Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
As Arago sailed north and neared France on the 1 July, 1809 a British warship
was blockading Marseille. Arago's ship was boarded, and his heart must have sunk
at the thought of a further period of imprisonment. He wrote about this incident in
his autobiography (Arago 1854, 1857):
The vessel in which I was, although laden with bales of cotton, had some corsair papers of
the regency [of Algiers], and was the reputed escort of three richly laden merchant vessels
which were going to France,
We were off Marseille on the 1st of July, when an English frigate came to stop our passage:
“I will not take you”, said the English captain, “but you will go towards the Hyère Islands,
and Admiral Collingwood will decide your fate.”
“I have received,” answered the Barbary captain, “an express commission to take these
vessels to Marseille and I will execute it.”
“You individually can do what may seem to you to be best,” answered the Englishman: “as
to the merchant vessels under your escort, they will be, I repeat, taken to Admiral
Collingwood.” And he immediately gave orders to those vessels to sail to the East.
“Admiral Collingwood” was Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, the Royal Navy's
Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean in 1809 (Adams 2005), who commanded
a squadron of 15 British warships that were blockading a French naval fleet of 21
ships (including six Russian) tied up in the harbor of Toulon under the command of
Vice-Admiral Ganteaume. Collingwood's mission was primarily to stop this fleet
from supporting Napoleon's armies, but also to prevent supplies from reaching
France and to put pressure on the French government in its home. It was under these
instructions that the British warship intercepted Arago's group of ships.
The ship that intercepted Arago has up to now not been identified. I believe that
it was HMS
Minstrel
(Murdin 2005), a 423-ton sloop with 18 guns. At the time of
the Napoleonic Wars, the word “sloop” covered a variety of warship types. They
were captained by an officer with the rank of commander and had 10-18 guns, so
Minstrel
was at the upper end of this range; if the ship had been any larger it would
have been a frigate. Its captain was Commander John Hollinworth, a man who
entered the Royal Navy as a midshipman and was promoted first to Lieutenant in
1802 and then to commander in 1806, a year before he became the captain of the
Minstrel
(which he commanded from 1807-1809). In his final years he reached the
rank of Rear Admiral, the lowest of the three ranks of admiral in the British Navy.
In the UK's National Archive I found Hollinworth's and the
Minstrel's
logs for
1809. The National Archive is located at the Public Record Office beside the River
Thames in Kew, and this is where the government's records are kept, including the
original logs of the ships of the Royal Navy. In the early nineteenth century, each
Royal Navy ship kept several logs. The original ship's logs were hour-to-hour
records made at the time of the incidents reported. Sometimes the handwriting
(several different hands) is very difficult to read, and one can readily imagine the
entries being written on the moving deck of a sailing ship. The captain's logs, how-
ever, are fair copies and filed with the Admiralty, the London headquarters of the
Royal Navy, written at leisure in a neat hand using the ship's log as a reference.
Minstrel's
log for 1809 (TNA reference ADM 53/820) is a large leather-bound
ledger of plain pages covered with filthy dust. Its pages are frayed and water stained
