The Nutmeg of Consolation

by Patrick O'Brian

  In parallel with the widening gulf between officers and men came a growing snobbery among the officers. (Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy 1793-1815; See also: N. A. M. Rodger, 'Officers, Gentlemen and their Education, 1793-1860', in Les Empires en Guerre et Paix, 1793-1860) In 1794 the Admiralty signalled its distaste for levelling principles by replacing the old ratings indiscriminately, with three classes of boy, distinguished on a class basis. (Lewis, Social History of the Navy) The coming of peace in 1815 allowed the process to be taken further, with a widespread sifting of the commissioned officers ironically known as 'passing for a gentleman'. (David Hannay, Naval Courts Martial); N. A. M. Rodger, 'Officers, Gentlemen and their Education') In all this the Service simply reflected the changing climate of opinion in British society ashore, and the ratings generally shared their officers' values. Many of their complaints were directed at low-born officers, (For example: The Adventures of John Wetherell, ed. by C. S. Forester) and it is striking to hear the words of the mutineers in one ship at the Nor in 1797, sending two of their officers ashore:

  The first Lieutenant, they said, was a blackguard and no gentleman, and by no means fit for being an officer. That the Master was like him; both of them a disgrace to His Majesty's Service.' (Peter Cullan's Journal, ed. by H. G. Thursfield, in five Naval Journals, 1789-1817, Navy Records Society)

  The most zealous defender of the privileges of birth could hardly have put it better, and the officer who tells this anecdote remarks that 'we all had proofs enough of the correctness of their observations'.

  With growing class-consciousness and mutual suspicion between quarterdeck and lower deck went a steady rise in the severity of punishments both formal and informal, and a growing tendency to indiscriminate brutality. Although we have little systematic research, it is certain that court martial sentences increased as the century went on, and probable that the same was true of flogging at captains discretion.' (Hannay, Naval Courts Martial, Peter Kemp, The British Sailor: A Social History of the Lower Deck) In principle no captain might award more than twelve lashes without a court martial, but in practice two or three dozen was common, and as many as 63 or 72 are recorded. (Neale, The Cutlass and the Lash) This in itself was not usually a grievance, for the cat remained, as it had always been, the good man's defence against his idle, troublesome or thieving shipmate; it was the growth of casual and indiscriminate brutality which aroused so much resentment. As one ship's company put it to Lord Howe in 1797:

  My Lord, we do not wish you to understand that we, have the least intention of encroaching on the punishments necessary for the preservation of good order and discipline necessary to be preserved in H.M. navy, but to crush the spirit of tyranny and oppression so much practised and delighted in, contrary to the spirit or intent of any laws of our country. (Gill, The Naval Mutanies)

  Or, in Dr Maturin's words:

  The world in general, and even more your briney world, accepts flogging. It is this perpetual arbitrary harassing, bullying, hitting, brow-beating, starting these capricious torments, spreadeagling, gagging—this general atmosphere of oppression. (Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain)

  It would be tedious to recite the many examples to be found in both reliable and unreliable sources, but two, not extreme, cases may be cited. Captain James Burney reported serving in a ship in which the maintopmen were flogged because another ship had swayed up her yards faster,' (Kemp, The British Sailor) while in 1794 a petty officer was court martialled and flogged for refusing to 'thrash the men up' from below. (Hannay, Naval Courts Martial) In both cases what was shocking to lower deck opinion was not simply the brutality but the fact that the sufferers were prime seamen, as it shocked Jack Aubrey to hear that his coxswain Bonden had been flogged by Captain Corbett. (Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command) The ignorant landmen had always been herded about their work with blows, but that smart topmen should suffer likewise offended every seaman's idea of natural justice and the social order within a ship's company. Resentment at such abuse of authority led the mutineers of 1797 to put ashore large numbers of their officers. At Spithead 114 officers were removed, including four captains and Vice-Admiral Colpoys.(Gill, The Naval Mutanies)

  It is possible that part of the problem was the many inexperienced or simply bad officers brought in by rapid wartime expansion. This was certainly the opinion of some contemporaries; Collingwood condemned captains who, 'endeavouring to conceal, by great severity, their own unskilfulness and want of attention, beat the men into a state of insubordination.'(G. I. Newnham, A Selection from the Public and Private Correspondence of Vice-Admiral Lord Collingwood)

  No doubt this was part of the problem, but it was certainly not the whole. Behind the growth in class-consciousness and mutual suspicion between officers and men lay another secular trend which affected the Navy along with the rest of society the growth of state power and centralisation. In the 1750s the authority of the Admiralty still largely relied on co-operation with senior officers whose patronage rep resented much of the real power within the Navy. By the 1790s the Admiralty was in process of taking much of that power into its own hands. (Rodger, Inner Life of the Navy) A succession of gifted and arrogant administrative reformers, notably Sir Charles Middleton, Lord St. Vincent and General Bentham, attempted to improve the discipline of the Navy, and the efficiency of the Navy Board and the dockyards, by the method traditional among reformers in every age: centralisation in their own hands. This was only one example of the way that the growing complexity of society and the pressures of a desperate war forced, or permitted, the British government to become more efficient, more centralised and more powerful. (Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793-1815) One of the effects of this development in the Navy was to weaken the old personal bonds of mutual obligation between officers and their followers which had been one of the major cohesive forces of the Service in earlier years, and replace them with an artificial discipline. Where officers' powers to reward had weakened, their powers to punish had to grow to compensate. When officers and men were less and less known and beholden to one another as individuals, they needed an impersonal authority to regulate their relations.

  An illustration of this trend is the Admiralty's attitude to captains' personal followings. In Anson's day captains and admirals were almost always allowed to take at least their particular followers with them from ship to ship, and they were strongly encouraged, indeed compelled, to use their local influence to recruit men in their home districts. (Rodger, The Wooden World) During the American War Sandwich favoured the same methods, and publicly praised officers who recruited their own ship's companies from among their followers:

  Such a mode of procuring men creates a confidence between the commanding officer and the seaman. The former is in some measure bound to act humanely to the man who gives him a preference of serving under him; and the latter will find his interest and duty unite, in behaving well under a person from whom he is taught to expect every present reasonable indulgence, and future favour. These, and other instances of a similar nature which have come to my knowledge, have enabled me to point out one thing that might, in my opinion, be the means of furthering the naval service; that is, trusting less to the assistance of the Admiralty board, and giving every possible encouragement to the captains appointed to the command of ships to complete their own crews. (William Corbett, The Parliamentary History Of England)

  It seems that during the American War about 230,000 men were raised for the Navy, of which the shore-based Impress Service raised 116,357 or about half. These in turn can be divided into 72,658 who were paid bounty as volunteers, leaving 43,699 pressed men. Recruiting by men-of-war or their tenders stopping merchantmen at sea, and direct recruitment by ships of volunteers ashore, accounted for the other half. In all cases these figures refer to individual instances of recruitment; the Navy lost so many men by desertion and otherwise that it had to recruit two men for every one borne on a ship's books, and it must be that in many cases the same men
were recruited more than once. (R. G. Usher, Mississippi Valley Historical Review) It is not possible to say exactly what proportion of these figures represent men volunteering to serve with particular officers, but it must certainly represent a considerable part of the volunteers both ashore and afloat. It is certain that captains were individually responsible, for raising half the men in the Navy, and consequently that their influence was bound to be felt in every aspect of recruiting. As Commodore Rowley wrote to Lord Sandwich in November 1778,

  Most of the Monarch's men have been of my own getting and have been tried, and many of the men would not have come into the Navy if it had not been to sail with me. (National Maritime Museum)

  In such cases, the captain was not only supplying the Navy's need of manpower, but acquiring a great deal of independent authority in the process. He and his men were personally linked, while the Admiralty was beholden to him for his efforts.

  By the end of the century this had completely changed. Naval recruitment was almost entirely in the hands of a centralised organisation, the Impress Service, and individual captains were not encouraged to raise their own men. A particularly favoured officer like Captain Sir Edward Pellew, the darling of Lord Chatham, was still allowed to take men of his own raising from ship to ship in the early years of the Revolutionary War,' (C. Northcote Parkinson, Edward Pellow, Viscount Exmouth, Admiral of the Red) but by then this was an exceptional indulgence, not permitted to other captains, or even admirals. (P. S. Graeme, Orkney and the Last Great War) Though the Navy was desperately short of men, the Admiralty was prepared to forbid captains raising men by private arrangement, (Rodger, Inner Life of the Navy) and the reason seems to have been that the process would establish links of mutual obligation independent of Admiralty authority. What had been the real cement of the Navy fifty years before, the 'immemorial custom of the service' to which Aubrey appealed when Admiral Drury tried to deprive him of his followers, had become subversive of the new discipline. (Patrick O'Brian, The Fortune of War)

  All the trends we have been considering tended to make the life of the ordinary rating worse in 1800 than it had been fifty years before. Commanded by officers to whom he was an entire stranger, cut off from them by a gulf of mutual incomprehension and suspicion, subject to harsh discipline (and in some ships to capricious brutality), forbidden leave for years at a time, his lot was undoubtedly worse than his predecessor's in the Navy of Anson's time. Against all these trends, however, we must set another which was beginning to work in the opposite direction. By 1800 there were a considerable number of officers in the Navy, most of them Evangelists or influenced by evangelical piety, who brought to their ships that high-minded conception of duty and moral obligation which we consider typically Victorian. It is at this period that church services—a marked eccentricity in the Navy of the 1750s—began to be commonplace aboard ship. Of Dr Byrn's sample of ships serving in the Leeward Islands between 1784 and 1812, 40% held divine services; moreover 18% received scriptures distributed (on request) by the Naval and Military Bible Society, which is an indicator of officers with evangelical convictions. Collingwood is a good example of this new type of officer: his social and political ideas were rigidly conservative, he was a firm disciplinarian, and had a horror of the least sign of independence from his men. But he attended to their material and spiritual wants with scrupulous care, he condemned excessive flogging as 'big with the most dangerous consequences, and subversive of all real discipline', and he insisted that his officers address their men with courtesy:

  If you do not know a man's name, call him sailor, and not you-sir, and such other appellations; they are offensive and improper. (Warner, Lord Collingwood)

  In return he received the devotion of all who served under him:

  A better seaman—a better friend to seamen—a great lover and more zealous defender of his country's rights and honour, never trod a quarter-deck. He and his favourite dog Bounce—were well known to every member of the crew. How attentive he was to the hçalth and comfort and happiness of his crew! a man who could not be happy under him, could have been happy no where; a look of displeasure from him was as a bad as a dozen at the gang way from another man. (M. D. Hay, Landsman Hay: The Memoirs of Robert Hay)

  Collingwood was an exceptional officer, but by no means unique, and the sort of approach to discipline which he exemplified began to be more influential in the Navy in the early years of the new century. Aubrey for one, an officer of rather different upbringing, agreed entirely,

  that none but a fool started, struck, beat or abused hands for not knowing their duty when those hands could not conceivably know it, having only just gone to sea; that any officerlike man knew the names of all the people in his watch; that it was quite as easy to call out Herapath as You, sir. (Patrick O'Brian, Desolation Island)

  The new edition in 1806 of the Regulations and Instructions removed the limit of twelve lashes which a captain might award at his own discretion, and which had long been a dead letter, but only four months later the Admiralty forbade running the gauntlet, in 1809 it forbade 'starting' (the common practice of officers and petty officers of 'encouraging' the men with sticks or rope's ends), and in 1811 it instituted quarterly punishment returns. These were scrutinised, for in the following year Admiral Laforey in the West Indies was ordered to check the excessive flogging in his squadron. (Byrn, Crime and Punishment) It was some time before all these orders were properly observed, and a long time before the new attitudes permeated the Service (if only because it was an extremely long time before the officers bred up during the Napoleonic War retired from service), but they represented the visible trend in 1800. Not everyone welcomed it; in that year a disgruntled surgeon was dismissed the Service at court martial for complaining that the captains of the Navy had turned republican and favoured the men over their officers. (Hannay, Naval Courts Martial) That certainly never happened, and in the Victorian Navy relations between quarterdeck and lower deck were if possible even more distant and class-ridden, but they were considerably more humane.

  It is instructive to draw a contrast in leadership between generations. Officers like Collingwood looked after their men from a deep sense of moral, and more particularly religious, duty; the image of paternal care, and the Biblical resonance which it aroused, were never far from their minds. (Byrne, Crime and Punishment) Fifty years before an equally outstanding captain of shins and of men, Augustus Hervey, had aroused the loyalty of his people without the aid of any detectable moral or religious feelings. For his generation good followers were a professional necessity, and the officer who did not look after his men could not expect loyalty, obedience, or success in a demanding and dangerous career. (David Erskine, Augustus Hervey's Journal) By Collingwood's day a system of discipline had been established which could and did support an officer in his authority even if he did nothing to deserve respect, even if he was known to be cruel and tyrannical. Captain Robert Corbett was infamous throughout the Navy for his mindless brutality; he aroused complaint, mutiny and reprimands by court martial, but was repeatedly rewarded with new commands until eventually he was killed in action, possibly by his own men. (Lloyd, The British Seaman; Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command) The Admiralty of fifty years before certainly did what it could to support captains' authority, but the fates of Captain William Hervey or Captain Penhallow Cuming show that it would not countenance brutality. (Rodger, The Wooden World)

  On the graph which might be drawn connecting Augustus Hervey in the 1750s with Cuthbert Collingwood half a century later, Jack Aubrey, though younger than Collingwood, represents an older style of command, one which still retained something of the rough intimacy of the old Navy. Definitely no Evangelist, nor one whose contacts with men like Mr Ellis could be said to have been fruitful, (Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander) he nevertheless represents the new world in his sense of obligation towards his men, as distinct from a mere understanding that it was in his interest to treat them well. There were other, probably many othe
r captains in the Navy like him, under whom good men were happy to serve:

  I like this ship much better than any other the Capt. whose name is Moorson is of very amiable disposition' the officers all merit esteem and the ship is of great force . . . a man of war is much better in wartime than an indiaman for we laught at and seek the danger they have so much reason to dread and avoid I find it the very reverse of what was represented to me to be for when we have done our duty we may go to the fire to sleep or read or write or anything. (J. Powell, topman of the Revenge, to his mother, (1805) British Naval Documents 1204-1960)

  We must beware of exaggerating the degree to which relations between officers and men had changed for the worse. Ill-treatment attracts notice, and was already attracting notice at the time, out of proportion to its frequency. Yet change was undoubtedly happening, in parallel with the changes which British society was undergoing. The old social order with its rough informality and its strong sense of solidarity in the shared dangers of the seafaring life could not possibly have survived the growth of class and political consciousness ashore. The French Revolution, in particular, poisoned the relations between officers and men for generations, 'perhaps for ever. Moreover some of the changes within the Navy paralleled those taking place in working lives ashore. A seaman's work, skilled, varied and independent as it was, never resembled that of a factory hand, but the new discipline moved as, far in that direction as it could. In place of the irregular, almost anarchic ways of the old Navy, officers began to adopt the image of the ship as a machine, her men reduced to so many mechanical components. (Lewis, Social History of the Navy) At the same time the rise of the idea of duty, undoubtedly influenced by the evangelical temperament, was in time to lead to material improvements in the life of the common seaman analogous to those produced ashore by the Factory Acts. Even now, however, nearly two centuries later, when the conditions of service of the naval rating have changed totally and the concept of duty towards subordinates is a commonplace of command, discipline remains more for mal, artificial and perhaps uneasy than it was in the 1750s. It is arguable that by 1800 the crucial transition to a 'modern' social structure, and attitudes to command and authority to match it, was already well under way if not completed. Our existing knowledge, however, which is rich but fragmentary, calls for imagination even more than learning to interpret it. How far the modern naval officer stands from the world of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin no one can say with more authority than Patrick O'Brian.