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

by A. T. Mahan

On the 14th of October Carleton landed at Crown Point, which the Americans had abandoned; but the lateness of the season deterred him from advancing against Ticonderoga, and he soon afterwards returned to Canada. The full import of this halt is too easily overlooked, with consequent failure to appreciate the momentous influence exerted upon the course of the Revolutionary War by this naval campaign, in which Pellew bore so conspicuous a part. It has never been understood in America, where the smallness of the immediate scale has withdrawn attention from the greatness of the ultimate issue, in gaining time for the preparations which resulted in the admittedly decisive victories about Saratoga. "If we could have begun our expedition four weeks earlier," wrote a German general there present, "I am satisfied everything would have been ended this year [1776]; were our whole army here, it would be an easy matter to drive the enemy from their entrenchments at Ticonderoga." The delay, not of four weeks only, but of the whole summer, was obtained by the naval force organized upon Champlain by Arnold and his superior, General Schuyler. The following year the invasion was resumed, under General Burgoyne. Pellew accompanied him with a body of seamen, taking part in all the operations down to the final surrender. Burgoyne, indeed, afterwards chaffed him with being the cause of the disaster, by rebuilding the bridge which enabled the army to cross from the east bank of the Hudson to the west.

Returning to England in the early part of 1778, Pellew was made lieutenant, and in 1780 we find him again serving under Captain Pownoll, as first lieutenant of the Apollo frigate. On the 15th of June, in the same year, the Apollo met the French frigate Stanislas. A severe action followed, and at the end of an hour Pownoll was shot through the body. As his young friend raised him from the deck, he had barely time to say, "Pellew, I know you won't give his Majesty's ship away," and immediately expired. The engagement lasted an hour longer, when the enemy, which had all the time been standing in for the Belgian coast, took the ground, the most of her spars, already wounded, going overboard with the shock. The Apollo had hauled off a few moments before, finding that she had less than five feet of water under her keel.

Though unable again to attack the Stanislas, which claimed the protection of the neutral flag, the result was substantially a victory; but to Pellew's grief for the death of a tried friend was added the material loss of a powerful patron. Happily, however, his reputation was known to the head of the Admiralty, who not only promoted him for this action, but also gave him a ship, though a poor one. After a succession of small commands, he was fortunate enough again to distinguish himself,—driving ashore and destroying several French privateers, under circumstances of such danger and difficulty as to win him his next grade, post-captain. This step, which, so far as selection went, fixed his position in the navy, he received on the 25th of May, 1782.

The ten years of peace that shortly followed were passed by many officers in retirement, which we have seen was contentedly accepted by his distinguished contemporary, Saumarez; but Pellew was a seaman to the marrow, and constantly sought employment afloat. When out of occupation, he for a while tried farming, the Utopian employment that most often beguiles the imagination of the inbred seaman in occasional weariness of salt water; but, as his biographer justly remarks, his mind, which allowed him to be happy only when active, could ill accommodate itself to pursuits that almost forbade exertion. "To have an object in view, yet to be unable to advance it by any exertions of his own, was to him a source of constant irritation. He was wearied with the imperceptible growth of his crops, and complained that he made his eyes ache by watching their daily progress."

His assiduous applications, however, were not wholly unavailing to obtain him the professional employments usually so hard to get in times of peace. For five of the ten years, 1783-1793, he commanded frigates, chiefly on the Newfoundland station; and in them, though now turning thirty, he displayed the superabundant vitality and restless activity that had characterized his early youth. "Whenever there was exertion required aloft," wrote a midshipman who served with him at this period, "to preserve a sail or a mast, the captain was foremost in the work, apparently as a mere matter of amusement, and there was not a man in the ship that could equal him in personal activity. He appeared to play among the elements in the hardest storms. I remember once, in close-reefing the main topsail, the captain had given his orders from the quarter-deck and sent us aloft. On gaining the topsail yard, the most active and daring of our party hesitated to go upon it, as the sail was flapping violently, making it a service of great danger; but a voice was heard from the extreme end of the yard, calling upon us to exert ourselves to save the sail, which would otherwise beat to pieces. A man said, 'Why, that's the captain! How the —— did he get there?' He had followed us up, and, clambering over the backs of the sailors, had reached the topmast head, above the yard, and thence descended by the lift,"—a feat unfortunately not easy to be explained to landsmen, but which will be allowed by seamen to demand great hardihood and address.

All this was the simple overflow of an animal energy not to be repressed, the exulting prowess of a giant delighting to run his course. It found expression also in joyous practical jests, like those of a big boy, which at times had ludicrous consequences. On one occasion of state ceremony, the king's birthday, Pellew had dressed in full uniform to attend a dinner on shore. The weather was hot, and the crew had been permitted an hour's swimming around the ship. While his boat was being manned, the captain stood by the frigate's rail watching the bathers, and near by him was one of the ship's boys. "I too shall have a good swim soon," called the latter to a comrade in the water. "The sooner, the better," said Pellew, coming behind him and tipping him overboard. No sooner had the lad risen to the surface from his plunge than it was plain that he could not swim; so in after him went the practical joker, with all his toggery. "If ever the captain was frightened," writes the officer just quoted, "it was then."

But along with all this physical exuberance and needless assumption of many of the duties of a foremast hand, Pellew possessed to a very remarkable extent that delicate art of seamanship which consists in so handling a ship as to make her do just what you want, and to put her just where she should be; making her, to use a common sea expression, do everything but talk. This is a faculty probably inborn, like most others that reach any great degree of perfection, and, while a very desirable gift, it is by no means indispensable to the highest order of naval excellence. Nelson did not at all equal Pellew in this respect, as is indicated by an amusing story transmitted by a Colonel Stewart, who served on board the great admiral's flag-ship during the expedition against Copenhagen: "His lordship was rather too apt to interfere in the working of the ship, and not always with the best judgment or success. The wind, when off Dungeness, was scanty, and the ship was to be put about. Lord Nelson would give the orders, and caused her to miss stays. Upon this he said, rather peevishly, to the officer of the watch, 'Well, now see what we have done. Well, sir, what mean you to do now?' The officer saying, with hesitation, 'I don't exactly know, my lord. I fear she won't do,' Lord Nelson turned sharply to the cabin, and replied, 'Well, I am sure if you do not know what to do with her, no more do I, either.' He went in, leaving the officer to work the ship as he liked." Yet Nelson understood perfectly what ships could do, and what they could not; no one could better handle or take care of a fleet, or estimate the possibility of performing a given manoeuvre; and long before he was called to high command he was distinguished for a knowledge of naval tactics to which few, if any other, of his time attained. He was a great general officer; and whether he had the knack of himself making a ship go through all her paces without a fault mattered as little as whether he was a crack shot with a gun.

A ship is certainly the most beautiful and most graceful of machines; a machine, too, so varied in its movements and so instinct with life that the seaman affectionately transfers to her credit his own virtues in handling her. Pellew's capacity in this part of his profession was so remarkable that it is somewhat singular to find him, in his first frigate action, compelled to discard manoeuvring, and to rely for victory upon sheer pluck and luck. When war with the French republic began in 1793, his high reputation immediately insured him command of a frigate, the Nymphe. The strength of England as a naval power lay largely in the great reserve of able seamen manning her merchant ships; but as these were scattered in all quarters of the world, great embarrassment was commonly felt at the outbreak of a war, and especially when it came with the unexpected rapidity of the revolutionary fury. As the object of first importance was to get the fleets of ships-of-the-line to sea, Pellew had to depend chiefly upon his own indefatigable exertions to procure a crew for his vessel. Seamen being hard to find, he had on board a disproportionate number of landsmen when the Nymphe, on the 19th of June, 1793, encountered the French vessel Cléopâtre, of force slightly inferior, except in men, but not sufficiently so to deny the victor the claim of an even fight.

A peculiar incident preceding the action has interest, as showing the strong preoccupation of men's minds at the opening of war, before meetings with the enemy have lost novelty. Pellew's younger brother, Israel, a commander in the navy, being otherwise unemployed, had come out with him for the cruise. The Cléopâtre having been first seen in the early morning, Edward would not have him called till just as the Nymphe was closing. As he came on deck, the brother said affectionately, "Israel, you have no business here. We are too many eggs from one nest. I am sorry I brought you from your wife." But the other was unheeding, his eyes fixed upon the stranger. "That's the very frigate," he cried, "that I've been dreaming of all night! I dreamt that we shot away her wheel." And, hastening to the after-gun, he made the French ship's wheel the object of an unremitting fire.

By the way the enemy was handled it was evident that she was well manned and ably commanded. She had, in fact, been in commission for over a year. Great as was his own skill, Pellew could not venture upon manoeuvres with a green crew, untrained save at the guns, and only filled the night before by pressing from a merchant vessel. He therefore determined upon a simple artillery duel. The Frenchman waited under short canvas, while the Nymphe, with greater way, drew slowly up on his starboard, or right-hand side; both ships running nearly before the wind, but having it a little on the left side. Each captain stood uncovered, and as the bows of the Nymphe doubled upon the stern of the Cléopâtre, within three hundred feet, a French sailor was seen to run aloft and fasten a red cap of liberty to the mainmast head. The eyes of the British seamen were fastened upon their commander, awaiting the gesture which he had set, instead of word of mouth, for opening fire. At quarter-past six he gave it, raising his cap to his head. A furious cannonade at once began, and, the Nymphe shortening sail as soon as fairly abreast her antagonist, the two frigates continued on parallel lines, maintaining their relative positions as though at anchor, and rolling easily in the soft summer sea under the recoil of their guns. So nearly matched were the gunners that the conflict, unusually deadly though it was, might have lasted long, but at a little before seven Israel Pellew's dream was fulfilled. The Frenchman's wheel was shot away, and, the mizzenmast going overboard at the same time, the Cléopâtre yielded to the impulse of her forward sails, turned sharp round to the right, and ran perpendicularly into the Nymphe. The British boarded her, fixed in this disadvantageous position, fought their way aft, and, although the French crew was numerically superior, in ten minutes hauled down the colors. In this brief hour they had lost twenty-three killed and twenty-seven wounded, the enemy sixty-three killed and wounded, out of ships' companies numbering respectively two hundred and forty and three hundred and twenty.