An Essex sailor
Roland Braddell published “An Essex Sailor” in 1959 as a genealogical and biographical essay built around the unpublished Life’s Log of his maternal grandfather, John Roberts Kirby (1819–1906), a midshipman who made seven voyages in East Indiamen between 1833 and 1844. The piece serves as both a family memoir and a primary-source window into the social world of the post-charter East India trade, the early settlement of Western Australia, and the Canton trade on the eve of the Second Opium War.
Summary
Braddell’s central purpose is to preserve and contextualise his grandfather’s handwritten Log, composed in 1881 from old diaries, ship’s logs, and memory. The narrative follows Kirby’s four voyages in the Essex (an 850-ton ship of the Wigram line) and earlier passages in the James Pattison, Hythe, and Bolton, tracing routes from London through the Cape to Western Australia, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Singapore, Penang, and Canton. Braddell reproduces long stretches of the Log verbatim — deliberately retaining its “Olympian disregard for punctuation” — and intersperses his own commentary to identify persons, correct dates, and draw connections to Malayan history. The Log’s value lies in its unselfconscious observations: the social customs of Calcutta (kitmurgars, hookahs, nautch performances, the fashionable drive), the conditions at King George’s Sound where the first free settlers were landed, the daily routine of an East Indiaman’s officers, and the origins of the Second Opium War as witnessed from a ship’s boat at Whampoa.
A secondary thread runs through the piece: Braddell uses the Log to establish his own family’s roots in the Straits Settlements. His mother married his father at St James’s, Piccadilly, in 1879 and sailed for Singapore the following month; Braddell himself was born there in 1880. He notes the coincidence that in the same year his grandfather Kirby was homeward-bound from his last East India voyage, his own grandfather Braddell was outward-bound from Demerara to Penang. The Log thus becomes a bridge between two generations of Braddell service in Malaya.
The piece also carries a genealogical appendix tracing the Kirby family from a Westmorland stock through Suffolk and Essex, and the Nassau family (of St Osyth’s Priory) back to the House of Orange-Nassau. After retiring from the sea in 1845, Kirby became a distinguished yachtsman and amateur marine artist of some repute, and Braddell closes with affectionate domestic recollections of his grandfather’s character and speech.
Key Findings
- The James Pattison (513 tons) carried the first free settlers to King George’s Sound in 1834, landing them after a three-month detention at Spithead; the colony’s harbour, “Prince of Wales,” was described as entirely landlocked and safe in any gale (pp. 36–37).
- Kirby was promoted to second mate of the Bolton at “little more than eighteen” (corrected by Braddell to nineteen) in 1838, receiving £5 per month and a cabin, during which the ship ran aground on the 2½-fathom bank off Pulo Sapata and narrowly escaped Malay proas (p. 50).
- The origins of the Second Opium War are described from the ship’s perspective: a Chinese man was strangled under the American flagstaff at Canton, prompting a fight that escalated into the wider conflict; Kirby, left in charge of the Bolton, prepared the ship for a Chinese attack that never materialised (pp. 52–53).
- The Essex (850 tons, Wigram line) carried General Hearsey’s family, Captain Hodgson, and Captain Pawson of the 16th Lancers on her first voyage; Kirby sailed four voyages in her between approximately 1839 and 1845 (pp. 55–56).
- Kirby’s father, the Rev. John Lawrence Kirby (1787–1850), was present at the 1804 action off Pulau Aor in which Commodore Dance’s twenty-seven merchantmen confronted Admiral Linois’s squadron (pp. 33–34).
- After retiring from the sea, Kirby built his first yacht, the Fawn (10 tons), in 1846; he was elected to the Royal Thames Yacht Club in 1854 and co-founded the Royal Cinque Ports Yacht Club in 1872 (p. 64).
Conclusion
Braddell presents the Log as “a simple and naive but very graphic story of life in East Indiamen from 1833 to 1844” whose principal interest is social and human rather than analytical. His definitive takeaway is that the document preserves a vanishing world — the manners, pay scales, shipping practices, and colonial encounters of the early Victorian East India trade — and that its value lies in the vividness of its first-person testimony, enriched by the author’s own sketches of sailing craft.
Context
- The primary source is the Kirby family’s private papers: the handwritten Life’s Log with its original sketches, supplemented by old diaries and ship’s logs. Braddell also draws on Buckley’s A History of the Malay States for corroborating details about Lawrence Kirby in Singapore.
- The piece contributes to the historiography of the East India Company’s post-charter merchant fleet and the early settlement of Western Australia, areas where first-person accounts from junior officers remain scarce. It also provides a rare contemporary description of the Canton trade’s social and commercial routines from the perspective of a junior officer rather than a merchant principal.