4. Aproximaci´ on fina 57
2.2. Demostraci´ on del teorema 5.2.5
SAMANTHA A. CAVELL, J. ROSS DANCY, and EVAN WILSON
F
or Britain’s Royal Navy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was no aspect of naval warfare that caused as much difficulty and an-guish as manning the fleet. Finding the necessary skilled seamen to man warships was the alpha and omega of the navy’s problems. Naval administrators’success in solving this problem laid the foundation for the navy’s remarkable per-formance in the two decades of war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
Administrators failed, however, to solve the problem of officer recruitment, a fail-ure that had significant human cost. These two contrasting perspectives provide a useful framework for analyzing the navy’s labor market. The controversial system of impressment largely succeeded in providing skilled seamen for the navy, while the chaotic pattern of officer entry failed to control the number of officers compet-ing to command its ships. The argument presented here relies on large data sets to demonstrate how naval administrators grappled with the contrasting imbalances in the labor markets for both officers and men in the late Georgian navy. Their great-est success—the Impress Service—has been misused and misunderstood by both naval reformers and historians, while their greatest failure—controlling officer entry—has been largely ignored.
The historiography of British naval manpower, and in particular the extensive literature on impressment, has suffered from a noticeable lack of data. At the heart of this chapter’s section on the “lower deck” (that is, what would now be called
“enlisted personnel,” so named for where their berthing spaces were found) is the first substantial and statistically significant study of the recruitment of over twenty-seven thousand sailors during the French Revolutionary Wars.1 Its analysis suggests that most of the assumptions underpinning the current scholarship on impress-ment are inaccurate: impressimpress-ment was in fact comparatively rare and targeted a select group of experienced sailors. There are far fewer assumptions about the labor market for officers, because there is little existing scholarship on the subject. This paper attempts to rectify this oversight by, again, relying on large databases: one of 556 officers who passed examinations for lieutenant from 1775 to 1805, and an-other of 3,417 officer recruits between 1771 and 1821.2 Utilizing recently digitized
42 NEW INTERPRETATIONS IN NAVAL HISTORY
sources and extensive archival records, the data sets describe the full range of com-missioned officers’ career patterns at the end of the long eighteenth century. Taken together, this research revises two significant aspects of British naval historiogra-phy, while at the same time providing the first comprehensive picture of the man-power problem of the Georgian navy.
The Lower Deck
During the second half of the seventeenth century, Charles II’s navy relied mainly on ships’ officers to man the fleet. With little in the way of organization and facing a constant shortage of volunteer skilled manpower, the navy had to rely on impress-ment, a medieval prerogative of the Crown.3 Often these efforts were not enough, and naval manning had to be supplemented by placing embargoes on outward-bound shipping until merchants provided enough sailors.4 But the seventeenth-century navy was usually employed only seasonally, to fight in the local waters of the North Sea. Not until the ascension of William III in 1689 and the beginning of more than a century of wars with France did the equation change. Warfare with France was waged throughout the year, in distant waters, with substantial fleets, and over long periods.5 Manning the navy haphazardly was no longer an option.
The Admiralty made many unsuccessful attempts to change naval manning policy over the first half of the eighteenth century; it was not until it took the manning issue out of the hands of ships’ officers and organized a dedicated recruiting service that it made any major progress toward supplying its vastly expanding naval force with the necessary manpower.
The Impress Service, an administrative branch of the navy, was the primary means by which the navy recruited men ashore and in coastal waters. Its origins can be found in the War of the Austrian Succession, when the navy introduced two
“regulating captains” in London to inspect men taken by press-gangs before send-ing them to ships. The captains streamlined the process of impressment on land and ensured that the men being pressed were actually mariners and not simply vagrants or criminals. During the Seven Years’ War, regulating captains were post-ed in several coastal cities, including Bristol, Liverpool, Whitehaven, Newcastle, Yarmouth, and Edinburgh. Further expansions in 1756, 1759, and 1762 saw many other cities receive regulating captains to supervise press-gangs, including Glouces-ter, WinchesGlouces-ter, Reading, Southampton, Aberdeen, ExeGlouces-ter, and Cork.6 Regulating captains supervised press-gangs, which were themselves generally recruited from local “tough men” and commanded by lieutenants. The lieutenants of the gangs were issued press warrants that gave them the legal right to take men for service in the navy. Press tenders (that is, craft) at sea were armed with undated warrants and ready to collect men from incoming merchant ships once war broke out. The cre-ation of an administrative branch of the navy specifically dedicated to impressment made the process of naval manning and mobilization significantly more efficient.7
BRITISH NAVAL ADMINISTRATION AND THE MANPOWER PROBLEM IN THE GEORGIAN NAVY 43
But what percentage of sailors was conscripted? The historiography of impress-ment has been filled with misconceptions. The first detailed statistical study of British naval manpower between 1793 and 1801, the height of the manpower issue in the age of sail, demonstrates that only 16 percent of seamen in the Royal Navy were actually impressed, while 73 percent volunteered.8 This finding undermines the majority of the historiography of impressment, since even the most conserva-tive estimates have placed the number of impressed seamen at one in three. Some historians have even claimed that three in four sailors were pressed.9 The high percentage of volunteers challenges the existing interpretation of how press-gangs functioned. Together, the database’s analysis of the proportions of pressed and vol-unteer seamen turns the historiography of impressment on its head.
If the majority of sailors volunteered, the stereotypical picture of the press-gang lurking in dark corners to surprise ordinary men and drag them off to sea needs serious revision. A press-gang’s base of operations, called a “rendezvous,” was usu-ally in a local inn or somewhere else where sailors typicusu-ally congregated.10 The pur-pose of the rendezvous was to recruit skilled seamen to volunteer, not to impress men against their will. Thus the rendezvous was highly visible and marked with flags, recruiting posters, and patriotic symbols: it was important that these places not look ominous, as such places would have little chance of attracting volunteers.
Press-gangs conducted recruiting drives, which included speeches glorifying na-val life and improvised bands marching up and down the street playing patriotic tunes.11 The chance to win glory and prize money was a common theme. A good example is a recruiting poster for the frigate Pallas, under the command of Lord Cochrane from 1804; it is filled with references to prize money.12 Admittedly, Coch- rane had a reputation as a daring and lucky officer, but recent research has shown prize money was much more abundant for all members of the Royal Navy than previously thought.13
Another important element of Cochrane’s poster is its admonition that “none need apply but Seamen or Stout Hands.” Lieutenants of the Impress Service and others sent ashore with press-gangs from warships were under unequivocal in-structions from the Admiralty “not to impress any Landmen, but only such as are Seafaring Men, or such others as are described in the Press-Warrant, and those only as are able and fit for His Majesty’s Service, and not to take up Boys or infirm Persons, in order to magnify the Numbers upon your Accounts, and to bring an unnecessary charge upon His Majesty.”14
Clearly, the Admiralty did not want press-gangs to bring in additional unskilled landsmen. In such a large operation mistakes were unavoidable, especially as sail-ors not wanting to be conscripted commonly claimed not to be seamen.15 But on the whole, press-gangs targeted experienced seamen. Contrary to what some his-torians have said, the majority of the men on the lower deck of British warships
44 NEW INTERPRETATIONS IN NAVAL HISTORY
were not strangers to the sea, and indeed many were highly skilled. Petty officers (in effect, junior noncommissioned officers) made up about 12 percent of the crew, and “able seamen” (experienced and versatile deep-ocean sailors) made up a fur-ther 36 percent.16 Together, they formed nearly half of the lower-deck complement of a ship. These men were the navy’s lifeblood, without which it could never have functioned to its fullest ability. A further quarter of the lower deck comprised “or-dinary seamen,” who had experience at sea, often in coasters or fishing boats, but likely had served little in large, square-rigged, blue-water sailing vessels. That left just over a quarter of the men to be rated as landsmen, meaning they had little ex-perience at sea.17 The figure shows the skill levels of volunteers and pressed men.18
Volunteers were more likely than not to be landsmen or ordinary seamen, while the skill levels of pressed men were often high: nearly half were rated as either able seamen or petty officers. Though pressed men made up a minority of the lower decks of British warships, it was a highly qualified minority.
Essentially, impressment sought deep-sea sailors for Royal Navy service.19 Able seamen were difficult to find, because it took years to learn the required skills. Most had begun working at sea in their early teenage years, likely in coasting or fishing vessels that used light sailing rigs that could be handled by boys.20 Able seamen needed to be agile enough to work high in the rigging, but they also needed the strength of full-grown men to handle the large, heavy sails of warships. Therefore, the age window in which men could fill this vital position on board naval ships was relatively narrow. The average age of pressed able seamen was twenty-two, while the average age of pressed ordinary seamen and landsmen was twenty.21 The fact that able seamen were on average two years older than ordinary seamen and
Petty Officers
9%
Able Seamen
28%
Ordinary Seamen
23%
Landsmen 40%
Volunteer Skill Levels
Total: 8,336 Men
Able Seamen
42%
Ordinary Seamen
35%
Landsmen 16%
Pressed Seamen Skill Levels
Total: 1,822 Men Petty
Officers 7%
BRITISH NAVAL ADMINISTRATION AND THE MANPOWER PROBLEM IN THE GEORGIAN NAVY 45
landsmen reflects the time it took for a seaman to gain the knowledge and experi-ence necessary to perform at that level of competexperi-ence.
Impressment was a system meant not only to target specific men for naval ser-vice but also to preserve others from naval serser-vice. Many men had statutory protec-tions by virtue of their posiprotec-tions in merchant ships, such as masters, chief mates, boatswains, and carpenters; so too did essential dockyard personnel.22 Other sea-men too were protected, including sea-men serving on coasters, colliers, and whalers, as well as fishermen, apprentice boys, and foreigners, if they had served less than two years in a British ship.23 Press-gangs did not simply sweep up everyone who fell into the category of seaman or “person who used the sea.” Many such individuals were vital in their present positions to Britain’s infrastructure and consequently its ability to wage war. Impressment did not increase the number of seamen in Britain;
rather it ensured that the Royal Navy had enough skilled manpower to function at top form without draining other essential maritime services of skilled men. Im-pressment helped guarantee the success of British sea power by ensuring that the overall skill level of the lower deck remained high enough to give British warships an edge over their adversaries. The maritime labor market could not accomplish this without impressment’s intervention.24
The Quarterdeck
On the quarterdeck—that part of the ship where command decisions were tak-en and thus the province of commissioned officers—the manpower problem was reversed. By the start of the Napoleonic Wars, the oversupply of commissioned officers in the Royal Navy posed a significant problem, one for which there was no obvious or easy solution. The difficulty stemmed in large part from the Ad-miralty’s inability to gain control over officer recruitment or the entry of officer candidates—“young gentlemen,” as they were commonly known—into the service.
The decentralization of appointing officer trainees, left almost entirely in the hands of naval captains, meant that the Admiralty exercised little control over the number of the boys inducted to become commissioned officers.25 A finite number of posi-tions for lieutenants, commanders, post captains, and admirals was fed by a mas-sive, overpopulated corps of trainees, a situation that led to unemployment among lieutenants and officer aspirants on a scale not seen before. This section attempts to explain the oversupply in the officer corps by examining its source—the lack of centralized control of officer recruitment or advancement in the precommissioned ratings.
Decentralized officer recruitment and Admiralty attempts to wrest control of officer entry can be traced back to the seventeenth century. Traditionally, naval captains used their powers of patronage to select boys who would be trained for command. These boys entered as “captain’s servants,” a rating that denoted them
46 NEW INTERPRETATIONS IN NAVAL HISTORY
as protégés under the direct supervision of the captain. The exercise of patronage enabled captains—by obliging colleagues and influential and aristocratic civilians looking to the futures of their sons—to amass both social and professional status.
Accordingly, these prerogatives were jealously guarded, and captains were wary of infringements on those powers by the Admiralty and the Crown.
Early attempts at regulating officer recruitment met with limited success. In the wake of the Restoration, Charles II recognized a need to raise a corps of skilled young officers who were also noblemen by birth and therefore inherently loyal to the Crown. In 1661 Charles instituted the “volunteer per order,” or “King’s Letter Boy,” as a means of encouraging the sons of the nobility to enter the service.26 In 1677 Charles also instituted examinations for lieutenant, which ensured that aspir-ing officers would be qualified for advancement to commissioned rank.27 Such cen-tralized programs of recruitment and advancement presented naval captains with the first challenges to their time-honored power to nominate officer candidates and promote them as they saw fit. While the examination proved to be one of the most enduring and successful programs instituted by the Royal Navy, the King’s Let-ter Boy idea did not outlive the turn of the eighteenth century. Between 1677 and 1701 the Admiralty sought to make the appointment as King’s Letter Boy the only avenue to commissions. The weight of tradition, however, proved immovable, and the captain’s-servant system of entry continued to flourish.28
The Admiralty’s next attempt to exercise at least a measure of control over of-ficer recruitment was the Naval Academy, founded on the grounds of the Ports-mouth Dockyard. The school opened in 1733, yet despite its success and popularity its capacity of only forty students limited the Admiralty’s ability to exercise much control thereby over recruitment.29 In addition, captains generally rejected “colle-gians” as coddled, overeducated, and underskilled upstarts.30 Capt. Sir John Philli-more, for example, refused to accept graduates on board his ship, while the future admiral B. J. Sullivan, an academy graduate, was told by the captain of his first ship that “he had never known a collegian worth his salt.”31 Such opinions, however un-merited, reflected resentment toward measures that infringed on captains’ powers of nomination. Overall, the Naval Academy achieved little by way of centralizing officer recruitment. Even at its peak, just prior to its closure in 1806 (before its re-invention as the Royal Naval College), the academy was never responsible for more than 2 percent of the Royal Navy’s total officer entry.32
From 1733 until the outbreak of war with revolutionary France, it appears that the Admiralty made few attempts to further its goal of gaining control of officer en-try. The cycles of war and peace that characterized much of the period kept both the quantity and social/professional quality of the officer corps manageable. Surpluses in the trainee officer corps and boys unsuited for command were, in most cases, culled naturally with each demobilization. The Royal Navy did not, throughout the
BRITISH NAVAL ADMINISTRATION AND THE MANPOWER PROBLEM IN THE GEORGIAN NAVY 47
eighteenth century, provide permanent employment for its officers or men, and peace often resulted in mass redundancies.33
Ironically, this process of demobilization and retrenchment presented the Ad-miralty with a considerable problem in 1790 with the onset of the Nootka Sound crisis. The Admiralty’s hasty and shortsighted response became the catalyst for the most significant problem of oversupply in the officer corps that the service had ever faced. In May 1790, the Royal Navy prepared for war with Spain over the latter’s claims to the British territory of Nootka Sound near Vancouver. A sizeable fleet had been kept in service since the American Revolutionary War, but peacetime manning meant that large numbers of officers and men were “beached.”34 Rapid mobilization for the Nootka crisis now created a shortage of lieutenants. Drawing from the pool of midshipmen and “master’s mates” (experienced petty officers or midshipmen appointed by captains as noncommissioned officers) who had passed the examination for lieutenant, the Admiralty created 150 new commissioned offi-cers on a single day, 20 November 1790.35 These appointments accounted for nearly half of all the commissions awarded for that year.36 The looming possibility at the same time of war with Russia over the fortress of Ochakov on the Black Sea only emphasized the navy’s need to strengthen its officer corps. In the short term, the new promotions solved the shortage of lieutenants. They also opened up vast num-bers of positions in the precommissioned ratings, midshipmen and master’s mates.
These openings were predominantly filled by boys who had served their two years as captain’s servants. This upward movement in the precommissioned ratings, in turn, created openings at the entry level for new captain’s servants.
The potential long-term consequences of the promotion boom and the subse-quent boom in entry-level recruitment were soon recognized by the Admiralty.
The actions of the First Lord, Earl Spencer, suggest that he was aware of the need, among other things, to reduce the number of officer aspirants by gaining control of recruitment. The decentralized selection of captain’s servants was not the only
The actions of the First Lord, Earl Spencer, suggest that he was aware of the need, among other things, to reduce the number of officer aspirants by gaining control of recruitment. The decentralized selection of captain’s servants was not the only