Cochrane

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by Donald Thomas

George III left his Privy Council. As he drove through the London streets, he was heartened by the crowds who cheered and roared, "War with France! War with France!" The diplomatic minuet was almost complete. Even as the King greeted his enthusiastic subjects, Lord Grenville was writing to Lord Auckland, British ambassador at The Hague, "the next despatch to you, or the next but one, will announce the commencement of hostilities. Probably the French will commence them".25

  As a matter of fact, hostilities had already begun. Captain Robert Barlow was off the north-west coast of France, commanding the Royal Navy brig-sloop Childers, a diminutive warship with a single gun-deck and eight small guns on either side. He was standing in towards the entrance of Brest harbour, the mouth of the port being guarded by two artillery forts. There was hardly a breath of wind and the flood tide was carrying the Childers towards the harbour entrance. When the ship was less than a mile away there was a white puff of smoke from one of the forts, the hiss of a cannon ball overhead, and then a plume of spray just beyond the brig-sloop. Assuming that there was some error of identification, Barlow ran up his ensign. At this the fort on the other side of the harbour opened fire as well and he found himself caught in a resolute crossfire. His only advantage was that the Childers was so small as to be a difficult target at that range. None the less, a 48-pound shot hit the upper deck, exploding into three fragments and doing superficial damage. The tide was not due to change for some hours and Captain Barlow owed his escape to a light breeze which sprang up and enabled him to carry his ship clear of the port. He returned home with the questionable honour of being the first man to engage the enemy.26

  On 1 February 1793, the French Convention put hostilities on an official footing by declaring war on England and Holland. The news reached London on 4 February and five days later George III wrote from Windsor to Lord Grenville, describing it as "highly agreeable to me".27

  It was not, perhaps, highly agreeable to the Earl of Dundonald but it certainly opened up opportunities for placing his remaining sons in the army or the navy. Young Lord Cochrane had made a sufficient ass of himself to rule out the army, however much his father might have preferred that to a naval career and his uncle, Alexander Cochrane, had at least entered his name as a midshipman on the books of several small and undistinguished vessels. It was not much, but it was the only expedient at hand. The 9th Earl had not even the money to buy his son's uniform but the first weeks of war were a time of great patriotic feeling and the nation's leaders were more ready than usual to encourage martial ambition among the young. Lord Hopetoun was approached, and the Earl managed to borrow

  £100 from him. Part of this was laid out in the purchase of a gold watch, which Cochrane received with the remains of the money and a dour warning that it was the only inheritance he need expect.

  The frigate Hind, lying off Sheerness, was the first available ship on whose books the young man's name had been entered. Lord Cochrane's grandmother happened to be going to London at the time and, since he had yet to prove his capacity for looking after himself, he was entrusted to her care. With the final lecture on the spartan virtues of the "res angusta domi" echoing in his mind, he watched the vistas of Culross, Edinburgh, and Scotland, fade behind him. On 27 June, in charge of an uncle who saw him safely from London to Sheerness, Cochrane and his luggage were ferried out to the frigate, which lay at anchor in the river estuary, the sails reefed on her tall masts.

  Even the general air of public indignation against France could not disguise the deep preoccupation with hard cash which dominated naval affairs. It was a fact of war that enemy ships were far more often captured than sunk. In the first year of the new war, for example, the British captured thirty-six French ships of which twenty-seven were incorporated into the Royal Navy. The French took nine British ships in return. Subject to the ruling of the Admiralty prize courts, the value of the ships captured from the enemy was shared, however unequally, between captains, officers, and men, as well as the admiral who happened to hold general command of the area in which the seizure had occurred. Though it was not mentioned in the patriotic ballads, it was a commonplace observation among those who knew naval life at first-hand that British seamen thought of cash rather than glory as they sailed into battle. From long experience, Captain Marryat observed that sailors "always begin to reckon what their share of prize money may be, before a shot is fired". An ordinary seaman, under an enterprising captain, found that his real income was higher than that of many officers on more easy-going ships. As for the commanders, they included such men as Captain Digby, who was to command H.M.S. Africa at Trafalgar and who had amassed £60,000 in prize money before he was thirty years old, which put him well on the way to being a millionaire by modern values.

  To most Royal Navy crews there was no incompatibility whatever between glory and cash. Glory was excellent for national morale and personal reputation, but it had proved a notoriously unnegotiable commodity for heroes and their dependents. Once the elation and gratitude of their countrymen began to cool, the heroes of the hour were easily regarded as the "surplus population" of the long years of peace.

  To a young man in Cochrane's position, the life of a naval officer was rich in promise. From the day on which he joined H.M.S. Hind, there was to be almost continuous war for twenty-two years. Few periods in history could have presented a better opportunity for the acquisition of wealth by conquest. Whatever interludes might occur in the land campaigns, the war at sea was likely to be unremitting.

  Such, at least, was the golden prospect offered to hopeful young officers. In more general terms, the nation was possessed by two alternative views of naval life. The first was that of a stout-hearted, £lite fighting service, unrivalled in the world. As the Royal Marine bands piped "Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men", they caught this sentiment with trite precision. The second and opposing image was of a navy of surly, press-ganged crews, kept to their duty by homicidal floggings and the fear of being hanged. Starved, diseased, and cowed, these men rose in occasional desperate mutinies, which were put down by brutal repression.

  Like all travesties, each of these pictures reflected an element of truth. Though its officers were less wealthy and its social prestige stood below that of the more famous regiments of the army, the Royal Navy was an elite fighting force. "You can always beat a Frenchman if you fight him long enough," Cornwallis assured Nelson. Such sentiments were arrogant as expressions but accurate as matters of record. It was not superior moral character but more thorough training in the techniques of battle which, for example, enabled many British gun crews to deliver two broadsides against a passing French ship in exchange for the one they received. Moreover, while the French Navy had been allowed to dwindle during the eighteenth century, Britain's maritime interests had dictated the opposite policy. Her most impressive ships had been laid down during that period. The Victory was forty years old at Trafalgar, the Defiance was forty-one, and the Britannia was forty-three, having been launched in 1762.

  Despite the dark legends of the press gangs, the lure of prizes was potentially the more effective weapon in recruiting seamen. The attraction was simply that piracy had been made legal for the duration of hostilities. In pursuit of their prey, the most respectable commanders of English ships resorted to devices which would have caused international dismay half a century later. Royal Navy captains flew American, Danish, or even French colours to dupe their opponents, hoping to come close enough to ships or shore-batteries to do untold damage before their victims awoke to the deception. When Sir Sydney Smith sailed almost into Brest harbour in 1795, flying French colours and hailing his enemies in their own language, no one thought he had acted otherwise than honourably. The French, in turn, went hunting in English colours. Though there was a difference in build between English and French ships, identification was by no means easy. Ships were frequently captured and incorporated into the opposing navy without even a change of name. The Bonne Citoyenne and the Revolutionnaire fought in the Royal Navy unde
r their original names. There was an Achille on both sides at Trafalgar.

  To hide a ship's guns, or to show sailors on deck dressed in the French style, were minimal deceptions by the Royal Navy. In return, the French set traps for avaricious crews. When Napoleon annexed Italy, all shipping in Italian waters became fair game. Captain Abraham Crawford described in his Reminiscences the delight of his comrades on H.M.S. Sultan at finding two merchant ships anchored and abandoned off the Ligurian coast, their crews having retired to a nearby town for the night. Boarding parties swarmed up the sides and cut the cables. But neither of the ships could be moved. The British sailors had fallen for the lure of ships moored by an extra line from the masthead to the cliffs above them. Concealed on these heights, the watching sharpshooters opened a flashing hail of musketry, which scythed among the boarding parties on the open decks. Any man who climbed the mast to sever the line would have been an easy target in the moonlight. But so long as the rope was not cut, there was no escape from the musket fire. The boarding parties were saved at last by the presence of mind of a lieutenant. Dressing a dummy in sailors' clothes, he hoisted it aloft. Every musket on the cliffs opened fire, and the dummy fell. During the moment when the sharpshooters were occupied with reloading, the most agile of the British sailors shinned up and cut the ropes.28

  But there was a code of honour in such matters. The British despised the French practice of having sharpshooters in the rigging to pick off individual officers and men during close skirmishes. It was one thing for a row of cannon to fire a general broadside at an enemy ship, when no one man fired specifically at another. But for a marksman to take deliberate aim at his opponent and shoot him was not an honest form of combat. Such had been the feeling in the army during the eighteenth century and so it was to remain for many captains and their crews. Prudence, as well as chivalry, endorsed the sentiment, since marksmen and their weapons had a disconcerting habit of setting fire accidentally to their own rigging.

  The same prejudice operated against the use of delayed-action devices or "submarine" warfare. Metal carcases were sometimes packed with gunpowder and floated into enemy ports or anchorages under cover of darkness. "Not a fair proceeding," said Admiral Otway during the Walcheren expedition. "Unmanly," announced Captain Crawford, "assassin-like". Even the heating of shot before firing was regarded as a despicable French subterfuge. More than a decade after the Napoleonic wars, the naval historian William James still thought that, "The employment of hot shot is not usually deemed honourable warfare." But, like the sharpshooters in the rigging, the practice also involved serious risk of setting fire to the ship which employed it.29

  However, a young officer in Cochrane's position, joining the navy with a hope of enriching himself by prizes, faced a more powerful enemy than France or Spain, and one whose weapons were a good deal more sophisticated: the Admiralty and its prize courts. In the view of many serving officers, these courts were at best unsympathetic and, all too often, cynically corrupt. It was relatively common for a hopeful young commander and his men to find that, after a hard-won capture, the Admiralty proposed to appropriate the entire value of the prize. It was always open to the heroes to fight for their claim in the prize court. But even if they won their case, they might hear that the cost of the proceedings had swallowed up more than the sum due to them, so that they were now in debt to the court as well as having been robbed of the proceeds of their valour.

  A man might complain publicly or privately against the prize system. But before he set himself up as a "sea lawyer", he was well advised to remember that this very employment, let alone his promotion, lay in the hands of the Admiralty itself. In consequence, there was a good deal of private grumbling and very little public campaigning.

  Even in time of war, appointment and promotion continued to be the great preoccupations of aspiring heroes. John Wilson Croker, who became Secretary to the Board of Admiralty in 1809, was dismayed by the "avalanche of applications", which fell upon his desk, day after day and year after year. He may have reflected that Lord St Vincent, as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1801 to 1804, had refused to favour proteges, even when they came from his own family, and had returned blunt refusals to the Duke of Kent and the Prince of Wales when they sought preferment for one of their favourites.

  An easy pretext for rejection, in the case of a young man for whom a first naval appointment was sought, was to show that he was too old. As Croker informed one persistent suitor, "a man turned nineteen years of age is more than six years too old to begin a sea life". Nelson had been a midshipman at twelve, and his friend George Parsons at eleven. Other "Young Gentlemen" went on active service at ten years old or less, until 1794 when the Admiralty laid down that candidates for commissions must be at least eleven. After several years of being dressed like a hero and beaten like a child, the boy might "pass for lieutenant". He would still be young, in many cases. Indeed, Admiral Rodney had appointed his son to the command of a British warship at the age of fifteen. But the path from junior lieutenant to first lieutenant of a ship more frequently depended on the removal of senior lieutenants by death or misfortune. Many young officers must have shared the dream of William Price in Mansfield Park, as he imagined the annihilation of these human obstacles to glory, and his own splendid heroism once he had stepped into their shoes.30

  On promotion to a ship of his own, the lieutenant would become a commander. When appointed to a ship of over twenty guns, he rose to post-captain, or captain as it was more generally known. But all such promotions were liable to cause bitterness. When there was a vacancy for the command of a ship, the best placed lieutenants were those serving on the admiral's flagship. Some of these were beneficiaries of "parliamentary promotion", in which the proteges of a member of parliament were promoted, in exchange for his support of the government. Lieutenants on smaller and less distinguished ships might live and die in their more lowly rank.

  Once a lieutenant or a commander became a post-captain, there was no impediment to the highest rank except for a very long list of senior officers. Captains themselves were listed in order of seniority. When there was a vacancy for a rear-admiral, it was filled from the head of the list. Beyond that, there were prospects of becoming vice-admiral, and even admiral of the fleet. In 1794, there were 425 captains, each waiting long and hopefully to move into the place of the man above him. By 1815, the captains' list had grown to double that length, making promotion a long and discouraging process.

  However, a man might console himself by scanning the names of casualties after each glorious victory, and then doing a little simple arithmetic.

  Hope deferred and prizes withheld inevitably tarnished the enthusiasm with which many officers had gone to war. Sir John Barrow wrote angrily to the Admiralty in 1810 that French ships were coming inshore at night and seizing English merchant vessels just off the coast of Kent. The commander of the Royal Navy brig, who was supposed to afford them protection, had evidently had his fill of war by dinner time. He was in the habit of anchoring his ship, retiring to his house at Birchington for a comfortable night's sleep, and leaving the French to do as they pleased. His motive was something more than cowardice or indolence. An entire Royal Navy squadron actually witnessed one seizure, under the eyes of the local population, and did nothing to prevent it. As the French ship made off with her prize, wrote Barrow, "it is mortifying enough to hear people publicly crying out, 'Aye, this is what we get for paying taxes to keep up the navy; a French privateer is not worth capturing, she will not pay the charges of condemnation.'"31

  The commander of the squadron, like the captain of the single brig, had learnt the hard lesson that French raiding vessels were too expensive to capture. A small privateer would not even cover the costs in the Admiralty court, so that the victors themselves would have to pay for their valour out of their own pockets. However, the captain who slept ashore may also have fortified himself with the example of Admiral Thomas Matthews, half a century before, who had contrived to spend eighteen y
ears on his country estate without once going to sea.

  The reputation of the navy in the war of 1793-1815 reached peaks at the time of great individual victories and then declined as the public mind grew more preoccupied by the horrors of the press gang and the lash. Pressing, as it was called, had become the only means by which a nation of fifteen million could sustain an expanding naval war to contain Napoleon. Yet the consequences of the system led to encounters between British ships, in full view of their countrymen, during which they fought one another as vigorously as they fought the French.

  In one such incident, just off Gravesend, the Royal Navy's Immortalite sent two boatloads of men, fully armed, to seize enough men from the East India Company's Woodford and Ganges to make up their complement. As the men of the Immortalite attempted to scale the steep, curving sides of the other ships, they were met by a fusilade of shot and missiles, and threatened by the cutlasses of the East India crews if they advanced further. When the lieutenant of the party sent against the Woodford saw that one of his men had had his foot nailed to the bottom of the long-boat by a pike, he ordered his marines to open fire. Two of the Woodford's crew were shot dead, but the resistance to the boarding parties continued until the Royal Navy at last withdrew with its wounded. The lieutenant of the long-boat was indicted for murder, though acquitted at Maidstone Assizes. Even so, such public skirmishes in the Thames estuary were hardly calculated to boost the nation's enthusiasm for its senior service.32

  In the navy which young Lord Cochrane now joined, there were even more bizarre aspects of the pressing system. When, for instance, the bands of the Victory played, "Britons, Strike Home!" as she sailed into battle at Trafalgar, the sentiments must have sounded a little incongruous to those eighty-two foreigners who made up an important part of the flagship's crew. There were twenty-eight Americans on the Victory on that occasion, as well as Frenchmen, Africans, and Indians. It was commonplace for men from neutral ships to be pressed. The American government was foremost in condemning the British for pressing its sailors, while the British swore that American ships were spiriting away shirkers Who wished to avoid their patriotic duty as true-born Englishmen.

 

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