In 1783, midshipman Francis Venables Vernon was stationed with the British fleet in Jamaica when he received terrible news: peace was imminent. Two months short of fulfilling the required sea time to qualify for the lieutenantsâ exam, Vernon was left with no prospects for employment or a commission. He returned to his native Ireland, disappointed but thankful that he had survived the war. Two years later, Vernon was offered an opportunity to carry dispatches to the British consul at Tripoli. He resolved to turn his mission into a kind of Grand Tour on a budget. From Tripoli, he served on merchant ships travelling along the coast of North Africa, marvelled at the wonders of Alexandria, and journeyed inland by caravan. He eventually arrived in Smyrna, where he befriended a Dutch captain who offered him passage to Europe âon the social footing of brother officersâ. In Marseilles, he met a Dutch lieutenant and a travelling English gentleman, and together the three men gained entrance to the French naval arsenal. Vernon was impressed with the scale of the operation, but less impressed by the French officers he met, who, he said, âhave been deprived of attending to the drudgery of practice, by a strict regard to have their heads well-powderedââin other words, they were no seamen. He returned from his Grand Tour thanks to a chance meeting with a British lieutenant who was commanding a merchant ship during the peace. The two had served together in the same fleet in the American War, and Vernon sailed home with him.1
Naval officers in the eighteenth century comprised an international community. As a member of the naval profession, Vernon moved easily in the maritime world. He formed connections with other naval officers through their shared expertise, and that expertise made him a desirable commodity on merchant ships. Seamanship and navigation set sailors apart from ordinary civiliansâand perhaps, he suggested, even from French officers. Unsurprisingly, he found more in common with the Dutch captain in Smyrna than he did with its inhabitants, but he also found more in common with the Dutch lieutenant in Marseilles than the English gentleman. As was true for most naval officers, Vernonâs maritime experiences exposed him to the foreign and the exotic. Shared stories of the curious and perilous cemented bonds between sailors in ways to which few outsiders could relate.
Yet our understanding of this community is frustratingly fractured. Being a naval officer meant belonging to a transnational community, but few historians have explored these connections. Naval history is dominated by studies of individual nations, too often reliant on source material in only one language. Few historians incorporate the influence of navies and officers into the fabric of society, yet this social group did so much more than sail ships. Naval officers shaped foreign policy, conducted scientific research, and patronized the arts; they were explorers, celebrities, and intellectuals.
This book addresses both oversights by surveying the lives and careers of naval officers across Europe at the height of the age of sail. It traces the professionalization of European naval officers by exploring their preparation for life at sea and the challenges they faced while in command. It also demonstrates the uniqueness of the maritime experience, as long voyages and isolation at sea cemented their bond with naval officers across Europe while separating them from landlubbers. It depicts, in a way no previous study has, the parameters of their shared experiencesâboth the similarities that crossed national boundaries and connected officers and the differences that can only be seen from an international perspective.
Circumstances varied for each navy. The British navy aimed for world domination and maintained naval operations all over the globe. The Russian navy, newly founded in this century, organized itself around distinct maritime interests. The small Danish navy spent most of the eighteenth century at peace, while the small Swedish navy struggled (unsuccessfully) for dominance in the Baltic Sea. Placing the well-known and well-studied navies in the same frame as peripheral and smaller navies, the contributors to this volume examine naval culture across Europe as well as how specific national contexts transformed and shaped that culture.
Navies are at the centre of the story of early modern states and societies. Building, recruiting, deploying, and supplying a fleet at sea required enormous commitments from governments and taxpayersâthe famous fiscal-military state. Much of the growth of the state apparatus in the eighteenth century can be traced to the navy, as Jan Glete, John Brewer, N.A.M. Rodger, and others have shown, but there is a social and cultural story that needs to be told as well.2 The chapters that follow tell that story. The eighteenth century was dynamic and tumultuous. It is often described as the beginning of the modern period. European states transformed from conglomerates into nation-states; global trade increased; European wars touched every continent; and most importantly, new ideas emerged about education, knowledge, training, and professionalization. Navies and their officers were at the core of all this, making them ideal subjects to study.
That the ship is a microcosm of society is perhaps clichĂ©, but naval officers are a useful analytical category for social historians. In many countries, they were subject to comparatively intense administrative scrutiny. We can learn more about their lives than most other eighteenth-century professionals. They were also representatives of the ruling elite, though they were not always drawn from those classes. The development of a middle-class and professional ethos among naval officers forms one key theme of the book. Our project provides an opportunity to examine how members of different social groupsâfrom the middle class to the nobilityâmet the challenges of being a naval officer. At the same time, over the course of the eighteenth century, officersâ relationship with social hierarchies changed, and the contributors trace the evolution of this relationship through the foundational chaos of the French Revolution. Naval officers were also a distinct group from other military professionals. They were highly trained men charged with protecting and deploying the most expensive and technologically advanced product of pre-industrial Europe, the deep-water, square-rigged sailing ship. Compared to their colleagues in the army, the stakes were significantly higher. Mistakes could lead to mutinies, catastrophes in battle, or, worst of all, the rapid death of hundreds of men in a shipwreck.
How, then, did European states ensure that naval officers were capable of handling their powers and responsibilities? There were many solutions to the problem of officersâ education. One way they did so was to force officers, no matter their background, to spend years at a young age on board a ship at sea. Seamanship is best learned through exposure to a variety of weather conditions, seas, and shorelines. Officers who learned their profession this way, as we saw with Francis Venables Vernon earlier, could become expert sailors at a comparatively young age. At the same time, they were expected to gain a classical education, a challenge that was difficult to meet given the limited resources available to officers at sea. The Russian navy arranged for young officers to serve on British ships throughout the eighteenth century, gaining practical experience that imparted not only nautical skills but also a shared mentality about naval service. Other navies took a shore-based approach, founding academies and cadet schools in port cities across Europe. Inspired by new ideas about knowledge and education in France, these navies suggested that the challenges of command at sea could be met primarily through classroom instruction emphasizing the classical education expected of a member of the ruling elite.3
A comparative approach contextualizes both naval practices and social structures. The chapters that follow reveal, in a way no previous work has, how European navies grappled with the universal challenges of survival at sea. How officers were educated falls on a spectrum, from immersive to theoretical. Whether officers could expect to be consistently employed also varied. At one extreme are the Danes, who were at peace for the eighty years following 1720 but nevertheless managed to find employment for most officers. The pinnacle of a Danish officerâs career was a prestigious dockyard command. At the other extreme are the British. Despite being at war for much of the century and boasting the largest navy in Europe, the British had far more officers than they could employ at sea or on land. As a result, most British officersâ careers were characterized by a decade or less of active service followed by long periods on half-pay.
Naval officers did more than simply pace the quarterdecks of Europeâs ships. Many navies sought to provide employment opportunities for officers by thinking creatively about how their skills could be best developed and deployed. The Swedes required officers to serve for a year or more in a foreign navy. In Denmark, officers could be employed as spies in dockyards around Europe. Without the opportunity to capture enemy ships in wartime, the Danish navy needed a way to learn about new developments in ship technology. In Britain, employment not at sea on a ship in commission was less common, though a small group were employed in the Impress Service, the Transport Service, and in coastal defence during invasion scares. A lucky few officers embarked on voyages of exploration. Early in the century, Dutch officers were in high demand around Europe; if their careers did not look likely to progress at home, it was relatively easy to look abroad. The Swedes even sent officers to the Netherlands to recruit experienced officers to support Swedish operations in the Great Northern War.
Education practices and employment patterns highlight differences among naval officers, but at the heart of the analysis here are several fundamental similarities shared across the international naval communityâsimilarities that allowed Vernon to greet officers as brothers thousands of miles from home. Most officers were born near the sea, close to the network of contacts that provided both the inspiration for them to join the navy and support throughout their careers. They were men of the sea, first and foremost. They also shared similar values. They identified as men of honour, and they fought duels to defend that honour. Honour was not sufficient motivation for most officers, though, perhaps because many officers did not come from the social elite. To compensate, they sought rewards from their sovereign for meritorious service, and some officers managed remarkable feats of social advancement over the course of their careers. To bolster their status, officers valued handsome uniforms, though the introduction of standard uniforms came surprisingly late in many navies. Prize money soothed many of the hardships of naval service, and it was universally sought. Death in action was rare; death by shipwreck was more common; most common of all was death from disease. These similarities form the fabric of the book, connecting isolated national histories to depict the shared experiences of the men who commanded Europeâs ships at sea.
What follows is a social history companion to Jan Gleteâs pioneering book, Navies and Nations . Glete argued that naval power and ship technology cannot be understood in narrow national contexts, and furthermore that navies were the product of a wide range of interest groups linked to all aspects of early modern society. Drawing on sources from archives in eighteen countries, Glete demonstrated the value of a transnational approach, though few since have attempted such an ambitious study.
The challenge of working in archives in so many countries is daunting; to meet it, we have brought together an international team with expertise in seven European navies. Though each author has been given the latitude to approach the bookâs key theme...