Jack Tar

by Roy Adkins

  I was in the first watch between the hours of eleven and twelve o’clock. I was going forward in the galley with a lanthorn and lighted candle in it, when I got forward near the manger. I perceived the prisoner Wm Bouch laying over a sow pig on his belly on top of her, and she was laying on her side. I immediately on perceiving him to be certain of it, took the candle out of the lanthorn, and held it close to the prisoner, I was so shocked at the moment conceiving the action he was about, that it took me about two seconds to articulate when I recovered. The first thing I said was ‘you beast’.83

  Kirkwood told the court that he had then called for witnesses and also for the surgeon to examine the man. The cross-examination continued:

  Q. Did the surgeon examine the pig as well as the man?

  A. No.

  Q. Are you certain that the man had entered the pig’s body?

  A. I cannot say.

  Q. When he drew from the pig and you saw the state of his penis, did you observe whether it came from the pig’s body or not?

  A. I could not see if he was entered into the pig as he was laying upon her belly, but I conceive from the way he drew back, the pig’s grunting at the time, and his remaining perfectly quiet, that he was in the pig.

  Q. What was done with the pig?

  A. Hove overboard next day.

  Q. Do you know if the prisoner is a foreigner or a British subject?

  A. By his description in the ships books, he is from Whitehaven in the west of England.84

  Bouch was found guilty and sentenced to 300 lashes, to forfeit all his pay and to be imprisoned in solitary confinement for a year in Marshalsea Prison in Southwark.

  The women who lived with their husbands certainly had next to no privacy, though the exact conditions they lived in reflected their husbands’ status. Commissioned officers and some warrant officers had cabins at the stern of the ship, and others at the bow end. The captain’s cabins were spacious, but most other cabins were small and formed by flimsy partitions that could be removed to provide more space when the ship went into battle. Such accommodation was not luxurious, as the chaplain Edward Mangin found when he joined the Gloucester in 1812:

  My accommodation, for the double purpose of repose and study, was all that could be expected; a short description of my transom cabin will show whether or not it was calculated to answer the end proposed. This apartment was formed into what appeared to be a room of about 8 feet broad and long; and nearly 6 feet in height: one end and one side being composed of the ship’s timbers; the other end, and the external side, of canvas strained in wooden framework; with a door of the same materials, and a small window in each, opening on hinges, and intended to admit as much light as could enter from the stern-port-hole; and the after-port on the ship’s starboard side: which latter was occupied by a 32-pounder, and open only in fair weather. The stern-port was still more frequently closed to prevent the sea, when heavy, from rushing in.85

  This was about the best Mangin found to say about his temporary home, and his description continued:

  I have said that this tenement appeared to be eight feet long, and as many wide: inside, however, it was not quite 5 feet broad at one end; and less than 2 at the other: the ship’s timbers projecting in the form of a shelf, on which my cot rested, when taken off the hooks in the day-time: and then the interior of this retirement was, in shape precisely, and in size, nearly the same as a grand-piano-forte: for it should be observed, that, when the cot was slung, as it is termed, the entire space was occupied.86

  Like Mangin, officers usually slept in wooden cots, with a mattress, which were suspended from the deck beams, while the men slept in hammocks. Lack of space, though, was not the only factor that made Mangin’s cabin uncomfortable:

  At midnight, and at 4 o’clock in the morning, the watch is called, and in a voice designedly of most alarming loudness. This order to turn out, as may be conjectured, is not obeyed without considerable noise. Another inconvenience, which affected me somewhat, arose from the hot and foul air of the region allotted to me; for on the same deck with me, when the crew was complete, slept between five and six hundred men; and the ports being necessarily closed from evening to morning, the heat, in this cavern of only 6 feet high, and so entirely filled with human bodies, was overpowering.87

  The wives of warrant officers at least had a few comforts in such cabins, but not the wives of the lower-ranking sailors, who shared their husband’s hammock. For these women, there was little space and less privacy, as seen in the court martial at Hamoaze in December 1794 of able seaman William Read of HMS Marlborough. Thomas Roach, of the gunner’s crew, related what he observed: ‘I was in the best bower tier and I turned out when I heard the noise, which happened with his, the Prisr, Girl, she being down in Mr. Cenyllins cabin and the Prisoner could not get her to come to bed, and he fetched her out by force and got her down to his berth in the sheet tier. He then wanted her to go to bed and she would not go, without his beating of her. She began to make a noise, and Mr Pardoe said he would not have such noise there.’88

  Midshipman William Pardoe confirmed what happened: ‘On the 24th Decer about eleven o’clock at night the Prisoner was going to bed and making a noise in the tier when I order’d him to go to bed quietly.’89 He was asked what was meant by the prisoner making a noise, to which he replied: ‘He was beating his wife and ordering her to go to bed.’90 Midshipman John Wilson was also called as a witness: ‘On Wednesday night the 24th Dec. the prisoner and his wife were going to their hammock and were quarrelling. Mr Pardoe desired them to be silent. They continued still making a noise, he threatened to turn them out of the tier, and sent for the Master at Arms, and the first time he quieted them; after which they began to make a noise again.’91 William Read was not being tried for beating his wife, but for mutinous expressions and contempt for his superior officer, of which he was acquitted.

  This incident highlights the crowded sleeping arrangements for the ordinary seamen and marines, where any disturbance affected a great number of people. The scheme for placing hammocks varied a little between ships, but with limited room there was not much scope for variation. Hammocks were the only viable method of providing somewhere to sleep for so many men in a confined space, with the added benefit that they could be rolled up and stored during the day. The upper deck, exposed to the weather, could obviously not be used, and so in a three-decker warship like the Victory, the middle and lower gun decks were for sleeping. The orlop deck below, regarded as a more desirable berth, was usually given to midshipmen and some petty officers, who also slept in hammocks. The men could not sleep where they wanted. They were allocated a precise spot, whose size and position reflected their rating and their watch. Where they slung their hammock was not necessarily where they ate and relaxed with their messmates and where they kept their personal possessions in a ditty bag or sea chest. As Samuel Leech remarked, ‘every hammock has its appropriate place … the beams are all marked; each hammock is marked with a corresponding number, and in the darkest night, a sailor will go unhesitatingly to his own hammock’.92

  Hammocks (also known then as hammacoes) were made of canvas into which was placed a thin mattress – the bed – and a blanket. The length of hammocks was reduced over time, reflecting the seamen’s habit of shortening them to make sleeping more comfortable. From 7 feet long in the late eighteenth century, their length was gradually reduced by the end of the war to 5 feet 6 inches, about the average height of the men. The width for a hammock space was 14 inches, but midshipmen might have 20 inches and a petty officer, such as the master-at-arms, 28 inches. Petty officers were also placed near the sides of the ship, which gave them slightly more room. Surviving plans of hammock arrangements show that they were squashed together in rows, but as most warships worked on a two-watch system, half the seamen would be on watch at any one time. The hammock spaces of men from each watch were alternated in each row, so that when the ship was at sea each man had an empty hammock space on either side, giving him th
e equivalent of 28 inches, rather than his allotted 14 inches. In port there was seldom any need to continue working in shifts or watches, which meant that sleeping arrangements were very cramped, especially with prostitutes added to the throng. The marines were frequently allotted an area between the seamen and the officers.

  The hammocks themselves were not the most comfortable of beds, but the weariness of the men made any sleeping place attractive, as Basil Hall remarked of his experience as a midshipman:

  Most people, I presume, know what sort of a thing a hammock is. It consists of a piece of canvas, five feet long by two wide, suspended to the deck overhead by means of two sets of small lines, called clews, made fast to grummets, or rings of rope, which again are attached by a lanyard to the battens stretching along the beams. In this sacking are placed a small mattress, a pillow and a couple of blankets, to which a pair of sheets may or may not be added … the whole of the apparatus just described occupies less than a foot and a half in width, and … the hammocks touch one another. Nevertheless, I can honestly say, that the soundest sleep by far, that I have ever known, has been found in these apparently uncomfortable places of repose; and though the recollection of many a slumber broken up, and the bitter pang experienced on making the first move to exchange so cozy a nest, for the snarling of a piercing north-west gale on the coast of America, will never leave my memory, yet I look back to those days and nights with a sort of evergreen freshness of interest.93

  The hammock that Hall described was slung in the cockpit of HMS Leander, his first ship on entering the navy in 1802. In a letter to his father he explained that it took him some time to get used to his new sleeping arrangements:

  I went to my hammock, which was not my own, as mine was not ready, there not being enough of clues [clews] at it, but I will have it tonight. I got in at last. It was very queer to find myself swinging about in this uncouth manner, for there was only about a foot of space between my face and the roof; so, of course, I broke my head a great many times on the different posts in the cockpit, where all the midshipmen sleep. After having got in, you may be sure I did not sleep very well, when all the people were making such a noise going to bed in the dark, and the ship in such confusion. I fell asleep at last, but was always disturbed by the quarter-master coming down to awake the midshipmen who were to be on guard during the night. He comes up to their bed-sides and calls them; so I, not being accustomed to it, was always awaked too. I had some sleep, however, but early in the morning, was again roused up by the men beginning to work.94

  Accidents and injuries could occur with hammocks, particularly when they were close to open hatchways between decks. The surgeon of the Canopus recorded that ‘Richard Cronan, boy … received a wound of the scalp upwards of nine inches in length in consequence of a fall from his hammock on the main deck down the main hatchway to the orlop.’95 Sleep could also be disturbed by the wind, rain and even waves breaking over the ship and coming down through the open hatchways. In 1799 in his standing orders for HMS Amazon, Edward Riou specified when canvas screens could be used:

  Screens are never to be admitted except where women sleep, and then only during the night, and to be taken down (not rolled up) during the day. Any man or men who sleep near hatchways or scuttles who feel any draught of wind or who are subject to be wet in their hammacoes from seas or rain, are to acquaint the first lieutenant, [so] that painted canvas screens may be neatly nailed up to make their berths as comfortable as possible. If they are not neatly furled during the day and fine weather, but hanging down, and preventing the free circulation of air, they will be taken away.96

  The main idea behind the circulation of air below decks was prevention of disease, which was thought to be a result of bad air or ‘miasmas’, but with no effective heating in much of the ship there was a delicate balance between too little ventilation and letting in too much wind and weather. Usually the areas where the hammocks were slung rapidly became hot and airless, as Edward Mangin had found. In the day, the hammocks were taken down and the lower decks were aired as much as possible with a canvas construction called a windsail, which Basil Hall recorded in another letter home:

  All the men’s hammocks are brought upon deck, and laid in places at the side for the purpose, both to give room for the men to work under the decks, and to give them air. All the decks are washed and well scrubbed every morning, which is very right, as they are often dirtied. There is a sort of cylinder of sail-cloth, about two feet in diameter, which is hung above the deck, and is continued down through the decks to the cockpit. The wind gets in at the top, and so runs down and airs the cock-pit, which is a very pleasant thing, down here, at the bottom of the ship.97

  The thickness of the atmosphere below decks was not helped by the livestock, which were stowed in any odd place where they would not obstruct the day-to-day running of the ship. Some places, though, proved unsuitable and Admiral Lord St Vincent issued an order about the stowage of pigs to his Mediterranean fleet in 1798:‘It having been ascertained by recent experience that the hogsties under the forecastle are a nuisance and extremely injurious to the sick berths, they are immediately to be removed and the place where they stand to be purified.’98 This followed on from a previous order to move the sick-bay to beneath the forecastle to improve the air for the sick.

  In some ships the men were allowed to sleep on the deck itself, if they wished, rather than in hammocks, but generally only in special circumstances, such as sailing in tropical waters. They might then be allowed to set up hammocks on parts of the open deck, or sleep on the deck itself, when it became too stifling below. Even in relatively benign Mediterranean waters life could be very unpleasant, as Midshipman George Allen described in a letter home from Malta in 1808:

  Our crew at this place are very sickly owing I believe to the scarcity of wind and the unwholesomeness of the water, which together with the intolerable heat is sufficient to put any person out of order – I have as yet escaped nor indeed do I think it will reach me at all. I constantly bath every morning before sunrise and again in the evening after sunset, eating scarcely any fruit and keeping as much out of the sun as possible, so that (as you may perceive), I am grown quite a Surgeon.99

  In general, though, Allen liked warm climates and the opportunity to see new places, as he had written in a letter to his family from Gibraltar two years earlier: ‘I can suppose you sitting round a fire as big as our Galley, shivering and shaking like so many frozen Bears, whilst I am perspiring up to the eyes, eating delicious grapes a half-penny a tub full, “Do not you envy me” You may judge that I am not very melancholy at the thought of leaving England, I assure you [I] am quite the contrary, as I shall now have the opportunity of seeing the World.’100

  For the families, and especially the wives, who were left behind, their feelings were not of envy as George Allen had joked, but of worry. William Wilkinson’s wife Sarah was in a state of constant anxiety, and she poured out her emotions in a letter to him in mid-December 1809:

  It is now a fortnight since I heard from you and then your letter was dated a week back. I cannot tell what to attribute it to, as I see by the papers there have been several actions from off Rockfort [Rochefort], and that you have sent in a small French prize. I am not willing to think my dear husband would let an opportunity slip that could afford me the pleasure of hearing from him and knowing he was well. I have a thousand fears for your safety, first your being surrounded by the French land and this dreadful stormy weather you have had makes me fearful it may have blown you on rocks off the French shores, then again I think you may be pursuing some of the enemy ships. Hearing there is so many of the French ships nearby, and some ready for sea, I think perhaps they may all come out some of these dark nights, and that you might be forced to engage them. God forbid that any of these should be the case, or that any harm should happen to you; my dear husband is and ever will be my prayer. I am afraid you will have had a bad night again tonight as the wind is getting up dreadfully. There has been drea
dful work among the shipping in the Downs in particular. Whether it is the sad accounts I have heard and my being unhappy not hearing from you I know not. But I have no peace sleeping or awaking, for every night I have such unpleasant dreams. I often think if it should please the Almighty to spare us both to meet again I never would suffer you to leave me if, by my persuasions, it could be done.101

  Map of France

  SIX

  BELLS AND WHISTLES

  Having at the beginning of every week some twenty or thirty petty offences to enquire into and punish consisting of all the lower classes of vice such as drunkenness, lewdness, theft, gambling, quarrelling, neglect, mutiny, disobedience, equivocation, lying &c. – militating not only immediately against the health and good order of the ship but against her safety also.

  One of Captain Rotheram’s ‘Growls of a Naval Life’1

  ‘A vessel of war contains a little community of human beings,’ Samuel Leech remarked, while summarising the daily round of life aboard a warship:

  This community is governed by laws peculiar to itself; it is arranged and divided in a manner suitable to its circumstances. Hence, when its members first come together, each one is assigned his respective station and duty. For every task, from getting up the anchor to unbending the sails, aloft and below, at the mess-tub or in the hammock, each task has its man, and each man his place. A ship contains a set of human machinery, in which every man is a wheel, a band, or a crank, all moving with wonderful regularity and precision to the will of its machinist – the all-powerful captain.2