| Description
| Watercolour painting showing the HMS Transit on a reef in the Straits of Banca, 1857. It was made in July 1857 by Captain G.J. Wolseley (later Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley) of the 90th Regiment, who was in charge of I Company. It shows the ship about an hour after it had struck the pointed reef at the island of Banca. The transit was taking I, K and L Companies of the regiment to Calcutta.
It had been an eventful journey from the United Kingdom. The Transit had a hole knocked in her side before reaching the needles in the Isle of Wight and was then caught in a cyclone when approaching Singapore before finally being wrecked at Banca. Luckily no lives were lost.
The diary of Private Wickens of the 90th Regiment gives the following account:
“We left Simons Bay on the 4th June and had rough weather and on the 22nd of June we met with a severe storm which lasted five days, during which time the Transit appeared a complete wreck … The ship’s carpenter was daily reporting to the captain that more rivets had given away and that he had discovered fresh leaks in the hull of the ship. The ship’s carpenter was busily engaged for several days splicing the main yard, which was just in time to be a little respectable to run on a sunken reef on the morning of the 10th of July in the Straits of Banka.
In the ten minutes after the accident the ship was in a sinking state. The boats were lowered and filled with provisions and landed on a rock three miles from Banka Island and three miles from the wreck. We remained on the rock until the tide rose, when we were taken off in boats and landed all safe with the exception of one man. The troops lost all they were possessed of.” |
