56 CLASSIC BOAT AUGUST 2016
Barnabas used to sail round Britain regularly in the 1880s.
More than a century later, she retraced her footsteps
WORDS NIGEL SHARP PHOTOS CORNISH MARITIME TRUST
ROUND BRITAIN
BY LUGGER
ONBOARD
When the 1881 St Ives lugger Barnabas comes into
Newlyn, Cornwall, there is normally little fanfare.
The fishing village is a frequent stopover when the
tides prevent Barnabas reaching her home port of
Mousehole, one mile south. But on 5 September
last year, things were different. And rightly so.
Crewed by the members of her parent trust, Barnabas
had completed a voyage around Britain – her first
for around 130 years.
The trip was proposed by Peter Morgan, one of
Barnabas’s regular skippers and a former trustee of the
Cornish Maritime Trust (CMT), which owns her.
Peter explains: “While visiting Shetland years ago I
found a picture showing a 1,000-strong fleet of driftnet
fishing boats from all over the UK, including from
Cornwall, waiting for the herring shoals to come down
from the north. Then when I retired to Cornwall in
2006, I found another picture entitled Departure
of the fleet for the North.”
It’s known that Barnabas was part of this massive
fleet for four consecutive years in the 1880s. Her route
followed that of other Cornish boats: up the Irish sea(where they would catch whatever they could), then
through the Forth and Clyde Canal or the Caledonian
Canal. “Barnabas probably never went round the top
[of Scotland],” says Peter. From there, the boats
entered the North Sea, where the real work would
begin, following vast shoals of herring down the coast.
Peter thinks the catch would have been landed on
beaches along the way. “They would have shore parties
numbering five or six thousand people, following the
fleet down the coast with donkeys and carts to unload
the catch. There wasn’t room for them in the ports.”
Initially, Peter had difficulty persuading all of CMT’s
trustees that a re-enactment was a good idea. In 2014,
Barnabas endured a difficult voyage when she was
caught in bad weather on the way to Milford Haven:
two crew members were airlifted off, and a disabled
engine and broken outrigger led to the RNLI towing the
boat to safety. “Some of the other trustees thought
Barnabas should just cruise locally,” says Adam Kerr,
another regular skipper and a CMT trustee.
The board gave the green light only after a thorough
risk analysis and detailed voyage planning, as well as