Cap-Haitien, Haiti: the surgery of HMS Bulldog. Watercolour by E.L. Moss, 1865.

The Dublin-born naval surgeon Edward Lawton Moss (1843-1880) spent much of his brief career in foreign waters Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean, with a period on land running the Esquimalt hospital on Vancouver Island, British Columbia (1872-1875). Moss was the medic on the British Arctic expedition of 1875-6, which was cut short by scurvy, and about which Moss wrote and illustrated Shores of the Polar sea (1878). In 1878 Moss was in the Dardanelles on the fringes of the Russo-Turkish war of the time. In 1880 he was one of 280 men on HMS Atalanta who disappeared without trace off Bermuda (Appleton, op. cit.)

HMS Bulldog was Moss's first ship. In 1865 it was patrolling the seas around Haiti, trying gunboat diplomacy on the rebels warring against the Haitian government of the day. The commander noticed that a British merchant steamer RMS Jamaica Packet was being harried by an armed warship controlled by the rebels, and went towards the coast to protect it. Unfortunately Bulldog then itself ran aground on a coral reef. Unable to move, it was a sitting target for the rebels. The Bulldog crew lived up to the name of their ship and defended themselves vigorously with the artillery available. A bitter battle ensued. Edward Lawton Moss, aged 22, was the surgeon on board: he had to perform two amputations on the day of the battle. Four of his patients died after surgery, and a further five men were injured. The surviving members of the Bulldog crew eventually made for the boats, in order to row along the coast to a part of the island under the government's control. On leaving the ship at 11.30 pm on 23 October 1865, the captain lit a fuse, and a few minutes later Bulldog was blown out of the water. On their return to London the commander and navigator of the Bulldog were submitted to a court-martial and reprimanded. Appleton found evidence that the Jamaica Packet was not as innocent as the officer claimed, as it was gun-running for the government

The painting shows Moss's operating room below deck on HMS Bulldog. On the right is a ladder leading up to the hatch, through which light floods down from the deck above. On the left is the operating table, with supports at either end to secure the patients whose limbs Moss had amputated. On the floor is a quantity of blood. On the ground on the right are three cannon-balls, and a fourth is in the foreground. Moss presumably painted this while waiting for the "Abandon ship", in the knowledge that, a few hours later, the site he was recording would be blown to smithereens

23rd Oct 1865.

1 painting : watercolour ; sight 6 x 11 cm

The surgery, H.M.S. Bulldog. Cape Haitien 23rd Oct 1865. E.L. Moss M.D. R.N. Lettering on front of mount, possibly repeating inscription on verso of watercolour (not seen)

Paul C. Appleton, Resurrecting Dr. Moss: the life and letters of a Royal Navy surgeon, Edward Lawton Moss MD, RN, 1843-1880, Calgary: University of Calgary Press ; Arctic Institute of North America, 2008 (on Moss)

William Schupbach, 'Running aground in Haiti and in cyberspace', Wellcome Library blog, 26 February 2009, archived at : https://wayback.archive-it.org/16107/20210314081914/http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2009/02/running-aground-in-haiti-and-in-cyberspace/

Wellcome Collection 44658i