Celebrating Royal Events on the High Seas in the Age of Sail
As the coronation of the new king, Charles III, looms large, project Co-Investigator John McAleer talks about commemorations past on the high seas
As the nation prepares to roll out the bunting and set up the street parties for the coronation of King Charles III, it’s worth remembering that such celebrations are not are confined to terra firma. As Britain’s maritime empire of trade expanded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so the celebration of significant royal and national occasions took place further from home and, sometimes, on the high seas.
One wonders, for example, if somewhere in the world on 6 May 2023, a ship’s company will be doing what Edward Cooke and his men did in 1711? On St George’s Day, 23 April, shortly after their ships – the Duke of Bristol and the Dutchess of Bristol – traversed the Tropic of Cancer on their return from a speculative trading voyage ‘to the South Sea, and round the World’, Cooke ‘fir’d guns, and gave the men drink’ to celebrate the anniversary of Queen Anne’s coronation.
There are plenty of other royal commemorations in the maritime records. The ‘anniversary of King Charles’s restoration’, commemorating the restoration the Stuart monarchy in 1660 (otherwise known as Oak Apple Day or Royal Oak Day) was observed as a public holiday in England until 1859. On one anniversary, Mary Campbell’s ship was in the icy waters off the coast of Southern Africa on its return from India. Although she and her shipmates were many thousands of miles from Britain, halfway between Asia and Europe, the commemoration connected them with domestic rites and rituals. As she noted proudly in her diary, ‘the African echoes answered to “Britannia rules the waves” played by the band of the Hyperion’.
Royal birthdays were a favourite for shipboard celebrations. Alexander Mackrabie’s ship, the Earl of Ashburnham, celebrated George III’s birthday on 4 June 1774: ‘We put on our best coats and drink [sic] his health in a bumper, which is thought a very proper and becoming measure.’ On 4 June 1802, ‘being the Kings birth day’, Sam Dyer and his shipmates ‘drank his health and made merry on the occasion’. Five years later, the East Indiaman Alfred was at St Helena, a remote island in the southern stretches of the Atlantic Ocean, whereupon it ‘fired a royal salute in honour of HM birthday’ at one o’clock. On the East Indiaman Dorsetshire on 4 June 1817, ‘this being HM Birthday a double allowance was served out to the ship’s company and all work remitted after 12 o’c[lock]’. For some passengers, the celebration of royal birthdays could have benefits other than an additional serving of grog. Mary Wimberley, travelling to Bengal on board the Java, recorded that 12 August 1825 witnessed ‘two soldiers tied up to be flogged, but were pardoned through Capt Driver’s intercession’. It is not clear whether the fact that this was the king’s birthday – George IV in this instance – played a role in the captain’s clemency. In any case, the anniversary was commemorated on the ship that day: ‘It being the King’s birthday his health was drunk by the whole party and crew and in the evening a number of soldiers and sailors danced on deck; when all the musicians (that is a drum, a bad fife and worse fiddle) were assembled we had some excellent hornpipes.’
Historians have long recognised that life on board ship has always been tightly regulated by routine. The firing of guns or the drinking of toasts to celebrate a monarch’s birthday or the anniversary of their coronation helped to define the voyage and mark its passage. In doing so, these acts of commemoration and celebration helped to connect the floating maritime community of a long-distance merchant vessel, far away from home on the high seas, with the familiar social and cultural routines and rituals of home. We can only hope that any British mariners and sailors, wherever they may be at sea, will raise a glass to His Majesty on Saturday!
