Lifeboat and Manby Apparatus Going off to a Stranded Vessel Making the Signal (Blue Lights) of Distress

In 1831 Turner sent this to the Royal Academy, and the strange word in its title, Manby, was current news. Captain George Manby had watched a ship break apart off Great Yarmouth in 1807 and afterwards devised a mortar that fired a rope out to a stranded vessel, so a line could be hauled across the surf without a boat launching into it. That same year, 1831, he was elected to the Royal Society for the idea. Turner shows the thing in use on a black, heaving night, the lifeboat pulling out and the blue flares that ships burned as a signal of distress. The paint is loose and smeared, more weather than drawing. John Sheepshanks, a Leeds cloth merchant who collected Turner, gave it to the museum in 1857.