Crosspatrick, The

DESCRIPTION: C(r)osspatrick leaves "for New Zealand, with their families and their wives." Five days out the ship is wrecked by fire. The captain and his wife try to save others. "Out of four hundred passengers and forty of a crew, There were only four of them left."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1911 (Greig/Duncan1)
KEYWORDS: drowning sea ship wreck sailor cannibalism fire
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Nov 18, 1874 - "The most terrible catastrophe of the old year was the destruction by fire of the emigrant-ship Cospatrick, and the consequent loss of over 450 lives, in the early morning of Nov. 18." (source: Illustrated London News, January 2, 1875, as quoted on The Ships List site)
FOUND IN: Ireland Britain(Scotland(Aber))
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Greig-FolkSongInBuchan-FolkSongOfTheNorthEast #167, p. 2, "The Loss of the Kilpatrick" (1 text)
Greig/Duncan1 32, "The Loss of the Cospatrick" (1 text)
Ranson-SongsOfTheWexfordCoast, pp. 99-100, "The Crosspatrick" (1 text)
Roud #3806
ALTERNATE TITLES:
The Loss of the Scotch Patrick
NOTES [3365 words]: There are Bodleian broadsides for at least two other ballads about this disaster. While neither is dated, both broadsides quote news dispatches making it seem that they should be dated 1874.
Bodleian, Firth c.12(104), "The Burning of the Emigrant Ship, 'Cospatrick'" ("To this most heartrending and sorrowful tale"), unknown, n.d.; the chorus begins "The 'Cospatrick' took fire when at sea."
Bodleian, Firth c.12(107), "The Burning of the Emigrant Ship, 'Cospatrick'" ("In '74 we've had some shocking disasters"), unknown, n.d.; the chorus begins "Far out on the ocean, in the darkness of midnight."
Another broadside seems to be a third different ballad but could not be downloaded and verified: Bodleian, Harding B 40(4), "The Burning of the 'Cospatrick'" ("You feeling-hearted Christians wherever that you be"), J.F. Nugent and Co.? (Dublin?), 1850-1899 ; also Harding B 19(115a), "The Burning of the 'Cospatrick'" - BS
Despite using different names for the ship, the two Grieg versions are the same, and come from the same informant. The Ranson version is different enough that it's just possible that it's a different song; it omits the ending with the cannibalism. But I suspect it's the same song. Clark has three other poems about the Cospatrick, by Charles Fox, T. B. Brindley, and J. E. Sykes, respectively. None of them appear to be the Grieg song, the Ranson song, or the Bodleian broadsides. So that seems to imply the existence of at least six Cospatrick poems, at least three of them aimed at a popular audience.
Clark says on p. 10 that this "period saw a number of catastrophic shipboard fires, but that involving the New Zealand-bound emigrant ship Cospatrick was certainly the most destructive.... Widely regarded as the most horrific disaster to befall a British merchant vessel during the Victorian era, the episode had all the ingredients to justify a notorious reputation: a desperate battle to quench the fire was followed by chaos as the inadequacies of the ships's boats became aparent, a huge death toll as the vessel was being abandoned, and acts of cannibalism in the one lifeboat to remain afloat."
Despite being only a limited reference, Ritchie, pp. 52-53, devotes many hundreds of words to this disaster. Cospatrick was built in Burma and seems to have spend many years working mostly in the Indian Ocean. Eventually it was taken over by the Shaw Savill Line and used to take emigrants from Britain to New Zealand.
Cross, p. 17, describes Cospatrick as "a two-decked, three-masted sailing ship of 1199 tones... completed on 18 August 1856. Built in what was known as the Blackwall Fritage style, she was heavily timbered, bluff-bowed, and beamy... her square stern, quarter galleries and stern windows were unfashionable even at the time she was launched. Cospatrick was ship-rigged (carrying square sails on all masts) and her dimensions were 191 by 31 by 23½ feet (length, breadth, depth of hold)." Lloyd's at the time rated her A1 for fifteen years (that is, assumed she would remain in good shape for a decade and a half). But she was eighteen years old at the time of her final voyage -- and in those years had made just fourteen round trips, so she spent a lot of time at sea and relatively little in port.
She initially belonged to David Duncan (1804-1862), who owned a significant fleet of merchant vessels although they were regarded as somewhat unlucky. He named her Cospatrick after the eleventh century earl of that name whom he regarded as an ancestor (Clark, p. 18). Much of her early service was as a troopship and hospital ship. She also spent some time as a cable-layer (Clark, p. 19) -- an unusual task for a sailing ship.
She does not seem to have been a particularly happy ship. Her last voyage before the one described in this song had seen a high number of desertions. She had carried Indian coolies on that voyage, and many had died. The crew bought sexual favors from the passengers. There were problems with her officers (Clark, pp. 22-25).
Several repairs had been done after she had finished that voyage (Clark, p. 25), and her lower levels were rebuilt to hold emigrants, with three great sections installed -- one for single men, one for families, one for single women. The partitions were soft pine, which was cheap but presumably wasn't much good against fire. Her 400+ emigrants were expected to fit into 5600 square feet (Clark, p. 54). That works out to thirteen square feet per person -- not even enough space to let them all have their own hammocks side by side. She did not have enough water capacity to make the trip to New Zealand with such a large load, so a coal-powered gadget was installed to distill fresh water. This could produce just over a gallon a day per person aboard -- enough for drinking but hardly enough for sanitation. Clearly this was the lowest possible rung of the emigration ship ladder.
Indeed, the emigrants on the Cospatrick were mostly so poor that they couldn't pay their own way; they were "Assisted Emigrants." This was part of the program by Julius Vogel, New Zealand's treasury secretary, and later premier, for much of the 1870s. He proposed that New Zealand borrow to pay for internal improvements and bring in enough colonists to make its economy more independently viable (Jackson/McRobie, pp. 73, 241-242. This would result in a financial disaster in 1878, but the plan did succeed in increasing the non-Maori population from about 256,000 to around 489,000, which was beneficial in the long run). New Zealand was paying the emigrants' way because it felt it needed people (especially women). It even hired agents in Britain to find people, paying them fifteen shillings a head. Naturally they swept up the dregs of society, often people who had no skills (Clark, p. 56). It wasn't transportation, quite, but it was done on almost the same scale, at the lowest price possible, and the people it pulled in were from the very lowest classes.
To their credit, the owners had appointed a schoolmaster to help both children and adults, as well as manage religious duties (Clark, p. 63) -- though one schoolmaster for dozens of children, plus adults, strikes me as not very adequate.
Ritchie reports 429 emigrants were aboard the Cospatrick for the final voyage, plus the crew, including the captain's wife and son (though Clark, p. 60, says that the couple had two daughters who were not aboard.) The emigrants included about 178 men, 125 women, 16 infants, and 110 older children (Clark, p. 62, though there some uncertainty about the exact numbers). There were 44 crew. Clark, p. 53, reports that she also had a large cargo: 992 tons, including 257 tons of railway iron, various types of alcoholic beverages, varnish, pitch, turpentine, vegetable oils, agricultural implements, clothing, medical supplies, and small manufactured goods. A lot of it was very flammable.
She had six boats, which were rated as being able to carry 183 people (Clark, pp. 54-55) -- enough to meet her legal obligations based on her tonnage, but obviously not enough to carry all her passengers and crew.
On September 11, 1874, she left Gravesend. She dropped off her last letters on September 13 at the Isle of Wight (Clark, p. 62). She was supposed to travel to New Zealand via the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean.
There were apparently few discipline problems (Clark, p. 64), but there was a bad bout of disease aboard, with eight children dying (Clark, p. 65). But the real disaster took place on November 17 or 18 ("accounts differ" on the date, according to Ritchie). Given how few survivors there were, we can't be sure just what happened, but the reconstruction followed by Ritchie and by Clark says that flammables in the forward part of the ship caught fire.
Just where this happened isn't clear to me. Ritchie seems to think the ship was approaching Auckland, New Zealand, but Clark, p. 81, says they were about 250 miles southwest of the Cape of Good Hope.
The fire burned quickly, soon making it impossible to man the pumps. Two of the six boats were also burned. The first officer, Charles Romaine, apparently ordered the main foresail furled, to keep it from burning -- but this caused the ship to turn with its bow to the wind. In other words, the wind was now blowing the fire back across the ship. It was a fatal decision; from that moment, there was no hope of saving the ship (Clark, p. 67). But Captain Alexander Elmslie, rather than pulling some crewmen off fire duty to lower the boats, insisted that they all keep fighting the fire (Clark, p. 68). He didn't even make any effort to supply the boats with food and water.
Eventually panic set in and the passengers rushed the boats. People filled the starboard lifeboat so full that the davits bent; the stern hit the water first, and the boat capsized. All aboard were dumped into the sea. There were so many people in the water that when a quartermaster jumped overboard to try to right the craft, he was swamped and drowned (Clark, pp. 72-73). A second boat was lowered but not secured, so it floated away without anyone aboard. A few members of the crew tried to prepare a third boat, but it was too heavy and they hadn't enough helpers, so it caught fire before it could be brought into action. That left only the port lifeboat, with a capacity of thirty people. The sailors guarded this one from the passengers (Clark, p. 73.) This last boat was only able to get away because it was a type that could be lowered from the boat rather than from the deck (Clark, p. 74). As this was going on, the foremast went down, and Captain Elmslie ordered "every man for himself." Then the mainmast went down, then the alcohol exploded. It took only two hours for the Cospatrick to be destroyed.
The waters in that part of the ocean were fairly cold; Clark, p. 79, estimates that people could only survive for six to nine hours before suffering hypothermia. Many went into the water, but there was nowhere for them to go.
The one boat that managed to be properly lowered ended up with both First Officer Romaine and Second Officer MacDonald aboard (Clark, pp. 74-75), plus 33 others -- in a boat rated for just 30 (Clark, p. 77). It was a tight squeeze, and left the boat very low in the water.
It is interesting to note that fully 14 of the Cospatrick's 44 crew managed to make it onto that boat; Clark, p. 77, lists them.
Surprisingly, the starboard lifeboat had landed in the water, and a few crew members had turned it over. It had 26 people aboard. The two boats met, and four men, including Second Officer Macdonald, transferred -- meaning that each boat had an officer (Clark, pp. 78-79). They made no attempt to rescue others; the boats were full (Clark, p. 70. Ritchie says that there were 80 people on the two boats, but this is surely at least a dozen too many.).
The two officers decided to man different boats because it meant that each boat would have someone who could navigate -- but there was no navigation equipment, and hardly any means to steer the boats. Romaine's port lifeboat had only three working paddles, and MacDonald's starboard lifeboat had no equipment at all until Romaine's boat transferred one working and one broken paddle. Neither had a sail, and neither had food or water. Elmslie's delay in preparing the boats had been a disaster.
Romaine and MacDonald decided to head for Cape Town (Clark, p. 81). But there was little chance of them making it unless they could hail a ship.
The two boats hoped to travel together, but it was stormy on the night of November 21 and the two were separated (Clark, p. 82. Sadly, while the sea was high, there was little if any rain to refresh those in the boats).
Romaine's boat was never found, so we don't know what happened aboard; Clark thinks it likely that it was swamped in the storm. On MacDonald's boat, by November 22, people were starting to make the mistake of drinking salt water. People started to die that day, and after nine or so deaths, the survivors turned to eating the dead bodies. (Or so they said; there can be no proof that the people died rather than being killed. MacDonald kept a diary for a few days, but soon was too sick to do so.) The men were so debilitated that they lost their last oar and were losing the ability to steer (Clark, p. 83). Six more men died November 24, then seven on November 25 (Clark, p. 84). That left just eight men alive, and three had lost their minds. The first ship they saw ignored them. One of the madmen died soon after (Clark, p. 85). By the time they were rescued, McDonald estimated that he had just twelve hours to live.
Although McDonald apparently did not see it, there was a lot of wreckage in the vicinity, and the Liverpool-based British Sceptre, bound from Dundee to Calcutta, had seen it. Her captain William Jahnke ordered his crew to watch for survivors.
When MacDonald's boat was finally found by the British Sceptre on November 26 (so Ritchie) or 27 (so Clark), it had six bodies aboard -- five dying men and one already dead (Clark, p. 87). Two of the five survivors were so far gone that they died in the next few days, leaving just three men alive -- second officer McDonald, quartermaster Thomas Lewis, and ordinary seaman Edward Cotter. The two who had died after the rescue were able seaman Robert Hamilton and emigrant Jeremiaj Leuchan, who were buried at sea. (Leuchan died almost immediately after the rescue, but Hamilton lasted until December 2; I suspect he could have been saved had there been a competent doctor to treat him. But the British Sceptre had no medical officer; Captain Jahnke was the one who nursed them; Clark, p. 88.) Thus the casualty rate for the Cospatrick was over 98%.
It turned out that the boat had floated some 500 miles north (Clark, p. 87), but was too far west to make land.
Captain Jahnke diverted his ship to Saint Helena, dropping off his passengers on December 6, 1874 (Clark, p. 89).
On December 9, the three survivors were sent back to Britain on a mail steamer, the Nyanza, along with a report from Jahke (Clark, p. 90).
Once home, the three survivors were of course made to explain what happened many times, both the the shipping authorities (the Wreck Commission and the New Zealand Agent-General) and to the press (Clark, pp. 95-98). There was much dispute about how the fire could have started, but that was highly technical and I doubt the public noticed much.
Eventually there was a formal investigation by the Board of Trade (Clark, p. 104 and following). These sorts of investigations had a tendency to go easy on the companies and the officers, and this one certainly started in typical form: Although there was no actual evidence, it promptly concluded that one of the emigrants or the sailors had caused the fire (Clark, p. 107).
The investigation also looked at the lifeboats, learning that they were hard to manage, that one may have been defective, and that in any case they were mishandled. The commission thought there could be better rules for lifeboats, and certainly there should be lifeboat drills, but as usual nothing was done (Clark, pp. 107-109).
One side effect of all this was that the sort of voluntary emigration that New Zealand wanted to encourage almost stopped, though the decline was temporary (Clark, p. 109-110). Penalties for sailors and passengers trying to steal from ships' stores (the reason the commission advanced for why the fire started) were increased (Clark, p. 110). Theoretically, controls were placed on passenger ships carrying dangerous substances, but because the definition of "passenger ship" was restrictive, cargo ships could still carry passengers (Clark, p. 111), so the change didn't make much real difference. It wasn't until the Titanic wreck, in 1912, that regulations finally required enough lifeboats to carry everyone (Clark, p. 118).
The New Zealand government brought an action against the ship's owners, Shaw, Savill & Co., to recover a portion of the fares it had paid for the sponsored emigrants. Shaw, Savill & Co. insisted on going to court, but lost and had to pay (Clark, p. 112).
The one surviving lifeboat, the only relic of the Cospatrick, was brought home by the British Sceptre, but its fate cannot be traced after 1875 (Clark, pp. 112-113).
The song's praise for Captain Elmslie strikes me as misguided. Based on the little we know, it appears Elmslie did little to prepare crew or passengers for disaster. He certainly did nothing to prepare the boats for launching until it was too late, and did nothing to provision them. And his choices to fight the fire proved ineffective, though it's not clear that he could have done better. Be that as it may, had he managed the boats better, the survivors of the fire might have numbered more than a hundred rather than just three.
The fates of the three survivors were not particularly happy. Quartermaster Thomas Lewis, who had done the most to keep the lifeboat afloat, seems to have been known at his home in Anglesey as Thomas Pen-Stryd. He worked on vessels near home until he lost a leg in a cargo accident, forcing him ashore, and died of bronchitis in 1894 (Clark, pp. 122-123).
Seaman Edward Cotter lived until 1941, when he was in his eighties, but he had had many troubles in the intervening years, being frequently in trouble at work and seemingly becoming a serial liar (Clark, pp. 126-129).
The worst fate, though, was probably that which awaited second mate Henry McDonald. Although folklore claimed he survived later shipwrecks, Clark, p. 129, says he never went back to sea. He and his wife kept moving from house to house, and he became an alcoholic, then became so irrational that he had to be institutionalized in February 1885. He went on a hunger strike; the staff force-fed him and tried some sort of shock therapy (Clark, p. 130, says electro-convulsive therapy, but my records say it didn't exist back then). He had to be placed in a straitjacket, and died on April 5, 1885, at the age of just 39.
Of the two surviving versions (Grieg and Ranson), the Grieg is fuller, so let's use it as a basis for testing the facts
-- "On September 11th the Scotch Patrick set sail From Gravesend": Except for the wrong ship name, this is correct: Cospatrick left Gravesend on September 11, 1874.
-- "With emigrants for Auckland bound": Yes; almost all the passengers were emigrants, mostly assisted emigrants, and her destination was Augkland.
-- "Four hundred and seventy-four all told": Clark, pp. 149-159, gives the best passenger list he can; it has 433 names, but he adds "There is no certainty as to the exact number"; there was no precise passenger list. She had 44 or so crewmen (the deceased, other than Elmslie, are listed on pp. 147-148). Add that all up and you get 477. Possibly the 474 came by subtracting three from 477. Or maybe somebody calculated a different total. In any case, it's close.
-- "The ship had been two months at sea" when the fire started. It was actually a bit longer than that, but that's correct as a round number.
-- "The captain and his loving wife Jumped in the water to end their life": No one who survived saw their fate, but Henrietta Elmslie was reportedly with her husband as he directed firefighting efforts, and both perished, probably in the water, since Elmslie apparently eventually gave the order "every man for himself."
-- "One of her boats got clear away": As se saw, there were actually two boats that survived the fire. But only one was recovered.
-- "Not a drop of water had they got... The remaining few with hunger mad Eat the dead bodies and drank their blood": every word of these six gory lines is true.
-- "The British Sceptre": was indeed the ship that rescued the few survivors.
-- "Three out of four hundred and seventy-four Were all that lived to reach the shore." The song is correct in saying there were three survivors, though, as we saw, the number aboard the ship is slightly uncertain.
Thus it appears that Grieg's version has everything right except the name of the ship! A strange error. But clearly this was composed very soon after the tragedy, and was preserved surprisingly well. - RBW
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