Today that
concept of weather forecasting is regarded as an integral aspect of news
reporting but in the mid-nineteenth century that concept was in its infancy. It
took a storm of massive proportions to emphasise the value of such a system and the
credit for conceiving the idea was due to Captain Robert Fitzroy (1805-1865).
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| Fitzroy in 1855 |
Fitzroy – a tragic
figure, as we will see later - had been captain of the Royal Navy’s HMS Beagle on her voyages of scientific
discovery with Charles Darwin in the 1830s. Fitzroy had later been Governor of
New Zealand from 1842-45, a difficult appointment at a time when white settlers
and Maori communities were coming into conflict over land ownership. Fitzroy’s
subsequent naval career was ended by ill health and in 1854 he was appointed to
head a new government department to deal with the collection of weather data at
sea. As such it was to be the forerunner of the modern Meteorological Office.
With a staff of three Fitzroy set up a system whereby calibrated instruments
were loaned to ships’ captains for record-gathering and subsequent collation of
the resulting data. He soon recognised that availability of weather information to shipping and fishing
interests could avert tragedies. The first measure he implemented was provision
of standardised barometers which were installed in stone housings at ports so
that crews could consult them before setting out to sea.
The next
logical step was to make information available on a national rather than a
local basis, a concept which Fitzroy named "forecasting the weather",
the origin of the modern term "weather forecast". The first daily
weather forecasts were published in The
Times in 1861. The availability of telegraphic communication was a major
facilitator but the trigger for more comprehensive action was to be a tragic
one, the storm in 1859 which became known as “The Royal Charter Storm” after
its largest victim – one, regrettably, of some 130 vessels sunk and 90 damaged.
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| The Royal Charter in proud service |
The SS Royal Charter was a modern vessel, a
2720-ton, 236-foot steam clipper built in 1855 for passenger service between
Britain and Australia. She had accommodation for 600 passengers; some in luxury,
and was fast in her day, capable of making the voyage in under 60 days. On 25th
October 1859 she was in the Irish Sea, on the last stages of a voyage from Melbourne,
Australia, to Liverpool. She carried a crew
of 112 and 371 passengers, many of the gold-miners who had been successful in the
Australian diggings and who were carrying large sums of gold about their
persons. More gold was also being carried as cargo.
As the Royal Charter reached the north-western
tip of Anglesey on 25th October – and was about to turn eastwards
towards Liverpool, the barometer was already dropping. This was the first
indication of a storm of huge geographical extent. Weather had already
deteriorated in the English Channel earlier in the day and significant damage
had already been sustained in Devon and Cornwall. In the hours that followed
the storm moved northwards, hitting the area where the Royal Charter found herself by 2000 hrs. This was only the start of
the tempest – maximum force was not recorded until midday on October 26th and the
storm rolled northwards towards Scotland with winds at their peak reaching
force 12 on the Beaufort scale and well over 100 mph.
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| The Royal Charter being driven shorewards |
The Royal Charter was due to pick up the Liverpool
pilot off Anglesey on October 25th but with the wind by then at 10 on
the Beaufort scale this was impossible. The wind continued to rise to hurricane
force during the night of 25/26th October, changing its direction as it did from
East to North North East, so driving the Royal
Charter towards the north-east coast of Anglesey. Unable to make way – her
installed horsepower was only 200 – the decision was taken to drop anchor. The
mooring held initially but first one anchor chain, then the second, snapped in the
early hours of 26th October. Now helpless, the ship was driven first on to
a sandbank and then, as the tide lifted her, she was thrown on to rocks just
north of the village of Moelfre on Anglesey’s east coast. Pounded by the waves, the Royal Charter now began to break up.
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| Royal Charter breaking up - contemporary illustration |
The unfolding
tragedy was close enough to be observed from the shore. In the light of dawn
two workmen, Thomas Hughes and Mesach Williams, who were working to secure the
storm-damaged roof of Williams’ cottage, saw what was happening. Hughes ran to
the village to raise the alarm while Williams watched helplessly from the cliff
top. What followed was vividly described
by the novelist Charles Dickens in his “The Uncommercial Traveller”, after he
had spoken to eyewitnesses when he visited the site soon afterwards:
And he (Hughes) and the other,
descending to the beach, and finding the sea mercilessly beating over a great
broken ship, had clambered up the stony ways, like staircases without stairs,
on which the wild village hangs in little clusters, as fruit hangs on boughs,
and had given the alarm. And so, over the hill-slopes, and past the waterfall,
and down the gullies where the land drains off into the ocean, the scattered
quarrymen and fishermen inhabiting that part of Wales had come running to the
dismal sight—their clergyman among them. And as they stood in the leaden
morning, stricken with pity, leaning hard against the wind, their breath and
vision often failing as the sleet and spray rushed at them from the ever
forming and dissolving mountains of sea, and as the wool which was a part of
the vessel’s cargo blew in with the salt foam and remained upon the land when
the foam melted, they saw the ship’s life-boat put off from one of the heaps of
wreck; and first, there were three men in her, and in a moment she capsized,
and there were but two; and again, she was struck by a vast mass of water, and
there was but one; and again, she was thrown bottom upward, and that one, with
his arm struck through the broken planks and waving as if for the help that
could never reach him, went down into the deep."
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| Joe Rogers - brave and indomitable |
Rescue by
boat proving hopeless, it was resolved to get a line ashore from the ship,
which could then be used to get survivors to safety with a bosun’s chair. Getting
a line through the boiling surf demanded a hero and one stepped forward in the shape
of a Maltese seaman, Guże Ruggier, who served under the anglicised name of Joe
Rodgers. He was a strong swimmer but in
the surf his progress would be impeded by a rope. He declined using a life belt
and secured a line about himself, crawling out along the bowsprit before dropping
into the water, disappearing into the foam and darkness. Though he could be no
longer seen those on board felt the rope gradually hauled out. At length they
felt it tauten, confirming that it had been grasped by those on shore. A stout
rope was now fastened to the line. It was dragged to shore and a bosun’s chair
was attached to it. All this time the Royal Charter was beating herself to
wreckage on the rocks. The slow process of transport by bosun’s chair now commenced,
one after the other, with 28 villagers hauling from shore. Twenty five persons were
brought on shore in this way before the ship disintegrated, taking over 450 victims
with her. Many of them were said to have been weighed down by the belts of gold
they were wearing. A total of 21 passengers and 18 crew members were saved, all
men, and no women or children.
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| "The Life Line" by Winslow Homer (1884)] - rescue by bosun's chair Philadelphia Museum of Art |
A large
quantity of gold was alleged afterwards to have been thrown up on the beach.
The bullion being carried as cargo was insured for £322,000, but the total
value of the gold on the ship must have been much higher as many of the
passengers had considerable sums in gold, either on their bodies or deposited
in the ship's strong room. Dickens was fascinated by this and reported:
“So tremendous had the force of the
sea been when it broke the ship, that it had beaten one great ingot of gold,
deep into a strong and heavy piece of her solid iron-work: in which also
several loose sovereigns that the ingot had swept in before it, had been found,
as firmly embedded as though the iron had been liquid when they were forced
there.”
In the light of this, the recognition of Joe
Rodgers’ courage seems miserly – he was given a gold medal and a gratuity of £5
($20 at the time) by the National Lifeboat . Dickens's friend, the painter
Henry O'Neil , exhibited the picture “A
Volunteer” in 1860, based on the incident, depicting Rogers about to leap
into the sea with the rope around him.
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| "A Volunteer" - by Henry O'Neil, (1860 |
The Royal
Charter Storm and its attendant tragedies did however impel Captain Fitzroy to
introduce the first gale-warning service in 1860. This was a
system of hoisting “storm warning cones” at the principal ports when a gale was
expected and shipping was recommended to stay in port under these conditions.
It is a sad reflection of the profit-orientation of contemporary fishing fleet
owners, even at the expense of life, that many objected to the posting of gale
warnings. Under pressure from them Fitzroy's system was briefly abandoned after
his death, though finally reinstated under pressure from fishermen themselves.
Largely
remembered today only as the captain of HMS Beagle,
Fitzroy was in fact one of the great Victorian heroes, and one to whom thousands
would owe their lives. His own end was tragic. Beset by money problems and, as
a sincere Evangelical Christian, disturbed by to the point of obsession by his
erstwhile friend Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and by what he saw as its
challenge to Biblical literalism, he cut his throat with a razor in 1865.
This noble
man, who achieved so much for so many, deserves to be well remembered.
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