The mast of our project blog has an image of portside preaching, A Mission to Seamen by Henry Herbert La Thangue (1859-1929). This is probably the best known painting of marine missions from the 19th century.
Another, which deserves to be better known, is ‘The Missionary Boat’, painted in 1894 by Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929), part of the Royal Cornish Polytechnic Society’s Tuke Collection, now on loan to Falmouth Art Gallery. Tuke was a member of the Newlyn School of painters, and for a while lived in Falmouth where he had a floating studio on a French barque, not unlike the one in this painting.
Henry Scott Tuke, The Missionary Boat, 1894 (oil on canvas). The Tuke Collection, Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. Wikimedia Commons: Public domain
Unlike many of Tuke’s marine paintings, this one is of a specific occasion. It shows the arrival of the chaplain, James Canning Badger, neatly sailing the mission yawl Clarice, to meet the French barque Verveine of Marseilles. Badger was a chaplain with the British and Foreign Sailor’s Society (now the Sailors’ Society) in Falmouth frm 1887 to 1916. Tuke depicts Badger as a competent sailor, little distinguishable from the sailors who hail his arrival.
On shore, Badger embraced the image of the sea and marine industry as part of the rhetoric and identity of his mission. The National Maritime Museum Cornwall has a striking photo which shows Badger astride his ship pulpit in the Seamens Bethel & Institute in Falmouth, resting his hand on the wheel.
James Canning Badger, chaplain British and Foreign Sailor’s Society, Seamens Bethel & Institute Falmouth. Source: National Maritime Museum Cornwall.
The most famous literary example of a ship pulpit is that for the sermon on Jonah and the Whale, delivered by Father Mapple in chapter eight of Henry Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). But they were surprisingly common in marine mission chapels and, along with floating ship chapels, they were to be found in both American and British contexts. But that must be the subject of another blog.
Hilary Carey
11/7/23