He had died in 1881, aged sixty-one, when Richard was fourteen. The death left him an orphan, for his mother had died when he was only seven. It gave him an immediate bond with Tom, who had suffered a similar family tragedy, and their backgrounds were alike in other ways. Like Tollesbury, Itchen Ferry was then an isolated community, in which virtually every man earned his living from the sea. Richard had been to the St Mary Extra school in the shadow of the churchyard on Pear Tree Green, where his parents were buried, but his teacher could make nothing of him and he left school unable to read or write. He lived rough for a while before being taken in by Captain Jack Matthews, under whom he was serving on the racing cutter Daphne. None of Jack Matthews’s own children were old enough to go yachting or fishing with him, and he became a surrogate father to Richard. The owner of the Daphne had also taken a liking to him, and had already offered him a berth for the 1884 racing season.
Although he had been brought up to boats from his cradle, Richard’s experience was confined to inshore fishing and yachting in the Solent, and he had never been to sea. When some of his friends told him that a boy was wanted for an ocean voyage in a yacht lying at Northam, he crossed on the next ferry to apply for the berth.
When he came home that night, he told the Matthews’ he was going out to New South Wales in the Mignonette. They were horrified and tried to talk him out of it, but he was determined to go. ‘If I can get away for twelve months, I’ll do myself some good. I want to go abroad and make a man of myself.’
Jack shook his head. ‘Dick, you ought not to think of going to Australia in so small a vessel.’
‘I shan’t hurt,’ Richard said. ‘The ship’s all right.’
The arguments went on for the next four days, and Jack enlisted some of his friends, and his brother John, the master of the May, to try to persuade the boy to change his mind. He insisted, though, that he had to try to better himself. ‘Captain Dudley is a good man and intends to teach me everything he can. You’ll have a good wage from me, I’ll come home a proper seaman, and I’ll be able to read and write as well — Captain Dudley promised me that.’
He was backed by many of his peers around Itchen Ferry who told him, on the basis of hearsay and seamen’s tales from around the docks, that he would be sure to make his fortune if he could only get out to Australia.
In his desperation to win the Matthews’ approval for the voyage, Richard told them he had been promised a wage of a pound a week, more than twice as much as he was actually being paid. They continued to be implacably opposed to his going, but the one person who might have been able to persuade him to change his mind, his eldest brother, Daniel, was away at sea. In his absence Richard was immovable.
Jack Matthews’s anxiety was understandable. He did not know Tom or the Mignonette, but he knew enough of ships and the sea to be concerned about the fitness of the craft for such a voyage, and he was deeply worried about what Richard might face in this or a subsequent berth once he was far from home on the high seas.
In the early days of British sea-power, life afloat was described as, ‘Continual destruction in ye foretop, ye Pox above board, ye Pleague between Decks, Hell in ye Forecastle and ye Devil at ye Helm.’
Nothing much had changed in the intervening centuries. It was not until 1854 that the Merchant Shipping Act imposed a requirement on a shipping master to take action if a death had occurred through violence on a ship. Before that it had been left to the discretion of the captain of the vessel.
Life on board the vast majority of ships, whether they were of the Royal Navy or a merchant shipping company, continued to be nasty, brutish, and often short; as late as 1880, one seaman in sixty met a violent end at sea. The next most dangerous occupation, mining, had a death rate of only one in 315.
A ship was a dictatorship, and captains and senior officers could — and sometimes did — get away with murder. Masters and mates routinely used knotted ropes and belaying pins to enforce their orders, floggings were frequent and there were other, even more barbarous and illegal punishments, such as keelhauling. A long rope was passed right under the ship and a seaman was then thrown into the sea and dragged from one side to the other under the keel. It often resulted in serious injury or death.
One US mate was put on trial after amusing himself by firing shots at the seamen up in the rigging. One had been hit and fallen to his death. The mate was tried for murder but acquitted.
Government regulation had begun to curb the worst excesses of the industrial robber barons on land and during the latter half of the nineteenth century it was extended — albeit with painful slowness, against the concerted opposition of ship-owners — to the shipping industry. The regulations were directed at the safe carriage of cargoes and passengers, however, not the protection of seamen from tyrannical captains and rapacious owners.
Beginning with the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854, the newly established Board of Trade began to chip away at the edifice of custom and practice that had grown up over the centuries. Among its duties was the registration of all British ships and of grain and timber cargoes. Grain’s propensity to shift dangerously in transit, the buoyancy of timber and the habit of carrying deck cargo on timber ships, made the vessels that carried those cargoes often dangerously unstable.
The board carried out inquiries into wrecks and casualties and supervised the testing of anchors and chain cables. It also oversaw — notionally, at least — the engagement, discharge and payment of seamen, the protection of them from crimps, the repatriation of seamen discharged abroad and the relief of distressed seamen, and investigated allegations of misconduct by officers and deaths at sea.
It held continuous records of discharge, investigating and punishing desertion or crewmens failure to join ships, and was given responsibility for supervising the examination and certification of ships’ officers.
Crews had to be signed on formally and discharged at a Marine Office under the eye of a Board of Trade official, but many ship-owners and masters simply flouted the law. The number of sailors and ships involved set limits to the control that the board could exercise, even around the wharves and dockside taverns, crimps and boarding-houses, let alone on the high seas.
The board was also given responsibility for ensuring the seaworthiness of ships, with particular attention to the overloading and undermanning of emigrant ships, after a string of disasters around the middle of the century. A huge growth in emigration had led to a shortage of passenger ships. Between 1846 and 1854, 2.5 million people had left the United Kingdom for Australia and America. Although partly fuelled by famine in Ireland, it was also inspired, and to some extent financed, by previous generations of emigrants who were now eager that their families should join them in the New World.
Large numbers of ships were converted to carry passengers, many of them utterly unsuited to the task. In seven years, sixty-one passenger-carrying ships were wrecked at a cost of 1,600 lives. The rate of losses forced government to legislate, and passenger, particularly emigrant, ships were subject to new controls.
While the carriage of passengers became better regulated, the scant legislation relating to crewmen laid down only the most minimal standards. The minimum area for a sailor’s quarters, for example, was only an eighth of the cubic space and a fifth of the floor space required by the War Office for barracks accommodation for soldiers.
If life for men in the Royal Navy was often grim — and the growth in traffic to the Black Sea resulting from the Crimean war had further increased the demands upon them — the ships in which they sailed were at least usually in a state of manageable repair. Merchant seamen had no such guarantee and the decrepit ‘coffin-ships’ of some corrupt shipowners were notorious.