by Roy Adkins
The Newfoundland Banks were as treacherous as storms, and John Howe, a marine, who sailed from Torbay to America on board the Defiance in June 1779, considered that ‘every thing went on very well three or four weeks; by this time we were got on the banks of Newfoundland; here we was becalmed and as it were buried in a thick fog for a fortnight’.12 Luckily, they reached their destination in safety, but later victims included HMS Scout, which is remembered by a plaque in a Dorset church that commemorates Henry Roberts Carpenter, eldest son of Thomas and Charlotte Carpenter, ‘aged about 14 years, a midshipman on board H.M.S. Scout sloop of war, which foundered at sea in November 1801 on the Banks of Newfoundland in her voyage to Halifax in Nova Scotia when all hands perished’.13
The worst of conditions could strike close to home ports, something Lieutenant James Gardner of the Blonde frigate experienced when sailing from Portsmouth to Guernsey:
After going through the Needles in the evening, it came on thick weather in the first watch; and about eleven the wind, at SE, began to blow a hurricane, with snow so thick that we could not see half the length of the ship. We sent topgallant yards and topgallant masts upon the deck, and hove the ship to under storm staysails. The topsails and courses [lower sails] were frozen as hard as board, and being short of complement it took nearly the whole of the middle watch before they could be furled. One of our main topmen was frozen and died soon after. The officers were also aloft, and all hands suffered most dreadfully. I was speaking to the man at the wheel when a sheet of ice fell out of the mizen top and knocked both of us down. It gave me a severe blow on the shoulder and the other a staggering thump on the back. I was so benumbed when I got below that I had hardly life in me.14
Some of the bad weather hit vessels when they were sailing from one climatic zone to another. In a letter to his wife Betsey, written on 17 March 1801, Thomas Fremantle described the snowstorms they encountered as they approached Copenhagen, before Nelson’s bombardment of the city: ‘We have since we sailed experienced a second winter; it has snowed every day since, and the ship’s company are hacking from morning to night with coughs.’15 A few days later Midshipman William Salter Millard said that they ‘reefed the courses in the midst of a storm of hail, snow, and rain, assisted by large pieces of half-frozen ice from the rigging’.16 The seaman Henry Walsh, on board the Ulysses in 1813, was also in the Baltic in March and pointed out that ‘the frost and snow is so excessive in this country in the winter seasons that ships is generally froze up and is then obliged to stop there all winter … I have also known the armourers or smiths forge to be placed on the ice convenient to the ship and there work all winter.’17
Of all the weather conditions, lightning strikes were probably the most dangerous and terrifying because they could occur with little warning, and the damage was unpredictable. Even in the Mediterranean storms could be savage, as George Watson discovered:
We steered toward Zante, off which place we experienced a most dreadful thunder storm; it came on about 8 P.M. and increased until midnight, when it was at its height; when it first commenced, the hands were aloft taking in sail, and before they could get that duty performed, the lightning burst upon the main mast, and by it the men on the main top gallant yard, were all knocked off, and scorched in a pitiable manner, and tumbling into the top, and crosstrees, some of them were maimed for life.18
It was not just the sailors exposed on the masts who were at risk, because lightning endangered everyone on board. While returning from Jamaica in 1801, Alexander Scott, who was Nelson’s chaplain at Trafalgar, was asleep in a cabin when lightning struck:
The electric fluid rent the mizenmast, killing and wounding fourteen men, and descending into the Captain’s cabin, in which Mr. Scott was sleeping, communicated with some spare cartridges and powder horns, which lay on a shelf immediately over his head. By this means he sustained a double shock, the electric fluid struck his hand and arm, passing along the bell wire, with which they were in contact, and the gunpowder exploding at the same time knocked out some of his front teeth, and dreadfully lacerated his mouth and jaw. The lightning also melted the hooks to which the hammock was slung, and he fell to the ground, receiving a violent concussion of the brain. His cabin was found in flames, himself in a sheet of fire, and he was taken up senseless and apparently not likely to live.19
Lightning conductors, though not properly understood, were effective, as Henry Walsh witnessed when sailing in April 1815 in the Ulysses from Cape Coast in Ghana:
There was nothing very remarkable on our passage excepting most dreadful thunder and lightning, greater than I had ever seen before. There was balls of fire struck our lightning conductors which happily conveyed them down our rigging and fell overboard without any damage either to our ship or men. Those lightning conductors above mentioned is made of brass or copper links or chains, which goes over the ship’s royal mast heads down the rigging, and hangs over the ship’s side. This chain attracts the lightning or fire, if it comes over the ship, and so conducts it overboard into the water and by this means preserves both ship and men from ruin.20
Too often, though, lightning conductors were only rigged to the masts after a storm had begun or else were set up incorrectly, or not at all, so that there were frequent, alarming strikes. In these incidents, with all the gunpowder on board, ships were lucky if they did not catch fire and even blow up. In the East Indies in 1798, the Resistance frigate was destroyed by such an explosion after a lightning strike. Two crew members were fortunate to be rescued, and they revealed what had happened, otherwise the Resistance would have been added to the long list of ships that mysteriously disappeared at sea, with all hands lost.
Particularly during storms, sea water and rainwater poured into the ships, even if the hatchways were battened down. The men were then ordered to pump out the water, which was the most exhausting work they ever had to do. The pumps were chain pumps, unsophisticated, theoretically simple to repair, but inefficient, working on the same principle as hauling up water from a well in a bucket. A chain of scoops inside a pipe acted like a series of buckets, raising the water from the lowest part of the ship and dumping it in a cistern at the top, from where it drained overboard. The chain passed over a sprocket wheel, and the pump was powered by men turning a handle attached to the axle of this wheel. Even with extensions to the handle, a considerable effort was needed to turn the wheel and raise the whole weight of water in the pipe. It was gruelling work that left men with strained muscles, torn ligaments and hernias, and in dire emergencies men would die of exhaustion.
Marmaduke Wybourn described the pumps to his sister Emily when sailing from Egypt to Malta in HMS Madras: ‘We sprung a dangerous leak, which however did not alarm us much until we were overtaken by a storm, the most tremendous. It lasted many days, and our leak increased from one to four feet of water in an hour with all the pumps going, and I must tell you that the pumps of this ship are calculated to throw out three tuns of water a minute.’21 In February 1811, at Plymouth, the Amethyst frigate was blown on to rocks in a violent gale, which Robert Hay recounted:
One part of the carpenter’s duty who keeps watch is to try hourly how much water is in the ship and make a report of the same to the officer commanding the watch that the pumps may be set agoing when need requires. Being a carpenter of the watch I accordingly sounded a few minutes after she first struck and found 3 feet water in the hold. I reported this to the captain who had assumed the command and the chain pumps were set a going. By the time she got broadside on the water had increased to 5 feet. It was therefore considered in vain to labour any longer and the pumps were accordingly abandoned.22
On abandoning ship, Hay took the chance to desert.
Unless the leak was massive, the pumps usually had a good chance of holding their own until the weather improved. The marine Thomas Rees, on board the Temeraire, described another storm at Plymouth some two years earlier: ‘By eight at night it blew a perfect hurricane. We had then three feet water in our lower
decks, and two in the middle: it had entered through the hawse-holes,* and through the bow-ports also. The sea kept rolling in so fast, that we expected every moment either to go to the bottom, or to be driven on shore. All hands were at the pump: every exertion was made to save our ship and our lives.’23 They continued to pump until the storm abated at five the next morning, Christmas Day.
Another Christmas Day storm, in 1781, was experienced by the marine corporal John Howe in the West Indies on board the Robust: ‘We sprung a leak under the starboard chesstree which the carpenter could not get at to stop so that the ship made water very fast, and one half of the ship’s company obliged to keep constantly pumping and with hard labour could hardly keep her from gaining on us. We had 4 feet of water in the hold for five days, and the gale continued with very little alteration.’24 They obtained a spare sail from a passing merchant ship to place over the leak and made their way to Antigua, meeting up in English Harbour with HMS Janus, which had fared even worse, as Howe learned:
She having sprung a leak also and hove part of her guns overboard to prevent her from sinking, they as well as us were continually pumping with all their pumps. Six men died at their pumps with hard work, and we had one died. 16 days and nights we were constantly at it, and not a man could go to bed all this time, or be from the pumps more than twenty minutes at a time every other 4 hours when it was his watch below, and the other 4 hours was his watch on deck, and we must be there to work the ship.25
The Janus had left New York in early December, accompanying a convoy of ships, and the weather deteriorated all month. On the 18th the master’s log recorded: ‘two foot 10 inches [water] in the well, both chain pumps at work, two hand pumps at work’.26 The next day they hove overboard several cannons, and from the 20th the pumps were in constant use. On 8 January they reached English Harbour, four days before the Robust, but still kept the pumps going. On the 15th ‘came on board thirty men from the Royal Oak to assist pumping, also twenty-nine negroes’.27 While the pumping continued, the remaining guns, casks and shingle ballast were removed, but on the 29th they were ‘employed in getting on shore shingle ballast, at 7 A.M., found the ship to make so much water that the Blackmen could not keep her; got twenty men from the Robust and twenty from La Nymph, to assist in pumping in the night.’28 In February, the ship was cleared of the last stores and ballast, enabling the caulkers and carpenters to make the ship watertight, and pumping finally ceased in April.
While lightning strikes and accidents sometimes caused ships to disappear without trace, vessels also sank rapidly in storms if they struck rocks or icebergs, if they were overwhelmed by waves, or if water broke through a leaky hull. Captain John Nicholson Inglefield was a survivor of one such tragedy, and therefore a rare eyewitness. In September 1782 his ship, the 74-gun HMS Centaur, was accompanying a convoy from Jamaica to Britain when they were struck by a terrific storm off the Newfoundland Banks. About two in the morning conditions abated when suddenly, Inglefield related,
A gust of wind, exceeding in violence every thing of the kind I had ever seen, or had any conception of, laid the ship upon her beam ends. The water forsook the hold, and appeared between decks, so as to fill the mens hammocks to leeward: the ship lay motionless, and, to all appearance, irrecoverably overset. The water increasing fast, forced through the cells of the ports, and scuttles in the ports … I gave immediate directions to cut away the main and mizen-masts.29
To his dismay, the foremast and bowsprit went overboard as well: ‘The ship upon this immediately righted, but with great violence; and the motion was so quick, that it was difficult for the people to work the pumps. Three guns broke loose upon the main deck, and it was some time before they were secured … The officers who had left their beds (when the ship overset) naked, in the morning, had not an article of clothes to put on, nor could their friends supply them.’30 After daybreak, several merchant ships offered assistance, but Inglefield refused as he expected his distress signals to be heeded by HMS Ville de Paris, which was in sight, but tragically no help came. Their situation looked bleak – guns and gun-carriages were thrown overboard, and the men were constantly pumping. The next morning Inglefield was informed that there was 7 feet of water in the hold, the pumps were wearing out, and all the food, rum and water were ruined. In desperation, they tried bailing out the water with canvas buckets:
The water by noon had considerably diminished by working the buckets; but there appeared no prospect of saving the ship if the gale continued. The labour was too great to hold out without [drinking] water; yet the people worked without a murmur, and indeed with cheerfulness … but as the evening came on, the gale again increased … The Centaur laboured so much, that I had scarce a hope she could swim ’till morning. However, by great exertion of the chain-pumps and bailing we held our own, but our sufferings for want of water were very great, and many of the people could not be restrained from drinking salt-water.31
Just as their situation was improving, the weather deteriorated once more, and water came pouring in. It was obvious to Inglefield that the ship was beginning to sink: ‘The people, who till this period had laboured as determined to conquer their difficulties without a murmur or without a fear, seeing their efforts useless, many of them burst into tears and wept like children … Some appeared perfectly resigned, went to their hammocks, and desired their messmates to lash them in; others were lashing themselves to gratings and small rafts; but the most predominant idea was, that of putting on their best and cleanest clothes.’32 The crew numbered nearly six hundred, and there were passengers as well, including Captain George Augustus Keppel. There was no concept of lifeboats, but Inglefield ordered their three working boats to be lowered over the side and rafts to be made: ‘While these preparations were making, the ship was gradually sinking, the orlop decks having been blown up by the water in the hold, and the cables [thick ropes] floated to the gundeck. The men had for some time quitted their employment of bailing, and the ship was left to her fate.’33 In the bad weather one boat was smashed, and there was little time left: ‘As the evening approached, the ship appeared little more than suspended in the water … It was impossible indeed for any man to deceive himself with a hope of being saved upon a raft in such a sea; besides that the ship in sinking, it was probable would carry every thing down with her in a vortex.’34
Having placed armed guards in the two remaining boats, Captain Inglefield decided that this was the time for him to leave the sinking ship. Many jumped into the sea to try to get into the boats, but he managed to escape with just a dozen men on board, and they never saw the final moments of the warship in which everyone else perished. They were at the mercy of the prevailing winds ‘in nearly the middle of the Western Ocean, without compass, without quadrant, without sail, without greatcoat or cloak; all very thinly cloathed, in a gale of wind, with a great sea running!’35 After a fortnight Thomas Mathews the quartermaster died, and Inglefield admitted that the rest of them were convinced they would soon follow, though ‘it was somewhat comfortable to reflect, that dying of hunger was not so dreadful as our imaginations had represented. Others had complained of the symptoms in their throats; some had drank their own urine; and all, but myself, had drank salt-water.’36 Shortly afterwards, land was spotted – they had reached the Azores.
HMS Ville de Paris and the nearby Glorieux warship did not come to the assistance of the Centaur, because those ships also perished in the hurricane, as the Annual Register reported:
A Danish merchant ship from the West Indies took a man off a fragment of wreck quite insensible, and for some time motionless. The Dane carried him to the hospital at Havre de Grasse, where he recovered, and was sent in a Russian ship to the English Admiralty. His name was Wilson; he had been on board the Ville de Paris, and when she was going to pieces clung to a piece of the wreck. He perfectly recollected that the Glorieux had foundered: he saw her go down, the day preceding that on which the Ville de Paris sunk.37
Over one thousand lives were lost in
a single storm, far more than in any battle.
Apart from storms, a whole range of weather conditions threatened the lives and health of seamen, who were constantly exposed to the elements. Modern technology has produced myriad man-made, lightweight fabrics that can cope with the most difficult conditions, but all that a sailor of Nelson’s navy had to protect him were materials like cotton, wool, linen, leather, straw and silk. No uniform existed for seamen until 1857, but on land they stood out because of the sort of garb they chose to wear. People on land at the time wore ‘long clothes’ – long coats or jackets with long tails, knee- or calf-length breeches and stockings. When Robert Hay deserted his ship at Plymouth, he took with him his best clothes, but reluctantly sold them and instead ‘purchased a long coat, breeches and other corresponding vestments, and assumed as much as possible the looks and gait of a landsman’.38 A typical seaman’s garb was described by Charles Pemberton: he was persuaded to join the navy by ‘two well-dressed sailors, that is to say, two clean white-trowsered, neat blue abundant-button jacketed, glazed-hatted, long pigtailed, mahogany-wainscot-faced quid-cheeked men’.39
Seamen preferred short jackets, usually blue in colour, with sleeves that could be rolled up, and wide, loose long trousers, often white, that could also be rolled up. Also favoured were short waistcoats, checked shirts and neckerchiefs. The traditional petticoat breeches – very wide breeches down to the knee – were gradually going out of use. The physician Thomas Trotter was critical of the men’s ability to dress appropriately: ‘They are too indolent to suit their dress to circumstances, unless they are forced to do it, nor is anything more common than to see them with a pair of thin linen trowsers on in the severity of winter, and a pair of greasy woollen ones in the hottest weather.’40