Henry now began to realise the huge change taking place in his life. Charles had left the ship in Bristol having decided to take his first steps to a new life at that major trading port. The light was fading as the ship approached Swansea from the Bristol Channel. As darkness fell it threw into relief the flames and smoke from the many hundreds of furnace stacks which formed a variegated backcloth to the streets and squares of the middle-class terraces and villas, which Harry later got to know as Sketty and Uplands. The Bay itself was filled with hundreds of ships waiting their turn to tie up and discharge their cargoes. Smoke, flames, and ships indicated the sources of wealth conspicuously displayed in the mansions and parks and the well-to-do housing of the people who lived in those pleasant parts of the town within sight of the bay, but well away from the smoke flames and the habitations of the hoi polloi.

Henry left the ship early the following morning to discover an entirely different world to the pastoral life which he had known in his previous life. This Swansea was a hotbed of business and trading, of getting and spending, of commerce and banking on an international scale. It was a town of shops of breathtaking variety that amazed and confused him. A hive of hotels and hostels and lodging houses, of eating places, coffee houses and restaurants. And everywhere, underlying a furious contemporaneity and modernity, was antiquity, the very old cheek-by-jowl with the very new. Walking the streets around the Castle, Henry was aware of the medieval origin of the town. Further along flanked by the Burrows and the mouth of the Tawe on a promontory of fashionable elegance, he was impressed with the Law Courts and other splendid buildings, the Assembly Rooms and the Royal Institution, Swansea's proudest possessions. A town full of movement and change. Henry felt stimulated and optimistic as he went in search of a cheap lodging and to try out his limited command of the language of his hosts and the intriguing practice in a district called Gorseinon and Loughor of dropping an octave on the penultimate syllable, back up again on the final syllable, which gave a characteristic twist to the final words of every sentence.

Henry's first few days ashore were spent coming to terms with a new culture, the hustle and bustle of the busy commercial hub of this Welsh town, the sing-song accents, the lively extrovert people, the never-ending movement, the smell of horse manure, the rattle of wagon wheels, and the cries of street traders. He found a room in a crowded lodging behind the High Street in an area made up of older Welsh houses with characteristic low elevations and gables, and the shops of craftsmen in wood, makers of clocks, of ironmongers, sellers of wine food and clothes. He was told that work was available at a factory in Vivians Morriston spelter works making tin-plate, most of which was exported to America to make metal pots and pans. Someone once said "The West was won on tin-plate from Wales". But when Henry visited the works his mind was soon made up. He saw the huge furnaces spurting out great gusts of fire - the heat even at a distance left his skin feeling peeled; the men feeding the coal into the hungry mouths of the furnaces were gaunt and lean, any excess flesh had been stripped away.

In his search he found a complex infrastructure of factories, and the noxious odours and plumes of fire. There was grime, smells, railway lines, piles of scrap metal and hideous dumps, There was black smoke from high stacks and chemical reek, open hearth furnaces that lit the sky at night where the mills were pouring steel and a red sky at night that could be seen from far away. What Swansea had was a steel making operation transforming iron ore with steel, hot metal pouring like lava into molds and in the middle of all this flame and dust and danger and noise, in temperatures of a hundred degrees, sucking in vapours that could ruin them, men laboured. Many of his fellow lodgers in the modest accommodation he found, worked in these copper, zinc, or ironworks in a placed called Llansamlet, where the atmosphere was arsenic and sulphur laden. Not surprisingly, the men were sallow, desiccated, wiry and thin. He was told that people either acclimatised quickly or died.

The prospect of a future working before banks of furnaces with all the hazards of accidents and disfigurements hastened Henry's decision to take up a life at sea. It didn't take Henry long to decide that life ashore in a factory was not a proposal to be contemplated. He had been brought up to have the courage to make decisions for himself even if they seemed difficult. He felt his future was at sea. He soon found the berth he was looking for in Kings Dock, a ship registered in Kiel with a captain who hailed from Bremen, and so began a seagoing life with its share of adventure and misadventure. He had been influenced by his one seagoing experience and the uneventful journey from his home to Swansea. He was to learn with time that a combination of the cruel sea, dangerous or badly loaded cargoes and sometimes negligent officers or owners, greedy of gain at the expense of safety, combined to take a heavy toll of Swansea registered shipping. As many as a hundred ships had foundered, some in collision with other vessels, others stranded on shores along the North Atlantic, South Atlantic or the waters of the South Pacific, provided the sad graveyards of Swansea owned ships.

Henry's first ship was the brigantine Regulus, carrying super phosphate from Charleston, South Carolina, to Newcastle after unloading a cargo of coal. There followed a number of vessels with cargoes of copper ore, coal and general cargo. Henry was later signed on as a sea-cook on the brig Bracadaile. He gained a reputation for being able to prepare good food under the most difficult conditions. It was on the schooner Barley, carrying a cargo of zinc from London to Swansea, that Henry had his first experience of a shipwreck. The ship collided with the North Shields' steamship Castleton, twenty miles north of St. Ives, Cornwall. On the second occasion, the crew of the barque Stranger were forced to abandon the vessel some forty miles off the South African coast following the spontaneous combustion of the cargo of coal.

In between his seagoing adventures Henry delighted in exploring the countryside of West Wales. He relished the tranquillity and beauty of the Gower coast. He visited the castles at Loughor and Llandeilo with their evidence of the earlier trading community established by Norsemen in the 12th Century. Henry found he had an ear for language, and endeared himself to the habitués of a local inn near to his lodging by his determination to make himself understood in their language. In other situations he remained true to his character, which was rather austere, almost aloof and at times taciturn. So began his new life at sea as a sea-cook on cargo vessels from Swansea to destinations often exotic and distant.

It was on one of the spells ashore between voyages that Henry in 1862 met and married Sarah Walker, a widow who lived in a nearby town called Loughor. She was a year or so older than Henry. The courtship was unusually brief as the courtship had to be pursued between voyages. Sadly for Henry the marriage only survived a few years; Sarah died suddenly of one of the many diseases which were prevalent in those days due to the medieval sanitary arrangements before the main drainage system came into use in the 1930s. Prior to that there were many epidemics, notably cholera in 1832, 1849 and 1866. In 1865 Swansea had the distinction of being the only town in Britain to have an outbreak of yellow fever. Typhus also made frequent visits to the town.

Then came another significant event in Henry's life. Whilst walking through the main market in Swansea one spring morning, savouring the salty smell of fresh cockles and tang of ''bara lawr' (seafood), his ears assailed by the shouts of market stall owners advertising their wares, mixed with the squawks of poultry in their small cages and the excited conversation of housewives exchanging sing-song gossip with rosy-cheeked farmers' wives hawking tangy yellow butter from farms spread across the valley of the River Tawe all the way from Llandovery to Carmarthen, past villages called Llangadock and Manordeilo, he saw a statuesque figure coming towards him. She was as tall as him, well-built and graceful. Balanced on her head in the traditional fashion was a bag of flour, which did not obscure the glossy mass of dark, almost black hair, parted in the middle and drawn back on either side of her head. Her features were regular, eyes large, intelligent and dark below thick eyebrows, and an aristocratic aquiline nose.

Henry was immediately attracted to this striking woman, and knew that he could not let the opportunity of making her acquaintance escape him. Taking courage, he offered to carry her burden for her and so began a relationship that was to last for the next thirty years. They were married in Loughor in 1868 and Henry discovered what for him was a new phenomenon. In his experience as a boy in Schleswig Holstein, the woman had always been subservient to the man of the house, Mary,however, wasn't cast in that mold. A woman of strong will and determination, she relished the responsibility of bringing up a growing family while Henry circled the globe on the high seas.

© March 2001