Robert Moresby - Lack of Accurate Maps

Lack of Accurate Maps

The Red sea is full of navigational hazards, but at that crucial time, reliable charts were not available. Preliminary surveys of the Red Sea route had been published in 1826–27 by James Horsburgh, hydrographer to the East India Company. Horsburgh's work provided a good foundation, but also highlighted the limitations' of existing knowledge. By this time, the marine steam engine appeared to be racing to the rescue of British communications with India; the engine, first tested on Scottish lochs and American rivers, was by 1826 attempting the Cape route to India.

In that year a 479-ton wooden paddle steamer, HMS Enterprise, steamed (mostly sailed in fact) from London to Calcutta. Its progress was particularly noted by two individuals — a river pilot named Thomas Waghorn who was impressed by the steamer's steady progress against the wind up the Hooghly river to Calcutta, and indirectly by the Governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone. A year later Elphinstone, together with the secretary of the Calcutta government and his wife, Mr and Mrs Lushington, chose to return to England via the Red Sea, sailing on a cramped little brig, HMS Palinurus. This involved disembarking at Qusayr and crossing the desert to the Nile in the customary four days. Back in Britain Elphinstone joined the campaign, promoted by the visionary new commander of the Bombay Marine (renamed the Indian Navy in 1832), Sir Charles Malcolm, to introduce steam to the Red Sea, which would enable boats to navigate up the Gulf of Suez against those tiresome northerlies.

Waghorn and other entrepreneurs in Britain and Egypt were meanwhile working at linking Mediterranean steam crossings (already overcoming its infuriating calms) with the Red Sea via an 'overland route' through Egypt. An experimental vessel, HMS Hugh Lindsay, was built in Bombay, powered by engines sent from England, and launched for Suez in 1829; a collier loaded with Welsh coal (sent via the Cape) went ahead, convoyed by a sailing brig, HMS Thetis. Captained by a real steam enthusiast, James Wilson, she made it to Suez in thirty-four days but the collier was later wrecked on a reef, a fate which narrowly missed befalling the Thetis, on a reef subsequently named after her, just south of Yanbu on the north Arabian coast.