“All the Ship sout turned us and went away before us,” Halley logged on October 29, 1698. What should have been a triumph—the full flutter of sails, the strained rigging, the smell of adventuresome brine replacing the staleness of domesticity—subsided into immediate disappointment. Halley’s boat was barely seaworthy!
The early trials and tribulations with the Paramore, many already evident even before leaving the English Channel, betrayed the shortcomings of these types of wooden vessels. They leaked, they struggled to sail close to the wind, and they were unsteady. Maintaining proper ballast alone challenged even the most sage captain. Gusts easily fractured masts and yards. Some seagoers affectionately called them pinks, but probably not Halley, at least not at this time. He had not established any faith in the vessel in the early goings.
Originally of Dutch design and named from the Middle Dutch “pincke,” these ships as a class were slow, plodding sailers. Their square rigging only compounded their sluggishness. On the plus side,
the three-masted vessels had a large cargo capacity for their size, ideal for safely stowing Halley’s bulky and fragile cache of scientific instruments. Compared with sleeker sailers from the same class, pinks offered considerable maneuverability in shallow waters close to shore. Along with the 50 Men-of-War used by His Majesty William of Orange, the Protestant champion, to cross the channel and to conquer England in 1688 were some 500 transports, including 60 pinks. No doubt pinks were better suited for traversing short distances in a protected channel than voyaging thousands of miles on the Atlantic chop.
Among this class of lemons, the Paramore had proven especially sour. Her shallow draught—roughly seven feet deep—offered poor stability, allowing ready movement from side to side. She was not only shallower but a good 20 feet shorter from stem to stern than the typical merchant ship of the day. Meanwhile, her broad beam—spanning 18 feet from port to starboard—hindered her forward progress, especially as barnacles and algae would amass on the hull. Halley had scrawled in his log, probably gritting his teeth, that she went more to leeward than most other ships. So awkward was her movement that Halley thought she looked the part of an ungainly renegade ship. His observations were not unwarranted. The appearance of the poor ship would later jeopardize her crew.
Shortcomings in Halley’s particular boat were all the more ironic, for the vessel had been custom built explicitly for the mission. And it had been crafted not by apprentice builders but by a master shipwright at Deptford named Fisher Harding. She was the only ship in the royal fleet ever to bear the name Paramore and one of only two pinks ever held by the Admiralty. Displacing 89 tons, she had launched April 1, 1694, in time for what would be Queen Mary’s last birthday. And then the long wait had begun.
Halley had successfully garnered his dream commission but not by any means his dream ship. Captaining a pink was far from his first choice. At various points in his preparations, Halley had contemplated securing a better class of ship. But his informal inquiries had been brushed aside.
BY MID-NOVEMBER, 1698, the Paramore had only made Portsmouth in the English Channel—about half the distance from London and the open ocean off Land’s End. True to form, the Paramore’s defects had already impeded the mission. The sand used for ballast had clogged the hand pumps, which were used to drain seawater that seeped inside the hull. Halley had wisely decided to head into port to replace the gritty sand with shingle ballast. Such small, water-worn stones would more effectively stabilize the ship while enabling water to pass through them without plugging up the pumps.
Though undoubtedly distressing to Halley to have to call to port so soon after launch, the Paramore’s unplanned stopover in Portsmouth harbor proved a welcome twist of fate. While workers replaced the unacceptable ballast with shingle, the gentleman commander turned his attention to the broader vision of his mission and began the painstaking process of gleaning information from the skies and Earth’s magnetic field. Independent of each other, Halley and Harrison jotted down observations of conditions and the compass and other notes in their journals. The mission’s first measurements of magnetic variation had come at Portsmouth. The phenomenon, also referred to as magnetic declination, is the difference between true north and magnetic north. Halley defined it as “the deflection of the Magnetic Needle from the true Meridian.”
Measuring magnetic variation was first put forth as a way to find longitude shortly after the Italian Christopher Columbus sailed the Atlantic in 1492 for King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain. Scholars are unsure who first proposed the idea. Halley believed the observable degrees that a compass needle diverges from the astronomical north-south line could be linked to longitude—and without the need for knowing what time it was in two places at once: on ship and at the home port, which competing methods required. During Columbus’s voyage, the magnetic declination had worked to Spain’s advantage, causing his ships to sail farther south than intended and sight land in the knick of time—before the deadline by which he promised his crew they’d turn back if unsuccessful—days sooner than
if they’d sailed toward geographic west. Inadvertently, Columbus had crossed the line where the variation of the magnetic pole is zero or where the magnetic and geographic poles coincide. After that meridian, when he thought he was heading due west by the compass, he was actually trending south of west.
More important to immediate concerns, though, Halley made the acquaintance of Rear Admiral John Benbow at the port. Although the main threats now in the channel were winds and tidal currents, the open seas were essentially lawless wilderness. The Paramore didn’t have much to repel attacks. Stowage for scientific instruments out-weighed that of weapons and ammunition. The ship had only six three-pound guns and two smaller guns on swivels. Despite all his planning, Halley had not resolved how to pass unscathed through pirate territory off North Africa’s coast. “Our people were somewhat doubtful of going alone, for fear of meeting with a Sallyman,” Halley wrote at the time. (Sallee was then a thriving port city on the Barbary Coast, now part of Morocco.)
Admiral Benbow, stuck in port awaiting favorable winds, had been recently appointed commander in chief of the king’s ships in the West Indies. Impressed with Halley’s quest, he agreed to escort the small Paramore past the African coast with his flotilla of warships bristling with cannons.
Finally the winds changed. The Paramore rode a moderate gale out of Portsmouth harbor on November 22 and soon joined Benbow’s fleet off the Isle of Wight. The Paramore fired a five-round salute. The admiral flattered Captain Halley with a return salute of as many volleys, ignoring military protocol for a subordinate.
Ten big bangs and the best escort anyone could hope for. “If we can keep the Admiral Company those [pirate] apprehensions are over. He has promised to take care of us,” Halley wrote to the Admiralty. Perhaps luck was finally turning in the Paramore’s favor.