Men-of-War by Patrick O'Brian

Author:Patrick O'Brian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-09-16T17:00:00+00:00

When beer was to be had, they were given a gallon a day; when it was not, which was most of the time, they had their beloved grog. This was rum, mixed with three times the amount of water and a little lemon-juice against scurvy: they were given a pint of grog at dinner time and another for supper, and they often got dead drunk, particularly when they saved up their rations and drank it all at once.

They were nearly always uneducated, often unable to read or write, and they had generally lived very hard all their lives; but there were some wonderful men among them, brave, very highly skilled at their calling, magnificently loyal to their shipmates and to their officers if they were well led. As Nelson said, ‘Aft the more honour, forward the better man.’ By aft he meant the quarterdeck, abaft the mainmast, the officers’ part of the ship, and by forward he meant the men, the foremast jacks, who lived forward of the mainmast.

They were brought together partly by free entry (popular officers like Saumarez or Cochrane could always man their ships with volunteers) and partly by the press-gang. Impressment was a rough and ready form of conscription, and the idea was that seamen should be taken from merchant ships or seized on land and compelled to serve in the fleet for as long as their services were required. In practice it meant that a short-handed ship (and a man-of-war needed an enormous crew – roughly ten times the size of a merchantman’s) would send an officer ashore with a strong party of powerful, reliable sailors armed with pistols and cutlasses for show and clubs for use to catch any reasonably able-bodied man they could lay their hands on – seamen for choice but anyone who could haul on a rope if sailors were not to be found. There was also the impress service itself, where shore-based officers did much the same, sending their prey to receiving ships, whence they were drafted to the men-of-war. Then, in 1795, there was the quota-system, by which each county was required to provide so many men for the Navy. The counties responded by getting rid of their undesirables – thieves, poachers, paupers, general nuisances, nearly all of them landsmen, or as the men-of-war’s men called them, grass-combing lubbers.

Faced with recruits of this kind, some of them straight from gaol, many officers tightened the already severe discipline of their ships: flogging became more frequent and more savage, and ‘starting’, hitting people with a cane or a rope’s end, to make them jump to their work, grew far worse. The real seamen came in for a good deal of this, and they began to feel even more ill-used, particularly as these alleged volunteers, who were sometimes given the choice between transportation and the Navy, received a bounty of as much as £70 – well over four years’ pay for an able seaman. The sailors were ill-used, they were knocked about,

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