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Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy. David Crane
Читать онлайн.Название Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy
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isbn 9780007373147
Автор произведения David Crane
Издательство HarperCollins
the great yard encompassed every activity required to send ships to sea … There were offices and storehouses, and neat brick houses … as well as the massive infrastructure required to produce a ship. In the Rope-house all cordage was spun, from light line to massive anchor cable, in lengths of more than a thousand feet, some so thick that eighty men were required to handle them … Timber balks and spires of wood lay submerged in the Main Pond, seasoning until called to use. In the blacksmith’s shop were wrought ninety hundred-weight anchors in furnaces that put visitors in mind of ‘the forge of Vulcan.’ And on the slips, or docked along the waterfront, were the 180-foot hulls of men-of-war, the great battle-wounded ships brought for recovery, or the skeletons of new craft, their hulking, cavernous frames suggesting monstrous sea animals from a vanished, fearsome age.
Along with all this industrial might came the people, the contractors and tradesmen, the wives and prostitutes, the shopkeepers and clerks, and the thousands of workers who kept the fleets at sea. ‘I could not think what world I was in,’ another boy recalled his introduction to this alien culture, ‘whether among spirits or devils. All seemed strange; different language and strange expressions of tongue, that I thought myself always asleep or in a dream, and never properly awake.’
If it was an alien world, though, with its own language and languages – England, Ireland, Canada, America, the Baltic, Spain, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Sardinia, Venice, they were all represented in Neptune – its own customs, and traditions, its own time-keeping, arcane ways of business and overlapping hierarchies, it was a world the young Hastings took to as if he had known no other. ‘Whilst on board with him (although only eleven years old last month),’ Sir Charles proudly told Warren Hastings, ‘he offered to go up the masthead without going through the Lubbers’ hole which however Capt Fremantle would not permit as I could not have borne seeing him make the attempt – I have no doubt that he will do very well if his education is not neglected but as there is a Schoolmaster on board I entertain great hopes of him making a proficiency.’
There were thirty-four boys in all entered in Neptune’s muster book – the youngest nine years old (there was a four-year-old girl in Victory, born in HMS Ardent in the middle of the Battle of Copenhagen) – though only a handful rated ‘Volunteer First Class’ who were destined to be officers. There was still such a wide divergence of practice from ship to ship that it is impossible to generalise about these boys’ duties, but in a world of interest and patronage, the naturally symbiotic relationship of captain and volunteer was a well-connected boy like Hastings’s best guarantee of the training his father had wanted for him. ‘My Dear General,’ – that ‘most mischievous political quack … Mr Pitt’ was still alive and the general as yet without his baronetcy – Captain Fremantle was soon writing to Frank’s father, conscientiously carrying out his side of the bargain: ‘… of your boy I can say nothing but what ought to make you and Mrs Hastings very happy, he is very mild and tractable, attentive to his books & dashing when with the youngsters of his own age. I declare I have had no occasion to hint even anything to him, as he is so perfectly well behaved.’
With all the ‘dash’ and patronage in the world, a man-of-war like Neptune, with her 116 marines and ship’s company of 570 brawling, drunken, thieving seamen recruited or pressed from across the globe, was a tough school for any boy. ‘Who can paint in words what I felt?’ Edward Trelawny, whose path would later cross with Hastings’s in Greece, histrionically recalled his first days as a thirteen-year-old midshipman in that summer of 1805. ‘Imagine me torn from my native country, destined to cross the wide ocean, to a wild region, cut off from every tie, or possibility of communication, transported like a felon, as it were, for life … I was torn away, not seeing my mother, or brothers, or sisters, or one familiar face; no voice to speak a word of comfort, or to inspire me with the smallest hope that anything human took an interest in me.’
Trelawny had his own sub-Byronic line in self-pity and self-dramatisation to peddle, but even in Neptune and under a captain like Fremantle, there were no soft edges to the gunroom. ‘I thought my heart would break with grief,’ William Badcock, a fellow ‘mid’ in Neptune when Hastings joined, recalled. ‘The first night on board was not the most pleasant; the noises unusual to a novice – sleeping in a hammock for the first time – its tarry smell – the wet cables for a bed carpet … Time however reconciles us to everything, and the gaiety and thoughtlessness of youth, added to the cocked hat, desk, spy-glass, etc of a nautical fit out, assisted wonderfully to dry my tears.’
And for all the brutal horseplay – ‘sawing your bed-posts’, ‘reefing your bed-clothes’, ‘blowing the grampus’ (sluicing a new boy with water) – and the ever-present threat of the ‘sky parlour’ or masthead for punishment, there was none of the institutional or private tyranny in Neptune so vividly recorded in Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son. A midshipman coming off watch might spend his first half-hour unravelling his tightly knotted blanket in the dark, but with cribbage and draughts to play, book work to be done and stories of Captain Cook to be wheedled out of the old quartermaster, Badcock did his ‘fellows in Neptune the justice to say that a more kind-hearted set was not to be met with’.
Hastings did not have long in Plymouth to acclimatise himself to this new world. On 17 May, after a hasty refit, the Neptune was ready again for sea. ‘I begin my journal with saying that I have passed as miserable a day and night as I could well expect,’ Fremantle complained to his wife Betsey the same night, as his sluggish-handling new ship pitched and rolled in heavy seas and Plymouth, home and family slipped below the horizon:
tho’ I have no particular reason why that should be the case … I dined with young Hastings only on a fowl and some salt pork, as triste as a gentleman needs to be … my mind hangs constantly towards you and your children, and I am at times so low I cannot hold up my head … my only hope is in a peace, which I trust in God may be brought about through the mediation of Russia. These French rascals will never come out and fight but will continue to annoy and wear out both our spirits and constitutions.
This two-month cruise with the Channel Squadron gave Hastings his first experience of blockade work, and after another brief refit at Plymouth he was soon again at sea. Fremantle had no more real belief in bringing the French out to battle than he had ever had, but by 3 August they were once more off Ushant and before the end of the month had joined Collingwood’s growing squadron blockading the enemy fleets inside Cádiz. ‘I am in hope Lord Nelson will come here as nobody is to my mind so equal to the command as he is,’ Fremantle wrote to his wife on 31 August:
it will require some management to supply so large a force with water and provisions, and as the combined fleets are safely lodged in Cadiz, here I conclude we shall remain until Domesday or until we are blown off the Coast, when the French men will again escape us. I can say little about my Ship, we go much as usual and if any opportunity offers of bringing the Enemy’s Fleet to battle, I think she will show herself, but still I am not half satisfied at being in a large Ship that don’t sail and must be continually late in action.
They might well have stayed there till doomsday, but while Fremantle fretted and flogged, a messenger was already on the road to Cádiz with orders for the French Admiral Villeneuve to take the fleet into the Mediterranean in support of the Emperor’s new European ambitions. From the collapse of the Peace of Amiens Napoleon’s naval strategy had been marked by an utter disregard for realities, but this time he had excelled himself, timing his orders to arrive on the very day before Fremantle and the whole blockading fleet at last got their wish for Nelson. ‘On the 28th of September was joined by H.M. Ship Victory Admirl Lord Nelson,’ wrote James Martin, an able seaman in Neptune, ‘and the Ajax and the Thunderer it is Imposeble to Discribe the Heartfelt Satifaction of the whole fleet upon this Occasion and the Confidance of Success with which we ware Inspired.’
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