Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ Charles wrote to Warren Hastings a month later, ‘who required my exertions to place him on board a sloop of war to cruise the channel … It was his own choice to employ the few months he has to finish his time in studying that most important though very dangerous navigation.’

      This was a period of feverish political expectations for the extended Hastings clan, as Lord Moira came within a whisker of forming a government, but for Frank the next two years were probably the quietest of his whole career. It is difficult to trace his exact movements during this time through the usual Admiralty records, but by the autumn of 1812, after another summer at Willesley studying with a clergyman tutor, he was again exploiting family interest to smooth over the next step in his career. ‘I am obliged to be in town the 1st week in Sept,’ Sir Charles explained to Warren Hastings, ‘on acct of my younger son, whose time of serving as a midshipman will be near expired and I must not be out of the way.’

      The first great hurdle for any midshipman, ideally taken at the age of twenty after the requisite six years’ sea-time, was the demanding examination to make lieutenant. In exceptional cases – or where powerful interest could be brought to bear – the age criterion might be fudged or falsified, but even a boy as well connected as Frank would seem to have had to do it the hard way, and to wait until just after his twentieth birthday in April 1814 for his promotion.^*

      Hastings was on the North America station at the time – the United States had declared war on Britain two years earlier – but it was only a matter of luck that he was alive to make lieutenant at all. Sometime late in 1813 he had taken a passage out to join the sloop Atalante under the command of Frederick Hickey, and early in November, as a nineteen-year-old acting lieutenant, found himself in heavy fog off Halifax when the distant sounds of a frigate’s cannon were mistaken for the signal guns at the lighthouse on Sambro Island.

      There was often clearer weather close in to shore at Halifax, and with lookouts posted on the bowsprit-end and jib boom, a leadsman in the chains taking constant soundings, and her signal guns firing every quarter-hour, the Atalante nudged under easy sail into the thickening fog. For forty-five minutes Hickey coaxed her towards the safety of harbour, and with the guns of Sambro Island – as he still fondly imagined them – silent, and the leadsman reporting nothing at twenty fathoms, had just begun to think his ship clear of danger when there was a sudden warning cry of ‘Starboard the helm!’ and the Atalante was in breakers. In a matter of minutes ‘the rudder, the stern-post and part of the keel’ had been ripped away by the rocks of the Eastern Shelf off Sambro Island, Hickey reported at his court martial, ‘and perceiving immediately that there was no hope of saving the ship, my whole attention was turned to saving the lives of my valuable crew; to effect which, I directed, in the first place, the quarter boats to be lowered, and the jolly boat to be launched from the poop. I had also given directions for the guns to be thrown overboard; but the ship filled before any of them could be cut loose.’

      There was just time to fire off a distress signal from the guns still above the water, and to order his men to the exposed larboard side of the ship, when with a crash of masts, the Atalante broke into three. ‘In twelve minutes she was literally torn to pieces,’ Jeremiah O’Sullivan, a passenger on board recalled, as the crew fought against the crashing breakers to get to the ship’s pinnace, tangled up helplessly in the wreck of the Atalante’s booms, ‘… and to see so many poor souls struggling for life, some naked, others on spars, casks, or anything tenable was a scene painful beyond description.’

      One of their boats had already gone down – not to mention Hastings’s sea chest with all his possessions and papers – and with some sixty of the crew struggling to get into the pinnace, it seemed only a matter of moments before most of them went the same way. It was rapidly obvious to Hickey that not all of them could possibly escape in her, and ordering twenty or thirty of them out onto the booms, he succeeded in freeing her from the wreckage and – ‘in a most miraculous manner’ – launching her to safety.

      With the pinnace freed there was one last, desperate attempt to lash the booms into a makeshift raft, but almost immediately they began to drift into still heavier breakers. ‘I signalled to the small boats to come near us,’ Hickey continued his evidence,

      and each to take in a few more men, distributing them with each other and the pinnace till I succeeded in getting every man and boy off the raft, when, with three cheers, the wreck was abandoned. After pulling near two hours without seeing the land, guided only by a small dial compass, which one of the quartermasters had in his pocket, we picked up a fisherman, who piloted the boat safe into Portuguese cove … It now becomes a pleasing task to me to state in the fullest manner that the conduct of my officers and ship’s company, under the most trying circumstances in which human beings could be placed, was orderly, obedient and respectful, to the last extremity.

      The loss of the Atalante probably had as much to do with her seaworthiness as anything else, and if Hastings was lucky to get away with his life and reputation – Hickey and his officers were honourably acquitted of all blame at the court martial – it was an omen of things to come. For the first seven years of his naval career he had known nothing but success, but over these next two he was to see the other side of his profession and learn the lessons of defeat in a war that exposed inadequacies in the Royal Navy that twenty years of almost seamless triumph had successfully masked.

      There were any number of issues that lay behind the War of 1812 – the right to search and impressment, republican sympathies, Yankee designs on British Canada, mutual dislike – but at the heart of the struggle lay the system of economic warfare between Napoleonic France and Britain that threatened American merchant interests. In 1806 Napoleon had promulgated the first of his decrees designed to cripple British trade, and when Britain retaliated with her own Orders in Council that effectively closed Continental ports to neutral shipping there were inevitably a thousand potential flashpoints for war. ‘With respect to America,’ Stewart had written prophetically to Sir Charles Hastings in 1808,

      we may possibly by concessions put off the evil day but the arrogance, highhandedness & I may say ungentlemanlike conduct of that nation will sooner or later force us to quarrel with them; we have always put up with things from them we would not have suffered from any other nation in the world, many instances of which I saw in the last war, & our forbearance only increases the insolence of the mob, which seems to me the only real government in that country.

      None of this can disguise what a ‘bad’ war the War of 1812 was, but to an ambitious young naval officer there is no such thing, and within weeks of the Atalante going down Hastings was lucky enough to join the newly commissioned Anaconda under the command of the twenty-eight-year-old George Westphal. There had been nothing wrong with Hickey – except that he seems to have been a permanently unlucky officer – but of all Frank’s captains George Westphal, a protégé of the Duke of Kent and scion of an aristocratic German family of Hastingsesque antiquity, was by some margin the most remarkable.

      As a young midshipman at Trafalgar he had lain next to the dying Nelson in the cockpit of Victory, and that was just the first and most romantic of his battle honours. In 1807 he had again been severely wounded and was captured after a long and bloody action, but making his escape in an open boat from a Guadeloupe prison ship, had worked his way back to England – courtesy of an American merchantman and an English privateer – in time to join in the reduction of Martinique and to take a prominent and heroic part in the attack on Flushing.

      Fleet actions, espionage, ship-to-ship, siege work, land skirmishes, Westphal had fought in over a hundred engagements in all, and had continued in the same vein on American soil. ‘On first landing,’ a contemporary biography recorded one typical incident,

      Mr Westphal, having dismounted an American officer, set off on the captured horse in pursuit of the fugitives; forgetting, in the ardour of the moment, that it СКАЧАТЬ