Feeding Nelson's Navy

by Janet MacDonald

  That worked well enough when ships came into port in small numbers and with time to spare. For the Channel Fleet, during the close blockade of Brest, the pressure to get large numbers of ships restocked and back on station led to a system where seven or eight merchant vessels, loaded with sufficient provisions for 15,000 men for one month, waited permanently at Dartmouth for the fleet to pass, then followed them in to Torbay and anchored by the fleet for transhipment. When St Vincent took over the command, he discouraged ships from returning to port for anything less than urgent repairs or seriously bad weather, instead arranging for victuallers to go to the fleet each month, carrying preserved provisions and supplies of fresh vegetables.

  VICTUALLING YARDS ABROAD

  The task of the agents victualler on foreign stations was more complex than that at home. Unlike the agents at the British outports, who reported to the Victualling Board itself, the agents victualler abroad, although still employees of the Board and still obliged to account for stores and money under its rules, were under the immediate control of the commander-in-chief, through, if there was one, the naval officer or civilian commissioner in charge of the station. There was a fuss at the Victualling Office in 1811 when the agent victualler at Malta, Patrick Wilkie, had ordered a large quantity of bread and flour from a local supplier. The Victualling Board said he should not have done it and was personally responsible for the cost, some £5266. Wilkie replied that the new Instructions for the Agents of the Victualling Establishments Abroad said quite clearly that he must take orders from the senior naval officer on the station and that was what he had done. The Board had to back down and pay the Bills of Exchange which Wilkie had drawn and the senior officer, Admiral Boyles, had countersigned.19 In such situations the agent victualler also had to provide full details, certified by three local dignitaries, of the current exchange rates. In a location such as Malta, where he had to supply necessary money for pursers to make purchases in various countries or small islands, he had to be able to provide this cash in several different currencies, each with its exchange rate listed in his accounts.

  When the yard did any manufacturing, as several of them did, the agent victualler had responsibility for that operation. He also had to pay the wages for all the yard and office workers and see to the repair and maintenance of the yard premises. The final task for agents victualler, whether at home or abroad, was to take back into store empty casks and bread bags, and to accept, inspect and dispose of any returned provisions which had been condemned as inedible.

  TRANSPORT SHIPS

  One other way in which agents victualler on foreign stations differed from those at home, and for which there were detailed instructions, was in the necessity to deal with transport ships and ‘victuallers’. In home outports, almost all the items which were not manufactured locally arrived by sea from Deptford, carried in transports which delivered their cargo and went away, usually back to London. The agent victualler would return empty casks and bread bags on them but that was all. On foreign stations, while some of the transports arrived from England and went back there, others would remain on the station under the commander-in-chief’s command, and shuttle back and forth carrying supplies between the victualling yard and the more remote squadrons.

  This was certainly the case in the Mediterranean. The main victualling yard for the Mediterranean station was at Gibraltar, at one end of a sea which was almost 2000 miles long end to end, and a minimum 400 miles across, and which was prone to some very contrary wind patterns. Add to this naval activities which might involve blockading Toulon (800 miles from Gibraltar), harassing the enemy in the Adriatic (some 1200 to 1500 miles from Gibraltar), convoying the Levant trade or supporting army activities in Egypt (1800 miles from Gibraltar), and you see why it was not feasible for ships to constantly return to Gibraltar to restock. There were supplementary bases at Port Mahon during the times when Minorca belonged to Britain and, after 1800, Malta, but these could also take many weeks of a ship’s time for the round trip there and back to her operating station. So the commanders-in-chief used a system of rendezvous where the transports could meet them. This meant the agent victualler had to despatch bulk supplies on the transports as well as supply individual ships which arrived at the yard. Whether originating from the main yard at Deptford or from victualling yards abroad, it was the norm to load these victuallers with proportionate supplies of all items of provisions, thus ensuring that an accident or capture of one of a convoy of victuallers did not deprive the recipients of any given item. It was also normal, where the destination was one of the larger victualling yards abroad which employed coopers, to include sets of disassembled wine and water casks for those coopers to make up.

  When the Royal Navy requires transport ships today, they use what are inelegantly termed ‘STUFT’ (Ships Taken Up From Trade), and much the same happened in Nelson’s time. There had been a separate Transport Board between 1689 and 1714, but this had then been disbanded. In 1794 the Transport Board was reinstated to organise transports for all the different boards’ purposes, but in the interim each board had arranged its own as and when needed, causing some confusion when the boards started bidding against each other for shipping. This had created major difficulties in the American War of Independence, when as well as the Navy Board and Victualling Board supplying the navy, and the Ordnance Board supplying both navy and army, the Treasury had been given the task of organising both food and other supplies for the army (and made a dreadful mess of the job, too), ending with a bidding war that pushed freight rates sky-high.20

  Once the Transport Board had been set up again, it handled all the merchant shipping for all the other boards, and things went more smoothly. The Admiralty owned, or had on long-term hire arrangements, a few vessels known as store-ships, which were operated by naval personnel: for instance the Hindostan and the William, which operated in the Mediterranean after the Peace of Amiens broke down. However, in general the Transport Board chartered merchantmen as transport ships, under the same terms and conditions prevailing in the commercial market. These ships might carry a mixed cargo of naval stores and victuals, and often passengers (Hindostan carried numerous dockyard artificers out to the Mediterranean in early 1804, while others might carry some troops), in which case they were referred to as ‘transports’. When their entire cargo was victuals, they were known as ‘victuallers’. These ships were hired direct from their owners or through brokers, either on charter for the use of the whole ship at an agreed rate per ton, or on ‘freight’ terms (either weight or volume of goods carried) which theoretically meant the ship could carry other goods as well – an advantageous situation for the owners of the ship, as it was the Victualling Board’s practice to give protection certificates to exempt the crews from impressment.

  The Transport Board sent regular lists to the relevant commanders-in-chief of ships in use as transports for their station, showing which were on their way from England, which were already on station, and which were still loading. One of these lists, prepared for Nelson in 1804, shows eighteen ships already in the Mediterranean or on their way there, listing their tonnage, whether they were sheathed or coppered, and their charging rates per ton per month; the coppered ships were the most expensive. A secondary list shows sixteen others loading at Deptford, Woolwich, Portsmouth and Falmouth with a mixture of navy and army supplies. Accompanying these lists is a letter from the Transport Board asking Nelson to send home the ships on the first list as soon as those on the second list arrive, and retaining, if needed, ‘the lowest priced coppered ships as generally most fit for the service’. Whenever possible, the returning ships were loaded with a useful cargo such as wine or lemon juice. All of this added yet another layer of tasks to the commander-in-chief’s job, but it did allow him some flexibility of supply pickups.21

  There were three other methods by which ships on foreign stations obtained provisions. The first was where the victualling was done by a contractor and where the man on the spot was an agent of the
contractor rather than an agent of the Victualling Board. These contractors might be an individual, such as Basil Cochrane who supplied the navy in four separate locations (Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Prince of Wales Island) as well as various sections of the army, or they might be a business firm based in London. As far as the pursers of the ships using these agencies were concerned, the procedure was more or less the same as for a Victualling Board yard: they produced the standard three-part form, the agent provided the provisions and the necessary paperwork for the pursers’ accounts.

  The second method applied at ports where there were no formal arrangements and where one or a few ships arrived needing provisions. Here, the purser took himself off to see the local British consul if there was one, or the local merchants if there was not, and bought what the ship needed. He had to provide certification that the prices he paid were the local norm, obtaining three signatures from local dignitaries (one of whom should be the Governor or Consul), or in situations where this was not possible, such as farmers’ markets in towns where neither of these dignitaries existed, by taking some of the ship’s officers with him to witness the purchases.

  The third method was used, by the approval of the Victualling Board, on occasions when a large squadron was operating in an area of its station which was remote from its victualling port, and needed supplies of provisions which could not conveniently be provided by transports from that port. What was needed was someone who could go off and make arrangements for provisions to be assembled at a convenient place for the individual ships of the squadron to collect as and when required, or someone whose own ship was prepared to collect bulk supplies and take them back to the rest of the squadron. Sometimes this person was a senior purser, sometimes he was a special Victualling Board employee appointed from London to do the job.

  Amongst the pursers who did this job were Thomas Alldridge, who was deputed to victual the squadron blockading Alexandria after the Battle of the Nile, Richard Booth, appointed by Nelson at Copenhagen, Richard Bromley, purser of Belleisle in the Mediterranean with Nelson, and William Fitzgerald, who was with Pellew at Ferrol. Alldridge bought various batches of provisions, including fruit and vegetables, from Cyprus, Syria and St Jean d’Acre, for a total cost of just under £3500; although he had offered to do the job ‘without any profit’, he was given an allowance of 2½ per cent on the total of the transactions (just about the equivalent of a year’s salary for him). Richard Bromley also did a good job. In August, November and December of 1803, Belleisle collected bulk supplies of 987 cabbages, 42,201 pounds of onions, 272 bullocks and 142 sheep with 30 bags of fodder, first from Spain and then from the Maddalena Islands, each batch of which she had then taken back to the squadron cruising off Toulon.22

  Richard Booth did not do so well. His appointed task was to buy fresh meat from Danzig for the fleet off Bornholm, having stated confidently that he could obtain this at a price of fourpence three-farthings per pound. Booth interpreted Nelson’s instruction as meaning he could buy live cattle if necessary; he thought he had some 600 beasts lined up when he found that the local butchers had ‘combined’ against him to push the price up. He then went to a local firm of merchants, Messrs Solly & Gibson, and asked them to go to an inland cattle fair and buy some bullocks there. They did so, buying 744 beasts, but by the time these had been bought, driven to a pick-up point, fed and delivered to the ships, the price was higher than expected. Added to this, a combination of hot weather and ship manoeuvres caused the hides to become seriously maggoty and smelly by the time they could be got ashore and the agent who received them then had so many complaints from his neighbours that he had to get rid of them quickly at a give-away price. Apart from the annoyance to the captains of the ships, who rather unkindly blamed Booth for the nuisance to their ships of the maggots and smell of rotting hides, the end product was that meat which should have cost fourpence three-farthings per pound cost fivepence halfpenny. This was bad enough, but then both Booth and Solly & Gibson asked for a 2½ per cent commission on the deal, Booth because he said Nelson had promised it to him and Solly & Gibson because it was their normal commission. Nelson was all for giving it to Booth but the Victualling Board disagreed; they thought that since he had handed the job over to Solly & Gibson, they should have the commission and Booth should have no more than his ‘reasonable expenses’. After much correspondence back and forth, the Victualling Board prevailed.23

  William Fitzgerald’s story is not a pretty one. He was sent to buy bread and flour, wine and cattle for the squadron in the countryside behind Corunna and Ferrol and took advantage of the situation to line his pockets. Among his little tricks was charging for 164 pipes of wine, when the receipts only showed sixty-six, and charging eightpence per pound for the cattle when the local going rate was fourpence halfpenny. He had falsified the certificates of market price by filling them in with invented names, and had persuaded the farmers from whom he bought cattle to sign receipts when they could not read English. The last document in this story refers to the file being passed to the Admiralty solicitor to start a fraud prosecution.24

  Apart from this sort of thing, the main problem with using pursers to do this job was that not only did the purser have his own job to do (not something he could lightly hand over to someone else), his ship also had a job to do and could neither turn itself into a transport indefinitely nor hang around waiting for its purser to complete his transactions. The answer was a dedicated agent victualler attached to the squadron, or, as they came to be known, an agent victualler afloat. Nelson had asked for such a person soon after he arrived in the Mediterranean in 1803; this was not a precedent, as such dedicated agents victualler had been appointed before. There had been two in the eastern Mediterranean not long before – Nicholas Brown supporting the fleet of warships and troopships off the coast of Egypt and the Levant under Lord Keith, buying food from various places from Sicily eastwards, and William Wills doing the same job in the hinterland behind Alexandria. This was not the easiest of tasks, Wills explained when asking for a proper salary: when buying provisions he was at risk from ‘the Bedouin and vagrant Turks who infest the desert around Alexandria’, he was exposed to the plague and other diseases, and finally put to much expense by being quarantined at Malta and Gibraltar when he was trying to get home. The poor man had also had nearly £600 of the Victualling Board’s money stolen from his house in Alexandria by a soldier, but since the culprit had been seen and was subsequently court-martialled (although the money was never recovered) and since there were no banks where the money could have been kept, Wills was absolved of responsibility. After some time, the Victualling Board agreed that he should be paid and awarded him a back-dated salary of £400 per annum.25

  Although Nelson would have been aware of these two agents, and the many others who had done similar jobs, the precedent he quoted was ‘Mr Heatley, who would find the Fleet in everything’.26 Heatley was agent victualler at Lisbon, but had spent some time travelling round the western Mediterranean organising supplies for both the navy and the army during the Corsica campaign between 1794 and 1796. He seemed to be very good at this, writing in one letter of his success in finding food in Naples, Tuscany, Sardinia, Rome (where the Pope insisted neutral ships should be used) and Elba, where he had command of five biscuit ovens.27 What he was not so good at was paperwork: by 1801 the Victualling Board was sending him sharp letters about his failure to produce proper accounts, which they complained was preventing them from passing the accounts of all the pursers he had dealt with.

  Heatley replied that it was not his fault, but that of the clerk who should have completed them but who had absented himself from the office after a quarrel with another clerk; Heatley then asked to be relieved of his post and allowed to come home.28 The Victualling Board agreed to this but sent out an audit team consisting of Commissioner Towry and a senior clerk, Richard Ford. With the exception of a few minor items, Heatley’s accounts were passed, Towry returned to England and Ford stayed behind to take
over as agent victualler at Lisbon (a short-lived appointment which ended with the Peace of Amiens in 1802). During the peace, Ford returned to work in the Victualling Office and at one point accompanied two of the commissioners on their annual inspection visit to the victualling yards at Chatham and Dover.

  These experiences, together with his previous work in the Victualling Office in London, made Ford the perfect man to attach to Nelson as agent victualler afloat. The Victualling Board recommended him, Nelson’s bankers Marsh & Creed reported to Nelson that he was well thought of, and he was duly appointed, given another Victualling Office clerk, John Geoghegan, as his assistant, and sent off to the Mediterranean to sort out Nelson’s problem. In December, the Admiralty gave them a passage out on the storeship Hindostan, but for some reason she was delayed and Ford showed his initiative by changing ships, travelling as far as Gibraltar in the frigate Diana and then in the Third Rate Donegal for the last stage. He and Geoghegan arrived with the squadron off Toulon by the middle of February; Hindostan did not arrive in the Mediterranean until April, when she promptly took fire and sank in Rosas Bay near Barcelona (fortunately with no loss of life, but with a quantity of Nelson’s personal supplies).