Wreck of the Kent (Part 2): The Letters

In 1825, many Britons first read about the destruction of the Kent via newspapers like this one. The facts seemed clear enough: The ship had been transporting soldiers and their families to India and a significant number of children were among the dead. There were survivors too, who had brought their stories to shore, and who later published popular moral narratives about the disaster.

All this writing gave me plenty of source material with which to reconstruct the Kent's story, but also some challenges.  I wanted to tell a compelling story about this event as well as relate an important history, but the kinds of things fiction writers want to know - what did it feel like to be on this ship as it went down? what did that experience look, smell and taste like? - are not usually documented in 19thC records.

Luckily, I found an ally in the National Maritime Museum's papers: Joanna Dick, a woman taking an unplanned voyage to India. Joanna's sister, Elizabeth, had just given birth and was suffering serious aftereffects, but, because she was an officer's wife, was expected to travel to India with her husband on schedule, despite her poor health. 

Caring for her sister, Joanna worried about Elizabeth's weak pulse and deepening depression. At the last minute, Joanna made a drastic decision: she would travel with her sister to India to help care for her and her child. Joanna knew that this might mean she would never see her homeland or other relatives again. But, she explained in a letter to her aunt, she considered it her religious and familial duty to go. Besides, as a 32-year-old unmarried woman, there was nobody in Britain “requiring my stay.” 

Soon afterward, Joanna accompanied her sister and the newborn baby on board the Kent, completely unaware of the disaster looming in their future. In the farewell letter she composed to her aunt, she tried to convey the vibrancy of the deck of a departing East Indiaman: 

 "the crowds of soldiers with their wives and children – the stock of poultry, pigs, geese and turkeys, the confused collection of packages before everything finds its proper place – the provisions of all kinds for so great a number as 640 people for four months (having no intention of touching any port before reaching India), altogether astonishes one who never before witnessed anything of the kind." 

The ship was, she marveled, "like a small town on the waters."

"A Departing East Indiaman" by Hendrick Staets, 1630, National Maritime Museum

More than anything I read, Joanna's letter helped convey the scale of an East-Indiaman. For comparison, a Boeing 777 flying to Mumbai today could seat around 451 people in a 2-class configuration. The Kent housed 641 people plus cargo. A Boeing 777 is around 229 feet long and has a cabin that's about 20 feet wide; the Kent was 130 feet long and 43 feet wide. It was a 'small town' crammed into an even smaller space, in which people would have to live for months. 

(I think it was when I was figuring out the size of an East-Indiaman that it hit me just how devastating shipwrecks were in the Age of Sail. Terence Grocott calculates that there were roughly 2000 shipwrecks a year worldwide from 1793 and 1816. Many of these ships would have been small, but many carried hundreds of people. As Carl Thompson notes in the introduction to Romantic-Era Shipwreck Narratives, an estimated “5,000 Britons [died] at sea each year” during this period. Imagine living in a world in which air travel had similar statistics.) 

Joanna's letters also conveyed the kind of social life that people of her class (she was the daughter of a Scottish baronet) experienced on board. Like many of the women depicted in Jane Austen's fiction, Joanna had a sense of humor as well as a keen eye for absurdity. Her description of a Regency dinner on board the ship during a storm -- with ropes laid down to keep plates in place and knives and forks flying everywhere -- was hilarious as well as informative.

Joanna had an eye for the human stories as well. Soon after she arrived on the Kent, Captain Cobb discovered a stowaway on board: a solder's wife, who'd hidden herself after being told she couldn't accompany her husband to India. Caught, the stowaway was sent on shore “weeping to think she'd only caused her husband to be punished.” 

Joanna was moved by the woman’s situation. Perhaps she felt a pang of guilt over the class dynamics that allowed her, an unmarried gentlewomen, to effortlessly take an unplanned space on the transport. She participated in some social maneuvering behind the scenes. David Pringle, her cousin and dinner companion, wrote a letter to the colonel pleading the stowaway’s case. The colonel “granted a pardon to the husband” but would not sanction the woman’s return. Captain Cobb then interceded, “generously [promising] to maintain her at his own expense.” The woman was “brought back with joy, to her husband,” Joanna reported with satisfaction. 

In some cases, Joanna's letters also provide rare details about the lives of marginalized people on board. She comments on the "fine little boys (taken at the Marine school, and most of them orphans,) who are employed in clearing out the gig boat". None of the other letters I'd read mentioned these boys, although the ship's logs from previous voyages give a sense of what their lives might have been like. On one of Kent's earlier voyages, the captain had punished a sailor for sexual abusing of one of the ship's boys -- a moment at which an otherwise unrecorded history of exploitation enters the archive.

Example of a page from one of the Kent's log books. The logs of previous voyages contain records of daily routines and punishments, giving another sense of what life was like on board for ordinary sailors.

As the Kent's final voyage began, Joanna kept up her letter-writing to relatives back home, describing the ominous weather. From one of her final letters, we learn that dinner-time conversation "turned much upon shipwrecks." Her sister's new baby slept soundly, but Elizabeth, Joanna's sister, "was alarmed with the creaking and shattering noises which she heard all night, and which kept her awake”. In the morning, Joanna found her sister “rather depressed and thinking that something was coming over us.” Unfortunately, Elizabeth was soon proved right. [Next]

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4