In connexion with the seamen something should be said about the organisation for the care of the sick and wounded. The credit of being the first English Government to recognise the obligation of providing for the sick and wounded belongs to the Commonwealth. The principle that the State should provide for those who had suffered in its service was laid down by the Long Parliament in 1642, and an attempt was made to apply it to the case of soldiers wounded in the Civil War[176]. A little later the same principle was applied to seamen, and the idea and the machinery were taken over by the Restoration statesmen. In October, 1664, in view of the impending war with the Dutch, a temporary Commission for the care of Sick and Wounded Seamen on the model of the Commission of 1653 was appointed for the duration of the war, the most active member of it being John Evelyn, the diarist[177]. This Commission was re-appointed in March, 1672, for the Third Dutch War, and the elaborate instructions given to it are to be found in the volume of Naval Precedents in the Pepysian Library[178]. The Commissioners were to distribute the sick and wounded among the hospitals of England, 'thereby to ease his Majesty's charge'; and as soon as this accommodation was exhausted, they were to billet them upon private persons at the King's expense. London, Yarmouth, Ipswich, Southwold, Aldeburgh, Harwich, Chatham, Gravesend, Deal, Dover, Gosport, Southampton, Weymouth, Dartmouth, and Plymouth were specially assigned for the reception of sick and wounded men set ashore from their ships. At these 'places of reception' as they were called, the Commissioners were to appoint an agent, and to provide 'a physician (if need be) and chirurgeon, and nurses, fire, candle, linen, medicaments, and all things necessary,' but in 'as husbandly and thrifty a manner' as might be. The Commission was also charged with the care of prisoners of war, and was instructed to provide for their maintenance on a scale 'not exceeding 5d. per diem for every common seaman and inferior officer, and 12d. per diem for every commission officer.' For a time also it was concerned with awarding gratuities to the 'widows, children, and impotent parents of such as shall be slain in his Majesty's service at sea'; but in 1673 these duties were taken over by another commission, for Widows and Orphans, and a regular scale was established on which gratuities were to be given. Widows of men slain in the service were to receive a gratuity equal to eleven months of their husband's pay, an additional third being allowed to each orphan except those who were married at the time of the father's death. If the deceased left no widow, his mother was to receive the bounty, provided that she was herself a widow, indigent, and over 50 years of age. The bounty to a child was to be allowed to accumulate until it was of an age to be apprenticed. This Commission terminated at the end of the war, and by an order of 21 December, 1674, its functions devolved on the Navy Board.
These arrangements were all admirable upon paper, and the members of the Commissions displayed indefatigable industry, but in this department of affairs as in others the best of schemes were wrecked on the rock of finance. On 30 September, 1665, Evelyn wrote that he had 5000 sick, wounded, and prisoners dying for want of bread and shelter. 'His Majesty's subjects,' he adds, 'die in our sight and at our thresholds without our being able to relieve them, which, with our barbarous exposure of the prisoners to the utmost of sufferings, must needs redound to his Majesty's great dishonour, and to the consequence of losing the hearts of our own people, who are ready to execrate and stone us as we pass.'[179] On 5 June, 1672, the same loyal and humane gentleman wrote in a similar strain from Rochester: 'I have near 600 sick and wounded men in this place, 200 prisoners, and the apprehension of hundreds more.... I hope there will be care to supply my district here with moneys, or else I shall be very miserable, for no poor creature does earn his bread with greater anxiety than I at present.'[180] The moneys did not come, and by the end of the summer some of the localities were becoming restive at the non-payment of arrears. There was a great deal of noise made at Gravesend when the Commissioners of the Navy passed by, and on 27 August Evelyn wrote to Pepys: 'Those cursed people of Gravesend have no bowels, and swear that they will receive not a man more till their arrears are discharged. We are above £2000 indebted in Kent, where our daily charge is £100 for quarters only. Judge by this how comfortable a station I am in.'[181]
When the war came to an end the temporary Commission was withdrawn, and by a warrant from the Lords of the Admiralty dated 28 March, 1674, its duties were handed over to James Pearse, 'chirurgeon-general of his Majesty's navy.'[182] Pearse was a man of business after Pepys's own heart, and he carefully systematised the whole of his functions, reducing them 'into such a method that it is not possible for me (or whomsoever shall succeed me) to wrong his Majesty or injure his subjects.'[183]
'Mariners and soldiers maimed in his Majesty's service at sea' were entitled to relief out of the Chest at Chatham, a fund provided by deducting 6d. a month from each man's pay. Fourpence a month was also deducted for the maintenance of a chaplain, and Pepys explains how the Chest benefited from an arrangement by which all moneys were also assigned to it 'arising out of the seamen's contributions for a chaplain upon ships where (by the remissness or impiety of the commander) no chaplain is provided.'[184] A paper of 24 July, 1685[185], gives the scale of this relief:
... And where any wound or hurt occasions a fracture, contusion, impostumation, or the like, under the loss of a limb, such are viewed by the chirurgeons, and certified to deserve what in their opinions may be a proportionable reward in full satisfaction. And these sorts of hurts frequently accompany the loss of a limb in other parts of the body, for which they have a reward apart from their annual allowance, according to the chirurgeon's discretion.
One more question remains for our consideration to-day—that of the rates of pay in the navy during the period 1660-88.
As far as the rates themselves were concerned the story is one of steady improvement. In 1653 the pay of a general or admiral of the fleet had been £3 a day during his employment; of a vice-admiral, £2; and of a rear-admiral, £1[186]. The scale adopted by Order in Council, 26 February, 1666[187], raised the admiral's pay from £3 to £4; the vice-admiral's from £2 to £2. 10s.; and the rear-admiral's from £1 to £2. The vice-admiral of a squadron only was to get 30s. and the rear-admiral of a squadron £1. The pay of the other officers was not increased beyond the rates fixed in 1653[188]. The able seamen in 1660 received 24s. a month; the ordinary seamen, 19s.; the apprentices or 'gromets,' 14s. 3d.; and the 'boys,' 9s. 6d. The wages of the carpenter, boatswain, and gunner varied from £2 to £4 a month according to the rate of the ship. Monthly wages in harbour, as distinguished from sea wages, were on a lower scale[189]. In 1686 a new establishment of wages[190] made a few minor changes, but the pay of the seamen was not affected thereby.
The misfortune of the 'poor seaman' was not that his rate of pay was insufficient, but that he could not get his money, or if he got it at all it was in the depreciated paper currency known as the 'ticket.' A ticket was a certificate from the officers of his ship, issued to each seaman, specifying the term and quality of his service. This, when countersigned by the Navy Board, was the seaman's warrant for demanding his wages from the Treasurer of the Navy on shore. The original purpose of tickets was to save the necessity of transporting large sums of money on board ship, but the want of funds in the navy soon made it the regular practice to treat tickets as inconvertible paper, and to discharge all seamen with tickets instead of money—or with money for part of their time and a ticket for the rest. Theoretically, the ticket should have supplied the seaman with credit almost up to the full amount of his wages, but in practice the long waiting and uncertainty of payment caused a great depreciation of tickets. We hear of women brokers standing about the Navy Office, offering to help seamen who might have tickets to ready money—but always upon terms. They took them to Mrs Salesbury in Carpenter's Yard, near Aldgate, who bought them for cash at a discount of at least 5s. in the £, and sometimes more[191]. This caused great discontent among the seamen, who naturally objected to being paid by the State in depreciated paper, and on 13 February, 1667, Pepys records in the Diary that 'there was a very great disorder this day at the Ticket Office, to the beating and bruising of the face' of one Carcasse, the clerk. The grievance attracted attention, and in 1667 the House of Commons enquired into 'the buying and selling of tickets.'[192] The 'infinite great disorder' of the Ticket Office also attracted the notice of the Commissioners of Public Accounts[193], but the reply of the Navy Board when invited to justify the practice was conclusive. 'We conceive the use of tickets to be by no other means removable than by a supply of money in every place, at all times, in readiness where and when ... any ... occasions of discharging seamen shall arise.'[194]
Apart from the disastrous results of the practice of issuing tickets without money to pay them, the actual machinery of the system was better under Charles II than it had hitherto been. Printed tickets with counterfoils had been invented under the Commonwealth, and were in use as early as August, 1654[195]; but in 1667 elaborate instructions for the examining and signing of tickets and comparing them with the counterfoils were issued by the Navy Board to protect the Office against fraud[196]. John Hollond complains of the abuses to which even a solvent ticket system gave rise. It enabled 'wrong parties' to secure the seaman's wages—these being 'such as have wrought upon the advantage of the men's necessities'—'either pursers, clerks of the check, or creditors, whether alehouse-keepers, or slopsellers, or else pretended sweethearts.'[197] He also notes the facilities which the system afforded for the abuse of 'dead pays,' tickets being issued for seamen who were dead or who never served, and men suborned to personate them at the pay-table[198]. This was particularly easy in time of war, when the pressure of business was too great to allow of the tickets being properly examined.