Rodney

by David Hannay

The tone of the letters, too, is not unworthy of notice. There is no anger in Rodney’s mind with the sailors of the Britannia for resisting. That was “the game”; and if he feels aught, it is annoyance that Sax’s men disobeyed orders, and regret that three stout sailors, who might have been used in the Prince George’s tops and batteries, should be lying stiff and stark on the merchant ship’s deck, waiting to be thrown to the fishes off St. Helen’s. Noteworthy, too, is Sir Edward Hawke’s summary decision that there shall be no coroner’s inquest to start unpleasant inquiries. There shall be no bodies for the jury to sit on. Such were the freedom of the seafaring subject and the sanctity of the law as understood by post-captains and vice-admirals of the blue, white, and red squadrons in 1755 and for long afterwards. No wonder that desertions were incessant, or that in this year Rodney has to receive on board the Prince George a company of “Colonel Bockland’s regiment of foot” to stand sentry over his pressed men. Haslar Hospital was a common “take off” for desertions. It was full in those times when complaints were common from every ship in the Channel that there are not slops enough, so that the men are naked, and in want of every necessary; that the beef is bad, the beer sour, the cheese and butter “stinking rotten.” From it the men ran in such numbers that the leakage threatened to counterbalance the inflow due to the press. On the top of the press warrants came orders to Lieutenant This and Mr. That, midshipman, to take so many trusty men, and with them keep watch and ward round Haslar to shut in the convalescent men who might try to make a run for the free air of the South Down. One touch more and we can be done with the press-gang. When in the following year Rodney had been transferred to the Monarch, seventy-four, and was lying at Plymouth, he reports in an official letter that many sailors use the high road by Wendover in going from port to port. He suggests the despatch of a lieutenant and a dozen trusty men to set up a rendezvous on the road, and catch the seamen in transit. The merchant sailor was hunted like the flying-fish. Clearly Rodney was a zealous officer, and whether he liked this kidnapping work or not he did it without shrinking. Probably he neither liked nor disliked it, but just did it as a matter of course. As for the men, they too took it as part of the incurable nature of things. They might give three cheers, and fire a gun, or knock the press sailors down, or desert if they could, but once in the mess, after a reasonable amount of cursing and storming they settled down. The fund of loyalty in the country was immense. They laid the blame of the misfortune on the French, and prepared to take it out of the hereditary enemy. The country in the meantime clung to the press out of the abundance of its love for the freedom of the subject. A proposal to replace it by a registration of seamen, made in Walpole’s time, was rejected indignantly because of the increased power it would give the administration. In a muddle-headed way the country was right, given the point of view. It was better to tolerate the survival of an old and now limited prerogative as an evil necessity than to give Government power to register men and call them out in classes. That would have been a recognition of a principle and a serious concession.

In 1755 Rodney was transferred from the Prince George to the Monarch, and from Portsmouth to Plymouth. During the first half of the next year he was in this latter ship and port, engaged in much the same work as before. Fighting had begun not only in America, but in the Mediterranean, to which Byng sailed this year on his disastrous expedition to Minorca, but there was no formal declaration of war till May, 1756. At Plymouth, Rodney came across an illustration of the barbarity of the time not inferior to the press-gang, which also he doubtless accepted as a matter of course. We had stopped a French emigrant vessel, apparently before the declaration, bound to Louisiana with Alsatian emigrants. Louisiana meant then the valley of the Mississippi, and as much to right or left of it as the French could seize. It would never do to allow them to increase their number if it could be prevented. There was no peace beyond the line—to the west that is of the line drawn from north to south, three hundred and seventy leagues to the west of the Cape de Verd Islands. So, though we were nominally at peace with France, the emigrants were stopped in the Channel by a kind of application, I take it, of the Cyprès doctrine. Among them were some twenty women and children, whom Rodney was ordered to send over to Ostend in a tender. The poor creatures petitioned to be allowed to remain with their husbands, promising to share the subsistence allowed the men by the French King. What answer was given I do not know, but it is characteristic of the slovenly inhumanity of the day that we should, after stopping these poor people, have calmly proposed to separate the wives from their husbands, and send them to beg or starve at Ostend—and have done that too, as was no doubt the case, under the impression that it was the good-natured thing to do. The British official man of the middle of the eighteenth century was above all things a very great ass. He was not so corrupt as he has been called; he could work very hard, was conscious of the duty he owed his king and country. Nobody, I think, can look at the evidence and doubt that he tried his best, but it was absurdly bad, for being an ass what could he do but administer in an asinine manner?

It is worth while to insist a little on this, because, unless you know the element in which a man swam, it is impossible to estimate his swimming. In 1755 that element was for naval officers one of official incoherence and incompetence. Contradictory orders with their inevitable consequences, which are omissions, and confusion, abounded. Men and officers were drafted from ship to ship according to what Nelson called “the infernal system” which prevailed too long in our navy. There seemed to be no plan at headquarters, or, what is even worse, several plans at once. To take a comparatively small detail as illustrating the working of the Navy Board. When in July the Monarch was ordered to sea to join Boscawen, now cruising in the Channel, Rodney is found at the very last moment applying for a third surgeon who had been promised to him, but had not turned up. He did not come, but in place of him a consoling letter from the senior officer at Plymouth informing Rodney that the Monarch would be better without him, for he had turned out on inquiry to be entirely ignorant of a surgeon’s business, and only seventeen years old. With that instance of official management we may leave the subject. That we pulled through it all is entirely due to the one redeeming merit our administration had. It did leave a very large share of power to the admirals and captains. When they were of the right stamp—admirals such as Hawke and Boscawen, captains of the order of Rodney and Hood, or the less famous Lockhart and Gilchrist, who were engaged in this and the following wars in snapping up the French cruisers and privateers as fast as they showed a bowsprit in the Channel—order and efficiency were soon evoked out of chaos. Of course when the commander was of the wrong stamp—when he was a Byng, who looked upon official mismanagement, not as a thing to be made good, but as mere matter of complaint and excuse for doing nothing, the result was very different. The fate which overtook Byng convinced every officer, however, that it was safer as well as more honourable to follow the example of Hawke and Boscawen. The naval officers and the great kindred spirit of Pitt, the master of them all, saved the country in spite of officialdom by sheer dint of playing the man.

In the July of 1756 the Monarch joined Boscawen in Channel soundings for a short time. She had only been with him a few days when the carpenter, “a very good man,” who had been warned to present no frivolous complaints, had to report that the “knee of the head” was loose, and worked so much as to cause the ship to leak dangerously. There was nothing for it but to apply to the Admiral for a survey. The result of the report of the surveyors was an order to the Monarch to return to Portsmouth to refit. Rodney spent the remainder of the year and the beginning of the next in the dockyard. He contrived to get some good out of the evil state of the Monarch by inducing the dockyard authorities to alter the internal arrangement of the ship, which was a French prize, and had her magazines in the wrong place. Whatever good the alteration may have done the Monarch, the advantage of it was reaped by another captain. About the end of February Rodney was transferred to the Dublin, which makes the fifth ship he had commanded in four years. One wonders how any kind of discipline and good spirit was maintained in the midst of these incessant changes.

Almost the last order given him on board the Monarch was one by Admiral Thomas Smith, “Tom of Ten Thousand,” directing him to receive on board, as “supernumeraries for their victuals only,” Rear-Admiral Byng and his retinue. It is dated February 6th, 1757. On the 17th of the next month poor Byng, having now no need to think and act, but only to undergo his fate, faced the firing-party on the Monarch’s quarter-deck like a gentleman, without fear and without ostentation. Rodney had no share, direct or indirect, in the trial or execution of the Admiral, but I have come to a very mistaken estimate of his character if he disapproved it. No man had less of the querulous spirit, which was Byng’s ruin, or less toleration for such half-hearted leadership as was shown in the fight off Minorca. If he ever saw, as he probably did, Voltaire’s famous jest, he replied, no doubt, that the execution did “encourage the others.” It set up a terrible warning to those who might in future feel inclined to think that if they were badly treated by the Admiralty they were therefore to be excused for not doing their best against the enemy.

Rodney’s new ship the Dublin lay at Deptford, and he was now to begin all over again the weary work of fitting for sea. According to the wholesome custom of the navy he was allowed to bring with him a few chosen officers and men to form the heart of a new crew. From April to August then we will suppose him at work as before, setting up a rendezvous, superintending the rigging of his new ship, dunning the Admiralty for slops to clothe his naked men, and food not “stinking rotten” for them to eat. Since the little picturesque touch is always welcome, we will note that he applies among other things to the Admiralty for a cook’s warrant for “Charles O’Raaf,” hardly an Englishman we should think, who had lost his arm in an action with the French in 1747. In September he had at last got his ship into shape and joined Hawke, now back from the Mediterranean, whither he had gone to supersede Byng, and preparing for the first of those combined attacks on the coast of France which were the least successful of the Great Commoner’s enterprises.

The history of the attack on Rochefort, which was made in September, may be quite fairly given in the words of Captain Marryat. “The army thought that the navy might have beaten down stone ramparts, ten feet thick; and the navy wondered why the army had not walked up the same ramparts which were thirty feet perpendicular.” Sir Edward Hawke, who commanded the fleet, was as capable an officer as ever hoisted his flag—and Wolfe was with the troops. The two, if they had been at liberty to act together, might have effected something, but unfortunately Wolfe was still only Lieutenant-Colonel in Kingsley’s regiment. The General in command, Sir John Mordaunt, was old and by no means competent. His personal bravery was nearly the only soldierly quality he had, and though he did not fear death he stood in terror of responsibility. With such a leader an expedition which required dashing management was sure to fail, and fail it did. Whatever credit was gained fell to Howe in the Magnanime, and then the squadron and the troops came back with very little glory, but with ample materials for a court of inquiry and a pamphleteering war. Rodney took no part in this last, and had no conspicuous share in the previous operations. The Dublin was in truth a wretched ship. Immediately after joining the squadrons he lost company because her rudder had got out of order. Soon, too, Rodney had to represent to the Admiral that a hundred and fifty of his men were down with an epidemic fever, while many others were so weak as to be unfit for work. To make good the defects of his vessel, and to recruit his crew, he was ordered back to Spithead.

In May of 1758 he sailed on a much more satisfactory piece of service. The Dublin was ordered to join Boscawen in the attack on Louisburg in Cape Breton. She was sent in place of the Invincible, which had just been lost. After experiencing repeated delays, and a long struggle with the difficulty of manning his ship—to make his complement up at all it was found necessary to enlist “neutral” prisoners who volunteered—he got off at last with a convoy. General Amherst and his staff sailed in the Dublin, which was in fact crowded with soldiers and stores.

The siege and capture of Louisburg marked the turning of the tide for us in the Seven Years’ War. It was the first completely successful thing we did. It gave us the command of the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and was a decisive step towards the final conquest of Canada. Navy and army, Boscawen and Amherst, worked admirably together, and Wolfe, who was here also, had some opportunity to show his great qualities as a leader. It would be pleasing to his biographer to be able to say that Rodney had a conspicuous share in the victory; but the truth is that during the greater part of the actual fighting the Dublin was at Halifax. She maintained her character as an unhealthy ship, and was hardly on the North American coast before the epidemic fever broke out again. Boscawen kept her mostly at Halifax, where Rodney had to discharge the very important but somewhat thankless duties of officer in command at the basis of operations. What part of his attention could be spared from forwarding transports was devoted to looking after the health of his men. The hospitals of Halifax were full of sickly sailors or soldiers, and the Dublin’s men had to be attended to in sheds run up on shore by the ship’s carpenter. Rodney rejoined Boscawen outside Louisburg just before it surrendered in July, and then sailed for Europe on August 15th with the convoy which carried the French prisoners of war. The room which had been taken up on board the Dublin on her way out by Amherst and his staff, was occupied on the way home by the officers of the eight French ships which were captured in the harbour. It is a not uninteresting detail that Rodney also took home a present of dried fish and Madeira from Wolfe to his family. One would like to know that the men were friends as they were certainly acquaintances.

The choice of the Dublin to attend the convoy was not only due to the fact that she was the kind of vessel an admiral would be naturally anxious to get rid of. Rodney was now a very senior captain, and would as a matter almost of course be selected for independent service for which a flag-officer could not be spared. He was now almost at the very end of his service as post-captain. When he had brought his convoy into the Channel and had sent it into Plymouth he proceeded to Spithead himself, and there applied for leave to attend to his health. A year spent on board a very ill-ventilated vessel reeking with fever had been too much for him. The leave was granted, and there ended Rodney’s work as a post-captain. In May of 1759 he was promoted rear-admiral.