courtesy john stobart, nmhs collection
Vicar of Bray in Yerba Buena Cove During the Gold Rush, November 1849 by John Stobart Vicar of Bray Vicar of Bray was built in 1841 by Robert Hardy at Whitehaven, Cumbria, England, for the Swansea copper trade as a 281-ton barque-rigged, full-bodied carvelplanked vessel: 121 feet long, with a 24-foot breadth and a 16-foot depth of hold. Built of African iroko, English oak, American elm, and pine, the ship was iron-strapped, copper fastened, and copper sheathed. The barque was built solidly to accommodate the bulk coal and copper ore cargoes it would carry throughout its working life. The Swansea copper trade began as a regional activity in the late seventeenth century and lasted until the early 1900s. With what historian Chris Evans terms the “Swansea trilogy” of “Welsh coal, reverbatories, and seaborne ore,” Swansea rose to global dominance “using ores that travelled a relatively short distance” up the Bristol Channel, so that by 1800 Swansea and other Welsh producers “accounted for more than fifty percent of the world’s output of smelted copper during the Napoleonic Wars.”1 The 287-ton capacity Vicar of 1
Chris Evans, “A World of Copper: Introducing Swansea, Globalization and the Industrial Revolution,” Welsh History Review/Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru, 27, no. 1 (2014): 112-131.
Bray was built in response to a late 1820s change in British law that dropped tariffs on foreign ore. Key to the role of copper and coal in the emerging global economy of the midnineteenth century were vessels like Vicar of Bray. The barque’s hulk in the Falkland Islands is a rare survivor, even in its deteriorated state. It represents vessels built specifically for that trade’s demands of sufficient capacity to maximize profits in the shipment of copper ore and coal from the other side of the world, balanced by a design with a draft shallow enough to cross the sandbar-choked harbor entrance of Swansea. The barque rig was well suited for long downwind legs across the oceans, but also for navigating in more confined waters, where its fore-and-aft rigged mizzen helped with tacking and sailing upwind. The African hardwoods and iron-reinforcement of Vicar of Bray speaks to the trade: heavy shipments of bulk coal out, and ore-laden chests or bags stowed in the hold on the return required a solidly built hull. The trade’s ships and the men who worked it were described by mariner and author Joseph Conrad, who wrote of a visit to a dying captain in his autobiographical memoir, The Mirror of the Sea:
He had “served his time” in the… famous copper-ore trade of the old days between Swansea and the Chilean coast, coal out and copper in, deep-loaded both ways, as if in wanton defiance of the great Cape Horn seas—a work, this, for staunch ships, and a great school of staunchness of WestCountry seamen. A whole fleet of copper-bottom barques, as strong in rib and planking, as well-found and great as ever was sent upon the seas, manned by hardy crews and commanded by young masters, was engaged in that now long-defunct trade. For all that praise, the trade was hard on the ships and the men. Accidents were common. Given the narrow confines of the Channel, a long and exposed Chilean coast, and potential of missing stays and crashing ashore, the dangers were real and everpresent. The ships faced peril from the threat of combustion of their coal cargoes and often fatal fires at sea, or the shifting of the ore and the capsizing of a poorly loaded barque in heavy seas. Loading copper ore meant carefully calculating the load
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