Welsh Journals

SHIPS AND SEAMEN OF WALES IN THE AGE OF VICTORIA SOME CARDIGANSHIRE EXAMPLES I am deeply conscious of the honour of addressing this annual meeting of the Ceredigion Antiquarian Society, and at the same time very much aware that I am sailing in waters, and along a coast that many in this audience know much better than I do, not only, "ancient mariners" and "old shell backs", but, also there are many distinguished scholars such as Professor E. G. Bowen and some of his former students who have worked diligently and with distinction upon the seafaring tradition of this area for many years. The old sailing-ship men of Wales knew their coastline very well, and I remember only too well hearing from seamen from Amlwch, Moelfre, or Porthmadog, about their fathers who had been master-mariners, and had an uncanny awareness, a kind of extra sense about wind and weather on the darkest of rainy dreary nights on inhospitable coasts. It is hard on a beautiful sunny afternoon in Aberystwyth today to imagine what it must have been like in those vessels of the last century, whether they were the small schooners which left Milford Haven after seeking temporary shelter there and then were heard of no more, or the large Cape Homers beating against contrary winds and icy seas for weeks on end-in what that most distinguished of maritime writers, Alan Villiers, has called The War with Cape Horn. In this talk I would like to submit, however, that there was a distinct tradition which linked the coastal ports of Wales in the age of Victoria, particularly those rural areas like Anglesey, Lleyn and Eifionydd in the North and the Cardigan Bay ports such as Aberystwyth, New Quay, and Aberaeron. As Robin Craig and Basil Greenhill and other writers have pointed out, the sea was a last resort occupation for the majority of the British Merchant Service in the last century; the men of South West England, Wales, the West of Scotland, and to a certain extent, North East England, went to sea because it was the only alternative to a very bleak existence on the land. Basil Greenhill, Director of the National Maritime Museum, has described the later Porthmadog schooners as the ultimate development of the small wooden merchant sailing ship in Britain. "They were lovely ships. The grace of their hulls and the balance of their tall spars gave them a beauty, both under way and lying to an anchor, not exceeded in all the history of sailing ships." How is it that Porthmadog, "a nasty corner of a nasty bay" as the late Professor J. Glyn Davies so