PRACTICAL SEAMANSHIP 1777

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 2, Issue 2, 1 October 1969, Page 68

PRACTICAL SEAMANSHIP 1777

J. F. Allan

A copy of a Treatise on Practical Seamanship by William Hutchinson, published in 1777, was recently presented to the Wellington Division of the Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve, hmnzs Olphert, by an old member of the Division, Lieutenant-Commander I. L. Thomsen, rnznvr (ret'd), for long Director of the Carter Observatory. He in turn obtained the book, which is in first class condition, from Dr L. J. Comrie, a New Zealander who became Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac Office in Greenwich. The volume will be held on permanent loan by the Turnbull Library, where it will form a useful addition to an already good selection of works on early seamanship.

When this book was published, Hutchinson would appear to have been approaching sixty years of age. He was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and served his apprenticeship as a cook on a collier working between the North East of England and London; and he claims that seamen brought up in this hard school 'are the most perfect in working and managing their ships in narrow, intricate, and difficult channels, and in tide ways'. From there he graduated to the East India trade and was in command of a privateer in the Mediterranean as a young man. He was also at sea, presumably in command of East Indiamen, during the Seven Years War which began in 1756. In 1760 he came ashore as Dock Master at Liverpool, and was so employed when his book was written.

A letter received from the Secretary of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board quotes Picton's Memorials of Liverpool as follows: 'Captain William Hutchinson was a remarkable man ... of varied qualifications and pursuits, amongst other things the inventor of reflecting mirrors for lighthouses, the first of which he erected at Bidston in 1763. In 1794 he published a treatise on naval architecture. From January 1768 to August 1793 he continued a series of observations on the tides, the barometer, the weather, and the winds, the mss of which are in the Athenaeum and Lyceum Libraries in Liverpool. From these were obtained data by which the Holdens, father and son, calculated the tide-tables. He was also the founder of the Marine Society. He died February 14, 1801, and is interred in St. Thomas' churchyard, Liverpool.' Perhaps the main interest of Hutchinson's Treatise in New Zealand, is the insight it gives into the early training of Captain James Cook, who joined his first collier in 1747; Hutchinson would have preceded him by only a few years. It is a little disappointing that Cook is not mentioned at all, but although published in 1777, there are indications

that the book was first drafted prior to 1769, in which case Cook would not have returned from his first voyage. So we have to be satisfied with Hutchinson's descriptions of some of the techniques which Cook was brought up in; two of these are worth quoting. First, 'On Tacking': 'But the best lessons for tacking, and working to windward in little room, are in the Colliers bound to London, where many great ships are constantly employed, and where wages are paid by the voyage, so that interest makes them dexterous, and industrious to manage their ships with few men, in a complete manner, in narrow channels, more so perhaps than in any other trade by sea in the world.'

Secondly, 'On making Passages in the Coal Trade': 'ln the navigation from Newcastle to London, two thirds of the way is amongst dangerous shoals, and intricate channels, . . . 'Blowing weather and contrary winds, often collect a great many of these colliers together, so that they sail in great fleets, striving with the utmost dexterity, diligence, and care, against each other, to get first to market with their coals, or for their turn to load at Newcastle, where at the first of a Westerly Wind, after a long Easterly one, there are sometimes two or three hundred ships turning to windward in, and sailing out of that harbour in one tide; the sight of so many ships, passing and crossing each other in so little time and room, by their dexterous management, is said to have made a travelling French gentleman of rank, to hold up his hands and exclaim, "that it was there France was conquered".

'What is most worthy remarking here when they are going out with a fair wind in their great deep loaded ships, and the waves running high upon the bar, that they would make the ship strike upon it, if she was to sail out pitching against the head waves, to prevent which when they come to the bar, they in a very masterly manner bring the ship to, and she drives over, rolling broad side to waves which management preserves her from striking.

'When they turn to windward up the Swin in dark hazey weather ... a compass course is not to be relied upon, therefore each ship, very artfully, endeavours to get a leader that they know draws more water than themselves, and the leading ship knowing their danger running no farther than they think is safe, commonly lets go her anchor, the next following ship apprehending the same danger, has their anchors ready and lets it go just above the first ship, and the next steers close past these two ships and come to an anchor just above them, and so on with the next, till the whole fleet forms a line one above the other, so that the ship that was first becomes last, when they commonly again heave up her anchor, and steer close by the whole fleet if they are perceived to ride a-float and the next ship follows them, and either

comes to an anchor again above the uppermost ship as before, or proceeds forward, according as they find by the soundings, by which they know that they have past the dangers they were afraid of and gets into a safe track, where they can depend upon the compass course, then they set and carry all the sail possible to get or keep a-head of each other.’ A second point of interest to Turnbull Library readers, rests in Hutchinson’s reference, in drawing his reader’s attention to an illustration, to the ‘much more masterly delineation in Falconer’s Marine Dictionary’. For the Turnbull Library holds three copies of different editions of this volume; not the original 1769 edition, but a 1789 one, together with later ones of 1815 and 1830. And while the two men produced their books differently, they have many points of contact. There is one slight mystery which I am unable to solve; it arises out of Hutchinson’s remark that Falconer’s plate ‘came out a good while after my plates were struck off’. Now as Hutchinson did not publish until eight years after Falconer, it would therefore seem that Hutchinson’s plates were ‘struck off’, and his accompanying notes presumably in draft form, about ten years before publication.

There are other clues which support, but do not confirm, this theory - as already noted, the failure to mention Cook is significant; and in the end papers is a chart of the approaches to Liverpool originally dated 1771, but corrected to 1776; and finally, in as much as they appear to be out of order, the last few entries appear to be a postscript. Hutchinson, had certainly seen Falconer’s book before going to press, and so one would expect his own to show some advances - which I think it does - but whereas Falconer’s Dictionary is inevitably ‘Verra interesting, but awfu’ disconnected’, and Hutchinson is more readable and more opinionated, the former ran to several editions over sixty years or more, with little amendment beyond up-dating, while Hutchinson as far as I am aware reached only the second edition. Falconer is undoubtedly an easier and much more complete Book of Reference, suitable for any seaman’s bookshelf; whereas Hutchinson wrote for men who wanted to be not just seamen, but good ones. For this reason he introduces almost another dimension when compared with Falconer, and is the more interesting for it.

Hutchinson’s biography, as I have sketched above, leaves wide gaps. Falconer’s life is well documented, from his birth in poverty in Edinburgh, through service at sea in Royal and Merchant Navies, through two shipwrecks and a celebrated poetic work ‘The Shipwreck’, to his loss at sea on HMS Aurora, when that ship vanished without trace on a voyage to India in 1769; (the year his Dictionary was first published). His manner is described by the Editor of the 1815 edition as ‘Blunt, awkward, and forbidding - but a thorough seaman’. His own original introduction endorses this view, in his abrupt dismissal of

previous attempts to produce similar books as ‘extremely imperfect - voluminous but very deficient in the most necessary articles - vague, perplexed and unintelligible’. Hutchinson, one feels, was a much happier man, and aware of his own shortcomings; thus ‘as an author, he would be glad of any remarks candidly pointed out how to improve his defects’. Also a more humble man; in discussing Privateering he remarks that he ‘never had the advantage’ of service in ‘our incomparable Royal Navy. I hope my defects will be thought the more excusable.’ His work is also much enlivened by many anecdotes drawn from his own experience. They would be more valuable to historians if he had included more details of the men, ships, date and circumstances which surround each of them; but this he largely omitted. Nevertheless, there is much to delight the lay reader, and the historian, in remarks such as: ‘ln the latter part of the last foreign war, in the evening, I saw one of His Majesty’s scows of war with all sail set crowding away with a large wind at S.S.E. and rainy weather, with about 140 pressed men on board, that night the wind blew suddenly round to the opposite point N.N.W. and blew a storm that must have overset and sunk her, for no remains was ever found but her barge that had floated off the booms.’

(This, Hutchinson reckons, with a logic I cannot follow, should ‘go against that vile and cruel practice of pressing seamen for government’s service). ‘On getting a Pilot on Board in bad Weather at Sea: This is sometimes attended with so much danger, that the Pilot sloops belonging to Liverpool, rather than run the risk of boarding a ship from their own sloop, sometimes go no nearer to the ship than to have a small rope thrown to or veered a-stern to them, which they make fast about the pilot’s body under his armpits, he then goes overboard into the sea when as near the ship as they dare venture, and he is hauled on board the ship by the rope.’

(A practice unlikely to meet with approval from the pilots of 1969! And yet there are similarities between the Treatise of 1777, and the Admiralty Manual of Seamanship of 1964. None more striking than the comparison of ‘stiff’ and ‘crank’ ships, (Hutchinson); and ‘lively’ and ‘sluggish’ ships, (Admiralty). Apart from the evolution of different terminology, the 1964 edition could easily be a simple re-draft of the 1777 one.) On Letter of Marque Ships and Privateers: ‘I have known our people vastly at a loss, both in privateers and merchants ships, when a war happens after a long peace; as in the first part of the war before last, I was in an East India ship of 32 guns, and a letter of mart ship in the Jamaica trade, where our great guns and small arms were never

exercised, because none on board either ship knew how it was to be done . . .’

But nevertheless, Hutchinson was so keen on Swivel Gun Carriages that he ‘was induced to think this carriage worthy the notice of the managers of our Royal Navy, therefore I got a nice model with a gilt gun, etc. made, and a friend to present it to Lord Anson, then at the head of the Admiralty, and was ready to give a report of it, but my well meant endeavours were disregarded, for I never heard or saw anything further of my gun and carriage afterward.’ One hopes that his suggestions had a bearing on the introduction of swivel guns in time to be decisive factor in Rodney’s victory over de Grasse at the Saints in 1782; and that his gilt model gun may have been known to Sir Charles Douglas, Rodney’s Captain of the Fleet, who is credited with this, and other, reforms.

Hutchinson’s interest in reflecting mirrors, lighthouses, and tides is evident from several pages devoted to these topics. The Port of Liverpool gained four lighthouses in 1763, all fitted with reflecting parabolic mirrors, three years after Hutchinson became Dockmaster. He claims that ‘the losses have been very few in comparison to what they were before the light houses were Built’. Finally, in his conclusion, which is an exhortation to religious observance (clearly much honoured in the breach!): ‘For the first fifteen years I was at sea, in different trades, I never saw any religious duty publicly performed on board except that in an East India Ship, for two or three Sundays, when we draw near the Cape of Good Hope, we had prayers, which ceased after we passed the Cape. Indeed that great Company, or their Managers, are highly blamable in shamefully rating these large ships at 499 tons, in order to avoid the expense of a Clergyman.’

The formal entry for the book is as follows HUTCHINSON, William A | treatise |on | practical seaman/hip; | with | hints and remarks | relating thereto: | de/igned to contribute Something towards fixing rules | upon | philq/bphical and rational principles |to | make ships, and the management of them; | and also navigation, in general, more perfect, | and | con/equently le/s dangerous and destructive | to | health, lives, and property. |By William Hutchinson, Mariner, | and dock master, at Liverpool. | Printed, | and sold for the author at all the principal seaports in Great-Britain | and Ireland, 1777. 4 0 xiv, 2i3p. 11 plates

The second edition which is not held in the Library, is recorded as follows in the British Museum Catalogue. It would appear to be some fifty-six pages larger than the first edition, although with the same number of plates.

HUTCHINSON, William The second edition, considerably enlarged of A treatise on practical seamanship with new and important hints, etc. Liverpool, Printed for the author. 1787. xv,26op. 11 plates