The letters of Archibald Buchanan, Midshipman (1803-1804) – Part 2

07 Aug 2014

Here is the second part of Daniel's look at the letters of a young gentleman midshipman, Archibald Buchanan. If you missed the first post, you can find it in the previous pages, posted on 30 June. After a few days aboard HMS Monarch, Archibald Buchanan was transferred to the sixth-rate ship HMS Ariadne. The smaller 24-gun vessel was considered to be a more suitable environment for the training of a future officer. Here he would certainly get some practice in sailing and the chances of experiencing naval combat were also higher. The Ariadne's muster book of 1804, today stored in the National Archives in Kew (reference: ADM 36/16943), lists Archibald not as a midshipman, as he proudly referred to himself in a letter to his mother, but as ‘volunteer first class’ – the typical entry-level rating for ‘young gentlemen’ from noble or esteemed families who were groomed for naval command. Archibald's letters to his mother, particularly the earlier ones, ooze with enthusiasm for his new life in the navy and display his juvenile excitement at the prospect of naval action. When leaving the Downs aboard the Ariadne for the naval blockade of the French port Le Havre he wrote to his mother in January that ‘I am going to give a helping hand to Destroy the French burn Boats.’ In the next letter he proudly described his role during a manoeuver aboard as being responsible for the ‘third Great Gun from the Stern’, and how they ‘fired two Broadsides one with powder & Ball, the other with Powder only’. Interestingly, it is only in the correspondence with his brothers that we learn that Archibald's attitude toward naval service had actually been more mixed. A letter to his brother Thomas from February indicates that Archibald had written friends at home about his struggles in the navy and was thinking of returning home. Hearing from his brothers that word had spread to his concerned mother, he carefully put their minds at rest explaining that he had now adapted ‘to the way of the ship’ and is ‘far from wishing to get home’. A month later he reassured his brother Robert that even ‘if I was to come home again (unless it was a free Day's) I would not be easy till I had got to sea again’.