Footnotes

Provenance :- The Parker Gallery.

Built at Chepstow for the West India trade in 1823, 'Clarendon', 345 tons, was a well-found ship which, on 27th August 1836, left the Caribbean island of St. Kitts homeward bound under the command of Captain Samuel Walker. In addition to a valuable cargo of sugar, rum and molasses, she was carrying eleven passengers – including Lieutenant Shore of the 14th Regiment of Foot, his wife and their four daughters – as well as her usual crew of seventeen. The voyage was uneventful and 'Clarendon' passed the Scillies on the morning of Sunday, 9th October; as the ship continued up the Channel however, the weather began to deteriorate and, by Monday night, gale force winds were battering the western coast of the Isle of Wight. Just before 6 o’clock on the morning of the 11th, local people were awoken by the sound of exploding distress rockets and, hurrying down to the beach at Chale Bay, below Blackgang Chine, saw the 'Clarendon' running before the wind and heading straight for the shore.

Hitting the beach with some force, the stranded vessel survived barely five minutes in the raging sea. Huge waves threw her broadside onto the shore and immediately rolled her over; as her spars caught in the sand, all three of her masts snapped off like matchsticks and, with her hull already severely weakened by the stranding, she literally burst open under the enormous stress. Within moments, all that remained of the once-proud vessel was a tangled mass of timber and rope from which only three crewmen emerged alive, all the passengers, including the women and children, having perished in the disaster. The loss of the young children, in particular, had a profound effect on those forced to witness the wreck, so much so that, as a later commentator wrote: ‘Of all the shipwrecks around the Isle of Wight, none is more secure in the corporate folk memory than the loss of the 'Clarendon'.’