by Roger Knight
The navy, however, never stopped trying to regain control of the transports. As late as 1807 Captain Thomas Hamilton, a Navy Board commissioner, attempted to persuade Tom Grenville, the prime minister’s brother, now first lord of the Admiralty, to oblige the commanders-in-chief to go through the Admiralty when obtaining transports, since ‘the hire of the Transports being paid for & regulated under the check of the Treasury, the Commanding Officers of the Navy abroad, are easily disposed to continue the employ of the Transports longer than … if their conduct in this regard was continuously liable to the inspection of the Admiralty.’ Hamilton claimed, fairly, that the retention of transports on foreign stations by the local commanders-in-chief led to shortages and high prices in Britain. A further advantage of naval control, Hamilton argued, in a pique of bureaucratic jealousy of the army, would be that the Transport Board would be ‘empowered to expostulate with the Military departments, on many peremptory demands, if supported by the weight & authority of the Admiralty’.10 The Transport Board thought otherwise, as did cabinet ministers, and the Board and Office retained their independence until 1817, when their functions were again absorbed by the Navy Board.*
The new Board implemented efficiencies immediately. The first was to use the registered tonnage required by the Customs Act of 1786 to calculate tonnage on which to base the chartering rate, as the tonnage registered with customs by the owners could be used for calculating payment, at so much per ton per month.† This procedure, which did away with the lengthy process of measuring the ship, was first suggested by Lieutenant James Bowen, the agent for transports at Deptford, who was to have a distinguished career in the Transport Service. Merchant ships were to be surveyed and valued in one operation by shipwright officers, responsible to agents for transports, who in turn reported to the Transport Board, and if the ships were not in good-enough condition they were turned down.
Attitudes and standards took a little time to change. Just when the new Board was taking over in 1794, the master of the Lady Juliana transport, recently returned from the West Indies, informed the owner that his ship had been subject to a very strict survey, and that the dockyard officers ‘behaved with as much Friendship as I could expect from men of long acquaintance put under a new and perhaps troublesome Board’. Old customs still seem to have been followed, for the master found that it was necessary to pay ‘a small fee in a proper place’ to relieve him of the necessity of taking his mast out for repair, and he spent £6.9s. on wine for the master attendant and the clerk of the survey of Deptford Dockyard.11 It was this sort of practice that Middleton was trying to eradicate.12
Of critical importance to the projection of military power overseas was the continuing growth of the British merchant fleet during wartime. In 1799 the French merchant marine, according to the Directory, had almost no ships.13 By contrast, Britain in 1793 had over 14,500 registered ships measuring 1.4 million tons; by 1815 the total had grown by over 70 per cent, to just under 22,000 at 2.5 million tons.14 Of these, however, only a small proportion was available to the Transport Board.* It relied on the market for procuring shipping, and thus had to follow the market price, and in times of particular shortage it had to increase the per-ton government chartering rate. An additional advantage for shipowners was government indemnification for loss against capture, although checks had to be put in place to guard against false claims, in particular to establish that a transport was actually in convoy at the time it was taken. A Transport Board order of 1 April 1797 required the master, in the event of capture, to provide a certificate signed by the commander of the convoy that he ‘believe[d] the Captures took place without any fault of the Masters’.15
In general, chartering a ship to the government during wartime was steadily profitable, based on rising freight rates. Short-term chartering provided employment for idle ships, while longer charters provided continuous income when trading opportunities were limited.16 Michael Henley, a substantial shipowner and coal merchant from Wapping on the Thames, at one time had two thirds of his ships contracted to government, on which he showed good returns.17 He owned more colliers than most shipowners, ships that had long been recognized as the most suitable for carrying troops, since they were broad and roomy, and of sufficiently shallow draught to get close to the shore when landing.18
This system was cost-effective to government, though some tried to prove otherwise. Lord St Vincent despised all contractors, none more so than the owners of the transports. In 1802 he wrote to a fellow member of his Admiralty Board of ‘the fraud upon the public committed by the navy and transport boards, with the profligate percentage on the contracts’.19 Yet chartering transports was cheaper than any other method of providing large amounts of tonnage, even though the judgement over whether to retain transports at government cost when not in use was very difficult. The cost to the Transport Board of chartering was usually about 7 to 8 per cent of the total naval budget.20 When it became obvious that the war at sea was being won, some felt that merchant transports were far less effective than warships converted to carry troops. The relative merits were much debated. Lord Melville in a long speech in 1810 tried to persuade the House of Lords that little money was saved by chartering, using the example of the Egyptian expedition of 1801. The first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Mulgrave, replied to Melville providing officially calculated costs for the expedition: transports cost £12 per ton, and troopships £27; thus it cost £24 to transport a man to Egypt, but £55 to send him in a troopship.21 Transports were usually chartered for two, three or six months ‘certain’, after which six months’ notice could be given by either party. Freight rates were calculated at so many shillings per ton per month, with copper-sheathed ships gaining a higher payment than those that were merely sheathed in wood and tallowed. To a warm climate, one soldier was carried for every two tons; to Gibraltar or the Continent, it was one man for every one and a half tons. A regiment of 700 men bound for the West Indies would therefore need 1,400 tons of shipping, and, with hired merchant ships ranging between 150 and 300 tons, on average each regiment required six transports.22 The shipowner was contracted to provide a well-manned and well-equipped vessel. The crew had to number five men and a boy for every hundred tons.23 They were given protections to keep the press gangs at bay, though a good deal of Transport Board time was spent in sorting out protests by owners who had lost their seamen in this way.
Equipment was of a higher quality than that for ordinary trade: a surviving specification for 1812, for instance, runs to four closely printed pages, itemizing rigging, reserve stores, navigational equipment and boats. If above 200 tons, four 3-pounder carriage guns or carronades were to be aboard; if below 200, then two only. Twenty rounds for each cannon had to be provided, as well as muskets, blunderbusses, pistols and swords.24 Significantly, charters contained a clause by which ships could be retained by the Board or its agents, and they were not discharged from their contract until the vessels returned to Deptford or Portsmouth. In practice, the commander-in-chief on a foreign station, or the agent for transports on the station, could retain a transport at his discretion, with the result that some merchant ships remained on foreign stations for years at a time.25
The contracts bound merchant ships to obey the commands of the agents for transports, who were specialist commissioned naval officers, responsible to the Transport Board. These agents were based at every major British port, and eventually they constituted a worldwide network, either ashore or afloat with a fleet. They had a difficult job, as with any liaison role that involves pleasing several masters, but they were vital to the prosecution of the war. Dealing with impossible requests from more senior naval officers was perhaps even more difficult than responding to demands from army officers. In late 1795 the Transport Board transmitted a report to the Admiralty from James Bowen (by now a captain) from Cork Harbour, the great rendezvous for trans-Atlantic convoys, where he was ‘having to attend to the quarrels of Young Officers of the Army, the masters of transports, Complaints abou
t provisions, etc.’. He continued:
We beg leave to assure their Lordships that, though our list of agents has swelled more than we desired and though every endeavor has been used to distribute them with œconomy as the requisite service would bear, we are, and have been, under great difficulty in procuring proper men, who considering the value and importance of their Trust, ought to be Officers of real Probity and Ability.26
The weight and complexity of this job, where seamanship and experience told more than a good education and social graces, was not to the liking of the relaxed Lieutenant James Anthony Gardner, who, for a short time, was appointed an agent for transports. He resigned when his transports were ordered to the West Indies after the war was resumed following the Peace of Amiens. His resignation, as he later recalled,
gave great offence to Sir Rupert George … However, … I left a service that I never would accept of, had I my time to go over again, upon any consideration. For the short time I was in it I saw enough to convince me that if an officer did his duty, he would be like the hare with many friends; and if he acted otherwise, he must lay himself open to any puny whipster who might wish to take advantage of his good nature.27
Nor were the troubles of a transport agent over when his transports accompanied a fleet or were under convoy, for keeping the vessels together at sea was never easy, and had to be accomplished by signal flags. It was in the interests of masters to keep with the convoy, but in dirty, winter weather, or at night, ships could easily lose each other.* Neither masters nor naval officers liked the delays that convoys inevitably caused, and transports were frequently known to slip away from the convoy at the end of the voyage to avoid the press gangs that habitually greeted them on arrival. Transport agents, as commissioned naval officers, also saw the masters of transports as socially inferior, which could lead to trouble, as illustrated by an altercation at the Texel in 1799, when William Dodds, the master of the Eagle, was ordered to berth in water that was too shallow. His protests to the agent were unavailing; and then, as Dodds informed his owner, Michael Henley:
I then sayd if you will make water for the ship I will gett hur to the wharf he then put his hand to my brest and shouved me back and sayd be gon you scoundrell … another officer of the Navey came and pulled off my hat and throu it on the ground and sayd you fellow ought to keep of your hat when you speak to an officer of the Navey.28
It was not surprising that masters avoided the transport service as much they could, for it was a burdensome business, with its voluminous instructions and rules, and the necessity to keep a constant watch for convoy signals from the escorting warship. Another of Henley’s masters claimed that he would much prefer to be the mate of any ship rather than the master of a transport.29 Even so, merchant ships were forced to sail in convoy by the Compulsory Convoy Act of 1798, which ordered that all vessels in foreign trades had to sail in convoy, unless they were East Indiamen, Hudson Bay Company or on passages to Ireland.30 By the terms of the vessel’s charter party, a transport if taken when ‘straggling’ from a convoy would no longer be covered by government indemnity.
With French privateers brazen at various times, particularly in home waters, it made good sense for merchant ships to accept the delay because of the protection that a convoy afforded. One shipowner wrote to his master in May 1799: ‘Whatever you do Do not leave the convoy on any account.’ The same owner received a report in 1805 from the master of one of his ships having trouble in making his way into London down the Thames Estuary against south-west winds: ‘Our commodore is really indefatigable and seems to have the welfare of the convoy much in view.’31 When a convoy consisted of a great many ships – and some were numbered in hundreds – the senior transport officer, who might have junior agents for transports under him, would fly the equivalent of a commodore’s broad pennant: ‘a plain blue broad pennant at the main topmast head … eight feet at the staff, and twenty feet long’. Such a flag was issued to Lieutenant Gardner: he called it, with disdain and professional embarrassment at having to ape the flag and rank of a full commodore, ‘my swaggering blue pennant’.32
The first problem that faced the agents for transports was embarkation, a lengthy and complex process. The cavalry presented the greatest logistical difficulties, for these regiments required specially adapted horse-ships, together with others that transported only forage. Cavalry horses and provisions took up large numbers of ships, unsurprisingly, since senior officers took several horses each. (Two lieutenant-colonels commanding the 7th Hussars, embarking for the Corunna campaign in October 1808, each had five.) Baggage horses for carrying equipment and uniforms, and mounts for the groom and undergroom, were included in this number, as well as cavalry horses.33 Majors had four, captains three and lieutenants two. In all, twenty-seven officers took seventy horses.34
Embarkation in the southern ports of England for Corunna in late 1808 demonstrates the difficulties for anyone attempting to organize this aspect of military transport. Six regiments and two troops of horse artillery, totalling 4,000 horses, were involved. First, the cavalry regiments had to march from their barracks to their embarkation port, each stage of the journey carefully planned by the Quartermaster-General’s Department in the Horse Guards in London. The 15th Hussars took two weeks to march from their barracks in Woodbridge in Suffolk – via Romford in Essex and Kingston and Guildford in Surrey, then through Chichester in Sussex – to Portsmouth. The regiment was split up into squadrons, so as not to put too much strain on forage resources in the locality where the cavalry rested. In any case, the presence of a cavalry unit was enough to push up local oat prices, which were, anyway, at their highest for years.35 The twenty-six transports required to take the regiment and horses rendezvoused in Stokes Bay, just off Portsmouth Harbour.36 For the Corunna expedition as a whole, the anchorages of Portsmouth, Weymouth and Falmouth were all needed to muster the total number of transports.37 Over 65,000 British, German and Spanish infantry, cavalry and artillery, and 7,155 horses, were carried in 522 transports, measuring 134,334 tons. In addition to 227 ships carrying troops, there were army victuallers, forage ships, ships carrying ordnance and camp stores, wagon train equipment, six hospital ships and one ‘ship with rockets’.38
By definition, any movement of troops by sea involved the cooperation of the navy and the army, and, when this was not forthcoming, failure was likely and recrimination bitter. Nor, over twenty years of warfare, is it surprising that there were differing views of the conduct of these expeditions, varying from the condemnatory to the praiseworthy. Army officers were the first to give the Transport Service a bad name. Tension existed, in any case, between the services aboard chartered merchant ships when it came to the question of whether army or naval discipline should prevail when at sea. This gave rise to the ‘Admirals’ Mutiny’ in October 1795, when the duke of York issued new regulations for troops at sea that appeared to remove them from naval discipline. All eight admirals in Portsmouth at the time signed an indignant letter of protest to Lord Spencer, who managed to persuade the duke to withdraw the new regulations, but the incident did not help relations between the services.39 Moreover, army officers regularly criticized shipboard conditions and the small size and discomfort of the transports in which they found themselves.* In 1794, for instance, during the expedition to Holland, Colonel Calvert thought the tonnage of the transports quite inadequate and their condition unfit for the troops.40 Another officer on his way to Spain in 1808 found:
The vessel in which I was was a small Newcastle Collier, a wretched sailor, with more men and horses on board than she could well accommodate … It was a universal complaint, the description of Boats that were hired as transports, not only were they wholly unfit for the service, but in many instances they were unsafe, as not being seaworthy. It is only necessary to look back to see the number of brave fellows who were lost, by being exposed to these old crazy unserviceable boats.41
Transports were worked hard, and their condition inevitably deteriorated. From Spa
in in 1810 Admiral George Berkeley complained to the first lord of the Admiralty privately that the transports were in ‘so dreadful a state from being copper’d over iron fastenings, and being patched up for the sake of Hire, that some of them are actually not fit to trust to sea with Troops’, and he reported that they had been surveyed and condemned.42 A jaundiced view of these ships often came from sick and exhausted troops returning to England. Arriving in the Downs from Holland after the fighting in November 1799, the Roebuck transport was twelve days on the short passage, the troops ‘under continual apprehension of the vessel being lost’. (Some of the soldiers had not had a change of clothes for ten weeks.)43 But there were happier experiences. In 1801, on a voyage from Spithead to Nova Scotia, one young officer was more than satisfied that his men were comfortable, and he wrote to his mother: