22 NAVY NEWS, DECEMBER 2010


Doctor at sea – but little to laugh about


A SEVEN-FOOT worm, a voluptuous sailor, aggressive walruses and an Eskimo skull – not your normal Navy News fare.


Royal Navy of the 19th Century, hence the meticulous notes made by the medical officers involved. And it is the journals of these and hundreds of their


men, Nor was it normal fare for the


colleagues, which have been catalogued and placed online by the National Archives in a project supported by the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation which seeks to improve human health. More than 1,000 such journals included in the project


are


● A sea snake of the Southern Ocean, illustrated in the pages of the journal of Henry Walsh Mahon, surgeon aboard the 6th rate 28-gun HMS Samarang in 1846. Dr Mahon notes that this or a similar snake “bit an offi cer of the HMS Woolf who died within a few hours.”


ADM101 series – covering HM ships,


–


shore parties and emigrant and convict ships from the period 1793 to 1880.


hospitals, naval brigades,


Through extensive cataloguing, the records can be searched by the name of the medical officer, the patient, the ship or the illness or ailment.


But the officers did not confine themselves to medical matters alone – there are also watercolours,


sketches, hand-drawn maps, plans of ships and thumbnail guides to the exotic peoples and places visited, from pristine landscapes now long-forgotten to sea snakes. The basic canvas is that of ship-board life, onto which the surgeons add colour and shade. Clearly a Royal Navy ship was a dangerous place to be, whether facing the guns of the enemy or not, with tales of mutiny, dissent, gunfights and the inevitable courts martial, much of the mayhem being caused by drunkenness, according to William Warner, surgeon of HMS Ville de Paris on Channel service in 1813-14. The natural world proved just


as dangerous, as HMS Griper found on her voyage of discovery off the North American continent in 1824.


Assistant Surgeon William Leyson gave details of encounters with native Inuit people – at one point the sloop’s First Lieutenant “procured a female eskimaux head from a grave” for closer study. Griper led something of a


charmed life – on occasions she was nearly lost in ice storms and fierce gales, and for almost a month in September Mr Leyson noted that the crew never considered themselves safe, for much of the time believed themselves in great peril and twice resigned themselves to their doom. Even in the ship’s boats the crew


of Griper diced with death, on one occasion having to desperately fight off attacks by walruses. Another ship, HMS Arab, had three men killed by a lightning strike at sea which splintered the main mast in the West Indies in 1799.


● Mata’utu Cathedral on Wallis Island, as illustrated in the journal of William Fasken MD, surgeon aboard HMS Fawn. The painting shows the Queen’s House and French Cathedral on the island, which lies between Fiji and Samoa, in 1862


One man, at the very top of the mast, was untouched, but the bodies of the victims were kept until evening “to satisfy the credulity and superstition of sailors,” said Surgeon Thomas


Tappen (whose favoured approach to bites and stings, whether from scorpion or tarantula, appears to have been the application of rum to the affected part).


A wide range of maladies was observed by surgeons,


gruesome, some extraordinary. Young Thomas Tapper falls into


many


the latter category – the 18-year- old, a sailor in HMS Dryad, was “taken ill” at Poros in 1828; the surgeon had been “frequently requested” to observe this patient, an excellent swimmer, bathe with the other boys.


“Tapper’s breasts so perfectly resemble those of a young woman of 18 or 19 that even the male genitals, which are also perfect, do not fully remove the impression that the spectator is not looking on a female.”


The surgeon stated that


finding themselves orphans in a foreign land.


The tragedy of mass-infection is also covered; Staff Surgeon Godfrey Goodman’s journal of his voyage with HMS Dido in 1875 discussed the measles epidemic which was possibly brought to Fiji by a party of rulers returning home in Dido after a visit to Sydney,


Australia, where the


disease was rife. With high-level meetings


Combining the extraordinary and the gruesome is the boatswain’s mate on the same cruise: “on the act of playing tricks upon one of his messmates, his penis was slit with a knife at about an inch.” A Mr Power, on board Irish


emigrant ship Elizabeth, bound for Quebec in 1825, described how 12-year-old Ellen McCarthy was brought to him with a range of symptoms, including a pain in her belly, swollen abdomen, a foul tongue, quick pulse and hot skin. It was not long before Ellen’s mother presented Mr Power with a worm 87 inches long which the child had vomited; she later produced two more, of 13 and 7 inches.


between chieftains held within days of the party’s return, the disease spread rapidly and is thought to have killed 40,000 people – almost a third of the population of Fiji. Many illnesses baffled the medics – but some were spotted straight away, such as the one presented by convict Thomas Wyld on board His Majesty’s male convict ship Albion in May 1828, bound for New South Wales. Surgeon Thomas Logan’s reaction to the claim of ‘vertigo’ was: “Suspected to be a sham. Medicina expectans [wait and see..]” Regimes on board convict ships


varied enormously, depending on the master and ship’s company. The


John Barry – quite


on the same route in the same year, the John Barry, noted that poor families suffered on board because they were not used to the richness of the food. Many children died en route, according to the record, which added that in one family, the Regans, illness killed both parents but the three children recovered,


Archaic and relevant


THE log books of Royal Navy ships from a century ago are being scoured in a bid to help scientists better understand the Earth’s climate.


These books contain a wealth


of meteorological and historical observations, and it is hoped that members of the public will help with the mammoth task of transcribing information of note. Visitors


including historic vessels such as HMS Caroline, the last survivor of


the 1916 Battle of


Jutland still afloat (pictured left). By transcribing information


about weather, and any interesting events, from images of each ship’s log book, web volunteers will help scientists to build a more accurate picture of how our climate has changed over the past century, as well as adding to our knowledge of British history. “These naval log books contain an amazing treasure trove of information,


but because the


entries are handwritten they are incredibly difficult for a computer to read,” said Dr Chris Lintott of Oxford University, one of the team behind the OldWeather.org project.


“By getting an army of online human volunteers to retrace these voyages and transcribe the information recorded by British sailors we can relive both the climate of the past and key moments in naval history.” Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said: “Historical weather data is vital because it allows us to test our models of the Earth’s climate: if we can correctly account for what


the


weather was doing in the past, then we can have more confidence in our predictions of the future. “Unfortunately, the historical record is full of gaps, particularly from before 1920 and at sea, so this project is invaluable.” OldWeather.org forms a key


to OldWeather.org,


which launched in mid-October, will be able to retrace the routes taken by any of 280 Royal Navy ships,


part of the International ACRE Project, which is recovering past weather and climate data from around the world and bringing them into widespread use. Most of the data about past


climate comes from land-based weather monitoring stations which have been systematically recording data for over 150 years. The weather information from the ships at OldWeather.org, which spans the period 1905- 1929, effectively extends this land- based network to 280 seaborne weather stations traversing the world’s oceans. The ‘virtual sailors’


OldWeather.org are rewarded for their efforts by a rise through the ratings from cadet to captain of a particular ship according to the number of pages they transcribe. But it isn’t just gaps in the


visiting


weather records that the team hope to fill but gaps in the history books too – OldWeather.org is teaming up with naval historians in an effort to add to our knowledge of the exploits of hundreds of RN vessels and the thousands of men who served on them. Ships covered by the project


range from the well-known – such as HMS Invincible, which was blown up at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 with the loss of most of her ship’s company – to the more modest, such as river gunboats HMS Gnat, HMS Mantis and HMS Moth, which patrolled the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates in a military expedition to Iraq.


● Watercolour illustrations of the eyes of Pte Christopher Walters RM, serving in the wooden screw sloop HMS Racoon at the Cape of Good Hope in 1868. The patient was suffering retinitis syphilitica, an infl ammation of the retina, resulting from syphilis, and ship’s surgeon Dr Pierce Mansfi eld, in his medical and surgical journal, records his progress from February 13 (fi gure I) to March 5 (fi gure IV), when he was deemed well


The journal from another ship


possibly the same vessel used to transport emigrants to Canada, as mentioned earlier – was a floating vision of hell in 1821, according to the observations of Surgeon and Superintendent Daniel McNamara. Quarrels, simmering unrest and mutinies festered throughout the voyage, one man was flogged for disobedience, others get drunk and threaten to fire on unarmed men, one man is arrested trying to


foment insurrection, while


another was arrested after several men were shot, apparently while lying in their beds. All the miscreants were guards – McNamara described the prisoners as “well-behaved and pay[ing] great attention”, while their guards were “irregular in their conduct and almost mutinous.” Just a year later, William Rae, on the Eliza, also heading for New South Wales, outlined a very different scenario. “Last evening several of the prisoners (amateurs),


in


testimony of the gratitude which they felt for the liberty they had hitherto enjoyed and the various indulgences which had been granted to them since their embarkation,


● Another illustration by Henry Walsh Mahon, showing the effects of disease on a prisoner on board convict ship Barrosa in 1841-2


officers with the performance of the play Rob Roy,” said Mr Rae. He also recalled how the keys to the ship’s prison were lost when the second mate fell overboard. “Last night, about 8pm, the deck being wet and slippery from rain, Mr R Bowen, the second mate of the ship with the prison keys, slipped and fell overboard [and was lost at sea],” he noted. “This morning the prison locks


were picked on account of the keys having been lost.” Mr Rae further suggested


that spare sets of keys might be handy... In addition to the words and the


illustrations of newly-discovered places, people, flora and fauna, some surgeons also included beautifully-crafted and detailed sketches of the scars, marks and symptoms of numerous diseases. Bruno Pappalardo,


Naval


Records Specialist at the National Archives, said: “Medical officers serving in the Royal Navy were required to submit detailed records of the health and treatment of those under their care in the form of journals, which are probably the most significant collection of records for the study of health and medicine at sea for the 19th Century.” For details on what is held in the


 entertained the


archive and how it can be accessed, see www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/surgeonsatsea/


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