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Men-of-War

AT HIGH TIDE ON A September morning in 1782, not quite a year since Britain’s humiliating capitulation at the Battle of Yorktown, His Majesty’s Ship Hermione, her coppered hull slathered with grease, slid stern-first down a wooden slipway into the swollen waters of the River Avon, fed by the swift currents of the Severn estuary. A launch was no easy feat, nor was it free of peril, but the port of Bristol, England’s “metropolis of the west,” had been building ships since the thirteenth century. Before a rapt crowd lining the stone quay—sailors, shipwrights, and merchant princes—heavy ropes, tethered fast to the bow, were cast off with ceremonial fanfare. Slowly the tide-borne frigate began to slip away from the dry dock of Sydenham Teast, directly across the Avon from the elegant townhouses of Queen Square. With a surplus of warships at royal wharves waiting to be built or repaired, private docks such as Teast’s reaped the rewards of government contracts.¹

It was a promising start. Fitted out in a naval yard, the Hermione was commissioned for duty the following spring—too late, owing to a halt in hostilities that February, to enter the American War of Independence. Two-decked, three-masted, and square-rigged in the fashion of frigates, she was the first in a new class designed by Sir Edward Hunt, bearing a rounder midsection, much like the profile of a tulip, to lend stability. The clean-lined hull ran 129 feet in length with a beam of nearly 36 feet. Of 714 tons burden, she was notably larger than the slavers that Teast’s shipyard furnished for Bristol’s lucrative African trade, designed instead for a naval company of 220 men. Costs of construction, fittings, sails, rigging, and armament exceeded £16,000. In addition to six carronades, devised with a large caliber for firing at close range, the Hermione received 32 cast-iron cannons, among them 26 twelve-pounders for the main deck. Unlike larger, more powerful men-of-war that boasted two or even three gun decks, with lower ports vulnerable to ocean swells, the main battery of the Hermione, lying well above the waterline, promised greater versatility in heavy weather.²

In the annals of classical mythology, Homer tells of the “rose-lipped” Hermione, the only daughter of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and Helen, whose abduction ignited the Trojan War.³ For many Britons, however, the frigate’s name conjured halcyon memories of wartime riches and national glory. Years back, in May 1762, toward the close of the Seven Years’ War, two British warships cruising off the southern coast of Portugal captured a Spanish treasure galleon named the Hermione just a day’s sail from the port of Cádiz, home to Spanish fleets for nearly two centuries. Striking her colors before firing a single shot, the enemy prize had been en route from Peru with a glittering cargo of gold dust, jewels, and silver estimated at £700,000 to £800,000, the “richest capture” in the history of the Royal Navy. Such was the outpouring of joy in Britain that the name “Hermione” graced newborns and racehorses alike. In August, throngs gathered from Portsmouth to London, anxious to glimpse twenty heavily laden wagons transporting the treasure under military escort to Tower Hill. George III viewed from an upper chamber in St. James’s Palace the convoy’s arrival in the capital, which was followed by a marching band. “The air was rent with the shouts of the populace,” described a newspaper. Less happily, major Spanish banking houses from Barcelona to Málaga collapsed; chaos reigned among Andalusian merchants; and the Hermione’s captain, on returning home, forfeited his head.⁴

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IN THE DECADE THAT FOLLOWED the Treaty of Paris of 1783—years that saw a resurgence of transatlantic traffic; the Royal Navy’s startling expansion to keep pace with rival fleets; and the spiraling descent of the French monarchy, corrupted by debt and decay, into revolution—an anxious peace descended on Europe like a bank of dark, low-hanging clouds lit by fitful flashes of sheet lightning. In the course of losing most of its American colonies, England had acquired a host of familiar enemies nursing grudges old and new. More than once, the country teetered on the brink of fresh hostilities, in 1787 with France over rival claimants in the Netherlands, and three years later with Spain in the Pacific Northwest.⁵

As much as ever, the realm’s safety depended upon naval superiority. During the Revolutionary War, control of the English Channel had been surrendered, sparking widespread fears of foreign invasion. Little wonder, with the looming prospect of peace, that the Admiralty, at the urging of England’s fledgling prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, set about rebuilding the fleet with an aggressive program of extensive repairs and new construction. Already the country’s largest industrial infrastructure, naval dockyards stretching from Deptford to Portsmouth resounded with newfound urgency. “The great naval preparations now making militate against every idea of peace,” observed the Reading Mercury in January 1783.⁶

All the while, British warships plied the North Atlantic. With the Channel fleet guarding the homeland, frigates, prized for their speed, firepower, and maneuverability, played a pivotal role in projecting British power overseas—displaying the flag, keeping sea-lanes open, and escorting commercial convoys. First designed by the French in the late seventeenth century, frigates typically cruised the seas either alone, in pairs, or in small squadrons detached from battle fleets. Not uncommonly, they roamed out of signaling range from other vessels. Though smaller than line ships armed with “heavier metal,” they were the most glamorous vessels in the Royal Navy, famed for their aura of adventure as well as for their autonomy and sailing prowess. “Star captains” was how an English poet described the small number of officers fortunate enough to receive a command.⁷

Adding to their allure was the prospect of prize money. Upon the capture of an enemy warship, merchantman, or privateer, everyone from the admiral of the fleet to the cabin boy, according to rank, reaped a portion of the spoils, with captains due a quarter share. In 1790, when war with Spain appeared imminent, a young officer, on hearing rumors of his posting to a frigate, immediately wrote his sister. Acknowledging the larger sums paid to captains of line-of-battle ships, he assured her, “If I can get her into the W’t Indies, I will make the Dons pay me the difference once or twice a month.”⁸

Besides periodic patrols of home waters and routine repairs in royal shipyards, the Hermione spent long spells cruising the Caribbean. When spring yielded to summer, it was not unusual to find her farther north—safe from hurricanes—policing British fishing banks off Newfoundland. Even then, uncertain trade winds, fickle currents, and mercurial weather could render familiar seas hazardous. During a harrowing trip from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Ireland in 1789, fierce storms, exhausted provisions, and the deaths of ten seamen forced the Hermione’s crew to take refuge in the Spanish port of Corunna. Sixteen bedraggled survivors were left to die in a hospital as the stricken vessel beat on for Ireland.⁹

Only after extensive repairs at a cost in excess of £20,000 did the Hermione return to the West Indies three years later in a squadron of seven warships, arriving barely a month after the revolutionary government in Paris declared war against Britain on February 1, 1793. Tensions had mounted after French troops invaded the Austrian Netherlands, followed in January by shocking reports of the execution of King Louis XVI at the age of thirty-eight. Insofar as prospects for peace had grown bleak, the only surprise was that France, not Britain, first loosed the dogs of war.¹⁰

Although the greatest part of the bloodletting during the First French Revolutionary War (1792–1797) occurred in Europe, the Caribbean, for the Pitt government, became a critical theater of operations. For all the hurricanes and earthquakes, the stifling summers, the perils of disease to say nothing of the Lilliputian size of most islands—their plantation economies afforded European powers immense troves of wealth. For Britain, the loss of Barbados or, worse, the much larger island of Jamaica would have been devastating. If anything, France’s colonies were dearer. Boasting eight thousand plantations, the French island of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) was the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean.¹¹

Equally important, with France deprived of naval bases, British sea power in the North Atlantic would again “rule the waves.” And with French troops on the march in Europe and much of the navy sidelined, the islands were all the more vulnerable to coastal raids and amphibious assaults. Hence the departure of a mammoth flotilla, months in the planning, in November 1793 under the seasoned command of Vice Admiral Sir John Jervis. Fitted out in Portsmouth and Cork, the expedition to the Caribbean comprised nearly one hundred warships and transports ferrying eight thousand unblooded troops tasked with bringing the French empire to its knees.¹²

Anonymous, View of Port Royal and Kingston Harbour in the Island of Jamaica, 1782 Credit 1

Even before the fleet’s arrival that January, life aboard the Hermione had quickened. Along with squadrons stationed from Newfoundland to East India, the Royal Navy maintained two bases in the West Indies: Port Royal, on the southeastern coast of Jamaica, once a pirate haven reviled as the most wicked town in the West, and Carlisle Bay, home to Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, from which the Hermione under Captain John Hills routinely departed to escort merchant convoys to safer waters. Come fall, however, the Hermione had joined a squadron from Jamaica in landing troops in western Saint Domingue. Soon afterward, a small inlet at Cape Saint Nicholas Mole, on the northwestern tip of the island where the sandy coastline gave way to mountains and lush forests, was seized from the French. On the same spot on December 6, 1492, Columbus had landed during his first expedition to the Americas. Although notorious for yellow fever, the sheltered bay gave the British a strategic anchorage in the Western Caribbean second only to Port Royal and Kingston.¹³

In the months following Jervis’s arrival in early 1794, Port-au-Prince, the capital of Saint Domingue, lying to the south, was taken after the fall of Martinique, Saint Lucia, and Guadeloupe, like so many dominoes, to British forces in the Eastern Caribbean. For several hours, the Hermione, lying directly opposite the capital, traded volleys of cannon fire with a French shore battery. Then one of the ship’s main guns blew up, igniting a second explosion on the larboard (port) side of the forecastle. “We suffer’d very severely,” a young officer later wrote of the eleven casualties, including five seamen mortally wounded. Despite the British victory, the interior of Saint Domingue, in the early stages of a slave insurrection resulting in Haitian independence, remained an elusive prize. And by year’s end, in an abrupt reversal, heavy French reinforcements poured into the Caribbean, causing the British offensive to sputter.¹⁴

The military, hobbled by indecision, struggled to retain hard-won terrain. The bill was steep. As the fighting ground on, massive numbers of troops and seamen perished, owing less to hostile fire than to the deadly triumvirate of yellow fever (“black vomit”), malaria (“ague”), and dysentery (“bloody flux”). “In the Hermione alone,” a junior officer attested, “we lost in three or four months, nearly half our crew; many from apparent good health, dying in a few hours.”¹⁵

The Hermione persevered in the thick of the fighting, shelling and protecting ports from Saint Nicholas Mole to Cape Tiburon, at the southern tip of the island’s western coast. She also tacked to and fro in search of merchantmen and other easy prey. Black with white molding, the frigate cut a forbidding figure. Not only were the commercial ships of belligerent nations subject to seizure but also neutral craft suspected of trading with the enemy, including the vessels of American merchants who enjoyed a lucrative commerce with the French islands. Profiting from the spoils, British commanders interpreted their instructions liberally. Frigates became notorious in the United States for their depredations. To the deep chagrin of George Washington’s administration in Philadelphia, by March 1, 1794, no fewer than 250 American vessels had been commandeered, with the lion’s share ruled legitimate prizes by British Admiralty courts.¹⁶

The Hermione garnered a princely portion of the plunder. By late 1793, she had already snagged four American ships laden with sugar, coffee, cotton, and provisions. More seizures followed, among them a Boston schooner taken at anchor off Saint Nicholas Mole while its captain, on shore, scrambled to sell its cargo of lumber. More lucrative, potentially, was the capture of the Rising Sun, a twenty-gun U.S. merchant ship thought to contain “a great quantity of money” belonging to the French commissary on Saint Domingue. To little effect, an American in Kingston howled, “The property of real American citizens are waisting by endless vexations, and her most invaluable treasure, the lives of her virtuous citizens, are daily closed by illegal detentions. Nothing can equal the contempt and derision wherewith we are treated.”¹⁷

Worst was the impressment of American sailors on suspicion of being either deserters, British citizens, or both, an estimated ten thousand men during all of the French Wars (1793–1815). Desperate to man their warships, the British had grown exasperated by the loss of seamen to an expanding American merchant marine. In the mid-1790s, no vessel earned a blacker reputation in American eyes than the Hermione under Philip Wilkinson’s command. On July 4, 1795, she left Port-au-Prince for the remote outpost of Jérémie, 120 miles to the west. There, at anchor, lay twenty American ships, which members of the frigate’s crew methodically boarded. Before the day was out, they had laid hold of nearly seventy seamen, practically all claiming to be native-born Americans. Kept aboard the Hermione without food for the better part of two days, they refused to enlist in the Royal Navy. Although five sailors were returned for being “unfit to serve king or country,” the angry protests of American captains, unable to crew their vessels, went unheard. “The next thing we shall hear of this frigate, Hermione, perhaps,” warned a New Jersey newspaper, “[is that she is] on our coasts, annoying not only our allies, but plundering our own vessels.”¹⁸

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ON THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY 1797, command of the Hermione fell to a twenty-eight-year-old naval lieutenant. Full-faced, with thin lips, a strong chin, and a broad nose, Hugh Pigot bore an impeccable pedigree. Not only did he descend from prominent stock—“one of the first families in England”—but Pigot was also a child of the service. A nephew of the Duchess of Grafton, he was born in Staffordshire, the second son of Admiral Hugh Pigot (1722–1792), whose naval career included service during the Seven Years’ War at both Louisbourg and Quebec. Although the admiral’s political proclivities had precluded a command for most of the Revolutionary War—landlocked instead at Patshull, his country seat in Staffordshire—the fall of Tory rule in March 1782 brought new opportunities for Whig stalwarts. In truth, Pigot senior had never commanded anything larger than an eighty-four-gun ship, nor had he been at sea for nineteen years. Still and all, owing to the generosity of the First Lord of the Admiralty in Whitehall, he obtained a plum appointment as commander in chief of naval forces stationed at Port Royal. That May, at the age of twelve, young Hugh accompanied his father as they departed Plymouth aboard the Jupiter, a fifty-gun two-decker under Captain Thomas Pasley bound for Jamaica. Scarcely a day passed before father and son, still finding their footing, succumbed to seasickness. Pasley fretted that the admiral, whom he deemed “good company,” was not up to his new post. The captain confided to his journal “fears when he comes to command so large a fleet: in that line he can have no experience, and from what I have seen, a change must be worked to cut a figure.”¹⁹

Francesco Bartolozzi et al., “Hugh Pigott,” 1802. One of thirty-four miniature portraits in Commemoration of the Victory of June 1st, 1794. Credit 2

Although the arrival of peace hastened his father’s return to London, the boy stayed behind in the Caribbean, serving aboard four ships over the ensuing decade. Pigot’s youth was not unusual. Most frigate commanders entered the service between twelve and fourteen years of age. Some, before becoming midshipmen, underwent an apprenticeship of three years as a captain’s servant. Common, too, were family ties that powered officers’ careers. Bloodlines in the military, as in church and state, brought enormous benefits, particularly for sons with high-ranking fathers. During the French Wars, nearly a quarter of all officers came from naval families. There was a great deal of truth to Horatio Nelson’s observation that the “near relations of brother officers” were “legacies to the service.”²⁰

At the time of his lieutenant’s commission in 1790, Pigot served aboard the Colossus, a 1,716-ton guard ship stationed at Portsmouth, Britain’s largest and most important naval yard. By then, he was on his way to a promising career. Four years later, at age twenty-four, after postings in the Channel fleet and a brief stint as the commander of a fireship, he received his first warship, an eighteen-gun sloop named the Swan, anchored at Port Royal with a complement of eighty men. Almost from the start, however, there was trouble. Just two weeks after Pigot’s appointment, in the course of escorting a convoy, his impatience with the slow progress of the Canada, a West Indiaman, led to his firing a shot across her bow. Later that evening, the two vessels collided. The damage was modest, and the uproar passed quickly, though Pigot, in defending his conduct to London officials, heatedly denounced the “insolent and provocative language” of the Canada’s master. The young lieutenant was “strongly of opinion” that the merchantman had “purposely” run afoul of the Swan.²¹

There is no knowing the true cause of the accident, but within four months, in September 1794, Pigot received command of the Success, a thirty-two-gun frigate twice the size of the Swan. His rise in rank owed much to the navy’s sudden need for fresh officers. The availability of frigate commands escalated sharply after the outbreak of war with France. From none in 1792, the number of new commands rose to thirty-one in 1793 and fifty-four in 1794, the year of Pigot’s posting. At no other time in the eighteenth century did opportunities for promotion expand so dramatically, with the consequence that the transition from lieutenant to captain averaged from seven to eight years. (Before the American Revolution, the interval had been twenty years.) Even so, Pigot at age twenty-five was exceptionally young for such a daunting assignment. Barely four years had elapsed since his commission, with fewer than four months in command of a warship. None of this would have been possible but for his father’s influence. Nor, despite his death in 1792, was the admiral’s older brother Sir Robert, a lieutenant general in the army, without connections.²²

Over the coming months, the Success performed the routine tasks of scouting enemy islands and escorting troop transports. She occasionally captured a prize, among them the Poisson Volant in October 1795, a French privateer with a crew of eighty-seven, off Jamaica’s northern coast. But the art of command did not come naturally to Pigot. Rather than affection, he was apt to inspire respect—or rather fear—in crew men. To enforce discipline, he relied heavily upon corporal punishment. Floggings were frequent, even by the standards of the Royal Navy, for which the cat-o’-nine-tails was the punishment of choice for petty offenses. Stripped to the waist, seamen were bound spread-eagled, often to the capstan, a revolving wooden drum with bars designed to be pushed by deckhands for winching ropes and cables. Made with a heavy rope handle, a “cat” had nine “tails,” cords roughly two feet in length, each bearing three small knots. Administered by a boatswain’s mate, a dozen lashes, normally the minimum, could inflict excruciating pain. In the event of open wounds, infection, even death, might ensue. Over a period of 49 weeks for which records exist during Pigot’s command of the Success, whose crew numbered between 160 and 170 men, he ordered as many as 85 floggings, with 7 men receiving 3 or more floggings apiece. The number of lashes over those 49 weeks totaled nearly 1,400, an average of 25 lashes inflicted each week. By contrast, aboard the Bounty, with a complement of 46 men, Captain William Bligh, famously vilified for cruelty, ordered a total of just 30 lashes during a voyage of roughly 44 weeks to Tahiti: 24 to a seaman for insolence and 6 to a second hand for neglect of duty.²³

George Cruikshank, The Point of Honor, 1825 Credit 3

According to American newspapers, Pigot also pressed United States citizens. To an American captain overtaken at sea, reported a witness in 1796, he vowed to conscript seven of his ten sailors. The captain protested that he would not be able to return home safely with just three seamen, prompting Pigot to press all ten, ranting, “You are yourself one of these damned rebels—go below!” That notoriety paled next to the debacle which erupted over the summer. The Mercury out of New York, captained by William Jessup, was one of several merchant vessels en route to Port-au-Prince escorted by the Success, pursuant to the terms of the Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation of 1794, which accorded protection by the Royal Navy to American merchant shipping. In the small hours of July 1, Jessup’s brig struck the frigate’s starboard beam dead-on, causing the Mercury’s jibboom to extend like a lance over the main deck. “Put your helm hard a’ starboard or you will be on board of us,” the master of the Success had shouted moments before impact. Remarkably, neither ship suffered serious damage. Jarred awake in his berth, Pigot was enraged. Amid the clamor on deck, he roared curses and instantly ordered the Mercury’s fore rigging cut away, along with a sail and “every thing” his crew “could lay their hands on.” Jessup pleaded “For God’s sake not to cut any more,” but it did no good. That was not the worst of it. Brought aboard the Success, the American captain was stripped to the waist and given twenty stripes with a rope. “Flog him well!” Pigot ordered a boatswain’s mate over the din.²⁴

No one could have predicted the consequences, but Captain Jessup’s painful humiliation set in motion a far-reaching train of events, beginning in the morning light with a formal complaint, upon the Mercury’s arrival in Port-au-Prince, to the American consul. With his assistance, Jessup penned a grievance to the capital’s ranking British officer that not only detailed his flogging but also blamed the Success for the collision. “Your petitioner,” he added, “made use of no offensive language whatever, nor any kind of resistance, but only begged they would have compassion on him.” Attached was a certificate signed by the consul and thirty-seven of the town’s “most respectable inhabitants” attesting to “the marks and lashing inflicted” on Jessup’s back.²⁵

And there, over the course of the summer, the petition languished. In the meantime, word of the incident prominently appeared by month’s end in American newspapers, which caught the eye of Robert Liston, the British minister to the United States. A well-traveled Scottish diplomat at fifty-five years of age, Liston had originally studied at Edinburgh for the ministry. Following his arrival in Philadelphia in March 1796, the new envoy had grown increasingly apprehensive about American grievances arising from the West Indies, particularly in light of French efforts to court U.S. support. In August, he informed William Wyndham, Lord Grenville, the British foreign secretary, of the “deep impression” that had been “made upon persons of all ranks” of the “outrage offered to Mr. William Jessup,” which, he reported, “has been published in every newspaper in the United States.” The Massachusetts doctor Nathaniel Ames entered in his diary: “Captain Jessup, flogged on board Pigot’s Frigate ’till he fainted, then vomited blood & just escaped with his life…so brutally shocking.” At stake for Americans was less the collision’s cause than the flogging of a fellow citizen, a sea captain no less, aboard a British ship. Better had he been shot, railed a contributor to the Gazette of the United States, than that “a high spirited, independent American” be “stripped and whipped like a thief.” One widely reprinted story used the occasion to denounce Pigot’s indiscriminate impressment of Americans, which he reportedly called “vexing the Yankees.”²⁶

Notified by Grenville, who had first informed the King, the Admiralty ordered a full review of the captain’s “outrageous and cruel behaviour.” En route to the Caribbean, the newly appointed commander in chief of the Jamaica station, Vice Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, fifty-eight years of age, was among the last to learn of the affair, finally arriving at Saint Nicholas Mole in late fall. Even so, the incident appeared at first to pose little more than a passing annoyance. The second son of a vice admiral dubbed “Old Vinegar,” Parker, a naval officer for forty years, had a sharp, pointed nose, protruding eyes, and prominent jowls. Renowned for his courage, he had been knighted for breaking a blockade under heavy fire during the occupation of New York City in 1776. No stranger to adversity, he had served in stations around the world with the loss of just one ship (in the midst of a hurricane off Cuba in 1780). In later years, he served in the Mediterranean and the Baltic. He was both patriotic and opportunistic.²⁷

John Chapman, Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, 1796 Credit 4

Apart from formulating and executing military strategy, coupled with overseeing the performance of men and ships at his station, Parker was charged with convening judicial inquiries and, if necessary, courts-martial. In the course of setting a court of inquiry for January 1797, he warmed to the embattled commander, owing in part to his family’s prominence, a quality shared by other favorites of the vice admiral. And unlike Robert Liston, Sir Hyde felt no sympathy for American complaints. Of efforts by U.S. envoys in Jamaica to locate impressed citizens, he was openly scornful, warning the Admiralty, “The squadron under my command will, by these evils, joined by sickness, be rendered wholly unserviceable.” Perhaps most important, Parker admired young Pigot’s aggressive temperament, as had his predecessor Vice Admiral Jervis. “A very promising officer and very spirited fellow,” noted Jervis. The commander in chief, after all, received one-eighth of the value of every prize, and Jamaica, according to the First Lord of the Admiralty, was “the most lucrative station in the service.” It was not entirely surprising, then, that Parker permitted Pigot to select the hearing’s witnesses or that, in the end, he would be lightly reprimanded for his transgression by a panel handpicked by Sir Hyde himself. In his testimony, Pigot reluctantly apologized for acting “in the heat of passion,” but he laid blame for the collision with the captain of the Mercury, a view strongly echoed by Parker and members of the court. In his report to the Admiralty, dated January 27, 1797, Parker trusted “that however unjustifiable [Captain Pigot’s] conduct may appear to their Lordships, they will be of the opinion with me, that it is proved to be far, very far, more favourable than what has been represented”—including, he pointedly stated, the allegations of “Mr. Liston.”²⁸

By a quirk of fate, the Success was due in a matter of weeks to accompany a commercial convoy to England. Clearly, the warship had enjoyed better days. Once at Portsmouth, she would be repaired and refitted top to bottom at a cost of more than £6,000. For Parker, however, the timing of Pigot’s departure was problematic. His arrival in England might result in a court-martial, conducted not in Port Royal but in Portsmouth. Inasmuch as no word had yet arrived from the Admiralty, his exoneration was not a foregone conclusion. Caught in a bind, the vice admiral was not one to dither. With breathtaking audacity, he abruptly ordered Pigot and Captain Wilkinson of HMS Hermione to exchange ships, notwithstanding the unsettling impact this could have upon their crews. In all respects but one—the Success’s disrepair—it was an even swap, with neither promotion nor punishment the purpose of the switch. Instead, Parker wished to shield his hot-tempered commander from Whitehall’s grasp. In retrospect, not only were his fears misplaced (the Admiralty dropped the inquiry), but Pigot would no doubt have benefited from an extended leave. He suggested as much in addressing the men aboard the Success: “I should be glad to go home as well as you.” Having served in the West Indies for nearly four years, he, like his warship, stood in need of repair. If Parker prized Pigot’s pugnacity as a frigate commander, he would—for the time being—be rewarded by this feat of legerdemain. If, as well, Parker hoped to protect his young protégé from harm, he badly erred. Worse was to come.²⁹

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PIPED ABOARD THE HERMIONE, Pigot paraded across a sun-washed deck past a column of marines, smartly attired in red jackets, to the continuous beating of a drum ruffle. Resplendent in a blue coat with gold braid, white breeches, and a cocked hat, he read aloud, from a parchment scroll, his commission from Vice Admiral Parker, after which the crew, in turn, let loose with three cheers. Lest there be any doubt, the commission instructed “all the officers and company” to “behave themselves jointly and severally” with “all due respect and obedience” to the captain.³⁰

Pigot inherited a complement of some 150 men, to which he added 23 crew members from the Success. Ordinarily, in switching ships, each frigate commander took his entire company with him. “I would wish to carry you along with me if you are agreeable,” Pigot had informed just twenty-six men invited to his cabin. Included were his cook, coxswain, and a boatswain’s mate, none of whom needed coaxing. Strange to say, despite soaring mortality rates and Pigot’s penchant for corporal punishment, only three of the twenty-six men opted to return to England, a likely testament to the prospect of prize money that was temporarily entangled in court proceedings. Additionally, by returning to England, crew members stood to forfeit future opportunities for gain. Plenty of men, if not all, appear to have shared Sir Hyde’s faith in Pigot’s promise. And for mariners who took omens to heart, the Hermione’s own good fortune may have heightened expectations of plunder.³¹

According to the last surviving muster roll, dated July 7, 1797, members of the crew—men mostly in their twenties and early thirties—were strikingly multinational in their origins, a virtual Babel of unfamiliar accents and outlandish tongues. Barely half of those with known origins hailed from England, with a fifth from Ireland (north and south), and another fifth from elsewhere in Britain’s Atlantic empire, including the North American mainland, Scotland, and the Caribbean. At least twenty men appear to have been Americans, among them mariners from Charleston, Norfolk, Philadelphia, New York, and Nantucket. Upward of a dozen countries on the Continent furnished “tars,” from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula. Two shipmates were identified as “Africans.” As on other naval vessels, local and regional identities accentuated divisions. Among Englishmen, provincial loyalties were deeply rooted. A sailor aboard a man-of-war wrote of encountering “Irish, Welsh, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Swedish, Italian and all the provincial dialects which prevail between Lands End and John O’Groats,” a coastal village at the northern tip of Scotland. The Hermione’s company, like most, was at once cosmopolitan and narrowly parochial.³²

It is tempting to attribute the international cast of British crews in the late 1700s to the broad appeal of naval service. For laboring men of meager means leading a hand-to-mouth existence, the Royal Navy afforded regular employment, food and shelter, and the possibility of prize money. A young surgeon’s mate in 1790 likened a “ship of war” to “a refuge for the distressed” of both foreign and domestic origins. And while terms were shorter and wages higher aboard European merchantmen, the regimen on commercial vessels was more arduous owing to the smaller number of seamen. But the diversity of crews like the Hermione’s also reflected the navy’s voracious need for manpower—all the more because England so frequently found itself at war, in nearly two of every three years between 1739 and 1815. Beginning in 1793, conflict was virtually continuous, with a changing cast of adversaries in addition to France, Britain’s most tenacious foe.³³

Apart from enlisting volunteers, from unskilled tradesmen to runaway apprentices, conscription offered the most reliable, if least savory, remedy. Rights celebrated by British citizens invariably gave way to the pressing priority of naval supremacy. Even before the Norman Conquest in 1066, English monarchs had required ports to supply ships and seamen. With the royal prerogative buttressed by parliamentary law, “impressment” (rooted chiefly in the Latin word pressare, meaning “to weigh down, afflict, or oppress”) accounted for roughly 50 percent of all seamen in the Royal Navy by the second half of the eighteenth century, with the consequence that among all forms of forced labor in the British Empire, conscripted sailors stood second in number only to African slaves. In some years, the proportion of pressed sailors among crews may have approached two-thirds: “The floating sinews” of Britain’s “existence,” a sailor wrote of his fellow mariners. Moreover, some “recruits,” as might be expected, enlisted to avoid the likelihood of impressment. Volunteers at least stood to reap bounty money and advance wages.³⁴

At risk were all males from eighteen to fifty-five years of age who “used the sea.” Most desirable, naturally, were deepwater mariners with skills and experience—able seamen—not vagrants and paupers. Although press-gangs still combed British port towns, a majority of conscripts were taken off foreign and domestic vessels at sea. Naval regulations, first published in 1731, authorized captains, on encountering a foreign ship, “to enquire if any seamen, who are his Majesty’s subjects, be on board her, and to demand all such.” Especially vulnerable during wartime were merchant convoys returning to British seaports from the West Indies and the South Pacific. Pressed hands were typically confined in the holds of tenders, small vessels likened to floating prisons, before being conveyed to a warship.³⁵

George Morland, The Press Gang, 1790 Credit 5

Not only were seizures easier offshore, but they also hid from view the violent spectacle of impressment, associated in the public mind with involuntary servitude and state tyranny. Out of sight, out of mind. It was one thing to conscript freeborn Englishmen at sea; it was quite another to rip fathers, husbands, and sons from the embrace of their families. As even proponents grudgingly conceded, the legality of impressment was at best questionable. The Magna Carta, for one, roundly prohibited the arbitrary seizure of subjects without due process. For the eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone, conscription, which violated the spirit of the British constitution, was “only defensible from public necessity.”³⁶

Even so, given its impact on seafaring families, impressment did not go unchallenged. Nor was popular opposition confined to ports. Newspapers contained heartrending stories depicting the evils of conscription, as did plays, ballads, and novels, among them Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Roderick Ransom (1748) by Tobias Smollett. In his arresting painting “The Press Gang” (1790), George Morland depicted a young waterman as he is violently seized from a skiff, to the shock of his genteel passengers. Critics of impressment included David Hume and Voltaire as well as George II, who lamented the navy’s reliance upon “force and violence.” Put on the defensive, Sir Robert Walpole, England’s first prime minister, in 1740 tartly condemned “popular affectations of tenderness for liberty.” The government brooked no opposition, tirelessly preventing the constitutionality of conscription from being put before a jury, while legal decisions from the bench continued to uphold its legality.³⁷

It is impossible to determine with any precision the number of impressed seamen aboard the Hermione. Although a series of muster books have survived, save for the last volume, commencing in July 1797, their value, as with those of other ships, is problematic owing to the erratic quality of entries and the number of men who may have volunteered under duress. Of the twenty Americans aboard the Hermione in July 1797, a slight majority appear to have received bonuses for “enlisting,” with the distinct likelihood that the remainder had been pressed. On the basis of anecdotal evidence, there is no reason to suspect that the percentage of conscripts, at least half of the crew, differed markedly from that of other ships during the French Wars. Thus in 1795, John Slushing, a thirty-eight-year-old Prussian raised on the outskirts of Danzig, was pressed off a British merchantman in Port-au-Prince to serve as a sailmaker’s mate; whereas John Brown was removed from the Fingal, a Scottish vessel. And the Irishman Lawrence Cronin, on shore leave in Port Royal, joined the Hermione only to evade capture.³⁸

Whatever the proportion of conscripts, impressment was unpopular among mariners of all ranks and ratings. If resigned to the necessity of coercion, naval officers bemoaned the inevitable damage to shipboard morale, for impressment, above all, stripped merchant seamen of their liberty—the chance to enjoy periodic stints ashore at home and abroad, to embark aboard different vessels, or, if they chose, to jump ship in a foreign port. By contrast, naval seamen during wartime enjoyed fewer occasions for shore leave and fewer opportunities to desert. Particularly for tars manning frigates, freedom was hard to come by. Even the frequency of dockyard repairs decreased after the introduction of copper-sheathed hulls during the War of American Independence. On top of everything else, there was no end in sight during wartime, week after week, month after month. Time at sea, in Samuel Johnson’s memorable words, resembled “being in a jail with the chance of being drowned.”³⁹

“Muster-Table of His Majesty’s Ship the Hermione between the 7th April 1797 and the 7th July following,” a table containing the number of crew members aboard the Hermione, taken from the ship’s last surviving muster book, dated July 7, 1797. For the ensuing weeks preceding the mutiny, no book has survived. Credit 6

Naval service strained sentimental ties to king and country. True, patriotic feelings gave way at sea to choruses of “Rule Britannia,” and fracases rooted in British xenophobia occasionally erupted. English animosity toward the Irish and French, to name the two most obvious targets within a ship’s company, was common enough (even so, as many as fifty-seven French seamen served under Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar). But a speedy and safe passage home, along with the welfare of one’s shipmates, invariably outweighed pangs of nationalistic fervor. According to the impressed seaman John Nicol, “We all wished to be free to return to our homes and follow our own pursuits. We knew there was no other way of obtaining this than by defeating the enemy. ‘The hotter war the sooner peace,’ was a saying with us.”⁴⁰

Alternately, the cosmopolitan cast of crews worked to erode national identities, as did the emergence of a common maritime culture distinguished by its own argot, values, and dress (a short jacket and trousers for easier movement aloft and on deck). Manly qualities included courage and strength, coupled with an intimate knowledge of seamanship honed by years of experience. Prevalent, too, was a working-class spirit of dogged independence, restricted aboard ship to outbursts of “ill language” and the excessive consumption of grog (rum diluted with water). During shore leave—typically the captain’s prerogative—unruly tempers gave vent in dockside taverns to violence, sexual escapades, and binges of heavy drinking. “Their manner of living, speaking, acting, dressing, and behaving are very peculiar to themselves,” remarked the London magistrate John Fielding, blinded in a naval accident as a youth. “Yet with all their oddities, they are perhaps the bravest and boldest fellows in the universe.”⁴¹

At sea, fiddling, dancing, and swapping yarns filled idle hours—momentary sources of comfort to ease the harsh realities of crowded, sometimes damp quarters, bland food, and low wages (just above the six to seven shillings per week paid farmworkers), not to mention the perils of disease, enemy fire, and ill weather. With most of a ship’s company divided into two watches, sleep at night was limited to four hours suspended in a hammock. Day-to-day tasks could be punishing and dangerous. Maintenance of sails and rigging was continuous. Masts and yardarms required periodic adjustment and fresh coats of tar. “Shipshape” called for scrubbed decks, neat quarters, and well-swabbed guns, usually the responsibility of landsmen with scant time at sea. Training drills were routine.⁴²

No wonder the want of liberty, which, in practical terms, meant shore leave, mattered most to crews. The anonymous poem “The Tender’s Hold” decried:

While Landmen wander uncontrol’d,

And boast the rights of Freemen,

Oh! view the tender’s loathsome hold,

Where droop your injur’d Seamen:

Dragg’d by Oppression’s savage grasp,

From ev’ry dear connection;

’Midst putrid air, Oh! see them gasp,

Oh! mark their deep dejection.⁴³

On the sixteenth of April 1797, crews mutinied aboard seventeen ships lying just off Portsmouth at Spithead, resulting in the largest uprising in the history of the Royal Navy. Comprising England’s Channel Fleet, they defied officers’ orders to put to sea in a well-coordinated protest over low wages, poor food, and, among other grievances, insufficient shore leave. Widely thought nonnegotiable in wartime, impressment was a “smoldering grievance.” From the start, the mutiny barely lived up to its name, assuming instead the trappings of a nonviolent strike. Prevailing fears of foreign invasion, however, gave the seamen’s demands added force. After four weeks of tense negotiations, briefly interrupted by an admiral’s precipitous decision to fire on the insurgents, killing several, the mutiny ended peacefully upon promises of better pay and full pardons.⁴⁴

But by then a new, more radical uprising, inspired by the French Revolution, unrest in Ireland, and the turmoil at Spithead, had suddenly arisen among a handful of ships at the Nore, an anchorage near Sheerness dockyard where the Thames emptied into the North Sea. Within two weeks, most of the North Sea squadron arrived to lend the mutineers support. Many of the official demands echoed the rhetoric at Spithead, but impressment loomed more prominently as a grievance. Not only did it arise in the songs and conversation of seamen, but a petition condemned those who “drag us by force from our families to fight the battles of the country that refuses us protection.” Following threats to ally with France and the Admiralty’s refusal to meet the mutineers’ demands, a number of ships broke ranks and the mutiny crumbled. Executed were twenty-nine leaders, including the impressed seaman Richard Parker, “president” of the self-proclaimed Floating Republic.⁴⁵