Champions of the fleet : $b Captains and men-of-war and days that helped to make the empireFraser, Edward
History
Champions of the fleet : $b Captains and men-of-war and days that helped to make the empire
Fraser, Edward
Great Britain -- History, Naval; Naval battles -- Great Britain
Scotsmen there from nearly every Scottish county, from Caithness and
Banff, Ross, and Cromarty, Aberdeen and Inverness, Fife and Forfar,
Berwick, Renfrew, Galloway, Lanark, the county of that _preux chevalier_
among British naval officers, Cochrane, Lord Dundonald, “the daring in
war,” Ayr and Argyll. Eleven men from Edinburgh were on board; five from
Glasgow; seven from Dundee, the birthplace of Duncan of Camperdown; with
men from Leith, and Peterhead, Dumbarton, and Greenock. From Ireland, in
like manner, men from Donegal fought the _Victory’s_ guns side by side
with men from County Down and Roscommon, Meath and Carlow, Galway and
Sligo, Cavan, Wexford and Waterford, Tipperary and County Cork. Fourteen
men from Dublin were in the British flagship at Trafalgar; eleven from
Cork; ten from Waterford City and Belfast; Carrickfergus and Kinsale were
also represented on board.
There were men of all ages between twenty and fifty in the crew of the
_Victory_ at Trafalgar, and boys from ten years old—the age of little
Johnnie Doag, an Edinburgh boy, rated as a “First Class Boy,” and
probably the youngest person present on either side at Trafalgar—to lads
of eighteen or nineteen. Four others of the thirty-one in the flagship
(nine short of the complement) were just twelve years old, and six
others, thirteen. The great majority of the men on board were from twenty
to thirty years of age. About 10 per cent were over forty, the majority
of these being between forty-seven and fifty. One of the “powder-monkeys”
on board the _Victory_, it was discovered later, was a woman. Her
husband was also on board the ship. She was a native of Port Mahon, and
an officer who saw her there in 1841 described her as being then “a
sturdy woman of 70.” The last survivor of the seamen and marines on board
the _Victory_ at Trafalgar died at Dundee in November, 1876.
This interesting detail in regard to the _Victory’s_ crew should be
mentioned in addition. Practically 30 per cent of the seamen were
volunteers, so the ship’s muster-book states. It records in the column
headed “_Whence and whether Prest or not_,” the word “Vol” against 181 of
the names, out of a total of 628 able and ordinary seamen and landsmen.
* * * * *
There were, of course, men of all callings in civil life among the
crew—as swept on board by the press-gang for the most part. According to
inquiries made by officers on their own account, almost every trade and
calling of every-day life contributed its quota in those times to the
assortment on board our men-of-war. Collingwood, it is on record, had
among the impressed men sent to one of his ships, a black San Domingo
general, who had somehow found his way across the Atlantic; and also
a Sussex market gardener, and a milkman, these last sent to him for
top-gallant-yard men—poor fellows!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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