The Sinking of the Gloucester: The Shipwreck That Made 17th Century England Tremble

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At first the bodies sank to the seabed. Then, after only a few days of submersion, once the internal organs had begun to putrefy and the flesh had swelled with noxious gases, they rose again to the surface like inflated balloons. Later that same week they came ashore one by one and at different locations, as if in death they disdained each other’s company. They fetched up all along the bleak and empty coastline that stretches from Yarmouth to Caister, Winterton and Happisburgh. There were even some that drifted as far north as Foulness and the estuary of the Humber.

They were deposited on the sands as the tide ebbed. In some, the softer parts, the cheeks and the lips, had been eaten away by lampreys and hag fish. But there were no obvious signs of human violence, no gaping wounds. The waves nudged and licked at their ankles, alternately fawning and spurning.

It was the middle of May 1682. The weather was thick and often raining with blustering easterly winds that kept the temperatures unseasonably low. The wind moaned through the grey hair grass that grew luxuriantly over the sand dunes. The booming call of the bitterns was like the sound of distant cannon fire, both a warning and a requiem.

Shipwreck was common in these waters, and Newarp and Scroby Sands were both notorious graveyards for sailors. But usually there was some evidence of the ship itself, a standing mast or a floating spar, and the number of victims was not so numerous. On this occasion the absence of wreckage and the wide dispersal of corpses suggested that a great ship had gone down far out to sea. But there was no war raging and there had been no storm, so there was no obvious reason for a ship to have perished.

It was the scavengers of the coastline, the cockle pickers and the samphire gatherers, peering into the grey light of dawn, who first spotted this strange invasion of the dead. Most of the bodies still had strips of coarse blue cloth attached to them.There was even the odd telltale red hat washing back and forth in the slack water. It all spoke of a Royal Navy ship. The bodies were hurriedly searched for valuables. Shipwreck was looked on as part of God’s beneficence by those who lived along this forlorn coast, far from the eye of the magistrates. Daniel Defoe in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain remarked on how:

As I went by land from Yarmouth northward, along the shoar towards Cromer … I was surprised to see, in all the way from Winterton, that the farmers, and country people had scarce a barn, or a shed, or a stable; nay, not the pales of their yards, and gardens, not a hogstye, not a necessary-house, but what was built of old planks, beams, wales and timbers, &c. the wrecks of ships, and ruins of mariners and merchants’ fortunes.

One or two of the corpses were sumptuously dressed, suggesting members of the gentry were among the drowned. They offered rich pickings for those who found them. The quickest and surest way to obtain a gold ring was to sever the finger on which it had become embedded.

For the most part the dead could not be identified. They were wrapped in a simple shroud, placed on the backs of carts and buried in a common grave in the nearest churchyard.There was no bell, no book, no prayer, no distribution of ale and cheese to mourn their passing. It was important to keep the cost to the parish to a minimum. But in certain cases the names of the missing can be traced through the letters of survivors, the evidence of wills or the ex gratia payments made to widows.

The Norfolk Coast

Rowland Rowleson was one of the ordinary sailors who lost their lives when the Gloucester frigate sank, for that was the name of the Royal Navy ship that had foundered some 30 miles from the nearest land. He had made his will just two weeks before he sailed:

Know all men by these words that I, Rowland Rowleson belonging to his Majestie’s Ship called the Glocester Sir John Berrie Commander have made … Hercules Browne of Wapping Whitechappell … slop seller my true and lawful attorney … and further considering the dangers and perils of the Seas and the uncertainty of my returne for the avoidance of variance and strife which may happen about that small estate which I shall leave at the time of my decease … do give unto Hercules Browne my said attorney all my wages debts moneys … goods chattels and estate whatsoever and do make the said Hercules Browne sole executor … whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seale the 19th day of April in the 34th year of Charles the second King of England Scotland France and Ireland in the year of our Lord God one thousand six hundred and eighty two, Rowland Rowleson, his mark …

His use of the phrase, ‘considering the dangers and perils of the Seas and the uncertainty of my returne’, has, in the circumstances, a grim poignancy. Did he make this will because he had a premonition of his own death? Was there talk among the sailors of Whitechapel and Wapping, Stepney and Shadwell that the Gloucester was a cursed ship? It is not out of the question. There were already rumours that James, Duke of York, would be sailing on the Gloucester to fetch back his pregnant wife, Mary of Modena, from Scotland with the intention of then settling in Westminster, where he was expected to take over much of the running of the state. The old king, Charles II, was sick and the duke was his named heir. But James was a Catholic, as was his wife, and both of them were deeply unpopular in many quarters. There was a large constituency who wished James dead. Only a few weeks before his departure for Edinburgh, his portrait in the City of London had been slashed viciously with a knife. ‘A vile indignity’ had been ‘offered to the picture of His Royal Highness the Duke of York standing in the Guildhall’. The symbolism of this act of violence was not lost on the populace and not all sailors were loyal to the throne. There may well have been loose talk in the taverns along Ratcliffe Highway about how the voyage north was fated to be troublesome.

Certainly, no sooner was it known that the ship had sunk than there were those who were saying that the wrecking was all part of a plot carried out by the Fanatick Party, with the explicit aim of drowning James. It was claimed that at the centre of this supposed plot was Captain Ayres, the Gloucester’s pilot. A Mr Ridley wrote excitedly to Sir Francis Radcliffe of Dilston, ‘I must inform you that the pilot is a known Republican … it’s not only suspicious but evident he designed his [James, Duke of York’s] ruin with the whole ship, having made a provision for his own escape, but he is taken and will be tried for his life.’

But there is another equally compelling explanation as to why Rowleson felt it necessary to make his will. It is an intriguing document, as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. Rowleson was obviously a man very much alone in the world. He makes no mention of a mother or a wife, a child or a lover, or even a friend. Instead he makes Hercules Browne, simply referred to as a slop seller in Whitechapel, both his attorney and his sole beneficiary. He may have been an orphan or simply old, indigent and solitary. What is very strange is that a man in Rowleson’s situation, a man with only a ‘small estate’ to dispose of, as he himself frankly described it, should bother to make a will in the first place. The most probable explanation for this meticulous ordering of his affairs before he set sail is that he owed Hercules Browne money and that it was Browne who had insisted on the will being made before he agreed to advance him any further credit. Slop sellers sold sailors their clothing, their canvas jackets and trousers, along with other small necessaries, quids of tobacco for a clay pipe, or dice carved from bone for playing backgammon.

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Excerpted from Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester by Nigel Pickford. Published by Pegasus Books, 2023.

Featured image: Johan Danckerts (c. 1682), The Wreck of the Gloucester off Yarmouth, 6 May 1682, Royal Museums Greenwich.

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