The Business of Shipbuilding: Dunn and Henna of Mevagissey, 1799–1806

Abstract

The six-year shipbuilding partnership between Captain James Dunn and Thomas Henna ended acrimoniously in April 1806 when Henna took Dunn to the Chancery Court in a dispute over profits. The partnership was officially dissolved in an advertisement in the local papers that same year when the contents of the yard were put up for auction. "All persons having any claims on the partnership are desired to send them to James Dunn." 1 While the court proceedings dragged on over the next twenty-eight years, Dunn continued to operate a shipyard. Dunn died in 1842 at the age of eighty-seven, an apparently prosperous shipbuilder. Henna was last heard of in 1834 as a pauper living in Middlesex, and his death has not been traced. The business documents, provided as evidence to the lengthy and expensive Chancery case, were not claimed by either party. The Dunn and Henna records in the Master's Exhibits cover more than the partnership activity from 1799 to 1806. The Chancery case took many years, and Dunn was reluctant to tum the accounts over to the court. For that reason, the surviving documents provide information for a longer period because Dunn continued to use the main partnership ledger for his own business until 1816. The ledgers list income, expenditure, accounts for each vessel and payments to shipwrights.? The details include a full breakdown of the cost of building a vessel, the types of materials purchased (and from whom), profits and debts. What makes the surviving documents of this short-lived business in a remote Cornish port of interest to maritime historians? It is because shipbuilding businesses are poorly represented in scholarly publications due to a paucity of sources. As Simon Ville has noted, this is particularly true for the late 'Royal Institution of Cornwall (hereafter RIC): Mapplebeck notes, Folio 3. 2The National Archives, Public Record Office (hereafter TNA, PRO) CllO/167, main ledger.

Depredación tecnológica y creación de una élite: la respuesta mallorquina a la situación naviera hispana del siglo XVII

“…En primer lugar, hemos estudiado cómo se obtenían las saetías, las tartanas y las naves, si por medio de la construcción naval, propia o extranjera, o a través del corso. En este sentido, siguiendo los estudios dedicados a Barcelona y Cornualles, hemos considerado las limitaciones que la localización y los requisitos de mano de obra y materias primas podían imponer a la construcción naval mallorquina (Doe, 2006;Chamorro, 2018). Considerados estos obstáculos, analizaremos en qué medida se recurrió a tecnología naval extranjera para renovar la flota isleña y cómo se hizo, si de forma convencional y amistosa, encargando y comprando buques en astilleros extranjeros, o si se incorporaron forzosamente a través del corso.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2006

“…Brown. Meanwhile, in two articles, Doe exploits a rare collection of business papers to provide an insight into the customer base of a small Cornish shipyard during the Napoleonic Wars (which included fishermen, the coastal trade, and smugglers), as well as highlighting the difficulties experienced by small yards in obtaining capital, controlling the labour supply, and obtaining materials at a time of high naval demand. Robinson focuses upon the variety of traffic using the Cumberland ports of Carlisle and Whitehaven to stress the extent to which international trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries relied upon the multitude of coastal brigs and sloops that both assembled export cargoes from the regions and distributed import goods around the country.…”