Merchantmen-at-arms : the British merchants' service in the war

by David W. Bone

As outposts to our field, roving bands on a frontier that rises and falls with the tide, the seamen were ever the first to apprehend the mutterings of war. With but little needed to set spark to the torch, they came in to foreign seaport or littoral with a fine confidence in their ships and arms. Truculent perhaps, and overbearing in their pride of long voyaging over a mysterious and threatening sea, they were hardly the ambassadors to aid settlement of a dispute by frank goodwill and prudence. Sailing outwith the confines of ordered government, their lawless outlook and freebooting found a ready rejoinder in restraint of trade and arbitrary imprisonment. Long wars had their seed in tavern brawls, enforcement "to stoope gallant [lower topsail] and vaile their bonets" for a puissant king or queen, brought a reckoning of strife and bloodshed.

Although military sea-captains, the glory of their victories, the worthiness of their ships and appurtenances, figure largely on the pages of subsequent sea-history, not a great deal has been written of the sailor captains and their mates and crews. Later chroniclers were concerned that their subjects should be grand and combatant: there was little room in their text for trading ventures, or for such humble recitals as the tale and values of hogshead or caisse or bale. A line of demarcation was slowly but inevitably ruling a division of our sea-forces. The service of the ships, devoted indifferently to sea-warfare or oversea trading—as the nation might be at war or peace—was in process of adjustment to meet the demands of a new sea-attack. The vessels were no longer merely floating platforms from which a military leader could direct a plan of rude assault and engage the arms of his soldiery, leaving to the masters and seamen the duty of handling the way of the ship. A new aristocracy had arisen from the decks who saw, in the pull of their sails, a weapon more powerful than shock ordnance, and resented the dictation of landsmen on their own sea-province. Sea-warfare had become a contest, more of seamanship and manœuvre, less of stunning impact and a weight of military arms.

In division of the ships and their service, it may quite properly be claimed that the Merchants' Service remained the parent trunk from which the new Navy—a gallant growing limb—drew sap and sustenance, perhaps, in turn, improving the growth of the grand old tree. Certainly their service was an offshoot, for, since Henry VIII ordered laying of the first especial war keel, the sea-battles to the present day have been largely joined by the ships and men and furniture of the merchants, carrying on in the historic traditional manner of a fight when there was fighting to be done, a return to trade and enterprise when the great sea-roads were cleared to commerce. Stout old Sir John Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake, Davis, Amadas, and Barlow were merchant masters, shrewd at a venture, in intervals of, and combination with, their deeds of arms. Only a small proportion of State ships were in issue with the merchants' men to scourge the great Armada from our shores. Perhaps the existence of such a vast reserve in ships and men delayed the progress of purely naval construction. Only with the coming of steam was the line drawn sharply and definitely—the branch outgrowing the interlock of the parent stem.

With partial severance and division of the ships, the seamen—who had been for so long of one breed, laying down sail-needle and caulking-iron to serve ordnance and hand-cutlass or boarding-pike—had reached a parting of the ways, and become naval or mercantile as their habits lay. The State war vessels, built and manned and maintained for strictly military uses, increased in strength and numbers. Their officers and crews developed a new seamanship and discipline that had little counterpart on the commercial vessels. For a time the two services sailed, if not in company, within sight and hail of one another. On occasion they joined to effect glorious issues, but, with the last broadside of war, courses were set that quickly swerved the fleets apart.

Longer terms of peace gave opportunity for development on lines that were as poles apart. The Naval Service perfected and exercised their engines of war, and drilled and seasoned their men to automaton-like subservience to their plans. A broadening to democratic freedom, quickened by familiar intercourse with other nationals, had effect with the merchantmen in rousing a reluctance to a resort to arms; they desired but a free continuance of trading relations. Although differing in their operations and ideals, both services were striving to enhance the sea-power of the nation. Thomas Cavendish, Middleton, Monson, Hudson, and Baffin—merchant masters—explored the unknown and extended a field for mercantile ventures, but that field could have been but indifferently maintained if naval power had not been advanced to protect the merchantmen in their voyaging.

THE BRIDGE OF A MERCHANTMAN

As their separation developed, relations grew the more distant between the seamen. While certainly protecting the traders from any foreign interference, the new Navy did little to effect a community of interest with their sea-fellows. Prejudices and distrust grew up. State jealousies and trade monopolies formed a confusion of interests and made for strained relations between the merchants and the naval chancelleries on shore. At sea, the arbitrary exercise of authority by the King's officers was opposed by revolutionary instincts for a free sea on the part of the merchants' seamen. Forcible impressment to naval service was the worst that could befall the traders' men. For want of energy or ability to carry through the drudgery of early sea-training, the naval officers took toll of the practised commercial seamen as they came in from sea. Bitter hardship set wedge to the cleavage. After long and perilous voyaging, absent from a home port for perhaps two or three years, the homeward-bound sailor had little chance of being allowed a term of liberty on shore—a brief landward turn to dissolve the salt casing of his bones. Within sound of his own church bells, in sight of the windmills and the fields and the home dwelling he had longed for, he was haled to hard and rigorous sea-service on vessels of war. The records of the East India Company have frequent references to this cruel exercise of naval tyranny.

"On Thursday morning the Directors received the agreeable news of the safe arrival of the Devonshire, Captain Prince, from Bengal. . . . Her men have all been impressed by the Men-of-War in the Downs, and other hands were put on board to bring her up to her moorings in the River."