Frigate Commander (4 page)

If ever I command an English 28 gun Frigate; and should fall in with a French 36 gun frigate, I hope I shall then remember the above.

2

From Liverpool to London (March 1786 – May 1789)

By the middle of March 1786, the
Perseus
was back in Liverpool, where several of the crew, given leave on shore, fell victim to crimp.
¹⁵
By the time Moore learned of this, the men were on board a merchantman destined for Guinea and the West Indies, almost certainly on a slaver. He quickly rescued the men, to the apparent chagrin of the ship’s merchant. On the brighter side though, Moore renewed his acquaintance with the Boates family and in particularly the three daughters

all agreeable, but the second is very handsome ... I am half in love with her, but I do not believe she cares a halfpenny for me. It is said she is to be married to a young gentleman of fortune whose name is Pilson Price ... an officer in the Inniskillen Dragoons.

After a brief patrol in the Irish Sea, the
Perseus
returned to Liverpool where Palmer married the eldest daughter of a fellow naval Captain, Richard Smith. Moore, as Palmer’s First Officer, was invited to the wedding ceremonies at Smith’s house in Cheshire and he was delighted to find that the beautiful but tantalizingly unavailable Ellen Boates was also there. He may have had mixed feelings, however, when Palmer stated that he intended to take his new bride on a honeymoon cruise in the
Perseus
– even if two of the Boates girls were to accompany her. Moore certainly had misgivings about the proposal, and it does seem that Palmer planned the cruise as an event to impress his new wife and her guests. Such plans often backfire, and this one certainly did so.

On 9 July, the
Perseus
left Liverpool bound for the Isle of Man. On arrival at Douglas, Palmer sighted an Irish Revenue cutter flying what transpired to be the adopted pennant of the Irish Revenue Service.
¹⁶

Not recognizing the pennant, Palmer ordered Moore to take a boarding party across and have the offending flag removed. Moore collected a party of seamen and rowed across to the cutter, where his request that the flag be removed was taken as an affront to the national pride of the cutter’s crew. Moore took one look at the furious seamen of the cutter, gathering solidly behind the vessel’s Master, and the small group of already inebriated men from the
Perseus
, and decided that withdrawal was the prudent option. The matter was not mentioned again. From Douglas the honeymoon cruise continued north to the west coast of Scotland, where Moore spent several days on shore visiting family friends, including the Hon. Keith Stuart and the Earl of Galloway. Hiring a horse, and packing a clean shirt in his pocket, he rode thirty miles to Barnbarrow, becoming deeply affected by the landscape:

I never saw a more wild and barren country than this part of Galloway, for miles all round I saw nothing but hills covered with heath and scattered rocks.’

By August, the honeymoon trip had sailed south again, to Dublin, where Moore once again found himself in trouble with his Captain. Palmer had already become a little tetchy upon learning the identity of the people that Moore had been visiting on shore in Scotland.
¹⁷
At Dublin, however, while Palmer and his guests went ashore for several nights, Moore, the Marine Lieutenant and the ship’s Purser went ashore to dine with a mutual friend, becoming heavily engaged with
‘plenty of good claret’
. As the hours drifted by
‘very jovially’
, the party decided that rather than return to the ship that night, they would find beds in a nearby hotel. Arriving back on board the following morning, Moore soon found himself summoned before Captain Palmer. The latter had learned of Moore’s use of the ship’s cutter and was furious, because he had only used the much less convenient pinnace. There was little that Moore could say to this, because the decision to use the pinnace had been Palmer’s own. As Palmer’s invective grew more heated he began to comment on Moore’s performance as his Lieutenant. Stung, Moore retaliated by demanding to know if he was being accused of neglect of duty – a disciplinary offence – at which point Palmer calmed down somewhat, finishing with a derogatory remark about Moore’s attention to duty.

On this rather unsatisfactory note, the discussion ended, but a sour atmosphere appears to have remained as the
Perseus
returned to Liverpool. There, after a few days on shore, Palmer again resolved on another trip with Mrs Palmer and the Boates girls on board. Moore was dismayed when Palmer ordered the ship to sea with unusual haste while the guests settled themselves in the Captain’s cabin. Unfortunately, by the time that the
Perseus
cleared the Mersey, she was pitching uncomfortably in a north-westerly wind. Palmer decided to anchor and a deeply uncomfortable night was spent with the ship rolling heavily and the ladies suffering miserably from seasickness. Crestfallen, Palmer ordered a return to Liverpool. After a night recovering from this ordeal, the persistent Palmer announced that they should try once again for a cruise. Moore was aghast. He believed that there was now insufficient wind to give them headway against the tide. Sure enough, outside the harbour the
Perseus
began to drift until she grounded on the Cheshire side of the channel. The crew struggled to strike masts and yards but, in spite of their efforts, as the tide dropped, the ship lay over on its side at an alarming angle. To make matters worse, they were surrounded by quicksand and unable to shore up the ship. This uncomfortable position was endured until 9pm that night, when the ship again began to right herself. The pumps were started, and masts and yards swayed up. Then, following the light of a lamp placed in one of the ship’s boats, they slowly groped their way into deeper water. Unfortunately, they quickly ran onto another shoal, and the ship heeled over with startling speed. The tide, however, was continuing to rise, and by midnight the
Perseus
was again afloat. With the pumps going continuously, she limped back into Liverpool.

The following morning, the powder was sent ashore for safety’s sake, and the
Perseus
was hauled into St George’s basin and lashed alongside one of the wharves.

Here the ship was stripped down for repair and here also Moore, left in charge of the ship, found himself embroiled in an incident with a discontented crew:

We were obliged to hire a cook room to boil the ship’s company’s provisions in; when the Pease were boiled they were brought down in a tub, which circumstance displeased some of our lads so much (as they were ashamed to have their Pease brought down before the crowd of people which were constantly about the ship) that they called out to throw them over the wharf, which request was immediately complied with by the marine who was sentry.

As this was happening, Moore was below getting dressed. Hearing the commotion he hurried up on deck and instantly ordered the marine put in irons. The men intervened, trying to explain that the marine was not to blame as he was only doing what they had demanded. The ship’s Master, a man by the name of Fryer, fearing that the matter was about to get out of hand, took up a rope’s end, and set about the spokesmen, driving the remainder from the deck. It was the first time that Moore had faced such a situation and he had doubts as to whether he had handled the situation well or even appropriately. He sympathized with the men’s sensibilities, but also felt that the marine’s action had been contrary to his role in helping to maintain order on board the ship. When Palmer returned on board, Moore reported the situation to him and advised that it would be best to let the people have their provisions

raw as we could not dress it on board. He agreed ... but at the same time I was happy to hear him express a determination to punish the marine for presuming to throw the Pease off the Wharf. Accordingly after he had been in irons three days he received eighteen lashes at the Gangway. For my own part I was under some apprehensions of a riot ... however our sentry kept the crowd off and there was not a murmur.

Such actions would not be likely to endear Moore to a crew and he probably knew it. As his career developed, he was to develop a much stronger empathy with the men under his command, and simultaneously a loathing for the use of the cat.

The
Perseus
continued in dock until November 1786, during which time Moore was introduced to the young Dr James Currie, a specialist on the treatment of fevers, who shared his passion for the poetry of Robert Burns. The two became lifelong friends. In February, the
Perseus
was ordered back to Plymouth to be paid off and Moore, lacking employment, returned to his parents’ house in London. England was still at peace and there seemed little prospect of a war to improve his career prospects. He decided to devote himself to the study of Latin but found

... that my mind from want of exercise was very languid, and that it was very necessary for me to accustom it to exertion.
Then, in September 1787, there was a confrontation with the French
... on account of the Dutch troubles ...
¹⁸

and naval forces were mobilized.

At the first sign of a re-armament, Moore applied to the Admiralty for appointment to a frigate, and was made Second Lieutenant of the 28-gun
Dido
, commanded by Captain Charles Sandys. Days later he travelled down to Portsmouth in company with his new commander, only to find that the frigate lay in the harbour without her topgallant or top masts. Before she could be prepared for sea the diplomatic crisis passed and orders arrived from London for many of the ships to be decommissioned. The
Dido
herself was not included in this and it was rumoured instead that she was to be sent to the West Indies. Moore was despondent.

I have not made the most of my time, that is certain, for although I am but a very superficial scholar I am notwithstanding by no means a remarkable good seaman. My Father does not wish me to go out in the
Dido
(which it is thought is bound for Jamaica) as he has an idea that a war is not very distant in which case I should stand a very good chance for getting into a flag ship
¹⁹
, if I am at home when war commences; whereas if I am unluckily abroad I am out of the way of my interest and unknown to the commanding officer on the station. I on the other hand am afraid of giving umbrage to the Admiralty by applying to be superceded. I therefore shall not apply for that purpose by letter but leave it to my friends to work under hand if they can so manage it.
²⁰

However, Moore’s friends do not seem to have pressed his case, for in December came news which deepened his gloom:

Yesterday we heard the accounts of 17 lieutenants being promoted to the rank of masters and commanders and about a dozen masters and commanders were promoted to the rank of post captains, besides a few midshipmen were made lieutenants. My father on hearing this wrote to me lamenting that he had not applied at first on the alarm of war to get me into a flag ship. I certainly must agree with him that it would have been the preferable situation.

Moore’s response to this was, typically, to blame himself for his own lack of promotion
:

I see numbers of lieutenants who seem to me to possess more useful knowledge than myself, this plagues me and ought to spur me to exertion.

But somehow, he found this difficult. Like many naval officers, Moore was drawn to the prospect of achieving fame through naval victory, yet paradoxically he also regarded fame as a hollow thing and as a result could put little enthusiasm into achieving it. Kicking his heels, he could only envy the call of other officers to an apparently meaningful activity.

21 December 1787:

The
Vestal
frigate sailed this day, she is going on some secret mission, supposed to be bound to China. The Hon. Lieutenant Colonel Cathcart is in her. The ship is commanded by a fine young fellow Sir Richard Strachan.

Moore’s admiration for Strachan was to increase. While waiting for orders, Moore attempted to find entertainment by attending the Portsmouth theatre, but grumpily found the players

tearing Shakespeare’s Richard the 3rd to pieces ... an uncommon silly farce took place of the tragedy at which I found no entertainment.

A different diversion was offered when Moore received an invitation from the banker Robert Drummond, a family friend, to visit his house at Cadland, in Hampshire. Cadland, an estate with grounds which had been created by the landscape gardener Lancelot Brown a few years earlier, lay close to the northern shore of the Solent and Moore was permitted to take one of the ship’s boats to land him nearby. There, Moore found himself dining with Sir William Howe, the General who had commanded an element of the British army during the American War and, perhaps more importantly, Philip Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty. Moore took the opportunity to express to Stephens his concern about being sent out to Jamaica in the
Dido
and learned that his father had already raised the issue. Affably, the Secretary to the Admiralty reassured the anxious Lieutenant that he would manage the matter in some way that would not offend Lord Howe (First Lord of the Admiralty). The visit was therefore apparently useful, and Moore was much impressed by the charm of his host, whom he described as a
‘sweet character’
. However, in somewhat Pooterish style, Moore was disappointed by the intellect of his companions: