Mate and Master (1876-1886)

Indeed Henry Johnson was lost to the research team for five years of his career. Just one Agreement missing from the Crew Agreement collection breaks the chain that depends on being able to trace a previous vessel. But in 1876, in New Brunswick, he took both master's and mate's certificates, and now not one but two agencies took a closer interest in him. Our enquiries in the Crew Agreement Archive could resume. The Mercantile Marine department of the Board of Trade opened a continuous record on Henry Allen Johnson, holder of Canadian Master's Certificate holder 856 (Certificates of Competency & Service, TNA BT 128/4, f.23, f.127). It took its information from the Crew Agreements.

Lloyd’s, the commercial insurance body in London, started to follow Johnson, though it was 1879 by the time he appeared in their manuscript Captain's Registers. This was the year when he took command of the Electa. The registers were for the underwriters' use, a master's reputation being a factor in calculating premiums on the insurance that Lloyd’s might be requested to provide on one or all of vessels, freights and cargoes. There is no evidence however that Johnson's new employers Troops of St John, New Brunswick had recourse to Lloyd’s, or to any other insurer.

The entries in Johnson's Board of Trade record enabled the research team to pick up the thread of his service. Using his formal record of service, his BT 128 entries, augmented by the Lloyds' Masters' register, we filled in further gaps. These gaps resulted from a phenomenon we had begun to recognize as a local variation in the standard practice of administering Crew Agreements. Sometimes men joining vessels in Atlantic Canadian ports were treated as though the voyage commenced there, and irrespective of an already existing Agreement, they signed a new one for a voyage that in its details looked different from that made by the crew originally signed on. What a researcher might not realize is that for at least part of the voyage they were shipmates sailing together. The original Agreement, opened and subsequently closed at a UK port, was delivered to the RGSS, but tellingly such Colonial Agreements as were filed were disproportionately the red (office) copy of the Eng. I. Office copies were standard, made outward-bound as a precaution against the non-return of the regular Agreement, but to this point when we had encountered them in the archive, researchers had confirmed the Agreement’s loss as due to the sinking of a vessel. Far from betokening a truncated voyage, we now contemplated a situation where the “office copy” indicated a routine colonial procedure. It reversed the centralizing logic of the foreign-going Agreement administered at British or European ports in a practice was more truly a reflection of what the colonies contributed in men and ships to the British empire. Canada’s Atlantic provinces contributed greatly in the 1860s, 70s and 80s.

The research team lamented the absence of data for the colonial seafarers' end-of-voyage. Only some of it could be recovered from subsidiary primary sources, and then only for masters and mates. The date these men were discharged from their vessels was part of their officers’ records, but not the sum of money that mates, for example, were paid when they left their vessel. Our suspicion was that the shipping masters at Atlantic Canadian ports who officiated over the men’s signing off had retained the final documents. Meanwhile as we puzzled over the relationship of the surviving Colonial Agreements to the vessel’s deployment, the team had even more reason to take note that “Port at Which Voyage Commenced” and “Port at Which Voyage Terminated” on the first page of a foreign-going Agreement might not square with the seafarer’s perception of the geography of his voyage and how it unfolded: nor, for that matter, might the formal start and finish to a voyage coincide with the shipowner’s or merchants understanding of the spatial logistics of their business. The men enlisted on these subsidiary Colonial Agreements were not marginal to the crew, far from it: they were the vessel’s masters, mates, bos’ns and cooks. A reminder of what we had previously discovered was salutary. Had not Johnson as an AB in the Curry’s employment left his Sandy Cove, Nova Scotia, home to join the Juno at Liverpool, England in July 1870; and had he not remained with the vessel through its voyage to New Orleans, returning to Liverpool in January 1871 and thence, as we presume, returned by sea to Nova Scotia? The shipmates who had enlisted in Cardiff joined the vessel with quite different expectations of their voyage to North America.

We have characterized Johnson as a seafarer with aspirations. His ambitions were sustainable at a time when Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were the source of many of the wooden ships on the British imperial register, and when the Atlantic Provinces had timber in plentiful supply for the outward-bound cargoes of those vessels. Johnson was by now (1876) serving as Mate, and for three years he worked in that capacity for the St. John, New Brunswick, shipowners Hall and Fairweather. Between 1876-1879 he worked on their barque St Patrick (726 tons) on North Atlantic runs. Its voyages took in as ports-of-call, or as final destinations, New York and Portland, Londonderry and Dublin, Cardiff and Plymouth, and Havre and Rotterdam.  Cargoes were loaded, and men, including Johnson, were engaged at the New Brunswick timber ports of Chatham, and St. John. He moved to the employment of Howard Troop (later Troop and Sons) of St. John, NB in 1879 and with them made his first voyage as master. His vessel, Electa, was not a big one, a barque under 500 tons, manned by a mate, bo’sn, cook/steward and six AB seamen, but still it was profitably engaged in runs between North American, British, Mediterranean and Baltic ports, during the early 1880s. Johnson joined the Herald in 1883 when the Troops deployed the vessel deep sea between Liverpool, England and South America. Herald was three times Electa’s size and a suitable vessel for the Troops to ship a cargo, likely guano, from the Chilean port of Iquique. It is notable, however, that Johnson did not serve as master on this trip, but as mate, subordinate to a fellow Atlantic Canadian as master. The three-year voyage perhaps took its toll on Johnson, now aged forty, and, according to his Lloyds' and BT record, he was only to make one more voyage. But in his declining years Johnson still eluded our research. Had he died at sea, and been the subject of a death report to the RGSS, there would still be more to be said about Henry Allen Johnson of Sandy Cove. But maybe he had quit the sea, and while we went looking for him in on land in the census. It was site user, however, who provided a clue that set us back on his track. We were to be surprised how an individual whose prospects of generating material for this site had seemed limited at first now had a story that was to run in a further section of the site (click here for "Henry Johnson Revisited").

Vessel &            # of Voyages Primary Documents
Blair Athol List C, Release M, Official Log Book, CR & RO Ship's Report
Imperial AC, Release M, Official Log Book
Eastern Belle AC, Release M, Official Log Book, Customs London Bills of Entry
Venus 1 AC, Release M, Official Log Book
2 Eng. 1, Official Log Book
Kewadin Eng. 1, Official Log Book
Juno Eng. 1, Official Log Book
Crown Jewel Eng. 1
St. Patrick 1 Eng. 1
2 Eng. 1
3 Eng. 1, Lloyd's Captain's Registers
4 Eng. 1, Lloyd's Captain's Registers
5 Eng. 1, Lloyd's Captain's Registers
6 Eng. 1, Lloyd's Captain's Registers
7 Eng. 1, Lloyd's Captain's Registers
8 Eng. 1, Lloyd's Captain's Registers
Electa 1 Eng. 1
2 Eng. 1
3 Eng. 1 Office Copy
JV Troop BT 128.4 Service Records
Herald Eng. 1, BT 128.4 Service Records
Keswick List C, BT 128.4 Service Records