Nelson (105 page)

The spirit a good and active captain could create aboard a warship during the French wars was best described by Captain Frederick Marryat, the novelist haunted by his years as a midshipman on the
Imperieuse
under the command of Lord Cochrane. A cantankerous subordinate, Cochrane was idolised by his young gentlemen, much as Nelson before him. As Marryat recalled in later life:

The cruises of the
Imperieuse
were periods of continual excitement, from the hour in which she hove up her anchor till she dropped it again in port. The day that passed without a shot being fired in anger was with us a blank day. The boats were hardly secured on the booms than they were cast loose and out again. The yard and stay tackles were for ever hoisting up and lowering down. The expedition with which parties were formed for service; the rapidity
of the frigate’s movements, night and day; the hasty sleep, snatched at all hours; the waking up at the report of the guns, which seemed the only keynote to the hearts of those on board; the beautiful precision of our fire, obtained by constant practise; the coolness and courage of our captain, innoculating the whole of the ship’s company; the suddenness of our attacks; the gathering after the combat; the killed lamented; the wounded almost envied; the powder so burnt into our faces that years could not remove it; the proved character of every man and officer on board; the implicit trust and the adoration we felt for our commander; the ludicrous situations which would occur even in the extremest danger and create mirth when death was staring you in the face; the hair-breadth escapes; and the indifference to life shown by all. When memory sweeps along those years of excitement, even now my pulse beats more quickly with the reminiscence.
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Perhaps Marryat exaggerated, remembering warmer days when he was an impressionable youth, but almost every one of his words would have held good for the
Agamemnon
. Her spirit could infect the occasional passenger. According to a story later told by a member of Nelson’s family, one of the most noteworthy of these was Cardinal Henry, Duke of York, the younger brother of Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender. Somehow the seventy-year-old man got into difficulties, and at Nelson’s invitation spent some time in the ship until he could be returned to Austrian protection. Nelson is said to have reduced him to tears with the loan of £100. Restored to his station and equanimity shortly afterwards, the grateful recipient soon found the
Agamemnon
at Genoa, and excitedly went aboard. He repaid Nelson’s loan, presented him with a sword and dirk and ran about the ship ‘shaking hands with all the crew’.
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The men of the lower deck of the
Agamemnon
are the least know-able to historians, for they left no written records, and while the musters preserve scant details, including some ages and places of origin, they capture next to nothing of the personalities themselves. Most of the men, no doubt, conformed in many respects to the stereotypical British sailor, with his seafaring slang, distinctive trousers, shirts, short jackets and hats, and pride in all things seamanly. But over the years the
Agamemnon
created a more cosmopolitan blend by recruiting men of different nationalities, including Italians, Corsicans and Austrians who spoke little English. Nelson still managed to weave them into the fabric and maintain a first-rate ship.

There were floggings, of course, about one hundred and twenty
over the entire period of Nelson’s command. Just before leaving for the
Captain
, Nelson had to flog ‘all the pinnace’s crew for bringing liquor on board’. Judging from the number of oars shipped by most pinnaces, eight men may have suffered on that single occasion. Nevertheless, the punishment rate as a whole was probably no more than average, considering the size of the ship, the duration of the command and the turnover of men, and most of the floggings were light. About three-quarters amounted to the token dozen lashes or less, with desertion and one case of sodomy earning four offenders the severest sentences of thirty-six strokes. A number of men also ‘ran’ successfully, some forty up to November 1794, and Nelson took the common precaution of issuing standing orders that no boat could go ashore without permission.
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Punishments such as these, as has been said, were not necessarily divisive or destructive. The usual offences, such as drunkenness, disobedience, neglect of duty, theft and fighting, were a threat to the welfare of the entire ship, and the victims were normally ordinary seamen and marines who needed the protection of a firm captain. Every ship had its more or less cowed malcontents, troubling companies like a grumbling appendicitis, and the
Agamemnon
had her share. One seaman, Thomas Kelly, was apt to drink and fight and got four floggings, while Joseph Turner suffered three times for drunkenness, quarrelling and theft. Most of the men of the
Agamemnon
seem to have felt secure in their captain, however, accepted his discipline and found him approachable and sympathetic in times of difficulty.

The liveliest but most vulnerable members of the ship’s company were the boys, who perhaps made up around 8 per cent of the total personnel. Some were volunteers, seeking employment or adventure, and others dependants of officers of every rank, originally rated servants but in actuality learning their various trades. A number may even have been formally apprenticed to masters, gunners or shipwrights. But whatever their condition and destination every youngster passed through adolescence in a difficult and dangerous world, divorced from the best female company, and raised among men who had seen life at its rawest. None were more in need of protection than the Marine Society boys. On 6 February 1793 Nelson had written to the society requesting ‘twenty lads’ for his ship at Chatham, and promising
that ‘the greatest care shall be taken of them’. Later that month contingents set out for the
Agamemnon
from the Marine Society headquarters at Bishopsgate, each boy carrying his sea outfit, including clothes, bedding, a comb and a needle and thread.
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In 1793 the Marine Society had been in existence for thirty-seven years. It had been founded by the illustrious philanthropist Jonas Hanway, who is said to have introduced the umbrella to the streets of London, and its purpose was to rescue pauper boys for service at sea, either with the navy or in merchantmen. Unfortunately, life afloat was not always conducive to reclamation. Once beyond the society’s compass some boys fell into the hands of unsatisfactory guardians or brutal taskmasters. Naval captains might appoint schoolmasters to their ships, but few teachers were the fonts of wisdom or museums of virtue expected today. They were presumbaly men of some education, but reminiscences of the period suggest that too many were drunken, downtrodden and discontented. Thirty years before Nelson got his Marine Society recruits one critic doubted that such boys were well served at sea, where the skills of ‘blasphemy, chewing tobacco and gaming . . . drinking and talking bawdy’ were so easily acquired.
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The prospects of rescued boys naturally depended upon their own inclinations and talents, the availability of decent guardians and sheer luck, but the most fortunate became ‘ordinary’ or ‘able’ seamen, or learned skills with carpenters, sailmakers, armourers, cooks and coopers that could eventually be transferred ashore. Nelson’s Marine Society boys have been ignored by historians, but they reveal an interesting fusion of self-interest and paternalism. On the one hand captains found it useful to top up their crews with such boys, and the week Nelson received his gang more than sixty other youngsters set out for the king’s service on different ships. Nelson filled up his personal allowance of twenty servants with his lads. Despite being labelled servants, few if any were employed as attendants, and their true duties were those of trainee seamen. No matter, Nelson received their wages, paid the boys a proportion and used the balance to improve his own salary. It was an accepted perk in the navy, and when the Admiralty abolished servants in 1794 and paid all boys directly, the captains were compensated for their financial loss. But Nelson married this pecuniary advantage to an act of charity, and genuinely believed he was giving unfortunate boys chances to change their lives. He valued the work of the Marine Society. As an admiral he made regular subscriptions and donations to its funds, and his appointment of
Withers to the
Agamemnon
was due to his desire to equip the ship with a good schoolmaster.
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There is some confusion about the number of Marine Society boys Nelson took aboard. Two listings survive – the society’s own register of boys sent and the ship’s muster of those received – but they are not a complete fit. At least twenty turned up, rather pathetic little chaps if the register is to be believed. Four were thirteen years old, but the average age was fifteen and the average height four feet eight inches, rather small even for those times. Though the Marine Society tried to inculcate the three Rs into their charges, more than half of these boys were functionally illiterate. Only six of the seventeen who sailed to the Mediterranean could both read and write, and two more read only. Six had previous experience of sea work, although it had probably been gained on the society’s training ship in the Thames, where boys were ‘employed drawing and knotting yarns, making yarn points [and] exercising guns’. They were all endangered youngsters from broken or extinguished homes, arriving with suppressed histories of neglect, abuse, violence and sometimes crime, and were charged with turning over new leaves.
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A few examples illustrate the whole:

James Moody, thirteen, measuring four feet four inches in height, illiterate. A ‘destitute’ orphan, but previously employed in rope-making.

Thomas Amery, thirteen, four feet five inches, literate. Mother a servant at 29 Barbican. Formerly an errand boy.

George Goldring, thirteen, four feet two inches, illiterate. Mother a weaver living two doors from the Fox and Hounds, Hare Street, Bethnal Green. Had ‘wound quills’.

John Heney, sixteen, five feet three inches, illiterate. ‘Destitute’ but formerly a ‘plasterer’.

Thomas Cursons or Couzens, sixteen, four feet six inches, could read but not write, sent by the Philanthropic Society. Had been to sea.

Thomas Bates, eighteen, five feet one inch, illiterate. His next of kin was a sister at the Snuff Mills, Hackney. Previously a bricklayer.

John Alderson, nineteen, five feet three inches, illiterate. His mother was Ann Duff of 11 Low Court, Strand. Some sea experience.

To discover how these troubled boys fared under Nelson’s command, and whether the Marine Society’s hopes for them were fulfilled, we have to turn to the muster and log books of the
Agamemnon
, deficient in sociological detail though they are. Three of the twenty never
settled down, and were discharged at their own request within three weeks, but the rest stuck it out and sailed; one rated a master’s servant, another a lieutenant’s servant and the rest captain’s servants. In reality, all were learning the trade of seafaring.

Given their backgrounds, it is not surprising that some of the boys got into trouble during the four years they served under Nelson, and although the captain had an eye to any exonerating circumstances, he allowed the penalties of the service to fall upon proven offenders. Four received floggings, and two of those remained incorrigible, and deserted the ship. Walter Holmes may have been the youngest person Nelson flogged on the
Agamemnon
. The son of a Smithfield smith, able to read but not write, he seems to have fallen under the influence of a habitually drunken and idle fellow named Wilmott, and both were punished for theft on 28 May 1793. The boy received a dozen lashes, though he may not have reached his fourteenth birthday and was less than five feet tall. Nor was he reformed, for on 2 July 1794 he took the opportunity presented by the siege of Calvi to desert.

Two other boys, Richard Firbee and Charles Waters, were punished for attempted desertion on 30 October 1794. Ironically, it was Firbee, at seventeen or eighteen the older of the two, who received the lighter sentence of a dozen lashes. Possibly he had known Waters before their seafaring days. An ex-butcher, his father was a sawyer at a Houndsditch chandler’s shop, while Waters and his brother had worked as braziers in the same area. Waters, unlike Firbee, was illiterate, but seems to have been the commanding personality because he received thirty-six lashes, a hard tariff on a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy, even if a conventional one for what was deemed to be a serious offence. Like Holmes, Waters, a lieutenant’s servant, remained disgruntled, and successfully jumped ship in Genoa in July 1795. Whatever the future held for a malcontented, inadequate youth, far from home in a strange land, his old accomplice Firbee never reoffended. Nor did James Martin, another Marine Society boy who had to be disciplined, though his misdemeanour had been an even more unfortunate one. The son of a Blackfriars nurse, Martin was about seventeen when he attracted the attentions of two Maltese seamen on board the ship. He was judged to have been a willing participant in the resultant ‘execrable . . . act’, and shared the punishment, receiving three dozen strokes of the lash on 10 May 1795. Fortunately, the youth managed to put the episode behind him and was promoted to ‘ordinary seaman’ the next year.
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Sad as these digressions from prescribed morality or practice were, most of the Marine Society boys buckled down to a steady life afloat, and despite hard service, battle, accident and disease, the deserters, Holmes and Waters, were the only ones to be lost in the four-year sojourn of the
Agamemnon
. Indeed, perhaps it is remarkable that so many of these graduates from the school of hard knocks created no appreciable problems. Fourteen returned in the ship to England with Captain Smith and were paid off at Chatham in September 1796. Four of them were rated ‘boys, second class’, a new designation introduced by the Admiralty in 1794 to describe seamen in training between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, but ten, including the aforementioned Firbee and Martin, had advanced to the status of ‘ordinary seaman’. All appear to have transferred immediately to new ships, the
Montagu
,
York
and
Sandwich
.
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