The War of Wars (29 page)

On 13 March 1793 the brig
Scourge
captured the first prize of the war, a much larger French privateer. A month later the
Phaeton
, a 38-gun frigate, caught a heavily armed French privateer accompanying two Spanish prizes stashed with gold, one of them carrying £1 million worth: Hood, as commander-in-chief, was entitled to £50,000; the captains of the squadron accompanying the
Phaeton
received £30,000 each (around £6 million at today’s values). Thus could colossal fortunes be made in a single engagement: it was a powerful incentive for captains and crews.

The first significant engagement of the war took place in May off Start Point, a spectacularly beautiful section of the Devon coast, when the 36-gun
Nymphe
, of 938 tons with 240 officers and crew under Captain Edward Pellew, soon to become a legend, spotted the
Cleopatre
of smaller size with a crew of 320. The
Nymphe
promptly gave chase and caught her up. The ships’ complements saluted each other: ‘Long live King George!’ called Pellew’s men. Captain Mallon’s men responded, ‘
Vive la Republique!
’

After this classic gentlemanly exchange, for three-quarters of an hour they exchanged broadsides at point blank range, until the mizzen mast of the
Cleopatre
came crashing down; at around the same time her steering wheel was disabled and she swung around at right-angles to the
Nymphe
, her jib boom locked against the mainmast of the enemy ship. Pellew expected to be boarded, but the French officers had all been killed. Seeing the confusion, he ordered his men aboard the
Cleopatre
.

In just a few minutes the British had seized control of the ship from the disorganized French crew and pulled down her colours. Captain Mallon, mortally wounded, attempted valiantly to destroy his signal codes by eating them, but chewed up his own commission instead. Of
the 320 aboard, sixty-three had been killed and wounded, while the
Nymphe
had suffered fifty casualties. It was hardly the greatest of victories, achieved against a smaller ship in a strictly conventional manner, but it was the first of the war. King George III came down in person to Portsmouth to congratulate Captain Pellew.

The principal fleet was the Channel Fleet (also known as the Western Squadron and the Atlantic Fleet). By 1795 the Channel Fleet had twenty-six ships of the line, including seven giant three-deckers, seventeen frigates, a hospital ship and two fireships. By 1805 this had increased to thirty-five ships of the line and seventeen frigates. Its main job was to blockade the French fleets at Brest, Rochefort, L’Orient and Cherbourg and the Spanish port of Ferrol.

To the west, the sixteen-ship Irish Squadron consisted principally of one ship of the line and ten frigates, its task primarily to protect Ireland from invasion. The Channel Islands Squadron, which was based at Guernsey, had eleven ships, including three frigates: its main purpose was to use its proximity to the French coast to spy on shipping movements.

Much more substantial was the North Sea Squadron, which consisted of fifty-six ships, including twenty ships of the line. There was also a small Downs Squadron, with just one ship of the line, to patrol inshore in the Channel, and a force at Leith. A Baltic Fleet was also intermittently formed.

The Mediterranean Fleet was the second most important in the navy. It had sixty-two warships in 1797, including twenty-three ships of the line and twenty-four frigates. (By 1812 this had risen to a staggering ninety ships, twenty-nine of the line and twenty-one frigates – the biggest fleet.)

In the West Indies there were the Jamaica and Windward Island Squadrons: the Jamaica Squadron had seven ships of the line and fifteen frigates by 1797. The Leeward Islands Squadron had twelve ships of the line and sixteen frigates. There were also two small squadrons to the north based at Halifax in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. The substantial East India Squadron consisted of thirty-two ships, including ten of the line and seventeen frigates in 1797.

These formidable fleets and the 120,000 seamen that manned them faced a French fleet of some 241 ships, including eighty-three of the
line and seventy-seven frigates, and some 60,000 seamen, based principally at Brest, Rochefort, L’Orient and Toulon. The British merchant marine was colossal in size, consisting of some 16,000 ships, employing nearly 120,000 men.

For a young midshipman joining a British navy schooner, for example, it proved an exciting world of professionalism, occasional cruelty, and self-contained claustrophobia amid the almost familial intimacy of a ship’s company. It could be hard going at first, although the navy was hardly the sink of institutionalized brutality that is popularly conceived. The sloop was a small, fast ship. It had two masts, each rigged with fore and aft sails. Its twenty-eight 9-pound guns were assembled on a single deck. The quarters for the midshipmen were damp and dark, below the gun-deck, though more spacious than for the seamen, and were only dimly illuminated by candles and the few cracks of light that showed from the decks above. The lonely midshipman, on his first few nights aboard, would have found the quarters stiflingly close, hunched in a ‘cot’ – a hammock of canvas stretched across a frame – with only a shelf for his possessions. In port the seamen’s cots actually touched each other. At sea there was much more room, as men took turns to take the watch.

About half of the crew would have been ‘impressed’ – most of them merchant seamen. More than four-fifths of ordinary seamen, and half of able seamen, were aged under twenty-five. Only about a fifth were married. Boys of between six and eighteen were to be found aboard ship, many of them engaged simply in playing as well as learning the ropes. There were also plenty of animals aboard, including the inevitable rats, but also such livestock as cattle, sheep, pigs and goats, for food. British ships were however, kept rigorously clean.

The damp below the decks could be pervasive, depending on the condition of the timbers. In summer, especially in the tropics, the heat and stench could be overpowering, although in winter the cramped conditions meant that men rarely suffered from the cold. As a midshipman became accustomed to being awoken at 6 a.m. to hurry about his new duties, he would quickly have understood the no-nonsense approach to naval discipline, although its harshness varied enormously from ship to ship. Such discipline and inflexible routines were considered
essential to keeping order among so many men at such close quarters.

In less well-ordered ships, young midshipmen were at the mercy of ‘oldsters’ – men passed over for preferment who would probably have to spend the rest of their lives in their jobs. Even young midshipmen could be venomous. As one seaman observed:

We had a midshipman on board of a wickedly mischievous disposition, whose sole delight was to insult the feelings of seamen and furnish pretexts to get them punished . . . He was a youth of not more than twelve or thirteen years of age; I have often seen him get on to the carriage of a gun, call a man to him, and kick him about the thighs and body, and with his feet would beat him about the head; and these, though prime seamen, at the same time dared not murmur.

‘Cobbing’ – being beaten by a stockingful of wet sand – was a frequent form of physical abuse. The men’s routine sexual needs were usually accommodated in port by allowing prostitutes on board, a practice the vast majority of captains turned a blind eye to, and even regulated to reward the deserving. The cry ‘show a leg’ in the morning derives from the need to check whether a man or a woman was in a cot, the latter being allowed to sleep on undisturbed. The ‘cockpit’ of a ship derived its name from the place where the all-too-frequent brawls between the working girls or ‘port wives’ occurred.

As for the quality of the food aboard ships, much depended on the climate, whether the ship was close to port, and whether the food was properly stored. Without refrigeration or canning the possibilities for deterioration were much greater. The purser, whose job it was to provide the food, was one of the ship’s company, and he too was liable to be judged by his peers.

The rations were the subject of strict written regulations: a packet of biscuits each day for every seaman, which in practice was often sodden and weevil-ridden; and a gallon of small beer, a very weak version of the real drink, no more really than water flavoured with hops. The beer ration was often changed to a pint of wine or half a pint of rum, the latter usually being mixed with water and called grog, the seaman’s
favourite drink. Each seaman was also entitled to 4 pounds of salt beef, 2 pounds of salt pork, two pints of peas, 3 pounds of oatmeal, 6 ounces of butter and 12 ounces of cheese a week. Flour, suet, currants and raisins were also issued. Where possible cabbage and greens were provided, along with the lime and lemon juice that had largely conquered the most dreaded disease, scurvy.

Although in practice particular items often went short and food often went bad, these were substantial enough rations – as they had to be to keep the crew strong and able-bodied. The threats to food were legion, according to one purser. Biscuit was endangered:

by its breaking and turning to dust; of butter, by that part next to the firkin being not fit to be issued; of cheese, by its decaying with mould and rottenness and being eaten with mites and other insects; of peas, oatmeal and flour, by their being eaten by cockroaches, weevils and other vermin, and by that part at the top, bottom and sides of the cask being so often damaged, as not being fit to be issued; besides the general loss sustained in all these provisions by rats, which is very great . . .

Punishment was a fact of life, but flogging was not all that frequent, except on a minority of ships. A typical average was some fifteen floggings per ship in nine months, usually of between twelve and twenty-four lashes, although occasionally far more. This made severe punishment a significant part of navy life, but hardly a daily occurrence. Captain Frederic Chamier describes the first flogging he witnessed as a young midshipman:

The Captain gave the order ‘Give him a dozen.’ There was an awful stillness; I felt the flesh creep upon my bones, and I shivered and shook like a dog in a wet sack. All eyes were directed towards the prisoner, who looked over his shoulder at the preparations of the boatswain’s mate to inflict the dozen: the latter drew his fingers through the tails of the cat, ultimately holding the nine ends in his left hand, as the right was raised to inflict the lash. They fell with a whizzing sound as they passed through the air, and left behind the reddened mark of sudden inflammation . . .

At the conclusion of the dozen I heard the unwilling order. ‘Another boatswain’s mate!’ The fresh executioner pulled off his coat. The prisoner had said nothing during the first dozen, but on the first cut of his new and merciless punisher, he writhed his back in acknowledgement of the pain; the second stripe was followed by a sigh; the third by an ejaculation; and the fourth produced an expression of a hope of pardon. At the conclusion of the dozen, this was granted, and the prisoner released.

Another observer remarked that after two dozen lashes: ‘the lacerated back looks inhuman; it resembles roasted meat burnt nearly black before a scorching fire.’ This was undoubtedly very harsh, but not more so than many punishments ordinary people could expect on land. Provided punishment was meted out fairly, and not excessively, it was probably supported or at least accepted by the majority of the men, who disliked their fellows getting away with serious offences, particularly major theft, for which the cat-o’-nine tails was prescribed, or less serious ones, such as malingering.

There were lesser forms of beating for more minor offences – such as minor stealing, always deeply unpopular on board ship, for which a man could be made to walk a gauntlet with his shipmates hitting him with knittles or small ropes. Liars were publicly humiliated by being made to clean the heads (latrines) for several days. Other punishments included ducking or a public scrubbing – usually for a dirty man – or wearing the cangue, a wooden collar with a cannonball attached, for several hours.

The terrifying ordeal of being flogged around the fleet, applied only in the most serious cases of mutiny, was extremely rare, although performed with sadistic precision to ensure the victim did not die – for example 200 lashes would be applied at a time on three successive fortnights. Keelhauling – being dragged under the length of the ship – is believed to have died out in the seventeenth century, when it was also extremely rare. Only desertion at sea, murder, sodomy, and extreme cases of theft were punishable by death. Mutiny was often not punished at all if non-violent and the purpose was the removal of a hated officer.

The ships of the British Navy ranged in size from the minuscule gunboat to the magnificent first-rated three-deckers that provided admirals and their officers the space to live in state. In 1808 a first 120-gun three-decker was built. There were also 90-gun second-rate three-deckers, whose hulls were tall and short, and therefore sailed badly; these were being phased out, as were the still more unwieldy 80-gun three-deckers (although 80-gun two-deckers were more manoeuvrable). The bulk of the line-of-battle ships were, however, 74-gun two-deckers; 65-gun two-deckers were a cheaper version of these, and regarded as very poor quality; they were being phased out. Smaller 50-gun two-deckers were short, but of slightly better sailing quality.

Frigates, with their speed, manoeuvrability and gunpower, were the real stars, acting in flotillas or single-ship actions. The 38-gun frigate was the most popular of these, with some eighty in service, compared with the increasingly obsolete 44-gun frigates, the still popular 40-gun frigates and the smaller 28-gun ships. The cheap, quickly built and even more nimble sloops (of which there were about 200 in 1801) also performed a major role. Bomb vessels had been created to act as mortars capable of firing explosive shells at enemy ports. Brigs (with fourteen 24-pound carronades), schooners (with four to six guns), cutters (with ten 18-pound carronades), and gunboats with a single gun made up the complement.