gloried in the name of Hogge and on her maiden voyage he piled the Dawn Light on to the bank at Diamond Harbour in Hooghly River. He was found by the court of inquiry to be under the influence of strong drink at the time and stripped of his command.
“Made a pig of himself,” I observed to Sherry, and she groaned softly and roled her eyes at my wit.
The trail of misfortune continued. In 1840 while making passage in the South Atlantic the elderly mate who had the dog watch let her come up, and away went her masts. Wallowing helpless with her top hamper dragging alongside, she was found -by a Dutchman. They cut away the wreckage and she was dragged into Table Bay. The Salvage Court made an award of 12,000 pounds.
In 1846 while half her crew were ashore on the wild coast of New Guinea they were set upon by the cannibals and slaughtered to a man. Sixty-three of her crew died.
Then on the 23rd September, 1857, she sailed from Bombay, outward bound for St. Mary’s the Cape of Good Hope, St. Helena and the Pool of London.
“The date.” I placed my finger on the line. “This is the voyage that Goodchild talks of in the letter.”
Sherry nodded without reply, I had learned in the last few minutes that she read faster than I did. I had to restrain her from turning each page when I was only three-quarters finished. Now her eyes darted across each line, her colour was up, a soft flush upon her pale cheeks, and she was biting her underlip.
“Come on,” she urged me. “Hurry up!”. and I had to hold her wrist.
The Dawn Light never reached St. Mary’s - she disappeared. Three months later, she was considered lost at sea with all hands and the underwriters were ordered by Lloyd’s to make good their assurances to the owners and shippers.
The manifest of her cargo was impressive for such a small ship for she had loaded out of China and India a cargo that consisted of.
364 chests of tea 494 halfchests of tea 101 chests of tea 618 halfchests of tea 577 bales of silk 26 boxes various spices 72 tons on behalf of Messrs Dunbar and Green.
65 tons on behalf of Messrs Simpson, Wyllie & Livingstone.
82 tons on behalf of Messrs Elder and Company.
4 tons on behalf of Col. Sir Roger Goodchild.
6 tons on behalf of Major John Cotton.
2 tons on behalf of Lord Elton.
2 tons on behalf of Messrs Paulson and Company.
Wordlessly I laid my finger on the fourth item of the manifest, and again Sherry nodded, with her eyes shining like sapphires. The claim had been settled and the matter appeared closed until, four months later in April, 1858 the East Indianian Walmer Castle arrived in England, carrying -aboard the survivors from the Dawn Light.
There were six of them. The first mate, Andrew Barlow, boatswain’s mate, and three topmast men. There was also young woman of twenty-two years, a Miss. Charlotte Cotton, who had been a passenger making the homeward passage with her father, a Major in the 40th Foot.
The mate, Andrew Barlow, gave his evidence to the Court of Inquiry, and beneath the dry narrative and the ponderous questions and guarded replies lay an exciting and romantic story of the sea, an epic of shipwreck and survival.
As we read I saw the meagre scraps of knowledge I had scraped together fit neatly into the story.
Fourteen days out from Bombay, the Dawn Light was set upon by a furious storm out of the south-east. For seven days the savagery of the storm raged unabated, driving the ship before her. I could imagine it clearly, one of those great cyclones that had torn the roof from my own shack at Turtle Bay.
Once again Dawn Light was dismasted, no spars were left standing except the fore lower mast, mizzen lower mast, and bowsprit. The rest had carried away on the tempest and there was no opportunity to set up a jury mainmast or send yards aloft in the mountainous seas.
Thus when land was sighted to leeward, there was no chance that the ship might avoid her fate. A conspiracy of wind and current hurled her down into the throat of a funnel-shaped reef upon which the storm surf burst like the thunder of the heavens.
The ship struck and held, and Andrew Barlow was able with the help of twelve members of his crew to launch one of the boats. Four passengers including Miss. Charlotte Cotton left the stricken ship with them, and Barlow, with an unlikely combination of good fortune and seamanship, was able to find a passage through the wild sea and murderous reefs into the quieter waters of the inshore channel.
Finally they ran the boat ashore on the spindrift smothered beach of an island. Here the survivors huddled for four days while the cyclone blew itself out.
Barlow alone climbed to the summit of the southernmost of the treble peaks of the island. The description was completely clear. It was the Old Men and Gunfire Reef. There was no doubt of it. This then was how Jimmy North had known what he was looking for - the island with three peaks and a barrier of coral reef.
Barlow took bearings off the sea-battered hull of the Dawn Light as she lay in the jaws of the reef, swept by each successive wave. On the second day the ships hull began to break up, and while Barlow watched from the peak, the front half of her was carried up over the reef to disappear into a dark gaping hole in the coral. The stern fell back into the sea and was smashed to matchwood.
When at last the skies cleared and the wind dropped, Andrew Barlow discovered that his small party were all that survived from a ship’s company of 149 souls. The others had perished in the wild sea.
To the west, low against the horizon, he described a low land mass which he hoped was the African mainland. He embarked his party in the ship’s boat once more and they made the crossing of the inshore channel. His hopes were fulfilled, it was Africa - but as always she was hostile and cruel.
The seventeen lost beings began a long and dangerous journey southwards, and three months later only Barlow, four seamen and. Miss. Charlotte Cotton reached the island port of Zanzibar. Fever, wild animals, wild men and misfortune had whittled away their numbers - and even those who survived were starved to gaunt living skeletons, yellowed with fever and riddled with dysentery from foul water.
The court of inquiry had highly commended Andrew Barlow, and the Han. Company had made him an award of E500 for meritorious service.
When I finished reading, I looked up at Sherry. She was watching me.
“Wow!” she said, and I also felt drained by the magnitude of the old drama.
“It all fits, Sherry,” I said. “It’s all there.” “Yes,” she said.
“We must see if they have the drawings here.”
the Prints and Drawings Room was on the third floor and a quick search by an earnest assistant soon revealed the Dawn light in all her splendour.
She was a graceful three-masted ship with a long low profile. She had no crossjack or mizzen course. Instead she carried a large spanker and a full set of studding sails. The long poop gave space for several passenger cabins, and she carried her boats on top of her deckhouse aft.
She was heavily armed, with thirteen black-painted gunports a side, from which she could run out her long eighteen-pounder cannon to defend herself, in those hostile seas east of the Cape of Good Hope across which she plied to China and India.
“I need a drink,” I said, and picked up the drawings of the Dawn Light. “I’ll get them to make copies of these for us. “What for?” Sherry wanted to know.
-The assistant emerged from her lair amongst the piled trays of old prints and sucked in her cheeks at my request for copies.
“I’ll have to charge you seventy-five pence,” she tried to discourage me.
That’s reasonable I said.
“And we won’t have them ready until next week,” she added inexorably.
“Oh dear,” said I, and gave her the smile. “I did need them tomorrow afternoon.”
The smile crushed her, she lost the air of purpose and tried to tuck her straying wisps of hair into the side frames of her glasses.
“Well, I’ll see what I can do then,” she relented.
That’s very sweet of you, really it is and we left her looking confused, but pleased.
My sense of direction was returning and I found my way to El Vino’s without trouble. The evemning flood of journalists from Fleet Street had not yet swamped it and we found a table at the back. I ordered two Vermouths
