A Sea of Words Page 5

  The War of the Third Coalition, 1805

  In 1804, the French began to prepare for an invasion of Britain. Simultaneously, Spain joined France, potentially providing naval superiority in the Channel and the Mediterranean. In the face of this, Britain worked to form a Third Coalition. Nelson watched the French fleet based at Toulon, not knowing where they would strike: Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, Egypt, or elsewhere. When the French fleet sailed from Toulon, Nelson followed them all the way to the West Indies and back. At the same time, squadrons commanded by Sir Robert Calder in the Bay of Biscay and by Lord Cornwallis in the Channel also helped prevent Franco-Spanish naval forces from joining together to form one superior fleet powerful enough to provide the support Napoleon would need to successfully invade Britain. Checked here, Napoleon canceled his invasion plans and marched his army from the northwest coast of France east against Austria. At Ulm, he quickly defeated the Austrians before Austria could become an effective member of the Third Coalition.

  Thwarted in its original purpose of supporting the invasion of Britain, the Franco-Spanish fleet left Cadiz and sailed east to enter the Mediterranean. There, with the French armies in Italy, the fleet intended to help recover Sicily and reinstate French control of the Italian peninsula. The 33 French and Spanish ships of the line under Vice-Admiral Pierre Villeneuve and Admiral Don Federico Gravina, however, were intercepted by Nelson off Cape Trafalgar before they could enter the Mediterranean. On October 21, 1805, with 27 ships of the line and four frigates, a cutter, and a schooner, Nelson destroyed 16 ships and captured four others. Tragically for the British, Nelson was struck by a bullet from the French ship Redoubtable about an hour after the fighting began. He died three hours later in the course of his greatest victory. His last signal, made at 11:43 in the morning, was “Engage the enemy more closely.”

  The stunning victory prevented Napoleon from dominating the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, he continued his military success, crushing the Austrians at Austerlitz in December 1805, forcing her out of the war, and ending the Third Coalition.

  The Fourth Coalition, 1806-1807, and the Naval War After Trafalgar

  From 1804 to 1806, British war strategy was built on coalition with other European states, but Britain’s Ministry of 1806 and 1807 took a different approach. Although Britain briefly participated in a fourth coalition, between October 1806 and the Peace of Tilsit in July 1807, the new government wanted to take independent action, using overseas and distant naval and amphibious actions to turn the war.

  After the Battle of Trafalgar, the weakest point in Britain’s Mediterranean naval strategy was Sicily, which she had been defending since 1804. Britain could neither defend so large an island adequately nor afford to give it up. Constantly threatened by French military forces in southern Italy and by the French fleet at Toulon, Sicily remained a deadweight on the Royal Navy. Because of this, the Royal Navy’s blockade of Toulon, keeping the French squadron in port, remained a key goal. Meanwhile, to keep France from attempting to dominate Turkey, Vice-Admiral Sir John Duckworth backed British diplomatic negotiations with the Sultan at Constantinople in 1807 by bringing his squadron into the Dardanelles and attempting unsuccessfully to compel the Turks to make peace with Britain’s ally, Russia.

  In that same year a new Ministry came to power in London and changed the focus of British strategy. It returned to the earlier emphasis on European affairs and began to build a new coalition. With this in mind, leaders in London saw that the Baltic was an area of concern. Fearing that Napoleon might take control of Denmark and the Baltic approaches to the North Sea, the Cabinet ordered Admiral James Gambier to attack Copenhagen in September 1807 and to seize the Danish navy’s ships and supplies to prevent their use by the French.

  Following this, Lord Saumarez sailed in early 1808 for the Baltic to support Sweden against Napoleon.

  Napoleon’s agreement in 1807 with Czar Alexander I in the Treaty of Tilsit altered the strategic situation for Britain. Shortly afterward, she changed her focus again, this time to southern Europe, sending an army to Portugal, as France attempted to occupy it. As in Denmark earlier, Britain was concerned about the possibility of Napoleon seizing Portugal’s navy and using it against Britain. To prevent this, Rear-Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith and his squadron arrived in Portugal and escorted the Portuguese royal family and its navy to safety in Brazil.

  The Fifth Coalition, 1809

  For a few months in mid-1809, Britain was allied with Austria, but this arrangement ended with the French victory at Wagram. The main thrust of British strategy in 1809 focused on the Low Countries and a large amphibious assault on Walcheren island in the Scheldt River estuary. Through this operation, the British hoped to remove the French threat from Antwerp, reduce the resources that the French could obtain to support their maritime power, and parallel Austria’s military campaign against France in the Danube valley. A huge undertaking, the Walcheren landing involved some 44,000 men and 235 armed vessels. But because of bad weather, wide-spread illness, poor planning, and ineffective leadership, the expedition was a disaster for Britain.

  The Peninsular War, 1807-1814

  Following the outbreak of war in Portugal in 1807, the first British troops arrived in July 1808 with support from the Royal Navy. However, military operations were halted in a short time, following the convention at Cintra. In the autumn of 1809 a new ministry came to power in London; as usual, there were strategic changes, particularly a new emphasis on the war in Portugal and Spain. In 1810, Napoleon made his last serious attempt to shift the balance in the Mediterranean, with a determined attempt to seize Sicily. This challenge and the necessity to continue supporting forces in the Iberian peninsula made the Royal Navy’s task even more complex. A revolt in Spain offered an opportunity to expand operations out from Portugal, and this theater became the British focal point.

  In other areas in this phase of the war, the Royal Navy provided differing contributions to the war effort. Small warships and privateers became key elements as they attacked French merchant ships and protected British trade. At the same time, Napoleon’s Continental blockade threatened to damage the British economy and industrial production, which was the basis for her war effort and allowed her to provide financial subsidies to allies as well as to maintain her own military and naval power.

  Between 1808 and 1810, British expeditions captured French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Santo Domingo, while other expeditions sailed from India to take the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Reunion, in a successful move to stop French privateers based in those islands. This was followed, in 1811, by the East India Company’s expedition to the island of Java. By that year, all the places in which Napoleon might reasonably have pressed Britain outside of Europe had been preemptively seized by Britain. Consequently, Britain was safely able to reduce her forces overseas.

  The War of 1812, 1812-1815

  However, Britain’s emphasis on stringently controlling trade and maintaining her rights as a belligerent in the war against France had an effect on other nations. Between 1812 and 1815, while still fighting Napoleon, Britain faced a war with the United States over neutral trading rights and the impressment of seamen from American vessels. These issues had caused tension earlier, as on June 22, 1807, when H.M.S. Leopard (50-guns)—the ship that Jack Aubrey would later command in Desolation Island—had opened fire on the 33-gun frigate U.S.S. Chesapeake, which was carrying American Commodore James Barron to command U.S. naval ships in the Mediterranean. Totally unprepared, the American warship surrendered. But the incident caused a great public outcry against Britain in the United States. The United States declared war on Britain in June of 1812. While active fighting against Napoleon continued, Britain tried to keep the conflict on a low burner. Nevertheless, the Royal Navy maintained a blockade on the eastern coast of the United States and had to increase convoy protection to prevent attacks by Americans. In the summer of 1812, U.S. Navy frigates enthusiastically engaged British warships. In a series
of spectacular single-ship actions, the 44-gun American frigate U.S.S. Constitution captured the 36-gun H.M.S. Guerriere on August 19 some 700 miles east of Boston and took the 44-gun H.M.S. Java off the coast of Brazil on November 29. On October 25, 1812, the 44-gun U.S.S. United States also captured the 38-gun Macedonian in the mid-Atlantic. These victories raised American spirits in a war that was going badly ashore.

  As Britain’s operations against France in the West Indies ended, British troops and warships were sent from that region to fight in North America. In addition to convoying these troops, the Navy supported British military operations along the U.S.-Canadian border, in the Chesapeake Bay area at Baltimore and Washington, and in Louisiana. Meanwhile, on the Great Lakes, the small vessels that the Americans had quickly built achieved notable success at the Battle of Lake Erie in August 1813. The two countries negotiated peace at Ghent in 1814, neither side winning the objectives for which it had gone to war.

  The War of the Sixth Coalition, 1812-1814

  As Napoleon’s authority in Europe began to crumble following his disastrous campaign in Russia in 1812 and 1813, the Ministry in London seized the opportunity to form a new coalition. Naval activity increased in northern European waters to support military activity there, but the emphasis on defense in the Mediterranean and support of the offensive in the Peninsula remained until Napoleon’s abdication in the spring of 1814.

  The War of the Seventh Coalition, 1815

  The peace lasted for nearly a year, but Napoleon broke it with his escape from Elba and return to power for what is now known as the Hundred Days. In the face of this new crisis, the Ministry and the allies chose to concentrate British military forces under the Duke of Wellington in the Low Countries, traditionally an area of strategic concern. Just before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and his final abdication, the British squadron in the Mediterranean laid plans to support a rebellion in Provence against France. Although that proved unnecessary, British naval power had already proved what it could do. It had contributed significantly to the broader strategic effort that carried the allies to victory over Napoleon on land. In the years that followed, Britain dramatically reduced her naval forces in a long period of peace but still remained unchallenged as the possessor of the most powerful navy in the world.

  Stephen Maturin and Naval Medicine in the Age of Sail

  J. Worth Estes

  IN PATRICK O’BRIAN’S NOVEL H.M.S. Surprise, Dr. Stephen Maturin laments, “Medicine can do very little; surgery less. I can purge you, bleed you, worm you at a pinch, set your leg or take it off, and that is very nearly all.” Although he gives 18th-century surgery less credit than it probably deserves, he is not far off the mark when it comes to the practice of what we now call internal medicine. Maturin and his contemporaries relied largely on bitter remedies, some introduced as many as 2,500 years earlier. In fact, almost all medicines prescribed during the last years of the Enlightenment were ineffective by modern criteria. Nevertheless, Jack Aubrey and his crews placed unqualified faith in Dr. Maturin, even if he was skeptical of the worth of his own prescriptions. One must wonder why they did so.

  Doctors and the Royal Navy

  When Maturin joined the Royal Navy, its ranks included about 720 Surgeons. By 1814, as the Napoleonic wars neared their end, 14 Physicians, 850 Surgeons, and 500 Assistant Surgeons were caring for 130,000 men on shore and at sea. Doctors who aspired to Royal Navy service had to be examined before they were deemed acceptable, but the oral exams were perfunctory and few doctors managed to fail them. Depending on where they had obtained their training, and on their social status, Navy doctors were ranked as Physicians, Surgeons, Apothecaries, or Assistants (or Mates). Because Surgeons and Apothecaries were considered to be craftsmen, or artisans, they ranked below Physicians, who, unlike Maturin, did not deign to use their hands.

  The most prestigious medical education in Britain and France, leading to standing as a Physician, was obtained at universities. Although Edinburgh was often recognized as the premier medical school in the English-speaking world, only Oxford and Cambridge could offer their medical graduates the qualification necessary for licensure in London (however, other doctors did practice there). Many Royal Navy Surgeons were trained at the Scottish universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen; the rest were probably trained as apprentices, and some of those obtained additional training by taking university courses, by attending private lectures and demonstrations by leading practitioners such as John Hunter in London, or by “walking the wards” of major London hospitals, to learn from the observations and opinions of senior medical staff as they visited their patients each day.

  It is not entirely clear how or where Dr. Maturin obtained his professional credentials. He seems to have acquired his premedical education at Trinity College in Dublin. Maturin tells Dr. Butcher, of the Norfolk, that he studied medicine in France, and elsewhere he says that he has walked the wards at the Hotel Dieu in Paris, a hospital that had been famous since the Middle Ages. Indeed, Maturin says he “has dissected with Dupuytren”; if so, it must have been while they were both students, because Guillaume Dupuytren (1777-1835) would have been a bit younger than Maturin, and he did not join the staff of the Hotel Dieu until 1808. Although he had become one of France’s leading surgeons by the end of Napoleon’s reign, Dupuytren did not achieve his reputation as an innovative surgeon until several years after Maturin first met Aubrey.

  Dr. Maturin may have earned an M.D. degree in Paris, but he is credited with it in only one dispatch from the Admiralty to Aubrey. The Admiralty may have assumed that Maturin had a formal academic degree because he held the rank of Physician, but it was not required in order to practice medicine in 18th-century Britain (except in London, where the requirement was often overlooked anyway). Indeed, some universities, most notoriously Aberdeen, granted the M.D. to those who would pay a fee for it rather than attend classes. Maturin had other credentials, however. In Post Captain the Physician of the Fleet praises two of his works: One was on the surgical removal of bladder stones, and the other was Tar-Water Reconsidered, Maturin’s reflections on, or perhaps his own experiences with, the panacea made by mixing the tar extracted from Scotch pine with water. Tar-water was devised in 1739-40 by the philosopher George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, who promoted it as a panacea.

  Shortly after Maturin joined the Navy, his partner at a dinner party asked him, “How come you to be in the navy if you are a real doctor [i.e., a Physician]?” Maturin’s reply, dosed with puns, was nonetheless honest: “Indigence, ma’am, indigence. For all that clysters [i.e., enemas] is not gold on shore. And then, of course, a fervid desire to bleed for my country.” Indeed, Maturin was politically motivated and in dire need of a job. It was within Aubrey’s power to rectify the latter.

  Until the Navy’s medical services were reorganized in 1806, Surgeons were warranted by individual ship captains, not commissioned by the Admiralty. Nevertheless, they were billeted along with the other officers in the wardroom. Their base salary was £5 per month, plus £5 for every 100 cases of venereal disease they treated, along with an equipment allowance of £43 as well as an allowance for a personal servant. Thus, including expenses, the Surgeon of a third-rate warship might have an income of more than £200 per year when his share of prize money was factored in. The venereal disease component of the naval Surgeon’s salary was financed by fining men with gonorrhea (“gleet”) or syphilis (“pox,” or “great pox”). Because naval Physicians, most of whom, unlike Surgeons, held academic degrees in medicine, were regarded as gentlemen, they were not required to be examined before acceptance into the Navy and were better paid. Moreover, they had some authority over Surgeons.

  Serving at Sea

  In addition to caring for the sick and wounded, Surgeons were responsible for maintaining cleanliness on the ship. They saw to it that pressed men, often dirty and poorly clothed, were properly cleaned. They fumigated the sick-bay and whole decks when necessary, usually by burning brimstone (sulfur),
and they oversaw the ventilating machines that supplied fresh air to the lower decks and kept them dry. Although Surgeons knew that inadequate food was a major contributor to shipboard illness, strict monetary limits often hampered their ability to improve rations. Most were also concerned about shipboard drunkenness, but seamen insisted on retaining the grog perquisite, amounting to a half pint of rum mixed with one quart of water twice daily. However, it was not only the seamen’s preference that kept rum as standard issue: They needed liquids, and beer and water did not keep well at sea.

  Plate showing the placement of a tourniquet to apply maximum pressure to the large arteries of the arm and leg. “The tourniquet here is of the simplest kind, and can be readily applied by any byestander,” stated William Turnbull in The Naval Surgeon, Figure 1 (courtesy of the Boston Medicine Library, Boston Massachusetts).

  Naval Surgeons saw most of their patients in the sick-berth, or sick-bay. It was usually located in a space partitioned off by fixed walls or canvas between decks. Most housed several men as well as the Surgeon’s desk, drugs, and surgical instruments; the largest had their own cooking and latrine facilities. The sick-berth of the third-rate H.M.S. Centaur, for instance, had 22 hanging beds as well as a drug dispensary. But that of the contemporary frigate U.S.S. Constitution seems to have had only four beds and no separate dispensary.