Captured by Napoleon

Walking through St. Paul's Church, Shadwell, a pathway and steps lead straight down to the Thames. Looking up this smartly-paved jogging route is to look at the exit point from the long since gone Farmer Street from which Charles Robinson would have walked down to the Docks. 

As the nineteenth century commenced, the young Charles John Robinson, seemed to be doing rather well. By the age of twenty, he was already a master mariner. What though does this tell us in the context of the time? 

This is less clear, but putting sources together, Charles had enough knowledge, skills, and character to be entrusted, more or less, with captaining a sea-going vessel of some type. This would have required management skills, meaning delegation, discipline, and punishment, as well as navigational know-how, including use of the nautical instruments of the day and maps. It seems sensible to presume that Charles was literate, capable to a degree, and from a family that was, at least, not at the very lower end of the Farmer Street socio-economic hierarchy.

What happened then? Who was this Mary Weston, this questionable ‘performer’ noted by the disapproving Reginald Blackwood generations later from his desk in Belfast, this woman who Charles chose to marry? Well, at a wild guess, and drawing on what little we know, in the free-mixing, socially and economically diverse Docklands region, for the up-and-coming young master mariner, Charles Robinson, a flirtation with a performing artiste of the locality with a liberal and free persuasion may just have proved too much for him to resist. 

Whatever the explanation however, disaster now struck. In 1809, just shortly after his marriage to Mary, his merchant ship was captured by the French (as seminal as Trafalgar may have seemed, it did not bring the Napoleonic wars to a conclusion). Charles was now to be detained in France at the pleasure of Monsieur Bonarparte until 1814.