Men of Honour (17 page)

Of course, one can't be too dewy-eyed about this. The degree of punishment, compulsion, anger and maltreatment of men on board the Trafalgar fleet would be considered barbaric today. In the days before the battle, in ship after ship, punishments had been given. On
Victory
, according to the log kept by the master, Thomas Atkinson, on the 5th of October 6 men had been given 36 lashes each for drunkenness; on the 8th another 7, the same punishment for the same crime; on the 19th another 10, again the same number of lashes for the same crime. In the battle, the flagship would suffer some terrible casualties: 54 killed, 25 dangerously wounded, 12 badly wounded and 42 slightly wounded—one in six men killed or hurt by enemy fire. But in the aftermath of battle, there was no let-up. The habits of punishment continued. On 29 October, barely a week after the guns had ceased firing, and after the most dreadful storm that many of the sailors had ever encountered, Atkinson's log would record:

Steering for Gibraltar. Fresh breezes and Cloudy. Out 1st Reef Topsails. Departed this life Mr Palmer Mid
ⁿ
[one of the Trafalgar wounded]. Punished Jn
^o
Matthews, Rich
^d
Collins, W
^m
Stanford, Jn
^o
Mallard [or Walland], Chas Waters & Mich
^l
Griffiths Seamen with 36 lashes each for Contempt & Disobedience of Orders.

There could be no sentimentality about this. The destruction of the French and Spanish Fleets could not mean the end of imposed discipline.

Thomas Hardy, Nelson's beloved captain, was more severe than most in the discipline he imposed on his crew. In the course of 1804 on the Mediterranean station, according to the evidence of
Victory'
s log, some 380 dozen lashes had been meted out to the men who made the flagship work, about 4,500 lashes in all. Drunkenness was by far the commonest offence, but all crimes that were punished with the lash could be classified as threats to order. Contempt, disobedience, insolence, neglect of duty and sleeping at one's post were all the offences of people who were not fulfilling their place in the regulated structure on which the fleet relied. Only five instances of theft—a crime not against the ship but against fellow members of the crew—are recorded against over 150 acts of insubordination. For very exceptional offences, including desertion, use of mutinous language or buggery, punishments of several hundreds of lashes would be given.

To some at the time it seemed barbaric, and there exists a rare description of what it was like to be beaten in this way:

I felt an astounding sensation between the shoulders under my neck, which went to my toe-nails in one direction and my finger-nails in another, and stung me to the heart as if a knife had gone through my
body…He came on a second time a few inches lower, and then I thought the former stroke sweet and agreeable compared with that one. I felt my flesh quiver in every nerve from the scalp of my head to my toe-nails. The time between each stroke seemed so long as to be agonizing, and yet the next came too soon…What with the blood from my tongue and my lips which I had also bitten, and the blood from my lungs or some other internal part ruptured by the writhing agony, I was almost choked and became almost black in the face.

Sickening as that is, and no doubt reflective of one reality, it nevertheless sounds like propaganda. Seamen in 1805 did not write ‘What with the blood from my tongue…' nor would they have called a heart-rending pain in their gut ‘some other internal part ruptured by the writhing agony' Neither of those expressions are the authentic voice of the lower deck. When you look harder, at genuinely contemporary documents, something different emerges: both a more phlegmatic attitude to suffering and an extraordinary sense that the revolution in feelings which had overtaken the gentry in the 18th century had yet to penetrate the social levels below them. Just as in Jane Austen's novels members of the working class do not exist in the same exquisite universe of feelings inhabited by their social betters, there is a sense on board the Nelsonian ship-of-the-line that ordinary seamen, a little like slaves or farmed animals, were somehow beneath the level at which consideration for their feelings was relevant.

The Rev. Edward Mangin, a temporary and admittedly disenchanted Irish chaplain on HMS
Gloucester
, blockading the Dutch in the uncomfortable broken, shallow waters of the North Sea in 1812, considered the world of a fighting fleet a place where ‘every object [was] at variance with the sensibilities of a rational and enlightened mind',
full of ‘preparations the most complex and ingenious for the purposes of plundering and murdering [one's] fellow creatures.' Each man-of-war, Mangin thought, was nothing but ‘a prison, within whose narrow limits were to be found Constraint, Disease, Ignorance, Insensibility, Tyranny, Sameness, Dirt and Foul air: and in addition, the dangers of Ocean, Fire, Mutiny, Pestilence, Battle and Exile.'

Mangin only lasted three months in the navy but it was an educative time. ‘Just before we sailed,' he wrote in his journal,

occurred one of those accidents, which though shocking to me, made little or no impression on my ship-mates, and was not talked of five minutes after it happened. A seaman, employed at the moment, with all the energy and fearless activity peculiar to this class of people, fell from the mainyard of the
Stirling Castle
, 74, lying close to us: he struck, as he dropped, against the main-chains, and was probably killed, for he instantly went down and disappeared.

If it had been an officer or a gentleman to whom this had happened, it is inconceivable that the ship's company would have treated it as ‘one of those things'. Later, at sea, Mangin was even more forcibly struck by the emotional and conceptual gap between quarter—and lower decks. A seaman on board the
Gloucester
had been fishing for mackerel when somehow he had fallen overboard. A boat was launched after him as he struggled in the water far behind. Just as his rescuers arrived, he sank, his waterlogged coat dragging him down. He was within seconds of death and only saved by the quick-wittedness of one of the boat crew grabbing a boat hook and hooking it under his clothes. He was brought back on board, restored by the doctors and, to Mangin's amazement, the next day was on duty as usual.

This is May 1812 and the man—significantly nameless in the story; Mangin only names officers—had been through one of the central liminal experiences by which the cultivated classes of Europe were then entranced. He had seen death; he had been within death's grasp; he had lived through a moment of revelatory, Gothic intensity and yet he shrugs it off like a dog that has been for a plunge in a river. Mangin is puzzled. The incident

admits of a question whether bravery in men of the lower classes of society should not rather be termed insensibility: or is it that they have the sensibility of the enlightened, but want expression? The man above mentioned owed his safety to his resolution;…yet, it was perfectly impossible to discover that he was in the smallest degree perplexed by the prospect of death, or exhilarated by his preservation.

For the governing classes, the men they subjected to such brutal discipline, to whom strong alcohol and women shipped over in bumboats when in port was a regrettable and in part hideous necessity, seem to have been of a different kind, for whom the ‘sensibility of the enlightened' was as alien as loyalty to King George would be to a Frenchman. This sense of a conceptual class division was not confined to the navy. It was generally accepted that men who could not be considered gentlemen were, at least in a political and social sense, of a different kind to those whose concern was order, government, rationality and business. Even John Wilkes, making his radical case, carefully delineates the boundaries of the political:

The people (I do not mean the illiterate rabble, who have neither capacity for judging of matters of government, nor property to be concerned for) are the
fountain
of authority. What they order is right,
what they prohibit is wrong. Because the public
business
is their business.

The illiterate rabble were not to have a vote because they could not understand what they were voting on or for. Enlightened captains and flag officers attended with detailed and constant care to the wellbeing of their men, both physical and mental, and the crew of a man-of-war were often referred to simply as ‘the people' or by the captain as ‘my people' but this term represented concern for the effective and profitable working of a complex organisation, much as a farmer would be interested in the health of his livestock. In some critical sense, these people were not considered people in the same way that the people who walked the quarterdeck were people. Love and honour operated down to a certain social level; below that it was a question of discipline and obedience, lubricated with drink and occasionally interrupted by sex and war.

When, in ‘the complex and wonderful machine of which I was an inhabitant' Mangin found that, for some obscure reason, a gentleman was living on the lower deck, it was as if the natural order had been turned upside down. He discovered one seaman on board the
Gloucester
, called Hickey, who

spoke French fluently, had the manners and address of a gentleman, fenced well, drew with taste, was a good mathematician and arithmetician, wrote a beautiful hand, conversed with a very happy choice of expression, quoted various authors, poets, philosophers and orators; criticised with judgment and novelty of feeling, statuary, architecture and painting—and played the violin finely: he besides impressed every one with respect, by his air of genteel and humble melancholy.

The officers of the
Gloucester
had a total of 500 books on board, which was all very well. But to find a Hickey slinging his hammock between the 32-pounders on the gundecks with between five and six hundred other men, where ‘the ports being necessarily closed from evening to morning, the heat, in this cavern of only 6 feet high, and so entirely filled with human bodies, was overpowering', that was simply disturbing.

Of course, this gulf between the classes on board was at least in part, as Mangin guessed, a question of language. They ‘wanted expression'. Within a few decades, the English gentleman would become identified with a hopeless stiffness and lack of emotional vocabulary. The working man, for figures like Marx, Ruskin and Morris, became the source of a kind of emotional authenticity which the gentleman lacked. In 1805, the position was precisely reversed. Nothing was more fluent than the affective language of the 1805 officer. It was the seamen who struggled to express their love and affection. When Tom Flynn, coxswain of the
Gloucester'
s first cutter, died on 29 July 1812, he had been lying for days in his cot in the ship's hospital, ‘mad, pale as ashes, and convulsed with dying spasms. Four or five of his messmates stood about him, holding lanthorns to his face, dropping silent tears on him, or in the most heart-rending accents calling him “Poor Tom” and “honest messmate”!'

When men from the lower deck needed to express feelings of a more sustained or elaborate kind, they reached with great difficulty, often in ways that remain profoundly moving two centuries later, for the language of gentility. A letter survives in the archives of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, addressed to ‘Mr George Hancock. Worksop. Nottinghamshire'. It was written on board
Victory
, by John Vincent, a 30-year-old Londoner, who was a quarter gunner on the flagship, He was writing to the father of a friend of his who had died in an accident during
the long blockade off Toulon. It is worth quoting in full, as evidence from the other side, of precisely the gap between officers and men which Edward Mangin had seen. In every line one can make out the careful, sombre attempt to address the grief and concern which friend and father shared.

H.M.S.
Victory

July 24 1805

Mr Hancock

I have rec
^d
the Letter directed to your son, dated Jan
^ry
1st [1805] and as a Messmate of your son's, think myself in duty bound to inform you of your son's unhappy and sudden Death, tho' at present being unknown to you, as a Parent, I feel a Parent's tenderness and affection, it certainly is a tender point to disclose, and will cause a tender and mutual sensation to commiserate his unhappy and untimely end, to you his Parents, his Brothers, Sisters, and acquaintances. On or about the 24th of November last, as we were cruising off Toulon, and at the time little or no Wind, the Day of the Month and time were taken down by me, but by some accident have lost the Memorandum, but hopeing this will reach you safe as a means of Giving you Satisfaction, I specify the time and place, as near as possible my recollection will allow me, tho' fully convinced this unhappy News will cause a grief not easy to be describ'd but by those persons, who experience so close and tender a tie in Nature, as the Agitation of Mind descri'd from a parent to a Child. I hope you will not say I express myself in too fully, tho' it is, a Candid and sincere manner, for I am a father, and possess'd of a Parent's feeling and concern. About half after ten at Night the time before mention'd, having left him about ten minutes or a Quarter of an
Hour, walking on the Larboard Gangway of the ship, but as I was Informed by Persons who were near him, that he being a young Man of a sprightly disposition, was moving himself about in different attitudes, unfortunately press'd the end of one of the rails, which are ship'd upon the Gangway, on purpose to hold the Ship's company's hammocks upright, I believe rather too hard, which upset with him, and not being able to save himself, he unfortunately fell overboard and was Drown'd, tho' every Effort possible was made use of for to save him, but at the time of his falling overboard, he had a great Coat on, which I believe must have been a great annoyance to him, I am very sorry, Sir, that I am the channel of such unwelcome Intelligence, tho' think myself in duty bound to Inform you, and if not too great an intrusion, should wish to be Informed of your receiving this Letter, which will be a great satisfaction to your Ever Obd
^t
Servant

JOHN VINCENT