Flower of Ugie interpretation
The Flower of Ugie was built on the banks of the River Wear in 1838, fourteen years later the vessel was wrecked in the Eastern Solent. Between these two events the Flower spent the vast majority of its life at sea, sailing thousands of miles between a range of ports in South Asia, Southern Africa, Europe and North America. In this sense the vessel epitomised the age of global seafaring and developing capitalisation that was in full-swing by the mid-19th century.
Although unclear, it seems likely that the vessel was commissioned for use in the trade with British colonies in Southern Africa and South Asia; the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Madras and Calcutta being primary destinations over a number of years. With this in mind, it may be possible to classify the Flower of Ugie as a late form of British East Indiaman, albeit one with no connection to the British East India Company itself. Ascribing such a status to the Flower of Ugie is perhaps over-simplistic, the vessel was very much the continuation of a tradition of British merchant shipbuilding that could be traced back to the beginning of the 19th century. If shipbuilder Luke Crown had been engaged in the building of a similar sized vessel, but with a destination of Quebec, rather than Calcutta, it is likely that he would have built the same design of vessel with the same materials and carrying the same rig. The flexibility of the ships resulting from the building tradition in which the Flower was constructed is illustrated by the range of destinations and variance in passage distance that the vessel was capable of being employed on. The vessel was equally suited to trade with the Baltic or Mediterranean as to the conveyance of cargoes to the East Indies.
In the light of later developments to materials and hull-form, in particular iron and steel and the clipper-style hull-form, it is easy to view the Flower of Ugie as being at the end of a particular branch of shipbuilding evolution. While this may be true in part, this should not mean that the vessel is viewed as backwards looking, low-tech or less advanced. Consideration of why the Flower of Ugie was constructed in such a way, using such materials provides a clue to the motives of the builder and owner and offers another interpretation of the vessel. The Flower was built to a tried and tested design formula that offered the capacious, steady conveyance of cargo over potentially long-distances in an economic fashion. Further indication of the latter is given by the rig of the vessel, selected for economic performance, rather than out-and-out speed. The building materials tell the same story through the building and repair of the vessel during its career; materials selected because they represent the most cost-effective way of achieving a specific technological aim.
Taking all of this into consideration, it is possible to see the Flower of Ugie as representing a state of the art approach to the procurement, use and deployment of materials in a manner in which economics was the primary driving force. Viewed in this way, the Flower of Ugie does not lie at the end of a technological line of development for large wooden shipbuilding, waiting to be displaced by bigger, faster iron and steel vessels. Although the fact that vessels such as the Flower of Ugie would cease to be built within a generation of its launch is beyond question. But Luke Crown could not foresee this in 1838, he was simply building within the accepted tradition of the day. Instead, the Flower of Ugie may be seen as representative of the pinnacle of British wooden merchant shipbuilding, developed over several centuries and epitomised in the approach of shipbuilders in the north-east of England and in Sunderland in particular.
At a wider-scale, the Flower of Ugie also symbolises much more than simply a technological snap-shot of British shipbuilding in the mid-19th century. The role played by the vessel throughout its life places it at the heart of the globally developing trading systems that were an on-going feature of the 19th century. Many of these routes and the goods, people and ideas that travelled along them, lay at the heart of British commercial activity at this time. This activity itself was linked irrevocably with the development of overseas colonies and the maintenance and expansion of the British Empire during the 19th century. In this sense, the Flower of Ugie is itself the result of this activity as well as a facilitator of its continuation. The technological features of the ship are simply the tangible manifestation of 19th century commercialisation, colonialism and economisation.