When the war of the Spanish Succession came to an end, the navy held perhaps an even higher place than it has occupied since. At the signing of the Peace of Utrecht, Great Britain was not so much the greatest naval power in the world as the only power. Holland had been overtaxed by the necessity of taking a foremost place in the war on land; France was bled nearly to death; Spain had ceased to possess even the show of a fleet. The Scandinavian nations and Russia were confined to the Baltic. Elsewhere there was nothing. In the midst of this general prostration we ruled at sea, not only without an equal, but without a second.
There was a great danger in a supremacy of this nature. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and he who is the best because the others are very bad may himself be far from good. The truth concerning the British navy during the earlier eighteenth century is that it owed at least as much to fortune as to its merits. At heart it was sound, and moreover it existed by a necessity, and in conformity with the nature of things, since it was for this country the indispensable instrument not only of power but of safety. Therefore it could not absolutely fail till the nation behind it withered. None the less it was hampered by defects, which might well have proved all but ruinous, had our enemy been more capable. Yet that he sank so completely by his own weakness was perhaps, in the long run, a misfortune to us. A sound beating at some not vital point, which could have been demonstrated to be the result of maladministration, would probably have roused the nation into taking the Admiralty and the navy in hand, and would have been for our good. No such lesson was inflicted, and we drowsed on in rather ignoble toleration for a dull half-century. A sound beating at some not vital point which could have been shown to be the result of pedantic adherence to a stupid method of fighting might have stung the navy itself into intellectual activity. Again no such lesson was given, and the navy drowsed on in brainless acquiescence to the Fighting Instructions. Great then as our position was, when compared with our neighbours’, we were yet at a level from which we could not have sunk without becoming dangerously bad.
It is a significant fact that the mere quality of our ships was poor. The superiority of the French shipbuilding, already noticeable in the reign of Charles II., was maintained for long. When Spain began to revive under the Bourbon dynasty she also constructed vessels far superior to ours. In the year after the renewal of warfare in 1739 a Spanish 70-gunship, the Princesa, which however only mounted 64 guns, was taken by three English vessels of the same rate. It cost them five hours and a half of fighting to get her, and although this no doubt speaks well for her captain and crew, her long resistance to apparently overwhelming force was largely due to her fine build. She was of 1709 tons, whereas English vessels of the same rating were only of 1225; therefore she would be stronger and could carry a heavier battery. Her lower deck ports were higher out of the water, and could be worked when ours had to be closed in bad weather. The inferiority of our ships, rate for rate, to the French and Spanish had been noted before, and had produced some effect, but the capture of the Princesa gave a much needed stimulus. Nor was it only in size, and what depends on size, that our ships were inferior. Their lines were poor, so that they were crank (i.e. liable to overturn) and sailed badly. To some extent this inferiority of our models was due to economy. The Admiralty made its vessels of weak scantling, that is with a minimum of timber, and preferred to patch up old ships rather than build new ones, and therefore perpetuated inferior types. This was also part of the general slackness of the time. We were content to be guided by routine, and to leave the building of our ships in the hands of shipwrights who were mere artisans going by traditional rule of thumb.
The difficulty of knowing what sort of men the officers and crews of our old navy were is very great. They have left small record of themselves, and they were too remote from the general life of their time to come under the notice of ordinary witnesses. The pictures we do possess of them are mostly drawn by satirists of whom one only, Smollett, was a man of genius and had personal experience. Unfortunately his spirit was bitter, and his purpose led him to pick out mainly the most extravagant and worst parts of his subject. Records of courts martial, again, tell a good deal, but it is necessary to remember they also are of the nature of selections of the worst. It was the bad not the good officer who came before a court martial. Pamphlet controversies reveal something, but once more it is the worst. That our navy sailed the sea in such bad ships with comparatively few disasters is proof of its seamanship. That its fighting was on the whole successful, in spite of absurd rules and of defective intelligence in leadership, shows that though the head lay wrong, the heart was right. All the materials were there, they only wanted better handling.
The evils afflicting the navy are easy enough to see. First among them was brutality. The times were hard. A glance at the trials which arose out of General Oglethorpe’s agitation against the management of some of our prisons will show how callous our ancestors could be in the early eighteenth century. The navy produced no General Oglethorpe. Though many officers sat in Parliament, none of them made a serious attempt to check the unquestionable ill-usage of the sailors. From that we may draw the deduction that they wanted humanity to incur the ill-will of the Admiralty by insisting on reform, or that they were indifferent to the miseries of others; or finally that, like the Roman Prefectus Castrorum, who had been a common soldier, and who was known to the men as “Bring another,” because he was for ever breaking sticks on their backs and calling for more, they were all the harder because they themselves had suffered.
Here is one brief passage of naval manners in the early eighteenth century, written by a naval pen in the Journal of Rooke’s expedition to Cadiz in 1702:—
“At six this evening Captain Norris coming on board this ship [the flagship] my Lord Hamilton, Captain Ley, Captain Wishart, and Captain Trevor, were standing on the quarter-deck, and as Captain Norris came up, Lord Hamilton asked him if he had taken any more wine or brandy. This means whether he had captured a ship laden with this kind of cargo. The other answered No; upon which Captain Trevor asked the price of his claret, whether he might have any at 4 li a hogshead. Norris said he would have 6 li or salt water, and then Captain Ley said he would rather the prizes were ashore than he would give the 6 li the hogshead; upon which Captain Norris said he was a rascal that he wished his prizes ashore; the other replied he was a rascal if he called him so; and then Captain Norris struck Captain Ley and threw him over the gun, which Mr. Hopsonn hearing, as he and I were in my cabin, ran out, and upon inquiry found he [Norris] had hurt Captain Ley, and by the admiral’s directions ordered him to be confined, upon which Captain Norris drew his sword, and offered to stab Captain Ley, but Admiral Hopsonn, holding his hand, ordered him to be disarmed, and confined in Mr. Rayney’s cabin.”
It is a scene of huckstering and violence on the very quarter-deck of the flagship. Yet though Ley died soon afterwards, perhaps from the effect of the blow, Norris was never called to account, and lived to be the most distinguished officer of the reign of George I. and the early years of George II.
The same Journal, under an earlier date, makes mention of one Captain William Moses of the Milford who accused his lieutenant and one of his midshipmen of attempting to murder him. It turned out on inquiry that he had wounded himself, in order to bolster up charges which he was bringing against these officers. They were brought to a court martial, the lieutenant was acquitted, and the midshipman let off with a mild rebuke. The story of this latter, whose name was Cæsar Brookes, is worth quoting from the minutes of the court martial.
The witnesses, who disagree in many details, are at one in saying that in the middle watch of a certain night, when the ship was on the coast of Africa, the captain, one Mr. Mite a passenger, and various officers, were sitting together on the quarter-deck drinking wine. Here the agreement ceases. Mr. Cæsar Brookes joined the party, and then, according to the captain, he voluntarily, without provocation, and out of pure native arrogance, advanced the proposition that he could fight any two men—nay, he swore he could. For this he was rebuked by the captain, who told him he might perchance meet one who was a better man than himself. To this Mr. Brookes, flaming into outrageous disrespect, answered, “Well, damme, you’re not,” and was thereupon justly confined for his mutinous behaviour. Brookes gives a very different version of the affair. According to him, he was only arguing that in defending narrow passages one man, if conveniently placed, could fight two—a scientific question of shock tactics, in fact, very proper for an officer to discuss. For this he was first abused and then put under arrest, though his carriage throughout was of the most respectful kind. The witnesses do not, with two suspicious exceptions, support the captain’s version of what took place. The exceptions are sailors who tell the same tale like parrots. One of them had been let out of irons by the captain, although he had beaten the gunner, after the quarter-deck scene be it observed. If the court martial thought that Captain Moses had been attempting subornation of perjury, it was not without excuse. Now follows a scene in the captain’s cabin, in which, teste Captain Moses, he was bearded by his extra midshipman; but Mr. Brookes says it was otherwise, and that he was assaulted. Certain it is that the midshipman remained in confinement for six mortal months in the sweltering heat of the Guinea Coast. At Cape Coast Castle, Captain Moses had reason to believe that his life was threatened by the implacable and unbridled Brookes. It seems that Mr. Donnidge the surgeon went to have a conversation with the imprisoned midshipman, and by way of telling him something really worth hearing, let him know that the captain had taken medicine and that it had done no good. Mr. Brookes, on hearing that physicians had so far been in vain, remarked that if he could meet the captain on shore he would give him two pills that should move him. Hereupon Mr. Donnidge rushed out, and finding the captain’s boat manned alongside, warned the crew to keep a good watch, for he believed that their commander’s life was threatened. Something of Mackshane the toady surgeon in Smollett’s Roderick Random seems to hang about Mr. Donnidge. Then there is another story of an anonymous letter found in the captain’s cabin, warning him that the lieutenant and the midshipman were plotting to raise a mutiny and run away with the ship. The letter was either an impudent practical joke or another device of this remarkable naval captain’s, much on a level with the wound on his leg. The notes are but brief, and many clues were not followed up; but one ends with the conviction that the court martial came to a sound and humane decision. It told Mr. Brookes that he had plainly been too free with his tongue, but that six months’ arrest on the coast of Africa was quite punishment enough, and it dismissed the captain’s rigmarole story of conspiracy to murder and mutiny as frivolous and vexatious.