Recovering the evasive sailor: patient registers and seamen’s desertions in British naval hospitals, 1792-1815

The possibility of seamen’s desertion from shore hospitals was a constant concern for British naval authorities in the late eighteenth century. It resulted in a flurry of correspondence, architectonic and policing measures, and the enduring stereotype of the naval hospital as the ideal platform for escaping the service. So far, however, we mostly lacked data on actual escapes to set alongside this evidence of administrative moral panic. This article presents a detailed statistical analysis of the incidence and patterns of desertions reported in the registers of Haslar and Plymouth, the largest naval hospitals on British soil, with brief comparisons to some of the smaller domestic and overseas establishments. Desertions can be classified by timing and coordination with others, rating of the individual involved, typology and duration of his sickness and convalescence, and, for Plymouth, modality of escape. The findings show a complex tapestry of escape decisions, often failing to match both Foucauldian models of institutional “confinement” and contemporary authorities’ expectations on the numbers and personal and medical profiles of escapees. This analysis suggests that naval seamen resisted not simply the physical coercion of the service, but the categorizations with which their bodies were labelled – as sick or healthy, or more or less prone to evade. Quantitative analysis also casts some light on sailors’ own perspectives and desertion cultures; as such, it can help us to write history not simply from below, but from beneath the layers of standardizing and depersonalizing administrative codification.