3

MAN AND BOY

1756–59

THE Vengeance’s orders that summer of 1759 were unusual and discomforting for the crew of a 28-gun frigate. No scouting or cruising as the eyes of the fleet this time. She was, William Spavens recalled, to prowl the west coast of the British Isles intercepting vessels homeward bound and ‘procure men for the service’.1 The Vengeance had been commissioned as a seaborne press gang.

The story of what followed is told only in part by the ship’s log. Sailing between Cork, Dublin and Liverpool in June and July she stopped and boarded four English and American letters of marque – in effect licensed privateers.² How many men were pressed is not stated in the captain’s record, which also passes lightly over the resistance that was offered; but Spavens pulled no punches in describing these events and his part in them, although his every instinct rebelled against the whole business. What particularly rankled was the seizing of men when they were in sight of home. Spavens declared it ‘shocking to the feelings of humanity’ for a sailor ‘after a long voyage [and] innumerable hardships . . . returning to his native land with the pleasing hope of shortly beholding a beloved wife and children, to be forced away to fight, perhaps to fall’.³

Yet, like others having to carry out orders they all detested, he was pragmatic too – and tough. One American ship offered resistance and was boarded:

We fired down amongst them, while they kept firing up at us. After having shot one of our men through the head, and another through both thighs, they submitted and we got 16 brave fellows.4

Among the American hands was one William Budd.⁵ That Herman Melville should have entitled his novella about an impressed topman Billy Budd is doubtless coincidental. Even so, the case of Budd and his shipmates symbolized the resentment already starting to develop among colonists at the British habit of treating American seamen as their own. In time this would be felt so keenly across the Atlantic that it contributed to war.

Whatever the number of men taken off the four privateers – perhaps seventy or so – it was not enough. Sailing off Liverpool, the Vengeance intercepted a whaler, Golden Lion, returning from Greenland. This time the boarding party were met by men ‘with lances and flinching-knives’ who drove them off. Under fire, the Golden Lion managed to make port; and that posed an awkward dilemma.

Resistance to press gangs from seamen was natural and common. By now, however, it was also to be encountered from their outraged relatives and other civilians. Among the port towns where Press Service operations had been extended, Newcastle and Bristol were notably hostile.⁶ But none was more renowned for offering violence than Liverpool. The regulating officer there, Captain John Fortescue, in charge of recruiting and press gangs, was often in despair. Every seaman, he reported, was ‘fought hard for, there being a number of men in town continually armed to defend themselves against my gangs, and to rescue what men they can from us’.⁷ As Spavens put it: ‘Pressing on shore at Liverpool had been deemed impracticable.’⁸

In the event, a party of eighty from the Vengeance was sent ashore, where they surprised the Lion’s crew in the process of renewing their protections from impressment:

We secured 17 of them, guarding them along the streets. Several hundreds of old men, women and boys flocked after us, well provided with stones and brickbats, and commenced a general attack. Not wishing to hurt them, we fired our pistols over their heads; but the women proved very daring, and followed us down to low water mark, almost up to the knees in mud.9

Spavens’s experiences in press gangs left him to reflect sourly: ‘Such are the methods frequently made use of to obtain seamen for service in this land of liberty.’ Yet even now he would add his caveat: ‘It is a hardship which nothing but absolute necessity can reconcile to our boasted freedom.’¹⁰

By 1759, the number of seamen in naval service had risen from 10,100 at the start of the Seven Years War, and 33,600 at the end of the first year, to some 84,400.¹¹ Such rapid recruitment had clearly involved rough practice. As Spavens also shows, however, the law confining impressment to men aged between eighteen and fifty-five who ‘used the sea’ was still, by and large, respected. In one foray from the Vengeance, ‘we picked up 16 men but only one of them being a seaman, the rest we set free’.¹² Where the law was bent it tended to be on inland waterways: men had been taken from rivers and beside them, off barges, lighters and wherries. We are still some way from the violations that occurred during the frantic remanning after 1803, when known instances occurred of civilians with no seafaring experience at all being seized. But opposition to impressment was already finding a voice, as heard in an anonymous forty-two-page polemic, The Sailors Advocate, which cited the rights of Magna Carta and went through seven editions by 1777:

Oppression certainly debases the mind, and what can be a greater Oppression than forcing men as prisoners on a man of war without necessaries, without allowing them time to order their affairs, or to take leave of their families. How can it be expected that a man should fight for the Liberty of others whilst he himself feels the pangs of Slavery.¹³

How many of the Navy’s 84,000 hands had been pressed since the onset of war it is not possible to say. Ships’ musters are incomplete and unreliable and many of the sailors listed as Able or Ordinary and described as volunteers had doubtless taken the sensible course when confronted by a press gang and accepted the alternative, usually offered at this point, of a bounty for those who signed on willingly – £2 10s for an Ordinary hand, £5 for an Able man. One study concludes: ‘At most one can only speculate that a majority were pressed.’14

Those listed as Landsmen did, however, include a substantial number of volunteers from a source experiencing its own revolution. Farming communities had previously provided sturdy types during hard times for agriculture. Over the next fifty years a quarter of the entire farmed area of the country became privately owned and as the old cooperative ways of working the land were killed off, a process of rapid urbanization began.¹⁵ London’s population doubled between 1750 and 1770, unemployment was rising, and the urban poor were also presenting themselves – and receiving Landsmen’s £1 10s bounty – at the six inland recruitment centres of Leeds, Leicester, Gloucester, Reading, Winchester and Shrewsbury.

Not all were white Britons. One of the best-known Africans in English history went to sea at this time. A former slave, Francis Barber, actually volunteered in preference to service in Samuel Johnson’s household. For all the doctor’s lofty pronouncements on the ghastliness of a sailor’s life, his Gough Square home was itself not a happy place, being composed of ‘morose, taciturn, argumentative individuals’.¹⁶ And Barber, as we shall see, only came ashore again – with obvious reluctance – because of Johnson’s insistence.

On more distant shores, meanwhile, men were recruited in Italy and Greece, while in India local seamen, known as lascars, began serving on British merchant ships.¹⁷

The need for new hands had also given rise to a most extraordinary and innovative social experiment.

As a solution to that intractable problem the idea had much to recommend it. The Navy never had enough seamen, yet city backstreets were alive with urchins – ragged, unemployed and disorderly. Taking the ragamuffins off the streets and putting them to the sea would resolve a social problem while breeding a new generation of top hands. In our cynical age, the creation of the Marine Society would be seen as the exploitative brainchild of some Admiralty hardnose. In its time, it was the inspiration of a philanthropist.

Ships’ boys are part of maritime lore, familiar figures in a seascape. There we espy the powder monkey – a nimble, barefoot scamp wriggling his way between the guns with a cartridge of gunpowder; and there in the aftermath of battle – a solemn, wide-eyed fellow squatting at the feet of a genial elder who is spinning tales. He can be seen with his bowl among the men at a mess table, and gambolling with friends amid the fug of tobacco on the focsle. One lad wrote of their fellowship: ‘We were always together, and a great part of our time was spent in play.’18 This same child would nevertheless be a combatant – witness to the ghastly spectacle of war and subject to all its dangers. Yet, so the theory went, innocence and vulnerability would be lost, skill and fortitude gained. Ships’ boys would grow into seamen.¹⁹

The Marine Society was formed in 1756, early in the Seven Years War and as a direct result of the old manpower shortage. But there was another factor. The process of urbanization had spawned a body of outcast youth – ‘distressed orphans who wander about like forsaken dogs’, as the society’s founders put it.²⁰ In London especially, abandoned children survived on the streets as ‘shop-lifters, pilferers and pickpockets’ and were seen as a threat to order.

Jonas Hanway, a merchant with seafaring connections, brought pragmatism to bear, combining his own humanitarian ideals with practical considerations. As well as boys, the Marine Society would recruit adult volunteers off the street for the Navy. But, as Hanway declared, it was ‘those who are bred to the sea from the earliest part of life [who] generally become the ablest mariners’.²¹ The society’s primary objective was always to channel the energies of those boys wandering London’s streets ‘like forsaken dogs’.

What gave the concept resonance, and contributed to its success, was Hanway’s recognition that society’s hostility towards homeless urchins closely matched its suspicion of seamen. A delinquent’s prospects were never good in an era when miscreants, generally deemed beyond salvation, were liable to be put to death or sent to a penal colony in America. As outcasts, however, there was a possibility that they might assimilate with another group of outsiders. They were, as one navy official put it, of an age ‘when their bodies or minds may be formed to any thing’. Hanway’s welcome came with a sermon:

You are the sons of freemen. Though poor, you are the sons of Britons, who are born to liberty; but remember that true liberty consists in doing well; in defending each other, in obeying your superiors and in fighting for your King and Country to the last drop of your blood.22

The first 4,000 Marine Society boys were aged between thirteen and fifteen. They were provided with ‘slops’, a basic outfit for going to sea that included bedding, and designated in the musters as servants – usually to captains or other officers. In addition, they were expected to act as powder monkeys in action. Initially they would be among the idlers or waisters, while they learnt the ropes and rose in time to the tops.

As well as removing from the streets ‘those who by extreme poverty and ignorance are pernicious to the community’, the Marine Society aimed ‘to encourage the industrious poor’ to send their children to sea. By 1760 it was advertising for recruits in the press:

Wanted to serve on His Majesty’s Ships of War, thirty or forty stout lads not under fourteen years of age, and of the stature of four feet and four inches, that go with their own and friends consent, and are no apprentices.²³

However boisterous a figure he might have cut in Gin Lane, the Marine Society recruit took a step back on entering his first ship. One lad wondered in awe whether he was ‘among spirits or devils . . . All seemed strange; different language and strange expressions of tongue, that I thought myself always asleep, and never properly awake.’²⁴ The babble was confusing enough – a new dialect embracing words and phrases that have since become part of common usage but at the time would have had a novel ring to any lubber: from ‘shipshape’ to ‘plain sailing’, ‘loose cannon’ to ‘broad in the beam’, or ‘pushing the boat out’ to ‘short-handed’ and ‘copper-bottomed’.

Still at anchor, although by now all at sea, the young recruit would have gazed at the spider’s web of ropes above. Though probably none the wiser as to the function of the folded bales of canvas, let alone the difference between a staysail and a studdingsail, he would be given a quick run-through by an experienced man:

When the [anchor] cable is up and down, the order is given to loose sails. The men stationed to loose them go up on the different yards; when the word is given to trice up and lay out, they lay along the yards and cast off the gaskets and keep the sails snug up in their arms until the word is given to let fall. The topsails are then sheeted home by those on deck, viz. the whole of the larboard watch forward on the forecastle to the fore topsail sheets, the starboard watch on the main deck to the main topsail sheets, the boys and idlers on the quarterdeck to the mizzen topsail sheets, those in the tops overhauling every rope that has any connection with the sail. Then the topsail halyards are manned by the same who haul home the sheets and the yards are run up. The topgallant sheets are then hauled home and the yards hoisted up. The capstan is again manned, the anchor is hove up, the sails are trimmed according to the point it [the wind] blows from, the ship gets to sea, the ropes are coiled up and the watch is set.25

A boy’s first sensation in this new world was nausea. The phenomenon of seasickness rarely features in sailor’s writings but everyone experienced it to start with. On coming aboard his first vessel aged fourteen, Samuel Kelly ‘lay about in holes or corners, unable to eat or scarcely crawl’ for weeks; Kelly remained in the Packet Service – based at Falmouth and carrying mail, despatches and passengers to British colonies and outposts – despite suffering seasickness at the start of every voyage for seven years.²⁶

The newcomer would also receive an early lesson in shipboard hierarchy. For every genial patriarch on the lower deck there was a tough nut. Samuel Leech, an orphan from Essex who joined at the unusually young age of twelve, wrote that the unruly lad would ‘be kicked and cuffed by all’:

He will be made miserable. Sailors, being treated as inferiors themselves, love to find opportunity to act the superior over some one. They do this over the boys, and if they find a saucy, insolent one, they show him no mercy.27

Worse than bullying, Leech thought, was the depravity. His memoir, coloured by the fact that he had embraced a spirit of evangelical mission, concluded that few worse places existed than a ship for instilling morality in a boy. It started with ‘beastly intoxication’, which led to ‘singing libidinous or bacchanalian songs’ before, ultimately, ships’ boys were exposed to vice ‘in the worst of its Proteus-like shapes . . . the meshes of temptation spread about his path in every direction’. And, bad as things were at sea, ‘they are worse in port’.²⁸

With due respect to Leech, it is unlikely that children raised in the poorest households, living cheek by jowl with their parents, were ever shielded from adult ways. But he brings into focus two particular aspects of life at sea – alcohol and sexuality.

Drink played a central part in Jack’s world. It was his comfort and his scourge, and not just for health reasons. Depending on where his ship was stationed, he received a daily ration of a gallon of beer, a pint of wine, or a half-pint of rum. That created a habit, and once acquired a real imbiber would go to great lengths to satisfy it. He would trade for the rations of more abstemious shipmates, and he would commit crimes that put his life at risk. Not that his habitual daily offence went unpunished. By far the greatest proportion of floggings noted in ships’ logs were for drunkenness. One study has found that it accounted for almost 30 per cent of punishments, followed by 23 per cent for neglect of duty, 11 per cent for insolence, 10 per cent for disobedience, with single figures for theft, fighting and desertion.29 A modern perspective might conclude that the Navy first institutionalized alcoholism, then punished it.^*

Sex was more rare, for obvious reasons. Insofar as boys are concerned, however, another form of sexuality came into play. While the fond attachment between a boy and an old hand is a theme of the age of sail, the fatherly figure has an ugly yet unavoidable associate – the sexual predator.

Indexes to court-martial records between 1750 and 1800 show just two men from the lower deck being found guilty of serial paedophilia, so either the authorities turned a blind eye to offenders or this form of crime must have later gained significant momentum. The former seems more likely. Henry Bicks of the Royal William was convicted in 1757 of ‘the detestable crime of sodomy upon the body of a boy’, and despite testimony from the victim, John Booth, that the accused had buggered him six times previously, Bicks was given the relatively moderate punishment of 500 lashes before being towed to Portsmouth Point with a halter around his neck and a note declaring his crime.³⁰ Forty years then passed before another man was convicted of the same offence, although this time David Jenness, who had sodomized three boys on the Prince, was hanged off Cadiz in 1798. At his trial, one of the victims testified that he had once driven Jenness away with a knife but did not report him, ‘being ashamed to mention what had passed’.³¹

Michael Berry was more fortunate. Although accused of attempting to sodomize five boys under the age of thirteen, one of whom testified that Berry ‘wanted me to take his prick in my hand and told me he would give me a shilling or six pence to shake it about’, he was acquitted at his trial.³² One study has concluded that the testimony of boys at such hearings was treated with suspicion, especially when made against officers, who made up the great majority of defendants.33

The harrowing case in the summer of 1761 of George Newton and Thomas Finlay, a boy on the Ocean, provides a slice of social history all its own. Before their joint trial on charges of sodomy could begin, the court had to consider an objection that a black seaman, Charles Ferret, could not testify against Christians – a claim it rejected after hearing that Ferret had been baptized and that his godfather was Captain Augustus Keppel, the son of an earl. Ferret went on to testify that he had been awakened at about 3 a.m. by ‘hearing somebody blowing and puffing alongside of me’. It was Newton lying on top of the boy Finlay:

I got hold of both his stones fast. The other part was in the body of the Boy. I asked him what he had got there. He said Cunt.³⁴

Finlay was aged fifteen and had been on the ship for just two weeks. Why he had been brought to trial was not spelled out, but the testimony of one officer was recorded:

Q: Do you remember to have heard the Boy declare he had been guilty of this before, or had been accustomed to suffer men to commit sodomy with him?

A: He said he had run away from his friends and had been accustomed to run about the Birdcage Walk in St James’s Park, but on what account he did not say. His confession was made freely and voluntarily.³⁵

A confession of sorts it was deemed, because the tree-lined avenue of Bird Cage Walk had acquired notoriety as a homosexual meeting point in London. Why the boy had not tried to conceal this activity, whether he might have been oblivious to any wrongdoing, the court seems not to have considered. And despite his father’s plea for mercy, testimony that he had been a dutiful lad and did butcher’s work in London before going to sea, fifteen-year-old Thomas Finlay joined the man who had sodomized him in being hanged from a yardarm.*

What then of homosexuality in general?

Sodomy always attracted opprobrium but was also – whatever Winston Churchill thought – rare.³⁶ Admiralty indexes record only fourteen cases involving seamen over an entire half-century up to 1806, four of which led to acquittals.³⁷ There were only three convictions for attempts to commit sodomy. An interesting example of legal punctilio involved John Ware and John Douglas, who were found naked and ‘in great motion’ in a hammock. They were obviously guilty of conduct ‘infamous, scandalous, unmanly and unworthy of British seamen’; but because it could not be stated emphatically ‘that the one’s privates were in the body of the other’, both were acquitted.³⁸ In another case where penetration could not be proved, George Reed and Thomas Tattershall were convicted only of ‘a most scandalous Action & abominable Uncleanliness’.³⁹

There was doubtless an element of self-regulation behind these figures, a degree of tolerance in some instances, and a tendency to overlook uncomfortable truths in others. No charges appear to have been brought between 1762 and 1797 and, perhaps typical of the period, one captain, rather than prosecute a case of attempted sodomy, had the accused flogged and turned ashore; Graham Moore of the sloop Bonetta admitted he had no right to avoid enforcing naval law, but his company ‘could not brook such a man remaining amongst them’ and he wanted to spare them shame. His own opinion was that ‘morality suffers by such practices becoming notorious’.⁴⁰

Yet making due allowance for exceptions, an incidence of one case every four years hardly suggests that homosexual practice was widespread. When discovered, it could produce on the lower deck a kind of ribald horror – as when Martin Billin and James Brian were found with their breeches down between a gun and a chest on the Newark in 1762.

A witness told their trial that he had ‘laid hold of Brian’s yard, pulled it out of Billin’s fundament, held it in his hand and called out to the bystanders to observe what a posture they were in’. Asked how he could be sure that penetration had taken place, he said: ‘Because Brian’s yard came out with a spring, as if a cork had been drawn out of a bottle.’ The two men were sentenced to receive 1,000 lashes each.41

When it came to buggery, the Navy made no distinction between man and beast. In one especially pitiful case, John Blake of the Rippon was convicted in 1757 of ‘the unnatural Sin of buggery on the body of a goat’. A marine testified that he had observed Blake beside a cannon, ‘with a goat between his legs, kneeling upon his left knee and standing on his right leg, in motion the same as if a man was with a woman’. Asked whether he had anything to say in his defence, Blake, shamed and terrified, replied he could only remember ‘offering the goat a piece of bread’. It did no good. He was sentenced to hang.⁴²

The Marine Society continued to play a part in recruiting the seamen of the future. It won the support of such benefactors as the composer George Friderich Handel and the actor David Garrick, and its scope shifted from saving boys from the streets to providing those already in trades with alternative opportunities. Apprentice boys suffering under tyrannical masters or unhappy in their line of work were taken on, including, for example, nineteen apprentice chimney sweeps found in 1773 in circumstances that amounted to little more than slavery.⁴³ And just as Jack’s status grew during the final quarter of the eighteenth century, so did the number of boys coming from simple backgrounds for whom a life of opportunity and adventure had appeal. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Marine Society had equipped around 25,000 boys for the Navy and sent thousands more to sea in merchant ships and coastal vessels.⁴⁴

Far from all ships’ boys were protégés of the society, however. A great many were the sons of seafarers, particularly those engaged in the traditional trade of the east coast, the colliers of Newcastle, regarded as the finest nursery for seamen. Others came by more random routes, and one individual of special interest made his appearance at this time.

Olaudah Equiano was among those who found life at sea a genuine release. But then he had been a slave until he was purchased at the age of nine from a Virginia plantation by a naval officer, Lieutenant Michael Pascal, who wanted a servant. Equiano never regretted it. ‘I had sails to lie on and plenty of good victuals to eat; and every body on board used me very kindly, quite contrary to what I had seen of any white people before.’45 More than comfort and kindness, however, life at sea brought Equiano friendship, education and ultimately the opportunity to redefine himself.

Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, in an engraving of 1789 when his seafaring days had given way to campaigning.

His first companion was Dick Baker, an American lad five years his senior who seemed blind to Equiano’s race, having ‘a mind superior to prejudice; and who was not ashamed to notice, to associate with, and to be the friend and instructor of one who was ignorant, a stranger, of a different complexion, and a slave!’ They shared duties as Pascal’s steward which, as Equiano’s biographer has pointed out, gave him the status of other ship’s boys, rather than a slave. They received no pay, but officers were given an allowance for a steward’s keep and during his navy service Equiano was entered in ships’ musters as Gustavus Vassa or Vasser, a volunteer and captain’s servant.

Equiano’s arrival in England aged ten coincided with the start of the Seven Years War and active duty appears to have given him a certain swagger. On the 40-gun Roebuck cruising off France he learnt to box, ‘the first time I ever fought with a white boy’. His next ship was the pride of the Navy, the 100-gun Royal George, where at anchor in a home port the quarters forward resembled a crowded village with

men, women and children of every denomination . . . Here were also shops or stalls of every kind of goods, and people crying their different commodities about the ship as in a town.⁴⁶

The 90-gun Namur was another castle, with a complement of 780 men, and she marked the high point of Equiano’s seafaring life, even if his memory of the voyage transporting General James Wolfe’s army across the Atlantic to Quebec has a hint of embellishment. ‘The good and gallant general,’ he wrote:

. . . often honoured me, as well as other young boys, with marks of his notice; and saved me once a flogging for fighting with a young gentleman.⁴⁷

It was in the Namur that Equiano finally saw action. He was fourteen and after four years at sea felt himself ‘a stranger to terror of any kind and, in that respect at least, almost an Englishman’, when the war took a historic turn. Olaudah Equiano and William Spavens were at the two battles that would define Britain’s future as a naval power.

* A criminal trial of 1763 is an example of the consequences ashore. James Chapman and Richard Forsit came to London with pay of 45 and 13 guineas respectively, and the anticipation of more in prize money. It was not forthcoming and after two months at the taverns of St Giles they were penniless. They were convicted of robbing a man of his shoes, a pair of silver-plated buckles, a hat and 7/6 in coins, and were executed at Tyburn on 15 June. They declined to join a priest in prayer, Forsit saying: ‘There is but one God but many ways to worship him.’ Instead they formed a circle with a third man on the gallows in their own quiet prayer. (Old Bailey online)

* ADM 12/21. A larger proportion of offenders came from the higher ranks, mainly warrant officers such as Robert Paton, bosun on the Volage, who preyed on four boys aged between fifteen and seventeen. ‘He made a practice of getting these boys into corners, handling their private parts & taking them into his mouth & thrusting his finger up their fundaments, blowing into them and with a wonderfully capricious and brutal depravity, making themselves in his hands.’ Paton was flogged around the fleet and drummed ashore with a halter around his neck (ff. 211/2). See also B. R. Burg, Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy (Basingstoke, 2007).