Like a Snap of a Carrot: Shipwreck Stories with Patrick Tayluer

This is part of a series of posts about the retired sailor and shanty singer Patrick Tayluer (1856-1948). Find the entire series at this link!

When William Main Doerflinger interviewed the retired sailor and shanty singer Patrick Tayluer in April, 1942, one of the topics he asked Tayluer about was shipwrecks. This is not surprising: ever since people took to the seas in ships, maritime folks have been fascinated and terrified by shipwrecks; in fact, shipwreck stories go back to the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. As it turned out, Tayluer had several stories about shipwrecks, which he told as first-person narratives, but which might not have happened exactly as he described. We’ll look at two of those stories in this post.

First, let’s hear “The Wreck of the Sutherlandshire in Macassar Straits.” You can listen in the first player, and follow along in the transcript below. (Note that the catalog card spells the name of the staits “Macassar,” but that the current standard spelling is “Makassar.” In this and other cases, I’ve tried to use the current spellings except in transcribing moments where Tayluer’s pronunciation strongly suggests another spelling.)

William Main Doerflinger: Captain Tayluer, have you ever had any hard times, shipwrecks, or something like that?

Patrick Tayluer: Oh, yes, I’ve had shipwrecks. In fact, I’ve been three times shipwrecked, and in one case, I’ll never forget till the day of my death. I was sailing nicely. I had brought my ship through the Indian Ocean and was sailing down through the Makassar Straits, which was known to us sailors in the old days as the Straits of Lombardy. Oh, everything was all set and plumb, and the ship, all of a sudden, took a whirling gig right out. I shouted orders to the sailors, but the men got scared. Fourteen of them jumped over the side with sheer fright. They thought the world had come to an end. Yes, I’ll never forget that as long as I live.

William Main Doerflinger: Well, what happened, Captain? What caused the ship to…?

Patrick Tayluer: Well, it was a submersible volcanic eruption.

William Main Doerflinger: I see.

Patrick Tayluer: And that night, Anjier point was blown away. At that time, there was a lighthouse on Anjier point. It was at the head of the Straits of Makassar, and the whole of the point was blown away. And there was nothing that nobody could do.

William Main Doerflinger: What did you do? Take to the boat?

Patrick Tayluer: We couldn’t take to any boats because our boats were purely wrecked. With the ship whirling over this volcanic eruption and the 14 men jumping over the side with sheer fright, I couldn’t take in sail. I couldn’t do anything. I gave the orders to the men. “All right, men, you men that are not scared, stay aboard of your ship. In the morning, we may find somewhere where we can land, or we may be able to drift into the shore.”

Our masts and our yards was carried out of it, just like a snap of a carrot. Every sail was lost, everything on board of the ship was broken away. And we men all huddled to the rigging. We came after the rigging of the gigger mast, and there we stood, all huddled together waiting for the morning to come. When the morning came, there was nothing but pumice stone all over the ocean, all over the sea, and all over the straits, you could see nothing but pumice stone.

We were about 200 yards from the shore. I looked at one…eh, I looked at the men, and I asked them:

“Is there any man who will volunteer to try and swim ashore through this and take a thread of twine with him, and we’ll unravel it as he goes?”

One man, a man named Scully, jumped up and he says:

“Yes, sir, I’ll try to swim it and make the shore.”

“All right, Scully, put the end of this twine around your neck and see what you can do.”

He got over the side and into the water and the twine round his neck, he swam ashore. But my God, had you have seen that man as I saw him when I got ashore, you would have taken sympathy on any poor devil who had to swim through that pumice stone as he did.

But anyway, he got ashore and we rigged…we rigged up a britches buoy. With twine we pulled lanyards ashore. And with lanyards, we pulled a rope ashore, and at last, we got the britches buoy in work, and we sent the men all ashore. I was the last to leave the ship, and I carried my papers with me.

All that day in Java on the hot scorching beach, we sit there, and at last we plucked up courage to walk, and we found a small railroad line, which took us into Batavia. Presently, a small train came along, stopped and picked us all up and took us to Batavia.

Patrick Tayluer’s story about the wreck of the Sutherlandshire is dramatic, and includes many realistic and vivid details, such as the sea being covered with pumice and the ship being dismasted “just like the snap of a carrot.” One very interesting passage describes a strategy for rescuing the crew using a “britches buoy.” The britches buoy or breeches buoy itself is essentially a pair of sturdy short trousers or breeches with a large ring buoy or flotation device at the waist. It is connected overhead, usually with a pulley, to a strong rope or hawser secured at both ends: one on the ship, the other ashore. By securing yourself in the trousers with the ring buoy at your waist, you can allow rescuers to pull you from one end of the rope to the other, as on a zip line, while minimizing the danger of drowning.

Most deployments of a britches buoy begin by using a mortar or other gun to shoot a rope from ship to shore or shore to ship, but that method relies on there being someone on the other end to fasten the rope. In the case of a ship that is wrecked off a deserted shore, someone has to swim ashore to secure the rope to a tree or other sturdy anchorage, and in that case he can also bring the rope ashore.

Tayluer describes this process in detail: the sailor, Scully, first swam ashore with one end of a spool of twine, while the other end remained on the ship; then that twine was used to pull one end of a long lanyard ashore; the lanyard was then used to pull one end of a rope ashore; and the rope was used in conjunction with the britches buoy to bring the men ashore. This complicated method of getting the rope ashore is necessary because a strong enough hawser or rope would be too bulky for a man to swim with, while the twine, which he can easily swim with, would risk breaking if it were used to pull the bulky hawser directly, necessitating the intermediate lanyard.

Tayluer’s extremely detailed description is not something anyone would come up with unless they had had the experience of a similar shipwreck. Other accurate details are the raft of pumice stone, which really can cover the surface of the sea during an eruption, and the destruction of Anyer and its lighthouse, which were really obliterated by a tsunami caused by a volcanic eruption.

However, some of the other details are certainly inaccurate. This is especially true of the geography: the Makassar Strait lies between Borneo and Sulawesi, while both Batavia (now Jakarta) and Anjier (now Anyer) are on the island of Java. Anyer does not lie, as Tayluer says, “at the head of the Straits of Makassar.” If Tayluer had been wrecked in the Makassar Strait and made it to either side, he and his party could neither have seen what happened at Anyer, nor proceeded on foot and railway to Batavia. His story must therefore really occur in the Sunda Strait, which is between Java and Sumatra, and on which Anyer and its lighthouse are located.

Another problem appears to be with the timing. The destruction of Anyer occurred during the famous eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. But the Sutherlandshire was not present for that event; it was wrecked 17 years later, in 1900, also in the Sunda Strait. (By that time, there was another lighthouse at Anyer, which is still there today.)

This leaves us with the problem of dating Tayluer’s story: does it date to the eruption of Krakatoa or the real wreck of the Sutherlandshire? The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 slightly predates the first known use of a breeches buoy in a shipwreck rescue, so it seems unlikely that one was really used during the eruption of Krakatoa. Tayluer’s general description of the event also doesn’t really comport with the eruption of Krakatoa, which was a scene of pandemonium. The explosions of Krakatoa occurred the day before the tsunami that destroyed the Anyer lighthouse, which seems to be the same day his story occurs. The biggest of the volcano’s explosions that day is thought to have been the loudest sound in recorded history, and was heard 3000 miles away. It was so loud it ruptured the eardrums of men on ships in the strait and damaged buildings on Java—yet Tayluer doesn’t specifically mention a loud explosion at all. On the coast of Java where Tayluer says his party landed, over 25,000 people were killed and the rest became refugees. His picture of a few British sailors sitting around on the beach and then walking to find the railway seems not to reflect the circumstances of the 1883 eruption.

What about the real wreck of the Sutherlandshire? We can read about the wreck in newspaper accounts and glean many details from reports of the Maritime Court’s enquiry, based mainly on the testimony of the first mate or chief officer, William Ahlert. The Sutherlandshire‘s captain at the tme of the wreck was David Nicoll, whose name is also given in newspaper acccounts as Nicol or Nicholl. The vessel was wrecked by simply running aground on July 25, 1900. She entered the Sunda Strait at about noon and struck bottom sometime after 8:00 pm. She turned broadside to the breakers, and shipped several waves, which smashed most of the boats. Three men volunteered to swim ashore with a line, but two drowned and only one made it, apparently without the line intact. The crew stayed on deck all night, and in the morning more men tried to get a line ashore using the remaining boat, but they too were lost. The captain then shouted: “Every man for himself!” As the men tried to swim ashore, the ship broke apart. Twelve men and the captain’s wife were drowned, while 17 people, including the captain and his child, survived. The ship’s papers were lost as well. The men walked a few miles, then somehow according to the newspaper account, “Batavia was reached.”

Clearly, this has some similarities to Tayluer’s story. The boats are smashed and the captain tries to get a rope ashore to rig a rescue apparatus. The men spend a miserable night on deck. They finally do make it ashore, but lose many lives: 13 in the real-life wreck, 14 in Tayluer’s account. The court of inquiry found that rescue apparatus was present and in order onboard the Sutherlandshire, suggesting if the line had successfully made it to shore the plan had been to rig a breeches buoy or similar device, just as in Tayluer’s story. In both versions, the sailors walk part of the way to Batavia, then succeed in arriving there; only Tayluer mentions the railway, but that seems likely to have been the way it happened in real life too.

But the two stories also have many differences: the cause of the wreck is different, there’s a massive raft of pumice stone in Tayluer’s account, and the attempt to rig a rescue apparatus was unsuccessful in real life. These differences suggest that Tayluer combined at least two real-life events into one story: the eruption of Krakatoa, its effects on the Sunda Strait, and its destruction of Anjier in 1883; and the real loss of the Sutherlandshire in 1900. More than this, he reversed the outcome of the attempt to rig a rope and a rescue apparatus, making it succeed in his story where it failed in the real wreck of the Sutherlandshire.

Why should he do this? Two reasons spring to mind. First of all, his tale is a far more dramatic story than the real wreck, in which the ship simply ran aground in a narrow strait. We know that by 1936 Tayluer had become something of a professional raconteur, making his living as the Washington Post said by “making ship models, telling sea stories over the radio, mending awnings and sails.” He knew how to tell an entertaining story, and the volcanic eruption certainly adds interest.

Beyond this, he seems to be tailoring the story to further his own reputation, or the reputation of his fictional creation, Captain Patrick Tayluer. As I’ve pointed out before, Tayluer wasn’t really a captain. The highest rank I found for him in an actual crew list was bosun. But in most of his stories, including the one about the Sutherlandshire, he’s the captain of the ship. This has implications for the stories he wants to tell.
In the real case of the Sutherlandshire, the court of Enquiry found:

“After the Sutherlandshire first grounded, nothing could have been done to save the ship or prevent the loss of life which occurred. The master [i.e. the captain] was himself navigating the ship, and the sole responsibility for the stranding appears, in the opinion of the court, to rest with him. […] In the absence of any statement by the master, the court is unable to decide whether the disaster was due to bad navigation or to an error of judgment on his part.”

In other words, the captain was entirely to blame for the shipwreck, either through poor navigation or poor judgment. Although the court didn’t find his actions after the initial grounding of the ship culpable, they certainly weren’t impressive; his failure to get a rope ashore when that could have saved more crew members, his decision to call “every man for himself” rather than to offer more useful commands or guidance, and his failure to save his own wife when he himself survived, make him, at least to all appearances, an unsuccessful captain.

Tayluer, on the other hand, comes out as the hero of his story. The wreck is not his fault but caused by a freak occurrence, a volcanic eruption. All the men who die kill themselves by leaping into the ocean in fright—Tayluer can’t be held to blame for that either. Tayluer remains calm and keeps his remaining men together, says calming words, plans out how to rig the breeches buoy, calls for a volunteer who succeeds in getting to shore, rigs the buoy, and saves his remaining crew. He even calmly goes below and saves the ship’s papers, which Nicoll failed to do in real life, no doubt causing later problems for the owners. Despite the similar outcomes (one more death, in fact, in Tayluer’s story), the fictional Captain Tayluer looks like a much better officer than the real-life Captain Nicoll. The real-life Mr. Tayluer, on the other hand, comes off as an engrossing and talented storyteller.

We see the same general trends in another of Tayluer’s shipwreck stories, in which he is not the captain but the chief officer or first mate. This one involves the wreck of the Maine clipper ship Shenandoah near Cape Horn. Hear the story below and follow along in my transcript!

My next wreck, well it was around the Horn in Philadelphia Bay. We drifted in in a beautiful ship, and one of America’s most beautiful ships. It was the Shenandoah of Bath, Maine, and boy, when we got in there, what a blessing it was that we got in there. The captain–I was only chief officer of the ship–Captain Murphy, he looked at me, says, “well, Tayluer, we better get all the boys ashore as quick as we can. And there is a station here that provides us with food and blankets. But be God, I am told that all the natives, these Patagonians, are all cannibals, and no doubt they’ll eat us.”

“Well, Captain, you might think so, but I don’t think there’s any cannibals in the world.”

“You don’t. Oh, well, I’ve heared that these people are really cannibals.”

All right. We got the boat over, and we landed the men, and sure enough, we made the station. The captain gave me orders:

“Well, Cap…Mr. Tayluer, you have to put two men on watch all night and in the daytime. We’ll have to keep a watch too, because I am sure these Patagonians are cannibals.”

“All right, Mr. Murphy, I’ll do what you say.”

That night, I thought to myself, well, with nice and daylight, I take a walk over the hill and have a look. When I got over the hill and I looked, oh, there were some pretty little girls all along, and they smiled at me and laughed at me. I thought to myself, what wonderful cannibals these are. It was then that the thing caught my mind of the beauty of God’s creation. As a sailor, we know it, but nobody has ever seen it, only where it has been a case of a shipwreck like we were in Philadelphia bay around the horn.

The girls came up, and they looked at me, they touched me, and they felt me all over to see if I was really the same as them. And they came to the same conclusion, that we were. They all went away down the hill again, and proudly, some men brought up meat, they brought up fruit, and they brought up everything they could to make us contented and happy.

Well, Captain Murphy looked at me. “Oh, Mr. I wouldn’t let the men eat that if I were you, would have maybe poison in it.”

“Well, Mr. Murphy, I don’t think that these people have any animosity against us, and therefore, I don’t see why we should have any animosity against them. We’ll try their food. I’ll eat the first bit of food, and if I don’t die, I don’t think anybody else will.”

“All right, it’s up to yourself. Mind you, I’ve told you, because it is mentioned in the charts that these people are all cannibals.”

“Well, they are not cannibals to me, and I am really satisfied that I am shipwrecked here.”

Well, we laid in that spot for two weeks, and during the two weeks, the natives fed us every day with fresh meat and with fruit and fresh fish. And at last a boat came and take us off, took us to Port Stanley, and then from Port Stanley down to Montevideo.

So you can quite understand that the world…what we have as cannibals, are really human.

Tayluer’s story of the wreck of the Shenandoah places him in the role of “chief officer” (the role better known as “First Mate”) and specifies the Captain’s name as Murphy. As it happens, the Shenandoah was commanded by two different Murphys, James F. Murphy and his son Wilder Murphy. James commanded the ship for much longer, both before and after Wilder’s stint as captain, and as her original commander and her longest-serving one would be popularly remembered as the iconic captain of the vessel. Several of James Murphy’s logbooks from the Shenandoah survive and have been placed online.

Although Tayluer gives Murphy an Irish accent, as well as mannerisms reminiscent of the stage-Irish characters of vaudeville, in fact both real-life captains named Murphy had been born in Maine (like Tayluer himself), and James Murphy’s father (Wilder’s grandfather) had also been born in Maine. It’s possible Tayluer never met the real Captain Murphy and thought he was Irish. It’s also possible he chose the Irish accent because he needed to adopt a different voice within the story to indicate which character was speaking, and he realized listeners would expect an Irish accent from a character named Murphy.

Captain Murphy’s fear of cannibals in the story may be a reflection of negative stereotypes of the Irish as fearful and superstitious, which were part of the same stage-Irish tradition Tayluer seems to be drawing on. But it’s also true that some British and American sailors had reported witnessing cannibalism among the natives of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, going back to a few years before Tayluer went to sea. It is likely that some officers, being shipwrecked in those parts of South America, really would worry about cannibals. At the same time, it is also true that Argentine authorities, as well as English missionaries, maintained stations that aided shipwrecked sailors. Many natives of the area had peaceful relationships with missionaries and had agreed to help shipwrecked sailors as well, in return for aid from the missions.

All this makes the broad outlines of Tayluer’s story very credible: after a shipwreck near Cape Horn, a crew locates a station where help is available. The captain believes the local people are cannibals, but the first mate thinks they’re trustworthy. Some of the locals help the shipwrecked crew, and on deciding to trust them on the advice of the mate, the crew is saved. They are brought first to Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands (the nearest English-speaking settlement), then to Montevideo in present-day Urugay (the nearest sizeable city), both in the South Atlantic. Similar scenarios to this likely occurred many times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

On the other hand, the story is still not likely to be fully accurate. To begin with, there is no record of the Shenandoah being wrecked near Cape Horn. There is, however, one incident that might be relevant. In 1907, the Shenandoah was erroneously reported to have been wrecked during a voyage from Baltimore to San Francisco around Cape Horn. Sixty-four days out she was found to be leaking so badly that the captain decided to divert to Melbourne, Australia, for repairs, instead of proceeding north to California. When she failed to be sighted anywhere along her expected route, word spread that she had been wrecked, but it was soon discovered that she was being repaired in Melbourne. Amusingly, some newspapers didn’t have time to rewrite the story, but were able to add an addendum, resulting in a story entitled “The Ship Shenandoah a Wreck Due to a Severe Storm,” followed by a second story entitled “May Not Be So Bad.” Notable to us is that whatever event caused the leakage would have occurred somewhere near where Tayluer’s story is set, so it’s where people would have assumed the Shenandoah was wrecked. It’s possible Tayluer might have spun the story out of either the rumor of the ship’s destruction, or the real incident that sparked the rumor.

Even if there’s a grain of truth to the story, though, it cannot have happened as described. The Shenandoah was launched in 1890, during the 20 years Tayluer was in the British Army in Africa. James Murphy gave her up in 1902, the year Tayluer was discharged, and the vessel was never wrecked under the command of either Murphy. (At the time of the 1907 incident, her captain was Omar E. Chapman.) The confluence of Tayluer, Murphy, the Shenandoah, and a wreck certainly never happened. Tayluer might have had an opportunity to sail with James F. Murphy in the Shenandoah during one of her last voyages in 1909 or 1910, but of course she was not wrecked then.  Additionally, I don’t believe Tayluer ever rose to the rank of Chief Officer, since a few years later he was serving as an able seaman or a bosun.

Finally, let’s observe that, as in the Sutherlandshire story, Tayluer sets himself up as the hero of the tale. While the crew might have been able to subsist on food provided by the minimally-described “station,” it’s through Tayluer’s willingness to socialize with the natives that the sailors are truly well treated, receiving meat, fish, and fruit every day. Tayluer even includes a scenario where several young native women “felt me all over,” a degree of curiosity and intimacy suggesting that, through Tayluer’s ice-breaking interaction, his crew might have been treated well in other ways too! Tayluer comes off not only as brave, but also generous, assuming the best of people until proven wrong. By contrast, Captain Murphy comes off as fearful, suspicious, and hidebound, expecting the worst of people based on written accounts from the past. He is proven wrong in the end, and Tayluer is proven right.

In the case of both these shipwreck narratives, then, Patrick Tayluer blends truth and fiction. He includes incidents and situations he probably didn’t experience himself, but which were nonetheless drawn from real life. He could have known about them from reading, or from talking about the events with other sailors. He also probably included real experiences he had as a sailor, possibly on the Sutherlandshire and the Shenandoah, but equally likely on other ships. Rather than strict accuracy, he seems to have had several goals in storytelling: first of all to entertain his audience, a skill he had honed from years of telling such stories on the radio; and secondly to establish his own reputation as a skilled seaman and accomplished leader. This validated the stories themselves, as well as suggesting to listeners that they should seek out more stories from him, which helped keep him in demand on the radio.

As always, thanks for reading! We’ll be back in the New Year with a final farewell from Patrick Tayluer!