Lady of St Kilda
Sketch of the Lady of St Kilda by Jno. R. Browning c 1890
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| History | |
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| England | |
| Name: | Lady of St Kilda |
| Owner: | Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 10th Baronet |
| Builder: | Robert Newman |
| Launched: | 1834 at Dartmouth, Devon, England |
| Fate: | Wrecked November, 1844 |
| General characteristics | |
| Tonnage: | 139 tons |
The Lady of St Kilda was a schooner which served from 1834 before being shipwrecked off Tahiti shortly after 1843.
It is notable for its cultural importance to Melbourne, Australia where it was moored in the 1840s. Several places in bayside Melbourne, including the suburb of St Kilda, and the former municipality the City of St Kilda (now part of the City of Port Phillip) take its name from the ship, its owner and captain.
The schooner was bought by Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, a member of a prominent British political family in 1834. Built in Dartmouth, Devon, England to carry fruit from the Mediterranean to London it was named Lady of St Kilda for the island of St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland to commemorate a visit to the island by his wife, Lydia, in 1810. Acland had named the vessel after Rachel, Lady Grange, who in 1734 was imprisoned by her husband and a group of Jacobite Noblemen on the St Kilda archipelago in Scotland for 17 years. The Lady of St Kilda is the only woman in Scotland known to have had three funerals.
Lady Grange is reported by Tom Steele to have been a bad tempered woman, who overheard her husband James Erskine, Lord Grange, plotting a rebellion in 1731. After she threatened to expose the conspirators, the Jacobite noblemen who were assembled at her house in Edinburgh decided to imprison her and pretend she was dead. Her fake funeral was held the next day. Rachel was first taken to the Isle of Heisker, off North Uist, then to St Kilda, where she was a virtual prisoner for eight years, from 1734 till 1742. She was then brought to Uist, then to Assynt, and next to Skye, where she learned how to spin wool. While on Skye, Rachel managed to smuggle a letter to her cousin, the Lord Advocate, who sent the Royal Navy to search Skye for her, but no trace of her was found on Skye, and her captors, the Macdonalds, had her taken back to Uist and from there to the Vaternish peninsula, where she died in 1745. Her captors were still afraid their false imprisonment of her would be discovered, so they held a second fake funeral for Rachel and buried a second fake coffin at Duirinish, while her body was interred at Trumpan, above Ardmore bay, on the Isle of Skye. Rachel stayed longer on the isle of St Kilda, the most remote of the Western Hebridean islands, than any other outsider, except for the Ministers who were sent there.
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