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
