by Max Adams
Collingwood’s method was to ask selected former shipmates to join him, and to beg that they bring some of their mates along as volunteers. This he did by getting his sister Mary to put the word about that he was recruiting. Many of these followers were from the north-east, and in this way Collingwood was able to nurture his ship’s companies from a basis of regional cultural and social ties. Even at Trafalgar he brought with him into Royal Sovereign a number of Geordies whom he called his ‘Tars of the Tyne’. His reputation as a stern but decent captain went a long way to attract volunteer seamen who might otherwise be pressed into less amenable ships. Such was the way of these things that as Mermaid was refitting, Collingwood’s ‘old man’ William (William Ireland, his steward) turned up to join him, having just come from India. One person he would not be taking with him was the son of Mrs Airey, a family acquaintance. ‘I am afraid he is doing no good. He is really now come to such a degree of depravity that in consideration to the other young men he cannot be taken into any ship.’16
In July Collingwood was in Mermaid at Sheerness fitting out. He was still writing to Mary with instructions for sending his things. He reported that the Admiral, Lord Howe, had been very kind and attentive to him, and there was also news of Bounce: ‘My dog is a good dog, delights in the ship and swims after me when I go in the boat.’17 Mrs Airey’s son had disappeared.
The stand-off between Britain and Spain continued through the summer of 1790 and into autumn. By October Mermaid was at Portsmouth with the rest of the squadron. In another, uncharacteristically skittish letter to Mary he revealed that he was now reluctant to sail to the West Indies, his supposed destination, because he had reached an understanding with a young woman. He must have been courting her in Newcastle, and finally summoned the courage to propose while he was fitting Mermaid out. The young woman in question was Sarah Blackett, daughter of John Erasmus Blackett, the mayor of Newcastle. Collingwood had persuaded his uncle, Edward Collingwood of Chirton near North Shields, to act as his marriage broker, but had not heard the result of the negotiations. But he entreated Mary to get to know Sarah, who appears to have been a diffident young woman:
And have you been to visit my dear Sarah? She wishes very much to be well acquainted with you but is so shy that you must encourage her. I think if you wou’d let her drink tea with you in my Doll’s [Dorothy’s] room she would soon lose that reserve … I am quite distressed that I must leave things as they are.18
However, leave things he did, for very soon Mermaid sailed on a cruise to the West Indies in Admiral Cornish’s squadron. By this time, Spain had backed down over the Nootka Sound incident. Pitt won the November general election with an increased majority. There was nothing to do in the West Indies but show the flag. Collingwood might have enjoyed it, as a pleasant way of spending the winter, but not having heard from Mary or Sarah in six months he was relieved to return to Portsmouth in April 1791.
MY DEAR MARY, I am sure you will be glad to hear of my arrival. I assure you I am exceedingly happy at my return, and consider I pray you that for six months I have not heard a word of you, until today Mrs Hughes shewed me a letter from Sarah wherein she says she had been visiting you … I have brought nothing from the W’t Indies but a bottle of snuff and a roll of tobacco. I had intended some good grog, but was ordered home before I cou’d get it.19
Collingwood was not yet able to leave his ship and go north. Persistent rumours of a war with Russia which, like the Spanish Armament, came to nothing, kept the squadron on alert. Mermaid also needed urgent repairs, having sprung her masts (i.e. they had cracked) during the stormy Atlantic crossing. But he went home as soon as the ship was paid off. Cuthbert and Sarah were married on 18 June 1791 at St Nicholas’ cathedral in Newcastle, no more than fifty yards from the house where he was born.
Collingwood in the bosom of his family was a quite different man from Captain Collingwood. He immediately made friends with Sarah’s sister, her uncle Edward Blackett, and another uncle by marriage, Alexander Carlyle. Cuthbert and Sarah visited many of them, and a host of other collateral relations, during 1791 and 1792. When they were away he wrote to Mary, keeping her up to date with all the gossip. From Musselburgh he wrote that Sarah’s aunt, Mrs Carlyle, was ‘in a very weak state of health but she frets herself on every little trifling occasion and has so many fears and apprehensions about nothing, that I do not think she will ever be much better’. Edinburgh was one long round of social engagements, and they were woken every morning at six with the noise of carriages returning from parties. Used as he was to the hard world of the sea, Collingwood was amazed at what he saw as the dissoluteness of the idle classes:
This has been called the land of cakes; it may well be called the land of pensions. There is hardly a family of note, either famous or infamous, who have not (some one of them) a pension. Even the Lady Augusta Murray who was the other day found in bed with the village apothecary, has since that by the interest of her friend Dundas [Viscount Melville, later first Lord of the Admiralty] got a [pension] of 300£ a year.20
During 1792 the Collingwoods rented a house on Oldgate in Morpeth. It was, and is, a large red-brick townhouse, square and rather formal, positioned half-way along the town’s oldest street and close to an old bridge across the River Wansbeck. Morpeth, the county town of Northumberland, was an Anglo-Saxon and medieval market town some fifteen miles north of Newcastle on the Great North Road, set in rolling fertile arable and grass lands. Unable to compete with Newcastle economically, it has stayed much the same size as it was seven hundred years ago when the local merchants hired the famous Scottish astrologer and alchemist Michael Scott to make the Wansbeck tidal as far up as the town. Even his magic failed. Collingwood liked the house and the town very much. It was close to the countryside he loved, and blissfully remote from the smoke and bustle of Newcastle. He took a keen interest in the garden, planting vegetables, building a summer house and creating what he called his quarterdeck walk. He established a nursery of oak trees and formed grand plans for improvements. Between 1792 and his death eighteen years later he spent a total of less than two years here.
By September 1792 the Collingwoods had a daughter, Sarah, who had been born in May. They had had her inoculated against smallpox, and her face was covered with ‘irruptions’, but the doctor was pleased with her, and thought she would do very well. The second daughter, Mary Patience, arrived in August 1793, by which time Cuthbert was at sea again.
During the summer of 1792 a close watch was being kept on events in France as the country descended into chaos. Quite naturally many British people, especially those who had property to lose, saw the spectre of revolution appearing on their own doorstep. Part of Tom Paine’s seditious Rights of Man had been published the previous year and was much discussed in England. King Louis XVI and his family had tried to flee France a year earlier and been brought back to Paris, where they were interned in the notorious Temple prison. The new Legislative Assembly was opposed not only by Royalist factions in France, but also by Prussia and Austria who, like Britain, did not want to see revolution becoming an export trade. Paris was in ferment, under the volatile rule of the Commune and its Sans Culottes. In April 1792 France declared war on Austria and Prussia, claiming royal collusion in acts of ‘foreign aggression’. In September the monarchy was abolished and a General Convention formed, headed by Danton, Marat and Robespierre. Collingwood, as ever, followed events:
If the French people are not all mad, I pity most sincerely those who have yet retained their senses. The news expected now is of the most important kind; let us see if there is more wisdom in the counsils [sic] of the General Convention than there was in the National Assembly. I doubt it … I hope the miseries of France will be such a lesson to the Patriots of this country as will teach them the danger of reform and shew them the true value of this form of government, which affords the means of happiness to all who have from nature dispositions to enjoy it.21
There is little doubt of Collingwood’s politic
al affiliations here (though he had an intense dislike of party politics: his party was Old England, he once said). In a sense he was right. Britain’s monarchy was comparatively benign because it was controlled so effectively by commercial interests.22 One reason why Britain could mobilise for war so quickly and efficiently was that her naval power was the instrument of maritime trade. As 1792 wore on, the threat to that trade from France’s upheaval grew more serious, politically and economically. France invaded the United Provinces (Holland), confiscating property and imposing revolutionary economics there. The Convention also believed that an invasion of Britain would tilt that country into its own revolution.23 European political instability was indeed adding to the internal tensions created by Britain’s manufacturing revolution. In November Collingwood admitted as much in a letter to Nelson, whom he had not seen since he left Antigua in 1786:
You must not be displeased that I was so long without writing to you. I was very anxiously engaged a great part of the time, and perhaps sometimes a little lazy; but my regard for you, my dear Nelson, my respect and veneration for your character, I hope and believe will never be lessened. God knows when we may meet again, unless some chance should draw us to the sea-shore. There are great commotions in our neighbourhood at present. The seamen at Shields have embarked themselves, to the number of 1200 or 1400, with a view to compel the owners of the coal-ships to advance their wages; and, as is generally the case when they consider themselves the strongest party, their demand has been exorbitant … the times are turbulent; and the enthusiasm for liberty is raging even to madness.24
In common with other periods of dramatic technical innovation there was great strain on social relations. An emerging entrepreneurial middle class was prosperous and confident. For those in work wages were rising, but unemployment had led to riots, rick-burning and Luddism. In some respects the north-east of England was lucky. As Scottish millwright Andrew Meickle was introducing the mechanical grain thresher that would turn thousands of peasants off the land, coal mining and the industries that were to ride on its back were booming. The big towns could and did soak up much of Northumberland’s migrating rural population. In the 1780s Britain’s mercantile tonnage would double.25 But as her wealth increased so did social and economic inequality, and it was not only the mercantile class who watched developments in France. Workers such as the Shields seamen were curious to see how far they could flex their new-found muscle.
Collingwood’s loyalties were now divided between the delights of his wife and daughter, a ‘comfortable fire and friends’, and the thought of his own possible employment at sea. In January 1793 Louis XVI was executed. In February France declared war on Britain. By the 17th of that month Collingwood was back in London, hoping for a ship.
5
The sharp point of misfortune
1793–1795
A ship of the line was a very different beast from a frigate. When Collingwood was appointed flag captain to Rear-Admiral Sir George Bowyer in 1793, it was a pivotal point in his career. Gone were the easy discipline and independent command that came with a frigate. Collingwood had served in a ship of the line before, but never a second-rate1 like Prince, with ninety-eight guns on three decks. The post of flag captain was difficult, if not impossible, to excel in. Theoretically in control of running the senior ship in a squadron, a flag captain could never quite forget the admiral looking over his shoulder, perhaps waiting for him to make some ghastly mistake. If battle honours were to be won, the admiral was likely to take them for himself. But generally speaking, junior captains of whom great things were expected were appointed to flag ships. So if the post was double-edged, it could at least be interpreted as a compliment and would lead, as Collingwood said himself, to a claim on a line of battle ship in the future.2 Collingwood and Bowyer had met as long ago as 1782 and Collingwood must have impressed the older man.3 The patronage system was working for him, but entirely on his own merits.
The sailing qualities of second-rate ships offered little pleasure. They were floating batteries, designed to ride the storms of the Atlantic and wait for a set-piece battle, to slug it out with an enemy of similar size and power. Prince, even among second-rates, was a notoriously slow sailer, ‘forever in the rear’.4 Nevertheless, Collingwood was at sea where he wanted to be, and Bowyer at least gave him the freedom to develop his skills further: as a manager of men, and as the supreme exponent of naval gunnery. It is Collingwood on whom Jack Aubrey very explicitly models himself in the O’Brian novels when he aspires to bring the enemy into close action as quickly as possible and fire at them with deadly accuracy and speed.5
Gunnery was as different an art in frigates and ships of the line as command was. Three times as many guns to begin with, many of them much larger, with bigger gun crews, and much more dangerous to fire and be on the receiving end of. The lower gun decks of a 98-gun ship carried 32-pounder cannon. They brought to the ship both her stability and her dubious sailing characteristics.
Ships of the Royal Navy, when at full complement, were over-manned from a sailing point of view. Compared to merchantmen there was a positive superfluity of men to lay out along the yards, trim the sails, haul on tacks and braces and complete the never-ending variety of tasks required to keep such a monstrous piece of armament at sea. They were over-manned so that when the ship beat to quarters for action, there were enough crew to sail the ship and man the guns. When the marine beat his drum, a sort of organised pandemonium broke out – baffling to a landsman, but a perfectly synchronised execution of orders long refined and practised – at least, they would be when Collingwood finished with them (it cost him ‘some fat’, as he admitted to his sister Mary).6 Every man on the ship, from the cook upwards, had to learn his place and role in any and all situations. For ordinary and able seamen this meant their position on one of the masts during tacking and wearing; their watch; their ancillary jobs and, of course, their place in action.
Except in the most unusual circumstances, a ship of the line was geared to fire from one side at a time. There were enough men to serve all ninety-eight guns with a seven-man crew, but in action each of the forty-nine guns on one side of the ship would be manned by ten or twelve. Extra gunners were needed to fire the carronades and nine-pounders mounted on the forecastle, quarterdeck and poop (but which confusingly did not count in the ship’s rating).
To take a single deck: the lower deck of HMS Prince.7 Two lieutenants would be in overall charge of the deck. They were like assistant directors in a grand theatrical performance, with an eye on everything at once, deeply sensitive to the performance and morale of their junior officers and men. At the companionways marines were stationed in their bright red uniforms, muskets loaded, in case any man should panic and run. Under the lieutenants were midshipmen, the stage managers, each one caring for a number of gun crews, ensuring they were supplied with powder and shot, helping when guns exploded or were overturned, redistributing crews after injury. The crews and their guns were serviced by powder boys and the gunner and his mates. Powder, especially, had to be managed with extreme care; too much on the decks at one time and the ship might catch fire or explode; too little and there would be hell to pay.
Every gun (they all had names and were regarded with jealous affection by their crews) had a captain. He controlled the firing sequence: a man of great experience and skill, one of the most valued men on the ship. It was a lack of experienced gunners, more than anything else, that led to a sequence of decisive naval defeats for France and Spain in the next twenty-two years. Gunnery could only seriously be practised and perfected at sea in live-firing exercises repeated regularly; ships’ crews who spent their lives in port under blockade would prove it, with a firing rate perhaps a quarter or a fifth of the navy’s.
There were twelve stages in the firing of a three-ton 32-pounder cannon.8 When the drum beat, the gun crew would raise the gun port, remove the gun’s tompion, cast off the gun- and breeching-tackles that held it tight against the ship’s side, and r
un it inboard with training-tackles. One man would clean out the barrel with a sponge – or a worm (like a corkscrew on a long pole) if a damp or failed charge had to be withdrawn. A cartridge of powder would be passed and rammed down the barrel, followed by the 32-pound ball. This was held in place by a cotton wad, also rammed down the barrel. Then the crew would haul on the gun-tackles to heave the muzzle of the gun out of the port, and the tackles would be carefully laid out on the deck to prevent them tangling during recoil – a potentially deadly error.9 Now the gun captain took a quill filled with powder and inserted it into the touch-hole. The quill pierced the cartridge, so that when the powder in the quill lit, the flame shot down the quill, into the cartridge, and the charge exploded. In a firing exercise, especially under a captain like Collingwood, the gun captain would train his gun for elevation and bearing, perhaps on a target made of barrels; but at close quarters speed was everything, and when you could see the crews of the enemy’s guns grinning from their own gun ports twenty yards away, careful aiming was irrelevant.
This was a period of innovation in gunnery. Slow match (a thin rope-like fuse with a glowing end) was reliable but did not allow for precise timing. The quill was an improvement, but during the wars against France flintlocks gradually superseded other methods, though initially they were unreliable. Both these last improvements were initiated by Sir Charles Douglas, one of Collingwood’s few equals in the art.10
The naval great gun also plays a curious cameo role in the industrial revolution. In the 1770s ironmaster John Wilkinson of Coal-brookdale (known as ‘Iron-mad’ Wilkinson, he built the first iron boat and was buried in the first iron coffin), invented a type of lathe that could internally bore a cannon barrel to a smoothness and tolerance that had never been achieved until then.11 This enabled the manufacture of guns with superior accuracy over longer ranges. Matthew Boulton and James Watt, the steam engineers, realised that Wilkinson’s lathe would allow them to make steam cylinders of much greater accuracy than before. This was a prime technological breakthrough in the development of the high-pressure steam engine and, subsequently, the locomotive. It is not just in the twentieth century that martial technology has had a civilian pay-off.