the agent who gave credit made it immediately available by the captor. This must have done something to counterbalance the long delays in the payment of wages. The amounts were relatively great. A sum of £175, 38. was several years' pay for a yeoman of the powder-room. The business of prize agency, though instructive, is somewhat beside the question. With the Chest at Chatham, and the Sixpenny Office, we are on the road to great matters. Both are pretty examples in a small way of the fine patina of abuses which settles on ancient institutions. Both were meant for the help of injured seamen. The Chest at Chatham was a friendly society of seamen and shipwrights (but (but the shipwrights afterwards retired), formed by Sir John Hawkins and others in 1590 for the relief of hurt and maimed men. It was endowed by kings with farms, and fines imposed on men for misconduct. The members subscribed sixpence a-month per man, fourpence amonth per grommet (i.e., ordinary seaman more or less, but the word was antiquated long before 1800), and twopence per boy. It was governed under the supervision of a Principal Officer of the Navy Board, by a committee of masters and pursers. It gave "present relief" to hurt and maimed men, and also terminable, or in very severe cases lifelong, allowances. The Chest had a revenue partly from funded money of £75,280, 8s. On the whole it strove to be honest, but it did not succeed in preventing dishonesty. Its farms were let on unduly favourable terms to relatives of those managers of the Chest who had happened to have the granting of the leases. Moreover, the rule was to pay pensions at the office only. The collection of the pensions fell largely into the hands of local publicans, who took in applicants, encouraged them to drink, and then, when they were put on the fund, acted as their agents. These men "nobly took their twenty-five per cent," in the literal sense of the words-not always, indeed, but much too often. The Sixpenny Office was a more extensive affair. In the reign of William and Mary there was passed an Act to deduct sixpence a-month from the wages of all merchant seamen for the benefit of Greenwich Hospital. In Queen Anne's reign an improved machinery for the collection of the money was provided by another Act of Parliament. My Lords of the Admiralty were authorised to appoint receivers, who in turn named Custom House officials to collect in the outports and the colonies. The sixpences were levied from near the beginning of the reign of George II. at all ports in his Majesty's dominions (except Gibraltar, Port Mahon, and those within the Charter of the East India Company) from incoming ships. The amount was not small. In 1802 Greenwich Hospital benefited to the extent of £20,225, 78. The sum would have been larger if irregularities and abuses had not vindicated their rights to a place in the Sixpenny Office as well as in others. In the outports the collection was fairly strict, since it was made by Custom House officials, who took twelve and a half per cent of the receipts for their trouble. At Liverpool the percentage amounted to £1081, 16s. 10d. But in London the abuses of the age were rampant. The three Receivers were simply sinecurists, who did not even live near London. One of them, the Comptroller, whose business it was to check all accounts, was "one of the Esquire Beadles of the University of Cambridge, where he resided." From time to time he dropped into the office to sign papers laid before him by Messrs Eve and Stanbridge, the clerks. They, for their part, took unauthorised fees from captains for "despatching their business." The sixpences were no doubt all deducted from the seamen's wages. They were not all paid to Greenwich Hospital. Nor ought it to be forgotten that no merchant seaman ever benefited by the Hospital-as a merchant seaman. He had to be wounded in the Navy while serving as pressed man or volunteer before he was qualified for a pension. The Sixpenny Office was a little nest of jobbery, but it was not only that. It also provided the only machinery known in those days when the census was just beginning for making an estimate of the size of the seafaring population. The Commissioners sought to get at the facts, in part from a desire to discover what the merchant seamen's sixpences ought to have amounted to, but doubtless also from a desire to obtain information for the manning of the Navy. The Office was but a blind guide. When asked to estimate the number of seamen, it took the gross amount of its collections in shillings, and divided by six, the proportion a man would pay if in employment all through the year. But he never was. Such a calculation was useless, and so was an estimate based on the known registered tonnage, and the wild supposition that all merchant ships were fully manned at the same moment. If they had been, 124,470 men and boys would have been required to man them. But it was notorious that a merchant vessel which discharged her crew the moment she reached port, and did not ship another till she was laden and about to sail, was unmanned for a third of every year. The Commis sioners called in Mr John Dalley, Assistant RegistrarGeneral of Shipping. Mr Dalley, who gave his evidence capitally and who plainly spoke with ample knowledge and after careful examination, would risk no estimate of the number of seamen in his Majesty's Dominions. He would not even answer for Ireland, which possessed 1004 vessels of 54,241 tons. But he did say that an experience of fifteen years led him to believe that the Foreign Trade of Great Britain employed 37,283 men; the coasting trade, 35,970; and the fisheries, 14,628. As regards the fisheries, he was on safe ground, for the men were registered. The total was 88,381. Observe that for the first months of 1802 there were voted for the Navy 100,000 seamen and 30,000 marines. The number of seamen in the Navy was therefore about 12,000 in excess of the total seafaring population of Great Britain. The 1004 Irish vessels of 50 tons each, or so, did not make up the difference. Those writers who say say that the Royal Navy was manned in war time from the Merchant Service, and that both were manned by British-born men, ought to explain how it was done. The Naval Storekeeper at Jamaica, the Sixpenny Office, and the rest, were but as the outworks. The Dockyards formed "the body of the place," the citadel of waste and corruption. A capital breach by which an entry may be made is afforded in the shape of the Cooper's contract at Chatham. In the course of their reports the Commissioners had occasion to remark on the disposition of human nature to be generous with the money of other people. The Cooper's contract is a fine example of this easy magnanimity. The story begins with the death on the 25th May 1745 of the contractor, Mr William Gunton. His widow kept on the business still, and the contract was renewed with her. I leave aside certain details of prices, increases, and abatements as being not essential. The relict of Mr Gunton must have remarried somewhat late in life, for when she died in 1782 she left two orphans Michael and John Hedges. The contract was given in trust for them to Messrs Young, Adams, and Corson, who held it till the Hedges were of an age to take it in hand themselves in 1800. Here was an old-standing connection. The dockyard officials plainly thought that a suspicious watchfulness would have been unbecoming towards friends of ancient date. The way of doing business is described by the Navy Office itself when it was at last forced to take notice of what was going on. It was beautifully simple. at the dock- or rope-yard, a message "When the Cooper was wanted was sent to the contractors desiring them to send a man down, which was accordingly done (but more frequently he came without being sent for). It does not, however, appear that any person gave the Cooper directions as to what work he was to perform, but when he had finished he made out a note, which he took to the Storekeeper's office. It was there entered in the workmanship Book without the work being previously surveyed, and one of the livered it back to the Cooper." Clerks put his name to it, and de At the end of the quarter or half year a bill was presented, and was paid without question. Given an ordinary 8 flesh-and-blood contractor be said on the organisation of the yards. At the head was the Commissioner, a naval officer who, as Dugald Dalgetty would have said, took the post when somewhat weary of the wars. He was understood to renounce all claim to hoist his flag on active service. There were a few cases of Commissioners who afterwards served at sea, but they were very few. The Commissioner, though first in dignity, was in some ways the least important officer in the yard. He could neither appoint, promote, nor dismiss any man employed in it. He could not originate an order except when the Commander-in-Chief of the fleet based on the dockyard sent a pressing demand that a ship should be fitted and victualled for urgent service. His subordinates communicated directly with the Navy office. These subordinates were: the Master Shipwright and his assistants, the Master's Attendant-Sailing Masters who had charge of the ships in dock, It is only just to allow that the storekeeper at Chatham, when asked to explain how he came to permit these monstrous overcharges to pass, replied that he had so much to do that he was unable to check the notes presented to him for signature. The Commissioners do to some extent bear out his plea. They allow that if vast masses of unchecked bills had accumulated since the beginning of hostilities in 1793, the reason might well be that the staff was not numerous enough to cope with the immense increase of work caused by the war. Yet they make it abundantly plain that the confusion and laxity of the administration made waste inevitable. A few words must the men were paid gave them not only the power but a very strong motive to overestimate the amount of work done. The men were paid by the quarter, and one quarter was always held back. Tickets were given them for the work done, and on the strength of them they found credit with local tradesmen. The rate of pay had been fixed in the last years of the seventeenth century, and could only be altered "by the King in Council." For the shipwrights the rate was 2s. 3d. for the day's work, and it was lower for the less skilled men. By the end of the eighteenth century this wage had become manifestly insufficient. The simple course would have been to revise the rate of pay. The Admiralty preferred to accept the suggestion that a system of piecework should be introduced. It was called "task" in shipbuilding, and "job" in repairing. The experiment began in 1775, and the system was fully established after some higgling in 1793. The result of it was that the men were allowed two days' pay (at the rate of 1690) for one day's work. This was the theory; but in practice exaggerated bills for wages were sent in and paid without control by the Navy Office. The officials had a strong motive for swelling the wages bill. From the Quartermen upwards they were allowed to take apprentices, for whose labour they were paid on a scale regulated by the amount paid to the men. When the other officers lost the right of keeping apprentices the Quartermen were left in possession of the privilege. There was an elaborate system of checks on paper, but in practice it was a futility. The officers were supposed to watch one another, but everybody knew that their rule was to copy the figures of one among them. What "the Public" lost first and last by this combination of the officials to draw excessive sums for wages it is impossible to say. The wages paid in Plymouth Yard alone rose from £386,001 in 1758 to £840,277 in 1801. Part of the increase was inevitable, but much was due to fraud. The rule was, that as much was to be drawn for as possible. Though there was a superannuation allowance for aged men, there was no age limit. Old men were allowed to go on in the yard, if not at the dockside, at least in the Boat, Top and Capstan, and Mast House at full wages. We hear of one John Bonnallack (a strange name) who, though very aged and blind, not only drew full pay, but was credited with overtime. Overcharges for everything were the rule at Plymouth. The Commissioners having heard that the small yard at Woolwich, being under the very eye of the Navy Office, was comparatively virtuous, went in search of confirmation of the good news. What they found was the story of of H.M.S. Amaranthe. She was a 24-gun ship taken from the Dutch by |