The Black Ship

by Dudley Pope

  When George arrived back from India and became a Member of Parliament and a baronet, Hugh began to take an interest in politics as a Whig, like his brother. His domestic life, however, was upset by the death of his wife; but he soon married again, this time to Frances Wrottesley, a daughter of Sir Richard Wrottesley, Bt, whose brother-in-law was to become the Marquis of Stafford. Hugh thus became linked by marriage to one of the most powerful of the Staffordshire families and one with strong naval connections and political influence. His brother George had in the meantime bought the Patshull estate.

  In 1769, Hugh’s second wife presented him with a son, the subject of this book, and on September 5 he was christened at the parish church of Patshull, being given the name of Hugh, after his father and his great-grandfather. He was two years old when his father was given the command of the Triumph but did not take up the appointment. Nevertheless it did not affect promotion because, of course, progress up the captains list was automatic: admirals dying meant everyone else moved up the appropriate number of places.

  Finally in March 1775 (a few days before his brother Robert fought at Lexington in the opening round of the American War of Independence) Captain Hugh was promoted Rear-Admiral of the White, second from lowest of the nine grades of admiral. The jump over the first was due to the fairly rapid expansion of the Navy in anticipation of the war, and in December he became Vice-Admiral of the Blue, four steps up the nine-rung ladder to the highest rank the Navy could offer. His previous experience had been as the captain of an 84-gun ship, which hardly equipped him for his present rank; but for the time being it was no handicap because, although the American War was in full swing, the Whigs had fallen and the Tories—the ‘King’s Friends’—were in power under Lord North, whose leadership was mostly confined to acting as horse-holder for the King. Whig admirals like Pigot could not expect employment; but no Government could stop his promotion, because providing he lived he stepped into dead men’s shoes.

  Only Robert Pigot was engaged in the war, which slid from one calamitous situation to another. General Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in 1777; France joined the Colonists in 1778, followed by Spain in 1779, and Holland a year later, while Prussia and the northern powers formed an ‘armed neutrality’. Britain staggered on in isolation, a cantankerous King at the wheel and a sycophantic government manning the pumps.

  Although the years sped by, Vice-Admiral Pigot received no summons from the Admiralty. His brother George died in India, but the Admiral and his family continued to live at Patshull, looking after George’s three sons (the eldest was within a few months of the same age as his own boy Hugh, and all four were playmates at Patshull).

  Finally Cornwallis, besieged at Yorktown, had to surrender, thus ensuring that America was lost—or won, depending on one’s viewpoint. The long-overdue collapse of the ‘King’s Friends’ followed, and with the Tories routed the Whigs formed a new government in March 1782. Hugh Pigot’s fortunes changed with equally dramatic suddenness: on March 30 Admiral Lord Keppel became the new First Lord of the Admiralty and on the same day he made Pigot a Lord Commissioner—in other words a member of the Board—and a few days later promoted him to be Admiral of the Blue.

  Pigot was still digesting his good fortune when Keppel made him Commander-in-Chief in the West Indies to replace Sir George Brydges Rodney, whose Tory politics had, of course, put him completely out of favour with the new Government. Pigot’s meteoric rise in less than a month is a good example of the powerful and utterly disastrous part that politics played in the Navy; but it was also useful to him since it solved the problem of a naval career for his second son, Hugh, who had just passed his twelfth birthday.

  Since the Admiral was about to sail for the West Indies, young Hugh would go as well. As the Commander-in-Chief s son he would be assured of the best of everything, ranging from food to the deference of his captain, but excepting the sound training in the vagaries of human nature which the knock-about life of the midshipmen’s berth would have given him. For him there would be none of the misery that usually greeted a youngster on first going to sea; no one would dare bully him overmuch with Admiral Pigot in the offing. The rough-and-tumble discipline which made a man out of a youngster, teaching him assurance and tolerance, and demonstrating what real leadership entailed at all levels, would be missing from young Hugh’s early, formative months at sea.

  Admiral Pigot and his entourage arrived at Plymouth, and on May 5 he hoisted his flag in the Jupiter, comfortably accommodated under the watchful eye of her captain, a far from dour Scot named Thomas Pasley. On May 18 the Jupiter sailed. (‘Ship very much lumbered by the vast quantities of stores, chests and etc, brought on board by the Admiral… and croud [sic] of followers’, noted Captain Pasley in his private journal.)

  As Admiral Pigot settled into his cot that night he was no doubt delighted to be at sea again; but his departure was a dreadful example of political expediency. The command in the West Indies was then one of the most important in the Navy: Rodney, whom Pigot was replacing, commanded a fleet which included six 90-gun line-of-battle ships, twenty-one 74s and nine 64s. Pigot, it will be recalled, had not been to sea for nineteen years and had never served in any higher capacity than captain of an 84-gun ship.

  Captain Pasley unwittingly added an ironic postscript to the situation in his journal next day: ‘Weather blustery and disagreeable. The Admiral and all his youngsters most heartily seasick owing to his not having been at sea for nineteen years.’

  But while the Pigot family were united in their misery, and Pasley noted ‘uncommonly cold for the season of the year—such as old men does not remember’, the Admiral’s departure had caused a major crisis in Whitehall, and even as he retched his way out of the Channel, a cutter was flogging her way to windward in an effort to catch him up to deliver urgent orders from the Admiralty—orders which told him not to sail.

  The crisis was caused by the arrival of a dispatch to the Admiralty from the West Indies telling them that within a few hours of Pigot being given his commission as the new Commander-in-Chief in the West Indies, the man he was to replace, Rodney, had won a decisive victory over the French Fleet at the Battle of the Saintes, capturing five French line-of-battle ships, including the huge flagship, the Ville de Paris.

  London—indeed the whole of Britain—would go mad with joy when Rodney’s news was published and the Government, knowing Pigot was on the eve of sailing (if he had not actually left), could visualize the mob’s reaction when they heard their new-found hero had just been sacked.…

  The First Lord hurriedly drafted new instructions ordering Pigot not to sail to the West Indies, and sent them off by a special messenger who was told to deliver them at all cost. The man galloped to Plymouth, where he found that although the Jupiter had sailed twenty-four hours earlier, there was just a chance that a fast cutter could catch her before she left the chops of the Channel He put to sea, but ran into the same bad weather that was disturbing the Admiral and had to turn back.

  While London rejoiced, the King and Parliament hastily prepared to shower Rodney with praise, pension and a peerage. The Jupiter meanwhile bore the Pigots across the Atlantic and Captain Pasley wrote some illuminating comments in his private journal. ‘The Admiral seems the perfect gentleman, affable and agreeable, which makes the service I am employed on the more agreeable,’ he commented after Pigot had been on board four days.

  Nor did the passing days—which did not bring them the right winds—make him change his first impressions: by the end of June he still found the Admiral ‘pleasing, affable, good company’, and he wrote ‘I do not think any admiral can be more pleasing in service or to serve than Admiral Pigot’. He had but one reservation: ‘I have my fears when he comes to command so large a fleet: in that line he can have no experience, and from what I have seen a change must be worked to cutt a figure—but let me not judge rashly.’

  On July 10 the Jupiter arrived at Port Royal, Jamaica, where a startled Admiral Pigot, unaware of the
recent battle, saw an extraordinary sight. ‘We found Admirals Sir George Rodney, Rowley, Sir Samuel Hood and Drake, thirty-seven ships of the line besides frigates, and the French ships taken,’ wrote Pasley. ‘… Such a Fleet, or such a number of flags, never was seen before in this Western World.’

  The fleet soon had more news from London—news which must have dispelled some of the bitterness over Rodney’s sudden displacement by Pigot: Rodney himself had received a peerage (and by the time he returned to his house in Hertford Street, Mayfair, Parliament had voted him a pension of £2,000 a year, to pass on to his heirs: this must have been welcome to a man who had once spent four years in France owing to debts). Hood, too, had received a peerage.

  Hood did not return to England with Rodney: instead he stayed on in the West Indies as second-in-command, and he left his opinion of Pigot on record. In his view Lord Keppel had been most unpatriotic ‘in placing an officer at the head of so great a Fleet who was so unequal to the very important command through want of practise’. Pigot, he said, had neither foresight, judgment nor enterprise, otherwise ‘he might have had a very noble chance for rendering a good account both of the French and Spanish squadrons’.

  The Commander-in-Chief’s inexperience had no effect on his son Hugh, who stayed in the flagship with his father for the next few months. However, negotiations for peace which had begun early in 1783 were concluded by the end of the year and the Admiral hauled down his flag and returned to England, leaving Hugh behind. Within a few weeks the Government changed, and with it the Board of Admiralty, of which the Admiral was still a member. He retired to Bath, his career as a sailor finished.

  His young son Hugh, however, stayed at sea: he was sent from the West Indies to the Assistance on the America Station, staying in her for two years before being transferred to the Trusty, which brought him back to the West Indies. On August 31, 1789, he passed his examination for lieutenant. Under the regulations he had to be twenty years old before he could serve as a lieutenant and he had only a day or two to wait before his birthday. But the lad had been out of England for more than seven years, and he received permission to return for leave, (Many of the dates for Pigot’s appointments and promotions are given wrongly in the Dictionary of National Biography. See note on page 346).

  After seeing his father, mother and two sisters, he set off the next July to join the 74-gun Colossus as fifth lieutenant. She was commanded by a friend of his father’s, Captain Hugh Cloberry Christian, who had served under the Admiral in the West Indies. With Britain at peace, the Navy was being cut down. Lieutenants and captains—even experienced ones, men who had several times distinguished themselves in battle—were two a penny; indeed, many were serving in merchant ships. It needed influence to get an appointment—particularly in a ship like the Colossus, and Lt Pigot was fortunate since he did not lack that commodity.

  Within a couple of months Captain Christian was replaced by Captain Henry Harvey, and either the young fifth lieutenant impressed Harvey or influence was at work, because within a few weeks Hugh was made fourth and, on January 7, 1791, third lieutenant. He had been on board six months and two days, and his promotion had been rapid. However, he remained third lieutenant for the next fifteen months, until April 24, 1792 when he suffered a demotion, being transferred to the 50-gun Assistance, a much smaller ship, as fourth lieutenant.

  His father died in December of that year, and he had to wait nine months—until January 28, 1793—before he was made third lieutenant again. But on February 1 the great war with Revolutionary France began, and the Navy hurriedly expanded: ships were rushed into commission and officers were recalled. On April 5 Hugh was once again a fourth lieutenant, but this time it was a promotion because the ship was the 98-gun London, commanded by Captain Richard Keats. His new appointment did him little good as far as experience was concerned because the London spent a long time in the dockyard being fitted out as a flagship. This was unfortunate, for Hugh might have learnt a great deal about leadership and the handling of men from that staunch Devonian Keats, who was a close friend of Nelson.

  Pigot’s next appointment was in January, 1794, as first lieutenant of the 38-gun frigate Latona. It was at this point, it seems, that interest really went to work to help him along the road of promotion, and it probably came from the direction of the Leveson-Gowers and his uncle, Lt-General Sir Robert Pigot. Hugh had been the Latona’s first lieutenant only a month when he was given command of the fireship Incendiary; but this was simply a device to make him a commander, and eleven days later, on February 21, he was given command of the 18-gun sloop Swan, which had been built at Plymouth two years before her new commanding officer had been born. Pigot was now twenty-four years old, and apart from the brief month as first lieutenant of the Latona, his previous highest appointment had been as third lieutenant in the Colossus. His new command was at Jamaica, and he had to cross the Atlantic to join her.

  He arrived in the West Indies and took over the Swan in April. Within a fortnight he was writing the letter to the Admiralty, referred to earlier, complaining of the language used by the master of the Canada after she collided with the Swan; within six months he was ‘made post’ and given command of the frigate Success. The Swan, of 300 tons and armed with eighteen guns, had a crew of about eighty men. The Success was roughly twice her size, with thirty-two guns, plus carronades, and a complement of 215 men. Thus, with at the most twenty weeks’ experience of command, he now had the power of life and death over ten score men. The order appointing him to the Success, signed by Commodore Ford, was dated September 4, a day short of twenty-five years after he was christened at Patshull. By coincidence, Commodore Ford next day appointed Captain Philip Wilkinson to command the frigate Hermione.

  In Hugh Pigot’s case, history was repeating itself with a vengeance: his father, Admiral Hugh, had arrived with his young son in the West Indies in 1782 to take over Rodney’s great fleet with no greater experience than that of captain of an 84-gun ship; now, twelve years later, his son, relatively even less experienced, had been given a frigate.

  5

  THE RED BAIZE BAG

  * * *

  HIS MAJESTY’S FRIGATE Successes anchored in Port Royal when Captain Pigot went on board to take command on September 4, 1794. In pouring rain, with a strong wind whipping it across the decks, he read to the ship’s company Commodore Ford’s order appointing him to her. He had not been in the ship more than a couple of hours before a boat came alongside and two hungry, rain-soaked men were brought on board under guard and handed over to the Master-at-Arms. They had deserted from the ship a few days earlier, but their taste of freedom had been brief.

  The Success, built at Liverpool between 1779 and 1781 at a cost of £13,759 16s. 9d., had an official complement of 215 men. This was the number the Navy Board regarded as necessary to sail and fight the ship. But a ship’s official complement was, in time of war, usually just a number: most captains had to make do with many fewer men. Hugh Pigot’s first task in his new command was therefore one of the most difficult that continually faced a captain in wartime: finding enough seamen so that he could report to the Commander-in-Chief in the time honoured phrase that the ship was ‘in every respect ready for sea’.

  The Muster Book was brought to him, so that he could read the figures written against the phrases, ‘Total borne considered as complement’, and ‘Short of Complement’. The book told him a dreary but familiar story, particularly the column headed ‘D, D.D., or R’, which were three abbreviations indicating the only ways a seaman could leave His Majesty’s service. ‘D’ stood for ‘Discharged’—to another ship, to a hospital, or for some other officially endorsed reason; ‘D.D.’ was the gruesome way of reporting that a man had died, either from illness, accident or in battle, and had thus been ‘Discharged Dead’. The third abbreviation, ‘R’, stood for ‘Run’ the Navy’s way of saying a man had deserted.

  Captain Pigot’s first orders were to prepare the ship for sea: certain rigging had to be repaire
d—and more men had to be found. He told the surgeon to report how many of the Success’s sick in the hospital were sufficiently recovered to be brought back on board, and three days later was told there were a dozen. A boat was sent off to fetch them, but the Success’s net gain was only eleven, because while the boat waited at the quay one of its crew managed to slip away and vanish among the streets of Port Royal.

  For the rest of September, life on board the Success was comparatively uneventful, if Captain Pigot’s log gave a fair picture. He watched the men at work and gradually came to know them, singling out certain men for promotion. Henry Croaker, for instance, who came from Plymouth, was made Yeoman of the Powder Room on September 13. It meant little in terms of his pay, which was increased by a shilling to 265. a month, but it was a position of great trust, since Croaker would have, under the Gunner, responsibility for the storage of the gunpowder. Pigot’s choice of Croaker was the first example of his unerring—and, as far as the Success and later the Hermione, were concerned, fatal—instinct for putting his trust in the wrong people.

  September soon came to an end, and with it the first twenty-six days of life in the Success under Captain Pigot. No floggings had been noted in the log, and only one man had deserted. However, for most of the crew of the frigate, October marked the beginning of twenty-seven months of bullying, misery and dejection, when (with the exception of the captain’s favourites) many of the men were to be treated like criminals and driven to the limits—but for the time being not beyond—of mental and physical endurance. Although Pigot was still busy trying to get more men for the ship, the month began with a series of desertions. On the 3rd he had to go on shore, and while his barge was waiting one of the crew seized the opportunity to desert. This loss was more than balanced by a haul of four men brought in by a press-gang that Pigot sent the same day to search some merchantmen anchored nearby. Finally in the first sixteen days of October Captain Pigot had obtained ten men from his press-gang, lost four trained seamen by desertion, and had another deserter brought back.