Such were the odds, and the issue was but one more instance of the inevitable decisiveness of the human factor—a factor that to-day, perhaps, such has been the extravagant growth in the weight and precision of modern weapons, has tended to become once more a little obscured. That history has revealed it again, just as it revealed it for us in the case of the Elizabethans, we hope to show; and, if fortune fought for them, it was not until they had proved themselves superior to it in skill, courage, and equanimity.
"Touching my poor opinion," wrote Sir Francis Drake to Queen Elizabeth on April 15, 1588, how strong your Majesty's Fleet should be to encounter this great force of the enemy, God increase your most excellent Majesty's forces both by sea and land daily; for this I surely think there was never any force so strong as there is now ready or making ready against your Majesty and true religion, but that the Lord of all strength is stronger and will defend the truth of His word, for His own name's sake, unto the which be God all glory given. Thus all humble duty, I continually will pray to the Almighty to bless and give you victory over all His, and your enemies.
"We met with this fleet," wrote Hawkins to Sir Francis Walsyngham on July 31st in the same year, "somewhat to the westward of Plymouth upon Sunday in the morning, being the 21st of July, where we had some small fight with them in the afternoon. By the coming aboard one of the other of the Spaniards, a great ship, a Biscayan, spent her foremast and bowsprit; which was left by the fleet in the sea, and so taken up by Sir Francis Drake the next morning. The same Sunday there was, by a fire chancing by a barrel of powder, a great Biscayan spoiled and abandoned, which my Lord took up and sent away. The Tuesday following, athwart of Portland, we had a sharp and long fight with them, wherein we spent a great part of our powder and shot, so as it was not thought good to deal with them any more till that was relieved. The Thursday following, by the occasion of the scattering of one of the great ships from the fleet, which we hoped to have cut off, there grew a hot fray, wherein some store of powder was spent, and after that, little done till we came near to Calais, where the fleet of Spain anchored, and our fleet by them; and because they should not be in peace there, to refresh their water or to have conference with those of the Duke of Parma's party, my Lord Admiral, with firing of ships, determined to remove them; as he did, and put them to the seas; in which broil the chief galleass spoiled her rudder and so rode ashore near the town of Calais, where she was possessed of our men, but so aground as she could not be brought away. That morning, being Monday, the 29th of July, we followed the Spaniards, and all that day had with them a long and great fight, wherein there was great valour shown generally of our company."
A few days later, Admiral Howard, also writing to Sir Francis Walsyngham, said, "In our last fight with the enemy, before Gravelines, the 29th of July, we sunk three of their ships, and made some go near the shore, leaking so they were not able to live at sea. After that fight, notwithstanding that our powder and shot was well near all spent, we set on a brag countenance and gave them chase, as though we had wanted nothing, until we had cleared our own coast, and some part of Scotland of them."
Such were the Fathers of admiralty as to-day we envisage it; and, dark as some of our naval pages have since been, their tradition has never died, or lacked among us sons to sustain and adorn it in larger issues. There have been times when the country in general and its statesmen in particular have lost or under-valued their sea-vision. In 1667, less than eighty years after the defeat of the Armada, and scarcely ten after the death of Blake, one of the greatest figures in English naval history, to such a pass had our naval administration come that the Dutch were able to sail almost unchallenged up the Medway; to destroy the booms and half-equipped battleships; to capture the Royal Charles as a trophy; for several weeks to blockade London; and, in the end, to compel the English Government to a disadvantageous peace.
Fortunately that was a lesson that England never forgot, and, though there were to follow lapses, not a few, in the struggles that followed against the lust for world-power, first of Louis XVI, and, a hundred later, of Napoleon, the navy of England played a not unworthy and probably a decisive part. In Hawke and Rodney and Hood, and supremely in Nelson, in their unremembered captains and too-often ill-requited men, the spirit of the great Elizabethans lived again and ultimately prevailed, as it was bound to do. Not less for peoples in the comity of nations than for individuals in smaller societies, the highest task is to put at the disposal of human progress their characteristic genius. In military capacity, never the equal of France; behind many other nations in certain of the arts and sciences; lacking the spiritual insight of the East and the buoyant versatility of the West, this maritime adequacy, this gift of admiralty, seems, by virtue of her history, to have been allotted to Britain—and she has always been at her greatest, both for herself and for mankind, when she and her statesmen have realized this most fully.
That among her seamen this conception was as strong as ever, the history of the Great War has abundantly made clear, little as most of them dreamed, on that July morning, to be described in our first chapter, that they were on the verge of an ordeal, in which humanity's fate would lie in their hands as never in history. And yet, had they been gifted with a vision of what was to come, certain doubts might well have been pardoned in them. Colossal as the machinery was, it was largely untried. New methods and engines, with unforeseeable possibilities, were already in embryo or in actual being. The submarine, the airship, the mine—in less than half an hour, a fleet might be at the bottom. Recent naval campaigns had shown that, whereas a century before, it had been the exception for a stricken ship to sink, it was now the exception for it to float; and what of the men in a modern naval battle?
For it would have to be remembered that, while on the one hand the terrors of naval warfare had immeasurably increased, the men who had to endure them had become, on the other, the educated products of a more sensitive civilization. Whereas, even in Nelson's time, the majority of British seamen were quite unable to read or write, and were too often, for all their courage, little better than human animals—many had been impressed by slum raids in seaport towns, and disciplined by a brutality now scarcely imaginable—the sailors of to-day, if of the same fibre, were men of a wholly different upbringing. They were the brothers of the shop-attendants, the men in the counting-house, the skilled workmen with their trade unions. They were even better educated than these, with a mellower, deeper, and more humorous philosophy of life. For them the navy was a career, from boyhood to old age, with solid rewards—and not a last resort. How would their new refinement weather the storm?
In the following pages we have tried to answer this, as often as possible, in their own words.