Let us ask ourselves what is our idea of a ship. However we express this in words, it will be vastly different from the idea of a ship that possessed the minds of those early inhabitants of Holderness of whom we read in Chapter III. Theirs was that of a tree-trunk hollowed out partly by fire and partly by hand labour with implements of flint, until it would balance itself on the water, and could be pushed along by its occupants with some sort of paddle.

Such were the ships that men first used on the Humber. Not long ago one of them was found buried six feet below the surface of the ground at Brigg in North Lincolnshire.

At a time when the river Ancholme spread widely over the surrounding land, this boat had been deserted on the river bank, and as years went by it sank into the mud of which the bank was composed. Then the river gradually silted up, so that what had once been a wide expanse of water became merely a narrow water-channel.

This ancient ‘dug-out’ is now one of the treasures of the Hull Museum. It has been constructed of the trunk of an oak tree, split lengthwise, and is nearly forty-eight feet long from stem to stern. Its width is from four to five feet, and its depth roughly two feet six inches. There is probably no oak tree growing in our country that would be tall enough to make a similar boat of equal length.

The stern board of the boat is a separate piece of timber, fitted into a groove along each side; and originally the sides were bound across with leathern thongs to keep the board in position.

Think of the immense amount of labour that the making of this early ‘ship of the Humber’ cost. The patience that its makers must have displayed would put some of us to utter shame in our frantic haste to finish a thing in the shortest possible space of time after its beginning.

Long after the days of the builders of this boat, the Romans and the Angles came to our shores. With them the knowledge of shipbuilding had greatly increased, and their ships were propelled with both oars and sails.

Later again came the Northmen, against whose attacks the Angles prayed in vain. A true sea-faring race were these Vikings of old, and they could boast, as their lineal descendants in Norway boast to-day, that they possessed more ships than any other nation in the world.

Long-ships was the name given to the Northmen’s ships of war, they being thus distinguished from the wider and clumsier merchant ships. But the Northmen were a poetic race, and to a Viking his ship was a ‘black horse of the sea,’ a ‘deer of the surf’ or a ‘raven of the wind.’

The largest ships of the Vikings were ornamented with a dragon’s head at the stem, and often a dragon’s tail at the stern, whence their name Dragons. The dragon’s head and tail might be covered with thin sheets of gold, if its owner were a great king. Its prow and sides might also be coated with iron to aid in ramming other vessels.

These ships were driven along by the use of a large square sail, and also by the use of oars. Twenty or thirty rowers’ benches was the usual number allowed for, and the space between two benches was known as a ‘room.’ Each ‘room’ would hold seven or eight men; so that a thirty-seater, which would be in length about 150 feet, would have a crew of something over two hundred men. Cnut the Great had a monster ship 300 feet long, and containing sixty ‘rooms.’

The Norsemen were very fond of bright colours, and the sails of their long-ships were made of woollen material striped red, blue, green, and white. The sides were painted red, purple, and gold, and along each were ranged the warriors’ shields, alternately yellow and black.

Picture to yourself what a fleet of some two or three hundred of these long-ships must have looked like when it sailed up the Humber. What terror it must have struck into the hearts of those who watched its arrival!

Then picture another scene. A single ship, the home of a renowned Viking, drifting slowly down the Humber on an ebb tide, with sail set, bearing in its bosom the dead bodies of its owner and his favourite horses, and alight from stem to stern with blazing tallow, tar, and oil. This is the picture that a great English poet has painted for us in his poem called Balder Dead:—

Soon, with a roaring, rose the mighty fire, And the pile crackled; and between the logs Sharp, quivering tongues of flame shot out, and leapt, Curling and darting, higher, until they licked The summit of the pile, the dead, the mast, And ate the shrivelling sails. But still the ship Drove on, ablaze above her hull with fire.

With the passing of centuries came more peaceful times, when the ships that passed up and down the Humber were no longer ships of war, but ships of peace. They were ships ‘that sailed from Hull ... to Bergen with English wares, and brought back cargoes of salt fish; that fetched iron from Sweden, and wine from the Rhine vineyards, and oranges and spices and foreign fruits from Bruges; and that carried out the English woollen cloths to Russia or the Baltic ports, and brought back wood, tin, potash, skins and furs.’

What the ships of the fourteenth century were like we can judge from the old plan of Hull on page 165, and from the drawing of the seal of the Corporation of Hedon here shown. The Humber was then noted for its ships, and in the year 1346 furnished the following ships and men to the expedition fitted out by King Edward III. for the siege of Calais:—

For the same expedition London provided only twenty-five ships and 662 mariners.

Gradually the ships of the Humber increased in size; and when in 1598 the seamen of Hull first engaged in whale fishing, the kind of ship they had was one much more seaworthy than the ‘cockle-shells’ of previous centuries.

In the hall of the Hull Trinity House hangs a strange relic of the early days of the whale fishery. This is an Esquimaux canoe, built entirely of whalebone and sealskin, and picked up off the Greenland coast by the captain of a Hull whaler in 1613.

When sighted, the canoe held the dead body of its owner sitting strapped upright with his paddle across his knees. The ‘Bonny Boat’ the English sailors christened it, and there in the Trinity House it may be seen to-day, with what at first glance appears to be its owner still sitting as he sat when he died of starvation on the wide Atlantic Ocean.

During the time of the Dutch wars of the reign of Charles II., the whaling industry passed into the hands of the Dutch, but a century later—in 1765—it was resumed by the Hull seamen. A shipowner named Captain Standidge took a great part in this revival of the Greenland fisheries, and for his services in this direction received the honour of knighthood.

From 1772 to 1852 the Whaling Industry flourished. To the icy seas around Spitzbergen, or to the Greenland seas and the Davis Straits, there went each year ships of the Humber in number from three to sixty-five. Often they were unlucky, and had to return ‘clean’—that is, with nothing in their holds to repay their owners and their crews. Sometimes they were still more unlucky, and did not return at all, having been gripped in the ice or captured by French privateers. Out of ten ships that sailed from the Humber in 1775, six came back ‘clean,’ and two were lost.

One of the most disastrous years known was 1835, when five of the Hull ships were frozen up, three of them being eventually lost, one with all hands.

In the following year a Hull vessel, named the Swan, was frozen up much farther north than the whalers usually went; so that it was the midsummer of 1837 before she got free. Meanwhile she had been given up as lost; and on Sunday, July 2nd, a memorial service was held on the Dock Green, and a collection of £47 taken on behalf of the families of the crew. In the midst of the service, however, news arrived that the ‘missing’ vessel was entering the mouth of the Humber.

We can imagine the excitement caused by her arrival. Among other things it meant, of course, a ‘Hextra Speshul’ edition of the News Sheet, as the photograph on the opposite page shows.

As a rule, however, a voyage resulted in fair profits for both owners and crews. The thirty-one ships that went to Greenland in 1821 took between them 204 whales, and the twenty-one that went to Davis Straits took 294 whales. These 498 ‘fish’ produced whalebone and oil to the value of £150,000. The average return per ship was here slightly lower than that for the whole period 1772–1852, which works out to £3,500.

Occasionally a ship would be particularly fortunate. In the Greenland Sea in one day the Gibraltar killed eleven whales, the Manchester ten, and the Molly six. In 1794, also, the Egginton arrived from Greenland with the produce of fifteen whales, 3,021 seals, and five bears. She had been away from home only a hundred days, and created a record by afterwards making two trading voyages to St. Petersburg the same season.

Such luck as this was quite exceptional. Usually the capture of a single whale meant much hard work and many dangers for the boats’ crews. In 1821 the Baffin

struck a whale which ran out fifteen lines of 240 yards each, and dragged two boats and fifteen men for a long time. When the ‘fish’ was killed, it was found to have been also dragging under water six similar lines and a boat belonging to the Trafalgar, of Hull. The 5,040 yards of line weighed a ton and a half.

Most famous of the ships of the Humber that passed to and fro in the whaling industry was the Truelove. This was a three-masted barque with a length of 96 feet and a width of 27 feet. Built at Philadelphia in 1764, the Truelove was captured by the English in the American war, and eventually sold to a merchant of High Street, Hull.

The Truelove’s first whaling voyage was to Spitzbergen in 1784. From that year till 1868 she made seventy-two voyages to Spitzbergen, Greenland, or the Davis Straits, and accounted for about 500 whales. In 1873 she was taken to her birthplace, where the captain and crew were fêted; and for several years afterwards she made trading voyages to Norway until eventually she was broken up as no longer seaworthy.

The peculiar build of the Truelove accounted to a large extent for her many hair-breadth escapes from the danger of being ‘nipped’ in the ice. Her sides bulged outwards like a barrel; or, as sailors put it, they ‘tumbled home’ to the deck.

One of the saddest events in the Hull whaling industry was the return home of the Diana in 1867. This was the first steamship to go to the whaling-grounds, and in her voyage of 1866 she had the misfortune to become locked in the ice for six months. The sufferings of her crew can be imagined. Captain Gravill died in December, one of her crew died in February, five died in March, and five more died in April.

The Truelove was sent out from the Humber as a relief ship for the Diana, but the two vessels passed each other. With thirty-six men down with the scurvy, and only seven left fit to work the ship, the unfortunate Diana eventually reached home, her dead captain’s coffin on the ship’s bridge.

The following year this ill-fated vessel was wrecked on the treacherous flats of Donna Nook, off the Lincolnshire coast at the mouth of the Humber. With her loss the whaling industry of the Humber seamen came to an end.

During many of the years when the whale fisheries were providing work for East Riding seamen, France and England were at war. Men were consequently needed to man the English navy, and such notices as the following were frequently issued in seaport towns:—

For the parishes of Sculcoates, Cottingham, and Little Weighton, A few able-bodied SEAMEN or LANDMEN to serve in His Majesty’s Navy during the present War ONLY.... The Families and Friends of Volunteers will receive Monthly Pay, and the Volunteers themselves will have a bountiful supply of Cloathing, Beef, Grog, Flip, and Strong Beer, also a certainty of Prize Money, as the men entered for this service will be sent to capture the rich Spanish Galleons, and in consequence will return loaded with Dollars and Honour, to spend their Days in Peace and Plenty.

Hull, November 28th, 1796.

But the results of this ‘Recruiting for the Navy’ were not always satisfactory, notwithstanding the ‘certainty of Prize Money’ and the ‘bountiful supply of ... Grog, Flip, and Strong Beer.’Beer.’ So recourse was had to the Press Gang, and many were the tricks practised by the captains and crews of Hull whalers to reach home safely.

A ship of war was stationed in the Humber to board incoming whalers and impress men for service in the navy. To escape, numbers of the men were landed at Easington or at lonely spots farther north, and these would make their way home as best they could by land.

Another very ingenious trick was worked successfully by the captain of a whaler which was boarded by a revenue cutter off Flamborough Head. This is how Captain Barron in his Old Whaling Days tells the story:—

A revenue cutter hove in sight off Flambro’ Head when Captain Scoresby was returning home with a full ship. When he saw it in the distance, he let four or five feet of water into the hold through a large brass tap which some whalers had in their counters on purpose to fill their casks for ballast. This was kept running, so that the pumps could not gain upon it, and when the officer boarded the ship he was told she made so much water that the crew would not be able to keep her afloat if he took any away. The officer sounded the pumps, and was satisfied in finding when they stopped pumping the water rose in the hold. He took his departure. The tap was at once turned off, and the water pumped out. This clever trick saved his men from being forced on board His Majesty’s ships.

On another occasion—in 1798—the Blenheim was boarded in the Humber by H.M.S. Nonsuch, and a free fight followed, in which two of the warship’s crew were slain. For this the captain of the whaler was brought to trial at York. But he was acquitted on the charge of murder laid against him; and when the York coach brought him safely home to Hull, ‘the crowd took out the horses, dragged it to the Market Place, and ran it three times round the statue of King William’ by way of showing their joy.

The warships of this period, were, of course, vastly different from the battleships of which English seamen are so proud to-day. Many were built in the Humber; the largest being the Humber, an eighty-gun ship, launched at Hessle Cliff in 1693. H.M.S. Hector was built by Hugh Blaydes fifty years later. During the years 1739–1774 three warships were built at Paull, six at Hessle, and fifteen at Hull. A memento of the Hyperion, built at Hull in 1806, still exists in the name of a small street running off Great Union Street, and a neighbouring street bears the name of a very popular whaler, the Aurora.

The first steamship used on the Humber was one built in Scotland, and hence appropriately named the Caledonia.^[66] This steam packet ran between Hull and Selby in 1815. Five years later the Rockingham was built at Thorne, and the following year the Kingston began the ‘expeditious and easy conveyance’ of passengers from Hull to London.

The Kingston was, of course, looked upon as a wonderful vessel. Its owners proudly announced to the public:—

In the construction of this elegant vessel, which will be propelled by an engine of sixty horse power every attention has been paid to render the conveyance expeditious, commodious, and safe.

‘Expeditious’, however, it did not prove to be—at any rate on its first voyage. For when twenty miles from the Humber, the axis of the paddles broke; and instead of reaching London in thirty hours, as the passengers had expected, the Kingston found its way back to Hull some forty-eight hours after its triumphant start.

These early steam packets were somewhat different from the ocean liners of our own day. Compare the portrait of the Rockingham on page 295 with that of the Bayardo on page 299. Launched in 1910 from Earle’s Shipbuilding Yard, at a cost of £67,000, the latter was for its short life the ‘Queen of the Wilson Line.’

The fate of the Diana and the Bayardo illustrates the dangers of the Humber. The latter vessel left Gothenburg on a Friday evening in January, 1912, with a cargo worth £30,000 and a small number of passengers. On the Saturday evening she was making her way up the Humber in a dense fog when she ran hard aground on a sandbank almost opposite the dock which was her destination. By the following evening her back was broken, and the ‘Queen of the Wilson Line’ was a hopeless wreck.