Introduction: The Origin of Lower-Deck Praying Groups

While the Blue Lights were developing a strategy for bringing Christianity to the navy, they were joined by allies of whose existence they initially knew very little. At one level the officers were concentrating on how to make the whole community more Christian. On another level were lower-deck hands struggling to keep their own faith alive in a sternly testing environment. Theirs was the harder task. An officer's religious eccentricity might become the stuff of lower-deck ribaldry behind his back, but naval discipline was always there to protect his person and authority; by contrast, a known Christian on the messdecks was exposed to mockery or potential harassment. Always under scrutiny, he could never escape abuse if his words or actions failed to match his professed beliefs. It was an obvious measure for men of faith to look out for fellow-believers, and if possible to mess together. And so was born the shipboard prayer group that powered the third phase of evangelicalism afloat. They were not called into being by captains or chaplains, still less by Admiralty regulations, but evolved as a self-help device for spiritual survival on the lower deck.

These gatherings appear as if from nowhere in the later years of the French Revolutionary War. Most likely they had existed in unstructured and extemporised form before that, a pair here and a group there, coming together as occasion allowed, dissolving and reforming under the demands of war service, undocumented and hence undiscoverable. There was no strategy behind their formation, and no organisation needed to sustain them. The earliest example so far unearthed is from 1798. It began when a young woman became concerned for her brother, then serving in the second rate Barfleur. She asked her minister, the Rev. John Campbell of Kingsland Chapel, London, to write to him about spiritual matters. The sailor showed Campbell's letter to a friend and, as a result, eight men wrote back asking if they too could receive some regular Christian instruction. They formed a circle which eventually numbered two dozen. As Campbell was a Scottish Dissenter it is possible that the unnamed seaman was a Scot who mistrusted Anglican clergy: it is worth noting that the Barfleur's chaplain was the Rev.