'Man Overboard'

Around 2am on the 23rd of November 1787, Yorgen Yorgenson, a seaman on the First Fleet transport, Prince of Wales, fell overboard from the main topsail yard. The ship’s log records this as a matter of fact, adding: ‘The ship’s having such Quick way through the Waters, thought it impossible to Save him, did not hoist out the Boat’. [1] The fleet’s surgeon-general, John White, wrote that any attempt at rescue would have been fruitless. [2]

It was not unusual for sailing ships of the 18th and 19th centuries to lose a man overboard in the course of a voyage, and there are numerous cases where Botany Baymen lost crew members, convicts or passengers.

Ignoring those who fell into the water drunk while the fleet was in port, there were two others who perished in this way on Australia’s First Fleet. The Alexander lost a man in late July, a convict who had been working on deck with the crew and fell overboard from either the bowsprit or the spanker boom (the accounts differ and these two spars are at opposite ends of the vessel). Alexander was brought to and a boat hoisted out, and the Supply brig, which functioned as a utility vessel for the fleet, turned about and bore down, but this unidentified man (possibly a former mariner named Isaac Rogers) drowned before they were able to reach him, some two miles astern. [3]

In September, a convict named William Brown fell from the bowsprit of the Charlotte as he was bringing in his washing. They hove to, a lifebuoy was cut adrift and a boat promptly hoisted out. Once again, Supply turned around to assist, but to no avail. John White, who was stationed on the Charlotte, wrote:

'. . . notwithstanding every exertion, the poor fellow sunk before either the "Supply" or our boat could reach him. The people on the forecastle, who saw him fall, say that the ship went directly over him, which, as she had quick way through the water, must make it impossible for him to keep on the surface long enough to be taken up, after having received the stroke from so heavy a body.' [4]

The Botany Bay Trade

In the years immediately following the First Fleet (by way of illustration) – the Lady Juliana (1789) and the Gorgon (1791) lost their carpenters on the outward voyage. A private of the NSW Corps was washed overboard when ‘a most extraordinary sea’ broke over the Atlantic as she was making her way up the NSW coast in August 1791. The Pitt, the Royal Admiral and the Bellona (all 1792) lost men on their outward or homeward voyages. The crew member who fell overboard from the Pitt at Calcutta (Kolkata) was a First Fleet convict, a man with shipboard experience who had completed his time and was working his passage home.

In a very few cases, the men were saved. The cook of the Sovereign (1795), a store ship, fell overboard shortly after they had sailed from Calcutta on the voyage home: they reached him in time. One of the seamen on the Hillsborough (1798) was almost washed overboard after leaving the Cape on the outward voyage: he was saved by a messmate who caught hold of his trousers.

The Speedy (1799) had just come through a gale which had washed away the starboard railings and broken the boat cranes at the ship’s stern. A seaman named Stewart was working on the cranes, when a board broke and he plunged into the water. The quarter boats being damaged, the captain launched a new boat from the quarter deck, which took half an hour. One of the passengers wrote:

'All this time, Stewart kept himself up, notwithstanding we had a very heavy swell, which hurt him very much, however, the boat got to him just in time and I am happy to say he was saved. He said that he could not have held it out much longer, for that he found himself going. He kicked off his shoes. He said a bird kept close before him all the time he was in the water. He also called to the ship every moment and the people answering him.' [5]

Accounts from the Ships’ Logs

For the most part, the spare accounts in the ships’ logs say nothing about what happened, although given that most of them fell from the rigging – the main topsail yard, the main stay sail or the main foremast cross trees – it is not difficult to imagine what might have happened. How a man fell from the poop deck or the main chains is more difficult to understand.

Richard Henry Dana, a Harvard law student who went to sea in the 1830s ‘before the mast’ (that is, as an ordinary seaman), helps us understand why these accounts are bare.

'The same day, I met with one of those narrow escapes, which are so often happening in a sailor’s life. I had been aloft nearly all the afternoon, at work, standing for as much as an hour on the fore top-gallant yard, which was hoisted up, and only hung by the tie; when, having got through my work, I balled up my yarns, took my serving-board in my hand, laid hold deliberately of the top-gallant rigging, took one foot from the yard, and was just lifting the other, when the tie parted, and down the yard fell. I was safe, by my hold upon the rigging, but it made my heart beat quick. Had the tie parted one instant sooner, or I had stood an instant longer on the yard, I should inevitably have been thrown violently from the height of ninety or an hundred feet, overboard; or, what is worse, upon the deck. However, ‘a miss is as good as a mile’, a saying which sailors very often have occasion to use.' [6]

Dana wrote that he had often known a man’s life to be saved by ‘an instant of time’ or ‘the merest chance’ and no one took any notice.

'An escape is always a joke on board ship. A man would be ridiculed who should make a serious matter of it. A sailor knows too well that his life hangs upon a thread, to wish to be always reminded of it. . .' [7]

An Account from the Forecastle

And yet it is Dana, alone amongst mariners’ memoirs, who explains what it meant when a shipmate was lost overboard. George Ballmer, an English sailor well-regarded by both officers and crew, was making his way aloft to fit a strap to the main topmast head, with the strap, a block, a coil of halyards and a marline-spike around his neck, when he suddenly fell: ‘. . . not knowing how to swim, and being heavily dressed, with all those things round his neck, he probably sank immediately’. A boat was lowered, and despite knowing that there was no hope of saving him, they rowed about for nearly an hour, not willing to acknowledge the truth of what had just happened.

Death is always solemn, Dana wrote, but when a man dies on shore, you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks his place of rest. However:

'. . . when a man falls overboard at sea and is lost, there is a suddenness in the event, and a difficulty in realizing it, which give to it an air of awful mystery. . . A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them; and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered.' [8]

‘Water in his Voice’

As a reminder of how dangerous these voyages were, a man was lost overboard during the re-enactment of Australia’s First Fleet in 1987: Henrik Bak Neilsen, first mate of the Anna Kristina. In this case, we know what happened because her captain, John Sorensen, filled out an accident report:

'Whilst the foresail was being hoisted Henrik was leaning over the side to gather the violently flapping sheets, in order make fast to the pinrail. The ship heeled and Kenrick was pulled over the side.'

David Iggulden, second mate on the flagship, Soren Larsen, and communications officer for the fleet, has recently provided further detail in a personal memoir. [9]

'. . . Henrik had been taking the headsail sheet to a belaying pin on the foredeck, to haul in the clew to set the triangular sail. A sudden gust of wind had filled the flapping sail, the vessel dipped its gunwhale to leeward, and the sheet he was pulling flipped him straight over the side.'

Iggulden was standing the 12 to 4 watch on the flagship when the news came through:

'On 'Soren' the wind was east-northeast force 4 gusting 5 (20 knots), seas moderate on a moderate swell. At 0120 came an Urgency Signal on VHF short range channel 16, ‘This is 'Anna Kristina', we have a man overboard. Position 31 degrees 21 minutes South, 15 degrees 52 minutes West.'

The nearest ship in the fleet was seven nautical miles to leeward and took two hours to reach the Anna Kristina. Another arrived shortly before dawn, and they used searchlights to sweep the sea. Soren Larsen arrived shortly after daybreak. Iggulden’s account of the desperate attempts to save Neilsen demonstrate just how difficult it is to retrieve a man who had fallen overboard in the middle of the Atlantic or the Great Southern Ocean. There is nothing like this in the journals and memoirs of mariners in the late 18th century:

'Henrik hung on to the sheet for a short while, bumping along the hull, but the vessel was travelling at 5 knots. Before the watch thought to bring the vessel up into the wind to stop her Henrik was torn away by the lumpy seas. A red and white lifebelt was thrown towards him but it drifted away. Captain John Sorenson was now on deck. Immediately he put the ship about, and Henrik was found hanging on to the line of the speed log trailing astern. Sorenson brought the ship up into the wind to stop her and ordered the log line to be hauled in. But a log line is very thin, designed to rotate easily through water, and Henrik could not hang on. John Sorenson put the vessel about and Henrik was sighted some 10 yards/metres away on the port quarter. Engineer Johan Brox tied a line about his waist, dived overboard, and tried to swim to Henrick. Rescuing between someone in a swimming pool is one thing; swimming in a force 5 sea, in the dark night, in a cold ocean swell, is another. Johan had to be pulled back to "Anna Kristina" before he drowned.

'Sorenson manoeuvred "Anna Kristina" upwind in order to drift back to Henrik's last position. At some stage a second lifebelt had been thrown in his direction. That, too, floated away. In his official report John wrote: ‘When we last saw him, he was without a lifebuoy and was screaming in panic and slapping his arms. His voice was full of water.’ Henrik disappeared into the darkness and the night. The last contact was his voice calling to them for help, Johan Brox told me afterwards. He also said: "There was water in his voice".'

These four vessels continued the search all that day, finally stopping as darkness set in. Iggulden recalled: ‘The ocean is incredibly large at times like these, a man’s head no larger than a coconut in the trough of a swell’. The fleet doctor advised that by that time, Neilsen would have died of hypothermia. The slower ships in the fleet arrived the next morning and made their own sweep to the east, in the hope, perhaps, of locating his body, ‘but the ocean is immense.’ Iggulden added some thoughts that not even Dana had been able to admit:

'In later watches on Soren I thought of Henrik in the cold sea. His last view of "Anna Kristina" – whether for one minute or for one hour, either must have seemed to him an eternity – his last view of his ship would have of her lights searching the wrong way, always directed the wrong way. And always moving away from him as his body grew colder and colder.'

After reading Dana and Iggulden, one can imagine the crew of the Prince of Wales – which numbered only twenty – each silently reflecting on the man now missing from their watch, and the last thoughts of a Scandinavian seaman lost overboard from a vessel a long way from home.

______________________________

[1] Log of the Prince of Wales, 20 December 1786 to 30 April 1789, UK National Archives, ADM51/4376.

[2] John White, A Journal of a Voyage to Botany Bay in New South Wales, London: J. Debrett, 1790, p. 102.

[3] John White, A Journal of a Voyage, p. 41; Arthur Bowes Smyth, ‘Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth, 22 March 1787 to 8 August 1789’, National Library of Australia, MS4568, 26, 28 & 31 July 1787; Arthur Bowes Smyth, ‘A Journal of a Voyage from Portsmouth to New South Wales and China in the Lady Penrhyn. . . 1787-1778-1789', State Library of NSW (hereafter SLNSW), Safe 1/15, 28 July 1787.

[4] John White, A Journal of a Voyage, pp. 77-78.

[5] Anna King, ‘Mrs King’s Journal of Her Second Voyage to New South Wales which commenced on the 20th of November 1799’, SLNSW, C185/1, 31 March 1800.

[6] Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years Before the Mast (1840), in Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years Before the Mast and Other Voyages, New York: The Library of America, 2005, p. 322.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., pp.35-36.

[9] David Iggulden, ‘Notes from the Sea: A Memoir’, typed manuscript, 2026, Chapter 6.

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