A dramatic coloured lithograph by New York printmakers N. Currier and JM Ives shows the Burning of the Clipper Ship “Golden Light” on February 22nd 1853. The newly-built vessel was on her maiden voyage from New York to San Francisco when she was struck and set ablaze by lightning. The Golden Light was perhaps the most notable casualty of an all too common phenomenon that was responsible for damaging huge numbers of merchant and navy sailing ships, and in rare cases their total destruction.
Lightning strikes, which regularly discharge between 10 and 100 million volts of electricity, were among the many meteorological hazards wooden sailing ships and their crews were routinely subjected to. One of the earliest documented strikes was aboard the Trumbull in 1696, its parlous effects being described in an account given to the Royal Society by a witness, Mr R. Mawgridge. After knocking down two sailors on deck, the bolt entered the gentleman’s cabin, where he reported “a great weighty Nail was started out of said Ceiling, and fell over my Head, and lay upon my Pillow, and I thought my Head with the Lightning had been in a Flash of Fire.”
In 1761, the increasing incidences involving Royal Navy ships led the electrical scientist William Watson to pen a letter to First Lord of the Admiralty, George Anson, making “Some Suggestions Concerning the Preventing the Mischiefs, Which Happen to Ships and Their Masts by Lightning”. A decade earlier Watson’s American peer Benjamin Franklin had shown how lightning could be conducted by means of metal rods. Resulting attempts to protect ships from lightning strikes consisted of running metal chains from masts to the waterline; however, as the science was so little understood, particularly by the common seaman, these early efforts often did more harm than good.
The scale of the problem was laid bare by another electrical scientist, William Snow Harris, in an analysis he undertook of strikes on Royal Navy vessels. Harris compiled details of 235 recorded lightning strikes between 1793 and 1838, including 70 frigates and over 80 ships-of-the-line. Many of these were rendered ‘hors de combat’ as a result of the damage inflicted on the masts and rigging. In addition to the cost of repairs, such incidents led to the deaths of around 100 seamen and seriously injuries to 250 others.
Snow’s analysis shows that ships were subject to lightning strikes across the globe, not only in the more obvious regions such as the West Indies and the Mediterraean but also in British ports. Often more than one ship was struck during an electrical storm, especially those lying close together at anchor. There are cases of ships being struck repeatedly, and on more than one separate occasion. The 74-gun HMS Cumberland, for example, was struck twice in a period of 18 months, her mainmast being ‘shivered’ and damaged beyond repair in each case.
The ‘shivering’ of timbers was one of the most common effects of lightning strikes, which naturally first connected with the masts, one of a warship’s most costly appurtenances. Ships’ logs record their masts being ‘split in pieces’, ‘shivered in atoms’, ‘split into ribbons’, ‘shattered’ or ‘rent’. In one case, the vessel had ‘[the] heart of [her] mainmast torn out’, in another, it was ‘ruined in the heart’. Other ships reported ‘masts carried away’, ‘[falling] over the side’, or ‘rendered inservicable’. In many cases, sails, rigging, and even the masts themselves were set on fire. Several captains reported the bursting and even melting of mast hoops. But lightning bolts could also damage other parts of the ship, ripping up decks, stoving in cabins, setting off ordnance, and filling the cabins with ‘sulpurous smoke’ and ‘vapors of a suffocating odor’. More often than not, affected vessels would need to return to port for repairs.
Recorded injuries to the crew ranged from being temporarily ‘knocked down’ to being fatally ‘knocked overboard’. Some men reported blindness and the lost use of limbs; others were ‘fearfully burned’ and ‘scorched black’ under layers of unburnt clothing. For all involved in a close encounter with lightning, it was invariably a traumatic experience. In one of the most deadly incidents aboard HMS Repulse in 1813, a bolt reportedly killed seven ‘on the spot’ and three more in the days that followed. The 74-gun warship had been part of a squadron under Admiral Samuel Hood then attempting to intercept the French fleet at Toulin. Having had her topgallant and topmasts shivered, she was forced to return to Minorca for repairs. An even more deadly strike occurred aboard the 18-gun sloop HMS Sappho while sailing off the Western Islands in 1820. The log recorded 10 fatalities; two being killed outright, 4 lost overboard and 4 dying of their wounds; on top of another 10 wounded.
Snow’s detailed account included some of the more unusual strikes. Among these was HMS Dictator (64 guns), struck while at anchor at Martinique in 1794. Her top mast was reported to have split open ‘like a pair of compasses’. Later, the ship’s solid elm figurehead had to be cut away after it was found to be ‘on fire in the heart of it’; the bolt having somehow penetrated deep inside the timber. A year earlier, HMS Duke (90 guns) had been struck while engaging a French-held fort on this contested island. The lightning had evidently caused more damage than the enemy’s guns.
One of the most seriously damaged of all Royal Navy vessels during this period was HMS Thisbe (32 guns), which was struck twice while off the Scilly Isles in 1786. These bolts so wrecked the mast and rigging that ‘the whole was in one general blaze’, leaving the frigate ‘a mere wreck on the sea’. However, she did eventually reach safety with jury-rigged sails. The veteran frigate Lowestoffe (36) was another almost lost to lightning after being struck while in the Mediterranean in 1796. The lightning shivered the mainmast, ‘split’ the foremast, and set parts of the rigging ablaze.
Harris also listed several likely examples of Royal Navy ships being totally destroyed on account of lightning. One of these was HMS Resistance (44 guns), which spectacularly blew up off Sumatra in 1798 killing most of her crew. ‘Elecrtical excitation’ was observed around this ship at the time of her destruction, and one of the few survivors reported seeing a bright flash immediately beforehand. Harris judged it ‘highly probable’ the Resistance was destroyed by lightning, pointing out that her foremast, like that of many Royal Navy ships of the era, ‘passed immediately through the fore [powder] magazine.’ The scientist speculated, not unreasonably that many more ships would have been lost to lightning, ‘of which no tidings ever came to hand.’
Harris’s deeply-held interest in shipboard lightning strikes had led him to invent some of the first reliable marine lightning conductors for ships, beginning in 1820. One of these early prototypes had been successfully tested aboard HMS Beagle during her 1831-36 circumnavigational survey, which had carried the young naturalist Charles Darwin to scientific enlightenment and future celebrity. Captaining this voyage was Robert Fitzroy, who’d had his own first-hand experience of lightning strikes. While serving aboard HMS Thetis in the harbour at Rio several years earlier, Fitzroy had witnessed its ‘fore topmast shivered into a mere collection of splinters’, following what he termed ‘a rattling crash’ which sounded like ‘several guns had been fired together’. The Beagle too was evidently struck several times during its five-year voyage, but suffered no damage, vindicating Harris’s ideas.
Nevertheless, due to typical reluctance on the part of the Admiralty, the general deployment of Harris’s innovations was resisted until the early 1840s, specifically when the conservative Sir Charles Adam had been superceded as First Lord by the more modernising Sir George Cockburn. Once installed, their practicality was swiftly acknowledged by ships’ officers, and many subsequent logs give praise to the new contraptions for having kept their masts and rigging intact. For example, Commander Robert Sharpe, whose ship, HMS Scylla, was struck by lightning ‘in a parlous thunder squall on 6th August 1843’, claimed that without her newly fitted conductors the brig-sloop would have been demasted. Harris also meticulously recorded these incidents of deliverance. As the scientific campaigner was keen to point out:
‘Any unbiased person therefore who considers attentively the history of such cases of lightning must reasonably admit that they have a conclusive and important bearing on the interests of the Navy; and evidently show that, by a proper arrangement of metallic conductors, ships may certainly be guarded against the destructive effects of an element which as shown by the record of Her Majesty’s Ships for a long series of years have continued to deprive the country of the full services of its fleets, destroying its sailors, and wasting its treasure; thereby frequently placing the national interest in a critical position.’
Bow Creek to Anatahan 