The First Salute

  The battle of fighting sail as practiced in the 18th century troubles the rational mind. Clearly, line ahead depended on the enemy presenting himself in an equivalent line as target or opponent. But suppose he did not, refused to form a line, maneuvered for the weather gauge and, if successful, sailed away to a friendly base or home port. The French often did just that, or did not come out to meet the enemy at all, leaving the English with the frustration of empty claws.

  A paradox of the 18th century, so admired for reason and enlightenment, is the senselessness it often exhibits, as in the case of the futile shore batteries on the islands and the unchanging tactics of line ahead, a maneuver which everyone on the ocean knew as well as he knew his own name, an old story that could have no surprises, although surprise is the sharpest weapon in the military arsenal.

  Since medieval days of the sixty-pound suit of armor, in which, for the sake of combat, men roasted and could not arise if they fell, no contrivance for fighting has matched in discomfort and inconvenience and use contrary to nature the floating castle called a ship of the line in the age of fighting sail. With its motor power dependent on the caprice of heaven and direction-finding on the distant stars, and its central piece of equipment—the mast—dependent on seasoned timber that was rarely obtainable, and control of locomotion dependent on rigging and ropes of a complexity to defy philosophers of the Sorbonne, much less the homeless untutored poor off the streets who made up the crews, and communication from commander to his squadron dependent on signal flags easily obscured by distance or smoke from the guns or by pitching of the ship, these cumbersome vehicles were as convenient as if dinosaurs had survived to be used by cowboys for driving cattle. The difficulties men willingly contend with to satisfy their urge to fight have never been better exemplified than in warships under sail. Not a few contemporaries were bemused by the curiosities of naval warfare that had inspired M. Maurepas’ conclusive judgment as “piff poff.”

  Hardly designed to invigorate naval spirit, the verdicts of the Toulon courts-martial succeeded in tightening the grip of Fighting Instructions while mystifying the public and deepening public suspicion of government. Eleven out of twenty-nine captains were accused and tried, of whom one died, one deserted and was never heard of again, seven were cashiered from the service and only two acquitted. Damage and discouragement in the navy, not unnaturally, followed.

  In 1777, the Admiralty’s report of 35 ships of the line in the Grand Fleet was shown to be fiction when surveyors reported the majority unfit for sea and only six fit for service, and these, when inspected by the new Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Keppel, “no pleasure to his seaman’s eye.” Little had improved since the survey of 1749, when the inspector discovered lax and ignorant officers, crews left idle and unskilled, stores disorganized, equipment shabby and decaying, ships dirty, unseaworthy and inadequately manned. Leaving untouched the central problem of corrupt management at the top to which these deficiencies could be traced, the authorities were moved to enact a sterner version of the Fighting Instructions under the title Additional Fighting Instructions, or, more formally, the Naval Discipline Act of 1749, which added “negligence” in the performance of duty falling short of the last ounce of fighting effort as a punishable offense. Under this legislation was staged the navy’s most notorious act of the century, the execution in 1757 of Admiral Byng on being tried and convicted under the death penalty of negligence in what was judged to be a halfhearted fight to relieve Minorca. In the actual combat that made Byng’s tragedy, when ordered to relieve Minorca, the Admiralty had underestimated, as it so often did, the strength of the enemy and had sent Byng with a small inadequate and ill-equipped squadron to the defense. The enemy had already landed and overrun the island when he reached Gibraltar. The Governor of Gibraltar, supposed to assist with troops, refused to release them, on the ground that they could not be spared from his garrison. Although Byng had already complained at the inadequacy of his squadron, he made no protest and proceeded against the French, whose ships were larger with heavier guns than his own, but were keeping to the defensive. When the two fleets came within sight, the French were to leeward and Byng had the wind. He raised the signal for line ahead but did not follow it at once, while he had the advantage, with the signal to bear down (engage) because his ships had not yet completed the line formation. He was cramped by the effect of the Mathews court-martial, which had punished Mathews for engaging without his full force in line. Having himself sat on the bench in the Mathews-Lestock case, Byng cited the verdict to his flag captain, “You see, Captain Gardiner, that the signal for the line is out,” and he pointed out that two ships were still out of place. “It was Mr. Mathews’ misfortune to be prejudiced by not carrying down his force together, which I shall endeavor to avoid.” When Byng did raise the signal to bear down, his ships, still in some disarray, came in at an angle with the van taking the full blows of the French guns. The center and rear were still too far apart from the enemy to bring their firepower to bear in support. The van was crushed. The fleets separated as night fell. Byng, making no effort to regroup, summoned a war council and readily accepted the advice given under his command that nothing further could be done and Minorca must be left to its fate. Accordingly, without further action he returned with his fleet to Gibraltar, where he was superseded and sent home under arrest. He was charged under No. 12 of the Articles of War with not having done his utmost to relieve the garrison of Minorca or to seize and destroy the enemy’s ships as was his duty. Article 12 refers to failure of duty “through cowardice, negligence or disaffection,” and since Byng was explicitly acquitted of cowardice or disaffection, negligence was left as his implicit guilt. The verdict left Fighting Instructions more twisted than ever, for it meant that while Mathews had been court-martialed for leaving line ahead to bear down on the enemy, Byng was punished for refusing to do so. Admirals were in a forked stick. Command, deprived of personal judgment, can win no battles, and the most important one that would decide the fate of America was still to come.

  Uproar at the death sentence was vociferous. Ministers were content to let Byng bear it, to cover their own failure to send adequate force to the defense. King George II, a stranger to the quality of mercy, granted no pardon. Rodney, always independent-minded, who could tell absurdity from utility when it stood in front of him, joined with the champion of Byng’s cause, Captain Augustus Hervey, in a campaign to solicit petitions for his pardon, in vain. The death kept discussion alive, one more bitterness to divide the navy. Byng was duly shot by a firing squad of brother officers for no discernible purpose except to “encourage the others,” as remarked by a mean-minded Frenchman. Voltaire’s comment would immortalize the act, whose peculiar excess was another aberration of the enlightened century. The execution could accomplish nothing, for even then nobody supposed that men can be made brave by enactment or deterred from weakness by fear of punishment.

  If to no purpose, why was the death penalty imposed? Because it was there, on the statute books, decreed by the lawmakers in their wisdom for the particular failing for which Byng was judged and held guilty. Because it was there, offering no alternative punishment, it must not be evaded. The court’s discretionary power had been removed and it claimed to have no alternative. Exercising choice, however, is one of the burdens of being human and having a mind. Not to exercise it may be easier, but if unused it is likely to become sluggish, which may be one of the reasons British performance in the American war was not brilliant.

  Byng suffered for his time. This was a period when the British went in fear of the wild assaults of the gin-soaked poor and feared anarchy rising from the so-called criminal class, which they believed to exist as an entity. To suppress it, they enacted laws of ferocious penalty, and no matter what suggestion of reason or compassion or common sense might be advanced against transporting for life and separating from home and family a boy of eleven for stealing a stocking, it would not be heard; the law must not deviate. In a sense, this non-thinking
severity was a development of the very political liberty of which the British were the progenitors and had done so much to foster by their own revolution in establishing the principle of a government of laws not men, of constitutionalism not dictate. This was now what Britain’s children, the Colonies, were fighting for, and which the British insistently ignored, pretending that the American rebellion was some kind of misguided frenzy and thereby losing any chance of winning back allegiance or reconciliation.

  Byng’s judges pronounced the death sentence expecting that the King or ministers would pardon him. In fear of the mob, angry at the loss of territory—Minorca, taken from Spain in 1708, had been British for only forty-eight years—and, shouting for blood, the government proffered no pardon; Byng was left to be shot as a scapegoat. The firing squad barked on command; the crumpled figure of the Admiral lay in a heap on the quarterdeck of the Monarch, a mute witness to one of the atrocities of law, the guardian of human conduct.

  Given the angle of fire, line ahead may have had no alternative, yet innovative minds might have devised tactical variations or surprises, as Rodney himself was one day to do. But the navy was not a home for innovative minds, being considered the place to dispose of the unteachable or stupid son of a family whose more promising brothers qualified for the army or clergy. While breaking the line was the most radical and important contribution to tactics of the time, after which they were never the same again, it was the idea not of a professional seaman but of a schoolboy of Edinburgh, who made a hobby of sailing homemade toy boats in a pond as a child and eventually worked out his plan in a treatise, which Rodney had the nerve to employ when the chance offered. The boy, John Clerk, was first drawn to the ways of seagoing vehicles by the tale of the shipwreck in Robinson Crusoe. Studying the movement of ships in response to the wind blowing through Leith, Edinburgh’s harbor, he began experimenting for himself with a schoolmate’s model boat. Soon he was making model boats of his own to watch as they sailed across his father’s pond. Meanwhile, public attention had fastened on the Keppel-Palliser court-martial, and as he followed the testimony the boy learned about “line ahead” and the problems it raised in naval combat. Possessor of that alert Scottish intelligence that so often caused uneasiness below the Border, Clerk noticed the major flaw in line ahead: that if the enemy did not offer himself in a comparable line, there could be no fighting that day under the rules of Fighting Instructions. As he watched his little ships move as directed by the breezes, he evolved the solution for breaking the deadly grip of the line. It was to allow the full line to concentrate against one section of the enemy, instead of each ship against its opposite in line, thus smashing a gap through which to penetrate and “double” the enemy while it was caught in the slow process of coming about and sailing back into the wind to assist its companions. Drawing charts to accompany his text, John Clerk explained his thesis in a small book entitled An Essay on Naval Tactics, which, circulating among friends and naval enthusiasts, found a publisher and soon came to the notice of navy professionals, among them Admiral Rodney. Investigators were later to find that he had come into possession of a manuscript copy, which he had annotated and was to put to use at Cape St. Vincent and in the aborted battle off Martinique in 1780, and most distinctly in his ultimate triumph in the Battle of the Saints of 1782, in which he was to win a decisive victory over the French that restored British self-confidence after the loss at Yorktown. The battle’s name refers to two islands so named marking the channel between Guadeloupe and Dominica where the action took place.

  Conditions that kept half the manpower of a ship in illness most of the time as a result of living between decks for months on end in fetid and stale air, on rotten food and brackish water in a hot climate, were other lazy submissions to old ways that could have been changed if the authorities had had the wit or the will to permit the entry of a ray of enlightenment. For two centuries, from 1622 to 1825, the official diet of the Royal Navy consisted of beer, salt pork and salt beef, oatmeal, dried peas, butter and cheese, usually rancid, and biscuit that walked by itself, as Roderick Random tells in Smollett’s novel, by virtue of the worms that made it their home. Since the diet supplied nothing of the body’s need of vitamin C, the result was widespread scurvy, whose symptom after the telltale skin lesions was generalized weakness deepening into exhaustion followed by death. It took the Admiralty forty years to adopt the known remedy of citrus fruit discovered within the navy itself by a ship’s surgeon, James Lind, who obtained wonderful cures by issuing oranges and lemons and limes to dying men and who published A Treatise on the Scurvy in 1754, prescribing a ration of lime juice for all. Because this was judged too expensive, it was not made compulsory until 1795. Enlightenment had not suggested that the burden of carrying and even minimally caring for a crew too weak to work was more costly than a keg of lime juice, which may account for the thought attributed to a legendary “philosopher” of 600 B.C. that there are three kinds of people in the world: the living, the dead and those at sea. Is it possible that admirals became resistant to change through some effect of life at sea? In the 20th century, hidebound inertia still ruled the flag deck. As First Lord in 1914, Winston Churchill, according to the authoritative naval historian Richard Hough, regarded “the professional hierarchy of the Royal Navy of the First World War as tradition bound, unadventurous, and underendowed with initiative and intelligence.”

  Atypical, Rodney possessed both, in addition to abundant self-confidence that never deserted him. When he saw a condition clearly in need of improvement, he was an activist, prepared to innovate, in one case to his own detriment. During his service in Jamaica, he installed a system of piping water from reservoirs to the ships, sparing the sailors the long laborious work of rolling barrels all the way. Their blessings turned to resentment when they discovered that under the new system, the task was done so rapidly that it gave them no time for shore leave. As the sailors’ annoyance was one reason for denying Rodney the governorship of Jamaica, his innovation unhappily demonstrated the greater safety in inertia.

  Tolerance of disgusting living conditions accepted with no effort at improvement bespoke a mental lethargy that underlay the general reluctance to change old habits. Alternatives were not beyond reach. To find friendly ports of call where fresh food could be obtained would have been difficult among so many belligerent relationships, but not impossible. Fresh air could have been introduced by opening hatches without the danger of the sea pouring in, if care had been taken to open them on the port side when the ship was heeling to starboard, or vice versa, but so much thinking in advance for the sake of comfort was not part of the plan. Preservation of food from rot may have had no alternative, but human filth was not incumbent. Given sweat, vomit, defecation and urination, sexual emission and the menstrual flow of women, the human body is not a clean machine, and when people are crowded together in an enclosed space, its effluents can create a degree of unpleasantness raised to the extreme. Means of improving hygiene and sanitation could have been devised if they had been wanted, for men can usually work out the technical means to obtain what is truly desired unless the refrain “it can’t be done” becomes their guide.

  Innovations occasionally broke through—not for comfort, but to improve the functioning of the ships. The most important was copper sheathing of the hulls to prevent infestation of crustaceans and worms and plant growth that rotted the bottoms, slowing speed and often rendering a ship unusable altogether. Rodney was always asking for coppered ships, which, in the Admiralty’s rare moments of spending money, were sometimes forthcoming. A wheel on the bridge connecting by pulleys to the rudder and giving the helmsman mechanical control was another advance that by its sheer efficiency managed to introduce itself against the overwhelming power of inertia. Even the time-honored “castles” used by archers in medieval combat were eliminated to lower the center of gravity and make room for more sail. Triangular jib sails to catch an elusive wind were added, over the jeering of the old salts.

 
In 1742 on board his first ship, the Plymouth, in the Mediterranean, Rodney made his mark at once by bringing in safely an unwieldy convoy of 300 merchant ships of the Lisbon trade through the haunt of enemy privateers at the western end of the channel. This feat brought him to the attention of the public and of thankful merchants of London and Bristol as well as to the Lords of the Admiralty, by whom he was promoted to Captain and later given command of the Eagle, a ship of the line of 64 guns.

  Active in commerce-destroying aboard the Eagle, Captain Rodney was not present at Toulon, where he might have supplied the needed vigorous action that he was to show in the second Battle of Finisterre three years later in October, 1747, and the earlier fight off Brest. That year Rodney was with a squadron under Admiral Hawke which the British had dispatched to cruise the Atlantic in search of French trade convoys. In the first engagement, Rodney’s unit under Commodore Thomas Fox fell upon four French warships escorting some 150 merchant sail coming from Santo Domingo, heavily loaded with sugar, coffee, indigo and other goods of the West Indies. During two days of chasing the widely dispersed convoy, Rodney took six ships, escorted his prizes home and put back to sea. He had rejoined Hawke when orders came to attack an outward-bound convoy of 250 French merchantmen, escorted by nine ships of the line. When the English intercepted the French in the waters off Finisterre in Spain, the westernmost point of Europe, there was nothing passive or negligent in the battle that followed. The French Admiral l’Etenduère, in order to give the ships he was escorting a chance to escape, placed himself between them and the English and fought for six hours, inspiring in his captains a fighting spirit as determined as if they were carrying the Dauphin himself on board. The French suffered terrible damages. On the 70-gun Neptune, seven officers and 300 men were killed before she was given up. Rodney fought for an hour against the more powerful Neptune and a second Frenchman on his other side, until, disabled by a broadside that destroyed the steering wheel and tore sails and rigging, the Eagle drifted clear. Despite heroic resistance, six of the French warships had surrendered by evening. Only two escaped, pursued into the night by Rodney—who, after some repairs, was eager for further action—and by two other ships of the English fleet. The convoyed French merchantmen escaped.