A History of the British Army, Vol. 2 / First Part—to the Close of the Seven Years' War

by Sir J. W. Fortescue

The white servants might, in the majority of cases, have been termed white slaves. They were frequently sold for money at so much a head without the least concealment, and were granted away in scores both by Oliver Cromwell and by James the Second as a means of profit and reward to good servants or to favourites. The practice was thoroughly recognised; and not a voice, except that of the younger Vane, was ever raised against the principle.[83] Theoretically the white servants were bound apprentices for a term of years, rarely exceeding ten, at the close of which they received their freedom with, as a rule, a grant of Crown-land to encourage them to settlement.[84] During their period of servitude they were obliged to serve in the ranks of the colonial militia, not as free men, but as the subjects of their masters. Every planter was bound by law to furnish his quota of men, and old colonial muster-rolls frequently consist only of a list of masters, with a figure showing the number of servants to be supplied by each of them, not unlike the provincial muster-rolls of Queen Elizabeth's day in England. Having furnished their men to the ranks, the masters took their places at their head, in such numbers as were required, as their officers.

Three causes conspired to clothe the colonial militia with an efficiency unknown to the militia of England,—the presence of powerful neighbours, native or European; the knowledge that little help was to be expected from the mother country; and, in the tropics, the eternal dread of a rising of the negroes. Barbados, an island no larger than the Isle of Wight, could at the close of King Charles the Second's reign show six regiments of foot and two of horse, or a total of six thousand men; while Jamaica, a less fortunate island and a full generation later in settlement, produced in the same year seven regiments of four thousand men. Jamaica, it may be observed, owing to the presence of wild tribes of runaway slaves called Maroons, lived in more than ordinary terror of a servile war, and therefore kept her militia up to a high standard of efficiency. The reader should take note, in passing, of these Maroons, for we shall meet with them again at a very critical time. Even so, colonies frequently observed the true English spirit of apathy.[85] The main point, however, is that each colony, tropical or temperate, made provision for its own defence in respect of trained men and of fortification. Magazines were replenished partly by local laws, which compelled all vessels trading regularly from England to pay dues of gunpowder in proportion to their tonnage; the mother country making frequent grants of guns and of other stores from the depots of the Ordnance in England, and occasionally doling out even a small subvention of money. As a rule, moreover, the Crown was careful to appoint men of some military experience to be governors, in order that the local forces might not want a competent commander; and it is noteworthy, as a curious survival of old military traditions, that the civilian who performs the functions of sheriff in the West Indian Islands still bears, in a great many cases, the title of provost-marshal.

But even in the days of Charles the Second this primitive method of colonial defence showed signs of breaking down. At St. Kitts, which island was shared by the French and English until the Peace of Utrecht, the French kept a small permanent garrison. The English were of course bound to do likewise, and accordingly two independent companies of red-coats were stationed there at the cost of the Crown—stationed, not maintained, for they were left at first without pay, clothing, or attention of any kind from home, for whole years together.[86] In times of emergency such companies were quartered also in other colonies, such as Jamaica and Virginia, but these were never retained for longer than could be helped, the colony receiving the option of maintaining them at its own expense or of dispensing with them altogether. As the men were generally mutinous for want of pay, they sometimes proved to be an element of danger rather than of security.[87] Where settlements were granted out by charter to companies or to proprietors, the burden of defence of course fell on them, and was almost invariably borne by a local militia. There were, however, exceptions, notably the East Indian and African Companies, which, as they concerned themselves not with colonisation, but solely with trade, will be more conveniently discussed elsewhere. New York, from its supreme importance as a commercial and strategic station, was provided by its proprietor, James, Duke of York,[88] with two regular independent companies of English.

Time went on, and the system of defence by transportation became more and more unstable. White men, chafing against servitude, ran away from the West Indian Islands by scores to join the pirates that swarmed in the Caribbean Seas. The long war from 1689 to 1714 finally cut off the supply of white servants altogether for a time, every possible recruit having been seized by the press-gang or by the parish constable to serve in the regular army or navy. At the accession of King William the only British garrisons in the colonies were one company at the Leeward Islands and two at New York; by 1692 the West Indies alone had one complete regiment[89] and four independent companies of red-coats. At the accession of Queen Anne the independent companies for a time disappeared from the West Indies, and gave place to regular regiments of the Line, which have furnished the garrison ever since.[90] Elsewhere, however, the old principle still held its own. In 1695 two companies at New York were increased to four, and in 1696 another company took charge of Bermuda and Newfoundland. The close of the War of the Spanish Succession found England in exclusive possession of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Minorca, and Gibraltar, all of them requiring permanent garrisons, and not one with the means of providing a militia of its own.

A situation so novel called for an entirely new departure in English military policy, but no one appears to have perceived any necessity for the same, possibly from the conviction that, however clearly a soldier's eye might see, the eyes of the country and of the House of Commons would certainly be blinded. The authorities, therefore, held fast to the tradition of the Tudors, that the garrison of a strong place must be irremovably attached to it. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland required special attention, and were accordingly furnished with four independent companies apiece, which in 1717 were merged, by some brilliant inspiration at headquarters, into a single regiment of ridiculous weakness, now living in our midst as the Fortieth Foot. The Leeward Islands having received their regiment of the Line during the war, were allowed to keep it during the peace, on condition of providing barracks and extra pay for all ranks; but a colonial garrison, even though it were a regiment of the Line, was still a garrison, and therefore irremovable; and so it came to pass that the Thirty-eighth Foot remained in the Leeward Islands unrelieved for sixty years. But meanwhile it was found indispensable to keep a small garrison also at Jamaica. The temptation to revert to the old system was irresistible, so two independent companies took charge of Port Royal.[91] Then Carolina was perceived to require defence, and in 1720 another independent company was sent there; then the Bahamas and Bermuda, which had hitherto shared a company between them, asked for a company apiece and received them; and at this strength the colonial garrisons remained until 1735. Then Jamaica was seen to be in serious peril from a rising of negroes, and everything pointed to the permanent quartering of a whole regiment in the Island; but still the old expedient was followed. Six independent companies were drafted from the regiments at Gibraltar, making with the two already in existence a total of eight independent companies; nor was it until 1743 that these were at last combined into Trelawny's regiment, or, to give it its modern name, the Forty-ninth Foot.

But meanwhile, in 1737-38, the needs of a new colony forced the War Office to provide yet another garrison for the defence of Georgia; and it was boldly resolved to form a whole regiment for that service and for that alone. Its colonel was the governor and founder of Georgia, General James Oglethorpe; and it was formed by the simple process of turning over the whole of the effective privates of the Twenty-fifth Foot to that estimable man.[92] This incident marks the furthest limit to which the principle of separating Colonial and Imperial service was pushed by the War Office. Another quarter of a century was to see, not the impressment of English soldiers for a colonial regiment, but the embodiment of colonists into an English, and a famous English, regiment.

But it was not in respect of the localisation of foreign garrisons only that the War Office showed itself hide-bound by ancient tradition. The authorities were amazingly slow to recognise that the conditions of service at Portsmouth and Annapolis, at Hull and at Gibraltar, were not and could not be identical. In a previous chapter I hinted at the neglect which drove the garrison of Gibraltar to burn their huts for fuel. The experience of twenty years seems to have taught the War Office but little, for in 1730 the men were still without a roof over their heads and suffering terribly from exposure and from dysentery.[93] In Minorca the quarters of the troops were equally bad, the fortifications were in as ill condition as the quarters, and the unhappy soldiers begged in vain for new bedding to replace that which they had fairly worn out by ten years of service.[94] At Annapolis and Placentia the barracks were falling down; and from Bermuda came complaints in 1739 that no stores of any kind had been received since 1696. In New York the tale of misery and hardship almost passes belief. There, men on the frontier-guards marched to their posts knee-deep in snow and lay down in their clothes, for want of bedding, when relieved: the sergeant having orders to wake them from time to time, lest they should be frozen to death in the guard-room. Yet the officers begged in vain for the supply of their wants. The Office of Ordnance, in abject fear of swelling the sum of its estimates, pleaded that Parliament had made no provision for such services: and the result was that forty-nine men out of two weak companies perished in a single winter for lack of a blanket to cover them.[95]

But the story of helplessness and neglect does not end here. The War Office appears to have imagined that all the world over there were, as in England, not only alehouses, wherein troops could be quartered, but landlords who would provide them, according to the tariff of the Mutiny Act, with food, fire, and candle. It would seem not to have occurred to it that supplies in an isolated barren fortress like Gibraltar must of necessity be limited; nor was it until 1720 that, at the King's instance, it was ordered that Gibraltar should be provided always with victuals for two months in advance. The feeding of the garrisons there, in Minorca, in Nova Scotia and in Newfoundland was entrusted to contractors, but in the contracts the most obvious necessities were overlooked. Thus, though Minorca was supplied with brandy, oil, bread, salt, and tobacco, the item of meat was entirely omitted, and it was actually necessary for the governor to explain that the five articles above enumerated were insufficient for the nourishment of the British soldier.[96] At Annapolis—loneliest, dullest, and dreariest of quarters—the soldiers were expected to content themselves with water for their only beverage. Not unnaturally they mutinied; and their officers were fain to purchase molasses at their own expense and brew them beer.[97] Deadly though the climate of the West Indies then was, men could think themselves fortunate to be quartered there, for Jamaica and the Leeward Islands showed far more generosity to the British soldier than the British Parliament.[98]

The greatest hardship of service on foreign stations remains yet to be noticed, namely, the absence of any system of periodic reliefs. Englishmen did not accept exile so readily in those days as in these. Ordinary soldiers did not conceive that they enlisted for service in foreign garrisons; that duty was for men especially recruited, as they thought; and they constantly deserted in sheer despair of ever returning home.[99] A distinguished officer, the Duke of Argyll, went the length of saying that a long term of duty at Mahon was equivalent to a punishment, and that his only surprise was that the troops had not mutinied both at Minorca and Gibraltar.[100] The Board of General Officers urged the question at least once upon the King,[101] but without result. A still more cruel matter was that the War Office refused to grant to invalided soldiers a free passage home. Even in these days of sanitary science the amount of sickness among our troops in the tropics is sufficiently great: the reader may calculate for himself what it must have been when malarial fever, yellow fever, and smallpox[102] were allowed to run their course unchecked. But the only answer of the War Office to an appeal from the Governor of Jamaica for the return of invalided soldiers was the usual plea of no funds, urged with something more than the usual warmth of indignation.

Such petty economies, of course, cost the country incredibly dear. The hardships of foreign service led not only to desertion but to extreme difficulty in obtaining recruits for the independent companies abroad. To overcome these obstacles three separate devices were employed. The first was to offer large bounties, which from between 1720 and 1739 grew swiftly from thirty shillings to seventy-five.[103] This proving very costly, recourse was made to the mischievous practice of drafting men from regiments at home, thereby transferring the expense from the state to the regimental officers, who were compelled to pay as much as five pounds a head for the men drafted to them.[104] The system being simple was soon carried to outrageous lengths. The bounty failing to attract recruits for Carolina, a draft of pensioners was sent out in their place, and the same principle was shortly after extended to Gibraltar.[105] Thus not only was cruel hardship inflicted on the pensioners, but the one reserve which England possessed for her defence in time of emergency was frittered away in service abroad. Finally, on the rare occasions when a relief was sent to the Mediterranean garrisons, the relieving regiment was generally so much weakened by desertion before its departure that it was necessary to turn over to it bodily the two junior companies of the relieved, and to call for volunteers from the remaining companies. If the requisite men could not be obtained by these means, the orders were to select as many more as were required by lot.[106] The inevitable result was that the garrison was composed mainly of discontented men, ready to desert at the first opportunity, with an infusion of lazy, cunning old soldiers, who had contracted an attachment to the wine or the women of the country, and were content to pass the rest of their lives in chronic insobriety.