David Hannay

After twenty-two years of unbroken sea service Rodney was well entitled to an easy billet on shore, or in a harbour ship. Besides, he now established a kind of moral claim to a stationary post, for in 1753 he married. The rank of the lady shows that he had a better social position than the very great majority of contemporary naval officers. They were largely sons of other officers or middle-class people, and they lived among themselves in the ports, marrying and giving in marriage in their own class. Rodney, who had some of the best blood in England in his veins, lived when ashore in the great society of London. His wife was chosen in this, and not in the naval world. She was a daughter of Mr. Charles Compton, brother of the sixth, and father of the seventh, Earl of Northampton. In Rodney’s life she is little more than a name. No letter to her or from her has come in my way—partly, no doubt, because the evidence about the Admiral’s life only becomes abundant in his later years when she was dead, when he had remarried and begotten a second family. All that can be said about her may be summed up in a few words. Her name was Jane; she married Rodney in 1753, and died in 1757, having borne him two sons and a daughter. The elder of the two sons, afterwards an officer in the Guards, was the ancestor of the present Lords Rodney. The younger went to sea, and was drowned in the wreck of his sloop, the Ferret. The daughter died in childhood.

In 1751, too, Rodney had entered Parliament as member for Saltash, which means that he was put into the seat by a patron. It was the first of five seats which he held, with an interval of exclusion from the House between the fourth and last, until he was made a peer in 1782. His Parliamentary adventures will, however, be more conveniently taken farther on.

With a wife and a seat in Parliament Rodney would have no present wish to go to sea, nor would his political patron wish him to be too much away. It was convenient to have him at hand if a critical division was expected. A guardship at Portsmouth would meet the case exactly, and accordingly he was appointed in 1753 to the Kent, sixty-four. Very soon, in the next year in fact, this vessel was commissioned for service in the East Indies, and then Rodney was moved into the Fougueux; and when she also was commissioned, he moved in 1755 yet again to the Prince George, still on guardship duty. In the earlier part of this time there was little beyond routine to attend to, but in the last-named year began the preparations for the Seven Years’ War. We were strengthening our hands in the East Indies, and Boscawen’s fleet was being got ready for that attack on the French-American fishing fleet which was our not formal, but effective, declaration of hostilities. Under these circumstances it was necessary to raise men for the fleet, and no small part of that duty fell to the captains of the guardships.

The men were procured in two ways—by persuasion and by force. A bounty was offered for seamen; landsmen, of whom a good proportion was carried in every ship, were not then entitled to this advantage. When free enlistment failed to supply sufficient crews, and it always did in war, recourse was had to the press. Even if there had been a reasonable security that enough men would ultimately come in, some quicker process than the volunteer one was needed. The quicker process was compulsion, pure and simple. As the press-gang, though a familiar name enough, is but vaguely known in these days, some little account of Rodney’s share in the working of it may not come amiss. There is no reason to suppose that his activity differed from that of others in nature or degree, but yet some sketch of it will help us to realise the surroundings in which he worked. The letter book, already quoted, supplies some characteristic facts.

His volunteers having first been secured, the captain of the Prince George selects from them and from the sailors who habitually enlisted in the navy, of whom there was always a backbone in the service, certain trusty gangs which he puts under active officers. One of these, a Lieutenant Allon, was sent to London to set up a rendezvous, under the direction of the registering captain, probably in the neighbourhood of Limehouse or Wapping. From this centre of activity the lieutenant went to work, recruiting men freely when he could, or laying hands on them in the fashion described in Roderick Random. Lieutenant Allon’s requests for more “imprest” money were frequent, and were regularly answered with remittances. When he had secured a haul of men he sent them round by tenders to Portsmouth. It is curious to reflect that Lieutenant Allon and, through him, Rodney helped to secure Captain Cook for the navy. The navigator enlisted at this very time in order to escape the “hot press” on the river, deciding, like the long-headed Yorkshireman he was, that he had better go quietly, get the bounty, and likewise secure a chance of promotion, than be seized as pressed man, for whom there would be no bounty and no chance. So it will be seen the press-gang worked indirectly as well as directly. In the meantime other gangs were at work in the fashion indicated by this little order, which is addressed on February 14th, 1755, to Lieutenant Richard Bickorton.

You are hereby required and directed to proceed on board the Frederick and William tender, taking with you forty men from His Majesty’s ship under my command, and immediately proceed to the eastward of the Isle of Wight, and cruise for the space of eight days between that island and Beachy Head, using your best endeavours to impress or otherwise procure all such seamen as you possibly can for His Majesty’s service. At the expiration of eight days you are to return to Spithead for further orders. Given under my hand February 14th.

G. B. R.

Lieutenant Bickorton was one of many officers in command of the tenders then swarming in the Channel, waiting all of them for the homeward-bound merchant ships and their crews, which were returning in ignorance of what was waiting for them. One can imagine the feelings of the merchant sailors when they were stopped in sight of shore, and carried off to serve King George for nobody knew how long, without as much as an hour given them to put a foot on dry land. A letter written by Rodney in June of this year to Sir Edward Hawke, now commanding at Portsmouth, will show what one crew thought of it all.

Rodney’s composition was hasty, or his clerk’s copying was careless, as we may see from the two sentences jumbled into one in the middle of his letter (“the men that was” is quite good grammar of the time), but the meaning is clear enough. Composition and meaning are alike luminous in Hawke’s answer.

This brief official letter, and the laconic order which is its answer, bring before one, all the more effectively because of their business-like calm, the most cruel phase of the press-gang. It was necessary, no doubt, that men should be found for the defence of the country, and at all times in all nations the State has compelled the service of its subjects. At this time the French had (as they still have) an inscription maritime, which spares no part of the maritime population; and nobody needs to be told in these days that the obligation to render military service is universal in nearly all the nations of the old world. But a conscription works on a definite system. The burden it imposes is known, foreseen, and adjusted with some approach to equality and justice. The press-gang was utterly erratic. It was, in fact, a survival of the prerogative by which Edward the Third could order the Lords Marchers to bring up just as many Welshmen as he wanted for his French wars. Time and the growth of the “freedom of the subject” had limited the incidence of the prerogative (if the expression is permissible) to the levies for the sea service, but in that restricted though still considerable field it worked as it had done in the fourteenth century. Men were seized wherever they could be found, with little or no regard to aught save the convenience of the service. As a matter of course, the easiest thing to do was to wait for the home-coming merchant ships, and take the men out of them close to port. This could be done without stopping the trade, and so raising a clamour among the merchants who possessed a vote. Moreover, it saved the press-gangs an immense amount of trouble in hunting for men in the back streets of towns and on the high roads. For the sailors seized in this fashion at the end of a long sea voyage it was a cruel fate, and one’s heart is sore for the three poor fellows who only came back to the sight of Portland Bill to die by the hands of their own countrymen.

The tone of the letters, too, is not unworthy of notice. There is no anger in Rodney’s mind with the sailors of the Britannia for resisting. That was “the game”; and if he feels aught, it is annoyance that Sax’s men disobeyed orders, and regret that three stout sailors, who might have been used in the Prince George’s tops and batteries, should be lying stiff and stark on the merchant ship’s deck, waiting to be thrown to the fishes off St. Helen’s. Noteworthy, too, is Sir Edward Hawke’s summary decision that there shall be no coroner’s inquest to start unpleasant inquiries. There shall be no bodies for the jury to sit on. Such were the freedom of the seafaring subject and the sanctity of the law as understood by post-captains and vice-admirals of the blue, white, and red squadrons in 1755 and for long afterwards. No wonder that desertions were incessant, or that in this year Rodney has to receive on board the Prince George a company of “Colonel Bockland’s regiment of foot” to stand sentry over his pressed men. Haslar Hospital was a common “take off” for desertions. It was full in those times when complaints were common from every ship in the Channel that there are not slops enough, so that the men are naked, and in want of every necessary; that the beef is bad, the beer sour, the cheese and butter “stinking rotten.” From it the men ran in such numbers that the leakage threatened to counterbalance the inflow due to the press. On the top of the press warrants came orders to Lieutenant This and Mr. That, midshipman, to take so many trusty men, and with them keep watch and ward round Haslar to shut in the convalescent men who might try to make a run for the free air of the South Down. One touch more and we can be done with the press-gang. When in the following year Rodney had been transferred to the Monarch, seventy-four, and was lying at Plymouth, he reports in an official letter that many sailors use the high road by Wendover in going from port to port. He suggests the despatch of a lieutenant and a dozen trusty men to set up a rendezvous on the road, and catch the seamen in transit. The merchant sailor was hunted like the flying-fish. Clearly Rodney was a zealous officer, and whether he liked this kidnapping work or not he did it without shrinking. Probably he neither liked nor disliked it, but just did it as a matter of course. As for the men, they too took it as part of the incurable nature of things. They might give three cheers, and fire a gun, or knock the press sailors down, or desert if they could, but once in the mess, after a reasonable amount of cursing and storming they settled down. The fund of loyalty in the country was immense. They laid the blame of the misfortune on the French, and prepared to take it out of the hereditary enemy. The country in the meantime clung to the press out of the abundance of its love for the freedom of the subject. A proposal to replace it by a registration of seamen, made in Walpole’s time, was rejected indignantly because of the increased power it would give the administration. In a muddle-headed way the country was right, given the point of view. It was better to tolerate the survival of an old and now limited prerogative as an evil necessity than to give Government power to register men and call them out in classes. That would have been a recognition of a principle and a serious concession.

In 1755 Rodney was transferred from the Prince George to the Monarch, and from Portsmouth to Plymouth. During the first half of the next year he was in this latter ship and port, engaged in much the same work as before. Fighting had begun not only in America, but in the Mediterranean, to which Byng sailed this year on his disastrous expedition to Minorca, but there was no formal declaration of war till May, 1756. At Plymouth, Rodney came across an illustration of the barbarity of the time not inferior to the press-gang, which also he doubtless accepted as a matter of course. We had stopped a French emigrant vessel, apparently before the declaration, bound to Louisiana with Alsatian emigrants. Louisiana meant then the valley of the Mississippi, and as much to right or left of it as the French could seize. It would never do to allow them to increase their number if it could be prevented. There was no peace beyond the line—to the west that is of the line drawn from north to south, three hundred and seventy leagues to the west of the Cape de Verd Islands. So, though we were nominally at peace with France, the emigrants were stopped in the Channel by a kind of application, I take it, of the CyprÈs doctrine. Among them were some twenty women and children, whom Rodney was ordered to send over to Ostend in a tender. The poor creatures petitioned to be allowed to remain with their husbands, promising to share the subsistence allowed the men by the French King. What answer was given I do not know, but it is characteristic of the slovenly inhumanity of the day that we should, after stopping these poor people, have calmly proposed to separate the wives from their husbands, and send them to beg or starve at Ostend—and have done that too, as was no doubt the case, under the impression that it was the good-natured thing to do. The British official man of the middle of the eighteenth century was above all things a very great ass. He was not so corrupt as he has been called; he could work very hard, was conscious of the duty he owed his king and country. Nobody, I think, can look at the evidence and doubt that he tried his best, but it was absurdly bad, for being an ass what could he do but administer in an asinine manner?

It is worth while to insist a little on this, because, unless you know the element in which a man swam, it is impossible to estimate his swimming. In 1755 that element was for naval officers one of official incoherence and incompetence. Contradictory orders with their inevitable consequences, which are omissions, and confusion, abounded. Men and officers were drafted from ship to ship according to what Nelson called “the infernal system” which prevailed too long in our navy. There seemed to be no plan at headquarters, or, what is even worse, several plans at once. To take a comparatively small detail as illustrating the working of the Navy Board. When in July the Monarch was ordered to sea to join Boscawen, now cruising in the Channel, Rodney is found at the very last moment applying for a third surgeon who had been promised to him, but had not turned up. He did not come, but in place of him a consoling letter from the senior officer at Plymouth informing Rodney that the Monarch would be better without him, for he had turned out on inquiry to be entirely ignorant of a surgeon’s business, and only seventeen years old. With that instance of official management we may leave the subject. That we pulled through it all is entirely due to the one redeeming merit our administration had. It did leave a very large share of power to the admirals and captains. When they were of the right stamp—admirals such as Hawke and Boscawen, captains of the order of Rodney and Hood, or the less famous Lockhart and Gilchrist, who were engaged in this and the following wars in snapping up the French cruisers and privateers as fast as they showed a bowsprit in the Channel—order and efficiency were soon evoked out of chaos. Of course when the commander was of the wrong stamp—when he was a Byng, who looked upon official mismanagement, not as a thing to be made good, but as mere matter of complaint and excuse for doing nothing, the result was very different. The fate which overtook Byng convinced every officer, however, that it was safer as well as more honourable to follow the example of Hawke and Boscawen. The naval officers and the great kindred spirit of Pitt, the master of them all, saved the country in spite of officialdom by sheer dint of playing the man.

In the July of 1756 the Monarch joined Boscawen in Channel soundings for a short time. She had only been with him a few days when the carpenter, “a very good man,” who had been warned to present no frivolous complaints, had to report that the “knee of the head” was loose, and worked so much as to cause the ship to leak dangerously. There was nothing for it but to apply to the Admiral for a survey. The result of the report of the surveyors was an order to the Monarch to return to Portsmouth to refit. Rodney spent the remainder of the year and the beginning of the next in the dockyard. He contrived to get some good out of the evil state of the Monarch by inducing the dockyard authorities to alter the internal arrangement of the ship, which was a French prize, and had her magazines in the wrong place. Whatever good the alteration may have done the Monarch, the advantage of it was reaped by another captain. About the end of February Rodney was transferred to the Dublin, which makes the fifth ship he had commanded in four years. One wonders how any kind of discipline and good spirit was maintained in the midst of these incessant changes.

Almost the last order given him on board the Monarch was one by Admiral Thomas Smith, “Tom of Ten Thousand,” directing him to receive on board, as “supernumeraries for their victuals only,” Rear-Admiral Byng and his retinue. It is dated February 6th, 1757. On the 17th of the next month poor Byng, having now no need to think and act, but only to undergo his fate, faced the firing-party on the Monarch’s quarter-deck like a gentleman, without fear and without ostentation. Rodney had no share, direct or indirect, in the trial or execution of the Admiral, but I have come to a very mistaken estimate of his character if he disapproved it. No man had less of the querulous spirit, which was Byng’s ruin, or less toleration for such half-hearted leadership as was shown in the fight off Minorca. If he ever saw, as he probably did, Voltaire’s famous jest, he replied, no doubt, that the execution did “encourage the others.” It set up a terrible warning to those who might in future feel inclined to think that if they were badly treated by the Admiralty they were therefore to be excused for not doing their best against the enemy.

Rodney’s new ship the Dublin lay at Deptford, and he was now to begin all over again the weary work of fitting for sea. According to the wholesome custom of the navy he was allowed to bring with him a few chosen officers and men to form the heart of a new crew. From April to August then we will suppose him at work as before, setting up a rendezvous, superintending the rigging of his new ship, dunning the Admiralty for slops to clothe his naked men, and food not “stinking rotten” for them to eat. Since the little picturesque touch is always welcome, we will note that he applies among other things to the Admiralty for a cook’s warrant for “Charles O’Raaf,” hardly an Englishman we should think, who had lost his arm in an action with the French in 1747. In September he had at last got his ship into shape and joined Hawke, now back from the Mediterranean, whither he had gone to supersede Byng, and preparing for the first of those combined attacks on the coast of France which were the least successful of the Great Commoner’s enterprises.

The history of the attack on Rochefort, which was made in September, may be quite fairly given in the words of Captain Marryat. “The army thought that the navy might have beaten down stone ramparts, ten feet thick; and the navy wondered why the army had not walked up the same ramparts which were thirty feet perpendicular.” Sir Edward Hawke, who commanded the fleet, was as capable an officer as ever hoisted his flag—and Wolfe was with the troops. The two, if they had been at liberty to act together, might have effected something, but unfortunately Wolfe was still only Lieutenant-Colonel in Kingsley’s regiment. The General in command, Sir John Mordaunt, was old and by no means competent. His personal bravery was nearly the only soldierly quality he had, and though he did not fear death he stood in terror of responsibility. With such a leader an expedition which required dashing management was sure to fail, and fail it did. Whatever credit was gained fell to Howe in the Magnanime, and then the squadron and the troops came back with very little glory, but with ample materials for a court of inquiry and a pamphleteering war. Rodney took no part in this last, and had no conspicuous share in the previous operations. The Dublin was in truth a wretched ship. Immediately after joining the squadrons he lost company because her rudder had got out of order. Soon, too, Rodney had to represent to the Admiral that a hundred and fifty of his men were down with an epidemic fever, while many others were so weak as to be unfit for work. To make good the defects of his vessel, and to recruit his crew, he was ordered back to Spithead.

In May of 1758 he sailed on a much more satisfactory piece of service. The Dublin was ordered to join Boscawen in the attack on Louisburg in Cape Breton. She was sent in place of the Invincible, which had just been lost. After experiencing repeated delays, and a long struggle with the difficulty of manning his ship—to make his complement up at all it was found necessary to enlist “neutral” prisoners who volunteered—he got off at last with a convoy. General Amherst and his staff sailed in the Dublin, which was in fact crowded with soldiers and stores.

The siege and capture of Louisburg marked the turning of the tide for us in the Seven Years’ War. It was the first completely successful thing we did. It gave us the command of the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and was a decisive step towards the final conquest of Canada. Navy and army, Boscawen and Amherst, worked admirably together, and Wolfe, who was here also, had some opportunity to show his great qualities as a leader. It would be pleasing to his biographer to be able to say that Rodney had a conspicuous share in the victory; but the truth is that during the greater part of the actual fighting the Dublin was at Halifax. She maintained her character as an unhealthy ship, and was hardly on the North American coast before the epidemic fever broke out again. Boscawen kept her mostly at Halifax, where Rodney had to discharge the very important but somewhat thankless duties of officer in command at the basis of operations. What part of his attention could be spared from forwarding transports was devoted to looking after the health of his men. The hospitals of Halifax were full of sickly sailors or soldiers, and the Dublin’s men had to be attended to in sheds run up on shore by the ship’s carpenter. Rodney rejoined Boscawen outside Louisburg just before it surrendered in July, and then sailed for Europe on August 15th with the convoy which carried the French prisoners of war. The room which had been taken up on board the Dublin on her way out by Amherst and his staff, was occupied on the way home by the officers of the eight French ships which were captured in the harbour. It is a not uninteresting detail that Rodney also took home a present of dried fish and Madeira from Wolfe to his family. One would like to know that the men were friends as they were certainly acquaintances.

The choice of the Dublin to attend the convoy was not only due to the fact that she was the kind of vessel an admiral would be naturally anxious to get rid of. Rodney was now a very senior captain, and would as a matter almost of course be selected for independent service for which a flag-officer could not be spared. He was now almost at the very end of his service as post-captain. When he had brought his convoy into the Channel and had sent it into Plymouth he proceeded to Spithead himself, and there applied for leave to attend to his health. A year spent on board a very ill-ventilated vessel reeking with fever had been too much for him. The leave was granted, and there ended Rodney’s work as a post-captain. In May of 1759 he was promoted rear-admiral.