Practically forgotten today, the sinking of the troopship Alert in 1843 was in its time considered an astounding story of leadership, widely cited as an example to all soldiers in the British army. This little-remembered adventure is particularly interesting to me because one of the soldiers aboard the Alert when it was wrecked was my 4th Great Grand Uncle, Samuel Lang.
Born the son of a thatcher in Ugborough, Devon in 1804, Sam “took the King’s Shilling” in Plymouth in 1825 (he actually received two shillings and sixpence on enlistment), enlisting in the 64th Regiment of Foot. After training in Jersey he joined his regiment in Gibraltar for three years. The regiment returned to England in 1830, but was then posted to Jamaica in 1834 and from there to Halifax in Canada, in 1840.
Life in a British infantry regiment in early Victorian times was treacherous; not because of the dangers of battle, but rather the risk of disease. The regimental history, written in 1883, records that “After the arrival of the Regiment at Gibraltar, they suffered considerably from pulmonary complaints, particularly when occupying the barracks on Windmill Hill, and subsequently ophthalmic cases were numerous, owing to the arduous services the regiment had to perform at the North Front, where they were much exposed to shifting sands, when strong and often fatal Levant winds prevailed.” It goes on to report on the terrible loss of life in Jamaica to Yellow Fever, which killed off the majority of the officers and many of the men. An English newspaper report from 1835 claimed there were so many deaths amongst the soldiers serving there that the cost of the wood for making coffins had increased by 15%.
In contrast, Sam’s period in Canada was quiet and uneventful. He and the other soldiers in the regiment faced harsh winters, which were a shock after six years in Jamaica, but their only excitement came when they fought the many house fires afflicting Halifax in that time. He must have been happy, then, when he and the rest of the soldiers of the 64th drew up in three ranks on the dock in Halifax on June 30th 1843 to receive a formal farewell from all the town’s citizens as the regiment prepared to sail back to England. The ceremony ended with a proclamation from the mayor in which he thanked the regiment for their service as an unofficial fire brigade. The ceremony over, the first contingent of the soldiers embarked the same day for the voyage back home.
Sam was in the last contingent and had to wait until July 9th, when he and 200 other soldiers and 95 women and children finally boarded the Alert, a 500 ton sailing ship newly built and untested, making ready for its first trip across the Atlantic. It departed Halifax harbour in favourable weather the next day.
The wind strengthened soon after they set sail, and by that first evening, it had blown into a strong gale, accompanied by torrential rain. The passengers had a terrible sleepless night below decks, wet and seasick and cold. Then, according to newspaper reports, at 2.00 AM the ship struck a rock just 80 miles from Halifax.
There was widespread panic on board (“the greatest state of excitement” as the newspapers reported), with the passengers all crowding onto the deck and risking the foundering of the ship. Captain Daley, master of the Alert, and Captain Draper, the officer commanding the troops, struggled to bring calm and restore discipline. They ordered some of the soldiers to the pumps and convinced the rest of the men and their families to go back below decks. Draper ordered all his officers to set an example by staying below with their men.
Daley steered the ship toward the nearest land, which he could just make out in the distance. The water was now coming in so fast that the pumps couldn’t keep up. Soon it was above the knees of the soldiers below decks. It must have been terrifying down there: overcrowded, rolling, dark, noisy, people throwing up, and strange things floating in the rising sea water flowing in through the splintered hull; and yet amongst the soldiers there was now absolute silence and calm. Children and wives may have been crying, but the men uttered not one word until after a long, agonising hour the Alert violently collided with tiny Goose Island.
The force of the impact forced her almost on her side, before she righted herself and started to subside. The newspapers reported that there was now “great confusion” and “excitement among the troops increased to an alarming extent” as the soldiers’ discipline broke again. Believing the ship to be breaking up and sinking, the soldiers and their families rushed for the ship’s boats.
Captain Draper and his officers and NCOs struggled to stem this widespread panic and then to organise the evacuation. Somehow, during that violent night, three soldier’s wives had delivered babies, and now all three were brought up from below and lowered into the boats still on their beds, with their newborns clutched to their bosoms. Other women and children were evacuated too, before the soldiers themselves began climbing down into the boats. For almost two hours they plied the broken ship’s boats to the beach and back, ferrying all the passengers just a handful at a time. The sun had risen over the wreck when the last of the survivors were brought ashore.
Everyone was forlorn, soaked and cold, but they were all safe. Not a single life had been lost, although now they were shipwrecked on a desolate, uninhabited island just 300 ft wide by 1,500 ft long.
Now Draper kept everyone busy. The sailors made more trips back to the wreck to recover spars and canvas sails and food and water. The soldiers began surveying the island and building cabins with the materials scavenged from the ship. Draper imposed a daily routine and everyone responded well to his discipline.
After ten days the survivors were rescued by the sloop HMS Rose, and by a lighter dispatched from Halifax. As was later reported, they ended their ordeal “without a sick person, or any flagrant breach of discipline.”
This was a remarkable feat of leadership, for which Captain Daley and Captain Draper were later both praised. Many lives would have been lost if the officers hadn’t restored discipline at the height of the confusion. The Duke of Wellington himself claimed that the behaviour of all the troops “throughout the transaction is praiseworthy, and by its result must render manifest to all the advantage of subordination, and the strict obedience to orders under the most extraordinary circumstances in which men can be placed in the performance of their duty in the service of Her Majesty.”
The survivors arrived in Halifax with only the clothes on their backs. The people of that town who had just a few weeks before been thanking these soldiers for their unofficial fire fighting duties, now took up a collection to pay for enough clothing and bedding for their second voyage back to England. The 64th re-embarked on the troopship Premier, for an apparently uneventful 17-day trip to Portsmouth, arriving home on August 22nd, 1843.
Much was subsequently written about the heroism of the officers in this incident, but nothing about the individual soldiers. We can only guess at the role Sam played: the only record is in his medical report on discharge three years later, which reported that he had suffered two ruptures caused by lifting heavy weights during the shipwreck.
For all his sickness and disease and his ruptures, Sam survived into his old age, passing away only in 1875, at the age of 71. No doubt the story of the wreck of the troopship Able won him many a pint along the way.
