SOLDIER AS SAILOR

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 December 1928, Page 8

SOLDIER AS SAILOR

‘‘A DOG’S LIFE” We are accustomed to regard the British soldier as the man who has taken a principal share in bidding up the British Empire ashore; but do many of us appreciate how many have been his adventures afloat? (writes Sir'John Fortescue in the London “Times”). For a century and a half his first duty was to man the Fleet: and very early in his career, through the performance of this service, lie helped to build up the British mercantile marine. Three of Cromwell’s Dunbar regiments were aboard the ships which, after six furious action:; in 1652-53, brought tile Dutch to their knees and began, the transfer of Iho world’s carrying trade from Holland lo England. The Guards we re actually part of the crews which won ‘.lie Battle of Lowestoft in 1665. To flic very end of the eighteenth century soldiers continued to take a very large share in operations afloat, ami were frequently called upon, after iho characteristic fashion of British Ministers, to be in two places at once. Thu:;,-Admiral Byng’s Fleet, which was sent to ill?, relief of Minorca in 1756, was supposed to draw part of ils men from Hie garrison of Gibraltar. General Fowke who commanded at Gibralta declined to spare a soldier as the fortress would be brought into great danger of capture. So Byng failed from want of men, and Minorca fell. Thereupon the Government shot Byng, because they had sent, him to sea with too weak crews, and disgraced Fowke because he had not risked the loss of Gibraltar as well as of Minorca. Soldiers did not enjoy life on board

v- man-of-war. The Royal Navy was never kind to them. The officers were not really allowed to command their own men, and the men themselves, helpless at first in unfamiliar surroundings, sea-sick, and miserable, were I treated with abuse and contempt. They settled down in time; but even General Wolfe, an excellent disciplinarian, in his regimental orders, hinted that soldiers must be prepared to put up with a great deal on board His Majesty’s Fleet. The number of naval engagements in which soldiers took an honourable share is too great to be recounted, but two only are commemorated on the colours —the Battle of St. Vincent, and Lord Howe’s Victory of the first of June, 1794. It is noteworthy that when the Captain boarded the San Nicholas in the former 'action, the first man on the Spaniard’s decks was a soldier of the 69th (2nd 'Welsh), who took precedence even of Captain Horatio Nelson himself.

HARDSHIPS AT SEA. Altogether, soldiers greatly preferred hired transports to the King’s ships, though on them, too, they must have led a dog’s life. The ships were small; the men were overcrowded: the ventilation was imperfect; the allowance of water was necessarily very small; and in a gale of wind the conditions must have been appalling. Of course, there were also the ordinary perils of the sea; but no computation can be made of the number of soldiers, who, first and last, have been lost through them. An expedition which sailed for the West Indies in November, 1795, ran into a gale immediately after starting, and for a week afterwards the shore between Portland and Abbotsbury was lined with the corpses of dead soldiers. But, apart from this, the ways of the merchant skipper were often fraught with danger. At the end of the 18th century a hired transport sailed with troops from the West Indies for England, and was well out in blue water when the skipper died of delirium tremens. No one else of her officers oi* crew could navigate her, so a major of infantry took command, and engaged himself to bring her into the Downs. Moreover, he actually did carry the ship across the Atlantic, and duly came to anchor in an estuary, which, upon inquiry, proved to be that, not of the Thames, but of the Mersey. The good man’s error in calculation, in fact amounted to the whole length of Ireland; but sttil it niight have been worse. Another trouble with merchant skippers was their carelessness of their nautical instruments. Sir Harry Smith records that on a voyage from Halifax to Jamaica in 1872 he was obliged to keep a watchful eye on the quadrant, upon which the safety of them all depended. An old general told me that, as a very young subaltern of Engineers, he sailed from England for the Cape in a hired transport—a sailing barque of 350 tons. One week out the skipper and the mate came to blows, and in the scuffle the only sextant on the ship fell overboard. Happily the subaltern had a quadrant, which was requisitioned, and after a voyage of 140 days they at last .arrived at Table Bay. A still worse passage was that of the 17th Light Dragoons fro mßio de la Plata in 1807 —lBO days from Buenos Aires to the Thames.

Meanwhile it may be mentioned that British military officers have shown themselves on occasion as fond of a bit, of sailoring as naval officers a bit of soldiering. They have rarely had the chance, yet they found it in Sicily between .1806 and 18.1.0, when they organised a flotilla of gunboats an small craft for the defence of the island against, the French in Calbria. The Royal Navy was not allowed to have anything to do with it. It was the soldiers’ own flotilla, manned, trained, and commanded by soldiers, and it engaged King Joachim Murat’s flotilla more than once with brilliant success. I think that I am right in saying that British military officers took command of ships in the Caspian in the confused operations at the close of the Great War.

FAMOUS TROOPSHIPS. It. was rather an evil day, long since past, when the Royal Navy undertook to provide its own transports for conveying soldiers on their various missions across the sea. In the early days of steam the Admiralty furnished very had vessels, and kept them in very bad repair. One of these, 11.M.5. Megaera, was sent off with a battalion of the Rifle Brigade from the Downs to the Cape on January 2, 1852. She met a gale, caught fire twice, and put into Plymouth on January sth utterly disabled. She was hurried to sea again two days later, and, after catching fire .'gain more than once, at last reached Simonstown after a, passage of two months. This wretched old tub was ultimately run ashore on St. Paul’s Island more than 20 years later to prevent her from sinking, and happily she remains there. Another transport, H.M.S. Transit, embarked a regiment for India at Portsmouth in April, 1857. She met aj gale, and was so badly rigged that she

was obliged to put, into Corunna for safety. Later she ran into a storm east of the Cape, when her iron plates worked so loose that the water flowed in freely, and she nearly went down in mid-ocean. Finally she ran upon a rock in the Straits of Sunda and became a total wreck. All hands were saved, and there was a good riddance of another bad vessel. The once famous Indian troopships the Serapis. Jumna. Crocodile, and Euphrates (everyone knew their names al one. Lime) were of a very different class, and rather beautiful ships to look upon, but in due time they became obsolete and were not replaced. The Army is much happier in hired transports.