3

ISLAND OF OAK

Ships off Fort William, engraving 1736

At sea, north of Ceylon, 9 April 1782

The Grosvenor whispered along almost due south through the Bay of Bengal under full sail. In that mighty company there were twelve ships running close to the Coromandel Coast towards Ceylon, men-of-war sailing in a line bow to stern with the solitary Indiaman, but apart from the cries of the crews in the rigging and the crack of canvas as topgallants were unfurled, there was only the hiss of their passage through the sea, the slap of water against oak bows.

The Grosvenor was a compact version of the great warships, the sixty-four-gun ships of the line in the Royal Navy squadron commanded by Admiral Hughes. Her apple-cheeked hull was built to carry cargo, her quarters were designed for comfort, and in these respects she was representative of the finest merchantmen of her day. A new class of even larger East Indiamen was about to be launched, raising the standard tonnage from 800 to around 1200, but for her time the Grosvenor was an owner’s ideal, capable of transporting 750,000lb of tea across the world and accommodating her passengers in conditions that were the closest thing to luxury travel offered by the age.

At the same time she could give a good account of herself against a foe. She was pierced for twenty-six cannon. The gun deck – 5ft 10in below the main deck, sufficient for a tall man of that era to stand upright – carried ten nine-pounders on each side, while the quarterdeck, where officers and passengers promenaded, had three six-pound cannon on either side. The Grosvenor sufficiently resembled a frigate of the Royal Navy to have intimidated the pirates then preying on merchant shipping in the Bay of Bengal. Her crew were trained for naval warfare, and her magazine bristled with the tools of battle: boarding pikes, muskets, bayonets, pistols, cutlasses, muskets and hand grenades, as well as thirty rounds for each cannon and around fifty barrels of powder.*

She had been built by the firm of Wells at Barnard’s Wharf, one of the larger shipyards at Rotherhithe, on the section of the Thames just east of the Tower of London that loops south in a large ‘U’ around the Isle of Dogs – a bleak, foul-smelling stretch of water about four miles in extent that launched one of the greatest maritime fleets in history. She was the second East Indiaman of that name, the first having returned in 1768 on the last of her scheduled four voyages, the average service life of an Indiaman. Both were seemingly named after Richard, the first Earl Grosvenor, a Cheshire landowner who had made a significant financial investment in them. At 741 tons, the second Grosvenor was completed in 1777, her hull being 138ft 10in long and 35ft 3in at its broadest point. (A new seventy-four-gun ship of the line, the battleship of the day, was about 165ft long and 45ft in the beam.) Her hold had a depth of 14ft 3in. A single oak around a hundred years old was required for every ton of the completed vessel, so roughly 740 mature trees from the clay soil of Sussex had gone into her construction. It is barely to be wondered at that oak had become a strategic resource of the highest priority and a source of constant friction between the Company and the Navy.

Mere statistics do nothing to convey the mysterious grace of the three-masted square-rigger, the pulse-quickening beauty of an object caught between the elements of air and water, part of each yet not fully of either. Fanciful it may be, but there was something about an Indiaman under a full press of sail that might be compared with a giant seabird skimming across the sea. Each vessel was founded upon a keel of elm, then built up in layer upon layer of oak, interlarded with decks of spruce sanded with holystones to a skinlike smoothness underfoot. The shipwrights who made them were craftsmen rather than technicians, as dependent on eye and instinct as they were on any construction plan, selecting timber for a curve or shape that suited the overall scheme of things, much as a chairmaker would have done, so that each completed ship, while one of a type, was also sui generis, a unique organic island of wood, held together by the finest Spanish iron and borne on clouds of canvas.

Each had her own disposition. No less than the man who commanded her, and to just as enduring effect, a ship acquired a reputation among seamen for her temper – her speed, comforts and sailing abilities, as well as that indefinable accretion of myth and folklore among an intensely superstitious fraternity that made her known in the taverns as a happy or an unhappy place in which to serve.

The Grosvenor’s maiden voyage had started from Plymouth in February 1778 and ended back at the Downs in November 1779. Her performance with a following wind had been first-class, a constant rate of six or seven knots, and she had been obliged to shorten sail or her companions, the Osterley and the Hillsborough, would have been left in her wake. Still, the officers thought her performance could be improved when sailing to the windward and she had been returned to the shipyard for corrective trimming, an adjustment of ballast in her hold to lower her by the head.

Proud as he was of his ship, Coxon was none the less delighted to have so formidable an escort. The arrival of the French fleet in the Bay of Bengal had cast a new shadow over his prospects and despite lingering resentment at his treatment by Macartney, he must have realised that he was fortunate to be in company with Admiral Hughes’s squadron. The French fleet was commanded by Pierre André, Bailli de Suffren-Saint-Tropez, who, for all the grandiloquence of his name, was a brilliant and gallant admiral. He had been sent to India after France’s entry into the War of American Independence to bring Hughes’s squadron to battle, while at the same time French land forces were aiding Hyder Ali. Suffren had a distinct edge in ships and manpower over the Royal Navy fleet, and within a week of sailing from Madras, Coxon discovered just how lucky he had been.

Escorting the Grosvenor was the least of Hughes’s concerns. Between Hyder on land and Suffren at sea, British enterprise in India was in jeopardy; but it was at sea – the means of supplying and sustaining land forces – that the balance of power lay. When Holland had entered the war as France’s ally the previous year, Hughes had bombarded the Dutch garrison at Trincomalee on the island of Ceylon into surrender and installed a British command. His task now was to land reinforcements and for the time being it was a priority to avoid the French.

Unknown to Hughes, his foe was cruising in the same south-easterly direction. Three times Suffren crossed his wake before the moment near midnight on 8 April when a French lookout spotted the British squadron’s lights, off the north-east coast of Ceylon. Suffren changed course to close with them.

The following day Hosea sat down in his cabin and started a letter to Sir Robert Chambers in a tone of almost boyish excitement:

Here we are after innumerable escapes in the latitude of 9´ about a degree to the Eastward of the Island of Ceylon, surrounded on all sides by the French fleet, which it will be impossible to get clear of without a Battle. They seem resolved that the admiral shall not make good the landing of the troops for the garrison. We must fight our way thro’ them to make good our object.

In their first encounter, the Battle of Sadras two months earlier, Hughes had been lucky to escape without suffering a major defeat. Numerically the Royal Navy fleet was almost a match for the French, but Suffren’s copper-bottomed French ships were faster and more manoeuvrable. At the same time, although brave and able, Hughes was no Nelson. He was, moreover, at an acute disadvantage in manpower: every one of his ships had been affected by scurvy or fever. The men who had been pressed from the Grosvenor and other Indiamen at Cuddalore months before had barely affected the rate of attrition. Hughes raged helplessly that his vessels were ‘more like hospital ships than men-of-war’.

With a following wind he tried to outrun the French, who lay about fifteen miles off. For two days the wind continued to favour him and the fleet reached the latitude of Trincomalee ahead of its pursuers. Soon after noon on 11 April, the squadron bore up and set studding sails to change direction, aiming to cut the French line. Just then the favourable wind dropped, and instead of being able to tack south-west for the port, they drifted past it.

As dawn came up, the squadron found itself about thirty miles south of Trincomalee – with the French fleet drawn up and barring the way. With no option but to fight, Hughes issued the order to beat to quarters. Although the Grosvenor had kept up with her escort throughout, it appears that Coxon drew off as the naval crews took up battle stations. So far as is known, the Grosvenor took no part in the action.

It was some hours before the fleets formed up in line and the first thunderous volley of the Battle of Providien was not fired until around noon. Hughes’s flagship, HMS Superb, a seventy-four-gun third-rate, was soon in the thick of things against Suffren’s Orient, another seventy-four. Along the line of battle eleven English ships were engaged against twelve French, but at the heart of the affray Superb and the seventy-gun Monmouth were under a sustained concentration of fire from three of the enemy. For the first two hours they passed broadside on, pouring volley after volley into one another.

Superb’s decks were thick with smoke, illuminated by the red flash of continuous cannon fire and awash with the blood of fifty-eight dead and dismembered men. At least double that number were wounded. On the Monmouth, the devastation was even greater. Her foremast and mizzenmast had been shot away and thus disabled she limped towards the rear of the line, only to be raked by successive broadsides from seven passing French ships. Her decks, too, ran red – forty-six of her men had been killed and more than a hundred wounded.

The battle was followed with fascination and pride from the decks of the Grosvenor. Amid the swirling smoke and the acrid bite of powder on the nostrils, one young crewman, William Habberley, recalling his former shipmates pressed in Cuddalore and now manning Navy carronades, cheered at the courage of the Monmouth. Habberley, a lad brought up in London’s docklands and barely out of his teens, thrilled to see how the man-of-war’s captain, his flag shot to pieces ‘and the ship greatly damaged . . . nevertheless nailed the colours to the stump of the mizzenmast and defended the ship till the action closed’.

By four in the afternoon the ponderous lines of warships remained intact but had drifted dangerously close to the coast, when Hughes showed his fighting qualities, wearing round in perfect order to engage the French on the port tack. Now Orient lost her foremast in a crash of rigging and sails, forcing Suffren to transfer his flag to Ajax. Another French seventy-four, Brillant, was also damaged, and although none of Suffren’s ships was crippled to the same extent as Monmouth, when the dark started to close in at about six, casualties and damage were spread evenly between the two fleets. The English had 137 killed and 430 wounded, the French 139 dead and 351 wounded. Hughes, surveying his battered fleet, wrote: ‘Nor had any one ship of the squadron escaped without great injury in her hull and masts, and all were much torn in their sails and rigging.’

Providien was the bloodiest of the five battles fought between the French and English fleets in the East Indies in 1782–3, a precursor of the epic contests to come in European waters, but as indecisive as the other four. For the next few days, while bodies wrapped in shrouds were dropped over the side and running repairs were made to shattered ships and wounded men, the two fleets eyed each other warily over a distance of about five miles, like bloodied and exhausted warriors. Finally, on 19 April, Suffren raised sail and advanced to within two miles, making every show of launching another attack; but when Hughes held his line the French broke off and tacked to the north. For another three days the squadron remained at anchor before Monmouth was sufficiently restored to proceed with the rest, limping into the lovely harbour of Trincomalee on 22 April.

For Coxon the most immediate consequence of the battle was further to strain the capacity of the Grosvenor’s quarters, for it brought on board yet another passenger.

Captain George Talbot, RN had been a senior member of Hughes’s command, the captain of the sixty-four-gun HMS Worcester. But he joined the Grosvenor under a cloud. Hughes had made it known that at the battles of Sadras and Providien, ‘several of his captains had failed him badly’. Without mentioning names, the admiral complained: ‘One is a dotard, no longer of any use. Another goes into action passably but has much deteriorated. Five others have behaved very indifferently.’ The Worcester had been hindmost in Hughes’s order of battle, and the fact that Talbot was leaving the campaign at this stage strongly suggests that he was the ‘dotard’ deemed of no further use. Hughes acknowledged, however, that there was ‘no case for a court-martial’, and there may have been personal differences between the two, for in the months ahead Talbot would show no lack of spirit. He came on board with a suite, a small retinue that included a coxswain, Isaac Blair, and a youth referred to on the passenger list, intriguingly but opaquely, as ‘Captain Talbot’s young lad’. As the boy was unnamed, he was probably either Indian or Anglo-Indian, and a servant.

Their arrival did nothing to ease the discomfort below decks, and while there is no evidence that having Talbot on board undermined Coxon’s authority, it is reasonable to suggest that it may have introduced a certain tension into the great cabin. Although there was a general social equivalence between Navy and Indiamen captains, the former tended to look down on their counterparts as having lost caste through trading. As one naval man put it: ‘The habit of buying and selling goods must have a tendency to detach an officer’s thought from those high and delicate refinements which constitute the distinction between the art of war and the art of gain.’ For Coxon, who had previously demonstrated touchiness in matters of his authority, and harboured well-founded fears about his comparative lack of experience, these were deep waters.

John Coxon came from the social dormitory of the Indies trade, a middle class that, in the words of one authority, ‘was gradually gaining a secondary gentility towards the end of the 18th century’. To William Hosea, who described him as ‘a plain man’, he was clearly not quite a gentleman, but to judge from his surviving correspondence and logbook, he was educated and had an ordered mind. Nevertheless, his rise to command had been distinctly unconventional.

Officers learned the sea the hard way – mostly from boyhood, usually after a spell as midshipman, a junior petty officer. Coxon came to the sea comparatively late and his first voyage in an Indiaman, the Pacific, in 1764, was not as a seaman at all but as the ship’s purser. He was aged about twenty-four at the time, a delicate-looking young man, responsible for finance and accounting. In this, and his shrewd exploitation of money-making opportunity, he showed a flair that was for mercantile rather than maritime affairs. Certainly nothing in his previous experience of the sea prepared him adequately for the sudden rise to officer rank that followed. For his second Indiaman passage he was made up to fourth mate before going directly to the rank of chief mate.

All this was thoroughly irregular. Coxon had escaped not only the usual rigorous apprenticeship in the shrouds, but also bypassed the ranks of third and second mate which, it was stipulated, candidates for command should hold for probationary voyages before promotion to chief mate. As so often in the murky world of the Company’s affairs, such rapid progress hinted at powerful patronage if nothing else. Coxon’s next step up, to the command of the Grosvenor, would have required something more: money.

The Company liked to make the claim that its captains were the finest navigators in the world. In reality, as C. Northcote Parkinson observed in his classic study, Trade in the Eastern Seas, they were nothing of the kind. Navigational pioneering was done by Navy men; Indiamen captains kept to a beaten track in which there was generally no need for brilliance. But the rewards for competence could be spectacular. A captain’s salary did little more than keep him in madeira and provide for his family at home. His prospects lay rather in the opportunity for private trade – space in the hold for 55 tons of goods on the way out, 38 tons coming home – and all that he could wring out of his passengers for their accommodation. This pragmatic compromise with its skippers evolved from the Company’s inability to prevent them from trading in the exotic rarities that it sought to monopolise. In the earliest days of the spice trade, when a pennyworth of nutmeg was worth £2 10s in London, private speculation by seamen who, quite naturally, sought proper recompense for their perilous existences had threatened that monopoly, and regulation of the practice now allocated space not just to the captain, but his senior officers too. Although profit margins had come down, captains still expected to make enough in two or three voyages to retire in the style of the nabobs they transported.

Coxon’s will was to disclose an estate of a modest £4,120, which suggests that his previous voyage as captain had been no more a commercial success than it had been harmonious. However, that makes no allowance for his investments, in acquiring both the command of the Grosvenor and her cargo for the second voyage. These would only have borne fruit on his return to Britain, where the £8,000 estimated value of his private goods in the hold would have translated into almost £50,000, or about £3 million today. His sale of passages and cargo space had already earned another £10,000 with a further significant consideration to come from the successor whom he would nominate. All in all, Coxon stood to benefit handsomely from what he intended to be his last voyage before returning to Bengal, where he would set up as a merchant on an estate he had just acquired from his father-in-law, Joseph Sherburne. Perhaps Coxon felt that he was not suited to the sea. Before taking leave of his wife Harriet and baby son Joseph, he had presented her with a miniature painting of himself in the recently introduced uniform of an Indiaman captain. Despite the gold braid and wig, it is not the portrait of an authoritative man; even aged forty, he appears almost too slight and youthful for command and there is a hint of softness, a pudginess about the chin.

It would have been extraordinary had there not been deficiencies in Coxon’s seamanship, and he had become dependent on two strong subordinates. Neither was his social equal but each had a depth of experience that he lacked. It was not, on the evidence, a healthy association – at least insofar as the running of a happy, efficient ship was concerned.

Coxon had first encountered Alexander Logie in the old Grosvenor in 1770. In contrast to his captain, Logie had come up the hard way, going to sea at the age of fourteen as an apprentice in a coastal vessel, then as a seaman to the West Indies before making his first voyage to India as a midshipman in the old Grosvenor, when Coxon was fourth mate. Logie had then gained experience as an officer on two further passages to the Caribbean before returning to serve under Coxon. Henceforth they were a team. Although Logie sailed once more across the Atlantic, he had tied his fortunes to Coxon’s star.

The second of Coxon’s trusted henchmen was also of modest background and had come up almost exactly the same way as Logie. Thomas Beale had gone to sea as a boy and joined the old Grosvenor aged seventeen as an ordinary seaman when Coxon, then about thirty, had been chief mate, and Logie, twenty-one, a midshipman. By their next voyage – with Coxon still as chief mate and Logie fourth mate – Beale had risen to midshipman. When Coxon had been approved as captain and proudly taken command of the new Grosvenor on her maiden voyage in 1777, Logie and Beale had followed him, as third and fourth mates respectively.

The log for the outward journey gave little hint of incipient trouble. Each day’s entry began with the weather, a record of the distance covered, an observation of latitude and an estimate of the infinitely more vexed question of longitude.* Even quite mundane events were recorded: ‘a.m. Washed the gundeck and swabbed with vinegar. p.m. Exercised the great guns.’ ‘Found several spare sails with rat holes in them.’ When tragedy or indiscipline occurred they were no more than were to be expected on board: ‘At 6 a.m. John McDonach one of the Company’s recruits fell over board and was drowned.’ ‘Punished George Taylor with a dozen lashes for cutting William Muir across his arm with a knife.’

But as the months went by and the strains of the journey started to tell on officers and men, human drama emerges in terse entries that hint at more complex events. The desertions began as soon as they landed in India:

    July 21 – Ran from the ship in the night five seamen.

    August 9 – Having liberty to go on shore, four men did not return.

    August 17 – Having liberty to go ashore, eight men did not return.

    August 30 – Run from the ship in the night with the Jolly Boat, two men.

Desertion was common enough when men had been so long at sea, and was not in itself a sign of a troubled ship. Lascars – Indian sailors from the eastern Muslim states – could usually be found as replacements and on this occasion at least three of the deserters returned. In all, however, the Grosvenor lost sixteen men through desertion and another ten to death by disease.

Even more serious were the signs of disciplinary problems that surfaced as she was preparing to depart for home. On 29 October, Coxon recorded: ‘Punish’d Edward Matthews quartermaster with a dozen lashes for insolent and Mutinous behaviour, and six lashes for refusing to do his duty.’ After they sailed, matters came to a head.

The Grosvenor’s chief mate then was David Drummond. He too had sailed with Coxon before, but whereas Logie and Beale had benefited from his patronage, Drummond had once been his superior. Ten years earlier, Coxon had been fourth mate to Drummond’s third mate. In those close quarters, grudges and enmities were easily conceived and if Coxon suffered at Drummond’s hands it would have been natural for him to take revenge when the opportunity arose. Equally if, as it appears, the team of Coxon, Logie and Beale had become a clique, they might simply have excluded Drummond, then turned on him.

The entry for the log of 15 February reads: ‘In the evening, suspended Mr Drummond from his station as Chief Mate for neglect of Duty.’ When the Grosvenor reached St Helena a month later, Drummond was still suspended. He immediately appealed to the island’s Governor and Council to be reinstated, protesting his innocence. While Drummond was admonished, it was the lightest rap on the knuckles, for his application was successful. Coxon wrote in the log: ‘I was desir’d to attend the Council, and after they had inquir’d into the merits of the case, Mr Drummond was reprimanded by them for his behaviour. They at the same time recommended his making a proper acknowledgment of his fault before them, to restore him to his Station, which he readily complied with, and promis’d better Behaviour in future.’

Drummond would pose Coxon no further difficulties, but discord persisted. The ship was off Ireland when the captain had two men clapped in irons, ‘Robert Newstead, seaman, for attempting to run from the ship and Alexis Adamson, quartermaster, for Mutinous behaviour.’ They remained in irons for ten days, an unusually harsh punishment, at which point the log records:

Punished Adamson with two dozen lashes for Mutiny and refusing to do his duty & afterwards confined him in irons again. Newstead being sensible of his behaviour in attempting to run from the ship and making proper confession, released him.

If Newstead was apologetic, he was not contrite. Nine days later, he was among twelve men who deserted as soon as the ship reached Dublin.

When the Grosvenor left again for India, not a single foremastman remained of those who had been on her maiden voyage. Just seven men stayed with Coxon: his servant, four petty officers, and Logie and Beale. As chief mate, Logie was now set to reap the rewards of his loyalty, for Coxon was leaving the sea and a ship’s owners usually accepted a captain’s choice of successor.

Promoted to third mate, Beale too was keen to exploit the benefits of his rank. On the outward voyage, he accepted £50 each from two young cadets to mess in his quarters, and then failed to meet his side of the bargain. When they objected, he abused and lorded it over them in the mess – to the point that they made an official complaint on landing. Beale, it would seem, was a fairly typical sea bully. Worse, however, he was an arrogant dolt.

The Grosvenor spent almost two months in Trincomalee, awaiting other arrivals. Indiamen usually sailed in company, both to assist one another in adversity, and to enable captains to consult one another on navigational questions at a time when the science was still at a fairly rudimentary stage. Coxon had good reasons for not wishing to voyage alone into what were, for him, uncharted waters and, faced with taking the route across the Indian Ocean known as the Outer Passage, he delayed his departure, hoping for another stray Indiaman at the end of the sailing season.

Trincomalee was one of the world’s great natural harbours, with sheltered sandy bays on either side of a peninsula, at the end of which Fort Frederick stood hundreds of feet above the sea at the edge of a cliff top. As the days went by, and still the Grosvenor remained at anchor, passengers had the chance to seek rooms in the fort, although many visitors found Trincomalee’s mosquitoes intolerable and preferred to stay on board ship. There was also an opportunity for walks, for fishing, and for a break from the fare served up by Coxon’s Portuguese cook, Antonio da Cruza. Among the local delicacies were a rich soup made from monitor lizards and roasted wild pig; but while the passengers enjoyed a respite from shipboard life, no such option was available to those with whom they were to share the voyage ahead. The crew spent those eight weeks in searing heat, broiling miserably in their hammocks.

Along with thirty-five passengers, the ship had a crew of 105. Of that number sixty-five were the foremastmen who scrambled up ratlines into the rigging, hauled themselves along yardarms to spread sails and performed other gravity-defying duties for £1 3s a month in the case of seamen rated ordinary, rising to £1 11s on being rated able. An able seaman walked down the gangplank after an eighteen-month voyage with a little over £20 in his pocket, before heading to the nearest tavern.

They came from the bottom rung of a society as unequal as any of its time: on the one hand, a privileged few able to enjoy what London offered Casanova: ‘a magnificent debauch – sup, bathe and sleep with a fashionable courtesan’ for six guineas; on the other, an underclass drawn from all the poverty and brutishness depicted by Hogarth. Life in the gin-soaked lanes off the Thames was particularly nasty and short; while life expectancy across the country was thirty-seven years, in London it was in the mid-twenties. Justice for miscreants was summary and savage; peine forte et dure – crushing to death – had been abolished less than ten years earlier, and public executions were still a popular spectacle.*

For young men entirely without prospects or education, the sea may have offered an escape from this world – that is if they could stay alive long enough to learn the ropes, avoid the ravages of scurvy and fever which took off on average 10 per cent of crews on voyages to the East, and then find themselves lucky enough to be serving under a fair and competent skipper, not on some hell afloat. Nevertheless, the life expectancy of the English seaman was probably no more than that of the poorest Londoner.

Sailors had long been identified as a community apart, with a distinctive dress that marked them almost like some odd religious sect. Habitués of waterfronts around the British Isles, they dwelt at land’s edge even when not actually at sea, and, like all outsiders, were regarded with a certain wariness. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, England was established as a great seafaring power and her seamen had been taken to the nation’s heart by a popular culture that mythologised their mystique. Arne’s ‘Rule, Britannia’ set the tone in 1740, but it was words by David Garrick and the music of William Boyce for a pantomime featuring the ballad ‘Heart of Oak’ that created an enduring image of the jolly tar as a seeker of honour and glory on the high seas, a world in which none were so free as the sons of the waves. The Viennese master Joseph Haydn, on a sojourn in London, set a breezy hornpipe to an English lyric celebrating the sailor, ‘High on the giddy bending mast, fearless of the rushing blast’. Most popular of these idealised period pieces, however, was Charles Dibdin’s lament for a dead shipmate.

Here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling,

The darling of our crew;

No more he’ll hear the tempest howling,

For death has broached him to.

His form was of the manliest beauty,

His heart was kind and soft.

Faithful below, Tom did his duty

And now he’s gone aloft.

An officer of the times offered a harder-edged but more persuasive view: ‘The multitude of these men are wholly illiterate, their ideas [as] wild, confused and indeterminate as the elements; their dispositions naturally generous, though turbulent. Fearless, or rather thoughtless of consequences, they will run every risk to satisfy the caprice of the moment.’

Improvident, reckless, dissolute, but brave and dependable . . . the qualities of the tar have acquired the ring of a stereotype. Still, they echo what we know of an exceptionally close-knit and interdependent society. Sailors trusted their shipmates and obeyed their commanders, not only because of the severity of the regime, but because it was the best way to survive. Allowing for a tendency to romanticise him, the English seaman was a doughty fellow – at least in his own environment; and if there were plenty of toughs and desperadoes, along with a few pessimistic ‘croakers’ and the occasional solitary mystic, there were also enough men who could be counted as worthy companions of Tom Bowling.

It would be a mistake, however, to see the community below decks as homogeneous. Among the Grosvenor’s foremast men we find Scots and Irishmen, and no fewer than seven Italians. There were Catholics and Protestants, fourteen Johns, seven Thomases, five Williams and four Jameses. A handful might be taken as broadly representative.

Thomas Lewis and John Warmington were experienced hands who had set topgallant sails from the Sargasso Sea to the Sunda Straits. Neither would still have been thought of as young in seamen’s terms – Warmington had recently turned twenty-nine – and years in the rigging had left them as weathered as the canvas they hauled and hoisted. They nevertheless retained the wiry fitness of youth. Lewis hailed from Belfast, Warmington from a village near Newquay, in Cornwall, that had produced generations of seafarers. The Warmington clan had another, darker association with the sea. A generation before John’s birth, the Warmingtons had been involved in wrecking at the coastal town of Perranporth; this practice, which generally involved plundering wrecked ships, rather than actually luring them onto the rocks as folklore would have it, had resulted in a number of Warmingtons being summoned to a manorial court, although they had evidently argued their case sufficiently stoutly to have escaped the assizes. John himself may have been ready by now to quit the sea, for shortly before sailing in the Grosvenor he had married a village girl, Elizabeth Roberts. He and Lewis were rated able and were able to sign their names in the ship’s impress book in which receipt of their wages was recorded.

John Hynes was an Irishman, born in Limerick, and had never been to sea before joining the Grosvenor in Dublin near the end of her previous voyage, when the crew had been so depleted by desertions that Coxon had been forced to take on unskilled men to get her back to the Downs. Hynes had gained sufficient experience to be rated ordinary.

Three youngsters are of particular interest. Even by the standards of the age Robert Price was young when he went to sea, being about eleven when Coxon took him on as his servant on the outward voyage. In addition, Price helped to serve meals in the cuddy and carried out some of the seaman’s simpler duties. He was now aged about thirteen, a bright and lively boy. Barney Leary was also in his teens, a lad of no education and little intelligence, but great physical strength. Of all the seamen on board, he was the only one rated a landman, a complete neophyte.

By comparison, William Habberley was an old hand, although only twenty-one. Born into a once-prosperous family a short distance from the taverns and slums of London’s docklands, he had been apprenticed, in 1778 while still in his teens, to a seasoned mariner, William Shaw, with whom he made his first voyage to the West Indies. Two years later Shaw joined the Grosvenor as second mate and took Habberley with him as his servant and as a seaman, rated ordinary. Unusually for one of his calling, Habberley was sufficiently educated to be able to write – his prose was rough but exemplified the vigour with which he did everything – and this, along with his tutelage under Shaw, indicates that he would have qualified in time for officer rank.

Captains waged a constant struggle to recruit even inexperienced hands and cast a wide net among the nationalities not only of Europe but also of Asia. Sailors from the ports of what is now Italy were especially welcome on English vessels, being unaligned in the conflicts of Europe; of the seven on the Grosvenor little is known besides their names, but two were to play notable parts in her story. Francisco di Lasso was from Genoa, Francisco Feancon, known as Bianco, from Venice.

The impressing of Grosvenor sailors in India explained the presence on board in significant numbers of another group, one often overlooked. Few Indiamen were able to start the homeward voyage without lascars, Muslim sailors who were recruited to make up the numbers of those lost to disease, desertion and the press gangs, and who made just the single journey before being shipped back to India as passengers. They did not have a high reputation among captains, being regarded as unreliable in bad weather and, unsurprisingly, prone to die in severe cold; it was barely to be wondered at either that they showed little inclination to risk their lives against England’s foes in battle, for which they earned a reputation for cowardice. Of the Grosvenor’s sixty-five foremastmen, twenty-five were lascars. Although these bearded and turbaned figures were a constant visible presence on deck and in the rigging, their names are not recorded in the ship’s impress book.

Evidence of integration is mixed. Although the lascars abominated the whoring and drunkenness of European seamen, they frequently joined in the gaiety of Saturday ‘grog nights’ on board, when songs were sung and hornpipes danced. Certainly there was no room for segregation on the gun deck, where the crew lived in the space forward of the mizzenmast. They messed in groups of five between the great guns, at tables that were stowed away between meals, and slept in hammocks slung fore to aft so closely that they brushed against one another with the ship’s movement.

All these men with the exception of Hynes were making their first voyage in the Grosvenor. For performing their day-to-day duties they were divided into two watches, starboard and larboard, and came under one of two officers – Logie, the chief mate, or William Shaw, the new second mate. In the divisions that were to affect the ship’s company, Shaw stands out as a catalyst.

From the little that is known of him, William Shaw was an unlikely candidate for the role of a Fletcher Christian. Like Logie, he had learned his craft from the bottom, but there similarities ceased. Logie was a rough Scot, while Shaw, according to Habberley, whose description is the only one we have, was ‘an amiable man of delicate constitution’. His seamanship, however, was proven. Still aged only thirty-one, Shaw had served in every capacity and alone of Coxon’s officers had commanded his own ship. He made his first voyage to India as a boy of fourteen when he was identified as a potential officer and made a midshipman in the Bute before being approved as fourth mate in the Prime. These three passages east were followed by four across the Atlantic, the last one to Grenada as captain of the Duchess of Devonshire. It was then that young William Habberley came under his wing.

When the second mate and his lad came on board the Grosvenor they were, like all the deckhands, newcomers to an established hierarchy. Below the triumvirate of Coxon, Logie and Beale, came a tier of petty officers. Coxon’s old hands included Robert Rea, the bosun, a sergeant-major figure in charge of deck activities, John Hunter, the gunner, and John Edkins who, as caulker, was responsible for keeping the ship watertight.

It would have been only natural for a certain rivalry to have arisen between Logie and Shaw. Both were experienced men of similar age, and they were required to work closely as officers of their respective watches; that Shaw had already been a captain added spice to the relationship. Evidence that this gave rise to disciplinary problems while they were at sea is scant and circumstantial. What can be said is that Shaw inspired loyalty in the men and when the time for a choice came, the common seamen demonstrated a preference for his leadership over that of the triumvirate.

For the duration of their stay in Trincomalee, Coxon was preoccupied by matters other than harmony among his officers. Day after day he scanned the horizon for sight of one vessel in particular: the Earl of Dartmouth was originally to have accompanied the Grosvenor from Madras but had failed to arrive in time. There was now little likelihood that she would pass this way, but Coxon held on as long as he dared. He could, in fact, have waited until doomsday, for the Earl of Dartmouth was at the bottom of the Bay of Bengal.

As the weeks passed, it would have been surprising if the passengers had not grown restive. No one sailed on an Indiaman with any pleasurable anticipation and the perception of later generations that sea travel could be stylish, enjoyable, and even sybaritic, was unimaginable. It was, quite simply, an ordeal – ‘the mere anticipation a kind of terrible nightmare’, as one contemporary source put it. Adding to the strain was the fact that conditions inimical to social harmony were being shared among persons of consequence. Men and women accustomed to having their own way, to spacious and luxurious surroundings and the attention of armies of servants, found themselves facing a voyage together of perhaps six months in an area rather smaller than a decent-sized drawing room. On the Grosvenor this area was being shared by eighteen privileged passengers, for the majority of whom the sole escape was a cabin in which there was barely space for a cot. The other sixteen, the discharged soldiers and servants, were given hammocks among the crew; some secluded quarter in the bowels of the ship was found for the ayahs.

The potential for discord was recognised by the Company, which had drawn up regulations for conduct at sea, which were issued to passengers and read in part:

The diversity of characters and dispositions which must meet on ship-board makes some restraint upon all necessary; and any one offending against good manners, or known usages and customs, will, on representation to the Court [of Directors] be severely noticed.

The gentlefolk kept to the aft. The largest living space was on the quarterdeck, starting with the roundhouse at the rear. This low but spacious and bright area, about thirty feet long, included the captain’s and officers’ cabins and a stateroom lit by a gallery of six windows set into the curved stern. Immediately forward of the roundhouse was the cuddy, where meals were taken and which gave on to an open stretch of quarterdeck, extending about forty feet forward to the mainmast, used for promenading and ‘airing’. Immediately below the roundhouse, on the gun deck, was the great cabin, an area about thirty-five feet by thirty, which was subdivided at the start of a voyage into individual cabins relative to the rank of passengers and the passage money they had paid. Sufficient space had still to be left for a general living area enclosed in the aft by a stern gallery of eight windows. The only other space for the passengers’ use was the poop – the rear upper deck, perhaps thirty feet long – although this was a little exposed in all but the calmest conditions.

William Hosea was undoubtedly feeling the strain. It was fully seven months since he and Mary had left their home in Bengal so abruptly, no doubt believing that with good fortune they would by now be back in England. That desperate race to join the ship in Madras must have seemed almost a lifetime ago, and now that he had regained his composure, Hosea was not impressed with his quarters.

For an outlay of £2,000 he would have been expecting the entire great cabin to be at his disposal. As it was, he and Mary with Frances and Tom Chambers had been allocated part of the roundhouse, with room just for their cots, a pair of chairs, a washstand and writing desk. A bookcase was superfluous, since his books, along with bedlinen and provisions, had been abandoned on the Yarmouth. Sweltering in the cabin, Hosea wrote fretfully, and a little testily, to Chambers: ‘We have no news of our dear Charlotte, which has not a little added to the many uneasinesses we have experienced lately. The heat is intolerable – the sun is vertical & being at anchor, no wind can reach our cabin.’ Mary tried to be uncomplaining but found the whole business a trial: ‘May the Almighty give my little woman strength to bustle thro’ all her fatigues and difficulties. I can at all times depend on her spirits of resolution.’

With space so short, the great cabin had been partitioned with sheets of canvas into four doubles and a single. Colonel and Mrs James and the traders Williams and Taylor occupied the two most spacious doubles. Talbot may well have been less happy at having to share a smaller cabin with the Army captain, Adair, for quite apart from the question of space, a Navy captain was equivalent in Army terms to a colonel. The paroled French prisoners were also mixing messes, Colonel d’Espinette being quartered with his junior, Lieutenant de L’Isle. Where space was found for poor Charles Newman is not clear. Each of them had room for just a ‘sea-couch’, a cot with drawers underneath that served as a lounger during the day, and perhaps a washstand.

The passenger best provided for was Lydia Logie, cosily set up with her husband, the chief mate, in his cabin, typically ‘a neat well-furnished little room’ about twelve feet by ten, with the services of her maid; but the four unaccompanied children, Thomas Law and Robert Saunders, and Eleanor Dennis and Mary Wilmot, were in two tiny partitions.

By the middle of June even Coxon’s patience was exhausted. No other Indiaman was likely to appear so late in the season. Sailings from Bengal would not recommence with any frequency before August and to wait until then would have been almost unthinkable.

Admiral Hughes, his duty to the garrison discharged, sailed on 14 June. In the months ahead, he was to fight three more indecisive battles with Suffren, but the French challenge to British ascendancy in India was effectively over. Hyder Ali’s death before the end of the year ended the threat to Madras.

On the eve of the Navy’s departure, Coxon raised anchor. As the Grosvenor slipped out of harbour with 140 souls on board, the crew clambered into the crosstrees and unfurled her topgallants. As the island receded and the Indian Ocean opened out broad to the horizon, they raised a cheer. At last they were sailing home.

Below, the passengers were gathered on the quarterdeck, watching the land slide away, Hosea with his secrets and Newman with his confidences, the former foes James and d’Espinette with old campaigns to talk over, and the merchants Taylor and Williams with their fortunes securely baled up in the hold and their dreams of palaces in the shires.

There, too, Mary Hosea, torn with longing for the baby she had left behind. Taking a last opportunity to write to Fanny Chambers before they sailed, she concluded with a prayer and a plea: ‘God bless you. Kiss my infant a thousand times for me.’