The difficulty discovered by merchant vessels in signalling or replying to a signal consisted in their ignorance of signalling. They were seldom required to signal; the use of the commercial code involved a tedious process, impossible to accomplish quickly without constant practice; they were equipped with neither Morse nor semaphore apparatus, nor had officers or men learned how to use it. When a man-of-war signalled to a merchantman, the merchant skipper or mate must first try to decipher the flags of the hoist, an exercise to which he was totally unaccustomed. When he had decided that the flags were, say, blue with a white stripe, and red with a yellow stripe, he had to turn them up in the signal-book to discover what they meant. All this time the distance between the two ships was rapidly increasing. Having made out the signal, the merchant sailor must refer to his signal-book to find what flags made his reply; and having found them, he had to pick out the flag itself from a bundle. By the time he had finished these operations, if he ever finished them, the ships were nearly out of sight of each other.
The reform was eventually achieved largely by the personal enterprise and energy of the mercantile marine officers themselves, who learned signalling, and who often paid for the necessary apparatus out of their own pockets.
The Undaunted paid off early in 1893. Upon the evening of the day upon which I arrived in London, I went to the House of Commons to listen to the debate upon the Navy Estimates.
CHAPTER XXXIX
THE SECOND SHIPBUILDING PROGRAMME
It is easier to take the helm than to be on the con. I have always been on the con. To drop the metaphor, I have looked ahead in matters of naval defence and have pointed out what (in my view) ought to be done. In 1889, I resigned my post at the Board of Admiralty in order to fasten public attention upon the instant necessity of strengthening the Fleet by the addition of 70 vessels at a cost of £20,000,000. In the same year, the Naval Defence Act provided those vessels at a cost a little in excess of my estimate. That was my first shipbuilding programme. Many other forces were of course exerted to the same end: the representations of distinguished brother officers; the many excellent articles in the Press; and the steadily increasing pressure of public opinion, then much less warped by party politics than it has since become. Apart from these influences, which were fortified by the irresistible logic of the truth, my own efforts must have availed little. But above all (to resume my metaphor), it was the helmsman at the Admiralty who put the wheel over. Captain W. H. Hall, Director of the Intelligence Department, worked out the requirements of the case, unknown to me, and arrived at the same conclusions as those at which I had arrived, and the Board of Admiralty adopted his scheme. By the irony of circumstance, the Intelligence Department had been instituted, in consequence of my representations, before I left the Admiralty, for the precise purpose of reporting upon the requirements of defence; and the first report of its fearless and enlightened chief completely upset the comfortable theories both of the Board and of the Government.
I have briefly recalled these matters, fully related in a previous chapter, because they present a curious parallel with the events of 1893-4.
In July, 1893, while still on half-pay, I addressed the London Chamber of Commerce on the subject of "The Protection of the mercantile marine in War." Since I had left the Undaunted, early in the year, I had been occupied once more in drawing up a scheme of naval requirements, specifying what was required, why it was required, and how much it would cost, and giving a detailed list of the necessary vessels. The protection of the mercantile marine was the first part of it; the whole was not completed until just before I was appointed captain of the Steam Reserve at Chatham; and it would have been improper for me to have published the paper while on active service. It was intended that I should read it before the London Chamber of Commerce, following upon and amplifying my address dealing with the protection of the mercantile marine in war. But as there was no time available for the purpose before I went on active service, I gave the scheme to Mr. John Jackson, for the London Chamber of Commerce. I may take this opportunity of paying a tribute to the disinterested and untiring patriotic zeal of the late Mr. Jackson, between whom and myself a warm friendship existed.
In my address upon the protection of the mercantile marine in war, the abrogation of the Declaration of Paris of 1856 was urged as a primary condition of British naval supremacy: a condition unequivocally laid down in the Report of the Three Admirals in 1889. Subsequent events have shown that successive British Governments, far from recognising the essential elements of sea power, continued to yield point after point, until at the Naval Conferences of 1907 and 1909, whose recommendations were embodied in the Declaration of London, British Ministers virtually conceded nearly every right gained by centuries of hard fighting in the past. Fortunately, public indignation has hitherto prevented the ratification of that fatal instrument.