William John Huggins

(British, 1781-1845)

The East Indiaman 'Earl Balcarres' dropping her pilot off Dover, with the pilot cutter in attendance astern 64.8 x 94cm. (25 1/2 x 37in.)

Footnotes

Provenance :
Mr. Hanning
The Parker Gallery, 1955
Col. (later Sir) William J.H.deW. Mullens, D.S.O., T.D.

The East Indiaman ‘Earl Balcarres’, named in honour of Alexander Lindsay, the sixth Earl (1752-1825), was a magnificent teak vessel built by the powerful East India Company at their Bombay Dockyard and launched on 25th March 1811. Measured at 1,417 tons, she was 139 feet in length with a 44 foot beam and, in her prime, mounted fully two tiers of guns which made her look more like a two-decked ship-of-war than the merchantman she was. Completed for sea in 1815, it was later said of her that “no finer specimen of an old type Indiaman was ever built” and she became one of the best known ships of her day. Her first master, Captain James Jameson, stayed with her for five years and completed five voyages to China, usually via Bombay. In 1821, he handed over command to Captain Peter Cameron who continued with the China run but altered her intermediate Indian call to Calcutta in place of Bombay. Her last two voyages, departing from England in April 1830 and May 1832 respectively, were direct to China but when she returned home from the second, on 25th May 1833, she was laid up in the Thames pending sale. Bought in September 1834 by Thomas Shuter for £10,709, he continued trading her to India and the Far East but sold her to Somes Bros. of London in 1848. Her new owners operated her mostly in the India trade for a further fifteen years until in May 1863, by which time she was no longer fit for long voyages, she was sold to the African Steam Ship Company for use as a hulk on the west coast of Africa. She endured this ignominy for eight years until finally broken up in 1875.

The fact that this work is dated 1832 suggests that it was almost certainly commissioned to mark the vessel’s final departure from England (on 25th May 1832) whilst still flying the colours of the Honourable East India Company. The number of similar portraits of notable East Indiamen by Huggins likewise suggests that this artist may have been specifically retained by the H.E.I.C. for such purposes