I have been chasing an odd little pair of footnotes in the family genealogy. My great-great-grandfather had seven sons, five of whom died during the Napoleonic wars (including Thomas Whyte). The oldest, Charles John Whyte, died in November 1803 leaving a pregnant wife; their son, also Charles John Whyte, was born in February 1804. In the usual course of things, the family estates would have gone to the younger Charles John after his grandfather; but in December 1804 his mother remarried a much older Protestant Englishman with indecent haste, and the Whytes disinherited the baby Charles John Junior, who was being brought up as a Prod.
Despite this unpromising start, not to mention the well-publicised travails of his older sister Letitia, Charles John Whyte Junior did well. He enlisted in the 95th Regiment of Foot and rose to the rank of captain; he married a young widow in 1832 and settled in Spanish Point in County Clare (later the home town of President Patrick Hillery); and they had seven sons and three daughters, all of whom survived childhood (with perhaps one exception, as we shall see) and about half of whom have living descendants, some of whom I have met.
The oldest three of the seven sons went into the army, and the next two into the navy. The younger of these two was Joseph Whyte, born in Limerick on 12 October 1840. On 10 January 1856, three months after his fifteenth birthday, he enrolled in the Royal Navy with the rank of Master’s Assistant, and was assigned to H.M.S. Sappho, which left Portsmouth in March 1856 with orders to fight the slave trade off the West African coast.
The Sappho, under command of Fairfax Moresby (whose father of the same name is more famous), intercepted and seized three American ships in 1857, and liberated hundreds of slaves. However the owners and crew of the first to be seized, the Panchita, successfully argued that they really weren’t involved in the slave trade and just happened to be hanging around the African coast at the time; Congress passed a resolution condemning the British actions against it and Moresby was reprimanded by the Admiralty and reassigned, with H.M.S. Sappho to Australia.
They never got there, or at least not to landfall. Sappho left the Cape of Good Hope on 8 January 1858 and was seen by another ship at the western end of the Bass Strait, not far from Melbourne, on 18 February. This would have been only a couple of days sail from the ultimate destination, Sydney. But as the months went on, there was no trace of the Sappho, and eventually it was concluded that they were lost in a storm soon after they were last seen; and the 147-odd crew were all declared dead, including 17-year-old Joseph Whyte.
The fate of the Sappho is still a topic of interest to Australian historians. Its wreckage has never been found, but the Bass Strait is fairly shallow, so if that is where it did meet its fate, it should be a good target for scientific investigation. See more about it here.
Joseph Whyte was the sixth of his parents’ ten children. The youngest, Frederick Whyte, was born on 8 July 1852, when his older brother was not quite 12, and was 5 when the Sappho disappeared. We don’t have a lot of detail about Frederick’s life. He qualified as a Master Mate in June 1873, the month before his 21st birthday, and he signed on as Able Seaman with the SS Baroda in May 1874. The Baroda was one of the ships of the Liverpool-based Brocklebank Line; it was built in 1864 by the then recently founded Harland and Wolff in Belfast.
The only other record I have of Frederick is from twenty years later, when he was serving as Third Mate on the SS Hydarnes, also a Liverpool ship with the Houston Line, which specialised in an express weekly steamship service from Liverpool to Buenos Aires. All of the Houston Line’s ships had names beginning with H; in 1897 the other were the Hellenes, the Hesperides, the Heliades, the Heraclides, the Hellopes and the Hippomenes. The name Hydarnes is unusual here because it’s actually Persian; all the rest are obviously Greek.
On 27 February 1897, the Hydarnes set off on its usual run to Buenos Aires, with a crew of 43; and, like the Sappho thirty-nine years earlier, it never arrived. The usual sailing time would be around a month, so it was probably not until April that people would have started to worry. But there is nothing that can be done; they were gone, without a trace. Assuming that the ship sank in mid-ocean, the wreckage is thousands of metres below the surface and will probably never be located.
It’s a bit surprising that Frederick Whyte left no further official bureaucratic trace than this in the 44 years of his life. One of the other brothers (as it happens, the other naval recruit) had died in the meantime, but the other four all married and had children, as did all three sisters. (The pioneering gynaecologist Gladys Sandes was the granddaughter of the oldest sister). Perhaps a physical investigation of the archives in Liverpool will tell me what Frederick was doing between the Baroda and the Hydarnes. Perhaps he had good reason, now lost in history, to cut off links with the rest of the family.
I don’t know how often shipwreck was a cause of death for Irishmen in the second half of the nineteenth century; but I also don’t know of any other cases in my extended genealogy, and it’s an odd coincidence that the only two should be brothers in the same generation, my second cousins twice removed. When the Hydarnes sank, Kitty Hawk was still six years in the future, but for all its inconveniences, I suspect that air travel is much safer all round.