Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  In a world where the orderliness of things seems so close to disorder and disintegration, an almost dance-like form of behaviour, in which the set moves are made with some grace and precision, was a kind of bulwark against chaos, a guarantee of who you were. On these ships, theatricality of language and dress was more than mere display: it was a mark of civility and order, of a distance from the anarchic mob, of precisely the values for which the war against revolutionary-cum-imperial France was being fought. ‘Even a momentary dereliction of forms,’ one ship’s chaplain wrote, ‘might prove fatal to the general interest.’ St Vincent had insisted that his captains should remain aloof from their men and even from their brother officers. The idea of a captain eating dinner with his lieutenants appalled him. Distance was a method of command. It is the same instinct for order which lies, for example, behind an instruction issued by Lord St Vincent to the Mediterranean fleet in July 1796. The admiral wasn’t going to have any hint of casual drawing-room manners, nor the wit of elegant society, about his fleet or flagship:

  The admiral having observed a flippancy in the behaviour of officers when coming upon the Victory’s quarterdeck and sometimes in receiving orders from a superior officer and that they do not pull off their hats and some not even touching them, it is his positive directions that any officer who shall in future so far forget this essential duty of respect and subordination be admonished publically; and he expects the officers of the Victory will set the example by taking their hats off on such occasions and not touching them with an air of negligence.

  St Vincent was insistent that midshipmen should have a uniform ‘which distinguish their class to be in the rank of gentleman, and give them better credit and figure in executing the commands of their superior officers.’ Decks were to be swept at least twice a day, the dirt thrown overboard, men to change their linen twice a week, to wash frequently, to make sure the heads were clean every morning and evening. The ship was to appear ‘clean and neat from without board.’ These orders, written in order books, were to be kept on the quarterdeck and open to inspection ‘of every person belonging to the ship’, sometimes in a canvas case.

  Filthy language, the solid staple of life between decks, was nevertheless not to be used within the hearing of officers. ‘There is a word which only comes from the mouths of hardened blackguards,’ wrote the extremely cleanminded Captain Riou on the Amazon in 1799, ‘that will not be permitted to pass with impunity.’ What that word was can only be guessed at but certainly Captain Griffiths on the London in 1795 thought “‘Bugger” a horrid expression disgraceful to a British seaman, a scandalous and infamous word.’ Not as scandalous as the act itself, which seems to have been committed rarely, and only then down in the unlit spaces in the depths of the ship, on the cable tier, where love, lust or dominance could have its way with least chance of disturbance.

  The essence of the order was of course vigilance, and the roots of vigilance reached far down into the souls of the officers themselves. Officers and men lived, critically, on either side of a moral watershed: an officer’s self-control was the source of the discipline which he then imposed on the men. The state of a ship and its company was a test of the officer’s inner, moral qualities and each ship needed to be, in effect, a diagram of that highly regulated state. It was a difference which meant that the violence done by officers to men was seen as almost unequivocally good; and violence done by men to officers just as unequivocally bad. A man’s duty was to obey, an officer’s to be right and so, as an aspect of nothing but logic, a man’s failure was a cause for punishment and an officer’s a cause for dishonour.

  Every aspect of the ship was to conform to this image of order. The stores were to be stored ‘with economical exactness.’ No excuse would be admitted for stores ‘not being neatly arranged and ready to hand.’ The officer of the watch was

  to be careful that the sails are at all times well hoisted, reefs repaired if required, sheets home, yards braced, trusses, weather braces and bowlines attended to, and the sails in every respect as properly set as if the ship was in a chase.

  ’Minute attention’, ‘her exact place’, ‘a uniform system of discipline’: every phrase reinforced the sense that not only was the ship a fighting machine but a microcosm of rational civilisation, surviving in and threatened by a chaotic and hostile world, a zone of chaos to which the ship’s company naturally belonged. The terror with which mutiny was viewed, and with which the mildest whisper of mutinous thought was received, was a measure of the tightness with which the line of order was drawn. For the first lieutenant, in effect on test for promotion to captain, the demands of the system could not be more absolute:

  It is impossible he can be too minute in these particulars of his duty. He ought to know everything, see everything and have to do with everything that is to be known, seen or done in the ship.

  He was, in other words, to be Enlightenment, Virgilian man, the representative of civilisation, entirely aware, entirely informed, entirely in control and as a result entirely admirable. From the cleanness and regularity of his heart and mind would ‘follow credit and comfort to a well disposed ship’s company.’ There were some deeply traditional aspects to this. Buried deep within the 1805 conception of the naval officer was a Roman and stoical image of distilled order, of an applied and balanced rationality which both constituted and oiled the fleet system itself. A fleet was an act of English civility. Its orderliness was its virtue, rationality its fuel, clarity its purpose, and in those qualities, the English had long congratulated themselves that they were different from foreigners. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, a thrilling discovery was reported in London:

  strange and most cruell Whippes which the Spaniards had prepared to whippe and torment English men and women: which were found and taken at the overthrow of certain of the Spanish Shippes.

  The implication, of course, is that no such violence would be natural to an Englishman. No, the English were honest, plucky little fighters against wicked European tyrants and many elements of what would come to be seen as the Nelson persona were in fact utterly conventional parts of this English naval self-image. A rough broadsheet song described the virtues of Rear-Admiral Richard Carter, killed against the Dutch at la Hogue in 1692:

  His virtue was not rugged, like the waves,

  Nor did he treat his sailors as his slaves:

  But courteous, easy of access, and free,

  His looks not tempered with severity.

  Change the idiom slightly and those are precisely the terms in which Nelson was described a century later.

  Needless to say, though, this straining for order, for the idea of the beautiful machine was founded on an overriding sense of anxiety. Naval order was little more than a thin and tense veneer laid over something that was on the boundaries of the chaotic. Rationality was merely a dreamed-of haven in all the oceans of contingency. Order, it turns out, was in many ways little more than a rationalisation of chaos, anxiety and corruption. The great Admiral Vernon had warned in the 1770s that ‘our fleets are defrauded with injustice, marred by violence and maintained by cruelty.’ The amount of money voted by parliament each year to pay the seamen was not only calculated on a scale unchanged since the days of Oliver Cromwell but the amount voted never corresponded to the number of seamen raised. No audit was ever done to see how the money was spent and enquiry after enquiry in the late 18th century did little to cure the wastage and muddle. Seamen’s pay was often years behind, the principal and justifiable cause of the great mutinies of 1797.

  It was generally known that the administration of the navy and its dockyards was a mass of deceit and inefficiency. As one contemporary pamphleteer wrote, it was a scene consisting of

  gigantic piles, and moles, and misshapen masses of infamy, where one villainy is the buttress of another; where crime adheres to crime; and fraud ascends upon fraud, inserted, roofed, dove-tailed and weatherproofed with official masonry, and the unctuous mortar of collusion. [The navy w
as] the central temple of peculation: where the god of interest is worshipped under the mystic form of liberality, and the common conscience of guilt is professed under the symbol of mutual charity and conciliation.

  Everyone, in other words, was on the make. The great Earl St Vincent had attempted reform and his brief tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty had ended with a savage attack on him, his competency and his methods in the House of Commons by William Pitt himself. His successor as First Lord of the Admiralty, Pitt’s closest friend Lord Melville, had been found guilty of at least borrowing from the state purse. When Barham succeeded him, he was at that time still Sir Charles Middleton, 80 years old, a seasoned naval administrator. Middleton accepted the job on one condition, quite explicitly expressed in a letter intended for Pitt’s ear but addressed to Melville: he wanted to be a lord. ‘I have no other wish towards the admiralty,’ he wrote from his elegantly rustic farm set among the orchards and woods at Teston in Kent, ‘but to secure the peerage to myself and family. The admiralty has no charms for me, further than to serve and promote these objects. The opportunity that offers at present to secure me the peerage must be obvious to Mr Pitt, and it would be a reflection on good sense to suppose his Majesty would be adverse to bestowing a mark of approbation on my many years services, and coming out again in the decline of life, at the desire of his ministers.’ He got the title, became Lord Barham and took the job. Enlightenment London knew all about self-promotion.

  In daily detail, life on board a ship-of-the-line was thick with an atmosphere of supervision, anxiety and the endless efforts at maintenance and mending. Order was achieved in a condition of near-anarchy. Take as a pair of complementary documents, a list of boatswain’s stores (to be checked, to be tested against theft and loss) and a ship’s surgeon’s list of what was wrong with the men, and you can read from them exactly what dominated the 1805 man-of-war.

  So for example, the boatswain’s stores on HMS Thunderer, a 74-gun ship, as recorded on 10 October 1805 included 35 gallons of black varnish; eleven large brushes, three small; 90 lbs of ground yellow paint; 863 yards of canvas of eight different grades and another 100 yards ‘old’ canvas; 5 ensigns, 4 jacks, 8 pendants; 1237 hammocks, 631/2 yards of kersey; 1 fish copper kettle, one small fish copper kettle, 1 machine for sweetening water; 1 machine for making cordage and 9,500 feet of spare cordage; 202 iron cringles; six boat grapnels; 7 hatchets; 24 boat hooks and a fish hook; 16 marline spikes; 78 sail needles and 12 sail making palms; 68 thimbles; 56 leather buckets; 11/2 tons of vinegar and 21/2 barrels of tar; 68 spare sails and 72 spare blocks; a 32-ft barge, a 31-foot-long boat, a 28-ft pinnace, two 25-ft deal cutters and a ten-foot fouroared boat, plus all their oars. The ship itself had a pair of giant sweeps with which to propel it in a calm. There were two 70-fathom seine nets, and a mass of fishing gear for albacore, dolphin and bonito, plus some shark-fishing gear fitted with a chain. There was a mackerel line but no turtle nets. The Thunderer carried a Dutch ensign, as well as a French and a Spanish one; a Dutch, Spanish and French jack and a Dutch, Spanish and French pendant, all of which could be used to disguise her identity or to trick the enemy. The stores themselves are a record of vigilance and danger, of damage foreseen and emergency accounted for. It is a world of shattered spars and blown-out sails, men and objects lost overboard, worn sheets and frayed halyards, blocks split and lost, hammocks torn, lift tackles gone, lanyards broken. It feels nearly comfortless.

  Alongside it, one can place the list of complaints with which a ship’s surgeon would have to deal, the human impact of this strained life in the damp, dangerous world of a man-of-war: ulcer of frenum of the penis; drunk falling from deck on keelson; hands caught in block; catarrh; rheumatism; diarrhoea; contusion; colic; falling while hauling on the braces, causing venereal hernia; fall while taking down the hammocks, producing dislocated shoulder; letting an adze slip while repairing a cutter and the blade cutting into his Achilles tendon; slipping and falling into tender (a boy aged 16); fractured humerus falling on deck in a wind; rheumatism in the knees; tonsillitis; inflamed glands in groin; ‘fell on deck with four or five men over him in a gale’; stabbed in forehead when ashore; fell out of his hammock on to deck; falling down drunk; a fall into the waist; ankles swollen; epilepsy, (the prospect of which aloft was terrifying); guts—griping, discharge of blood, faeces scanty and white; severe pain in loins; right hand dragged into a block, ends of fingers fractured; sole of left foot punctured by a scrape. More often than not men took several days before they reported they were hurt. One was said to complain simply of ‘Hypochondriasis’. Others, for whom the strain was too much, are described merely as ‘hectic’ or ‘withdrawn’. ‘Mania’ afflicted all categories of men on board.

  It is remarkable, in the light of the deeply demanding conditions in which it operated for years at a time, that the navy of 1805 achieved what it aimed for. Deep orderliness was a quality which struck visitor after visitor to the fleet. Part of a diary survives kept by an anonymous tutor to a 15-year-old midshipman called Frederick Gilly cruising on board HMS Gibraltar enforcing the blockade off L’Orient in 1811. The tutor was catastrophically seasick but, like Coleridge, was entranced by the very things which most navy men would not bother to have noticed. Coleridge had gazed for hours at ‘the sails sometimes sunshiny, sometimes snowy: sometimes shade-coloured, sometimes dingy’. The tutor, despite his seasickness,

  found a pleasure totally new and indescribable in attending to the execution of orders. What most attracted my notice was the silence which prevailed; not a word was spoke but by the officers commanding, which not only showed the fine order to which the ship’s company had been reduced, but also the alacrity with which everything might be done in case of emergency…

  At 11 o’clock all the men are mustered and inspected at their divisions by the captain and officers. All hands are expected to appear dressed in clean linen and their best clothes, consisting in the summer of blue jackets and white trousers.

  This is not the usual picture of the rough and ready, brutalised workforce of a British man-of-war, but this journal, naively enthusiastic as it might be, was written for no purpose but the tutor’s own. On Friday 9 August 1811, he recorded that

  When several ships are in company it is a very interesting sight to observe the manner in which anything is conducted, as for instance getting under weigh, coming to anchor, loosing and furling sails etc. The signal is first of all given from the admiral’s or commodore’s ship and then all begin at the same time and there is no small emulation in making a display of smartness and discipline. If the command be given to furl sails, then the first lieutenant orders the bosun to ‘Pipe all hands to furl sails’. They then come on deck and wait for the word. In the meantime the midshipmen stationed in the tops take their places. The next word is ‘man the rigging’. This is obeyed by the men ascending the first ratlines of the shrouds and there staying till the lieutenant sings out ‘Away aloft’. When they have got into the tops they wait again for the last word, ‘Lay out and take in—reefs.’(According to the number of reefs out when the sails were loose.) The whole fleet acts with smartness and dispatch.

  That too is what you must imagine on the morning of Trafalgar, as the logs laconically describe the evolutions of the fleet, responding to a shift in the wind by coming on to the other tack, ‘wearing ship’ by taking her stern through the wind, raising the topgallant yards as the wind drops and more sail is needed, shaking out the reefs in the topsails, setting the steering or studding sails with which to add the slightest extra fraction of a knot in the light airs, setting the royals above the topsails, for that little bit more, and then lowering the ships’ boats from the davits and towing them on long lines astern. In their cradles on deck, they would not only have interrupted the line of fire; a shot landing among them would have sprayed the deck with murderous splinters.

  A ship, to a stranger a maze of complexity, is to a seaman the infinitely exact working out of a few basic principles. The hull combines two co
ntradictory qualities: quickness through the water for the chase of the enemy; steadiness to provide a platform from which guns could be fired. Greater waterline length provided the first, greater beam the second. The profile of men-of-war, seen from bow or stern, was curved steeply in above the waterline because it was realised that if the guns on the upper decks could be brought nearer to the centreline of the ship, there would be less roll and for a higher proportion of the time the muzzles of the guns would be on target. Two ships alongside each other could be touching at the waterline but forty feet apart at the quarterdeck. The heaviest guns, which fired roundshot weighing 32 pounds each, enormous objects, 9ft 6in long and weighing very nearly three tons, were on the lowest decks, those above getting increasingly lighter, for the same reason. The keel of course was dead straight, made of vast baulks of elm, the bow extremely bluff, because there was more room aboard if the full width of the ship was carried as far forward as possible. The stern sharpened to a point, allowing the water to run smoothly off the lines of the ship, reducing drag. The very structure of their world was shaped to a purpose.