CHAPTER 11

The Peril of the Waters: War at Sea

But ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats and water-rats, land-thieves, and water-thieves,—I mean pirates,—and there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks.

Merchant of Venice, I, iii, 16–18

WAR AT SEA IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM WAR ON LAND. AS HAS BEEN argued, the sea is an inherently dangerous environment, where men drown in storms, or die from diseases that spread like wildfire in the crowded insanitary conditions aboard ship, or they perish from poor rations or a lack of food and water. Indeed, war marginally increased one's chances of dying at sea. Because it is such a perilous place, survival at sea requires great skills, gained only from experience. It also demands a harsh discipline, for the results of disobedience, or even negligence, can be fatal to all aboard. Yet going to sea has its attractions: seeing new places, the beauty of a tropical sunset, racing along in a monsoon gale, winning the lottery of fabulous prize money—all persuaded men to serve on ships. During the early modern period, the skills required of a sailor changed little since ships remained remarkably consistent, being built out of wood, with smooth-bore cannon, sails and three masts. Ships remained much the same, so the experience of a naval battle stayed pretty constant. Because ships were in essence floating artillery platforms, they were more man than ship killers, thus making decisive naval victories extremely hard to achieve.

The Cruel Sea

Richard Hakluyt, the Elizabethan father of British naval history, recognized the hazards of being at sea in time of peace as well as war. He wrote: ‘No kind of man in any profession in the Commonwealth pass their years in so great and continual a hazard as sailors and so few to grey hairs [old age].’¹ No wonder, he added, that so few of them reached a ripe old age. Storms, uncharted shoals, rotten hulls, anchors that did not hold, masts that could not stand the strain of gale-force winds, cliffs and careless navigation could all sink a ship. On 22 October 1707 Sir Cloudesley Shovell, a popular admiral, ran his fleet aground on the Isles of Scilly in the worst naval accident in British history.² Lacking accurate timepieces, navigators could not precisely determine longitude. As a result, two thousand sailors drowned (and parliament offered a £20,000 prize for the inventor of a precise chronometer).

Storms could kill without pity and without survivors. Explanations, no matter how good, did not count. As Captain John Smith (the first Governor of Virginia) pointed out in his best-selling Sea-Grammar (1627), ‘there is no dallying nor excuses with storms, gusts, overgrown seas and lee shores.’³ Shovell's fate made this point. He not only lost his life when he sailed his fleet ashore, but a reputation built up over forty years. By failing to follow the usual practice of anchoring overnight when uncertain of one's position, and by pressing on instead, the admiral, whom Queen Anne called ‘the finest seaman of his day’, became a horrid warning to all who go down to the sea in ships.

The ocean is alien: we cannot drink it, and, even if we can swim, we cannot survive in it for long. To stay afloat, ships have to be kept watertight—no easy task for wooden planked vessels. To survive, food and water had to be preserved for as long as possible in barrels that were prone to leakage. A large, highly trained, professional crew was needed to work the most complicated and expensive machinery of the day. Man-made or natural accidents could strike without warning. In 1661 James Yonge, a fourteen-year-old surgeon's mate, was seated on the heads of the Adventure when a sudden wave turned the ship hard to starboard, pushed him under water, and nearly swept him out to sea. In 1692 another surgeon's mate, this time aboard the Deptford, was sitting in a similar seat of ease, when a stern-chaser was fired to celebrate the queen's birthday, blowing away his hat and head.⁴

Sailors at sea usually lived on poor, vitamin-deficient food and putrid water. They inhabited enclosed, badly ventilated, fetid lower decks that were in effect floating petri dishes, in which germs and parasites, both familiar and foreign, flourished. No wonder so many died from disease. For instance, within two years, four thousand (84 per cent) of the 4,750 sailors sent to the Caribbean in 1726 died, mostly from sickness. As the ballad ‘Admiral Hosier's Ghost’ lamented:⁵

Think what thousands fell in vain

Wasted with disease and anguish

Not in glorious battle slain.

The most infamous affliction was scurvy. Sir Richard Hawkins, the distinguished Elizabethan sailor, called scurvy ‘the plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners’, claiming that he had seen ten thousand cases during his long career at sea.⁶ The estimate that scurvy killed a million sailors in the eighteenth century is greatly exaggerated, since at the very most only half a million served in the navy during this period.⁷ Since scurvy resulted from a deficiency of Vitamin C over several months, it only became a widespread problem after the late seventeenth century with the growth of a blue-water navy that spent a long time at sea eating preserved foods. At the start of that century several authorities had recommended effective cures. Admiral Richard Hawkins urged the use of citrus fruits. In The Surgion's Mate (1617) John Woodall, the East India Company's surgeon general, advocated using limes, while Captain John Smith's Sea-Grammar favoured lemons. Yet it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the issuance of limes and sauerkraut ended the scourge.

Typhus, caused by lice, and malaria and yellow fever, spread by mosquitoes, were in fact the greater killers. The introduction of hammocks in 1586, which could be folded up and brought on deck to air and dry, replacing cots that Raleigh called ‘sluttish dens that breed sickness’, improved hygiene.⁸ So did more efficient ventilation systems, as well as the replacement of sand and gravel ballast with stones, which were easier to wash out. Hospital ships bolstered a patient's chances of recovery. By 1704 there were four in home waters and one in the Mediterranean. That year James Christie, master surgeon of the hospital ship Jeffreys, urged that all sick sailors be concentrated on such vessels, which should carry live sheep and fowl to provide fresh meat. As a result, Christie boasted, he only lost one in four of his patients, a much better rate than that of fashionable London surgeons. Compared to their land-based colleagues, naval surgeons could do quite well financially. James Yonge claimed to have made an average of over £120 a year from treating sailors with the pox—physically and fiscally the mercury medication exacted a heavy price.⁹ Nonetheless, surgeons were often little better than butchers, with scant concern for their patients. Edward Barlow, who served forty-three of the forty-seven years between 1659 and 1701 at sea or overseas, had little time for sea surgeons. He complained that they would not bother to see a man until he had been sick for two or three days: and then all they did was feel his pulse, ask about his bowel movements, and give him a potion ‘which doeth as much good to him as a blow upon the pate with a stick’. That was one of the many reasons, Barlow concluded, why ‘England was the worst kingdom in all Christendom for poor seamen.’¹⁰

Chaplains were another group that sailors held in contempt. As university graduates they were literate so they sometimes acted as ‘war correspondents’, as during the expeditions of the 1620s. Most, however, were clergymen who had failed on land. Although he was fifty-five years old, with a wife and four children, in 1676 Chaplain Henry Teonge joined the Assistance to avoid his creditors. Even though the Bishop of London recommended Richard Bradford for the post of chaplain on the Swiftsure, he got drunk in every port, cheated at cards, danced naked around the grounds of Trinity College, Dublin, and a few days later did the same with his wife around Carrickfergus at one in the morning. Chaplain Thomas Turner, another of the Bishop of London's protégés, got so drunk that he climbed a mast and fell to his death.¹¹

Life at sea was undeniably tough. According to Luke Foxe, the sailor who explored Hudson Bay, it consisted of ‘a hard cabin, cold and salt meat, broken sleep, mouldy bread, dead beer, want of fire’.¹² Want of pay could damage morale. John Robartes, earl of Radnor, reported that his ‘ill paid’ sailors ‘are low in courage, but loud in complaints’.¹³ Nothing could sap spirits faster than hunger. ‘Sir, for God's sake,’ Sir Edward Howard, captain of the Mary Rose, begged Cardinal Wolsey in April 1513, ‘send us down our victual.’¹⁴ Samuel Pepys knew only too well the importance of ample, good and regular food. He wrote that ‘Englishmen, and more especially seamen love their bellies above all else.’ If you feed them well, he added, they will do anything, overcoming ‘any other hardship you can put upon them’.¹⁵ Alcohol was vitally important. ‘Nothing displeases the men as sour beer,’ Lord Howard of Effingham wrote to the Admiralty during the Armada. On the other hand, ‘Good liquor to sailors is preferable to clothing,’ noted Captain Woodes Rogers, the privateer and first governor of the Bahamas. Barnaby Slush, the sea cook, agreed that ‘liquor is the very cement that keeps the mariners’ body and soul together’.¹⁶

In theory rations were generous. In 1565 the standard daily allowance consisted of one gallon of beer, one pound of bread, two of fresh meat or half a pound of salt beef or bacon, providing 4,257 calories, ample for strenuous labour.¹⁷ The issue of half a pint of neat rum twice a day (which provided another thousand or so calories) was instituted in 1655 following the capture of Jamaica, the sugar island, replacing French brandy. Unlike spirits, food turned rotten particularly in wooden barrels that easily leaked, the only available containers. Complaining that their food was ‘full of maggots and so rotten that a dog would not it eat’, in 1658 the crew of the Maidstone demolished the victualling office at Rochester.¹⁸

War and Death Rates at Sea

In 1690 William Cockburn, one of those naval surgeons whom Barlow despised, estimated that for every sailor who died as a result of enemy action, four perished from other causes.¹⁹ Almost certainly his estimate is far too low. The sea inflicted many more dangers and did much more damage than any enemy. For instance, between 1660 and 1666 Thomas Allin, the royalist admiral, noted twenty-four incidents in his diary in which ships on which he served lost masts or spars: only one was due to enemy action.²⁰ During his forty-three years at sea Barlow survived three fleet actions with only one slight wound, and was shipwrecked twice, being drowned on the second occasion (see ill.18). Only 30 of the 330 pages of dialogue on Marine Affairs (c. 1634) by Nathaniel Boteler, a retired naval captain, privateer and colonial administrator, dealt with fighting at sea; the rest were on sailing, indicating the relative importance of each activity.²¹

Early statistics on deaths at sea are hard to obtain. Of the roughly thirty thousand Spaniards who set out on the Armada, twenty thousand died—1,500 (7.5 per cent) from enemy action, 6,000 (30 per cent) in wrecks, 1,000 (5 per cent) were murdered, mainly after being wrecked, while the remaining 11,500 (57.5 per cent) succumbed to disease. Death rates from disease for the English sailors kept on board ship after the battle were nearly as high.²² The best statistics for deaths at sea are for the years after 1746. During the Seven Years War (1756–63) only 1,512 (0.8 per cent) out of 184,893 naval personnel died from enemy action. While increasing during the American War of Independence (1775–83), that figure remained remarkably constant: of a total of 175,990 sailors, a mere 1,243 (0.7 per cent) perished in combat and 18,541 (10.5 per cent) from disease. For the Napoleonic Wars, out of 103,660 naval deaths, 6,540 (6.3 per cent) were due to enemy action, 12,668 (12.2 per cent) were lost in shipwrecks and 84,440 (82 per cent) to disease.²³ There is no reason to think that the figures for the earlier period were much different. To be sure, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries voyages were shorter, so fewer sailors would have succumbed to scurvy. Yet by the late eighteenth century, chronometers, better charts and the use of ascorbics would have improved non-combat mortality.

So it seems reasonable to infer that going to war increased a sailor's chance of dying by only 5 to 10 per cent. In comparison, it raised a soldier's odds of dying at the hand of the enemy by 50 per cent or more.

A Skilled Profession

Because the sea was so perilous it was no place for the unskilled. A ship was ‘too big and unmanageable a machine to be run by novices’, observed Barnaby Slush. The author of Naval Royal: or a Sea Cook turn'd projector (1709) went on to observe that ‘good mariners grew up not like mushrooms without care or culture,’ but needed ‘just and generous and understanding officers’.²⁴ One such officer, Captain John Smith, justified writing his manual because ‘I have seen many books on the art of war on land, and never any for the sea.’ Apparently, he was unaware of William Bourne's A Regiment at Sea (1574). Written by a self-taught gunner and ship's carpenter from Gravesend, it borrowed heavily from other sources. A shortage of naval textbooks meant that some students had to go back to the classics. In 1660 Sir Thomas Browne wrote to his son, a naval officer about to fight the Dutch, ‘When you first undertook this service, you cannot but remember that I caused you to read the descriptions of all the sea fights of renown in Plutarch and Aristotle.’²⁵

In addition to being skilled professionals, officers had to be leaders. ‘I confess the charging of trenches and the entrance to a breech are attempts as desperate as a man could think,’ thought Captain John Smith: having fought both on sea and on land, he believed that the former was far more dangerous than the latter.²⁶ To be sure, both required similar leadership skills. For instance, during the La Rochelle expedition of 1627 a tempest forced Lieutenant Dawtrey Cooper, captain of the Pelican, to anchor. The lines dragged, compelling Cooper to use his cudgel to make the crew (many of whom were pressed landsmen so sick they would have preferred to drown) leave the hold ‘and labour for their lives’. A week later another gale woke Cooper, who went on deck to discover the watch all asleep. ‘I first gave thanks to almighty God who showed me that danger I was in, and then fetched my cudgel, and wakened my watch.’ Forty years later, in the same waters, a storm brought down the Antelope's main mast. She was about to flounder or run aground on the French coast. The crew was inert with fear. So, like an officer rallying his men in the face of defeat, Jeremy Roch, her first lieutenant, shouted ‘Who follows me?’ as he ran up the shrouds to clear away the damage. Several topmen followed and the ship was saved.²⁷

The training of naval officers relied more on a practical apprenticeship than book-learned theory. Although this produced the tensions between the gentlemen and tarpaulins (which are discussed in Chapters 3 and 10), it also resulted in a very efficient navy. Indeed, an incompetent navy is in many ways an oxymoron, particularly in the days of sail: storms, unseaworthy ships, rocks and cliffs tend to sink amateurs long before they ever come to battle. When soldiers, who lacked a lifetime of experience at sea, commanded fleets, the results were usually ruinous: every senior officer of the botched 1626 Cadiz expedition was a soldier. Joining a ship as volunteers or midshipmen, aged twelve to fourteen, apprentice officers occupied the orlop between the lower deck and wardroom. Because officers and men lived so close to one another at sea, professionally they had to keep their distance. After the restoration a midshipman had to serve a set time and pass an exam to be promoted lieutenant. In contrast, army officers did not serve in the ranks, had no exams to take and mixed far more with civilians.²⁸

Out of combat, army discipline could afford to be more lenient. If, for example, a sentry fell asleep while guarding some stores, the results of his neglect would not be as catastrophic as that of a look-out at sea who nodded off, missing surf breaking on a reef a few hundred yards ahead. A soldier who forgot to fix his musket strap tightly deprived his battalion of an extra weapon. A gunner who did not properly secure an artillery piece before a storm could produce ‘a loose cannon’ that could run wild, smashing walls and bulkheads, perhaps sinking the vessel. Sailors drunk on duty were heavily penalized because they could hazard the ship. Undisciplined crews could trigger terrible results. Just before she floundered in 1544 the Mary Rose's captain called his crew ‘a sort of knaves I cannot rule’.²⁹ Naval discipline could be harsh: the first flogging around the fleet was in 1658.³⁰ The 1663 Articles of War ordered that anyone guilty of lying should be hoisted to the mainstay with a shovel and broom tied to his back for half an hour, and then made to clean the ship's side immediately under the heads for a week. Harshness could be mitigated. In 1675 one Skinner of the Assistance was sentenced to be ducked three times for desertion. But when his officer intervened on his behalf explaining that ‘he had injuries enough already having a wife a whore and a scold,’ he was pardoned.³¹

The view of a harsh navy of excessive flogging was truer of the Napoleonic Wars than of the early modern period, when land-based civilian hierarchies, mainly rural ones, reinforced those at sea. Mutinies, which were in fact strikes over pay and conditions, took place within well-established procedures in which each side recognized the other's rights and limits. Navies had far more skilled enlisted men than armies, especially the corps of warrant officers, such as the carpenter, sailmaker and boatswain, who stayed with the same ship and could steady rasher hands. They were a ship's backbone: competent and solid middle-class men. Take William Bourne. As a young man he attracted the patronage of Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth's chief adviser, and became a friend of Dr John Dee, the scientist. Bourne had a distinguished naval career as a gunner and carpenter, wrote several books on seamanship, gunnery and navigation and designed a primitive submarine before retiring to his native Gravesend to serve on the town council and keep an inn.³²

For such men—the commissioned and warrant officers—discipline grew from a consensus that authority was essential to survive at sea. This was a lesson that pressed men had, often painfully, to learn. Barnaby Slush, who as a cook was one of the Lyme's key warrant officers, had little time for conscripts, two-thirds of whom, he claimed, were ‘boys, pickpockets and skipkennels’.³³ A few men volunteered for the navy, recruited by those such as Matthew Bishop, who had the gift of the gab. With ready wit, and readier cash, he could induce men to take the bounty and sign up for his ship. ‘Bishop, thou art the greatest artist that was ever born,’ his captain congratulated him, ‘for it is miraculous and inconceivable that you should get so many men and the lieutenant and mate so few.’³⁴ But in wartime the press was the only way to man the Royal Navy. It was an unyielding and cruel system that literally snatched men from the bosom of their families. So it is unlikely that the Admiralty granted the 1695 petition of ‘two pretty seamen's wives’ to have ‘the enjoyment of their husbands for a month’, after which they promised to return them to their ships.³⁵ Occasionally the press tangled with the wrong people. When late one night in 1691 it tried to seize the two footmen riding behind the earl of Denbigh's carriage, his lordship intervened, and for his pains the press beat him up. Two months later several members of the press gang were tried for assault and a couple of them were sentenced to the pillory.

Whether the mob pelted them with unwonted enthusiasm or let them off lightly, we do not know. But here is a paradox. While the press was wildly unpopular, most Englishmen retained a soft spot for Jolly Jack Tar. To be sure, most landsmen found him hard to comprehend. In 1635 Lieutenant Hammond of the Norwich militia called sailors ‘half fish, half flesh, for they drink like fishes and sleep like hogs’. A 1581 ballad commented on the contrast between their behaviour at sea and on land:³⁶

You live at sea a lawless life,

For murther and piracy

Which on land you do consume,

On whores and jollity.

Sailors did their dirty deeds at sea, away from the land: so there was little harm in their cakes and ale, in the raucous whoredom and unbridled jollity they enjoyed during their brief stays in port. Thus Britons saw the navy as the protector of their freeborn rights: it kept foreigners away and, unlike Cromwell's army, was not going to establish a military dictatorship. After its composition in 1740 all happily sang ‘Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves/ Britons never never never shall be slaves.’ Even pressed men—virtual slaves—joined in with surprising vigour.

But, as Pepys admitted, pressing men ‘is a great tyranny’. Many men did not want to serve aboard His Majesty's ships. They joined them, admitted Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘as if they were to be sent slaves to the galleys’.³⁷ Conditions could be even more unpleasant. ‘Foul winter weather, naked bodies, and empty bellies make the men voice the king's service worse than a galley slave,’ reported Captain Mervyn in 1629.³⁸ Many men would do all they could to avoid being drafted. Of fifty-four men pressed in Hull in May 1694, thirty-six escaped, every house in town being willing to hide them.³⁹ On his way back from Newfoundland in 1652 the navy stopped Edward Coxere's ship in the Thames. The able seaman hid by diving overboard, and clinging to a rope hanging down from the ship's side opposite the naval vessel. Landing at Gravesend he went via back roads to Rotherhithe, the press being very hot, and hid in an ale house, ‘where we refreshed ourselves with fresh meat and good drink.’ Coxere ventured out disguised as a merchant. Stopped by a press gang he persuaded the officer that he was not a sailor, and made it back to his home in Dover. Realizing that ‘I could not walk the streets without danger,’ he made the best of things by volunteering to join the navy. Not surprisingly, Coxere eventually became a Quaker and a pacifist, going to jail for his conviction that violence was wrong.⁴⁰

But as far as manning the navy went, in time of war violence was inescapable. ‘Our Fleets,’ admitted Admiral Edward Vernon, ‘are manned by violence.’⁴¹ But there was no other way: at least in wartime. In peace the navy had few manning problems. In 1688, for instance, there were about fifty thousand sailors, of whom the navy needed to recruit twelve to thirteen thousand, a relatively easy task.⁴² But when war expanded the navy to fifty or sixty thousand men, the sole way it could be manned was through coercion. Although legally only seamen were exposed to the draft, the press could snare landsmen, and caught seamen almost at random. The process was unfair, and a register of seamen subject to conscription would have made sense, but was unacceptable: like a standing army, a standing list of those liable for service was seen as a threat to British liberties.

The Attractions of the Sea

Dr Johnson thought that ‘Being on a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned,’ adding that ‘A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.’⁴³ Some sailors would have agreed. Edward Barlow, who was twice taken prisoner of war, grumbled that as a sailor he only got four hours of sleep a night, lived on bad food and rotten drink, in weather that was either too hot or too cold, before concluding that ‘beggars had a far better life of it than I did’.⁴⁴ If this was the case, why then did men go to sea?

To be sure, the oceans can be beautiful and attractive. Beating into a steady tropical wind, with fluffy blue clouds, as the bow cascades warm white waves, is glorious: a full gale in a well-found ship can be exhilarating. The ocean and its denizens—who were far more common in those unpolluted days—provided enduring memories. For instance, Barlow filled his diary with illustrations of strange creatures, and fascinating foreign places. After escaping a hated apprenticeship as a cloth bleacher in 1657, he sailed twice to the Mediterranean, twice to the Canary Islands, three times to India, four to the West Indies, and five to China. Barlow disliked the land as much as he did landsmen. ‘We are spilling our dearest blood for our King and Country's honour,’ he wrote after the Four Day's Fight (1666), ‘whilst our traitorous country men lay at home eating and drinking.’ Landsmen could find their first exposure to the sea enchanting. On his way to attack Cadiz in 1596 Dr Roger Marbeck was captivated by all the novel sights. ‘First in all my lifetime, I did see the flying fishes,’ he recalled, revelling in their fantastic colours as they leapt out of the water to escape bonito.⁴⁵

Some saw service at sea as an opportunity to advance, to get away from domestic problems or to make money. As John Weale sailed off on a two-year cruise to the Mediterranean in 1654 as the George's purser, in his diary he breathed a sigh of relief: ‘So endeth my land troubles.’⁴⁶ Others hazarded themselves for money. Matthew Bishop first joined the navy in 1702 ‘with the hope of making his fortune’.⁴⁷ John Morris, an ambitious master's mate, explained in 1735 that his objective was ‘either a golden chain or a wooden leg’.⁴⁸ Lieutenant Jeremy Roch, who was as good an officer as he was bad a poet, wrote:⁴⁹

My stars to travel did incline me strong

What made me seek for an occasion long

At length domestic broils increase so

To the wars abroad, I was resolved to go.

For most sailors prize money was a major attraction. The system of paying for captured ships went back to the thirteenth century, being formalized in the fifteenth. It was a powerful motivation. As Martin Parker's famous naval ballad, ‘Sailors for my Money’, explained:⁵⁰

And when by God's assistance our foes are put to the foil,

To animate our courage we all have share of the spoil.

During Elizabeth's reign a few sailors reaped vast fortunes from privateering. One of them, Sir Francis Drake, slyly observed they did not go to sea for their health but ‘for some little comfortable dew from heaven’. Attempts were made in 1644, 1652 and 1689 to regulate ‘the custom of the sea’ over the distribution of prizes, which the 1708 Prize Act eventually codified.⁵¹ Prizes were a lottery. For both officers and men they offered the hope of striking it rich, and retiring as country gentlemen, or prosperous tavern keepers.

The Nature of Ships

A ship is the only non-gendered object in the English language described as ‘she’. Almost like a wife, the ship was a sailor's home, community, family. He ate, drank and slept in her. He spent much of his time maintaining her. She could become a man's refuge and comfort. Losing a ship could be a widowing never to be forgotten. On 28 May 1712 Sir Richard Haddock wrote to his grandson, an Oxford undergraduate, that fifty years ago to the day fire had forced him to abandon ship at the Battle of Southwold.⁵² A ship could also become a prison, for it is hard to escape from one. Way out at sea a deserter could hardly jump overboard and swim for freedom. In port he had to elude guard boats and shore patrols. On long voyages the ship might be the only man-made object a sailor might see for months. The culture aboard ship depended, more than anything else, on the character of the captain, who could be a wise leader or a bizarre despot. The ship was a sailor's wooden world, a world normally devoid of women, apart from two or three warrant officer's wives who might be allowed aboard unofficially, and the occasional port-time debauch, in which whores were permitted on ship under the pretence they were ‘wives’. During such an orgy Henry Teonge, chaplain of the Assistance, was shocked to see ‘a man and a woman creep into a hammock, another couple sleeping on a chest, others kissing and clipping [hugging], half drunk, half sober’.⁵³

From the reigns of Henry VIII to George III, ships changed little, as a real or virtual tour of Portsmouth Naval Dockyard will reveal.⁵⁴ If you walk the couple of hundred yards from the recovered remains of the Mary Rose, which sank in 1544, to HMS Victory, which achieved immortality at Trafalgar in 1805, apart from the size—700 to 2,151 tons—you will notice little difference: both vessels had three masts, with elaborate rigging; both were long ships with heavy cannon that fired broadsides through gun ports; both sailed at roughly the same speed, with about the same windage. True, there were technological changes: a steering wheel had replaced the tiller and capstans were more sophisticated—yet they still depended on human muscle power to lift, brace and haul. Even though Victory and the Mary Rose were launched 255 years apart, a crew member from the former would have had little difficulty in settling into the latter. But if he were to walk over the quay three hundred yards to HMS Warrior, the revolutionary steam-powered, screw-driven, iron-built vessel with long-range rifled guns that was constructed only ninety-five years after Victory, he would find himself in a completely different world.

It is appropriate that the museum for these three key vessels from the Royal Navy's history are in a dockyard, for when they sailed off to war they required huge bases to support them. Between 1687 and 1703 employment at the royal dockyards increased over fourfold, from 1,185 to 5,195. Daniel Defoe described them as ‘monstrously great and extensive, resembling a well ordered city’.⁵⁵ Yet all three ships, the Mary Rose, Victory and Warrior, were essentially floating artillery platforms, which could move with relative speed and ease, particularly compared to armies. Sailing ships transported six times as many cannon, of much larger calibre, than an army, at a fifth of the logistical cost and at five times the speed.⁵⁶ With such massive firepower it is no wonder sea battles could be so horrifying.

Naval Battle

The battlefield at sea was very different from that on land. It was not, of course, a field with geographical features—cover, hills, dead ground, roads and rivers. Only rarely did features such as sand banks or the coast affect its outcome. The sea is featureless: the geographical forces that matter were the movements of wind and waves. But this, as the duke of Marlborough, admitted, made war at sea far more difficult than on land.⁵⁷

Sailing ships could only sail six points, in other words, 67.5 degrees into the wind, which meant that they could not use 38 per cent of the sea around them. However, since wind was free, they did not need coal or oil from a string of refuelling bases or supply ships. Indeed, they could carry supplies for many months, becoming independent of land depots. The prevailing south-westerly winds favoured the British, enabling them to blockade continental navies, the exception being Ireland, to which it was fairly easy for enemies, particularly the Spanish, to sail.

In battle, officers and men were quite literally in the same boat. While on land, generals stayed in relative safety behind the lines, during a naval battle captains and admirals were expected nonchalantly to walk the quarterdeck in full uniform, exposed to enemy sharpshooters—unlike many of the lower deck whom the ship's sides protected. In fact, in a naval battle one's chances of being killed increased with seniority. During the St James's Day Fight (1666) splinters ripped open Admiral Thomas Allin's cheek, broke his jawbone, penetrated his arm above the elbow and dislocated his thumb. ‘These put me to great dolour,’ the admiral confessed.⁵⁸ As the French medieval historian Jean Froissart observed, ‘on the sea there is no recoiling or fleeing; there is no remedy but to fight.’⁵⁹ When the enemy is sighted, cowards could hardly leap overboard and swim for safety. So sailors did not need the unthinking, drilled discipline demanded of soldiers. While it was hard for the latter to flee the field of battle, it was nigh impossible for the former to do so.

Fleet actions opened slowly. Since it was hard to fight in high winds, ships tended to furl their sails, or take down their lowest sails so they would not obscure the view or catch fire, meaning that vessels moved at walking pace or a steady jog. Record keeping in sea fights tended to be more methodical and complete than during land battles, although comprehensive and thorough logs did not become the norm until after the end of our period. To maintain morale and identify themselves amid the smoke of combat, ships flew large national flags and pennants designating their commanders’ ranks. Many recalled how colourful were approaching fleets. Some men were lucky in having something to do as the opposing fleets ponderously sailed to be within range of each other. Gun crews would check cannon balls to make sure they were true and free of rust. Safely below in the magazine the gunner and his mate would sew new powder cartridges, and the surgeon and his mates might sharpen their instruments, while on deck the boatswain would check and recheck the rigging. Most men went ebulliently into battle, encouraged sometimes by music or psalms. ‘'Twas impossible to express the universal cheerfulness our men showed as they found they should fight,’ reported Matthew Bishop before the Battle of Malaga (1704), ‘joking with one another.’

Once the great guns opened fire the horror began. According to the 1711 ballad, ‘Dismal Lamentations of the Widows’,⁶⁰

Legs, arms, heads, hands, feet, hips, bones, backs and thighs,

By fire and powder flew up to the skies.

The balladeer was not exaggerating. Thomas Churchyard described what happened when English ships intercepted a French convoy consisting mainly of rowed galleys in the Firth of Forth in 1557: ‘our cannon made a great murder and havoc among the poor slaves, whose legs, arms and oars I saw fly about.’⁶¹ In similar terms Matthew Bishop described the effect of a French broadside on the Swiftsure at the Battle of Malaga: ‘like a slaughterhouse’ she was ‘wallowing in blood’. Since Bishop's is perhaps the best description of what it was like to be a common sailor in a fleet action, it deserves quoting almost in full:⁶²

Then at it we went, loading and firing as quick as possible. We were closely engaged and for my part I loaded twelve times…. And would have loaded more had I not been prevented by a cannon ball, which cut our powder boy almost in two, and I thought it had taken my arm off. For it took a piece of my shirt sleeve, which caused my arm, in a moment, to swell as big as my thigh. I went down to the doctor, and he put a red plaster on it, and would have had me to have stayed below. But I said I would go up and see how my comrades sped…. When I came up I found four of those I had left behind killed, and another wounded…. He shook his head saying … I am a dead man.

Fleet actions, like land battles, soon became engulfed in dense white gunpowder smoke, which drifted downwind giving the side that held the wind gauge an additional advantage. An account of the Battle of Barfleur (1692) similarly stressed the noise and smoke, which ‘almost stunned me’. After two hours the wind appeared to drop, and the ships could hardly manoeuvre.⁶³ Many sailors were convinced that gunpowder made the wind fall. There is, of course, no meteorological explanation for this, so it could be part of a common psychological experience of battle, when events appear to slow down. Like Bulstrode Whitlocke at Edgehill and John Stevens at the Boyne, Jeremy Roch, Antelope's first lieutenant, found combat nigh impossible to describe or comprehend. He wrote of the Four Days’ Fight that ‘The Noise, the Smoke, the Fire, the Blood, was not to be expressed nor understood.’ His ship suffered sorely. Fifty-five men were killed and nearly as many wounded including the captain, who lost an arm. Even though ‘our mast, sails and rigging all in tatters, our deck dyed with blood like a slaughterhouse,’ the Antelope made it back to Chatham to be refitted.⁶⁴

The Antelope's experience illustrated a paradox of naval battles. Although doing terrible things to human beings, naval cannon were not ship killers. Being made out of wood, cleverly braced and sturdily reinforced, ships were immensely strong. They had to be to withstand the forces of nature. So they could also resist artillery fire. Wood absorbed the energy of cannon, turning it into flying splinters that ravaged men's bodies. But cannon fire rarely sank ships. A thirty-two-pound ball—the heaviest in general use—would be lucky to hole a wooden hull, and even luckier to do so under water when the ship was heeled: even so the carpenter could readily plug the opening, and the crew pump the vessel. Thus it is not surprising that during the Armada cannon fire sent just the one Spanish vessel to the bottom, while it sank only three of the 179 ships that took part in the St James's Day Fight. During the Dutch Wars more ships were lost to the weather than to enemy action.

Wood was both a ship's salvation and her Achilles heel: because wood was so highly inflammable, fire was a mortal danger. When, in 1630, the gunner's mate of the Seventh Whelp entered the magazine with a naked candle, he blew up the vessel, killing forty-eight men, including all the officers. A cannonball hit the frigate Duncannon as it entered Youghal Harbour in 1645, knocked the head off a woman, who dropped the candle she was carrying in the magazine, destroying the ship with the loss of eighteen lives.⁶⁵ Fire, or at least fire-ships, and the weather, did far more than cannon to defeat the Armada.

Yet the memory of the Armada set the agenda for nearly two centuries. Afterwards the Royal Navy was determined on a climactic confrontation in which it would annihilate the enemy. Such was virtually unachievable. Not only were wooden vessels virtually indestructible, but the weather, tactics and communications made it very hard, if not impossible, to concentrate sufficient forces on the enemy's centre of gravity. Because the attacking side normally held the wind gauge, the defenders could break off by sailing downwind. While on-board communications between a captain and crew were fast and effective, until Admiral Home Popham developed a system based on numbered phrases in 1803, those between ships were slow and limited. In the sixteenth century fleets attacked pell-mell, with each vessel having a go at the closest enemy. Some were assailed by many, others escaped scot-free. By the late seventeenth century, fleets attacked each other in a line formation, sailing parallel to each other as they exchanged broadsides, which, as we have seen, killed men, not ships. Between the battles of La Hogue in Normandy in 1692 (which was won by boarding) and the Saintes in the West Indies ninety years later, the Royal Navy did not win a decisive battle.

But in a sense that did not matter, for the function of the violence at sea was not just its actual use but the threat of its use. War at sea was more a matter of amphibious landings than fleet battles, of convoys rather than ship-to-ship actions. As ships remained at sea for far longer periods, deaths from the real killers—storms, wrecks and disease—rather than at the hands of an enemy, increased.

Wounds and Capture

Unlike those wounded on land, those injured at sea were a deck or two away from medical facilities, although during a major battle surgeons in the orlop deck could be overwhelmed. Tobias Smollett, who served as a surgeon's mate, described how in 1741 after the bloody attack on Cartagena, Spain, the wounded were jammed below deck with inadequate medical attention, wallowing in their own blood, vomit and excreta, maggots in the sores, wounds undressed, legs and arms hacked off by a surgeon with a saw in one hand and a rum bottle in the other, as corpses bobbed alongside where they had been hastily tipped.⁶⁶ In truth, Smollett was exaggerating. Surgeons treated the wounded in order of arrival, and being rarely overwhelmed by the numbers of casualties seldom had to practise triage. Unlike those wounded on land, those hurt on board ship were not subject to a long agonizing journey on stretchers to medical facilities, but did run the risk of death if their vessel sank or caught fire.

When a ship sank or surrendered those of the crew who did not drown or were not murdered became prisoners. The worst fate befell those captured by Algerian pirates. Some became galley slaves, others eunuchs; a few, despairing of ever seeing home again, converted to Islam in the hope that it might improve their status, or at least save their masculinity. After being captured by Salle pirates in June 1670, and forced to row in their galleys, George Elliot, a young Oxford graduate, was auctioned off as a slave. When his master suggested ‘a not-to-be-mentioned Carnality’ familiar to ‘the citizens of Sodom’ (but apparently unknown at Oxford University), Elliot escaped, and was lucky to be rescued by some Spanish soldiers. As a prisoner in Algiers for five months in 1670, Edward Coxere was constantly beaten while being forced to work for the Algerian Navy. ‘We became their slaves, a heart breaking sorrow,’ Coxere recalled, dejected that he might never again see his wife, pregnant with their second child.⁶⁷ No wonder English prisoners desperately wanted to escape Turkish captivity and, better still, get their revenge. The title of a book published in London in 1627 says it all: A Strange and True Relation of a Ship of Bristol named the Jacob of 120 Tonnes, which was about the end of October last, 1621, taken by Turkish Pirates of Algeria. And How within a few days after, four English Youths did valiantly overcome 13 of the said Turks, and brought the Ship to St. Lucia, Spain, where they sold nine of the Turks for Gally-Slaves.

Even the Dutch, fellow Christians, treated prisoners badly. Edward Barlow remembered spending the Christmas of 1672 as a Dutch prisoner of war in Java: ‘instead of good pies and roast meat, we were content with a little boiled rice and a piece of stinking beef which they gave us three days in the week, and a quart of stinking water to drink a day.’ Forced to labour, seven out of every eight prisoners died.⁶⁸ Captured by the Dutch at sea in 1665, James Yonge was shackled for seven months to another prisoner, sleeping on a sack in the hold, before being landed near Amsterdam. Freed at last from his shackles, ‘I went like a chicken long tied,’ Yonge recalled, tending to walk in right-handed circles. He was lodged in a warehouse loft with 160 other prisoners, all lousy and smelling as badly as the overflowing latrine. Yonge admitted that ‘My heart was ready to break.’ Eventually he was exchanged for Dutch prisoners in British hands.⁶⁹

At sea sailors such as Edward Barlow, Edward Coxere, James Yonge, Jeremy Roch, Cloudesley Shovell and Barnaby Slush paid a high price for British hegemony, the foundation of which will be the topic of the next chapter.