The name at sea

George Howard Davidson, second officer; Peter Engstrom, A.B.; George De Franceschi, A.B., an Austrian; and Edward Eliassen, A.B., all stated that the light which was observed on the port bow of the vessel…

Shields Daily News, 22 June 1889. Not a master this time — an able seaman, giving evidence at the Board of Trade inquiry into a wreck, and the reporter takes the trouble to write «an Austrian» after his name. This is the other half of the same world. The Adriatic did not only send captains into the British trades; it sent crews. George De Franceschi, A.B., is the first man of this surname anywhere in this archive who is named, dated, placed on a named ship, and quoted.

PASSENGERS ARRIVED ON THE 11th. By the Aust[ro]-Hung[arian] Carola from Syracuse: Rev. H. H. Mitchell, E. De Franceschi, L. Miceli and family, G. S. Cala…

Daily Malta Chronicle and Garrison Gazette, 13 October 1899. Twenty-one years after the Aquilone last appeared, somebody of the name is still crossing the middle sea under the Habsburg flag — this time as a passenger, on the Austro-Hungarian Lloyd's Carola out of Syracuse.

INWARD. A LIST of the Crew and Passengers arrived in the Ship Miowera of London, James Stott Master, of the Burthen of 1,911 Tons, from the Port of Melbourne to Sydney, New South Wales, 1893. SEAMEN'S NAMES · Station · Age · Of What Nation … Alex. McKinnon · Q.M. · 45 · — … P. Nicholson · ″ · 36 · — … G. Defranceschi · ″ · 28 · Austrian

For two days this archive has carried an unexplained line: «G de Franceschi, born 1865, New South Wales, 1893» — one Australian record fifty-seven years before every other, in the decade this family's own branch was moving down to the Kvarner, in the country the line eventually reaches. It was queued twice as a lead to chase. It is not a migrant. He is crew. The index field «Seaman or passenger» reads Seamen, and the station column, dittoed down from Alex McKinnon above him, reads Q.M. — Quartermaster. Twenty-eight years old, Austrian, at the wheel of a brand-new 1,911-ton Huddart Parker steamer on the overnight run from Melbourne to Sydney, on the sixth of January 1893. He was not going to Australia. He was passing through it, the way the master of the Aquilone passed through Cardiff and George De Franceschi passed through the Tyne. The lead is closed, and the answer is better than the question: the surname reaches Australia in 1893 not as a settler but as a sailor, and does not settle there for another fifty-seven years.

The obvious next question is her port of registry, because that is the one fact that would tell us whether the Aquilone was a Bakar, Rijeka or Lošinj ship. Lloyd's Register is the book that answers such questions, and its volumes are digitised. The full text of Lloyd's Register for 1875 and for 1877–78 was downloaded and searched. There is no Aquilone in either. The only near miss is the French Aquilon, of Jersey, 48 tons. That is not a failure; it is the answer. Lloyd's classed British ships and those foreign ships whose owners paid to be classed by London. An Austrian barque of 350 tons working the Levant grain trade and the Bristol Channel coal trade had no need of it: she would have been on the register of the Austro-Hungarian Veritas, and her papers are in Trieste and Rijeka, not in Cornhill. So the port of registry is a question for the Austrian register, and this archive now knows to ask it there.

Two things the British press supplies that the Austrian register would confirm. Her tonnage: 350 in the Cardiff Shipping and Mercantile Gazette of 17 December 1877, 351 in the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette of 7 June 1878 — the small discrepancy between gross and net that every ship of that period carries. And her Cardiff agent: «Aquilone, Aus, 350, Defranceschi, G. Montaldo & Co». Montaldo was one of the Italian shipping houses of the Bute Docks. A firm's ledgers are a better finding aid than a ship's name.

Not one article in the entire British and Irish newspaper archive mentions this family's village by name. Zero. Gračišće existed for the British press exactly as much as it existed for the clerk who wrote «Frieste» on Joseph's draft card.

The optical character reader turns «early rising» into «TARLY PISINO» and there was a brand of stove polish called Pisino Sun. Nine hundred and fifteen results, not one about Pazin. It is a useful reminder of what a keyword search in an OCR archive is actually doing.

Bakar had its own standing heading in the London shipping press. «BUCCARI. Arrived [March 5] from — Carl Emma, Holz, Trieste» (Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 21 March 1850). «BUCCARI. Mima, Bachich (Sept 2) Antwerp» (16 November 1869). Column after column, decade after decade, between Cagliari and Carloforte in the alphabetical run of ports. The town where this archive has twelve unplaced people of the surname, styled Dominus, was a port the London insurance market tracked daily, by name, for a century. And no Defranceschi ever appears under that heading. A combined search — the surname and the port — returns nothing. Whatever the Bakar household were, they were not clearing ships out of Bakar under their own name in the years the British press was watching.

CARDIFF EXHIBITION. ADDITIONAL ATTRACTION. Messrs Thompson and Shackell have arranged with Signorina Defranceschi to give a series of pianoforte recitals on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday afternoons in the Art Gallery on a magnificent harpsichord grand.

This piano is a fac-simile of the instrument presented to the Duchess of York on the occasion of her marriage. Signorina Defranceschi belongs to an old Cardiff family, and has recently taken her degree at the Vienna Conservatoire of Music. The first recital…

«An old Cardiff family.» In 1896 a Cardiff paper could write that phrase about people of this surname and expect its readers to know who was meant. And there is a marriage to go with it. Findmypast's Wales Roman Catholic Marriages has Emerico de Franceschi, married 1876 at St Peter's, Roath, Glamorganshire — the Catholic parish of Cardiff, in the year before the Aquilone cleared the Bute Docks for the West Indies. The transcript is outside this subscription's tier and has not been read.

…in a picture gallery, but one might go far and not meet with such a finished pianist as I heard on Saturday. Signorina Defranceschi, who was giving a pianoforte recital free to the visitors to the Exhibition, is a young lady who has passed with distinction…

A columnist wandering the Cardiff Exhibition, stopping in front of a harpsichord, and going home to write that he had not expected to hear playing like that. It is the only sentence in this whole archive in which somebody of the name is simply admired.