Cruisers

Ship.Guns.Disposition.
Thetis32To come to Plymouth.}Channel Islands.
Actæon44 〃 Spithead.}
Seaford20 〃 Falmouth.}
Hyæna20 〃 Spithead.}
Cygnet16}To the Downs.
Grasshopper14}
Pheasant 8}
Boston28To cruise between Belfast Lough and the Mull of Cantyre.
Stag28To cruise in the Irish Channel.
Squirrel20To cruise between the Dodman and the Land’s End.
Harpy18}To convoy the trade from Ireland to England.
Wolf 8}
Wasp 8At Plymouth.
Beaver’s Prize14To cruise between Flambro’ Head and Yarmouth.
Merchant A. S.20}To cruise from Flambro’ Head to Shields.
Content A. S.20}
Queen A. S.20North Shields.
Heart of Oak A. S.20Liverpool.
Three Sisters A. S.20}Leith.
Leith A. S.20}
Three Brothers A. S.20Bristol.
Satisfaction A. S.20Greenock.
Cutter Meredith6·10To cruise from Beachy Head to Portland.
Cutter Sherburne6·8To cruise from Portland to Ram Head.

Convoy

Ship.Guns.Disposition.
Belleisle64To proceed to St. Helena to convoy the East India trade home.
Jupiter50}To cruise on coast of Spain and Portugal till the 20th October, and return with the trade.
Medea28}
Warwick50To convoy the trade to Canada from Cork, and return to Spithead.
Chatham50}To cruise between Stromness and the isle of Bona, for the protection of the Hudson’s Bay trade, and repair with it to the Nore.
Portland50}
Jason28}
Atalanta16}
Montreal32To convoy trade to the Mediterranean and repair to Spithead.
Hussar28To cruise between Oporto and Lisbon.
Pelican24To cruise between Finisterre and Lisbon.
Fly14To convoy trade to Holland and return with it to the Nore.
Savage14To proceed to New York with dispatches and return to Spithead.
Hawke10To proceed to Newfoundland with dispatches and return to Plymouth.
Endeavour10To proceed with dispatches to Jamaica.
Ranger 8To attend the Yarmouth Herring Fishery and return to the Nore.
Resolution12·12″}In remote parts.
Discovery8·8″}

The letters A.S. stand for “Armed Ship.” These were merchant craft bought into or hired for the navy, and armed with small guns. The Resolution and Discovery were the ships of Captain Cook, then on his last voyage. It must be remembered that these lists represent the cruisers and convoy ships at home or sent directly from home. On every station the admiral would detail part of his command for such duties as these.

The manning of the navy continued to present the old difficulties, aggravated by the fact that we had lost the services of the thousands of American seamen who had been found in our ships in the last war. They were now manning the privateers which preyed on our commerce as far abroad as the Channel and the Mediterranean. All the old complaints were heard of the cruelty, the unconstitutional character, and the inefficiency of the press. A Bill to abolish it was introduced and favourably received in the House of Commons, but went no further. The fact is that the press was indispensable. We would not train men in peace. The merchant seamen would never enlist of their free will in the navy, and were the less likely to do so because the first effect of a war was to send up wages in the trading-ships. But the press was not only needed for the sailors. They indeed were sought by it with particular zeal, because their skill was indispensable in the ships as riggers and to set an example to other men in handling masts and sails in all conditions of weather. It was on them, too, that the captain relied in the greater perils of navigation. But they never formed the bulk of the crews of our warships, nor was it possible they should. In a debate on the Bill to abolish the Press, held on 11th March 1777, Lord Mulgrave declared that the total number of seamen in the country was only 60,000, while the number required for the navy in war had sometimes risen to 80,000. If the whole body of our merchant seamen had been swept into the navy and their places in our trading-ships taken by foreigners who swarmed in to earn the high war wages, there would still have been a deficiency. In truth we never secured all the merchant sailors. The list of men rated as seamen was made up by taking landsmen, who either volunteered or were impressed, and were not uncommonly vagabonds and jail-birds. Though all might be known officially by the same name, a wide distinction was always made among the crews themselves, and in the opinion of the officers, between the “prime seamen” who had served their apprenticeship in the long sea voyages and could turn their hand to anything, and the mere “man-of-warsman,” who had not been bred to the sea and had only been taught the work of his particular station. It was inevitable that in crews composed in this fashion there should have been wide differences of quality and that some of their elements were worthless and criminal. Neither was it denied by the representatives of the Admiralty that this was the case. On the 11th November of 1777, Mr. Temple Luttrell said in the Commons, “Your bounties procure few good seamen, and your press warrants, though enormously expensive, fewer still, while great numbers are daily deserting from your ships and hospitals to commit robberies and murders in the interior counties.... I am assured that fifty have lately deserted from the Monarch while in dock, forty from the Hector, and twenty-five from the Worcester, six of these are confined at Winchester for felonies, and there are two committed to Exeter jail on a charge of murder.” Lord Mulgrave’s answer was that fifty men had indeed deserted, from the Monarch, because Captain Rowley was humanely unwilling to treat his men as slaves, and that the deserters were not to be regretted, because “the health of the rest was preserved, as the service was freed from a number of men not to be depended on.” No reply was given on other points. Lord Mulgrave’s tone of jaunty flippancy was characteristic of the incompetent Government which led the country unprepared into the most disastrous of its wars.

Yet in 1777 the navy was beginning to reap the benefit of the General Press warrant issues in October 1776, when the king and his ministers were at last forced to recognise that the rebellion in America was very serious. It was now possible to lay hands on good men by force. Until this was the case, our ships were not uncommonly manned in the fashion described in the following letter from Captain Price of the Viper sloop on the North American station in 1775, as quoted by Beatson in his Naval and Military Memoirs:—

“I am very much distressed for Petty officers, as well as Warrants. My Carpenter infirm and past duty, my Gunner made from a livery servant, neither seaman nor gunner; my Master a man in years, never an officer before, made from a boy on board one of the guardships, he then keeping a public house at Gosport. Petty officers I have but one, who owns himself mad at times. A Master’s Mate I have not, nor anyone I can make a Boatswain’s mate. I have not one person I could trust with the charge of a vessel I might take to bring her in.”

What complication of slovenliness and jobbery there was behind that master who had been borne as a boy on a guardship and yet kept a public-house at Gosport, we do not know, but it must be allowed that H.M.S. Viper differed vastly from the smart British man-of-war with her crew of fine seamen which is supposed to have represented the navy of the eighteenth century. It is probable, however, that she only differed in degree from the average vessel in commission at a time when jobbery was common, and there was no press at work to sweep in the thoroughbred seamen.