Shakespeare at sea: the ship's concert 1

The ship's concert tradition goes back a long way, although in Shakespeare's plays sea voyages tend to be stormy and perilous, reflecting the reality for those wind-driven ships.

"Thou God of this great vast, rebuke these surges,
Which wash both heaven and hell;
……O! still
Thy deafening, dreadful thunders…"  Pericles, Act III

So Gertrude the Queen describes Prince Hamlet as:
 "Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend which is the mightier."   Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Act IV

The first recorded performance of Hamlet took place at sea in 1607, on board the East India Company ship, the Red Dragon, off the coast of Sierra Leone.

Woodcut of The Red Dragon c. 1595

(from the Dutch E. India Company archives, 1645-6)

The sailor audience would be keenly aware of the risks when Laertes is urged aboard by Polonius -
"The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail, and you are stayed for" - and later Hamlet too is  hastened on his sea voyage by Claudius, the king:

"The bark is ready, and the wind at help,
The associates ready and everything is bent for England!"

When Hamlet, safely back on land in Denmark, describes his narrow escape and rescue by pirates, did the sailors cheer and exchange anecdotes?
"…a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour;  in the grapple I boarded them: on the instant they got clear of our ship, so I alone became their prisoner…."

The Red Dragon began life in 1595 as the Earl of Cumberland's flagship,  a 38 gun 'privateer' ship, for raiding on the Spanish Main, and was given its name The Scourge of Malice by Queen Elizabeth I.  

In 1601 it was sold to the newly formed East India Company, renamed the Red Dragon and sailed for the Indian Ocean under the command of James Lancaster.

Sir James Lancaster c. 1600: (the ship may be one he captained in the Armada 1588) 

  © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

The Red Dragon's third East India Company voyage was captained by William Keeling, and it is surviving accounts from him and his sailors which record the plays performed.

Later in the voyage, the entertainment was Shakespeare's Richard II, but even this tale of English wars and treachery two hundred years before would have extra meaning for sailors, far from home on a round trip voyage which would last two to three years.  As the play opens, Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) and Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk are banished and sent into years of exile:

"Must I not serve a long apprenticehood
To foreign passages, and in the end,
Having my freedom, boast of nothing else
But that I was a journeyman to grief?"        Richard II, Act I

King Richard himself, returning from Ireland, marks the moment of landing in Wales:

Aumerle: "How brooks your Grace the air,
After your late tossing on the breaking seas?
Richard:   " I weep for joy to stand upon my kingdom once again.
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand."               Act III

King Richard II with his patron saints,  The Wilton Diptych, c. 1395-9

© National Gallery, London

 This folding devotional panel painting  was probably King Richard's personal portable altarpiece.  It has his emblems on the exterior side and the angels also are wearing his white hart device, and would have been taken on campaigns, such as his trip to Ireland.

And John of Gaunt's speech in Act II of the play might mean as much to the homesick sailors in the Red Dragon, sailing on distant oceans:

"……this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,...

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

…...

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,  

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune,……"

Detail from the National Gallery's Wilton Diptych, showing a castle on an island, discovered during conservation in 1992

A Cabinet of Collectors 6: a Trio of Traders

This hand-moulded teapot and its pair was in the collection of William Beckford,  when he died in 1845.

Chinese teapot in the shape of a musical instrument  ( a sheng)  c. 1700-20

© Victoria & Albert Museum

The Chinese had been drinking tea since before the Tang dynasty, but it was the East India Companies who developed the trade with Europe in the seventeenth century, sending fleets from their 'factories' in India to Canton, the only Chinese port open to them.

A fleet of Company ships sailing for Canton, from the Log of the Rochester, 1710

© British Library

One English trader, John Lock,  writes of his cargoes in 1701, "the goods I brought from Surat were putchuk*, olibanum, mirh, cominseed, cotton & pearle, all which renders good profit".   Cotton returned  a hundred percent, but it was a bulky cargo, and some two-thirds of the cargo was in silver dollars, which the Chinese imported in great quantities as an international currency.  His return cargo included copper, sugar, camphor, chinaware and gold.  No mention of tea, although porcelain was still being used as ballast for it, but  he may have carried very little or none, as tea was not yet a regular import.  *(an aromatic root)

Chinese portrait figure of a Western merchant, 29.5 cm. Canton workshop c. 1720-25

© Victoria & Albert Museum

This trade on the far side of the world was full of hazards, conducted in two totally alien cultures, with risky sea voyages..  Having reached China, the traders had to catch the right monsoon winds back to India, in order to connect with the ships sailing on the lengthy voyage home to their markets in Europe. They were kept waiting in the Canton estuary while intermediaries dealt with the Chinese merchants; Young Lock (who went on to become a Director of the East India Company) complains: "to purchase the forgoing commodities, are obliged to trust the merchants with most of our Mony and goods, and are often very dilatory in their dispatch".    These men were explorers and collectors as well as traders, and brought home souvenirs like this painted clay portrait figure, done during their enforced delay.  This merchant stands there with the same aplomb, as if he were in a London drawing room.  (His embroidered coat is made of the fine English wool which they hoped to sell to the Chinese, but the Chinese preferred their versatile silk robes.)

The European taste for hot beverages, tea (especially after its prohibitive taxes were slashed in 1784) and coffee, made many traders' fortunes,  including that of Quakers, John Horniman  and his son Frederick in the next century.  By 1891 Horniman & Co was reputed the largest tea company in the world.

Tea advertisement from the 1900s.

Frederick J. Horniman (1835-1906) used his trade contacts and his travels in the Far East and elsewhere to build a vast collection of natural history, anthropological and ethnographic objects, as well as rare and unusual musical instruments.  When his collection outgrew his house in Forest Hill (and chivvied by his wife), he had a purpose-built museum designed for it.   This was opened in 1901 and he donated Museum and collections, together with other property, to the London County Council for the benefit of the public.

The Horniman Museum Building, 1901, designed by C. Harrison Townsend

Our twentieth century trader, Edward Bramah (1931-2008), was both tea and coffee merchant, learning from the ground up, on tea plantations in Malawi, and coffee farms on the slopes of Kilimanjaro,  and also dealing with China.  He set up his own business, the Bramah Tea and Coffee Company, in 1966.

He was descended from Joseph Bramah, the 18th century inventor. Joseph trained as a carpenter and cabinet maker, and it is thought that making tea caddies for the costly leaf tea, inspired him to create his unpickable Bramah Locke, 'the Challenge".  It was patented in 1784 and was only beaten at the Great Exhibition of 1851, by Frank Hobbs, and it took him sixteen days to work it out.

Joseph Bramah's famous lock

Edward inherited this inventive skill.  His collection began in the1950s, particularly with early coffee-making  machines, which he dismantled in order to perfect his own design, the Bramah Coffee Filter,  and he opened his Museum of Tea and Coffee in 1992.

His famous giant teapot uses four pounds of tea 

Edward eventually sold the collection and today it is in storage, with all its novelty teapots and unique tea and coffee-making artefacts,  awaiting a new home.    Maybe some of Edward Bramah's fascinating collection could be more regularly displayed, on loan to the restaurants and bars in Southwark and the City, where our long history of the tea and coffee trades began.

© The Bramah Tea & Coffee Museum

The wreck of the "Blanchefleur"

" 'This little fan and these tarnished slipper-buckles,'  the Abbe now said, giving his host a mournful smile, 'come, monsieur, out of that great Indiaman, the Blanchefleur.   A total loss, an utter wreck, my son, Mary save us.  The fine ship, the pride of the owners, officers and hands, has been broken among surges and rocks.  The coast of Africa, a savage place. ... Christ's pity! -- it's there the Blanchefleur struck and foundered.'


'Thomas Pidgeon knows all, ah me! that may now ever be known of the loss of the Blanchefleur.  He was a servant in that fatal ship, and, monsieur, you shall hear from his own lips a story of disaster, extraordinary peril, and tears.'


The young steward ceased, and looked, with a kind of questioning in the eyes, at the priest.  Lucy made a small movement, compassionate and woeful.  Stanyhurst  watched a candle burning out, with little jumps of flame, in its socket.  The priest gazed steadily, with a smile  kind and quiet, at the sailor.  No one spoke until Thomas Pidgeon again went on with the story.  And now, and through the remainder of the sailor's words, a low rumble, far or near, seemed, gradually to fill the chamber from without, to arise and enter and resound about the walls, and echo in the air; a noise distinct from and blending with, the constant dropping of rain.  Early industry was awake, and all the wheels of London beginning to revolve once more.

'Everything ended',  the young steward said;  'it all ended like now I must tell'. "

All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst's   Hugh Edwards
with an Introduction by Ian Fleming in 1963