Types of Naval Officers, Drawn from the History of the British Navy

The Court held that the admiral was justified in not trying to go to leeward of the two ships, under the circumstances when they were seen; but blamed him for permitting the useless cannonade which prevented seeing them sooner. The results at this moment in other parts of the field should be summarized, as they show both the cause and the character of the failures due to faulty management.

The five ships of the British van had already seen their adversaries withdraw after a sharp engagement. This seems to have been due to the fact that two were individually overmatched and driven off; whereupon the other three retired because unable to contend with five. But no support reached the British van at this important moment; on the contrary, the British rear was now two or three miles distant, astern and to windward. The lagging of the crippled Intrepid held back the Revenge. Cornwall was detained some time by the old idea that he needed a signal to pass her, because to do so was breaking the order established by the admiral; but concluding at last that Byng was unaware of the conditions, and seeing that his immediate opponent—the French admiral—was drawing ahead, he sent word to the Intrepid to hold her fire for a few moments till he could go by. He then made sail.

The French rear with its commander-in-chief had been watching the incidents narrated: the crippling of the Intrepid, the consequent disorder in the British rear, and the increasing distance between it and the van. When the Revenge, however, passed ahead, and Byng disentangled his flag-ship, the moment for a decisive step arrived. The French rear vessels were nearer the British van than Byng's division was. They now filled their topsails, made more sail, stood for the British leading ships, already partially unrigged, passed by, and in so doing gave them the fire of a number of substantially fresh vessels, which had undergone only a distant and ineffective cannonade. Byng saw what was about to happen, and also set more canvas; but it was no longer possible to retrieve the preceding errors. The French admiral had it in his power very seriously to damage, if not to destroy the hostile van; but in accordance with the tradition of his nation he played an over-prudent game, strictly defensive, and kept too far off. After exchanging distant broadsides, he steered northwest towards Mahon, satisfied that he had for the time disabled his opponent. The British that evening tacked off-shore and stood to the southeast. Four days later they abandoned the field, returning to Gibraltar. The fall of Minorca followed.

Nothing could have been much worse than the deplorable management of this action on the part of the commander-in-chief. It is a conspicuous instance of weak and halting execution, superimposed upon a professional conception radically erroneous; and it reflected throughout the timid hesitancy of spirit which dictated the return to Gibraltar, under the always doubtful sanction of a Council of War. But the historical value of the lesson is diminished if attention is confined to the shortcomings of the admiral, neglectful of the fact that his views as to the necessity to observe the routine of the Fighting Instructions are reproduced in the evidence of the captains; and that the finding of the Court censures, not the general idea, but certain details, important yet secondary. Durell, being asked whether the admiral could not have passed under the stern of the Trident, as the Trident had under that of the Louisa, replies, "Yes, but she would have been to leeward of those ships ahead;" that is, to leeward of the line. Gardiner "knows no other method than what the admiral took, for preserving the line regular." Cornwall cannot pass the Intrepid without a signal, because it would be breaking the order. These were all good men.

The Court, composed of four admirals and nine captains, the junior of whom had over ten years seniority, give in their finding no shadow of disapproval to the broad outlines of the action. There can be, therefore, no doubt about service standards. The questions put to the witnesses reveal indeed a distinct preference for forming the line of battle parallel to that of the enemy before bearing down, so that all the ships may have the same distance to go, have a clear field ahead of each, and the comparatively simple mutual bearing of "abeam" to observe; but it refrains from censuring the admiral for forming on a line very oblique to that of the enemy, which entailed the burden of changing the relative positions during standing down, so as to arrive all together, on a line parallel to his; while the course itself being oblique alike to their own front and the enemy's, each preceding ship was liable to get in the way, "to prove an impediment," to its follower,—as actually happened. It was indeed impossible to fault the commander-in-chief in this particular, because his action was conformable to the letter of the Instructions, with which he was evidently and subserviently eager to comply.

The decision of the Court therefore was, in substance, that in bearing down upon the enemy Byng did not do wrong in starting upon a line oblique to them; but that he should have steered such a course, and maintained such spread of sail, graduated to the speed of the slowest ship in the fleet, that all should reach point-blank range at the same time, and be then ranged on a line parallel to that of the enemy. "When on the starboard tack, the admiral should have tacked the fleet all together and immediately conducted it on a direct course for the enemy; … each ship steering for her opposite ship in the enemy's line, and under such sail as might have enabled the worst sailing ship, under all her plain sail, to preserve her station." It is needless to insist with any naval man, or to any soldier, that such an advance, in orderly fashion, oblique to the front, is unattainable except by long drill, while this fleet had been but a few weeks assembled; and the difficulty is enhanced when each ship has not only to keep its station in line, but to reach a particular enemy, who may not be just where he ought, having respect to the British order. The manoeuvre favored by the Court for the fleet as a whole was in fact just that which Byng attempted for his own division, with the results that have been narrated. These were aggravated by his mismanagement, but did not originate from it.

The invariable result of an attack thus attempted, however vigorously made, was that the van of the assailant got into action first, receiving the brunt of the enemy's fire without proper support. Not infrequently, it also underwent a second hammering from the enemy's rear, precisely in the same way as occurred in Byng's action; and whether this happened or not depended more upon the enemy than upon the British rear. In ignoring, therefore, the idea of combining an attack in superior numbers upon a part of the enemy, and adopting instead that of an onslaught upon his whole, all along the line, the British practice of the eighteenth century not only surrendered the advantage which the initiative has, of effecting a concentration, but subjected their own fleets to being beaten in detail, subject only to the skill of the opponent in using the opportunity extended to him. The results, at best, were indecisive, tactically considered. The one apparent exception was in June, 1794, when Lord Howe, after long vainly endeavoring a better combination with a yet raw fleet, found himself forced to the old method; but although then several ships were captured, this issue seems attributable chiefly to the condition of the French Navy, greatly fallen through circumstances foreign to the present subject. It was with this system that Rodney was about to break, the first of his century formally to do so. A false tactical standard, however, was not the only drawback under which the British Navy labored in 1739. The prolonged series of wars, which began when the establishment of civil order under Cromwell permitted the nation to turn from internal strife to external interests, had been for England chiefly maritime. They had recurred at brief intervals, and had been of such duration as to insure a continuity of experience and development. Usage received modification under the influence of constant warlike practice, and the consequent changes in methods, if not always thoroughly reasoned, at the least reflected a similar process of professional advance in the officers of the service. This was consecutively transmitted, and by the movement of actual war was prevented from stagnating and hardening into an accepted finality. Thus the service and its officers, in the full performance of their functions, were alive and growing. Nor was this all. The same surroundings that promoted this healthful evolution applied also a continual test of fitness to persons. As each war began, there were still to be found in the prime of vigor and usefulness men whose efficiency had been proved in its predecessor, and thus the line of sustained ability in leadership was carried on from one naval generation to another, through the sixty-odd years, 1652-1713, over which these conditions extended.

The peace of Utrecht in 1713 put an end to this period. A disputed succession after the death of Queen Anne, in 1714, renewed the condition of internal disquietude which had paralyzed the external action of England under Charles I.; and this co-operated with the mere weariness of war, occasioned by prolonged strife, to give both the country and the navy a temporary distaste to further military activity. The man of the occasion, who became the exponent and maintainer of this national inclination, was Sir Robert Walpole; to whom, during his ministry of over twenty years, can fairly be applied Jefferson's phrase concerning himself, that his "passion was peace." But, whatever the necessity to the country of such a policy, it too often results, as it did in both these cases, in neglect of the military services, allowing the equipment to decay, and tending to sap the professional interest and competency of the officers.

From this last evil the United States Navy in Jefferson's day was saved by the simple fact that the officers were young men, or at the most in the early prime of life,—the Navy itself, in 1812, being less than twenty years old as a corporate organization. The British Navy of 1739 was in very different case. For a quarter of a century the only important military occurrence had been the Battle of Cape Passaro, in 1718, where the British fleet in a running fight destroyed a much inferior Spanish force; and the occasion then was not one of existent war, but of casual hostilities, which, precipitated by political conditions, began and ended with the particular incident, as far as the sea was concerned. Back of this lay only Malaga, in 1704; for the remaining years of war, up to 1713, had been unmarked by fleet battles. The tendency of this want of experience, followed by the long period—not of peace only, but—of professional depression resultant upon inactivity and national neglect, was to stagnation, to obviate which no provision existed or was attempted. Self-improvement was not a note of the service, nor of the times. The stimulus of occupation and the corrective of experience being removed, average men stuck where they were, and grew old in a routine of service, or, what was perhaps worse, out of the service in all but name. In naval warfare, the Battle of Malaga, the last point of performance, remained the example, and the Fighting Instructions the passively accepted authority. The men at the head of the Navy, to whom the country naturally looked, either had no record—no proof of fitness—because but youths in the last war, or else, in simple consequence of having then had a chance to show themselves, were now superannuated. This very fact, however, had the singular and unfortunate result that, because the officers of reputation were old, men argued, by a curious perversion of thought, that none but the old should be trusted.

Of this two significant cases will tell more than many words. Mathews, who commanded at Toulon in 1744, was then sixty-seven years old, and had not been at sea between 1724 and 1742. Hawke, in 1747, when he had already established an excellent reputation as a captain, and for enterprise in recent battle, was thought young to be entrusted with a squadron of a dozen ships-of-the-line, although he was forty-two,—two years older than Nelson at the Nile, but four years younger than Napoleon and Wellington at Waterloo, and one year less in age than Grant at the close of the American Civil War. Such instances are not of merely curious interest; they are symptoms of professional states of mind, of a perplexity and perversion of standards which work disastrously whenever war succeeds to a prolonged period of peace, until experience has done its work by sorting out the unsound from among the fair-seeming, and has shown also that men may be too old as well as too young for unaccustomed responsibility. The later prevalence of juster views was exemplified in the choice of Wolfe, who was but thirty-two when he fell before Quebec in 1759, charged with one of the most difficult enterprises that had then been entrusted to a British general.

It is these two factors, therefore, an erroneous standard and a lethargic peace, which principally caused the weakness of the British official staff for battle service at the period of lowest descent, which was reached in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, but was prolonged and intensified by a protracted interval of professional apathy. Other grievous evils doubtless existed, serious defects in administration, involving indifferent equipment, bad and scanty provisions, inferior physique in the ships' companies, and wretched sanitary arrangements; but while all these unquestionably gravely affected general efficiency for war, they belonged rather to the civil than the military side of the profession. In the hour of battle it was not these, but the tone and efficiency of the officers, that chiefly told. A false pattern of action had been accepted at a moment favorable to its perpetuation, when naval warfare on the grand scale had ceased, owing to the decline of the principal enemy, the navy of France; while the average competency of naval officers had been much lowered through want of professional incentive, and the absence of any sifting process by which the unfit could be surely eliminated. That plenty of good material existed, was sufficiently shown by the number of names, afterwards distinguished, which soon began to appear. Weeding went on apace; but before its work was done, there had to be traversed a painful period, fruitful of evidences of unfitness, of personal weakness, of low or false professional ideas.

It is with this period that we have first had to do as our point of departure, by which not only to estimate the nature and degree of the subsequent advance, but to illustrate also the part specifically contributed to it by Hawke and Rodney, through their personal and professional characteristics. While types, they are more than mere exponents of the change as a whole, and will be found to bear to it particular relations,—its leaders in fact, as well as in name. It is not merely fanciful to say that Hawke stands for and embodies the spirit of the new age, while Rodney rather exemplifies and develops the form in which that spirit needed ultimately to cloth itself in order to perfect its working. The one is a protest in act against the professional faintheartedness, exaggerated into the semblance of personal timidity, shown by the captains off Toulon in 1774; the other, in the simple but skilful methods and combinations adopted by him, both represents and gives effect to a reaction against the extravagant pedantry, which it fell to Byng, in all the honesty of a thoroughly commonplace man, to exhibit in unintentional caricature.

In thus ascribing to these great men complementary parts in leading and shaping the general movement, it is not meant that either is deficient on the side attributed to the other. Hawke showed by his actions that he was by no means indifferent to tactical combinations, which is another way of saying that he appreciated the advantage of form in warfare; while Rodney, though a careful organizer and driller of fleets, and patient in effort to obtain advantage before attacking, exhibited on occasion headlong, though not inconsiderate, audacity, and also tenacious endurance in fight. Still, it will probably be admitted by the student of naval biography that to him Hawke suggests primarily the unhesitating sudden rush—the swoop—upon the prey, while Rodney resembles rather the patient astute watcher, carefully keeping his own powers in hand, and waiting for the unguarded moment when the adversary may be taken suddenly at unawares. Certain it is that, with opportunities much more numerous than were permitted to Hawke, his successes would have been far greater but for an excess of methodical caution. There was a third, who combined in due proportion, and possessed to an extraordinary degree, the special qualities here assigned to each. It is one of the ironies of history that the first Sir Samuel Hood should have had just opportunity enough to show how great were his powers, and yet have been denied the chance to exhibit them under conditions to arrest the attention of the world; nay, have been more than once compelled to stand by hopelessly, and see occasions lost which he would unquestionably have converted into signal triumphs. In him, as far as the record goes, was consummated the advance of the eighteenth century. He was the greatest of the sowers. It fell to Nelson, his pupil,—in part at least,—to reap the harvest.

Before closing this part of our subject, the necessary preliminary to understanding the progress of naval warfare in the eighteenth century, it is pertinent to note the respect in which advance there differs from that of the nineteenth, and in some degree, though less, from that of the seventeenth centuries. The period was not one of marked material development. Improvements there were, but they were slow, small in ultimate extent, and in no sense revolutionary. Ships and guns, masts and sails, grew better, as did also administrative processes; it may indeed be asserted, as an axiom of professional experience, that as the military tone of the sea-officers rises, the effect will be transmitted to those civil functions upon which efficiency for war antecedently depends. Still, substantially, the weapons of war were in principle, and consequently in general methods of handling, the same at the end of the period as at the beginning. They were intrinsically more efficient; but the great gain was not in them, but in the spirit and intellectual grasp of the men who wielded them. There was no change in the least analogous to that from oars to sails, or from sails to steam.

Under such conditions of continued similarity in means, advance in the practice of any profession is effected rather in the realm of ideas, in intellectual processes; and even their expert application involves mind rather than matter. In the nineteenth century such intellectual processes have been largely devoted to the purposes of material development, and have found their realization, in the navy as elsewhere, in revolutionizing instruments, in providing means never before attainable. The railroad, the steamer, the electric telegraph, find their counterpart in the heavily armored steamship of war. But in utilizing these new means the navy must still be governed by the ideas, which are, indeed, in many ways as old as military history, but which in the beginning of the eighteenth century had passed out of the minds of naval men. It was the task of the officers of that period to recall them, to formulate them anew, to give them a living hold upon the theory and practice of the profession. This they did, and they were undoubtedly helped in so doing by the fact that their attention was not diverted and absorbed, as that of our day very largely has been, by decisive changes in the instruments with which their ideas were to be given effect. Thus they were able to make a substantial and distinctive contribution to the art of naval warfare, and that on its highest side. For the artist is greater than his materials, the warrior than his arms; and it was in the man rather than in his weapons that the navy of the eighteenth century wrought its final conspicuous triumph.

Edward, Lord Hawke

HAWKE

1705-1781

The first great name in British naval annals belonging distinctively to the eighteenth century rather than to the seventeenth, is that of Edward Hawke. He was born in 1705, of a family of no marked social distinction, his father being a barrister, and his grandfather a London merchant. His mother's maiden name was Bladen. One of her brothers held an important civil office as Commissioner of Trade and Plantations, and was for many years a member of Parliament. Under the conditions which prevailed then, and for some generations longer, the influence attaching to such positions enabled the holder to advance substantially the professional interests of a naval officer. Promotion in rank, and occupation both in peace and war, were largely a matter of favor. Martin Bladen naturally helped his nephew in this way, a service especially valuable in the earlier part of a career, lifting a man out of a host of competitors and giving him a chance to show what was in him. It may readily be believed that Hawke's marked professional capacity speedily justified the advantage thus obtained, and he seems to have owed his promotion to post-captain to a superior officer when serving abroad; though it is never possible to affirm that even such apparent official recognition was not due either to an intimation from home, or to the give and take of those who recognized Bismarck's motto, "Do ut des."

However this may have been, the service did not suffer by the favors extended to Hawke. Nor was his promotion unduly rapid, to the injury of professional character, as often happened when rank was prematurely reached. It was not till March 20, 1734, that he was "made post," as the expression went, by Sir Chaloner Ogle into the frigate Flamborough, on the West India Station. Being then twenty-nine years old, in the prime of life for naval efficiency, he had reached the position in which a fair opportunity for all the honors of the profession lay open to him, provided he could secure occupation until he was proved to be indispensable. Here also his uncle's influence stood good. Although the party with which the experienced politician was identified had gone out of power with Sir Robert Walpole, in 1742, his position on the Board dealing with Colonial affairs left him not without friends. "My colleague, Mr. Cavendish," he writes, "has already laid in his claim for another ship for you. But after so long a voyage" (he had been away over three years) "I think you should be allowed a little time to spend with your friends on shore. It is some consolation, however, that I have some friends on the new Board of Admiralty." "There has been a clean sweep," he says again, "but I hope I may have some friends amongst the new Lords that will upon my account afford you their protection."

This was in the beginning of 1743, when Hawke had just returned from a protracted cruise on the West India and North American stations, where by far the greater part of his early service was passed. He never again returned there, and very shortly after his uncle's letter, just quoted, he was appointed to the Berwick, a ship-of-the-line of seventy guns. In command of her he sailed in September, 1743, for the Mediterranean; and a few months after, by his decided and seamanlike course in Mathews's action, he established his professional reputation and fortunes, the firm foundations of which had been laid during the previous years of arduous but inconspicuous service. Two years later, in 1746, Martin Bladen died, and with him political influence, in the ordinary acceptation, departed from Hawke. Thenceforth professional merit, forced upon men's recognition, stood him in stead.

He was thirty-nine when he thus first made his mark, in 1744. Prior to this there is not found, in the very scanty records that remain of his career, as in that of all officers of his period while in subordinate positions, any certain proof that he had ever been seriously engaged with an enemy. War against Spain had been declared, October 19, 1739. He had then recently commissioned a fifty-gun ship, the Portland, and in her sailed for the West Indies, where he remained until the autumn of 1742; but the inert manner in which Spain maintained the naval contest, notwithstanding that her transmarine policy was the occasion of the quarrel, and her West Indian possessions obviously endangered, removed all chance of active service on the large scale, except in attacking her colonies; and in none of those enterprises had the Portland been called upon to share.