The Lady Hermione persuaded Lord Dufferin to learn Morse and semaphore. She was moored at the foot of the cliff, beneath Lord Dufferin's hotel, from whose balcony he used to shout his orders for the day to the boy who was in charge of her, and who often misunderstood his instructions. I suggested that he should learn to communicate with his ship's company by signal, and drew up both the Morse and semaphore codes for his benefit. In six weeks he sent letters to me written in both codes; an instance of determined application. During that time he insisted on practising for so many hours every day with his wife and daughter, so that at the end of it the whole family were proficient in signals.
An interesting example of the manoeuvres of those days occurred at Volo, when Captain Wilson, V.C., disguised his ship, the Sanspareil, in olive trees. The Undaunted was told off to make a torpedo attack at night in the narrow channel where lay the Sanspareil. Captain Wilson (now Admiral of the Fleet Sir A. K. Wilson, V.C., G.C.B., O.M., G.C.V.O.) had constructed a dummy ship on the side of the channel opposite to which lay the Sanspareil, completely clothed in olive trees. I sent a midshipman to cut the cable of the searchlight playing upon the entrance to the channel. The Undaunted steamed into the channel, discovered first the wrong ship, and then the right one, at which I discharged two torpedoes, which were found next morning under the bottom of the Sanspareil.
At the conclusion of all manoeuvres, Sir George Tryon invariably gave a critical lecture upon them to his officers; a method which I adopted in later years. No practice can be more useful; for, while the events are fresh in mind, it demonstrates what was wrong, and why. Often what looks wrong at first, turns out to have been a good idea. But for years all reports of manoeuvres remained locked in the Admiralty. Many of the manoeuvres were useless; but for lack of information admirals afloat continued to repeat them.
During my time in the Undaunted, my knowledge of signalling saved Captain Harry Rawson (afterwards Vice-Admiral Sir H. H. Rawson, K.C.B.) and myself a deal of trouble on one occasion. We had been out shooting all day, had missed the way, and as darkness fell, found ourselves on the wrong side of the bay in which the Fleet lay at anchor, with the prospect of a further tramp of twelve or fourteen miles. Rawson used to chaff me for doing what he called "boatswain's work."
"You always want," he used to say, "to go down to the store-room and cut off 30 fathoms of rope yourself."
To which I used to reply that I wanted to do nothing of the sort; but what I did want to do was to see that a piece of 30 fathoms of rope was cut off. On the same principle, Rawson used to deride my acquaintance with signals. Now that we either had to attract the attention of the Fleet or walk for another three or four hours, I told Rawson that if I could find a shepherd's hut I would get a boat over. He did not believe me.
But we found a hut, and in the hut, an oil lamp and a bucket, out of which I constructed a signalling apparatus. I had hardly made the Undaunted pennant, when it was answered from the ship, and inside a quarter of an hour the boat waiting for us on the other side of the bay had been recalled, and another boat was rapidly approaching us. Rawson left off chaffing me after that.
It was at this time that my old friend, Captain Gerard Noel (now Admiral of the Fleet Sir G. H. U. Noel, G.C.B., K.C.M.G.), one of the smartest seamen in the Service, performed a brilliant feat of seamanship. Captain Noel commanded the twin-screw, rigged ironclad Téméraire, of 8540 tons displacement, one of the types in which sail-power was employed as well as steam. She was brig-rigged, and I think her main-yard measured 104 feet, or about four feet longer than the main-yards of the sailing line-of-battleships of, say, 1850-60. On the 3rd October, 1890, Captain Noel beat her under sail alone against a head wind up Suda Bay, a long narrow arm of the sea, with shoal water in places, which added to the difficulty of handling the ship. If I am not mistaken, that occasion was the first and last time an ironclad beat her way under sail into an anchorage. The Téméraire made thirteen tacks and anchored within two cables (400 yards) of her appointed berth with the Fleet. By that time the wind had failed and it was useless to attempt to tack again.
It was early in the commission of the Undaunted that I read Captain (now Admiral) A. T. Mahan's admirable book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History; of which it is not too much to say that it has changed the whole trend of modern thought in respect of the relation of sea warfare to land warfare. Preparation for war now turns upon a new pivot. The result has been that extraordinary increase of foreign navies which necessarily imposes upon us a proportionate increase of our own Navy. I was so greatly impressed with the work of Captain Mahan, that I wrote to him to express my admiration for it. I received in reply the interesting letter which follows, and which Admiral Mahan has kindly permitted me to quote:
"75, EAST 54TH STREET, NEW YORK
7th February, 1891