Admiral Collingwood Page 8
By this means I might prevent a repetition of the attacks of this rapacious hoard [sic] of blood suckers, who never fail to make a hearty meal off Johnny Newcome, whilst a beef and plumb pudding flavour is to be extracted from his veins.23
There were other hazards for sailors in these parts. One was the temptation for ‘Johnny Newcome’ – the inexperienced sailor – to shelter from heavy rain under the branches of the manchineal tree, whose poisonous sap raised peculiarly unpleasant boils on the skin; but there were many others:
In the West Indies, the fuel made use of on board a ship is wood, among which varieties of insects are brought, such as scorpions, centipedes, and tarantulas, with now and then a few snakes; these soon begin to crawl up and down the ship, even into the hammocks, and the men frequently get stung and bit by them.24
Anyone on the station who had delicate sensibilities must also have given a thought to the plight of slaves. Raigersfeld could hear the driver’s whip ‘smacking upon their backs as they laboured in the field, better than a mile off’.25 Whether he pondered on the morality of the Royal Navy protecting plantation owners, or the government’s funding of its navy through the wealth created by slave labour, is doubtful. Similar brutality was casually handed out to many seamen, who had themselves been recruited by the press and were effectively slaves too.
Raigersfeld, when he was not being bullied by his older messmates, was understandably more interested in having fun. He was taught how to swim and even dive by a local, but was banned from attempting the feat of one of his shipmates, whose habit it was to dive from the topgallant yard arm, a height of over one hundred feet, into the shallow waters of the harbour. He was amused, too, with some of the wildlife, including an eel called a torpedo that gave a very sharp electrical shock.26 One day Collingwood was sent a present of a turtle with ten or twelve of its young. To the amusement of the midshipmen they were kept in a soup plate, where it was ‘very pretty to see them blow and swim about’.27
In September 1783 Britain signed peace treaties with France and Spain at Versailles, and finally recognised American independence. Shortly afterwards, William Pitt became Britain’s youngest prime minister at the age of twenty-four. His younger brother James, who at twenty was made commander of that ill-starred sloop Hornet, died in Antigua in 1780, and lies buried in St Paul’s church at Falmouth, a mile or so from English Harbour.
By the time Collingwood arrived on the station, Americans were once more trading vigorously with the islands. Collingwood’s role in peace time was to show the flag at the various islands owned by Britain, and protect merchant ships from piracy. But it soon occurred to him, as a keen student of politics and the law, that under ancient Navigation Acts, going back to Cromwell’s Protectorate and the Restoration, this trade with America was illegal. The acts stated that only British ships might trade with her colonies. American ships were de facto no longer British, and were therefore trading illegally. In 1784 Collingwood decided to deploy Mediator in protection of these laws. At least, that was how he saw it. Horatio Nelson, arriving on the station in July 1784 in the frigate Boreas (and carrying the new station commander Admiral Hughes), later claimed it was he who started operations against the ‘smugglers’. Most historians have accepted Nelson’s testimony at face value, but Collingwood was in fact the original instigator of the trouble that followed, even if it was the result of conversations with Nelson at English Harbour that autumn. The reason these actions caused so much trouble was that most of the powerful people in the islands, among them Governor Shirley and Admiral Hughes, were making money from the American trade.
Nelson’s influence on the station was immediate; he seemed to invigorate people wherever he went. Within days of his arrival he had established an officers’ mess, which he supplied with a hogshead of port and another of white wine, plus twelve dozen bottles of porter, 50lbs of loaf sugar, a firkin of butter, two baskets of salt and 2lbs of black pepper.28 There were amateur theatricals, and dancing and cudgelling on the decks of the ships. He had also managed to argue with John Moutray. Although senior on the navy list to Nelson by many years, Moutray was now on half-pay, and when he had a commodore’s pennant raised on Latona, moored at a dockyard wharf, Nelson ordered it struck. Typically, though, Nelson dined with the Moutrays the same night, and very quickly fell in love with Mary.
Collingwood, meanwhile, was at Grenada: ‘a great loss to me,’ wrote Nelson.29 He was back at English Harbour by November and Nelson, despite the Moutray’s company, was glad to see him. ‘What an amiable good man he is! All the rest are geese.’30 They both spent evenings up at Windsor, where they would frizz Mary’s hair for a ball, and she managed to persuade them to draw each other’s portrait. These are preserved in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, where they make a striking contrast. Collingwood, though a fine draughtsman, never managed to draw faces convincingly, and in this picture Nelson is wearing a wig, having had his head shaved after a bout of yellow fever: it is not flattering. Nelson hated the West Indies climate. He was ‘woefully pinched’ by mosquitoes31 on his night-time walks, and the fever never seemed far away. On the other hand, Nelson’s silhouette of Collingwood is a naval paradigm – as if Collingwood was not so much an individual, as an embodiment of the right true naval officer: straight, firm, steady. Collingwood had a much stronger constitution and seemed unaffected by bugs or heat.
On 15 December 1784, after the end of the hurricane season, Mediator was cruising off Antigua when an American vessel was sighted, making for St John’s.32 By this time Collingwood’s brother Wilfred (a year younger than Cuthbert, though apparently he already looked ten years older) had arrived on the station in command of Rattler, a 14-gun sloop. All three captains must by this time have discussed the Navigation Acts and decided it was their duty to prevent American trade in the islands. Collingwood sent a lieutenant on board the American, whose master claimed that his mainmast required repair. Collingwood’s response is interesting, in the light of Nelson’s later comments. He shepherded the American vessel to St John’s, had her tie up alongside him, and sent his carpenter aboard to help effect repairs – knowing full well there was nothing wrong with her. In this way, the American was prevented from landing his cargo, but without any grand gesture or threat on the navy’s part. It was the sort of subtle tactic that Collingwood later developed into a diplomatic art form on the grandest stage.
The American master immediately complained to Governor Shirley, who referred the matter to the attorney-general, while the merchants of St John’s quite understandably railed against this disruption of their trade. The attorney-general’s opinion was that Collingwood had no right to interfere with the trade, hoping to end the matter there. Collingwood, though, knew he had the full weight of the law – and, he hoped, the Admiralty – behind him. The following day he wrote:
For my authority for not suffering her to proceed further, I refer your Excellency to the Statutes (12 Chas: 2 and the 7th and 8th of William and Mary) excluding Aliens from Commerce with the British Colonies, which statutes I am ordered to put in full force and execution.33
It must have come as an unpleasant surprise for the attorney-general to confront a post-captain able to quote chapter and verse of the law to him. Collingwood had no intention of backing down. The matter was naturally referred to the senior officer on the station, Admiral Hughes, though none of the captains expected much support from him. Hughes was living in Barbados, having already made an enemy of Nelson on the passage out. He came up with an entirely unsatisfactory compromise, ordering his captains to report the arrival of foreign ships, but to take no action against them unless by the express orders of the governor. There was little or no chance of Shirley acting under his own initiative. Nelson and the Collingwoods were furious with their admiral, though they cannot have been surprised. Collingwood wrote to his sister in January 1785:
Of this man here [Admiral Hughes] nothing but nonsense can be expected. Because our diligence reflects on his neglect, he dislikes
us: we are seldom with him, but often enough. It is by dint of much trouble that I brought about the exclusion of the Americans from these islands. To my representation from Grenada he made a reply which can never be produced as an instance of his knowledge or zeal for supporting the rights of British ships and seamen. When we all met at Barbadoes, however, the point difficult as it was, was carried, and the Americans are excluded to the great grief of those Governors, collectors, and American merchants who made immense sums by this illicit trade … The people of this island clamour’d loudly against my conduct, and I was pester’d with letters …34
Thus fortified by the moral superiority of the righteous, the three captains carried on. In February Collingwood seized the Lovely Ann, a merchantman flying an Irish harp flag, and in July the Dolphin, an American brig. Wilfred and Nelson were at it too. It soon became clear that they were going to be sued for wrongful seizure; indeed they were pursued by lawyers for many years afterwards. Potentially they could be ruined by what they saw as their duty. Nelson took it upon himself to ask the Admiralty for indemnification against litigation, and to his and Collingwood’s great relief the Admiralty supported them fully.
Nelson later wrote a very full account of the entire episode. It reveals a pathological trait in his character. Fond as he was of Collingwood, and eager to give him praise, he still could not allow that Collingwood had been the instigator of the policy:
The Captains Collingwood were the only officers, with myself, who ever attempted to hinder the illicit trade with America; and I stood singly with respect to seizing, for the other officers were fearful of being brought into scrapes.35
This is evidently not true. Nelson would never have dared repeat it in public, and yet he seems not to have been able to resist taking for himself any glory that was going. It does not even have the taint of personal rivalry; he seems simply incapable of granting that another officer was as zealous, if not more so, than himself. It would not be the last time that his friend suffered at his hands in this way. Did Collingwood know of this trait? It is hard to believe that he did not. Later, he admitted that Nelson was prone to flattery, and sometimes allowed himself to be surrounded by the wrong people, but he was adamant that Nelson always put the service and his friends before himself. This sounds like loyalty overcoming truth.36
Meanwhile, life on the station continued, though not for the Moutrays. John was seriously ill, and early in 1785 they returned to England. ‘I shall miss them grievously,’ wrote Collingwood, ‘she is quite a delight and makes many an hour cheerfull, that without her wou’d be dead weight.’37 Nelson was even more effusive. ‘Her equal I never saw … I took leave of her with a heavy heart. What a treasure of a woman.’38 John Moutray died shortly after returning to England. Both Collingwood and Nelson corresponded with Mary for the rest of their lives, often in terms that can only be described as very warm. Had she been a widow earlier, one or other, probably both of them, would surely have proposed marriage to her.
Collingwood, meanwhile, was having trouble with his ‘monkeys’. ‘The boy Pennyman is quite a plague, a dirty lad without one good quality to set against a great many bad ones.’39 Raigersfeld and any others who showed promise were allowed into his cabin on a Sunday morning. Here the captain tried to give them a taste for letters, made more palatable by the prospect of sharing his breakfast. Collingwood preferred to see his young gentlemen thrive on the carrot, but he had no hesitation in employing the stick when he thought it necessary, whatever his later reputation for banning the use of the ‘cat’ might suggest:
One morning after breakfast … all the midshipmen were sent for into the Captain’s cabin, and four of us were tied up one after the other to the breech of one of the guns, and flogged upon our bare bottoms with a cat-’o-nine-tails, by the boatswain of the ship; some received six lashes, some seven, and myself three. No doubt we all deserved it. Some time after this another of the midshipmen and myself were put to mess with the common men, where we lived with them for three months … At first I was indignant at such treatment, but there was no help for it … and I am very glad I was so placed, as it gave me a great insight into the character of seamen …40
… precisely Collingwood’s intention. This was the same treatment that Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey was so grateful for when, as a mid’ in Surprise, he was disrated on the same Leeward Islands station – though in his case it was for keeping a trollop in the cable tiers. Collingwood was not only sensible of the effect of his discipline on the midshipmen themselves. He knew its effects on the crew, too, as Raigersfeld and his mates found to their cost on one occasion:
The Captain, a well read man as well as a clever seaman, took it into his head one day that he would like to see the midshipmen work their day’s-work from their own observations before him on the quarter deck; they did so, but only three or four out of twelve or thirteen could accomplish this with any degree of exactitude, so calling those to him who were deficient, he observed to them how remiss they were, and suddenly, imputing their remissness to their pigtails, he took his penknife out of his pocket and cut off their pigtails close to their heads above the tie, then presenting them to their owners, desired they would put them into their pockets and keep them until such time as they could work a day’s-work, when they might wear them again if they thought proper. This coup de main afforded visibly an internal smile upon the countenances of all present.41
One of the problems inherent in the West Indies economy was its reliance on monoculture. Almost every square yard of land was turned over to the production of sugar cane, so fresh food for hungry soldiers and sailors was often in short supply, and during the summer months when hurricanes could strike without warning, there was little chance of being resupplied from England:
So very seldom was it that fresh provisions could be had at this time in the West Indies, that the captain of the hold used to catch rats, (of which there was an abundance in the ship) in the night, and by eight in the morning, generally four or five rats were ready cleaned and spread out as butchers dress sheep for the inspection of amateurs; and those who purchased the rats for a relish, had only to pepper and salt them well, broil them in the galley, and they were found nice and delicate eating; so that this captain of the hold’s fishing for them, for he caught them by a hook and line, became a source of profit. As to the rats, they fed off the best of the ship’s provisions, such as biscuit, flour, peas, &c. and they were full as good as rabbits, although not so large.42
What stores the ships did carry suffered greatly from the effects of a tropical climate:
The biscuit that was served to the ship’s company was so light, that when you tapped it upon the table, it fell almost into dust, and thereout numerous insects, called weevils, crawled; they were bitter to the taste, and a sure indication that the biscuit had lost its nutritious particles; if, instead of these weevils, large white maggots with black heads made their appearance, then the biscuit was considered to be only in its first state of decay; these maggots were fat and cold to the taste, but not bitter.43
Towards the end of the hurricane season of 1785 Mediator sailed for Barbados. She was becalmed off the island of Deseada (la Désirade, off Guadeloupe) for a night, but at dawn the next day it was obvious a nasty blow was on the way. Reefs were taken in the topsails and the courses were hauled up. At one in the afternoon the sky became black, and the edge of the horizon seemed to be covered with a white foam that advanced with extraordinary rapidity. Before the hands, called from below to shorten sail, could even get up through the hatchways the squall struck, and Mediator was instantly on her beam ends. Men were deafened and made stupid by the noise of wind and foam screaming through the rigging, as all hands desperately tried to haul down the yards on to a near vertical deck. And then as suddenly as it had risen the wind fell, the skies opened and torrents of water fell on the ship.
Many of the men involuntarily began to huddle together under the half deck, along with bemused goats and sheep, all with a sense of
awe and impending danger, until, at last:
A terrible crash took place in the fore part of the ship, accompanied by a tremendous explosion and stench of sulphur; deep groans followed, – sixteen men upon the main deck were knocked down, some were apparently dead, and others groaning; relief was instantly afforded, and in about four hours after all were well again. A lightning ball had struck the fore topmast, passed into the pigsty, and through the galley into the waist, where it burst and overthrew seventeen men; eleven pigs in the sty before the mast were killed, belonging to the Captain; the silver buckles in the shoes of the gunner were melted into wire, and himself was knocked out of the roundhouse forward.44
Amazingly, no one was killed. By the 1780s the Admiralty was supplying its ships with lightning conductors, but bizarrely they came in a box to be deployed when necessary. Mediator’s evidently never saw the light of day. As a reward for the exertions of the ship’s company in fishing the foremast (in effect putting huge plank splints on it) and setting the ship to rights, Collingwood had his dead pigs distributed among them. Raigersfeld’s mess made a ‘very good dinner from it, and considered it a God-send’.
Mediator returned to English Harbour at the beginning of 1786. Here she was hove down and careened, and then sailed for England. Raigersfeld subsequently had a long, though disappointing, career. He served as a lieutenant on the 14-gun sloop Speedy a few years before her famous cruise under Lord Cochrane. Refusing promotion to another ship, he was captured in her and spent six months on parole in France where he was nearly executed on a trumped-up charge. He escaped, and later became a post-captain, though he saw no action. He ended his career as a rear-admiral, a ‘yellow’ admiral, without an active command. Surprisingly, he acquired great skill as an artist, and exhibited paintings four times at the Royal Academy.45 In 1815 he encountered Napoleon on the deck of Bellerophon and made a sketch of the former emperor. He wrote in his autobiography that he spent no more valuable time in his life than when Collingwood disrated him and he learned the ways of the lower deck.