The Black Ship

by Dudley Pope

  In the West Indies the solitary captain and his ship were further burdened with the ever present triple threat of virulent disease, which could decimate a crew overnight; dangerous and unpredictable currents which could, and not infrequently did, sweep a ship off her course in the darkness and fling her on to a shoal of uncharted rocks; and uncertain sub-tropical weather—for the Caribbean is the birthplace of the hurricane and the playground of the notorious white squall which, suddenly appearing out of a clear sky, would send the topmen racing aloft to reef or furl before its invisible strength tore the canvas of the sails out of the boltropes.

  Occasionally all these responsibilities put too great a load on the moral fibres which kept a captain’s sense of proportion and temper under control so that, nearing breaking point, they became distorted and slowly warped the man’s personality. This rarely affected his efficiency as a fighting machine; but since he wielded almost absolute power over his ship’s company—a power backed by the Articles of War, and behind which was the whole weight and approval of the State—it could and often did have a powerful effect on the life and happiness of the men serving under him; particularly on the justice and the punishment he meted out to them.

  It must be emphasized, because it says much for the natural resilience of the human spirit, and the rough and ready training which an officer received in the Royal Navy from the time he first joined as a young boy, that only rarely did a captain become so warped that he became an irresponsible tyrant; and this book is a study of one particular case, the worst in the whole history of the Royal Navy.

  The Commander-in-Chief of ‘His Majesty’s ships and vessels employed… at and about Jamaica’ in 1797, Vice-Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, was usually to be found at Cape Nicolas Mole, at the western end of Santo Domingo (now Haiti), a small anchorage which was ridden with yellow fever and swarming with mosquitoes. The Mole’s purpose was entirely martial: it had recently been captured from the French and for the Commander-in-Chief was strategically better placed than Port Royal, in Jamaica. It had no social life; the captains of the warships nominally based there could expect leisure and equable company only when their ships needed dockyard refits at Jamaica, where the society of Port Royal and Kingston could be relied upon for invitations to dinner at the homes of rich planters, and the choicest food and wines would be served by immaculately uniformed Negro servants and eaten in the company of beautiful women. This emphasized the dreariness of a captain’s normal existence afloat, when an invitation to the First Lieutenant and the doctor to join him at his table constituted a social occasion, and everyone knew and was probably heartily sick of the others’ jokes and foibles.

  Normally there was nothing but the usual harbour routine to occupy Captain Hugh Pigot’s thoughts during his infrequent stays at Cape Nicolas Mole in his frigate the Success; he would sit in the hot and humid solitude of his cabin dealing with the paper work, or pace the windward side of the quarterdeck (which was shaded by canvas awnings and specially reserved for his use). However, on January 19, 1797, as the frigate lay at anchor at the Mole he had plenty of time to reflect on the furore which he had caused because he had lost his temper with the captain of an American merchant ship, a certain Mr William Jesup, some six months previously. Indeed he was being forced to reflect, since he had to set down his explanation in writing.

  To Captain Pigot, who though only twenty-six years old was a post captain, the whole wretched business was a matter for surprise, since all he had done was to order a couple of boatswain’s mates to give the damn’d fellow a ‘starting’ with a rope’s end. A few stripes across the back was little enough for Jesup to complain about considering his behaviour and the way he had handled his ship, which was one of several Pigot had been convoying.

  Pigot was prepared to agree that he had been rather hasty; that his anger with the ‘Jonathan’ had clouded his judgment. But further than that he would not go; nor indeed had the Commander-in-Chief then desired it. But now—that very day—Sir Hyde had been forced to order a court of inquiry… simply because of a Yankee skipper whose behaviour, Pigot thought, had certainly shown him to be a fool or a knave, and perhaps both; whose behaviour had hazarded the Success and whom Pigot had punished accordingly.

  Pigot’s hasty action had certainly landed him in deep water. Apart from the diplomatic relationship between Britain and the United States, which at that time was far from friendly, on a more prosaic level the masters of American merchant ships, although only too willing to trade with British ports, had an active and sometimes understandable dislike of the Royal Navy.

  This had sprung up against the ever-present background of disagreement between the two nations over Britain’s claim to the right in wartime to board American ships on the high seas and take off British sailors. The rights and wrongs of this will be discussed later, but it must be remembered in turn that the masters of many neutral ships could be a nuisance to nations at war. They were always ready to protest but, in the opinion of the Royal Navy, seldom cared to give credit when it was due—when, for example, a British warship rescued and set free (without making any claim against her owners) an American merchantman which had been captured by the French because she was allegedly carrying a cargo to or from a British port.

  Such bickering was natural: it had always existed in previous wars and was to continue in wartime for the next century and a half. Any combatant country expecting a neutral’s thanks for an act of kindness in time of war was naive, and any neutral skipper who failed to grumble and protest at every opportunity was a rare and tolerant prince among seafarers.

  Nevertheless convoying a motley bunch of British and neutral merchant ships, all of different size and seaworthiness and whose masters were invariably rugged individualists, was a thankless and temper-fraying task for even an experienced and patient frigate captain, which Hugh Pigot certainly was not. No one in authority commented if the convoy arrived safely; but if even a single ship was lost to the enemy, her owners made wrathful protests to the Admiralty, blaming the escorting warship for what was often the master’s stupidity, or the result of their own notorious frugality in not allowing a large enough crew (which had probably been further depleted by a press-gang) or sufficient new sails and cordage. Sailing with a very small crew, reefing down too much at night through habit or over-cautiousness and falling far behind the convoy (the master of a merchant ship was freed by the convoy system of the need to hurry into port to be first at the market place with his cargo, since his rivals were usually in the same convoy)—all these, and several more, were the faults to which many of the charges of a harassed frigate captain were prone.

  Captain Thomas Pasley, of the Glasgow, provides typical examples. ‘The Mary Agnus was leaky and sinking for want of men to pump her… came out so badly manned that at Bluefields he applied to me for men to weigh his anchor; I think him a rascal but could not see him sink—so gave him four men’, he wrote about one of his charges. ‘The damn’d mule her captain stood on till 6 o’clock ere he put about, not paying the smallest attention to the signal,’ he said of another. ‘… How can I pretend to answer for the safety of ships commanded by such a set of mules? Thus is a captain of a man-of-war’s character sported away, who happens to have the misfortune to command a convoy.’

  The incident which had forced Sir Hyde Parker to order an inquiry into Captain Pigot’s behaviour had occurred in July 1796, just before the Spaniards joined the war on the French side. The British had earlier captured Port au Prince, a small French town sprawled on a plain at the far end of the long and ever-narrowing gulf at the western end of Santo Domingo, The coastline for dozens of miles on either side of the gulf consisted of jungle interspersed with isolated villages and small towns, most of which were still held by small French garrisons and hardly worth the bother of attacking. One town, Leogane, which gives the gulf its name and is only twenty miles short of Port au Prince, was a flourishing base for French privateers, so that British merchantmen bound up the gulf for Port au Prin
ce had to be escorted.

  Pigot in the Success had been convoying a dozen of them on the short voyage from St Marc, sixty miles away, when the incident happened. Pigot knew the Leogane privateers were a constant menace—not because they were powerfully armed, but they were small enough to be propelled by oars: dangerous opponents in an area where the wind often dropped suddenly, leaving sailing ships wallowing in a flat calm. The Frenchmen were so bold that in such a calm they would dart out and, skimming across the water like lissome flying fish, seize and tow away some fat merchantman as she lay helpless and out of gunshot from the escorting frigate, whose sails, starved of wind, would be hanging down limply like so much laundry.

  For the whole of this particular voyage one American ship in the convoy had been a continual nuisance, according to Pigot. Badly sailed and usually out of station, she repeatedly ignored shouted orders and requests from the Success. She was the brig Mercury, of New York, and was being handled in such a lubberly fashion that in broad daylight she had run up so close under the Success’s stern that her jib-boom had nearly stove in the frigate’s jolly-boat in the stern davits.

  This had been alarming enough, in Pigot’s view; but that very night, July 1, despite frequently shouted warnings, she had rammed the Success amidships, and her jib-boom had poked across the waist of the ship like a clumsy giant’s lance before being snapped off short by the frigate’s main shrouds.

  To Pigot, roused out of his sleep by the crash of the collision, and whose frigate formed the convoy’s sole protection, there seemed to be only one immediate explanation for the Mercury’s strange and dangerous behaviour: with Leogane only a few miles to leeward it seemed obvious the American captain, William Jesup, was in the pay of the French and had deliberately rammed the Success to disable her, leaving the flock of merchantmen to the mercy of the enemy privateers.

  The Mercury’s crew, Pigot had told Sir Hyde Parker, did little or nothing to help separate the two ships; and it was after Jesup had been called on board the Success—where he had made several unhelpful remarks—that he was given a ‘starting’.

  Pigot was probably justified in being angry that the collision had actually occurred; but he was not the man to act with restraint or foresight: his impulsiveness and lack of judgment stopped him realizing that for the captain of one of His Majesty’s ships to order an American skipper to be ‘started’ with a rope’s end was bound to be regarded by even the British Government as an insult to the American flag. It was just the type of provocation, insignificant yet humiliating, which was bound to anger the sensitive Government of a new and proud country and give powerful ammunition to its considerable anti-British element.

  Pigot’s troubles had begun officially when the Mercury arrived at Port au Prince and Jesup went on shore to register his protest with the American Consul, Mr L. MacNeal, who helped him draw up a petition to the British authorities. Addressed to ‘His Honour R. W. Wilford, Commander of His Majesty’s Forces at Port au Prince’, it gave Jesup’s version of the whole episode. According to him the fault was with the Success which ‘wore ship and ran foul of the Mercury’. Captain Pigot had then ‘ordered his people to cut away everything they could lay their hands on’, and also told them to bring back to the frigate the Mercury’s jib and foretopmaststaysail, saying ‘they would do to make trowsers’ [sic].

  Jesup’s petition said that he ‘begged Captain Pigot for God’s sake not to cut any more than he could avoid, or words to that effect. Captain Pigot forthwith commanded his people to bring the d—d rascal that spoke on board the frigate, where he remained for a few minutes till the vessels were cleared. Pigot thereupon desired the boatswain’s mates to give the d—d rascal, meaning your Petitioner, a good flogging.

  ‘They took hold of your Petitioner, and inquired who he was—it was told them, he was the Master of the Mercury. Well, said Captain Pigot, “flog him well and let him flog his officers”. These orders were instantly obeyed in so severe and cruel a manner that your Petitioner was nearly bereft of his senses. During the time your Petitioner was thus so brutally beaten and ill-treated, he, your Petitioner, made use of no offensive language, or no kind of resistance—but only begged they would have compassion on him…

  ‘Your Petitioner arrived here same day, when he exhibited the marks and bruises of his shocking treatment to a number of the most respectable inhabitants and others in the town of Port au Prince, who all impartially pronounced it an outrage of the most brutal and unmanly kind, as the certificate annexed to this paper abundantly testifies.’

  Jesup requested that his petition, dated July 4, three days after the Mercury arrived in port, should be put before the proper authority so that he could obtain ‘justice and satisfaction’. The certificate attached to it bore the signatures of thirty-seven of the ‘most respectable inhabitants’ who had ‘seen and viewed the marks and lashing inflicted on the body and person of Captain Jesup… by the order of Captain Pigot’, and ‘give it as our candid opinion that the dangers to be apprehended from such wanton and barbarous treatment, is of the most imminent and alarming nature to the life and person of Captain Jesup, revolting to humanity, degrading and dishonourable in the highest degree to the com: mander of a ship of His Britannic Majesty’.

  Consul MacNeal also signed the certificate and added a paragraph saying that he too had ‘viewed the body and arms of Captain Jesup, and that it appears to me, that he had been severely flogged, beat and bruised, by some person or persons unknown to me’.

  On July 8, possibly in reply to a counter-allegation by Pigot, the nine passengers who had been in the Mercury, including a Frenchwoman, Mme Gumaire, signed another certificate saying that at the time of the incident they ‘did not hear Captain Jesup utter or say anything of an irritating or offensive nature, but [that he] behaved in the most passive and forebearing stile [sic] in his answers when hailed from the Success’. When he left the Mercury for the frigate he appeared to be ‘in perfect health’; but when he returned he was ‘in a very suffering condition’ owing to ‘the sore beatings and bruises whereof his body and arms, which he exhibited to us, bore the most convincing proof…’

  The petition and certificates were duly forwarded to the British Commander-in-Chief, Sir Hyde Parker. There is no record whatsoever that he took any action when he received them: certainly he neither noted the incident in his journal nor wrote to the Admiralty. (Under the Regulations and Instructions, a commander-in-chief’s dispatches were to tell the Admiralty of his fleet’s activities ‘and of all other circumstances worthy of notice’, and he had to keep a daily journal recording all such information.) Parker appears to have been satisfied with Pigot’s explanation and description of the episode.

  Pigot was convinced that he had been perfectly in the right, and Sir Hyde had behaved very well so far, in his view: there had been no unnecessary nagging and carping. His confidence seems to have been well founded, for there must have been a tacit understanding with the Admiral that the whole episode should be ignored—unless demands for an explanation arrived from Their Lordships in Whitehall. Anyway, for many days after the arrival of Jesup’s petition all was quiet; but unknown to Pigot or Sir Hyde, copies of the petition and certificates had been sent to the United States, where they were immediately published in the newspapers. The reaction was instantaneous and noisy.

  At that time the American Press and the British Government viewed each other with mutual suspicion—within a few months Lord MacDonald was to write to the Secretary of State in London that ‘half a dozen books are not certainly published in any one year… The printers are employed in the universal business of newspapers and… the consequence is that the opinions of all classes arise from what they read in their newspapers; so that by newspapers the country is governed.’ He added that ‘the newspapers which abuse or slight us most, sell best’.

  Even allowing this was an exaggeration inflated by outraged indignation, it goes far to explain the extent of the uproar when Mr Jesup’s story was published. Within
a few days copies of newspapers from the Southern states were delivered on board Sir Hyde’s flagship at Cape Nicolas Mole, and Pigot found the dog—indeed, a large pack of them—still worrying the bone.

  It did not take long for the first of the swell waves heralding the storm’s approach to travel eastwards across the Atlantic from the United States and lap along the shores of Whitehall. The episode had happened on July 1, the latest date on the Jesup certificates was July 8, and on July 25 the New York Diary, among many other newspapers, had published its first full account of Jesup’s story. By September 22 the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty—otherwise known as the Board—were reading a copy of the Diary in London. This gave them the first news of the incident and since Sir Hyde Parker had made no mention of it in his dispatches—a major tactical error—Their Lordships instructed the Secretary to the Board, Mr Evan Nepean, to write to him at once demanding information.

  With scant regard to the spelling of names, Nepean’s letter told Sir Hyde that ‘I am commanded… to transmit to you the enclosed extract from the New York Diary of 25th July last relating the particulars of the very extraordinary behaviour of Captain Pigott of His Majesty’s ship Success towards Captain Jessup of the ship Mercury and to signify Their Lordships’ direction to you to call upon Captain Pigott to report a full and circumstantial account of the transactions above alluded to, which report you will please transmit to me for Their Lordships’ information’.

  The letter was sent at once to Falmouth for dispatch to the West Indies by the next packet. (There were nine packets maintaining the service between Britain and the West Indies and America.) However, before the ship sailed the Board had to send another letter to Sir Hyde about the same subject, but written in much stronger terms.