King's Captain

by Dewey Lambdin

  There were also some senior officers who got “yellow squadroned” as unfit for future sea commissions; the Spithead Mutiny at least weeded out a fair number of “gummers” and overaged ninnies who weren’t worth a pinch o’ pig-shit already, and action was taken about the real bastards who delighted in abusing their crews. But it didn’t cull many of the middle and lower ranks, who’d go on to command ships later—those who were of the “off-with-their-heads” persuasion to start with, and were utterly convinced, after the mutinies, that their sailors were the scum of the earth forevermore.

  Lewrie met quite a few real people in this book, such as Commissioner Proby at Chatham, who really did christen HMS Bellerophon on a night of winter gales, after she’d launched herself! Whether Proby really believed the sentiments I gave him (for dramatic effect) I do not know, and I’ll thank his family to keep a cool head and lose the phone number of their solicitors if I portrayed him as more romantic or mystic than he really was. Evan Nepean’s descendants too.

  Vice-Admiral Buckner and Commissioner Captain Hartwell at the Nore were real people too. Poor Buckner, he really did command all, and nothing, no matter his vaunting title. Admiralty lost patience with him ’round the beginning of June 1797, and shipped Admiral Lord Keith down to dictate in their name, whilst still signing orders in Buckner’s name; but the old fellow was relieved soon after it ended.

  Thomas McCann and Richard Parker …

  In Dugan’s The Great Mutiny (the year-long loan of which I am most heartily grateful for from Bob Enrione’s personal collection!) Thomas McCann was limned as a loose cannon. He’d been in HMS Sandwich but had been sent ashore to the naval hospital for skin ulcers, where he railed against almost everything, though his main complaint was the quality of the beer, and hoisted a red flag from the hospital’s roof! McCann was such an irritating and fiery rabble-rouser that, towards the end of the mutiny, he was kicked off his own ship, and none other would accept him aboard, sure every man-jack would be hanged if found within a mile of him. And he was the irksome sort who could turn missionaries into mass-murderers!

  That incident when McCann demanded the arms-chest keys—that really occurred, but aboard Captain William “Breadfruit” Bligh’s HMS Director (3rd Rate, 64-gun). Bligh told him rather calmly (given his allergic reaction to mutiny by then!) that he couldn’t have them, and McCann went bugeyed, “snot-slingin’” nuts, howling, “By God, was I in Director I’d have the arms-chest keys!” Though he was, at the moment, aboard that ship and armed to the teeth to boot!

  Richard Parker was a more enigmatic character, because no one I could find for research knew much about him. Richard Parker had entered the Navy young, had been a Master’s Mate, perhaps a Midshipman, and was reputed to have gained a Lieutenant’s commission, before challenging his captain, Edward Riou, to a duel! Dismissed from the service, Parker tried his hand as a private tutor, teacher, and schoolmaster, essayed a few commercial pursuits, but failed at each. He last enlisted under his own name in Scotland, was now married, and deep in debt. He wangled a £30 Joining Bounty to support his wife while he was at sea—a main-well job of negotiating, that—and was in HMS Sandwich.

  There is no record that Parker ever called himself the President of the “Floating Republic” or Admiral of the Nore Fleet; he must have had some sense, after all! He did sign himself as the President of the Fleet Delegates though, which was enough to get him hung in the end.

  After being tossed out of the Royal Navy, Richard Parker simply must have been infected with radical (small R) republican grievances. As a failed “gentleman” who could not make a decent living, his grudge against Society must have been stoked by London Corresponding Society newspapers and tracts, to a certain extent—though not, perhaps, as red-hot as Bales’s/ Rolston’s grudges. In fact, compared to the majority of the Fleet Delegates, Parker might have been considered a moderate! He was educated and literate, more so than the rest, able to pen a telling letter, and the perfect choice of the wild-eyed radicals who appointed him spokesman and president. Later, for trying to quell the greater foolishnesses of his fellow delegates, he was punished by the end of his presidency every night at eight bells, re-elected every morning at eight bells, so they could keep him under their thumbs!

  It was Parker, though, whose limited knowledge of legislation and his misperceptions, (from what I could gather) who led the mutineers into thinking the Acts of Parliament settling the Spithead Mutiny were mere Orders-in-Council or, even if a real Act or Acts, good but for a year-and-a-day. Poor, mis-guided fellow—he even failed when acting as his own attorney at his court martial; victim of his belief that he was capable. And a man who did not lead, quite as much as he was pushed from below!

  “A British naval historian told the author (James Dugan) in 1963, ‘ … Ah, the Nore! Nobody will ever understand the Nore!’”

  Compared to Spithead, the Nore Mutiny was a dis-organised mess and a lot more violent. None of the mutineers were as familiar with each other as the Channel Fleet and Spithead ships had been. The comment has been made that Spithead was “leaders looking for supporters” … whilst the Nore was a disgruntled “herd” looking for leaders; and they found people like McCann and Parker and other firebrands—to their great loss.

  It was brawling and violent from the outset, with other ships and the shore being fired upon. Just after Proteus escaped, and those last few North Sea Fleet ships from Great Yarmouth had come down to be part of the mutiny, effigies of Pitt and Dundas were hung from the yardarms aboard HMS Sandwich. Waverers, “Perjurers to the Oath,” and the remaining midshipmen, petty officers, and senior Marines were ducked by hauling them up “two-blocked” to the main-course yard, then let go to sink deep in the harbour water as punishment. Some were flogged, as Rolston threatened, and shown round the anchorage with cries of “here is a bloody sergeant (bosun, midshipman, etc).”

  For a time, it looked as if the Nore Mutiny might topple the government. A regiment near Woolwich and the Arsenal did wobble in their discipline and loyalty; troops in Sheerness and Chatham did commingle with mutineer sailors. Ships anchored below the Tilbury forts on the Thames, not twelve miles below the Pool of London, did join the mutiny. At one time, seventeen ships of the line and well over ten thousand men were involved, blockaded London’s vital upriver imports, the downriver export trade, and seized nearly two hundred merchant ships.

  Lewrie was lucky in escaping when he did, for a few days later, the ancient navigators’ guild, the Trinity House Brethren, removed all the buoys, light ships, beacons, and channel marks near the Nore in the night and extinguished the lighthouses.

  None of the merchant ships’ crews joined hands with the sailors at the Nore though, and no foodstuffs were taken out of the captured ships; the lack of supplies helped end the mutiny. Despite the boast that McCann made that the “people are with us,” after the King’s Proclamation of 31 st May (quoted in full, thankee very much!) the merchant sailors wouldn’t even allow mutineers aboard their anchored ships, sure they’d be hung with them.

  The Nore Fleet did try to sail out en masse. Vilified in newspapers, from the pulpits, knowing there would be no sympathetic civilian or Army revolt, the Green Cockades erred badly by announcing that they would steer course for France and join their Navy! But when it came down to it, most of the Nore sailors, even some of the initially determined hands, were simply too used to being True Blue Hearts of Oak and Englishmen, unable to turn real traitors, become life-long deserters … or sever ties to home, and kith and kin, forevermore. It is said that some sail was freed, but not set, and just as quickly was brailed back up again. No capstans turned to raise anchors, just as Lewrie’s crew did when he ordered Proteus to set sail when the mutiny began!

  As a final resort, the Nore Fleet split into five distinct camps or schools of thought. The largest group voted to stay in the Great Nore, surrender, and take their chances. A smaller second group was of a mind to sail out for Cromarty Firth in Scotland, far from authority’s initia
l reach, and make up their minds what to do later.

  Some wanted to sail for Shannon, and become a quasi-Irish Navy, to join the expected French invasion when it came. If all else, they thought to sell off the ships, guns, muskets, powder, and shot for what they could get to help arm the Irish countryside—then melt into the civilian population with the profits.

  There were two other camps, both forlorn and deluded by rhetoric right to the end, of a mind for more radical things—or simply too stark-staring “bonkers” to recognise reality if it crawled up to bite them on the ankles!

  One group actually believed that they could continue a rebellion by sailing over to the Texel to seduce Admiral Duncan’s few remaining warships into joining hands with them, then sail back down-Channel to the French port of Cherbourg, and become an English Republican squadron of the French Fleet!

  The last group, spurred by thoughts of the Bounty mutiny, with heady romances of lusty native girls (perhaps by back copies of the National Geographic, and the Discovery Channel!) had a thought to sail to some nebulous “New Colony,” wherever and whatever that was, beginning a new life of buccaneering and, “Arrh, yo-ho-ing!”

  But at the very last, none of them hoisted anchor for any purpose; they all ended up surrendering.

  If you think that the tortured rhetoric that the mutineers used sounded a lot like the sort of Socialist Revolutionary, Bolshevik, or People’s Liberation Army cant one might have heard in St. Petersburg in 1917, and in Havana or Pyongyang today, I’ll admit that I was amazed too, when reading their writings or recorded speeches. It was Trade Unionism, “All hail the proletariat!” to a Tee! And “the Floating Republic” had an eerie similarity to George Orwell’s novel 1984, or his Animal Farm; Green Cockades were better than Red Cockades—“two legs good, four legs better”? Perhaps while delving among the stacks of the London libraries, Karl Marx found his “lingo” for Communism in the annals of the Nore!

  At the Nore, people had been wounded and killed. Damning insults had been uttered, a republic had been proclaimed, and a rebellion urged, civil war threatened in the mutineers’ sneering response to the King’s Proclamation (also quoted verbatim, thankee!) and broadsides fired, so there was little mercy for the Nore mutineers. Crown, Admiralty, and Society had been humiliated and taunted enough at Spithead; they were not about to swallow a second, more dangerous dose! Had the mutineers not been drunk on their own words and fantasies, the Nore might have ended much sooner and a lot more peacefully, but their truculence was their doom.

  McCann, Richard Parker, and dozen of others were hung as rebels, as well as for being mutineers. Others were transported for life, got long gaol sentences—a stalwart few committed suicide. In the end, most sailors returned to duty, with the gains that Spithead had gotten them and they had already possessed before rising their only comfort—except for the part about removing officers and mates that did not apply to them.

  I hope no one minds that Rolston (even I can’t recall his first name from The King’s Coat!) served as a stand-in for Richard Parker … and got what Lewrie thought both deserved. But trust Lewrie to have a host of people in his past who wish to slip him a bit of “the dirty” and give him a comeuppance, a talent pool upon which I may happily draw to challenge, confuse, and plague him. But what would life be like if things ran as smooth as a Swiss watch all the time, hmm?

  And we’ve plagued him pretty sore, by now, ain’t we! Old foes, new foes—it was looking rather neat, with Lewrie-1, Baddies-0, ’til that letter showed up. Was it really Lady Lucy Shockley nee Beauman, or Commander Fillebrowne? A lark played by Clotworthy Chute or Lord Peter Rushton? A skewering connived at by Harry Embleton and Uncle Phineas Chiswick; Zachariah Twigg and his spy minions run amok in his dotage? Could it possibly really be Theoni Connor … even Phoebe Aretino, who wants him back … Claudia Mastandrea, still in the pay of French schemers? Admit it, you didn’t think of those, now, did you!

  Well, no matter for now. He’s truly in the “quag,” 1797 and 1798 will be an adventurous time.

  And even I can’t wait to find out what happens!

  This one is for …

  Tom C. Armstrong, “your humble poet” as he calls himself, who, disguised as a mild-mannered writer/producer on Music Row for many years, a sometime songwriter, sometime book reviewer, sometime teacher/mentor to a new generation of writer/dreamers, a veteran of the old Smothers Brothers Show’s stable of comedy writers, and a poet … serves the best, bottomless pot of coffee, along with a sympathetic ear for scribblers around Nashville such as myself, and has an abiding faith that talent will be recognized and appreciated. For Tom and his incomparable Beverly, and may God bless your encouragement.

  Also by Dewey Lambdin

  The King’s Coat

  The French Admiral

  The King’s Commission

  The King’s Privateer

  The Gun Ketch

  HMS Cockerel

  A King’s Commander

  Jester’s Fortune

  KING’S CAPTAIN. Copyright © 2000 by Dewey Lambdin. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue,

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  eISBN 9780312276522

  First eBook Edition : April 2011