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Shipworm and Environmental Damage

The destruction of wooden hulls between about 1690 and 1725 by boring and fouling, hurricane and reef, and the operational constraints those conditions placed on the ships of the period.

Also writtenShipworm; Marine borers; Fouling and boring; Environmental damage to hulls

Two agencies destroyed wooden hulls in these waters, and they are different things. Boring is structural, hidden and terminal: the borer enters the planking, works inside the timber, and is found when the plank fails. Fouling is superficial and reversible: weed, slime and barnacles grow on a bottom and come off with a scraper. Woodes Rogers met both in one morning on the coast of Mexico in 1709 and wrote them down together, "This Morning we began heeling our Ship, and found that abundance of Worms had enter'd the Sheathing; we scrub'd, clean'd, and tallow'd as low as we could", and his council resolved that December to leave the South Sea "because the Worm had already entred our Sheathing". Careening treats fouling. A bored hull is condemned.1

This page holds the environmental cause. Heaving down as seamanship, the choice of a haven and the dockyards pirates were shut out of are recorded elsewhere.

The silence in the pirate record

Johnson's pirates seem never to stop cleaning, and he never says what they are cleaning against. Careening and scrubbing run all through the 1724 General History, and the worm goes unnamed.2

The best description of the animal is a naturalist's. William Dampier, taking up driftwood in the Pacific in 1700, wrote that it "was much worm-eaten and had in it some live worms above an inch long, and about the bigness of a goose-quill, and having their heads crusted over with a thin shell." Of Babao in Timor he wrote that "The greatest inconveniency in it is the multitude of worms."3

What cleaning cost

Careening meant grounding a hull on a beach or heaving her down with tackles from the mastheads, guns landed and sails unbent. A clean bottom was worth the trouble, in Johnson's words, for "a light Pair of Heels being of great Use either to take, or escape being taken." At Port Mayo the local people came down on Lowther's men while they were "heaving down, scrubing, tallowing, and so forth," and the Happy Delivery was burnt; at Blanco the Eagle sloop of Barbados found his next vessel "just careen'd, with her Guns out, and Sails unbent"; Low lost a ship "by the oversetting of his Ship, when she was upon the Careen."4

In each of the three the ship was down on her side when it happened. On that pattern, much of the catching of pirates in the closing campaigns may well have been catching them ashore.

Roebuck and the Adventure Galley

HMS Roebuck was lost at Ascension in February 1701 after a leak within four strakes of the keel that could not be reached. Her captain, William Dampier, had it from his boatswain at the last "that the plank was so rotten it broke away like dirt." Later writers put the rot down to shipworm; Dampier himself never mentions it.5

The Adventure Galley is often called worm-eaten, though no surviving account of her says so. Kidd called her very leaky; she came into Ile Sainte-Marie about 1 April 1698; and the accounts of her end conflict, William Jenkins having her stripped and fired for her ironwork, Kidd having the crew unable to keep her from sinking.

Hurricane, bar and reef

John Atkins, a naval surgeon ashore at Port Royal for the hurricane of 28 August 1722, sets down the period's own climatology in his 1735 narrative: "The West-Indians agree, that August and September is the Season to expect them," hurricanes giving warning "by a preceding unusual Swell of Water." Of that storm he records that "Of 50 Sail in this Harbour, only 4 Men-of-War and 2 Merchant-Ships rid it out, but with all their Masts and Booms blown away."6

Bars and reefs took what the worm and the weather spared. Queen Anne's Revenge grounded on the bar of Topsail Inlet, now Beaufort Inlet, about 10 June 1718, and Johnson wrote that she went in "on Pretence of running into Topsail Inlet to clean," a pretext that could only have served because going into an inlet to clean was an ordinary thing to do. The 1715 treasure fleet went onto the Florida reef.

What the sources cannot yet give is the worm itself. No period account names the borer, giving the damage and the remedy rather than the animal. No period cleaning interval has been found, and none is stated. The bibliography of the agency excavating the Beaufort Inlet wreck carries one timber dating report and no study of wood species, sheathing or borer damage, and the dockyard survey papers that would give surveyors' own words have not been read. That the Beaufort Inlet hull is Queen Anne's Revenge is an argued conclusion from circumstantial evidence: no name board, bell inscription or document ties the wreck to the ship. The three companies lost while cleaning all come from one narrative of contested reliability, so the wording is firm and the pattern only suggestive.

What the evidence does not settle

Shipworm in period sources

  • How period English texts described shipworm damage to hullsUnverified

HMS Roebuck's loss

  • Roebuck's shipworm loss is not stated in Dampier's own accountLikely

Adventure Galley's condition and fate

  • Whether the Adventure Galley was worm-eaten

Each line is one question with its own grade, taken from the register where a claim carries it. Nothing here is graded as a whole.

Sources for this record

Every statement above that rests on a checked claim carries a small number; the numbers lead here. Each entry gives what is claimed, how far the record supports it, and where it comes from.

  1. Boring and fouling were distinct in practice, and only one of them could be dealt with by careening. Woodes Rogers's journal shows both in a single entry on the coast of Mexico in 1709: "This Morning we began heeling our Ship, and found that abundance of Worms had enter'd the Sheathing; we scrub'd, clean'd, and tallow'd as low as we could". His council resolved on 20 December 1709 to leave the South Sea "because the Worm had already entred our Sheathing", and the prize Marquiss was later condemned as unfit for Europe because the carpenters found "she had but a single Bottom, eat to a Honey-comb by the Worms", which had "eaten thro' her Bends, and good Part of her Bottom like a perfect Honey-Comb". Scrubbing and tallowing dealt with what grew on the outside; nothing in the account undoes the boring. The identification of the borer as a marine bivalve mollusc of the family Teredinidae, and its entry as a larva, are modern science and are established by no period document read here. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Period voyage journal: Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World (London, 1712), read in the Seafarers' Library reprint edited by G. E. Manwaring, digitised on the Internet Archive, for the heeling and tallowing entry, for the council's resolution of 20 December 1709 signed Woodes Rogers, and for the survey and sale of the Marquiss
  2. In the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1724 General History the string worm does not occur at all, while careen in any inflection occurs eight times, the period spelling carreen a further three, and clean in any inflection fifty-five times unfiltered. Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Period narrative: A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, 1724, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, Project Gutenberg ebook 40580, searched in full
  3. William Dampier described shipworm accurately in driftwood taken up in the Pacific in 1700, the modernised transcription reading that it "was much worm-eaten and had in it some live worms above an inch long, and about the bigness of a goose-quill, and having their heads crusted over with a thin shell", and he rated the anchorage of Babao in Timor by the animal, writing that "The greatest inconveniency in it is the multitude of worms." Very likely Strong evidence, short of proof. Period narrative: William Dampier, A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland, first published 1709, Project Gutenberg ebook 15685, modernised transcription searched in full
  4. The 1724 General History records pirate companies destroyed while cleaning, the Happy Delivery burnt when the local people attacked Lowther's men at Port Mayo as they were "heaving down, scrubing, tallowing, and so forth", the Eagle sloop of Barbados finding his later vessel at Blanco "just careen'd, with her Guns out, and Sails unbent", and Low losing a ship "by the oversetting of his Ship, when she was upon the Careen". Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Period narrative: A General History of the Pyrates, second edition, 1724, attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, Project Gutenberg ebook 40580; A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates
  5. HMS Roebuck was lost at Ascension in February 1701 after a leak within four strakes of the keel that could not be reached, her captain William Dampier recording his boatswain's report "that the plank was so rotten it broke away like dirt", and his narrative nowhere attributes the failure to shipworm, that diagnosis belonging to later writers. Likely More likely than not on the evidence we have. Period narrative: William Dampier, A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland, Project Gutenberg ebook 15685
  6. John Atkins, a Royal Navy surgeon ashore at Port Royal for the hurricane of 28 August 1722, states the period's own hurricane climatology, that "The West-Indians agree, that August and September is the Season to expect them" and that they give warning "by a preceding unusual Swell of Water", and records of that storm that "Of 50 Sail in this Harbour, only 4 Men-of-War and 2 Merchant-Ships rid it out, but with all their Masts and Booms blown away." Unverified Reported, not yet checked against the record. Period narrative: John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil and the West Indies, 1735, Project Gutenberg ebook 72102, searched in full; A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies