The Story of the Pickle
It was 1967 when famed folk singer Woody Guthrie's son Arlo sang: “I don't want a pickle, I just want to ride on my motorsickle(cycle)."
However, things were very different for the Royal Navy after the Battle of Trafalgar on October 22, 1805, off the coast of Spain. Although the British were victorious, 458 of their sailors had been killed along with nearly 4,500 French and Spanish, and their beloved Admiral Horatio Nelson had been mortally wounded by a French sniper's bullet. Vice Admiral Cuthbert Coilingwood, who was now in charge, was anxious to convey the news of Nelson's triumph and the tragedy of his death to an apprehensive England. While his great 200 foot ships of the line were efficient machines of war, they were very inefficient when sailing to windward, so Collingwood called upon the 73 foot Bermuda-built topsail schooner HMS Pickle to relay his message. Pickle's commanding officer, Lieutenant John Lapenotiere, raced over 1,000 miles of ocean to Falmouth, Cornwall, and rode in a horse-drawn stagecoach for nearly 300 miles across a wintery landscape to arrive in a foggy London at one o'clock on the morning of November 6 to deliver the news.
You may wonder whatever happened to Admiral Nelson's body after the battle…
Well, talk about being pickled! Listen to the British sailor's version handed down from ship to ship throughout the years and related to me in modern times, by the last of the official Chantymen in the Royal Navy, Welshman Stan Hugill (1906-1992): "While the Pickle was speeding toward England with the news of the Admiral's death, Nelson's body (under the direction of the ship's Irish surgeon William Beatty) was itself ‘pickled' in a cask of brandy which was lashed to the deck of the HMS Victory and placed under marine guards for transport to a proper burial back in England. But sailors, being who they were, could not resist the lure of all that good booze so they devised a way to drill a hole in the cask and, unseen by the guards, slowly began what they called 'Sucking the Monkey' or 'Tapping the Admiral' so that by the time they arrived in England and the cask was opened it was bone dry!" In fact, today Nelson aficionados can even visit the famous 'Tapping the Admiral' Pub for a little taste of the past, at 77 Castle Road in Kentish Town, London.
Pickle Night
Each November 5th, the journey of HMS Pickle and the bearing of the news from Trafalgar is commemorated by warrant officers of the Royal Navy. The annual celebration is known as “Pickle Night.”
