Men of Honour

by Adam Nicolson

  If it had been an officer or a gentleman to whom this had happened, it is inconceivable that the ship’s company would have treated it as ‘one of those things’. Later, at sea, Mangin was even more forcibly struck by the emotional and conceptual gap between quarter—and lower decks. A seaman on board the Gloucester had been fishing for mackerel when somehow he had fallen overboard. A boat was launched after him as he struggled in the water far behind. Just as his rescuers arrived, he sank, his waterlogged coat dragging him down. He was within seconds of death and only saved by the quick-wittedness of one of the boat crew grabbing a boat hook and hooking it under his clothes. He was brought back on board, restored by the doctors and, to Mangin’s amazement, the next day was on duty as usual.

  This is May 1812 and the man—significantly nameless in the story; Mangin only names officers—had been through one of the central liminal experiences by which the cultivated classes of Europe were then entranced. He had seen death; he had been within death’s grasp; he had lived through a moment of revelatory, Gothic intensity and yet he shrugs it off like a dog that has been for a plunge in a river. Mangin is puzzled. The incident

  admits of a question whether bravery in men of the lower classes of society should not rather be termed insensibility: or is it that they have the sensibility of the enlightened, but want expression? The man above mentioned owed his safety to his resolution;…yet, it was perfectly impossible to discover that he was in the smallest degree perplexed by the prospect of death, or exhilarated by his preservation.

  For the governing classes, the men they subjected to such brutal discipline, to whom strong alcohol and women shipped over in bumboats when in port was a regrettable and in part hideous necessity, seem to have been of a different kind, for whom the ‘sensibility of the enlightened’ was as alien as loyalty to King George would be to a Frenchman. This sense of a conceptual class division was not confined to the navy. It was generally accepted that men who could not be considered gentlemen were, at least in a political and social sense, of a different kind to those whose concern was order, government, rationality and business. Even John Wilkes, making his radical case, carefully delineates the boundaries of the political:

  The people (I do not mean the illiterate rabble, who have neither capacity for judging of matters of government, nor property to be concerned for) are the fountain of authority. What they order is right, what they prohibit is wrong. Because the public business is their business.

  The illiterate rabble were not to have a vote because they could not understand what they were voting on or for. Enlightened captains and flag officers attended with detailed and constant care to the wellbeing of their men, both physical and mental, and the crew of a man-of-war were often referred to simply as ‘the people’ or by the captain as ‘my people’ but this term represented concern for the effective and profitable working of a complex organisation, much as a farmer would be interested in the health of his livestock. In some critical sense, these people were not considered people in the same way that the people who walked the quarterdeck were people. Love and honour operated down to a certain social level; below that it was a question of discipline and obedience, lubricated with drink and occasionally interrupted by sex and war.

  When, in ‘the complex and wonderful machine of which I was an inhabitant’ Mangin found that, for some obscure reason, a gentleman was living on the lower deck, it was as if the natural order had been turned upside down. He discovered one seaman on board the Gloucester, called Hickey, who

  spoke French fluently, had the manners and address of a gentleman, fenced well, drew with taste, was a good mathematician and arithmetician, wrote a beautiful hand, conversed with a very happy choice of expression, quoted various authors, poets, philosophers and orators; criticised with judgment and novelty of feeling, statuary, architecture and painting—and played the violin finely: he besides impressed every one with respect, by his air of genteel and humble melancholy.

  The officers of the Gloucester had a total of 500 books on board, which was all very well. But to find a Hickey slinging his hammock between the 32-pounders on the gundecks with between five and six hundred other men, where ‘the ports being necessarily closed from evening to morning, the heat, in this cavern of only 6 feet high, and so entirely filled with human bodies, was overpowering’, that was simply disturbing.

  Of course, this gulf between the classes on board was at least in part, as Mangin guessed, a question of language. They ‘wanted expression’. Within a few decades, the English gentleman would become identified with a hopeless stiffness and lack of emotional vocabulary. The working man, for figures like Marx, Ruskin and Morris, became the source of a kind of emotional authenticity which the gentleman lacked. In 1805, the position was precisely reversed. Nothing was more fluent than the affective language of the 1805 officer. It was the seamen who struggled to express their love and affection. When Tom Flynn, coxswain of the Gloucester’s first cutter, died on 29 July 1812, he had been lying for days in his cot in the ship’s hospital, ‘mad, pale as ashes, and convulsed with dying spasms. Four or five of his messmates stood about him, holding lanthorns to his face, dropping silent tears on him, or in the most heart-rending accents calling him “Poor Tom” and “honest messmate”!’

  When men from the lower deck needed to express feelings of a more sustained or elaborate kind, they reached with great difficulty, often in ways that remain profoundly moving two centuries later, for the language of gentility. A letter survives in the archives of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, addressed to ‘Mr George Hancock. Worksop. Nottinghamshire’. It was written on board Victory, by John Vincent, a 30-year-old Londoner, who was a quarter gunner on the flagship, He was writing to the father of a friend of his who had died in an accident during the long blockade off Toulon. It is worth quoting in full, as evidence from the other side, of precisely the gap between officers and men which Edward Mangin had seen. In every line one can make out the careful, sombre attempt to address the grief and concern which friend and father shared.

  H.M.S. Victory

  July 24 1805

  Mr Hancock

  I have recd the Letter directed to your son, dated Janry 1st [1805] and as a Messmate of your son’s, think myself in duty bound to inform you of your son’s unhappy and sudden Death, tho’ at present being unknown to you, as a Parent, I feel a Parent’s tenderness and affection, it certainly is a tender point to disclose, and will cause a tender and mutual sensation to commiserate his unhappy and untimely end, to you his Parents, his Brothers, Sisters, and acquaintances. On or about the 24th of November last, as we were cruising off Toulon, and at the time little or no Wind, the Day of the Month and time were taken down by me, but by some accident have lost the Memorandum, but hopeing this will reach you safe as a means of Giving you Satisfaction, I specify the time and place, as near as possible my recollection will allow me, tho’ fully convinced this unhappy News will cause a grief not easy to be describ’d but by those persons, who experience so close and tender a tie in Nature, as the Agitation of Mind descri’d from a parent to a Child. I hope you will not say I express myself in too fully, tho’ it is, a Candid and sincere manner, for I am a father, and possess’d of a Parent’s feeling and concern. About half after ten at Night the time before mention’d, having left him about ten minutes or a Quarter of an Hour, walking on the Larboard Gangway of the ship, but as I was Informed by Persons who were near him, that he being a young Man of a sprightly disposition, was moving himself about in different attitudes, unfortunately press’d the end of one of the rails, which are ship’d upon the Gangway, on purpose to hold the Ship’s company’s hammocks upright, I believe rather too hard, which upset with him, and not being able to save himself, he unfortunately fell overboard and was Drown’d, tho’ every Effort possible was made use of for to save him, but at the time of his falling overboard, he had a great Coat on, which I believe must have been a great annoyance to him, I am very sorry, Sir, that I am the channel of such un
welcome Intelligence, tho’ think myself in duty bound to Inform you, and if not too great an intrusion, should wish to be Informed of your receiving this Letter, which will be a great satisfaction to your Ever Obdt Servant

  JOHN VINCENT

  A winter night in the Mediterranean; the sailors wrapped up in their heavy greatcoats; some of them larking about on the gangways that crossed the waist of the ship from the quarterdeck to the forecastle, perhaps drunk, although Vincent couldn’t mention that; and then the sprightly boy going a step too far and disappearing into the dark. It happened in the course of the war tens of thousands of times. It has very roughly been reckoned that an average of about 5,000 men in the Royal Navy died every year: about 400 in enemy action or of their wounds; another 500 in shipwreck: about 2,600 from disease and almost 1,700 from accidents on board. In a war that lasted 22 years, that gives a figure of about 37,000 men who died from accidents on board. Ships were intensely dangerous places but only rarely can there have been a letter such as Vincent’s. More often the news would have come in a far colder fashion. This is a letter which the young Henry Bayntun wrote to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty from Jamaica in August 1800:

  Gentlemen,

  I beg leave to inform you of the Death of the persons named in the Margin late belonging to His Majesty’s Ship under my command who had allotted part of their wages for the maintenance of their families and I have to request you will stop the payment of the same in consequence.

  George Cuttler

  Lott. Boyce

  That’s all: the money from the distant son or father stops coming one day. It is a commercial arrangement: the man is dead and so the navy no longer pays for his services. The stopping of the pay may well have been the only way in which the family of the dead man heard the news. Like hundreds of thousands of others, they will go on the poor relief and all they are left with is the knowledge that the body of their man has been dropped into the ocean, sewn into a hammock, shotted at each end with a 32lb ball.

  On either side of the class division, a form of love operated. The British fleet was thick with it. Officers loved officers and men loved men. That closeness did not cross the divide between quarterdeck and lower deck. But without doubt, on the best ships, there was a sense of oneness in a ship’s company, a treasuring by the men of a commander they admired; and a nurturing by the commander of the men he relied on. Captains might transfer from one ship to another and take their entire ship’s company with them. Elderly midshipmen might look after young gentlemen volunteers, much as family retainers might have attended to them at home.

  Certainly, this morning, there is an outpouring of love to those at home. On board HMS Mars, Captain George Duff was already a hero. He had run away to sea when he was nine, had been in 13 engagements before he was 16, and had been placed, on Collingwood’s recommendation, in command of the all-important inshore squadron watching the Combined Fleet in Cadiz. It was intended that the Mars would lead Collingwood’s lee column into battle. There was a heroic look to him: ‘a man of fine stature, strong and well made, above six feet in height, and had a manly, open, benevolent countenance,’ famous in the fleet as ‘an instructor, and father, to the numerous young men who were under his command.’ He had his eldest son, 13-year-old Norwich, with him on board the Mars as a volunteer and this morning he wrote to his wife, whom he had married fifteen years before, a desperately rushed, ink-blotched letter which was found among his papers when the battle was over.

  Monday Morning 21st Oct.1805

  My Dearest Sophia I have just time to tell you we are just going into action with the Combined, I hope and trust in God that we shall all behave as becomes us, and that I may yet have the happiness of taking my beloved wife and children in my arms. Norwich is quite well and happy I have however ordered him of the Qr Deck Yours ever and most truly Geo: Duff

  The quarterdeck was the most dangerous part of the ship in battle, where officers stood desperately conspicuous and with the protection only of the men’s hammocks brought up from below and stowed in netting along the gunwale. The quarterdeck was the killing zone. Any father would send his son below hidden behind the thick oak bulwarks of the Mars.

  And more famously Nelson was writing to Emma Hamilton with the emotionality and immediacy that marked all his letters to her, his love pouring without thought on to the page:

  Victory Octr: 19th: 1805

  Noon Cadiz ES.E 16 Leagues

  My Dearest beloved Emma the dear friend of my bosom the Signal has been made that the Enemys Combined fleet are coming out of Port. We have very little Wind so that I have no hopes of seeing them before tomorrow May the God of Battles crown my endeavours with success at all events I will take care that my name shall ever be most dear to you and Horatia both of whom I love as much as my own life, and as my last writing before the battle will be to you so I hope in God that I shall live to finish my letter after the Battle May Heaven bless you prays your Nelson + Bronte

  Nelson is not an aberrational figure. For him, as for his officers, love, longing, battle, glory, sacrifice, honour, risk, excitement and the terrifying beauty of the moment are all bound up in his words. Love and battle are two parts of the same thing. They seem, in Nelson’s heightened language, to be almost interchangeable. Love, in a sense, is what battle is for and the battle is where love becomes most clear. He envisages Emma and Horatia forever cherishing not himself but his ‘name’. Henry Blackwood also writes to his wife this morning about his ‘name’. Death hangs in the background; the foreground is filled with love and glory.

  Love in the 18th century had been seen, essentially, as a social virtue, part of the politeness which distinguished the 18th century from the rough violence and extreme views of the century before. ‘Politeness’ for the enlightened Englishman did not carry its wooden, post-Romantic and post-revolutionary sense of constraint, inhibition and hypocrisy. The polite was the easy, the open, the courteous, the civilised and the loving. Well dressed and well behaved amicability allowed people of every degree and every condition to mix. The country had lost its martial front. The wearing of swords to public gatherings became unfashionable; towns had their medieval walls demolished and substituted with parks and avenues. This belief in courtesy and the efficacy of charm—at least within the gentlemanly class—was inherited by the best of the Nelsonian officers. It was a belief which despised the old naval tyrants, ‘the oppressive and tyrannical characters in the Navy,’ as Captain Anselm John Griffiths described them in his Observation on some Points of Seamanship, published in 1809. Griffiths went on:

  The man who endeavours to carry all before him by mere dint of his authority and power would appear to me to know little indeed of human nature. Surely there can be no comparison between those who obey from fear and those who do it from inclination, or those who feel that necessary restraint alone is correctly laid on them.

  The Royal Navy was, in part, a love structure, for two reasons. Love was one of the marks of a gentleman. ‘Amiability’ was one of the characteristics which distinguished an enlightened man. Even old Mr Austen advised his son Francis to treat the men of the lower decks with ‘a certain kind of love’ not because they deserved it but because that was what was expected of him. Love was one of the values for which Trafalgar was fought.

  More than that, though, love worked as a tool of battle. It was the twin of courage. At the time of Trafalgar, Coleridge, attempting to remake his life after chronic catastrophes over love and drugs in England, had gone to Malta, where he was working as the secretary of the Governor, Sir Alexander Ball. Ball had been one of Nelson’s band of brothers at the Nile. Now he was administering Malta like a philosopher-king. Coleridge, from his own position of half-broken, self-doubting despair, looked up to Ball as pure hero. From another naval officer in Malta, younger than Ball and just as much a hero-worshipper as Coleridge had become, Coleridge heard a story which seemed to encapsulate everything that mattered most about love and courage. Ball had been the lieutenant in c
ommand of a cutting-out expedition in the West Indies, in which a small British force, in open boats, attacked an enemy frigate. The young man who spoke to Coleridge had then been a very junior midshipman, a boy:

  As we were rowing up to the vessel which we were to attack, amid a discharge of musketry, I was overpowered by fear, my knees trembled under me, and I seemed on the point of fainting away. Lieutenant Ball, who saw the condition I was in, placed himself close beside me, and still keeping his countenance directed towards the enemy, took hold of my hand, and pressing it in the most friendly manner, said in a low voice, ‘Courage my dear Boy! don’t be afraid of yourself! You will recover in a minute or so—I was just the same when I first went out in this way.’ Sir, added the officer to me, it was as if an Angel had put a new Soul into me. With the feeling that I was not yet dishonoured, the whole burthen of agony was removed; and from that moment I was as fearless and forward as the oldest of the boat crew, and on our return the Lieutenant spoke highly of me to our Captain.

  That moment is the culmination of a culture. Nelson, famously, use to run up the ratlines alongside the junior midshipmen going aloft for the first time, encouraging them upwards, by the example of his ease and grace in the predicament they feared. But Alexander Ball adds even greater dignity to the act. He looks at the enemy not at the midshipman—a gesture which itself preserves the young boy’s honour. He holds and presses the midshipman’s hand, like a father and a friend. He understands, as a man educated in the knowledge of his own and others’ feelings, that it is not the enemy the boy fears, but himself. ‘Don’t be afraid of yourself! You will recover in a minute or so—I was just the same when I first went out in this way.’ This is the community of honour vivified by an act of loving care. It is one of the foundations of the British victory at Trafalgar: glory as an outgrowth of love.