Death far from home

Foveran Parish Church, built in 1794 to replace a mediaeval church, lies a couple of miles from Newburgh on Ythan. The small graveyard surrounding the church contains many old gravestones, mostly those of farmers but also those of a number of mariners. At least two of them mark the graves of men who died at sea, far from home.

One commemorates Capt. John Thomson, Master of the ship Omar Pasha who died in at sea, in 1861, at Latitude 58 S. Longitude 98 W., just as he was about to round Cape Horn.

The Omar Pasha was a fast clipper ship, launched in Aberdeen in 1854 for use on the Australian and China trade routes. The manifest of the ship homeward bound from Melbourne in 1864 was: 3,550 bales of wool, 14,000 hides, 80 casks of tallow, 20 tons spelter, 4,000 ounces gold and 12 passengers.

The Omar Pasha, named after the Ottoman General Omar Pasha (1806 - 1871) who had defeated the Russians at Crimea and was thus a hero in Britain, had been built by the Walter Hood shipyard in Aberdeen. The Hood shipyard built many of Aberdeen's finest sailing ships, including the clipper Thermopylae the great rival of Cutty Sark.

The other family gravestone includes the name of John Allan, Shipmaster of Newburgh who died in 1870 in Latitude 21 degrees 53 minutes south and longitude 99 degrees 58 minutes east, in the Indian ocean west of Australia. He was possibly on board the John Bunyan a clipper carrying tea and silks from China.