Cochrane (6 page)

Despite the dark legends of the press gangs, the lure of prizes was potentially the more effective weapon in recruiting seamen. The attraction was simply that piracy had been made legal for the duration of hostilities. In pursuit of their prey, the most respectable commanders of English ships resorted to devices which would have caused international dismay half a century later. Royal Navy captains flew American, Danish, or even French colours to dupe their opponents, hoping to come close enough to ships or shore-batteries to do untold damage before their victims awoke to the deception. When Sir Sydney Smith sailed almost into Brest harbour in
1795,
flying French colours and hailing his enemies in their own language, no one thought he had acted otherwise than honourably. The French, in turn, went hunting in English colours. Though there was a difference in build between English and French ships, identification was by no means easy. Ships were frequently captured and incorporated into the opposing navy without even a change of name. The
Bonne Cit
oyenne
and the
Revolutionnaire
fought in the Royal Navy under their original names. There was an
Achill
e
on both sides at Trafalgar.

To hide a ship's guns, or to show sailors on deck dressed in the French style, were minimal deceptions by the Royal Navy. In return, the French set traps for avaricious crews. When Napoleon annexed Italy, all shipping in Italian waters became fair game. Captain Abraham Crawford described in his
Reminiscences
the delight of his comrades on H.M.S.
Sultan
at finding two merchant ships anchored and abandoned off the Ligurian coast, their crews having retired to a nearby town for the night. Boarding parties swarmed up the sides and cut the cables. But neither of the ships could be moved. The British sailors had fallen for the lure of ships moored by an extra line from the masthead to the cliffs above them. Concealed on these heights, the watching sharpshooters opened a flashing hail of musketry, which scythed among the boarding parties on the open decks. Any man who climbed the mast to sever the line would have been an easy target in the moonlight. But so long as the rope was not cut, there was no escape from the musket fire. The boarding parties were saved at last by the presence of mind of a lieutenant. Dressing a dummy in sailors' clothes, he hoisted it aloft. Every musket on the cliffs opened fire, and the dummy fell. During the moment when the sharpshooters were occupied with reloading, the most agile of the British sailors shinned up and cut the ropes.
²⁸

But there was a code of honour in such matters. The British despised the French practice of having sharpshooters in the rigging to pick off individual officers and men during close skirmishes. It was one thing for a row of cannon to fire a general broadside at an enemy ship, when no one man fired specifically at another. But for a marksman to take deliberate aim at his opponent and shoot him was not an honest form of combat. Such had been the feeling in the army during the eighteenth century and so it was to remain for many captains and their crews. Prudence, as well as chivalry, endorsed the sentiment, since marksmen and their weapons had a disconcerting habit of setting fire accidentally to their own rigging.

The same prejudice operated against the use of delayed-action devices or "submarine" warfare. Metal carcases were sometimes packed with gunpowder and floated into enemy ports or anchorages under cover of darkness. "Not a fair proceeding," said Admiral Otway during the Walcheren expedition. "Unmanly," announced Captain Crawford, "assassin-like". Even the heating of shot before firing was regarded as a despicable French subterfuge. More than a decade after the Napoleonic wars, the naval historian William James still thought that, "The employment of hot shot is not usually deemed honourable warfare." But, like the sharpshooters in the rigging, the practice also involved serious risk of setting fire to the ship which employed it.
²⁹

However, a young officer in Cochrane's position, joining the navy with a hope of enriching himself by prizes, faced a more powerful enemy than France or Spain, and one whose weapons were a good deal more sophisticated: the Admiralty and its prize courts. In the view of many serving officers, these courts were at best unsympathetic and, all too often, cynically corrupt. It was relatively common for a hopeful young commander and his men to find that, after a hard-won capture, the Admiralty proposed to appropriate the entire value of the prize. It was always open to the heroes to fight for their claim in the prize court. But even if they won their case, they might hear that the cost of the proceedings had swallowed up more than the sum due to them, so that they were now in debt to the court as well as having been robbed of the proceeds of their valour.

A man might complain publicly or privately against the prize system. But before he set himself up as a "sea lawyer", he was well advised to remember that this very employment, let alone his promotion, lay in the hands of the Admiralty itself. In consequence, there was a good deal of private grumbling and very little public campaigning.

Even in time of war, appointment and promotion continued to be the great preoccupations of aspiring heroes. John Wilson Croker, who became Secretary to the Board of Admiralty in
1809,
was dismayed by the "avalanche of applications", which fell upon his desk, day after day and year after year. He
may have reflected that Lord St
Vincent, as First Lord of the Admiralty from
1801
to
1804,
had refused to favour protege
s, even when they came from his own family, and had returned blunt refusals to the Duke of Kent and the Prince of Wales when they sought preferment for one of their favourites.

An easy pretext for rejection, in the case of a young man for whom a first naval appointment was sought, was to show that he was too old. As Croker informed one persistent suitor, "a man turned nineteen years of age is more than six years too old to begin a sea life". Nelson had been a midshipman at twelve, and his friend George Parsons at eleven. Other "Young Gentlemen" went on active service at ten years old or less, until
1794
when the Admiralty laid down that candidates for commissions must be at least eleven. After several years of being dressed like a hero and beaten like a child, the boy might "pass for lieutenant". He would still be young, in many cases. Indeed, Admiral Rodney had appointed his son to the command of a British warship at the age of fifteen. But the path from junior lieutenant to first lieutenant of a ship more frequently depended on the removal of senior lieutenants by death or misfortune. Many young officers must have shared the dream of William Price in
Mansfield Park,
as he imagined the annihilation of these human obstacles to glory, and his own splendid heroism once he had stepped into their shoes.
³⁰

On promotion to a ship of his own, the lieutenant would become a commander. When appointed to a ship of over twenty guns, he rose to post-captain, or captain as it was more generally known. But all such promotions were liable to cause bitterness. When there was a vacancy for the command of a ship, the best placed lieutenants were those serving on the admiral's flagship. Some of these were beneficiaries of "parliamentary promotion", in which the proteges of a member of parliament were promoted, in exchange for his support of the government. Lieutenants on smaller and less distinguished ships might live and die in their more lowly rank.

Once a lieutenant or a commander became a post-captain, there was no impediment to the highest rank except for a very long list of senior officers. Captains themselves were listed in order of seniority. When there was a vacancy for a rear-admiral, it was filled from the head of the list. Beyond that, there were prospects of becoming vice-admiral, and even admiral of the fleet. In
1794,
there were
425
captains, each waiting long and hopefully to move into the place of the man above him. By
1815,
the captains' list had grown to double that length, making promotion a long and discouraging process.

However, a man might console himself by scanning the names of casualties after each glorious victory, and then doing a little simple arithmetic.

Hope deferred and prizes withheld inevitably tarnished the enthusiasm with which many officers had gone to war. Sir John Barrow wrote angrily to the Admiralty in
1810
that French ships were coming inshore at night and seizing English merchant vessels just off the coast of Kent. The commander of the Royal Navy brig, who was supposed to afford them protection, had evidently had his fill of war by dinner time. He was in the habit of anchoring his ship, retiring to his house at Birchington for a comfortable night's sleep, and leaving the French to do as they pleased. His motive was something more than cowardice or indolence. An entire Royal Navy squadron actually witnessed one seizure, under the eyes of the local population, and did nothing to prevent it. As the French ship made off with her prize, wrote Barrow, "it is mortifying enough to hear people publicly crying out, 'Aye, this is what we get for paying taxes to keep up the navy; a French privateer is not worth capturing, she will not pay the charges of condemnation.'"
³¹

The commander of the squadron, like the captain of the single brig, had learnt the hard lesson that French raiding vessels were too expensive to capture. A small privateer would not even cover the costs in the Admiralty court, so that the victors themselves would have to pay for their valour out of their own pockets. However, the captain who slept ashore may also have fortified himself with the example of Admiral Thomas Matthews, half a century before, who had contrived to spend eighteen years on his country estate without once going to sea.

The reputation of the navy in the war of
1793-1815
reached peaks at the time of great individual victories and then declined as the public mind grew more preoccupied by the horrors of the press gang and the lash. Pressing, as it was called, had become the only means by which a nation of fifteen million could sustain an expanding naval war to contain Napoleon. Yet the consequences of the system led to encounters between British ships, in full view of their countrymen, during which they fought one another as vigorously as they fought the French.

In one such incident, just off Gravesend, the Royal Navy's
Immortalite
sent two boatloads of men, fully armed, to seize enough men from the East India Company's
Woodford
and
Ganges
to make up their complement. As the men of the
Immortalite
attempted to scale the steep, curving sides of the other
ships, they were met by a fusi
lade of shot and missiles, and threatened by the cutlasses of the East India crews if they advanced further. When the lieutenant of the party sent against the
Woodford
saw that one of his men had had his foot nailed to the bottom of the long-boat by a pike, he ordered his marines to open fire. Two of the
Woodford's
crew were shot dead, but the resistance to the boarding parties continued until the Royal Navy at last withdrew with its wounded. The lieutenant of the long-boat was indicted for murder, though acquitted at Maidstone Assizes. Even so, such public skirmishes in the Thames estuary were hardly calculated to boost the nation's enthusiasm for its senior service.
³²

In the navy which young Lord Cochrane now joined, there were even more bizarre aspects of the pressing system. When, for instance, the bands of the
Victory
played, "Britons, Strike Home!" as she sailed into battle at Trafalgar, the sentiments must have sounded a little incongruous to those eighty-two foreigners who made up an important part of the flagship's crew. There were twenty-eight Americans on the
Victory
on that occasion, as well as Frenchmen, Africans, and Indians. It was commonplace for men from neutral ships to be pressed. The American government was foremost in condemning the British for pressing its sailors, while the British swore that American ships were spiriting away shirkers Who wished to avoid their patriotic duty as true-born Englishmen.

Many French and Spanish seamen also chose to serve with their captors rather than to spend the rest of a long war rotting in Dartmoor or one of England's other prisons. But Lieutenant Thomas Hodgskin was determined to enlighten the "apparent ignorance" of the public by revealing that foreigners, American or European, were by no means the most unlikely conscripts for the Royal Navy. "I knew Africans, who had been stolen from Africa, taken in a slave-ship, afterwards cloathed, on board a guard-ship, and, without being able to speak a word of English, sent to man the British fleet. . . . Such a thing is a burlesque upon a national defence."
³³

Thomas Cochrane, like almost all contemporary naval officers, accepted that pressing was a necessary evil during the critical years of the war against France. Even after
1815,
there were many figures of influence who took offence when the system was criticised. In
1822,
Captain Marryat had rashly published his
Suggestions for the Abolition of Impressment.
Some years later, he had occasion to seek permission from William IV to wear a French order conferred on him by Louis XVIII and, at the same time, to seek promotion. The King, having been Lord High Admiral as Duke of Clarence, took a keen interest when the request was forwarded to him.