VI

LORD HAWKE

IT would seem more than a little curious that the name of Hawke should be now comparatively unknown to the average Englishman, were it not that even in his lifetime his services were tardily acknowledged and grudgingly rewarded. This may have been partly because he had no great family interest, and still more, perhaps, because, devoted to his profession, he meddled little with politics and not at all with party; his business, he declared by his actions, was "to keep foreigners from fooling us." Other reasons, of a more personal nature, will manifest themselves in the course of the narrative.

Edward Hawke, the son of a barrister whose family had been settled at Treriven in Cornwall for many generations, was born in London in 1705. On the mother's side he was great-grandson of Sir William Fairfax, of Steeton-cousin of Lord Fairfax, the parliamentary general-and nephew of Lieutenant-Colonel Martin Bladen, who had served with Marlborough in Flanders, and in Spain as aide-de-camp to Lord Galway. From 1717 to his death in 1746, Bladen was a commissioner of trade and plantations and a member of parliament, and was thus able in some degree to support

and forward the career of his nephew, whose guardian he became on the death of the boy's father in 1718.

In February 1720 young Hawke entered the navy as a volunteer on board the Seahorse, commanded by Captain Thomas Durell, with whom he continued for five years, on the North American Station and in the West Indies, till, on the return of the Seahorse to England, he passed his examination on the 2nd June, 1725. He was afterwards for a couple of years on the coast of Africa and in the West Indies in the Kinsale; and in April 1729 he was promoted to be third lieutenant of the Portland, in which, in the Leopard and in the Edinburgh, he served in the Channel and in the Mediterranean, till in January 1732 he was appointed to the Scarborough with his old captain, Durell, with whom he again went to the North American Station. In November 1732 he was moved into the Kingston bearing the broad pennant of Sir Chaloner Ogle at Jamaica, and was promoted by him to be commander of the Wolf sloop, and again, in March 1734, to be captain of the Flamborough, in which ship he remained till September 1735, when she was paid off in England and Hawke was placed on half-pay.

All this was peace service and uneventful-if any sea service in those days, with its accompanying accidents and dangers, can be properly so called; but for nearly sixteen years, from the day of his first entry into the navy till, as a post-captain, he paid off the Flamborough, he had been constantly employed at sea, and at the age of thirty had thoroughly learned his profession under such capable officers as Durell and Ogle. He did not again go afloat till the outbreak of the war with Spain in 1739.

The navy of the eighteenth century, and more especially of the first half of the eighteenth century, was, in its daily life and discipline, almost as different from the navy of today as it was in the ships, their propulsion and their armament. Allowing for a great deal of exaggeration, we are still compelled by much corroborative evidence to accept the picture of life on board ship, as portrayed by Smollett in Roderick Random, as substantially correct. Smollett himself served as junior surgeon's mate on board a ship of the line in the fleet which went out to the West Indies in 1740, and was present at the abortive attempt on Cartagena in 1741. The experiences of his hero are referred to the same date, and are probably, to some extent, autobiographical, or were gathered from the yarns of his messmates. He describes the berth in which he and the other surgeon's mates had to live as "a gloomy mansion" six feet square, enclosed with canvas, "with a board by way of a table." When he saw "the sick berth or hospital," he was much less surprised that people should die on board than that any sick person should recover. Here, he says—

"I saw about fifty miserable distempered wretches, suspended in rows, huddled one on another, and deprived of the light of day as well as of fresh air; breathing nothing but a noisome atmosphere of the morbid streams exhaling from their own diseased bodies, devoured with vermin hatched in the filth that surrounded them, and destitute of every convenience necessary for people in that helpless condition."

The story of Captain Oakum who is enraged at there being sixty-one on the sick list and declares that he will have no sick in his ship, is almost incredible. The tyrant

is represented as ordering all the patients to be brought on deck, and examining them-calling them skulkers and lazy vagabonds. One man "just freed of a fever and so weak that he could scarcely stand," was sentenced to receive a dozen lashes; others were punished in various ways; some died, and the sick list was reduced to less than a dozen. In all this there is possibly a good deal of fiction, but probably some substratum of fact.

The description of a gale which they encountered soon after they put to sea shows an utter lack of discipline and even of seamanship. No doubt, as a landsman, the author exaggerates; but he represents officers and sailors as "running backwards and forwards with distraction in their looks, hallooing to one another, and undetermined what they should attend to first; masts falling over the side,1 and so on. This is bad enough; but the victualling appears to have been worse. During the attack on Cartagena the seamen are said to have

languished for five weeks on the allowance of a purser's quart per diem of fresh water for each man; their provisions consisted of putrid salt beef, to which the sailors gave the name of Irish horse; salt pork of New England, which though neither fish nor flesh, savoured of both; bread from the same country, every biscuit whereof, like a piece of clock-work, moved by its own internal impulse, occasioned by the myriads of insects that dwelt within it; and butter, served out by the gill, that tasted like train oil thickened with salt."

1 [It is a certain fact that in the middle of last century, and very much later, masts did very commonly go over the side in any stress of weather. The rope was extremely bad, and the standing rigging most unscientifically fitted. As the ships were also extremely crank, the readiness of the masts to go probably prevented more serious disasters.]