The magnificent Mathilda Wattenbach was built at
Frederick Clarke’s West Park shipyard at Mont Patibulaire – “on the beach” near
where the Grand Hotel now stands - during 1853.
At its peak the
business occupied two acres of the foreshore and employed 400.
Clarke, born at
Grouville in 1812 - the son of a pensioned RN gunner and Esther Valpy - produced
62 vessels from this most basic of workplaces from 1844 to 1867. Earlier he had
built smaller craft at Havre de Pas and La Folie.
The Mathilda Wattenbach (MW) won the General Post Office contract
in December 1853 for taking the mails from Liverpool to Melbourne and Sydney. Her
initial owners were important shippers such as T.H.Wattenbach of London and
several foreign locations. Melhuish was of Liverpool, London and other places.
Melhuish was
probably from the extensive Devon/Cornish shipbuilding and former smuggling
family which had links with South Wales. They had expanded greatly into
international trading during the nineteenth century.
Wattenbach, Heilgers
& Co of London, Hamburg and Calcutta were most likely of Swiss origin and
part of a major international business - which lost their Danish flagged ship Calcutta just before Clarke launched the
MW - but the loss did not interfere
too much with their substantial trading. They also owned a Bremerhaven built Augustus Wattenbach barque besides
others of similar tonnage.
John James Melhuish
at Liverpool had dissolved his ship owning partnership with Robert Kent at
Liverpool in February 1852 and was probably useful to the Wattenbach empire as
the means of flying the British flag thus giving access to the extensive
British overseas territories and markets.
A fine painting
from the National Maritime Museum collection shows the three masted, metal sheathed
timber ship under full sail soon after her launch but details of the artist are
not known. She measured 211 feet from stem to stern, 35 feet wide and 20 feet
deep in the hold and was usually calculated at about 1,077 tons burthen.
She was among the
largest vessels constructed in Jersey although Clarke had several such craft on
the stocks at this time according to the contemporary Jersey Almanac. She was
first surveyed at St Helier, registered at Liverpool and then embarked upon a known
career sailing the world’s most distant oceans for the next twenty years under
many captains for a long, ever changing list of owners out of several British ports
of Registry.
The details of several contemporary vessels indicate that the business
relations were complex. The F.C. Clarke
barque built at Jersey in 1852 was owned at Liverpool by Melhuish & Co but
listed as sailing from Jersey to Calcutta under Captain W. Melhuish in 1853. He
also supposedly commanded the Jersey built Ann
Holzberg barque too, for Melhuish & Co that same year on a similar voyage.
The William Melhuish Jersey
built ship, sailed from London to Philadephia for Liverpool owner Melhuish whilst
the F.C. Clarke was later owned by
Holzberg at Liverpool but sailing for India from London. The F.A. Althausse Jersey built barque was
also owned by Melhuish at Liverpool in 1855 when the Jane Pratt Jersey built barque, Captain H. Clare, was also Melhuish
owned at Liverpool and trading to India.
The Helen Heilgars ship,
built at Jersey in 1854 of about 1,000 tons was similarly owned and sailing to
Calcutta, according to Lloyds Registers.
Clarke built a dozen vessels for Melhuish commencing with the Robert Bradford barque in 1849 – “constructed
with raking stem and stern post on Messrs Hall of Aberdeen’s plan” according to
a Lloyds surveyor. Alexander Hall’s distinctive curved bow design was a feature
of many speedy opium and tea trade clippers.
MWs first voyage from Liverpool to Sydney
under Captain John Clare’s command almost ended in disaster when she was
dismasted and had to put into Lisbon for repairs. For the fifty-six passengers
this would have been a worrying experience but she carried on to Melbourne, arriving
there on 27 April 1854.
Leaving for Sydney
on 7 June she ran foul of another vessel in the bay losing her bowsprit and
rudder but after more repairs arrived on 28 July.
The profitable life
for such ships was usually short. Not only due to the cruelties of the sea and
weather but also because after ten years they were likely to lose the prized
Lloyds A1 registration which was the key to obtaining top freight rates.
For a decade the MW proudly sailed alongside the smartest
of the “clipper ships” racing to exotic destinations in China, India,
Australia, New Zealand and many ports between. But the opening of the Suez
Canal in 1869 would soon allow steamers to compete with, and eventually defeat
the sailing ships on these routes.
Passengers proved
to be the mainstay of her business for some years.
In June 1862 she
loaded 350 “Non-Conformist” emigrants at London destined for Albertland, near
Auckland. Offering forty acres of land to every paying passenger the New
Zealand government soon had 800 committed volunteers with the necessary skills
and enthusiasm.
Following some
nifty – and slightly devious re-registration – the MW was renamed as Racehorse
in 1864 and emerged under the ownership of Alexander Fotheringham and John
Smurthwaite on the Sunderland Register, sailing for Hong Kong.
More Southern
voyages followed but during 1866/7 she was listed transporting “indentured
Indian servants” to British Guiana which was akin to sanitized slave trading.
John Fotheringham’s
name had appeared in the East India trade from the 1820s as owner and captain
of vessels.
Smurthwaite was a
Sunderland based shipbuilder, broker, owner, merchant and wharfinger but
featured as bankrupt in the Edinburgh
Gazette during 1865.
The Racehorse was probably now having to try
harder for profitable cargoes. Agents’ adverts in the New Zealand newspapers
offered freight rates of £20 per ton for the return voyage to English ports.
On 26 May 1865 she
sailed from Portland (Dorset) with 280 convicts besides 172 passengers – mostly
“pensioner guards” and their families – destined for the Swan River Colony near
Fremantle in Western Australia.
The
convicts’ cargo had been assembled from all around Britain and some overseas
locations too such as Canada, Athens, St Helena, Manila and Shanghai. Many had already
been incarcerated – some on prison hulks – for several years. Just two died on
the 76 days voyage under the care of Captain Seaward and surgeon Watson.
The shipping of convicts to Australia ceased soon
afterwards in 1867 when the Hougomont
left London with the final consignment of 280 unfortunates including four men
sentenced to ten years transportation by the Jersey Royal Court and about sixty
politically troublesome Irish “Fenians”.
Racehorse’s voyage from London
commencing 27 March 1868 to Auckland under Captain Seaward almost proved to be
her last.
All went well until
16 June, when after crossing the equator in light winds and calms, the ship was
hit by a hurricane with huge seas which “pitched her on her beam ends”. The
main topmast was lost, along with top-gallants and trysail yards which came
crashing down onto the deck, wrecking gear such as the binnacle and splitting
the mainsail.
Bosun Charles Crane
was washed overboard from the rigging and drowned. The whole sailing crew - ten
at most - were mustered but most were disabled and unfit for duty. Full of
water, the Racehorse was a complete
wreck as she sailed on for Auckland when the storm subsided but the fifty-four
passengers, ship and cargo had all survived.
After 101 days at
sea the destination was reached and the Auckland
Weekly Press described the ordeal “as one of the most tempestuous passages
for this time of the year that has ever been made by any similar vessel…”
Her final years flying
the British flag saw the Racehorse sailing
to Saigon and Java in 1869/70 under Captain Hybert’s command for Spottiswoode
& Co and Captain E. Peacock for owner Thomas Oswald & Co., another
shipbuilding and merchant business. With the crew now further reduced she
sailed initially from Sunderland to China but soon transferred to Exmouth owners
Thomas Redway & Co., although remaining on the northern port register.
Redway & Co.
was a family business that had been bankrupted in 1865 but specialized in trading
with the East and West coasts of Africa and South America before embarking on a
substantial ship building activity and made a fortune contracting for the
government during the Crimean war.
Their Dartmouth
yard was almost destroyed by fire in 1878 along with several vessels on the
stocks and so the remaining business resources were diversified to Hull fishing
ventures and building Milford Haven docks...
Clarke’s yard
failed due to the progress of steam but it was the railway that defeated him in
the 1860’s, not smoking iron ships. His last vessel was the St Vincent in 1867 but In spite of a
fierce and expensive court battle the St Aubin to St Helier line was laid on
the same West Park foreshore across his site and that signaled his failure.
But the fate of the
Racehorse ex Mathilda Wattenbach remains less certain because she ceased to
appear in Lloyds lists or Registers after 1871.
Lost at sea, sold
foreign or seized for some trading irregularity were all hinted but she slipped
quietly from public gaze and into history like so many thousands of other
magnificent sailing ships over the centuries.
