Category Archives: History and biography

The HMS Victory Goes Down: A Famous Naval Disaster Illustrated in The Pretty Book of Pictures (1765)

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The Pretty Book of Pictures for Little Masters and Misses is the best known natural history book John Newbery issued–not because its illustrations were so fine, but because the majority were copied from out-of-date seventeenth-century sources like Edward Topsell’s History of Four-footed Beasts (1659) and Francis Willughby’s Ornithology (1674). Sometimes owners colored them with more artistic verve than accuracy…

The handful of illustrations at the end are almost never mentioned because they have nothing to do with natural history.   Master Tommy and Miss Polly are shown “taking the air” in their coach in one and dancing a minuet in another.   Mother Bunch standing outside her cottage under the hill, where she sells cheesecakes. A natural philosopher observes the night sky through a telescope, while a student reads as he walks through the countryside.

The first one in the group, that of the sinking man-of-war Victory, had never caught my eye until last week. It suddenly occurred to me that there are illustrations of shipwrecks everywhere in eighteenth-century children’s books–ships leaving ports, ships in full sail, ships in distress, ships breaking up on the rocks.   Whoever decided to include the illustration of the Victory took it for granted that little readers were interested in shipwrecks. If they didn’t understand the reference, they would ask someone older who explain it to them.   Not having brothers who went to sea like Jane Austen, I would have to figure it out for myself.

Could it refer to the most famous ship of the line bearing that name, the HMS Victory, Admiral Nelson’s flagship during the Battle of Trafalgar, where the hero met his death in 1805.  The information I found suggested it had to be another ship.  Nelson’s Victory was not launched until 1765 and The Pretty Book of Pictures was first published in 1752.  It’s not impossible that this block was added in later editions, but I wasn’t able to confirm that hypothesis.   The Rothschild catalog doesn’t describe the illustrations in the 1752 edition and and the National Library of Scotland has not digitized its second edition of 1754.  Before Nelson, the Victory was  Keppel’s flagship in the Battle of Ushant in 1778 and Jervis’s in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797.    This ship, which saw so much action was never sunk: since 1923 she has been drydocked in Portsmouth, the oldest naval ship still in commission, with 245 years’ of service.

Admiral Sir John Balchen’s memorial in Westminster Abbey showing the Victory sinking

Nelson’s Victory, I discovered, was the sixth of her name in the Royal Navy and there is a story that the sailors, being a superstitious lot, thought it would be unlucky to give her that name.  The Victory depicted in the Pretty Book of Pictures, had to be the fifth.   A 100-gun first-rate ship of the line launched in 1737, she was the flagship of the navy squadron charged with protecting the Channel waters in the 1740s.   In the War of the Austrian Succession, she was Admiral Sir John Balchen’s flagship during the blockade of Tagus in Spain.  When Balchen’s fleet reached the Channel in early October, a storm scattered the ships before they reached port. The Victory was separated from the rest and was believed to have gone down at Black Rock in the Casquets in the Channel Islands on October 4, 1744.  The design with sides rather high for the draft of her hull were said to have made her unstable in heavy or rough weather.   All 1100 men on board were lost, making it the worst disaster in British naval history. 

Naval histories quickly incorporated accounts of the tragedy. George Berkeley and Sir John Hill’s The naval history of Britain, from the earliest periods of which
there are accounts in history, to the conclusion of the year M.DCC.LVI (1756)  solemnly reported “Parts of the wreck were found by the people of Alderney, who also gave the account that they heard the discharges of near 100 guns in the Night, Signals of Distress.”  It was a natural subject for a dramatic marine painting like the one by Peter Monamy to the left.  Allusions to the disaster turn up in contemporary literature.  A correspondent with The Wise Woman in Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1746) inadvertently reveals what a self-absorbed creature she is by complaining that the sensible young man courting her reflected upon the tragedy of the Victory.  If he must bring up the subject of the sea, she says peevishly, he ought to compare  her to Venus rising out of it!

Many attempts over the next two hundred and sixty years were made to find the HMS Victory and in May 2008 Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration succeeded in finding the wreck in over 300 feet of water a good 80 kilometers past the Casquets.   Two of her brass cannons were salvaged and are on display in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.  Because of the complexity of maritime law regarding salvage, it is unclear if and when the wreck will be raised from the seabed.

Benjamin Harris’s Protestant Tutor (1679): Teaching Religion, Reading, and Writing in a Time of Crisis

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Soft metal cut from the T. Norris and A. Bettesworth edition, ca. 1715. Cotsen 2039.

Late seventeenth century journalist and printer Benjamin Harris probably would have gotten his bearings pretty fast in our toxic media environment.   Familiar with bad actors, feverish conspiracy theories,  succession crises, bitter factional combat, and brutal rhetoric, only the technologies would have been new to him. Harris would have quickly grasped how much mightier social media was than the coffee house as a channel for rumors and gossip.  His fellow bookseller John Dunton remarked that, “I should have been much concerned if Ben Harris had given me a good word, for his commendation is the greatest reproach that an honest man can meet with. He is so far from having any dealings with truth or honesty, that his solemn word, which he calls as good as his bond, is a studied falsehood, and he scandalises truth and honesty in pretending to write for it.”

Title page of the 1707 edition. Cotsen 379.

Someone with these particular gifts would not seem especially well-suited for a sideline writing children’s books. Examine the contents of his Protestant Tutor, Instructing Children to Spel and read English, and Grounding them in the True Protestant Religion, and Discovering the Errors and Deceits of the Papists, and his loudly proclaimed priorities have quite a bit in common  with those of contemporary American authors on the right who have self-published children’s books than one might suppose.   Harris was, like many of them, neither a professional educator nor writer, but he felt confident enough to offer the public a book that would challenge dangerous mainstream ideas circulating pernicious ideas and values.

He abhorred Roman Catholicism with the deadly fury of a conspiracy theorist and a cultural warrior.  A member of the Particular Baptists, who believed Christ died only for the elect like Calvin, he rejoiced in the letter dedicatory that the Papists’ diabolic strategy “to destroy King Charles II, his government and the Protestant religion by disseminating “their cursed Opinions among the Ignorant, as they have demonstrated by vast numbers of Popish Primers, Catechisms, Manuals, and a multitude of such Romish Trash and Trumpery, which they intended to have dispersed like a General Infection  among the youth of this nation” had been foiled.

Cotsen 2039

To convince parents and heads of school “to strengthen and confirm this young Generation in Protestant Principles, by the methods whereby they [the Roman Catholics] intended to Debauch them,”  he argued that now was the time “to arm our Innocent Children against the cursed and continual practices of our Romish Adversaries, who designed not only the Murder and destruction of the bodies, but the ruin and Damnation of the souls of our poor Children with the utter Extirpation of the Protestant Religion from under Heaven.”  Better they die than “be bred up in Popish Superstition and Idolatry, or otherwise to be Imprisoned, Rackt, Tortured and Burnt at the stake as our Fathers have been before us.”

Harris attempts to plant seeds of hate so deeply in his young readers’ minds that they will never forget the horrors Protestants have suffered for their faith. The reading lessons retelling the scriptural accounts of Moses, Christ’s  crucifixion, and long quotations from Revelations invite children to identify with God’s chosen ones and turn deaf ears to the call of Babylon.  The blatantly sectarian catechism says little about  justification by faith alone, its chief preoccupation being to list all Romish practices to be shunned, like obeying the Pope, worshipping images or saints’ relics, praying to the Virgin Mary, and buying pardons.

The martyrdom of John Rogers, better known from its inclusion in The New England Primer. This version of the scene is more detailed and better executed than most. Cotsen 2039.

Cotsen 379.

The minister John Roger’s exhortation to his wife and nine children days before he was burned at the stake leads off the history of “Cruelties, Treasons, and Massacres committed by the Papists” since Bloody Mary’s reign illustrated with ghoulishly crude but effective cuts of the faithful being disemboweled upside down,  the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the Irish atrocities against the Protestants in 1641, the Huguenot massacre in Paris, and the great fire of London of 1666, supposedly an act of Papist arson.   Rome is ridiculed through an account of the pope-burning procession through London in 1679.   It took place on November 17, the day Elizabeth I ascended the throne which was observed as a Protestant holiday. The description of the order of the groups in the parade, their costumes, the exchanges between the Pope and his privy counselor the Devil, the crowning of Elizabeth’s statue, the fireworks, and great bonfire are drawn from the explanation on the satirical print “The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, Cardinals, Jesuits, Fryers” published by Jonathan Wilkins in 1680.   In spite of having to reformat the procession from the print’s much larger horizontal format to a small vertical one, Harris’s cutter preserved a remarkable amount of detail.Even after the tumult of the Exclusion Crisis died down, the explosive mix of faith, fear, and ridicule in The Protestant Tutor remained available for another forty years: the English Short Title Catalog lists editions in 1680, 1683, 1685, 1690, 1707, 1713, 1716, and ca. 1720.  One factor explaining its longevity could be the way Harris bulked up the sections of reading instruction to make it more widely useful without cutting the anti-Catholic propaganda.. Attractive additions to the 1707 edition include two engraved leaves of writing samples, directions for cutting pens, and a section of model letters for business correspondence, while ca. 1720 featured an engraved alphabet lottery plate.  He also brought the little book of martyrs down to the present day, there being plenty to document since 1679 when the book first appeared.A greater motivation to keep the Protestant Tutor in print must have been Harris’s fear of a Stuart restoration to the English throne, a fear that was not groundless in light of Irish and Scottish Jacobite activity from the 1690s into the 1700s.   The title page of the 1713 edition states bluntly that the text will inform readers of what can be expected from a “Popish successor” to the ailing Queen Anne, who had failed to produce an heir, then throws its support behind the future George I.  The anti-Jacobitism is even stronger in the last known edition, issued by Thomas Norris and Andrew Bettesworth, which includes a new section,  “A Timely Memorial to all true Protestants, Demonstrating the Certainty of a horrid and damnable Popish Plot carried on in Great Britain, in order to destroy his Majesty King George, and Royal Family, introduce a Popish Successor, and involve these Kingdoms in blood and Fire.”  It contains a passage on the 1715 Jacobite uprising in Scotland with an explicit reference to its leader,  John Erskine, 6th Earl of Mar, suggesting that it may have been issued as earlier than the date the English Short-Title Catalog proposed.  If Benjamin Harris had lived to see the Jacobite army headed up by Bonnie Prince Charlie defeated at the Battle of Culloden, (or his sons shared in his anti-Papistical fervor), perhaps another edition would have been issued in 1745…

For such a notorious children’s book, Harris’s Protestant Tutor has not received much serious attention, perhaps because it has been hard for us in the 20th and 21st centuries  to believe that it was actually put into children’s hands. Indeed it was, as this opening from Cotsen’s 1707 edition with the illustration of London on fire shows, the blank filled up with annotations in a childish hand.  Its preliminary pages are likewise filled with signatures of its owners, as are the ones in the ca. 1715 edition.    While not as famous or influential as The New England Primer, in which Harris was also supposed to have had a hand, this preliminary look at the contents, illustration, and publication history of the much more radical Tutor demonstrates why it is important to understand, not dismiss, the motives and methods of authors who believe children (or at least those of their tribe)  must be saved from the dark forces of their times.