The small town in which Johnson had landed himself and his family turned out to be the creation of a modern history that opened in the first year of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, a conflict provoked by British aggression against Dutch ships and imperial possessions in America, the Caribbean and West Africa, and formally declared by Charles II on 4 March 1665. A British fleet commanded by the Duke of York may have “trounced”12 a Dutch squadron off the Suffolk coast at Southwold that spring, but further preparations against Dutch attack were considered necessary, not least at the mouth of the Medway, a river that was then the primary home of the English fleet. So it was, as Johnson was soon informing his friends abroad, that, on 18 August that year, Samuel Pepys, the diarist who was also Clerk of the Acts of the King’s Ships, joined a party that included the navy’s chief engineer, William Brockman, and sailed down the Thames from London:
Up about 5 o’clock and dressed ourselves, and to sayle again down to the Soveraigne at the buoy of the Nore, a noble ship, now rigged and fitted and manned; we did not stay long, but to enquire after her readinesse and thence to Sheernesse, where we walked up and down, laying out the ground to be taken in for a yard to lay provisions for cleaning and repairing of ships, and a most proper place it is for the purpose.
Ten days earlier, the dockyard at Chatham, a then plague-stricken place some twelve miles further up the Medway, had been ordered to “equip Sheerness with the requisites for cleaning ships’ hulls”.13 The new dockyard would be particularly convenient thanks to its proximity to the Nore, a submerged offshore sandbank that was already in service as a naval anchorage, and also to the existence of deep water close to the shore at Sheerness (the increased size of warships was combining with the shoaling of the rivers to challenge more sheltered dockyards in Deptford, Woolwich and Chatham). The land acquired may have been “unhealthy marshland of little value”, but it is said that a certain Colonel Edward Vernon, whom Pepys later described as “a merry good fellow”, was paid a fortune for it by Charles II — a fee that would be judged sufficiently “improper” to be successfully reclaimed under Charles’ successor James II.14
Preparations for the new dockyard took place alongside other measures intended to increase the security of the English fleet in the Medway. The Victoria County History of Kent cites a “consultation” held at Garrison Point on 20 March 1667 to consider defensive measures that might improve on the circular artillery fort — “the old Bulwarke Sherenasshe”15 — built here during the reign of Henry VIII. It was decided to create a garrisoned fort alongside the new dockyard, and also to establish a battery of eighteen-pounder guns to help repel any hostile fleet that might try to advance up the Medway.
Not for the last time in the history of Sheerness, these preparations would prove too little and too late. Neither the dockyard nor the fort had been completed when Sheerness was attacked by a squadron from the Dutch fleet in June 1667. The force of seventeen ships that sailed into the Thames was commanded by Lieutenant-Admiral van Ghent. Having failed to capture an assembly of frigates and Barbados merchantmen moored near Gravesend, Ghent sailed back downriver to try the Medway, attacking the fort at Queenborough and “conquering” much of the Isle of Sheppey, before proceeding to bombard the unfinished outpost at Sheerness and then landing eight hundred marines under the command of a “renegade English Republican”16 named Colonel Thomas Dolman, to finish the job. “The enemy hath possessed himself of that place; which is very sad, and puts us into great fears of Chatham”,17 so Pepys wrote on 11 June 1667. He returned to the humiliating story on 30 June: “it is said that the country soldiers did first run at Sheerness, but that then my Lord Douglas’s men [Scottish soldiers of the so-called ‘Dumbarton Regiment’] did run also; but it is excused that there was no defence for them towards the sea, that so the very beach did fly in their faces as the bullets come, and annoyed them, they having, after all this preparation of the officers of the ordnance, only done something towards the land, and nothing at all towards the sea”.
The conquest and plundering of Sheerness fort under Colonel Dolman, Romeyne de Hooghe after W. Schellink, c. 1669.
The Dutch account confirms that the defenders of the unfinished fort at Sheerness were easily routed: “Our cannon so stormed the place that the enemy left it before Colonel Dolman, who had been sent for by some messengers, had arrived”.18 This Dutch witness adds, “Our people found there an entire royal magazine, with very heavy anchors and cables and hundreds of masts. Our people took on board the ships as many of the cables, masts and round woods as they could, and they also acquired fifteen heavy pieces shooting balls of 18 lbs. The rest was destroyed or rendered useless, and the magazine burnt. The damage done to the English at this island was estimated at more than four tons of gold”. While these events were unfolding, the 1st Duke Albermarle, whose gilded flagship the Royal Charles was at anchor in the Medway, was still in Gravesend, awaiting the Dutch fleet together with “a great many idle lords and gentlemen”.19 Like Pepys, who saw them there, these commanding fellows had yet to learn of the conquest of Sheerness, and we can’t trust the Conservative myth-maker Sir Arthur Bryant, who asserted in a book published in 1933 that they should have known, since “the offals of sheep borne up the river by the flood showed all too well what the Dutch had been doing” on the Isle of Sheppey.20
Having laid waste to the unfinished fort at Sheerness, Ghent’s squadron advanced up the Medway on 12 June, allegedly with the help of renegade English pilots (who may, like Colonel Dolman and his force of realigned English soldiers, have been Parliamentarians who had gone over to the Dutch in reaction against the Restoration of the monarchy in England). Breaking through the defensive chain placed across the river, they unleashed havoc on the English fleet, which they found laid up and largely unmanned at Chatham and Gillingham, thanks partly to the financial difficulties of Charles II, who was struggling with the combined consequences of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. Before withdrawing in triumph, taking the Royal Charles with them as their trophy (“nothing more costly has been made in England”), the invaders further humiliated the English by proving themselves exceptionally well-mannered.
The Dutch marines who landed at Gillingham did not kill, loot or wantonly destroy — unlike the English force that had fired the town of West-Terschelling during Rear-Admiral Holmes’ raid on the Vlie estuary the previous summer. And also, so Pepys testifies, unlike Lord Douglas’s twelve thousand-strong English force, which came to chase the Dutch out of the Medway: a savage rabble that is said to have “plundered and took all away” as its members advanced through the Medway towns. On 30 June 1667, Pepys recorded the words of a waterman, who repeated the local conviction that “our own soldiers are far more terrible to those people of the country-towns than the Dutch themselves”. As Johnson told Hannah Arendt, the contrasting Dutch account of the conquest praises Sheppey as “a beautiful and fruitful island” where little if any lasting harm was done to the natives: “Everyone was strictly forbidden, on pain of heavy punishment, to injure the inhabitants in life or goods”.21
Work on both fort and dockyard at Sheerness went ahead with greater urgency after the polite Dutch sailed off with their prizes. New fortifications would be built, along with defensive ditches and canals on the landward side. In May 1673, the “clerk of the cheque” noted “the beginning of something like a yard here”, including a store house going up on ground enclosed the year before. In a contribution entitled “Of the Arsenals for the Royal Navy in Kent”, prepared in the 1690s for a new edition of Camden’s Britannia, Samuel Pepys described Sheerness as an “appendix” to Chatham and “a Yard furnish’d for answering all occasions for the same upon Ships of the Lower Rates, resorting thither in time of Action”.22 The previous year, on 7 June 1672, which is to say little more than a week after the Battle of Solebay (the first encounter of the Third Anglo-Dutch War), Charles II sailed downriver to Sheerness to inspect the new fort, the mere existence of which had already proved sufficient to dissuad
e the Dutch fleet from trying a repeat of its humiliatingly successful raid on the Medway.
Time for the Engineers
For more than a century, just about everything required by the dockyard and garrison was brought to Sheerness by sea. Even fresh water had to be shipped in at considerable cost in barrels from Chatham, Queenborough or even Gravesend. Various attempts had been made to sink wells under the jurisdiction of the Admiralty, but the ground turned out to be an unstable swamp of mud, gravel and quicksand, through which salt water would filter in apparently limitless qualities before digging had reached more than a few feet.23 This difficulty was not resolved until after 1778, when the Master General of the Ordnance, Lord Townshend, realised that the government was unlikely to pay for improvements to the defensive fortifications along England’s east coast unless each defended area was possessed of a reliable supply of fresh water. The engineer called in to achieve this, Sir Thomas Hyde Page, had been pensioned off after suffering serious injuries while fighting at Bunker Hill during the American Revolution. He set to work at Sheerness in April 1781, using a “very ingenious” engine-maker called Cole from Lambeth.24 When his excavation was flooded out almost as quickly as earlier efforts, Page and the Board of Ordnance were mocked for making “not a well for fresh water, but a sink for the money of the public”.
For his next attempt, Page chose a site within the army garrison and employed a certain Mr Hooper from Margate, who made a horizontal windmill for powering a water-removing chain of thirty-six-gallon buckets. This time, they marked out a circle of twenty-two feet across, and dug down in five-foot stages, lining the opening with vertically braced “ribs” of wood that locked into one another to close the circle. On reaching a solid layer of blue clay at thirty-six feet, they marked out a smaller circle inside the larger one, created another circular frame, built a double brick lining inside it, and then filled the space between the two frames with rammed earth. This inner cylinder, eight feet in diameter, was then sunk down into the ground without great difficulty — except for a “piece of tree” found at a depth of three hundred feet. The ground started to ooze at 328 ft, and the bottom of the well blew inwards at 330 ft, filling so quickly with torrents of water and quicksand that the well-diggers only just managed to escape. The water proved to be of “very soft quality” and “perfectly good for every purpose”. The duly christened “King’s Well” at Sheerness was soon being praised as “the most extraordinary Structure of its Kind in Europe”.25
The quest for fresh water was by no means the only thing that called for exceptional engineering in Sheerness. The dockyard that Charles II ordered into existence in the seventeenth century was small, modestly equipped and, despite considerable growth encouraged by Britain’s far-flung imperial wars and adventures through the eighteenth century, increasingly inadequate to requirements. It was this situation that brought the founder of the modern town of Sheerness to the island. Born in North Yorkshire in 1770, Edward Banks had started out as a day labourer but subsequently become one of the great engineering builders of his age. He would count three London bridges among his works, all of them designed by the Scottish engineer John Rennie (Banks and his partner William Jolliffe completed Waterloo Bridge in 1817, Southwark Bridge in 1819 and London Bridge in 1824), along with diverse lighthouses, prisons, canals, locks, and also the docks at Goole. It was the decision to build a new sixty-acre dockyard to Rennie’s plans that had brought Banks to Sheerness. The first phase of this prodigious £3 million scheme involved creating a new granite basin on “quicksand, nearly forty feet deep”.26 The walls fronting the sea were composed of “hollow masses, standing upon inverted arches” which were themselves supported by numerous piles some thirty feet long. This ingenious “mode of building” was considered “in a great measure new in this country”, although Rennie, who would die during the early stages of the work at Sheerness (the project was taken over by his son, John Rennie the Younger), had previously used a similar method at Great Grimsby.27 The basin had iron gates of seventy tons each, and a steam-powered pumping system that could clear it of water in a few hours. Adjacent to the basin were three dry docks, and there were plans to build a new one thousand-foot length of river wall with a low water depth of twenty-seven feet and a great many more facilities within the site too.
Northeast corner of Rennie’s dockyard
The construction of Rennie’s dockyard was begun in February 1815. Two months later, on 22 April, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Melville, boarded the Admiralty yacht in London and sailed downriver to Sheerness with a bevy of commanding figures. This time the visiting party included the First Naval Lord and member of the Admiralty Board Sir Joseph S. Yorke, and also the first secretary to the Admiralty, John Wilson Croker. These well-appointed men stayed for long enough to express “much satisfaction” at the “improvements” underway, and then sailed back to London.28 Another of Melville’s flying visits to this remote construction site, made only a few days after Napoleon had surrendered to Capt. Maitland on the deck of HMS Bellerophon on 15 July 1815, gave rise to hectic rumours that “this fortress is fixed upon as the place of confinement of Buonaparte”.29
Rennie’s new basin was formally opened in September 1823. London was said to have been emptied as the people who mattered in such estimates climbed aboard the vessels that would bring them downriver to witness a development that had been hailed as the largest engineering works in Europe. The occasion was judged “a truly national fete”, despite the abiding difficulties of the location. Two steam ships, the Royal Sovereign and Venus, which had collected their passengers from Tower Stairs at 6am,30 arrived too late for the ceremony; and the Lord Melville, a steamer on which Sir Edward Banks (he had been knighted in 1822) and Jolliffe hosted “a very large party”, considered it wise to leave Sheerness for the return journey at 3pm, three hours before even the Duke of Clarence had departed.31 A general insufficiency of boats left many of the estimated fifteen to twenty thousand visitors stranded on the Isle of Sheppey without accommodation, obliging them to find their own way back to London via Chatham and other inconvenient places. While there, some of them might have registered both the “sallow, unhealthy complexions” of the natives and the “multitudinous array of new-formed graves in the church-yard”. Some may also have felt the mud seeping into their shoes and wondered, as “W.R”. would do in the Morning Chronicle five years hence, what “folly” can have induced the First Lord of the Admiralty “to construct the finest dockyard in England, or, perhaps, in Europe, in the centre of a pestilent marsh, where multitudes are carried off yearly by the remittent and intermittent fevers arising from its noxious miasmas…”32
Hulks Before Hovels
How, meanwhile, was a dockyard on such a dismal shore to accommodate its workers? The practice of incarcerating convicts on hulks in British waters had been introduced in 1776, when “disturbances in America” necessitated changes in the British system of penal transportation (America having preceded Australia as the customary destination for British convicts). At this point, as a parliamentary committee explained in a report of 1810, it had been decided that any offender might be put to work “raising sand or gravel from the river Thames, or in any other benefit for the Navigation of that river”.33 Other naval rivers were soon added to this dispensation. Convicts who might once have been shipped across oceans instead found themselves undergoing hard labour in the “hulk establishment” at home. They might receive a considerable reduction in their sentences for their pains, and the Crown was also empowered to spare those under sentence of death on condition that they served “a term not exceeding ten years” on the hulks. Above the overseers, there was an “Inspector of the Hulks”, the first incumbent being a Mr Graham, whose improvements included separation of decks, close constraints on communication, the introduction of a chapel and the replacement of fixed barrack bedsteads with hammocks.
From the beginning of the “hulk establishment”, there was much concern with “moral amendment” and sav
ing the young offender especially from being rendered “more vicious” by confinement. Bad things had followed from the fact that prisoners were left “entirely to themselves” from the moment of evening lockdown within the decks to the opening of the hatches in the morning. The consequences of this lack of oversight were not limited to “gambling, swearing, and every kind of vicious conversation”.34 Rumour also imputed “the most atrocious vice” to the hulks. Indeed, letters had been received alleging not just that prisoners did indeed commit and suffer this unnameable sin, but that it had “ceased to be held in detestation” among the convicts. The captains of the hulks concurred in “disbelieving” the existence of such a thing, and the deniers worked hard to convince themselves that “this vice appears to be held in as much abhorrence on board the Hulks as in other places, and any person suspected of having been addicted to it has invariably met with ill-usage from the rest of the prisoners”. The letters in which some convicts had alleged such goings-on were dismissed as the manipulations of devious men who considered their accusations to be “the most effectual means of exciting compassion” and stimulating friends into “exertions on their behalf”. And yet the blizzard of rules that various inspectors brought down on the hulks in those early years leave little doubt that those in power recognised that something should be done.
In Sheerness, where “the local situation” made it exceptionally hard to procure labour, the convicts had been found “all the more valuable” in the years immediately before Rennie’s reconstruction of the dockyard. Adult convicts had been lodged on the Retribution, a demasted seventy-four-gun frigate formerly known as the Zealand and stationed there as a hulk in 1810.35 Boys under sixteen were accommodated, allegedly with the appropriate Christian discipline, on another third-rate man-of-war, the Bellerophon (known to sailors as the Billy Ruffian), which, having served in the Battle of Trafalgar and received the surrender of Napoleon after his defeat at Waterloo, was brought to Sheerness to be “fitted up” as a convict ship.36
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 21