Nelson

by John Sugden

  Punishments such as these, as has been said, were not necessarily divisive or destructive. The usual offences, such as drunkenness, disobedience, neglect of duty, theft and fighting, were a threat to the welfare of the entire ship, and the victims were normally ordinary seamen and marines who needed the protection of a firm captain. Every ship had its more or less cowed malcontents, troubling companies like a grumbling appendicitis, and the Agamemnon had her share. One seaman, Thomas Kelly, was apt to drink and fight and got four floggings, while Joseph Turner suffered three times for drunkenness, quarrelling and theft. Most of the men of the Agamemnon seem to have felt secure in their captain, however, accepted his discipline and found him approachable and sympathetic in times of difficulty.

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  The liveliest but most vulnerable members of the ship’s company were the boys, who perhaps made up around 8 per cent of the total personnel. Some were volunteers, seeking employment or adventure, and others dependants of officers of every rank, originally rated servants but in actuality learning their various trades. A number may even have been formally apprenticed to masters, gunners or shipwrights. But whatever their condition and destination every youngster passed through adolescence in a difficult and dangerous world, divorced from the best female company, and raised among men who had seen life at its rawest. None were more in need of protection than the Marine Society boys. On 6 February 1793 Nelson had written to the society requesting ‘twenty lads’ for his ship at Chatham, and promising that ‘the greatest care shall be taken of them’. Later that month contingents set out for the Agamemnon from the Marine Society headquarters at Bishopsgate, each boy carrying his sea outfit, including clothes, bedding, a comb and a needle and thread.6

  In 1793 the Marine Society had been in existence for thirty-seven years. It had been founded by the illustrious philanthropist Jonas Hanway, who is said to have introduced the umbrella to the streets of London, and its purpose was to rescue pauper boys for service at sea, either with the navy or in merchantmen. Unfortunately, life afloat was not always conducive to reclamation. Once beyond the society’s compass some boys fell into the hands of unsatisfactory guardians or brutal taskmasters. Naval captains might appoint schoolmasters to their ships, but few teachers were the fonts of wisdom or museums of virtue expected today. They were presumbaly men of some education, but reminiscences of the period suggest that too many were drunken, downtrodden and discontented. Thirty years before Nelson got his Marine Society recruits one critic doubted that such boys were well served at sea, where the skills of ‘blasphemy, chewing tobacco and gaming . . . drinking and talking bawdy’ were so easily acquired.7

  The prospects of rescued boys naturally depended upon their own inclinations and talents, the availability of decent guardians and sheer luck, but the most fortunate became ‘ordinary’ or ‘able’ seamen, or learned skills with carpenters, sailmakers, armourers, cooks and coopers that could eventually be transferred ashore. Nelson’s Marine Society boys have been ignored by historians, but they reveal an interesting fusion of self-interest and paternalism. On the one hand captains found it useful to top up their crews with such boys, and the week Nelson received his gang more than sixty other youngsters set out for the king’s service on different ships. Nelson filled up his personal allowance of twenty servants with his lads. Despite being labelled servants, few if any were employed as attendants, and their true duties were those of trainee seamen. No matter, Nelson received their wages, paid the boys a proportion and used the balance to improve his own salary. It was an accepted perk in the navy, and when the Admiralty abolished servants in 1794 and paid all boys directly, the captains were compensated for their financial loss. But Nelson married this pecuniary advantage to an act of charity, and genuinely believed he was giving unfortunate boys chances to change their lives. He valued the work of the Marine Society. As an admiral he made regular subscriptions and donations to its funds, and his appointment of Withers to the Agamemnon was due to his desire to equip the ship with a good schoolmaster.8

  There is some confusion about the number of Marine Society boys Nelson took aboard. Two listings survive – the society’s own register of boys sent and the ship’s muster of those received – but they are not a complete fit. At least twenty turned up, rather pathetic little chaps if the register is to be believed. Four were thirteen years old, but the average age was fifteen and the average height four feet eight inches, rather small even for those times. Though the Marine Society tried to inculcate the three Rs into their charges, more than half of these boys were functionally illiterate. Only six of the seventeen who sailed to the Mediterranean could both read and write, and two more read only. Six had previous experience of sea work, although it had probably been gained on the society’s training ship in the Thames, where boys were ‘employed drawing and knotting yarns, making yarn points [and] exercising guns’. They were all endangered youngsters from broken or extinguished homes, arriving with suppressed histories of neglect, abuse, violence and sometimes crime, and were charged with turning over new leaves.9

  A few examples illustrate the whole:

  James Moody, thirteen, measuring four feet four inches in height, illiterate. A ‘destitute’ orphan, but previously employed in rope-making.

  Thomas Amery, thirteen, four feet five inches, literate. Mother a servant at 29 Barbican. Formerly an errand boy.

  George Goldring, thirteen, four feet two inches, illiterate. Mother a weaver living two doors from the Fox and Hounds, Hare Street, Bethnal Green. Had ‘wound quills’.

  John Heney, sixteen, five feet three inches, illiterate. ‘Destitute’ but formerly a ‘plasterer’.

  Thomas Cursons or Couzens, sixteen, four feet six inches, could read but not write, sent by the Philanthropic Society. Had been to sea.

  Thomas Bates, eighteen, five feet one inch, illiterate. His next of kin was a sister at the Snuff Mills, Hackney. Previously a bricklayer.

  John Alderson, nineteen, five feet three inches, illiterate. His mother was Ann Duff of 11 Low Court, Strand. Some sea experience.

  To discover how these troubled boys fared under Nelson’s command, and whether the Marine Society’s hopes for them were fulfilled, we have to turn to the muster and log books of the Agamemnon, deficient in sociological detail though they are. Three of the twenty never settled down, and were discharged at their own request within three weeks, but the rest stuck it out and sailed; one rated a master’s servant, another a lieutenant’s servant and the rest captain’s servants. In reality, all were learning the trade of seafaring.

  Given their backgrounds, it is not surprising that some of the boys got into trouble during the four years they served under Nelson, and although the captain had an eye to any exonerating circumstances, he allowed the penalties of the service to fall upon proven offenders. Four received floggings, and two of those remained incorrigible, and deserted the ship. Walter Holmes may have been the youngest person Nelson flogged on the Agamemnon. The son of a Smithfield smith, able to read but not write, he seems to have fallen under the influence of a habitually drunken and idle fellow named Wilmott, and both were punished for theft on 28 May 1793. The boy received a dozen lashes, though he may not have reached his fourteenth birthday and was less than five feet tall. Nor was he reformed, for on 2 July 1794 he took the opportunity presented by the siege of Calvi to desert.

  Two other boys, Richard Firbee and Charles Waters, were punished for attempted desertion on 30 October 1794. Ironically, it was Firbee, at seventeen or eighteen the older of the two, who received the lighter sentence of a dozen lashes. Possibly he had known Waters before their seafaring days. An ex-butcher, his father was a sawyer at a Houndsditch chandler’s shop, while Waters and his brother had worked as braziers in the same area. Waters, unlike Firbee, was illiterate, but seems to have been the commanding personality because he received thirty-six lashes, a hard tariff on a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy, even if a conventional one for what was deemed to be a serious offence. Like Holmes, Waters,
a lieutenant’s servant, remained disgruntled, and successfully jumped ship in Genoa in July 1795. Whatever the future held for a malcontented, inadequate youth, far from home in a strange land, his old accomplice Firbee never reoffended. Nor did James Martin, another Marine Society boy who had to be disciplined, though his misdemeanour had been an even more unfortunate one. The son of a Blackfriars nurse, Martin was about seventeen when he attracted the attentions of two Maltese seamen on board the ship. He was judged to have been a willing participant in the resultant ‘execrable . . . act’, and shared the punishment, receiving three dozen strokes of the lash on 10 May 1795. Fortunately, the youth managed to put the episode behind him and was promoted to ‘ordinary seaman’ the next year. 10

  Sad as these digressions from prescribed morality or practice were, most of the Marine Society boys buckled down to a steady life afloat, and despite hard service, battle, accident and disease, the deserters, Holmes and Waters, were the only ones to be lost in the four-year sojourn of the Agamemnon. Indeed, perhaps it is remarkable that so many of these graduates from the school of hard knocks created no appreciable problems. Fourteen returned in the ship to England with Captain Smith and were paid off at Chatham in September 1796. Four of them were rated ‘boys, second class’, a new designation introduced by the Admiralty in 1794 to describe seamen in training between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, but ten, including the aforementioned Firbee and Martin, had advanced to the status of ‘ordinary seaman’. All appear to have transferred immediately to new ships, the Montagu, York and Sandwich. 11

  The picture that emerges from these records is occasionally stark, but not in its finality unsatisfying. It appears that for all their disadvantages and difficulties, most of the Marine Society boys used their opportunities to build new careers for themselves at sea. No studies of the fortunes of such boys on other ships appear to have been made, but as far as the Agamemnon was concerned the Society would seem to have been a moderate success.

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  The practised hands, no less than boys, looked to the captain to mediate their needs and perplexities in a world that frequently baffled them. The seaman of the day was often portrayed as a simple soul. ‘Excluded by the employment which they have chosen from all society but people of similar dispositions,’ wrote an observing surgeon, ‘the deficiencies of education are not felt, and information on general affairs is seldom courted. Their pride consists in being reputed a thorough bred seaman, and they look upon all landmen as beings of inferior order. This is marked in a singular manner by applying the language of seamanship to every transaction of life, and sometimes with pedantic ostentation. Having little intercourse with the world, they are easily defrauded, and dupes to the deceitful, wherever they go; their money is lavished with the most thoughtless profusion; fine clothes for his girl, a silver watch and silver buckles for himself, are often the sole return for years of labour and hardship.’12

  Nelson realised that many of his men were far more complex, but he was ready to assist them over everyday hurdles, great and small. He witnessed a legal document for John Brock, who granted a power of attorney to his wife to enable her to receive his money in England, and for others he kept an eye open for suitable promotions and a watch over their prize dues. It was also his custom to address a company when leaving a command, and to assure the men in his Norfolk drawl that his concern for them would continue and that he would be ever ready to answer their calls for assistance. Examples of his willingness to fulfil those obligations in earlier times will be remembered, and the men of the Agamemnon and Captain likewise benefited.13

  Thus Robert Robinson, a boatswain of the Captain who later ran upon hard times, reminded Nelson that he had once told him he ‘should write if occasion required’. Even so humble a servant as Andrea Peri Romano, who had shaved and dressed Nelson when he stayed with a Mr North in Bastia in 1796, felt able to send an appeal. Many sailors remembered Nelson’s helping hand. A sailmaker of the Captain, fighting to escape imprisonment for debt, received written testimony that Nelson knew ‘this person very well’ and considered him ‘a worthy good man’. The Colletts – William, a gunner, and his son Isaac, a young gentleman of the Agamemnon – left testimony to their captain’s kindness, as did John Wilkinson, a Cumberland man, born in 1762. He served his apprenticeship in Irish colliers and shipped aboard traders and transports before being drafted into the Agamemnon. Nelson was impressed with his handling of the wheel during the Channel cruise of 1793, made him a boatswain’s mate and eventually got him promoted to the Ganges. When Wilkinson’s career subsequently stumbled, he wrote to his old benefactor, hoping he had not been ‘forgotten’, and was rewarded with an appointment as boatswain’s mate of a sloop. As a frail Greenwich pensioner he still recalled Nelson with a mixture of gratitude and awe:

  It is truly gratifying to hear him speak of Nelson [wrote the interviewer]. ‘He was a daring man, sir,’ said he. ‘There was nothing he would not do if it came into his head. We could always tell of a morning, when he came on deck, whether we should have anything to do. When he came up with his ironbound hat on and his roast-beef coat, we knew he was up to something, and it used to be a sort of warning to us to get ready.’ The old man’s face will kindle as he speaks, and you see that he feels what he is talking of.14

  The seamen who followed Nelson into the Captain were his most dedicated followers, and nearly all of them were young and vigorous. They included the twenty-four-year-old able seaman Tom Allen, a Sculthorpe ploughman with an almost incomprehensible Norfolk dialect; the Fearney boys of Newcastle, William twenty-four and James a year younger; Francis Cook, aged twenty-six, from Sudbury in Suffolk; Thomas Ramsay of Berwick, a sturdy man of middling height, but in his thirties or early forties; a twenty-six-year-old Lincolnshire man named John Sykes; Joseph King, a twenty-nine-year-old boatswain; and at least one American, a twenty-four-year-old able seaman, William Hayward.

  Most were uncomplicated men, loyal, conscientious, valorous and fiercely protective of a commander they had come to rely upon for their employment, welfare and self-respect. King, for example, had been with Nelson in the Boreas, and would soon owe to him an appointment as boatswain in the Gibraltar dockyard. Despite the social gulf between the two, one an officer and gentleman of the quarterdeck and the other a petty officer of the lower deck, they became remarkably close. King worshipped Nelson, and acknowledged the many favours done him. When he heard that his old commander had been injured at Tenerife, he wrote from Gibraltar, recalling ‘that dreadful moment’ when he thought that he had lost ‘my best of friends’. A few months later, blessed with a daughter on Christmas Day 1797, the admiring boatswain named her Mary Nelson King. The admiral was touched by the tribute, and as late as 1804 we find him gratuitously sending King one hundred Spanish dollars as a ‘present from me’.15

  Stereotypical sailors apart, Nelson’s self-elected guard were by no means all primitive beings. Of sixteen men acknowledging their receipt of prize money in one account, only five were illiterate and unable to sign their names in full. John Lovell, a small, powerful Agamemnon from London, was the son of a modest merchant skipper and had benefited from a little schooling. King wrote a fair letter. John Sykes was even more accomplished. He joined the Agamemnon in 1793, and devotedly served Nelson as able seaman, ship’s corporal, gunner’s mate and coxswain. Hailing from humble agricultural folk of Kirton, Lincolnshire, he had lost his father, though a step-parent, Thomas Huddlestone, earned a living as a fishmonger on the riverside in Lincoln. John’s brother, Robinson Sykes, was also in the navy, and as far as can be told John himself took to the life. He had raw courage, for which Nelson referred to him as his ‘brave Lincoln friend’, yet he could write a good letter, and exhibited unusual sensitivity. Ralph Miller, soon to become Nelson’s flag captain, thought Sykes good commissioned officer material. ‘His manners and conduct are so entirely above his situation,’ he wrote, ‘that Nature certainly intended him for a gentleman.’16

  No fewer than sixty-five
of those who followed Nelson into the Captain were soldiers of the 69th (South Lincolnshire) Regiment who had been acting as marines aboard the Agamemnon. These, too, thought Nelson a good provider and protector. Prompted by his friend Villettes, the lieutenant colonel of the regiment, he had intervened to secure them fair shares of prize money.17

  Most notable of the six officers of the 69th who transferred was Lieutenant Charles Bradshaw Peirson, a handsome twenty-two-year-old Londoner who had become one of Nelson’s most dependable supporters. When Nelson first saw Peirson during the sieges in Corsica two years before he was wearing a Neapolitan uniform, for he had somehow got from Britain to Italy and won the patronage of Sir William Hamilton. It was Hamilton who recommended Peirson to Hood and his entourage, and he proved a useful aide-de-camp to Villettes before getting an ensign’s commission in the 50th Regiment of British Foot the following September. A man eager to be the first with good news, Nelson assured Hamilton of his own ‘sincere regard and esteem’ for Peirson, whose ‘propriety . . . in every situation’ had won the praise of superiors.18

  In March 1795 Peirson advanced to a lieutenancy in the 69th and it was in that capacity that he served on the Agamemnon. Despite his obvious military and diplomatic talents, facilitated by a rare command of the Italian language, Peirson’s prospects in a force as elitist as the army were doubtful, and there was an insecure restlessness about him. Josiah, Nelson’s stepson, thought him the mercantile type. Nevertheless, Nelson’s affection and support for his ‘poor soldier-officer’ were rewarded with an extreme loyalty. Though a redcoat, Peirson ‘always’ found Nelson ‘my friend and protector’, and was so ‘distressed’ at the thought of being left behind in the Agamemnon that he implored the commodore to specifically request his transfer. Peirson wanted ‘much to go with me’, Nelson wrote Jervis, ‘if it be possible, pray sir, indulge me’.19