13 Sharks

The Careers of a Series of Small Royal Navy Ships, from the Glorious Revolution to D-Day

John D. Grainger

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Maritime
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781473877245
• eBook ISBN: 9781473877269
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

John D Grainger charts the careers of the thirteen vessels that have served the Royal Navy under the name HMS Shark. Despite the ferocious name, they have all been relatively small vessels including one brigantine, five sloops, one Sixth Rate, a gunvessel, four destroyers and a submarine. Collectively they therefore give a good representation of the various roles of these types, which receive far less attention than larger, more glamorous ships. Furthermore, as the first entered service in 1699 and the last was sunk in 1944 (having the dubious distinction of being the only Allied vessel lost on D-Day), they illustrate the changes and continuities in the Royal Navy and war at sea across almost 250 years. In each case the author considers the origin of the ship, the purpose for which it was designed and employed, its captains and where possible its crew, as well as the activities of the ship itself and its final fate; in addition background information of a general nature is included as a necessary context for those actions.

Chapter 1

Shark I: a Brigantine, 1691–1698

I

The first naval Shark was built at Deptford, in the old naval dockyard founded in King Henry VIII’s reign, and was launched on 20 April 1691. The need for ships of all sizes, and perhaps particularly for small ships, was great. The Revolution Settlement of 1688–1689 was no more than a year or two old, and the cause of the self-exiled King James VII and II had been taken up by Louis XIV of France, who had been building up his own navy for the past decade. Little was yet certain about the political condition or future of the British Islands: in Scotland there was plenty of sentiment still for a Stuart king; mainly Catholic Ireland had fallen almost entirely to Catholic James II. Small ships were going to be useful in the next years in the intricate and difficult waters off Ireland and in the English Channel and the North Sea. Shark, with just four guns, was classed as a brigantine, a vague term which covered a wide variety of vessels – essentially it meant a small ship with two masts. It was the first of a new type, of which seven more, all larger than Shark, were built; the type was not thought to be a success, though Shark itself was certainly well used in its short life.¹

The first crew began installing the rigging, gathering stores, and so on, on 28 October 1691. The first captain was Lieutenant Jedediah Barker.² He began with a crew of just eight men – the mate John Higginbotham, the boatswain-and-gunner Charles Moore and five seamen. No log of the ship’s progress has survived for the nine months of Barker’s captaincy, but some idea of where the ship went can be gleaned from its muster book.³

The complement of the ship was supposed to be thirty men, but in the nine months from October 1691 to July 1692 seventy-four men were listed as joining the ship. Twenty-seven of them were marked as ‘discharged’, that is, they were transferred to another ship or station; the new ship was clearly being used as a catch and source for seamen for the fleet as a whole. Two of the men died; eighteen are marked as ‘run’ – deserted – including two of Barker’s first five crewmen. The dates of these events are noted in the muster, allowing us to make a rough estimation of the ship’s activities. By July 1692 the remaining crew numbered twenty-seven, a little under complement. (There is a discrepancy in the numbers; about ten men cannot be accounted for.)

It took until the end of 1691 to complete fitting out, and then from January to March the ship was in the Downs, the great waiting place for the navy, at the eastern choke point of the Channel between Kent and the Pas de Calais, where a guard was always kept in peace and war, to supervise traffic in peace, and in wartime to intercept any threatening fleet aiming to invade England, either from northern France, or from the Low Countries – Belgium was the Spanish Netherlands, and Holland had been a regular English enemy in the past fifty years – or from the French Channel ports. This last was the clear and present danger at the time Shark was fitted out. The ship made occasional visits to Dover for water and fresh supplies, and it was back in the Thames estuary, at Sheerness, for a time in April, no doubt for technical adjustments. In May it sailed to Gosport and Portsmouth.

A brigantine was a small ship, in Shark’s case 58ft long and with a beam of 15ft. It was rigged in an unusual, experimental, way, with a square sail and a topsail on the foremast, and a larger triangular fore and aft sail, called a lugg, on the mainmast. This was not a rig easy to control, and at least one of its captains disliked it sufficiently to ask for the lugg sail to be replaced by a square. It was not a design which in the end was much favoured by the Royal Navy, but it has persisted to this day as a civilian craft rig.

In its first months the ship’s career was unexceptional, but two incidents are obliquely recorded in the muster which indicate that it was soon involved in some of the great events in the Channel in 1692. On 24 May 1692 able seaman John Land was killed in an ‘engagement’. The ship had been at Portsmouth until at least 11 May, when one sailor is noted to have deserted. It thus had left the Downs, gone to Portsmouth, and then went to sea between 11 and 24 May. But 24 May is the date of several incidents in the Battle of La Hougue, or Barfleur. This was when the two fleets of France and the Anglo-Dutch allies met in a great fight off the coast of Normandy. This was their second fight, the first, off Beachy Head, having been a victory for the French, but one they had failed to follow up by an intended invasion of England.⁴

Now in the second battle, in late May 1692, the French were beaten, and Shark, with its four guns, had been part of the battle.⁵ On 23 May the boats and fireships of the fleet went into the Bay of La Hougue on the eastern side of the Cotentin Peninsula to burn several of the stranded French line-of-battle ships; next day – 24 May, the day AB Land died – they went in again. On each visitation half a dozen of the great French ships were burned, and numbers of transports and storeships as well. It may thus be assumed that this was the ‘engagement’ referred to in the ship’s muster book; Land was no doubt shot by a Frenchman as his ship drove into the French coast to assist in the burning and destruction of the French ships.

The second incident came two weeks later, at Portsmouth. On 6 June Captain Barker was transferred to ‘discharged into’ – the St Vincent fireship. This was a former French ship captured not long after the Battle of La Hougue.⁶ Since Barker was given the command it is probable that the capture was accomplished by Shark, and that his new command was Barker’s reward; he took fourteen of the men from Shark with him on his transfer; this would form the nucleus of his new crew.

Next day, 7 June, a new captain for Shark arrived, Thomas Stepney. He came from the 100-gun flagship of the fleet, Britannia, and his appointment was no doubt at the instigation and favour of Admiral Edward Russell, the commander-in-chief of the fleet and the victor of the recent battle. Stepney was thus now given his own ship, and it is at this point that the first of the surviving captains’ logs begins, and so provides more detailed information about the activities of Shark.⁷ (No doubt Barker took his Shark journal with him.)

The first task, no doubt stimulated by the experience of the great battle, was to double the number of guns on the little ship. By Admiral Russell’s order, Shark was sent to acquire four more guns while at Spithead. This took a week, then it went to sea once more. By 19 June, Shark was off the ‘Island of Basto’, as Stepney put it, which is presumably the Ile de Batz, just off the north coast of Brittany, near Roscoff. ‘I spyed a sail close into shore’, he explained, but when he chased it, it got away, as did another, which was spotted amid some rocks; Stepney was sensible enough not to attack an enemy vessel amid a rock-strewn enemy coast.

Shark was evidently part of a squadron under Captain George Mees, which had been detached from the fleet to examine the coast of Brittany from Cape Frehel westwards.⁸ They failed to find any possible landing place – for the intention after the naval victory had been to land a force somewhere on the French coast, though no one could decide where. The summer of 1692 was a particularly stormy one and Shark lost its topmast on 21 June; the ship was back with the fleet by then, and received a replacement from Britannia. Shark was exactly the sort of vessel which the admiral wanted for close reconnaissance of the enemy’s coast and ports, able to get close to the enemy coast and yet it would be no great loss if it was wrecked on the rocks or captured by the French. Keeping the ship and others like it fit was clearly one of Admiral Russell’s priorities. The fleet crossed and recrossed the Channel, and by 21 July it, and Shark, was back at Spithead.

Shark was sent, presumably with some message, as far as Plymouth in the next days, returned in stages to Torbay on the 20th, and was then ordered back to Portsmouth. It was a lone voyage, perhaps to locate any separated ships, or perhaps to try to contact a squadron under Sir John Ashby which had been told to keep in touch through the port of Dartmouth. Captain Stepney was ordered to complete his stores to a month’s supply on 23 July, and the next day the fleet sailed again on another fruitless Channel cruise. It was back in Portsmouth by 4 August.

Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell was now detached to pursue an idea of King William for an attack on Dunkirk, a well-fortified city which was a notorious privateer base. Shovell took with him to the Downs a convoy of transports carrying some of the troops originally intended for the now-abandoned descent on France, and Shark was part of the convoy escort. The port of disembarkation was to be Ostend, and Shark was sent on ahead to deliver a letter from the army commander, the Duke of Leinster, to the governor of the town. Captain Stepney took the opportunity to make a fairly detailed sketch map of the place in his log, indicating gun emplacements, city walls, and the anchorages. The squadron and its convoy arrived on 23 August. Three of the ships went aground in the shallow waters, and it was decided to actually put the troops ashore at Nieuport instead. This was a smaller port but closer to Dunkirk, which was the target of the expedition. But Nieuport was an even shallower and smaller port than Ostend, and only ships with less than 8ft draught could go in, so all the small ships and the boats of the squadron were employed to carry the troops to the shore.

This task did not, it seems, include Shark, for it was sent back at once to Ostend to redirect the artillery, which had been sent by the king by boat along the canals and the Maas River, and was apparently landed at Ostend, to be moved on to Dunkirk by road. After this the ship remained at Ostend for several days. This was clearly intended and not just a matter of adverse weather. Captain Stepney used part of the time to clean and tallow his ship, a task which usually took some time, leaving the ship temporarily immobilized. Shovell required Shark’s services again on 5 October, and for the next month the ship visited a series of French and Flemish and English ports, sometimes delivering letters, sometimes reconnoitring, sometimes collecting provisions. These were not always easy tasks, for the season was getting late. On 1 October Stepney sailed from Nieuport to Ostend with a letter for the Dutch Admiral Evertsen, but it took the ship five days to get into the harbour to deliver it.

Then on 9 October the ship carried Shovell to the Maas estuary to supervise the return of the guns which had been lent to the expedition by King William. After all the preparations, Dunkirk had been adjudged to be too strong, behind its Vauban-designed fortifications, to be attacked; the expedition captured Dixmude instead, which was hardly a proper compensation, but perhaps better than nothing. On 15 October Shark was ordered back to Ostend where the whole expedition had been gathered to return to England. Three days later the ship was off Dover and was sent on to Sheerness and then to Deptford. On 14 November it was laid up for the winter.

(This episode provides a perfect example of the neglect of the work of these small ships where larger vessels or high ranked officers are involved. In a recent biography of Shovell, Shark is mentioned once (but not in the index), and the context ignores its clearly essential passages back and forth, providing the necessary communication links between the several commanders.)⁹

For a ship which was essentially less than a year old it had been an exciting introduction to its navy career. Involved in a battle, drawing the favourable attention of two admirals, having had two captains, budding off a crew to another ship, deeply involved in a major expedition – these were all events which few ships could list in their history over a period of lifetime, let alone a mere single campaigning season. And yet in most accounts of these events the ship is never mentioned.

II

After a winter being laid up, the whole process of fitting out, collecting stores, and recruiting a new crew had to be done again. The new captain was Edward Durley, another sailor whose first independent command this was. (He arrived as a lieutenant; he was promoted to captain by 25 May 1695.)¹⁰ He took command of Shark on 13 April 1693, with just three other men for his crew, and when he sailed for Spithead on 7 May he was still short of a few men.

For some reason Durley had great difficulty in holding on to his physician (a problem which also arose for other Shark captains). The first man he recruited, Samuel Lopes, one of his first crew members, deserted before the end of May; the second was recruited the day after Lopes went, but was discharged within a fortnight; the third died in October; it was only his fourth, Edward Mosorvoo, who stayed the course. Two of these were clearly foreigners, be it noted. During the year thirteen other men deserted, some of them in late May or early June, the others in September and November – the dates reflecting the times the ship was in harbour, of course, when desertion was possible.¹¹ There was thus the usual constant seepage of sailors away from the ship, by desertion, and by discharge, though only one man died.

By way of the Downs Shark, in company with two line-of-battle ships and several small vessels, sailed to Spithead, arriving on 27 May 1693. The ship was at once assigned to a fleet commanded by Admiral Sir John Ashby, which sailed on the last day of May. (Six men, including Lopes the physician, managed to desert while the ship was at Spithead.) This fleet was covering for a huge convoy of 400 British and Dutch ships which were heading for a variety of Mediterranean destinations. They sailed together as far as Ushant, and there Ashby’s fleet left the convoy, it being supposed that its presence was preventing the French from coming out from Brest – but the French were already out, though no one had noticed, and no check was made. The convoy, which was the famous ‘Smyrna convoy’, was ambushed off Cape St Vincent, losing ninety-three ships, a near quarter of the total. It would have been worse but for a gallant fight by some of the Dutch warships in defending the merchantmen.¹²

After the separation off Ushant indecision reigned in Ashby’s fleet, probably because Ashby was already ill; he died at sea on 13 June, and the fleet returned to moor off Berry Head in Devon until a new commander, Admiral Lord Berkeley, arrived. And then, when he did take command, all Berkeley did was to bring the fleet back to Torbay. Shark had meanwhile sprung a leak and had been sent in ahead to make repairs. At ‘Bricksome’ (Brixham) pier on 14 July no obvious leak was found, but the ship was caulked. The fleet sailed again on the 21st, slowly moving as far west as Scilly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Shark I: A Brigantine, 1691–1698
• Chapter 2: Shark II, A Sloop, 1699–1703
• Chapter 3: Shark III: a Sloop, 1711–1732
• Chapter 4: Shark IV: a Sloop, 1732–1755
• Chapter 5: Shark V: a Sloop, 1775–1778, and a Fireship, 1778–1783
• Chapter 6: Shark VI: a Sixth Rate, 1780
• Chapter 7: Shark VII: a Sloop, 1779–1818, Part One: 1779–1794
• Chapter 8: Shark VIII: a Gunvessel, 1794–1795
• Chapter 9: Shark VII: a Sloop, 1779–1818, Part Two: 1794–1818
• Interlude, 1818–1894
• Chapter 10: Shark IX: a Destroyer, 1894–1911
• Chapter 11: Shark X: a Destroyer, 1912–1916
• Chapter 12: Shark XI: a Destroyer, 1918–1931
• Chapter 13: Shark XII: a Submarine, 1934–1940
• Chapter 14: Shark XIII: a Destroyer, 1943–1944
• Conclusion
• Notes