The ship was built in 184 I by Robert Hardy for the copper-ore trade between England and Chile. The Whitehaven yards in Cumberland were past their economic prime and would close forever before the century ended; but the builders were specialists in the design of strong bulk cargo vessels, which they had developed for the Dublin coal trade monopolized by them in the previous century. When surveyed by Lloyds, the Vicar was pronounced " As good as can be built," and given the rating of "A 1, for 12 years." A prescient journalist of the time saw fit to state that she was " Built to Last a Hundred Years." And well she was. A survey undertaken at Goose Green in 1976 by Peter Throckmorton, Norman Brouwer and Hilton Matthews, found her basic structure to be in a good state of preservation, with little deterioration save on the surface of her timbers. 1 It is estimated that 85 % of the original hull survives . (For the sake of comparison, it is believed that only about 15% of the U.S.S. Constitution is original, and even less of the H.M.S. Victory.) Framed and planked with West African hardwoods, with lower planks of American elm, floors of English oak and pine decks (since removed) , she was fastened with oak treenails, copper bolts and forged iron knees , pointers and breast hooks. Before her lengthening to l 20ft overall in 1859 , she was registered at 281 tons, 97ft on deck, 24ft 3in beam, and 16ft lOin depth in hold . She underwent a further change in 1877 , when her hatch coamings were enlarged, giving her a registered tonnage of 364 tons. Fitted out as a bark, she is puzzlingly listed as a brig in Lloyds from 1843 through 1849. The Vicar's primary trade was between English coal ports and the copper ports of Chile where thirty yeai:s after independence there were still no copper smelters. This rugged trade, down the Atlantic, around Cape Hom, and back again, stands as one of the world's most trying for ships and sailors. It is described by Joseph Conrad in his reminscence of a former captain: It appeared he had "served his time" in the copper-ore trade, the famous copper-ore trade of the old days between Swansea and the Chilean coast, coal out and ore in , deep-loaded both ways, as if in wanton defiance of the great Cape Hom seas-a work, this, for stanch ships, The dynamic heart of a city born of the sea lies before you in this view of San Francisco, seen from Rincon Point in 1853. Wharves which will become streets are being pushed out into the shallow water of Yerba Buena Cove where the argonauts' ships lie largely abandoned, andfences markfuture landfill sites. In the right foreground , an unmasted ship is being scrapped by Chinese laborers working for the shipbreaker William Hare . This panorama was made up of daguerreotypes made by William Shaw. Courtesy the Smithsonian Institution.
SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1985-86
and a great school of stanchness for West-Country seamen. A whole fleet of copper-bottomed barques, as strong in rib and planking, as well-found in gear, as ever was sent upon the seas, manned by hardy crews and commanded by young masters, was engaged in that now long-defunct trade. "That was the school I was trained in, " he said almost boastfully , lying down among his pillows with a rug over his legs. And it was in that he obtained his first command at a very early age. The Vicar continued in this through the 1840s, then freighted general merchandise, at first between England and Peru, and then to Australia. In the early 1870s, outward bound from Swansea to Valparaiso once again, she arrived at Port Stanley and was condemned. Purchased and refitted by the Falkland Island Company , she commenced sailing between the Falklands and England , until 1880, when her entry is listed for the last time in Lloyds and stamped "now a hulk." In I 966, Karl Kortum, director of the National (then the San Francisco) Maritime Museum, visited the Falklands with a view to bringing to San Francisco the hulk of the first ocean liner, Great Britain, for exhibit at the Museum's Hyde Street Pier. The iron-hulled Great Britain, the engineering wonder of her day (1843) , had been used by the Falkland Island Company for wool storage until she had outlived even that grim utility. Kortum was offered her replacement, the four-masted bark Fennia, better known by her original name, Champigny. Hearing of this other strangely named ship, Vicar of Bray, he managed a side-trip to Goose Green and took some cursory measurements and a few photographs. 2 Back in San Francisco, while typing a letter recommending that the Vicar's bows and windlass be brought to the Museum for display , Kortum decided to look up her dates in Lloyds. Surprised to find that she had been built as early as the midnineteenth century, he turned to the Museum's librarian, Al Harmon, and said, "I wonder if the Vicar of Bray could have come here during the gold rush-she was built in 1841." "Without a word," Kortum continues, "Al reached for a quarterly publication of the Society of California Pioneers and opened it to a list of arrivals made by the San Francisco har-
I. Throckmorton ' s report is published in SHS , Fall 1976. 2. Neither the Great Britain nor the Champigny got to San Francisco. Roused by the interest of " the Yanks"-and to Kortum's satisfactionEnglish interests took on the salvage of the Great Britain, and she was towed to Bristol in 1970. The Champigny project failed. Towed away by an entrepreneur for restoration , she was ultimately sold for scrap.
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