Famous Sea Fights, from Salamis to Tsu-Shima

by A. Hilliard Atteridge

Four years later Hubert de Burgh, Governor of Dover Castle, defeated another attempted raid on England by improvising a fleet and attacking the French squadron in the Straits. De Burgh got to windward of the French, then sailed down on them, grappled and boarded them. There was an incident which happily we do not hear of again in naval warfare. As the English scrambled on board of the French ships they threw quicklime in the eyes of their opponents. It was, no doubt, an ugly trick of piratical fighting, for in those days when there was no police of the seas there was a certain amount of piracy and smuggling carried on by the men of Dover and the Cinque Ports. Just as for lack of police protection highway robbery was a danger of travel by road, so till organized naval power developed there was a good deal of piracy in the European seas, and peaceful traders sailed in large fleets for mutual protection, just as travellers on land took care to have companions for a journey. The Channel was also enlivened by occasional fights for fishing-grounds between fleets of fishing-craft, and the quicklime trick of Hubert de Burgh's battle was probably one of the methods of this irregular warfare.

Edward I had a navy which did useful service by coasting northward, as his armies marched into Scotland, and securing for them regular supplies and reinforcements by sea. Under his weak successor the sea was neglected, and it was the third Edward who used the navy effectually to secure that his quarrel with France should be fought out, not on English ground, but on the Continent, and thus became the founder of the sea power of England.

There was no Royal Navy in the modern sense of the term. When the King went to war his fleet was recruited from three different sources. The warship was a merchantman, on board of which a number of fighting-men, knights, men-at-arms, archers and billmen were embarked. These were more numerous than the crew of sailors which navigated the ship, for the largest vessels of the time were not of more than two to three hundred tons, and as oars were not used in the rough seas of the Channel and there was only one mast with a single square sail, and perhaps a jib-foresail, the necessary hands for sailing her were few. There was a dual command, the knight or noble who led the fighting-men being no sailor, and having a pilot under him who commanded the sailors and navigated the ship. This dual arrangement (which we have seen at work in the fleets of more ancient days) left its traces in our Navy up to the middle of the nineteenth century, when ships of the Royal Navy still had, besides the captain, a "sailing master" among their officers.

The King owned a small number of ships, which he maintained just as he kept a number of knights in his pay to form his personal retinue on land. During peace he hired these ships out to merchants, and when he called them back for war service he took the crews that navigated them into his pay, and sent his fighting-men on board. But the King's ships were the least numerous element in the war fleet. Merchantmen were impressed for service from London and the other maritime towns and cities, the feudal levy providing the fighting complement. A third element in the fleet was obtained from the Cinque Ports. There were really seven, not five, of them—Dover, Hythe, Hastings, Winchelsea, Rye, Romney, and Sandwich. Under their charter they enjoyed valuable privileges, in return for which they were bound to provide, when the King called upon them, fifty-seven ships and twelve hundred men and boys for fifteen days at their own expense, and as long after as the King paid the necessary charges. The naming of so short a term of service shows that maritime operations were expected not to last long. It was, indeed, a difficult matter to keep a medieval fleet at sea, and the conditions that produced this state of things lasted far into the modern period. Small ships crowded with fighting-men had no room for any large store of provisions and water. When the first scanty supply was exhausted, unless they were in close touch with a friendly port, they had to be accompanied by a crowd of storeships, and as the best merchantmen would naturally have been impressed for the actual fighting, these would be small, inferior, and less seaworthy ships, and the fleet would have to pay as much attention to guarding its convoy as to operating against an enemy. No wonder that as a rule the most that could be attempted was a short voyage and a single stroke.

It was in 1340 that King Edward III challenged the title of Philip of Valois to the crown of France, and by claiming it for himself began "the Hundred Years' War." Both sides to the quarrel began to collect fleets and armies, and both realized that the first struggle would be on the sea. It would be thus decided whether the war was to be fought out on French or on English ground.

The French King collected ships from his ports and strengthened his fleet by hiring a number of large warships from Genoa, then one of the great maritime republics of the Mediterranean. The Genoese sailors knew the northern seas, for there were always some of their ships in the great trading fleet that passed up the Channel each spring, bringing the produce of the Mediterranean countries and the East to the northern ports of Europe, and returned in the late summer laden with the merchandise of the Hansa traders.

Early in the year King Philip had assembled a hundred and ninety ships, large and small, French and Genoese, off the little town of Sluys on the coast of Flanders. The fleet lay in the estuary of the river Eede. Like Damme, Sluys has now become an inland village. Its name means "the sluice," and, like Damme, reminds us how the people of the Netherlands have for centuries been winning their land from the sea by their great system of dams to keep the sea-water back, and sluices to carry the river-water to the sea. The estuary of the Eede where the French fleet anchored is now pasture land traversed by a canal, and the embankments that keep the sea from the meadow lands lie some miles to the westward of the place where King Edward won his great naval victory.

Had the French acted at once, there was nothing to prevent them from opening the war by invading England. Perhaps they did not know how slowly the English fleet was assembling.

In the late spring when the French armament was nearly complete, King Edward had only forty ships ready. They lay in the estuaries of the Orwell and the Stour, inside Harwich, long a place of importance for English naval wars in the North Sea. Gradually, week after week, other ships came in from the Thames, and the northern seaports, from Southampton and the Cinque Ports, and even from Bristol, creeping slowly along the coasts from harbour to harbour. All this time the French might have swept the seas and destroyed the English in detail; but they waited for more ships and more men, and the time of opportunity went by.

At last in the beginning of June the English King had two hundred ships assembled, from decked vessels down to open sailing-boats. An army crowded on board of them, knights and nobles in shining armour, burghers and peasants in steel caps and leather jerkins, armed with the long-bow or the combined pike and long battle-axe known as the "bill." The King's ship flew the newly adopted royal standard in which the golden lions on a red field, the arms of England, were quartered with the golden lilies of France on a field of blue, and another banner displaying the device that is still the flag of the Royal Navy, the Red Cross of St. George on a field of white, the banner adopted by Richard Cœur de Lion in his Crusade. The other ships flew the banners of the barons and knights who commanded them, and on the royal ship and those of the chief commanders there were trumpeters whose martial notes were to give the signal for battle. As a knight of the Middle Ages despised the idea of fighting on foot, and there might be a landing in Flanders, some of the barons had provided for all eventualities by taking with them their heavy war horses, uncomfortably stabled in the holds of the larger ships.