It was easy enough to argue, as the Post-Office did, that in former wars the average of losses had been higher; and that to expect the Packets to carry every mail in safety was much the same as asking them to teach forbearance and morality to the enemy’s Privateers. The West India merchants neither listened nor replied to these contentions. They did not want arguments. They wanted security for their correspondence, and they looked to the Post-Office to obtain it for them, whether in war or peace.
When the Postmaster General and the other high officials cast their eyes around to discover what prospects there were of satisfying this very natural desire, they could not fail to discern that in the near future they were likely to fare worse than in the past. The hopes of peace raised by Lord Malmesbury’s negotiations in the autumn of 1796 had been disappointed. Even the Packet told off to convey despatches from the ambassador, having been driven ashore near Calais by a violent storm, was seized by the French and condemned as lawful prize, notwithstanding the full explanations which were rendered by her commander and by the British Government. The number of Privateers which were reported week by week to be issuing from St. Malo, Nantes, Bordeaux, and a hundred other ports was absolutely without precedent. Between 20° and 30° W. long. there were, as the officers of a Nantes Privateer informed some Packetsmen whom they had captured, no less than forty vessels like herself cruising with the sole object of preying on British commerce, and through this belt of enemies every West India Packet must pass. Many of these wolves of the ocean were hardly less powerful than frigates; and the smallest of them was an overmatch for any Packet in every point save that of individual courage and resource.
Moreover, when the war broke out it had been a duel between England and France alone, and the enmity of Holland on the north and Spain on the south somewhat limited the French powers of offence. Of whatever value this advantage might have been it was now lost; and the three powers henceforward presented a united front to England. The Privateers of any one could shelter, refit, or dispose of prizes in the ports of any other; and while this circumstance gave them an added strength in European waters, the case was even worse in the West Indies, where the French gained lurking places in every creek of the Spanish islands, and were enabled to lie in ambush for British commerce at numberless points where our ships were used to think themselves in safety.
It was easier by far to discern these facts of evil augury than to discover any remedy. They were still being pondered in Lombard Street when the merchants opened their attack and lodged a memorial in Downing Street in which they complained in the strongest terms of the failure of the Post-Office to protect their correspondence. Scarcely had this memorial been received when the loss within one month of three West India Packets stamped it with an urgency which even its promoters had not foreseen, and raised the subject immediately from one chiefly affecting a single class to a grave matter of national concern.
The “Princess Elizabeth,” homeward bound from Barbados and Jamaica, was taken on February 28th, by the “Actif,” a Privateer carrying fourteen guns and a hundred and thirty men. The “Swallow” carried the outward mails of February 1st, for the same islands, while the “Sandwich” took out those of February 15th and March 1st. Three consecutive mails were thus on board these two Packets; and even the most anxious of merchants, sending important letters in triplicate by successive mails, might fairly have thought his precautions adequate to the risks. How great then was the anger and alarm when the news arrived that both Packets were captured and the three mails lost may be easily conceived.
Even more alarming than the present loss was the apprehension for the future raised by the great force of the Privateers concerned in these captures. The “Du Gay” which captured the “Sandwich” carried no less than two hundred men and eighteen guns; while the captor of the “Swallow” was armed with sixteen guns (nines and sixes) and a hundred and twenty men. How, the Postmaster General demanded, could the Packets be expected to resist such force? And the merchants, echoing the question, declared that impossibility to be the basis of their whole argument; for the Packets, they asserted, had no more effective power of resisting Privateers than so many wherries from Blackfriars stairs.
The prayer of the merchants’ memorial was that the Packets might be so equipped as to enable them to resist any enemy of equal size. This, as the Postmaster General pointed out, meant that each one of the Post-Office fleet should carry at least fourteen guns and one hundred men—a proposition which would involve rebuilding every Packet afloat, since no one of them was constructed to carry such an armament; and besides, that great capital expenditure would more than treble the charges of the Service, which already resulted in a yearly loss of over £12,000, exclusive of the liabilities for captured Packets, amounting at this time to more than £34,000.
It was natural enough that the Government, involved in a dangerous and costly war, should decline to entertain such a costly proposal. The Post-Office, however, willing to strengthen its hands against the merchants, put forward a modified scheme for arming each Packet with ten four-pounders and forty men, at an extra cost of £8,000 yearly; and if more losses had been reported while that scheme was before the Treasury, it may have been that the Government would have accepted it. But unfortunately for the merchants, there was at this particular period a lull in the storm. Four months passed without disaster. Then came the report that the “Grantham” had been captured, but after a stout fight; and following the receipt of that news another equal period of good fortune. The disasters of February seemed to be exceptional. A House of Commons Committee was urging that by every means Post-Office expenditure should be reduced; the Treasury yielded to the greater pressure, and declined the Postmaster General’s proposals.
The “Grantham” was commanded by Captain James Bull, an officer of long experience and proved ability, whose son, Captain John Bull, afterwards made a considerable reputation as commander of “Duke of Marlborough,” of which much will be heard in subsequent chapters of this work. The “Grantham” was attacked near Barbados by a French Privateer of “fourteen double fortified four-pounders and one hundred and eleven men.” She was much shattered in the action which preceded her capture; but no details of the fight have been preserved. Not long after it was decided, the “Tamar” frigate happily chanced to pass that way, and delivered Captain Bull and his men from the prospect of a French prison.
Those optimists who held the comfortable faith that the disasters of February, 1797, were not likely to be repeated received an uncomfortable shock in the last month of that year and the first of the new one.