An early account of shipwreck survivors on Tavernier Key

Born in 1786, Pownoll Pellew was 13 when he first went to sea as a midshipman under the command of his father, Rear Admiral Sir Edward Pellew. 

The Admiral would go on to become Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy East Indies Fleet while his son moved quickly up the chain of command. Though the rank of lieutenant required a term of at least seven years at sea, Pownoll achieved the rank after only five. While still a teenager, Lt. Pellew was given command of the H.M.S. Fly, an 18-gun frigate that reportedly wrecked on Carysfort Reef while escorting a fleet home to London in 1805.

According to early records, roughly one-quarter of all ships reported wrecked along the Florida Reef encountered the stony corals of Carysfort. The number is misleading. During the early years of record keeping Carysfort Reef was used as a generic term encapsulating not only Key Largo reefs, but many reefs of the Upper Keys. This idea of Carysfort being used as an umbrella term is emphasized by accounts offered by not only those on board the Fly when it wrecked, but also from divers who salvaged the wreck during the 20th Century.  

According to the Autobiography of Lemuel Norton: including a account of this early life — two years in a printing office — eleven years at sea, in which he was twice shipwrecked, and experienced several narrow escapes from death, published in 1864 by Concord: Fogg, Hadley & Company, Printers, the Fly tacked off the Moro Castle (Havana) at 8 p.m. before hitting a reef off of “Key Tabiner” the following night at midnight. “The weather guns were then thrown overboard, a constant firing of the lee ones was kept up in order to alarm the fleet, which was a little astern of us, that they might tack ship and escape the danger.”

Prior to his service aboard the Fly, Norton, along with several other men, had been shanghaied at Port Royal, Jamaica and taken aboard the 84-gun French man-of-war Thunderer. 

When the ship left Port Royal it set sail for the Golden River, described in the New London Universal Gazetteer, Third Edition, published in 1827, as both a tributary of the Mississippi River and a river of America which runs into the Spanish Main.

According to Norton’s account, “…because there was no mahogany there, we had to go to a place called Golden River, on the Spanish Main, where slaves had hewed and rolled out to the river a cargo of mahogany for us. While taking in this, we were made a prize of by His Majesty’s ship-of-war Fly, Sir Edward Peliew’s son being commander…. we were all taken on board the British man-of-war, and our ship was manned with a crew from the frigate. We now joined the fleet, consisting of 33 ships, bound for England, loaded with dye-woods, mahogany, etc.”

Norton wrote of his experience aboard the Fly after it had wrecked upon the reef as well. “At break of day all hands were called aft to receive each one a glass of good West Indies rum. This seemed to warm us up, and we commenced getting the boats of the spar deck in readiness to embark for the land, it being about three miles under our lee… We discovered plenty of wrecking vessels in the harbor getting underway to come to our relief.”

The captain of the Fly, as reported in John Viele’s excellent book The Florida Keys: The Wreckers, painted a somewhat different picture than Norton. “We soon had the pleasure of seeing several Providence wreckers standing off to our assistance… Some of the wreckers got to us by eight o’clock [that morning], and, before night, we had got off all the people [the crew], several day’s allowance of provisions, and the greatest part of the baggage.”

Norton’s observations offer a slightly different account. “Our water and provisions were now all submerged on board the frigate. We were on an uninhabited isle of the sea—about three hundred of us. We soon commenced digging wells, hoping to find water; but all in vain; no water except a very little the wreckers served to us.”

“Next day,” Norton continued, “the sea became more smooth. Some of us returned on board the ship, and with plenty of negro divers, who went down under water into the hold of the ship, having a rope first made fast around one leg to haul them back by, when they should give the sign by kicking, we soon obtained bread, beef, and pork plenty, with some other good things that sailors are apt to be found of.”

The actual location of the wrecked Fly was not Carysfort, but Little Conch Reef, in close proximity to the site of the Spanish treasure fleet wreck of the Infante that hit the reef during a hurricane in 1733. Carysfort Reef, marked by Carysfort Lighthouse today, is actually located some 20 miles to the north. While scores of named reefs separate Little Conch Reef from Carysfort Reef, the go to name assigned to them by mariners in the early 1800s was simply, Carysfort.

Brad Bertelli is a published author of four books on Florida and Florida Keys history. He is the curator of the Keys History and Discovery Center, located at the Islander Resort. His column will appear every other week in The Reporter. Reach Brad with comments and questions at WhyPanic@aol.com.

This story was originally published January 29, 2016 at 5:45 PM with the headline "An early account of shipwreck survivors on Tavernier Key."