Nelson & His World

O.K. folks - here is this evening's "brain teaser".

My understanding of the first few days or weeks for a new recruit in Nelson's Navy(volunteers/pressed etc.) would be as follows.

1. Probably deposited in the hold of a Tender - a small vessel i.e. a cutter or some such. This could be at one of many ports round the coast.

2. Moved on, most likely with a batch of fellow recruits to a holding vessel - and most likely at one of the major ports such as Chatham, Portsmouth, Plymouth etc.

3. Finally moved to the vessel in which he will commence his naval service proper.

My question is regarding Stage 2 - the holding vessel.

i.e. I have seen these described variously as Guard Ships and/or Receiving Ships.

I have referred to the Sailor's Word Book which tells me as follows:





If you had Receiving Ships in each of the major ports why would you want new recruits in the hold of a Guard Ship which has other harbour duties to perform?

If this question makes any sense to you I would be interested in any comments or opinions.

Thanks

MB

Receiving and Guardships were usually elderly ships of the line with armament removed giving over the deck space to accomodation; there were usually several at each port. One of them would be the guardship, with armament reduced and with the local senior officer and his 'staff' onboard. I would suspect that having a few dozen or even two or three hundred 'new recruits' onboard would not really interefere much with their duties; a Flagship would run quite happily carrying out its normal routine, with the Admiral embarked.

Where they went would be a question of numbers I suspect. New drafts arriving would be directed to the ship that had the space

Thanks P - I wondered if it might be something along those lines.

These Receiving Ships must have been an "interesting" challenge as regards administration and security - with men constantly coming and going.

Presumably the men had to be mustered - even if "For Victuals Only" (I can't remember if they were eligible for pay whilst they were on a Receiving Ship)

Can anyone confirm this - or otherwise.

I wonder if they had a contingent of marines on board to reduce the risk of attempted escape. The pressed men and even volunteers who had pocketed their bounty would know it was their last chance for a long while to "do a runner".

Having said that I believe that Receiving Ships were pretty AWFUL places. If you ended up as crew on one of them it was about as far down the pecking order as you could go.

MB

Having done a piece of work involving the fleet at Portsmouth just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary war in 1793, My impressions are these.

Tenders, as Mark B pointed out, were small vessels which carried recruits and pressed men from the various small recruiting rendezvous to the major fleet anchorages (ie Portsmouth, Plymouth etc)

Once there, they were transferred temporarily to Receiving ships, which were clapped out ships-of-the-line with no other purpose but accomodation.

They were then sent to ships in commission as required, where they were mustered and rated, and where their naval service officially began.

Ships in Ordinary were ships in reserve and not in commission generally disarmed and dismasted.

Guard ships, however, although not ready for immediate active service, were ships in commission. They were fully armed, fitted and supplied and carried a full complement of officers but not of seamen. Their purpose was to form a reserve which could be quickly mobilized and sent to sea in a crisis. In 1791, for example, the Guard ships at Portsmouth comprised 'Duke' ( the HQ of Admiral Roddam), 'Brunswick', Edgar', 'Alcide', 'Hector' and 'Bedford'. This idea was a lesson learnt from the disasters of the American War. Pitt and his government realized that speedy mobilization in time of crisis was vital and that it was no good having a vast fleet if it was all in Ordinary and took months to put on a war footing. He therefore deliberately fitted out a number of Guardships at the major ports which could be prepared for active service in weeks. One result was the speedy conclusion of the so-called Nootka Crisis when the Spanish seized British trading posts in the Canadian North west. The British Fleet was mobilized so quickly that the astonished Spaniards promptly gave in.

Brian

Thanks Brian - fascinating!

I would have assumed just one Guard Ship per port - but makes perfect sense what you say - i.e. to have a number of ships in immediate reserve.

As regards the Receiving Ships something came to mind which I am pretty sure I am correct on. i.e. the men only had a first physical and medical examination when they arrived on the ship they were going to serve on.

Prior to this I assume they might have spent weeks on either a Tender and/or Receiving Ship.

I guess that some of these men must have been in a terrible state as regards health, fitness, hygiene etc.

I doubt that the press gangs and rendezvous lieutenants were exactly choosy!!

You can only imagine what the conditions must have been on those lower decks - dark and relatively airless - and all these bodies crammed in.

No wonder the Receiving Ships got their deporable reputation!

MB

Absolutely right Mark!

The tenders and the receiving ships were in effect floating prisons. Men had to be closely guarded because, until they were mustered on the ship which was their ultimate destination, they were not techncally members of the RN. Thus if they managed to escape they had committed not crime - desertion didn't apply until they had signed on.
These ships were riddled with disease notably typus - it only took one or two jailbirds to infect the lot. Naval surgeons were bitter in their criticisms of the system and its results - but the navy's needs were great and not much was done about it.

Brian

My research has also recently involved the guard-ships, but in the slightly earlier period of 1770-75 before the American War of Independence (as we prefer to call it). The strategy of maintaining a reserve of guard-ships in commission with reduced complements seems to go back at least as far as this period, when there were 16 guard-ships stationed at the various dockyards. During the 1770 Falklands crisis, the guard-ships were quickly brought into service as the first phase of mobilisation. Although there were problems with the state of the British fleet, France and Spain were unable to match the pace of the British mobilisation, resulting in Spain backing down and war being averted. Following the Falklands crisis, the guard-ships were kept in a higher state of readiness, and were used in successful shows of strength against France with a ‘training exercise’ in the Channel in 1772 and the King’s review of the fleet at Spithead in 1773.

The King approved the policy of keeping an increased number of 20 guard-ships ready for immediate service, but with the constraints on spending during peacetime, I can’t remember offhand whether this was carried through.

My research focussed on Plymouth, where the captains of the guard-ships included some familiar (and some less familiar) names: Samuel Barrington (Albion), John Jervis (Foudroyant), Charles Feilding (Kent), Joseph Knight, father of Cornelia Knight (Ocean), and Sir Edward Hughes. I think they enjoyed a good social life!

I believe the greatest problem with the mobilisation in the American War may have been simply that it was started too late. North's government wished to delay war with France for as long as possible, and refused to mobilise in order to avoid provoking France into war. When Britain finally did mobilise, an added problem was the age of the fleet, as peacetime budgets had constrained Sandwich’s re-building programme, but the speed of mobilisation was constrained as much by the difficulties of recruiting men as by the availability of ships.

During times of mobilisation, the routes recruits took to their ships were fairly varied. For example in 1803, the Minotaur received men at Sheerness from the Woolwich tender, Aggression gun-brig, Hebe hired cutter, Deptford tender, and a barge with 15 prisoners sent by Maidstone magistrates. At the Downs, still drastically under-manned, she received 48 men directly from an East India Man (who had probably arrived not realising war was imminent), and another 142 from the frigate La Minerve. At Plymouth the Defiance had just taken all but twenty of the seamen from the port-admiral’s guard-ship Salvador del Mundo, and the Minotaur was offered 30 pressed men - ‘all tailors, barbers, or grass-combers’! They took twenty, including the tailor.

Some captains recruited directly, hence Cochrane’s famous recruitment poster for seamen who could carry a hundredweight of pewter for three miles without stopping.

When were receiving ships first introduced? One benefit to the rest of the fleet was that in effect they provided a period of quarantine for recruits which reduced the spread of disease to other ships – although at the expense of the other recruits.