Joseph Ashmore – A Tragic Ending at Sea

My ancestor Joseph Ashmore was born in Dover, Kent in 1761. He was a mariner and spent many years at sea. In 1805 he was 54, and had joined the Sea Fencibles. Originally formed in 1798, they were disbanded in 1802 then reformed in 1803 during the Napoleonic Wars the Sea Fencibles were recruited from volunteers in coastal areas. They were  paid 1s per day when required for service, but the main incentive was immunity from service in both the militia and from the press gang. Unsurprisingly, there was no problem getting volunteers.  Although they do not appear to have played a major role during the wars, they did take part in some minor skirmishes with the French, although their lack of larger ships limited their potential. Whenever there was an invasion scare, two lines of blockade were formed – one off the French coast, provided by the navy, and one off the British coast, mostly provided by the sea fencibles, using smaller gunboats. Sea Fencible volunteers were trained in the use of arms and were also required to man watch and signal towers as well as cannons along the coasts and ports. A member of the Sea Fencibles would spend one day a week training.

The Sea Fencibles fleet consisted of small vessels such as colliers and coasting vessels such as hoys adapted to serve as gunboats. A hoy was a small sloop-rigged coasting ship or a heavy barge used for freight, usually with a burthen of about 60 tons. English hoys plied a trade between London and the north Kent coast that enabled middle class Londoners to escape the city for the more rural air of Margate, for example. Others sailed between London and Southampton. These were known as Margate or Southampton hoys and one could hail them from the shore to pick up goods and passengers. Concern about a possible French invasion led the Royal Navy on 28 September 1804 to arm 16 hoys at Margate for the defense of the coast. The Navy manned each hoy with a captain and nine men from the Sea Fencibles.

In early 1806, Joseph Ashmore was working on a hoy named the Friends Good Will. He was possibly carrying out duties as a sea fencible when, on the evening of Sunday April 6, the Friends Good Will was anchored in The Downs, a stretch of sea off the coast of Deal in Kent. Joseph and another sailor were endeavouring to get up what is called a fender, a kind of safeguard usually placed at the side of a vessel to prevent damage from another lying alongside, when Joseph unfortunately fell overboard, and was drowned. According to a newspaper report: “Immediately the deceased fell into the water, a rope was handed him from the deck, which he did  not  perceive, being probably senseless, from a violent contusion on the forehead, which he received from the side of the vessel in his fall. A few minutes only elapsed, before one of the crew caught hold of him just as he was sinking, got him into a boat alive, and had recourse to the usual method of placing him upon a cask for the purpose of recovering him, but all endeavours proved unavailing, as he very soon expired.”  Joseph was buried in Dover a few days later leaving his wife a widow and their four children without a father.

Following my ancestor's footsteps to Ballarat

This week I'll be travelling to Ballarat for the Eighth Victorian Family History State Conference: Under the Southern Cross – A goldfields experience. My ancestor, Henry Ashmore, was one of the first to travel to the Victorian goldfields after payable gold deposits were discovered there in 1851.

Henry wrote a wonderfully descriptive letter to his brother in England in September 1852 which I would like to share with you. He wrote:

"On the 20th of October, 1851, I proceeded with a party of five to Ballarat diggings, it is situated six miles from Boningyong, that being the name of a very high mountain. From hence through the ranges to the diggings it is covered with white quartz which at places looks as if it is snow. To show you the fearful state of the roads, we sent our things up by a bullock-dray, and it took a fortnight (with ten bullocks) to reach a distance of fifty six miles. We walked with our damper and mutton, which occupied us eight days; some part of the way having to wade knee deep through the mud: there were drays out of number bogged on the road. At night we made our mi mis (hut) of green boughs and branches, and when it rained we were generally wet through. When it rains here it is not like your April showers, but it comes down in torrents. On reaching Ballarat we set to work, and in three weeks we averaged £60 each man, or nearly 2lbs. in weight. My party then wished to return home.

We set out shortly afterwards with a horse and dray for Mount Alexander. On our arrival we commenced work, but were not so fortunate as many, owing to our having a lazy, obstinate Scotchman with us, which was a great drawback. We stayed at the Mount three months, each dividing £150 per man. I then purchased the horse and dray for £52 (the same is now worth £120) and proceeded with my son and son-in-law to Bendigo, twenty-eight miles farther north, there being then not more than 100 people at the place. We commenced surfacing and earthing it down to the creek full two miles to wash, and we averaged about six ounces per day. We could not stop long here, as the drinking water was so bad that it gave us all the dysentry, and the heat was very oppressive. We left a great deal of sickness at the place. On our return to Corio, we found hundreds wending their way to Bendigo. After a few weeks I proceeded to Wardi Yallack, prospecting about fifty miles more southerly, as water was one grand point as well as gold. The precious metal is found there, but not in large quantities. The rocks and mountains in this district are the most splendid I have ever seen. We afterwards returned with a party to Bendigo-creek, remaining there about three months, and dividing £200 each man, The gold is mostly obtained in holes of from 10 to 30 feet deep. It took us on this last occasion 16 days to reach Bendigo from Corio. Provisions were very high when I was last at Bendigo, and there could not be less than 50,000 persons in that district—they are scattered for miles. Flour was selling £18 per bag; oats, £2 15s. per bushel; sugar 1s. 6d. per lb.; tobacco, 12s. per lb., and everything equally dear.

If the weather permits, we are off again in a week; at present it is not promising. Ice fell the other day, Sept. 2nd, nearly as big as walnuts, and the rivers are much swollen. We shall start for the Eureka (Ballarat), for diggers generally are doing well. The highest price I have obtained for my gold was £3. 7s. 3d. per ounce, the highest that has been given in this colony; when I first went to the diggins, only £2 18s. was given for it. I have sent you and my other brothers some Melbourne newspapers ; they will give you some idea of the quantity of gold that has been got. A ship left Melbourne on Tuesday with 120,000 ounces, for London; and a ship has just arrived with 837 emigrants. I should not be surprised to hear of thousands leaving Britain for our shores.

To give you some idea of the working the ground—when we get to the bottom of a hole, we fall in with different coloured clay, which we put into a tub to puddle and reduce so thin that we can wash it off in a dish: dipping the dish continually in the water, the gravel and sand wash out from being the lightest, and the gold falls to the bottom of the dish; but it frequently happens that we wash nearly all the surface down, which is done by putting the earth into a sieve and working it in a cradle—one bales water all the time, and the gold falls down on the slide or back part of the cradle. I see by the papers the gold found here has astonished our good folks at home. I must say some of the yields are wonderful: last week a nugget of solid gold, weighing 102 ounces, was found at Ballarat. The largest piece I have found was 7 oz. 15 dwts., when we first went to Ballarat."

Henry was described in a newspaper article several years later as a 'denizen of the diggins'. In the early 1860's he travelled to New Zealand in search of gold but soon returned to Australia. He lived for many years in the goldfields town of Creswick in Victoria where he died in 1884.

My biggest brick wall smashed: John SCOTT was really John CONACHER

A surprise phone call from a relative a few weeks ago has helped me smash my biggest genealogical brick wall. She had found some old letters dating back to the 1850's from SCOTT relatives in Scotland.

For over 25 years I had been searching for my 2nd great grandfather, John SCOTT, a baker at Creswick in Victoria, Australia during the 1850s who married Susan ASHMORE at Creswick in 1857. When he married, John gave the names of his parents as Alexander SCOTT and Margaret LAMB, his place of birth as Dunkeld, Scotland and his age as 30. John's brother, Alexander also came to Victoria and married.

I had never been able to find John and Alexander's birth or baptism or the marriage or even existence of their parents. The records just weren't there. The newly found letters, however, provided details of brothers and sisters and importantly where they were living in Scotland from the 1850s to 1870s. A letter written in 1855 told of the death of a sister, Susan.

I set to work checking ScotlandsPeople and other sites for the SCOTT family, but still no luck! Surely Susan's death would have been registered in 1855 and the family should have appeared in the various census records. I had another look at the letters and noticed that father Alexander's surname wasn't there. He signed his name Alexander at the bottom of one letter but the part where his surname would have been written was missing due to a tear - perhaps this was deliberately torn. Maybe the brothers had changed their name.

More searching for the first names of the family in the census indexes finally brought results. The family's surname was actually CONACHER. There was a family story that John and Alexander had left Scotland to get away from their father who was a strict Calvanist. Their mother was Margaret SCOTT who married Alexander CONACHER at Dunkeld in 1824, so the sons had adopted their mother's surname when they came to Australia. John had given his mother's surname as LAMB when he married, but LAMB was in fact the surname of his grandmother, Susan LAMB, the mother of Margaret SCOTT.

Now onto the next brick wall!

Irish convicts nearly burned alive on Norfolk Island

I came across this interesting story whilst researching the voyage of the East India Company fleet from England to China in 1804.

HMS Athenienne, a 64 gun warship under the command of Captain Francis Fayerman, left England with nine ships of the East India Company bound for China in June 1804. A homeward bound fleet from China had been attacked by the French Admiral Linois as the fleet entered the Straits of Malacca earlier in the year. It was therefore decided that instead of sailing via the shortest route across the Indian Ocean this fleet would sail via the southern coast of Australia then via the Pacific Ocean to China to avoid confrontation with the French.

In a heavy fog whilst crossing the Southern Atlantic Ocean three of the ships separated from the remainder of the fleet. Two of missing ships rejoined the fleet a month later, but one ship, the Taunton Castle, remained missing. Captain Fayerman decided to make an unscheduled visit to Norfolk Island to ask whether the Taunton Castle had been sighted.

In 1804 Norfolk Island was a penal colony. Many of the convicts on the island were Irish who, it was thought, could be sympathetic to the French if the island was attacked by a French force.

The Athenienne and the accompanying ships arrived off Norfolk Island at 3.30 pm on 9th November. On seeing the fleet of ships approaching the island, the commandant, Captain Piper, reported that he was ‘very much alarmed’. Fearing that they were French ships, he had the Irish convicts locked in the gaol and mustered his forces ready for an invasion. According to one of the convicts, wood was stacked around the gaol (apparently without the knowledge of the commandant) with the intention of setting it alight and burning all of the Irish convicts alive if the ships turned out to be French.

Captain Fayerman sent a boat with Lieutenant Little on shore to inform the commandant who they were and to enquire about the Taunton Castle. The relieved commandant said that the missing ship had not been seen.

The Taunton Castle called in at the island three days later after the remainder of the convoy had departed. She arrived at Harlem Bay, China on 5th January 1805 after having been separated from the rest of the convoy for nearly four months.

My ancestor, Joseph Ashmore, was a midshipman on HMS Athenienne.