This chapter focuses on individuals who undermined the order of the navy by increasing their personal finances, reputations, or satisfying personal needs, and thus directly violated the Regulations and Instructions, the Articles of War, and/or specific orders and directions from superior officers. Where the last chapter dealt with behaviour which directly threatened the control of those in authority, the people engaged in the above activities were not trying to escape the navy, were not seeking a confrontation with authority, but wished to stay in the navy and continue their self-interested activity. Erving Goffman's concept of secondary adjustments applies to this type of behaviour. Goffman stated that people within institutions, either inmate or keeper, actively “employ unauthorized means, or obtain unauthorized ends, or both, thus getting around the organization's assumptions as to what he [or she] should do.” Charles Glass, in his recent work on deserters in World War II, describes the thick web of the black market in army supplies in which “thousands” of Allied soldiers immersed themselves during the European campaigns. Glass does not evoke Goffman's phrase but the soldiers were part of the military system, did not want to leave it, but did engage in activity by which they profited at the expense of the organization's goals. In this study, such activities included theft, embezzlement, profiteering, as well as rape and sodomy. In some cases, the actions to be discussed threatened or hampered the navy's war effort against America, as it took valuable time and energy to find, remove and punish the offenders.

Theft

The evidence available indicates that theft took one of two variations: one form involved stealing from the dockyard in order to return one's ship to active duty quickly. This type of theft involved commissioned and warrant officers. The other form of theft was exclusively about personal gain, either monetary or simply possessing a desired object. At the beginning of the war with America, theft occurred from the Halifax dockyard as officers stole goods to ready their ships for sea. Theft secured necessary supplies immediately, avoiding the delay encountered when placing a proper request. Stealing an item removed the need to record the expenditure in the ship's account book. It circumvented being denied the requested item, or receiving only part of the necessary supplies. Such theft provided for a ship's earlier return to sea, in order to press the war effort, and possibly capture prizes.

At the time of the War of 1812 the Admiralty had two key documents to assist in their control over the navy's men and ships, the Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty's Service at Sea and the Articles of War. The Regulations and Instructions were the detailed outline of the expectations for each officer aboard ship and for those commanding a station. In a sense it was a lengthy series of ‘thou shalts’. The Articles of War listed the behaviour subject to punishment, the range of punishment from which a court martial could choose, and the right for the captain to punish summarily seamen and marines. The articles outlined the fate of the mariners and marines deemed to be ‘sinners’. In addition to these two documents the Admiralty added specific written orders and instructions to direct not only the station admirals, but also the officers serving under them, on decisions in areas ranging from naval tactics to daily life aboard ship. Apart from the Admiralty orders and instructions, station admirals and their supporting flag officers issued their own sets of written commands to control the officers, seamen and marines under their direct authority. Some captains of individual ships also issued their own sets of written orders to shape the behaviour of their inferior officers and crews. The Admiralty's push to centralization reached down through the navy, as officers at each level became more accountable to those above, and in turn attempted to tighten control over those below. In a perfect world these written directives would create order, as every officer abided by them. This is not what happened. Officers failed to follow the written regulations, instructions and orders, and the Admiralty responded with constant surveillance of the officers’ activities, marked by reminders and injunctions to conform to their superiors’ directives.

Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty's Service at Sea

The central tenet of the Regulations and Instructions was the expectation that all officers preserve and ready their ships and crews for action, so that they would be able to achieve the goals the Admiralty set for them. The first collection of Regulations and Instructions, published in 1731, was an attempt to gain control over the ships’ officers and undo confusion resulting from a series of previous standing orders. The 1731 Regulations and Instructions laid out in an organized manner the duties of the “various posts.”

Each of the three chapters in Part I explores different means that the Royal Navy used to establish order among the officers, seamen and marines on board His Majesty's Ships on the North American and West Indies Station during the War of 1812. Chapter 1 examines the multiple layered web of written regulations, instructions and commands employed to create order. As noted in the Introduction, the bureaucratization of the navy was well underway by the outbreak of the war with the United States. The Admiralty’s use of legalistic sets of regulations, instructions and orders to establish the appropriate behaviour of all officers, and in turn seamen and marines, in the navy is further evidence of their effort to centralize power. The officers, from admirals down through captains and commanders, passed the stricter scrutiny along by producing additional written instructions to shape order on their own vessels. Chapter 2 examines the more traditional use of patronage and promotion, and monetary forms of inducement to gain compliance. These inducements offered the junior officer or the compliant sailor or marine the possibility of reward for conforming to authority's sense of order. Chapter 3 examines the use of religion, language, physical activity, and allowances in the form of leisure time and leave, food, alcohol and tobacco, to control those serving in the navy.

There are two overarching themes in this book. The first concerns order and how it was created in ships of the Royal Navy at the end of the long eighteenth century. The second theme explores how people shape their lives by engaging in a range of behaviour, at times outside the lines drawn by authority. This will be a different view of the Royal Navy than those offered by other historians who most often start with and return to the leader, the captain or admiral, the great or lesser man, as the driver of all shipboard activity, the determiner of mission or battle outcome. The shipboard world is cleaved into three parts in this study. The first concerns the range of ways in which order was established on a ship. Order refers to the state in which people adhere to the structure and rules created by authority which enables authority to accomplish the goals it sets. Order was established in a variety of ways and from different points within the organizational structure of the Royal Navy. It is established in a top-down process. Ordering systems often view acts which contradict established customs, regulations or laws as reflective of personal idiosyncrasy, an inborn or social class proclivity to err or stray from the good. The second element investigated is the ways in which people serving within the navy undermined that order. The resulting ‘disorder’ was most often viewed and responded to by the navy through the legal lens of the Articles of War, with the aforementioned frame of mind. But to the perpetrators this behaviour could be perceived as any number of things, including resistance, retaliation, disobedience, accessing a right, exercising choice, or simple filching for self-gain, among others. The term ‘disorder’ is employed throughout the book to indicate this range of possibilities. It is offered to push against the tendency to see the ‘disordering’ behaviour as crime, which leads to an explanation of failure within the perpetrator rather than seeing it as behaviour engaged in to shape aspects of the environment, to improve or change one's circumstances. This latter approach to ‘disorder’ portrays an additional source for determining activity aboard a ship beyond the officers, that is, the seamen and marine privates. It also allows for the perspective that officers themselves pressed against order to shape their own and their crews’ experience.

The Ships in the Sample, the Expected Complements, Their Officers and the Time Period the Officers Were in Command, within the Study

This chapter explores the place of patronage in creating order among the officers and men serving on the North American and West Indies Station during the War of 1812. The struggle over access to and the use of patronage between local and central commanders reflects the changing nature of patronage in this era. The checked use of patronage to create order among the men of the lower deck, and even one's junior officers, induced local commanding officers to employ other means to accomplish these ends. Pay, prize money, ransom and pillage constitute material incentives officers used in their attempts to engender and maintain order among their subordinates. These material incentives rewarded the officers and ship's company for carrying out actions largely, though ambiguously, condoned by the Admiralty. Through prize money, ransom and pillage, the mariner or marine could obtain better food, more alcohol, and other material gains. Compliance in exchange for material incentives did not necessarily reflect a sense of obligation or any form of permanent loyalty on the part of subordinates. The use of material incentives to create order undermined the ideals of patronage.

Patronage

Patronage involved persons of high standing assisting subordinates in gaining access to positions of authority and social standing. Harold Perkin suggests that it extended from the highest levels of society down through the masses, in an unending series of patron–client relationships. In the navy, this could mean gaining an appointment to a particular ship, command of a vessel, duty on a station with access to prizes, or into the care of a more powerful patron. In return, the patron would expect the loyalty and obedience of his followers. The Admiralty's ready confirmation of the patron's appointments increased the patron's power to attract more clients. Historians have debated the alleged pervasiveness of the patron–client relations. In viewing the 1790s, Rodger proposed that the revolutionary ideas challenging the social order eroded the power of patronage between officers and seamen and marines. Tom Wareham disagrees, stating that an increase of officers from the upper class reinforced patronage. With a sense of “noblesse oblige,” interfused with a more positive view of the lower order, they could see “the seamen under their command as fellow, if not quite equal, human beings.” Such a relationship made for less resistance from the men and thus less punishment from the officers.

In March 1813 Captain Hassard Stackpoole ordered seaman William Miller punished with twenty-four lashes for “neglect of duty and wilfully destroying the spy glass.” Tenedos seaman Robert Duncan received eighteen lashes, for “throwing a grindstone overboard,” on 22 February 1814. On 16 December 1814 the crew of HMS Severn watched seaman Samuel Hawkins receive two dozen lashes for the offence of “breeding disturbance.” What are we to make of these brief entries in the captains’ logbooks? Did Miller smash the spy glass against the bulwark in response to the charge of neglect of duty? Was throwing the grindstone overboard an act of frustration or part of a larger, unrecorded, labour dispute aboard ship? What was the disturbance Hawkins tried to breed, a fight over ill-spoken words between crewmates, or rebellion against the officers? As the logbooks offer no further description of the events, a certain answer to the question is impossible. The salient work on discipline aboard ships, typified by Eder and Byrn, counts incidences, like the ones above and those noted in courts martial, to build their understanding of the frequency and level of punishment in the Royal Navy. In this part I attempt to read the behaviour that was the target of summary punishment and courts martial as different forms of action creating ‘disorder.’ The punishment inflicted for these actions will be dealt with in Chapter 7. By concentrating on the behaviour, we can examine the nature of the recalcitrance and the level of intentional or inadvertent ‘disorder’ it created.

As Michel Foucault suggested, “Where there is power, there is resistance …” Resistance assumes many different forms, from private acts done in secrecy to public displays of outright rejection of authority's claim over the individual or group. Most of the resistance discussed in this study involves the removal of an individual from the control of the navy's authority, either momentarily or more permanently. In this period this came principally in two forms: as an act of desertion or disobedience. Contempt, insolence and disrespect present other modes of resisting authority's order and discipline. Sometimes resistance manifested itself as “mutinous activity,” a direct public confrontation with authority, however momentary. In the specific context of the War of 1812 it came, at times, in the form of declaring American citizenship. These acts receive our attention in Chapter 4.

This chapter starts with the summary punishment in the sample ships by analysing the data by ship and officer. The Admiralty's assessment of the level of punishment on the North American and West Indies Station will assist in our analysis of its harshness. The review of courts martial offers an opportunity to see how the officers used the courts to deal with behaviour for which summary punishment was not considered appropriate or were necessitated by the rank of the accused. Convictions, acquittal rates and sentences, together with reprieves from hanging, will help to assess the purpose and fairness of the court martial procedure. Other responses to behaviour deemed inappropriate and harmful to the service will be reviewed. Finally, this chapter closes with an overall analysis of the Royal Navy's response to behaviour which undermined authority's order.

Summary Punishment

Of the 2,697 incidents of summary punishment found in the captains’ logbooks for the sample ships, almost all listed a reason for the flogging. The individual reasons were assigned to one of eighteen categories of punishment. Markus Eder, looking at the navy from 1755 to 1763, and John Byrn, studying the period 1783 to 1812, found more summary punishment for disobedience and neglect of duty than I found. A higher level of alcohol-related offences was found in the current study than reported by either Eder or Byrn. This may reflect a greater concern by authority over the use of alcohol at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, or the heavier use of alcohol after twenty-eight years of war among those serving aboard ship. The present study cannot answer this question. The results in this study were similar to Byrn's in the area of contempt, insolence and disrespect, desertion and mutinous behaviour, but higher than those of Eder, with the exception of desertion. Eder's higher rate of desertion in North America during the Seven Years War reflects the fact that the British still controlled the American colonies, allowing ships to make port, facilitating more opportunity for seamen to run. Similarity between this study and Byrn's reinforces the present results. The increase in ‘disorderly’ behaviour over the levels found in Eder's earlier time period might indicate an overall increased level of everyday recalcitrance in the Royal Navy between 1755 and 1815, or perhaps a more determined effort at its detection.

Regimentation through the gunnery exercises and the acts of mustering and cleaning established and reinforced a person's place within the ship. These practices support Foucault's belief that the late eighteenth century saw a new discipline of the body, rendering it docile and compliant through rigorous training, while simultaneously shaping the body to meet the heavy demand of the state's use of it. Increased regimentation and control over people’s movement and roles ought to lead to greater uniformity in action. With a greater level of uniformity, the officers established an order aboard ship that supported their authority. Order could be reinforced by granting shore leave and allowing leisure activity, such as dances. Liberal rations of tobacco and food could also achieve the same effect. They all allowed seamen to vent their frustrations or distracted them from their hardships afloat.

Language was also important in creating order among the seamen and marines. Reward and punishment were heralded by words of praise or condemnation. Language could be the form in which punishment or reward occurred. Greg Dening's analysis of Mr. Bligh's inappropriate use of language in disciplining the officers and crew of HMS Bounty demonstrates the fine line officers trod between exercising absolute authority and considering the ship's company's sensibilities. Religious sermons could underscore authority aboard ship and further the sense of esprit de corps established through regimented activity and shared belief. Research in maritime history has not paid attention to the power of religion or the everyday use of language to establish authority's order in the navy. This chapter will also explore the role of religion and everyday language in creating order aboard ship.

The Admiralty's expectations for each of these activities were contained in the Regulations and Instructions. In this chapter, we will find further evidence of the tensions between the Admiralty's effort to control what took place aboard ships and the captains’ efforts to maintain order through their own methods.

Gunnery Exercise, Mustering and Acts of Cleaning

During the long eighteenth century the critical feature in ship-to-ship combat was the speed at which guns were fired, reloaded, and fired again. Aiming was secondary to rate of fire in the era's close actions. Division of labour and constant practice were necessary to obtain a high rate of fire. Ideally, every man received training in all activities necessary to operate the gun.

The Captain's Log of HMS Espiegle notes that on 5 February 1813, Seaman Thomas Wallis received six lashes for smoking on the main deck. What it does not tell us is what led up to the punishment and why it was only six lashes. Wallis, off watch, was headed to the spot designated by Captain John Taylor for smoking aboard ship, under the forecastle. As he left the ladder from the lower deck and entered the forecastle, Wallis brought his pipe to his mouth. Somewhere from behind, the captain called out to Wallis. He stopped and turned; Taylor was there accusing him of smoking out in the open of the main deck. Wallis denied the accusation. Taylor immediately ordered Boatswain's Mate Richard Marchant to deliver a starting to Wallis. Marchant hit Wallis across his bare back twenty-five times with the maintopsail clue-line of two and a half inches diameter. Captain Taylor had Marchant stop and ordered Boatswain's Mate John Foley to continue with another twenty strokes, using the topgallant clue-line of an inch and a half diameter. After the beating, Taylor told Wallis that he ought to remember to smoke only under the forecastle. Wallis murmured a reply, which he later said was a respectful yes, but which Taylor claimed was the remark, “I’ll smoke again.” Perceiving disrespect and disobedience, he ordered an immediate summary punishment of a dozen lashes for Wallis. Seaman Wallis was thereupon taken by the boatswain's mates and tied across the gangway. With dusk turning to night, all hands were turned up to watch the punishment. After six strokes, ship's surgeon B. E. Omeara stepped forward and stopped the punishment, over the objection by Captain Taylor. Wallis was removed to the sickbay to have his back dressed. Lieutenant Dougal stated that he “observed at the time amongst the other Officers it was worse than if he had received eight dozen, the back was swelled up in large black whales … it was very black all over.” Wallis had drawn the surgeon's attention during the lashing by holding his tongue for strokes five and six, causing the surgeon to think he had passed out.

This story perfectly represents the content of the following chapter. It contains the responses to behaviour perceived as breaking or threatening the order established by the navy and its representatives.

• 1 Frequency of Reading the Articles of War, Gunnery Exercise, Mustering, Acts of Cleaning, and Divine Service by Officer

• 2 Frequency of Reading the Articles of War, Gunnery Exercise, Mustering, Acts of Cleaning, and Divine Service by Ship

• 3 Type of Gunnery Exercise by Officer

• 4 Muster Type by Station Area

• 5 Frequency and Percentage of Gunnery Exercise, Mustering and Acts of Cleaning by Season

• 6 Percentage of Each Nationality for Officers and Seamen Serving on the North American and West Indies Station

• 7 The Number of Deserters from Thirty-Seven Ships

• 8 Mean Number of Lashes Given for Each Category of Summary Punishment

• 9 Number of Summary Punishments for Each of the Thirty-Six Ships in the Sample

• 10 Number of Summary Punishments for Marines and Seamen

• 11 Mean Number and Standard Deviation of Lashes Assigned to Seamen and Marines in Each of the Eighteen Categories of Punished Behaviour

• 12 Frequency of Summary Punishment for Fifty-Nine Officers

• 13 Rating or Rank of Those Who Were Court Martialled and the Verdict by Category of Offence