Patrick O'Brian, The Great Conservative, Part 2
Jack Aubrey, a man out of time
In my last post, I promised a discussion of the setting of the O’Brian novels. Henry Farrell’s original post pointed out the underlying historical forces that shape the series’ politics: “The books are set in that moment when the old ways are giving way to the new.”1 That moment is 1800 for Master and Commander and just after Waterloo for the last book. That means that the series spans from the end of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1801) through the whole of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815).2 The wars are not covered evenly. By his own admission in the introduction to the tenth novel, O’Brian began the series too late in the French Revolutionary Wars and he moved too quickly in the first few books. It takes just six novels to get from 1800 to June 1813, and then another dozen novels to finish 1813. He extends 1813 in part by replaying months across several novels and in part by sending Aubrey and Maturin to remote outposts where events in Europe shape the plot less obviously.
But O’Brian’s time dilation is not the point of this post. Rather, the point is to ask whether Jack Aubrey’s brand of conservatism makes historical sense in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic Wars.
Farrell points out that Aubrey’s conservatism manifests in his personalized care for his men, in his recognition of their perquisites, and in his understanding of both the danger and the necessity of hierarchies. Even if each ship is different, Aubrey develops these relationships over time by bringing his followers with him—Barrett Bonden, Joe Plaice, Preserved Killick, etc. They repay his care with loyalty, and their relationship is characterized by mutual respect. Together, Aubrey and his followers form a formidable team that improves the fighting efficiency of every ship on which they serve.
Or, put another way, Aubrey’s navy was:
held together by internal bonds of mutual dependence between patrons and followers which threw officers and their men into close contact. In such a world the distant, and almost feeble authority of the Admiralty counted for much less than the officers’ power to reward, and their need of reliable followers. As a social system it offered strong incentives to mutual accommodation, and both officers and men were reluctant to push disputes to extremes. If the men had occasion to complain, they generally found senior officers who took them seriously. If complaints were not met, the resulting mutinies invariably conformed to established rules which confined them to the status of a sort of formal demonstration. Only mutinies openly led or covertly incited by officers broke the rules, and only then did authority react with severity. Respectable mutinies conducted in accordance with Service tradition, in pursuit of proper objectives such as the payment of overdue wages or the ejection of intolerable officers, could expect to get what they demanded, and with no question of punishing the mutineers.3
That description is based on the 1986 book The Wooden World, by N.A.M. Rodger, which is a seminal study of the organization, social makeup, and administration of the Royal Navy of the Seven Years War (1756–1763).4
Note the similarities between Rodger’s description of shipboard hierarchies and the ways in which O’Brian (through Aubrey) creates a fictional version of the ideal form. “Mutual accommodation” when things are going well; “respectable mutinies” when they are not; but in all times and places, officers and men know their place. When things go wrong, it is usually an officer’s fault. The men seek “proper objectives” “in accordance with Service tradition,” and at no point do they attempt anything radical that would undermine the effectiveness of the fighting force.
As you can probably tell, I think Rodger overstates his case. Nevertheless, he and I can agree on a fundamental point: compared to the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy of the Seven Years War was more dependent on close contact and mutual accommodation between officers and men.
What changed the relationship between officers and men in the fifty years between the two conflicts? Three developments, it seems to me, stand out as most important.
The increasing centralization of recruiting. This is a vastly complicated subject about which there are many books, but in brief: it was more common for captains to be responsible for recruiting their own crews in the Seven Years War than it was in the Napoleonic Wars. The Admiralty took more control over recruitment through the Impress Service, which it established permanently in the Seven Years War and grew steadily for the rest of the century. The Impress Service not only organized press gangs but also recruited volunteers. Its volunteers were sent to a receiving ship before being assigned to a ship fitting out, which meant they did not get to choose their captains. In contrast, when captains recruited directly, volunteers could exercise agency in finding captains that they wanted to serve under.
The French Revolution. With all due respect to the English Civil War and the Battle of Yorktown, this is the ultimate example of The World Turned Upside Down.
The Great Mutinies of 1797. Drawing in part on the ideology spreading outward from France, and in part on the tradition that Rodger identifies of labor strikes for better pay, sailors at Spithead and the Nore paralyzed British naval operations in home waters in the summer of 1797. Parliament did raise sailors’ pay in response to the initial strike action, but the mutiny continued. The Admiralty suppressed it with violence and hanged many of the supposed ringleaders. In the aftermath of these and other bloody mutinies like that on Hermione in September of that year, many historians have seen the final severing of the old trust between officers and men as described by Rodger in the passage above. (Other historians don’t think that the trust ever existed in the first place, but nobody downplays the significance of the Great Mutinies in shaping the relationships on board ships.)
I could also mention copper bottoming, the changing character of warfare, cultural factors, etc.—it’s not an exhaustive list. But there’s enough in it to provide context for my thesis, namely: Aubrey and his followers are men out of time, transplanted from the navy of the Seven Years War to the navy of the Napoleonic Wars.5
That transplanting should not diminish anyone’s enjoyment of the series. But perhaps it does cast some of Aubrey’s debates with Maturin in a different light. Maturin’s story depends entirely on the events of the French Revolution: his initial enthusiasm for it, followed by his disillusionment and his decision to work for British intelligence. When he talks about authority with Aubrey, he’s talking to a man from the ancien regime, from the pre-Revolutionary world, before it was turned upside down. Read the famous passage that Farrell quotes again:
‘As for mutinies in general,’ said Stephen, ‘I am all in favour of ’em. You take men from their homes or their chosen professions, you confine them in insalubrious conditions upon a wholly inadequate diet, you subject them to the tyranny of bosun’s mates, you expose them to unimagined perils; what is more, you defraud them of their meagre food, pay and allowances — everything but this sacred rum of yours. Had I been at Spithead, I should certainly have joined the mutineers. Indeed, I am astonished at their moderation.’
‘Pray, Stephen, do not speak like this, nattering about the service; it makes me so very low. I know things are not perfect, but I cannot reform the world and run a man-of-war. In any case, be candid, and think of the Sophie — think of any happy ship.’
‘There are such things, sure; but they depend upon the whim, the digestion and the virtue of one or two men, and that is iniquitous. I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.’
Maturin speaks more eloquently than Aubrey in the debates, so O’Brian has Aubrey show rather than tell. But the happy ships that Aubrey shows us belong more to the Seven Years War than the Napoleonic Wars.
To be clear, there certainly were officers like Aubrey in the Napoleonic Wars. Cuthbert Collingwood, for example, was a conservative officer who maintained a strict social distance between himself and his men, but his care for their well-being famously inspired a devoted following. It was more common, however, for captains to have to negotiate with crews that they had not recruited and who had been turned over into their ship after long years of service in other ships with limited opportunities for leave. Often the easiest way to assert authority was through flogging and strict adherence to formal regulations laid out by the Admiralty. The ship became less of an ordered society based on mutual trust and more of a machine in which the men were cogs. As James Davey’s most recent book has shown, the men responded by engaging in various forms of active and passive protest that called into stark relief many of the inequities on which British society rested. It is hard to imagine the kind of organic, ordered community that Aubrey aspires to construct in the febrile revolutionary atmosphere of the turn of the nineteenth century—not impossible, but difficult.
When are they not?
The movie Master and Commander is set in 1805, the year of a great invasion threat and of the battle of Trafalgar. But none of that makes any historical sense. The plot is based on the O’Brian novel The Far Side of the World, which is in turn based on the true story of HMS Phoebe and USS Essex in 1814, but for understandable reasons the studio was reluctant to make the U.S. Navy the bad guys.
N.A.M. Rodger, “The Naval World of Jack Aubrey,” in A.E. Cunningham, ed., Patrick O’Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (Wetherby: The British Library, 1994), 55. An odd book, this: the preceding chapter was written by Charlton Heston.
You wouldn’t know that from the subtitle, An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy, but such is the publishing business.
This is not an original argument, and indeed it was made by, among others, Rodger himself.