dressed, then drank rum and danced till night. There were no blows, but much confusion.’ The next day, Philipps wrote: ‘The night has passed over without accident, although some of us expected otherwise, indeed at one time, there was not a sailor sober enough to relieve the man at the wheel and one of the settlers was placed there.’
Apart from the moods and tempers of the ocean, the hazards of infected food, the dangers of dirt and disease, the irresponsibility and negligence of the crew, and the incidents of settlers falling overboard and having to be recovered with great difficulty, there were the additional dangers lurking everywhere posed by the seafaring community.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before the advent of steam-driven ships, every vessel sailing on legitimate business, unless it was a man-of-war, was in danger of being attacked by pirates. To take advantage of the favourable prevailing winds, the settler fleet had to make for Brazil, then turn and head for the southern tip of Africa, calling in at islands off the African and Brazilian coasts to refresh their supplies. It was on those islands, where the sea was calmer and the weather more congenial, that pirates made their camps and villages, from where they operated.
The organisers of the settler project had tried to minimise the danger of piracy by arranging for the ships to sail in pairs. In some cases, the plan worked well but most of the ships became separated from their partners early on. On the whole, the settler ships were not accosted by pirate vessels. There were some reported incidents, however, but more in the nature of scares and conjecture than of actual pirate attacks.
A dramatic incident took place one night when the HMS Weymouth encountered a licensed slave ship. Its captain began firing on her. There was an exchange of fire, ending with crew members of the slaver boarding the Weymouth. With cannon balls flying past them and loud booming coming from their own ship’s guns, the settlers must have thought that their end was imminent. Then to see a rough-looking bunch of seamen coming aboard, there could have been no greater nightmare. But the slaver’s captain soon realised that he had mistaken the Weymouth for a Spanish merchantman. To make up for the error, the next morning he entertained some of the settlers on board his ship. One of them, William Cock, wrote in his journal about the slave ship: ‘She was quite prepared for battle and carried several small guns, with a long brass gun on a swivel, and a rascally-looking crew fit for anything – no doubt a pirate as well as a slaver.’
The Aurora had what might have been a genuine close encounter with pirates. On 25 March, William Shaw wrote that he saw ‘a small vessel at a distance bearing down upon us with all her sails set. So small a vessel such a distance from any land surprised us – and we thought she was in distress and wanted help. We lay to until she came nearer. She hoisted Portuguese colours, hailed us, and, after having asked two or three frivolous questions and given no answer to some proposed by our Captain, she tacked about and went away. Several circumstances appear to countenance the opinion of our people, viz. that she is a Pirate Ship.’
Of all the things that could conceivably go wrong on an ocean voyage, one would not immediately expect one of them to be the captain getting lost at sea. But there is an occasion when that reportedly happened. The Kennersley Castle approached what its captain thought was the island of Santiago, one of the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, but as the ship came closer something didn’t look right – the harbour didn’t seem familiar. Puzzled, the captain examined his charts and declared that there was something wrong. It soon emerged that he didn’t know where they were and had no idea what island it was that they had arrived at.
A British ship, not one of the settler vessels, was moored nearby. Its boat approached, carrying the ship’s mate, who came aboard the Kennersley Castle. Thomas Philipps commented: ‘It is rather a delicate question to ask him what island it is and the Lieutenant takes him into the cabin.’ The sailors were laughing: their captain may not have had any idea of where they were, but the crew told the passengers that it was the island of Boa Vista, a day’s voyage from Santiago.
So it turned out that they were off schedule. They had lost time unnecessarily and would not get to Santiago until the next day.
The island of Santiago eventually came into sight and the Kennersley Castle tried to approach the harbour. As Philipps noted: ‘As the wind blows out of the bay we [were] obliged to tack and pass again near the eastern battery: when pretty close we are astonished with a cannon shot whizzing through the rigging. An officer with two epaulettes and a tawdry uniform comes alongside in a boat manned with Blacks. As soon as he is on board the Lieutenant takes him by the shoulder and pointing to the British flag, says: “How dare the port fire at that?”
“I assure you that it shall not occur again,” the officer says. “By your tacking the soldiers thought you were going away again. We have been so annoyed by pirates and insurgent privateers that orders were given to fire at all vessels that hovered about.”’
The officer was repentant. Philipps continued: ‘We find the officer is a harbour master and lieutenant in the navy, and is come to pilot us in, and soon brings us to anchor. When finished he takes some oranges out of his pocket … What a prize it is considered!!’
Aside from the incident of the cannonball, the Kennersley Castle’s visit to Santiago was a pleasant respite for the passengers. Philipps concluded his account of the episode: ‘Our cabin is hung round with oranges, sweet and sour lemons, limes, pineapples, bananas, plantains, eggs, gourds, pumpkins and coconuts. What a treat you must suppose all this must be to people who had been a month at sea.’
The Ocean also had an unfortunate experience on reaching the Cape Verde Islands. As if the collision with the Northampton weren’t adventure enough for her passengers, there was more to come. During one of his talks about the early days of the settler experience, William Howard told his audience of an even more terrifying incident than the one in Portsmouth harbour.
After several weeks without seeing land, the ship arrived at the island cluster. On the afternoon of 10 February they entered the harbour of Porto Praia, on the island of Santiago, and the ship dropped anchor.
The sea was calm, tranquil and blue. The settlers crowded the deck to enjoy the weather, made perfect by a cool breeze. The children played, the adults chatted and there was laughter all around: it was an atmosphere of well-being. As the passengers looked on while brightly coloured tropical fruit, green vegetables and fresh water were brought on board, it seemed as though all the fears, discomforts and hunger of the voyage so far had been an illusion. They went to bed that night, snuggling down in dry bedding, something they had not done since leaving home.
Then, at about one o’clock in the morning their sleep was shattered by a deafening bang and a large cannonball ripped between the masts of the ship. The settlers were immediately awakened. The passengers below joined those who had been sleeping out in the cool of the decks, and watched the flickering lights on the fort where there was a battery of guns.
As they debated what was happening, some hysterical, all afraid, ‘the sound of a large discharge from the fort rolled fearfully on our ears,’ William Howard wrote. ‘The noise on board as the ball struck our ship was so tremendous that I considered the masts were certainly carried away (not supposing that it had entered the ship so near to me and my family as it really had). In about a quarter of an hour afterwards, however, a third discharge was heard from the same quarter and the ball, I am confident, came in the same direction with the one previously alluded to, but it fell into the sea at a short distance from us for, as my cabin window was open, I distinctly heard it go down into the sea, making a noise resembling hot iron put into water.’
In the morning Howard asked the ship’s carpenter and its second mate for an assessment of the damage done: ‘The noise which I had supposed was made by the carrying away of masts, was the effect of a ball, weighing nine pounds, entering the side of the ship into the storeroom, about three feet only below the floor of the little cabin
