As with most classes of warship, the 22 vessels of the Roebuck Class of fifth-rate frigates suffered mixed fortunes during their careers. The ships were constructed between 1769 and 1783 for service in the ever more desperate American Revolutionary War. Three of the class were lost during this combat. Five more were victims of mishap, three being wrecked on deadly foreign shores. HMS Guardian was in fatal collision with an iceberg, while HMS Resistance was destroyed as a result of a lightning strike. However, perhaps the ship with the most eventful career among this class, 12 of which bore names relating to classical antiquity, was one that never went to sea. It was upon the timbered decks of HMS Gladiator that numerous judicial dramas were played out over a fifteen-year period when Britain was in arguably her greatest peril.
As one of the Royal Navy’s larger types of fifth-raters, HMS Gladiator carried a total of 44 guns on two decks; 20 18-pdrs on the lower deck and 24 9-pdrs on the upper. Combined, these amounted to a broadside weight of shot of 285 pounds. This firepower, coupled with a frigate’s smaller dimensions and relatively shallow draft made them ideal for operations in the coastal waters of North America. Along with her sister Romulus, Gladiator was constructed at Buckler’s Hard, a small private shipyard on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire.
Gladiator commissioned at Portsmouth on 28th November 1782 under the command of Captain Richard Murray, just three days after news of General Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown had reached British shores. Only three months later, she was decommissioned and placed ‘in ordinary’, a fate shared by many of her sisters. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries it was not uncommon for ships to spend much of their time laid up without sails or spars awaiting the outbreak of a fresh conflict. In fact, there are probably examples of warships completed after the cessation of the Napoleonic wars that went from slipway to scrapyard without ever putting to sea. This was nearly the fate of HMS Unicorn, a Leda Class frigate completed in 1824 that survives to this day at Dundee. Aside from making one voyage from the Medway to the Tay, she spent the next 200 years at her moorings.
Gladiator remained in ordinary until 1792 when she was refitted for harbour service, being assigned a number of static roles over the next quarter century; as a convalescent ship, a guard-ship, a store-ship and a receiving ship [1]. However, from 1798 onward, she was to become a principal site for the Royal Navy’s administration of justice through the system of court-martials. The reason the Gladiator was chosen for this important duty is unclear for although a relatively large frigate, she was much smaller than HMS Cambridge; the 80-gun third-rater that hosted court-martials at Plymouth during the same period.
In general, court-martials were decided by a council of between 5 and 9 commissioned officers of flag rank, or infrequently those of lower ship-commanding ranks. The council was usually led by a president of flag-officer rank, assisted by a judge-advocate whose role was to administer an oath of impartiality and confidentiality from every member of the court. The accused was escorted into the room by an armed guard with sword drawn, or in the case of ordinary seamen, a cutlass. Officers were obliged to place their own swords lengthwise on the court table, an act symbolizing that their commissions and reputations were at the mercy of the court. Officers receiving a guilty verdict would see the sword turned tip-wise towards them, while those acquitted would have it returned to them with solemnity. Court-martials could not be conducted on an individual warship at sea; rather, at least three vessels needed to be in attendance at the site of the hearing. This, and the need for a quorum of senior naval officers meant that the majority were held in Royal Navy home ports.
The records show that scores of such military trials were held aboard the Gladiator between 1799 and 1815. The charges ranged from lesser misdemeanors of drunkenness, desertion, disobedience and seditious remarks to more serious crimes such as neglect of duty, cowardice and mutiny. In addition, any loss of a warship would be subject to a court martial to determine the causes and culpability. Whatever the type of felony, the penalties, if found guilty could be severe, depending on the social status of the individuals involved. Punishments for ordinary seamen ranged from the ‘mulcting’ of pay (fines) and dismissal from the service to flogging (usually from 50 to 300 lashes), imprisonment and execution. Officers, on the other hand, might be dismissed, demoted or merely reprimanded [2].
One of the earliest court-martials conducted aboard the Gladiator concerned the loss of HMS Impregnable, a 98-gun first rate ship-of-the-line. A veteran of The Glorious First of June – the first major British naval victory over revolutionary France – she’d run aground after dark on Chichester Shoals on 18th October 1799 after escorting a convoy from Lisbon to the Isle of Wight. The crew attempted to lighten and anchor the vessel, but further grounding left her hull damaged beyond repair. The court, which convened 12 days later, exonerated the Impregnable’s commander, Captain Jonathon Faulkner, but her master, Michael Jenkins, was held accountable and dismissed.
Further court-martials of a similar nature were held over the next two years after the loss of the French prize HMS Scout, the fifth-rate HMS Jason, and the 74-gun HMS Hannibal. The Scout had run aground on the Shingles, a shifting pebble bank on the western edge of the Needles Channel. The Jason had been wrecked in St Malo Bay, her crew captured by the French and subsequently exchanged by cartel. The Hannibal was the most serious case. The ship had run aground during the First Battle of Algeciras, near Gibraltar, in July 1801. After sustaining more than 140 casualties including at least 75 dead, her captain Solomon Ferris had surrendered his vessel to the enemy. In all of these cases, those in command of the vessels were honourably acquitted.
Also in 1801, a court martial aboard the Gladiator considered the case of HMS Mars and HMS Centaur, two 74s which had ‘run afoul of each other’ in the Hamoaze, the estuary on which Plymouth’s Devonport Dockyard was situated. Of the officers involved in this evidently minor collision, Captain Lloyd and Lieutenant Burnet of the Mars were exonerated by the court whereas Lieutenant Davis of the Centaur, perhaps by dint of being subordinate in rank to Lloyd, was dismissed from his post and reduced in rank by six months.
In the aftermath of the events at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, acts of mutiny remained relatively common and HMS Gladiator witnessed several court-martials of mutineers. On 12th September 1801, a court heard evidence against John Williams, charged with ‘aiding and assisting’ in the overthrow of Captain William Proby and the officers of HMS Danae 18 months earlier. Interestingly, the 20-gun vessel was originally French, having been captured in 1798. After her seizure by the mutineers, she’d been sailed to Le Conquet, a port at the western tip of Brittany, where Proby had reluctantly surrendered her ‘to the French nation, but not to mutineers’. On his release from French custody in June of 1800, Proby was court-martialed aboard the Gladiator for the loss of his ship and exonerated from all blame. Williams was sentenced to hang, but appears to have escaped such a fate owing to a legal technicality.
Eight crewmen of the frigate HMS Active were tried aboard Gladiator on 9th April 1801 ‘for writing anonymous letters, endeavoring to make mutinous assemblies, and for uttering seditious and mutinous words’. All but one of the men were found guilty, receiving flogging sentences of between three dozen and several hundred lashes. The presumed ringleader, the unfortunate John King was condemned to receive 500 lashes. However, this may have been a signaled deterrent rather than an actual punishment as floggings were often halted on the advice of ships surgeons if it was thought the victim might not endure any more lashes.
The most significant trials were of men implicated in the violent seizure of HMS Hermione, the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history. The small frigate’s captain, Hugh Pigot, and eight officers had been murdered on the evening of 21st September 1797 by members of the crew while the ship was patrolling Caribbean waters. The mutineers had sailed the Hermione into enemy hands at La Guaira, on the Spanish Main. Some were later captured while serving aboard enemy ships and repatriated to England for trial. John Watson and James Allen were court-martialed on 31st July 1800, and William Miller and Thomas William respectively on 13th February and 30th March 1802. All were found guilty and hung from a yardarm.
On 10th December 1800, the court martial was held aboard the Gladiator for what was recorded as ‘an unnatural crime’. The men involved were John Hubbard and George Hynes, seamen from HMS St. George. This was almost certainly a case of buggery, which was considered a capital offence, on a par with mutiny in the British military until 1861. The incidence of such acts is hard to ascertain, but the harshness of the sentence it carried probably deterred many sailors from informing on their shipmates, and encouraged officers either to look the other way or mete out less severe punishment for a euphemistic offence such as ‘indecency’ or ‘uncleanliness’. It appears that Hubbard and Hynes, in being sentenced to hang, were quite unlucky to meet with the full consequences of naval law [3].
Desertion was another potentially capital offence in time of war. A court martial held aboard the Gladiator on 15th October 1800 set out to make an example of Thomas M’Cartney of the frigate HMS Melpomene. A serial deserter, M’Cartney had re-enlisted twice under false names, in each case fraudulently pocketing the King’s shilling. The previous six months had seen more than 300 instances of desertion at Portsmouth alone, adding to the problem of manning warships. In this context, the court settled on a sentence of death, M’Cartney supposedly being the first seaman so condemned during the French Revolutionary Wars. William Ellis, tried aboard the Gladiator on 14th November 1800, had been found among the crew of the captured French privateer L’Eole in June and later identified as a British subject and a deserter from the old third-rate HMS Fame. The court duly sentenced Ellis to death, though this was probably more on account of his act of treason.
Perhaps the most famous court martial to take place aboard HMS Gladiator was that of Lord Gambier in July of 1809. Admiral James Gambier was one of the Royal Navy’s most distinguished senior officers, having fought as a captain at The Glorious 1st of June in 1794, where his bold actions had earned him the Naval Gold Medal, and commanded naval forces during the Bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, for which he’d been rewarded with a peerage. As commander of the Channel Fleet, he’d bottled up a sizable squadron of French warships in the Basque Roads, a sheltered anchorage at the mouth of the Charente River near Rochefort.
There, his subordinate Thomas Cochrane had led an attack of fire-ships, which forced the anchored French men o’ war to cut their moorings and subsequently become beached. Gambier refused Cochrane’s entreaties to enter the roadstead with his main force and destroy the stranded vessels, his inaction allowing several to be recovered. The Battle of the Basque Roads was celebrated as a great victory back in Britain. However, an incensed Cochrane, who was also an incumbent MP, threatened to oppose a planned parliamentary vote of thanks to Gambier for his actions, which he considered timorous and un-Nelsonian. When he learned of this objection, Gambier requested his own court-martial in order to clear his name.
Among those adjudicating the case aboard the Gladiator were Admiral Sir Roger Curtis, Admiral Sir William Young, and Vice-Admiral Sir John Thomas Duckworth. Curtis and Duckworth were known allies of Gambier while Young held a long-standing antipathy towards Cochrane. Unsurprisingly, given Gambier’s elevated status and the bias of the assembled court, the Admiral was ‘honourably acquitted’, and his surrendered sword ceremonially returned to him. Indeed, the court praised his conduct during the Battle of the Basque Roads as one ‘marked by ‘zeal, judgement, ability, and an anxious attention to the welfare of His Majesty’s service.’ Cochrane, on the other hand, had his standing in the Royal Navy destroyed, although he remained a hero with the wider public, and would achieve further celebrity for his exploits during various independence wars in South America.
This was in fact the second court-martial relating to the Battle of the Basque Roads to be heard aboard the Gladiator. Before the battle, Rear-Admiral Eliab Harvey, the renowned captain of the ‘fighting’ Temeraire at Trafalgar, had aimed ‘vehement and insulting language’ at Gambier upon hearing he’d been passed over to lead the fire-ship attack himself. At his trial in May, Harvey had been dismissed from the service, and although reinstated a year later, he was never given another command.
Another remarkable court-martial heard within the timbered confines of HMS Gladiator occurred the following year. The case surrounded the marooning of a seaman in the Caribbean. In December 1807, Robert Jeffrey, a crewman aboard the 18-gun brig-sloop HMS Recruit, had been accused of stealing beer belonging to one of the midshipmen. The ship’s captain, Commander Warwick Lake had impetuously ordered that Jeffrey be cast ashore on the tiny and remote island of Sombrero, at the northern extreme of the Lesser Antilles, without provisions; in effect left to die of famine. Six months later, word of Lake’s unorthodox punishment reached the ear of his commanding officer, Sir Alexander Cochrane, who immediately ordered Lake to go and retrieve the unfortunate sailor. However, Jeffrey could not be found, and Lake was held to account for his evident demise, being dismissed from the service at his trial in February of 1810. Lake’s extraordinary conduct was subsequently brought to the attention of parliament, being decried as ‘a most inhuman act of wanton and deliberate barbarity.’ It was later learned that Jeffrey had been picked up by a passing American ship after being marooned for just over a week. On his return to Britain some three years later, Jeffrey reputedly received £600 in compensation from his former captain.
In 1813, the year following renewed hostilities between Britain and America, a court aboard HMS Gladiator heard the events surrounding the loss of the frigate HMS Java, captured and burned by the USS Constitution the previous December. Lieutenant Chad was the most senior surviving officer; the Java’s commander Captain Lambert having been among 22 men killed during the bloody 3-hour engagement. It being deemed that the Java had put up a noble fight against a more powerful frigate, Chad and his fellow officers were honourably acquitted.
After 25 years of static but otherwise sterling service at Portsmouth, HMS Gladiator was finally paid off on 5th October 1815. The ship that never went to sea was broken up in August 1817. Her gladiatorial figurehead can still be admired at the preserved shipyard where she was built.
[1] A convalescent ship was where sailors suspected of carrying infectious diseases could be quarantined before being allowed ashore.
[2] The one infamous exception had been the court-martial of Admiral John Byng following his defeat at the Battle of Minorca in 1756, which had led to the British losing control of the island. Byng had subsequently been found guilty of ‘having failed to do his utmost’ and executed by firing squad.
[3] Had the two men continued to serve aboard the same ship, they would probably have drowned for the St. George was wrecked off the coast of Jutland a year later; barely a dozen from her complement of 850 survived.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 