The Years of Endurance (39 page)
The new requests were in themselves reasonable: they were all in the end granted without doing the country the least injury. Pursers who " took care of their eighths " were far too common: the meat was often uneatable, the biscuits weevily, the butter rancid and the cheese full of long red worms.
2
Many ship's surgeons were drunken wastrels who had gone to sea as the last resort in a life of professional failure. And considering that the seamen had been torn away from their homes and callings to indescribable hardships and tedium, it seemed monstrously unjust to keep them on board in harbour.
1
Bonner Smith,
Mariner's Mirror,
XXII, 74.
2
It was an old saying in the Service that Judas Iscariot was the first Purser. But Boatswains often ran them fine in the art of peculation. It was Johnny Bone, the Boatswain of the
Edgar,
to whom the great Adam Duncan observed : " Whatever you do, Mr. Bone, I hope and trust you will not take the anchors from the bows."—
Gardner,
71.
But however reasonable, the ultimatum was presented at a time when the country was in graver danger than any since the Spanish Armada appeared off Plymouth. To yield unconditionally at the pistol's mouth might undermine the whole fabric of naval discipline and precipitate the same tragic train of events which had brought monarchical France to massacre and ruin. To aristocrats like Spencer the very discipline of the mutineers seemed ominous: it argued, as Lady Spencer wrote to " weathercock " Windham, a steadiness which overpowered her with terror.
1
Therefore, though the Board prudently eschewed violent counsels, it determined to make some sort of a stand: to keep the seamen at a distance and, while granting the substance of their demands, to make as many minor abatements as possible. In fact it tried to avoid paying the full price for its own former and very English failure—through complacency, inertia and reluctance to inquire too closely into uncomfortable facts—to reform abuses while it had time to do so with dignity.
The results of this obstinacy were not happy. On the 20th the Prince of Wurtemberg, who had come to Portsmouth to marry the Princess Royal, had been cheered and saluted as though nothing unusual was happening while being escorted by Spencer round the mutinous Fleet. This singularly English episode encouraged the Lords of the Admiralty in their firm resolve. But next day, while Admiral Gardner was arguing with the delegates in the
Queen Charlotte's
stateroom, the men—after seeming agreement had been reached—grew suspicious and declared that a final settlement must wait till a pardon had been received under the King's hand. At this the Admiral, who thought it high time the Fleet was at sea, lost his temper and denounced the delegates as " a damned, mutinous, blackguard set " of " skulking fellows " who were afraid of meeting the French. In his fury he even shook one of them and threatened to have him hanged. At this there was a riot which ended in the apoplectic old man's being hustled out of the flagship and the red flag being hoisted in all ships. The officers were placed under confinement or—in the case of the unpopular ones—sent ashore.
Once more, faced by urgent crisis, Spencer acted promptly. That night he set out for London to obtain the royal pardon, secured next
1
Windham Papers,
II,
48.
morning an immediate Cabinet council and by midnight had obtained the King's signature at Windsor and had had copies printed for circulation in the fleet. But by the time that these, galloped through the night, reached Portsmouth, the good temper of the Navy was already reasserti
ng itself. The astonishing dele
gates, while still insisting on the redress of grievances, had apologised gracefully to Bridport for the flag-striking incident and begged him as " father of the Fleet" to resume command. This the admiral did on the morning of the 24th, reading the Royal proclamation to the crew of the flagship and making a speech in which he promised general satisfaction of all demands. The mutiny thereupon ended. Next morning the greater part of the Fleet dropped down to St. Helens to await an easterly wind to carry it to Brest.
But though the country congratulated itself that a dreadful week had been attended by no worse consequences, suspicion and unrest remained. The men were not sure that the Government meant to honour its promises. The inexplicable delays attendant on parliamentary processes
1
increased their distrust. During the next fortnight while the fleet waited for the wind, the ferment continued to work. The seamen had tasted power and learnt their strength. Moreover the recognition of their principal grievances had reminded them of others.
On several occasions in the recent past abuses in particular ships had been so serious that they had provoked isolated mutinies. Over-rapidity of war-time expansion and the difficulty of raising men and keeping them from desertion had aggravated the severity of discipline. With the jails emptied to supply the pressgangs, it is not surprising that some officers could only enforce order at the cat's tail. Such a regimen could be accompanied by a horrible brutality. " The ill-usage we have on board this ship," the crew of the
Win
chelsea
wrote to the Admiralty early in the war, " forced us to fly to your Lordships the same as a child to its father." Another ship's company referred to its treatment " from the tirant of a captain " as more than the spirits and hearts of Englishmen could bear, " for we are born free but now we are slaves." These things were against the Regulations, but, with each ship a world of its own and often
1
The King with his usual common sense complained of these.—
Spencer Papers,
II, 124.
far from port, the Regulations were hard to enforce. In certain ships the officers, as Collingwood said, beat the men into a state of insubordination.
Grievances apart, the Fleet was ripe for trouble. The dilution of the better elements with the worse had left a dangerous sediment at the bottom of every crew. In four years of war naval personnel had swollen from 16,000 to 120,000. Many of the latest joined were " quota men " raised under the Act of 1795 which had imposed on every parish the obligation of supplying the Service. Among these were inevitably some of superior station—broken-down tradesmen, fraudulent attorneys and the like, who were disgruntled with their lot. Ten per cent of the seamen were foreigners. Another ten per cent were Irish, some of them under sentence for political offences and illegally smuggled into the Fleet by high-handed officials. Recently an increasing number had been United Irishmen and sympathisers with the principles proclaimed by France.
1
The agitation and struggle of those seven breathless days at Spithead stirred all this perilous matter into a ferment. This was no ordinary mutiny, for it had succeeded. Suspicion that its fruits were going to be filched by parliamentary chicanery was now aroused by two circumstances. On the
3rd
the
Duke of Bedford, making party capital out of a national misfortune, contrived by an awkward question in the Lords to convey to uninitiated seamen poring over their newspapers the false idea that the Government was going to drop the bill for supplementary naval pay. Simultaneously the Admiralty circulated a foolish document forbidding captains to temporise with mutiny, and directing the marines to be kept in constant readiness for action. This was no more than a childish attempt of official pride to recover official face. But by accident or design its contents became known to the Fleet. On Sunday, May 7th, when on a change of wind Bridport hoisted the signal to sail, the seamen at St. Helens once more manned the shrouds and broke into defiant cheers.
This time mutiny wore a graver aspect. The seamen of the
Royal George,
swearing their officers had deceived them, seized the arms and ammunition. A broil in Admiral Colpoys's flagship at Spithead, in which a seaman lost his life while rushing the quarter-deck, nearly
1
Wolfe Tone himself was nearly pressed
while sailing in 1795 from Ire
land to America.—Lecky, III,
4
6.
ended in the Admiral and the officer who had fired the shot being summarily hanged. In other ships unpopular officers were bundled ashore and left with their belongings on the quayside. Some of the marines, the traditional keypins of naval discipline, joined the rest.
The people of Portsmouth, confronted with
the
spectacle of the fleet flying the red flag and of shaken captains and admirals dumped on the sea front like
emigres,
hourly expected the arrival of the French and the guillotine. As a Civil Lord of the Admiralty wrote to Spencer, the situation formed " the most awful crisis " the country had ever known.
Meanwhile the conflagration had spread. At Plymouth the crews of Sir Roger Curtis's squadron had mutinied on April 26th and turned most of their captains ashore. Four days later ominous cheering signalled an outbreak of revolt in the flagship of the North Sea Fleet waiting at Yarmouth for a wind to blockade the Dutch invasion fleet in the Texel. But in this case the Admiral in command was equal to the occasion. Towering with rage, the giant Scot, Adam Duncan, called his men out of the foreshrouds and rated them like a father. The affair ended—for they adored the fine old man—in their promising to go to any part of the world with him and writing a letter thanking the Lords of the Admiralty for their compliance with the request of the Channel Fleet.
For underneath the suspicion, the smouldering grievances and agitation ran the English individual sense of humanity. A worthy officer remained in the seamen's eyes a worthy man, however much he might theoretically embody the forces of despotism. All the generalisations of French ideology or Irish logic could never persuade them otherwise.
It was this deep-rooted manliness of the British sailor that saved the day. The authorities, at last abandoning false pride, behaved with equal good sense. The supplementary estimates providing for the increase in pay were hurried through their remaining stages, and the one line of approach to the disgruntled seamen which was certain of success—the simple human one—was chosen. Someone with a flash of the inspiration which always seems to come to the salvation of England in the last ditch suggested the victor of the First of June as a
deus ex machina.
Armed with full powers to redress grievances on behalf of the Admiralty and to grant pardon on that of the Crown, Lord Howe, overcoming gout and infirmities, set off for Portsmouth. Without wasting a minute he had himself rowed across the Solent to St. Helens where, visiting every ship in turn, he set to work to restore the confidence of the seamen in their rulers.
By May 13 th, six days after the renewed mutiny had begun, the old hero had achieved his purpose of quietening what he described as " the most suspicious but most generous minds " he had ever met.
The demand of the men to dismiss
the
more unpopular officers was tactfully turned by getting the latter to petition the Admiralty for transfer to other ships. There only remained to celebrate the reconciliation of Fleet and nation. On May 15th, after twelve hours of rowing round the cheering fleet
amid the strains of " Rule Bri
tannia," " Black Dick "—as exhausted as after the battle of the First of June—was carried by the sailors shoulder high to the port governor's house. Here in a perfect delirium of patriotic emotion he and his lady entertained the delegates to a grand dinner and jollification. At Plymouth, where a similar happy ending occurred, Captain Boger, after being kept a prisoner in the
Cambridge
guard-ship, was paraded with his fellow-captains in open carriages round the town on a broiling summer day, amid tumultuous cheering. Dressed in full uniform, with a face scarlet from the heat, he repeatedly asked for a glass of water, but his men, who were extremely fond of him, horrified at the request, told him that " his Honour might have any sort of grog, but that as for water, they would not suffer his Honour to drink it."
1
Two days later the Channel Fleet put to sea to seek the enemy. But the country had no time for relief. During the second Spithead mutiny the news reached London that Austria, brought to her knees by Bonaparte's advance on Vienna, had signed an armistice at Leoben and that France was free to concentrate her entire force against England. Already a Dutch army was waiting at the Texel. Every day brought new alarms. On May 12th, while Howe was completing his work of pacification, a brilliant young Tory M.P., George Canning,, penned some mock verses congratulating his friend Windham, who had made a comforting ministerial reference in a recent speech to " negative successes," on a " day of
1
C. N. Robinson,
The British Tar in Fact and Fiction
(1909), 129.
no disas
ter."
1
He was too soon. For on that very day, while rumours percolated through London that the Household troops had revolted, the men of the flagship at Sheerness defied their officers and turned the forecastle guns on the quarter-deck. The rest of the battleships lying in the mouth of the river at the Great and Little Nore followed their example.