LAX ADMINISTRATION.
It may be that from the bird’s-eye view given in the previous chapter,
the reader has gathered some impression of the magnitude of the
Post-Office establishment at Falmouth, and of the strength and number of
the ties which united it with the prosperity of that town.
To describe in similar detail the life of other Packet Stations would be
tedious and useless; for no one of them could vie with the great Cornish
seaport in any circumstance of interest. The Dover Station, whence the
Calais Packets sailed, was closed during every French war. The Harwich,
or Yarmouth boats, for they sailed during several years from the latter
port, stood next to Falmouth in importance. They maintained the Postal
Service for Holland and Northern Europe generally, sailing chiefly to
the Brill and to Hamburg. Their voyages on the stormy North Sea were
often dangerous; and were performed with great skill and hardihood, but
with little variety of incident. It was not until the Continental System
established by Napoleon began to force the exclusion of English vessels
from every seaport which his hand could reach, and like a creeping
paralysis, the hostile influence mounted steadily up the shores of the
North Sea and the Baltic,—it was only then that the Harwich Packets
began to serve as counters in a game of exceptional difficulty. The
Holyhead Station confronted no dangers worth speaking of. The Milford
Packets ran to Waterford, often making rough and troublesome passages,
but offering very little detail worth recording. The boats between
Portpatrick and Donaghadee were still less interesting.
In every sense Falmouth was the chief station. Nearly every vestige of
interest connected with the ancient Mail Service centres there, and the
Falmouth Packets may be regarded as the most perfect type of the
Post-Office Establishment.
No account appears to be extant of the circumstances attending the
institution in the year 1688 of a Service of Packets from Falmouth
Harbour, but they may be easily surmised. For fourteen years the
communications were with Corunna alone. It could scarcely have been for
the convenience of passengers that in those days of difficult roads, the
most westerly port in England was chosen as the place of embarkation.
The selection suggests that the Government were guided in their choice
by the paramount necessity of quick passages, and the swift transmission
of news; and this anxiety for haste is amply accounted for by the
growing importance of Spanish politics at the time. Questions were
indeed arising in that quarter of the world which were of vital
consequence to England; and the Ministry in providing a means of
forwarding and receiving despatches with regularity, were impelled by
something like necessity.
The idea of a Regular Service of Packet boats, supported by the
Government, was not a novel one. Such a Service had existed on the
eastern coast of England from very early times; and in the Packets of
Harwich or Dover a model for the new establishment was ready to hand. A
somewhat different type of vessel was required for the Corunna voyage.
The new Packets were considerably larger, nearly two hundred tons, while
those serving in the North Sea did not usually exceed sixty tons. They
were also more heavily armed, as became vessels which ventured further
from the protection of English cruisers in the home waters, and carried
a larger complement of men. They were hired under contract, and were not
the property of the Post-Office, which, indeed, at no period of its
administration, became the owner of the Packets, though the officers and
men serving on them were from very early days the servants of the
Postmaster General, not of the contractors.
It might have seemed more natural that the new Packets should sail from
the same ports as the old ones, and be located on the east coast, where
all the machinery needed for their administration was at work already.
But it seems to have been recognized from the outset that for the
Spanish Service that port was the most suitable which lay furthest to
the west. Falmouth was chosen from the first, and though in the early
years of the last century the contractors were occasionally allowed to
despatch their boats from Plymouth, and even once or twice (under a
strong representation of the danger of Privateers watching a known point
of departure) from Bideford, the Postmaster General, as time went on,
became less ready to fall in with the whims of these gentlemen, and the
Service settled down regularly at Falmouth.
That the right port was chosen there cannot be a doubt. The extreme
westerly position of Falmouth Harbour gives it an advantage which is
rendered evident by a single glance at the map. From no other harbour in
this country can an outward bound vessel clear the land so soon. No
other is so quickly reached by one homeward bound running for shelter.
On the darkest nights and in dense fog, ships unacquainted with the
harbour enter it in safety, so easy is it of access; and sailing vessels
can leave it in any wind, save one blowing strongly from the east or
south-east. The prevalent gales in the English Channel are from the
west. These are head winds for a ship leaving Plymouth, the port with
which Falmouth is most naturally compared; but they are favourable for
Falmouth. In fact, it happened only on very rare occasions that the
despatch of the mails was delayed by stress of weather;[2] and the
Post-Office agent, when giving evidence on the subject in 1840, could
not remember one instance of such delay throughout his whole service,
extending over forty-five years.
Footnote 2:
The standing rule was that the Packets must put to sea immediately on
receiving the mails, _whatever the wind was_, provided only that they
could carry a double-reefed topsail—a striking proof of the certainty
with which a good and well-found sailing vessel can clear the Channel
from Falmouth.
If, however, Falmouth excelled in ease of access, the natural advantages
of the harbour were still more evident when the ships had reached it. It
is, in fact, the safest anchorage in the country, protected from the
full strength of the Atlantic rollers by the great promontory of
Meneage, and abounding in sheltered creeks where vessels might lie in
practical immunity from the worst of storms.
On one of these creeks the town of Falmouth stands; and this inlet, the
King’s or Inner Harbour, was assigned to the Packets as their special
anchorage. It lies in such a situation that the swell entering the
harbour is diverted from it by the high land of Pendennis, at the
entrance of the port; and the advantage of this aspect is so great, that
vessels may be seen lying in the Inner Harbour without perceptible
motion, while just outside others are rolling gunwale under.
There is seldom any difficulty in leaving this sheltered anchorage. With
a fair wind a vessel may be in the open sea in a quarter of an hour
after slipping her moorings off Green Bank, opposite the town of
Falmouth; and here the Packets used to lie until the day before sailing,
when they warped out into Carrach Roads, and lay there to receive the
mails, in order that not the slightest loss of time might occur in
proceeding to sea when the bags were once on board.
At Falmouth then the Post-Office located itself in the year 1688, with
two Packet boats hired from a contractor, one Daniel Gwin, who appears
to have received a salary of £70 per annum, in addition, doubtless, to
whatever he could make indirectly out of his contract. Probably his
gains were considerable. At any rate the Government made none, for the
accounts show from year to year a loss of several thousand pounds upon
the maintenance of these two boats, from which, indeed, the revenue
seems seldom to have received more than £450. Expensive as the Corunna
Packets proved to be, it may be presumed that the promoters of the
Service were not dissatisfied with it; for early in the new century they
proceeded to develop it. The West Indian trade was becoming important
enough to make its wishes felt. The merchants engaged in it may probably
have represented that the regular communication now established with
Corunna gave their colleagues in the Spanish trade more facilities than
they enjoyed. All Governments have found it difficult to resist such an
argument; and accordingly, in 1702, Packets were established at Falmouth
to ply to Barbados, Jamaica, and certain places in the Southern States
of North America. Two years later a Service with Lisbon was set up; and
the Post-Office Service at Falmouth began to assume the form which it
preserved until within the memory of men now living.
It is no part of the present writer’s purpose to trace in detail all the
events which went to make up the history of the Packet Station at
Falmouth during the last century. Such a task would doubtless throw much
light on naval history, and some, perhaps, on other subjects not without
their share of interest. The materials are scanty, however, and the
record might be dreary reading. The personal recollections which would
have lit the story up and made it real are lost beyond recall. What has
come down to us is hardly more than the bald record of administrative
changes—at such a time there were two West India Packets, at another
four; under one regime they touched at Charlestown and Pensacola, while
under its successor their voyages were restricted. There were such
changes of rule in regard to victualling the sailors, such and such
difficulties in controlling them; and so on. It is nothing but an arid
waste of technicalities, almost devoid of interest save for the
professed student of naval or commercial history.
One or two facts stand out from this mass of detail, and arrest
attention as we pass it by. There is the occasional mention of a sea
fight, in which so many men (in proportion to the number of the crew)
were killed and wounded, as to create a strong desire to know the
details.
Thus, an order of the Postmaster General, dated May 16th, 1744, recounts
that a petition has been received from one Hannah Christophers, widow of
Joseph Christophers, who lost his life on June 24th, 1740, on board the
“Townshend” Packet, Captain John Cooper, in an engagement against the
Spaniards, wherein five men (whose names are given) received “several
grievous wounds in defence of the Packet, and afterwards suffered a long
and cruel imprisonment of sixteen months.” By the rules and customs of
His Majesty’s service, the order goes on to observe, these poor men are
entitled to “some bounty or allowance for their comfort and support”;
and the Postmaster General, having in mind this laudable usage, and
moreover, “having in part experienced it will be impossible to carry on
the sea service of this office without great difficulty, danger, and
interruption, unless some such encouragement be constantly given in the
like cases,” proceed to award bounties ranging from £4 to £10, and in
one case even a pension of no less amount than £4 per annum!
We shall hear further of the “Townshend” Packet, for the mantle of
Captain John Cooper descended on the commander of another “Townshend,”
by whom some seventy years later a great action was fought against
hopeless odds with such determined bravery as must be admitted to
surpass any other recorded achievement of the Post-Office fleet.
Again, on July 25th, 1759, it is ordered that Captain John Jones be
allowed £100 for his gallant defence of the “Fawkener” Packet, when
attacked by a large French sloop of twelve carriage guns and upwards of
one hundred men between Barbados and Antigua; and three years later the
same sum was awarded to Captain Bonell, for bravery and good conduct in
action with a French Privateer.
Many more such quickly jotted entries of the perils of brave men can be
traced in the ancient records. The details of their conduct were allowed
to perish. The question of account alone survives. Enough has been said
however to show that from the outset the Falmouth Packets formed a
fighting service, that is to say, a service which was frequently called
upon to fight, and understood how to acquit itself when occasion arose.
It is true that the Packet officers were not allowed to seek
engagements; and this rule, though obviously necessary, seeing that the
safety of the mails was the sole object of the Service, proved most
difficult to enforce. The difficulty was not caused by any especial
unruliness on the part of the Falmouth officers. It grew from a much
deeper root, and flourished in the natural tendency of all mankind to
pick up any articles of value which can, even by a stretch of
conscience, be regarded as fair prize.
A long succession of years of peace has so confirmed the sacredness of
the principles of _meum_ and _tuum_ in the minds of most of us, that it
is not easy to realize how far they were undermined in days of war,
especially upon the high seas. The world has grown very punctilious, and
looks askance on even honest privateering, while piracy is universally
held to deserve no better fate than a post and chains in Execution Dock.
In the last century these excellent sentiments were by no means
generally entertained, at any rate in quarters where they were likely to
be acted on. Among men of the sea, the ocean was regarded in the light
of a great lucky bag, into which you thrust your hand and pulled out the
best thing you could find. If the thing belonged to your neighbour, so
much the worse for him. He should have kept his guns in better practice,
and trained his men more carefully to the use of small arms.
Now there were sailing on the seas in those days a considerable number
of ill-defended ships which were so very valuable as to make a poor
sailor’s mouth water and his fingers tingle. Of the wealth of the
Spanish treasure ships every one has heard. The sums they are reported
to have carried in their clumsy holds sound fabulous even to us as we
read of them in the sober light of history; and exaggerated as they
doubtless were in the heated atmosphere of a Falmouth tavern, where
every sailor strove to surpass his neighbour in marvellous tales of the
sea, these reports must have seemed to many a poor Packet captain to
open a road to untold wealth. Such galleons were captured very easily
sometimes. A little disguise to make the Packet look like a sloop of
war, a bold onset, a desperate boarding assault, and the prize would be
won. Many a well-armed vessel had been taken by a handful of men!
England was at war with Spain during a great part of the last century;
and did not that fact make the Spanish argosies the fair prize of any
Englishman who could seize them?
Whether, under the influence of such considerations, a treasure ship was
ever taken by a Packet, is not mentioned in the scanty records. But it
is certain that a good deal of piracy in a quiet way was done by the
Falmouth commanders, especially early in the century, when the control
from headquarters was lax, and the necessity of watching the use made of
the armaments supplied by the Government was not clearly seen. The
officers showed a disposition to call the irregularity “privateering”;
but a vessel which takes prizes without a license from the Crown is a
Pirate, not a Privateer, and the Packets never held such licenses.
Of course without a license there was a difficulty in disposing of a
captured vessel. The intervention of the Admiralty Court could not be
sought, unless indeed it was possible to represent the Packet as having
been attacked, and as having captured her prize in self-defence. The
Admiralty Courts were not models of incorruptibility, as all who
recollect Lord Cochrane’s descriptions of them will allow, and doubtless
did not inquire too closely into any plausible story. But if the matter
would not bear even their examination, there were a dozen ports known to
all sailors where a vessel and her cargo could be sold without any
questions asked.
Of course these practices, however full of charm for the officers who
profited by them, were very strongly condemned by the Postmaster
General, who had to consider only the safety of the mails, and to guard
against the chance of heavy claims being made upon the Government for
the value of captured Packets. As far as was possible, therefore, they
forbade piracy and punished the offenders; and yet the frequency of the
offence is pretty clearly shown by the fact that it was constantly being
adduced as the best of all reasons for not arming the Packets heavily.
About the year 1780, as was detailed before a committee of the House of
Commons, a sailor called at the General Post-Office, to announce the
capture of the Packet in which he sailed. He described the gallant stand
which his officers and his fellow seamen had made against hopeless odds,
spoke feelingly of the cruel captivity they had undergone, in which some
of them were still languishing, exhibited the scar of the wound he had
received, and confidently claimed the “smart money” which he had earned
so well.
The story was imposing, but it did not survive cross-examination.
Something suggested suspicion; and by degrees the true facts were wormed
out of the brave fellow. It was quite true that his Packet had been
captured. In the early dawn of a certain summer morning, as the Packet
was running towards New Orleans, she descried two innocent-looking
vessels lying-to off the shore. They were remarkably like sugar ships,
such as would fetch a substantial sum, if sold judiciously; and being
traders, were doubtless well within the power of the Falmouth vessel,
which accordingly ran down, and sent a shot across their bows, only to
find the strangers were a French frigate and her consort, which quickly
turned the tables on their presumptuous adversary.
Of course in such a case as this the Government would admit no claim for
the value of the Packet lost by gross misconduct, and it may probably be
assumed that the money loss thus thrown upon the owners was not the only
punishment imposed. There were cases, however, in which conduct equally
irregular, but which happened to succeed, was entirely condoned; and a
striking instance of this leniency shown towards success occurred in the
year 1808, at a time when several years of strong administration had
purified the Packet Service of many of its blemishes. It may be safely
concluded that for every such case occurring in the present century,
there were half a dozen in the last.
It was a Harwich Packet which was concerned in this curious case; and it
may be that the Postmaster General thought it unnecessary to apply a
strict rule to a station on which the Packets came but rarely into
conflict with the enemy. The circumstances were as follows:—
On June 16th, 1808, the “Earl of Leicester,” Captain Anthony Hammond,
homeward bound from Gothenburg with mails and passengers, was met about
ten leagues to the westward of the Scaw by a gale of wind which obliged
her to bear away for Marstrand. On the way thither she encountered two
Danish vessels laden with corn from Jutland for their army in Norway.
Now, under his instructions Captain Hammond had nothing to do with these
vessels, but to leave them alone. It is true this country was at war
with Denmark at the time; but the “Earl of Leicester” was neither one of
H.M. cruisers, nor a letter of marque, and had no business to involve
herself in the matter. Captain Hammond never asserted that the Danish
vessels attacked him. Indeed both he and they had quite enough to do at
the moment with their own affairs, for a full gale of wind was blowing,
and all the ships were labouring heavily. Nevertheless Captain Hammond,
it being as he said “too rough to board them,” ordered them to regard
themselves as prizes, and to follow him.
The two Danish ships being unarmed had no choice but to obey these
orders, and Captain Hammond made joyfully for Marstrand with his prizes.
He had not proceeded very far when one of them flew signals of distress,
and made known that she was in danger of sinking. Captain Hammond
lowered a boat and at great risk took the crew out of the foundering
vessel, which went down as soon as the boat had got clear of her. The
remaining prize duly reached Marstrand, and was handed over to the
British Consul at that port, to await the decision of the Admiralty
Court. The crews of both vessels were liberated, on giving a promise to
do their utmost to secure the release of the crew of the “Unity” Packet,
captured in the previous November.
On board the “Earl of Leicester” were three Swedish passengers, who were
so far from feeling satisfied with Captain Hammond’s conduct on this
occasion that they addressed a special letter of complaint to the
Postmaster General. In this letter they by no means admit that the
prizes were picked up by Captain Hammond as he went along, in the casual
way detailed by him, without delay or interruption to his voyage. On the
contrary, they assert roundly, that he chased the two little vessels
during a whole night, keeping up a continual fire both of cannon and
musketry; that the “Earl of Leicester” was far past Schagen when the
prizes were first seen, which of itself proved that Captain Hammond put
in to Marstrand with no other motive than that of realizing them secure;
and they add: “On account of this chase and capture, in which, in our
opinion, Packets have no right to engage, our voyage to England was
entirely broken off, because, during the above hostile operations, we
were in continual anxiety and fear, loaded guns being carried about in
the cabin where we lay, and several shots fired from them; and we had
reason to fear that the war-like scene might soon be acted again,
wherefore we did not venture to pursue our voyage on board the said
Packet, but returned to Gothenburg.”
Captain Hammond, in reply to these charges, maintained that three
gentlemen who, by their own admission, were extremely frightened, and to
his knowledge were also lamentably sea-sick, were not the most
trustworthy witnesses of what occurred, and with this argument, together
with some evidence that the return to Marstrand was really made
necessary by the weather, the Postmaster General remained content. The
matter was dropped; and Captain Hammond, after waiting some five years,
during which time the Admiralty Courts considered his case in their
pleasant, leisurely way, received the value of the prize.
Smuggling was a practice very frequently charged against the Packet
Service by its critics who, towards the end of the last century, raised
an outcry loud enough to become heard in Parliament. It may be feared
that the charge was by no means groundless. Indeed it would be strange
if it were, seeing that throughout the west of England, if not
elsewhere, the game of eluding the revenue laws was played with infinite
zest and enjoyment by all classes of society. Falmouth itself was a nest
of smugglers. The old town was full of hiding-places. The women entered
into the sport with audacious ingenuity; and probably there was neither
man, woman, nor child in the town, with the possible exception of the
revenue officers, who did not regard the success of a smuggler as a
triumph for his kind against men who were scarcely to be distinguished
from foreign enemies.
It is true there was a high officer of the Post-Office at Falmouth,
whose duty it was to discover malpractices of every kind, and report
them to the Postmaster General. The contractor, from whom the Packets
were hired at their first institution, had long since disappeared.
The Packets were hired from the commanders; and over these officers was
set an agent, to whom each one of them was responsible for his actions.
This agent was not Postmaster. His duties did not extend beyond the
foreign mails and the conduct of the Packet officers and seamen. He was
the link which united the sea service with the internal system of the
Post-Office. His duties were multifarious and of the greatest
consequence to the welfare of the service.
It is perfectly clear that the duties of a controlling officer cannot be
properly performed unless he keeps his affairs and interests totally
distinct from those of his subordinates. The misfortune was that the
agents at Falmouth in the last century could not grasp this principle,
but departed from it so far as to have trading relations with the
commanders. The agent dealt in naval stores: the commanders supplied
their Packets with spars and cordage from his stock.
This was not the only way in which the agent’s affairs became entangled
with those of the men he was placed at Falmouth to control. The Packets,
though nominally owned by the commanders, with whom the Government
contracted for their hire, were in most cases really the property of a
syndicate, or of private individuals, who put forward the commander to
represent them, on condition of receiving the larger part of the
emoluments. This capitalist in the background was frequently no other
than the agent himself.
Relations such as these of course rendered it very difficult for the
agent to perform the duties of his position at all effectually, and, as
a matter of fact, he did not so perform them. Abuses of every kind crept
into the Falmouth service. The captains were subjected to gross
extortions by the agent, who in turn relaxed discipline in any way they
might desire. If, for instance, it occurred to any commander, that by
sailing with a few men short of his complement, he could save their
victualling allowances and so increase his own profits; the agent, whose
duty it was to muster the men immediately before sailing, would either
neglect the muster altogether, or else make it, and be careful not to
see the shore-boat which, immediately afterwards, took off three or four
of the men who had answered to their names. If the captain wished to
stay ashore, whilst his Packet went to sea, the agent would accept and
forward to London a certificate that he was ill, without asking any
questions either as to the nature of the illness or the qualifications
of the person appointed to command the ship, who was not infrequently a
common seaman. If the captain had received from some Bristol merchant a
larger consignment of goods to be sold on commission at Lisbon or
Barbados than his vessel ought to carry, the agent would still certify
that she was in trim when she left Falmouth harbour, and had nothing on
board which could impede her sailing. In fact, there were a hundred ways
in which the agent could oblige those captains who dealt largely with
him; and without attempting to go more deeply into the events of the
last century, it may fairly be doubted, in the light of the scandals
discovered in its closing years, whether misconduct far grosser than any
here indicated was not practised by the commanders and tolerated by the
agent.
This is a matter which will be dealt with more fully in succeeding
chapters. Enough has been said to show that the state of affairs at
Falmouth was unsatisfactory to the last degree; and while it may very
probably be that a considerable number of individuals acted with
scrupulous fidelity to their trust, there is no doubt whatever that very
many betrayed it systematically.
Of course, a strong administration from headquarters would have changed
all this. But the General Post-Office itself was by no means exempt from
the taint which had fastened on Falmouth. There was scarcely a single
official, from the secretary down to the door-keepers, who did not own
shares in the Packets, and each one of them was for ever trying to
secure advantages for the particular vessel in which he was interested.
The ancient system of paying the clerks merely nominal salaries, and
leaving in their hands privileges and perquisites out of which they were
expected to make their chief, if not their sole, remuneration, produced
its natural effect in causing every officer to judge upon departmental
matters in the light of his own pecuniary advantage; and, in short, it
can only be said that when the outcry in Parliament, which has been
mentioned already, made itself heard, it was high time for some change
to occur.
In truth, the end of an age of corruption was approaching. In all
departments of Government a purer atmosphere was spreading. The
Post-Office was no worse than other public offices. It was what the
spirit of the times had made it, and it did but partake of the vices
which were characteristic of the age. The old, bad system was everywhere
breaking down, crushing individuals beneath it, as such rotten growths
will when they fall at length. At Falmouth, a certain agent went too
far. The unsavoury story need not be probed. Even at the time, as would
appear, the facts were not fully disclosed; for it no sooner became
plain that a searching inquiry into the agent’s conduct would be made,
than the miserable man shut himself up in his office and blew his brains
out.
That tragic occurrence marked, or coincided with, a turning point in the
history of the Packet Service. On one side lies corrupt and slovenly
administration, with its natural sequel of scandals and disorder. On the
other can be traced the commencement of earnest endeavours for reform,
the springing up of patient and honest striving after an ideal; and as
the course of events in the Packet Service is followed from this moment
through the forty years or so which intervened before the control passed
from the hands of the Post-Office, the effect of these endeavours
becomes continually more manifest, till they culminate at last in
something resembling absolute success.
This is the story told in the ensuing pages. It is taken up from the
year 1793, because that year, the first of the great struggle for
mastery on which no Englishman can look back without pride, serves well
to mark the commencement of the new order of things. Moreover, much more
is to be known about the Packet Service from 1793 onwards than can be
gleaned concerning the earlier period. The departmental records are
fairly complete thenceforward; some account, at least, of every sea
fight is preserved; and among piles of brown and dusty papers, from some
of which the ink is fading fast, there has lain untouched for ninety
years, not only the story of a piece of administrative work, as
difficult and as useful to this country as any that has ever been
carried through by patient effort, but also a whole series of naval
actions, of which the Post-Office was once proud, and of which
Cornishmen are proud still, though they have forgotten the details of
most.