Scene of the shipwreckSt Gallgo's Church, showing graves. Black and white print on lithograph c. 1860.
The Royal Charter was a steam clipper which was wrecked off the beach of Porth Helaeth[1] in Dulas Bay on the northeast coast of Anglesey, Wales on 26 October 1859. About 450 lives were lost,[2] the highest death toll of any shipwreck on the Welsh coast. The precise number of dead is uncertain as the complete passenger list was lost in the wreck, although an incomplete list (not including those who boarded just before departure) is retained in the Victorian Archives Centre in Victoria, Australia. The Royal Charter was the most prominent among about 200 ships wrecked by the Royal Charter Storm.
The Royal Charter was built at the Sandycroft Ironworks on the River Dee and was launched in 1855. She was a new type of ship, a 2,719-ton iron-hulled steam clipper, built in the same way as a clipper ship but with auxiliary coal-fired steam engines which could be used in the absence of suitable winds.[3]
The ship was used on the route from Liverpool 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 [by whom?] a very fast ship, able to make the passage to Australia via Cape Horn in under 60 days.[citation needed][clarification needed]
Wreck
In late October 1859 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 northwestern tip of Anglesey on 25 October the barometer reading was dropping and it was claimed later by some passengers,[who?] though not confirmed, that the master, Captain Thomas Taylor, was advised to put into Holyhead harbour for shelter. However, he decided to continue on to Liverpool.
The Royal Charter broke up on these rocks near Moelfre
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 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 Storm".
As the wind rose its direction changed from E to NE and then NNE, driving the ship towards the northeast coast of Anglesey. At 11pm she anchored, but at 1.30am 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, 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 at Porth Helaeth on the north coast of Anglesey. Battered against the rocks by huge waves whipped up by winds of over 100mph, 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[by whom?] to have been thrown up on the beach at Porth Helaeth, 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, where the graves and a memorial can still be seen.[4] There is also a memorial on the cliff above the rocks where the ship struck, which is on the Anglesey Coastal Path.
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 trying to set the record straight and refute the accusations.[citation needed]
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 the Moelfre lifeboat under its coxswain, Richard Evans, succeeding in saving the crew.[citation needed]
The aftermath of the disaster is described by Charles Dickens 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, 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 collapsed in 1879 the Astronomer Royal referred to the Royal Charter storm frequently in his report.
The wreck was extensively salvaged shortly after the disaster. The remains today lie close inshore in less than 5 metres (16ft) 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.[5] Teams have air-lifted, water-dredged and metal-detected for other treasure as late as 2012.[6]
Britain's largest gold nugget
Vincent Thurkettle, a prospector from Norfolk, found in 2012 what is Britain's biggest gold nugget while scouring the waters just off Anglesey. He kept his find secret until early May 2016 as he and friends continued to search for other debris from Royal Charter. He found the 97-gram (3.4oz) nugget in water about five metres (16ft) deep, about five metres (16ft) from the shore. The nugget was about 40 metres (130ft) from the site of Royal Charter's wreck, so Thurkettle had to notify the Receiver of Wreck, who took possession of it on behalf of the Crown. Recent storms had exposed seabed that had lain under two metres (6ft 7in) of sand.[7]
Cultural references
American folk singer Tom Russell recorded a song about the wreck of the Royal Charter, "Isaac Lewis" on the 2003 album Modern Art. American folksingers William Pint and Felicia Dale covered the song "Isaac Lewis" on their 2017 album Midnight on the Sea.
The Royal Charter public house in Shotton, Flintshire was named after the vessel.
During an episode of the BBC TV Show Who Do You Think You Are?, gardener Monty Don discovered his great-great-grandfather, Reverend Charles Vere Hodge, died on board Royal Charter.[8]
It is referenced in the song Downed And Drowned by The Longest Johns featured on their album Smoke + Oakum.
Peter Moore[which?] (2015). The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers who Sought to see the Future. Chatto & Windus 2015. ISBN978-0701187996.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) Chapter 14 covers the disaster in great detail.
RMS Tayleur was a full-rigged iron clipper ship chartered by the White Star Line. She was large, fast and technically advanced. She ran aground off Lambay Island and sank, on her maiden voyage, in 1854. Of more than 650 aboard, only 280 survived. She has been described as "the first Titanic".
Marco Polo was a three-masted wooden clipper ship, launched in 1851 at Saint John, New Brunswick. She was named after Venetian traveler Marco Polo. The ship carried emigrants and passengers to Australia and was the first vessel to make the round trip from Liverpool in under six months. Later in her career, the ship was used as a cargo ship before running aground off Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, in 1883.
Moelfre ( ) is a village, a community and, until 2012, an electoral ward on the north-east coast of the Isle of Anglesey in Wales. The community area covers the village and harbour, and several smaller, dispersed settlements. It includes six scheduled Iron Age hut groups and many other sites of archaeological interest. The harbour was formerly a local fishing port; a lifeboat station has been based here since 1854. Among many shipwrecks off the coast was that of the Royal Charter in 1859. Near the modernised lifeboat station is the RNLI Seawatch Centre. The coastline includes a rocky headland north of the village and a large sandy beach at Lligwy Bay, both traversed by the Anglesey Coastal Path. The 2011 census measured the village population as 710. It was estimated at 614 in 2019.
The Royal Charter Storm of 25 and 26 October 1859 was considered to be the most severe storm to hit the Irish Sea in the 19th century, with a total death toll estimated at over 800. It takes its name from the Royal Charter ship, which was driven by the storm onto the east coast of Anglesey, Wales, with the loss of over 450 lives.
HMY Mary was the first Royal Yacht of the Royal Navy. She was built in 1660 by the Dutch East India Company. Then she was purchased by the City of Amsterdam and given to King Charles II, on the restoration of the monarchy, as part of the Dutch Gift. She struck rocks off Anglesey in thick fog on 25 March 1675 while en route from Dublin to Chester. Although 35 of the 74 crew and passengers were killed as the wreck quickly broke up, 39 managed to get to safety. The remains were independently discovered by two different diving groups in July 1971. After looters started to remove guns from the site, a rescue operation was organized and the remaining guns and other artifacts were taken to the Merseyside Museums for conservation and display. After the passing of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, she was designated as a protected site on 20 January 1974.
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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 early 7th century, making it one of the oldest Christian sites in Anglesey. Some restoration and enlargement took place during the 19th century.
Llanallgo is a small village a mile from the coast of the island of Anglesey. The community is in the community of Moelfre, Anglesey, Wales, which is 136.4 miles (219.6 km) from Cardiff and 214.9 miles (345.9 km) from London.
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The Halsewell was an East Indiaman that was wrecked on 6 January 1786 at the start of a voyage from London to Madras. She lost her masts in a violent storm in the English Channel, and was driven onto the rocks below a cliff on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, England. The vicar of nearby Worth Matravers recorded the event in his parish register:
On the 4th, 5th and 6th day of January, a remarkable snow storm, sometimes a hurricane, with the wind at south. On the latter day, at two in the morning, the Halsewell East Indiaman, 758-tons burthen, commanded by Captain Richard Pierce, bound for Bengal, was lost in the rocks between Seacombe and Winspit quarries in this parish. Never did happen so complete a wreck. The ship long before day-break was shattered to pieces...
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Richard Matthew Evans (BEM), was a Welsh lifeboatman. He was born in the village of Moelfre on the north-east of the island of Anglesey. During his 50 years service as a lifeboatman, Richard Evans was involved in 179 launches and the saving of 281 lives and is one of only five men to be awarded the RNLI gold medal twice, the highest accolade awarded by the institution and the equivalent of the Victoria Cross for bravery at sea.
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