English: Captain Captain George Pechell Mends' 'Trafalgar' sketchbook: (inside front cover) 'Hints on Drawing' with a small watercolour landscape sketch

No. 1 of 36 (PAI0849 - PAI0884).

The Museum has over 80 sketches or more finished drawings by Mends, of which the majority are in this sketchbook, which covers his commission in the ‘Trafalgar’, from 1850 to 1853. It includes sketches and notes on the inside front cover (shown here), 34 pages worked on both sides (PAI0850-PAI0883) and a later and unrelated loose watercolour in the back (PAI0884). The earliest drawings are round Teignmouth – where his family may have lived - just before his appointment to the ‘Trafalgar’ at Sheerness: the latest date to October 1853, three months before he left her in the Black Sea. Some are on-the-spot sketches, others more composed records, but the fact that they are usually (though not always) dated as to when he did them, or the occasions shown, allows ‘Trafalgar’s movements to be roughly traced. As the largest ship in the Mediterranean fleet, and not steam assisted, this appears always to have been with at least one steamer in attendance to tow her when necessary, and usually in company with other ships. The following summary does not distinguish which side of the page the drawing appears on, or include pages which cannot be reasonably dated or the location identified. There is for example a technically interesting study of ‘Trafalgar’ in a storm off Majorca (PAI0878 verso) which cannot be dated from the context. The Museum also has a number of other loose drawings that Mends made during this commission.

He probably bought the book while on leave at or near Teignmouth about 8 July 1850, the date he put in the front (PAI0851 – 52). Passing through London later in the month to join ‘Trafalgar’ he drew the Crystal Palace, set up in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition (PAI0856), but Sheerness is the location of subsequent drawings (PAI0850, PAI0853 – 55 ) until July 1851, when she sailed for the Mediterranean. The next are at Gibraltar (12 - 26 August, see PAI0857 and inscription on PAI0862 verso). From there the ship, with others, made a visit to Barcelona in mid-September (PAI0857 – 58, PAI0859). She then went north to Rosas Bay (9 October, PAI0860) before turning south again past Ibiza (26 October, PAI0859) to Port Mahon, Minorca, by early November (PAI0860 – 61). The next sketch is of her in a storm on 1 February 1852 off Malta, which she reached on the 9th (PAI0863 – 64), where rigging was refitted and they remained until early April (PAI 0864 – 66, the last of uncertain date). Then, with others, she patrolled south off Cape Carthage (26 - 27 April, PAI0866 – 67). By late May she was back at Mahon, which she apparently left on 1 June probably heading for the Spanish coast (PAI0867 – 68) and then perhaps briefly back to Malta, (PAI0869). On 17 and 30 July the whole fleet exercised in sailing trials, first off Malaga (PAI0870) and then off Cabo de Gata (near Almeria, PAI0871 – 72 ) but ‘Trafalgar’, and presumably others, were back at Gibraltar in August (PAI0871). A view of Zembra island off Cape Bon in the Sicilian Channel, sketched on 2 September 1852 (PAI0872), was probably taken on passage to Urla Bay, Turkey (which he calls ‘Mulah’), west of Smyrna, passing close to Cape Matapan in southern Greece on the evening of the 13th (PAI0873). ‘Trafalgar’, again with others including the Mediterranean flagship ‘Britannia’, arrived at Urla before 18 September (PAI0874 – 75), sailing back towards Athens by the end of the month. A late-September sketch (PAI0873) of two steamers towing four sailing ships, including ‘Trafalgar’ and ‘Britannia’, through the Doro Strait between Andros and Euboea, suggests the composition of the squadron in this Aegean reconnaissance. They rounded Cape Sounion on 3 October (PAI0876) and anchored in Salamis bay, off Piraeus, which gave Mends the opportunity to sketch them there from high on the road to Athens, and also Athens itself from a distance on the 8th (PAI0877). Whether he visited Athens is unknown but there are no closer sketches. On 13 October they again rounded Cape Matapan (when Mends made a drawing of Cape Grosso to its west, PAI0873), heading for Corfu in the Ionian Islands, then British-held. Here Mends drew the citadel from the Governor’s country house on 21 October (PAI0878). By 22 January 1853 ‘Trafalgar’ was again at Gibraltar (PAI0879). As the diplomatic situation between the Ottoman Empire and Russia deteriorated that spring, the British Mediterranean fleet was ordered to assemble at Malta (PAI0879) and rendezvous with its French equivalent, which had sailed for Salamis from Toulon in March, in Bezika Bay, Turkey, south of the Dardanelles between the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos. They sailed from Malta on 8 June and, with steamers towing the sailing ships when necessary, reached Bezika on the 13th. The French – who should already have been there - only arrived on the 14th (a diplomatic embarrassment that led to replacement of their commander). Mends’s drawing of their arrival (PAI0881) is the first dated one after 22 January 1853. He subsequently did a number of sketches of French ships moored in the bay into early October (PAI0880 – 82). On and following the 22nd, at Ottoman invitation, the Allied fleet moved to enter the Dardanelles (PAI0882) to defend Constantinople from Russian attack. Mends’s last dated sketch in the book is of the French steamer ‘Mogador’ towing the French ‘Valmy’ into the strait on the 29th (PAI0883), the verso of which bears slight sketches of French ships drying sails, probably in the Sea of Marmara. He would certainly have witnessed the gathering impetus of the Crimean War, as the joint fleet entered the Black Sea on 3 January 1854 following Russian destruction of the Turkish squadron off Sinope, but his promotion to Commander occurred on the 11th and he returned to England to become second-in-command of HMS ‘James Watt’. Such part as he played in the Crimean War was in its Baltic theatre but the Museum only has one drawing of this by him, showing the ‘James Watt’ as witness to minor skirmish off Cronstadt in 1855 (PAD9408). 'Trafalgar's' ongoing part in the Crimean campaign is covered after Mends' departure in the illustrated log of Midshipman (later Captain) Edward William Hereford, HRD/2/1.

'Hints on Drawing' with a small watercolour landscape sketch