One practice of the old navy certainly lent itself to fraud. The captain was allowed four servants for each hundred of his ship’s company, and was accustomed to count this among the perquisites of his office. Indeed the total of their wages is sometimes spoken of as part of his pay. A captain was fully entitled to employ men shipped on these terms as servants, and he had a good claim to the patronage which the power of selecting them gave him. He could for instance provide for a son, or the son of a friend, by bringing him to sea, rating him captain’s servant, and training him to become an officer. Many of the best of our chiefs, Nelson himself being one of them, served their apprenticeship or part of it in this very way, and where the captain was an honourable man who used his patronage on a high principle the state was the gainer. The history of our navy in the last century shows that a large proportion of our captains did use their privilege in this spirit. But here there is no question of money profit. That could only be got in two ways, of which the first was mean and the second fraudulent. A captain could take servants to sea, on the understanding that he was to draw their pay, and give them what part he chose of the ten pounds a year allowed for them by the state. He could also keep false musters, that is, return boys or men as present when they were not in the ship. This was an offence punishable by dismissal, but it was habitually committed. In its least criminal form it was done to allow a boy, who was still at school, to be borne on the books of a ship in order to shorten the time he would have to serve at sea, according to regulations before passing for lieutenant. A distinguished officer who died in our own time, Sir Provo Wallis, had had his name on the books of a ship for some years before he joined. At its worst it was the offence of keeping false musters, pure and simple. The names of imaginary persons or of lads, who never meant to go to sea, were entered on the roll of the ship’s company, and their wages drawn by the captain. In the old slang phrase they were known as “Captain’s Hogs” and it is said that as many as thirty or forty of them drew pay in a single ship. At ten pounds a head this made a material addition to the commander’s salary.

Bad pay, badly given, did not sum up the wrongs of the sailors. The constant infliction of the lash was, as far as we can see, not felt as more of a grievance by sailors than by schoolboys. But the bad food they did resent, and there can be no doubt that the rations supplied were frequently inferior, while the practice of putting six men on the allowance of four, in long voyages, caused the amount supplied to be insufficient. It may be that the men did not realise how much the want of ventilation and the prevalence of dirt was against their interests. But they suffered from them none the less. It must be repeated that the administration did not sin from want of knowledge. There was a standing order to keep the ships properly aired. But a writer of the time, Henry Maydman in his Sea Politics, has explained why this regulation was not applied. Captains frequently took the steerage, the space of the main-deck in front of their cabins, for themselves, forcing the officers, who ought to have had it, further forward, so that the after-hatchway was shut to the men. Thus only the fore-hatchway was left to the crew, or for the purpose of establishing a draught. When the ship was at sea, and the ports closed, the air below grew foul, and turned food and drink bad. It is to this we have to look for the explanation of the frightful ravages of fevers during the cruises of the time. A few weeks at sea even in European waters commonly made the ships sickly. At the close of the century a long cruise at sea was relied on to make them healthy. In the interval a great internal revolution had been wrought in the navy, dating from about the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, and carried on partly by Captain Cook, partly by Dr. Gilbert Blane, who accompanied Rodney to the West Indies in 1782, but caused originally by the influence on the naval officers of the great revival of intelligent humanity in the country.

CHAPTER IV
THE TWO COLONIAL WARS

Authorities.—Beatson, Military Memoirs; Campbell’s Lives of the Admirals; Schomberg’s Naval Chronology; Burrows’ Life of Hawke.

From the signing of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 till the beginning of the colonial war with Spain in 1739, the Royal Navy was used as an instrument in the hand of diplomacy to keep the peace, or as the police of the seas. Europe was disturbed in the North by the last stages of the struggle between Peter the Great of Russia and Charles XII. of Sweden, in the South by the foolish ambitions of Philip V., the first Bourbon king of Spain, and his second wife, Elizabeth Farnese. But the statesmen who controlled the policy of Western Europe during most of these years, Sir Robert Walpole in England and Cardinal Fleury in France, were unwearied in warding off another war. Once, in 1718, a strong fleet sent into the Mediterranean, to put a stop to one of the Italian ventures of Philip V., destroyed a much weaker and very ill-handled Spanish fleet off Cape Passaro, in Sicily. As a rule, the appearance of our ships was enough. Now and then an officer found some chance of distinction in service against the pirates, largely recruited among the privateers of the war, who swarmed in distant seas. The most signal example was the suppression of a noted adventurer of this class, named Roberts, by Sir Chaloner Ogle, on the West Coast of Africa in 1722. Meanwhile war on a vast scale was being prepared by two causes—on the Continent by the rivalries of France and Austria in Germany, and Spain and Austria in Italy, together with the ambition of the rising kingdom of Prussia and its great King Frederick; and on the sea by the collision of England with Spain and France in America, and with France in India. Great Britain was drawn into the Continental War by the Hanoverian interests of the royal family and the desire to maintain the balance of power. Here the navy played an indispensable but secondary part. But in the colonial struggle it was the foremost combatant, and exercised a decisive influence.

A common interest drew France and Spain into alliance against us, but the causes of hostility were various. As regards Spain, they go back to the reign of Charles II. From the time of our settlement in Jamaica it had been our constant wish to secure the right of trading with the Spanish colonies, while firmly refusing the Spaniards all access to our own. The buccaneer wars, in so far as they were more than plundering raids conducted by miscellaneous scoundrels, were the attempts of private adventurers to carry out this policy. By the Peace of Utrecht we secured the right to share in the trade of Spanish America. Agents were allowed to establish themselves at Carthagena on the Eastern, and Panama on the Western side. We secured an asiento, or contract for the supply of negroes. We were also authorised to send one trading ship of 500 tons burden laden with manufactured goods to the Spanish Main in each year. This arrangement led, as it was bound to lead, to much smuggling. As Spain revived, under the more intelligent administration of the Bourbon dynasty, the abuse of English treaty rights was resented. The Spaniards said that the treaty ship was continually supplied with fresh goods by tenders, and complained that other smugglers haunted their coast, and were guilty of many excesses. To protect themselves, they insisted on searching English vessels found near their coast, and condemning those they considered guilty, and Spanish adventurers retaliated by piracy. Hence arose a long angry conflict of claims and counter-claims between England and Spain, complicated by political disputes in Europe, and only prevented from ripening into war by the resolute peace policy of Walpole. The Parliamentary Opposition, composed largely of disappointed office-seekers, and, as they afterwards proved, incapable administrators, took up the cause of the West India traders. There was much general denunciation of the atrocities of the Spaniards. The best known instance given was that of a certain John Jenkins, master of a trading vessel called the Rebecca of Glasgow. Jenkins asserted that in 1730 his vessel had been boarded by a Spanish guarda costa, or revenue cutter, in the West Indies, and that the Spanish captain, who is habitually described as “the infamous Fandino,” had cut his ear off. His vessel was undoubtedly searched near Havana, but was allowed to proceed on her voyage, and there is no evidence for the story that his ear was cut off except his own word. As the country grew tired of the long predominance of Walpole, and was worked into a pugnacious mood by the Patriots, use was made of Jenkins’s case to appeal to popular sentiment. A theatrical scene was arranged before a Committee of the House of Commons, and the man was prompted to declare “that he had recommended his soul to god, and his cause to his country” when he was subject to the violence of Fandino. At last Walpole, seeing that the country was resolved on war, yielded, dishonestly, to what he believed to be a mistaken policy for the sake of keeping office. War with Spain was declared in July 1739.

The Colonial quarrel with France arose in another way—and one more honourable to us. The trade of her colonies was less worth striving for than the Spanish, and she was too strong to be hectored. The aggression came from her. In America her agents endeavoured to unite her possessions, in Canada and Louisiana, by annexing the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, which were first explored by her brilliant and daring adventurers. The result would have been to confine the growing British colonies between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic. In India the French Company was bankrupt. It endeavoured to gain the means of expelling its prosperous English rival, by acquiring political power among the native princes. For a time the Colonial conflict with France was postponed by the great European war arising over the scramble for the heritage of the house of Austria on the death of Charles VI. It was our exceeding good fortune that, when the decisive struggle for trade colonies and supremacy at sea had to be fought out, the attention and the resources of France were mainly employed on an attempt to acquire a predominant position in Central Europe.

This was the happier for us because years were to pass before we could afford to dispense with any of the help fortune gave us. Never was the Government of England less able than during the fag end of Walpole’s rule and the administration of the so-called Patriots. Never, save during the last ignoble days of Charles II., was the navy less fit to meet the calls of a great war. Its paper strength was indeed imposing. There were 124 ships of the line—of from 100 to 50 guns each, and 104 of lesser rates—that is, of 40 guns each or less. The total was 228, and it exceeded the united navies of France and Spain in everything except the quality of the individual ships. But it was suffering from the moral and intellectual diseases spoken of in the previous chapter. The long peace had afforded no opportunity of testing the quality of officers. In the earlier years its chiefs were worn-out and commonplace, or brutal and noisy. All those years did for us was to bring forward the men who were to lead gloriously in after times. From the point of view of the navy, the struggle waged under various names, the Spanish War, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War from 1739 to 1763 with an eight years’ truce in the middle, was one and the same war. Fortunately for us, if we were bad, our enemies were worse. Spain was languid, brainless, and could only fight on the defensive. France was overtaxed, distracted by a multiplicity of aims, drifting to bankruptcy, corrupt at heart and frivolous. Great Britain was a mighty force, healthy, though afflicted by bad habits, but capable of reform, and even at its worst advancing on sound lines. Therefore it could bear its administrative scum as a mighty river carries driftwood and rubbish on its surface. This floating trash may make a block and delay the current for a short space, but the moving water flows below, and accumulates in irresistible pressure till one day it sweeps the obstruction out of its path.