Merchantmen-at-arms : the British merchants' service in the war Part 1

Merchantmen-at-Arms.

by David W. Bone.

INTRODUCTION

WRITTEN largely between the shipping crisis of 1917 and the surrender of German undersea arms at Harwich on November 20, 1918, this book is an effort to record a seaman's impressions of the trial through which the Merchants' Service has come in the war.

It is necessarily halting and incomplete. The extent of the subject is perhaps beyond the safe traverse of a mariner's dead reckoning. Policies of governmental control and of the economics of our management do not come within the scope of the book except as text to the diary of seafaring. Out at sea it is not easy to keep the right proportions in forming an opinion of measures devised on a grand scale, and of the operation of which we see only a small part. Our slender thread of communication with longsh.o.r.e happenings is often broken, and understanding is warped by conjecture.

In pride of his ancient trade, the seaman may perceive an importance and vital instrumentality in the ships and their voyages that may not be so evident to the landsman. By this is the mariner constantly impressed: that, without the merchant's enterprise on the sea--the adventure of his finance, his ships, his gear, his men--the armed and enlisted resources of the State could not have prevailed in averting disaster and defeat.

The unique experiences of individual seamen--the trials of seafaring under less favourable circ.u.mstances than was the writer's good fortune--the plaints and grievances of our internal affairs--are but lightly sketched. Many brother seamen may feel that the hara.s.sing and often despairing case of the average tramp steamer has not adequately been dealt with; that--in "Outward Bound," as an instance--the writer presents a tranquil and idyllic picture which cannot be accepted as typical. The bitter hardship of proceeding on a voyage under war conditions, with the same small crew that was found inadequate in peace-time, is hardly suggested; the extent of the work to be overtaken is perhaps camouflaged in that description of setting out. Reality would more frequently show a vessel being hurried out of dock on the top of the tide, putting to sea into heavy weather, with the hatchways open over hasty stowage, and all the litter of a week's harbour disroutine standing to be cleared by a raw and semi-mutinous crew.

Criticism on these grounds is just: but it was ever the seaman's custom to dismiss heavy weather--when it was past and gone--and recall only the fine days of smooth sailing. If the hard times of our strain and labouring are not wholly over, at least we have fallen in with a more favouring wind from the land. Conditions in the Merchants' Service are vastly improved since Germany challenged our right to pa.s.s freely on our lawful occasions. Relations between the owner and the seamen are less strained. Remuneration for sea-service is now more adequate. The sullen atmosphere of harsh treatment on the one hand, and grudging service on the other, has been cleared away by the hurricane threat to our common interests.

Throughout the book there are some few extracts--all indicated by quotation marks--from the works of modern authors. The writer wishes to acknowledge their use and to mention the following: "Trinity House," by Walter H. Mayo; "The Sea," by F. Whymper; "The Merchant Seamen in War,"

by L. Cope Cornford; "Fleets behind the Fleet," by W. Macneile Dixon; "North Sea Fishers and Fighters" and "Fishermen in Wartime," both by Walter Wood; the pages of the _Nautical Magazine_.

The grateful thanks of writer and artist are tendered to Rear-Admiral Sir Douglas Brownrigg, Chief Naval Censor, and to Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. Arnold Bennett, of the Ministry of Information, for facilities and kindly a.s.sistance in preparation of the work. The writer's indebtedness to his Owners for encouragement and for generous leave of absence (without which the book could not have been written) is especially acknowledged.

Mr. Muirhead Bone's drawings reproduced in this book were executed during the war for the Ministry of Information with the co-operation of the Admiralty. They are now in the possession of the Imperial War Museum. With the exception of the ill.u.s.trations on pages 44, 224, and 252, these drawings were made on the spot.

DAVID W. BONE

PART I

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRAVESEND: A MERCHANTMAN OUTWARD BOUND]

I

THE MERCHANTS' SERVICE

OUR FOUNDATION

ALTHOUGH sea-interest of to-day finds an expression somewhat trite and familiar, the spell of the ships and the romance of voyaging drew an instant and wondering recognition from the older chroniclers. With a sure sense of right emphasis, yet observing an austere simplicity, they preserved for us an eloquent and adequate impression of the vital power of the ships. One outstanding fact remains constantly impressed in their records--that our island gates are set fast on the limits of tide-mark, leaving no way out but by pa.s.sage of the misty sea-line; there is no gangway to a foreign field other than the planking of our vessels.

Grandeur of the fleets, the might of sea-ordnance, the intense dramatic decision of a landing, stand out in the great pieces the early writers and painters designed. Brave kingly figures wind in and out against the predominant background of rude hulls and rigging and weathered sails.

The outline of the ships and the ungainly figures of the mariners are definitely placed to impel our thoughts to the distant sea-marches.

Happily for us, the pa.s.sengers of early days included clerks and learned men on their pilgrimages, else we had known but little of bygone ship life. With interest narrowed by bounds of the bulwarks, they noted and recorded a worthy description. In the mystery of unknown seas, as in detail of the sea-tackle and the forms and usages of the ship, they penned a perfect register: down to the tunnage of the b.u.t.ts, we know the ships--to the 'goun of faldying' and the extent of their lodemanage, we recognize the men.

At later date we come on the seaman and his ships recorded and portrayed with a loving enthusiasm. Richard Hakluyt--"with great charges and infinite cares, after many watchings, toiles and travels, and wearying out" of his weak body--sets out for us a wonderful chronicle of the shipping to his day. He grew familiarly acquainted with the chiefest 'Captaines,' the greatest merchants, and the best mariners of our nation, and acquired at first hand somewhat more than common knowledge of the sea. He saw not only the waving banners of sea-warriors and the magnificence of their martial encounters, but lauded victory in far voyages, the opening to commerce of distant lands, the hardihood of the Merchant Venturers. He realized the value of the seaman to the nation, not alone to fight battles on the sea, but as skilful navigators to further trade and intercourse. He was not ignorant "that shippes are to litle purpose without skillfull Sea-men; and since Sea-men are not bred up to perfection of skill in much lesse time than in the time of two prentiships; and since no kinde of men of any profession in the commonwealth pa.s.se their yeres in so great and continuall hazard of life; and since of so many, so few grow to gray heires; how needful it is that . . . these ought to have a better education, than hitherto they have had."

His matchless patience and care and exact.i.tude were only equalled by his pride in the doings of the seamen and the merchants. With a joyful humility he exults in the hoisting of our banners in the Caspian Sea--not as robber marauders, but as peaceful traders under licence and amba.s.sade--at the station of an English Ligier in the stately porch of the Grand Signior at Constantinople, at consulates at Tripolis and Aleppo, in Babylon and Balsara--"and which is more, at English Shippes coming to anker in the mighty river of Plate." In script and tabulation he glories in the tale of the ships, and sets out the names and stations of humble merchant supercargoes with the same meticulous care as the rank and t.i.tles of the Captain-General of the Armada.

Alas! There was none to set a similarly gifted hand to the further course of his lone furrow. Purchas tried, but there was no great love of his subject-matter to spread a glamour on the pages. Perhaps the magnitude of the task, ever growing and gathering, and the minute and unwearying succession of Hakluyt's "Navigations and Traffiques,"

discouraged and deterred less ardent followers. Of voyages and expeditions and discoveries there are volumes enough, but few such intimate records as "the Oathe ministered to the servants of the Muscovie company," or the instructions given by the Merchant Adventurers unto Richard Gibbs, William Biggatt, and John Backhouse, masters of their ships, have been written since Hakluyt turned his last page.

As outposts to our field, roving bands on a frontier that rises and falls with the tide, the seamen were ever the first to apprehend the mutterings of war. With but little needed to set spark to the torch, they came in to foreign seaport or littoral with a fine confidence in their ships and arms. Truculent perhaps, and overbearing in their pride of long voyaging over a mysterious and threatening sea, they were hardly the amba.s.sadors to aid settlement of a dispute by frank goodwill and prudence. Sailing outwith the confines of ordered government, their lawless outlook and freebooting found a ready rejoinder in restraint of trade and arbitrary imprisonment. Long wars had their seed in tavern brawls, enforcement "to stoope gallant [lower topsail] and vaile their bonets" for a puissant king or queen, brought a reckoning of strife and bloodshed.

Although military sea-captains, the glory of their victories, the worthiness of their ships and appurtenances, figure largely on the pages of subsequent sea-history, not a great deal has been written of the sailor captains and their mates and crews. Later chroniclers were concerned that their subjects should be grand and combatant: there was little room in their text for trading ventures, or for such humble recitals as the tale and values of hogshead or caisse or bale. A line of demarcation was slowly but inevitably ruling a division of our sea-forces. The service of the ships, devoted indifferently to sea-warfare or oversea trading--as the nation might be at war or peace--was in process of adjustment to meet the demands of a new sea-attack. The vessels were no longer merely floating platforms from which a military leader could direct a plan of rude a.s.sault and engage the arms of his soldiery, leaving to the masters and seamen the duty of handling the way of the ship. A new aristocracy had arisen from the decks who saw, in the pull of their sails, a weapon more powerful than shock ordnance, and resented the dictation of landsmen on their own sea-province. Sea-warfare had become a contest, more of seamanship and manoeuvre, less of stunning impact and a weight of military arms.

In division of the ships and their service, it may quite properly be claimed that the Merchants' Service remained the parent trunk from which the new Navy--a gallant growing limb--drew sap and sustenance, perhaps, in turn, improving the growth of the grand old tree. Certainly their service was an offshoot, for, since Henry VIII ordered laying of the first especial war keel, the sea-battles to the present day have been largely joined by the ships and men and furniture of the merchants, carrying on in the historic traditional manner of a fight when there was fighting to be done, a return to trade and enterprise when the great sea-roads were cleared to commerce. Stout old Sir John Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake, Davis, Amadas, and Barlow were merchant masters, shrewd at a venture, in intervals of, and combination with, their deeds of arms. Only a small proportion of State ships were in issue with the merchants' men to scourge the great Armada from our sh.o.r.es. Perhaps the existence of such a vast reserve in ships and men delayed the progress of purely naval construction. Only with the coming of steam was the line drawn sharply and definitely--the branch outgrowing the interlock of the parent stem.

With partial severance and division of the ships, the seamen--who had been for so long of one breed, laying down sail-needle and caulking-iron to serve ordnance and hand-cutla.s.s or boarding-pike--had reached a parting of the ways, and become naval or mercantile as their habits lay.

The State war vessels, built and manned and maintained for strictly military uses, increased in strength and numbers. Their officers and crews developed a new seamanship and discipline that had little counterpart on the commercial vessels. For a time the two services sailed, if not in company, within sight and hail of one another. On occasion they joined to effect glorious issues, but, with the last broadside of war, courses were set that quickly swerved the fleets apart.

Longer terms of peace gave opportunity for development on lines that were as poles apart. The Naval Service perfected and exercised their engines of war, and drilled and seasoned their men to automaton-like subservience to their plans. A broadening to democratic freedom, quickened by familiar intercourse with other nationals, had effect with the merchantmen in rousing a reluctance to a resort to arms; they desired but a free continuance of trading relations. Although differing in their operations and ideals, both services were striving to enhance the sea-power of the nation. Thomas Cavendish, Middleton, Monson, Hudson, and Baffin--merchant masters--explored the unknown and extended a field for mercantile ventures, but that field could have been but indifferently maintained if naval power had not been advanced to protect the merchantmen in their voyaging.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BRIDGE OF A MERCHANTMAN]

As their separation developed, relations grew the more distant between the seamen. While certainly protecting the traders from any foreign interference, the new Navy did little to effect a community of interest with their sea-fellows. Prejudices and distrust grew up. State jealousies and trade monopolies formed a confusion of interests and made for strained relations between the merchants and the naval chancelleries on sh.o.r.e. At sea, the arbitrary exercise of authority by the King's officers was opposed by revolutionary instincts for a free sea on the part of the merchants' seamen. Forcible impressment to naval service was the worst that could befall the traders' men. For want of energy or ability to carry through the drudgery of early sea-training, the naval officers took toll of the practised commercial seamen as they came in from sea. Bitter hardship set wedge to the cleavage. After long and perilous voyaging, absent from a home port for perhaps two or three years, the homeward-bound sailor had little chance of being allowed a term of liberty on sh.o.r.e--a brief landward turn to dissolve the salt casing of his bones. Within sound of his own church bells, in sight of the windmills and the fields and the home dwelling he had longed for, he was haled to hard and rigorous sea-service on vessels of war. The records of the East India Company have frequent references to this cruel exercise of naval tyranny.

"On Thursday morning the Directors received the agreeable news of the safe arrival of the _Devonshire_, Captain Prince, from Bengal. . . .

Her men have all been impressed by the Men-of-War in the Downs, and other hands were put on board to bring her up to her moorings in the River."

". . . On Sunday morning the Purser of the _William_, Captain Petre, arrived in town, who brought advice of the said ship in the Downs, richly laden, on Account of the Turkey Company: the Ships of War in the Downs impressed all her men, and put others on board to bring her up."

"Notwithstanding the Report spread about, fourteen days ago, that no more sailors would be impressed out of the homeward-bound ships, several ships that arrived last week had all their men taken from them in the Downs."

Serving by turns, as his agility to dodge the gangs was rated, on King's ship for a turn, then hauling bowline on a free vessel; forced and hunted and impressed, the shipmen had perhaps sorry records to offer the historian, then busy with the enthralling chronicles of fleet engagements and veiling with glamour the toll of battles. Perhaps it was, after all, the better course to preserve a silence on the traders'

doings and leave to romantic conjecture a continuance of Hakluyt's patient story.

Since the date of naval offgrowth, the chronicles have not often turned on our commercial path. Lone voyages and encounters with the sea and storm are minor enterprises to the sack of cities and the clash of arms at sea. Unlike the Naval Service, we merchants' men hold few recorded t.i.tles to our keystone in the national fabric. The deeds and doc.u.ments may exist, but they are lost to us and forgotten in the files of musty ledgers. The fruits of our efforts stand in the balances of commercial structure, and are perhaps more enduring than a roll of record. But, if we are insistent in our search, we may borrow from the naval charters, and read that not all the glory of our sea-history lies with the thunder of broadsides and the impact of a close boarding. Engagement with the elements--a contest with powers more cruel and implacable than keen steel--efforts to further able navigation, the standard of our seamanship--drew notable recruits to the humbler sea-life. The small crews and less lavish gear on the freighters brought the essentials of the sea-trade to each individual of the ship's company. Idlers and landsmen learned quickly and bitterly that their only claim to existence on a merchant's ship lay in a rapid acquisition of a skill in seamanship. The lessons and the threats and enforcements did not come wholly from their superiors, to whose tyranny they might expose a sullen obstinance, and gain, perhaps, a measure of sympathy from their rude sea-fellows. Then--as later, in the keen sailing days of our clipper ships--their hardest taskmasters were foremast hands, watchmates, the men they lived with and ate with and worked with--bitter critics, unpersuadable, who saw only menace and a threat to their own safety in the shipping of a man who could not do man's work. On the decks and about the spars of a merchant vessel, each man of the few seamen carried two lives--his own and a shipmate's--in his ability to 'hand, reef, and steer.' There was no place on board for a 'waister,' a 'swabber,'

longsh.o.r.eman, or sea labourer. Every man had quickly to prove his ability: the unrelenting sea gave time for few essays.

Fertility of resource, dexterity to serve at all duties, skill at handling ship and canvas, were the results of sea-ship training. In the merchantmen great opportunities offered for advancement in all branches of the seaman's art. Long voyaging was better exercise for a progression in navigation than the daily pilotage of the war vessels. Blake, in his early days as a merchant supercargo, learnt his seafaring on rough trading voyages, and his training could not have been other than sound to persist, through twenty years sh.o.r.e-dwelling as a merchant at Bridgwater, until he was called from his counting-house to command our naval forces. Dampier was a tarry foremast hand in his day: whatever we may judge of his conduct, we can have nothing but admiration for his seamanship. Ill-equipped and short-handed, racked by sea-sores and scurvy, his expeditions were unparalleled as a triumph of merchant sea-skill. James Cook learned his trade on the grimy hull of an east-coast collier--to this day we are working on charts of his masterly surveys.

In later years the merit of the trading vessels as sterling sea-schools was equally plain. During intervals of combatant service, or as prelude to a naval career, training on the merchants' ships was eagerly sought by ardent naval seamen who saw the value of its resource in practical seamanship, in navigation, and weather knowledge. Great captains did not disdain the measure of the instruction. They sent their heirs to sea in trading vessels to draw an essence in practice from their sea-cunning.

Hardy, Foley, and Berry had borne a hand at the sheets and braces, and had steered a lading of goods abroad, before they came to high command of the King's ships. Who knows what actions in the victories of Copenhagen, the Nile, and Trafalgar (hinged on the cast of the winds) were governed by Nelson's early sea-lessons, under Master John Rathbone, on the decks of a West India merchantman?

For long after, relations and interchange between the two Services were not so intimate. Until coming of the Great War, with a mutual appreciation, we had little in common. Our friend and peacemaker--the influence of seafaring under square sail--languished a while, then died.

In steam-power, with its growth of development and intricacy of application, we found no worthy successor to present as good an office.

In the long span of a hundred years of sea-peace we grew apart. The gulf between the two great Services widened to a breach that only the rigours of a world-conflict could reconcile.

As though exhausted by the indefinite sea-campaign of 1812, the Royal Navy lay on their oars and saw their commercial sea-fellows forge ahead on a course that revolutionized sea-transport and sea-warfare alike. The Lords of the Admiralty would listen to no deprecation of their gallant old wooden walls: steam propulsion was laughed at. To the Merchants'

Service they left the risk and the responsibility of venturing afar in the rude new ships. In this wise, to us fell the honour of leading the State service to a new order of seafaring. Iron hulls and steam propulsion came first under our hands. It was not long before our new command of the sea was noted. Somewhat grudgingly, the conservative sea-mandarins were brought to a knowledge that their torpor was fatal.

The Navy stirred and lost little time in traversing the leeway. They progressed on a path of experiment and probation suited to their needs, striving to construct mightier vessels and to forge new and greater arms. Exploring every avenue in their quest for aid and material, every byway for furtherance of their aims, they drew strange road-fellows within their ranks, new workmen to the sea. The engines of their adoption called for crafty hands to serve and adjust them. Steam we knew in our time and could understand, but auxiliary mechanics outgrew the limits of our comprehension; naval practice became a science outwith the bounds of our sea-lore, a new trade, whose only likeness to ours lay in its service on the same wide sea.

Parted from the need to draw arms, secure in the knowledge of adequate naval protection, the Merchants' Service developed their ships and tackle in the ways of a free world trade. By shrewd engagement and industry in the counting-house, diligence and forethought in the building-yards, keen sailing and efficiency on the sea, the structure of our maritime supremacy was built up and maintained. Monopolies and hindering trade reservations and restrictions barred the way, but yielded to the spirit of our progress. Vested interests in seas and continents had to be fought and conquered, and there was room and scope for lingering combative instincts in the keen compet.i.tion that arose for the world's carrying trade. Other nations came on the free seas, secure in the peace our arms had wrought, and entered the lists against us. The challenge to our seafaring we met by skill and hardihood--keener and more polished arms than the weapons of our sea-fathers. The coming of compet.i.tors spurred us to sea-deeds in the handling of our ships and cargoes, dispatch in the ports, and activity in the yards, that brought acknowledged victory to our flag. Every sense and thought that was in us was used to further our supremacy. The craft and workmanship of the builders and enterprise of the merchants provided us with the most beautiful of man's creations on the sea--the square-rigged sailing ship of the nineteenth century. With pride we sailed her. We, too, brought science to our calling; rude, perhaps, and not readily defined save by a long, hard pupilage. Not less than the calibre of the new naval ordnance was the measure of our sail spread, not inferior to ironclad hulls the speed and beauty of our clippers--we paralleled the roads of their strategy by the masterly handling of a cloud in sail. With a regularity and precision as noted as our naval sea-brothers' advance in gunfire, we served the trade and the mails, and spread the flood of emigration to the rise and glory of the Empire.