Hello Arthur, My JOHNMAN family moved from Perthshire to Jarrow/South Shields rather later, between 1861 and 1871, probably via Aberdeen. Is your Captain McDearmid on the Lloyds list of master mariners dated 1869, produced by SOG on fiche and available at many local archives for viewing? Maybe not, if he was retired. http://www.nationalarchivist.com/ has an index of Deaths at Sea. Searching the index is free but you have to pay £6 to look at up to about 10 images of the original records within 30 days. It is a commercial site which has done a deal with the National Archives to put certain data on-line in a searchable form. Like 1837online, you need to get djvu viewer. In the period around 1870 there was a fashion, at least in some newspapers, of abbreviating Mc and Mac to M' so you might find he was M'Dearmid or other spelling such as M'Diarmid. Jeff