'Golden Fleece bearing up for the Morea in bad weather', 1854 (c)

Watercolour by 2nd Lieutenant William Thomas Markham (1830-1886), 2nd Battalion, Rifle Brigade, 1854 (c).

Morea is the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece and was a province of the Byzantine Empire and then the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

Markham painted this watercolour while his unit was en route to the Crimea. After passing though the Straits of Gibraltar his troopship would have steamed along the North African coast before stopping at Malta and then continuing east through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorous and out into the Black Sea.

The 'Golden Fleece' was an iron, three-masted steam ship built by C J Mare and Company and launched on 17 November 1853. It was owned by the Australasian Pacific Mail Steam Packet Company but, with the advent of the Crimean War (18514-1856), it was utilised as a transport vessel by the British Government. Between 1854 and 1856, the ship shuttled fresh troops, horses, supplies and wounded and sick personnel to and from Turkey and the Crimea to England, via Gibraltar and Malta. Following the Crimean War the East India Company chartered the vessel for transporting troops and supplies to India. The Golden Fleece was still transporting troops in 1867, to Hong Kong and Abyssinnia. In 1869, back under private ownership, she sank in the Penarth Roads, en route to Alexandria.

From an album of watercolour paintings and sketches by Colonel William Markham, 1820 (c) and Second Lieutenant William Thomas Markham (1830-1886), 2nd Battalion, Rifle Brigade, relating to the Crimean War (1854-1856), 1854 (c).

Purchased with the assistance of the Society of Friends of the National Army Museum.