One of the great enduring myths of naval storytelling is the innate rightness, even goodness, of the protagonists, high and low. Given that for several hundred years the sailor was looked upon with a combination of fear and horror by "ordinary" people (those who lived on land), that is all the more surprising.
Portrayed in modern books as bluff, brave, loyal, deferential, and perhaps a little stupid, most common seamen were, in fact, rootless, homeless, desperate men, who lived by the bottle and the knife. Their contact with women was almost exclusively in the "sailor towns" of every port, and the "doxies" were not the sort they would have introduced to mother, had they had one. Their lives, to borrow from the great philosopher, were nasty, brutish, and short.
In some ways, naturally, the officers were different. With few exceptions they rose not from the "lower orders," but from a class-base that provided at least a minimum of financial security. Some were, indeed, very rich, and there was tradition too - for many, the navy was a family thing, steeped in expectation of success. Some of these men became great heroes, and contemporary records of their unbelievable courage and daring do exist.
It should be borne in mind, however, that many of these accounts of skill and heroism were written by the protagonists themselves, or their agents, as were the accounts of other career officers who might have had an axe to grind. Even William Bligh, a man with not one but two famous mutinies to his name, considered himself a hero, sadly misunderstood, and wrote a chronicle of the events on board the Bounty that is startling in its lack of insight.
Bligh, much hated by his men, believed in punishment, of course, as did Nelson, who was quite clearly held in reverence and awe by his. In fact, the "people" of every naval ship - many of them brought on board against their will, all of them virtual prisoners for years at a time - were kept under control by a combination of brutal discipline, exhausting work, inadequate food, and terrifying quantities of liquor.
Some commanders clearly understood the psychology of this - and some spectacularly did not. Hugh Pigott, of the Hermione, in the name of smartness and efficiency, chose to flog the last man down from every sail change or adjustment, as a matter of course. When the men rose up and butchered him and his officers, the Admiralty spent years and a fortune tracking them down and hanging them - the same Admiralty that then shot Admiral Byng for using his imagination. Like Pigott, they did it "to encourage the others," as Voltaire put it dryly. Discipline was the watchword.
The other great myth fostered by historic books is that of justness, fairness, necessity - war forced upon our protagonists by the greed or viciousness of the other side. During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Britain fought naval wars with Holland, France, Spain, America, and almost any combination of the four, and every one was a "just war," against a foe prepared to plumb the depths of savagery.
Last year's bitter enemy, however, was quite possibly this year's loyal friend, and each war, inevitably, was fought with God on our side and not on theirs. Tragedies sometimes befell the foe - massacres, sackings, starvation - but war crimes weren’t invented until the last century, and of course, by unstated definition, only the losers in any conflict can commit those.
In the period of this novel, the innate crime level in any war was nearer the surface than it is nowadays. Put at its simplest, it was the naked struggle of emerging states to carve for themselves a "fair" proportion of the wealth existing in the discovered world. Portugal, then Holland, rushed to the east, Portugal and Spain rushed to the west, then the French and British put in their bids.
New sources of wealth included precious stones and metals, spices and cotton and textiles, then sugar. Wealth extraction required more than indigenous labour, and there sat Africa—wild, enormous, and with newly found populations to subject to slavery. The Iberian lands, then Holland, Britain, France, and Scandinavia joined the stampede. The natives of the Caribbean islands were exterminated or displaced, Spain and Portugal raped central America, and the French and British drove the native tribes of America and Canada ("New France") towards the western wilderness.
There is little point, to my mind, in trying to apply modern ideas of blame to these events. The men who did the fighting and the raping were treated almost as brutally as the people they brutalised, while even the general populations of most European countries and emerging states lived in a form of slavery. Atlantic slaving was a business, and Britain benefited enormously from the trade, then deftly sought to take the moral prize by fighting for its abolition.
The Jamaican planters like those in this story treated their slaves with a viciousness and cruelty that strikes one as almost medieval (none of the punishments described was abnormal by the standards of the time and place), but most of them genuinely believed that they acted from necessity, that it was somehow for the slaves' own good, and that in any case they "bore the mark of Cain".
Some slaves ran away to become "Maroons," and visited atrocities to match those of their oppressors not just on them, but on other Africans as well. Racism as it is understood today is possibly a product of all this, not a cause; history is too blunt a tool to let us judge, I think.
What is unarguable is that life for many black people in that time, as for many white, was bleak to the edges of belief. Deborah, a poor and hopeful runaway from the Stockport hatting trade, became a whore to live, and (almost) hoped to be kept in (almost) comfort as a demure mistress.
Poor Black Bob, for reasons way beyond his comprehension, became a rich man's toy. This was not unusual in those days. Even Samuel Pepys, the "saviour of the British Navy" and by no one's standards a villain or a thug, quite liked the idea of a small black human "pet". And to the men of the Biter - the normal sailors of the era, torn from homes, families, or the gutter to go and die by violence or disease - Bob was merely a curiosity, a luckless victim, then the target in a drunken spree. No one thought much worse of him for it. Or even them. Such was life...
This, then, is a brutal book, but I can not apologise for that. The era of fighting sail was a great one in our perception, which is shot through inevitably with our romantic notions of the sea. Will Bentley and his friends and enemies are on a voyage of discovery, and I'm going to have to follow them, I'm afraid. The waters are uncharted, and I'm not sure at all what I am bound to meet. All I can hope to do is report back honestly.
Jan Needle
The Spithead Nymph - sample chapter
Heroes - the writer's rationale
