If you're interested in maritime history, you may want to check out Bloomsbury's just-published Cultural History of the Sea. This 6 volume (!) history explores how human understanding of the sea has developed over 2,500 years of cultural and natural history. I was lucky enough to be asked to contribute an essay on Ocean Networks to the Nineteenth Century volume (Margaret Cohen is our fabulous editor). I focused on the 1825 shipwreck of the Kent -- one of the most famous shipwreck stories of the nineteenth century, and one of the most dramatic. Naturally my essay came in long -- over 17,000 words! -- and in cutting it down I had to sacrifice some interesting archival details. So, over the next few days I'm going to post about my research on the Kent and tell some of its story. Hopefully, you'll get a sense from this as to why this story became the 19thC icon that it did.
Loss of the East Indiaman 'Kent' (1826) by Thomas Luny, Collection of the National Maritime Museum
I think I first read about the Kent bottle in a "Ripley's Believe it Or Not" cartoon about messages found in bottles. The cartoon, alas, turned out to be inaccurate, but the real story turned out to be more interesting than I'd imagined.
First, here's a photo of an actual "message in a bottle." This is the actual, sea-stained letter that washed up on the beach of Bathsheba, Barbados in 1826. It's been placed in a picture frame and is held by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.
"The ship, ‘The Kent,’ Indiaman, is on fire -- Elizabeth, Joanna, & myself commit our spirits into the hands of our blessed Redeemer. His grace enables us to be quite composed in the awful prospect of eternityD.W.N. MacGregor
1st March 1825
Bay of Biscay."
(I'll be trying to use burgundy text to indicate quotations taken from original documents.)
In writing my essay, one of the first decisions I had to make was how to describe this letter's discovery. The note in the National Maritime Museum identifies J. Surles as the person who discovered the letter. But local accounts from Barbados claim that the letter was first discovered by a Black man (sometimes a "servant") who handed the letter to James Surles. Given how often Black people have been written out of history, I wanted to do what I could to write this man back in.
Having made that decision, it was surprising to me how much I could figure out about this person. For example, he was most likely alive during Bussa's Rebellion, the uprising of enslaved people in 1816. The letter had been found in September. If this man was lucky enough to live to live until the end of the year, he would gain the right to own property and give evidence in court. If he lived
until 1833, he would witness the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. In getting this one detail about a black man discovering the letter, I suddenly had a sense not only of this person's probable past but also his potential future.
Likewise, I had a glimpse into the future of the man who wrote the letter in a bottle: Duncan MacGregor. He'd survived to write the bestselling narrative of the Kent's sinking. Perhaps more importantly, my grad assistant on this project -- Powder Thompson at the Anglia Ruskin Center for Science Fiction -- sent me copies of letters written by other people on the ship. The letters of Joanna Dick, a young woman making an unplanned trip to India, became a very important source for me in reconstructing the story of the Kent.
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