Feeding Nelson's Navy
Page 9
Ford took up the reins immediately, his first task being to take charge of the residue of public money which Nelson had been holding. This was 1050 ‘hard’ or Spanish dollars (a currency which was in common use in the commerce of the western Mediterranean and which was currently worth just over $5 to £1 sterling); James Cutforth, the agent victualler at Gibraltar had supplied Nelson with $6000, most of which he had issued to the pursers of his squadron to buy provisions. Ford’s accounts show that this was not reimbursements of specific sums spent, but small tranches of money for use when needed, varying from $200 for the frigates to $800 for the First Rate Victory.
Ford’s next task, having received a further tranche of $12,000 from Cutforth, was to pass some $3000 to the pursers so they could pay the crews their long-awaited money for short allowances and savings of provisions over the past year. This was something which, as Ford pointed out in his first progress report to the Commissioners for Victualling, was not covered in his instruction letter, but Nelson had given him written instructions to proceed. Another difficulty with his instructions which he pointed out in this report was the requirement that receipts for purchases should be witnessed by two commissioned or warrant officers. His buying trips to the Maddalena Islands had already demonstrated that this was impractical as he had only been able to buy cattle in small lots from different sellers at places some five or six miles from where the fleet was anchored, and since payment had to be made at the time of purchase (without any warning of the sellers arriving with their cattle), complying with this instruction would have meant officers having to attend him all the time. He would, he said, therefore fall back on the alternative of providing certificates of market prices from the consul or local merchants. His final comment in this report was that as four victuallers had arrived, the fleet ‘amounting to nine sail of the line’ was ‘now completed to five months victualling of all species’.29
This comment did not mean that his task was over for the time being. The nine ships he had referred to were only those with the commander-in-chief; there were a further thirty-three naval vessels in the Mediterranean at that time, and ‘complete of all species’ did not include wine or the desirable fresh food on which Nelson was so keen. There were also future supplies of beverages to be organised, so Ford now set off on a series of investigating and buying trips which continued throughout his service in the Mediterranean. His first trip, in March, was to Barcelona and Rosas, with a specific instruction to buy 200 pipes of wine, 30,000 oranges, 20 tons of onions and 50 sheep ‘for the use of the sick and convalescent’. Ford carried a letter of introduction from Nelson to the Rosas merchant Edward Gayner, which also expressed concern over the difficulties being raised by the Spanish authorities over supplying bullocks, sheep and other items.
The obstacles created by the Spanish authorities ranged from rigidly enforcing export duties on various products and export restrictions on live animals to treating naval personnel with a level of insolence which caused Nelson to complain to the British minister in Madrid, John Hookham Frere. Ford could do nothing about the insolence, but he shared with the locally-based British merchants an ability to think laterally when dealing with Customs personnel. One of the merchants in Barcelona, Walsh, had suggested that if necessary he would deliver wine by neutral vessels and Gayner had remarked that even if Spain declared war against Britain, he was confident that the wine he was holding for the fleet would not be confiscated, which implies that he knew who was ‘persuadable’. Ford, when reporting to Nelson from Rosas, remarked about cattle;
… they are in a great degree prohibited from exportation. The last that we had put on board the Active were without the public permission of the Revenue officers at Rosas tho’ with their knowledge and coment [sic].
This may explain the entry in his accounts, after ‘Duties on the live cattle’ and ‘Ditto on the slaughtered’ of ‘Paid Customs House officers’. On the matter of sheep, he said;
The sheep sent by the Niger for the use of the sick were obtained without the knowledge of the officers of Customs, who refused my application to ship so large a number in consequence of [an] order from the Spanish government. It was therefore necessary to provide them by other means.
Gayner seems to have been the most useful of the merchants in Catalonia and Ford was in regular contact with him during this period. As well as organising live beasts, vegetables and lemons and oranges, Gayner supplied wine itself and organised the manufacture and repair of casks. In June, when Ford was having difficulty in obtaining a supply of water at Rosas, Gayner agreed to fill casks and get them out to the ships at a better price than any of the other offers. He had also gone to the aid of the crew and passengers of the transport Hindostan after the fire, finding and paying for their accommodation and food. Nelson made sure that he was reimbursed for his costs in that matter, and was moved to write to the Admiralty secretary William Marsden and suggest that for this and for the fact that he ‘had on every occasion furnished us with articles prohibited by the Spanish government, without a motive of pecuniary reward’ Gayner should be given some sort of official recognition; the Lords of the Admiralty agreed with this suggestion and Gayner was presented with a 100-guinea silver cup. Nelson did not mention in that letter that Gayner was also feeding him with intelligence information, but he was clearly a very useful contact in what was about to become an enemy country. Alas, poor Gayner was thrown into prison in Barcelona when the Spanish declared war against the British in late 1804; so far the author has not been able to find out what happened to him after that.
There was, however, the constant concern over whether Spain would declare war against Britain and it was therefore necessary to explore other sources of supply. Apart from Sardinia and the Maddalena Islands, where Ford did buy substantial supplies, he began to investigate Sicily and much later, Tangiers. There is no indication that he ventured further east than Sicily or attempted to obtain provisions from Naples, where there was a risk that the French spies who infested the city would pass the word back to Bonaparte, who was thought to be seeking an excuse to invade. While Nelson was alive, the majority of purchases arranged by Ford were from Catalonia and the Maddalena Islands, but later he rented a house and storehouses in Palermo and made some purchases from North Africa. He was buying on a far greater scale than Bromley had done; within five months of his arrival, he had bought 1627 cattle, 219 sheep and lambs with fodder, 70,416 gallons of wine, 30,326 gallons of brandy, 99 cases of lemons, 21,300 oranges, over 30,000 pounds of onions, 913 cabbages and various other small amounts of ‘vegetables’ (undefined), soft bread, fresh beef, rice and sugar.
He continued to perform at this level for the rest of his time in the Mediterranean. We are fortunate in having a lot of documentation about him: his detailed appointment letter, which runs to twenty-four long clauses and reads very much like the printed instructions for victualling agents abroad, his accounts and his letter book. We also have some personal information, including his will, which shows that he left his house and other property to his sister Susannah. Neither she nor Richard ever married, which would explain why he was happy to move out to the Mediterranean for several years. At the end of 1807 both Ford and Geoghegan left the Mediterranean, Geoghegan to be agent victualler at Rio de Janeiro and Ford to return to London where the post of Accountant for Cash had fallen vacant. Ford was next in line for this job, which carried the substantial salary of £750. He may, by this time, have grown tired of dashing round the Mediterranean; he may also not have got on as well with Collingwood as he had with Nelson, or perhaps he thought it would be too long before another similar vacancy came up again. He was obviously a man of comparatively humble origins: despite his elevated position, he was still referred to as plain Mr Ford, not the coveted ‘Richard Ford, Esquire’ which would have marked his rise to the status of gentleman, and his letter requesting a pay rise when he was in London with Nelson in 1805, is in terms which are just on the borderline between due deference and grovelling.
Chapter 3
ADMINISTRATION ON BOARD SHIP
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LIFE AT SEA in the Georgian navy was conducted under four levels of regulations: those issued by the various departments of the Admiralty which applied to the whole of the navy; additional general orders issued by the commanders-in-chief of individual fleets which applied to all the ships under their command; additional general orders applying to ships in detached squadrons issued by the squadron commander; and additional instructions issued by the commanding officers of individual ships which applied only to that ship.
The regulations issued by the various subsidiary boards of the Board of Admiralty were known as the Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea (hereafter ‘the Regulations’). At irregular intervals, these were gathered together and re-issued in printed and bound form under an Order in Council; each version built on what had gone before and as time went by, each became more elaborate and detailed. For instance, the thirteenth edition, published in 1790, consisted of 232 pages, with a few printed forms bound into the volume at the appropriate places; by 1806 the fourteenth edition had almost doubled to 440 pages with a separate section of 29 forms at the back. These forms, which included such things as muster sheets and pursers’ accounting forms, were also available separately. It was, however, acceptable to use a hand-written version. Although it was the responsibility of each level of commanding officer to ensure that everyone below him adhered to the Regulations, separate chapters were addressed to the relevant commissioned or warrant officers.
General orders given by commanders-in-chief added to the Regulations, partly as a matter of that officer’s personal views on discipline and partly to cover local conditions. These orders were usually issued in the commander-in-chief’s name by the senior captain of the fleet; copies of these orders were entered in a separate letter book where they are typically shown as being addressed to ‘the respective captains’.1 For example, Nelson issued an order on procedures to be followed when obtaining provisions from locations where there was no agent victualler, this order stating firstly that it was the master’s responsibility to check the goods against receipts or bills of lading and to enter details of these transactions in the logbook, which was then to be signed as correct by ‘the Captain or other signing officers’; and secondly that all fresh beef coming on board was to be weighed ‘in the presence of a lieutenant or the master’ before the receipts were signed. A copy of each of these orders would be sent to each captain as it was issued, and a set of them to any new captains who joined the fleet. There were several of these orders immediately after Nelson joined the Mediterranean Fleet in 1803, with others following at longer intervals. This was the normal pattern when any commander-in-chief took over his new command.
One common general order from commanders-in-chief and squadron commanders referred to regular reports on amounts of provisions on each ship. These were usually required weekly and there seem to have been two basic formats: either the specific amount of each species of provision, or the number of days or weeks the items in store would last. Similar reports were required for other types of stores, such as cordage or sailcloth, the numbers of sick with their ailments, and finally the state of the ship itself. The object of this exercise was to allow the senior officer to decide when any particular ship should go into port, or when to organise transports to bring supplies. There are substantial collections of such reports for both Keith and Nelson and it is quite noticeable that the provisions reduce over the weeks and then suddenly increase for all ships at the point at which transports are known to have arrived. This checks out with the logs, and something else which is apparent is that somebody was organising transfers of provisions between ships in a squadron. Ship As logs will show her receiving, say, bread from Ship B and giving beef to Ship C, and at the same time passing pease to Ship B and oatmeal to Ship D. The captains also did it between themselves when the rest of the squadron was elsewhere: Ship E sights a sail which turns out to be Ship F, a signal requests a lieutenant to come aboard and a couple of hours later, some provisions are received or sent across. Almost as often one ship will go off to port for some repairs and bring back supplies for the others; this will most commonly be fresh vegetables or livestock.
THE CAPTAIN AND THE PROVISIONS
Fictional ships’ captains, when not playing whist or the violin, appear to spend all their time directing gunnery drill or engaging in bloody battles. Real ships’ captains, although they did do these things, actually spent a lot of time dealing with administration and paperwork, including that relating to the provisions. As well as checking those weekly reports for the commander-in-chief, which would have been prepared by the purser and, where water was concerned, by the master, and making sure that the appropriate vouchers had been exchanged when stores were passed from ship to ship, he was required to ensure that the right amounts of provisions came aboard in port or from victuallers (but forbidden to stop a victualler bound for another ship). Of course he had a clerk to do the main part of this work but his was the ultimate responsibility and his the salary that could have an imprest placed against it if the paperwork did not tie up.
The principle of imprests was one which operated throughout the Royal Navy, from warrant officers to admirals and from agents victualler to major contractors. Every time a financial transaction took place, the cost was charged to someone’s salary or business account and stayed there until their accounts could be passed. When the captain decreed an extra issue of wine for the sick, it was charged to his salary. When an agent victualler abroad made a local purchase and paid for it by a Bill of Exchange, as soon as the Bill had been presented to the Victualling Board and paid, that amount was charged to the agent victualler’s salary. When a victualling contractor like Basil Cochrane bought supplies with his own money, that amount was the subject of an imprest to his account. The system operated on a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ basis, and proving your innocence could take many years. In the middle of the argument with Basil Cochrane, the Victualling Board remarked to the Admiralty that it was their practice not to finalise accounts until the agency was closed. Basil Cochrane’s agency opened in 1796 and closed in 1806, by which time his account bore an imprest totalling £1,418,236.6.9. In that year, the total amount of imprests on agents and storekeeper’s accounts alone (ie not counting pursers or captains) was almost £11,000,000.2
The same principle was applied to warrant and commissioned officers. Their account started when the ship was commissioned or when they joined her, and did not cease until the ship was paid off, which could be many years later. Everyone w
as meant to submit quarterly accounts, but because the Victualling Board insisted on seeing original documents, and because no-one with any sense was going to risk sending those off by another ship which might be captured or suffer other disasters, those accounts went off with copy vouchers and sat in the Victualling Office limbo for years until the originals could be produced. Add to that the Victualling Board’s insistence on seeing and finalising both sides of every transaction and you get, as we saw with Heatley in Chapter 2, a situation where dozens of pursers’ accounts were held up because those of the agent victualler were not finalised. Small wonder that barely a day went by without the letter files containing a plea from some officer (or his widow or executors) for his accounts to be passed despite missing vouchers. (For more information on Bills of Exchange and imprest accounts, see Appendix 5.)
Another little bit of penny-pinching from the Victualling Board was their reluctance to allow the possibility of accidents. If, say the Regulations, through the carelessness of the men handling it, some item of provisions was lost when coming aboard, it was to be charged to their wages. This happened on Leviathan in 1804, when a bag of bread was dropped between boat and ship, a common enough situation when two men were tossing it and one let go too soon. The fuss about this went on for days, while the rescued bagful was spread out to dry and inspected and a decision made on how much was still usable.3 And all of this, of course, was the captain’s problem, as he had to make the decision on who to charge and how much, and then pass a voucher to the purser who also had to account for it. It was also technically the captain’s decision, when pork ran short, to declare that beef should be served instead; of course what really happened here was that the purser would report on the shortage and suggest the substitute and the captain would give him a written order to do it. The same applied when overall shortages occurred and food had to be rationed.