The Menace Of Lightning To Ships 100 Years Ago

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30396, 21 March 1964, Page 5

The Menace Of Lightning To Ships 100 Years Ago

[Specialty written for "The Press" by DERRICK MANSBRIDGE]

A POWERFUL British squadron under the command of RearAdmiral Sir John Borlase Warren sailed out of Port Mahon in Minorca on February 24,1801. Their orders were to pin the French fleet in Toulon.

Britain had been at war with the leaders of the French Revolution more or less continuously since 1793, a year after Austria and Prussia had taken up arms against France. When Admiral Warren’s squadron set sail for the Western Mediterranean, Napoleon’s forces were driving the Austrians out of Italy, and it became vital to keep the French fleet under surveillance.

Six sail of the line—Warren’s flagship, Renown (of 74 guns), with Gibraltar (80), Dragon (74), Hector (70), Gtnereux (80), Haerlem (64), and two frigates, Mercury (28) and Phoenix (36) —left Mahon. Ten hours later they limped back to port, the whole squadron out of action, masts splintered and toppling, sails ripped and burnt. Yet not one of the eight ships had fired a gun in anger. The powerful British ships had been made impotent, after running into an electrical storm that lasted only a few minutes. Captain Chambers White, the flag captain of the Renown, said afterwards: “The whole squadron sustained as much damage in spars as would have occurred in action with the enemy.” Hardly Ever Had Admiral Warren believed in the tale that lightning never strikes in the same place twice, he had cause to know better seven months later. Another of his squadrons was gravely weakened in the same way while he was policing the Western Mediterranean. Three line-of-battle ships, Alexander (74 guns), and Dragon and Renown, both of which were damaged in the early encounter with nature, were severely crippled and had to withdraw for refit.

Lightning was a dreaded hazard to the men who sailed in the old wooden ships, and many a hard-bitten seaman preferred to meet the enemy in action than be caught in a lightning storm. But it is doubtful if many who sailed the seas during these years had not seen their ships damaged, their mates killed and wounded, some cruelly, by this aerial bombardment.

Even Prince William Henry (who came to the throne later as King William IV) had to beach his damaged frigate, Pegasus, in Cork in December, 1787. Lightning had toppled her mainmast. Staggering Between 1790 and 1840, a period comprising 25 years of war and 25 years of peace, 280 of His Majesty’s ships were struck by lightning. It is not known how many merchant ships were damaged, although one authority estimated that between 1810 and 1854 a hundred merchant vessels were damaged beyond repair or lost completely. The loss of lives was equally staggering. Between the same period, 1790 to 1840, more than 100 Royal Navy seamen were killed or died from burns; more than 250 were so badly injured (many were blinded) that they were invalided out of the service. These figures would increase alarmingly if there was any way of including the casualties suffered in the Merchant Service, and in the crews of the ships of other countries sailing the seas at this period. A Captain Spencer, who commanded the Madagascar in the Mediterranean in January, 1830, has told how his ship was struck five times in less than two hours. One of the blows destroyed the mainmast. The captain of the Squirrel (28 guns), off the coast of Africa in 1805, was

“enveloped in a luminous haze as the lightning played about his head." He was unharmed. The captain of the Tigre (80 guns), in November, 1809, was not so fortunate: lightning burned the hat and hair off his head. Some of his sailors were even more unfortunate. Four of them were struck dead, and a fifth, a boy, had his arm struck and shrivelled. Ships’ logs told some gruesome tales. Admiral Sir George Cockburn told how one of his sailors in the Implacable in 1810 was knocked senseless. “The skin of his hack,” the admiral wrote in the log, “exhibited a curious appearance; the small veins were ruptured so as to appear like a tree extending its branches over the whole back.” The man did not die.

The frigate Sappho was at sea off the Western Isles in February, 1820, when lightning destroyed her mainmast. Four men fell from her foreyard into the high sea and were lost; two were struck dead on deck, and 18 others were severely wounded, four dying later. The hands of the watch on the Repulse, lying off the coast of Spain in 1810, were in the rigging, taking in the clothes they had been washing, when lightning struck “out of a clear blue sky.” Seven men dropped dead on to deck, 13 more were burned, and of these three died in agony later. Court-Martialled Captain Dacres, whose frigate Guerriere (36 guns) took part in the famous naval engagement with the American frigate Constitution (44 guns), commanded by Captain Isaac Hull, was courtmartialled for losing his ship. The Guerriere was raked by a broadside from the Constitution which destroyed her foremast. This was a normal risk of a battle at close quarters. But as the foremast toppled it brought down the mainmast, which had not been damaged by the Constitution’s fire. At the court-martial it was reported that the Guerriere’s mainmast had been struck by lightning 18 months earlier but the damage had not been considered serious. It gave way under impact from the foremast.

The effect of lightning on spars and masts was quite unpredictable. When the Dictator (64 guns) was struck in 1794, the cross-tress and cap of the topmast were scattered in fragments and the mast was split open. Some days later there was a smell of smouldering wood in the ship. It was traced to the figurehead, made of solid elm, but without a trace of damage on the outside. It was cut open and revealed what the captain described as “a nest of fire inside it.” Only Emergency Little was known, and less was being done to protect the ships from lightning. Many carried copper-link chains for use In emergency. When it was thought lightning might strike they were hastily taken out of the locker, where they had been stored shipshape. The bo’sun would chase

a hand up each of the masts, who, holding one end of a temporary lightning conductor, would fasten it to the mast-head. The other end would be laced through the rigging and put over the ship's side and into the water tied to a hempen rope. Sometimes lightning would strike while the seamen were tricing up the chain. Usually they were dead when they hit the deck. Convincing Task One man. Sir William Snow Harris, of Harris’s Fixed Lightning Conductors, who had spent 25 years in research, was convinced he had found the answer. But he also had to convince the Admiralty and this took him longer than producing the invention. He had earlier invented a mariner’s compass which their Lordships seized on with gratitude, but they did not understand his lightning conductor. They took 23 years to be convinced, and more than 30 years to pay for it. Sir William designed a copper strip, of varying and nicely gauged widths and thicknesses, to be fitted permanently into ships’ masts. These would conduct lightning flashes down through the ships’ decks, through the spaces between them, through the keelson and through copper terminals into the copper sheathing of the hull and through the sheathing into the sea. No-one bothered what happened to it after that.

Sir William fought a long and finally victorious battle with their Lordships at the Admiralty. He collected immense data on the damage ships had suffered, the lives that had been lost, the men who had been severely wounded, and the thousands of pounds that had been spent repairing damaged ships. But there was a lunatic fringe who would not be moved. One of these was a Lieutenant William Pringle Green, Royal Navy. Some Nonsense “Since the introduction of conductors to the vineyards in Switzerland, the electricity has been attracted down in such quantities that the whole country has been set on fire and canals have had to be cut in all directions to afford water to extinguish it” Lieutenant Green told a "Parliamentary commission that was set up to consider Sir William Harris’s invention. “I know an instance,” he continued, “where a conductor on the side of a mountain attracted the lightning to such an extent that the cloud was emptied of electricity and it consequently fell on the mountain and swept everything away." A Mr Martyn Roberts drew a terrifying picture for their Lordships of a thunderbolt penetrating through the conductor to the inside of the ship and with no way to escape. There it would dash this way, and that way, creating havoc, until in the end, with nothing else it could do, it would explode and blow the ship to smithereens. Professor Michael Faraday, the authority on electricity in his day, convinced the commission that Mr Roberts was talking nonsense, and the commission recommended the acceptance of Sir William's invention. But this was not the end. It took many more months of Parliamentary lobbying, the writing of books and pamphlets, and the addressing of public meetings to push their Lordships into action. In 1842, fixed lightning conductors became compulsory equipment in all Her Majesty’s ships. “Most Awful” Five years later the frigate Fisgard (42 guns) was lying at anchor in the mouth of the Nisqually river on the Pacific coast of America. The officer of the watch. Lieutenant Dyke, described the lightning crash as “most awful. Just as if 500 broadsides had all gone off together.” The Fisgard’s log recorded the incident simply: ‘Ship at anchor; 7.45 p.m., the mainmast was struck by lightning, the electric fluid passing down the conductor and out both sides of the ship, with a very loud explosion, but doing no injury." Fisgard had been fitted with one of Sir William Harris’s coonductors. But it was another seven years later, 110 years ago this month, that Sir William was finally paid for his invention.