From Sea Voyages to Shipwrecks: The Accidental History of Fortified Wines

These are general designations given to wines that have been fortified with hard liquor, more often than not brandy, to prevent them from spoiling. Fortified wines emerged as a by-product of the “Age of Sail,” as red wines quickly fell victim to spoilage during the lengthy sea passages. The exact introduction of such wines is shrouded in mystery, but it is generally assumed to have been an accidental discovery.

The Portuguese island of Madeira, which lies in the path of the trade winds in the Atlantic Ocean, served as a major port of call for sailing ships venturing into the Atlantic as well as the Indian Ocean and later the Pacific Ocean. To supply ship crews with desired wine, Jesuits had established vineyards that produced wine of questionable quality. Sometime during the seventeenth century, a ship that had sailed from Madeira to India returned to the island with an undelivered barrel of Madeira wine in its hold. Written off as spoiled wine, the beverage soon became mythical as it was discovered that the rocking of the ship and the extreme heat of the cargo hold had turned a regular Madeira wine into an extraordinary, much-sought-after product.

Although initially not fortified with brandy, this naturally agitated and heated product became known as the vinho da roda (round-trip wine). Besides the Portuguese colonies of Brazil and India, Madeira became a favorite among the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. Unable to grow wine themselves, many American politicians used Madeira to celebrate their festivities, including, among other occasions, the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Madeira wine was also a favorite for many of the eighteenth-century expeditions heading into the Pacific Ocean, including those captained by James Cook.

A Wine Cellar on the Bottom of the Sea? Lovers of wine, commonly referred to as oenophiles, must store their bottles in perfect climatic conditions. To ensure such conditions, they construct elaborate subterranean wine cellars or, more recently, purchase a top-of-the-line wine refrigerator. Yet even under such perfect conditions, wine does not keep its quality forever. For instance, it is estimated that the oldest drinkable bottle of wine dates to the late 1800s. Fortified wines last a great deal longer, as a recent discovery of three cases of Madeira wine dating to 1796 indicates. The final frontier for oenophiles might very well be the bottom of the sea; wine bottles have been recovered from the many shipwrecks scattered around the world.

In some cases, the ocean floor provides perfect conditions for preservation: temperatures ranging from 35 to 39° F coupled with minimal light exposure. There are, of course, limits to preservation, because the ubiquitous cylindrical bottle did not become common until the late 1700s. Even under perfect conditions, there is no guarantee that the wine still tastes good, as a recent tasting of a bottle of wine raised from a Confederate wreck, which sank off the coast of Bermuda in 1864, suggests. Wine experts agreed that the gray liquid of the bottle tasted somewhere between “crab water” and “gasoline.” The reviews concerning a cache of renowned Veuve Clicquot champagne dating to the second quarter of the 1800s were more positive. When divers lifted the bottles from a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea, they accidentally popped a cork and discovered that the bubbly liquid was outstanding. Some oenophiles are now contemplating raising the rich wine holdings of the Titanic, although many scholars frown upon this action as grave robbery. Tasting wine or champagne from the bottom of the sea will remain an expensive endeavor, as individual bottles can fetch anywhere from $5,000 to $150,000 at auction. Rainer F. Buschmann

Port wine was another Portuguese wine that hailed from the northern city of Oporto (literally “the Port”). Again, the origins of this beverage are not known, but it is believed that it was monks in a monastery in the vicinity of Porto who first employed brandy to arrest the fermentation of red wine. This product was generally much sweeter and much higher in alcohol than regular wines from the legendary Duoro (Duero) River Valley, located between Portugal and Spain. Most importantly, this fortified wine was drinkable up to twelve months after the opening of the bottle. English merchants, who had initially arrived in Porto to trade for Portuguese wool, quickly took to the beverage and started exporting port wine to their home country. A lengthy conflict between France and England, which covered much of the eighteenth century (1688-1815), cut the island nation off from its major supply of wine. A growing alliance with Portugal meant that wines from this Iberian country were employed to fill the gap, making port wine (and Madeira) some of the most popular drinks in Great Britain during the eighteenth century. This also meant that many English, and later Scottish, merchants (e.g., Dows, Grahams Sandeman) took over the thriving fortified wine business in Madeira and Porto.

The decline of Madeira and Port during the nineteenth century was tied to a number of reasons. A brief but fateful invasion of Portugal by Napoleonic forces led to the flight of British merchants. Similarly, the introduction of steam engines on ships made passages quicker and less reliant on islands such as Madeira. Also, new wines, most importantly sherry (Jerez), became a major competitor for the still-growing vine markets. Lastly, the relatively quick arrival of phylloxera (the grape vine louse) devastated grape crops on Madeira and the Douro River Valley. Both wines survived by shifting from preferred ship wines to much-sought-after dessert wines. The aging process of the wine in either small barrels (colheita) or bottles (vintage) has provided both Madeira and Port wines with a near mythical status. When a pre-phylloxera Port wine dating to 1855 was recently discovered, it was marketed in special bottles meant to fetch a minimum price of $2,500. Rainer F. Buschmann

FURTHER READING: Bennett, Norman R. 1990. “The Golden Age of the Port Wine System, 1781-1807.” The International History Review 12: 221-48.

Hancock, David. 2009. Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Ludington, Charles. 2013. The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

The Lost Franklin Expedition: Mystery, Cannibalism, and the Modern Discovery of HMS Erebus & Terror

The explorer John Franklin (1785-1847) was integral to Great Britain’s search for the fabled Northwest Passage via the Arctic Ocean. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Franklin participated in four major expeditions to this part of the world. His disappearance in the Arctic triggered many more ventures attempting to unravel the mystery of Franklin’s fate and that of his crewmembers while mapping a great deal of the Canadian Arctic.

Following a stint as governor of Tasmania, Franklin, now fifty-nine years of age, took on what was going to be his last expedition to locate a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. His orders were to sail from Baffin Bay to Baring’s Strait utilizing two vessels, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror. Both ships had been retrofitted with steam engines designed to propel locomotives, screw propellers, and iron plates to protect their hulls from ice floes. While utilizing steam to drive the propellers was remarkably innovative for the Royal Navy, packing enough coal to sustain such engines put constraints on provisions and scientific equipment. Packing a twelve-day coal supply was insufficient for this multi-year endeavor to one of the world’s most challenging regions. Historians frequently cite this inadequate supply as one of the reasons why Franklin was destined to fail.

Leaving England in 1845, the crew of two British whaling ships last sighted the expedition in Baffin Bay in July of that year. Franklin and his vessels subsequently vanished in the icy labyrinth that forms the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. When no news from the venture reached England, Jane Franklin, John’s presumed widow, pressed the Royal Navy to support search operations. Over the next twenty years, no fewer than twenty expeditions, including private and other national ventures, searched the region to reveal what happened to the Erebus and the Terror. This exploratory activity yielded clues as to the crew’s whereabouts and contributed significantly to mapping these, for Europeans, relatively unknown parts of the Arctic.

By the 1860s, a gruesome picture detailing the last years of the expedition emerged from found artifacts, human remains, messages, and collected Inuit stories. Despite the contested nature of the accounts, it became painfully evident that there were no survivors. A message dating to April 1848 revealed that ice had trapped both ships near King William Island (in the Canadian Territory of Nunavut). John Franklin died in 1847, and after several failed attempts to break free during the summer months, the crew abandoned the vessels’ relative safety. Their near-impossible target became Fort Resolution, a Hudson Bay Company outpost close to 1,000 kilometers away. From the scarce evidence, a gloomy portrayal emerged that the already depleted crew died from hypothermia, potential lead poisoning from the solder employed to seal canned food, scurvy, and widespread violence. Scratches on human bones and scattered Inuit reports suggested that the last survivors might have resorted to the consumption of human flesh. Jane Franklin and other relatives of the vanished expedition vehemently contested such debasing accounts. Accounts of cannibalism also cast doubt on the integrity of Indigenous Inuit accounts that rightfully claimed to have encountered survivors in early 1850.

With Jane Franklin’s passing in 1875, the search for more evidence of the lost expedition subsided. However, Franklin’s endeavor now took on a new character: from a tragic venture to a heroic test of the human spirit. As the unfolding British Empire around the globe was looking for older antecedents, they found in Franklin’s crewmembers the true character of the explorer, keeping “a stiff upper lip” or a stoic, resolute demeanor in the face of adversity. A painting by William Smith, They Forged the Last Link With Their Bodies, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895, illustrated this trend well. The artwork represents the fictionalized end of the last survivors of the ill-fated expedition. Based on findings of a lifeboat containing human remains during the massive search for the venture, the artist depicted the last exhausted survivor leaning against the boat, surrounded by the corpses of his fellow sailors within reach of the legendary Northwest Passage.

The search for the wrecks of the Erebus and Terror continued into the twenty-first century. Even before finding the exact location of the two ships, Canada declared them a National Historic Site in 1992. Fifteen years later, a sustained quest utilizing new technology went underway. Western scientific methods clashed again with Indigenous knowledge. Inuit hunters reported seeing a ship mast protruding from the frozen sea at a great distance from where ice initially trapped Franklin’s vessels. In 2010, the team detected the HMS Investigator, a ship that had to be abandoned in 1853 while searching for Franklin. Four years later, the Erebus was discovered. Finally, in 2016, the team detected the Terror. A year later, Canadian and British authorities reached an agreement by which the wrecks became the property of Canada. The British government retained the rights over some artifacts, valuables (especially gold), and the repatriation of human remains. Exploration of the wrecks developed in earnest in 2018, but efforts were interrupted due to the global pandemic. Since the summer of 2022, the investigation, mapping, and salvage of artifacts from the ships have resumed. Rainer F. Buschmann

FURTHER READING:Alexander, Alison. 2013. The Ambitions of Jane Franklin: Victorian Lady Adventurer. London: Allen & Unwin.

Craciun, Adriana. 2016. Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Disaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Royal Greenwich Museums. “HMS Terror and Erebus.” https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/hms -terror-erebus-history-franklin-lost-expedition. Accessed January 15, 2023.

Williams, Glyn. 2010. Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press.