Sea Control - Sea Control 460 - Hulks of the Hamoaze with Emma Haddon

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

“The Hulks of the Hamoaze: a Study of the Receiving Ships of Plymouth during the Napoleonic Wars," by Emma Haddon, University of Portsmouth, July 25, 2022.

Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, Jared speaks with Emma Haddon to discuss her award-winning dissertation on the British receiving ships of the Napoleonic Wars. Brian Kuluklasuria edited and produced this episode. I would like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you are in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org. So, if you are interested, please reach out. Finally, I want to take this opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps.

You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha shipmates and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Emma Haddon. We're going to be discussing her dissertation, The Hulks of the Homo's, A Study of the Receiving Ships of Plymouth During the Napoleonic War. So Emma, welcome aboard. Could you start by telling the listeners a little bit more about yourself, please? Hi, Jared. Thank you for inviting me on. Yes, so my name's Emma. I've recently finished my

master's degree with the University of Portsmouth, where I looked at particular the receiving ships of Plymouth during the Napoleonic Wars. And I currently work in Dartmoor Prison, which some of your listeners may know a little bit about because of the American prisoners of war that were housed there during the War of 1812. Okay, I thought for a second you were implying that some of our listeners were the former residents of Dartmoor Prison, but I'm glad you took it where where the sentence wound up. But as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions stay our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So let's start with the simplest part here, because I did not know what a receiving ship was until I started

reading this. So what is a receiving ship? Well, I think one of the things, you know, if you were to type receiving ship into Google, one of the things that you'd get back as your definition would be that it was a stationary ship used to house new recruits into the royal navy or any particular navy because it doesn't you know receiving ships are not just used in the uk but one thing of note is that this is a little bit misleading as the word ship suggests that you may be able to sail it somewhere and this was actually far from the reality a receiving ship was usually a decommissioned ship that was no longer seaworthy and these vessels would have been demasted the rigging would have been taken down and it would have been removed as with the rudders so everything

that would have made the ship seaworthy and able to sail would have been taken away and then it would have been basically a basic shell used as a floating barracks essentially these hulks were anchored just offshore and in Plymouth in this case it was in the hammocks and this would make it incredibly difficult for these recruits to change their minds about their service and when I say when we say receiving ship I think the word hulk would be a better way of describing them and you know some of your listeners may well think hulk and think of prison hulk and the receiving ships were in their physicality very very similar but one of the other things about the receiving ship when I say about it being a place to house new recruits. This suggests that we were just

looking at volunteers but this was again far from reality. Now I'd expected to see pressed men in the muster roles of the receiving ships and those were men who were forced into service by the Royal Navy, by the press gangs and I expected to see them and I found them but I also expected to see a number of men that were listed as being turned over and these were men whose current assignments on whatever ship had come to an end this could be because the ship was returning to harbour to be refitted or be repaired or simply because the ship's commission had now come to an end and they were just waiting on board these receiving ships for their next assignment whatever that may be. But what I didn't expect to find were prisoners of war on a receiving ship. And

in the muster rolls that I was looking at, I found 555 Spanish men who had been taken as prisoners of war after the Battle of Cape Santa Maria in October 1802. And I also didn't expect to see sailors who had popped on board just to stay for maybe an evening or two because they brought prize vessels back in. The actual term receiving ship and a place to house new recruits is pretty far from the actual reality. And one of the very last things that I didn't expect to see was receiving ships housing shipwreck survivors, basically. It was also a place where men were being brought to stand trial. So they were there for court marshals. So to sum up a receiving ship as merely a space to house new recruits in a floating barracks, it's not really the case.

It was far more complicated and a far more complex space than I first imagined. Yeah, it actually sounds incredibly dynamic and like quite a motley crew of individuals. Which ships did you focus on and why? I think there's lots of threads to my research in general. And there are a few answers to this question, but I think I'll focus on two aspects in particular. So the first was my general interest in the age old question as to how do you man a navy? How do you man the Royal Navy? And this particular argument bloomed and was featured heavily during the long 18th century due to the many wars that Britain was involved in. One historian estimates that we were at war two years out of every three during that time period.

So there was obviously a lot of concern and anxiety in society how Britain could sustain that kind of involvement. And obviously, with Britain having an enlarging empire, which could only be reached by sea, you needed a navy to be able to get to those colonies outside in the wider world. but also you needed the Navy to protect it and Britain's interests. So impressment was one of those methods that the Royal Navy employed that piqued my interest during this time period whilst I was studying it. And in particular, it was the most recent research that suggested that it wasn't impressment itself wasn't as successful or maybe not as bad as previous historians had said. Now, that particular study that I'm referring to was based on the period of the French Revolutionary Wars. And the data was specifically from 1793 to 1801.

And depending on what year the data was from, it was estimated that around 10 to 27 percent of all men that entered the Royal Navy during those years would have been pressed into service. And that was far less than previous estimations. and it also suggested within this research that the navy was targeting specifically experienced seafarers so those images that you can conjure up of the press gangs coming into town and scooping up every single man and every tom dick or harry that they saw as they walked through the streets was somewhat overestimated now you know being somebody that was born and lives in the southwest rest of England, with all of these coastal communities and small fishing towns and villages around, I wanted to know what that would look like in reality to these people. So if the Royal Navy

were only targeting experienced seafarers, so we're looking at fishermen, merchantmen, sailors, just in general, what would that mean for these small rural communities and coastal communities in this particular area so if the press gangs did rock up in Plymouth or in some of the smaller fishing villages around we've got Brixham, Loo, Polpero what would that look like you know how would that have an impact on those communities so that that was why I was thinking right okay if it wasn't that big of a deal if impressment wasn't that big of a deal and only 15% of the entire Royal Navy were made up of impressed men what would that look like in the small communities that these men coming from and since receiving ships in particular had not really been used in

this kind of research before and so therefore it was an untapped source I decided to look at the Napoleonic Wars because it was slightly later than the most recent research but concentrate that search in Plymouth so that I could answer some of those questions primarily for myself but also then to see whether or not that could then have some sort of impact on the impressment debate in general. Sadly due to Covid and restrictions and archival closures my original plan had to be curtailed somewhat so and only ended up looking at one ship but I'm very glad that I only looked at one ship because what a find I got. So I chose the Salvador del Mundo as my receiving ship. Now the Salvador del Mundo when I chose it unbeknownst to me was the largest receiving ship in Plymouth

during the Napoleonic Wars. She was a Spanish ship 112 guns so big ship. She was taken as a prize during the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797. She was brought into Plymouth so the battle took place in the February by the April 1797 she was in Plymouth she was in harbour and she was being fitted out to be a receiving ship straight away so that's what they decided they were going to do with her and at this point this is now coming into the second reason why I chose the Salvador as well this was kind of a little bit of serendipity I guess because I can invoke the sense of chaos that a newly recruited member to the Royal Navy would have faced when they came aboard the Salvador del Mundo. And I can do this by quoting from first-hand testimony, and this was

given by a man called Robert Hay. And Robert decided at the grand old age of 13 that he wanted to go to sea for adventure. And Robert was born in Dumbartonshire, so he was not very far from Glasgow but he was more rural he was bought up on a farm and he decided that farming life wasn't for him he wanted to go to sea he didn't necessarily want to go to the Royal Navy he just wanted adventure he wanted to go to sea so one day in July 1803 he woke up and he decided he was going to run away and he ran away to Greenock and whilst he was there he was trying to get on board a ship he couldn't find a job he met a couple of young lads who said hey we're going to go to port glasgow there's a rendezvous there we're going to go and join the navy we're going to take the

king's bounty do you want to come with us and he said yeah all right then and off he went and eventually he ended up in plymouth and he talks about whilst he was on the tender where they went he went he came down on a tender ship called the maria and he was on it for a few weeks before he He arrived in Plymouth and he states in his in his memoir, from the descriptions I had heard given during the passage, I'd formed some idea of the appearance of a three deck ship, but found this far short of reality. The noise and bustle upon this vessel astonished me. On the lower deck appropriated to the ship's crew, almost every berth was converted into a shop or warehouse where commodities of every description may be procured. groceries, haberdashery goods, hardware, stationary, everything, in fact, that could be

named as the necessities or luxuries of life. And then he then goes on to describe how they were selling alcohol on board ship. And even though they weren't allowed to have alcohol, people selling it anyway, because the profits they could make from the alcohol far outweighed any punishment they would receive he talks about the fact that he he's a 13 year old boy born in rural scotland he's now on board a ship that has six years previously been been won in a battle and he talks about all the different types of people that he he can view on this ship and he talks about the fact there were people from africa there and there were people from asia on board ship he doesn't say any specific country unfortunately but he knows that they're from somewhere else he then goes on

to describe all the different kinds of costumes that people were wearing so there were kilted highlanders and there were spaniards wearing ruffles and there were men who had barely any clothes at all because they've just come from prison and they've been now put on board a receiving ship ready to join the navy and then he says to the ear came a hubbub little short of babel irish welsh dutch portuguese spanish french swedish italian together with every dialect prevailing between land's end and john o'groats and he also talks about the fact that the lower deck was never quiet there was never a silent moment because there was all of these people doing things day and night but it wasn't just men on board the ship their families were there too

um and uh you can probably hear it just gives me a sense of joy the fact that we actually have this first-hand account of what the salvador del mundo looked like in 1803 and when i'm looking at the salvador muster rolls in 1805 i can confirm that it was very very similar so that's why i chose it what was the receiving process like are you able to tell anything about what actually happened to personnel when they arrived so this this is very interesting question so um the receiving process was um not quite i not quite what i imagined because i just assumed you know men would come into plymouth they would go on board a receiving ship they'd be appraised there and then sent on um and that's again not what happened robert hay

gives a very brief description of what happened to him when he arrived in Plymouth in 1803 so he comes in on the Maria the tender ship as soon as it arrives into Plymouth the men on board that ship him included were taken to the Resolue now this uh Resolue again this was another prized ship from the French um it's moored up in the Hamos as well and it's being used as an examination ship um and hay actually describes it as such as well and he says that basically we go onto this ship and as soon as we're there they're being appraised and all of the men have to strip down until they're naked they're washed and cleansed they are then taken to a surgeon who or a naval surgeon who's now going to look for signs of any illness or disease so they're looking for men

who are a fit for service and b if they do have anything at all they don't want to put them on a receiving ship because you wouldn't want to put anybody who was sick or diseased in with healthy men because that would then spread like wildfire um so um once they've established who was fit to go they would then be taken off to whichever receiving ship was ready to to have them um if you were discovered to have some sort of disease or were ill there were a couple of things that the surgeon could do now um if you had something which wouldn't take very long uh to cure for instance maybe just a couple of days maybe you've got a bit of seasickness or you know a bit of vomiting or whatever perhaps you'll be kept on the resolute for a couple of days just to see how you

are um and then once you're better you could then be moved on to another receiving ship um if however there was something a bit more to whatever was wrong with you you could either be discharged as sick to the Royal Naval Hospital in Stonehouse which was not very far away um or you could be discharged to one of the hospital ships such as the Prince Frederick now the Prince Frederick comes up time and time again in the salvador muster role um so you know you could go there um and in very extreme cases if you were declared unfit for service you would be discharged permanently there and then i was going to ask this as a follow-up here because uh okay i recently interviewed uh david graham about his book the wager and he's talking about immunity that occurred

during the War of Tinker's year back in, I want to say, 1741. And part of the way they filled out Commodore Anson's squadron at that point was, again, impressment. They scooped up all these people and they brought on a lot of older and infirm people, people missing limbs, people up to 80 years of age. So I was curious about how many people are actually being outright turned away as like, no, we can't use you for service. oh um very few to be honest um i think so um on the salvador itself the thing is is that

on the resolute i i didn't i have not checked the muster rolls of that one so that's going to be a follow-up um you know an expansion of this project because this what this project actually showed me um was how very little we know about how the navy was manned um i i it's not through it's not necessarily assumptions being made but it's the most of the research is based on actual ships of the line man of war muster rolls rather than the actual receiving ships that took these in so i mean from the resolute itself how many were turned away i don't know because I don't have that data but what I can say is on the Salvador in the sixth month period that I'm looking at in particular 118 men were discharged as sick from Salvador

now that doesn't sound like an awful lot but that's 2.8 percent of the entire cohort of men that came on board the Salvador in that sixth month period now the Salvador was one of only eight ships I think in total that were receiving ships in Plymouth at that time they were all different sizes you know so the Salvador was by far the largest but if we scale that up we're looking at 18% of men being turned away every six months due to sickness now whether or not they come back in that in itself would be a large piece of work anyway because then you'd have to then go through um not only the naval uh hospital logs to see if somebody was discharged back into the navy and taken back on ship but also those are the hospital ships as well um so an awful lot of

cross-referencing would have to happen in order to be able to get a real definitive answer um but when we when you look at the royal navy at this point anyway you know it was standard to have about 20 of people being declared sick at any one point you know so that the people that were being turned away or or being discharged off to hospital during this time is not out of the ordinary um but it's still a high proportion of men for sure um and you know there were there was two uh people that i i noted him in my actual dissertation um but there were many more um so there was two in particular so there were they were both from ireland one was thomas murphy he was a landsman volunteer he was 28 years old he'd come over from county clare and william talbot i

don't know his age but he was listed as a ship's boy he was a volunteer he'd come across from dublin so we're looking at somebody aged between probably 12 and 15 um they were on board salvador for only two days before they were discharged as being sick um and they didn't appear back in the muster roll um so therefore whether or not they ever went to sea on a royal navy vessel i i don't know at this point um but i would suggest that you know 20 of all of men that's that's that's a lot it's it's substantial particularly when you think of today's standards um were POWs or the personnel awaiting court-martial handled any differently uh the prisoners of war um they they were quite interesting so um from what I understand from the

actual um muster rolls they were brought on board the salvador in october 1802 so just after the battle um they were they were brought on they were just housed on there i don't know what happened whilst they were there because unfortunately i didn't get the ship's logs because i wasn't expecting to see prisoners of war um but they were on there until january So they were there for a good couple of months before some of them were moved out. Most of them were moved into the nearby Mill Bay prison. And all of the officers, they were deemed to be gentlemen. So they were shipped out to various different parole towns, which parole towns, unfortunately, again, the Salvador muster doesn't doesn't tell me.

um it's it's it's it's a real shame because I'm quite a curious person so I want to know what happened to them um but I don't know where they went but you know on nearby parole towns uh to Plymouth we had Launceston which is in Cornwall um Ashburton which is about I don't know 30 or so miles away from Plymouth um so there were a few towns in the area that these prisoners of war would go as for the court-martial again not really they weren't treated any differently they were just as far as the muster roles are concerned they were there so therefore they were being vittled essentially um in terms of their treatment whilst they were on board the salvador again that would have to be a case of getting the ship's logs which will hopefully be featured when i

expand the project how long were personnel typically assigned to a receiving ship before being sent out to ship in the fleet? This particular question is quite difficult to answer purely because of the types of men we're talking about and also because of the fact that there's this system called the lent or lending system. So if we look at that particular system first, a historian described it as being a complicated system and basically said that these men were lent to either another man of war or to merchant vessels. And this was to replace men who had been pressed into naval service, which on the face of it sounds really reasonable and quite logical because you need to keep the fleet going. However, the research that I have from this

master role doesn't actually lend itself to that explanation at all. Aside for two or three instances most of men were lent to naval vessels but it wasn't just you know men of war um they were lent to tender ships they were lent to the hospital ships um they were lent to um ships that were in harbour waiting to get commissioned but weren't actually going anywhere and they didn't actually stay there for that long either and there were 849 individual entries within the muster role of people being lent to various ships so just to give sort of like a brief overview or an example of this of the men that were on the salvador who were then going to join hms achilles crew 43 were lent to her in the days before their eventual discharge why were they lent why were

they not just discharged there straight away again need ships logs potentially to find out the answer to that but there were also instances like i said about men being lent out multiple times and to multiple different vessels and there was a chap called thomas mead he was a volunteer landsman from limerick he was brought across on the tender ship maria he embarked on the salvador on the 8th of april 1805 and he was immediately as in that day lent back to marie to the maria what he was doing there i don't know and then he eventually returned to the salvador on the 15th of april before being lent to hms achille on the 18th and then he became part of the achilles crew on the 20th of april so whether or not there was a how would i put this maybe a housing shortage

i suppose might be a way of looking at it was he being put back on that tenter ship for a few days because there wasn't enough space for him on the salvador and the maria was staying in port for a couple of days before it was going back off up to scotland to get new recruits i don't really know um and again that's something for the future and then i said about the the men being lent to hospital ships there was multiple entries of men being lent to the prince frederick hospital ship but they weren't being discharged as sick they were they they were being lent to it so the question now becomes what were they doing there you know were they being part of the ship's sort of skeleton crew to keep things going because they need people to clean the ship and make sure

that everything's fine so that people are actually becoming healthy enough to then actually go on and join the Royal Navy and I'm hoping that ship slogs will help with that and then we have the men that were recorded as bringing prizes in to Plymouth during this time so they would stay for maybe one or two nights on the Salvador before going off to either join their ship because it's coming to port or maybe join another ship, he's going to then take them back off into the channel so they can rejoin their ship's crew. There was, you know, some men waited days, some men waited weeks, some men waited months. And there was one man in particular who interested me somewhat. His name was Isaac Hurst. He's recorded in the muster roll as being a prisoner of HMS

phoenix not what he was doing or why he was a prisoner just that he was one now he was noteworthy because he was the only man who was boarded on the salvador on the 3rd of january 1805 but he also had one of the longest days recorded he was on board the salvador until the 4th of june when he was discharged onto the gun brick horsey so he was there for 152 days on board the receiving ship you know full six months so there was no real evidence of any kind of system within this muster roll i you know i couldn't detect any rhyme or reason as to why certain men were being chosen and others weren't now that's because the salvador muster roll was pretty bleak in terms of entry which was something that was addressed much later on when all ships had to give full account

of what people were doing and who they were and where they were from but that didn't happen until 1807 which is why I had to do an awful lot of cross-referencing with other ships essentially but again some of this detail may very well be in the ship's logs so that will be my next oh my god I can't believe I'm going to say this port of call when I expand the project perfect unfortunately that's all that we have time for today I'd like to thank my guest Emma Haddon And so, Emma, where can we find you online? I think I know what you're going to work on next, as you've referenced it several times there. But, yeah, if you want to tell us anything about any more about your next project, please go ahead. Well, I'm looking at hopefully expanding this into a PhD because I think that this deserves an awful lot more research and a lot more time,

specifically because I think that of all of the naval ports, Plymouth doesn't feature very heavily. So I think, you know, Plymouth was the centre of a spider web of men manning the Navy. And I think there's an awful lot of questions to be answered. And I'm hoping by expanding this project into a PhD that maybe we can get to the bottom of it. Well, if you had said anything other than expanding this into a PhD, I would have sent you an emphatic email after this, encouraging you to do exactly that. You've talked about so much that merits further exploration, but thank you once again for joining us. To listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

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