I imagine it was the same for Howard Carter when he opened the long-sealed tomb of Tutankhamun. He knew something awaited the beam of his torch, but until it broke the millennia of darkness, he knew not what.
Whilst it is not quite as dramatic in the hushed reading room of the National Archives at Kew, laying the heavy brown cardboard box on your allocated table does have an air of reverence about it. Although ‘ADM/2889 Trade Division Records, Routes for Merchant Shipping, East Coast’ is unlikely to include a golden death mask, or indeed curses from across the ages, there was still a pang of excitement as I untied the box and removed the lid.
The smell of musty long unread papers makes its escape. You cannot but wonder who was the last person to read the documents. The words retelling stories of long-past dramas and lives, the humdrum and the heroic, here they are patiently awaiting their rediscovery. You stir the old ghosts with the turn of every page. There is the occasional startling revelation, but the vast majority of pages are passed over rapidly, sent back to their long sleep, awaiting their historian.
Researching history is as far removed from the fast-paced digital online world as it is possible to get. This is a profession, perhaps a better description might be obsession, that rewards the patient, studious shuffling of obscure papers.
On day one of my research trip to London, St Pancras station bustled with travellers, commuters heading for their offices, darting expertly between heavily laden tourists. The contrast between the hot summer streets and the air conditioned calm of the British Library’s Asian and African Studies reading room could barely be greater. There is a studious silence. I join the rows of academics, historians and the outright curious at the rows of desks. The bulky file entitled ‘Compensation to Dependents of Lascars of S.S. Tangistan’ is placed at my allocated workspace. And so the work begins.
On Tuesday 9 March 1915 the Tangistan was conveying iron ore from North Africa to Middlesbrough when she struck a mine off Cayton Bay. The heavily laden ship sank within minutes, killing all but one of her crew. The engine room was manned largely by, what was then termed, Lascar seamen. They had signed on at Aden on the shores of the Red Sea. Prior to my visit to London, I knew all of their names and approximate ages. But their exact origins remained a mystery, they may have been classed as being in the Indian Merchant Marine, but this covered an area from East Africa to Burma, so wide-ranging as to be a hindrance to research.
There were seventeen Lascar sailors working in the ship’s engine room. Every single one of them were lost to the cold waters of the North Sea. A single body was found by a fishing coble, floating off Flamborough Head, the body was landed at Bridlington, where, despite detailed enquires, it proved impossible to identify him. Thus he was buried in an unmarked grave in Bridlington Cemetery.
The unmarked grave of the sailor from Tangistan is to the left of the CWGC headstone
The file on the Tangistan does give previously unpublished information on the Lascar sailors. Whilst it will probably prove to be impossible to positively identify the man buried at Bridlington, the field will certainly be narrowed to two or three names. What the file does allow is a window into the world from which they came. The men were all from the ‘interior of Arabia, beyond Aden’. This is probably today’s Yemen, but there is the possibility that they also came from Saudi Arabia. What has come apparent is that three of the men deserted the ship before it sailed towards its fate off Cayton Bay, thus the number of those lost will have to be adjusted accordingly.
Over the coming weeks I hope to gain a far greater understanding of the men, their origins and working conditions. As ever, the act of reading and researching, leads to perhaps unexpected conclusions and destinations.
In the next blog I will describe my second day in London and visits to the Imperial War Museum and the National Maritime Museum.
This research trip was kindly facilitated by the Scarborough Maritime Heritage Centre and will lead to an exhibition at the centre, entitled ‘After the Bombardment, the Battle of Cayton Bay 1914-15’ between December 2024 and March 2025.