Admiral Collingwood

by Max Adams

  On 22 March Portland arrived at Madeira where, appropriately, she took on wine, and where Collingwood made a delicate pencil drawing of the island. She sailed again on the 30th, and the next day Mathew Hayes, Thomas Bullard and William Davies were punished with twelve lashes each for the guilty pleasures of their last night ashore in Funchal. Ten days later Collingwood wrote of a tragic accident: for the first time his facility for dry but telling expression springs from the page fully formed:

  Mr Gold, midshipman, fell from the gangway overboard, and every means to save him were abortive, thus died an amiable young man, respected and beloved most by those who best knew him. Fresh breezes and hazy weather.1

  On 11 April, when the ship’s supply of beer ran out, wine was served to the men, as was the navy’s custom in tropical waters. These were days of pure blue-water sailing with the ship averaging seven knots and 150 miles a day on the back of the north-east trade winds. On the 17th, forty days out from the Downs, the lookout sighted Domenica, one of the Leeward Islands, and Portland anchored in Prince Rupert’s Bay. The midshipmen and marines were sent to cut wood, and two days later they sailed again, west and north, across the Caribbean Sea. As they passed each island in turn, Collingwood recorded meticulous observations on pilotage, and drew pencil silhouettes so that he might recognise them again. On 2 May they passed the south-east corner of Jamaica and arrived at Port Royal, where they were piloted into the harbour by ‘a negro’. They fired a fifteen-gun salute for the commander of the Windward Islands station, Vice-Admiral Rodney, who responded with his own salute and very decently sent the ship’s company a puncheon of rum. Whether or not the officers of the Portland drank the traditional West Indies toast, to ‘a bloody war and a sickly season’ was not recorded by Collingwood. It reflected the high mortality rate among sailors in the West Indies, and the chance of rapid promotion for those who survived.

  One of the first and most unpleasant tasks in port was to convene a court-martial, which could only happen when there was a sufficient number of post-captains present. Portland’s boatswain, Harris, had been accused of embezzlement, but the court found him innocent of the charge and acquitted him. Not so the boatswain of the sloop Diligence. He was found guilty of drunkenness and neglect, and dismissed the service. The same charge against a common seaman would have been dealt with by his captain and the cat o’ nine tails in the privacy of his own ship. A popular or useful boatswain might have got away with being temporarily disrated. This man was obviously no great loss to the service.

  During the next three weeks in Port Royal, twenty seamen and marines of the Portland were punished, each with twelve lashes, for a variety of familiar misdemeanours including theft, drunkenness, disobedience and neglect of duty. What seems unbearably brutal to modern sensibilities must be put into context. Similar offences ashore could attract the death penalty, a sentence prescribed in many of the Articles of War but very rarely meted out; usually for aggravated theft, or for sodomy. Sailors themselves, when they made complaints against authority and ‘the system’, sometimes cited brutal tyrannising authority, but not what they considered a just punishment, seen as an absolute requirement in a service in which efficiency and obedience were life and death matters. However, Collingwood cannot even then have been overly impressed with his captain’s use of the cat for, once in command, he would establish a regime that required very little corporal punishment, and indirectly led to a widespread acceptance that harsh physical punishment reflected a failure of management by officers.

  On 26 May Portland was still at Port Royal, and now Collingwood’s log provides an explanation for the previous acquittal of her boatswain. A second court-martial was held, and this time the defendant was Thomas Bradley, accuser of Harris, the boatswain. He was charged with false accusation, and with endeavouring to suborn witnesses to prove his allegations. The next day, in line with the seriousness with which the service viewed such a crime, he was sentenced to three hundred lashes – little short of a death sentence, and probably thoroughly approved of by all his shipmates. Although Collingwood did not record the aftermath, it was usual to carry out such a sentence in doses, under the eye of the ship’s surgeon, so that the offender should survive to see the full sentence out.

  On 1 June Collingwood recorded blandly that he was discharged from Portland and sent into Princess Amelia, under Captain Berkeley, in order to ‘navigate her to England’. This sounds rather as if he had been given an acting warrant as master, though there is no available confirmation of this. Although his log states the bare fact of the matter, Collingwood must have left with some regret for his shipmates: he made a full-page drawing in his log showing a melancholy sailor waving sadly at a departing ship.

  Before he had a chance to discern the Princess Amelia’s sailing qualities, he recorded another death (possibly from fever) of one of the Portland’s lieutenants. These are the words of the same man who was to cry openly in front of Lord Chancellor Eldon on the Strand, nearly thirty years later:

  AM. Departed this life Mr. Samuel Price 3rd lieutenant, who for his gentleness of disposition, equanimity, vigilance and unwearied attention to the Service, was universally regretted. Every action of his life was guided by justice, candour and honour; the years of a youth were enriched with knowledge equal to long experience; he discharged his duty to his country like an officer, and to all mankind as their friend; no wonder he lived beloved, and died lamented.2

  Princess Amelia sailed from Port Royal on 15 June, north-west towards Florida, and then up the east coast of America to Newfoundland, where she arrived off Cape Race at the end of July. This was the normal route home from the West Indies, taking advantage of westerly winds. After an uneventful passage (except for the loss of another man overboard) she arrived back in England in August.

  Two other important events occurred in 1773, while Collingwood was ashore. Both would have a profound effect on his career. One was the first meeting (though we do not know when or where it took place) between Collingwood, aged twenty-five, and Horatio Nelson, aged fifteen.3 In this year Nelson took part in the famous expedition to the North Pole during which he had the mythic encounter with the polar bear, and later went to the East Indies and nearly died on the way home. Despite the difference in years, they immediately struck up a close friendship: Collingwood tall and imposing with a long pigtail tied in a queue behind, a seaman of twelve years’ experience, but reserved and shy; Nelson, still little more than a child with just three years at sea, slight in build and sickly, but already having decided he would become a hero and already possessing the magnetic personality that would later prompt so many men to die for him.

  The other event was the tipping of a consignment of imported tea into the harbour at Boston on 16 December by a group of young men dressed as Indians: the Sons of Liberty. Boston today, as it always has been, is the most European of American cities, literary, strongly Irish and Italian, but essentially Anglophile. Its Common might be Hyde Park, and its Victorian-looking streets with their elegant cast-iron lamps are reminiscent of Bayswater. Above all though, it was and is a mercantile city, sitting at the head of its grand harbour and best approached from the sea. Unlike Mahon it is physically unrecognisable from the town that Collingwood knew. Two churches, a cemetery, the Old State House and Faneuil Hall are among the few buildings which remain from that period, but they are dwarfed by mirror-glass skyscrapers (a term borrowed from the navy), high-level roads, and even by five-storey redbrick apartment blocks that date from the late nineteenth century. Long Wharf, which in 1773 led from the bottom of Beacon Hill some eight hundred yards out into the harbour, is much stunted, and the vessels which tie up here are more likely to be jet-powered catamarans ferrying trippers to Cape Cod than sailing ships filled with English tea and coal.

  At the start of the American Revolutionary War, Boston was a peninsula, indeed all but an island, at the mouth of the Charles River. Across the harbour was Charlestown, these days a very desirable and old-fashioned hill district at th
e bottom of which is a US Navy dockyard. The oldest floating warship in the world is berthed here: the USS Constitution, launched in 1797 to a design which made her the most formidable ship in her class: a 44-gun frigate with an exceptionally strong internal bracing structure which meant she was unsinkable by any British ship of similar size and, in the war of 1812, earned her the nickname Old Ironsides. Once a year on 4 July, to confirm her commission and to remind Britons that she beat them in that war, she is paraded round the harbour.

  When Collingwood first went to America she had no navy. She was a colony, or group of colonies, of the British Empire, protected by the ships of the Royal Navy. The reasons behind the Revolutionary War are complex, though they can be summed up as the outcome of a relationship rather like that of a parent to an adolescent child: resentment at the cost of upkeep (an army of ten thousand men) on one side, and on the other, frustration at being asked to pay for that upkeep (the Stamp Duty) without an increased role in family decision-making: no taxation without representation, was the famous cry. One thing is certain. The trigger that started the war was the imposition of a tax on tea imports that led to the infamous Tea Party. Things got out of hand. The Continental Congress was formed to provide a forum for negotiation and protest in response to the Boston Port Bill (known to Americans as the Intolerable Acts), which amounted to a naval blockade. The bloody-minded intransigence of powerful interests on both sides, in the face of large numbers of conciliatory voices, was to lead to armed conflict.

  Newspapers of the time, though lacking a sense of historical perspective, reflect the immediacy (and irony) of the events that culminated in all-out war. One of these was the Boston and Country Gazette and Journal – a republican organ. The Tea Party was reported defiantly in its pages in December 1773. In January 1774 another consignment of tea was refused entry, but otherwise the paper contained a normal assortment of items: best Newcastle coals were on sale at ten dollars per chaldron. A ‘very likely negro man’ was to be sold for want of employ,4 and ‘a woman with a good breast of milk wou’d take a child to suckle’.5 In May the Gazette was taking a much more serious tone, when it reported the reaction in London to the publication of the Boston Port Bill and the impending blockade:

  Concerning public matters, I am sorry to say that Things are going from bad to worse, and a Breach between Great Britain and her colonies seems approaching very fast. This accursed tea is the very Match that is appointed to set fire to a Train of gun Powder.6

  On 23 May the editor of the Gazette himself wrote, ‘We consider this an attack not just on Boston, but on the whole continent’, and on 30 May he called the British measures ‘rash, impolitic and vindictive’.

  The main loyalist paper, representing both British and American interests in that part of the population (mainly merchants and first-generation immigrants) who deplored the prospect of a breach, was the Massachusetts and Boston Weekly Gazette: the Newsletter. It had begun the new year carrying an advertisement that had an air of flippant levity:

  JUST ARRIVED FROM THE MOON

  In the ship Airy Castle,

  One hundred and fifty likely servants of both sexes; among whom are, lovers, schemers, horse-jockeys, sail-jobbers &c. Enquire of –7

  And in the same pages was a private advertisement…

  MADE THEIR ESCAPE

  An husband’s affections. They disappeared immediately after seeing his wife with her hands unwashed at breakfast.

  On Thursday 7 July 1774, among announcements of strayed cattle, a burglary, a body found floating in the harbour and notice of a husband wishing to apprehend the wife who had run off with all his money, the paper reported the arrival in Boston harbour of Vice-Admiral Graves in His Majesty’s Ship Preston, of 50 guns. Cuthbert Collingwood, still a master’s mate at the age of twenty-seven, had landed in the New World in a town virtually besieged by the Massachusetts militia. The British army garrison in Boston, under the overall command of General Thomas Gage, also the appointed governor of Massachusetts, was in an invidious position. A drain on the town’s resources, and a very obviously resented presence, redcoats were subjected to the sort of harrying that occupying forces habitually suffer: knifings in dark alleys, muggings and thievings, and accusations, false or otherwise, of brutality that had of necessity to be punished for form’s sake. Gage’s need was for a decisive step by the British government. As he himself suggested, the only way to deal with the colonies was to ‘lop them off as a rotten limb from the Empire, and leave them to themselves, or take effectual means to reduce them to lawful authority’.8 Three thousand miles of ocean and political vacillation at home resulted in that decision, when it was finally made, being made too late.

  Gage’s temporary solution was to march his regiments off the peninsula along Boston Neck on periodic forays into the hinterland of Massachusetts: to relieve the febrile atmosphere of the town, to reconnoitre the countryside and, acting on intelligence, to look for and seize caches of arms (mostly supplied from France) that were being secreted at strategic locations by the militia. In turn, the republican element in the town reported all the redcoats’ movements (and many of Gage’s private intentions) back to the Provincial Congress at Concord, twenty miles away.

  Vice-Admiral Graves, as senior commander of the naval contingent, had arrived in Boston to ensure the effectiveness of the blockade and support Gage. But the arrival of naval reinforcements in the shape of the two-decker Boyne (74 guns) and Somerset (64) later that year can only have increased republican resentment. Throughout the late autumn and winter of 1774 Collingwood witnessed the build-up to a war that no one wanted. As if to emphasise that the navy was now a target too, the Newsletter of 18 August reported that Nathaniel Corset, a seaman of the sloop Lively, had been found floating in the harbour. Out there in the countryside, in a landscape suited to guerrilla warfare rather than the neat manoeuvres of lines of troops, the movement of arms, munitions and militiamen under the noses of the redcoats stopped short of outright conflict, but only just. The Congress had also created a system of ‘minute men’, a local rapid response force which could put up to twelve thousand men in the field at a few hours’ notice. It was useful practice for them.

  In November 1774, having long realised that his force of three thousand men was too small, Gage wrote:

  If force is to be used at length, it must be a considerable one, for to begin with small numbers will encourage resistance, and not terrify; and will in the end cost more blood and treasure. A large force will terrify, and engage many to join you, a middling one will encourage resistance, and gain no friends.9

  This was more or less the conclusion the government was coming to. George III had already decided his own mind, as he wrote to Lord North: ‘The New England governments are in a state of rebellion, blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.’10

  In February 1775 Gage decided that staying in Boston would achieve nothing, but without orders he dithered. It was not until April that orders came from London that he should now act decisively: troop reinforcements were on their way. On the 8th prominent opposition leaders left the town. With the Provincial Congress about to adjourn and disperse, Gage finally mobilised his troops, and on 18 April they advanced across Boston Neck and marched north-west. Reconnoitring officers, being spotted by observers, gave the enemy notice and the rebel forces rose in response. The upshot was running battles – skirmishes really – at Lexington and Concord on 19 April, during which the rebels suffered a hundred casualties, the redcoats a humiliating three hundred.11 These were the opening engagements of a war that would last until 1783 and give birth to the new American nation. Over the next few days twenty thousand militiamen surrounded Boston, completely cutting it off except by sea.

  The army’s reinforcements arrived in May. By this time disastrous tensions had arisen between Gage and Graves. Graves it was whose boats had ferried the dispirited soldiers back across the Charles River from Charlestown on 19 April. Now he realised that Charlest
own and the hills behind it (Breed’s Hill and Bunker’s Hill) offered the enemy too great a strategic advantage. So, he suggested burning Charlestown and fortifying redoubts on the hills, to be covered by the guns of his ships in the harbour. However, quite apart from natural inter-service rivalries, Graves carried with him from England a bitter hatred of Gage’s father. Perhaps affected by this as well as a naturally dilatory mind, Gage called the plan ‘too rash and sanguinary’12 and withdrew all British troops from the Charlestown peninsula. What he did allow the admiral to do was construct a battery on Copp’s Hill, overlooking the narrows between Boston and Charlestown, and arm it with 24-pounder guns. It was the sort of job the navy relished, perfectly convinced that in the matter of gunnery it knew better than the army. What the dispirited regulars thought is another matter.

  The atmosphere inside the town during these few months is hard to imagine. Collingwood’s experience of his eighteen-month stint in Boston is confined to three lines of a potted autobiography written after Trafalgar, thirty years later. What is not in doubt is his opinion of the political situation, recorded in the first of his letters that survives. It was an opinion almost universal among the British armed forces and the Tory establishment:

  I am all out of patience with them [Americans], and consider them the supporters of a dangerous Rebellion, rather than the assertors of the publick liberty; wish from my heart the whole pack were on Mount Pisga, then their declamations might get them a dinner.13

  Since the end of April 1775 thousands of loyalist refugees had been pouring into Boston from many miles around, preferring the fetid certainties of a town under siege to the persecution of rebels. There were still many republicans in the town, and with a worsening food and fuel crisis, and rival mobs roaming the streets at night, the navy must have felt themselves at least relatively well-placed, secure inside their wooden walls anchored in the harbour.