Bad pay, badly given, did not sum up the wrongs of the sailors. The constant infliction of the lash was, as far as we can see, not felt as more of a grievance by sailors than by schoolboys. But the bad food they did resent, and there can be no doubt that the rations supplied were frequently inferior, while the practice of putting six men on the allowance of four, in long voyages, caused the amount supplied to be insufficient. It may be that the men did not realise how much the want of ventilation and the prevalence of dirt was against their interests. But they suffered from them none the less. It must be repeated that the administration did not sin from want of knowledge. There was a standing order to keep the ships properly aired. But a writer of the time, Henry Maydman in his _Sea Politics_, has explained why this regulation was not applied. Captains frequently took the steerage, the space of the main-deck in front of their cabins, for themselves, forcing the officers, who ought to have had it, further forward, so that the after-hatchway was shut to the men. Thus only the fore-hatchway was left to the crew, or for the purpose of establishing a draught. When the ship was at sea, and the ports closed, the air below grew foul, and turned food and drink bad. It is to this we have to look for the explanation of the frightful ravages of fevers during the cruises of the time. A few weeks at sea even in European waters commonly made the ships sickly. At the close of the century a long cruise at sea was relied on to make them healthy. In the interval a great internal revolution had been wrought in the navy, dating from about the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, and carried on partly by Captain Cook, partly by Dr. Gilbert Blane, who accompanied Rodney to the West Indies in 1782, but caused originally by the influence on the naval officers of the great revival of intelligent humanity in the country.
AUTHORITIES.—Beatson, _Military Memoirs_; Campbell’s _Lives of the Admirals_; Schomberg’s _Naval Chronology_; Burrows’ _Life of Hawke_.
From the signing of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 till the beginning of the colonial war with Spain in 1739, the Royal Navy was used as an instrument in the hand of diplomacy to keep the peace, or as the police of the seas. Europe was disturbed in the North by the last stages of the struggle between Peter the Great of Russia and Charles XII. of Sweden, in the South by the foolish ambitions of Philip V., the first Bourbon king of Spain, and his second wife, Elizabeth Farnese. But the statesmen who controlled the policy of Western Europe during most of these years, Sir Robert Walpole in England and Cardinal Fleury in France, were unwearied in warding off another war. Once, in 1718, a strong fleet sent into the Mediterranean, to put a stop to one of the Italian ventures of Philip V., destroyed a much weaker and very ill-handled Spanish fleet off Cape Passaro, in Sicily. As a rule, the appearance of our ships was enough. Now and then an officer found some chance of distinction in service against the pirates, largely recruited among the privateers of the war, who swarmed in distant seas. The most signal example was the suppression of a noted adventurer of this class, named Roberts, by Sir Chaloner Ogle, on the West Coast of Africa in 1722. Meanwhile war on a vast scale was being prepared by two causes—on the Continent by the rivalries of France and Austria in Germany, and Spain and Austria in Italy, together with the ambition of the rising kingdom of Prussia and its great King Frederick; and on the sea by the collision of England with Spain and France in America, and with France in India. Great Britain was drawn into the Continental War by the Hanoverian interests of the royal family and the desire to maintain the balance of power. Here the navy played an indispensable but secondary part. But in the colonial struggle it was the foremost combatant, and exercised a decisive influence.