Footnotes

The last captain of the Fighting Temeraire. The 98-gun Temeraire had fought alongside the Victory at Trafalgar, being the only ship to be named in Collingwood's dispatch: see the sale of her Trafalgar papers in our Phillips rooms, 9 November 2001, lots 489 to 496. She was put out of commission on 19 March 1812. From 1813 to 1820 she served as a prison ship in Plymouth Harbour, and from 1820 to 1838 she was moored off Sheerness, where her chief duties were to act as a victualling ship as well as a receiving ship (where seamen assembled before going on active service). She also served as a guardship, and so escaped reduction to a hulk and preserved her great guns: for a full account of her latter days, see Julie Egerton, Turner: The Fighting Temeraire, National Gallery exhibition catalogue, 1995, pp.35-45. Her last Captain, Sir John Hill, had fought as a first lieutenant at the Nile (see others of his papers above, lots 27 and 29). He succeeded the acting Superintendent of the Sheerness yard Captain Thomas Fortescue Kennedy (who had served on the Temeraire at Trafalgar) as her Captain on 9 March 1838: the present commission being subscribed "vice Captain Kennedy/ superseded". The last log of the Temeraire, which runs from 1 January to 30 June 1838 was begun by Kennedy and continued by Hill. The Temeraire's guns were fired for the last time on 28 June 1838 in order to celebrate Queen Victoria's coronation (on the present commissions the engraved 'His Majesty' has been corrected to read 'Her Majesty' by hand). In June Sir John Hill was instructed to prepare her for sale, in other words to remove from her anything, such as guns, masts, stores, yards and stays, and ammunition, that the navy could reuse. His Ocean log records that on 4 July 1838, in "Light airs and fine weather", he "commenced dismantling the Temeraire - sent Top Masts & Yards on deck & unrigged the Fore and Mizen Masts" (Egerton, pp.38-9). By the end of July the ship was reduced to an empty shell, her small remaining crew being transferred to the Ocean before being paid off. She was sold by Dutch auction at the Navy Board in Somerset House on 16 August 1838, and was knocked down to John Beatson, a Rotherhithe ship-breaker and timber merchant, for £5,530. From that moment she ceased being a ship of the Royal Navy. Beatson hired two tugs from the Thames Steam Towing Company, the Samson and London, to tow the dismasted hulk from Sheerness to Rotherhithe on 5 and 6 September 1838. It seems unlikely that J.M.W. Turner saw the Temeraire on her last journey, his painting being almost certainly painted entirely from the imagination (Egerton, p.75). 'The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838' was exhibited at the Royal Academy eight months later.