example and impressed by the public grief over his loss, Manby concluded that his best chance of fame lay in saving lives; in particular, saving lives at sea. It was a startling choice. Manby’s only marine experience until then had been an unsuccessful spell as a naval lay captain on a frigate heading for Dublin. The ship had foundered off the Irish coast, and, once embedded upon the lee shore, began sinking fast. Manby wrote later that ‘the striking of the ship was the most awful and momentous period I had hitherto experienced. The immediate hallooing of all hands on deck; to the pumps, plumb the well, cut away the masts, throw the guns overboard. And amid all this activity, the dismal moans of some, the screams of the women.’ The crew hurled everything moveable over the sides and the rising tide finally pulled the ship back to the sea’s uneasy safety. Once back in Portsmouth, Manby reflected on his experience and concluded that the sea and he were not well suited to each other. Instead, he applied for a post as barrack master, a position which allowed him to keep his military honours while staying safely on dry land.
Manby did admittedly have good reason to be cautious. Two centuries ago, almost a third of all British seamen died pursuing their trade, being either killed by the punishment of life on board ship or sacrificed to storms and drownings. Nearly everything the modern mariner relies upon – competent maps, accurate instruments and adequate communication – was either unreliable or non-existent. The major sea lanes around Britain were crowded and collisions were frequent. What is now fixed and understood was then debatable, and navigation was more a matter of art than science. Sailors depended on experience or luck to avoid danger, and when they did run into trouble there was no kindly lifeboat service to deliver them. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was made harder to assist victims than it was to collect the proceeds from wrecks. Previous legislation had defended the salvagers, not the mariners, and neither government nor shipowners devoted much attention to the consequences of nautical disaster. Most efforts were aimed at protecting cargo rather than ensuring that the crew returned intact with the goods. For several long centuries, lives lost at sea were regarded by much of Europe as so much natural wastage. Accounts still exist of sailors watching slack-handed from the gunwhales while one of their colleagues drowned. Once a person had fallen overboard, so the thinking went, he had been claimed by the sea, and it was not for mankind to challenge that claim. Such superstition was only an ideological response to an uncomfortable fact; the sea did kill people in great numbers, year after year. And, short of refusing to leave the safe shores of Britain, there was almost nothing that could be done about it.
Manby seized on the belief that something more must be done to prevent the deaths of shipwreck victims beached on the indifferent shores of Britain, if not for compassionate reasons, then certainly for civilised ones. The destruction of the gun-brig Snipe off the coast of Yarmouth in 1807 only confirmed his views. One hundred and forty-four lives were lost after the ship ran aground during a gale less than one hundred yards from the shore. Manby watched the ship beat itself to death on the rocks, and listened impotently to the cries of those still on board as they died. Over the next few months, he began experimenting with possible solutions. He concentrated his efforts on the idea of throwing a line from the shore to a distressed ship, using a rope fixed to the end of a canon ball. Several early versions failed spectacularly: the rope was either burned through by the gunpowder, or, in those rare instances when the ball and rope successfully reached their target, only managed to set what remained of the ship on fire. At the same time, he tinkered with the notion of an unsinkable boat. During a storm, small row-boats which were used to ferry survivors from the wreck to the shore almost invariably sank, either capsized by the seas or flooded by waves. Manby sealed several small wooden barrels with pitch and fixed them to the sides of a small, undecked boat, providing primitive but workable buoyancy chambers.
By the summer of 1807, his prototype mortar line was ready for testing. Until then, his colleagues and neighbours had watched Manby’s eccentric experiments with derision. But once he produced something that threatened the wreckers, who took their livelihoods from the plunder of injured ships, he became a more serious danger. As the wreckers saw it, he was not only removing their prized source of income, he was also directly contradicting the will of God. God, they reasoned, had sent the storm that had wrecked the ship which they took as their reward. Any interference was therefore a form of devilish meddling. And so, helped by the knowledge that Manby could not swim, the wreckers tried to drown him. Several local sailors volunteered to help Manby demonstrate his boat and mortar line, and, when the boat was a good way from the shore, deliberately capsized it. Manby, just managing to keep afloat, was finally saved by his own efforts and two conscience-stricken spectators.
His determination was, if anything, increased. In 1808, the small brig Elizabeth, carrying a crew of seven sailors, became snared on the sandbanks near Yarmouth during a storm. Manby, seizing his opportunity, positioned himself and his mortar line on the shore and managed to fire the line successfully onto the ship. To do so required accurate calculation, since visibility was minimal and the mortar risked being damaged by both rain and salt water. Manby fired; the rope coiled outwards to sea. There was a pause, and then, slowly, the rope tautened. Someone, it seemed, was still alive and had taken up the line. Once he was confident that the link from ship to shore was secure, Manby sent out one of his ballasted row-boats. When it finally groped its way back to shore, seven sodden survivors crawled exhausted onto the beach. As they later testified, all of them would have almost certainly drowned without the help of the mortar line. Manby, all his heroic intentions vindicated, knelt on the sand and wept.
During the next forty years, it was later calculated, upwards of 1,000 people were rescued from disabled ships by the mortar line. But if Manby thought that his battles had ended there on the darkened beach, he was wrong. His inventions did not meet with the esteem he had hoped for. Despite his energetic lobbying in Parliament, the Admiralty remained suspicious, and the local sailors agitated loudly for his removal. Other, more credible competitors came forward, claiming either to have invented the line before Manby or to have improved it far beyond his original designs. Even his later attempts to establish a lifeboat service to rescue those victims of shipwreck who were stranded farther out to sea met with disapproval or silence. Manby was present at the inaugural meeting of the Royal Society for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck in 1824, at which the first decision was to award five gold medals: one to the King, one to the Duke of York, one to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and one each to Manby and Sir William Hillary. Manby took the medal, but not the credit. Hillary, a boastful but enterprising Yorkshireman whose career bore a strong resemblance to Manby’s, is now generally honoured as the founding father of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Admittedly, Manby did not always help his own cause. He could be pompous and grasping, and was hopelessly vain. His journals and letters are littered with moments when he ‘considered his fortune made’ by the platitudes of a minister or the flattery of a courtier. His efforts often had more to do with his own self-advancement than they did with more generous motives. But for all his deluded grandeur, Manby did achieve great things. After the invention of the mortar line, he spent the rest of his life searching for the recognition he felt he deserved. Just before his death aged eighty-nine, he decided to build a monument commemorating both himself and the mortar line. When completed, he offered it to the town of Yarmouth, which had already built and paid for a statue of Nelson in the town centre. Manby’s memorial was rejected; he was left with nowhere to put it but his own front garden.
From Berwick to the Solway, including the sea lochs of the west, the Scottish coast runs for 4,467 nautical miles. By the late eighteenth century, that coast had gained an ominous reputation. Most mariners stayed well clear, and those who sailed there often chose to continue travelling all night instead of looking for landfall after dark. Not only is Scotland girdled by two opposing seas – the North Sea and the Atlantic – but her ragged island archipelago provides a major obstacle course for the best of sailors, even now. In the past, the sea was considered so dangerous in winter that one early Act had forbidden ships stocked with essential goods from leaving Scottish ports between the end of October and the beginning of February. The reasoning was obvious. As well as the sandbanks and treachery of the English coast, Scotland is moated by an awkward brew of conflicting tides and currents. The North Sea, which in the eighteenth century gave the only access to the Continent, Scandinavia and Russia, is a dark place
