The battle began at 12.40, and at 3 it ended. The two hours and a half while it lasted were the hottest hours of battle in the whole war. The Dutch were awkward in fleet manœuvres from want of practice, but they were more phlegmatic, more solid, better gunners, and better ropemen than the French. They reserved their fire till our ships were close, and their two first broadsides, as English officers experienced them confessed, “were terrible.” Onslow, who cut through the line astern of the Dutch between the Jupiter and the Haarlem, and Duncan, who cut the line behind the States General, were both heavily pounded, and so were the vessels which followed them. If there was final concentration of English ships on the Dutch centre and rear, there had been a preliminary concentration of Dutch ships on the English leaders. Three vessels lost more than a hundred men each. The Ardent, 64, which belonged to Duncan’s division and was closely engaged with the Vryheid, lost no less than 148 killed and wounded—more than a third of her crew. Her captain, Burgess, and her master, Don, were both slain. The total loss was officially stated to be 825, but the committee appointed to distribute a public subscription for the wounded and the families of the dead put it at 1040. The eleven Dutch ships taken were so shattered as to be of no further use. Admiral De Winter was taken prisoner. The ships in the Dutch van escaped too soon, after doing too little to help the others. On our side all did not come equally well into action. Captain John Williamson, of the Agincourt, had hung about the outskirts of the fight in a very feeble way. In 1779 he had been a lieutenant with Captain Cook, and had witnessed the murder of his commander from a launch, not only without attempting to save him, but without attempting to rescue his body. He was brought to a court martial and, though acquitted of cowardice, was sentenced to be put at the bottom of the list of post-captains for misconduct.

Nelson once complained that actions fought near home were more thought of than those fought far off. Camperdown is an exception to the rule—if rule there be. It was early half forgotten, and is much neglected among our battles. Yet it was a great deliverance from fear of invasion at the time, and the quality of the enemy we conquered must place it far above St. Vincent as a battle. At Trafalgar a far better appointed fleet than Duncan’s fought a much less formidable enemy, on the same method as he fought the Dutch. Much pedantry has been expended in inquiring whether both admirals did or did not alter their first plans—as if it could ever be a reproach to a leader of men that he adapted his actions to the circumstances. That Duncan did not waste time in forming the starboard line of bearing, and thereby give the Dutch an opportunity to slip away, is manifestly true—and to a plain man it appears that he did alter his plan. Nelson at Trafalgar may have done what he had meant to do all along, but he had Duncan’s battle to show the advantage of doing it. Yet Duncan is commonly spoken of to-day as a brave old fellow who blundered on a victory, and nobody has noted how little originality was required in 1805 to do what had been already done in 1797. I know of no reason why Duncan is not to be credited with sense enough to foresee, and intend, the consequences of his acts.

CHAPTER XII
THE MUTINIES

Authorities.—In addition to the general histories and biographies of officers named already, two pamphlets ought to be consulted for the mutinies. A Narrative of Occurrences which took place during the Mutiny at the Nore in May and June 1797, by Rear-Admiral Charles Cunningham, 1829; and The Natural Defence of an Insular Empire, by Admiral Phillip Paton, 1810.

The year of St. Vincent and Camperdown was also the year of the great mutinies which mark a turning-point in the history of the navy. They were the culmination of long-standing grievances caused by old evils.

If we could reconstruct a crew (supposing the thing to have been done fairly and without beautifying), the spectacle would surprise, and somewhat disenchant, the spectator. To do it fairly we must take not a crack frigate commanded by a popular officer with a good reputation for luck in prize-taking, but one of the ordinary vessels, liners or less, which did the bulk of the heavy work of the old wars. If the date chosen had been well on in any of our naval wars, and certainly if it had been taken in the midst of the last and greatest, the figures of wax or wood—which we suppose to be properly ticketed—would tell a curious tale. It would be startling to see how many foreigners there were, how many landsmen, how many boys, how many quota-men, and state-the-case-men. The quota-men were those whom each county of the United Kingdom was called upon at one period in the old war to supply for the fleet. Of course they all came from the Cave of Adullam, and were, in fact, the scamps of every neighbourhood, tempted by high bounties. Their character is sufficiently well indicated by the fact that Parker, who headed the mutiny at the Nore, was a quota-man from Perth. The state-the-case-man is more complicated. As the press-gang swept all fish into its net, a great many were seized who were, or believed themselves to be, exempted. They were for ever appealing to the Admiralty for release, and the Department kept writing to the captains about them. For convenience, these letters were marked outside “State the case.” Hence the expression a “state-the-case-man,” as applied to the poor forced complaining creatures, of whom every captain would have been delighted to get rid, if only he could have kept his complement up without them. Of such material our crews were largely formed in the most triumphant times; for the navy was not popular with the real sailors, and least of all with the best. Although the prime men who were the real nerve of a crew were supposed to form a third only of the complement, they contributed more to the list of deserters than the ordinary seamen, landsmen, boys, and marines put together. Every ship carried a proportion of landsmen, who were not expected to do real sailor’s work. This perversity of the seamen was a sore grievance to officers. Admiral Cunningham, who was captain of the frigate Clyde during the mutiny at the Nore, and wrote an account of it, was very severe on them. He thought that they were as happy as mortal sailor could expect to be. But they were of another way of thinking.

This wrongheadedness of theirs, too, was an old story—as old as the seventeenth century—and, in spite of Admiral Cunningham, was thoroughly intelligible. It was a question of pay, both in amount and manner. As far back as the reign of William III., Captain Saint-Lo put the whole thing into a nutshell. The wages of A.B.’s were then 23s. a month for a month of twenty-eight days, which is 25s. a month on the year. This rate of pay remained unchanged, in spite of the fall in the value of money, till the mutiny at Spithead scared Parliament into greater, but still very measured, liberality. Now in Captain Saint-Lo’s time the average wages of a good man in the merchant service during war were 50s. and 60s. a month. In the eighteenth century they were known to go as high as £4. The men who manned the coal-ships in the North Sea earned as much as £6, £7, or £8 the run. Here was a contrast which the A.B. naturally perpended. But what had equal, or even greater, weight with him was the reflection that, whereas a man in the merchant service was sure of his money at the end of the voyage, the man-of-war’s man could never know when he would be paid. Admiral Cunningham quoted as one of the blessings of the sailors that the Admiralty had done all human wisdom could do to see that each man got exactly his right amount; but, unluckily, it was precisely the fatherly care of “My Lords” which constituted the grievance. The treatment given to the seamen had indeed been improved in the course of the eighteenth century. In 1758, George Grenville, who was then Treasurer of the Navy, persuaded Parliament to pass “an Act for the Encouragement of Seamen employed in the Royal Navy; and for establishing a regular method for the punctual, frequent, and certain payment of their wages; and for enabling them more easily and readily to remit the same for the support of their wives and families; and for preventing frauds and abuses attending such payments.” But these fine promises of the title of the Act were spoilt by many limitations. A man who volunteered was to receive an advance of two months, and could assign part of his pay for the support of his family. All men who had served for a year and upwards were entitled to be paid the wages due to them (less a deduction of six months, which was kept back as a guarantee against desertion) whenever the ship they were in came into a home port where there was a Commissioner of the Navy. But pressed men got no advance, and none of the men were paid when serving abroad, or at a home port other than a naval dockyard. The deduction of six months was calculated in a way which the sailors complained of. Their wages were paid by months of four weeks, but the deductions were made in calendar months.

In practice the men got their wages not in hard coin on board, but in pay-tickets, which had to be presented at an office, and were only cashed when all the red tape had been duly complied with. As a ship’s commission in war-time might last four years, we can easily imagine what this might mean for a man who had been pressed out of a home-coming merchant-ship at the beginning of hostilities, and also what it meant for his wretched wife and family. But even this was not all. It frequently happened, when there was great need to keep fleets at sea, that when a ship was “paid off” and her crew had received their “tickets,” they were bodily turned over to a fresh ship, with their paper money in their hands, and sent off on another four years’ cruise. Admiral Ekins, who wrote after the great war, when something had been done for the men, says that he heard of a case of one who had served fourteen years without touching a penny of actual pay. This he gives as mere report; but he adds that, to his own knowledge, men often served nine years without the receipt of wages. After that, one understands what Nelson meant when he said that his heart was with the men who mutinied at Spithead. After all, their main demands were that their pay should be raised above the figure fixed in Charles II.’s time, when money was worth twice what it was in 1797, and that they should be paid whenever a ship returned to England—which assuredly were moderate requests. The practical results of the old system were horrible. For one thing, as the men had to buy their clothes, they were actually reduced to nakedness and rags for want of money. When a crew were turned over in the style described above, the Jews (by race or occupation) were allowed on board. To them the sailors sold their tickets at the price they were likely to get in a forced market. On these occasions a certain latitude was allowed by the humanity of officers. Liquor was winked at, and the “wives” of the sailors were allowed on board. The scenes which followed on the mess decks reproduced the animalism of the South Sea Islands without the picturesqueness. But it was not only by the “Jews,” and on board, that the unfortunate sailor was pillaged. William Hodges, who in 1695 made a pathetic representation of their grievances to Parliament, draws a dreadful picture of the misery inflicted on the whole class by the monstrous system on which they were paid. Hodges does not measure his language, and was plainly one of those good men in whom zeal for justice has eaten up moderation; but his statements are too substantially in agreement with probability to be rejected. From him we learn that when the sailors’ tickets were sent home to their families to be cashed, the poor women were compelled to come up to the pay office for their money, even from Scotland, and then if they were ignorant of the forms to be complied with, or a “Q” (query) was put against any name, which he declares was often done on frivolous pretexts, they were put off, and had their journey for nothing. Of course they sold the tickets to traders, who made a business of speculating in them. Hodges takes great credit to himself for having bought large quantities at the very moderate discount of half a crown in the pound. It is probable that, allowing for all risks—stoppage of deserters’ wages and Government delays—he did not make much profit. Still, his boast shows that a sailor’s family was thought lucky if it only lost 12·5 per cent. on his wages. Hodges may be believed when he says that in one small precinct of London he found a thousand, besides children, belonging to seamen’s families in absolute destitution.