Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract

Congress convened again at Philadelphia on 10 May; among the delegates was Benjamin Franklin, recently returned from London. On 14 June Congress voted to establish its own fighting force – the ‘American Continental Army’ – and appointed George Washington, a wealthy Virginia planter, as its commander-in-chief. Meanwhile at Boston, on 17 June, a British force led by General William Howe attacked the Charlestown peninsula – the closest promontory across the water from the town – and captured it from rebels occupying Bunker Hill. This was a tactical victory for the British, for it secured control of Boston harbour, but a Pyrrhic one, too, with more than a thousand redcoats dead or wounded – twice the casualties of their opponents. Only recently, ministers had sneered at the ‘raw, undisciplined, cowardly’ colonists, but General Gage advised them to think again: ‘The Tryals we have had shew that the Rebels are not the despicable Rabble too many have supposed them to be.’[24]

BY NOW, GAGE was finding it near impossible to obtain food for the eight thousand men under his command. ‘All the ports from whence our supplies usually came,’ he wrote to the Treasury on 19 May, ‘have refused suffering any provision or necessary whatever to be shipped for the king’s use.’[25] The Treasury was the Whitehall department with responsibility for army provisions; which is why Lord North, as First Lord of the Treasury (and therefore, according to convention, prime minister), needed to attend to the minutiae of feeding a garrison more than three thousand miles away. On 13 June the Treasury Board ordered their usual contractors to ship 4,000 barrels of salt pork, 6,000 barrels of flour and 1,000 firkins of butter to Boston.

News of the Battle of Bunker Hill reached London on 25 July; the following day, Lord North solemnly informed the king that the conflict had now grown ‘to such a height, that it must be treated as a foreign war’.[26] At some point it must have dawned on the prime minister and his colleagues at the Treasury that if the soldiers cooped up at Boston were to remain healthy over the winter, they would need better than salt rations to sustain them; and yet, given the onset of the hurricane season, it was perilously late in the year to start planning the dispatch of fresh food supplies. At the Treasury, it fell to John Robinson to procure the shipping that would be needed for such an operation. He soon discovered that the army’s most robust transport vessels had already left for America; meanwhile his next port of call, the London merchants who specialized in the America trade, refused to charter their ships to the Treasury, fearing the consequences for their colonial property if they were seen to be aiding the authorities. Sometime during August, it seems that Robinson sought Richard Atkinson’s advice on this knotty problem. The partnership of Mure, Son & Atkinson had never undertaken government business before, but Richard readily offered his assistance.

On 8 September, Robinson confirmed that the Treasury wished to send large quantities of food and fuel to Boston before the arrival of winter; later that day, Richard attended Lord North at Downing Street, and offered to obtain and ship the necessary items. The prime minister agreed to his terms – a commission of 2½ per cent, as was the mercantile norm – with one notable exception. Given that the price of rum was almost as volatile as the spirit itself, Lord North preferred to fix its cost beforehand; so the two men agreed to use the price quoted in the standing contract for supplying the navy with rum in Jamaica, adding on the ‘usual freight of 6 pence per gallon’, and allowances of 4 per cent for insurance and 10 per cent for leakage.[27]

The rushed manner in which Lord North engaged Richard’s services reflected the emergency. No contract was drawn up; no record of the agreement made it into the Treasury Board minutes. Richard at once committed four of Mure, Son & Atkinson’s vessels to the expedition, swaying fellow merchants to volunteer ships. These were the items on the prime minister’s ‘shopping list’:

4375 Chaldron of Coals

468,750 Galls of Porter

2,000 Sheep

2,000 Hogs

Potatoes

Carrots

Sour Crout

Onions

Sallad Seed

Malt – a small Quantity for the Hospitall

Vinegar – a reasonable Quantity for six Months Consumption

20 Boxes of Tin Plates

33,320 Pounds Wt of Candles to be shipt from Cork

100,000 Gallons of Rum – to be sent from Jamaica next Spring

400 Hogsheads of Melasses – ditto [28]

The list was largely compiled through guesswork. ‘We are busy sending out every Comfort & Conveniency for the Troops,’ Robinson wrote to Charles Jenkinson on 19 September, ‘but since Gen. Gage does not tell us anything they want or may be useful, we are obliged I may say to grope for it.’[29] The Thames set sail for Boston at the end of September, the first of thirty-six ships that would depart over the following two months as soon as their holds were packed and winds permitted. The captain of the Thames, David Laird, was not only one of Mure, Son & Atkinson’s longest-serving employees – it was he who had eight years earlier been involved in the altercation over Jonathan Strong’s fate – but was also known to General Howe, the new commander-in-chief of the British forces in America, both men having fought at the Battle of Havana back in 1762.

As is clear from his correspondence with General Howe, Richard took great pains to make sure the supplies arrived in optimum condition. Five hundred tons of potatoes were loaded gently into the ships ‘so as not to bruise them’, and onions were stored in hampers for the same reason. To guarantee the safe passage of livestock, Richard ordered generous pens to be built in the ships’ tween decks. The Lincolnshire breed of sheep was chosen as fittest to undergo the voyage, in preparation for which the animals were kept on dry food for ten days before being taken on board; the pigs were the ‘half fed kind from the Country & of a large Size, such as will pretty certainly get fat upon the Voyage, a Plentiful Stock of Beans & Water being provided for their Consumption’.[30] As a further incentive to take care of the animals, Richard offered the ships’ captains a bonus of 2s 6d for each one they landed alive.

Scurvy, which we now know to be caused by a lack of vitamin C, was by no means limited to seafaring men; it often afflicted those subsisting on salt rations. Sauerkraut, or ‘sour crout’, was widely believed to be effective against the disease, and its main ingredient, cabbage, was just then coming into season. Richard planned to send up to 300 tons of the stuff out to America. ‘We are informed that in general the Sailors have disliked it at first & afterwards grown extremely fond of it,’ he told General Howe. ‘This first dislike may we hope be lessened by our having left Juniper berries & Spices out of the composition which appear to contribute nothing to its Preservation.’ Normally, it would be unwise to seal and ship casks of sauerkraut during its six-week fermentation period, as they were likely to rupture – but such obstacles did not faze Richard. ‘We have caused Valves to be made (which cost a mere Trifle) to fix in the Bungs of the Casks which Valves being kept down by a Spiral Spring strong enough to resist any thing that can happen in rolling the Cask, will at the same time give way to a Pressure far less than sufficient to burst it & so let out the expanded air,’ he explained to Howe. ‘By this means we shall be able to ship the Sour Krout within a week or ten days of gathering the Cabbage.’[31]

John Robinson kept the king updated on the progress of the Boston expedition. ‘Mr. Robinson,’ starts one of his memoranda, ‘has the Honour to send, by Lord North’s Directions, for His Majesty’s Inspection, two Casks of Sour Crout, put up with Valves, in the same Manner as the Casks shipped for America; and also one of the Valves – The Cask marked No. 1 has been sometime made and may be nearly fit for use, that marked No. 2 is at present in a state of Strong Fermentation.’[32] No detail affecting the comfort of His Majesty’s troops was beneath royal scrutiny.

All the while, the press provided a sardonic commentary on these goings-on. ‘One person has contracted for several thousand cabbages at 3d. each, which, were they brought to market at home, would barely fetch half that price,’ reported the Evening Advertiser on 5 October. ‘It is computed, that, by the time the above sheep and hogs arrive at the places of their destination, they will stand the government (or rather the public) in no less than two shillings per pound, bones included, which occasioned a Wag to remark, that the Ministry have brought their pigs to a fine market.’[33]

DURING THE SUMMER of 1775, Congress ordered all able-bodied men to form into companies of militia – an edict that presented Robert Erskine with a headache, for he knew that were his forgemen, carpenters and blacksmiths to enlist in different units from each other, production at the ironworks would soon seize up. He therefore applied to the New Jersey Congress for permission to raise his own company of foot soldiers, and gained his captain’s commission in mid-August.

Erskine explained the situation in his next letter to Richard, neglecting to mention that the owners of the ironworks would bear the cost of the muskets, bayonets, flints, powder and shot with which their employees would, if necessary, fight the British. He also expressed his disappointment at not having received a personal letter from Richard for the best part of a year: ‘You would add greatly to my satisfaction were you to favour me oftener with a few lines directly from yourself – I know, my Dear Sir, the multiplicity of your engagements and that you have no time to throw away in letters of mere Compliments – but I cannot help wishing to hear from you were it ever so short, especially since I heard of your bad state of health.’[34] (This is the earliest mention I have found of Richard’s fragile constitution.)

It was not long before Erskine faced a crisis at the ironworks, after the London-based proprietors decided they would no longer honour his bills drawn on them. With little coin circulating in New Jersey, Erskine started dipping into his stock of iron – ‘a commodity which neither fire nor vermin can destroy’ – to settle with tradesmen.[35] As he informed Richard on 6 December:

I have between 6 & 700 Ton of pig & 20 & 30 Tons Bar at the Works and expect to make 50 more before the frost sets in. I have no reason to despair, it gives me some satisfaction to tell you so, because I have no doubt it will give you pleasure. I know it would pain you to see anyone in distress, much more one who has had so many proofs of your regard – Distress did I say? Oh my country! To what art thou Driving – this gives me poignant distress indeed. How long will madness and infatuation Continue?[36]

The first four ships of Richard’s provisioning fleet limped into Boston harbour on 19 December, with the Thames at their head, having experienced atrocious storms during the twelve-week crossing. On 31 December, General Howe wrote to John Robinson with a description of the cargoes of the nine ships so far arrived. The supplies of porter, malt, vinegar, salad seed and sauerkraut had held up well, but most of the potatoes had putrefied in the heat of the hold. Only forty out of 550 sheep and seventy-four out of 290 pigs had landed alive; their pens had proved too spacious, and they had repeatedly been ‘thrown upon one another by the Violent motion of the Ship’.[37] Most of the carcasses were too badly crushed to be fit for consumption and had been thrown overboard.

The expedition’s goal had been to bring home comforts to the besieged garrison over the winter, but it proved an abject failure. A foot of snow had fallen in Boston on Christmas Eve, and fuel was in such short supply that Howe authorized the scrapping of old wharves, houses and ships for firewood. The general would be forced to place his troops on short rations in mid-January 1776. In the end, just twenty-four of the thirty-six provisioning ships made it to Boston, including seven stragglers that arrived too late for their rotting cargoes to be unloaded, since by then the garrison was on the point of departure. (The remaining twelve ships were forced ‘by Stress of Weather’ to put into Antigua for essential repairs.)[38]

On the morning of 5 March, Howe discovered that Washington’s Continental Army had, overnight, occupied the Dorchester Heights, a lofty no-man’s-land across the water. Twenty American cannons now pointed towards Boston. The next ten days saw the packing up of the British garrison. Any ordnance that could not be carried away was destroyed or dumped in the sea; seventy-nine horses and 358 tons of hay were also left behind.[39] On 17 March, with the arrival of a fair wind, 120 ships carrying more than ten thousand troops and loyalists set sail for Halifax, Nova Scotia.

SIX

The Rum Contracts

AN ARMY THAT LACKS a strong supply of food, clothing and shelter will be fatally weakened; and yet military historians have often ignored the behind-the-scenes contribution of those working to provide these necessities. As Professor Arthur Bowler, one of the few academics to have studied the logistical minutiae of the American conflict, has written: ‘Since human society began, minstrels and historians have told over and again the exploits of men on the field of battle while condemning to limbo by the process of neglect the more prosaic activities of contractors, commissaries, quartermasters, subtlers, and administrators generally.’[1] Presumably these storytellers have considered the deeds of such people to be too boringly deficient in that stirring narrative quality, jeopardy, to merit their attention – but what greater jeopardy could there be than knowing that a vast army, struggling to save an empire on the other side of a wide ocean, looks to you for its every need? This was the burden that Richard Atkinson would bear for the next six years.

By the start of 1776, it was clear that the redcoat army fighting the American rebels would have to be almost entirely provisioned from home. The shortcomings of the system by which the Admiralty was the government department with responsibility for shipping the troops out to America, while it fell to the Treasury to organize the delivery of their supplies, were perfectly obvious – but the Navy Board categorically refused to offer assistance.

Custom dictated that each British soldier in the field received the same basic ration: one pound of bread and either one pound of salted beef or nine ounces of salted pork every day, plus items issued on a weekly basis, typically eight ounces of rice or oatmeal, six ounces of butter or cheese and three pints of pease. On 9 February, the Treasury Board settled terms with six merchant syndicates who would between them, over the following year, supply provisions for 36,000 men in America and 12,000 men in Canada, at a cost of 5¼d for each daily ration. Richard was the managing partner of the group that won the contract to feed the army in Canada.

Two weeks later, the Treasury agreed to engage Mure, Son & Atkinson to ‘take up a sufficient Quantity of Shipping to carry the Provisions ordered from Time to Time by this Board for the Supply of the Forces in America’.[2] The individual contractors would arrange for supplies to be taken to Cork, on Ireland’s south coast, where under the direction of a Treasury commissary they would be loaded into ships chartered by Mure, Son & Atkinson. The provisions would be sent to America in quarterly batches, with ships making two return crossings every year; that, anyhow, was the theory.

During the spring of 1776, the Treasury Board and the Navy Board – which was preparing to take 27,000 infantry, plus a cavalry regiment and 950 horses, out to America – were in fierce competition for the limited pool of merchant shipping that was available to hire. By the end of April, Richard had succeeded in chartering fifty-two ships on the Treasury’s behalf; but then the Navy Board, urgently needing vessels to carry horses, unilaterally hiked the previously fixed hire rate of 11s to 12s 6d per ton per day. This placed Richard, who was still obliged to offer the lower rate, at a serious disadvantage, and over the next six weeks he managed to charter only nine more ships. On 12 June Richard expressed his concerns at a meeting between Lord North and Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty; afterwards the Treasury Board put up its rate to 12s 6d, while the Navy Board dropped its rate back down to 11s. The manoeuvre enabled Richard to hire seventy-six more vessels over the next seven weeks, although merchant shipping was so scarce by then that he was forced to cast around in ports as distant as Amsterdam and Hamburg.

Once chartered, the Treasury required Mure, Son & Atkinson to have the merchant ships armed ‘in due Proportion to their Burthen’, meaning that a large number of cannons in a variety of sizes had to be found at short notice.[3] Thus (to give two examples) the Locke, an ex-East Indiaman of 685 tons’ capacity, was furnished with twenty nine-pounder and six four-pounder cannons, while the Lyon, a vessel of 170 tons from the port of Leith, was fitted with ten two-pounders and eight swivel guns. ‘You are already, Sir, apprized of the Disappointment we have met with in Guns,’ Richard wrote to John Robinson at the Treasury. ‘This has driven us to ransack this Town and its Environs for light six Pounders.’[4]

Although rum did not fall within the standard army ration, it was still considered essential. It provided warmth on cold nights; it made bad water drinkable; it offered relief from pain; and it prevented wounds from turning septic. On 2 May, the Treasury Board settled terms with five West India merchants, each of whom was to supply 100,000 gallons of rum from the sugar island with which he was closely connected. Richard’s tender for Jamaican rum was the winning bid for that colony. Each island distilled its rum to a different strength, and Jamaican rum was most potent of all – a distinction which did not, however, quite account for the discrepancy between the 5s 3d per gallon that the Treasury agreed to pay Richard, and the 3s secured by a Barbados merchant. The suspicion that Richard had negotiated an outrageously good deal for himself by underhand means would follow him around like a bad smell for the rest of his days.

THE ABSENCE OF any surviving letters between Richard and his siblings at Temple Sowerby has left a glaring gap in the family correspondence, and I have little sense of the dynamic that existed between them. But they were by no means estranged. George Atkinson saw his youngest brother quite often during the mid-1770s, when his duties as the Treasury’s money changer in Westmorland regularly took him to the capital; the task of replacing the nation’s defective gold coinage would take four years to complete.

As for Bridget, who we last met in 1762 – it’s fair to say she had been far from idle, not only having given birth to ten children (two of whom died in infancy), but also running the family house and farm. During the late 1760s, Bridget and George had taken the lease on one of Lord Thanet’s new farms across the river at Whinfell; it was just as well that she did not mind getting her hands dirty, for it was a condition of the tenancy that the land should be cleared, and she often came home reeking of gorse smoke.[5] (One lucky day, while turning over an old rabbit warren, Bridget’s plough unearthed a gold ‘fede-ring’ brooch – two pairs of arms joined together with clasped hands, with a devout message in raised letters on the sleeves – that dated back to the fourteenth century, when Whinfell had been a deer park belonging to the great Clifford family.) Bridget abhorred waste of any kind, and made a point of planting apple trees in the corners of her fields where the plough could not reach – it became a kind of signature of her occupancy. The topographer William Hutchinson, who toured the northern counties in 1774, observed the Atkinsons’ farm approvingly. ‘We then passed Whinfield Park,’ he wrote, ‘where we had the pleasure of viewing a large tract of ground, lately enclosed from the park, and growing corn. There is not any thing can give greater satisfaction to the eye of the traveller, than to behold cultivation and industry stretching their paces over the heath and waste, the forest and the chase – population must follow, and riches ensue.’[6]

The gold brooch that was ploughed up on Bridget’s farm.

Andrew Davidson

So far as I know, Bridget only visited London twice – and her second visit, as an old woman, would be a miserable business. The first time, in May 1776, when she was forty-three, George brought her down with him after the weaning of their final child. George returned to Westmorland a week later; Bridget, on the other hand, decided to stay put until her husband came back with another consignment of ‘light’ gold. It was, in fact, her brother-in-law Richard who urged her to remain in the capital, as Bridget explained in a letter to her eldest child, fifteen-year-old Dorothy:

Your Uncle was not willing I should return with your Father. He purposed my seeing the King go to the House of Lords and two or three Little jaunts into the country. I have been foolish enough my Dear Dolly in buying you a peice of Checked Muslin for a Gown and also a peice of striped Lutestring for another it is not very fashionable but I got it cheap. I durst not sent your Hatt and cloak by your Father I am sure they would have been quite spoiled. I have almost spent all my Monny, many Temptations are here.[7]

Bridget must have spent a good deal of her ‘Monny’ on shells, for a cart would soon arrive at Temple Sowerby, delivering a box that contained, among other things, ‘54 pretty shells in a Bag & 4 mighty ugly ones loose’.[8] Her collection was acquiring a global dimension; her latest coup had been to persuade George Dixon, a Kirkoswald man who was appointed armourer of the Discovery on Captain Cook’s third voyage, to keep an eye out for specimens. ‘Hear is sum smal Qurosetes such as large Locusts, small spotted snakes, but no shells of any account,’ Dixon would report from Cape Town on 24 November 1776. ‘What is qureas I shall get, if our stay will Permit (but ounderstand we must sail on Wednesday first from this for New Zealand, in the South Sees).’[9]

Shortly after returning from London, Bridget would oversee the ‘inocolation’ of her four youngest children against the smallpox.[10] This nerve-racking procedure involved scratching the skin with a needle, then rubbing the contents of a smallpox pustule into the wound. Within days, symptoms including a high fever, a painful rash and pustules might start to appear, and the danger period could last a fortnight; the possible side effects of this treatment ranged from disfigurement to death.

This, of course, was some twenty years before Edward Jenner’s famous experiments of the 1790s, which confirmed the common rural belief that an infection from cowpox conferred immunity to smallpox, and explained why milkmaids were possessed of such flawless complexions. As a young man, in 1772, Jenner had attended George Fordyce’s courses on the ‘practice of Physick’, the ‘Materia Medica’ and chemistry.[11] A brief sentence in a letter written by Bridget to her husband George around this time (she neglected to give the date) offers an obscure hint, tucked among chit-chat about prison visits and church pews, that she knew about the connection between cowpox and smallpox, and might even have discussed it with George Fordyce. ‘I shall go to the Gaol to see poor Mr. Bird,’ she wrote. ‘I was sure Dr. Fordice would be of my Opinion in regard to Matts Cow but all the World could not convince my Sister. I am glad you have got the Seats in the Church made up I hope our Rector and you are sitting in it today it is a great acquisision and a good thing as I saw no use that piece of Space was to any one and now we shall have room enough for all our Family.’[12]