Qualla: Robert Quayle (1814 ship)

Robert Quayle (1814 ship): Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three men hid in the hold, waiting to vanish. It was 8 September 1821, and Robert Quayle was fitting out at Hobart Town for a voyage to Macquarie Island - a desolate rock in the sub-Antarctic where sealers worked in pelting rain and nobody looked for escaped convicts. The men had chosen well: a ship bound for nowhere any authority would follow. But the constables found them before the lines were cast off, and they were marched back to gaol. The ship sailed without them, and the convicts returned to whatever punishment the colony prescribed. It was a small episode in the life of a small vessel, and yet it captured something true about Robert Quayle - 356 tons of Liverpool oak that spent twenty-four years in the commerce of empire, carrying cotton, oil, timber, and the desperate wherever the winds would take her.

Robert Quayle (1814 ship): Liverpool, 1814

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Robert Quayle was launched at Liverpool in 1814, the final year of the Napoleonic Wars. Her name first appeared in the Register of Shipping - misspelled as Robert Quagh, a clerk's approximation of a Manx surname. Missing pages in Lloyd's Register mean she did not show up official...

Robert Quayle (1814 ship): Cotton and the Cape

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From that first voyage onward, she shuttled across the Indian Ocean for three years. She reached Bengal on 21 July 1817, sailed from Bengal to the Cape of Good Hope, pushed through to Castletown on the Isle of Man in May 1818, and came home to Liverpool with a cargo of cotton. Ca...

Robert Quayle (1814 ship): The Whaling Detour

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In July 1819, Robert Quayle left Liverpool under master James Leslie, bound for New South Wales with William Kermode aboard as supercargo - the merchant representative responsible for the cargo and its sale. She reached Hobart Town on 11 November, then continued to Sydney, arrivi...

Robert Quayle (1814 ship): The Stowaways

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Then came Macquarie Island and the three convicts. Nobody recorded their names. We know only that on 8 September 1821, three men were found hidden aboard Robert Quayle as she prepared to sail for the sub-Antarctic, that constables took them to gaol, and that the ship sailed witho...

Robert Quayle (1814 ship): The Wreck

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After her Pacific adventures, Robert Quayle returned to more conventional trades - South America, North America, the Atlantic routes that did not require an East India license. By the late 1830s she was in the Canadian timber trade, a specialized and dangerous business. The ships...