Royal Charter (ship)
Encyclopedia
The Royal Charter was a steam clipper
Clipper
A clipper was a very fast sailing ship of the 19th century that had three or more masts and a square rig. They were generally narrow for their length, could carry limited bulk freight, small by later 19th century standards, and had a large total sail area...

 which was wrecked off the beach of Porth Alerth in Dulas Bay on the north-east coast of Anglesey
Anglesey
Anglesey , also known by its Welsh name Ynys Môn , is an island and, as Isle of Anglesey, a county off the north west coast of Wales...

 on 26 October 1859. The precise number of dead is uncertain as the passenger list was lost in the wreck but about 459 lives were lost, the highest death toll of any shipwreck on the Welsh coast. It was the most prominent victim among about 200 ships wrecked by the Royal Charter Storm
Royal Charter Storm
The Royal Charter Storm of 25 and 26 October 1859 was considered to be the most severe storm to hit the British Isles in the 19th century, with a total death toll estimated at over 800...

.

The Royal Charter was built at the Sandycroft Ironworks on the River Dee
River Dee, Wales
The River Dee is a long river in the United Kingdom. It travels through Wales and England and also forms part of the border between the two countries....

 and was launched in 1855. She was a new type of ship, a 2719 ton iron-hulled steam clipper, built in the same way as a clipper
Clipper
A clipper was a very fast sailing ship of the 19th century that had three or more masts and a square rig. They were generally narrow for their length, could carry limited bulk freight, small by later 19th century standards, and had a large total sail area...

 ship but with auxiliary steam engines which could be used in the absence of suitable winds.

The ship was used on the route from Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

 to Australia, mainly as a passenger ship although there was room for some cargo. There was room for up to 600 passengers, with luxury accommodation in the first class. She was considered a very fast ship, able to make the passage to Australia in under 60 days.

Wreck

In late October 1859 the Royal Charter was returning to Liverpool from Melbourne. Her complement of about 371 passengers (with a crew of about 112 and some other company employees) included many gold miners, some of whom had struck it rich at the diggings in Australia and were carrying large sums of gold about their persons. A consignment of gold was also being carried as cargo. As she reached the north-western tip of Anglesey on 25 October the barometer was dropping and it was claimed later by some passengers, though not confirmed, that the master, Captain Thomas Taylor, was advised to put into Holyhead
Holyhead
Holyhead is the largest town in the county of Anglesey in the North Wales. It is also a major port adjacent to the Irish Sea serving Ireland....

 harbour for shelter. He decided to continue on to Liverpool however.
Off Point Lynas the Royal Charter tried to pick up the Liverpool pilot, but the wind had now risen to Storm force 10 on the Beaufort scale
Beaufort scale
The Beaufort Scale is an empirical measure that relates wind speed to observed conditions at sea or on land. Its full name is the Beaufort Wind Force Scale.-History:...

 and the rapidly rising sea made this impossible. During the night of 25/26 October the wind rose to Hurricane force 12 on the Beaufort Scale in what became known as the "Royal Charter gale". As the wind rose its direction changed from E to NE and then NNE, driving the ship towards the north-east coast of Anglesey. At 11 pm she anchored, but at 1.30 am on the 26th the port anchor chain snapped, followed by the starboard chain an hour later. Despite cutting the masts to reduce the drag of the wind, the Royal Charter was driven inshore, with the steam engines unable to make headway against the gale. The ship initially grounded on a sandbank, but in the early morning of the 26th the rising tide drove her on to the rocks at a point just north of Moelfre
Moelfre
Moelfre is a village and community on the east coast of Isle of Anglesey in Wales, and on the Anglesey Coastal Path. It has a population of 1,129.The Royal Mail postcode begins LL72....

 at Porth Alerth on the north coast of Anglesey. Battered against the rocks by huge waves whipped up by winds of over 100 mph, she quickly broke up.

One member of the crew, Maltese born Guzi Ruggier also known as Joseph Rogers managed to swim ashore with a line, enabling a few people to be rescued, and a few others were able to struggle to shore through the surf. Most of the passengers and crew, a total of over 450 people, died. Many of them were killed by being dashed against the rocks by the waves rather than drowned. Others were said to have drowned, weighed down by the belts of gold they were wearing around their bodies. The survivors, 21 passengers and 18 crew members, were all men, with no women or children saved.

A list of 320 passenger names departing from Melbourne in August 1859 on the Royal Charter is available on-line from the Public Records Office, Victoria: "Index to Outward Passengers to Interstate, UK and Foreign Ports, 1852–1901".

A large quantity of gold was said to have been thrown up on the beach at Porth Alerth, with some families becoming rich overnight. The gold bullion being carried as cargo was insured for £322,000, but the total value of the gold on the ship must have been much higher as many of the passengers had considerable sums in gold, either on their bodies or deposited in the ship's strongroom. Many of the bodies recovered from the sea were buried nearby at St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo
St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo
St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo is a small church near the village of Llanallgo, on the east coast of Anglesey, north Wales. The chancel and transepts, which are the oldest features of the present building, date from the late 15th century, but there has been a church on the site since the 6th or...

, where the graves and a memorial can still be seen. There is also a memorial on the cliff above the rocks where the ship struck, which is on the Anglesey Coastal Path
Anglesey Coastal Path
The Anglesey Coastal Path is a long-distance footpath around the island of Anglesey in North Wales....

.

At the time of the disaster there were allegations that local residents were becoming rich from the spoils of the wreck or exploiting grieving relatives of the victims, and the "Moelfre Twenty-Eight" who had been involved in the rescue attempts sent a letter to The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

trying to set the record straight and refute the accusations. The fact that English-speaking press representatives must have encountered a language barrier when attempting to gather information can only have served to further misunderstandings.

Almost exactly a century later (to the day) in October 1959 another ship, the Hindlea, struck the rocks in almost the same spot in another gale. This time there was a different outcome, with all the crew being saved by the Moelfre lifeboat under its coxswain, Richard Evans.

During an episode of the BBC TV Show Who Do You Think You Are?, gardener Monty Don
Monty Don
Montagu Denis Wyatt Don is a British television presenter, writer and speaker on horticulture, best known for presenting the BBC television series Gardeners' World.-Early life:...

 discovered his great-great-grandfather, Reverend Charles Vere Hodge, died on board the Royal Charter.

Aftermath

The aftermath of the disaster is described by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

 in The Uncommercial Traveller. Dickens visited the scene and talked to the rector of Llanallgo, the Rev. Stephen Roose Hughes, whose exertions in finding and identifying the bodies probably led to his own premature death soon afterwards. Dickens gives a vivid illustration of the force of the gale:
So tremendous had the force of the sea been when it broke the ship, that it had beaten one great ingot of gold, deep into a strong and heavy piece of her solid iron-work: in which also several loose sovereigns that the ingot had swept in before it, had been found, as firmly embedded as though the iron had been liquid when they were forced there.


Dickens's friend, the painter Henry O'Neil exhibited the picture A Volunteer in 1860, based on the incident, depicting Rogers about to leap into the sea with the rope around him.

The disaster had an effect on the development of the Meteorological Office as Captain Robert FitzRoy
Robert FitzRoy
Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy RN achieved lasting fame as the captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, and as a pioneering meteorologist who made accurate weather forecasting a reality...

, who was in charge of the office at the time, brought in the first gale warning service to prevent similar tragedies. The intensity of the "Royal Charter" storm and winds were frequently used as a yardstick in other national disasters – when the Tay Bridge
Tay Bridge disaster
The Tay Bridge disaster occurred on 28 December 1879, when the first Tay Rail Bridge, which crossed the Firth of Tay between Dundee and Wormit in Scotland, collapsed during a violent storm while a train was passing over it. The bridge was designed by the noted railway engineer Sir Thomas Bouch,...

 collapsed in 1878 the Astronomer Royal referred to the Royal Charter storm frequently in his report.

The wreck was extensively salvaged by Victorians shortly after the disaster. The remains today lie close inshore in less than 5 metres of water as a series of iron bulkheads, plates and ribs which become covered and uncovered by the shifting sands from year to year. Gold sovereigns, pistols, spectacles and other personal items have been found by scuba divers by chance over the years. Teams have air-lifted, water-dredged and metal-detected for other treasure as late as 2005.

Fictional work about the Royal Charter

In 2010 a French comic, entitled "les Gardiens des Enfers" (Guardians of Hell), was published. Some of the main characters are two miners from Wales who, after having found gold in Australia, return to homeland aboard the Royal Charter, when it sails its final trip. The cover and the first pages can be seen on the publisher's site

American folk/ country singer Tom Russell has written and recorded a song about the Royal Charter disaster. Called "Isaac Lewis", the song (viewable on YouTube) tells the story of one of the victims, whose body was washed ashore at the door of his father's house. Russell says he picked up the story from a local he talked to after a gig he played in Caernarfon.

Isaac Lewis was a lad from the village who worked as a sailor aboard the Royal Charter. The ship was so close to shore that he was able to see his father on the headland and cry out -"O 'nhad, dwi wedi dod adra i farw." (Oh father, I have come home to die). The ship broke up and Isaac Lewis lost his life. After travelling half way around the world, he died within a stone's throw of his home.
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