William Shand (1818 ship)

The National Herbarium of Victoria is not typically associated with maritime artefacts. In November 2025, however, a member of the curation staff sorting a container of nineteenth century seed collections for accession, made a significant discovery.

As was standard practice in the nineteenth century, seeds were stored in hand folded paper packets. Botanists employed a distinctive folding method designed to secure and protect the contents, and, due to the scarcity of paper at the time, these packets were commonly made from recycled documents. It is not unusual for curation staff to find historic botanical specimens wrapped in paper repurposed from journals, illustrations, sheet music, or correspondence. In this instance, the packets were constructed from pages of the William Shand’s logbook.

The five packets contain seeds from Petrophile and Isopogon, both members of the family Proteaceae. The two principal botanists active during this period were Allan Cunningham and Charles Fraser. While the numbering on the packets appears more consistent with Cunningham’s system, the absence of additional collection details means their provenance cannot be confirmed. At present, the seeds have not been identified to species level. Once identification is complete, it may be possible to associate them with the regions where those species occur, providing further clues about the likely collector.

No one can be certain how Allan Cunningham or Charles Fraser may have come across pages from the William Shand’s logbook, there is no record of either man travelling on the vessel. However, before the Mercantile Marine Act of 1850, British merchant ships were not under a statutory obligation to keep an official logbook. ^[9]

It is therefore possible that, once a log had served its immediate administrative purpose and the ship’s accounts were settled, it was not retained and may have been discarded as routine paperwork at the port’s shipping office, the pages to be recovered later for use as seed packets.

The surviving records consist of five half pages with nine handwritten logbook entries from the William Shand, dating from 27 April to 17 December, 1824. Two of the pages bear an 1822 watermark, consistent with the vessel's period of operation. These logbook entries provide a window into life aboard an early 19th-century ship, detailing navigation routines and coordinates, weather observations, sailing procedures, and routine maintenance such as painting the vessel’s exterior, cleaning portholes, and maintaining the lazaret, a designated quarantine area.

Summarize Timeline Fact Check

The newly discovered log entries, in conjunction with existing reports, allow a partial route to be plotted of the 1824 voyage.

The William Shand is documented as departing London in October 1823 and reaching Hobart on 4 February 1824 ^[10]. After a stay in port, she sailed for Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) in late February. ^[11]

From Port Jackson, the vessel departed on 30th March and proceeded north toward Batavia (Jakarta). On the 3rd April, the William Shand came across a large, coral seamount reef system approximately 680 km E, of what is now, the coastal town of Mackay, in the Coral Sea, (21° 9’ S 155° 49 E.) This sighting served as the first documented record of the site in the India Directory, which was subsequently named Kenn Reef, in honour of the ship's commander, Captain Alexander Kenn. This is the last report, prior to the discovery of the logbook pages, of the William Shand during her 1824 voyage. ^[12]

From this point onward, the vessel’s movements are traced through the logbook entries. By 2nd May the ship had entered the Indonesian archipelago, passing Semoa (Pulau Semau) and Sandalwood Island (Pulau Sumba), and on 4 May she was navigating through the Straits of Allas (Alas Strait).

After departing Batavia for London in late June, the ship navigated the "Middle Channels" of the Thousand Islands (Kepulauan Seribu), passing Maneaters Island (Pulau Laki) and St. Nicholas Point (Tanjung Pujut). On 27 June, the vessel arrived at Anger town (Anyer) where the captain went ashore for refreshments; however, during the subsequent departure, the anchor cable was severed by a rocky bottom, resulting in the possible loss of an anchor.

By October, the William Shand had reached the South Atlantic. The final logbook entry of 19 December recorded coordinates of 31° 5’ S 19° 11’ W, marking eight and a half months of travel since leaving Sydney.

While these late-year log entries don’t include a recorded year, they are attributed to the 1824 return leg through a process of elimination; maritime records from the Hobart Gazette (6 Feb 1824) ^[10] and The Australian (4 Aug 1825), confirm the vessel was in London in late 1823 and back in Sydney by August 1825 ^[7], making an 1823 or 1825 date for these coordinates geographically impossible.

This 1824 return voyage was exceptionally lengthy compared to the vessel's 1822 passage, which was completed in only three months and 18 days. Having spent nearly 11 months in transit, the William Shand concluded its voyage in London in early 1825, refitting in time for a March 12 departure back to the colonies ^[7]. While the 1822 passage demonstrated the vessel's capability for speed, the 1824 leg appears to have had its challenges, including the possible loss of an anchor at Anyer and documented heavy south-westerly swells in the South Atlantic. There are no recorded voyages of the William Shand travelling this route after 1827.

On 5 January 1827, a Sydney newspaper reported the sale of the William Shand and noted that Captain Kenn had taken command of another ship ^[13]. This evidence suggests that the William Shand underwent a change of commander in the late months of 1826, when the ship was sold and Captain Kenn left the vessel to take command of the newly built brig, the Lion ^[14]. Neither the purchaser nor the identity of the captain who succeeded Kenn after on the William Shand, after the 1827 sale, has been established.

On the 2nd December 1836, the 18-year-old William Shand was documented as being owned William Boswell, most likely a merchant or ship-owner and captained by Thomas Davidson. ^[1] The vessel was registered in North Shields ^[15], a major coal-exporting centre on the River Tyne in the north of England, just 12 km north of Sunderland, where she was built. Under Boswell’s ownership the ship was most likely employed carrying coal outbound on Tyne-Baltic routes.

Captain Kenn died in January 1829 his death notice as follows: DIED — On Sunday last, Jan. 11, universally respected, at Launceston, (where he had only for a short time opened a mercantile house, in connection with Buckles, Bagster, and Buchanan, of London) Captain Alexander Kenn, late owner and commander of the brig Lion and ship William Shand ^[16].

The ship’s last recorded event was in 1842, while still under the Shields registry. On the 6 September, the William Shand was reported as being: “driven ashore on the Sickragger three leagues west of Domesnes (Cape Kolka), Latvia. On a voyage from the Tyne towards St. Petersburg”. ^[15] The Sickragger referring to the coast off the village of Sīkrags, Courland Governorate (57° 39’ 41” N 22° 13’ 21” E).