Trading in War by Margarette Lincoln

Author:Margarette Lincoln
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300227482
Publisher: Yale University Press

Defending absent husbands

Some seamen’s wives were not just competent domestic managers but called upon to defend, intelligently, their absent husband. Charlotte Whitford, who kept a shop in Back Lane (now New King Street), Deptford, letting out an upper floor to lodgers, had to step in when her husband was accused of deserting his ship. He regretted having enlisted. Conditions were terrible in the North Sea and he had already been away for two years. ‘You may depend on this I shall take the first chance I can to escape from this floating hell’, he wrote.49 When he and others were tempted to abscond, they were put in irons. A severe flogging was imminent but Charlotte contacted relations and asked them to intercede with her husband’s captain.

Few were as assiduous in their husband’s defence as Elizabeth, wife of William Bligh. The couple met in 1781 on the Isle of Man where her father was Receiver-General of Customs. They married after a whirlwind romance: Bligh had served under Cook on his third voyage to the Pacific and was expecting a new commission. He returned to sea just ten days after the marriage. Betsy, as Bligh always called her, was a Glasgow-born, vivacious woman who dressed with verve and style. She was well educated, fluent in French and Italian, and wrote confident letters in a bold, italic hand. She was also well connected. Her maternal grandfather was principal of Glasgow University, chaplain to the King, and friend of leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. Her uncle, Duncan Campbell, was a wealthy merchant. He owned a fleet that traded with the West Indies and was contracted to ship convicts to Britain’s American colonies. Later, he managed convict hulks on the Thames. Bligh benefited from these connections.

After the American War, when Bligh faced the prospect of maintaining his family on naval half-pay, Campbell employed him as a master sailing to the West Indies. As Betsy said, ‘a Rum and Sugar Capt may be as well off as any other’.50 In fact, rather better. When in 1787 he took the captaincy of the Bounty to transport breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, he took a salary cut from £500 to £50 a year. Whether Bligh ever captained slave ships is doubtful, but he did not baulk at working in the shadow of the slave trade. Breadfruit was intended to provide cheap food for slaves on the sugar plantations.

Bligh was notoriously thin-skinned and exacting. He had an explosive temper. While he has been unfairly blamed for the mutiny on the Bounty – it was his misfortune rather than his fault – there is no doubt that his ability to curse and swear was extraordinary. He was court martialled for it in 1804 and he must be one of the few British naval officers ever to be ordered to moderate his language at sea. The more surprising, then, to find that his letters to Betsy were models of affection and politeness. They were devoted to each other.

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