Famous Sea Fights, from Salamis to Tsu-Shima

by A. Hilliard Atteridge

The fleet sailed southward along the coast, keeping the land in sight. The two hundred ships of varying rates of speed and handiness could not move in the ordered lines of a modern naval armament, but streamed along in an irregular procession, closing up when they anchored for the night. From the North Foreland, with a favourable wind behind them, they put out into the open sea, and steering eastward were out of sight of land for a few hours, a more venturous voyage for these coasting craft than the crossing of the Atlantic is for us to-day. It must have been a trying experience for knight and yeoman, and they must have felt that a great peril was past when the tops of church towers and windmills showed above the horizon, and then the low shore fringed with sandhills and the green dykes came in sight.

Coasting along the shore north-eastwards, the fleet reached a point to the north-west of Bruges, not far from where the watering-place of Blankenberg now stands. It had been ascertained from fishermen and coast-folk that the French fleet was still at Sluys, and it was decided to proceed no further without reconnoitring the enemy. The larger ships anchored, the smaller were beached. The fighting-men landed and camped on the shore to recover from the distresses of their voyage, during which they would have been cramped up in narrow quarters.

Instead of, like a modern admiral, sending some of his lighter and swifter ships to take a look at the enemy, King Edward arranged a cavalry reconnaissance, a simpler matter for his knightly following. Some of the horses were got ashore, and a party of knights mounted and rode over the sandhills towards Sluys. They reached a point where, without being observed by the enemy, they could get a good view of the hostile fleet, and they brought back news that made the King decide to attack next day.

The French fleet was commanded by two knights, the Sieur de Kiriet and the Sieur de Bahuchet. Kiriet's name suggests that he came of the Breton race that has given so many good sailors and naval officers to France, so perhaps he knew something of the sea. Associated with the two French commanders there was an experienced fighting admiral, a veteran of the wars of the Mediterranean, Barbavera, who commanded the Genoese ships. Though they had a slight superiority of numbers and more large ships than the English, Kiriet and Bahuchet were, as one might expect from their prolonged inactivity, very wanting in enterprise now that the crisis had come. They were preparing to fight on the defensive. It was in vain that the experienced commander Barbavera urged that they should weigh anchor and fight the English in the open sea, where numbers and weight would give them an advantage that would be lost in the narrow waters of the Eede estuary. They persisted in awaiting the attack.

The French fleet was anchored along the south shore of the river-mouth, sterns to the land, its left towards the river-mouth, its right towards the town of Sluys. The vessel on the extreme left was an English ship of large size, the "Great Cristopher," captured in the Channel in the first days of the war. The ships were grouped in three divisions—left, centre, and right. Kiriet and Bahuchet adopted the same plan of battle that King Olaf had used at Svold. The ships in each of the three divisions were lashed together side by side, so that they could only be boarded by the high narrow bows, and there was an addition to the Norse plan, for inboard across the bows barricades had been erected formed of oars, spars, and planking, fastened across the forecastle decks. Behind these barriers archers and Genoese cross-bowmen were posted. There was a second line of archers in the fighting-tops, for since the times of Norse warfare the masts had become heavier, and now supported above the crossyard a kind of crow's nest where two or three bowmen could be stationed, with shields hung round them as a parapet.

The fleet thus was converted into a series of three long, narrow floating forts. It was an intelligible plan of defence for a weak fleet against a strong one, but a hopeless plan for an armament strong enough to have met its opponents on the open sea, ship to ship. At Svold, Erik Jarl had shown that such an array could be destroyed piecemeal if assailed on an exposed flank, and at Sluys the left, where the "Great Cristopher" lay to seaward, positively invited such an attack.

King Edward saw his advantage as soon as his knights came back from their adventurous ride and told him what they had seen, and he arranged his plans accordingly. His great ships were to lead the attack, and concentrate their efforts on the left of the French line. The rest were to pass inside them and engage the enemy in front, on the left, and centre. The enemy had by tying up his ships made it impossible to come to the rescue of the left, even if the narrow waters of the estuary would have allowed him to deploy his force into line. The English would have, and could not fail to keep, a local superiority from the very outset on the left of the enemy, and once it came to close quarters they would clear the French and Genoese decks from end to end of the line, taking ship after ship. While the attack developed the English archers would prepare the way for it by thinning the ranks of their enemies on the ships in the centre and then on the right.

At dawn on 24 June—the day of battle—the wind was blowing fair into the mouth of the Eede, but the tide was ebbing, and the attack could not be driven home till it turned, and gave deep water everywhere between the banks of the inlet. King Edward used the interval to array his fleet and get it into position for the dash into the river. His ships stood out to sea on the starboard tack, a brave sight with the midsummer sun shining on the white sails, the hundreds of banners glowing with red, blue, white, and gold, the painted shields hanging on poop and bulwark. On the raised bows and sterns of the larger ships barons and knights and men-at-arms stood arrayed in complete armour. The archers were ranged along the bulwarks, or looked out from the crow's-nest-tops over the swelling sails.

Old Barbavera must have longed to cut lashings, slip cables, drift out on the tide, and meet the English in the open, but he was in a minority of one against two. And now the tide was dead slack and began to turn, and King Edward's trumpets gave the expected signal for action. As their notes rang over the sea the shouting sailors squared the yards and the fleet began to scud before the wind for the river-mouth, where beyond the green dykes that kept the entrance free a forest of masts bristled along the bank towards Sluys.

The English came in with wind and tide helping them, several ships abreast, the rest following each as quickly as she might, like a great flock of sea-birds streaming towards the shore. There could be no long ranging fire to prelude the close attack. At some sixty yards, when men could see each other's faces across the gap, the English archers drew their bows, and the cloth-yard arrows began to fly, their first target the "Great Cristopher" on the flank of the line. Bolts from cross-bows came whizzing back in reply. But, as at Crecy soon after, the long-bow with its rapid discharge of arrows proved its superiority over the slower mechanical weapon of the Genoese cross-bowmen.