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

by A. T. Mahan

This was the first decisive frigate action of the War of the French Revolution, and in consequence great was the enthusiasm aroused. Lord Howe wrote to Pellew, "The manner in which you have taken the enemy's ship will set an example for the war." In truth, however, while admitting the soundness of Pellew's judgment in adopting the course he did, the actual demand upon his personal skill was less, and in so far the credit due therefore less, than in the second successful frigate action, in the following October, in which Sir James Saumarez commanded. Not only was the French vessel's superiority in force more marked in the latter instance, but Saumarez's ship there met with an accident similar in character to that which befell the Cléopâtre, from the consequences of which she was extricated by his masterly seamanship. Still, it may with fairness be argued that, as the one action from its attendant circumstances evidenced the individual skill of the commander, so the other testified to the antecedent preparation and efficiency of the crew, which are always to be attributed to the care of the captain, especially under the conditions of Pellew's enlistments. Both captains fully deserved the reward of knighthood bestowed upon their success. Israel Pellew was promoted to post-captain.

During the first three years of this war British commerce in the neighborhood of the Channel suffered most severely from French cruisers. The latter resumed the methods of Jean Bart and other celebrated privateers of the days of Louis XIV.; the essence of which was to prey upon the enemy's commerce, not by single vessels, but by small squadrons of from five to seven. Cruisers so combined, acting in mutual support, were far more efficient than the same number acting separately. Spreading like a fan, they commanded a wider expanse than a ship alone; if danger arose, they concentrated for mutual support; did opportunity offer, the work was cut out and distributed, thus insuring by co-operation more thorough results. At the suggestion of Sir Edward Pellew, the British Admiralty determined to oppose to these organized depredators a similar system. Groups of crack frigates were constituted, and sent to cruise within the limits of the Channel Fleet, but independent of its admiral. In these Pellew served for the next five years, much of the time as squadron commander; to him a period of incessant, untiring activity, and illustrated by many brilliant and exciting incidents, for which the limits of this sketch afford no space.

There are, however, two episodes in which he was so distinctly the central figure that they demand at least a brief narration. In January, 1796, while his ship was repairing, a large East Indiaman, the Dutton, carrying some six hundred troops and passengers, was by a series of mishaps driven ashore on the beach of Plymouth, then an unprotected sound. As she struck, all her masts went overboard, and she lay broadside to the waves, pounding heavily as they broke over her. Pellew was at this moment driving to a dinner with his wife. Seeing crowds running from various directions towards the same quarter, he asked the reason. Upon learning it, he left his carriage and hurried to the scene. When he arrived, he recognized, by the confusion on board, by the way the ship was laboring, by the poverty of the means that had been contrived for landing the imperilled souls,—only a single hawser having been run to the shore,—that the loss of nearly all on board was imminent. Night, too, was falling, as well as the destruction of the vessel impending. After vainly offering rewards to the hardy boatmen standing by, if they would board the wreck with a message from him, he said, "Then I must go myself." Though then close to forty years of age, his immense personal strength and activity enabled him, though sorely bruised thereby, to be hauled on board through the breakers by the hawser, which alternately slacked and then tightened with a jerk as the doomed ship rolled to and fro in the seas. Once on board, he assumed command, the want of which, through the absence of the proper captain, had until then hampered and well-nigh paralyzed all effectual effort. When his well-known name was spoken, three hearty cheers arose from the troops on board, echoed by the thousands of spectators on shore; and the hope that revived with the presence of a born leader of men showed itself at once in the renewed activity and intelligent direction of effort, on the decks and on the beach. The degree of the danger can be estimated from the fact that boats from the ships of war in port, his own included, tried in vain to approach and had to run for safety to the inner harbor. With sword drawn,—for many of the soldiers were drunk and riotous,—Pellew maintained order, guided with a seaman's readiness the preparations for landing, and saw the women, the children,—one child but three weeks old,—the sick, landed first, then the soldiers, lastly the seamen. When he himself was transferred to the beach by the same means that his skill had contrived for others, but three persons remained on board, officers of the ship, who eased him on shore. The injuries he had received in his perilous passage out, and which confined him to his bed for a week, forbade his being last. To the end of his life, this saving of the crew of the Dutton was the action in which he took most pride.

The year that opened with this magnificent act of self-devotion saw Pellew, at its close, bearing a seaman's part in the most serious crisis that befell his country during the wars of the French Revolution. The end of 1796 and the earlier months of 1797 marked the nadir of Great Britain's military fortunes. The successes of Bonaparte's Italian campaign were then culminating; Austria was on the point of making peace with France; England was about to find herself alone, and the discontent of the seamen of the navy, long smouldering, was soon to break out into the famous and threatening mutinies of the Channel Fleet and of the Nore. At the same time France, relieved on her eastern frontiers, felt able to devote seventeen ships-of-the-line and eighteen thousand troops to the invasion of Ireland.

Pellew, with two frigates besides his own, was stationed off the mouth of Brest harbor to watch the enemy's movements; the main British fleet being some fifty miles to seaward. To this emergency he brought not only the intrepidity of a great seaman and the ardor of an anxious patriot, but likewise the intense though narrow Protestant feeling transmitted from a past, then not so remote, when Romanism and enmity to England were almost synonymous. "How would you like," said he to an officer who shared Pitt's liberal tendencies, "to see Roman Catholic chaplains on board our ships?" and to the end of his life he opposed the political enfranchisement of persons of that creed.

The French expedition against Ireland sailed from Brest on the 16th of December, 1796. Having sent off successively each of his consorts with information for the fleet, Pellew remained with his own ship alone, the Indefatigable, at the moment of the final start. There are two principal channels by which Brest can be left, one leading to the south, the other due west. The French admiral had at first intended to use the former; but, the wind showing signs of an unfavorable shift, he endeavored to change the orders just as night was falling. The weather being hazy, his signals were understood by but few of the forty-odd vessels composing the force. Eight or ten joined him; the remainder followed the original instructions and went out by the south. Pellew attached himself to the admiral's division, kept along with it just out of gun-shot, and by making false signals, burning blue lights and sending up rockets, introduced into the attempts to convey the wishes of the commander-in-chief such confusion as rendered them utterly futile. Having satisfied himself as to the general direction taken by the enemy, he left them, and made all sail for Falmouth, where he arrived on the 20th.

The general fortunes of the expedition do not belong to the present story. Suffice it to say that the greater part reached Ireland safely, but through stress of weather was unable to land the troops, and went back to France by detachments, in January, 1797. It is during this process of return that Sir Edward Pellew again appears, in perhaps the most dramatic incident of his stirring career.

On the afternoon of January 13th, being then in company with the frigate Amazon, and about one hundred and twenty miles west of Brest, a French ship-of-the-line was discovered. The stranger, named the Droits de l'Homme, was returning from Ireland, and heading east. The frigates steered courses converging towards hers, seeking to cut her off from the land. The weather was thick and gloomy, with a strong west wind fast rising to a gale. At half-past four, as night was falling, the French ship carried away her fore and main topmasts in a heavy squall; and an hour later the Indefatigable, now under close reefs, passed across her stern, pouring in a broadside from so near that the French flag floated across her poop, where it was seized and torn away by some of the British seamen. The enemy, having on board nearly a thousand soldiers besides her crew, replied with rapid volleys of musketry, and, as the frigate passed ahead, sheered impetuously towards her, attempting to board, and in her turn grazing the stern of the Indefatigable. In another hour the Amazon drew up, and then the British vessels took their positions, one on either bow of the Droits de l'Homme, whence, by movements of the helm, they alternately raked her. The labor of the gunners, however, was arduous, due to the deep rolling of the ships, on board which, also, the seas poured in volumes through the gun-ports. On the main decks the men fought up to their middles in water, the heavy cannon broke away from the breechings, or ropes used to control them, and even iron bolts tore out from the ships' sides under the severe recoil of the guns. Thus through the long winter night the three ships rushed headlong before the gale towards the French coast, intent on mutual destruction; the constant storm of shot, though flying wild under the violent motions of the vessels, tearing through spars and rigging, and crippling them in much that was essential to their safety.

At four o'clock in the morning of the 14th, long before daybreak, land was sighted right ahead. The Indefatigable hauled at once to the southward, the Amazon to the northward; the enemy alone, seemingly unconscious of the danger, kept on, and as she passed Pellew's ship fired a broadside which severely wounded all the masts. The situation of the combatants was well-nigh desperate. They had reached the coast of France at a point where it forms a deep recess, called Audierne Bay, from either side of which project capes that must be cleared in order to gain once more the open sea. One only of the three escaped. The Droits de l'Homme, unmanageable for want of sail power, tried to anchor, but drove, and struck on a shoal some distance from the beach. Of sixteen hundred souls on board when the battle began, over one hundred had been killed; and of those who survived the fight three hundred perished in the wreck. The Amazon, likewise crippled, though not so badly, had gone ashore to the northward only ten minutes after she ceased firing. Of her people, but six were drowned. The Indefatigable, beating back and forth against the gale before the scene of the French disaster, upon which her crew gazed with the solemn feeling that such might soon be their own fate, succeeded at last in clearing the southern cape. At eleven o'clock, nearly twenty-four hours after first meeting the foe, and with six feet of water in her hold, she passed only three-quarters of a mile outside of the Penmarcks, a rocky promontory thirty miles south of Brest.

This remarkable encounter is said to have suggested to Marryat the vivid sea picture with which "The King's Own" ends. Pellew's unusual personal endurance was signally illustrated on the same day, very shortly after the safety of the ship from wreck was assured. Her principal sails had been so torn by shot as to require immediate renewing, and this had scarcely been done when two vessels were sighted, one of which was for the moment supposed to be the Amazon, whose fate was yet unknown. Pellew gave orders to chase, but his officers represented to him that, whatever he himself was capable of, the ship's company was too exhausted for present further exertion; and that, besides, the ammunition was very short, almost the last filled cartridge having been expended. Under these circumstances he was compelled to desist.