Historical Events in the Cator Family’s Occupation of  BPP

The Cator family were living in the mansion roughly between 1770s and the 1820s after that they decamped to their recently acquired estate at Woodbastwick in Norfolk. The family retained the mansion and estate land to let it out to a series of tenants.

Some interesting events of the time.

1785 Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom, a steam-powered machine mechanising weaving. The loom needed  improvement but by 1820 was in common usage.  Prior to mechanisation men were weavers, but this move to mechanical production of textiles brought women into the  factories to run the looms replacing men in the industry.

1787 Lieutenant William Bligh set forth on H M S  Bounty to obtain bread fruit plantings for Sir Joseph Banks. The idea was to transplant them to the Caribbean to provide a food crop for the slaves. There was a great deal of ill feeling on this long voyage and after collecting the cargo in Tahiti, in the Pacific Ocean, the ship sailed for the Caribbean. On 28th April 1789 Masters Mate Fletcher Christian and twelve of the crew mutinied and set Bligh and eighteen others adrift in a launch only 26ft long  near Tofua. Miracuorasly they all survived and landed in Timor forty-seven days later  after a journey of 3,618 nautical miles. The mutineers continued on in the Bounty to the Pitcairn Islands where they founded a colony, which wasn’t discovered until 1808.

1795 The British Royal Navy orders that lime juice rations are to be carried on all voyages of more than five weeks.  In 1794 testing of James Lind citrus juice remedy for scurvy had been proved successful. This would have been a breakthrough discovery at the time as so much long distance exploration was taking place.

1800 The world’s population reaches an estimated 880 million with Britain reckoned to have 10 million of them. London was the largest European city with 864,000 people. These figures were gathered in the first accurate census.