Hundreds of graffiti on left on the walls of Richmond Castle by conscientious objectors during World War I will be preserved by English Heritage, thanks to the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Richmond Castle was built a few years after the Battle of Hastings by the Alan Rufus, a relative of William the Conqueror’s and the 1st Lord of Richmond. The remains of a hall block from the 1080s still stand, the most surviving 11th century architecture of any castle in England. In 1854 the Duke of Richmond leased the castle, many parts of it now derelict, to the North York Militia. Barracks were constructed against the western wall and a reserve armory built near the castle gate.

It was the 19th century armory which was put to use in World War I as a prison for conscientious objectors after conscription began in 1916. The castle was occupied by the northern Non-Combatant Corps, a support unit which allowed people with religious or moral objections to killing to serve in non-combatant roles. That didn’t work for all the objectors, 16 of whom wanted no part of the war effort, combatant or no. In theory the conscription law had a “conscience clause” which allowed people with pacifist religious beliefs to be exempt from combat, but in practice exemptions were very hard to come by. Even members of a church denomination like the Quakers which had strictly upheld the principle of non-violence for hundreds of years at times under extreme persecution and duress, faced arrest and imprisonment.

The Richmond Sixteen included people from different Christian denominations — Quakers, Methodists, International Bible Students (renamed Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931) — and socialists. They were kept in eight small, damp cells on two floors of the old armory. Often they were forced to subsist on bread and water. They kept their spirits up by singing, discussing religion and politics, playing chess through a hole in the wall and decorating the walls that confined them with hundreds of graffiti. There are Bible verses, portraits of loved ones, hymns, political statements, a calendar and more.

The Richmond Sixteen were moved from the castle on May 29th, 1916, to a military camp near Boulogne in France. As soon as they stepped foot on the camp, they were officially considered on active duty, which meant they would be subject to harsh military justice should they refuse to follow orders. Since everyone knew they weren’t going to follow any orders, the move to France was basically a gun to their head. When they declined to schlep supplies at the dock when ordered, they were court-martialed, found guilty and “sentenced to suffer death by being shot.” Their sentences were quickly commuted to 10 years’ hard labour.

It turned out that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith had issued a secret order that none of the conscientious objectors in France were to be shot. He didn’t want them dead; he wanted people to think the military wouldn’t hesitate to shoot COs to death as a deterrent to anyone else thinking of asking for an exemption from service.

When the COs were shipped back to England, they had sentences to serve in civil prisons and work centers. For the rest of the war the Richmond Sixteen busted up rocks in a quarry near Aberdeen where the local newspapers referred to them as “degenerates.” When they were finally released, the “conscies” were widely reviled as cowards and treated with contempt. Finding a job and a place to live was a huge challenge.

The graffiti they left on the walls of their Richmond Castle cells has survived for a hundred years, but conditions have been as unkind to it as people were to their creators. The 19th century armory was built lime-washed walls that were never intended to last. Water is leaking in through cracks in the roof and walls. Salts in the lime react to moisture, crystallizing and lifting the lime layer off the wall behind. As the lime flakes off, it takes the graffiti with it.

The Buildings Conservation and Research Team at Historic England have been studying the site since 2014, documenting temperature and humidity levels, analyzing the walls and wash, pinpointing the most threatened areas. They have laser scanned the walls and captured the graffiti with high resolution photographs. They didn’t have the funding to do the necessary repairs and conservation until this year. From 2016 to 2018, English Heritage will spend £365,400 to repair the roof and walls, stop the water penetration and treat the graffiti in greatest danger. Once the walls have been stabilized enough to ensure people’s breath won’t harm the artwork, the cells will be open to the general public for the first time in 30 years.

For more information about the Richmond Sixteen, the graffiti and the castle, see English Heritage’s website. Here are two short videos they made with fine shots of the interior.

Conserving the graffiti:
[youtube=https://youtu.be/d48ZhtKtQsY&w=430]

Inside the cells:
[youtube=https://youtu.be/F92G_bPoLqU&w=430]

The first lock of hair from the head of third President of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson ever to be offered at public auction sold on Saturday, May 14th, for $6,875 including the buyer’s premium. You might think for that amount you’d get traditional tuft of hair, maybe tied in a ribbon or encased in a velvet-lined box, but no. There are precisely 14 reddish hairs in this lot, held in a glassine envelope. They look like he got some tape stuck on his hair and had to pull it off losing a few in the process.

The ownership history of these hairs is well documented with a clear connection to Thomas Jefferson, which is why they sold at more than double the pre-sale estimate of $3,000, already a princely sum for 14 hairs. Locks of hair were common keepsakes in the 18th and 19th centuries, and several of Thomas Jefferson’s are extant. None of them are known to have been sold at auction before, however. The first owner of the hairs (save for Jefferson himself when they were attached to his scalp) was Doctor Robley Dunglison who was very close to Jefferson in the last year and a half of his life.

Robley Dunglison was an English doctor trained as a general practitioner and obstetrician. He was working at the Eastern Dispensary in Whitechapel, London, in 1824 when he met Francis Walker Gilmer, a lawyer and friend of Thomas Jefferson’s and the first chair of law at the University of Virginia. The university had been founded in 1817 and was just about to open its doors to students (the first class would meet on March 7th, 1825), but first they had to find some professors. Jefferson commissioned Gilmer to recruit faculty in Britain. Gilmer offered Dunglison a positioning heading the anatomy and medicine department and Dunglison accepted, in no small part because it gave him the wherewithal to marry his sweetheart Harriette Leadam. They married on October 5th, 1824, and on October 27th they set sail for Virginia.

By the terms of his contract with UVA, Dunglison was prohibited from establishing a private practice which made him the first professional full-time professor of medicine in the United States. There was one exception: he was allowed to treat Thomas Jefferson who was by then 81 and in very poor health. For most of his life Jefferson had avoided doctors, believing most illnesses naturally sorted themselves out. He explored his thinking on the subject in an 1807 letter to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the country’s foremost anatomist and professor of anatomy, midwifery, and surgery at the University of Pennsylvania.

As far as Jefferson was concerned, physicians were more often than not ill-informed quacks randomly experimenting on patients only to worsen the problem, delay the healing and/or take credit for any improvement that would have happened anyway if they’d just been left alone. “I believe we may safely affirm that the inexperienced and presumptuous band of medical tyros let loose upon the world destroys more of human life in one year than all the Robinhoods, Cartouches, and Macheaths do in a century,” he wrote. (Cartouche was the nickname of the famous highwayman Louis Dominique Bourguignon who stole from the rich and gave to the poor in early 18th century France. He was captured and executed by breaking on the wheel in 1721.)

Jefferson thought enough of the young Dunglison to overcome his reluctance. Dunglison first treated him for an obstructive uropathy, probably caused by an enlarged prostate, by passing a bougie. Jefferson paid close attention, taking notes on the remedies Dunglison recommended and learning how to pass the bougie himself. After that bonding experience, Dunglison became Jefferson’s personal physician and was a frequent visitor at Monticello from then on and was at Jefferson’s deathbed on the Fourth of July, 1826.

The lock the 14 hairs came from passed from Dr. Robley Dunglison to his son Dr. Richard J. Dunglison, editor of the first five American editions of Gray’s Anatomy. It was then passed down to his step-son Charles Ferry Fisher, a librarian of the Philadelphia College of Physicians. Most of the lock was donated to the college along with other Robley Dunglison artifacts, but they kept a few of the hairs. Those few hairs were eventually acquired by autograph dealer Charles Hamilton.

A 1929 affidavit from Charles Ferry Fisher attesting to the provenance of the hairs was included with the lot, as is another letter from Charles Hamilton confirming its authenticity. It’s not known when the lock was snipped. Since it’s still the reddish hair of Jefferson’s younger days — he was fully grey by the time of his death — Dr. Dunglison was likely given it to remember his most famous patient by rather than taking it himself.

When side scan sonar found the wreck of an iron-hulled Civil War steamer off Oak Island, North Carolina, on February 27th, 2016, researchers from the Underwater Archaeology Branch of the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology identified it as one of three blockade runners known to have gone down in the area: the Agnes E. Fry, the Spunkie or the Georgianna McCaw. The measurements of the wreck suggested it was the Agnes E. Fry. The remains are 225 feet long, the Fry 236 feet long. The other two candidates were significantly smaller.

Archaeologists were hoping to get a conclusive identification when divers explored the site in March, but the currents were very active and visibility was consistently bad, maxing out at 18 inches on a good day. Divers were able to recover a few artifacts — a deck light, a coal sample and what appears to be the handle of a homemade knife — but nothing with a name. Still, the sonar and diving data clearly matched what we know about the Fry. Contemporary documents report that the two engines and paddlewheel were salvaged from the Fry. The engines and paddlewheel are missing from this wreck. At least one boiler is still in place, and it is of a newer type than McCaw or Spunkie were equipped with. The hull design is also more modern than the two other lost blockade runners. Damage to the bow and stern explains the small discrepancy in dimensions between the wreck and the Agnes E. Fry before it sank.

According to Billy Ray Morris, Deputy State Archaeologist and director of the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology’s Underwater Archaeology Branch, there are also references from the US Life Saving Service to this wreck being the Fry as late as the 1920s. Morris is “99.99% positive” on the wreck being the Fry, which is as convinced as anyone of a scientific bent can be.

The discovery made international news which spurred Capt. J.D. Thomas of the Charlotte Fire Department Special Operations/EMS Command to offer the Underwater Archaeology Branch the use of a state-of-the-art 3D sonar device provided by Nautilus Marine Group International, plus a team of experienced search and rescue divers to work with the maritime archaeologists. The 3D sonar technology allowed the team make a complete, highly accurate, multi-dimensional map of the wreck in days no matter how murky the waters. It also detects details that the side scanning sonar missed. This was the first 3D sonar imaging was used to scan a shipwreck site in North Carolina.

The results of the scan were combined into a sonar mosaic which shows the wreck in exceptional detail and high resolution. The Underwater Archaeology Branch has released the composite image complete with labels identifying the different parts of the ship and Billy Ray Morris was kind enough to send me a beautifully huge version of the mosaic.

Here’s the original side scan sonar image, just for comparison.

Quite a difference, isn’t it? I can’t wait to see this technology widely applied to maritime archaeology.

The Agnes E. Fry was built and launched on the Clyde in Scotland in 1864. It was initially named the Fox, but Captain Joseph Fry renamed it after his beloved wife (and first cousin; their mothers were sisters), Agnes Evelina Fry, nee Sands. Captain Fry had had an illustrious career in the US Navy. He reluctantly resigned his commission when the Civil War broke out despite believing in the principle of the Union because he could not stand to fight against his home state of Louisiana and his family and friends. His skills as a naval captain were put to use in the Confederate Navy.

In the Spring of 1864, he was sent to Scotland to pick up the new ship. He stopped in neutral Bermuda for supplies for the Confederacy and returned with his much-needed cargo to North Carolina where he tried seven times to get it through the Union blockade of Wilmington with no success. He finally broke through and on November 10th, 1864, wrote to his wife:

Many vessels have arrived here since I first left Bermuda, and it is also true that many have been lost trying to get in. God has watched over our safety, and prospered us wonderfully. I have been chased over and over again;… have had the yellow fever on board; have headed for the bar about seven times in vain. … I never was so happy in my life as when I at last arrived, and thought I should be with you in three or four days; nor so miserable as when I found they wanted me to try and go out again immediately, by which I lose my chance of coming home. But I am bound to do it. I am complimented on having the finest ship that ever came in, named, too, after her whom I love more than all the world beside. The owners are my personal friends, and are pledged to take care of you in my absence, or in case of my capture. She is a vessel they especially want me to command, and although I would not leave without having seen my family for twice her value, still duty requires that I should do so.

Blockade running required persistence and daring, and a strong, fast ship, all of which Joseph Fry had, but the latter not for long. The Agnes E. Fry ran aground near the mouth of the Cape Fear River on December 27th, 1864. Fry was given command of another ship in Mobile Bay until the end of the war.

Perhaps his time as a blockade runner gave him a taste for smuggling for a cause, because less than a decade after the Confederate surrender, he was commanding the steamer Virginius and bringing its cargo of rebels and weapons to Cuba to fight Spanish rule. He was captured by the Spanish before he got there and taken to Santiago de Cuba. Captain Fry and his crew were court-martialled on charges of piracy and convicted. Over the complaints of US and British officials, they were sentenced to death. On November 7th, 1873, Joseph Fry and 52 of his officers and crew were executed by firing squad in a brutally slapdash manner. A witness described the scene:

“The victims were ranged facing the wall, and at a sufficient distance from it to give them room to fall forward. Captain Fry having asked for a glass of water, one was handed him by Charles Bell, the steward of the Morning Star. Fry then walked from the end of the line to the center, and calmly awaited his fate. He was the only man who dropped dead at the first volley, notwithstanding that the firing party were but ten feet away. Then ensued a horrible scene. The Spanish butchers advanced to where the wounded men lay writhing and moaning in agony, and, placing the muzzles of their guns in some in stances into the mouths of their victims, pulled the triggers, shattering their heads into fragments. Others of the dying men grasped the weapons thrust at them with a despairing clutch, and shot after shot was poured into their bodies before, death quieted them.”

Another 93 were scheduled to be shot, but the second round of executions was interrupted by Commander Sir Lambton Lorraine of the British warship Niobe who threatened to bombard the city if they didn’t stop. The execution of Joseph Fry caused outrage in the United States. President Ulysses S. Grant gave a speech to Congress decrying it as a barbaric slaughter in violation of treaties between the countries. Fry was seen as a martyr and patriot, and while things didn’t come to blows quite yet, fury over his fate still simmered 25 years later when war finally did break out between Spain and the United States.

A treasure hunter has found the largest nugget of gold ever discovered in the UK near the shipwreck of the Royal Charter off the coast of Anglesey, northwest Wales. Vincent Thurkettle was shallow diving when he spotted the nugget in a crevice about 40 meters (131 feet) from the wreck and just five meters (16 feet) from the shore. The wreck and its environs are usually covered in six feet of sand, but storms had shifted the sands and exposed the crevice in the sea bed and the chicken egg of gold nesting inside of it. At 97.12 grams (3 oz), the nugget is almost twice the weight of second biggest nugget ever found in Britain, the Carnon Nugget, which weighs 59g and was found in Cornwall in 1808. The third largest at 57.9g is the Rutherford Nugget, found in Scotland in 1869.

Built in 1855, the Royal Charter was an iron-hulled steam clipper with sails and back-up steam engines which could be used when the wind was uncooperative. Its speed and sturdiness made it the ideal ship for the challenging Liverpool-Australia route which crossed almost the entire length of the Atlantic, passing through the Cape of Good Hope, notorious for its brutal storms. The Royal Charter pulled off this crossing in fewer than 60 days, a cakewalk for the time, and thanks to the discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851, there were plenty of passengers most extremely keen to get to the antipodes to try their luck in the Australian Gold Rush. The return voyage was typically replete with prospectors carrying the fruits of their panning and digging labour.

It was on one of those return trips from Australia to Liverpool that the Royal Charter, laden with a cargo of 79,000 ounces of Australian gold insured for £322,000 (worth an estimated £120 million in today’s money) plus much more carried by miner passengers, encountered a violent storm off the coast of Anglesey near the village of Moelfre. The captain decided to drop anchor in Moelfre Bay, lower the sails and shut down the engines lest the northerly winds drive the ship towards North Wales. This proved a fateful decision as it kept the ship in the middle of the roughest part of the storm. Assaulted by waves 60 feet high and winds of 100 miles per hour, the anchor chain broke and the ship was dashed onto the rocks. In the wee hours of on October 26th, 1859, the Royal Charter broke apart and sank.

One of the crew managed to get to the shore 50 yards away towing a lifeline, but a total of only 39 people — 21 passengers, 18 crew, all men — were able to use the lifeline to reach the safety of the shore. The exact number of passengers and crew is unknown but is estimated to be around 450. The passenger manifest listed 320, but people who purchased last-minute tickets weren’t listed. In the two weeks between October 25th and November 9th of that year, storms wrecked 325 ships taking 748 people down with them. The dead from the Royal Charter make up more than half of that terrible total.

The storm, which was so massive around 200 ships sank in it, became known as the “Royal Charter gale.” As a result of the tragedy, the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade, which was only five years old at the time and only collected meteorological observations, was made to issue official gale warnings via the new telegraph technology to ships in British waters. The first gale warnings were issued in June of 1860.

The owners of the ship and insurance underwriters set to salvaging what they could of the Royal Charter‘s valuable cargo. When Charles Dickens visited the wreck site on New Year’s Eve, 1859, salvage operations were still ongoing. He described the wreck and the salvage he witnessed in The Uncommercial Traveller.

Even as I stood on the beach with the words ‘Here she went down!’ in my ears, a diver in his grotesque dress, dipped heavily over the side of the boat alongside the Lighter, and dropped to the bottom. On the shore by the water’s edge, was a rough tent, made of fragments of wreck, where other divers and workmen sheltered themselves, and where they had kept Christmas-day with rum and roast beef, to the destruction of their frail chimney. Cast up among the stones and boulders of the beach, were great spars of the lost vessel, and masses of iron twisted by the fury of the sea into the strangest forms. The timber was already bleached and iron rusted, and even these objects did no violence to the prevailing air the whole scene wore, of having been exactly the same for years and years. […]

The divers were down then, and busy. They were ‘lifting’ to-day the gold found yesterday—some five-and-twenty thousand pounds. Of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth of gold, three hundred thousand pounds’ worth, in round numbers, was at that time recovered. The great bulk of the remainder was surely and steadily coming up. Some loss of sovereigns there would be, of course; indeed, at first sovereigns had drifted in with the sand, and been scattered far and wide over the beach, like sea-shells; but most other golden treasure would be found. As it was brought up, it went aboard the Tug-steamer, where good account was taken of it. So tremendous had the force of the sea been when it broke the ship, that it had beaten one great ingot of gold, deep into a strong and heavy piece of her solid iron-work: in which, also, several loose sovereigns that the ingot had swept in before it, had been found, as firmly embedded as though the iron had been liquid when they were forced there. It had been remarked of such bodies come ashore, too, as had been seen by scientific men, that they had been stunned to death, and not suffocated. Observation, both of the internal change that had been wrought in them, and of their external expression, showed death to have been thus merciful and easy.

Official salvage continued for years, and when the companies finally called it a day with about 80% of the cargo recovered, unofficial treasure hunters persisted. They continue to persist to this day. Vincent Thurkettle is a professional prospector and has been panning/diving for treasure for close to 40 years. He’s been leading teams of friends and relatives to the explore Royal Charter site for years. In 2011 he made the news for finding gold dust, nuggets, coins and 200 artifacts from the wreck. He kept mum on the big nugget, which he discovered in 2012, in order to continue to search the site without interference from the public. Also, he developed something of a Gazza Ladra love for this great find. “I had grown very fond of it,” he said. “Other pieces I’ve found before have been quartz with gold in, but this was a big lump of gold with bits of quartz in.”

Anything found close to a shipwreck by law has to be reported to the Receiver of Wreck (RoW) which then researches ownership and determines where the salvage should go. It’s not clear when Thurkettle reported it. He kept it for long enough to grow fond of it, so it seems it wasn’t immediately turned over to the Receiver. The RoW has claimed it for the crown now, which means they’ve probably had it for at least a year since the law says they’re supposed to hold on to wreck salvage for a year to give private owners a chance to claim it.

The nugget is currently stashed in a safe place before it finds a new home in a museum. Thurkettle will have to content himself with a salvage award and the same visitation rights the rest of the public will get when the nugget goes on display.