SYMHC Classics: Wreck of the Ten Sail

This episode revisits the biggest shipping disaster in Cayman Islands history, in which 10 ships went down together one night in 1794. Why would so many ships be traveling so closely to one another, and how did they all end up in peril?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everybody, it is time for another Saturday classic, and
this one is on the Wreck of the ten Sale,
which was a colossal multi ship wreck that was inspired
The episode was inspired by Tracy's trip to the Cayman
Islands National Museum. She took a vacation the air back
in and came back full of enthusiasm for this topic,

(00:22):
so we hope you enjoy it. Shipwrecks are always a
listener favorite, and this one has the added advantage of
being enormous, so let's just jump right into it. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm

(00:47):
Tracy Wilson and I'm so uh late. This winter I
got to go to the Cayman Island National Museum in Georgetown,
Grand Cayman, right, actually been once before because you our
fancy vacation and the fancy well, I'm a fancy vacationer,
but this time we were trying to vacation both fancily
and frugally, which is why we spent our time in

(01:09):
Grand Cayman walking around and going to the National Museum,
which is not a very expensive place to go if
you are in Grand Cayman. So I had been there
once before, but this time I took Patrick with me.
The museum is in the oldest public building in the
Cayman Islands. It's one of the very few nineteenth century
structures still standing on the islands because they are struck

(01:30):
by hurricanes on a regular basis. Um While we were there,
Patrick mashed a button on one of the displays and
it brought up brought up this video on something called
the wreck of the ten Sale, And we started off
being like, that's a weird name for a ship, which
is why we watched it. And then as we watched
this video, we realized that the ten Sale was not
the name of the ship. It was ten Sale of ships,

(01:54):
so ten ships, a shipwreck of ten ships at once.
It was the biggest shipping disaster in Cayman Islands history.
And so naturally Patrick said, you should do a podcast
on this. So we are thanks to my vacation. So
I love a good vacation discovery too. I have them

(02:16):
pretty often when I'm on vacation. Uh. And this, like
the last time I had been um in the museum,
there was nothing like that that really sparked my attention
that this way, but this one did. Uh, so, just
so you have uh some background on the Cayman Islands.
These are a collection of islands in the Caribbeans south
of Cuba and northwest of Haiti, and they were uninhabited

(02:39):
by humans when Columbus sighted them in fifteen o three
after he was blown off course on his last voyage
to the America's There is no archaeological evidence of any
indigenous people living on these islands, but there certainly were
lots and lots of turtles, so Columbus named them last Tortugas.
Later they were renamed that came on ups, probably after

(03:00):
the carib word for cayman, the alligator like lizard that
lives in Central and South America, and this eventually morphed
into being the Cayman Islands. They are made up of
Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, and Cayman Brock. The Cayman Islands
are now famous for their banking and financial industries and
being a place to squirrel your money offshore to get

(03:22):
it away from the tax man, but until more modern times,
the economy was based on more local industries like rope making,
and during the Golden Age of piracy, they were also
a popular haven for pirates, including Blackbeard. This is what
led Prince Philip to say on a n visit to
dedicate a monument to this disaster. Aren't most of you
descended from pirates? Cracks me up. I love Prince Philip.

(03:48):
So so the ocean around the Cayman Islands is just
full of shipwrecks. Unlike the larger Caribbean islands like Haiti, Cuba,
or Jamaica, the Caymans are really flat and to the ocean,
so even in good weather they can be hard to
see from far away. And they're also surrounded by really
treacherous reefs and right in the middle of a track

(04:09):
for major hurricanes. And yet, in spite of all this
danger and kind of a non ideal uh topographical situation,
during this part of history, ships traveling back and forth
between the Caribbean and Europe routinely went around the Caymans
rather than taking the much more direct route between Cuba
and Hispaniola. That bit of water, which is known as

(04:30):
the Windward Passage, is extremely rough and very windy. I
have been through the Windward Passage four times. It has
made me sea sick every time. And that was in
like a great, big ship with modern stabilizing technology. So
I cannot really imagine how horrible it must have been
to go through that little stretch between Cuba and Hispaniola

(04:51):
in like a a wooden sailing ship from the eighteenth century.
That sounds terrible me. Yeah, probably a little bit of
a tummy twister. Yeah. So instead of going through the
winter passage, they would go the long way around around
the Cayman Islands, which could be treacherous but okay if
you gave it a wide berth. And then once you

(05:11):
got on the other side, the Gulf stream would speed
the ship along its way, so it was a farther
journey but easier than going through the windward passage. It
did not go so well one night in sev though.
And the story of this particular shipwreck starts with the
French Revolutionary Wars, during which France was at or with
a whole chunk of Europe, including Great Britain, and along

(05:35):
with everything else going on, the warring nation's navies were
naturally taking one another ships as prizes and trying to
protect their own shipping interests by providing naval escorts for
civilian vessels. In see the British Royal Navy took the
French frigate Inconstant as a prize, and after taking it
to Port Royal, Jamaica, the Navy gave it a new

(05:57):
crew and put it back into service as the Convert,
since there was already a ship named in Constant in
the Royal Navy, and the Convert was really too lightly
built to survive heavy heavy combat, so under Captain John
Lawford it was put into service as a scout, a
messenger and also as an escort for merchant convoys. In
January of sevour the Convert was sent to the west

(06:20):
end of Jamaica to gather up a convoy and escort
it back to England. This convoy was originally scheduled to
leave at the end of January, but it was postponed
a couple of times, first by a request of the
Chief of Magistrates and Merchants, who thought that a later
departure date would be better for the merchant community as
a whole, and then it was delayed a little bit
longer because the winds were very light when they were

(06:43):
trying to set sail and it was not enough to
get the heaviest merchant ships out of the bay, and
when the convoy finally set sail on February six, it
had fifty eight ships and all but three of them
were bound for Europe, and those three were going to
various American ports. This sounds like a huge, huge convoy,
but this size really wasn't unusual for a convoy at

(07:04):
this point in history, especially during wartime. Kind of like
a stick together mind. If you wanted to wait for
a military escort, you pretty much had to go when
that was going to be available to you. Lawford's orders
were to set the pace to that of the slowest ship,
and then to keep the convoy together at all costs,
and he did this by ordering all of the merchant
ships to stay behind the convert which would occasionally fire

(07:27):
its guns to warn merchants that started to creep ahead
of it. And under normal circumstances, a ship of this
era leaving Jamaica would pass the Caymans within twenty four hours,
and theoretically that should have been possible even with such
a large convoy, but one of the merchant vessels was
leaky and the convoy had to lie to twice while
it was bailed out, and even though they picked up

(07:48):
speed to try to make better time. When the sun
went down on the seventh, they had seen no side
of land. This was a very dark, cloudy night, and
as midnight approached. The sailing master, he was an Thomas Popowell,
calculated that they should be safely passed the Caymans, with
at least seven leagues between the convoy and the treacherous reefs.

(08:09):
Papawell also suggested that they needed to alter their direction
a little bit to compensate for very northerly winds, so
that they would stay on their course, which was sort
of aimed at the western tip of Cuba, and based
on Popowell's recommendations, Lawford gave the order. Papa Well relieved
him for the night, and he went below. At about

(08:29):
three a m. Two shots were fired from one of
the civilian ships. Papawell went below, he woke La, offered up.
They went back up. Both of them thought that this
was a distress call from one of the ships behind them,
but when Lawford got on deck again, he realized that
several ships had passed the convert in the night, apparently
without anyone aboard the convert. Realizing the shot had come

(08:51):
from one of the ships, that was ahead of them,
not a ship behind them. And at the same time
someone on watch called that there were breakers ahead and
Lawton's words they quote appeared in every direction, and I
could not tell from the darkness of the night to
what extent they might run. So, knowing that the breakers
meant they were all in imminent danger, the Convert tried

(09:12):
to take evasive action. This was a really nimble ship.
It was a light and fast French ship, and according
to the captain, they really would have been fine. But
almost immediately Lawford realized that they were on an inevitable
collision course with one of the merchant ships that was
also right next to them. The two ships struck each other,

(09:32):
and their crews managed to separate them, but only for
the Convert to then be struck again by the other ship.
And about this same time, Papawell tried to sound the
depth of the water, but as he did, the Convert
ground against the reef. The crew tried to lighten the
frigate by taking down the masts, but the damage was
already done. The bilge was filling up, and the captain

(09:54):
had to give the order to abandon ship. And before
we talk about what happened. Next, it's exciting, middle of
the night shipwreck. Let's take them from it. Yeah, it's
take a moment and talk about a sponsor. Okay. So

(10:17):
it was clear even in the middle of the night
that that multiple ships had wrecked, and they started evacuating,
either with their own boats or with canoes that were
rowed out from the island. So survivors who were in
the water made rafts out of flatsam and jetsam to
try to get to shore, but the going was really rough.
It was the middle of the night, the sea was
extremely choppy, and the wind was blowing right at the reef,

(10:40):
so the ships that had avoided this pile up could
not risk approaching to assist, and sailors from the Convert
who managed to make it into the ship's boats were
picked up by other vessels. About twenty of the Converts
crew decided to wait aboard the disabled ship for rescue
rather than risk the canoe passage to land at night
in the dark. Kind of imagine them being let huh

(11:02):
and it's not happening. Uh. The men who made it
to shore made huts and tents from the wreckage and
then used the Converts boats to try to salvage provisions
and other equipment, but there was really not a lot
they could do. In the middle of the night, the
sharp coral was destroying their ropes as they were trying
to haul things, and the sea was so rough that
even really strong swimmers were having trouble managing it. When

(11:26):
the sun came up, they saw, in Lawford's words, quote,
a most melancholy scene, seven ships and two brigs on
the same reef, with the convert a very heavy sea running,
and the wind blowing directly on the shore. Those seven
ships and two brigs were the William and Elizabeth, the
more Haul, the Ludlow, the Britannia, the Richard, the Nancy,

(11:47):
the Eagle, the Sally, and the Fortune. The Ludlow was
sadly a fine new vessel on her first voyage, according
to an advertisement that had been placed in Kingston, Jamaica
the December before advertise using its place in the convoy,
and the more Haul so sadly was full of quote, flour, ham,
cheese and potatoes for sale, although most of the perishables

(12:10):
were lost after the wreck. I feel like we should
have a moment of silence for the all and cheese
and cheese, well, and the potatoes. There's a lot of
casserole that was lost at sea. Not to belittle the
loss of the other things, but yeah, even with the
benefit of daylight, the conditions on the water weren't much
better than they had been during the night before. Rough

(12:32):
swells and the constant wind meant that even though visibility
was better, the forty eight undamaged ships in the convoys
still couldn't approach to offer any help. Locals from the
island spent the whole day of February eight in a
canoe based rescue operation, and by the time the sun
went down again, most of the survivors from the wrecked
ships had been brought to shore. Also on the eight

(12:53):
Lawford talked the fisherman into delivering a letter to the
unwrecked ships instructing them to go westward to hogs Stye
Bay on the Lee side of the island, which is
off of Georgetown. The water would be calm there and
they could all basically just wait at anchor for a
new escort. Nine of the ships did this, and the
rest of the convoy continued on unescorted. On the ninth,

(13:16):
Lawford set off from gun Bluff on the east end
of the Grand Cayman where they were camped to Georgetown,
planning to send word to the Admiralty and make arrangements
for the convoy while he was there. This was basically
the opposite end of the island. He arrived on the
eleventh and posted his various letters to sort of give
you an idea of how small Grand Cayman is. He
did this on foot in two days, until you walk

(13:37):
the whole island. On the twelve he was met in
Georgetown with a petition signed by eight residents of Grand
Cayman who were asking for the passengers from the wrecked
vessels to be quote immediately removed from this island as
soon as possible. The huge influx of shipwreck survivors had
the residents pretty much panicked. There were only about nine

(13:59):
hundred people living on the island at this point, and
shipwrecked survivors had increased the island's population by more than half,
so at least four people now feeling a little crowded.
You have a little crowded on top of all that,
In the words of the petitioners, it was quote morally
impossible for the inhabitants to support themselves. This was because

(14:20):
of a huge hurricane that had struck the islands the
past October, so it was sort of like, we're in
dire straits already and you guys have just made our
population half again as big. We cannot manage this. In
response to this petition, Lawford divvied the survivors up. He
sent them to the ships at Hogsti Bay and wrote
letters to their captains repeating this quote morally impossible language.

(14:42):
He begged the captains to remove their ships immediately, and
he also wrote introductory letters to the Governor of Havanah
requesting aid for any of the ships that should make
their way there on route back to England. Having handled
all this correspondence and arrangements, Lawford then went back to
the camp on gun Bluff, and there he and about
to any of his men carried out a salvage operation
for the next six weeks. In the end, they were

(15:05):
able to get quite a lot from the wreckage, including sales,
rope tools, ammunition, and artillery swords, pikes and axes. Nearly
everything perishable was lost, though, and many of the Convert's
original French cannons sank to the seafloor. Only five men
from the Convert were killed in the wreck, along with
three people on other ships, one of whom was the

(15:26):
master of the Britannia. Several people died of illness in
the wake of the disaster, though, but considering that there
were ten ships involved in this shipwreck, the death toll
was remarkably small. All nine of the ships that had
rendezvoused at Hogstey Bay and their newly increased crew and
passengers made it safely back to England. Two of the

(15:47):
others that left previously unescorted, they were a little less fortunate.
One was taken by a French privateer and another was
captured by the French Navy. And then there are consequences,
of course, because this incident had been so huge and
had involved a navy vessel, it led to a court
martial on April one of sevente four. The court martial

(16:10):
was held aboard the HM S Success, which was anchored
off Port Royal, Jamaica. Lawford's defense was that this entire
thing would have been completely prevented if the ships and
the convoy had stayed behind the convert like they were
supposed to from the beginning. He insisted that had the
convert been at the front of the convoy. It was
a nimble enough that it could have evaded the reef

(16:31):
and steered the rest of the convoy away from it,
even if they had gotten as close to the reef
as they did before wrecking. The first Lieutenant b Bogue
and second Lieutenant William Earnshaw were questioned as well, asked
by the court to give their account of what had
taken place, and each was cross examined by Lawford, who
asked about whether they had seen the master of the
ship used the sextant to figure out their latitude, whether

(16:55):
the signals had been flown to instruct the other ships
to stay behind them, whether they had had the fire
shots to wardships to get back behind them, and additional
questions of a similar nature that the third lieutenant I
also kind of want to say lieutenant every time, because
we're talking about English people. Um. The third lieutenant was
also called and sworn, but he had not been on

(17:17):
duty because of an injured arm, so he was excused.
Mr Popplewell was questioned on the matter of the log book,
which had been found to contain no record of the
distance traveled the day before the wreck. He was also
questioned about his knowledge of the region and the route,
even though it hadn't been in the log. Papolwell was
able to tell the court their latitude as of his
last reckoning, and he insisted that the difference in their

(17:39):
position was because of unexpectedly strong currents that had carried
them off course during the night. Then there was a
lot of back and forth questioning on the matter of
the log book commission, and the master's mate and the
midshipmen were called, and Lieutenant Bog was called for a
second time, and they were both cross examined also by
the captain. None of them knew the reason for the

(18:01):
omission in the log, but they all had every reason
to believe, according to their statements, that the measurements had
been correct and that the sextant had been accurate. Then
Mr Davy, master of the ship's success, was called and
asked by the court to give the latitude where the
wreck had happened. Lawford cross examined him, asking him how
he found the currents leading north from Jamaica to the

(18:23):
Caymans during his own voyages, and he said he'd found
them to be very strong and it had put them
off their reckoning by nine or ten leagues. I kind
of I like, you know, Al Lawford's kind of like
you've you've found this to be like extraordinarily strong current,
did you not? We sure did. In the end, Lawford
and his crew were acquitted. And here is the statement

(18:46):
on that quote. The Court, having thoroughly examined into the
several circumstances attending the same, and having maturely and deliberately
considered the whole, is of the opinion that the misfortune
was occasioned by a strong current setting the ships very
considerably to the northward, and they're reckoning. And doth therefore
a judge that the said Captain Lawford, commander of His

(19:11):
Majesty's late ship, the Convert, the officers and the company
of the said ship, be acquitted. And they are hereby
acquitted accordingly. And this incident didn't really affect Lawford's career.
He continued to command ships, and he eventually became an admiral.
So weather and science have dredged up lots of new
information about this two twenty year old shipwreck. Shipwrecks plural

(19:34):
of ten ships uh in the last forty years so years,
coral encrusted cannons started showing up around town on the
east end of Grand Cayman in the nineteen seventies, and
the locals had lots of stories to tell about cannons
in the water where they had played as children. These
weapons all board dates of seventeen eighty one, as well
as French markings. An archaeological survey by the Institute of

(19:56):
Nautical Archaeology in nine eighty confirmed that there were six
are large pieces of artillery still in the sand. The
weapons themselves all seemed like they probably came from the
Convert uh it had kept its French artillery when it
had been put into service for Britain, and a study
of the reef line the same year also found evidence
of where the convert had to run aground. And still more,

(20:18):
in that same year, Hurricane Allen unearthed more wreckage in
that same part of the ocean. There are more than
twenty shipwrecks in the area, and surveys of all of
them pinpointed six that are probably from the wreck of
the Ten Sale Ashore archaeologists found all manner of pottery, shards, glass,
and naval hardware suspected to be from the survivor's camp

(20:40):
as you recall, they gathered up stuff and built a
camp out of the salvage wreckage, and then they did
their salvage work for about six weeks. From there. Field
work into all of this continued for about a decade,
and then correspondence with naval scholars from France confirmed that
the cannons that were there on the seafloor would have
been aboard the Inconstant or it was pressed into English service.

(21:02):
Margaret Leakar Denton, an archaeologist serving with the Cayman Islands
and National Museum, conducted a survey of cannon salvage from
shipwreck sites and followed it up with an extensive underwater
survey of thirty shipwrecks along a three mile stretch of
seafloor near the east end. She identified one site as
the probable Convert and a collection of others that are

(21:22):
probably some of the merchant ships. And she found some
other previously unknown shipwrecks sites from the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries in the process. So while looking for these additional
history was unearthed. That happened, and when we were saying that,
you know that the ocean around the Cayman Islands is
full of shipwrecks. Thirty shipwrecks along a three mile stretch. Yeah,

(21:43):
a lot of shipwrecks. Is That's one of the reasons
why if you go on vacation to the Cayman Islands,
one of the things that will be advertised is uh
like snorkeling and scuba diving in shipwrecks. Glass bottom boat
rides to like a shipwrecks. There's a lot of shipwrecks.
Are an industry shipwrecked tourism, in addition to hiding your

(22:04):
money from from from taxas. A couple of legends grew
out of this shipwreck and have persisted until today. One

(22:25):
is that in the years after the wreck of the
Tin Sale, fashion completely changed on the island as locals
retrieved bolts of identical cloth from the wreckage and then
used them to make their own clothing. I love that.
I thought you might as that mentioned textiles. The other
legend is that there was a prince or another dignitary
aboard one of the ships, and George the Third declared

(22:47):
the islands to be free from taxes and conscription out
of gratitude. And this is almost certainly made up story. Yeah,
it's much more likely that there there were so few
people in the Cayman Islands for so many years that
it wasn't they were not really making any kind of
income for a long time. Probably kind of grew from there.

(23:08):
Queen Elizabeth the second visited the island and unveiled a
commemorative park in for anniversary of the massive shipwreck, and
that is the story. That's a lot of ships, so
many ships well, and it's one of those things where
it's the wreck of ten Sale, but there were so
many other ships involved. Yeah, because of this giant convoy

(23:32):
that when you think about how many people were kind
of there at the nexus point all at once while
it was going down late in the night. I got
this this book that was put out by the Cayman
Islands National Archive and Cayman Free Press Um that collects
reproductions of all these historical documents about the wreck. And

(23:54):
you can hear Captain Lawford's exasperation when he's like writing
out his his descriptions of what happened, of like if
only these stupid merchant ships had just stayed behind me
like they were supposed to, instead of me having to
babysit them like a bunch of little children, none of
this would have happened. Well, I also have a question

(24:15):
that's like, how did no one notice? I have that
question also, and that was not satisfactorily answered. And any
of the research that I did of like how nobody
I feel like Papa, well maybe should have taken some
blame because wasn't he on Yeah he was damned while
that was happening. Yes, what was he doing? Maybe he

(24:35):
was napping, But even so, there would have been other
people on deck two. That is the weirdest part of
this whole story is like how at least nine ships
got ahead of them and wrecked without anyone noticing that
anyone was ahead of them. I mean, it was a
dark night, but that does seem a little It seems

(24:56):
like a lot. That seems like a lot of ships
to pass you in the night without you noticing. Yeah,
so anyway, Wreck of the Fans sail thanks to my vacation. Hey,
since uh these episodes that we're sharing on our past classics,
we have some updated information that will supersede the contact

(25:19):
stuff you've heard before. If you want to email us,
our email address is History Podcast at how Stuff Works
dot com, and you can find us across the spectrum
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find us at Missed in History dot com, and you
can visit our parent company, how stuff Works, at how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands

(25:44):
of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.