by Roger Knight
Bulky primary produce and processed provisions, and other major commodities, such as coal, beer and fresh water, without which the navy could not have functioned, were transported by sea as well as by canal. Coal was needed for cooking on board. A first-rate ship might take as much as sixty tons in her hold at the start of a three-year commission, and the need for fuel was constant. Landing parties of seamen were constantly foraging for wood for the ship’s oven when on foreign stations. Beer was largely brewed in the state victualling yards, rather than by contractors, but it was tricky to handle and could go sour, and it was awkward and heavy to load on a ship, so wine or spirits were often issued instead.
Of all of the necessary commodities, fresh water was the most troublesome. Used in huge quantities, the deadweight tonnage of filled water casks that a ship took on board far exceeded all the rest of the provisions put together. The Victory had a capacity of 380 tons, but even she sometimes ran out of water.53 When Nelson was returning across the Atlantic in pursuit of Villeneuve in 1805, some of the large water casks in the ship’s lower tier leaked and on a calm afternoon in the middle of the Atlantic twenty tons had to be transferred from another ship.* The daily consumption of water for a first-rate ship of 850 men was a minimum of three tons. A 74-gun ship with 640 men would consume sixteen tons of water a week, while a 64 with 490 would expend fourteen.54 Heavy casks had to be filled and hoisted aboard, then stowed securely in the hold. Water was needed not only for cooking but also for ‘steeping’ beef and salt provisions: the salt had to be leeched out of the meat before it could be cooked. Finding fresh, clean water was a constant preoccupation of naval captains when on foreign stations.
In the early years of the war even the well-established naval bases at Portsmouth and Plymouth could not provide enough fresh water for warships. Pioneering engineering was to improve the situation. It is here that we first meet Samuel Bentham, at this time the inspector-general of naval works, responsible for major improvements at both the western naval bases, and for many important naval technological developments in these wars. He came from a family of original thinkers and problem solvers: one of his brothers was Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher, to whom he was particularly close; and his half-brother was Charles Abbot. Samuel had entered the dockyard service at Chatham as a shipwright apprentice, unusual for someone from a family of rank, where he was frustrated by being forced to work with his hands rather than at the drawing board. Seeing that there was no easy route to promotion in Britain, he went to serve in the Russian Army, where he designed and built galleys for the Russian Navy, fought with distinction at the Battle of Kherson in June 1788 against the Turks, and by 1791 had attained the rank of brigadier-general. Untactful, pushy and obstinate, he was inclined to upset his fellow officers, one of whom was John Paul Jones, the American naval hero. When Bentham returned to England, he impressed Charles Middleton, who was anxious to accelerate the introduction of new methods and technology into British dockyards. In June 1795 Middleton wrote to the first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Spencer:
The shipbuilding and Civil building have been too long committed to insufficient men. An opportunity offers of recalling it out of their hands, and as General Bentham is undoubtedly a man of first-rate abilities and of great experience in practical mechanics, I hope and trust they may be converted to the benefit of his native country instead of carrying them again into Russia.55
Middleton recommended that Bentham be given his own, independent office, as inspector-general of naval works, to be responsible directly to the Admiralty Board – which was to prove a recipe for constant conflict.56 When it came to persuading and convincing his colleagues, Bentham lacked two essential attributes, patience and flexibility, and this weakness was to blunt his effectiveness.
Bentham, nevertheless, brought confidence and innovation to engineering projects. At Plymouth the fresh-water supply problem was solved by the Plymouth Dock Water Company, which piped water from Dartmoor, although there were delays in 1798 over where to site the reservoir in the dockyard, as Bentham and the yard officers could not agree.57 With the help of John Rennie, the civil engineer, improved water pipes were installed serving the wharves at the fleet rendezvous at Torbay. It was at Portsmouth that Bentham provided an imaginative solution and on a grand scale. By 1801 a deep well had been dug in Portsmouth Dockyard, lined to a hundred feet, with copper pipes driven further down. Fresh water was discovered at 274 feet, and it was steam pumped to the surface at the rate of 520 tons a day; pipes then took it to the edge of a wharf.58
Major works were also undertaken to store water at overseas bases in drier or tropical climates. Gibraltar was notably short of water, until six vaulted underground storage tanks were built between 1799 and 1804.* Water collected from the roof of the victualling yard was directed to the tanks, and purified as it flowed from tank to tank; from the lowest tank it was then gravity-fed to ships or boats in Rosia Bay. The local contractor, Juan Maria Boschetti, built them so well, of bricks sent out from England, that they were used by the Royal Navy for 200 years, and were in good condition when handed to the Gibraltar government in 2004.59
When the focus of the war moved in 1807 away from the Channel and towards the North Sea, the Victualling Board had to revert to more traditional methods to obtain enough water for seamen and troops. Costs and effort were much increased: a ton of water in a cask, delivered to a warship at Falmouth, was supplied by a contractor for 3s.10d.; yet the cost of delivering it to a ship in the Roads off Great Yarmouth was 7s.3d. Ships waiting in the Downs, or troopships waiting to sail to Walcheren, received water brought from the upper reaches of the Thames, a hundred miles away, where it was fresh above the level of the tide. Depot ships containing only water were moored in the Thames Estuary and were constantly served by half a dozen water transports. As thousands of tons were required at any one time to get a large fleet of warships away, it was little wonder there were delays.60 Given a fair wind, the transports could make their journeys very quickly; but, when the wind blew from the wrong direction, they could not move. The problem for the coastal trade lay not so much in the length of the journey as in timing and safety, which were unpredictable.61
The timely arrival of victuallers for replenishment at sea was one of the main preoccupations of a naval commander-in-chief in these wars. On occasion shortages of food for frontline troops and seamen became critical, but these did not damage the overall war effort. In 1795 the troops carried by Keith’s expedition to capture the Cape found themselves very short of food before they were luckily relieved by wheat arriving from India destined for Britain. Keith complained to Lord Spencer, the first lord of the Admiralty, about lack of information and supplies from Britain, ‘nor a Morsel of Bread or flour, Rum etc so with 7000 troops to feed and a long voyage before me I have five days bread left, one week’s Rum’. Spencer sympathized, but warned, ‘it would however have been very satisfactory to us to have had a more accurate Return of what Stores of every Sort you found at the Cape, as we are at a loss to know what ought to be sent out for want of such Information.’62 Victualling Board calculations depended upon precise information from those at sea.63 In 1809 Admiral Strachan’s squadron off Rochefort had to leave its station due to depleted rations, which led to questions being asked in parliament, but weaknesses in naval supply were usually few.64
When victualling was reliable, as it was most of the time, it brought about a real extension of British sea control. Adequate supplies of fresh food and processed provisions underpinned the whole British strategy of blockade of the French naval bases in the Channel from 1796 – one rendered highly aggressive in 1800, when St Vincent assumed command of the Channel Fleet and forced his captains inshore to impose a very close blockade. The warships were supplied by convoys of victuallers from Plymouth and Torbay, and instances of scurvy were negligible.65
Even more impressive was the supply of food to operations on distant stations. The most risky but successful combined operation of the French Revolutionary
War was the Egyptian expedition, when, on 8 March 1801, an army of 14,000 under Sir Ralph Abercromby landed under fire at Aboukir and defeated the French. This force, together with the seamen on board the supporting naval squadron under Lord Keith, required 20,000 rations daily. The landing was at the limit of the range of supply, and the logistics gave Abercromby much anxiety. Only the capture of Malta the year before made it possible for adequate supplies to reach the expedition, though Malta itself, lacking self-sufficiency, also needed to be fed.* The other element essential to success was fresh produce and beef supplied by the Turks, as well as large quantities of biscuit, though they were slow to meet their promises.
Abercromby’s plan was to rest his troops and organize his beach-assault drills with a stay of seven weeks in the superbly sheltered anchorage at Marmaris in Turkey.66 Of course, the extra time this involved put more strain on the supplies. Commissary-General Motz, accompanying the expedition and charged with feeding it, regularly reported on his stock of food, and expressed his anxieties in his correspondence with the Treasury (his letters were forwarded to the Victualling Board by Treasury secretaries George Rose and Charles Long). His chief worry was a lack of specie to pay the Turks for local provisions, noting that one ship contained 20,000 rations for eleven days. A week after the landing he had enough bread rations for 92 days, 89 days’ worth of meat and 83 days’ of spirits, reckoning one pound of bread, one pound of meat and one gill of spirits per day. This would decrease to sixty days if the navy ‘should continue to partake’.67 The Board responded by sending out two convoys to the Mediterranean, ordered in February and June 1801: each convoy took over 3,000 tons of provisions.68 The success of this expedition therefore depended, as always, upon a number of complicated and accurate calculations.
The war in the Baltic between 1808 and 1812 demanded an even greater victualling effort. The provisioning of Admiral Saumarez’s fleet, manned by 16,000 seamen, was made particularly difficult by every Baltic nation bar Sweden being under French domination and therefore hostile. Most of the provisions were sent in victuallers from Britain, through the Greater or Little Belt, where the convoys were harried by Danish gunboats; by the end of 1808, 6,000 tons of chartered merchant shipping were required to feed the Baltic Fleet. In 1809 the island of Anholt at the mouth of the Baltic was occupied by the British Army because the water supply there was so abundant. Although the Swedes, too, were forced to declare war on Britain in late 1810, they continued to supply the British Fleet covertly, though they could manage no more than fresh beef, water and occasionally biscuit and citrus fruit. It was hardly surprising that this sparsely populated country could not supply more. When the British Fleet was anchored off almost any Swedish port, it temporarily doubled the local population.69
Saumarez’s success in keeping open the Baltic trade, particularly the import of naval stores vital for British shipbuilding, owed much to a regular supply of provisions, without which this extension of British sea control could not have been maintained. The health of British seamen contrasted with that of the Swedish Fleet, which Saumarez visited in late 1808. He reported to the Admiralty:
On board their ships I found 1500 Sick all much affected with scurvy, accompanied with dysentery, low fever, and a few Catarrhal complaints … all apparently sinking under general debility and despondency; in many instances amounting to insanity, which too frequently terminated in the unhappy sufferer committing suicide.70
Ashore, the admiral found that there were nearly 4,000 more Swedish seamen in a similar state of ill-health. By contrast, out of 11,000 sailors in the British Fleet at the same time, only 4 suffered from scurvy, 45 from rheumatism and 32 from venereal disease.71
During 1805, when the British were parrying every attempt by Napoleon to invade England, the advantage provided by good provisioning proved to be hugely important. The French and Spanish were at a constant disadvantage from lack of provisions, short rations and consequent sickness. Allemand’s squadron managed to escape from Brest in April 1805, stay at sea for over five months, and return to Brest safely, but only with appalling sickness among his crews. Nelson, on the other hand, before setting off westwards across the Atlantic in pursuit of the French and Spanish fleets, managed to replenish his ships because he luckily ran into a victualling convoy not intended for him. On 10 May 1805, in one hectic night in Lagos Bay, near Cape St Vincent, provisions were hoisted into his warships from the transports officially destined for General Craig in the Mediterranean.72 On the way back, after the long chase over the Atlantic, the crews of the Spanish ships under Gravina’s command suffered severely from sickness.
British ships enjoyed a similar advantage before the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. Life was not easy for the French and Spanish crews in the ships of the Combined Fleet anchored in Cádiz Harbour. The only way food could be delivered in bulk from other parts of Spain to Cádiz was by merchant ships, but the port had been blockaded for many years by British warships, so supplies were short. The town had been subject to severe yellow fever outbreaks in 1800 and 1804. As the crews of French and Spanish had been unpaid for many months, morale was low and desertion high. On the flagship of Rear-Admiral Magon, the Algésiras, for instance, 37 per cent of the crew had scurvy.73 The British Fleet, however, on blockade out at sea, was well provided for by a succession of victualling convoys from home, and fresh meat and vegetables from Lisbon and the North African ports. The result was that Nelson’s seamen were better fed, and had greater energy and morale, than their French and Spanish enemies – evidence that the Victualling Board and its contractors had passed one of their sternest and most important tests.
7
Transporting the Army by Sea 1793–1811
When you consider that Transports are not commonly to be had at the present moment when they may be wanted, that to fit a Transport for service from the state in which she comes out of the merchant hands, is the work often of a full two months, and that Transports called for in a hurry can rarely be had without a great increase of price, and without exciting a degree of attention hardly compatible with secrecy … The service will not so exactly meet as that the conclusion of one service shall correspond exactly with the commencement of another.
– William Windham, secretary of state for war, to Lord Grenville, prime minister, 14 December 18061
Statesmen and generals depended on the Transport Board to charter sufficient numbers of privately owned merchant ships from the market, needed to move the infantry, cavalry, artillery, ordnance and medical resources, along with wagons and food for thousands of soldiers and seamen. These ships took stores and provisions to warships blockading the enemy’s ports, and to garrisons overseas, but the bulk of them supported amphibious expeditions, known then as ‘conjunct operations’. They were the only way that Britain – excluded from the Continent from 1795 until the start of the Peninsular War – could directly assault France or its vassal states. But Britain was never to have much success in effecting difficult landings in force on Continental shores.
Amphibious operations were the most complex and costly operations attempted by the British state, and as such were overseen and coordinated by cabinet ministers. So many resources and so much money had to be committed that a decision to send an expedition could directly affect other areas of war strategy and policy. The authority to send an expedition lay with the prime minister, not only in his role as head of the government but also as first lord of the Treasury. He was advised by the secretary of state for war, the first lord of the Admiralty and, when appropriate, the master-general of the Ordnance.2 If expeditions went badly wrong, it was usually due to mistakes or friction at this level of decision making.
With such a wide span of military and civilian involvement, it was essential to minimize conflict between government departments. This problem never entirely vanished, for control of the transports continued to be contested by the army and the navy, and indeed by the Admiralty and the Navy Board, throughout the wars. In July 1794 the Pitt g
overnment took the decision to reconstitute the Transport Board, which had not been in existence since 1717, and the Navy Board gave up the task of hiring transports, which it had undertaken for most of the eighteenth century, though not without protests.3 As discussed in Chapter 4, the brief for the new Board was to hire transports for the army, navy and Ordnance, so that negotiations with shipowners or ship-brokers were handled by a single part of the government, the Transport Board; in the language of modern defence it was responsible for ‘central procurement’. The hand of Charles Middleton at the Admiralty can be seen behind this move, for he wanted to remove the process of inspecting and surveying the ships to be hired from the hands of the dockyard officers.4
The newly constituted Transport Office was set up in Great Scotland Yard and then in Cannon Row, Westminster.5 It led a near-autonomous existence, receiving a large majority of its orders from the secretary of state for war, rather than from the Admiralty Board, but it was financially beholden to the Treasury. The first chairman of the new Board, Captain Hugh Cloberry Christian, was soon promoted to rear-admiral to command the large expedition to the West Indies. This was still a relatively junior rank for a leader of such an enormous expedition, and army officers with greater seniority objected; the dispute did nothing to forward preparations and was solved only with difficulty by Lord Spencer.6 As we have seen in Chapter 3, the expedition was catastrophically wrecked in the winter gales of 1794/5.* Christian was succeeded as chairman in 1795 by the shrewd Captain Rupert George, an able administrator.† Procedures evolved so that the responsibilities of each board were clear.7 When a chartered ship had completed the loading of its cargo of provisions at Deptford, the master of the vessel would go to the Victualling Office at Somerset House to sign the bill of lading, from which point the ship and its cargo became the charge of the Transport Board.8 Nevertheless, Rupert George became adroit at shifting the blame to the other boards – often the Board of Ordnance – when things went wrong, usually delays in loading and sailing vessels. A constant irritant was the tendency of admirals on overseas stations to retain the vessels that had sailed out with stores from Britain, which George took up with the Amiralty, and there were always problems when crew members of transports were pressed by the navy. His relationship with the secretary of state for war, who needed the largest amount of tonnage for transporting troops and army supplies, was generally very good.9