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Description
In 1870 Admiral Sir James Hope presented an almost identical picture of this subject by J. C. Schetky to the United Service Club in London and it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871 with a brief description, of which a longer version appears to have been supplied with the picture on Hope's authority. This was repeated in full when it was reshown at the Royal Naval Exhibition at Chelsea in 1891 and in the original Dictionary of National Biography entry on 'Endymion's captain: 'Towards the close of the long French war, Captain the Hon. Sir Charles Paget, while cruising in the Endymion frigate on the coast of Spain, descried a French ship of the line in imminent danger, embayed among rocks upon a lee shore, bowsprit and foremast gone, and riding by a stream cable, her only remaining one. Though it was blowing a gale, Sir Charles bore down to the assistance of his enemy, dropped his sheet anchor on the Frenchman's bow, buoyed the cable, and veered it athwart his hawse. This the disabled ship succeeded in getting in, and thus seven hundred lives were rescued from destruction. After performing this chivalrous action, the Endymion, being herself in great peril, hauled to the wind, let go her bower anchor, club hauled and stood off shore on the other tack'. The RA description, perhaps tellingly of Hope or Schetky's familiarity with club-hauling, adds the technical point that 'Endymion' dropped her starboard bower for this dangerous manoeuvre. It involves a moving ship dropping an anchor to pull her bow round rapidly onto the other tack, and then cutting the cable at the critical moment before she is dismasted.
The whole story is, in fact, mysterious; for while Paget commanded the 'Endymion' around 1803 he did not do so towards the end of the war and nothing of this nature is recorded in his log. If true (which Sir John Knox Laughton in the DNB thought improbable), he may have omitted it for good reason. He could not, however, have prevented it from entering naval lore by word of mouth and there are three near-identical paintings of it.
The earliest is a little-known oil by Nicholas Pocock (1740 -1821), now in the Welholme Gallery collection at Grimsby. This was clearly not known to Laughton but must have been a composition familiar either to Colls, Schetky or both. Given that Colls is only recorded as working in the 1850s, this may be the second version and Schetky's the third. All the pictures appear to show 'Endymion' on the port tack as she prepares to drop her sheet anchor for the French two-decker, before club-hauling and clawing offshore on the starboard tack. Colls's version is one of a stormy but contrasting pair: its pendant (BHC0482) is based on an aquatint after W. J. Huggins and shows the frigate 'Indefatigable' raking the troop-carrying 'Droits de l'Homme', at the start of the action which drove the latter ashore with great loss on the Brittany coast in 1797.
Colls exhibited pictures at the British Institution, 1852 -54, from an address in Camden Town but nothing else is known of him. The Schetky version of this picture remains in the United Service Club, London, now headquarters of the Institute of Directors.
Related paintings
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See also
Ship views diagram
Sails diagram
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