Many French and Spanish seamen also chose to serve with their captors rather than to spend the rest of a long war rotting in Dartmoor or one of England's other prisons. But Lieutenant Thomas Hodgskin was determined to enlighten the "apparent ignorance" of the public by revealing that foreigners, American or European, were by no means the most unlikely conscripts for the Royal Navy. "I knew Africans, who had been stolen from Africa, taken in a slave-ship, afterwards cloathed, on board a guard-ship, and, without being able to speak a word of English, sent to man the British fleet. . . . Such a thing is a burlesque upon a national defence."33
Thomas Cochrane, like almost all contemporary naval officers, accepted that pressing was a necessary evil during the critical years of the war against France. Even after 1815, there were many figures of influence who took offence when the system was criticised. In 1822, Captain Marryat had rashly published his Suggestions for the Abolition of Impressment. Some years later, he had occasion to seek permission from William IV to wear a French order conferred on him by Louis XVIII and, at the same time, to seek promotion. The King, having been Lord High Admiral as Duke of Clarence, took a keen interest when the request was forwarded to him.
"Marryat! Marr-yat!" said the old King suspiciously. "By-the-by, is not that the man who wrote a book against the impressment of seamen?"
"The same, your majesty."
"Then he shan't wear the order, and he shall have nothing!"34 The popular view of the naval discipline awaiting the victims of the press gang was conditioned by the grim reputation of figures like "Old Jarvie", as Lord St Vincent was known. In one cameo, his hard-set and weatherbeaten old face watched with stern satisfaction the expiring struggles of a mutineer dangling at the yard-arm. As the struggles ceased, St Vincent turned to his companion, raised his hat in salute to the ceremony rather than to the man who had died, and said confidently:
"Discipline is preserved, sir!"35
Surgeon Cullen, one of his critics, denounced him as "haughty and imperious, rigidly and unnecessarily strict. . . which made him very much disliked by his captains and officers". But the dour old admiral had also sailed through the famous battle of Cape St Vincent, immovable on the poop of the Victory, unshaken even by the blood and brains of a marine blown in his face, as he continued sucking an orange.36
For all his harshness, St Vincent showed a resolve and an independence of mind which was lacking in lesser men. Admiral Sir John Duckworth, for instance, was regarded as brute and sycophant by men who served under him. "Old Tommy", as he was called, was loathed without reservation. William Richardson, a gunner on H.M.S. Tromp, recalled Lieutenant Byam of that ship being so habitually drunk that "he staggered so that the quarterdeck was hardly large enough to hold him". Duckworth summoned him to the flagship, where he learnt that Byam was related to a family of considerable political influence. He at once gave the drunken lieutenant command of a ship and, to no one's surprise, Duckworth received a knighthood in his turn.37
Duckworth's brutality appeared when, after prolonged and repeated reefing of the sails on H.M.S. Castor, the men dared to descend to the deck, cheer ironically, and go below. Duckworth tried the four ringleaders of this "mutiny", sentencing three to be flogged and the other to be hanged. Christmas Day 1801 being at hand, he chose that for the execution. The knot was placed under the man's chin, prolonging his sufferings until he struggled so wildly that it slipped round to the side of his neck and ended his life. The season of good will continued on Boxing Day with two floggings of three hundred lashes and one of five hundred.38
A dramatic consequence of such discipline was seen in the loss of Royal Navy ships like the Africaine, the Hermione and the Danae. The crew of the Hermione murdered their officers in 1797 and sought sanctuary in Spain, while the men of the Africaine, when boarded by the enemy, refused to fight anyone but their own captain, who was cut down in the skirmish. Before sailing, they had petitioned the Admiralty for his removal, offering to serve for a year without pay under some other commander.39
However, these incidents were as exceptional as they were sensational. The attention of most men was taken up by such mundane matters as food and drink. Corned beef and biscuits, wine and water, made up much of the diet in ships of the Atlantic squadrons. The beef, reported young Bernard Coleridge, had been ten or eleven years in the corn. The biscuits felt like cool calves' foot jelly or blancmange when swallowed because of the number of maggots in them. The water was the colour of pear tree bark "with plenty of little maggots and weevils in it", while the wine tasted like a mixture of sawdust and bull's blood. For all these shortcomings, Bernard Coleridge was still lucky not to be on a ship which ran short of water, however unpalatable the supply might seem. When the level fell low, the butts were closed up except for a hole at the top with a musket barrel in it. Any man wanting a drink was obliged to suck it up through the barrel. A further deterrent to unnecessary drinking was to keep the butt at the masthead. A man had first to go aloft, carry the butt down to the deck to drink, and then replace it at the masthead once more.40
Officers fared better than their men in matters of diet, particularly on the larger ships of the line, the battleships of the Napoleonic period. Yet officers and men alike had an interest in the safety of the ship. As war approached, there were astute men of business, with no particular interest in shipping, who would buy up the most unseaworthy vessels as cheaply as possible. They knew that when hostilities commenced, these could be hired out to the Admiralty for £400 a month, their owners recouping the purchase price two or three times in a year by this practice.
Whether England's warships were hired or purpose-built, many of the nation's heroes found themselves in what were euphemistically described as "wet ships", a term applied to vessels which let the sea through their timbers at a disquieting rate. During the blockade of Toulon in 1796, St Vincent informed the Navy Board that many of his ships were "a complete sieve, from the poop to the orlop deck, both in the decks and the sides; repaired as they are with planks of Pomeranian and Holstein growth, the water runs through them like a porous dripping-stone". William Richardson, who lived as an ordinary seaman on the orlop deck, confirmed this. "Our ship was so leaky . .. that we had seldom a dry bed to lie on, and frequently shipping a great deal of water the decks were never dry." Proof of this was clear when the ship returned to Spithead. "The ship being so continually wet the green grass was growing on her sides and on her decks under the gun-carriages."41
The pervasive damp turned bruises into ulcers and brought all manner of ailments to Richardson's comrades. But still there were other men who suffered worse fates in order that the shipbuilders might profit. The new war meant good business for the Royal Dockyards and, particularly, for the private yards to which about two-thirds of the contracts went. A careful builder could charge £9 or £10 a ton for a ship which only cost him £3 or £4 a ton to build. There were, of course, drawbacks. Poor quality timber had to be used to make such economies and, in bad cases, while the final work was being completed on the slipway, the first timbers had already rotted. Far more dramatic, however, were the economies made on the main bolts which, literally, held a ship together. When the vessel was inspected, all the bolts appeared to be in place, but in some cases it was only "the tops and points" of the expensive copper shafts which ornamented the hull. Some crews escaped the consequences of this, but other ships disintegrated at sea, the loss of the York, the Blenheim, and the near-loss of the Albion being attributed to this fraud. St Vincent, writing to Lord Spencer from his flagship in 1797, remarked, "You may rest assured, the Civil Branch of the Navy is rotten to the very core." He later insisted that "Our dockyards stink of corruption." To the victims or their comrades, they also stank of murder.42
The scale of administrative corruption in the navy which young Thomas Cochrane entered was so vast that it seems remarkable that England ever got a fleet to sea. At critical moments, such as trying to heave a stranded ship off a shoal by means of a kedge-anchor, it would be discovered t
hat the cables provided were anything up to 90 feet short of the stated length because of economies practised by the dockyard manufacturers. When confronted with this, the officers of the rope-yard replied in pious unanimity that it was nothing to do with them. The cables must have "shrunk" when they were coiled up.43
More generally, the same work was charged for many times over, and wages drawn for men or children who did no work and, for that matter, rarely went near the dockyard. In less than eighteen months, the cooperage at Woolwich dockyard charged £3670 for work whose value was £264. Among the skilled craftsmen who were paid for these labours was a blind and elderly man who received £120 a year for allowing himself to be led to the dockyard from time to time.44
Far from diminishing one's admiration for the victors of the Nile, or Trafalgar, or the Glorious First of June, the revelation of such practices enhances their reputation still further. They triumphed not only over the enemy abroad but over the enemy at home as well. To keep pace with war and embezzlement, the money voted for the navy rose from four million pounds in 1793 to fifteen million in the year of Trafalgar, and to twenty million by the time of Waterloo. St Vincent, as First Lord of the Admiralty, won the reluctant approval of the government for a Commission of Naval Enquiry into frauds and abuses. But the Commission's reports merely confirmed what most people had already guessed. Up to a quarter of the annual budget for the navy had disappeared into the pockets of those who contrived the frauds and abuses.
Predictably, men who had political influence or held offices of state were milking the revenues quite as assiduously as their rivals in private commerce. An admiral would retire with a pension of £410 a year, a post-captain with £210. But the fortunate sycophant who held the post of "clerk of the ticket office" at the Admiralty retired with £700 a year. The total sum paid to thirteen widows and orphans of admirals and captains killed in battle was less than the pension paid to one widow of one Admiralty commissioner. Cochrane himself noticed with interest that for eight years after the death of his grandmother, she having been the widow of a naval captain and in receipt of a widow's pension, "some patriotic individual had been drawing her pension, as though she were still living!" Dean Inge's description of pohtics as the art of transferring the contents of one's opponents' pockets to those of one's supporters was seldom truer than during this period. It was calculated, for instance, that the sinecure payments to the Duke of Buckingham would have financed the entire supply departments at Chatham, Dover, Gibraltar, Sheerness, the Downs, Heligoland, Cork, Malta, the Mediterranean, the Cape of Good Hope, Rio de Janeiro, and would still have left more than £5000 in the Treasury. The majority of Royal Navy officers put such things firmly from their minds and steered hopefully for glory. None the less, it must have occurred to many of them to wonder what would happen if ever there should be a young commander of audacity and tactical brilliance who chose to fight the enemy at home as well as the enemy at sea. With the advent of Lord Thomas Cochrane, the answer to such speculation was about to be provided.45
2
Steering to Glory
H.M.S. Hind was a far cry from the ships which gripped the patriotic imagination in 1793. The popular image was of the mighty leviathans of 90 or 120 guns, the bronze mouths of the cannon towering in successive ranks to guard the black fortress of the hull. There was an almost baroque splendour in the upper decks, ornate with white and gold, and the curve of the great sails against the sky.
Ships like the Hind were a different matter. She carried a single tier of guns, twenty-eight in all, and they were 9-pounders, against the 32-pounders of the great battlefleets. Even by the standards of the frigates, she was not powerfully armed. Instead of the ornate white and gold, her hull was topped off with acid-yellow. Regardless of appearances, however, it was the Hind or ships of her type which carried on the day-to-day business of war against France for the next twenty-two years.
For most contemporaries, the sight of England's warships, anchored offshore in deeper water, was their closest acquaintance with naval life. The distance was a necessary one and was made more significant by the boats which rowed in careful circles round the anchored vessels. With their scarlet tunic'd Royal Marines, long-barrelled muskets at the ready, these were the guard-boats, intended to dissuade volunteers and pressed men alike from trying to slip through an open port and swim for home.
When Cochrane and his luggage were rowed out from the shore in a bum-boat, it was the duty of the midshipman of the watch to direct the little harbour craft to the entry port of the Hind. The captain of the frigate happened to be his uncle, Alexander Cochrane, which was the young man's only asset in joining her. Captain Cochrane was not on board at that moment, but his nephew was required to report himself to the quarterdeck like any other newly-arrived midshipman.
More than sixty years later, his first moments on the Hind remained one of the most vivid impressions of his life. He reached the quarterdeck, its surface holystoned to a wooden pallor and smelling strongly of pitch with which the caulkers repaired the decking of a ship in port. Having been told to report to the lieutenant of the Hind, Jack Larmour, he naturally expected to find him there. There was no one there but a common seaman, "with marlinspike slung round his neck, and a lump of grease in his hand". The man was "busily employed in setting up the rigging". The young Lord Cochrane interrupted him and asked where he might find Lieutenant Larmour. The seaman with the lump of grease and the marlinspike explained that he was Lieutenant Larmour, improbable though it might seem. "His reception of me," wrote Cochrane, "was anything but gracious."1
There were reasons for Larmour's hostility, as Cochrane discovered. "A tall fellow over six feet high, the nephew of his captain, and a lord to boot, were not very promising recommendations." It was worse than that, because though Cochrane was a lord, his father was nothing but a crotchety and bankrupt old Scottish earl, in the eyes of the world. A young lord without money was the worst proposition of all for his comrades. It also seemed that Larmour had heard of the regimental fiasco and of the way in which the aspiring naval hero had run home to his father because he had been laughed at by rude boys near Charing Cross.
Larmour was irritated by the interruption, according to Cochrane, and annoyed at having been "saddled with a hard bargain". He gave the young man his first naval order.
"Get your traps below!"
The ship's boys carried the new midshipman's luggage down to the twilight of the gun-deck, where the marines also stood guard by the open ports to frustrate any of the pressed men who tried to stow away in the returning harbour-craft and supply-boats. For a young man of Cochrane's height, the headroom below deck was so little that he was never to be able to stand upright. But his berth was further down in the hull, below the gun-deck, in the communal accommodation for all midshipmen.
At that level, there was almost total darkness, the little light that there was filtering down through the gratings of the decks above. The midshipmen, like the seamen, lived below the waterline, where even in the brightest summer day it was impossible to see clearly without a "purser's moon", as candles were known.
The single berth of the midshipmen was lined with shelves on to which all personal possessions, food and clothing, were crammed. It was commonly stocked with plates, glasses, cutlery, combs, hats, quadrants, salt-butter and whatever other supplements to the ship's diet the men had managed to bring with them. During the day, the berth was almost filled by the table at which the midshipmen dined. By night, the "cots" of canvas stretched on wood were slung from hooks in the beams. There was, of course, no such thing as bed linen or blankets unless the new arrival had brought some of his own.
Cochrane's innocence of living conditions on board ship was such that he had brought a considerable quantity of luggage with him. Among this was a sea chest, so imposing that it would literally not fit into the berth. As an old man, he still remembered the voice of Lieutenant Larmour behind him, at the door of the berth where the uniformed marine stood guard.
&n
bsp; "This Lord Cochrane's chest? Does Lord Cochrane think he is going to bring a cabin aboard? The service is going to the devil! Get it up on the main deck!"
The sea chest disappeared and, presently, Cochrane followed it to see what had happened. He saw to his astonishment that under Lieutenant Larmour's orders, one of the seamen was sawing open an end of it and that some of his possessions were already scattered about the deck. As Cochrane appeared, Larmour explained brusquely to him that it had been found necessary to saw the chest in half owing to "the lubberliness of shore-going people in not making keyholes where they could be most easily got at".2
If it seemed to Cochrane that he had entered a world ruled by lunatic logic and peopled by grotesques, there were further and stranger surprises in store. As the midshipmen assembled by candlelight for their afternoon tea, he discovered that all of them were not younger than he was. If a midshipman failed to pass for lieutenant, he remained a midshipman. In one crowded berth there were boys of ten and men in early middle age, known as "oldsters", who would be midshipmen until death parted them from their profession. The shore-bound moralists who feared that the drunkenness and debauchery of the "oldsters" might corrupt the young boys were entirely correct. Reticence and decency were not characteristics of life among a couple of hundred men cooped up for months at a time on a ship hardly more than a hundred feet long. Even men who were wasted to skeletons by venereal disease still boasted of what they would do if they lived until the next port of call. "I'll get well soon," shouted one dying man, "time enough at any rate by the time we go to Malta, and then I'll have another rattle at a bitch of a whore!"3
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