7

HANDS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

1775–83

THE North Atlantic was the maritime equivalent of Jack’s backyard. He had been crossing that ocean for centuries and since the establishment of the North American colonies the flow of settlers and merchandise between Old England and New England had surged like a tide. Seamen on a transatlantic run were as familiar with Boston as with Bristol.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, America’s War of Independence touched a rare nerve of uncertainty in Jack. Fighting a Frenchman or a Spaniard came naturally. This new foe was a quite different fish. Up to this point he had been not an enemy at all but a shipmate. He not only spoke the same language, he shared the same popular culture of folk tales and songs. He was part of a common history. Diversity on British ships may have reached a point that a mess could have among its number Danes, Swedes, Italians, Portuguese and Germans; but by far the largest proportion of hands from outside the British Isles hailed from the American colonies. This was a conflict that divided kith and kin across the Atlantic.

The outcome was always going to be decided on land, where the fighting started and brought early victories to a supposedly ill-disciplined rabble. No such outcome was ever likely at sea, where the Navy maintained an armada off New York with a combined firepower that exceeded all the American guns facing them from the shore.1 The declaration by Congress of the colonies as free and independent states was followed by the formation of an embryonic US navy consisting of two ships, two brigs and a sloop. How their lordships at the Admiralty chortled at that. Then, in the summer of 1778, France joined in, sending a great fleet across the Atlantic to exploit the old enemy’s difficulties.

There, stationed off Newfoundland, was John Nicol. Last glimpsed among orientals in China and cannibals in the Pacific, the young Scot was in a 28-gun frigate, the Surprise. He retained an eye for the quirks of humanity: Newfoundland he thought an unnervingly primitive place, from the viciousness of fishermen’s feuds to the practice of incest in marriage; but the Surprise helped to knock any last semblance of faintness out of him. Her hands were mainly Irishmen, who ‘fought like devils and the captain was fond of them on that account’. In fact, Captain Samuel Reeves was a tough disciplinarian, but one who gave his men latitude at anchor. Officers would go ashore at St John’s, leaving the Irish to get drunk and turn pugnacious among themselves – and then with the English and Scots. Nicol tried to stay out of the way but once, when ‘the crew were all fighting amongst each other in their drink, an Irishman came staggering up, crying “Erin go bragh!” [“Ireland forever”] and made a blow at me. My Scottish blood rose in a moment and I was as throng as the rest.’²

The Surprise was based at Newfoundland to deal with American privateers playing havoc with trade and was out cruising on 30 September when a strange sail was sighted. It was the Jason, one of the most active rebel privateers and an emblem of the gulf that now divided motherland and colony; her captain, a redoubtable character named John Manley, was an old Devon man who had crossed over and become a senior rebel officer. On being hailed and ordered to surrender, Manley shouted back: ‘Fire away! I have as many guns as you.’ Nicol was full of respect: ‘He had heavier metal but fewer men than Surprise.’³

Single-ship actions were dramatic and noisy but rarely prolonged. Manley, however, stuck to his guns for more than two hours. On the Surprise, Nicol was ‘serving powder as busy as I could, the shot and splinters flying in all directions’, when he was mortified to see the warlike Irish tars put his anvil – he was in the ship as a cooper – into the muzzle of a cannon and roar in triumph as it blasted a gaping hole in Jason’s side.

Off on the Jason, a young hand named Joshua Davis from Boston came up on deck after an exchange of broadsides to find it a shambles:

. . . the ship reeling one way and the other. The helmsman was killed and no one to take the wheel. The rigging, sails, yards, &c. were spread all over the deck. The wounded men were carried to the cockpit, the dead men lying on the deck and no one to throw them overboard.4

By the time the Jason struck she had eighteen dead and twelve wounded, the Surprise seven dead. The colonists were taken to St John’s and, as was routine practice, urged to submit once more to the Crown or face transportation to jail in England. Manley refused and was duly shipped off to the Old Mill prison in Plymouth.

The reaction of the nineteen-year-old Joshua Davis was more typical. He was brought before Captain Reeves, who said, ‘if I behaved well he would give me a midshipman’s pay’. Davis agreed, and was then rather aggrieved to find himself back on the lower deck ‘as a gunners’ boy, at 16 shillings 6 pence per month’.⁵

In later years Davis was understandably keener to emphasize his revolutionary role, writing as ‘an American citizen who was pressed and served on board six ships of the British Navy, was in seven engagements, once wounded, five times confined in irons and obtained his liberty by desertion’. The truth is that he went from one side to the other repeatedly during the war, and by his own account seems to have sung ballads to England’s glory with the same gusto as Yankee songs. His is a remarkable tale. Moreover, he and Nicol are a unique case of hands who were in action against each other, then, astonishingly, served in the same ship and went on to write lower-deck memoirs. (Neither made any mention of the other and they lost touch; both were by then elderly and down on their luck – Davis, living in Boston in 1811, lame after ‘repeated misfortunes’, and Nicol back in his native Edinburgh, aged sixty-seven, and living from hand to mouth.)

Davis soon fell foul of Captain Reeves, who decided he was an idle fellow and put him ashore as a prisoner. If Davis is to be believed – and it may be said that his tales in general have the ring of an old hand’s mythologizing – he escaped to Boston with eighty-four other Americans and joined another privateer before being captured again. This time he was transported to England, exasperating his captors with a song that went:

Vain Britain, boast no longer with proud indignity –

By land your conq’ring legions, your matchless strength by sea;

Since we your braver sons incens’d, our swords have girded on.

Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza, for war and Washington.

On landing in Plymouth, Davis and his fellows were incarcerated in the Old Mill, ‘for rebellion, piracy and high treason on His Majesty’s high seas’.6 Again he was offered his liberty on condition of agreeing to serve in the Navy. Within weeks he was entered on another British man-of-war, the 64-gun Anson, bound for the West Indies and singing a quite different tune.

The ambivalence of men like Davis was only natural. As well as ties of language, culture and geography, the act of seafaring itself made the connection between Britain and North America almost umbilical. Migration had become relatively easy and in ‘a world in motion’, as the age has been described, about 125,000 people had left Britain and Ireland between 1760 and 1775 and settled across the Atlantic.⁷

Seamen on both sides found their loyalties divided. Just as there were colonists who adhered to the king, there were Britons drawn to the notion that a man might be a citizen rather than a subject. It would be unwise, however, to characterize the maritime aspect of the American Revolution in terms of ideals and beliefs. From the available evidence, when Jack switched allegiance from the Crown to the Yankees, or deserted from the Yankees to the Crown, it was usually with the same pragmatic blend of self-interest and impulsiveness with which he changed ships.

Sailors raising a flag. An eighteenth-century sketch by the Anglo-American artist John Singleton Copley represents men of graceful, almost balletic, form.

Yet if there was expediency, there was also a libertarian streak among American Jacks that sat ill with the rigour of naval tradition and above all with impressment. The fact that Britain – and the Admiralty in particular – had come to treat the colony as a source of manpower and, therefore, seamen, had come to stick in American throats like rank salt pork. Andrew Sherburne, another rebel hand, recalled growing up in New Hampshire where:

. . . sailors and fishermen used to dread the sight of a man of war’s boat as a flock of sheep would dread the appearance of a wolf.8

Fear of the press was one thing. Gradually in America, however, it had been replaced by systematic resistance. Decades before the revolution, anti-impressment riots had rendered Boston, New York and Newport dangerous ground for red-coated enforcers. While violence never reached the levels seen in British ports, press gangs ceased to operate on American soil.9 They still took men out of American merchant ships, and one study has gone so far as to argue that American seamen’s resentment played a primary role in fostering the revolution; naval impressment was cited in the Declaration of Independence among the grievances against British rule.¹⁰

On the other side, old habits died hard. Long after the king’s troops had been driven from America, his ships would impress hands deemed ‘colonists’ almost wherever they were to be found. While this only deepened antagonism towards the old country, so far as their lordships at the Admiralty were concerned there was no avoiding those stormy waters in the eternal demand for manpower.

The consequences were felt in policies starting to take shape which would redefine procedures in the coming century. For now, the figures may be left to speak for themselves. At the height of the Seven Years War, it has been calculated, the number of seafarers employed in British ships was an unprecedented 130,000. By the time of the American war it had risen to 150,000, of whom 110,000 were mustered by the Navy.¹¹ How many were Americans is impossible to say. (Ships’ musters do not cast much light on the subject because the column for a seaman’s place of birth was frequently left blank; that said, where such entries were made, the number of Americans is significant – up to a third on some ships.) What we do know is that some 900 American privateers and merchant vessels were captured and their hands first invited, then coerced, to recognize the Crown.¹² Those born in Britain, known as ‘old country men’, plainly found this easier than most. There were still a significant number, like Joshua Davis, for whom the prospect of regular food and pay was sufficient to overcome any initial reluctance.

Those of stronger character and diehard rebels would be brought to Britain and committed to the Old Mill prison where again they were invited to acknowledge their duty to the king by serving in his Navy. Out of 631 Americans imprisoned in the Old Mill between 1777 and 1781, roughly one in eight sought a pardon and entered a navy ship.13

Another group of Americans who went over to the enemy did so not reluctantly but as a form of escape. Proclamations that ‘all indentured Servants willing to bear Arms’ against the rebels would be freed and that ‘Negroes [are] free as soon as they set on English ground’, started a movement by black slaves. Thousands went over to the British and served in the Army, including a 300-strong ‘Ethiopian Regiment’.¹⁴ As for the Navy, fanciful claims have been made about the number of former slaves who signed on and served as seamen when no reliable figures exist and the individuals are anonymous. An exception was Anthony Mingus, who was to be found on British men-of-war until the end of the war.^*

Of the British seamen drawn to American republicanism we have a somewhat clearer picture. An analysis of naval records shows a sharp spike in courts martial for desertion over the course of the war – from twelve in 1775 to twenty-nine in 1778 and sixty-six in 1781.¹⁵ Most of these incidents occurred off America, and at least four cases involved hands who enlisted with the rebels and were caught and hanged.¹⁶ How many Britons actually went over to the rebels is impossible to say, because we know only of the very small number who were recognized and captured. It is reasonable to assume, however, that many deserters – and there were hundreds if not thousands who ran from British ships off America during the war – found the new country to their liking and stayed, even if they did not actually fight for it.

Among those clearly sympathetic to the rebels was Francis Roderick, who deserted from the Rose off Rhode Island in 1775 and was captured at the guns of an American privateer, Alfred, three years later. As he was clapped in irons he was heard to shout defiantly that given the chance, he would do the same thing again. Roderick declined to explain himself more fully at his court martial and was sentenced to hang.17

William Pearce from Bristol seems to have been another genuine republican. Aged twenty-four, he ran from the Solebay near Charleston and disappeared from sight, only to be captured more than a year later, hundreds of miles away, a soldier in an American regiment serving under the name of William Powell. Pearce was brought to New York where he suffered the freakish misfortune of being recognized by a marine from his old ship. He too was hanged.¹⁸

Another Englishman, Charles White, was luckier. White bore a navy brand on his cheek, the mark of a serial deserter, when he was captured along with the rest of the company of an American privateer; but having realized his peril in the form of an approaching British ship, he had a shipmate cut his face with a razor, obscuring his features. He escaped detection and, having been identified as an American, subsequently regained his liberty in an exchange of prisoners.¹⁹

Who can say what was in the minds of Stanley Cooper and James Read when they swam from the Centurion off New York in January 1778? The officer who ordered a marine to open fire at them in the water believed they meant to go over to the Americans. However, the fact that a search party later found them concealed on a ship bound for Jamaica indicated that they were ordinary deserters, and when their captain gave them a good character, declaring that he had brought them to a court martial only to deter others from running, they were given the unusually light punishment of fifty lashes apiece.²⁰

There was also some vagueness over what William Dominey of the Fox really intended after his ship was captured by rebels in June 1777. Dominey’s shipmates thought that he had become too friendly with their captors, and when the Fox was retaken he was brought to trial for deserting to the enemy. The proceedings were full of pathos. Dominey was an unworldly outsider who fraternized with the Americans to prevent his possessions being stolen and was won over by their easygoing warmth. The question was whether he had actually ‘entered’ with them. Some of his fellows thought not, but the evidence of a surgeon who saw Dominey acting as a powder monkey in action proved decisive – along with his own statement to another hand that ‘he was better used by the Yankees than he had been in the King’s service’. In his defence, Dominey declared: ‘I never had any intention of entering with the rebels. What I did was in return for their civil usage, and to protect my things from being plundered.’ He was still sentenced to hang.21

The American Revolution may also account for a wider trend in Britons’ resistance to authority. Within a year, three cases came to trial involving conspiracies to seize the king’s ships and defect with them. In the most serious, eight men of the Narcissus tried to recruit their shipmates off New York ‘to take command of her and carry her into some rebel port’. Six were sentenced to hang, one received 500 lashes and another 200.²²

Were there other signs of assertiveness? Certainly there had never been defiance of the press in quite the same startling form it took off Sheerness in 1779 when Thomas Wood managed to get his hands on a substantial quantity of gunpowder and smuggled it aboard the tender Speedwell, ‘for the purpose of blowing up the fore-part of the deck, to enable the pressed men on board to make their escape’.²³

The Admiralty would draw its own conclusions from such cases, leading to a stricter punishment regime for offences of disobedience. Patterns are not invariably clear, however, and inconsistencies abound. Initially, there may even have been a tendency towards flexibility rather than severity. The gunpowder plotter Wood was given 300 lashes, a number often inflicted for plain desertion. Other cases that might have been expected to bring automatic death sentences included the mutiny by two men who plotted to seize the sloop Savage off Halifax in 1778 with the help of American prisoners and who received 500 lashes apiece.

What the Navy ought to have learned from this surge of libertarian spirit was that men worked better when they were not subjected to casual violence. The practice of ‘starting’, the beating of men to their stations with sticks by petty officers – always detested by all self-respecting hands – was being challenged, and Captain John Inglefield wrote approvingly of a new method of:

. . . dividing and quartering the officers with the men, and making them responsible for that portion of duty allotted them, without noise, or the brutal method of driving the sailors like cattle with sticks . . . By a just proportion of labour falling to the lot of each man, instead of the management of it being entrusted to the partiality and brutality of boatswains’ mates, the men were kept in better temper; and were less harassed and fatigued in their spirits, as well as in their bodies.24

Inglefield’s conclusion, that during the war discipline was ‘brought to as great a degree of perfection, almost, as it is capable of receiving’, may sound too blithe; a considerate captain, he held to the traditional opinion that Jack would undertake any task cheerfully if he was allowed to ‘enjoy the society of his mistress and be permitted to drink his skin full of liquor’. It remained the case, however, that the great majority of men were indeed dutiful as well as loyal, and a far cry from the pathetic creatures described by another captured American hand, Israel Potter, as ‘an exceedingly oppressed and forlorn people’.^*

Events on the sloop Scorpion in the summer of 1778 are a case in point.

The Scorpion was at anchor off New York when William Swift entered her on 4 July; the date is unlikely to have been coincidental for Swift and his accomplice, Edward Power, were rebel agents.²⁵ Swift, who had signed on as a volunteer, went about ingratiating himself with other new hands. ‘He threw himself in my way,’ said William Wilson, ‘saying he had friends ashore with a fine purse of money.’

Nothing is known of the origins of Swift and Power. Even the names have the defiant ring of aliases, and Swift’s only admission at his trial was that before volunteering for the Scorpion he had served on an American frigate. As an agent provocateur he was well out of his depth, however. His efforts had an air of desperation. Trying to impress another new hand, he claimed that:

He could raise eight men in as many minutes to take away the cutter, that there was arms in the cutter and if he got clear he would bring a rebel frigate alongside and blow the ship out the water.26

When Swift urged George Turner to join him, he declined, saying: ‘I was a deserter before, but was forgiven.’ Meantime, Wilson had gone to the captain and exposed Swift and Power as ‘agents employed to entice away the King’s subjects’. The evidence against Power was not very compelling and he escaped with 100 lashes. Swift was consigned to the yardarm.²⁷

Fear, dutifulness, bewilderment . . . all are to be seen in the lives caught on the edge of the war. And so too those other forces at work in Jack’s life – elements akin to the tides and currents that shaped ships’ movements and that might carry men off on a quite unexpected course – forces of the kind that help to explain the later career of Joshua Davis.

Davis never went into much detail about how he found himself back on a king’s ship. Once independence was won, American seamen tended to emphasize the miseries of life in the Navy and in this Davis was no exception. Although writing in his memoir that he had been sent forcibly on the Anson, he probably volunteered in order to get out of the Old Mill prison in Plymouth.

The Anson sailed for the Caribbean late in 1781, just as news from across the Atlantic reached England. French intervention on the American side had altered the war at sea from small-ships actions to fleet battles, and when the Comte de Grasse prevented a British fleet entering Chesapeake Bay in September, the Army under Lord Cornwallis was cut off and surrendered. America had won its independence.

What remained was a new phase of the Anglo-French war for global domination, which for the time being turned on control of the West Indies and its commercial riches. Joshua Davis was in the Anson with Admiral George Rodney’s fleet when it caught up with an equal French and Spanish squadron preparing to invade Jamaica.

The Battle of the Saintes was notable for its bloodiness, its unusually clear outcome and for the tactic known as ‘breaking the line’. Joshua Davis, as so often in a view from the lower deck, does not touch on strategy, but he retained two especially vivid memories. The first was of the fleet’s entire livestock being hove overboard to clear space before the battle, so ‘cows, sheep, hogs, ducks, hencoops &c. were seen floating for miles around us’. The battle raged for the next four hours, by which time, Davis wrote, ‘we could scarcely see for smoke’. During a lull the men were served raw salt pork and bread before battle was resumed and the 64-gun Anson found herself caught with an 84 on the larboard quarter and a 74 on the starboard bow. Davis was on the poop, helping the signal officers, when a ball:

. . . struck Capt. Blair in the side, which cut him entirely in halves. The first Lieutenant ordered the men to take his remains, and throw them overboard. We continued fighting under the command of the first Lieutenant, until a shot took his leg off, and he was carried below.28

Ordered aloft to help repair the rigging, Davis heard a thunderous explosion as the 74-gun César blew up, before he was wounded in the leg. British casualties that day ran to more than 1,000 with 200 dead, but the French had some 3,000 killed and 5,000 taken. Five of their ships of the line were captured or sunk, including the 110-gun Ville de Paris.

The victorious tars had a new ballad in honour of this triumph and Davis, so recently singing ‘huzza, huzza for war and Washington’, now joined in a chorus to British glory:

Success to our good officers, Our seamen bold, and jolly tars,

Who like brave daring sons of Mars, Take delight for to fight

And vindicate Old England’s right, or die for Britain’s glory.^*

Had Rodney followed up his victory, the entire French fleet might have been taken. As it was, Jamaica was saved and Britain had regained control of the Atlantic. While still lamenting the loss of the American colonies, its command of the oceans was once more secure.

There were other benefits, fresh insights. While the fleet was in the Caribbean, the physician Sir Gilbert Blane had experimented with a new regime of cleanliness and diet. ‘A true seaman is in general cleanly,’ he remarked, ‘but the greater part of men in a ship of war require a degree of compulsion to make them so.’ The rewards of rigorously enforcing Blane’s regime – based on ventilation, clean clothes, and fresh fruit and vegetables – were astonishing. The death rate in one of the unhealthiest climates for seamen was reduced to 1.4 per cent a year – which, the historian N. A. M. Rodger has noted, made them probably the healthiest body of British subjects anywhere in the world.29

Joshua Davis was in the Navy for another five years before returning to his home town of Boston. By the time he sat down to pen his memoirs a further fifteen years had passed and, as he acknowledged, he wrote them only because he was in desperate need of money. The year was 1811, anti-British sentiment was on the rise again and Davis had quite a story to tell. To those of his countrymen ‘anxious to know the fate of fathers, husbands or sweethearts’ he offered little solace: ‘Many are on board those hellish floating torments . . . the ships of his Brittanick Majesty.’ Nor did he pull his punches in describing the treatment their loved ones might expect, outlining the procedures for hanging by the yardarm, flogging through the fleet and running the gauntlet. To any Yankee unfortunate enough to find himself on a British ship his advice was to mess with other Americans and stay out of the way

. . . until an opportunity offers when you may make your escape to your native country, and finally get clear of these dens of horror, cruelty, confusion, and continual uproar.³⁰

Whether Davis’s narrative helped to ease his final years financially is not recorded, but it was certainly prettily timed to touch a chord. A year later, in 1812, Britain and the United States went to war again, for reasons that had partly to do with the continued impressment of American seamen, and this time the conflict was fought largely at sea.

Not all Americans took so bleak a view of navy life; and one who spent a virtual lifetime at sea under the British flag had credentials that define him as a stand-out figure in Jack’s story.

Jacob Nagle had fought for American independence on land and sea before signing on with the old enemy to serve in one of the king’s ships. He would have the rare distinction of encountering both George Washington and Horatio Nelson in the flesh, and of sailing with the East India Company and the First Fleet to Botany Bay. He also survived shipwreck and being cast away, all the while keeping a journal that is in every sense an epic – the tale of an adventurer to rank with any from Joseph Conrad’s imagination. Jacob Nagle was Foremast Jack writ large.

He was fifteen when he marched off to fight the king. His father served in Washington’s army and in 1777 Jacob set out from home in Pennsylvania to join him, starting a warrior life on land and sea in which he always served with distinction while remaining on the lower deck. As the historian who brought Nagle’s journal to light has observed, this was not due to lack of ability, but rather to an entire absence of ambition, combined with wiliness: ‘He could drink, carouse, throw a punch, pick up a girl, and tell off an officer with the best of his shipmates, but he chose his moments for each of these activities carefully. There was a shrewd intelligence, a solid self-assurance . . . and an instinct for self-protection that explains his longevity.’* Nagle’s military career was brief. An artilleryman, he was at the Battle of Brandywine when Washington rode up ‘and enquired how we came on’. He might have been killed then but the shells that landed nearby ‘never busted’ and he joined the retreat to Philadelphia. After that Nagle found himself ‘inclined for the see [sea]’.31

His first ship was the Fair American, a 16-gun privateer commanded by Stephen Decatur, father of the US naval hero. She took prize after prize, along with an English brig, the Holker, of twenty-six guns, and Nagle became a bit of a dandy, able to sport a silk handkerchief at his neck and buckles on his shoes, along with rings and a gold watch. Ideally set up for the sea, slim but strong and with a sprightliness that would still carry him into the rigging when he was well into his forties, Nagle had found his calling.

He was untroubled by serving in an English ship – but only after independence had been won. A series of Caribbean scrapes landed him in a French jail with British captives, so when they were handed over in a prisoner exchange, Nagle followed them up the side into a Royal Navy vessel. Peace brought him to Plymouth in the spring of 1783, and a crossroads in his life. He was paid off from the 64-gun Ardent and might have taken a ship home directly. Instead, ‘the first English ground I ever stood on’ led naturally ‘to a publick house where we had sum beer’. Within hours Nagle was squaring up on a common to a gunner’s mate who had refused to pay for his round, and whom he scolded with a thrashing before they adjourned again to ‘a publick house and drank and treated our seconds and parted’.³² On reaching Wapping, Nagle would see a good deal more of public houses until his money ran out and he signed on again.

Other navy ships were also slipping homeward across the Atlantic at the end of the war, among them the frigate Surprise. John Nicol had been away long enough to ‘sigh for the verdant banks of the Forth’. Nicol suffered from a curious affliction: wanderlust, interspersed with bouts when he longed for a domestic hearth and a woman’s love. These conditions could never be reconciled and, although a sensitive soul, he was not immune to outbursts of frustration. The Surprise’s log records three times when he was lashed, once for fighting.

John Nicol and Jacob Nagle were contemporaries. They would spend the next twenty years crossing the world and, although never serving on the same ship, are often to be found sailing in one another’s wake – to the Eastern Seas, or transporting convicts to New South Wales. They could not have been more dissimilar: Nicol the thoughtful romantic, Nagle the devil-may-care blade; it is curiously typical of the age that transformed England in every respect into an imperial power, that one was a Scot and the other an American.

* A study of American slaves who served willingly in British ships is found in Unkle Sommerset’s Freedom: Liberty in England for Black Sailors by Charles R. Foy, Journal for Maritime Research, 13:1, 2011. No personal information about Mingus is included, other than his listing in the three men-of-war in which he served, and Foy notes that most eighteenth-century black mariners are unidentified; Olaudah Equiano and Francis Barber are exceptions.

* Israel Potter’s colourful narrative of his capture and impressment was used by Hermann Melville as the basis for his novel of the same name. However, Potter was writing after his return home from years in Britain and was trying to obtain a pension as ‘one of the few survivors who fought and bled for American independence’. As a historical source, the Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter is partisan and unreliable.

* The words were set down by Davis on page 38 of his memoir. He stated that that song was ‘sung by the officers’, but the fact that he reproduced the entire twelve verses indicates a considerable degree of familiarity with it. The significance of song in Jack’s life is examined in Singing for the Nation: Balladry, Naval Recruitment and the Language of Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century Britain by James Davey, in The Mariner’s Mirror, 103:1, 2017.

* Dann, pp. xviii–xix. As John C. Dann, the journal’s editor has said, it appears almost too good to be true – a diary in the original hand, discovered almost 200 years on, vivid and accurate, and complete with heart-warmingly phonetic spellings. Reviewing it in The Mariner’s Mirror, N. A. M. Rodger wrote: ‘None has ever conveyed so much authentic and important evidence about the life of the common man at sea.’