Almost every man on board took a native woman for a wife while the vessel remained … The fattest woman I ever saw in my life our gunner chose for a wife. We were forced to hoist her on board. Her thighs were as thick as my waist. No hammock in the ship would hold her. Many jokes were cracked upon the pair.
He also records the wonderful facility of the Hawaiians to parody the Europeans:
We had a merry facetious fellow on board called Dickson. He sung pretty well. He squinted and the natives mimicked him. Abenoue, King of Atooi, could cock his eye like Dickson better than any of his subjects. Abenoue called him Billicany, from his often singing ‘Rule Britannia’… Abenoue loved him better than any man in the ship, and always embraced him every time they met on shore or in the ship, and began to sing, ‘Tule Billicany, Billicany tule,’ etc.
Then comes Nootka Sound, the Marianas, and finally back to Nicol’s beloved Wampoa in China, which he visited three times. How can we believe that Nicol was befriended there by a Chinaman named Tommy Linn, a barber-surgeon who contracted to shave the entire crew of Nicol’s ship during the duration of their stay? Nicol was really at home among the Chinese, and he was accepted into their bosom when he saved a child from drowning.
The current was strong and the boy was carried down with rapidity. I leapt into the river and saved him with great difficulty … and soon had the pleasure of delivering him to his father who stood on the beach wringing his hands.
I wished to go on board, but the Chinese would have me to his house where I was most kindly received and got my dinner in great style. I like their manner of setting out the table at dinner. All that is to be eaten is placed upon the table at once, and all the liquors at the same time. You have all before you and you may make your choice.
He also records, in a delightful manner, some examples of the lingua franca used between Chinese and European traders. Here were the antecedents of the diverse modern pidgins of Oceania, some of which are now the national languages of Pacific nations:
Tommy Linn the barber … was a walking newspaper. His first word every morning was, ‘Hey, yaw, what fashion?’ and we used the same phrase to him. One morning he came, and the first thing he said was, ‘Hey, yaw, what fashion? Soldier man’s ship come to Lingcome bar.’ We, after a few hours, heard that a man-of-war frigate had arrived …
They are much alarmed at the appearance of a man-of-war ship, and they often say, ‘Englishman too much cruel, too much fight.’ There were some English seamen flogged for mutiny while we lay in the river. The Chinese wept like children for the men, saying, ‘Hey, yaw, Englishman too much cruel, too much flog, too much flog.’
Nicol’s final service was aboard a series of ships fighting in the French Revolutionary Wars. Nicol’s ship the Goliah participated in the Battle of the Nile, one of Nelson’s three great victories, and one of the most celebrated naval victories of all time. What is surprising is the presence of women and the role they played in the battle. Nicol writes:
The women behaved as well as the men, and got a present for their bravery from the grand signior … I was much indebted to the gunner’s wife who gave her husband and me a drink of wine every now and then which lessened our fatigue much. There were some of the women wounded, and one woman belonging to Leith died of her wounds and was buried on a small island in the bay. One woman bore a son in the heat of the action.
What a birth that must have been! After the guns ceased their booming, Nicol records what ‘an awful sight it was. The whole bay was covered with dead bodies, mangled, wounded and scorched’. This carnage had been caused when the French war ship L’Orient blew up close to Nicol’s Goliah. Such an event was rare in the naval warfare of the day.
At the termination of his service Nicol returned to Edinburgh, where he married his cousin Margaret. It was probably a match based more on affection and convenience than love. He had saved a relatively large sum (which was apparently kept sewn in his clothes) from his decades at sea, and this enabled him to set up a prosperous cooperage business. He also purchased a small cottage and for a time enjoyed married life. But then war (the Napoleonic Wars) broke out again, and the press gangs began their ghastly rounds. These gangs were sanctioned to kidnap and sell into forced labour any sailor they could find.
It is hard for us, in our egalitarian age, to understand just what a threat the press gangs represented to someone such as Nicol. The most vivid description of their rapacity comes from Admiral Anson’s Voyage Around the World.8 Although it was written sixty years earlier, little had changed by Nicol’s time. The various efforts made to obtain marines for Anson all failed until:
five hundred invalids [were] to be collected from the out pensioners of Chelsea college … who, from their age, wounds, or other infirmities, are incapable of service in marching regiments … But instead of five hundred, there came on board no more than two hundred and fifty nine; for all those who had limbs and strength to walk out of Portsmouth, deserted, leaving behind them only such as were literally invalids, most of them being sixty years of age, and some of them upwards of seventy.
This ‘aged and diseased detachment’ was destined to undertake a five-year-long voyage around the world, which was almost unequalled in its arduousness. They dropped like flies. The wounds some had received over fifty years before broke open afresh due to the scurvy. Few survived to see action, much less their homeland.
And so we find John Nicol, newly married at the age of forty-six, unable to sleep in his own bed for fear of being pressed. For eleven years he was forced to live the life of a fugitive in rural Scotland. Yet he remained loyal to king and country, and upon hearing the news of the victory at Trafalgar recalled:
None but an old tar can feel the joy I felt. I wrought none the next day but walked about enjoying the feeling of triumph. Every now and then I felt the greatest desire to hurra aloud, and many an hurra my heart gave that my mouth uttered not.
To ‘hurra’ of course, would have alerted the press gangs to his being ‘an old tar’.
Finally, at the age of fifty-eight, Nicol felt that it was safe to return home. His homecoming was a joyous one. Perhaps the excitement was too much for Margaret, his wife, for she did not long outlive it. Her death brought on another trial, for Nicol discovered that for years there had been ‘more money going out than I by my industry could bring in … and a number of debits … had been contracted unknown to me’.
Nicol travelled to London in search of the pension he desperately needed and richly deserved. His fate in this endeavour would be familiar to anyone who has been shunted from one part of the bureaucracy to another. First he learned that his old friend Captain Portlock, who could have provided a testimonial of his service, had died six weeks earlier. He then went to Somerset House to gain a certificate of service. A clerk there sent him to Admiralty House where another clerk told him he had waited too long before applying. As a last ditch effort to gain the all-important certificate he went to see the governor of Greenwich Hospital, but he was on holiday in Scotland. Broke, Nicol returned to Edinburgh.
And so, in the early spring of 1822, at the age of sixty-seven, this fine old sailor was forced to walk the streets of his city, seeking fragments of coal to prevent himself from dying of cold. Had he not met John Howell he would have died in anonymity.
It is heartwarming to know that Howell’s charity really did make a difference to Nicol, for unlike so many of his fellows, he ‘died like an admiral, in bed, having evenly rounded out his threescore years and ten’.9 His funds were not exhausted even then, for a sum of 30 pounds was left to his relatives.
As great as Howell’s gift was to Nicol, he left the world a far greater one, for Nicol’s recollections offer a unique glimpse of an extraordinary world as it was seen through the eyes of a simple yet most acute