KING GEORGE’S NAVY
If you are a small island nation that imports twenty percent of the food that you eat, earn your living by importing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods and has colonies around the world, then you need a navy. You need a navy to defend the home island and its colonies, to project power around the globe and to protect trade routes. For many centuries the defence of England has been the Royal Navy. As Admiral Sir John Jervis, later Lord St Vincent, said in 1792 when there was a (false) invasion scare ‘I do not say they cannot come. I do say they cannot come by sea’. Jackie Fisher said the same thing in 1914 and Dudley Pound in 1939.
At the outbreak of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in 1793 Britain had 113 ships of the line (battleships) compared to France’s forty-five, Spain’s forty-five and Russia’s thirty-four, and although the Royal Navy’s ships were spread around the world she still had almost as many as the next three largest navies put together. In addition the Royal Navy commanded 191 frigates, sloop and brigs. By the height of the wars in 1812 the number of British battleships had grown to 127, with around 600 other ships, mostly frigates. Battleships varied from those classified as First Rate with 100 guns to Fourth Rates with fifty guns, the majority being Third Rates of seventy-four guns.
It took 3,500 mature oak trees to build one Seventy-Four. Two sorts of oak trees were needed: those which grew in a field by themselves, whose branches would be curved, needed for ribs and frames, and those in a forest which grew straight up to get at the light, producing straight wood for planking and sternposts. Admiralty parties, usually of three experts, were deployed on horseback all over the country to mark (with a painted arrow head) oak trees for the Royal Navy. The trees had to be between eighty and 120 years old, when they were at maximum strength, and growing not more than forty miles from a canal or river. Roads then were such that the task of hauling oaks for long distances was onerous and instead they would be floated down waterways to the shipyards. As the navy grew there was a shortage of oaks in Britain and so many were imported from Italy.
Although the ships were of oak the masts were of pine, imported from the Baltic. There were and are lots of pine trees in Scotland, but the weather there was not cold enough to force the pines to grow tall and strong, so access to the Baltic was critical, hence the bombardment of Copenhagen and the destruction of the Danish fleet in 1801 and again in 1807, when it was feared that the Danes might be forced to ally themselves with France and thus close the route to the Baltic. In 1778 the Royal Navy started to sheath their ships’ bottoms with copper, thus doing away with the need to beach ships and careen their bottoms to remove barnacles and other wood-boring molluscs. This also enabled ships to move faster through the water.
In 1793 the Royal Navy had 49,222 sailors. By 1812 that had grown to 150,000. Manning was the responsibility of the Imprest Service, known colloquially as the Press Gang. The Service consisted of eight-five parties, each of an officer and ten or eleven sailors. The Hollywood myth depicts the bank manager in Shrewsbury going home after a hard day at the office when a matelot pops out from behind a bush and knocks him over the head. When he awakes he is in a block ship off Toulon, wet, cold, seasick and subsisting on weevilly biscuits. In fact the gangs were strictly regulated. They could only operate in a port and then only within one mile of the docks (occasionally extended to three miles if there was a shortage of recruits), they could only press men between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five, they could not press apprentices, nor only sons, nor sole breadwinners nor merchant navy officers, nor foreigners unless they were married to a British citizen or had served on a British merchant ship for three years. There were, of course, also men who volunteered to join, but the majority were pressed.
In practice the Gangs impressed merchant seamen. They knew their way about a ship and would require little training compared to a ‘landsman’ who knew nothing about the sea and would be useless until trained – which might take a considerable time. Another method of obtaining sailors was for a Royal Navy ship to stop a merchant ship on the high seas and impress some of its crew, providing they were British. The press had to leave enough crew on board to sail the ship to the nearest port of its own registration. In general merchant sailors impressed, after the initial shock, were not unhappy, as is evidenced by the low desertion rates. The owner of a merchant ship was in business to make money and so crewed his ship with the minimum number of men to sail the ship. If the ship sank, or the cargo was captured by pirates, or the owner went out of business the crew did not get paid. The navy, on the other hand, needed enough men to sail the ship but also enough to fight it, and so navy crews were much larger than in merchant vessels of the same tonnage. In wartime there was of course the risk of death or disablement, but by and large life on a navy ship was a lot easier than on its civilian equivalent, once the man became accustomed to naval discipline. Similarly the Royal Navy sailor got paid, no matter what, and could qualify for a pension depending on length of service. While the sailors pressed from foreign vessels might be reasonably happy, the owners were not, and it was the impressment of men from American ships that was one of the causes of the War of 1812, or Madison’s War as it is known in the USA. At that time over fifty percent of sailors on US merchant ships were British. As nobody then had identity documents, the principle that if the man looked British and sounded British then he was British, led to the impressment of Americans as well as Britons.
On leaving port a Royal Navy ship would take on board live pigs, chickens and, on bigger ships, a cow for milk. Once fresh rations ran out the crew would be fed salted beef and pork accompanied by biscuit, supplemented by fresh vegetables obtained from friendly ports. ‘Biscuit’ was actually bread baked twice, (French bis cui) which made it last longer, and the bread room was the driest storeroom on the ship. From 1793 lime or lemon juice was issued to prevent scurvy, a vitamin deficiency liable to occur after a month or more constantly at sea, and which if untreated will eventually cause death. Once a naval surgeon discovered that citrus fruit could stave off its onset, the Royal Navy sought a source of large quantities of them, and found it in Sicily where a small group of entrepreneurs contracted to supply what was required. Asked if they had a business name the suppliers said they called themselves the group, or the mob. This translates as ‘Mafia’ in Italian, and so to the Royal Navy might be attributed the credit of kickstarting the world’s largest criminal organization!
To be continued.