PREFACE
THE precise span of his long and turbulent life is a matter of some dispute. Some say he is to be seen as early as 1577, among the 166 seamen who circumnavigated the globe with Francis Drake on the Golden Hind. He was certainly recognizable by the 1650s when Britain went to war at sea against the Dutch as well as the Spaniards. At Trafalgar, he emerged fully formed: the common man as national hero. What concerns us here, however, is an era – the century from 1740, when Foremast Jack, the man who went aloft under the British flag, established his country’s command of the oceans.
Also known as Jack Tar, his very name proclaimed him a man of the people – Jack being a generic term for the common man. Yet among them he was an outsider, almost another species. At a time when others of his class might never stir beyond their native valley, he roamed the world like one of the exotic creatures he encountered on his travels, returning home bearing fabulous tales – some of them actually true – as well as curious objects and even stranger beasts. Although while at sea he was as poor as any rustic labourer, ashore he knew spells of brief wealth. Then, fired up with back pay and prize money, he would eat, drink, cavort and fornicate like a lord. Habitually profligate and with a terrifying thirst for alcohol, he was loyal to his ship, his country and his king, roughly in that order. Most of all, though, he was loyal to his mates, and it was this kinship, as of a tribe, that made him capable of the endeavour and boldness that marked him in his golden age, under Horatio Nelson.
He was, simply, the most successful fighting man ever produced by his native land which, with its taste for booty, pugilism and foreign adventure, is saying quite something. So profoundly did he believe in himself, and so deeply did he awe the enemy, that defeat was never contemplated and rarely experienced. His spirit earned him the respect, the admiration, and sometimes even the love, of his officers.
It was not only in action that he was tested. Voyages of exploration, of trade and of imperial expansion took him to the farthest reaches of the globe. Jack was with Captain Cook in charting the South Seas. He joined in the discovery of a Pacific idyll, and helped to cast Captain Bligh adrift when the dream turned to nightmare. He went aloft in the East India Company’s ships, venturing to lands of outlandish peoples and mystifying customs. Among the cargoes he shipped were humans – African slaves to the Caribbean and convicts banished to the ends of the earth. In doing so he encountered perils every bit as dire as those he faced in battle; for if one thing about his existence is plain, it is that he was far more likely to be carried off by disease or shipwreck than by a cannonball.
The dangers and hardships – even sufferings – of his life are well known, and were certainly enough to deter most of his compatriots. Samuel Johnson spoke for baffled Landsmen in general when he declared: ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a gaol; for being in a ship is being in a gaol, with the chance of being drowned.’ One clergyman who joined a man-of-war – and fled as soon as he was able – could not fathom how human beings dwelt ‘in a prison within whose narrow limits were to be found Constraint, Disease, Ignorance, Insensibility, Tyranny, Sameness, Dirt and Foul air: and in addition, the dangers of Ocean, Fire, Mutiny, Pestilence, Battle and Exile’.
Still, we do well to challenge received truisms that are confined to the wretchedness of existence below decks, most notably that glib old chestnut about rum, sodomy and the lash. While obviously there was a great deal of rum, many hands went years at sea without being flogged, and sodomy was a capital crime scorned by almost the entire tribe. The bleak monograph that portrays Jack as a hapless sufferer does no justice to his individuality. He might be a press-ganged hostage, yet he could also be an enthusiastic volunteer; as often as he was a noble simpleton he was a cunning devil; the drunken dolt was sometimes a thoughtful and, yes, literate, traveller. And at a perilous moment in Britain’s history, he showed a capacity for rebellion and defiance that utterly terrified his superiors and countrymen.
What might be termed the miserabilist school prevailed for most of the last century. John Masefield was a key influence on it and one might be forgiven for wondering why on earth the poet laureate, who spent part of his early life on windjammers, ever – in the elegiac words of ‘Sea Fever’ – wanted to go down to the sea again.
The truisms of another age have been overtaken by the subtler work of modern historians. In the past decade particularly, Britain’s maritime past has been chewed over and contested from a range of perspectives. What might be termed a revisionist school has challenged long-received attitudes about matters ranging from the press gang to discipline and social history, provoking vigorous debate among academics not only in home waters but across the Atlantic.
While addressing recent scholarship, this book will attempt to advance a different form of narrative. It will do so by confining itself to the lives and experiences of common seamen, as related in their own tales and memoirs and through maritime records; and it will argue that the notion of victimhood falls down, not only because of Jack’s achievements, but because of his spirit. One characteristic stands out above all others in his storytelling, and it is self-respect. These reminiscences, it has been argued, are not invariably to be trusted: on top of his tendency to be carried away by a good yarn, Jack’s memoirs are said to have been used as a vehicle for polemical axe-grinding in a time of reform. But the records are there for us to test his accounts, and to a remarkable degree they stand up to scrutiny.
Over the century to be examined, the seafaring man became a crucial figure in almost every aspect of Britain’s endeavours. He was the essence of its defence – its guard against invasions as well as the key to its victories – and the means by which it acquired wealth and new possessions. Without him there could have been neither the trade nor the exploration that made Britain a mighty power. The fact that he stood out among his less adventurous compatriots – that he dressed differently, talked differently, even walked differently – conferred further distinction on him. For his part, the simple truth is that he rather looked down on anyone who was not a seaman.
Among the biggest myths is that he lacked a voice. Jack’s story was neglected by generations of naval historians, perhaps because of a mistaken belief that he had failed to tell it. The unearthing, and dusting off, of many texts over the past thirty years has amply disproved that. In fact, it is now plain that the Trafalgar moment gave rise to a spate of lower-deck memoirs, including one magnificent fantasy, The Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Anne Talbot, Related by Herself, purportedly by the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat who followed her seducer to war, joined the Navy disguised as a man, was wounded at the guns on the Glorious First of June, and, unsurprisingly, created the publishing sensation of 1809.
Of genuine full-length accounts by plain tars there are at least a dozen. One of the earliest was the work of William Spavens, who signed on almost fifty years before Trafalgar as an unlettered orphan, and towards the end of his life – disabled by the loss of a leg, living on the charity of benefactors, but self-educated to a level little short of erudition – produced a memoir that is as gripping as it is moving.
Subsequent accounts extend to the Napoleonic Wars and beyond. One of the most thoughtful is by John Nicol, a shrewd observer and traveller, who fought at the Nile but was also an incurable romantic and fell hopelessly in love with a female convict on their voyage to New South Wales. Another romantic, the dashing Jacob Nagle, was an American who took up arms for his country’s independence before crossing over to the former enemy by volunteering for the Royal Navy; he also sailed with the East India Company, survived shipwreck and being cast away, and kept a vivid, carefree diary covering forty years at sea. A contrast to the usual heroics is provided by William Robinson, who was at Trafalgar and wrote a sour account of navy life under the nom de plume Jack Nastyface that is more in line with the Masefield perspective and was long accepted as a valuable record; interestingly, Robinson’s record shows him to have been a failure as a seaman.
The best sailors’ memoirs are about more than the sea. Robert Hay, William Richardson, Samuel Leech and Robert Wilson, like Spavens and Nagle, cast real light on their times. Olaudah Equiano, renowned as the former slave who campaigned for abolition and wrote a celebrated autobiography, was also a sailor. Famous as a thespian, Charles Pemberton was another hopeless seaman but wrote eloquently. Others were less fluent but still had stories to relate – John Wetherell, Daniel Goodall and James Choyce among them. Their chronicles are supplemented by many shorter accounts encompassing a century of seafaring to 1840, by which time the age of sail was drawing to a close.
This is not a book about naval policy, strategy, tactics or the political designs that shaped maritime history – for in general Jack would appear to have had little awareness of or interest in any of these; and, if he did, they are not matters that figure in his writings.
Nor is it about the beautiful machines, compounds of wood, canvas, hemp and a small amount of iron in which he lived and fought. Crucial though ships are to this story, the emphasis is on how seamen saw them – often as living things imbued with human qualities – rather than how they were made, or the technical process of sailing them, the mystery by which they were summoned to motion by the raising of sails, set for the far side of the world and, despite storm, navigational error and other disasters, reaching it more often than not.
In telling Jack’s story, I have been at pains to confine myself to his own voice, turning to the writings of his officers and other contemporaries only when they touch on his character and his world. Extracts from Admiralty records, including ships’ logs and court-martial proceedings, are used to provide context and an overview for individual accounts.
The man who emerges bears a surprisingly strong resemblance to the Jack of folklore. He did, whenever he could, drink, dance, fiddle and sing. He was indeed as impulsive and headstrong as he was improvident – and often pugnacious with it. And he really did lollop along like a sturdy little vessel on a rolling sea (although this arose from his habitual need to balance on a heeling deck, rather than, as was sometimes said, because his body had actually been deformed by living in the confined space of the lower deck). By his own account, he was no put-upon sufferer but a proud soul with robust opinions, and learned in his own fashion, even when his phonetic way with words needs some deciphering.
But while he was crucial to a great national enterprise, he was no national stereotype. He came from every corner of the British Isles and sometimes very much farther off. Quite often, like Jacob Nagle, he was an American (although the assumption by the naval establishment, long after the War of Independence, that former colonists still owed allegiance to the king was a constant source of trouble). He could be from Scandinavia, from a range of European states – hostile as well as friendly – and, surprisingly often, from Africa or India.
There is a further paradox to Jack, and it helps to explain his sense of self-worth. He may have been part of a great and powerful tribe, yet he retained a degree of independence almost unknown to his class at the time. He was mobile. If he disliked his ship, he would find another. A press gang might cut short his liberty, but it could not stop him deserting at the next port and signing on with a new captain. A spirit bold enough to embark for the far side of the world, a man with the strength and skill to clamber aloft in choppy seas and wrestle canvas while a wind blasted through the rigging – he was always a rare commodity. As long as ships went to sea, an able hand was never short of a place to stow his chest.
By the time sail gave way to steam, Britain had gained an imperial hold on the globe. In this Jack had been a critical factor, for neither naval supremacy nor mercantile prosperity could have been achieved without him. He would have been the last to see it that way, but it is reasonable to suggest that the engine of national success up to the Industrial Revolution was the common seaman.