To revert to the gun, which was the weapon of overriding importance in the naval warfare of Nelson's time, neither words, nor a visit to the preserved Victory, can convey any real idea of the monstrous inferno of a Ship's gun deck in action. Some conception can, however, be gained by visiting Madame Tussaud's, in London, where a realistic representation of a part of Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar may be seen, complete with life-size wax figures and a cacophony of sound and light - but without the blood, the sweat, the confusion and the sickening stench of reality. A similar one-third scale model has been installed in a building alongside HMS Victory.
3. Officers and Men
The number of officers and men required to man a Ship or Vessel depended chiefly on her armament - those needed to work her guns in action and to keep them supplied with ammunition. The composition of these complements may be illustrated by a closer look at the 837 officers and men borne in the Victory at Trafalgar. The admiral, being a commander-in-chief, was allowed a first captain (or captain of the fleet) - in effect a chief of staff, though Nelson had none at Trafalgar - a secretary and a clerk. The ship's own complement was headed by a (second, or flag) captain in command, and nine more commissioned 'sea officers' - a first lieutenant as second-in-command, and eight other lieutenants for such duties as watchkeeping and for charge of the gun decks in action. There were also twenty-two midshipmen, who were embryo lieutenants under training. Subordinate to these were four warrant officers; the master, who navigated the ship (anachronistic reminder of the sixteenth century when a warship's crew was sharply divided between the 'military' men who fought her and the 'mariners' who sailed her), the boatswain, the carpenter, and the gunner, whose titles are self-explanatory. There were, too, several 'civilian' officers, whose duties likewise need no amplification; the purser, the agent victualler and his assistant, the surgeon and his assistant, the captain's clerk, and the chaplain. A captain and three lieutenants of the Royal Marines (as they were styled in 1802 at the instigation of Lord St Vincent) brought the total number of officers up to forty-nine.
Not the least of Samuel Pepys' reforms was to establish the Navy as a career for its officers. He recognized the disadvantages of the jealous rivalry between 'tarpaulins', such as Admiral Benbow, and 'gentlemen captains', such as the mutinous Captain Kirkby, who were so admirably satirized when Commodore Flip and Captain Mizzen strutted the post-Restoration stage in Charles Shadwell's comedy, The Fair Quaker of Deal. (11) Well before Nelson's time all had been replaced by true professionals of whom, by 1793, many had gained experience in the Seven Years War and the War of American Independence. Enough is said of Nelson's own career in other chapters to indicate how commissioned officers were recruited when very young from the upper and middle classes, to be trained at sea as midshipmen, and subsequently promoted to lieutenant, to commander, to post-captain and to flag rank. Warrant and civilian officers were a humbler breed without such opportunities, the former because they were concerned with material (a ship's rigging, hull and armament) rather than men - a form of ostracism preserved with the introduction of engineers in 1835 and only finally abolished after the Second World War - the latter because, to cite just one explanation for the social distinction, medical practitioners in England were required to call at the back (tradesman's) door until well into Victorian times.
The total numbers of sea officers entered into the Royal Navy and promoted to each rank were those required to man its ships and fleets in war. In peace, and when not otherwise needed, they were retained on half-pay, an acceptable system when they could augment inherited private incomes with considerable sums from prize money - and continued until the rapid technical developments of the second half of the nineteenth century made it impossible for an officer to keep up to date with his profession unless he was continuously employed. Not so satisfactory was their retention for life: there were no pensions except for those whose wounds rendered them unfit to serve. The inevitable consequence was that too many were past their prime. This was especially true of flag officers when their numbers were limited to twelve. This small figure was that required for the single fleet into which the Navy was at first organized. (Thus Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Norris achieved the doubtful distinction of being appointed to repel the expected French invasion of 1744 when he was as old as eighty-four.) But by Nelson's time the need for fleets and squadrons overseas as well as in Home waters had compelled a considerable increase, or he could not have hoisted his flag so young (though the principle of stepping into a dead man's shoes remained until its grave disadvantages were highlighted by half-a-century of peace after 1815, and the Treasury at last conceded the need to retire the older officers on pension). These comments on the state of the 'List of Sea Officers' must not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that Nelson's Navy was officered by true professionals of outstanding ability and experience, whose admirals, though often in their sixties, gained many notable victories.
Turning to the Victory's ship's company, her 135 sergeants, corporals and privates of the Royal Marines were also professionals of a trained, disciplined corps who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Crown. But the 593 petty officers, (who included the master's, gunner's, boatswain's and carpenter's mates) and seamen, together with the 'idlers' (as they were then known, i.e. cooks, stewards, etc.), 653 in all, were very different. Some were not even British (or Irish), no fewer than eighty-five coming from more than a dozen other nations. (12) There was no need for a seafaring country to go to the expense of retaining in peace more than a tithe of the men it required in war, when the great majority of its ships could be kept 'in ordinary' without crews until war threatened, and when gunnery was so simple that 'raw material' could' be turned into a good gun's crew in little more than a week.
Reasons ranging from an inbred love of the sea to inability to obtain any other form of employment produced a considerable number of volunteers - they made up a third of the Victory's crew - but the majority had to be obtained by legal compulsion. Magistrates who shared Dr Johnson's opinion - 'No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get him in jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned' - sentenced offenders to serve in the Navy as an alternative to imprisonment. But the more usual, and infamous method was the press gang. A captain sent a few trusted hands ashore by night in charge of a lieutenant to seize by force any able-bodied men they might find in the streets and taverns. And such a search of Britain's numerous ports could be fruitful: to quote Admiral Sir Charles Saunders in 1774: 'Give up the fishery, and you lose your breed of seamen.' A man so caught, who could prove that he was not a seaman, was entitled to be released; but necessity usually dictated that such proof should be ignored until too late - after the ship had sailed. The evident hardships which this improvised form of conscription inflicted upon men - and upon their families - were, however, exceeded by an even more inconsiderate method, rightly pilloried by Herman Melville in his small masterpiece, Billy Budd. Since the best seamen were to be found in merchant ships, these were intercepted and boarded, often when approaching Britain on return from a long voyage overseas, and men from their crews seized for service under the Crown when they were almost in sight of their homes.
Nor was impressment the only hardship. For officers conditions afloat might be reasonable enough: they enjoyed cabins, of which the admiral's and captain's were large, almost luxuriously furnished, a wardroom, adequate food, and wine with it. But for the men life was very different, especially the inadequacy of their pay. The Spithead mutiny remedied no more than their worst grievances.
Monthly basic rates of pay in 1805
Vice-admiral – £74.50 ($180)
Post-captain - £28 ($75)
Lieutenant - £7 ($17)
Midshipman - £2.25 ($5.4)
Master - £9.10 ($21.4)
Carpenter / Gunner / Boatswain - £4 ($9.6)
Purser - £4 ($9.6) (plus 12 per cent commission on provisions issued and 5 per cent on slop clothing sold)
Chaplain - 95p ($2.3) (plus 'groats' - 2p [5 cents] per head oft he ship's company)
Petty Officer - £1.75 ($4.2) - £2.50 ($6)
Seaman - £1.655 ($4)
For an approximate comparison with the purchasing power of the pound sterling in 1970, these figures need to be multiplied by a factor of fifteen. But a more useful comparison is with wages paid ashore at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A skilled boat-builder on the Thames and Severn Canal earned £4 ($9.6) per month, a lockkeeper £2 ($4.8) plus the benefit of a tied cottage. But if there was no significant difference between these rates and those paid to their equivalents in the Royal Navy, carpenters and seamen, the latter suffered under the disadvantage of having to wait until their ships 'paid off' after a 'commission' (which might last two or more years) before they received much of what was due to them - a system which Nelson, with his characteristic interest in his men, roundly denounced for the hardships it inflicted on their families (according to an official estimate, in 1787 pay due to seamen was in arrears to the extent of the then very large sum of £1.5 million [$3.6 million]). Moreover, unlike the officers, the men could not hope to make a fortune out of prize money: their shares were too small. After the capture of Havana in 1762 Admiral Sir George Pocock received £122,697 ($294,480), but each seaman a sum less than £4 ($9.6).
The men’s daily rations were sufficient. But they seldom received so much because of the peculations of the purser. Moreover, before canning and refrigeration, little could be done to rectify the almost uneatable quality of these victuals, especially the heavily salted meat (junk) and the rock-hard, weevil-infested ship's biscuit (hardtack). In harbour fresh meat might be issued in lieu of salted, but on only two days per week.
The men were also denied shore leave because they might desert, for which their only compensation was the dubious privilege of having their wives and other women on board in harbour. Their only 'home' was a congested mess table rigged between a pair of guns, with a bare stool on each side, and a 20-inch space between the beams overhead in which to sling a hammock. And though much was done to keep the gun decks clean, aired and sanitary in fair weather, no words can describe their condition in a gale, with all ports and hatches closed, half the heads (lavatories) in the eyes of the ship unusable, and the decks swilling with more obnoxious fluids than sea water. (Since, for example, the Victory had only four heads to meet the natural needs of more than 800 men, many must have urinated elsewhere even in fair weather.) Nonetheless, such conditions were not so very different from the stews and hovels in which many lived ashore, (13) nor from those soon to be suffered by Durham miners and Lancashire cotton workers.
The seaman was, however, much more likely to suffer - and die - from scurvy, typhus and yellow fever, as well as from smallpox, tuberculosis (especially virulent because of the dampness between decks where no fires could be allowed, except in the galley), typhoid and malaria, to none of which was the Admiralty particularly disposed to discover either prevention or cure until after Nelson's time. The seaman was also subject to naval discipline. This had to be strict if order was to be preserved in a necessarily congested vessel, with harsh punishments to enforce it when so many crews were composed of pressed men, including jail birds and other riff-raff. And there is no question but that some captains too readily evoked the 'cat' to assert their authority. But for every sadist, such as Captain Hugh Pigot of the 32-gun Hermione (whose tyranny impelled her crew to murder him and his officers in 1797, and then to carry their ship over to Spain), there were those, like Collingwood, who seldom resorted to flogging. Moreover, to set against every contemporary account of a 'flogging round the fleet' (the inhuman torture of 300 lashes of which a proportion was inflicted alongside each ship present), one can find a description of life afloat that is near idyllic; for example, in John Béchervaise's Thirty Years of a Seafaring Life or, more briefly, these words of one of Collingwood's men: 'A man who could not be happy under him could have been happy nowhere.' This was, after all, an age in which men and women were accustomed to bear such fearful pain as that inflicted by surgical amputation without anaesthetic, and in which women were stripped to the waist and whipped at the cart-tail from the Palace of Westminster to Temple Bar. It is, therefore, as unrealistic to suppose that life afloat was all 'rum, sodomy and the lash' as it is to see all life today through the eyes of London's News of the World or of the New York Mirror.
Be this as it may, conditions were better in the Danish and Dutch fleets. Both countries encouraged their seamen, as well as their officers, to make the Navy a career by such enlightened measures as the provision of married quarters ashore. (Those built in Copenhagen are still in use.) Since this enabled them to man their ships to a large extent with volunteers, and since the balance was provided by a regular form of conscription, neither Navy needed to enforce discipline with excessive punishment.
Nonetheless, and despite their undoubted skill and courage, both Fleets were at a disadvantage when they fought against the British during the years 1793-1815. The Danes lacked experience of war at sea, except against the Swedes within the confined waters of the Baltic. The Dutch had no van Tromp nor de Ruyter to lead them.
Through maladministration in Madrid the Spanish Navy was chronically short of both officers and men. To remedy these deficiencies they were compelled to use army officers who lacked the skill needed to sail and fight a ship of war, especially with crews largely composed of the sweepings of the streets and jails, with a stiffening of soldiers, all of whom were new to the sea. 'When ordered to go aloft, [they] fell on their knees, crying that they would rather be killed on the spot than meet certain death in trying so perilous a service.' (J. de la Gravière in Histoire de la Marine.) Nor did this state of affairs improve as the war progressed: in 1795 Nelson described the Spanish Fleet as 'ill-manned and worse officered'. Much more telling, however, is Napoleon's order to Villeneuve in 1805, to the effect that, though the Spaniards sometimes fought like lions, two of their ships-of-the-line must be counted as equal to one French.
The French Fleet had won renown in the Seven Years War with experienced officers from the nobility and from the superior middle class, and with 10,000 trained seamen gunners to provide a sizeable proportion of its ships' complements. Admirals of the calibre of de Guichen, de Grasse and Suffren had tipped the scales against Britain in the more recent War of American Independence. But in 1789 much of this was sacrificed on the altar of revolution: anarchy superseded law and order afloat just as it did ashore. When Commodore D'Albert de Rions was ordered to commission a fleet of forty-five ships-of-the-line at the time of the Nootka Sound dispute, the National Assembly so far failed to support his attempts to restore discipline that he resigned his command in disgust and left his country for good. Many more French officers fled abroad during the Reign of Terror, including Admirals Kersaint and D'Estaing, while others fell victims of the guillotine.
The National Assembly made matters worse by refusing to believe that any special abilities were needed by those who manned their fleet. Fidelity to the new order of things was all. A lieutenant in 1791, Villaret Joyeuse was an admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Brest fleet three years later. But 'patriotism alone cannot handle a ship', as Rear-Admiral Morard de Galles discovered a month after war broke out: 'The tone of the seamen is wholly ruined. If it does not change we can expect nothing but reverses in action, even though we be superior in force.'
Such warnings did not trouble men blinded by egalité. In 1792 the seamen gunners were replaced by less efficient marine artillerists. Two years later these were likewise seen to be a form of aristocracy, and abolished when Deputy Jean Bon Saint-André demanded of the Convention, why 'these troops have the exclusive privilege of defending the republic upon the sea? Are we not all called upon to fight for liberty . . . to go upon our fleets to show [our] courage to Pitt and lower the flag of George?' He, nonetheless, found it necessary to accompany the fleet to sea himself in order to persuade its officers and men i
nto doing their best for the Republic. And he was sufficiently purblind to blame the sharp rise in the number of accidents suffered by French warships, even in good weather, on King Louis XVI's 'system of ruining the Navy by carelessness and neglect'. The charge is an exaggeration. French naval administration after the Revolution was much inferior to what it had been before. The Fleet was constantly hampered by a shortage of timber, rigging, sails, provisions and clothing. And Admiral Ganteaume was not the only one to complain, as he wrote in 1801, of 'the frightful state . . . [of] the seamen, unpaid for fifteen months, naked or covered with rags, badly fed, discouraged; in a word, sunk under the weight of the deepest and most humiliating wretchedness'.
It must not, however, be supposed that, as a consequence of the Revolution, the French Navy ceased to be a fighting force, any more than the British Channel and North Sea fleets when they were riven by serious mutinies in 1797. Although the Comte de Trogoff was unable to get the Toulon fleet to sea in 1793, Admiral Martin not only managed to do so a year later, but in 1795 so harassed Hotham's fleet in two actions that, when Spain joined Britain's enemies, Pitt thought it wise to withdraw from that area. And, within weeks of writing his above-quoted complaint, Admiral Ganteaume took his fleet out of Brest and round to Toulon in mid-winter. French admirals had to exaggerate the parlous state of their fleets in order to persuade their government to affect improvements. And French historians, understandably anxious to excuse the crushing defeats suffered by their Fleet during these years, have readily taken such critical reports at their face value. In truth, although much was wrong with the French Fleet at the outbreak of war, its officers were not devoid of skill, nor its men lacking in courage. Revolutionary fervour can overcome many obstacles, as the peoples of Russia have shown in our own century. And in so far as more than this is required for war at sea, so with each year that passed did the French Republican Navy gain in skill and experience.
Nelson the Commander Page 8