by Max Adams
His first biographer, and son-in-law, G. L. Newnham-Collingwood, told an old family story of Collingwood’s first days after he joined Shannon. One of the lieutenants found him crying from homesickness. Although lieutenants were duty-bound to toughen up their recruits, this man comforted Collingwood, and in return was taken to his sea chest and given a large piece of plum cake.20 It is possible that this lieutenant was William Smith, who until 1758 had been gunner in the Alcide before being promoted into Shannon.21 This was an unusual though not a unique move.
A lieutenancy was the first promotional step between midshipman and admiral, the long ladder of an officer’s career. A lieutenant’s commission could only be awarded as a result of the man passing a stiff examination in seamanship and navigation before the Admiralty Board and on him having served six years at sea, two of them in the navy as midshipman or master’s mate. Even then, especially in peacetime, such was the competition for places that many aspiring officers, having passed their exams, remained midshipmen or master’s mates for their entire careers. If they were lucky, in the time-honoured and well-understood tradition of the navy, midshipmen became lieutenants, then commanders, then post-captains and finally, if they lived long enough, admirals.
Each step up the ladder called for a number of attributes. One was ability: not just seamanship, but man-management skills which, in a man-of-war where death was a constant prospect, were vital. If men were not prepared to follow an officer’s orders because he was stupid or incompetent or tyrannical, they could make his life very difficult indeed. Another was ‘interest’, or patronage. It was hard to advance solely by merit. Some sort of influence was essential in so competitive a career. The influence might be familial or political or both, or it might radiate from one’s own commanding officer. A third requirement was combat. A spectacular wound acquired in action, leading a boarding party, or being given command of a captured enemy ship were persuasive badges of merit. This may well be how William Smith advanced from being gunner – a warrant officer with no commission – to lieutenant, though his promotion would have required him to pass the examination and have his promotion officially endorsed by the Admiralty. Petty officers and warrant officers could be disrated; commissioned lieutenants could not, except by court-martial.
After his lieutenancy, an officer would hope to be made master and commander, probably in charge of a sloop. He was then called captain by courtesy, but did not appear on the holy list of post-captains. Once an officer became a post-captain, his position was almost inviolate. From playing at snakes and ladders, he was now on a conveyor belt which led to the hoisting of an admiral’s flag, and which only death or disgrace could rob him of.
A year before Collingwood joined Shannon in 1761 George III had acceded to the throne, and two years later, in 1763, peace was signed with France. With no prospect of war ahead, and with no influence other than that of a frigate captain, Collingwood’s chances of promotion were slim: he would spend fourteen years learning the ropes. He did so in six different ships. Only a few months after joining Shannon, during which time he saw service, but no action, in Atlantic and Home waters, escorting convoys to the Baltic, he joined another ship. Braithwaite transferred into Gibraltar, an even smaller frigate of 24 guns, and took Collingwood with him as one of his followers. Gibraltar must have been known to Collingwood by reputation, because in 1759, during the Year of Victories, she had been the ship which first sighted the enemy squadrons before both Lagos and Quiberon Bay. It gave her a certain cachet.
In Gibraltar Collingwood saw service again in Home and Atlantic waters, and also made his first voyage to the Mediterranean. Britain had bases at Gibraltar and Menorca, returned under the terms of the Treaty of Paris which had ended the Seven Years’ War and confirmed France’s withdrawal from Canada, Nova Scotia, Dominica, Grenada and Tobago.
We know very little of Collingwood’s early experiences; his first letter home dates from 1776. It is not even known what leave, if any, he had during that time, or whether he saw his family at all. In all probability he did not, but one experience from this time was recorded. Many years later, when Collingwood was a senior captain, once again serving in the Mediterranean, he was stationed in Corsica. In a letter home he reflected that the last time he had visited that island, serving on board Gibraltar, it had left a lasting impression on him:
A more miserable prospect than that island presents is scarce to be conceived of, the most savage country, barren brown mountains, rearing their rugged, wrinkled, heads to the skies: the valleys produce a little corn, bad wine and olives, but the barbarians who inhabit there have not industry to cultivate any of them. Their manners are savage, their ignorance is gross, but the part of their character of most consequence to us is the inveterate hatred they on all occasions express to the English. Every man of them travels in the country with a rifle, a gun and a dagger, with which he kills with admirable dexterity such game or Englishmen as he may chance to meet in his way – the ships of war have lost several men stabbed by those fellows – and do it with the same composure that an old butcher kills a pig. The Gibraltar had four seamen stabbed the last time they were there, three of them died.22
By 1766, still in Gibraltar, Collingwood had been rated as a midshipman, in his eighteenth year. This reflects the lack of opportunity open to a sailor in peace time rather than a lack of talent. His skills as a seaman were already maturing. There was nothing simple about sailing a square-rigged ship, even one as comparatively small as a jackass frigate. To begin with, knowing a ship’s position and how to calculate its course was a hybrid art somewhere between the rarefied mathematics of spherical trigonometry and the finely honed intuition that allowed dead-reckoning to be estimated from a log towed behind the ship every hour, a rough calculation of wind speed and direction, and a guess at leeway, currents and tides. At that very time the voyages of James Cook to the Pacific were just beginning to show that chronometers could give an accurate idea of longitude, but even so reading the positions of sun and moon relied on clear skies. Even the sextant was a relatively recent invention.
All square-rigged vessels, and especially men-of-war, were a compromise design. Frigates, especially, had to be fast and point as close to the wind as possible, though no square-rigged ship could sail closer than sixty-seven degrees to the direction of the wind – regardless of leeway, the tendency for the ship to drift sideways. But to hold enough stores for a long commission a frigate had to be broad in the beam, and to access the smallest harbours she needed a shallow draught. Neither of these factors enhanced her sailing qualities. Nor did the fact that in order to be an effective ship of war she had to function as a mobile battery, mounting as many guns as her frame would take, with as low a centre of gravity as possible.
All competent sailors had a deep knowledge of these factors and how they affected each ship. And each ship, with its particular arrangement of masts, sails and rigging, responded differently. Square-rigged ships generally sailed best with the wind on their quarter, coming from aft of midships, but not directly astern. With the wind coming from forward of midships the square rig was a disadvantage: fore-and-aft-rigged ships, like modern racing yachts, are at their best with the wind forward, because their sails act like aerofoils pulling them through the water, and the best fore-and-aft-rigged ships can sail very close to the wind indeed. With a square rig it was necessary to make the sails as stiff as possible to mimic this effect. The leading or weather edge of the sail was pulled as tight as possible with bowlines, while the lee edge of the sail was pulled tight with tacks. The yards from which the sails hung were braced round as close as possible to a fore-and-aft position, and under those conditions the ship could point upwind, tacking or wearing as necessary to gain sea mileage.
The thirty or so miles of rope and cordage that a frigate employed in sailing had two main functions. The standing rigging supported and braced the masts from the front, back and sides. The running rigging was used to manage the sails. Each of the three masts had a
possible ten or so sails: on the main mast, for example, the lowest sail was called the main course or main sail. Above that was the main topsail, above that the main topgallant, then the main royal. Extra sails called studding sails might be bent to booms which could be extended on either side of the yards. The foremast was smaller but with a similar arrangement. The mizzen mast bore a fore-and-aft sail – the mizzen – and above that a topsail and topgallant sail. Forward of the foremast, jibs (hung from stays between the foremast and the bowsprit) were rigged fore and aft, and below the bowsprit extra canvas, the ‘spritsails’, could be rigged.
Every combination of these sails, their effects under every type of condition and their relative merits, had to be familiar to any experienced sailor – most able-seamen would be able to sail a frigate with perfect confidence. Collingwood was no exception, and as a midshipman part of his training was learning to manage the two hundred men on the ship as they executed all her possible manoeuvres, each of which required more or less perfect co-ordination to accomplish successfully. Failure to carry out a manoeuvre competently could result in shipwreck or – possibly worse – humiliation. The next, the supreme level of naval competence and skill, Collingwood did not acquire until he was forty-five years of age: the unimaginable, to a modern mind, difficulty of sailing a ship and fighting her at the same time in battle.
The year after he was rated midshipman Collingwood transferred into Liverpool, another 28-gun frigate, and by 1770 had been made master’s mate, a senior rating for a prospective officer looking towards his lieutenancy. A master’s mate was a midshipman with special responsibilities for navigation, assisting the sailing master (the senior warrant officer) with bearings, charts and laying courses. But in addition to these duties he would have responsibilities for a division of the ship’s company and would take watches. Fortunately a copy of Collingwood’s own log during his time in Liverpool remains in the possession of his family. It is the first of his writings that survives. As a narrative it lacks pace, to be sure, but its language, drily understated, and its bare recording of hurricanes and floggings, endless tacking and wearing, taking on stores and mending rigging, preserves an image of eighteenth century naval life that has great vitality.
The first entry is dated Saturday 8 December 1770. Liverpool had passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and was heading north-east towards the Balearic Islands. At sea, each day was given a full page of the log, organised into two twelve- hour sections and beginning, in accordance with naval tradition, at noon. Against each hour is a record of the ship’s speed, her course, the wind direction, and any remarks. It is laid out with a draughtsman’s precision, for Collingwood had an artist’s eye as well as a scientific mind. Thus:
Saturday 8th December 1770
1 [o’clock] 3 [knots] 4 [fathoms] [course] NE [wind] ENE Fresh gales and cloudy weather.
Later that day:
Fresh gales and mizzling rain, handed the mizen top sail, and wore ship.
When in port, Collingwood wrote entries in a more diaristic style, recording the mostly administrative events of the ship’s life. On 10 December Liverpool arrived at Port Mahon, in Menorca. It was probably Collingwood’s first visit there. He may have been to Menorca in Gibraltar, but on this voyage he recorded pilotage information such as bearings to prominent landmarks, and drew an elegant map of the harbour, with the names of various islands and watering places marked with depth soundings. These suggest it was a new experience for him. On 11 December he recorded that they opened a cask of beef which contained 190 pieces (two short). They hove up the first bower anchor and let go the second bower in its place. The ship’s company were employed in watering (filling barrels of fresh water from the nearest springs) and mending the topgallant sails after a recent gale. On the 13th they weighed anchor and set sail for Algier Bay, where they bought bullocks and Collingwood had time to make a careful map of that harbour with soundings.
And so the entries run, day after day. On Christmas Day Cape de Gatte was sighted WNW ten leagues off, and the slings of the cross-jack yard broke and had to be mended. New Year was spent in Gibraltar Bay attending to the rigging and taking in stores and water. Three weeks later they were back in Port Mahon, firing a 28-gun salute for the Queen’s birthday. On this visit they careened the ship. This was a major exercise, and Mahon one of the few harbours where it could be carried out. It involved removing everything from the ship: rigging, stores, iron and shingle ballast, guns, top masts, hen coops, the lot. This took twelve days, during which time Alexander Dunn and his mate George (Collingwood does not record their rank, but they were either ordinary or able seamen) absented themselves from duty and were given eighteen and twelve lashes apiece. Careening started on the 31st. To accomplish this, the ship, with only her lower masts left standing, was heeled over by means of cables wound on to capstans mounted on shore, to expose half her bottom. The hull was scraped clean of weed and barnacles, checked for rot, and her copper (if she was coppered) repaired where necessary. Then she was hove upright again, turned round, and the other side would be cleaned. By 5 March she was rerigged, refitted, and with stores taken on ready to sail again.
Britain was not at war, so there are many entries in which foreign ships are encountered and ‘spoke to.’ Collingwood’s remarks are generally confined to the weather, to punishments, and the mostly humdrum business of everyday life aboard a frigate. At Leghorn (Livorno) he was amused to see a Tuscan man-of-war fire a salute of thirteen guns to a chapel of St Mary as she left port: a ‘remarkable instance of blind superstition by which they implore the protection of the Virgin’, he wrote in the log.
By now, at the age of twenty-two, Collingwood was a highly experienced seaman. His remarks are intelligent and he takes a keen interest in all aspects of navigation as well as sailing. There are silhouettes of every significant cape or port entrance, and after one entry there is a remarkable drawing of a ‘machine’ which he had thought up. It seems to be a jury-rigged rudder, to be constructed if the ship lost steerage. It involves an intricate arrangement of ropes, spars and planks, and comes with a detailed description of its practical applications. This was precisely the sort of resourceful, thinking seaman that the navy hoped to bring on.
In March there was a semblance of excitement when Liverpool entered Villa Franca (now Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice), firing an eleven-gun salute, and one of her men noticed that a Swedish snow (a large unarmed two-masted trading ship) had acquired the barge of an English man-of-war. It had apparently, but suspiciously, been found floating in the Gulf of Lyons. A request for its return was refused, so Braithwaite sent an armed party to retrieve it. This was British naval diplomacy in action: straightforward, effective, and allowing of no compromise.
The lack of real action must have been frustrating. Apart from there being no opportunity for prize money or promotion, this sort of commission involved tedious cruising between the ports of the western Mediterranean with little excitement. Things were enlivened in August 1771 when Liverpool visited Lisbon, only to have a gun from Belum Castle on the River Tagus fire two shots at her, one of which passed between the mizzen and main masts: ‘an insult which the British flag never before received without satisfaction. Some months later, at Cadiz, they were refused fresh water and stores: ‘an absolute infraction of the treaty which at present subsists between His Majesty and the Spanish court’. How much this precocious pomposity was Collingwood’s own, and how much was part of the culture of the service is hard to say. It was a trait he carried to his death. The last frisson of this commission was felt when Liverpool ran aground in a very severe gale upon Diamond Rock, just outside Cadiz. They managed to ‘throw all aback’ and get her off. Without a war, this was about as much excitement as a sailor could expect.
2
Out of all patience
1772–1777
If Mediterranean cruising had its dull sides, it must have seemed like heaven compared to Collingwood’s next posting. In 1772, under Captain Roddam (another North
umbrian and friend of the family) Cuthbert went aboard Lennox, the Portsmouth guard ship. Lennox was a 74-gun two-decker whose crew had distinguished themselves by capturing the Spanish Princessa in 1739. In peace time the guard ship was something of a plum posting. Duties included working on other ships in harbour, and plying boats from one to another. Benefits included all the delights of port, regular pay, and not having to keep watches, which at sea prevented seamen and officers of the watch from ever having more than four hours’ sleep. On top of these advantages, Collingwood had his brother Wilfred with him. But to a pair of zealous young would-be officers, desperate for active service and the chance of promotion, the guard ship must have seemed a dead end.
In February 1773 Collingwood was sent to Sheerness with a party of eighteen seamen from Lennox to join Portland, a 50-gun two-decker in the process of being fitted out for a voyage to the West Indies. In the next three weeks he was joined by carpenters, painters, gunners and boatswains as the intricate operation of rigging and arming the ship went on. By the beginning of March Portland had anchored off the Downs in East Kent. Sheltered from the worst of the North Sea gales by the Goodwin Sands, this anchorage provided a rendezvous for hundreds of merchantmen and men-of-war joining convoys for America, the Baltic and the Indies (East and West).
This was Collingwood’s first voyage to the Americas; he would not return to the Mediterranean until 1795, more than twenty years later. His log makes it clear that the first part of the passage was swift: three days from the Downs to the Lizard, where he noted passing the Eddystone Lighthouse (rebuilt by John Smeaton in 1759, the Year of Victories). On 13 March, far out in the Atlantic, the captain ordered the ship’s company to clear for action so they could conduct a great gun exercise, followed by small arms practice. This is the only entry recording such an exercise in either the Liverpool or Portland logs. It was not in peace-time conditions that Collingwood developed that passion for gunnery which later earned him the record for broadside firing, and which won the battle of Trafalgar.
