#the only pre-marryat merchant signal code i could find was developed by lloyd's in 1812 and not really used?

[clove-pinks]

"The Victory as it left Woolwich (detail) from Robert Huish, The Last Voyage of Capt. Sir John Ross, 1835." (Linda Hall Library, see source link)

My first thought when I saw this picture was to marvel at the size of the smokestack on Victory. I wasn't expecting it to be so tall, or so large, especially when screw-propeller ironclads of the mid-19th century have such short stacks. But while a lot of things going on in this illustration are dubious (more on that later), this depiction of Victory's smokestack is probably accurate enough, q.v. the 1820s steamship Diana and her similar appearance.

Much more frustrating to me are all the hoists of flags.

Remember that the Admiralty did not sponsor this expedition (which is why there is a big chunk of Nunavut named after a gin distiller), so you might think that Ross was using Marryat's code of signals for merchant ships, first published in 1817. Except that those aren't Marryat's flags— there are designs not in his simple numerical system, and they're all square/rectangular in shape. That last detail alone is unusual, since naval signal flags generally have distinguishing pennants and the odd swallow tail or triangle-shaped flag.

So, are they using a Royal Navy system? As far as I can tell, no (with a question mark at the end). It’s not Admiral Home Popham’s famous flags, it’s not the flags drawn by Charles Copland (who is a somewhat mysterious figure, with many drawings in possession of the National Maritime Museum but not any biographical information. He was possibly affiliated with the East India Company, going by his art.)

I’m obsessed with these stupid flags, which are tantalizingly grouped in sets of 4 and 5, as you would expect from a ship making her number or sending some other message. The designs are simple, and they look nothing like the “house flags” of merchant shipping companies, or banners belonging to individuals on the expedition. “What is presumably Ross's expedition flag” is in the background of this painting, according to the description from the NMM. 

All weekend I have been poring over Timothy Wilson’s Flags at Sea, in addition to whatever resources I can find online. On Royal Navy signal flags, Wilson writes, “In 1808 and 1816 the Admiralty revised the general Signal Book. In 1827 a recast series of signal books was issued, consisting of a General Signal Book, a Vocabulary Signal Book and a book of Night and Fog Signals.”

Could this 1827 update include some of the mystery flag designs that stump me in the illustration? Possibly, since I can’t find a chart of the flags to verify it. I didn’t want to post about this until I could find a satisfactory answer about the signal flags, but at this point I’m trying to crowd-source an answer. If these flags are legitimate, they would be from a system developed 1829 or earlier (when Ross sailed); or perhaps 1835 or earlier, if the artist was referencing a real ship at the time of publication.

Stymied with the flags, I started looking for information on Robert Huish. I found a startlingly diverse array of books written by what appears to be the same Robert Huish: celebrity biographies and memoirs, more than one beekeeping guide, travelogues, a home economics guide for women. To quote from Huish’s wikipedia page: “His other works [not the beekeeping books] are nearly all poor examples of anecdotal, quasi-historical bookmaking; the Quarterly Review spoke of him as an obscure and unscrupulous scribbler.” 

So there is the very real possibility that the flags are complete bullshit. It seems more than likely considering the timing and nature of Huish’s book, published in the same year as Ross’s own narrative and compiled from what the Linda Hall Library calls “the journal of the steward, William Light, who was more than a little disgruntled with Ross, and much of the text has to be taken with a grain of salt.” (link)

Huish also provides us with a nice view of the Victory, as she set out on the voyage, which Ross did not do.  Perhaps that is because by the time Ross wrote his narrative, he was thoroughly sick of the Victory and its steam boilers and paddlewheels.  Ross dumped all the machinery onto the ice during his first winter at Felix Harbour and fulminated at length against the manufacturers in his narrative—so much so that the manufacturers wrote a treatise in rebuttal. 

I didn’t expect such a whirlwind of drama and half-truths when I found this lovely picture of Victory (or someone’s, uhh, artistic interpretation of what she may have looked like); but I guess with the Ross family involved it’s par for the course!