As might be expected, Portsmouth has not in the past been entirely free from spies and traitors during war time; but, as a rule, these have had but short shrift when discovered. Perhaps one of the most notable of traitors who happened to be caught was one David Pyrie, at the time employed as a clerk in the Navy Office. He was found to have disclosed information regarding the naval preparations and movements of the fleet to the French Government in 1782 during the Napoleonic wars. Upon trial, which took place in the summer of that year, he was condemned to what must nowadays strike one as a barbarous sentence, namely, “to be hanged by the neck, but not until he was dead; that he should then be cut down, his bowels taken out and burned before his face; and that his head should then be taken off, his body cut into four quarters, and (this is a grim touch of unconscious humour!) to be placed at the disposal of his Majesty the King.” Southsea was the spot selected for the carrying out of this terrible sentence. “There were,” we are told, “over much people present to see the traitor die, so that many pressed against the others to their hurt.”
There are two outstanding and arresting things above all others in the Harbour—they are the Victory and the dockyard. In the former we have enshrined noble memories of the greatest of all Britain’s sea kings, and of deeds the lustre of which time cannot tarnish whilst there dwells in the hearts of men a love of country and of courage nobly shown; in the latter we have almost all the modern as well as much of the ancient interests of Portsmouth encompassed.
Men, whilst talking eloquently of the might of modern machinery, of speed, of tonnage, of submarines, of destroyers, of Dreadnoughts and of the devastating hail of bullets which the modern battleship and cruiser can discharge, yet look across at the Victory, that survival of the most brilliant episode in our naval history, with loving eyes. And, as one lies at anchor in sight of the old ship, whose decks have run blood for England’s sake, whose ports have belched fire as she weathered the battle, and whose sides have sung the music of salt water as she drove through it, amid the forest of masts, and in sight of the spires and towers and giant cranes of this great naval port, memories crowd upon one of the great deeds done in the past, and of their significance. The men who may in the future serve to keep England great will not probably, after all, accomplish more than those through whose courage, resource and skill she became so.
A detailed description of the dockyard is beyond the scope of the present volume; but its existence cannot be entirely overlooked. It is not difficult to “get over”—some, and we are inclined to agree with them, assert it is far too easy—but after all one is only shown what it is good for the stranger to see; unless, indeed, one’s patriotism and respectability (as was ours) is vouched for by some high official; but when once inside the evidence of activity and of naval greatness is almost appalling.
Within a comparatively small area one finds gathered together battleships of all types of the last twenty years or so—smart new cruisers; long, low torpedo boats; and the bigger destroyers, wicked-looking in their neutral-tinted slaty-greyness, by scores; huge travelling cranes and shears rearing their clustered beams heavenwards, and capable, some of them, of lifting 100 tons as easily as a man could a fourteen-pound shot; Nasmyth hammers, Titanesque instruments which, whilst beating iron plates flat and thin as easily as a smith moulds a horseshoe, can yet close upon a watchglass without cracking it. Amid all these gigantic and impressive instruments of destruction and construction one is able to feel how insignificant an atom man, the originator of all these things, often is in comparison with his own handiwork.
PORTSMOUTH. ENTRANCE TO HARBOUR
Then there is generally a terrible object-lesson of the destructive powers of modern guns and gunnery in some out-of-date battleship, which, as a target, has been subjected to a hail of projectiles. Riddled and rent asunder almost as though her sides were of cardboard instead of foot-thick steel plates, battered out of semblance of anything resembling a ship, one is made to feel in some measure what the horrors of a modern naval battle would be. One can scarcely believe that within the few short minutes in which the poor maimed craft was exposed to the hail of shot and shell, such destruction could have been wrought. Certainly one is made to realize that between her decks, which in real warfare would have held seven or eight hundred men, no living creature could have existed long.
Then in the construction yards one catches glimpses of battleships coming into being; and in the dry docks—the first of which owes its existence to the initiative of Henry VIII in 1495, and was in constant use for many years—one finds all sorts and conditions of ships undergoing repairs. In “Anchor Lane” one has another object-lesson in what is practically a street composed of anchors ready for any demand or contingency. Many things have changed; but the anchor and the block, though the size and pattern of the former have from time to time been modified, remain, we are told, practically the same as a century or more ago. The navy blocks—which are made of elm after “pickling” in salt-water mud for at least two years—are made in precisely the same way as when a century ago the elder Brunel invented and introduced special machinery for their manufacture.
The Gun Wharf never fails to interest the visitor, be he a sailorman or civilian. Here stacks, or “parks,” of guns of various sizes, but mostly big, are to be seen, forming, as a visitor once not inaptly remarked, “an object-lesson concerning the wastefulness of progress,” for comparatively few of the hundreds of weapons there gathered together for the scrap-heap have been discarded because of any flaw or other fault, but merely because they have become outclassed or out-of-date. In connexion with the Gun Wharf are the buildings containing the vast supplies of arms, from which at a moment’s notice 40,000 or 50,000 men could be equipped.