael Duffy 16 Maritime History of Falmouth rev. David Clement 18 HMS Terror : a Topsham Ship rev. Martin Hazell 19 Even the Cows were Amazed rev. David Clement 20 Dive Truk Lagoon rev. Ness Smith 22 BOOKS RECEIVED 24 LETTERS NOTES AND NEWS 25 OFFICERS and COMMITTEE back cover WEBSITE. http://www.swmaritime.org.uk FACEBOOK www.facebook.com/SWMarHistSoc 1 Individual contributions © Individual contributors. Entire journal © South West Maritime History Society 2015. Views expressed are the authors’ and not necessarily those of the Society or editor. Please note the Society cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of information on websites and that references in older editions may not be accurate. WELCOME ABOARD Paul Cooper Padstow Nigel Sharp St Mawes 2 FUTURE MEETINGS AND OTHER EVENTS March 12th Scapa Flow and the Italian PoW Chapel. Talk by Andrew Welch RN Retd. At Devonport Naval Heritage Centre. April 9th Shipwreck History of Plymouth Sound. Talk by Peter Holt. At Devonport Naval Heritage Centre. April 18th Portishead. SW Ship Show. Society stand. May 9th South Yard Devonport and Princess Yachts (notice enclosed) June 6th AGM Topsham (notice enclosed) In the pipeline: Day trip on Kingswear Castle, River Dart. Date tbc. Ffi Julia Creeke Underwater archaeology ffi Mike Williams Autumn meeting, Bristol. Naval shipbuilding November 8th Taunton or Bridgewater. Maritime History of Somerset (Italics indicate an event of interest but not organised directly by the Society) Confirmation of events will be published either in the next edition or in calling notice for bookings, which will be sent to members at the appropriate time. Next copy date: 20th April 2015 3 EDITORIAL A year ago your editor Jonathan Seagrave asked if any member would be willing to act as guest editor for this current issue of Soundings. In hindsight it was probably unwise of me to offer help as my past editing experience has been largely confined to deciphering hand written manuscripts, reading faint carbon copies of typed ones and wielding the traditional blue pencil. However, there could not have been a very long queue for the job as I was almost immediately sent a comprehensive set of Handover Notes along with thanks and well wishes from the committee. With deadlines looming I am still getting to grips with formats and fonts (why does my computer offer so many options?). At one stage I thought that I would be short of copy and the term press ganging took on an entirely new meaning. I am grateful to the members who sent in contributions and I apologise to any damage I may have caused in re-formatting. Well I am almost there and have only to worry about pdf file conversion, mailing lists and talking to the printer (that is a human in Exeter and not the machine at the end of my desk!). SWS98 hopefully goes to press in time to beat Royal Mail's latest postal increases which is a fitting reminder that you could be subscribing to this newsletter on-line. Apart from saving postage there are a number of other potential advantages. For example, increased clarity in photos and illustrations. I have reluctantly held back an interesting article by Gary Hicks which involves deciphering handwritten extracts from a ship's log. It is unlikely that the extracts would have been clear enough for interpretation in our normal print but, hopefully, Gary's interesting account will be shortly published with examples of the handwritten entries available on our website. In the previous newsletter (SWS97) Martin Hazell's Letter from the Chair, outlined the present state of our society. A copy of the calling paper for our AGM at Topsham on 6th June together with an update of Martin's letter is enclosed with your copy of SWS98 Please try to attend this important meeting and participate in discussions on the society's future. If you are unable to attend then you can contact Martin in advance with your views and suggestions. Ray Fordham 4 ARTICLES The Portuguese Maritime Museum During a recent holiday it was something of a surprise to discover that Portugal’s Maritime Museum in Lisbon was founded as long ago as July 22 1863. When we recall that the British Maritime Museum in Greenwich was eventually opened to the public on 27 April 1937 after a lengthy gestation period of almost ten years one wonders just what could have caused so large a difference. The answer, of course, is that Portugal’s navigators had been the first to explore of the oceans of the world. The Portuguese King Luis 1 (reigned 1861-1889), resolved to celebrate the Great Discoveries of 1419-1522 by a royal decree founding a museum “with the goal of building a collection of testimonies related to the Portuguese maritime activity”. The Museum moved to its present site in 1962. A new home was found for it in the vacant west wing of the Monastery of Jeronimos in Belem, a down river suburb of Lisbon from whose harbour the early explorers sailed on their many expeditions. Nearby is the elegant Torre de Belem, built between 1515 and 1518 on an island in the Tagus to defend the river mouth and the monastery. The Tower was made accessible from the north shore after the channel moved following the great earth-quake of 1755. A short distance upstream is the Monument of Discoveries, a modern sculpture erected in 1960 to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator. He had been born in 1398. 5 After sailing on two voyages led by his father King Joao 1, which had resulted in the Portuguese gaining control of the Straits of Gibralter, Henry retired to the Sagres peninsula in the far south-west of the country. Here he began to study the available charts and to question experienced navigators and cartographers to try to find a new sea route to India. At that time the valuable East-West trade, which moved both by land and sea, was monopolised by Moors and Venetians. By 1427 Henry’s captains had discovered Madeira and the Azores. In 1434 Gil Eanes found a passable route around Cape Bojador, the headland north of the ‘bulge’ of Africa. Adverse winds and unfavourable tidal streams in these waters were overcome by the development of the oceangoing caravel with its improved windward sailing ability. Discoveries now came more speedily. Diego Cao found the mouth of the Congo in 1482 and a few years later, in 1488, Bartolomew Dias reached the Cape of Good Hope. This discovery led to Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage to India. He sailed with four square-rigged ships on 8 July 1497 and arrived in Calicut on the south-west coast of India on 20 May 1498. By 1515 Goa, midway between Calicut and Mumbai (Bombay), had become the capital of Portuguese India. It remained so until the territories were forcibly annexed by India in 1961. Pedro Cabral’s voyage to Brazil in 1500 was perhaps the high-point of the Age of Discoveries. Brazil soon became an important Portuguese colony and, indeed, was used as a refuge by the Royal Family after the French invasion of 1808. It must be remembered too that Ferdinand Magellan was Portuguese although he departed on his circumnavigation in 1519 on behalf of the King of Spain. Magellan himself was killed by natives in the Philippines but one of his ships returned home to Spain via the Cape of Good Hope after a three year voyage. The Museum is entered through the large gallery devoted to the Discoveries. These are explained to the visitor by means of paintings, portraits, ship models, replicas of charts, navigational instruments, weapons and so on. Excellent models of Vasco da Gama’s ships, made in the Museum’s workshops in the 1970s, can be found here. The 6 model-makers worked under the directions of a number of senior naval officers with long term interests in and experience of their country’s maritime history. Unfortunately, there is as yet little archaeological evidence of ships from the days of the explorations. A fine walnut chest is exhibited, decorated with da Gama’s badge. It has been shown by radiocarbon dating to have been made from a tree felled in the fifteenth century. It is believed to have been aboard his flagship during the voyage to India. Also in this gallery are a number of wrought iron and bronze breech loading cannons dating from the sixteenth century. Few such weapons figure in the chronologically later British collections where the predominant weapon is the cast iron or bronze muzzle loader. In 1948 the Museum’s collection was greatly enhanced by the immensely generous donation of Henrique Maufroy de Sexias. A wealthy man with lifelong maritime interests, de Sexias had built up a private museum within his own home, employing skilled modelers to draw up plans of nineteenth and twentieth century Portuguese warships, river boats and deep-sea and inshore fishing craft from the mainland and islands. Models of the vessels and craft were subsequently built. His collection also included a number of paintings and photographs. The latter comprise some 20,000 glass plates, a resource of great value to future researchers.