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THE MAKING OF CORNELL PLANT THE PILOT
Author's note
MICHAEL GILLAM
Although Cornell Plant died some ten years before I was born, he had an important place in my early memories of family visits to his younger brother, Uncle Charles Plant, There I heard the story of this grand old man of the river and his untimely death and that of his wife on their way home from China. In later years, when his papers were passed down to my parents I became more interested, particularly in the account of his adventures in Iran, where I had spent a year working with the Iranian Navy.
When the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich expressed an interest in his papers and undertook to take some of them into safe keeping, the valuable contribution he made towards the opening up of the Yangtse Gorges to steam navigation became all too evident. Eventually, his remaining books, papers, photographs and other memorabilia came into my possession and, once I had retired, gave me the opportunity to study them in depth.
But it was not until I read the article on Cornell Plant by AC Bromfield and Rosemary Lee in the Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society [Hon.Ed.-Vol.41] that I became aware of the world wide interest in his life and achievements. This article dealt mainly with his time in China, with only a brief mention of his early life. It also posed a number of questions about him and his wife Alice. The papers that he left behind him and the information that has come to light through the research of Plant enthusiasts over the years enables some of the gaps in his life to be filled and shines some light on the making of Captain Samuel Cornell Plant - 'Plant the Pilot.'
The early days
Cornell Plant was the third of four children born to Samuel Plant, a Suffolk farmer's son and his wife, Harriet, neé Bennett, daughter of a Suffolk village baker. Perhaps it was the proximity of the North Sea that caused Samuel Plant to make his career in the Mercantile Marine