Erebus. Michael Palin

      7 June 1826, Pembroke, Wales: it’s the sixth year of the reign of George IV, eldest son of George III and Queen Charlotte. He is sixty-three, with a quarrelsome marriage, a flauntingly extravagant lifestyle and an interest in architecture and the arts. Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, a Tory, has been Prime Minister since 1812. The Zoological Society of London has just opened its doors. British explorers are out and about, and not just in the Arctic. Alexander Gordon Laing reaches Timbuktu in August, only to be murdered a month later by local tribesmen for refusing to relinquish his Christianity. In north Wales two great engineering achievements are being celebrated, as two of the world’s first suspension bridges, the Menai Bridge and the Conway Bridge, open within a few weeks of each other.

      At the other end of Wales, in an estuary near the old fortified town of Pembroke, people are gathering on this early June morning for a somewhat smaller celebration. Cheered on by a crowd of engineers, carpenters, blacksmiths, clerks and their families, the stout, broad-hulled warship they have been building for the past two years slides, stern first, down the slipway at Pembroke Dockyard. The cheers rise to a roar as she strikes the waters of Milford Haven. She bounces, bobs and shakes herself like a newborn waterfowl. Her name is Erebus.

      It wasn’t a cheerful name, but then she wasn’t built to cheer; she was built to intimidate, and her name had been chosen quite deliberately. In classical mythology Erebus, the son of Chaos, was generally taken to refer to the dark heart of the Underworld, a place associated with dislocation and destruction. To evoke Erebus was to warn your adversaries that here was a bringer of havoc, a fearsome conveyor of hell-fire. Commissioned in 1823, HMS Erebus was the last but one of a type of warship known as bomb vessels, or sometimes just ‘bombs’. They were developed, first by the French, and later the English, at the end of the seventeenth century, to carry mortars that could fling shells high over coastal defences, doing maximum damage without an armed landing having to be risked. Of the other ships in her class, two were named after volcanoes – Hecla and Aetna – and the others after various permutations of wrath and devastation: Infernal, Fury, Meteor, Sulphur and Thunder. Though they never achieved the heroic status of the fighting warships, their last action, the siege of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour in the War of 1812, came to be immortalised in the American national anthem, ‘The Star Spangled Banner’: ‘the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air’ refers to the fire from British bomb ships.

      It was a proud day for the shipbuilders of Pembroke when Erebus went down the slipway, but as she was steadied and warped up on the banks of the Haven, her destiny was unclear. Was she the future, or did she already belong to the past?

      The defeat of Napoleon’s armies at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 had brought to an end the Napoleonic Wars, which, with a brief lull during the Peace of Amiens in 1802, had preoccupied Europe for sixteen years. The British had been central to the allied war effort and, by the time it drew to a close, had run up a national debt of £679 million, twice her Gross Domestic Product. The Royal Navy had also incurred huge costs, but had outperformed the French, and were now undisputed rulers of the waves. This brought increased responsibilities, such as patrolling of the slave trade, which Britain had abolished in 1807, and operations against the pirates off the coast of North Africa, but nothing on the scale of her war footing. In the four years from 1814 to 1817 the Royal Navy’s numbers therefore shrank from 145,000 men to 19,000. It was traumatic for many. Numerous unemployed sailors had to take to begging on the streets. Brian Lavery, in his book Royal Tars, gives the example of Joseph Johnson, who walked the streets of London with a model of Nelson’s Victory on his head. By raising and lowering his head he would reproduce her movement through the waves and so earn a few pennies from passers-by. An ex-Merchant Navy man who could only find work on a warship was distraught: ‘for the first time in my life [I] saw the monstrous fabric that was to be my residence for several years, with a shudder of grief I cannot describe’.

      There was heated debate about the future of the Royal Navy. Some saw the end of hostilities as an opportunity to cut defence expenditure and begin to pay off some of the vast debt that the war effort had accumulated. Others argued that peace wouldn’t last for long. The defeated Emperor Napoleon had been taken to the island of St Helena, but he had already escaped from incarceration once, and there were nagging doubts as to whether this latest exile might be the end of him. Precautions should be taken to strengthen the Navy just in case.

      By and large, the Cassandras won. The government authorised expenditure on new dockyards, including a large complex at Sheerness in Kent and a much smaller yard at Pembroke in Wales. Four warships, Valorous, Ariadne, Arethusa and Thetis, were soon under construction in the hastily excavated yards dug out of the banks of Milford Haven.

      The dockyard where Erebus was built still exists today, but is now less about shipbuilding and more about servicing the giant Milford Haven oil refinery a few miles downstream. The slipway from which Erebus was launched in the summer of 1826 lies beneath the concrete floor of the modern ferry terminal that links Pembroke with Rosslare in Ireland.

      When I visit, I can still get a sense of what it must once have been like. The original layout of roads, running past the few surviving slate-grey terraces built in the 1820s for the foremen and bosses, is quietly impressive. These terraces look as strong and proud as any London Georgian town houses. In one of them lived Thomas Roberts, the master shipwright who supervised the construction of Erebus. He arrived in this distant corner of south-west Wales in 1815, when the shipyard was then just two years old.

      Sharing responsibility with Roberts for running this new enterprise were Richard Blake, the Timber Master, and James McKain, Clerk of the Cheque. They were not a happy team. McKain’s clerk, Edward Wright, claimed in court to have been assaulted by Richard Blake, whom he accused of ‘wrenching my nose several times and putting himself in a menacing attitude to strike me with his umbrella’. Roberts quarrelled incessantly with McKain over allegations and counter-allegations of corruption and malpractice. By 1821 McKain could take no more and left to accept a new post at Sheerness Dockyard. He was replaced by Edward Laws. The poisonous atmosphere had begun to clear when the news broke on 9 January 1823 that the Navy Board had shown its continued confidence in the Pembroke yard by placing an order for the construction of a 372-ton bomb vessel, designed by Sir Henry Peake, one-time Surveyor of the Navy, to be named Erebus.

      She was not to be a big ship. At 104 feet, she was less than half the length of a standard man-o’-war, and at 372 tons she was a minnow compared to Nelson’s 2,141-ton Victory. But she was to be tough. And more like a tugboat than a sleek and fancy ketch. Her decks and hull had to be strong enough to withstand the recoil from two big onboard mortars, one 13-inch, the other 10-inch. She therefore had to be reinforced with diagonal iron bracing bolted to the planking in the hold, strengthening the hull whilst reducing her weight. She also had to have a hull capacity wide and deep enough to store heavy mortar shells. In addition, she was to be armed with ten small cannons, in case she should need to engage the enemy on the water.

      Erebus was built almost entirely by hand. First the keel, most likely made of sections of elm scarfed together, was secured on blocks. To this was attached the stem, the upright timber in the bow, and at the other end of the ship the sternpost, which supported the rudder. The frame, made of