Yet it is doubtful whether these explanations of the decline of our discipline and skill are satisfactory. No vessel lost to the Americans was so scandalously lost as the Ambuscade, taken by the French Bayonnaise in 1798. She was outmanœuvred by a smaller ship, and carried by boarding. In the American war the Phœbe, which took the Essex in the South Seas, and the Shannon, which took the Chesapeake, were nowise inferior to their opponents in gunnery. Nor were we always beaten in that war by gunnery or by American seamen. The Decatur, which took the Dominica by boarding, was commanded by a French privateer, Captain Diron, and manned by a French crew. The discipline of the navy was as severe for the marine as for other men. Yet there never was any difficulty in recruiting for the marines. If our navy sank below the level of 1805, the reason must be sought in its size. One hundred and forty-five thousand men was an immense number to take from the population of Great Britain when it was less than half what it is to-day. And they had to be found just when increased numbers of soldiers were needed, when our merchant shipping had doubled, and when there was a great development of manufacturing industry and of agriculture. If we had been forced to rely on our own population we could not have found the men. We succeeded because multitudes of foreign seamen were driven to seek service in England by the ruin of commerce in their native countries. Even with their help the Admiralty was unable to supply crews of good quality to all the ships. If the Epervier was largely manned by negroes and foreigners, she had many feeble, undersized Englishmen who were taken because no better could be obtained. The physical strength of the men was a consideration of the first importance in the warships of the old navy. All the work at the guns had to be done by downright pulling and hauling. The proportion of one man to every 500 pounds of metal was just sufficient to work the gun, and could not be maintained when the crew was short-handed, or when it was necessary to fight both broadsides. The effort required to run out a 32-pounder, which weighed 55 cwt. 2 lb. on the weather broadside when the ship was leaning over, was severe even for a full crew of twelve men. The demand for good men had far outrun the supply. The existence of the United States added materially to our difficulties, for it supplied our sailors with an English-speaking country to which they could escape. During the later stages of the war the navy was compelled to form its crews with ever-increasing difficulty. It found marines who, when they enlisted, had a security for permanent employment and a pension. The sailors did not form a permanent corps and were sent adrift when their ship was paid off. The regular bred seamen preferred the good wages and freedom of the merchant service, or emigrated to America. The miscellaneous landsmen, who formed a large part of our crews, were obtained by bounties and the press. The press did indeed take time-expired apprentices from the merchant ships at sea, and they constituted a valuable part of our crews. On land it was of little value. During 1811, 1812, and 1813, 29,405 men were impressed, 27,300 of them deserted, and as 3000 trustworthy men were employed in the gangs which seized them, the navy was in fact the loser to the amount of 1000 men. The naval rendezvous, placed in “the vilest sort of public house, with a something that had once been a Union Jack suspended from a pole, but from filth and dirt wearing the appearance of a black flag,” was not only a scandal, but a useless expense. Pressgang midshipman was a byword for a ruffian. The practice of incorporating criminals and vagabonds in the navy, which was as old as the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was continued throughout the great war. Captain Anselm Griffiths, whose description of a naval rendezvous has been quoted above, is emphatic about the criminal element in the navy. “What,” he says, “was the mass of discontent and impatience generated by a forced association with the refuse of our jails, convicts, vagabonds, thieves not brought to justice from lenity, smugglers, White Boys, suspected Irish during the rebellion, all who from loss of character could not procure employment, the idle and the worthless,—all was fish that came to the net.”
Such accounts of the crews of the navy as this might be quoted in numbers. We are tempted to wonder how the work was done with such men, and whether there can be any foundation for the praise given to the seamanship and gunnery of the navy. But Captain Griffiths, and other authorities who support him, spoke of the bad elements. With them were others of a very different order—the marines and the pressed men of good character. The great length of the war allowed time for the formation of a class of men who were trained wholly in the navy and were attached to it by habit and affection. When Broke commissioned the Shannon, he left England with a crew composed of drafts from the guardships of very mixed quality, and of a majority of boys provided by the Patriotic Society and the workhouses. If the Shannon had met a well-appointed American frigate within three months she would have fared no better than the Epervier or the Java. But she was six years in commission before her famous action. Broke had time to weed out the bad characters. The boys grew to manhood under his wise training. The same process was going on in other ships. If we could have limited the establishment of the navy to 80,000 or even 100,000 men, every ship might have been as well manned as the Shannon. It is even possible that the weaknesses of the navy were made to appear greater than they really were by the fact that the Admiralty, which naturally looked first to fleets Napoleon was building in European ports, kept its best men for the European stations, and compelled captains, whose ships were commissioned for distant seas, to put up with the worst. The increase in the staff of officers from over two to over five thousand, brought with it the necessity for not being too exacting as to their quality. Something must be allowed for the jobbery of the time. There were men in the navy who owed their positions to no merit of their own, but to the fact that some one of influence had spoken for them. We must, again, allow for the fact that there was as yet no uniform standard of discipline. The captains had wide discretion, and the bad ones were unchecked.
Whatever evils the overgrowth of the navy brought with it, the increase was unavoidable. In the years following Trafalgar, the English Navy was in something not unlike the position of the French armies in Spain after 1809. They were far more numerous than the army of Wellington in Portugal. Yet they were frequently unable to collect a force to oppose him, because they were compelled to spread themselves over the whole of Spain. We have recently learned how rapidly an army, which is powerful on a field of battle, can be frittered into small detachments when it has to guard long lines of communication, and to occupy a wide expanse of territory. The English Government was, from the year 1793, under a peremptory obligation to guard trade routes extending from Canton to the St. Lawrence. The task did not become lighter after Trafalgar. Napoleon adopted a definite policy. He began to build line of battleships on a great scale. As his power spread he increased their numbers till he had upwards of one hundred and fifty in ports extending from Venice to Hamburg. They were rarely sent to sea. Many of them, built hastily of green timber, began to rot so soon as they were launched. But it was impossible to neglect them. Squadrons must be employed to watch them. The bulk of our navy was necessarily employed in that work. While our squadrons were watching hostile ports, our commerce was subject to a double form of attack. Light squadrons and single ships sailed from French ports on commerce destroying cruises. Privateers sailed not only from French ports, but from colonial harbours, Martinique and Guadaloupe, Bourbon and Mauritius, and the Dutch islands of Java and Sumatra. These attacks had to be guarded against by blockade, by convoy, by patrol, and by the conquest of the ports from which the privateers sailed.
The history of blockade cannot be told. It is a long monotonous roll of sailings from one point to another and back again, of periodical returns to port to refit or for provisions, of ships driven away by gales from the land, or forced to work to sea that they might not be driven on a lee shore. The daily fulfilment of a routine, isolation from family life and all society other than that of messmates, exposure to cold, to heat, to wet, make up the lot of the officers and men of a blockading fleet. And this was the work on which the majority of the navy was employed. The brief intervals spent in a home port when food and water had to be renewed, were hardly less painful than the time spent on the cruising-ground, for the rule that neither officer nor man might sleep on shore rendered the promise of more leave, given in 1797, almost nugatory. Indeed an increase of pay was the most solid advantage the seamen gained in that year. In 1808, when the need for more men became very urgent the pay of the sailor was raised to £1, 12s. for the lunar month. The secluded unnatural life of the blockading squadrons was terrible for all ranks. Some of the consequences it produced cannot be named. Not a few of the men went mad under the strain, multitudes were hardened in heart and distorted in character.
The blockades did the work assigned them. When, in 1809, Napoleon endeavoured to send a strong squadron, drawn partly from the Brest fleet and partly from ships at Rochefort, to the West Indies, his plan was ruined by the Channel fleet. The bulk of his force did get away from Brest, but only to be sighted by the British forces and driven into the Basque roads. There they were attacked by fireships under the immediate command of Lord Cochrane (Dundonald) and the superior direction of Lord Gambier. The operation was not so completely successful as it might have been. Cochrane was so dissatisfied by the interference of his commander-in-chief that he forced the Admiralty to bring Gambier to a court martial. Even so, the attack ruined the French squadron, and the reinforcements never reached the French islands. Here we see the normal working of the blockade, which left the French fleet no chance of getting to sea, except by the help of good fortune in evading the watch of the British ships.
No great French fleet ventured to sea, and only once did a considerable French squadron incur the risk of trusting itself far from port among the English forces. Napoleon would not hazard the great fleet he was building up till he had vanquished all enemies on the Continent, and could make a final attack with all the forces of Europe. But though the main purpose was achieved the duty became continually more severe till after the Russian campaign, when the destruction of the Grand Army compelled the Emperor to take the crews of his ships and make regiments of them. As his power spread up to 1812, more and ever more ports had to be watched, and it became constantly less possible to block them all effectually. The vast works he carried out at Cherbourg made the harbour capable of holding line-of-battle ships and imposed more blockading duty on the navy. After the fall of Prussia in 1807 he brought the coast of the Baltic under his control, and more ships were needed to counteract his plans. The coast-line to be watched was so long that though the English Government strained its resources to the utmost, though the navy was increased by desperate measures, it was impossible to prevent cruisers and small squadrons from escaping to sea. In 1812 when 621 vessels were in commission, and the establishment of the navy was 145,000 men, Admiral Allemand sailed from Rochefort. He eluded the blockading squadron. He almost succeeded in cutting off the Pompée, 74, which was compelled to start eighty tons of water to lighten herself for flight. He cruised in the Atlantic for the destruction of commerce, and, though he had little fortune in meeting English trading vessels, he got safe back to Brest. Allemand’s raid shows that the new fleet Napoleon was forming was not so incapable of keeping the sea as it has often been supposed to have been. An action fought in this same year must have been a warning to the English Government, if any were needed, that it dare not fail to maintain its naval forces at the highest attainable level of strength. On the 21st February the Victorious, 74, Captain Talbot, which was watching the growing Franco-Venetian squadron at Venice, fought an action with one of the vessels belonging to it, the Rivoli, 74, Captain Barré. The Victorious had been detached from the Toulon blockade, the Rivoli was at sea for the first time, yet the action lasted for four hours, and though the Rivoli was finally compelled to surrender, she inflicted a loss of 27 killed and 99 wounded on the Victorious.
At the beginning of 1808, the year in which the great increase began, the need for numbers had been even more effectually taught. English troops were then engaged in somewhat fretful operations on the coast of Calabria. The French had recovered Corfu and held Venice. The calls on our fleet in the Mediterranean were many. Collingwood was co-operating with the troops, in southern Italy, leaving frigates to watch Toulon. The French Government decided to reinforce its squadron at Toulon by bringing round six ships—the Majestueux, 120, the Ajax, Jemmappes, Lion, Magnanime, and Suffren, 74’s, from Rochefort. They were commanded by the same Admiral Allemand who was throughout his career very successful in avoiding the many squadrons sent against him. Rochefort was blockaded by Sir Richard Strachan with seven sail of the line. Sir Richard generally kept his squadron at anchor in the Basque Roads, but at the close of November 1807 he was compelled, by the lack of provisions, to go to the rendezvous he had assigned to the victuallers which were coming to join him—a point thirty miles or so south of Roche Bonne. A frigate and a brig were left to keep watch. North-easterly gales forced Strachan to the south. The victuallers did not keep touch punctually. The work of transferring cargo at sea in rough weather was tedious. Allemand, seeing that he had only a frigate and a brig before him, put to sea on the 17th January and steered for the Mediterranean. He had a good start, and as the wind turned to the west and rose to a storm he got clear away with five of his ships. The Majestueux was injured in the gale and compelled to return to Toulon. Allemand passed the Straits of Gibraltar and reached Toulon, unseen by any English cruiser, on the 6th February. Strachan, who was fighting his way back to his station against the north-easterly wind when he heard of Allemand’s escape, followed him to the Mediterranean. But he was embayed by the westerly gale. He did not pass the Straits till the 10th, and he joined Thornborough, Collingwood’s second in command, at Palermo on the 21st. Ganteaume, who commanded at Toulon, put to sea with Allemand’s ships on the 7th February, made his way round to Corfu to revictual the garrison, drove off the Standard, which he found there, discharged his mission, and was safe back at Toulon by the 10th April. Collingwood, who concentrated his ships and pursued him, failed to meet him. In the meantime, two French frigates, the Pénélope and Thémis, which sailed from Bordeaux on the 21st January, had cruised near Madeira, had destroyed English property to the value of a quarter of a million, had entered the Mediterranean, and had reached Toulon before the end of March. Criticism after the event could show that if this or the other officer had done something he did not do, Allemand, Ganteaume, and the frigates would have been cut short somewhere. But the palpable fact was that our forces had not prevented the cruises of the Frenchmen. When Strachan followed Allemand he necessarily left Rochefort free for the privateers to enter or leave. With all our superiority over the French fleets we still could not have too many men, too many ships, and an increase was not to be avoided, be the evils it entailed what they might.
The blockading fleets composed the screen covering all the other operations of our ships. They were not able to protect completely, but without such protection as they did afford other duties could not have been performed. The most exacting and most constant of these was convoy. The whole British Navy was engaged in the protection of trade, but the task was peculiarly imposed on the ships which sailed with the fleets of merchant vessels. It had always been counted one of the most pressing of an admiral’s duties to protect “the trade.” Hood took a crowd of merchant crafts with him when he sailed to reinforce Rodney in the West Indies in 1780. Rodney brought the trade with him when he returned home in ill-health. Howe was called upon to see a hundred trading ships well clear of the Channel when he sailed in 1794. But after that year the main fleets were relieved of the duty. They were left free to pursue the enemy’s fleets, and the protection of the traders against privateers, and single man-of-war cruisers was left to detachments. It was a tedious and thankless duty. The rate of sailing of the merchant ships was very slow. The need for vigilance was unceasing, and peculiarly great, while just leaving or approaching the land, for it was then that the prowling privateer was most active. As the trading fleet neared its destination the skippers were tempted to push ahead to reach their market first, and they frequently fell into the hands of the hostile commerce destroyers. The naval officers, who were liable to be accused of neglecting their duty by the owners of the captured ships, had long complained of their inability to control the merchant skippers. When the war was renewed in 1803 the Government took measures to reduce the loss inflicted on our shipping to the lowest attainable level, by compelling all vessels not specially exempted to sail in convoy. It passed “An Act for the better Protection of the Trade of the United Kingdom during the present Hostilities with France” (anno 43d Geo. III. cap. 57). By this Act merchant ships were required to sail in convoys, to obey the naval officer commanding, and not to separate wilfully under a penalty of £1000, if the cargo belonged to a private owner, and of £1500 if it was composed of naval or military stores. If a vessel did leave the convoy, and was captured, the owner forfeited all right to recover his insurances. Vessels might be licensed to sail without convoy, and the vessels of the East India Company, and of the Hudson’s Bay Company were expressly exempted.
An event which occurred on the 14th and 15th February 1804 would seem to indicate that the East India Company could well dispense with convoy. The French admiral, Linois, the victor of Algeciras, had been sent to the east with General Decaen. He obtained early news of the outbreak of hostilities when at or near Pondicherry and went off at once to Java in such a hurry, that he did not wait for an English naval officer whom he had invited to breakfast. On his way he captured a number of valuable English ships, and then he sailed from Batavia to intercept the Company’s vessels on their way from Canton to Europe. This very valuable trading fleet consisted of sixteen vessels of the nominal burden of 1200 tons, but a real tonnage of from 1300 to 1500. They were armed with from 30 to 36 guns, and carried crews of 60 white seamen, and 120 Lascars. Their guns were as a rule of no great value, and in real force they were far inferior not only to a frigate but to a heavy corvette. Linois had with him the Marengo, 74, the Belle Poule, 40-gun frigate, the Semillante, 36, the Berceau, 22, and the Aventurier, 16. On the 14th February he sighted the Company’s ships to the E.N.E. of Pulo Aor, an island near the east side of the southern extremity of the Malay Peninsula. They were on their way to the Straits of Malacca—sixteen of them in all—the Earl Camden, the ship of the Company’s commodore, Nathaniel Dance; the Warley, Henry Wilson; Alfred, James Farquharson; Royal George, John Fam Timmins; Coutts, Robert Torin; Wexford, W. Stanley Clarke; Ganges, William Moffat; Exeter, Henry Meriton; Earl of Abergavenny, John Wordsworth; Henry Addington, John Kirkpatrick; Bombay Castle, Arch. Hamilton; Cumberland, W. Ward Farrer; Hope, Jas. Prendergass; Dorsetshire, Rob. Hunter Brown; Warren Hastings, Thomas Larkins; Ocean, J. Christ. Lochner. The size of the 1200-ton ships, the fact that they were painted to represent two tiers of guns, the craft of Commodore Dance, who hoisted the man-of-war pennant on three of them, and the bold bearing they all assumed, cowed Linois. He hesitated to attack till the Indiamen saw his hesitation, bore down on him and drove him to flight. The Company’s skippers richly deserved all the praise and rewards they received. The knighthood given to Dance was handsomely earned. Yet it would be a great mistake to conclude from the affair of Pulo Aor that the Company’s ships could rely on their own strength. Linois was singularly disappointing to his friends whenever he attempted to attack, though he could fight manfully with his back to the wall. Indiamen did on several occasions make gallant and successful fights. On the other hand they were frequently taken by frigates and privateers. When Sir E. Pellew came to take the command in the East Indies in 1804 the shipping had been well-nigh ruined in the Bay of Bengal by French and Dutch privateers. It was only by submitting to accept convoy that the Company was able to revive its trade.
There were, however, limits to what the navy could do to protect trade by convoy. Vessels might be captured while on their way from their port of departure to the rendezvous. Gales might scatter them when collected. Fog and mist might afford cover to the assailant. By far the most effectual of all ways of protecting trade was to capture the ports from which the assailants sailed. Therefore from 1793 to 1811, when the Dutch island of Java was taken, the navy was engaged in a series of colonial expeditions. They began with the seizure of St. Pierre and Miquelon, the two little islands belonging to France on the south coast of Newfoundland, and of Pondicherry—three ports always occupied at the beginning of a war, and restored at the close. St. Pierre and Miquelon were taken in May, and Pondicherry was occupied August of 1793. In the same year Tobago was taken from the French, and Martinique was attacked without success. The royalists of the island called the English forces in, but Rochambeau, the general in command, held his ground. The planters of the French half of San Domingo also appealed to England for protection against their insurgent slaves. It was so freely given that Jamaica was for a time left without a garrison. The spectacle of a triumphant servile revolt was dreadful to all the slave owners of the West Indies. The operations on the coast of this island were disastrous to the troops. They dared not carry negroes with them from our own islands lest they should be infected in the rebellious spirit of the French slaves. No use could be made of the negroes of San Domingo. Therefore the soldiers had to engage in work which is fatal to the white man in the tropics. Whole battalions were swept away by fevers. The part of the navy in this case and in most colonial expeditions was to carry the troops, to land them, to supply naval brigades. These services were necessarily unvarying in character. The occupation of a Dutch island in the Moluccas differs only in the names of the men and ships from the occupation of a French island in the West Indies. In these cases, too, the navy though an indispensable, was a subordinate, part of the forces engaged. It carried the soldiers and it helped them, but the army effected the conquest. Nothing could well be more idle than to speculate as to which of the two, the sailor or the soldier, was the more essential to the victory. The soldiers could not reach the place to be taken unless they were carried in ships, and the sailors could not occupy the land without the soldiers. To speak of these conquests as the gift of the Sea Power is inaccurate if not absurd. The Sea Power of itself could never have taken the Cape, or Mauritius. Many of them were not taken to be kept. The permanent occupation of Martinique or Guadaloupe would have been offensive to the West Indian interest, since their produce would have competed with that of our own islands in the home market. These islands were taken primarily because they were the headquarters of the privateers who preyed on our commerce, and secondarily because they were useful pledges to have in hand when peace was to be arranged.