Volume Eleven - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - some more aspects - Random Rants, Notes and Articles No. 1 . . .

1855 - Capture of a Russian Vessel in the Bristol Channel

A good deal of interest has been excited in Bristol, in consequence of its becoming known that a Russian vessel laden with coal had been captured ay Penarth Roads, in the Bristol Channel.

It appears that the vessel in question had been in the Bute Docks, Cardiff, where she mounted the Danish flag, under which she took a cargo of steam coal, no doubt for the use of the Russian navy.

No particular suspicion would seem to have entertained of her, for, having completed her loading, she cleared, sailed from the harbour, and would have probably have got off had not rough weather, which she encountered in the channel, forced her to put back into Penarth Roads.

There her build and rig attracted attention, and it being suspected that she was a Russian craft, she was boarded. The boarders were confirmed in their suspicions, and they seized both her and her cargo, and have communicated particulars of her capture to the Admiralty. - The British Colonist [791] 6th January 1855.

The background to hostility against the Russian vessel at that time comes from an article published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. [972]

Having lost its military and economic power, by the start of the war the Ottoman Empire had become vulnerable to an invasion by Russia, which was growing in power. From the 1830s, the other European powers, Britain in particular, became alarmed by the Russian expansion to Europe and its territories elsewhere. They promoted a European alliance with the Ottoman Empire to check this threat. Fighting began in the autumn of 1853, as the Ottoman–Russian War. In March the following year Britain and France joined in on the side of the Ottomans, turning the war into a major European conflict.