On Debt, II: For Who Are So Free? Manning the Fleet

It's not the song. The song is fine. It's the choice to perform it,  down the years, in a musical style that's been obsolete since the invention of the amplifier. I do not want "Hearts of Oak" distant and mannered. It is about hands on the sea. The sea is wild, pressing, urgent, in the now. It is dangerous, wily. It needs all our skills to survive and triumph. Instead we serve it boys and broken men on ships  designed by fools

or, to all appearances, beyond our grasp..

I think I know what that is. "Hearts of Oak" as we hear it is part of the conceit of a"New Augustinian Age," a denatured and unemotional Age of Reason, where people are stifled until they cry for life.. Obviously it is not true. The real Eighteenth Century was pretty wild. It's ideology, and I have an idea what purpose this particular inversion of idea and reality is all about. Start by inverting "Hearts of Oak." (NSFW, obvs.)

I've talked and talked about Eighteenth Century England as an unstable regime, forced to make war and desperate for the money to fight them. Inside the house are the elegant, listening to chamber music. Outside is the mob, stoning the house.  

We want to write the mob out of the story. It will push the price of consols up if fewer people think a default is in the cards. The problem is that we can't get rid of the mob, not if the wooden ships are going to go to sea. That's a mistake that people have made before, and keep on making. You don't need buy-in from your soldiers and sailors, provided you have flags and uniforms and great, steaming piles of patriotism. That's a link to Barry Sandler's "Ballad of the Green Berets," if you haven't the patience, and I think that the comparison is apt. I'm very lucky to even be conscious this morning after far too much overtime these last two weeks, and my employer tells me that it is going to solve its recruitment problem with a "climate of superior customer service" and a chance of promotion to department manager. 

I know it doesn't believe that. It is perfectly aware that what will solve its recruitment problem is pay raises. It's just not its place to  lead a competitive sector into a new world of the kind of wages it paid in the '70s. I don't think anyone believes it. It's a story we tell ourselves to evade the kind of policies that would lead to a labour shortage. That's ideology, and while we don't quite believe it as such, it is comforting if we use it to distance ourselves from the kind of people who sing "North Atlantic Squadron" because they like it.

Because, no, they're not dangerous, misogynistic, creeps. Well, they are, being young men. But, Goddamnit, we're not born socialised, we learn social skills through social interaction, and that happens mostly through positive reinforcement at work. Blah blah: the problem is that they're unemployed, bored, and frustrated, and the world won't end if you give them what they actually want, which is a good job. Except for all the people who seem to think that it will. 

Anyway, jobs for all: the War of Jenkins' Ear.

(It's a Habs sweater. That makes all the difference.)

"The War of Jenkin's Ear" is a bit of a joke. In much the same way that telling a "funny" story about how your 12th-level orc mage got his +3 ring of protection is a "joke." Nerd!, in other words. But I do have a point. Historically, what happened was that Charles VI put together a "Pragmatic Sanction*" to ensure that his daughter, Maria Theresia, would succeed* him instead of the  son* he never had to succeed* to both the ungainly congerie of Habsburg family possessions, and Elect* Holy Roman Emperor, which are linked because reasons*. When Charles VI died in the fall of 1740, various military conflicts followed, which can be framed around the Pragmatic Sanction. Many years later, Reed Browning once pointed out, historians brought order to this ungainly assembly of events by calling it the "War of the Austrian Succession," Now we have to explain why Britain and Spain went to war a full year before Charles died,and we either launch into the story of the fall of Sir Robert Walpole, or we go with the story of  Robert Jenkins' unusual preserve. (I'm pretty sure I've been in joints where there are jars of pickled ears on the bar. But enough about Thunderbirds hockey.) In the introduction to Browning's War of the Austrian Succession, the author thanks map librarian Nadine George and ILL librarian Carol Marshall,administrative assistants Roberta McPhail, Mary Highfield and Kimberley Highfield, and, of course, his wife and Kenyon College. Does any modern monograph get this kind of support? Because I'm not sure that anyone can understand an event as complicated as the "War of the Austrian Succession" without standing on the shoulders of the typing pool, and we don't have typing pools anymore. Hence, "War of Jenkins Ear." I'm an expert, and I'm still learning the details. Today I will explore details that make sense even if you settle for explaining the war in terms of some guy cutting off some other guy's ear over smuggling.

The Royal Navy in 1740: 1

Ships:

Rate	Guns	Crew	Home	Reserve	Laid up	Med	West Indies	N. Am.	Transit	crew	Total
First	100	850			7					8,500	7
Second	90	750			15					11,250	15
Third	80	600			11	2				7,800	13
Third	70	480	3	3	18	3	1		1	13,920	29
Fourth	60	400	7	1	16	2	1		1	11,200	28
Fifth	50	300	7	1	16	2	1		1	5,700	19
Sixth	20	130	5		1	5	4	4		2,470	19
Others			16		5	2	2	2	2		29
	8,130+		32	10	93	18	12	8	5	69,000	181

 Source with minor interpolation: Richard Harding, The Emergence of British Global Naval Supremacy: The War of 1739--1748 (2010; Boydell)

This is about ships, and we live in a golden age of information, so you can learn a lot about them. To avoid clutter, I have linked to a loving Wikipedia page giving the specifications for the ships of the 1719 (1733 revision) Establishment. Here's the cut-and-paste text boxes for:

100 Gun First Rate such as Victory actually, Victory only, because, as the article says, it was the only 100 gunner rebuilt to the 1733 standards.

General characteristics for 100-gun first rates[10]
Type:	100-gun first-rate ship of the line
Tons burthen:	1869 42⁄94 bm
Length:	174 ft 0 in (53.0 m) (gundeck) 140 ft 7 in (42.8 m) (keel)
Beam:	50 ft 0 in (15.2 m)
Depth of hold:	20 ft 0 in (6.1 m)
Complement:	850 officers and men
Armament:	100 guns: Lower deck: 28 × 42 or 32-pounders Middle deck: 28 × 24-pounders Upper deck: 28 × 12-pounders Quarter deck: 12 × 6-pounders Forecastle: 4 × 6-pounders

Victuals:And 60 gun Fourth Rate

General characteristics for 60-gun fourth rates[14]
Type:	60-gun fourth-rate ship of the line
Tons burthen:	951 27⁄94 bm
Length:	144 ft 0 in (43.9 m) (gundeck) 117 ft 7 in (35.8 m) (keel)
Beam:	39 ft 0 in (11.9 m) (1719) 41 ft 5 in (12.6 m) (1733)
Depth of hold:	16 ft 5 in (5.0 m) (1719) 16 ft 11 in (5.2 m) (1733)
Complement:	365 officers and men (400 from 1733, 420 from 1743)
Armament:	60 guns: Lower deck: 24 × 24-pounders Upper deck: 26 × 9-pounders Quarter deck: 8 × 6-pounders Forecastle: 2 × 6-pounders

These, especially the staggering three deck 100 gunner, are pretty amazing pieces of old-fashioned naval architecture. What is not well brought out here is the fact that Britain was the only power to maintain three deckers in 1740. The fate of Victory suggests questions about the seaworthiness of these monsters, but in the absence of French or Spanish three-deckers the seriousness of a continental threat to Britain's control of the seas is a bit questionable. 

So that's one thing. The other is the crewing statistics, the main interpolation I have supplied to the table above. Harding further notes that numbers borne in the summer of 1739 was 16,000 (compare with an army of 28,000 men at home, 8000 on the Irish Establishment), and tha the intent of Cabinet and Admiralty at the time was to increase this to 35,000. Rodger provides a helpful, synchronic overview. Peak numbers borne in the War of the Spanish Succession (1700--1714) was 48,000; in 1747: 58,000; in 1760: 85,000. Rodger provides the further calculation that the 1747 figure is 62% of the total stock of British seafarers and watermen, while Lord Gage cited "150,000 free-born Englishmen" as being potentially affected in a 1740 parliamentary debate over a naval registration/reserve act. 

Look! More Wiki-plagiarism!

Population 1100–1751
Year	Pop.	±%
1100	3,250,000	—
1350	3,000,000	−7.7%
1541	2,774,000	−7.5%
1601	4,110,000	+48.2%
1651	5,228,000	+27.2%
1700	5,058,000	−3.3%
1751	5,772,000	+14.1

This is, inconveniently, for England alone, but Scotland is small, and, for the purposes of this discussion, Ireland counts as "foreign." Taking the numbers as found for the moment, and waving our hands uselessly in the direction of the likely age-distribution, a male working-age population number for 1740 is going to be in the range of 2 million, so either Lord Gage is full of it, or the English have salt water in their veins. A third possibility is that a large "floating proletariat" is identifying as English in whatever data source Gage is picking up, so that his "150 free-born Englishmen" includes Lascars, etc, in a neat and vaguely plausible run around the collision of demograpic plausibility (7.5% of the male working population of a subsistence agricultural society in the marine transportation sector?) at the expense of wandering so far out into handwaving territory it's actually more plausible that an MP speaking in the Commons might be pulling numbers out of his ass. 

That said, the 68,000 figure is attested, and, although nominal, as based on ship's complements rather than ship's rosters, we do know that the ships were able to get uder way. 

For the moment we can take away the observation that the Admiralty was, as a normal practice, building more ships than it could conceivably man, and that, nevertheless, the nation, however conceived, did a fair job of meeting the Admiralty's expectations. In the spring of 1745, for which period for some reason a particularly ample data set survives to allow us to bring our forensic attention on the Fleet, we have:

Class	Home Nominal	Home Effective	West Indies	Med	North America	Cruisers/convoy
Line	20	17	12	28	2	1
Cruisers	10	6	15	18	10	17

 Harding, 236

1745 is a pretty critical year. The Austrians and Prussians are fighting in Bohemia, freeing the French of a blitzkrieg through Belgium, demonstrating that the "Dutch Barrier" was obsolete, with Maurice de Saxe  winning a very convincing victory in a spring campaign (always logistically tricky due to shortage of grass) at Fontenoy. The Dutch demanded that the British fulfill their promise of 40,000 men, and while many of those could come from Hessian and Danish auxiliaries, the auxiliaries had to be paid, and that meant re-exporting "colonial" goods to Europe, and that meant convoy on the one hand, and impeaching French sugar imports to keep prices high, on the other. Notice that only ship of the line is on convoy duties: last year, Vernon hit on the idea of using his three-deckers as convoy ships in order to get them clear of the foul weather of the Channel and southern North Sea, and that did not end well. This year, only 15,000 of the 20,000 men required to man the fleet in home waters could be found, and the three-deckers were laid up entirely,with the Board of Admiralty demanding a regiment of foot to bring them up to strength to sail, and the King, with his eyes on Flanders but with overall good sense, refusing. Soldiers could be conscripted into sea service; but that wouldn't turn them into sailors, and the confidence we see that they could be restricted to "waist duties" such as hauling ropes is a little optimistic here. Mathews in the Mediterranean had been under pressure to send ships, and, hence, some of the 23,000 men he is holding, back home, but Rowley seems to have sailed clear of this pressure,perhaps reflecting the difficult situation in Italy in the wake ofthe Battle of Toulon. This in spite of the fact that naval stores for the Mediterranean Fleet have to be shipped out from Britain under convoy. The Mediterranean Fleet replenishes itself with fresh stores as it can, but only preserved food has the holding power needed for long cruises, and provision of properly packed, properly preserved food requires depot-level supply, hence sourcing in the Home Counties, along Thames and Medway. Convoys, store ships, multiple theatres of operation and the competing needs of the army: the manning situation is desperate. 

Now let's take this in a different direction. Fifteen thousand men is not going to turn out to be enough to keep Prince Charles off the island (I like the Corries' version), but it is going to be enough to prevent crucial reinforcements of success that might well have ended Britain's War of the Austrian Succession in "regime change" similar to that which overtook the Dutch Republic. 

Motivation, then: it's not magic that's keeping the ships at sea. First, pay: N. A. M. Rodger rather combatitively, and early in his career (125--6), stood up for the seaman's base pay rate of 22s 6d/28 day month after deductions on the grounds that at time when a ploughman might make £3-4/year, even a landsman's rate might have been attractive in some parts of the kingom. Then, he muffs his chance to state the landsman's rate or give us any sense of  how many onboard in, say, 1745, were receiving a landsman's rate while doing substantive seaman's work. Because I'm not saying that employers have been known to pull that crap, but I am saying....

More recently (313), Rodger has noted that the basic pay rate was, indeed, set in 1653 and held through the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, but this was okay, because the period was one of steady or declining prices, as though that paints a more benevolent picture of Admiralty pay policy! He then goes on to admit the obvious; that this was far less than was paid in the merchant marine, and that is why, back in 1739, the fleet was being manned with marines and by using an embargo on outbound sailings to either force sailors into the colours by unemployment, or to allow the press to work its magic. 

Mentioning the press brings images of brute coercion, images that are perfectly fair except to the point where they fall short of helping us understand why the fleet worked. The basic answer was that coercion was complete, but fleets that don't get some level of buy in just do not sail. They collapse into mutiny, malingering and desertion. The obvious answer, and the one that you will pretty much expect of me by now, is that there is an implicit payment in useful skills, so that it is precisely the high pay available in the merchant marine that is keeping men under the colours. They are learning the skills that will allow them to get high paying jobs later. It is more than incidentallly interesting that only a very small proportion of sailors took advantage of the remittance system to pay out to their wives, presumed wives, and other dependants. It might be placing too much weight on the evidence, but my old graduate school buddy Gerry Lorentz observed that this is because actually seafaring sailors, as opposed to about-harbour riggers, were young men presumably putting away the werewithal needed to get married in the first place. So, then, young men in training, and the Royal Navy as the apprenticeship of a maritime nation. 

I'm going to explore that a little further in a minute, but first I want to get some other details taken care of, and that's the attraction of not starving. Here, again, from Rodger's early work, is the ration issue per man of the Royal Navy.  

Day	Bread	Beer	Beef	Pork	Pease	Oatmeal	Butter	Cheese
Sunday	1lb	1 gal. (8 pints!)		1lb	½ pt
Monday	1lb	1 gal				1 pt	2 oz	4 oz
Tuesday	1lb	1gal	2lbs
Wed.	1lb	1gal			1/2 pt	1pt	2oz	4oz
Thurs	1lb	1gal		1lb	1/2pt
Fr.	1lb	1gal			1/2pt	1pt	20z	4oz
Sat	1lb	1gal	2lbs

On its face, this is unimpressive to an Expert(TM), because he's seen so many lists exactly like this from "bread of ordnance" returns. Everyone from janissaries to the inhabitants of an Amsterdam workhouse are supposed to be fed like this in 1745, and while I'll bite for the Janissaries, I have my doubts that the indigent poor saw anything like this much food. It's pretty clearly a normative list, laying out an idealised expectation. The victualling board, for example, issued 54 million pounds of bread in 1750--7, but also 6 million lbs of flour, 809,000lbs of suet, 705,000lbs of raisins, 71,000lbs of oil, and 160,000lbs of stockfish. The latter foods would have added significantly to quality of life onboard, and are not listed because of its normative character. Still, the fact that the Fleet didn't die of inanition is something. 

Just to put the actual, as opposed to normative caloric demand in perspective, let's back up a year to the first invasion crisis of the war. In January of 1744, increasing amounts of information became available to London to the effect that the French, under the influence of the Comte de Maurepas, were going to attempt an invasion. A little less than 10,000 men were assembled at Dunquerque on transports. They would be carried across the Channel under a fair wind by a combined escort of a small squadron already at Dunquerque and a much larger one which had finished outfitting at Brest. This would require combining the two squadrons, and notice that this was imminent, received confidentially on 12 February, led the Cabinet to direct Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Norris to sortie from Portsmouth to attack Dunquerque. 

(This is the campaign in which Norris flew his flag from Victory, and the experience helps explain his decision to send his first and second rates away. In practice, the order meant taking 18 ships of the line out of Portsmouth into the winter Channel on 14 February. On 17 February, he arrived in the Downs. In theory, he was ready to deal with Dunquerque, but information now came in that the Brest squadron was making its way up Channel, and Norris himself was stuck in the Downs by weather so fierce that he had to strike yards and sails. On 24 February, Norris received word that the French were anchored off Dungeness, waiting out a north-north-west wind and ebb tide which gave Norris reason to believe that he would be able to descend on them and destroy the French squadron before the invasion flotilla could be re-assembled after being partly blown on shore by the same weather than had nailed Norris in the Downs. By 8 PM, Norris was anchored near the French, southeast of Dover, with the expectation of a battle next day. Instead, from 1AM on the night of 25 February (again, 25 February! In the Channel! In wooden sailing ships!) the wind began to freshen. Neither fleet could manoeuvre. Indeed, anchors were dragging, ships were drifting, and visibility was so poort that neither fleet knew how the other was doing. Early in the morning, Anglesea's (50) cable parted, and the ship was driven by the wind right through the French position. 

They were gone. Word had reached the squadron commander, 77 year-old Comte Amiral de Rocquefueil of the scope of the disaster at Dunquerque. Anchors were cut, and the fleet sailed before the wind to Calais. By 1 March, Norris was back at the Downs, still waiting on news of the status of the invasion force. Finally, on 28 March, the invasion threat abated, Norris returned to shore to advice a rudderless Admiralty Board, although whether he much improved things may be wondered, his useful ships were allowed to go into harbour, and the three-deckers sent away to convoy the long-delayed outbound military and trade convoys as far as Spain. 

The point of this campaign anecdote is that the calorie count, if not the details, of the ration schedule above must be correct, or everyone in the fleet would be dead by this point. Cold, humid, windy cold, hard work, hard lying, the human body can stand up to all of this, but only if the food keeps coming. This is not likely to be sufficient incentive to just anyone to stand up to the conditions at sea. It will be incentive enough for a half-starved boy whose body is trying to balance its hormone-driven need to feed and build the muscle-mass of a future father against the starving times of rural underemployment. Now let him go to sea, and let him eat and drink his fill, and he will put up with hard lying, at least until he begins to appreciate the barganing postion that high wartime wages gives him.  

The reason that I think that the 90 and 100 gunners are important in this story is that I've built up a picture of the fleet at mid-war as being similar to the workforce I know: underpaid, offered alternatives, and trapped in a training process where it takes on the unskilled, turns them into the skilled, and then loses them to other employers.  The big First and Second Rates are the most difficult and complex machines in the fleet, and the picture we see here of their gradually declining utility and use is consonant with this picture. 

I've left till now a final, dangling point, the observation that wartime wages are high. Rodger notes at one point that it does not look as though Parliament ever contemplated matching civilian sector wages. Indeed, this relationship of wages to naval manning needs a closer look. Britain used the press, rather than a conscription scheme, Rodger tells us, because Britain was a weak state in which local authority trumped the power of the centre, and that the county magistracy jealously stood up for the rights of the trueborn Englishman. That's only a bit of a parody, and, since Jess Brewer at least, we can see how wrong it is. The actual strength of the English state, which is clearly considerable, is measured by the large size of the excise bureaucracy and its success in levying taxes. This is a strong state.

So what does it tell us that the elite has closed its ranks against naval conscription? That, in some profound sense, it is content with the way things are. It sees the press as socially useful. How so? I could go out on a going out on a speculative limb here, but I have tried to keep this post as clear of that as I can just by sticking to the facts, and the facts, at least as laid out in Rodger's account, pretty clearly support the idea that the press is being seen, not in terms of the rights of freeborn Englishmen, but in terms of its effect on wartime wages. 

And I'm going to leave it at that, because it's already 5PM, and its Christmas season, and I need a little decompression time before I face work again tomorrow in a chronically understaffed retail environment.

*It's complicated.