Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  He too brought a version of England to the battle. Bayntun was an immensely experienced officer, who had spent most of his life since he was in his early teens at sea in the West Indies, a career full of danger and aggression. He is a forgotten figure now but Nelson knew him and trusted him; they had been watching the Toulon fleet for many months together (British sailors called it ‘Too-Long’) and in pursuit of Villeneuve’s fleet in the summer of 1805 they had crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic together. Nelson had defended him against some aspersions from the Admiralty, calling him an ‘excellent officer’ and ‘extremely correct and proper’.

  It would be easy enough to consider him, from these facts alone, as little but a hardened warrior. His personal papers are now preserved among the Bedfordshire County Records and from them a subtler picture emerges. They include his annotated copy of A Treatise on Practical Navigation and Seamanship by William Nichelson, published in 1792. Nichelson was Master Attendant at Portsmouth and from time to time Bayntun has written ‘Note!’ in the margins of this standard work. The emphasis of what Bayntun—the son of the Consul-General at Algiers—marked was consistently towards the need for an understanding of the general shared humanity on board a warship. Order was necessary; without order the great machine would not work; but subject to that order, all were men and all should be treated as human beings. ‘There is a sort of doctrine,’ Nichelson had written,

  which I hope will never gain credit in the service, and which cannot be too much discountenanced or reprobated, which is, that it is possible to be a good Officer without being a good Seaman, which I positively deny, it being a flat contradiction of reason and common sense; I believe it to be generally favoured by those Officers who came too late into the service to be initiated into a Seaman’s duty; wishing at once to become officers, they were perhaps placed to command, instead of being placed in the tops, or other parts of the ship to be taught a sailor’s duty.

  Bayntun drew asterisks in the margins next to this passage. It is a measure, for all the distinctions of rank, of the communality in the British man-of-war. The form of organic order on which such a ship relies is in fact dependent on recognising that communality:

  There is a confidence also which the men have in their commander; when they find he is a seaman, the duty is carried on with a good will and a steady chearfulness because they know he is a competent judge of all that can be expected in the performance of their duty.

  Only when that sharedness is absent does the system disintegrate. It is not that sailors are the usual run of men. They are not like soldiers, ‘since any able bodied landsman will make a soldier, a plowman taken from the plough today, in two or three months may be made a good soldier.’ But a seaman ‘should be understood to be quite different from all other classes of men, he does not spring up like a Mushroom, it requires many years to make him a seaman, with fatigue both of body and mind.’

  That is why naval officers needed to be seamen first and officers second: if an officer does not truly know the ways of a ship, he will be deceived and cheated at every turn. And if he doesn’t know what to expect, he will punish unfairly: ‘how often has it happened, that a whole set of top-men have been flogged because the top-gallant yards have not been got across so soon as other ships?’ Nichelson asked, and Bayntun took due note.

  Of all the passages he marked, the most heavily starred was this, a sermon on the nature of shared danger, in which Nichelson rises to some rhetorical heights, emphasising the need for the commander to be a man like other men, and for a single social fabric to cover all parts and all manner of men within the ship:

  It is night time, or it is foggy or very hazy weather, that you cannot see the ship’s length, which is as bad as if it were night time; under those circumstances the mariner’s art, skill and experience are put to the trial, he is loaded with care and anxiety, but this is the time to shew himself a man of experience and true knowledge of his profession, as a Seaman and an Officer, to conduct and govern a ship or ships in such times as those; It is not hats and periwigs, powdered hair or silk stockings, fribbles or beaux, that are equal to the task required to be performed at this time, it must be men with heads and brains, the Seaman and the Officer, that must support the man at all times.

  These are some of the ideas deep in the pre-conceptions of those on board the British fleet at Trafalgar. It is, for all the severity of its corporal discipline and the essential violence of its methods, a humane world and Henry Bayntun, by the evidence of his own letters was a humane as well as an energetic, resourceful and, in Nelson’s word, ‘excellent’ man.

  When appointed to the frigate Quebec in the West Indies in 1799, he was, as new captains are, constantly busy perfecting his ship: applying to swap his old-fashioned 6-pounders for the more powerful new man-smashing carronades; changing the way in which the Quebec was ballasted; requiring another officer of marines; writing for a new supply of boys from England as well as a new 8-oared deal cutter instead of a heavy barge; replacing the gun carriages which were unserviceable; stowing the bread in ‘Iron Bound Casks’; commissioning new casks for the all-important scurvy-preventing lime juice; complaining of the lack of onions. He was, as he needed to be, zeal in action and his commanding officers saw the best in him.

  From Robert Montague, Admiral

  22 Oct 1801 in Port Royal

  I desire to know who you wish to have for a Lieutenant and I also desire you will at all times ask, respecting your Officers appointments without any Ceremony as I am sure you will never wish to promote any person who is not Zealous in the public Service & I shall be happy at all times to evince by my Actions, how extremely high I hold your conduct in Estimation.

  There is a little Boy named Thomas on board your Ship whose story excites my Compassion, I wish to see him immediately in order to give him a little Money, which perhaps may be acceptable: the Boat shall bring him back.

  I am Sir Your Humble Servant Robert Montague, Admiral

  When the admiral asked him to inspect the prison and hospital ships in Port Royal in Jamaica, Bayntun was appalled. There was nothing like enough awnings to protect the prisoners when on deck, nor windsails with which to direct breezes down into the foetid spaces below.

  Bayntun was horrified to find that half of them were naked, that their guards beat them ‘with more brutality than is absolutely necessary’, that there were no safety ropes to prevent them falling down hatchways and that some of them were so ill fed and emaciated that they were on the point of death.

  This is the voice of compassionate humanity confronted with a situation which had probably persisted ever since naval forces had taken prisoners. There were officers who thought ships could be run on kindness, a sin known in the 1805 navy by the significant term ‘fraternizing with the people’, as though the lower deck was a form of enemy. It was not to be tolerated and Bayntun was not one of them. He flogged when necessary, and at times more than the regulation maximum of 12 lashes to which a ship’s captain was limited. Nevertheless, when humanity was called for, he applied it:

  Aug 28 1800

  H.M.S.Quebec, Port Royal, Jamaica

  Richard Wilton a Seaman of the said Ship was sentenced by a Court martial to receive one Hundred & Fifty Lashes for Desertion. He received Seventy Five Shortly after. But from Youth and Delicacy of Constitution could not at that time receive more. His character in other respects stands fair. Has been confined in Harbour and a prisoner at Large at Sea ever since.

  And it is significant that among the papers discovered in the attic of his Bedfordshire house when his descendants sold it in the 1950s were both the log and muster book of the Leviathan for 1805. These were documents which by law Bayntun should have surrendered to the Admiralty at the end of a voyage but which he had kept. Out of pride? Or affection? It is impossible to say but they remain poignantly evocative documents.

  Both are covered in stained and filthy sailcloth, made into a loose wrap almost like a fitted bag. The grey, coarse-woven covering is
spotted with lamp oil and grease from food. Candle wax is dripped all over the cover on which the name of the ship is written in ink in huge Roman capitals.

  The log itself is a coarse, working document, each page bearing not only the entries of the officers of the watch, each succeeding the other, but the signs of the weather, sea-splashed, sun-bleached. This morning—and the reality of the moment is never more insistent—there is an air of excitement, repetition and muddle to it:

  Light airs and cloudy—at daylight observed the Enemy’s fleet to Leeward 35 sail; [corrected to 33] bore up, made sail pr sig [ie per signal] out first reef Topsails [ie the full depth of the topsails, the main driving sail of a man-of-war, shaken out to catch the wind] Cleared for action. At [illegible] hours [illegible] light airs and cloudy weather. All sail set standing down for the Enemy’s Fleet; they consisting of 35 [changed to 33] Sail of Line 5 Frigates and 2 Brigs Empd clearing ship for action. In company with 26 [changed to 27] sail of the Line 4 frigates and a schooner and Cutter.

  One can all too easily imagine Admiral Sir Henry Bayntun, as he was to become, at home with his grandchildren in Bedfordshire, reading out to them from the Leviathan’s log of his day of glory. The muster book is its companion, bound and lettered in precisely the same way, the long list of the men with whom Henry Bayntun entered the cockpit of battle. The nominal complement of the ship, subjected to a weekly muster, is 640 people. But for the whole of 1805, there are never more than 515 men on board. The Leviathan, like every ship in every navy in the world, was undermanned. Some 180 of them were Irish, and of them 116 were listed as ‘landmen’, or men who had no previous experience of the sea and had been driven on board not by the press gang but by the wages, preferable to the pittance which an Ireland, already moving towards congestion, poverty and starvation, could afford. Apart from them, it was mixture of England, Scotland and a world community: Jamaica, Bermuda, Barbados, men from Bremen, from Norway, a John Ferris from ‘Russia’, men from Ostend, Rotterdam, Philadelphia, Boston, Maryland, New York, Marblehead, and a man called Domingo, an armourer’s mate, from ‘Bengall’.

  Every officer, it was said in the best ships, knew the name of every man. This was no undifferentiated mass of humanity. Every man was allocated a precise task in handling the ship and another precise task in the station he was to take up for battle. Ships carried precise descriptions of each of member of the crew, useful in case of desertion but also in the daily management of a large concentrated body of young men. It may be a step too far to say that Henry Bayntun’s keeping of this precious muster book at home was a sign of love but it is at least a sign of attachment to his men.

  That method of command was what his men expected. When a commanding officer fell short of that level of humanity, ships complained to the Admiralty. The company of HMS Terpsichore presented a petition in about 1800:

  We are constantly on deck and beat and kicked about by Captain Mackellar and Mr Hall and the Boatswain now carries a stick cut of rawhide, plaited and served over with tarred twine, with which he cuts and slashes all he come near. We your petitioners have been seven years in this ship and always behaved ourselves as loyal and true-hearted subjects both by sea and land, under Admirals St Vincent and Nelson.

  It was in part a question of simple dignity. The men of HMS Centaur, lying in Plymouth harbour, complained in 1812:

  We the humble petitioners, the crew of His majesty’s ship the Centaur beg leave to inform you of doleful complaints. The first act of White’s cruelty was break up the hogsty and suffer the swine to range the main deck to the annoyance of the crew…

  In exposing the private parts of a man’s body to public view and flogging on the posterior instead of the back; in terming damned useless trash and degrading us beneath brutes.

  We therefore beseech you to extend your lenity to us and disperse us throughout the navy, The divine blessing will be on you for it.

  Of course, one can’t be too dewy-eyed about this. The degree of punishment, compulsion, anger and maltreatment of men on board the Trafalgar fleet would be considered barbaric today. In the days before the battle, in ship after ship, punishments had been given. On Victory, according to the log kept by the master, Thomas Atkinson, on the 5th of October 6 men had been given 36 lashes each for drunkenness; on the 8th another 7, the same punishment for the same crime; on the 19th another 10, again the same number of lashes for the same crime. In the battle, the flagship would suffer some terrible casualties: 54 killed, 25 dangerously wounded, 12 badly wounded and 42 slightly wounded—one in six men killed or hurt by enemy fire. But in the aftermath of battle, there was no let-up. The habits of punishment continued. On 29 October, barely a week after the guns had ceased firing, and after the most dreadful storm that many of the sailors had ever encountered, Atkinson’s log would record:

  Steering for Gibraltar. Fresh breezes and Cloudy. Out 1st Reef Topsails. Departed this life Mr Palmer Midn [one of the Trafalgar wounded]. Punished Jno Matthews, Richd Collins, Wm Stanford, Jno Mallard [or Walland], Chas Waters & Michl Griffiths Seamen with 36 lashes each for Contempt & Disobedience of Orders.

  There could be no sentimentality about this. The destruction of the French and Spanish Fleets could not mean the end of imposed discipline.

  Thomas Hardy, Nelson’s beloved captain, was more severe than most in the discipline he imposed on his crew. In the course of 1804 on the Mediterranean station, according to the evidence of Victory’s log, some 380 dozen lashes had been meted out to the men who made the flagship work, about 4,500 lashes in all. Drunkenness was by far the commonest offence, but all crimes that were punished with the lash could be classified as threats to order. Contempt, disobedience, insolence, neglect of duty and sleeping at one’s post were all the offences of people who were not fulfilling their place in the regulated structure on which the fleet relied. Only five instances of theft—a crime not against the ship but against fellow members of the crew—are recorded against over 150 acts of insubordination. For very exceptional offences, including desertion, use of mutinous language or buggery, punishments of several hundreds of lashes would be given.

  To some at the time it seemed barbaric, and there exists a rare description of what it was like to be beaten in this way:

  I felt an astounding sensation between the shoulders under my neck, which went to my toe-nails in one direction and my finger-nails in another, and stung me to the heart as if a knife had gone through my body…He came on a second time a few inches lower, and then I thought the former stroke sweet and agreeable compared with that one. I felt my flesh quiver in every nerve from the scalp of my head to my toe-nails. The time between each stroke seemed so long as to be agonizing, and yet the next came too soon…What with the blood from my tongue and my lips which I had also bitten, and the blood from my lungs or some other internal part ruptured by the writhing agony, I was almost choked and became almost black in the face.

  Sickening as that is, and no doubt reflective of one reality, it nevertheless sounds like propaganda. Seamen in 1805 did not write ‘What with the blood from my tongue…’ nor would they have called a heart-rending pain in their gut ‘some other internal part ruptured by the writhing agony’ Neither of those expressions are the authentic voice of the lower deck. When you look harder, at genuinely contemporary documents, something different emerges: both a more phlegmatic attitude to suffering and an extraordinary sense that the revolution in feelings which had overtaken the gentry in the 18th century had yet to penetrate the social levels below them. Just as in Jane Austen’s novels members of the working class do not exist in the same exquisite universe of feelings inhabited by their social betters, there is a sense on board the Nelsonian ship-of-the-line that ordinary seamen, a little like slaves or farmed animals, were somehow beneath the level at which consideration for their feelings was relevant.

  The Rev. Edward Mangin, a temporary and admittedly disenchanted Irish chaplain on HMS Gloucester, blockading the Dutch in the uncomfortable broken, shallow waters of t
he North Sea in 1812, considered the world of a fighting fleet a place where ‘every object [was] at variance with the sensibilities of a rational and enlightened mind’, full of ‘preparations the most complex and ingenious for the purposes of plundering and murdering [one’s] fellow creatures.’ Each man-of-war, Mangin thought, was nothing but ‘a prison, within whose narrow limits were to be found Constraint, Disease, Ignorance, Insensibility, Tyranny, Sameness, Dirt and Foul air: and in addition, the dangers of Ocean, Fire, Mutiny, Pestilence, Battle and Exile.’

  Mangin only lasted three months in the navy but it was an educative time. ‘Just before we sailed,’ he wrote in his journal,

  occurred one of those accidents, which though shocking to me, made little or no impression on my ship-mates, and was not talked of five minutes after it happened. A seaman, employed at the moment, with all the energy and fearless activity peculiar to this class of people, fell from the mainyard of the Stirling Castle, 74, lying close to us: he struck, as he dropped, against the main-chains, and was probably killed, for he instantly went down and disappeared.