The Black Ship

by Dudley Pope

  Sansum, however, was not the only unpopular officer. Archibald Douglas, the Second Lieutenant, was perhaps trying to ingratiate himself with Pigot; but whatever the reason, the men hated him. They also hated the youngest officer in the ship, Midshipman Smith, who was thirteen years old and had just caused a seaman named John Fletcher to receive a severe flogging for what they regarded a trivial offence. Fletcher, a Whitby man, had served in the Hermione for nearly five years—he was one of the half-dozen who had been with the ship since she commissioned in December, 1792.

  The First Lieutenant, Reed, was not popular, but the men did not bear him any particular malice: he had a weak character, and they probably saw that he had a hard time trying to please the Captain. Pacey, the Purser, was disliked no more than any other of his calling; and the men seem to have had a genuine regard for the Master, Edward Southcott, and the Carpenter, Richard Price, a Caernarvon man who had first joined the ship nearly five years earlier as an able seaman.

  So the morning of Wednesday, September 20, passed: Sansum dispensed his meagre medicines; Pacey served out the provisions at fourteen ounces to the pound; Lt McIntosh’s life ebbed away; and the Hermione, with the Diligence on her starboard bow, sailed along under easy canvas.

  At 11 a.m. a fresh breeze sprang up from the north-east and a lookout suddenly spotted a sail dead in the wind’s eye. It was only one of a hundred such sightings made in the previous months; but at the moment he shouted the news down to the quarterdeck, a shadow fell across the lives of more than 170 men on board the frigate.

  Captain Pigot immediately ordered the signal for ‘General Chase’ to be made to the Diligence, which was nearer to the stranger than the Hermione. By 1.15 p.m. the brig was close enough to see that she was another Jonathan, and a boarding party reported she was from Newport, Rhode Island. Her brief role in the forthcoming tragedy completed, the American ship got under way again as the frigate and brig turned back south-westwards.

  But for their long chase after the schooner both the warships would almost certainly have missed a sudden squall which came up at 6 p.m. Pigot ordered the Hermione’s topsails to be reefed, and the topmen ran to the bulwarks ready for the mad scramble up the rigging at the order ‘Away aloft’.

  This followed immediately and the men were soon up the wildly-gyrating masts and out on the yards, feverishly gathering up the canvas as the wind tore at it. As far as Pigot was concerned they were not working nearly fast enough, and with his speaking trumpet to his lips he aimed a stream of curses and threats at them. He had learned nothing from the Casey incident, and within a few moments he was in the grip of his usual impetuous rage.

  He turned to the seamen on the mizentopsail yard. Three of these, it will be remembered, were only youngsters—the former clerk William Johnson, the Negro boy Peter Bascomb, and Francis Staunton, who was eighteen years of age.

  Pigot watched as they fought with the sail fifty feet above his head, trying to get the last of the reefpoints tied; but to him they appeared a lubberly bunch—slow and unskilful. He put his speaking trumpet to his lips and hurled up a threat which must have chilled their blood, since one of the eight or ten men on the yard was bound to suffer. Convinced that his order to hurry was being ignored, Pigot bellowed:

  ‘I’ll flog the last man down.’

  They knew this was no idle threat. Pigot and Reed watched them as they scrambled back in to the mizentop, and nearby the Master, Southcott, was standing just abaft the wheel and directly beneath the yard. Suddenly three figures became detached from the slender security of the yard and seemed to hang motionless in space for a split second before their screams clawed the air and they plunged downwards, like birds of prey. At the moment they hit the deck Southcott pitched forward with a grunt, struck on the back by a falling body.

  The colour of his skin showed that one of the trio was Peter Bascomb. The second was Francis Staunton, but the name of the third has not been recorded.

  Captain Pigot looked at the three bodies sprawled on the deck only a few feet away. Their grotesque attitudes, like rag dolls thrown on a rubbish heap, showed they were dead.

  ‘Throw the lubbers overboard,’ he ordered.

  The screams of the falling men had frozen everyone on deck and aloft, and when they heard Pigot’s subsequent contemptuous order, which the wind had carried in the silence that followed, the men on the mainyard began to murmur in protest—the episode, wrote Casey, ‘caused a painful sensation when it was observed’. The murmuring made Pigot glance up. When he saw the maintopmen staring down at him instead of wrestling with reefpoints or getting back into the top, he screamed at Jay and Nash, who were near him: ‘Bosun’s mates! Bosun’s mates! Start all those men!’

  Jay and Nash scrambled up to the maintop, side-stepped out on to the yard, and lashed at each man in turn with their knotted ropes. The seamen could not protect themselves: each had to use an arm to cling to the yard, so that the starters smashed down on their heads and shoulders remorselessly, while from below Captain Pigot watched: he had not finished with them yet. In the meantime Mr Southcott was carried below to his cabin.

  When Jay and Nash, their bruising task finished, came down on deck again Pigot ordered that the maintopmen’s names should be taken: the starting had not been a sufficient punishment for those murmurs of protest—which he obviously correctly interpreted as criticism—and he would deal with the men properly in the morning…

  Midshipman Casey’s comment is all the more valuable because he had previously been the midshipman of the maintop and wrote his verdict forty-two years after it happened. The men’s death was ‘a melancholy circumstance… which greatly increased the previous dislike of the Captain, and no doubt hasten’d, if not entirely decided, the mutiny’.

  That it decided the immediate fate of Pigot and nine officers is certain, because it is clear from the evidence of several of the ringleaders that during the night an instinctive change came over many of the ship’s company. Pigot’s brutality in threatening to flog the last man down, which resulted in the death of three young mizentopmen; his lack of compassion when they perished at his feet; and his crude behaviour in ‘starting’ the maintopmen and making it clear he would flog them on the morrow, were things so alien and shocking to the men that their response could only be primitive.

  Exactly what they discussed that night is not known for certain, except for the evidence of one man. But he was to become a leader, and he said, as will be recorded later, that several decided they ‘were going to take the ship’. However, while Pigot and the rest of the officers—with the exception of one on watch—slept soundly in their cabins, the men’s courage failed them. Dawn brought Thursday, September 21: a cloudy day with light and variable winds and a mass flogging of the maintopmen in prospect.

  13

  THE INEVITABLE HOUR

  * * *

  THE BOAST of heraldry (and interest) had secured Hugh Pigot’s promotion to captain, and he had made full use of the pomp of power for his own cruel ends. Inheritance and prize money had given him wealth; but now his inevitable hour was fast approaching, spurred on by the cat-o’-nine-tails and the starter. The reason, seemingly a strange one when set against the floggings and furious threats which put men in terror of their lives, was that discipline no longer existed in the Hermione.

  The fault was entirely Pigot’s. For months he had imposed a harsh, brutal and erratic discipline which finally defeated its own purpose because eventually it inhibited the men’s response to it, as all over-strict discipline is bound to, in the same way that a man trapped in a snowdrift is swiftly numbed by Nature so that he does not feel the cold.

  The Hermiones, basically the same men who had served under Wilkinson, were clearly no worse than those in any other British warship; certainly not as bad as those that Otway found in the Ceres. The offences the Hermiones committed under Wilkinson were, apart from the usual desertions, quite minor; and there is no evidence that they became worse under Pigot, But, because of the type o
f discipline he imposed, and the resentment his behaviour engendered, the pattern changed.

  The conclusion is inescapable: the occasional minor and monotonously similar offences—drunkenness and quarrelling, for example—committed by some of the Hermiones were infinitely less harmful to the King’s service than the brutalizing effect of Pigot’s continually harsh punishment and bullying manner. Terrorized men fumble and forget—the untied reef point in the Casey episode proves that—or they hurry and fall, as in the case of the mizentopmen.

  Therefore in the Hermione discipline had been destroyed by the man charged with enforcing it, while at the same time the men were labouring under the stress of the climate, disease, and the cruise itself, now in its fifth week. Almost continuous sail-handling was a great strain on men already debilitated by the lack of fresh food, and even the slightest attack of scurvy left them breathless after the least exertion. A rain squall meant more than reefing and an entry in the log; it meant soaking clothes and bedding—with what spare gear the men had sodden by water dripping through the seams of the deck planking, which opened up in the heat of the sun and made the lower deck more fetid than usual.

  Under a good captain who cared for his men, the stress of climate, disease and constant hard work was bearable; but with a harsh, thoughtless captain it was not. A hot, sultry day, when the sun and humidity were stifling, was for a contented man simply a quirk of the weather. To an oppressed seaman it was an intolerable burden, sapping his energy and destroying his spirit.

  By drawing on all the relevant contemporary official and private documents which could be traced, it has been possible to study and, where space allowed, relate Hugh Pigot’s activities up to September 20, 1797, the day the mizentopmen fell to their deaths. His actions, often described in his own words from letters and the questions and answers at courts martial and the Jesup inquiry, have already revealed much of his personality. The statistics and incontrovertible evidence of the floggings in the Success point to him using the cat-o’-nine-tails as much to satisfy his sadistic instincts as to administer justice. But it is more important to understand why he flogged so much than to know how many lashes he ordered.

  As he took the last impetuous, headlong steps towards his own destruction, it is possible to make an appraisal of his character, but before doing so it must be emphasized again that Pigot was far from being just a brutal captain: with two others, he was the worst in the Royal Navy’s recorded history.

  Brought up as a child in a family with a tradition of command and authority, Hugh had inherited more than his share of arrogance and autocratic behaviour from his uncle George, who was probably a hero to the young boy. Lord Pigot had been in England from the time Hugh was born until he was six, and much of the time had been spent at Patshull. The comparison between the boy’s mild-mannered father and the forceful, blustering and arrogant uncle must have been very marked.

  By entering the Navy under his father’s wing we have seen that Hugh was at first shielded from the harsher side of a life which had a tradition of undeviating discipline and often equally harsh overtones of bullying and petty despotism. The boy found, when he first boarded the Jupiter, that seamen old enough to be his father had to touch their hats to him; at a very impressionable age he realized there were virtually no limits to his behaviour; that he personally was someone set apart from the rest. He discovered there were very few limits to the exercise of power by anyone in authority. He could, by a wave of his hand, bring a grey-haired seaman running. The lowly boatswain’s mates, under a slack or harsh captain, could bruise seamen with their starters without reason or reprimand. In turn, lieutenants could haze and harry the boatswain’s mates, while the captain could bully them all. Obviously not many captains were bullies; indeed, the percentage was small. But the Articles of War and the customs of the service gave each of them the opportunity: like a sword in its scabbard, the weapon was always there when required.

  So, for all his formative years, Hugh Pigot was in a privileged position, watching (but not understanding or learning) how men wielded power, often without restraint, or with only the restraint an individual placed on himself. Soon—all too soon—he was himself wielding power; power lawfully placed in his hands by the Articles of War and backed by the whole strength and majesty of the State: power which increased in scope with every promotion.

  Only thirteen years after first going to sea at the age of twelve, Pigot was commanding a frigate with the power of life and death over a nominal ship’s company of 215 men. He had more crude, naked power over any one of his seamen than the King over his whole nation: the King could not order any man to be given even one lash, let alone a dozen; he could only reprieve, not condemn. Every commanding officer was an offending seaman’s prosecutor, defender, judge and jury and, thanks to the all-embracing thirty-sixth Article of War, the so-called ‘Captain’s Cloak’, lawmaker as well.

  Anyone given such power needed to exercise considerable judgment, humanity and restraint; justice indeed had to be tempered with mercy. Since he was dealing with men for the most part simple, uneducated and superstitious, he should have more than a touch of father and confessor in him.

  Most of the captains in the Navy fulfilled this role; but in Hugh Pigot the King had a bad bargain. Due certainly to his early environment at sea, and to his own basic personality, the youth and later the man had come to believe that he need never brook even the slightest hint of denial, contradiction or suggestion from a subordinate; that there were no limits to the methods he used.

  While he was serving under Sir Hyde Parker he was quite correct in this assumption: almost all the official documents concerning Pigot’s service still survive, and apart from the Jesup case there is not even a hint that he had ever been criticized, advised or warned that his methods were cruel, unnecessary or dangerous. Since most of the time he commanded a frigate he came under Sir Hyde, that worthy must bear some responsibility: under him, Pigot had in fact been able to bully his crew and even flog two men to death without comment. In fact Sir Hyde approved of Pigot’s harsh methods—a letter proving this will be quoted later. For Sir Hyde, a United Irishman sworn to bloody revolution lurked behind every grumbling sailor who spoke with a brogue; if the man had an English accent then he was a member of the London Corresponding Society and therefore just as dangerous.

  So far we have been concerned only with the way Pigot treated his own crew. But when, behaving more like an irresponsible drunkard than the captain of one of His Majesty’s ships of war, he actually ordered the American master of a United States’ ship to be flogged with a rope’s end, what was the result? Did his Commander-in-Chief at once demand an explanation, institute an inquiry, express any surprise or criticism? No—Sir Hyde did not bother to mention it in the daily journal that he was by law required to keep, nor in his dispatches. And when brought to account for his actions—on the direct orders of the Secretary of State—Pigot was once again in a privileged position: on Sir Hyde’s orders only Pigot’s witnesses were called.

  Even by the custom of the service Pigot should have faced a court martial or a court of inquiry over the Ceres going aground; but he avoided it. The court’s verdict in the trial of Lt Harris, and the report of the Jesup inquiry, are the nearest things to criticism that Pigot was forced to endure.

  Criticism: that word held at least one key to Pigot’s personality, because criticism (however oblique, and whether actual, implied, or as in the Casey episode, completely unintentional) was anathema to him. Much of Pigot’s behaviour appears to have been caused by the fact that within him, to be thrust away and denied whenever it tried to come to the surface, was a half-conscious recognition of his own inadequacy and inexperience; as if he realized, deep down, that in truth he was no leader; that the men did not respond to him spontaneously, obediently and loyally as they did to captains he knew were natural leaders.

  His misgivings were probably justified: the influence which obtained him command of a sloop at the age of twenty-two had fail
ed to give him confidence and ability. Nor did he have time to gain either before getting command of a 32-gun frigate a few weeks later.

  To compensate for his own misgivings he seemed determined that his ship must appear the smartest in the Fleet: thus every manoeuvre had to be carried out as if the Admiral was watching, although he did not realize that flashy methods used while getting under way at the Mole might not be the best when a dangerous squall hit the ship in the open sea. Speed and blind, unquestioning obedience: these qualities he demanded from his officers and men, because they compensated for the inadequacies of his leadership. Making the common error of confusing speed with efficiency, and terrorized obedience with loyalty, he produced a ship which was not an effective fighting machine, though neither he nor Sir Hyde were intelligent enough to realize it. Real leaders produced seamen who were efficient, and speed was an automatic by-product; who were loyal because they were properly led, and were blindly obedient because of absolute trust in their leaders.

  Yet since he was surrounded by brother captains who were both experienced and natural leaders, Pigot’s own pride probably instilled in him a fear that he might appear weak or vacillating, undignified or undecided—shortcomings which he knew were unheard of in real leaders.

  This fear almost certainly added to the rigidity of his mind: once he had decided on a course of action he could not change it: he pursued it to the bitter end, regardless of whether it was right or wrong. Making ill-judged and impulsive decisions and sticking to them rigidly, without a moment’s thought of their effect on the future, meant he lived in the eternal ‘now’; he acted his part for today without realizing that there must inevitably be a tomorrow, a time of judgment, and of reckoning. So far in his career there had been no tomorrow; no judgment of any cruel, stupid or ill-considered action.