The name of Captain Moses may serve as connecting link to another tale of the sea life of that time. It was told in 1704 by an army officer of the name of Colonel Luke Lillingston, in the course of a controversy with Burchett, the Secretary of the Admiralty, and historian of the naval wars of King William and Queen Anne.
In 1695 an expedition left England to harass the French West Indies. The squadron was commanded by Captain Robert Wilmot, and the soldiers were under the command of Colonel Lillingston. As a military operation it was of no importance, and its character has been sufficiently described in the previous chapter. Our subject here is naval human nature as it was displayed towards the close of the seventeenth century and remained for two generations. Lillingston had served as Lieutenant-Colonel of Foulkes’s regiment in the expedition of Sir Francis Wheeler in 1692, and had, he tells us, seen instances of the “arbitrary behaviour” of naval officers. So extreme was this, and so much was it resented by military men that in 1695 they were most reluctant to subject themselves to “the ill usage and insolent behaviour of commanders at Sea, especially to officers of the army.” Lillingston moved, he assures us, by a sense of duty, agreed to go with Wilmot. A regiment was made up for him by drafts from others, and the expedition sailed at the end of January. The naval commander, who as senior captain was called commodore, carried two women with him, in defiance of the regulations, and, so the soldier asserts, was on various occasions “pleased to be very drunk.” He touched at Madeira, and on the way there had the following conversation with Lillingston. The men had not been on good terms, and we see clearly that the soldier expected the sailor to be brutal, and was on the watch for instances of “arbitrary behaviour.”
“He (i.e. Wilmot) told me he found I was a little strange to him, and [that he] should be glad we might understand one another better. I told him, I thought if there was any strangeness it was on his side, and as we had both promised His Majesty to maintain an entire confidence, and a friendly correspondence, it should not be my fault if we did not, and so offered, forgetting all that was past, to begin a more sociable agreement from that time, and so we drank to one another again. ‘But,’ says the Captain, ‘our agreement is very necessary on our own accounts, for if it be not our own faults we may both make our fortunes in this voyage, and provide for ourselves as long as we live.’ With all my heart said I, I shall endeavour not to be wanting to myself provided the King’s business be done too. ‘Damn the King’s business,’ says he, ‘we will do the King’s business, and our own too. But I’ll be free, with you,’ says the Captain, ‘I had the misfortune to kill a man (and I think named him) and it has almost ruined me, for it has cost me above a thousand pound, and I am resolved this voyage shall pay for it, and if you will join with me in such measures as I shall propose, this voyage shall make up all our losses.’”
Lillingston refused, and Wilmot went off in the sulks, growling:—
“Well well” says he “if you don’t think fit to join with me you may let it alone, but I am resolved to make myself amends. I won’t go to the West Indies to learn the language. I’ll take care of myself, let the King’s business go how it will.”
When the squadron reached Madeira, Wilmot endeavoured to get rid of the military officers. He seized an opportunity to sail while most of them were ashore buying provisions. A sudden gale was his pretext. Fortunately his ships were scattered in a storm; one of them came back to Madeira, and the officers were picked up. At a council of the officers of both arms, Wilmot had refused to allow Lillingston’s captain-lieutenant to sit, alleging that no officer under the rank of captain had a right to a seat. Now the captain-lieutenant, according to the military customs of the time, commanded what was counted as the colonel’s company and ranked as the senior captain. Wilmot was induced to see reason by the arguments of the commissary Murray; but Lillingston, not unfairly, quotes his conduct as an example of pure arbitrary insolence. He had turned the captain-lieutenant out of the cabin “with a rudeness that I had never seen among gentlemen.” At the Leeward Islands Wilmot was again “pleased to be very drunk,” and went the length of offering to give away commissions in Lillingston’s regiment. The military and naval elements came, in fact, to open quarrel. From the Leeward Islands this jarring expedition went on first to San Domingo, where some Spaniards, then our allies, joined us. There was delay, wrangling, and an incessant conflict between soldier and sailor. Wilmot, says Lillingston,
“loitered away six days in the Bay. During this time how his people were employed I know not, but as for himself he spent the time in diversions every day rowing about the bay in his barge with the Ladies, and attended by trumpets and all the music of the fleet in other boats to recreate himself and the women, with the pleasantness of the country.”
When at last the expedition got to its work of plundering the French settlements in Haiti, Captain Wilmot, who had been joined by various Jamaica privateers, kept ahead of the troops as they marched along on shore, and applied himself to robbing the plantations, particularly of their negroes, who were then very valuable booty. At Port de Paix the commodore made his last attempt to induce the colonel to come to an understanding for their common advantage:
“But smiling he takes me by the hand and leading me aside he told me he wanted to speak with me, and now he showed himself in his own colours a second time and made his last attempt to bring me over to him; he told me he would comply with all the orders of our council of war, and assist me with all the men he could spare, and do everything he could to forward the service if I would but join with him in one thing, and allow a second. The first was I should consent to his having an equal share of the plunder with me in case the fort should be taken.