A problem beyond solution?

‘Portsmouth Point – wickedness and blasphemy abounds – shocking scene.’ Ardent piety in the person of William Wilberforce had just met naval profanity of a fairly normal kind, admittedly excited by return to port after a victory at sea in 1794. To people ashore sailors off their ships seemed wild and licentious, best left to their officers to control with stern discipline when back aboard, but once out at sea the same tempestuous energy made them formidable to the country’s enemies. Wilberforce represented evangelicalism of the most confident sort, yet even he was appalled by what he saw of unconverted moral and religious degradation. Other strands of religious opinion were equally at a loss. Stanier Clarke, the suave and learned naval chaplain who was a founder-editor of The Naval Chronicle, regarded sailors with their patriotic fervour for God and King as embodiments of true religion, apparently with no need of conversion: ‘Christianity in its purest state, utterly devoid of hypocrisy, forms the general and leading feature of a seaman’s character.’ William Mangin, a clergyman from Bath who tried a chaplaincy in 1812, was convinced that sailors needed conversion, but he soon abandoned the task as he found them incorrigibly secular and irreligious: ‘I did not see the smallest likelihood of effecting any material change in the morals of such an assemblage … To convert a man-of-war’s crew into Christians would be a task to which the courage of Loyola, the philanthropy of Howard and the eloquence of St Paul united would prove inadequate.’ Wilberforce in consternation, Clarke in denial and Mangin in defeat illustrate the problem: sailors seemed far from God and morality, unreached by religion of home and parish, and untroubled by the lack.

Although exacerbated by the interminable wars against French republicanism and Napoleon, the problem had long been recognised. James Ramsay, naval surgeon and clergyman whose pamphlets sparked the antislavery movement – never a man to flinch at difficulty – referred to ‘themost profligate of mankind, seamen’; Admiral Kempenfelt believed that British seamen were more licentious and less religious than those of other nations, while a long-serving officer of marines described a man-of-war as a ‘dreadful abode for a Christian’. Yet evangelicalism thrived on this kind of challenge, believing that God would be particularly honoured by the repentance of notorious sinners.