HAVING SUCCEEDED, Captain Hamilton needed no excuse for having virtually disobeyed Sir Hyde’s orders. He paid tribute to the cutting-out party: ‘Every officer and man on this expedition behaved with an uncommon degree of valour and exertion.’ He did not criticise Lt Wilson and the Boatswain for their stupid behaviour: instead he did not mention them by name (which in itself indicated they had failed in some way). He added, ‘I consider it particularly my duty to mention the very gallant conduct, as well as the aid and assistance, at a particular crisis, I received from Mr John M’Mullen, Surgeon and volunteer, and Mr Maxwell, Gunner, even after the latter had been dangerously wounded’.
Three days later Sir Hyde Parker wrote to the Secretary of the Admiralty: ‘I have a peculiar satisfaction in communicating to you, for the information of my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, that his Majesty’s late Ship Hermione is again restored to his Navy, by as daring and gallant enterprise as is to be found in our naval annals…
‘I find the Hermione has had a thorough repair, and is in complete order: I have therefore ordered her to be surveyed and valued, and shall commission her… by the name of Retaliation.’
The path before Captain Edward Hamilton was strewn with honours—and with troubles. The people of Jamaica were stirred by his exploit, the fruits of which were clearly visible lying off Port Royal, and within four days of the Hermione’s arrival the House of Assembly voted him a sword, valued at 300 guineas, ‘in testimony of the high sense this House entertains of the extraordinary ability displayed by him…’
On February 1, 1800, it was announced in London that ‘The King has been pleased, by letters patent under the Great Seal of Great Britain, to confer the dignity of a Knight of the said Kingdom unto Edward Hamilton, Esquire, Captain in the Royal Navy….’
Even though Hamilton had not then returned to England, the City of London paid its tribute on March 6 when the Court of Common Council voted unanimously that the City’s thanks be presented to Captain Hamilton and his crew ‘and that the Freedom of the City be presented to Sir Edward Hamilton in a gold box value fifty guineas’.
The award of the Naval Gold Medal by the King completed the major honours—but of course Hamilton was also due for a share of the prize-money because at the time of her capture the Hermione was a Spanish warship, and this amounted to a considerable sum. According to the first valuation, Hamilton’s share of two-eighths would have been about £4,024, and Sir Hyde’s one-eighth, about £2,012. The rest would be split as follows—an eighth shared between the Lieutenants, Master and Surgeon; an eighth between the Lieutenant of Marines, the Commander-in-Chief’s secretary (the Rev A. J. Scott), the principal warrant officers and the Master’s Mates; the same amount for midshipmen, inferior warrant officers and their principal mates and the Marine Sergeant; and two-eighths, £4,024, shared between the rest of the crew. However, the first valuation was not the final one. (According to one contemporary account, Sir Edward Hamilton gave £500 from his own two-eighths to be shared among the seamen of the Surprise.)
The total amount of prize money had depended in the first place on the report of the officers at the Port Royal yard, where the naval storekeeper, master shipwright, acting master attendant, and the carpenters from the two biggest ships there surveyed the ship and made an inventory which listed and valued everything on board—from sails to anchors, and watch glasses to copper kettles. (Watch glasses, for instance, were valued at 2d. each, while a large copper kettle at £11 8s. 2d. compared favourably with a new main-topgallant sail at £12 2s. zd. The ship’s equipment was valued at a total of £6,057 15s. 9d.).
The surveyors then described the condition of the hull, masts, yards, booms, rigging and fitted furniture, and put a value on them. This was done by estimating the total tonnage—they worked on a figure of 717 tons—and allowing £14 a ton, giving a total of £10,038, ‘making in the whole sixteen thousand and ninety five pounds fifteen shillings and ninepence sterling, which we consider to be a fair and equitable valuation’.
Sir Hyde enclosed their report in his letter to the Admiralty, When the Board received Sir Hyde’s dispatch they were delighted with the passage reporting the recapture of the Hermione but they thoroughly disapproved of the rest—that the ship ‘has been purchased by my order at the price she has been valued at’, and that he had ‘ordered her to be called the Retaliation’. Sir Hyde’s purchase was on behalf of the Admiralty, and of course the prize-money depended on the price he paid.
A note on the corner of Sir Hyde’s letter gave Mr Nepean, the Secretary to the Board, instructions to tell Sir Hyde that ‘under the present circumstances Their Lordships will not disapprove of his having purchased the ship without first receiving Their Lordship’s authority for so doing’. They sent the commission of the new captain appointed by Sir Hyde to command ‘the Hermione which they have thought fit to name the Retribution’.
Thus the Hermione, later the Santa Cecilia, and then the Retaliation received her final name. Sir Hyde’s choice seems in retrospect more appropriate, for the cutting out was indeed retaliation against the Spanish, whereas the Board’s choice seems to imply retribution against the mutineers—who did not suffer one iota from her recapture.
However, inky fingers had not yet finished. The Admiralty, passing on the Jamaica yard’s survey and valuation to the Navy Board—who were responsible for the construction, repair and fitting out of ships—soon received a stiff letter in reply: the Navy Board reported the ship was not worth nearly as much as the Jamaica yard’s valuation and gave facts and figures to prove it.
Since the Jamaica yard was the Navy Board’s responsibility, the Admiralty replied to the Navy Board, giving their decision and also recapitulating the main points the Navy Board had made, which was that the figure of £14 a ton for the ship was much too high because she was eighteen years old, and a price of £10 15s. a ton was ‘a proper and sufficient valuation’.
The yard officers at Jamaica, according to the Navy Board, had put nearly £200 on the valuation of every £100 of the stores and £254 on every £100 of cordage, making the total price for the equipment £1,526 4s. 9d. higher than ‘you pay in England for similar stores when perfectly new’. This, they added, included the extra £60 charge added to every £100 of stores bought from the Jamaica yard by merchant ships.
‘We do hereby signify to you,’ Their Lordships told the Navy Board, ‘that we very highly disapprove the conduct of the yard officers at Jamaica, in not being properly mindful of the public interest… and desire and direct you… to allow that valuation only for the Hermione which you have stated to be proper’. This letter, written a year after the capture, shows how Their Lordships thus went back on their word. A year earlier they had ‘not disapproved’ of Sir Hyde’s purchasing the ship without their permission; but now they were cutting down the price. Only the Surprise’s crew suffered, particularly the hundred who had captured the Hermione against such odds.
Sir Edward Hamilton had been too ill to return to England immediately: he had to spend several weeks recuperating from the effect of his wounds. In the meantime the officers of the Surprise had presented a sword to Mr John M’Mullen, their brave Surgeon. Incidentally one of the boarding party was later court-martialled as a deserter from the sloop Swallow and sentenced to 300 lashes. When it later transpired he was one of the men who saved Hamilton’s life when he was badly wounded on the Hermione’s quarterdeck, the court successfully applied to have the sentence remitted.
Sir Edward finally sailed for England in April on board the Jamaica packet—but he was out of luck: three packets in succession were captured by the French—the Princess Charlotte on May 4, the Marquis of Kildare on May 6, and the Princess Amelia on May 11. Thus Sir Edward found himself a prisoner of war in French hands, but news of his exploit had already reached France, and as soon as he was landed at a French port he was, according to a contemporary account, ‘sent to Paris, where he was taken notice of by Bonaparte’, and after remaining there six weeks, was exchanged for four French midshipmen held prisoner in England.
He was back in England in good time to attend a dinner in his honour given by the City of London on October 24, the first anniversary of the cutting-out expedition. Hamilton was later given command of the Trent—where, as mentioned earlier, he established a reputation as a martinet and filled Midshipman, later Admiral, Jackson with apprehension. It may well be that his behaviour then was, in part at least, due to the severe headwounds that he received. After being dismissed the service by a court martial trying him for tying an elderly gunner in the rigging, he was later reinstated by the King, and between 1806 and 1819 he commanded the Royal yacht.
The rest of the Hermione’s story can be told briefly. On January 20, 1802, as the Retribution, she arrived back in Portsmouth, just two months before David Forester was caught by Steward Jones as he walked through the Point Gates, and two days before Sir Edward Hamilton was court-martialled in the Gladiator, moored nearby, and dismissed the service.
Also in Portsmouth at this time was another ship which had been concerned in the Hermione’s story, the little Diligence. This brig sailed for the Thames on February 6 to be paid off—and, by a coincidence, the Hermione, under her new name, sailed for Woolwich the same day, also to be paid off.
The Royal Navy had no further use for the Retribution since the Treaty of Amiens was about to be signed. She arrived at Woolwich on March 2, but Trinity House, responsible for the buoys and lightships round the coasts of Britain, wanted her. She was therefore fitted out for them, sailing on her first voyage under their flag on October 16, 1803. However, she had only a brief life left. She arrived at Deptford on June 8, 1804, docked the following August, had her copper sheathing taken off, and was broken up in June 1805.
So the story of the ship Hermione ends. Of the thirty-three of the Hermione’s crew who had been caught or given themselves up and been tried as mutineers, twenty-four had been hanged and another transported. But apart from Nash, Forester, Elliott and Redman, the rest of the leaders were never captured—men like Thomas Jay, Lawrence Cronin, and William Turner. Midshipman Wiltshire was not heard of again; nor was Mrs Martin, the widow of the murdered Boatswain.
What happened to them, and to more than one hundred other Hermiones who evaded arrest? Cronin we know settled down in La Guaira, and no doubt married and had a family. Did Thomas Jay when the war ended eighteen years after the mutiny, ever return to his native Plymouth? Did William Anderson, who last saw his native Canterbury when he was twenty-one, dare return with the peace, when he was nearly forty? John Farrel, the murderous American, no doubt went back to New York with the watch he won in the quarterdeck lottery. Did John Innes, the captain of the maintop and a former Success, visit his native Galloway again, or John Phillips his birthplace in Hanover? Did Cranbrook, Ton-bridge, Liverpool, Belfast, Whitby, Colchester, Lambeth, and several score other towns and villages ever again see those men and boys who left in the 1790s to serve in the Hermione? It is obvious that the majority of the men must have eventually settled down somewhere and married. So many coincidences occurred in the story of the Hermione that it is perhaps not being fanciful to wonder how many people in various parts of Europe and America may be quite unaware of their forebears’ mutineering past, even if they read this narrative. Somewhere, perhaps, there is a silver teapot still in use on which is engraved Pigot’s name and Otway’s thanks.