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  Clothes for the sailors were a constant worry. Many had been clad in rags when press-ganged in England, and were now practically naked. The navy commissioners in London had introduced the issue of 'slop clothes' to combat this, but the system did not work. 'The slop-clothes are all gone', wrote Gibson to the Admiralty, 'and would there were twice as many, and more shoes and stockings for the seamen.' Sir Edward Spragge pressed the matter further in writing: 'the seamen complain for want of clothes and fall daily by agueish distempers, many being pressed men, who brought no more than is on their backs.' When more were issued, the seamen sold them for liquor, so the admiral tried issuing more wine.

In the following year he reported to Pepys that the ship Milford, at anchor in Port Mahon, was a total loss by fire, and the guilty seamen were given the usual punishment: 'ordered to each of them three lashes at a boat's mast, by the side of each ship riding outside the harbour's mouth'.
On another occasion he turned his house into a hospital. 'There are 100 sick and wounded ashore,' he wrote, 'to my no small trouble. . . lodging in my house.'

As Gibson turned out his endless reports for Samuel Pepys's information, he occasionally found time for a personal letter. During the stifling August heat of 1671 he explained to Pepys that Admiral Spragge allowed him 'with so great a freedom as to lay and write in his Stateroom, and to be as bold as at home'.
 Stretched there on a couch he promised 'a report in the island harbour of Minorca' whose 'poor but shuffling people' he found 'very friendly'. In a second, later letter, he apologises for his neglect, adding: 'I am in hopes of supplying that defect by sending your Honour a neate but large draught of the Hand.' It never arrived. For once, perhaps, Richard Gibson had a siesta.
 

Minorcans  in  1700
 While Gibson rests, a glance may be taken at the structure of Minorcan society towards the close of the seventeenth century.
At its head, as we have seen, was the Spanish governor of the island who held military and judicial responsibilities with the aid of a group of advisers. In addition there was the Governor of the Castle of Mahon, who late in the century assumed supreme powers. The pattern of society was still medieval; it was divided into gentry, military, peasants and craftsmen, the last two organised and disciplined by their respective guilds. The farms were large, and poorly husbanded. Mahon and Ciudadela were thronged with impecunious grandees and priests, and more well-to-do attorneys, notaries and doctors. The appearance of a 'poor but shuffling people' was but a reflection of the decadence and penury into which Spain had fallen at the time.
They had been touched-but only just-by their first contacts with the British, by the vigorous determination of Allin and Spragge, and by the honesty and industry of Gibson. As yet they had no inkling of the closer ties that lay ahead.
 

Next: Chapter 5  - British Dominion 34