by Roy Adkins
The details of the day-to-day running of a ship were set down by most captains in what were termed his standing orders – fixed orders that all the captain’s officers had to follow, in addition to the official printed Admiralty rules known as Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service at Sea, to which there was a major revision in 1806 and slight amendments two years later. The standing orders varied from ship to ship, yet much similarity existed because captains had themselves experienced such orders while serving as midshipmen and lieutenants. Junior officers commonly made their own copy of these orders, so by the time they were promoted to captain they might have accumulated a mass of orders as a basis for their own regime.
The standing orders were prominently posted, for those who could read, but the men who were illiterate became acquainted with the routine through experience, especially if they contravened the orders. When on board the Unité, Robert Wilson noted that ‘There are, to be sure, printed directions for to be observed by all King’s Ships, but then, generally speaking, most officers have plans of their own, which the crews over which they command do follow; and it’s a common saying, “different ships, different rules,” for it must be considered that every commanding officer of a vessel of war is like unto a prince in his own state and his crew may be considered as his subjects, for his word is law.’3 In William Dillon’s view, ‘one of the most unpleasant duties of a captain is to train the crew of a vessel which has been disciplined by another commander. If his regulations differ from what they have previously been used to, it occasions unpleasant occurrences, murmurs, and sometimes even mutiny.’4
Captains generally divided the crew (except for the idlers) into two watches, and they worked in alternating shifts. ‘The ship’s company,’ Robert Wilson said, ‘are equally divided, not only in numbers but also in a fair manner (so that one half has as good men as the other) into two separate watches, called the starboard and larboard’5 – larboard being the old term for port side. The alternating watches worked for four hours and then had four hours off, seven days a week, so that the men never had a lengthy period of sleep. Two shorter shifts, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., were called the dog watches and broke this daily pattern to ensure that men were not constantly on duty during the same periods. Daniel Goodall complained about this routine because they had so little sleep:
The common system of watch adopted even now [he was writing in the early 1850s] in small vessels is that which divides the whole of the crew into two watches only … The result of this arrangement was that the half of all those who kept watch were on deck night and day, and that one watch during each alternate night had not more than three and a-half hours in their hammocks and six and a-half on the night following – that is, supposing the exigencies of weather or other causes did not necessitate a call for all hands, in which case every one of the crew liable for duty in reefing and furling, &c., was obliged to turn out. This system of watch is indeed the only one available in small vessels, where a third of the crew would certainly be found inadequate to the necessary safety and working of the ship.6
In a few of the larger ships, particularly in the last years of the war against Napoleon, a three-watch system was used, which Goodall much preferred: ‘Where the crew, as in a vessel of the first class like the Temeraire, is numerous enough to allow of subdivision, no better plan for the comfort and consequent efficiency of the men could be devised than that adopted by Captain Marsh [the Temeraire’s captain when Goodall joined in 1801] – namely, of dividing the ship’s crew into three watches.’7 To Goodall, the benefit of the three-watch system was that they worked fewer hours and could sleep much longer:
Only a third of them were required to be on deck night and day, and consequently every person who kept watch had at least six hours rest during the night, under ordinary circumstances. This is a subject of deep interest to seamen … it is a subject I have often heard discussed in the course of my service, both by officers and men, and the general opinion I found was, that it could be made quite practicable in all ships of seventy-four guns and upwards which were properly manned according to the full complement allowed by the rules of the navy.8
Time on board was measured according to the number of bells and the watch, rather than by hours and minutes. Regulated by sand-glasses, time was announced every half-hour by a number of strokes on the ship’s bell. Using this system, one bell was half an hour and two bells was one hour into a watch, three bells was one and a half hours, four bells was two hours, five bells was two and a half hours, six bells was three hours, seven bells was three and a half hours, and finally eight bells was four hours – the end of the watch. Being able to tell the time depended not only on counting the number of bells but also knowing which watch it was. A further complication to telling the time by bells and watches was the two consecutive two-hour dog watches, during which four bells indicated the end of the first dog watch, but instead of five bells being struck half an hour later, the sequence was one bell, two bells, three bells, and lastly eight bells to mark the end of the second dog watch.
The first watch started in the evening, at 8 p.m., so six bells in the first watch was 11 p.m. This watch ended at midnight, and the middle watch began, until 4 a.m. From then until 8 a.m. was the morning watch, followed by the forenoon watch from 8 a.m. to midday. From midday to 4 p.m. was the afternoon watch, and the two dog watches then followed, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Despite the fact that the first watch started at 8 p.m., the ship’s official day began at noon rather than midnight, although this was changed in 1805. The probable reason for this start of the calendar day was that whenever possible the ship’s position was measured at noon by observing the angle of the sun with the horizon at its highest point. The observance of noon was something of a ceremony, as Basil Hall recounted:
In one way or another the latitude is computed as soon as the master is satisfied the sun has reached his highest altitude in the heavens. He then walks aft to the officer of the watch, and reports 12 o’clock, communicating also the degrees and minutes of the latitude observed. The lieutenant proceeds to the captain, wherever he may be, and repeats that it is 12, and that so-and-so is the latitude. The same formal round of reports is gone through, even if the captain be on deck, and has heard every word spoken by the master, or even if he himself assisted in making the observation. The captain now says to the officer of the watch ‘Make it 12!’. The officer calls out to the mate of the watch, ‘Make it 12!’. The mate, ready primed, sings out to the quarter-master, ‘Strike 8 bells!’. And lastly, the hard-a-weather old quartermaster, stepping down the ladder, grunts out to the sentry at the cabin-door, ‘Turn the glass, and strike the bell!’.9
This noon observation produced an accurate point in time during most twenty-four-hour periods, from which the sand-glasses and any clocks and pocket watches on board (usually less accurate than the sand-glasses) could be checked. Although seamen did buy pocket watches, officers were more likely to afford such timepieces and to opt for a more accurate mechanism rather than an expensive-looking case. John Peace, a Scottish gunner, recorded in a notebook around 1782: ‘This is the number and maker’s name of my watch: James Hinton maker London number 6584’,10 a watchmaker known to have been working in London then. In surviving manuscripts, it is noticeable that officers usually recorded time as on land, whereas a seaman referred to bells and watches, so he might talk of ‘between one and two bells in the first watch’, while an officer would say ‘at a quarter to nine at night’. Since pocket watches were unreliable, an officer might actually be less accurate than the sailor who was referring merely to a half-hour period notified to all by the ringing of the bell. With this system of marking the hours, ship’s time was always behind Greenwich time, but the number of hours and minutes it was behind depended on where the ship was in the world. Until 1805, the calendar date was also half a day behind, which made no difference to the seamen, but is more of a problem for historians today – in the mo
rning the date on board ship would be recorded in official logs and correspondence as the previous day’s date, though afternoon dates would be the same.
Just as the passing of time was marked by the sound of bells, orders given to the seamen were punctuated by whistles. The boatswain and his mates each had a whistle (also called a ‘pipe’ or ‘call’), which was capable of several different notes. Such pipes had already been in use for many decades and were not just a tool but also a mark of the boatswain’s authority, who was often known as ‘Tom Pipes’ or just ‘Pipes’. To carry out any task, the boatswain would blow his pipe and shout an order, which was echoed throughout the ship by means of the boatswain’s mates blowing their pipes and repeating the order. Different sequences of notes on the whistle prefaced different orders, so the seamen would in most cases know what order to expect from the sound of the whistle. Some sequences had become ceremonial, such as that used in ‘piping the side’ – three drawn-out low-high-low notes were sounded to herald the arrival on board of naval officers, royalty and foreign dignitaries. Other calls gave rise to popular sayings, such as ‘pipe down’. In the evening, the call for the seamen to go down to their hammocks and go to sleep, in silence, was called ‘piping down’ and so to tell someone to ‘pipe down’ became another way of telling them to be quiet.
The day started off by waking the men of the watch who were asleep in their hammocks. ‘The first sound that breaks the stillness of the night,’ Robert Hay recalled, ‘is uttered at five o’clock in the morning. It consists of a “whe–e–e–ugh all hands wash decks a ho–o–o–y”.’11 Samuel Leech was rather more prosaic in his description:
The boatswain is a petty officer of considerable importance in his way; he and his mates carry a small silver whistle or pipe, suspended from the neck by a small cord. He receives word from the officer of the watch to call the hands up. You immediately hear a sharp shrill whistle. This is succeeded by another and another from his mates. Then follows his hoarse cry of ‘All hands ahoy!’ which is forthwith repeated by his mates. Scarcely has this sound died upon the ear, before the cry of ‘Up all hammocks ahoy!’ succeeds it, to be repeated in like manner. As the first tones of the whistle penetrate between the decks, signs of life make their appearance.12
As Hay explained, this was followed soon after by the boatswain’s mates moving through the lower deck to rouse those men not yet awake:
The clearing of the men out of the hammocks is not so easy, but it must be done. They press their shoulders against every one of them, roaring out with a voice of thunder, ‘A sharp knife, a clear conscience, and out or down is the word.’ If the weight of a hammock indicates an inmate, the sharp knife and the head lanyard come into immediate contact and down comes the occupant head foremost. He has no time to dress, but snatching his jacket and trousers in hand, flies off.13
The hammocks, Leech related, were stored away in the daytime:
With a rapidity that would surprise a landsman, the crew dress themselves, lash their hammocks and carry them on deck, where they are stowed for the day. There is a system even in this arrangement; every hammock has its appropriate place … They are also kept exceedingly clean. Every man is provided with two, so that while he is scrubbing and cleaning one, he may have another to use. Nothing but such precautions could enable so many men to live in so small a space.14
The first task was not breakfast, but cleaning the decks, a constant necessity with the dirt generated by so many people on board, the excess tar, as well as all the animals. Pets such as dogs and monkeys often roamed freely, and some of the livestock, particularly goats and occasionally sheep and even pigs, wandered about. Others might be tethered or penned on the deck, which at least kept their dung within a small area, but bedding and fodder were easily scattered by the wind, and the animals – like some of the crew – suffered from seasickness. Captain Pasley of the Sybil, infuriated by the lax cleaning, wrote in his journal on 21 February 1780: ‘Found great fault this morning with cleaning the ship. Written orders [are that] every watching officer has to move every arm chest, hencoop &c. abaft daily; yet this morning I had only too incontestable a proof that my orders were not complied with. [It is] Above ten days since we sailed; yet I discovered lodged between the coops the whole dirt made by the stock since the day of taking them on board. Bushels of it – horrid.’15
The cleaning, Leech explained, was done by holystoning and washing down:
By holy-stoning, I mean cleaning them with stones, which are used for this purpose in men of war. These stones are, some of them, large, with a ring at each end with a rope attached, by which it is pulled backwards and forwards on the wet decks. These large stones are called holy bibles; the smaller hand ones are also called holy-stones, or prayer-books, their shape being something like a book. After the decks are well rubbed with these stones, they are wiped dry with swabs made of rope-yarns. By this means the utmost cleanliness is preserved in the ship.16
The holystones used for cleaning were generally blocks of a suitable sandstone, and at Port Mahon in Minorca, Joseph Bates saw a ‘rocky mountain’17 and remarked that ‘the stone of this mountain is a kind of sandstone, much harder than chalk, called “holy-stone”, which is abundant on the island, and made use of by the British squadron to scour or holy-stone the decks with every morning to make them white and clean’.18 Cleaning the decks in this way was harsh labour because, William Robinson pointed out, ‘the men suffer from being obliged to kneel down on the wetted deck, and a gravelly sort of sand strewed over it. To perform this work they kneel with their bare knees, rubbing the deck with a stone and the sand, the grit of which is often very injurious.’19
The never-ending cleaning also involved sweeping, often with besom brooms, and whenever going on shore to obtain water, they went ‘brooming’ as well and fetched twigs to make brooms, as the marine John Howe mentioned at New York at the end of 1779: ‘I was sent on board a brig to go to Straton [Staten] Island for water and brooms.’20 Brooms would have worn out rapidly when sweeping up the dust from dry holystoning, something that Captain Griffiths abhorred because of the men’s health:
Dry holystoning is a practice on which so much admiration has been bestowed, from the beautiful appearance it gives to the decks, and it has been so generally adopted; that to oppose it is treading on slippery ground. Under impressions that it was injurious to health, it did not prevail in the ships I commanded. The decks, therefore, looked brown, though they were in reality not less clean. The objection to it was this. The sand is made quite hot, and if you go between decks while the process is in operation; you will find yourself in a constant dust, which the men employed must inhale. If a black handkerchief be tied over their mouths, a crust of this dust will be formed, where the breath moistens it; and which without this precaution would be inhaled.21
There is no doubt that some captains insisted on excessive holystoning and washing of the decks by the men of each watch in order to keep them occupied, and crews bitterly resented such treatment. The crews of warships were significantly larger than those of merchant ships, not because warships were more difficult to sail, but because many hands were needed to fire the guns during battles. George Watson praised Captain Bennett of the Fame for treating the crew fairly and not giving them work merely to keep everyone occupied, a practice that Watson railed against:
The Captain, R.H.A. [Richard Henry Alexander] Bennett was a good man, and did everything in his power to make his crew comfortable … nor did he ever oppress them with unnecessary exercises, to ‘keep them at it ’, as some call it. ‘Keep them at it!’ I dislike that expression – do those who use it think men under them no better than brutes, and fit only to drudge continually as if insensible to toil, and unworthy of rest from their labour that they like to keep them at it? If they do, let them learn that such treatment generally creates, in the oppressed, a dislike to their masters, and a reluctance to lawful and proper employment.22
Such sentiments were as accurate on some navy ships as o
n land – there were some officers, as there were many employers ashore, who did indeed consider that those they commanded were ‘no better than brutes’. Another task commonly given to the men to occupy their time was ‘working up junk’ – picking to shreds worn-out pieces of tar-covered rope, and the resulting oakum was useful for anything from caulking to toilet paper.
After holystoning, it was time for breakfast. From then until noon the watch on duty kept the ship sailing, the cleaning of the decks continued, and new recruits were trained. The specialist craftsmen such as the cooper, carpenter and armourer and their mates carried on their work as normal. Sundays were generally treated as special, and the almost idyllic picture painted by Basil Hall demonstrated, by contrast, a warship’s activity during the rest of the week:
The circumstance which most distinctly marks the afternoon of Sunday on board a man-of-war, even more than on land, is the absence of all the usual stir caused by the multifarious occupations of the artificers and crew. The fire in the armourer’s forge, abreast of the fore-hatchway being extinguished, the rattle of his hammer, and the gritting of his rasp, are no more heard. The wearing and tearing of the adzes and axes, planes and saws of the carpenter, cease to torment the ear. The spunyarn-reel of the forecastlemen is stopped in its revolutions, and stowed away till Monday. The noisy thump-thumping of the cocoa-pounder is laid asleep. The bayonets of the marines, the cutlasses and boarding-pikes of the sailors, and all other weapons of offence, have some respite given to their points and edges. The tailors close their shears, and bundle up their remnants; while the sail-makers draw off their palms, and thrust their stools on one side.23