The Wreck of the Royal Charter
Our editor Peter Moore on how hundreds of people were lost in a disastrous shipwreck in 1859
Journalism has frequently been called the first draft of history. In this continuing series, 'First Draft', we revisit significant events in modern history and look at how they were reported in their immediate aftermath.
On the afternoon of Monday 24 October 1859, John Suica, boatswain’s mate on the steam clipper Royal Charter, watched as a pilot boat cast free from the side of the ship and doubled back towards Queenstown (Cobh) in Ireland.
Just two months had elapsed since the Royal Charter had begun its voyage in Melbourne, Australia, and only a few more days remained before it would enter the harbour at Liverpool.
Although stream clippers – vessels that combined traditional sailing rigs with modern methods of propulsion - like the Royal Charter were making voyages between Great Britain and Australia with increasing regularity, the speed with which they were able to accomplish the journey was still seen as astonishing. It was not so very long before that a voyage to Australia was an undertaking of six months.
Along with this speed came a sense of style. No longer were long ocean voyages something to be endured. The Royal Charter’s ‘splendid accommodation’, ran one advert, was ‘unsurpassed by any ships in the world’. It was filled with superior cabins and elegant saloons that were furnished with the panache of Mayfair drawing rooms.
Travel in the modern age was becoming an experience in itself and beneath the travellers’ feet on the Royal Charter lay something still more exciting. Many of the them were returning home after years spent in the gold fields of the colony of Victoria. By one estimate, stowed away in the ship's hold was around 79,000 ounces of gold.
Having left Queenstown on Monday afternoon, Suica worked his watches over the next day. Off the port beam ran the green Irish coast with its familiar run of lighthouses – the Ballycotton, the Youghal, the Tuskar Rock – before the Royal Charter began its crossing the Irish Sea.
By first light on Tuesday morning the wind was beginning to freshen. Captain Thomas Taylor—an experienced sailor—ordered all the fore-and-aft sails in. Shortly after midday the ship was abreast of the British mainland at Holyhead and there was only a short coastal passage remaining. There, off the island of Anglesey, in the weak light of an unsettled autumn day, the passengers were able to gaze over the water towards the mammoth outline of Brunel’s SS Great Eastern, by far the largest vessel afloat.
Anticipating the news of the following day, one British newspaper was already going to press with the following announcement:
Liverpool Daily Post
Wednesday 26 October 1859
‘The Royal Charter, after a run of 58 days from Melbourne, will enter the Mersey this morning. This splendid vessel has redeemed the high opinion early entertained of her; for her recent voyages have surpassed expectation.
At this moment she illustrates the value of speed in commercial affairs; for already a cargo is nearly provided for her outward voyage to Melbourne. One firm alone is shipping in her 450 tons of bales and boxes.’
At a quarter to eight on Tuesday 25 October, the Royal Charter rounded the northern point of the island. ‘At this time’, explained Suica with a note of disquiet, ‘the wind had increased to a heavy gale, and the ship was making little or no progress through the water.’
The storm that followed over the next few hours was one of the most intense in memory. The north coast of Wales was particularly scoured by driving winds that blew down telegraph poles and trees, and washed away stretches of railway in Rhyl and Conway. In Hollyhead people awoke the next morning to find that part of the breakwater had come away. From further along the coast came news that rail passengers had been compelled to leave the carriages and trudge, on foot, past miles of damaged track.
This was an inconvenience, but news of a more dreadful kind was poised to emerge. Early on the morning of 26 October a message was received from Moelfre, a coastal village on Anglesey:
Loss of the Royal Charter and Four Hundred Lives
‘The Royal Charter was wrecked, last night in a terrific gale, from the N.N.E. All hands lost except, according to my judgment, 25; all the officers lost excepting the carpenter and boatswain’s mate.’
This first report was soon supplemented by another, carried by The Sun in London on 27 October:
‘The public will learn with overwhelming grief that the splendid vessel the Royal Charter was totally lost yesterday, in Muffa Red Wharf Bay, near Bangor.'
The melancholy intelligence which reached us late last night was brief, but we fear that it was only too true. Of upwards of 400 persons on board, only 10 are said to have been saved. There is some hope, however, that this is an exaggeration; but under any circumstances the loss of life, it is to be feared, has been immense.
The Royal Charter, it was supposed, had about half a million of gold on board. The gold will, of course, be easily recovered, but, alas! Not so the poor people who have perished.’
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For the vivid, transfixing particulars, readers had to wait for another day. It was then that the testimony of John Suica, the boatswain’s mate, was relayed in full.
Suica explained how the gale had lashed the Royal Charter after nighfall on 25 October. The power her steam engines generated was nothing when compared with the force of the wind the ship confronted. Knowing that the sails could not withstand such a blow, Captain Taylor had ordered from them to be taken in and for the anchors to be let out to fasten the ship to the sea floor.
The sailors soon realised, to their horror, that the anchors were not biting. They were merely scraping over the sea floor as the Royal Charter was driven constantly back towards the shore. At length Suica felt the ship ‘canting over to port’ and then, shortly after, ‘she struck on a bank’.
Suica heard a flurry of orders as Captain Taylor sought to stabalise the ship. The engineer was told to give as much steam as possible, to ‘harden her on the bank’; the helm was put hard a starboard to stop her breeching. Suica himself was told to cut various ropes so that the boats could be cleared if they were needed.
All this time the sea was making ‘a complete breach over the ship’. Through the spray he could detect daylight in the western horizon. He recalled the events that followed:
Westmorland Gazette
Saturday 29 October 1859
I volunteered to go ashore with a line to get a hawser ashore, immediately after which I felt the ship striking heavier than ever, supposing it was in consequence of the tide making. The sea still broke over her with even greater violence than ever.
The captain was at this time on deck, standing by the steam telegraph. I told the chief officer again I was willing to go ashore with a line and do everything in my power to save life. Asked him if he would allow me a few minutes to put my lifebelt on, and he said of course he would. I afterwards told the boatswain I was going to try and get a line on shore, and he said it was useless, the sea was running too high. Afterwards I had a small line slung round my body, and wished some one to volunteer to attend to it while I swam ashore.
After some hesitation, a man volunteered. Just as I was being lowered into the water, some one called out that there was a line on shore from forward. Upon hearing that I did not go. A hawser was got on shore and made fast to a rock, and with this myself and some of the other seamen saved our lives.
The hawser was made fast by several of the inhabitants on shore, who came to render assistance. After the ship struck, all the passengers were directed to go aft until the hawser could be got properly out, so that as many as possible might be saved. Shortly after this the vessel parted amidship, and a large number of passengers, standing on the deck where she parted, were swept into the sea and drowned.
The boats were smashed to pieces by the fury of the gale, and the others could not be lowered, so that none of them could be made available. The passengers saved were driven on shore by the force of the waves. Sixteen of the crew got ashore by the hawser. An endeavour was made to get a second hawser ashore to rescue the female passengers, but this could not be accomplished. Not a single female passenger was saved.
In three hours after the vessel struck she began to go to pieces. I saw about seventy passengers on the port bow, all anxiously awaiting some means of getting them on shore; but a heavy sea which struck the starboard bow stove it in, the ship gave a lurch, and the people were all driven into the sea and drowned. Some of the passengers saved were thrown upon the rocks, and picked up by the crew and others who came to render assistance.
*
Mr. James Russell, a passenger, belonging to Scotland, who had been seven years in Australia and acquired considerable wealth, was below in his berth when the vessel first struck. He had with him his wife and two young children, one aged seven and the other one a half years old. He was aroused by hearing a commotion on deck and a fellow passenger, Mr. Smith, saying, 'Oh, Mr. Russell, we are all gone; we are drifting on shore.'
On getting to the deck his worst fears were confirmed, as a perfect devastation that little any hope of rescue existed. The sea swept back life after life. Mr. Russell describes the dreadful and terrible scene with frantic activity of the deck, in which he was driven bodily forward, but got on, fortunately on his feet as they stood on the deck.
In a few minutes a huge wave struck at us, threw us violently up on the deck. We gathered every moment. He sprang up the deck trying to make a large wave. He was fortunate as we reached the shore. Another sea then struck him, and he was driven forward on the beach, and, as he himself described it, saved by the miraculous hand of Providence. Mr. Russell had a considerable sum of money on board, the produce of his enterprise and skill in Australia, and is now, comparatively speaking, penniless.
Suica watched helplessly as the Royal Charter broke to pieces. Soon nothing was left of the ship but haphazard pieces of timber and debris. As another seaman described, ‘she broke up like a bandbox’.
The survivors were given shelter in nearby cottages. After the storm had abated, the two dozen or so of them were collected by a number of steam tugs that had been sent by the Black Ball Line. Meanwhile the dreary business of searching for survivors began:
‘Some of the scenes arising out of these inquiries and recognition of the bodies of their nearest relatives and friends were affecting in the extreme’, reported one newspaper.
‘Shortly after the wreck, several of the bodies of the unfortunate sufferers by the calamity floated upon the beach; subsequently others were picked up, and the number amounted at a late hour last evening to twenty-six. Of these, five were females and two of them young children.
The bodies were conveyed to Llaneilian Church, and carefully laid out on straw, so as to afford an opportunity for identification. Some had on their clothing, while others were only partially dressed, though when the vessel struck they had been in their berths, and rushed suddenly to the deck in a state of alarm on being made acquainted with the perilous position of the ill-fated ship.
Some small books and papers were picked up yesterday by one seaman; one of the papers appeared to be a diary kept by a passenger on board, supposed to be a clergyman or missionary. The various incidents of his voyage, from the time of leaving Melbourne until the arrival at Queenstown, were carefully recorded in it.’
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One of those who visited Anglesey in the weeks that followed was Charles Dickens. The great novelist described what he saw in his Uncommercial Traveller journal:
The wreck! It is low water, and I can trace the ship from stem to stern; upwards of three hundred feet! Yes! there I behold the Royal Charter; her crippled sides, upheaving heavily as the waves advance; herself fixed immovably in the dark trap of this terrible coast.
What floating memorials; spars and rigging and ship-work!—the great iron plates bent like whale-bone; the massive beams splintered like mere matches! And what else were they to that raging ocean on the twenty-sixth of October, eighteen hundred and fifty-nine?
The divers are at work yonder; you observe the tug-steamer 'lying a little off the shore, the lighter lying still nearer to the shore, the boat alongside the lighter, the regularly-turning windlass aboard the lighter, the methodical figures at work, all slowly and regularly heaving up and down with the breathing of the sea; all seeming as much a part of the nature of the place as the tide itself.'
The gold which they recover will be taken on board of the little tug-steamer and transported to Beaumaris. Only the other day a parcel of gold-dust, weighing upwards of forty pounds was obtained by washing, though all expectations of recovering that parcel had vanished. Cradles, as in California, were tried, but did not succeed; and the simple bucket was adopted with success.—Jammed into the rocks, crushed and broken, the sport of every wave, O look at this sunken steamer! Think that beneath your eye, deep in the waters, repose many dead!
When the great ship sundered and her engines sank, how many of the passengers went down into the deep with them; whom earth shall never more behold, whose remains shall be restored only in eternity! •
This edition of First Draft was originally published October 10, 2024.
Peter Moore is an English historian and writer. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestsellers The Weather Experiment and Endeavour. His latest book was a British pre-history of the American Revolution, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (2023). He teaches creative writing at the University of Oxford and edits the website Unseen Histories.
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