The Boats that Built Britain, Episode 2: HMS Pickle

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“Britain is an island, surrounded by a cold and unforgiving sea. For centuries, it protected us from attack. But to prosper and thrive, we would need to do more than just hide behind her salt water shield. Britain needed brave men to venture out into the unknown, and she needed good boats to take them there.”

 

Thus starts the second episode of The Boats that Built Britain, in which presenter Tom Cunliffe, sailor and writer, talks about (and sails) HMS Pickle, one of the unsung heroes of British history.

As Cunliffe sees it, the Pickle delivered the most important message in British history,  a message that confirmed Britain as the first maritime superpower: the news that the French and Spanish had been properly trashed at the Battle of Trafalgar and Britain now ruled the waves.

First off, Cunliffe went to the HMS Victory replica and explained a bit what it would have looked like just after the battle: guns upended, holes in the sides, splinters everywhere, men lying where they fell or being carried belowdecks to the surgeon, smoke, blood – basically, chaos. Getting the news home was the last thing on people’s minds – save one man, Vice Admiral Collingwood, who knew that getting the news home was vital since fear of a French invasion was rampant in Britain.

Cunliffe said that Collingwood's choice of the Pickle to carry out this important mission must have surprised everyone. To naval eyes, the Pickle was hardly a ship at all: 73 feet on deck, no large guns, and “a strange, suspiciously modern” rig. During the battle, she had run errands and picked up survivors – nothing glorious. The reward for successful delivery of the message was £500 (a lieutenant’s yearly pay was about £90 at the time), so it was a payday too for the lucky captain. But what should have been the Pickle’s moment of glory turned into one of the greatest sea-stories of them all as they raced against a larger, faster vessel whose captain was determined to take the reward-money for himself.

Cunliffe went aboard Pickle to find out what it was about her that enabled her to outsail this other ship that should, by rights, have left her dead in the water. He explained that she is very different to most of Nelson’s fleet – the fashion of the time was to have tall, square-rigged ships and great spreads of canvas. These made great fighting ships, but were very limited as sailing-vessels: they are very good at sailing before the wind, but they cannot sail upwind close-hauled. They also roll because their hulls are shaped like barrels to enable them to carry the weight of a lot of guns. Their sail-plan hadn’t been changed in over a century.

The Pickle is very small in comparison, a schooner. There is no square yard on the main mast, which to a naval officer at the time would have looked bare naked. But what you need to sail close-hauled is a long boom and a sail that will lie close to the wind – which is what the Pickle is all about. Cunliffe calls it „the magic of the schooner“.

Her hull is also very different. Cunliffe went down to the hull of the Pickle and showed that it is wineglass-shaped with a long dead drop at the back end, which makes her “slippery”. Today, this shape looks traditional, but in 1805 it was revolutionary. This was the shape of ships that was developing – ships that could sail upwind and didn’t roll.

Cunliffe then went on to talk about the Pickle’s origin and her commanding officer. According to him, the Pickle was an American or Bermudan boat captured in the Carribbean, sailed home by a forward-thinking officer. At the time, the Americans were completely rethinking boat-design.

As unusual as the vessel herself was her skipper, Lieutenant Lapenotiere. He was from a humble Cornish background, very much unlike the well-connected officer class more common in the Navy at the time. Cunliffe spoke to Gordon Frickers, who has researched both the Pickle and her officer extensively. Frickers said that Lapenotiere was considered a solid reliable officer: he didn’t seem to make friends easily, missed a few opportunities to enjoy the patronage of officers who rose and became very distinguished, many other officers rose through the ranks faster than him, but on the other hand, he never lost a ship, captured a couple of prizes and, overall, had quite a successful career. So he wasn’t the most sociable person but a good seaman and a very good person to be under command of. Apparently the Pickle was not an easy command at all: contemporary accounts describe her as “wet, small and uncomfortable”.

Cunliffe sees the Pickle as a symbol of what was going on in the Navy at the time: before, it had been who you knew that determined your career, but now the Navy were trying to ensure that it was what you knew, and to build a naval force based on merit and knowledge. Lapenotiere was one of this new breed. To illustrate this point, Cunliffe went to Navigation School in Portsmouth, where the dreaded naval exams took place, and sat a mock exam. At the time, as he explains, these exams could last up to five hours and covered every aspect of command. If you failed, it could be years until you were allowed to reapply.

The original Pickle was lost on a shoal in 1808, but the ship that Cunliffe is sailing now is an exact replica. She weighs 127 tons and carried only 10 guns at the time. Cunliffe took her through her paces in a force 8-10 storm together with his friend, a sail-racing professional.

(This is the part where Cunliffe gets carried away a bit, talking about how beautifully the ship handles.)
As Cunliffe demonstrated, even with a force 8 gale over the quarter, she’s still amazingly light and balanced so he could steer her comfortably with one hand, which you can’t do on a lot of ships this size with this weight of wind. As the wind was gusting up even higher, the crew were having to put up quite a bit of a fight to keep her on course, but we could also see how fast she is. The downside is that her fine lines which make her so fast also allow a lot of water over the rails, which is why contemporary accounts speak of the Pickle as a wet, uncomfortable boat.

Cunliffe went down below to explain living conditions on board. Back then, what is now the cabin sole was lifted in order to store provisions, so the crew quarters only had 4’ 7’’ head room. With over 40 men on board, conditions must have been seriously cramped. But morale would have been sky-high at the outset of the journey, what with the good news and Lapenotiere thinking of the reward and his promotion.

(Here follows the story of the race between Pickle and Nautilus.)

But of course, it wasn't all plain sailing. Two days into their journey, the Pickle was being hailed by the Nautilus, a square-rigged sloop-of-war, commanded by a higher-ranking officer, a Captain Sykes, off Cape St Vincent. Usually, Lapenotiere would have been summoned to the senior officer’s deck, but because he had the important despatches and Collingwood’s instructions to not let anything stop him, he wouldn’t move from his own deck, so Sykes had to come and see him. Their meeting lasted over an hour, and the crew of the Pickle must have waited on tenterhooks to see if their commanding officer would give in to Sykes’ demands. When the meeting was over, Lapenotiere gave the order to sail on. Sykes went back to his own ship, wrote a despatch relieving himself of his duties under the pretense of protecting the Pickle, then started racing her. 

Now the crew of the Pickle would have moved everything. The accounts state they were holding the ends of the sails in their hands rather than making them fast just so they could gain that quarter-knot that could give them a dramatic advantage. When they came up to Finisterre, the Nautilus pushed ahead, driven by the wind, which favoured her sail-plan. The Pickle took a lot of water, so Lapenotiere had his men make a bucket-chain to get the water back out. He also threw guns and gun-carriages overboard – for a ship of war, this was considered a last desperate measure – and went on.  Then the wind changed direction, which meant that now the schooner could outsail the square-rigger, which couldn’t keep her course and had to sail around the wind.

Then disaster struck again: the wind died within sight of the south coast of England. The Pickle had been aiming for Plymouth, but now, in sight of Falmouth, there was the choice between a longer journey on land or trying to coax another 40 miles out of Pickle. Lapenotiere’s call was to leave the Pickle behind, get into a boat, and order his crew to row him the final miles ashore. Then he got into a post-chaise, the fastest available mode of transport, and set out for London, spending half a year’s pay and changing horses 21 times during the 270-mile journey. After 37 hours on the road, he reached London, beating Sykes by half an hour. And now it was his turn to claim his reward and tell the First Lord: “We have gained a great victory, but we have lost Lord Nelson.”

Cunliffe concludes that to him, the Pickle sums up everything that is best about the sea: “a boat packed with new ideas, sailed to perfection by men with timeless qualities, and the news she carried changed British history forever.”