J. R. Tanner

“ VICTUALLING; DISCIPLINE; SHIPS; GUNS
The arrangements for victualling had always had an important bearing upon the contentment and efficiency of the seamen. 'However the pay of the mariners, both for sea and harbour, may be wanting for some time,' wrote one of the Victuallers, 'yet they must have continual supplies of victuals, otherwise they will be apt to fall into very great disorders.' [207] Pepys, in his private Minute Book [208] , makes the same point. ”

“ We should expect business habits in a Government official, but in his correspondence Pepys exhibits [78] a methodical devotion to business which is beyond praise. We have here sobriety and soundness of judgment; a sense of the paramount importance of discipline, and the exercise of a steady pressure upon others to restore it in the navy; a high standard of personal duty, which permits no slackness and spares no pains; and a remarkable capacity for tactful diplomacy. The decorous self-satisfaction of the Diary has been replaced in later years by professional pride ”

“ All we have is our lives; if you will please to get his Royal Highness to give us a fireship among us all, here is a dozen of us, out of all which choose you one to be commander, and the rest of us, whoever he is, will serve him ”

“ The maintenance of the great professional army came to be a burden too heavy for the resources of the country as they stood in that day, and the navy suffered from the competition of the army for the available funds. The disease usually assigned to the Restoration period declared itself before the Restoration took place, and when the King came back he found the navy already deep in debt. In 1659 nearly half a million was due on account of wages alone, and the total debt must have been over three-quarters of a million [123] . ”

“ But there is this element of truth in it—that vigorous efforts for the regeneration of the navy were to a certain extent rendered abortive by the corruption of the Court and the lowness of the prevailing political tone. Able and energetic reformers were baffled by want of money, and this was due partly to royal extravagance and partly to unsatisfactory relations with Parliament, which suspected peculation and waste. ”

“ One captain with a breezy style complains that for want of pay 'instead of a young commander, he is rendered an old beggar.' [156] The crews of two ships petition the Navy Board to order them their pay 'that their families may not be altogether starved in the streets, and themselves go like heathens, having nothing to cover their nakedness.' [157] The Commissioner at Portsmouth writes of workmen in the yard [45] there, that they are turned out of doors by their landlords, and perish more like dogs than men [158] .
Naturally enough, this state of things affected discipline. ”

“ His experience in sea affairs is not so much to be required at first as his sincerity, honour, and wisdom; for his daily practice in his Office, with conference of able and experienced [19] men, will quickly instruct him.' [31] All the Stuarts were interested in the sea. Nothing gave Charles II more pleasure than to sail down the Thames in one of his yachts to inspect his ships, and his brother possessed something like an expert knowledge of naval affairs. ”

“ Pepys was the only one of the Principal Officers whose experience was continuous.
The extra Commissionerships, when vacancies arose, did not all go to naval experts, but men of ability were selected for them, and sometimes men of distinction. When in 1662 another extra Commissioner was appointed, the choice fell on William Coventry, a civilian; but Coventry had already had two years' experience of naval administration as Secretary to the Lord High Admiral, and his ability soon made him one of the most valuable members of the Navy Board. ”

“ In October, 1664, in view of the impending war with the Dutch, a temporary Commission for the care of Sick and Wounded Seamen on the model of the Commission of 1653 was appointed for the duration of the war, the most active member of it being John Evelyn, [49] the diarist [177] . This Commission was re-appointed in March, 1672, for the Third Dutch War, and the elaborate instructions given to it are to be found in the volume of Naval Precedents in the Pepysian Library [178] . ”

“ Hollond, like Pepys, appears to have had a genuine sympathy for the sorrows of the 'poor seaman,' and he complains bitterly of the long delays in paying wages; the 'intolerable abuse to poor seamen in their wages' by naval captains' who are of late turned merchants, and have and do lay magazines of clothes, ... tobacco, strong waters, and such like commodities into their ships upon pretence of relieving poor seamen in their wants, but indeed for no other reason than their private profit' [9] ; the practice of discharging sick men without adequate funds to take them home ”

“ In his Memoires of the Royal Navy [305] , the only work which he ever acknowledged [306] , Pepys states the essential 'truths' of the 'sea œconomy' of England, which are as valid to-day as when he wrote them down—'that integrity and general (but unpractised) knowledge are not alone sufficient to conduct and support a Navy [79] so as to prevent its declension into a state little less unhappy than the worst that can befall it under the want of both' ”

“ It is in a way remarkable that during the period of complaints against gentlemen captains we come upon the first establishment of an examination for lieutenants. Towards the end of 1677 complaints reached the Admiralty from Sir John Narbrough, commanding in the Mediterranean, of the 'defectiveness' of his lieutenants 'in their seamanship.' [272] Pepys also refers to 'the general ignorance and dulness of our lieutenants of ships' as 'a great evil' of which 'all sober commanders at this day' complain. ”

“ During the period from 1660 to 1688 the operations of the navy were grievously hampered by the deficiency of men, both in the dockyards and at sea; and this deficiency was mainly, if not entirely, due to the want of pay.
The state of things during the Second Dutch War was appalling. The Diary contains pitiable stories of poor seamen starving in the streets because there was no money to pay their wages. ”

“ It is true that Pett's accuser is not above suspicion, for he begins his philippic with an artless exposition of his motives: 'In the last year of the Queen's reign, I, seeing some abuses by Phineas Pett, told him he had not done his duty. He strook me with his cudgel. I told him he had been better he had held his hand, for he should pay for it.' Pett was in some respects a calumniated man, but this particular kind of peculation is more easily justified to the official conscience than any other, and there is nothing inherently improbable in the accusation. ”

“ That some such contrast exists it is impossible to deny. The Commonwealth navy was on the whole well managed, and every reader of Pepys's Diary knows that he was disposed to regret in private the administrative successes of the treasonable times. ”

“ The combination of captains and pursers to return false musters, or to present men to receive pay who never served, was another longstanding abuse. There was in the navy a recognised system of drawing pay for non-existent persons to which no discredit attached, for it was the regular way of giving the officers extra pay. ”

“ One of the earlier acts of Charles II on his return was to dissolve these two bodies, and to revive the ancient form of navy government by a Lord High Admiral and four Principal Officers—the Treasurer, the Comptroller, the Surveyor, and the Clerk of the Acts. James, Duke of York, the King's brother, afterwards James II, was made Lord High Admiral—an appointment which realised the ideas of Monson, who had written earlier: 'The way to settle things is to appoint an Admiral, young, heroical, and of a great blood. ”

“ It is evident that the administration of the navy after the Restoration was in the hands of able and experienced men, [27] and that they were acting under instructions which were good enough to survive without material alteration for another century and a half. Yet there is abundant evidence in the Pepysian manuscripts and elsewhere to shew that naval administration during the period 1660-1673 was in the main a disastrous failure. ”

“ The danger of collusion among officials was one of the chief difficulties in the way of would-be reformers, and just as collusion between the captains and the pursers defrauded the King in the matter of pay, so collusion between the victuallers and the pursers defrauded the King over the provision of victuals. ”

“ The important episode of the period 1684-1688 is the appointment of the Special Commission of 1686 for the regeneration of the navy—an experiment in organisation for which Pepys was largely responsible [113] . A sum of £400,000 a year was to be assigned to the navy [114] , and this was to be [35] administered by a body of experts, on which the two most important figures were Sir Anthony Deane, the great shipbuilder, and Sir John Narbrough, the hero of the war with Algiers. ”

“ The agreeable vices of the Diary suggest the light irresponsible cavalier. The official correspondence suggests that Pepys was a Puritan at heart, although without the Puritan rigidity of practice or narrowness of view. In his professional career he exhibits precisely those virtues which had made the naval administration of Blake's time a success—the virtues of the Independent colonels who manned the administrative offices during the First Dutch War. ”

“ It is fortunate for the student of naval administration during the Restoration period that the 'Sea Manuscripts' in the Pepysian Library include two 'Discourses' [3] upon naval abuses written at the beginning of the period, which enable us to understand some of the difficulties with which Pepys and his colleagues had to contend. The Second Discourse by John Hollond, in succession Paymaster, Commissioner, and Surveyor of the Navy under the Commonwealth Government, following a First Discourse of 1638, is dated 1659 ”

“ It was necessary first to buy out Thomas Barlow, who had been Clerk of the Acts under Charles I, and Pepys, observing that he was 'an old, consumptive man,' [51] [22] offered him £100 a year. He lived until 1665, and then a characteristic entry appears in the Diary. 'At noon home to dinner, and then to my office again, where Sir William Petty comes among other things to tell me that Mr Barlow is dead; for which, God knows my heart, I could be as sorry as is possible for one to be for a stranger by whose death he gets £100 per annum, he being a worthy, honest man ”

“ He has a discriminating taste in the selection of words, always choosing the more impressive, and leaving the reader with the sense of something dignified moving before him, like a procession, but never sacrificing clearness and precision to mere sound. ”

“ An important measure which had an indirect bearing upon discipline was James II's 'establishment about plate carriage and allowance for captains' tables,' [281] dated 15 July, 1686. The title of the establishment gives little indication of its real scope; it was designed to give the Admiralty a better control over ships on foreign service, and at the same time so to improve the position of the commanders as to put them beyond the reach of temptations to neglect their public duty for private gain. ”

“ This, when countersigned by the Navy Board, was the seaman's warrant for demanding his wages from the Treasurer of the Navy on shore. The original purpose of tickets was to save the necessity of transporting large sums of money on board ship, but the want of funds in the navy soon made it the regular practice to treat tickets as inconvertible paper, and to discharge all seamen with tickets instead of money—or with money for part of their time and a ticket for the rest. ”

“ Hollond only develops in detail earlier themes, and Pepys, who thought very highly of his Discourses, 'they hitting the very diseases of the navy which we are troubled with now-a-days,' [7] takes up the same tale. And such is the tenacity of life exhibited by a well-established naval abuse, that a Parliamentary enquiry of 1783 [8] into the Victualling Department at Portsmouth revealed malpractices of a kind very [6] similar to those described by Hollond. The keys of the victualling storehouses had been entrusted to improper recipients, who had access to the stores at all hours ”

“ But ships had still to be manned by pressing, and the quality of the pressed men left much to be desired. For instance, two watermen, pressed in 1673, are described as 'little children, and never at sea before,' who could not be suffered 'to pester the ship.' [170]
'It can never be well in the navy,' wrote Pepys on 5 September, 1680, 'till the poor seamen can be paid once in a year at furthest, and tickets answered like bills of exchange ”

“ Apart from the disastrous results of the practice of issuing tickets without money to pay them, the actual machinery of the system was better under Charles II than it had hitherto been. Printed tickets with counterfoils had been invented under the Commonwealth, and were in use as early as August, 1654 [195] ; but in 1667 elaborate instructions for the examining and signing of tickets and comparing them with the counterfoils were issued by the Navy Board to protect the Office against fraud [196] . ”

“ John Hollond complains of the abuses to which even a solvent ticket system gave rise. It enabled 'wrong parties' to secure the seaman's wages—these being 'such as have wrought upon the advantage of the men's necessities'—'either pursers, clerks of the check, or creditors, whether alehouse-keepers, or slopsellers, or else pretended sweethearts.' [197] He also notes the facilities which the system afforded for the abuse of 'dead pays,' tickets being issued for seamen who were dead or who never served, and men suborned to personate them at the pay-table [198] . ”

“ There was a great deal of noise made at Gravesend when the Commissioners of the Navy passed by, and on 27 August Evelyn wrote to Pepys: 'Those cursed people of Gravesend have no bowels, and swear that they will receive not a man [51] more till their arrears are discharged. ”