Ashore and Afloat: The British Navy and the Halifax Naval Yard Before 1820

PREFACE

Preface "Oh dear, those learned people who spend a whole lifetime in getting up their subjects!"1 This book is about the navy, not at sea, but on land. A naval yard and the squadron it serves are intimately connected. If a squadron or fleet is not much more than an elaborate gun deck, it cannot function without a base. In fast-moving operations, the base might prove to be very temporary. This was seen at Turtle Bayon Manhattan Island during the war with rebel America from 1776 through 1783. For enduring strategic reasons a base might acquire near-permanence. As the British Empire expanded, early examples of overseas yards were found in such places as Gibraltar, Port Royal in Jamaica, English Harbour in Antigua, and Halifax in the colony of Nova Scotia. Warships, like land-based fortresses such as the Halifax citadel, needed to be maintained and supplied, while those who manned and conserved them needed all sorts of tools and equipment, as well as provisions, clothing, pay, leave, management, and training. Each yard behind its walls - wooden or stone - constituted to some extent a world of its own. Each interacted in all sorts of ways with the port town where it was established, not the least of which was economic. This is the focus of Ashore andAfloat, which is as much about the workforce as it is about the administration and infrastructure of an important naval institution. To explain this interaction, this book is divided into three parts. The first section analyses and describes the history of the Halifax careening yard which sustained successive North American squadrons xii Preface and fleets. There is a particular focus on its spatial and physical evolution along the harbour's shore lying to the north of the growing town of Halifax. It includes discussion of the adjoining naval hospital complex and the Commander-in-chief'shouse, prominently positioned overlooking both yard and hospital. My account of the yard ends in 1819, when it was reduced for a period of thirteen years to the statusof a small depot with a skeleton workforce.Thereafter for some years, its only real work was to greet the squadron for a few weeks each summer , when the commanding admiral put in a brief appearance. Then the highlight was the annual regatta. Never again until the great wars of the twentieth century did the yard play so important a role as it had assumed before 1820. The actual work of the yard is considered in some detail in the second part. The conditions of work for those employed in the yard, from the resident commissioner, the other officers and their clerks, to the corps of artificers, and other workers, form part of this section. The variety of work undertaken is also analysed. The book's final section deals with the economic impact of the yard, and looks both at the extent to which it was dependent on local suppliers and its role in coordinating the supply of masts and other forms of wood products for the Halifax yard and for yards elsewhere, especially in the West Indies, England,and Bermuda.Finally, it considers the yard's role as a quasi-bank, before a banking system existed in the colony. Between 1793 and 1815, when the British navy numbered upwards of 1,000 warships, as many as 15,000 men worked in the dockyards at home and perhaps another 3,000 more in refitting yards scattered about the British Isles and the Empire. To carry this heavy load, by 1815 the Navy Board in London employed more than 200 clerks to maintain the flow of orders to places as widely scattered as Madras, Trincomalee, Penang, Mauritius, Sydney, Capetown, Rio de Janeiro, Barbados, Bermuda, Antigua, Jamaica, Halifax, Kingston on Lake Ontario, Malta, Port Mahon, and Alexandria.2 The Navy Board was accused by contemporaries of inefficiency, charging that it remained technologically backward and wasteful both of funds and scarce materials. Against any reforming impulses stood, on the one hand, the Navy Board's jealous defence of its London-based, highly centralized system of management and, on the other, weight of custom and traditional practice of the corps of workmen, led by the master artificers in the yards themselves. These criticisms by contemporaries have been Preface xiii examined and sometimes echoed by historians, especially because of the impact on the navy's ability to confront its enemies in the...