Part 3
The Navy
Chapter 22
From Sail to Steam
The Victorian Age, the Pax Britannica, Splendid Isolation, the Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets, existed because Britannia Ruled the Waves. Essentially, she ruled unchallenged. Her former antagonists, the Spanish and the Dutch, had no navies to speak of; Russia and the United States were deeply engaged in consolidating control over their own continental landmasses; the German Empire did not exist. Despite its shattering defeat by Nelson, the French Navy remained throughout the century the world’s second-largest. But France, after Bonaparte, faced decades of political instability and institutional change: empire, monarchy, republic, empire again, then, following crushing military defeat, another republic. Only briefly, at the height of the Second Empire, did France build ships which caused alarm in England. Even then, Great Britain’s naval supremacy remained unshaken.
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British Navy shrank. The number of ships fell drastically. In 1815, when the Emperor was dispatched to St. Helena, the British Fleet possessed 214 ships-of-the-line and 792 other vessels of all types. By 1817, there were 80 ships-of-the-line active and in reserve; in 1828 there were 68; in 1835, 50. The reduction in manpower was even more drastic. Of 145,000 sailors and marines in the wartime fleet, only 19,000 remained in 1820. Moments still came when the Fleet was summoned. In 1827, against the Turks at Navarino, a Royal Navy squadron fought its last battle in Nelsonian style: oak-hulled sailing ships forming a line of battle and British broadsides rolling out from gunports lining three-tiered decks. In 1855, the Queen went to war against the Tsar, but the Russian Navy remained in harbor, so the British Fleet was needed only to bombard fortresses and convoy troopships.
Unable to fight other major warships, British captains and seamen took on new duties. The Royal Navy became the policeman of the oceans. Pirates were attacked and exterminated along the Barbary Coast of North Africa, in the Aegean, the Red Sea, the Caribbean, the East Indies, and the coastal waters of China. British warships attempted to suppress the slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa, intercepting slave ships, and freeing their suffering cargo. To fulfill these duties, the distribution of the British Fleet dramatically changed. Once consisting primarily of ships-of-the-line concentrated in home waters and the Mediterranean, the Fleet had broken up into squadrons of smaller ships scattered around the globe. In 1848, twenty-five ships were assigned to the East India and China Station, twenty-seven served against the slavers off West Africa, fourteen patrolled the east coast of South America, ten were in the West Indies, and only thirty-five remained in home waters.
Manning these far-flung ships were dozens of captains, hundreds of officers, thousands of seamen, many of whom spent an entire career at sea without ever being in a battle. Individual ships saw action, and individual officers and seamen won medals—but often for heroism on land, as participants in one of the naval brigades landed on unfriendly coasts throughout the century. Most of the admirals who were to lead the Royal Navy into the twentieth century and the First World War were baptized by fire in colonial wars. Several were wounded or decorated: Lord Charles Beresford, speared in the hand in the Sudan; Arthur Wilson, fighting with his sword hilt and then with his fists, also in the Sudan, winning the Victoria Cross; John Jellicoe, shot in the chest and feared lost in the failure of the naval-brigade relief column during the siege of the Peking Legations. These men stepped out of the Victorian Royal Navy, when sea power exercised a wider influence on history than ever before or since. Going from ship to ship as they progressed in age and rank, they experienced the sea and learned to command. The ultimate lesson was constant: in the British Navy it was not ships but men who won.
A ship of war is an entity, a city, a kingdom. In the nineteenth-century Royal Navy, ruling despotically over each of these far-flung floating kingdoms, wielding power benevolently or otherwise as was his nature, stood a Royal Navy captain. No longer could he hang a man for mutiny, but he could do almost anything else. As Her Majesty’s ships went about their duties in the distant reaches of the globe—patrolling Oriental rivers, anchored in sleepy South Pacific harbors, steaming off sunbaked African coastlines—peculiarities appeared and eccentricities blossomed in the behavior of some of Her Majesty’s captains. Many were entirely harmless. Captain Houston Stewart of the three-decker Marlborough, flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet in the early 1860s, enjoyed fishing from the window of his stern cabin when the ship was at anchor. Required occasionally to leave his line, he tied it to a rail but returned eagerly every few minutes to see whether he had a catch. Admiral Kingcome, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Station during the same decade, delighted in beating the drum for night quarters himself. He strapped on the drum and away he went down the lower decks, bending double beneath the hammocks of the sleeping seamen.
On board ship, especially when far from the spyglass and signal flag of his admiral, the captain of a British warship had virtually unlimited authority. One captain, commanding a ship in West African waters, always took off his uniform to read his Bible and removed his cap and jacket when conducting divine service on deck for his crew. A British captain, he believed, could recognize no higher authority than himself. Another captain advanced Christmas Day to December 18 because the pork brought on board for Christmas dinner was “feeling the tropical heat.”1 The same captain once appointed one of his officers a bishop so that the new prelate could consecrate a patch of ground in which the captain wanted to bury a seaman. After performing this service, the new bishop was returned to the laity. Still another British captain, invited by the governor of the nearest British colony to dine on the Queen’s birthday fourteen days hence, declined on the ground that he would have a headache. Reported by the angry governor to his admiral, the captain blandly explained that “he had had a headache2 every day for six months and he did not see why he should be spared one on Her Majesty’s birthday.”
Captains assumed wide latitude in matters of dress. If the captain liked gold braid, he wore gold braid and all his officers wore gold braid. If the officers next went to a ship whose captain thought gold braid pretentious, all the embroidery came off. There was great variety in hats. One admiral wore a tall white top hat, another a white billycock hat. Eventually, these eccentric sartorial proclivities confronted a powerful opposing force. The Prince of Wales cared deeply about uniforms and he liked them properly worn. In 1880, even on home stations, naval officers were wearing practically whatever they liked. Under the prodding of the Prince, a committee was formed to meet three days a week in London until standards were set. The Prince, declaring that he could understand pictures better than words, demanded drawings. Drawings were made, choices discussed, and decisions reached. Thereafter, on and near the shores of England at least, officers wore uniforms which were, by the Prince’s pleasure, uniform.
Another perquisite of rank was the right to bring animals on board ship, either for nourishment or for companionship. One admiral who liked fresh milk brought two cows to sea. Officers frequently brought sheep and chickens. Some captains kept parrots, dogs, or cats in their cabins and some harbored larger and more exotic pets. Captain Marryat of the corvette Larne, in Burmese waters, owned a pet baboon named Jacko, who bit the crew and tore off buttons.
One of the most tolerant officers in Her Majesty’s Navy was Her Majesty’s second son, H.R.H. Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, a career officer. In 1870, when Prince Alfred commanded the wooden frigate Galatea, he permitted one of his officers, twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Lord Charles Beresford, to bring an elephant on board the ship in India. The elephant lived in a house built on the afterdeck and fed on branches of trees, bran, biscuits, and anything else that came his way. Lord Charles trained him to clew the mainsail by picking up a line and walking along the deck. The elephant avoided seasickness by balancing himself carefully, rolling to and fro with the motion of the ship. When the Galatea returned to England, the elephant was sent to the
London Zoological Gardens, but not without difficulty; only Lord Charles could persuade the happy pachyderm to abandon his seagoing home.
Nine years later, when Prince Alfred had advanced in rank to admiral and was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, he agreed to a brown bear named Bruin as a pet for the midshipmen aboard his flagship. At sea, Bruin liked wrestling on the quarterdeck with the boys after supper, and when the ship moored in the Grand Harbor at Malta, Bruin swam ashore and walked down the main street, the Strada Reale. Bruin’s favorite trick, however, was to slip into the water when the fleet lay at anchor and swim up to the boats of another warship. Approaching stealthily, Bruin would reach out and lay one paw on the gunwale and another on the shoulder of the unsuspecting boatman. Bruin and his young masters, watching with binoculars and telescopes, enjoyed the reaction.
Bruin’s fate was a watery one. His berth was in one of the ship’s boats, hung above the edge of the deck out over the water. One evening, Bruin, disoriented, climbed out the wrong side of the boat and fell into the sea. The cry of “Bear overboard” was raised and the midshipmen were frantic. But neither Prince Alfred nor the captain could bring themselves to stop one of Her Majesty’s battleships to pick up a mere bear, and Bruin was left behind.
When peculiar behavior in a naval officer fermented into madness, the most common cause was isolation. After years on a foreign station, crowded into a tiny wardroom, officers often ate without speaking to each other. Drink, permitted on British warships to break down tensions and mitigate the effects of isolation, sometimes made things worse. A visitor once came aboard a ship in Bermuda and found every officer drunk in the wardroom. Two were suffering from delirium tremens; one was picking the bodies of imaginary rats from the floor with a stick. Aboard another ship, an engineer officer was confined in his cabin because he believed himself to be the ship’s boiler. All day long, he lay on his back, puffing vigorously, shouting that if he stopped he would burst. Still another case involved a gentle, retiring officer who went berserk. The ship’s chart house was padded and he was locked inside, but somehow the ship’s cat strayed within his reach and was torn limb from limb.
Captains, of course, were the most isolated of all. After years of being part of an Officers’ Mess, a man on becoming a captain was suddenly condemned to live and dine alone. He could modify his predicament by inviting his officers to dine with him or by speaking to them on deck, but it was expected on both sides that distance would be maintained.
One captain of a ship lost in the immensity of the South Pacific appeared one morning on the poop of his ship with his salmon rod in hand. To the horror of the crew, he began casting long and accurately at the first lieutenant standing below him on the quarterdeck. Another captain suddenly turned and shouted at the ship’s quartermaster to bring him a bucket because the commander, his second in command, made him sick. Officers afflicted by disagreeable captains had means of retaliation providing they proceeded with caution. If invited to dinner, they were free to decline. One captain, faced with refusals from his entire company of officers, countered by giving each a written order to come to dinner. The officers could not disobey this command and they came to his table, but refused to look at the captain, or to speak, or to eat the food which was placed before them.
Not all British captains were demented or foolish, of course. Most were respected, many were admired, and some learned to rule their floating kingdoms with near-Solomonic wisdom. There was, for example, the captain of a troopship engaged in ferrying soldiers, officers, and sometimes officers’ wives between England and India. On one voyage a dispute broke out among the ladies as to who should have the privilege of bathing first. The ship’s captain pondered and then solemnly declared that the oldest lady should have precedence. Thereafter, it is said, the younger ladies splashed happily while the more elderly female passengers gave up bathing for the remainder of the voyage.
Officers gave their orders to boatswain’s mates, whereupon these grizzled noncommissioned officers, themselves promoted up from the ranks, used a blend of shouts, curses, coaxings, and explanations to pass the orders to the men. Their usual tone was exasperation. “You’re a bloomin’ Portuguese army,3 you are,” one boatswain’s mate complained to his men. “I say to one of you beggars, go, and he comes, and to another, do this, and he sees me damned first.” Sir Percy Scott once overheard a boatswain’s mate explaining to a group of seamen how they were to behave when Queen Victoria presented them with medals at Windsor Castle. “Now do you ’ear there,”4 said the boatswain’s mate, “when you come opposite ’er Majesty you don’t go down on your knee. You stand up, take your ’at off, hold your ’and out, and ’er Majesty puts the medal in the palm. When you get it, don’t go examining it to see if it ’as got the proper name on it; walk on; if it’s not the right one, it will be put square afterwards.”
Years at sea taught most boatswain’s mates exactly how far they could go in dealing with the ship’s officers. One captain who took to sea a coop filled with chickens excoriated his boatswain’s mate in public because the birds and their pen were dirty. Whereupon the mate cleaned the pen, whitewashed the chickens, and blacked their legs and beaks. The chickens died and the captain fumed, but he was helpless.
For ordinary seamen, it was a harsh life in a Darwinian world; those who were not fit did not survive. Everything was done at the run to the insistent clamor of hoarse shouts. There was no privacy and little rest. Men stood four-hour watches, four on and four off. Seamen off duty slept, as in Nelson’s day, in hammocks slung over the guns. At night, flickering candles, hung in lanterns, threw shadows across the sleeping, swaying men and the polished, gleaming guns. In peacetime, there was far too little to do to occupy the time of the huge crews which had to be maintained on board in case of war. Idleness was dangerous and thus, over the centuries, evolved the practice of daily holystoning of the decks, the entire crew in rows on their knees rubbing the deck with a kind of sandstone until it shone like the floor of a London ballroom—until flying salt spray covered it again with gumminess which would be removed by holystoning again the following day.
The food, too, was cheerless; this had changed little since Trafalgar. Lime juice, a preventive against the dreaded scurvy, was served once a week, not to please the men but to keep them healthy. Water was drawn from casks where it had stood for months; what came out was often a foul-smelling, syrupy brew. The ration of rum, served on British ships since the days of Francis Drake, was halved in 1825 and then halved again in 1853. Salt beef and salt pork, preserved in brine, were drawn out in stiff slabs which had to be soaked for hours in fresh water before they could be cooked and eaten. As the century progressed, beef was preserved in tins; the sailors called it “bully beef” or “Fanny Adams”5 after an English girl who had mysteriously disappeared near a tinning factory. Biscuits, hard as stones and the abode of weevils, were a staple. On sailing ships, British seamen ate with their fingers; later, when knives and forks were issued, old admirals grumbled that the Navy was pandering to luxury which would undermine discipline.
Disciphne in the Royal Navy had always been stern. The great eighteenth-century admiral John Jervis, Earl St. Vincent, had decreed that shipboard discipline must rest on fear. In the Napoleonic era, harsh discipline was essential to harness and coerce seamen dragged aboard ships, cursing and kicking. The operation of the press gang, less conscription than kidnapping authorized by Parliament, was simple and violent: when a ship needed men, the captain sent a press gang ashore. They overpowered and captured as many civilians as were needed and carried them, subdued by violence or drink, back to the ship. Once aboard, there would be no escape for many years. They were kept in subjugation by the cat-o’-nine-tails, wielded by boatswain’s mates, a collection of “brutes who rejoiced6 in their muscular arms and were charmed with the sound of the heavy, dense blows which they dealt in sheer wantonness.”
The ultimate reaction to this ill-treatment, desertion, was perilous: a seaman caught in an a
ttempt to desert was condemned to the dreaded penalty of “flogging around the fleet.” This meant that he would be tied to a capstan in a small boat which would proceed in stages between the anchored vessels of the fleet. Alongside each ship, the victim would receive twenty-five lashes of the cat-o’-nine-tails on his bare back, the time between ships being used to revive him by pouring wine down his throat. This ended before mid-century, and by the 1870s a captain’s right to order flogging was severely restricted by law, although floggings continued on more distant stations. It was not until 1879 that flogging was finally abolished in the Royal Navy and the last cat-o’-nine-tails permanently put away in a boatswain’s mate’s locker.
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