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Artist J.M.W. Turner, RA. The Engravings. Perhaps the most famous English Romantic landscape artist. Turner
products many engravings and was very hands-on in there progress to printings.
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Stranded Vessel off Yarmouth
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| This picture is described in the Catalogue of the Royal Academy for 1831 as “Lifeboat and Manby apparatus going off to a stranded
Vessel making signals (blue lights) of distress;” and in the Catalogue of the Fine-Art Collection, at South Kensington, as “Vessel in
distress, off Yarmouth.—A lifeboat is going off to a stranded vessel, which is seen on the right of the picture, making blue-light
signals of distress. Two of the females whose fathers or husbands man the boat eagerly watch it from the sands. their position
indicating the long recession of the waves, which are boiling and tumbling cr under the influence of the storm.” The vessel in
distress appears in our engraving on the left, and the signals are rather more like rockets than what are now termed blue lights. It
shows Turner’s interest in marine matters and his sympathy with shipwrecked seamen, that he should include not only the lifeboat, but
the at that time little-known Manby apparatus, by which, and its successor the rocket apparatus, apparatus, many thousand lives have
been saved on our shores. The apparatus of Captain Manby consisted of a mortar from which round or conical shot were fired over the
wreck; to the shot was attached a line by which those on board hauled off from shore a double line passed through a pulley. This
pulley was set up to the mast. and the endless or double line could then be worked by- the men on shore, who hauled off a life-buoy
into which a man could get, and then hauled it and the man back to the shore. The essential features of this apparatus are preserved,
but a rocket is used instead of the mortar to fire the line over the ship. |
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