Of all his children, Lazarus’s fourth son, Charles Dunrich Roberts, is the hardest to find in the records. He was born at West Lulworth on 29 August 1829, while his father was stationed at Dorset in the Coastguard, and was baptised there on 27 September. 

In 1841 he was living with his parents at Brightlingsea, Essex. Five years later, in 1846, Charles joined the merchant navy at the age of sixteen. He served in several mercantile vessels – theVernon, the Sutlej, the Prince of Wales.

These were all sailing ships built, owned and run by the shipowners Wigram and Green (later R. & H. Green), at their yard at Blackwall, London, the largest private shipyard in the world. Greens took over the eastern portion of the yard in 1843 and built the last ships for the East India Company. Their vessels were so sturdy they were known as the ‘Blackwall frigates’ (see Basil Lubbock’s The Blackwall Frigates [1922]).

The Blackwall frigates regularly sailed to India and the Far East. The ships Charles served in ran between London and Madras (Chennai) and Calcutta (Kolkata), in Bengal, a voyage of some four months. Departures and arrivals were announced in the ship news columns of many newspapers of the day, notably Allen’s Indian Mail and Register. 

The Sailors’ Home

Being away from home between September and the following summer each year, Charles avoided some harsh winters in England during the late 1840s and into the 1850s. 

When he was on shore in London, he stayed at the Sailors’ Home on East India Dock Road, just a short walk up from Blackwall yard. This was a well-known hostel for merchant seamen, described in The Nautical Magazine (1845) as a comfortable and respectable retreat from the temptations of the gin-shop and the brothel. 

It had been opened in 1841 by Charles’s benevolent employers, solely for the accommodation of the their own men. Greens devoted much care to the improvement of the mercantile marine. The Sailors’ Home, one of their earliest efforts, could accommodate up to 200 ‘East India sailors, white and black’; such racial integration must have been unusual in the 1840s. 

When Henry Mayhew visited the home in April 1850 (while Charles himself was returning from India), he was astounded at the quality of the accommodation:

The cleanliness and pleasantness of the place were so diametrically different from what I had lately been accustomed to – the men spoke so lovingly of their master – and the master betrayed everywhere such kindness and consideration for his men – that after half a year spent among sweaters, slopsellers, chamber-masters, lumpers, ballast-contractors, and a host of others who live and fatten on the physical and moral degradation of those whom they employ, the comfort, happiness, and air of sympathy that pervaded the whole building had indeed a most cheering effect. 

In connection with the home, Greens also provided a course of instruction in navigation for officers and men. On 12 July 1852 Charles applied for a Certificate of Competency to be a second mate and after passing an ‘ordinary examination’ received this on 15 July 1852 (certificate number 6610). 

At the time of his application his residence was given as the Sailors’ Home but presumably his certificate could not be sent there so when it was actually issued in July 1852, it was sent to the family home: 3 Harrison’s Buildings, North Yarmouth, Norfolk.

Disappearance

Where Charles went after this is not clear. 

He is listed in the Mercantile Navy List from 1852 up to 1864. However, where included, the columns giving ‘present capacity’, ‘present vessel’, ‘port belonging to’ and ‘destined voyage’ are all blank, so presumably he was absent or on shore unemployed during these years. 

He had disappeared from the Mercantile Navy List by 1867 and no further mention of him can be found. When Lazarus wrote his will in 1869, Charles had not been heard of for some time:

My dear son Charles Dunridge [sic] Roberts not having been heard of for many years I fear he has left this world before me, but should he ever return again to his family I beg that he may understand that I fear I behaved harshly towards him and I beg his forgiveness. My sorrow on this account has been great and my heart has yearned towards him.

The details remain obscure but clearly whatever it was, was of great regret to Lazarus at the end of his life. 

According to Lazarus’s will, should he have reappeared, Charles would have inherited his father’s atlas, placed in his brother Arthur’s care. That seems most appropriate.

What Happened to Charles?

Charles Dunrich Roberts is apparently absent from the 1861 census of England and Wales, when he would have been almost thirty-two. So the assumption is he was out of the country. If he died in England in the 1850s or 60s, a death record cannot be located.

But overseas deaths and deaths at sea, from disease or accident, were not uncommon in the navy, especially in ships that sailed to Asia. 

Could there be a clue in the last vessel listed in Charles’s statement of service (which is undated but seems to end in about 1852): the Prince of Wales? 

In February 1853, perhaps when Charles was still second mate, the Prince of Wales’s seventeen-year-old midshipman, Thomas Octavius Morse Prichard, was killed after falling from the top of the mizzen mast while they were at anchor at Calcutta (Kolkota). 

According to newspaper reports of the accident, young Prichard was interred at the burial ground at Kedgeree (Khejuri) in East Midnapore. This walled cemetery (now totally abandoned), located in the grounds of a large residence at the mouth of the river Hooghly, was where eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans who died on board ship were buried. 

Could Charles have died in similar circumstances? Did he also end up in the cemetery at Khejuri? If so it seems nothing was communicated back to his family in England. 

Unlucky sailors did not always succumb to disease. The often unpredictable weather was also a constant threat to mortality. In 1843, before Charles joined the Vernon, bound for Madras, it had been caught in a cyclone. In April 1848, the Sutlej hit a hurricane and had to limp dismasted into Table Bay (there is an illustration here and repairs outlined here). 

On 5 October 1864, a devastating cyclone hit Kolkota and West Bengal. Floodwaters rose rapidly and surged for 13 km on either side of the Hooghly River. In a matter of days the number of deaths by drowning exceeded 50,000 and a further 30,000 died from disease as a result of inundation. 

The cyclone destroyed the seaport town of Khejuri, where poor Midshipman Pritchard had been laid to rest, and more than 160 vessels in the Bay of Bengal were ‘piled up on the shore’ in what has been described as probably the single largest disaster ever to hit British shipping. 

A report was published by the Government of Bengal in 1866 and an account appeared in the Blackwall Frigates (p. 143). None of the ships we know Charles was on are mentioned but could he have perished in this, an event so cataclysmic that a reliable list of all casualties was simply impossible and there were few survivors left to inform the authorities?

>Lazarus's fifth son, Felix