Stockwin's Maritime Miscellany (21 page)

The earliest anchors were just large stones attached by rope to the craft. They were held by friction and were inefficient. The breakthrough came when a wooden crossbar or stock set at right angles enabled the anchor to dig itself into the seabed, no matter which way it fell.

However, it is not the anchor itself that holds ships in fixed positions against a current but the weight of the anchor cable, which acts like a spring. Ideally, its length is between three and a half and five times the depth of water.

Eighteenth-century anchors were made from massive iron rods forged to form the shank and arms. These component parts were then welded together in a hammer forge. In those days, however, there was no means of checking welds, which meant that hidden defects could sometimes cause anchor arms to break off under severe strain.

In the largest wooden warships, in addition to two main anchors, called bowers, there were two sheet anchors which served as spares, a stream anchor which was lightweight and ideal for low tide, and two kedge anchors which were used for operations such as warping the ship (hauling her to a fixed point using large ship’s ropes).

The Admiralty pattern anchor is the type most readily recognised as a typical sailing vessel anchor, reaching its peak in the nineteenth century. Curiously, devices of rank at all levels in the navy, from a seaman’s rating badge to the flag of the Lord High Admiral and the Admiralty itself, feature the anchor fouled. This is an abomination to any seaman, an anchor entangled with its cable being more likely to drag. Equally curiously, the only one not being required to display it is the lowly able seaman.

Weighing anchor in a ship of the line was an extraordinarily complex operation involving up to 300 men. In HMS
Victory
, for example, each main anchor stood the height of two or three men and weighed about 4 metric tons, and each anchor cable itself weighed over 6 metric tons, making a massive dead lift of over 10 metric tons. This load had to be lifted manually, as there was no mechanised means of providing power. The anchor cable itself was about 60 cm in circumference; in
order
to heave on the cable and weigh anchor a smaller endless rope, the ‘messenger’, was seized to it and this was the one taken around the capstan.

The occupation of hovelling could earn a man a respectable living in the Downs, a favoured anchorage off Deal in Kent. When ships lost their anchor in a storm, hardy local mariners braved horrific sea conditions to carry out replacement anchors that they had previously salvaged from the seabed. The endangered ships had no choice other than to pay a good price
.

THREE SHEETS TO THE WIND – intoxicated and staggering about.
DERIVATION
: sheets are lines used to control sails and each sail has its own set of sheets. If these were carried away or allowed to run free the sails flapped uncontrollably. This was bad enough, but if the sheets on all three masts came loose, the situation was out of control.

Most sailors could not swim, preferring the thought of a quick end if they were swept overboard, rather than a slow, lingering death as they struggled on until exhaustion overtook them. But a ducking in Neptune’s Realm did not automatically mean a death sentence – around one-third of sailors who went overboard were rescued. Before the development of modern resuscitation techniques a near-drowned person was often placed face down over a barrel, which was then rolled vigorously back and forth to drain the water from his lungs. A favourite restorative of the ship’s surgeons was hot onion soup, which was believed to stimulate breathing. Other treatments included bleeding and forcing tobacco fumes into the victim.

George III once asked a senior naval officer what was the proper starting age for a youngster intent on a sea career and was told: ‘Fourteen is as late as so hardy a profession can be embraced with the smallest chance of success.’ His son, the future William IV, was then sent off to sea shortly before his 14th birthday.

Some were even as young as 10, but most entered service at 12 or 13. The Royal Navy divided them into classes of ‘boys’, first, second or third class, depending on their age.

Horatio Nelson joined at the age of 12. As a boy he was known as Horace and in March 1771, then a frail-looking lad, he stepped down from the stagecoach near Chatham dock and made his way to HMS
Raisonnable
. He later recalled how nobody seemed to be expecting him and how he spent much of that day and night endlessly pacing the deck. It was a lonely and depressing introduction to the navy. His uncle Captain Suckling had agreed to take him on as a midshipman in his ship but had written in a letter to his father, ‘What has poor Horace done, who is so weak, that he above all the rest should be sent to rough it out at sea…? But let him come; and the first time we go into action a cannon ball may knock off his head, and provide for him at once.’

One 11-year-old wrote home to his mother:

‘Indeed we live on beef which has been 10 or 11 years in corn and on biscuit which makes your throat cold in eating it owing to the maggots which are very cold when you eat them, like blancmange being very fat indeed… I do like this life very much, but I cannot help laughing heartily when I think of sculling about the old cider tub in the pond and Mary-Anne capsizing into the water just by the mulberry bush… I hope I shall not learn to swear, and by God’s assistance I shall not…’

Norwich Duff was a 12-year-old midshipman on board HMS
Mars
. After the Battle of Trafalgar he wrote home to his mother about the death of the captain. ‘My Dear Mama, you cannot possibly imagine how unwilling I am to begin this melancholy letter… He died like a hero, having gallantly led his ship into action, and his memory will ever be dear to his king, his country and his friends.’ The hero he referred to was his own father, who had been decapitated by a cannonball. His headless body covered by an ensign lay where it fell on deck until the end of the battle. Norwich Duff was not put off naval service after this, and eventually rose to the rank of admiral.

TO THE BITTER END – seeing something through relentlessly, to the last stroke of adverse fortune.
DERIVATION
: if a crew lets all the cable run out while anchoring, the rope will come to its bitter (inner) end, the turn of the cable around the mooring bitts at the ship’s bow. There is no more to let out.

The supply of timber came to be one of the main constraints of naval power during the Napoleonic Wars. To build a ship of the line like HMS
Victory
the timber from about 6,000 trees was required. Oak, prized for its strength and durability under exposure, was by far the most valuable timber, often accounting for 90 per cent of the timber in a ship’s
hull
. The Wealden forests of Kent and Sussex were an important source. Later, oak was imported from Danzig, modern Gdansk.

In 1793 the cost of a 74-gun ship of the line was just under £50,000. Construction took several years. Curved or ‘compass’ oak, which could take up to 100 years to grow to size, was highly valued and was used for stern-posts, frames, knees, etc. This often came from isolated trees, deliberately constrained during their growth. Straight oak was used for beams, planking and strengtheners.

Concerned at the dwindling supply of timber, Admiral Collingwood decided to do something about it himself. He loved to walk the hills of his Northumberland estate with his dog and would always start off with a handful of acorns in his pocket; whenever he found a good place for an oak tree to grow he would press a few into the soil.

Many sailors believed that to have a woman on board would bring bad luck to the ship in the form of a terrible storm that would destroy the vessel and all in her. Female mariners were not common in the age of sail, but life at sea was not completely a male preserve.

Pirate lore tells of women sea captains such as the fearless Irish pirate Grace O’Malley and French noblewoman Jane de Belleville, who sought to avenge her husband’s death by ravaging the coast of Normandy. Some women went to sea disguised as men. Hannah Snell enlisted in the marines and for
over
five years managed to conceal her true sex. During that time she took part in the attack on Pondicherry in India and was wounded in battle. Back in England she finally revealed her secret and became somewhat of a celebrity.

One person’s true sexual identity could not help but be discovered at the Battle of Trafalgar when British sailors pulled a naked woman out of the water. This was ‘Jeanette’, who had disguised herself as a seaman when the French fleet sailed from Cadiz because she could not bear to be parted from her sailor husband. Although she initially feared he had been killed, the couple were later reunited.

There were of course women who came on board when the ship was at anchor, a mixture of prostitutes and those who claimed a more established relationship. Some wives of standing officers went to sea; they assisted with the care of the sick and wounded and even acted as powder monkeys during battle.

John Nichols, a seaman aboard HMS
Goliath
, wrote of the women on board ships during the Battle of the Nile, recording that some were wounded, and one died. During the Glorious First of June in 1794 Mrs Daniel McKenzie of HMS
Tremendous
went into labour and delivered her son in the bread room. The infant was named Daniel Tremendous McKenzie. He was awarded the naval General Service Medal, his rating being recorded as ‘baby’.

Ann Hopping was born in Devon in 1769 and served as seamstress to Captain Saumarez in
Orion
. Her husband Edward was on board and both of them were present at the Battle of St Vincent and the Battle of the Nile. In 1847 the British government awarded a special medal to all living survivors of the major battles fought between 1793 and 1840. Ann and several other women applied and were originally approved, but later refused on the basis that ‘there were many women in the fleet equally useful and it would leave the army exposed to innumerable applications of the same nature’. Ann Hopping remained at sea until her husband died. She remarried and lived to the age of 96 and was buried in Exmouth – in the same church graveyard as Nelson’s wife Fanny.