Damage, Repairs, and Maintenance

For perhaps 40,000 years prior to the events considered in this book, humans had been building seaworthy watercraft out of wood, setting up masts in them, and hanging sails from those masts to catch the wind and drive those craft across the water. Eighteenth-century Atlantic mariners drew on that cumulative experience to contrive variations on that technology so sophisticated and intricate that their use took years to master. They used that technology to expand the maritime empires founded by their immediate predecessors, effecting transatlantic migration, the transfer of goods and pathogens, and the expropriation of an enslaved labor force of at least twelve million people from Africa to the Americas, all of whom were shipped across the Atlantic in ships made from trees and powered by the wind.

In the nineteenth century, a westward-looking preoccupation with conti¬nental expansion reinforced the pressure of nationalism to reconfigure North Americans’ appreciation of their own history. They no longer thought of themselves as denizens of the western coastal provinces of an Atlantic empire, but as owners of landmasses surrounded by water. More and more of them had only an indirect connection to maritime commerce, and would live out their lives never having witnessed it in person.

That process was only just beginning in the late eighteenth century. Then, most North Americans of European or African origin lived near water and used it for transportation, in everything from a canoe to a three-masted, 300-ton ocean-going ship. Daniel Baugh has written that ‘the superior weight-carrying efficiency afforded by water transport in respect to trade was the central techno¬logical-economic factor of the Early Modern era.’ Roads were few and usually bad, especially when it rained or snowed. Almost everything we now load onto trucks and trains, they loaded into skiffs, periaugers, flatboats, sloops, and schooners. People and goods making ocean passages, whether up or down the Eastern Seaboard, across the Atlantic, to or from the Caribbean, would do so on sloops, schooners, brigs, snows, and ships. The news, official documents, letters, government and military orders traveled the same way, and connected Boston to Charleston, Philadelphia to London, Tidewater Virginia to Glasgow, New York to Barbados.

Sultana had made it across the Atlantic, and was anchored just outside the largest base of the world's most powerful navy, with seven other naval vessels, but her men were focused on keeping her anchored there, as November gales lashed the anchorage. On the first day at anchor, they shifted their berth; they chose a new spot, perhaps one less-exposed, farther away from another vessel, or with better holding ground. The men were serving the cables – wrapping twine tightly in the lay of the thick rope, to protect it from chafe. Also on that day, Inglis records that the schooner was ‘very leaky in her bows,’ a problem they had been grappling with since early spring on the Delaware. This did not mean that Sultana was structurally compromised in any serious way; one or two planks with fasteners just loose enough that they could work their seams even slightly would be enough to cause persistent leaking.

On the second day at Spithead, they let go their best bower – larger anchor. They had originally used the small bower, but the gales had worsened and squalls were blowing through, with their unpredictable sharp gusts that could reach hurricane-strength. The men were still serving the cables that kept Sultana attached to her anchor. During a one-day lull in the weather, during which they hove up the best bower, they ‘received a harbour boat,’ which transported the four invalids from Boston to Haslar Hospital at Gosport. The next day, the gales returned even harder from the south-southeast, south, and southwest, blowing on shore; the schooner was now facing into the blast, her stern to the shore. They let go the best bower again, at three in the morning. Their two heaviest anchors had the best chance of holding them. At nine, they got the boat in, before it could be capsized or torn away. The following afternoon, they ‘shipped a great deal of sea’ – for the last time. At seven the next morning, they hove up the best bower and hove short – pulled in most of the cable – on the small bower, and signaled for a pilot to take them into Portsmouth Harbor. By noon, they were anchored there, drying their sails. Only now was Sultana's Atlantic voyage truly over.

Suppose a Boston merchant, stopping at a public house on a certain warm August Monday evening, had picked up a copy of the Evening-Post. He might have noticed a small advertisement, among others, reading

‘Mr. Hallowell’ was Benjamin Hallowell, Esquire, and the merchant who noticed the ad would have known that. Hallowell was the most prominent shipwright on the Boston waterfront and a member of the Boston political elite. That political elite, however, was by no means politically united, and neither was the town of Boston, at the top of whose society they sat.

Boston had been through the Stamp Act riots two years earlier, and, while that crisis had passed, its citizens now knew full well what the mob – and those at the top of society who supported and used it when it suited them – could and would do to resist the enforcement of laws they did not like. That mob had sacked the home of Hallowell's own son, Benjamin III, Comptroller of Customs.3 For the most part, unpopular laws concerned themselves with maritime trade: who could sail where, carry what cargoes, and how much they would pay in Customs duties for landing those cargoes. The Navigation Acts, as they were known, were quite old by this point. They had imposed restrictions on British American trade, but they had created a privileged space for that trade as well; American shipping enjoyed the protections of sailing and trading inside the British Empire, by 1767 the largest, richest, and most powerful maritime empire the world had yet known. British American ships enjoyed the protections of imperial law and imperial warships. Yet, as trade with the enemy, France, in the late war of 1756–63 had made quite clear to anyone paying attention, some British American merchants, like their counterparts based in Britain, also took advantage of opportunities to flout those laws when it suited them and when they could get away with it.

On September 2, Sultana's first full day on the open sea, a stiff wind from the north-northwest died down to a light breeze, then calm. As the pressure on the sails eased and they began to sag and flutter, the crew set to work adjusting the stays that held up the masts, and setting up the rigging. The six days spent moving down the Channel had been, literally, a ‘shakedown’ – under their first strain, with the wind coming on and backing off, and the schooner rocking and pitching on the sea, the rain drenching the rig, and the sun and wind drying it out again, the new hemp rigging stretched. The sails stretched and re-tightened. The masts developed a bit of play, and perhaps moved slightly out of true. They would have to be shifted and the stays and shrouds tightened up. As far as we know, no one aboard this little vessel had ever sailed her before. Even those familiar with schooners needed to learn as much as they could, as fast as they could, about this particular one – how she sailed, what she could do and what she could not, what her strengths and faults were. Their lives depended on it.

Two days later, the winds were contrary, which required a sailing vessel to take a zig-zag course, rather than a direct course, toward her destination, at least as long as the contrary winds held from the same direction. The Polynesians, perhaps the most skilled navigators in human history, were not so remarkable because they were blown downwind to islands that lay that way. They were remarkable because they settled the Pacific islands upwind of them. In addition to the extra work, and the extra fortitude, it takes more skill, both in operating the vessel and in navigation, to sail into the wind.

So, Sultana's crew tacked the schooner at half past four in the afternoon; that meant, first, making sure she was making good enough way through the water that she would have adequate momentum to swing her bow through the resisting wind far enough that the sails would fill on the other side. Then, the orders would be shouted, lines would be pulled, and the helm put over. It required a well-timed, coordinated, choreographed effort by the crew to execute the maneuver properly.

Sultana's men also made their schooner impossible to ignore. On the 17th, they fired two guns at a brig to make her haul down her pennant. This was not the first time she had demanded this sign of respect. She did it again the next day to a sloop.

Merchant vessels tended to emulate or mimic naval vessels in visible ways, for reasons both of security and prestige. The trend was strong enough that we believe it had a significant effect on technological choice in early modern merchant ships. Painted-on ‘gunports’ and even dummy wooden guns are clear examples of mimicry for security, but the practice goes beyond that; it is likely that the merchant fleet did not adopt the two-masted rigs for mid-size vessels that, by Sultana's time, had become so popular, until the Navy had done so. It was to a merchant ship's advantage for a potential predator to mistake it for a warship from a distance, in an age when maritime warfare was endemic and a major component of that warfare was predation on the enemy's commerce by naval cruisers and privateers. Mimicry for prestige was not separate from mimicry for security; it was at times perhaps a matter of retaining a trait after the security value of that trait had become obsolete. The retention of painted-on gunports – the ‘checkerboard pattern’ – of both British and U.S. merchant ships through the early decades of the nineteenth century is an obvious example.

A less-obvious example is the flying of pennants – long, streaming flags – from the masthead. This was a naval custom, and merchant ships imitated warships when they did this. According to custom and naval regulation, a merchant ship was required to strike, or at least dip, such a pennant when encountering a King's ship, out of respect for the King and acknowledgement of his sovereignty. Given how often Sultana demanded this courtesy by firing her swivel guns, it is clear that the masters of these merchant vessels were in no hurry to make their obeisance to this unusually-small member of His Majesty's Navy.

The primary sources for analyzing Sultana's sailing operation and performance were the Bruce and Inglis logbooks – primarily Bruce’s, as he tended to provide more detail about sail sets and changes, given his role on board. I prepared and used transcriptions of Bruce's logs of seven voyages: the transatlantic crossing from England to America from August to October 1768; a short coastal passage from Boston to Newport in December 1768; Virginia to Halifax in August 1770; Halifax to Virginia in October 1770; Virginia to Newport, October–November 1770; Boston to Philadelphia in October 1771; and the transatlantic crossing from Boston to England, October–December 1772.

Important supplementary sources were the interviews conducted with experienced period replica schooner operators Drew McMullen, Aaron Thal, and Jan Miles, and the ensuing discussions of issues raised with Jan Miles and Nick Burningham.1 The overarching goal was to understand as much as possible about how the vessel was sailed: what sails were set in what conditions and why, and Sultana's operational parameters in terms of wind direction, sea state, and speed. Such an effort relies on the principles established for the specialty of experimental archaeology, adapted to the exigencies of replica ship operation in the real world, as opposed to anything approaching laboratory conditions.

The first task was to condense Bruce's log to information pertaining directly to sailing performance: wind direction, wind strength, course made good over the day's run, the day's run in nautical miles, the times of sail changes, and the details of those sail changes. For ease of use, I then converted the original point-system directions and bearings into degrees and minutes. I also eliminatedall days from this modified log for which no sailing performance data was provided.

For wind strength, I used Bruce's and Inglis's terminology. As it is impossible to correlate, exactly, their terminology to the modern Beaufort Scale, I would introduce less uncertainty and/or error into the interpretations by sticking to their terms. As is typical of eighteenth-century verbiage, Bruce's and Inglis's ‘weather categories’ are not strictly consistent. For example, I am confident that ‘light breezes and calms’ is the same as ‘light breezes mixed with calms.’

That the Boston schooner at the center of this history happened to serve in the Royal Navy is key to what this history is about, but I did not set out to write a naval history book. I do not consider myself a naval historian. In general, I am interested in the human use of water and watercraft for contact and commerce, and in situating ordinary technologies in their particular social and cultural environments – especially technologies displaying strong continuities, as a counterpoint to the general apprehension of technological history in our innovation-obsessed culture. To both ends, I work on the technology of ordinary merchant vessels in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Atlantic. For three primary reasons, however, it is impossible to separate mercantile from naval affairs in that world. First, the technology overlaps far too much. Second, the merchant fleet and the Navy shared the same labor pool, and it was common for sailors – and thus their skills and experience – to move between merchant and naval service. Finally, the records needed to study vessel technology are far more complete for naval vessels than for merchant vessels, given the Navy's penchant for documentation and record-keeping – typical of centralized state bureaucracies. The technological overlap has limitations, given that merchant and naval vessels were built to accomplish different purposes, but it was not uncommon for the Navy to buy and use vessels originally built for merchant service, usually for auxiliary purposes such as troop transport or, in the case of this book's subject, Customs enforcement. When they did so in the eighteenth century, they typically documented the vessel. They made an accurate physical survey of her in a naval dockyard, from which they drew up a line drawing and listed her exact dimensions. They made a complete inventory of her equipment and stores, and they made a valuation of her. Many such documents survive, as do the logbooks and muster books (lists of crew members and information about them) required by the Navy to be kept by every commander. Thanks to that fact, we are in possession of a rich archival trove of information on some ordinary workaday vessels whose counterparts in the merchant service left no such records. As I discovered while working on my first book, such is the case for the small New England-built schooner Sultana.

The main sources for information on Sultana's crew are the two muster books, TNA ADM 36/7269 and 36/7270. Like the logbooks, these were kept in pre-printed volumes whose format was standardized by the Navy. The primary purpose of these books is not to track personnel, however, but to track expenses paid out and debts incurred. They can be considered account books as much as anything else.

Introduction to the muster books

The MUSTER-TABLE recorded, once a week, how many crew were currently being carried aboard (‘Borne’), divided into how many were ‘Mustered’ (present to be accounted for), ‘Checqued’ (absent from the muster that day), and ‘Sick’.

The next table, recorded on the general-purpose sheets used for most of the book, records ‘Supernumeraries borne for Victuals.’ These were not members of the crew, but any other persons carried aboard who were entitled to be fed from the ship's food supplies but were not entitled to be paid seaman's wages. Almost always on Sultana, these were local pilots, brought aboard for a day or a few days at the most, to direct the schooner into or out of an unfamiliar port or harbor. They were issued certificates which they could present for payment to naval authorities ashore. Here, we also find men carried aboard for short times who belonged to other vessels, or who were being carried as passengers under special circumstances.

Next is the ‘Run Table,’ written on the same type of form. This is the record of desertion, which was rarely negligible on a naval vessel, and was rampant on Sultana and her fellow interceptors on the North American station. The Run Table's purpose was to provide the Navy with a record of men who had deserted and (a) were thus deserving of the prescribed punishment if caught; and (b) had forfeited whatever wages they would have otherwise earned for their time in service aboard. Fortunately for posterity, the Run Table provides details of when, where, and how the men deserted.

By the 13th of August 1771 – the same day John Montagu replaced Commodore Gambier as commander of the North American squadron – Sultana was at Philadelphia. She had spent a total of 113 days patrolling New York, making forty interceptions, for a daily rate of 0.35, only slightly higher than her Rhode Island rate. In May of 1769, Hood had written that the Customs Commissioners believed that a ‘sloop of war’ and a ‘King's schooner’ patrolling the approach to Philadelphia could increase the revenue collected in that city of merchants by ‘above twenty thousand pounds a year.’ It was now Sultana's turn to take up this station, relieving Gaspee, which was due for overhaul at Halifax.

John Inglis's hometown was, by this point, presenting similar problems to Customs enforcement to Newport and Boston. The collectors there had written letters complaining of collusion in the thwarting of two major seizures of illegally-imported wine on the first of April. The Surveyor of Customs, William Sheppard, was threatened with pistols and pelted with stones by a mob. He received a threatening letter, and when he went out, he was attacked by unknown assailants and suffered internal injuries. He soon left the city. The responses to incidents like this were always indicative of a division of power within British American ports, whether Benjamin Hallowell's Boston or John Inglis's Philadelphia, between those colluding in and encouraging such behavior, and those genuinely disturbed by it and determined to counteract it. Some merchants, and some officials, were on one side, some on the other, some conflicted. Some merchants and officials, including governors, played both sides, by doing the bare minimum to carry out their legal obligations while sympa¬thizing with those who flouted the law and the authority of the King's men. Naval officers like Inglis were consistent in doing their duty; the cooperation they received, or failed to receive, depended on where they were at the time and who wielded what power over whom at the time.

On the 5th of July, Inglis and Bruce lay off chasing and boarding. They took Sultana ‘up the river to lie her on shore and attempt to stop her leaks.’ It was eight days shy of four years since Inglis had first come aboard her at Deptford to take command and raise a crew. Since then, she had seen only hard service. Only the Navy's funds and infrastructure for repair and maintenance had kept her in serviceable condition. She was tired enough to need a major overhaul, perhaps going beyond re-caulking to include some re-fastening, but for now, some repairs on the fly would have to do. The next day, the crew hauled her ashore at Billingsport, on the New Jersey side of the river, across from Philadelphia. They scrubbed her bottom, then scraped and payed her sides with turpentine. The schooner's last coat of paint would have worn off by now, or at least most of it, and the men used whatever they could get, usually pine varnish, to coat the sides. Sultana would have looked about as tired as she was, though she would have been kept clean and as tight as the men could make her. Two of those men, however, John Bloom and Charles Anderson, decided they no longer wished to toil on Sultana; Bloom deserted from the boat, and Anderson swam ashore in the night. They were two of the three men Inglis had pressed not even two months earlier.

Conventional wisdom has it that most early modern sailors, at least those from the European world, could not swim. Swimming was not considered wholesome recreation in the British Atlantic world; it was a needless exposure to danger, both drowning and the risk of contracting illness from being wet and cold. While it might seem absurd to us that sailors, of all people, did not generally possess this ability, the labor culture of these sailors did not work against the wider society's general disapprobation of the activity. Sailors accepted the risks of the sea, and there was a certain amount of fatalism in their subculture; the sea and its hazards were beyond the control of men, and a sailor worthy of respect went about his work not only accepting that, but regarding it with a certain degree of insouciance.