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

by David W. Bone

". . . On Sunday morning the Purser of the William, Captain Petre, arrived in town, who brought advice of the said ship in the Downs, richly laden, on Account of the Turkey Company: the Ships of War in the Downs impressed all her men, and put others on board to bring her up."

"Notwithstanding the Report spread about, fourteen days ago, that no more sailors would be impressed out of the homeward-bound ships, several ships that arrived last week had all their men taken from them in the Downs."

Serving by turns, as his agility to dodge the gangs was rated, on King's ship for a turn, then hauling bowline on a free vessel; forced and hunted and impressed, the shipmen had perhaps sorry records to offer the historian, then busy with the enthralling chronicles of fleet engagements and veiling with glamour the toll of battles. Perhaps it was, after all, the better course to preserve a silence on the traders' doings and leave to romantic conjecture a continuance of Hakluyt's patient story.

Since the date of naval offgrowth, the chronicles have not often turned on our commercial path. Lone voyages and encounters with the sea and storm are minor enterprises to the sack of cities and the clash of arms at sea. Unlike the Naval Service, we merchants' men hold few recorded titles to our keystone in the national fabric. The deeds and documents may exist, but they are lost to us and forgotten in the files of musty ledgers. The fruits of our efforts stand in the balances of commercial structure, and are perhaps more enduring than a roll of record. But, if we are insistent in our search, we may borrow from the naval charters, and read that not all the glory of our sea-history lies with the thunder of broadsides and the impact of a close boarding. Engagement with the elements—a contest with powers more cruel and implacable than keen steel—efforts to further able navigation, the standard of our seamanship—drew notable recruits to the humbler sea-life. The small crews and less lavish gear on the freighters brought the essentials of the sea-trade to each individual of the ship's company. Idlers and landsmen learned quickly and bitterly that their only claim to existence on a merchant's ship lay in a rapid acquisition of a skill in seamanship. The lessons and the threats and enforcements did not come wholly from their superiors, to whose tyranny they might expose a sullen obstinance, and gain, perhaps, a measure of sympathy from their rude sea-fellows. Then—as later, in the keen sailing days of our clipper ships—their hardest taskmasters were foremast hands, watchmates, the men they lived with and ate with and worked with—bitter critics, unpersuadable, who saw only menace and a threat to their own safety in the shipping of a man who could not do man's work. On the decks and about the spars of a merchant vessel, each man of the few seamen carried two lives—his own and a shipmate's—in his ability to 'hand, reef, and steer.' There was no place on board for a 'waister,' a 'swabber,' longshoreman, or sea labourer. Every man had quickly to prove his ability: the unrelenting sea gave time for few essays.

Fertility of resource, dexterity to serve at all duties, skill at handling ship and canvas, were the results of sea-ship training. In the merchantmen great opportunities offered for advancement in all branches of the seaman's art. Long voyaging was better exercise for a progression in navigation than the daily pilotage of the war vessels. Blake, in his early days as a merchant supercargo, learnt his seafaring on rough trading voyages, and his training could not have been other than sound to persist, through twenty years shore-dwelling as a merchant at Bridgwater, until he was called from his counting-house to command our naval forces. Dampier was a tarry foremast hand in his day: whatever we may judge of his conduct, we can have nothing but admiration for his seamanship. Ill-equipped and short-handed, racked by sea-sores and scurvy, his expeditions were unparalleled as a triumph of merchant sea-skill. James Cook learned his trade on the grimy hull of an east-coast collier—to this day we are working on charts of his masterly surveys.

In later years the merit of the trading vessels as sterling sea-schools was equally plain. During intervals of combatant service, or as prelude to a naval career, training on the merchants' ships was eagerly sought by ardent naval seamen who saw the value of its resource in practical seamanship, in navigation, and weather knowledge. Great captains did not disdain the measure of the instruction. They sent their heirs to sea in trading vessels to draw an essence in practice from their sea-cunning. Hardy, Foley, and Berry had borne a hand at the sheets and braces, and had steered a lading of goods abroad, before they came to high command of the King's ships. Who knows what actions in the victories of Copenhagen, the Nile, and Trafalgar (hinged on the cast of the winds) were governed by Nelson's early sea-lessons, under Master John Rathbone, on the decks of a West India merchantman?

For long after, relations and interchange between the two Services were not so intimate. Until coming of the Great War, with a mutual appreciation, we had little in common. Our friend and peacemaker—the influence of seafaring under square sail—languished a while, then died. In steam-power, with its growth of development and intricacy of application, we found no worthy successor to present as good an office. In the long span of a hundred years of sea-peace we grew apart. The gulf between the two great Services widened to a breach that only the rigours of a world-conflict could reconcile.

As though exhausted by the indefinite sea-campaign of 1812, the Royal Navy lay on their oars and saw their commercial sea-fellows forge ahead on a course that revolutionized sea-transport and sea-warfare alike. The Lords of the Admiralty would listen to no deprecation of their gallant old wooden walls: steam propulsion was laughed at. To the Merchants' Service they left the risk and the responsibility of venturing afar in the rude new ships. In this wise, to us fell the honour of leading the State service to a new order of seafaring. Iron hulls and steam propulsion came first under our hands. It was not long before our new command of the sea was noted. Somewhat grudgingly, the conservative sea-mandarins were brought to a knowledge that their torpor was fatal. The Navy stirred and lost little time in traversing the leeway. They progressed on a path of experiment and probation suited to their needs, striving to construct mightier vessels and to forge new and greater arms. Exploring every avenue in their quest for aid and material, every byway for furtherance of their aims, they drew strange road-fellows within their ranks, new workmen to the sea. The engines of their adoption called for crafty hands to serve and adjust them. Steam we knew in our time and could understand, but auxiliary mechanics outgrew the limits of our comprehension; naval practice became a science outwith the bounds of our sea-lore, a new trade, whose only likeness to ours lay in its service on the same wide sea.

Parted from the need to draw arms, secure in the knowledge of adequate naval protection, the Merchants' Service developed their ships and tackle in the ways of a free world trade. By shrewd engagement and industry in the counting-house, diligence and forethought in the building-yards, keen sailing and efficiency on the sea, the structure of our maritime supremacy was built up and maintained. Monopolies and hindering trade reservations and restrictions barred the way, but yielded to the spirit of our progress. Vested interests in seas and continents had to be fought and conquered, and there was room and scope for lingering combative instincts in the keen competition that arose for the world's carrying trade. Other nations came on the free seas, secure in the peace our arms had wrought, and entered the lists against us. The challenge to our seafaring we met by skill and hardihood—keener and more polished arms than the weapons of our sea-fathers. The coming of competitors spurred us to sea-deeds in the handling of our ships and cargoes, dispatch in the ports, and activity in the yards, that brought acknowledged victory to our flag. Every sense and thought that was in us was used to further our supremacy. The craft and workmanship of the builders and enterprise of the merchants provided us with the most beautiful of man's creations on the sea—the square-rigged sailing ship of the nineteenth century. With pride we sailed her. We, too, brought science to our calling; rude, perhaps, and not readily defined save by a long, hard pupilage. Not less than the calibre of the new naval ordnance was the measure of our sail spread, not inferior to ironclad hulls the speed and beauty of our clippers—we paralleled the roads of their strategy by the masterly handling of a cloud in sail. With a regularity and precision as noted as our naval sea-brothers' advance in gunfire, we served the trade and the mails, and spread the flood of emigration to the rise and glory of the Empire.

With the decline of square sail, a new way of seafaring opened to us. In the first of our steam pioneering, we took our yards and canvas with us, as good part of our sea-kit; a safe provision, as we thought, against the inevitable failure we looked for in the new navigation. We were conservatively jealous of our gallant top hamper, and scorned the promise of a power that only dimly as yet we understood. But—the promise held. In a few years we became converts to the new order, in which we found a greater security, a more definite reliance, than in the angles of our sail plane. There was no longer a need for our precious 'stand by,' and we unrigged the wind tackle and accepted our new shipmate, the marine engineer, as a worthy brother seaman. It was not only the spars and the cordage and the sails we put ashore. With all the gallant litter we unloaded, condemned to the junk-heap, went a part of our seamanship as closely woven to the canvas as the seams our hands had sewn.