Rewards and Pleasures
THE SEAMAN’S LIFE was hard, but it was by no means unremittingly so. Conditions were at least the equivalent of those in other walks of life: wages were comparable to those of labourers ashore, but even at its worst, the naval diet was undoubtedly better than theirs; naval pay was lower than that in the merchant service, but stoppages were fewer and the work was easier.1 Moreover, the seventeenth-century naval seaman was not only better off than many of his contemporaries, he was also better off than many of his successors were to be.
LEAVE
One of the clear differences between the seventeenth-century navy and ‘Nelson’s navy’ was that shore leave was by no means uncommon in the earlier period. This was primarily a consequence of the predominance of volunteers among most ships’ companies, and the strong bonds of loyalty that existed between them and many of the captains that they served. The disciplinary code and the instructions to captains were based quite explicitly on the assumption that leave would be given, and refusal to grant it for whatever reason caused much resentment.2 By the 1670s the norm was for captains to grant four or five days’ leave when a ship was fitting out and ten days when it came in, but the Admiralty thought this too lenient, and by 1680 four or five days’ leave at the end of a voyage had become the norm.3 In 1689 the crew of the Charles Galley was largely made up of Devon men, so when the ship went into Plymouth, the captain gave them a day’s leave.4 Men were often granted leave when their ship called in a foreign port, but disgorging dozens of young Britons at once into such an environment had consequences that have changed little down the years. At Malta in 1676, the men of Admiral Sir John Narbrough’s Mediterranean fleet outraged the Inquisitor and the local populace by trading illicitly, smoking indiscriminately, demanding to be served meat on Catholic days of abstinence and generally acting disreputably. The Inquisitor protested, and in January 1676 Narbrough had to issue orders to his men to mend their behaviour.5 A few years later, what seems to have been a three-way drunken fist fight took place at Livorno (Leghorn) between English, Irish and French seaman, during which one Irishman was killed. This was one of countless ‘runs ashore’ where British seamen invariably fetched up in the local drinking dens and brothels before looking for someone to fight (preferably Frenchmen).6 Otherwise, many officers and men behaved as classic British tourists abroad, viewing the sights and attending the local festivities – bullfights in Spain and Portugal, carnivals in Italy, Catholic rituals in all southern European ports of call.7
RECREATION AND MUSIC
During their off-duty time, seamen relaxed by swapping jokes and tales, gambling, and playing games, including boisterous deck sports. A few men, presumably of a more reflective bent, carved models, and one ship’s company in the Straits was entertained by a performing bear.8 Fishing was another favourite form of recreation, for it also served to supplement and vary the official diet. In 1658 one captain requested an official issue of a seine net, arguing that using it to catch fish would benefit the health of his crew.9 Others took a more direct approach: when the men of the Adventure caught a dolphin off Portugal in 1661, they killed it with an axe and then fried it for supper.10 Music, singing and dancing were common pastimes aboard warships, although the latter may have been less prevalent in the ‘Puritan’ morality prevailing before 1660. There was a fiddler aboard the St David in 1670, although he deserted at Alicante to cohabit with a local prostitute.11 Pepys recorded singing and dancing by the crew, or impromptu musical offerings by the officers, during many of the evenings on the Grafton’s cruise to Tangier in 1683; on one evening, he listened to ‘mighty pretty music upon the flutes’ in the captain’s cabin.12 Officers sometimes had their own instruments, or else brought their own musicians aboard.13 In 1660 Edward Montagu borrowed the gittern belonging to the lieutenant of the Royal Charles, filled two candlesticks with money to use them as cymbals, and began an improvised concert.14 Not all were enthusiastic about such musical offerings. One of the many merits attributed to Blake after his death was his refusal to have ‘chamber-music squeaking in the night, which suggests that this was a common trait among his fellow officers.15 The seamen had favourite songs for particular situations. Teonge recorded how ‘Loth to Depart’ was sung as his ship began its journey away from England, and at occasions of leave-taking thereafter.16
Reading and letter-writing were common pastimes among officers. Captain Charles Talbot’s estate included twenty-three books of divinity.17 Thomas Browne, a particularly well-educated lieutenant, read the discourses of the Dutch theologian Vossius during the 1665 campaign, and had an excellent knowledge of Plutarch.18 Officers also brought games and other personal possessions to sea with them, and some of these have been discovered in wrecks of the period.19 Some took part in the men’s activities; Pepys and Edward Montagu played nine-pins several times during the Naseb’s voyage to collect the king in May 1660, though Pepys was evidently not particularly proficient, losing fourteen shillings in side-bets over two days.20 If several ships were in company together, rowing or sailing races between their boats could be organised.21 Officers’ pets sometimes found their way aboard ship; the Duke of York’s dog was a veteran of the battle of Lowestoft.22 ‘Mr Bromley’, a seaman borne on the books of a fireship in 1675, was actually the captain’s dog; probably the most breathtakingly audacious example in the period of the ‘false muster’, the practice of entering non-existent men on the ship’s books.23
DRINK AND TOBACCO
The abundance of clay pipes brought up from the wrecks of seventeenth century warships suggests that smoking was one of the most popular activities aboard ship, despite the hazards that accompanied it in a wooden environment and the various attempts that were made to ensure men could continue to enjoy it while not endangering the ship.* There was no need to apply such regulation to drink, which was an essential – indeed, an obligatory – part of each man’s daily rations. But the gallon of beer to which they were officially entitled was insufficient for many seamen, who were eager to get hold of stronger fare. Some pursers and even some captains colluded in this by running illegal trades in liquor.24 Although there were obvious dangers in having so much alcohol circulating so readily aboard heavily armed sailing warships, there were also potential benefits: a crew in a permanent state of semi-inebriation was arguably likely to be more passive, and certainly more contented, than one that thought it was being deprived of its fair share of strong drink. Drunken brawling must have been common, but on one level this would have been simply the natural way for cooped-up young men to let off steam. Most of it went unrecorded, and probably never even came to the attention of the ship’s officers, let alone the authorities ashore.25 In home ports, just as in foreign harbours, seamen often made straight for the alehouse as soon as they got ashore, often remaining there until their money and credit were exhausted.26 Officers were often just as bibulous as their men, and Prince Rupert claimed that if every drunken officer were turned out of the fleet, there would be none left.27 Henry Teonge noted that the naval obsession with toasting was already well established. In his first ship, two bowls of punch were required for the appropriate toast on each weekday evening, and far more would appear on special occasions, which were frequent. Party games often followed, and on one occasion these resulted in an entire crate of expensive Venetian glass being smashed during a tipsy bout of toasting.28
SEX
By tradition, the wives and girlfriends of sailors were allowed to remain on board a ship for the first leg of a long voyage, such as that from the Thames round to the Downs. Henry Teonge watched with bemusement as
a man and a woman creep into a hammock, the woman’s legs to the hams hanging over the sides or out at the end of it. Another couple sleeping on a chest; others kissing and clipping; half drunk, half sober or rather half asleep; choosing rather (might they have been suffered) to go and die with them than stay and live without them.29
The officers’ wives also remained aboard until the Downs, where they made a rather more discreet leave-taking.30 Many women were aboard ships of the fleet in May 1666, and it was feared that they had brought the plague aboard.31 Abroad, seamen frequented brothels with an enthusiasm that would not have been unfamiliar to their successors;* but back home, sailors’ wives were often relieving their perennial indebtedness by resorting to prostitution.32 On the longest voyages, ships might be away for several years at a time, so unsurprisingly seamen’s, and sometimes officers’, marriages were often casual affairs with infidelity or bigamy featuring on one side or both. In 1656 one captain discovered to his surprise that two of his crewmen seemed to have five wives between them. One Commonwealth captain had a wife in England and a second wife in Barbados, but returned to the first (who had remarried, though fortunately her husband was in the East Indies) while preparing to take a third, and rather younger, bride.33 A few captains risked bringing their wives or other women aboard ship with them, but given the number of prying eyes on board, not all of which would belong to allies of the captain, it was usually only a matter of time before word of such activities reached the authorities, who invariably took a firm line.34 Captain Sir William Jennens was dismissed the service for taking his wife with him on Mediterranean convoy duty in 1670–1, and was also sentenced to a year and a day in the Marshalsea prison.35
Pewter plates, a clay pipe, and other essentials of the seventeenth century seaman’s daily life; salvaged from wrecks on the Goodwin Sands and now on display at Ramsgate Maritime Museum.
(AUTHOR’S PHOTOGRAPH)
The same lack of privacy aboard ship made it difficult to conceal acts of homosexuality, which was condemned as a capital crime by the thirty-second article of war of 1661. There had been a handful of cases in the 1650s, the most significant of which involved the pursuit of ships’ boys by the sailing master (who had a cabin, and thus greater privacy), but there is very little record of it in the Restoration navy. Only one case seems to have come to a court martial between 1673 and 1689 (on two seamen aboard the Mary Rose in 1684), and even in that instance there is only a record of the court being ordered, not of it having taken place.36 Although the records for that period are incomplete, the virtual silence in other sources suggests that this picture is not unrepresentative.37 Pepys mentioned one incident of attempted buggery aboard the Grafton in 1683, but this was carried out by a ‘Turk’, who was whipped at the capstan and had his beard burned with a candle.38 It should have been more difficult still for a woman to conceal herself aboard ship and pass herself off as a male member of the crew, but Anne Chamberlyne, the twenty-three-year-old daughter of a lawyer, served aboard the Griffin Fireship, commanded by her brother Clifford, during the battle of Beachy Head in 1690; ‘a second Pallas, chaste and fearless’ was how her memorial inscription in All Saints Church, Chelsea, put it. A second-hand report of 1692, which may possibly have been a conflation of Anne Chamberlyne’s story, claimed that another gentlewoman had served in the fleet during the battle of Barfleur.39
This detail from Danckerts’ painting of the wreck of the Gloucester (shown in full at p171) shows the wide variety of costumes - and, by implication, of social class - that might be found aboard a Restoration warship (exaggerated in this case by the presence of the Duke of York’s retinue).
(NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH)
BELONGINGS
Most seamen carried few belongings to sea with them, and often left little more ashore. Their worldly estates consisted of little more than the wages due to them, which were often more than offset by the debts they incurred. John Oakley of the Pearl, who died in 1682, left his widow a chest and clothes valued at 13s 4d, a gold ring valued at 4s 6d and £26 of‘desperate debts’.40 When he died Patrick Darnatt of the Centurion was owed £27 in wages by the navy and over £11 in debts from other members of her crew, but his only worldly possessions, his clothes, had vanished, presumably purloined by one of his many creditors.41 Simon Grudgeon of the St Andrew left £1 worth of household goods; these were immediately seized by his landlady, probably because she had little faith in the navy’s ability to pay the £6 wages that Grudgeon was due.42 Most naval seamen, like Grudgeon, lived in rented accommodation in the cramped seamen’s villages along the Thames, the likes of Wapping, Rotherhithe and Shadwell. A very few, particularly among the pressed men, were more substantial individuals who owned one or more properties; but the great majority were poor men who subsisted on credit, hoping that one day the state would finally provide them with the arrears of pay that could settle their debts.43
Naturally, officers had far grander personal estates, both at sea and on shore. Many of their possessions reflected the extent of their travels. When Captain Sir Richard Munden died in 1680, the inventory of his possessions included ‘Portugal mats’, a ‘Japan cabinet’, chairs and carpets from Turkey and over 1,100 ounces of plate; he had a good house in Bromley, and the total value of his estate was £5,936.44 Captain William Botham left a Turkish gun, ‘two small pieces of Barbary gold’ and ‘one gold medal of the late Pope’.45 As well as investing in property, captains often sought to put their money into other shipping ventures, and carried the relevant papers to sea with them. When Captain Anthony Langston of the Royal Oak died suddenly in March 1679, the chests in his cabin were found to contain clothes and other domestic items, blunderbusses and rapiers, the mortgage for £300 on his estate in Worcestershire, a lease of tithes in the same county, an eighth share in a merchantman, papers relating to two plantations that he owned in Virginia and a bond of £140 owed him by Lord Carey. The fact that so much of his estate was at sea (and had to be transported from Deptford to Worcestershire when the ship returned home) caused a long and tedious succession of problems for his sister, who acted as his executrix.46
* See Part Eight, Chapter 34, pp169-79 below.
* See Part Eight, Chapter 33, p166.