It is said that any man who had been long a sailor, got into the habit of tapping his biscuit on the table to knock the weevils out before he ate it, a trick that old salts were seen to do at the tables of their friends on shore!
As for the state of the hospitals in India and elsewhere, the following story tells a tale. “Soon after the last action with the French fleet, I observed a wounded seaman, who had lost part of his hand by a shot, climbing up the side with one hand, and holding his bread bag in his teeth. I asked why he had left the hospital. He answered they were so much in want of provisions that he had come on board to beg some biscuit (which was full of maggots) for his messmates. At that time I understood Government was charged a rupee a day for every man in the hospital (about 1000 or 1500) but I believe seven or eight pence was all it cost the contractor for their provisions, and it was reported that he was obliged to share the profits with the admiral and his secretary, said to amount to about £70 a day.”
We have had some revelations of official corruption recently, but there is nothing to compare with the openly recognised stealing of the eighteenth century, when, so late as 1783, a minister could say in earnest to a purser who had been a commissary and complained of poverty, “You had your hand in the bag, sir, why did you not help yourself?” And help themselves everyone apparently did, from the highest to the lowest. Enquiry first began to be made by Lord St. Vincent, who set himself to clean this Augean stable.
There being a prospect of a vacancy in the office of the Admiralty, a satirical correspondent to the Morning Chronicle in 1792 forwarded the following list of qualities essential for any candidate applying:—
- He should know nothing of a ship.
- He should never have been to sea.
- He should be ignorant of geography.
- He should be ignorant of naval tactics.
- He should never attend office until four in the afternoon.
- He should be unfit for business every day.
- He should be very regular in keeping officers waiting for orders.
- He should not know a bumboat from a three decker.
- His hair should always be well dressed,
- And his head should be empty!
Though matters were bad enough for the officers they were fifty times worse for the men, and it is not at all singular that men should have been procured with difficulty to enter a service where they were liable to all sorts of hardships; to great risk of life; where they were at the mercy of an irresponsible commander, who could order them to be strung up on the slightest provocation, and given any number of lashes he thought fit; where they could be hanged for disobeying or manifesting the smallest revolt to this tyrant; where prize-money, which was freely distributed to officers, sometimes never reached the men. There were instances of prize-money fairly due to the men being held over for a year or more as “not worth distributing.”
The deficiency of men was, as we have seen, supplied by using the criminals of the gaols. Bounty money was also liberally offered, the authorities realising that a few pounds ready money were likely to be a valuable bribe to a man out of luck. The St. James’s Chronicle remarks at the beginning of the war, “Five pounds bounty, and two pounds extra from the Corporation of London; surely no tars can be found backward.”
In 1770 the Government had offered thirty shillings a head, which was augmented by various towns; London offering forty shillings additional, and Edinburgh forty-two shillings. In 1788 a prohibition forbidding seamen to serve in foreign navies was issued, and in 1791 the bounty money of London rose to two pounds for an ordinary seaman, and sixty shillings for an able seaman. The city added twenty shillings to the one, and forty shillings to the other at the beginning of the war in 1793. And in 1795 the total bounties in some places even amounted to thirty pounds a head!
In 1795 an Act was passed demanding levies of men from the whole country, the proportions varying according to the size of the county or port; from Yorkshire more than a thousand were demanded. In addition to this the pressgang was hard at work, and the monstrous injustice perpetrated by it makes one wonder how, even in times of greatest stress, it could have been allowed.
The difference between an ordinary press and a “hot press” was that in the latter all protection was disregarded, and men of every sort, even apprentices usually protected by law, were seized and carried off to serve, utterly regardless of mercy. The odd part of it is that, when it was found to be inevitable, the men who had been taken against their will plucked up spirit and performed their duties well.