It cannot well be said that the power of the navy was shown in the discharge of another piece of political duty it had been called upon to perform at the other extremity of Europe from the Baltic. In 1806 Napoleon was instigating the Turks to attack Russia, who was still in arms against him. The English Government desired to help the enemy of our enemy, and Sir Thomas Duckworth was sent with a squadron to coerce the Turks into keeping the peace. He forced the passage of the Dardanelles in February 1807, and placed his squadron opposite Constantinople. But he unfortunately allowed himself to be played upon by the diplomacy of the Turks, and the French ambassador, General Sebastiani. He delayed action till the Turks had thrown up batteries which made the position of his squadron dangerous, and he was compelled to retreat. On his return his squadron was roughly handled by the Turkish batteries.
With the beginning of the war in the Peninsula the navy was provided with a field on which it could perform, profitably and with a definite aim, duties which it had too often been called upon to discharge to no purpose. From the beginning of the war it had escorted troops to be landed for conquest or co-operation with allies. Many of these undertakings were of the most futile character. If it took Abercromby to success in Egypt, it also took General Fraser to disaster. It carried Sir John Moore to the fiasco of the Swedish expedition, and General Stuart to that barren victory at Maida in Calabria, which was followed by re-embarkation, and served no other purpose than to aggravate the sufferings of the very people we came to help. After Sir Sidney Smith covered the escape of the Portuguese royal family in November 1807 and escorted them to Brazil, the work of our army was to be done on a great scale, nobly, and with triumphant results in Spain and Portugal. It would be pleasant to dwell on the incidents of the story; on the feats of the Impérieuse, and the untiring activity of English cruisers which intercepted the coast roads, and helped to keep the war alive all along the coast of the Bay of Biscay. The navy helped to take coast forts, or defend them. It embarked the Spanish irregular bands when hard pressed, and disembarked them to begin again. It contributed marines to hold the lines of Torres Vedras. It kept the sea routes clear for the food and reinforcements sent to Wellington’s army. But a service made up of scores of small actions cannot be shown by a few examples, or told fully except at great length.
The same work was being done on a smaller scale on the coasts of Sicily and Calabria, to guard the island against the attacks of the two successive French rulers in Naples—the emperor’s brother Joseph, and his brother-in-law Murat—and to keep resistance to them alive on the mainland. When Napoleon had extorted Venice and Dalmatia from Austria, English ships entered the Adriatic to carry on there the work of blockade and harassment which others were doing elsewhere. But in this sea the little war of skirmishes, single combats, and affairs in boats, was varied by an action too considerable and too significant to be allowed to pass among minor operations.
On the 13th March 1811 a Franco-Venetian squadron of four heavy frigates, two lighter frigates, and some small craft, commanded by Captain Dubourdieu, attacked an English squadron of three frigates and a 22-gun corvette, under Captain Hoste, near Lissa. The French officer was to windward, and he attacked in two divisions, a weather and a lee line, heading to cut through the English and surround the rear ships. If Hoste had been forced to remain passive with an awkward fleet, Dubourdieu would no doubt have succeeded. But a good breeze was blowing, and the English squadron was thoroughly alert. Hoste closed his line till the bowsprit of one ship was over the taffrail of the ship ahead of her, and he stood on. As he was moving ahead the Franco-Venetians were compelled to advance on slanting lines, and the lee ships masked part of the weather line. Hoste knew that a sunk rock lay across his course. He stood on in hot action with the leader of the Franco-Venetian weather line and of the lee line, which came behind, till he could not safely go any further. He then wore his line together. The leading Franco-Venetian ship, the Favorite, ran on the rocks, and the others wore to escape her fate. Their division into two lines became a cause of confusion. The single unhampered English line cut them to pieces, and they were beaten with the loss of three frigates. Dubourdieu would have done better if he had formed his squadron in a single line, had engaged the four English vessels to windward with four of his frigates, and had left the two others to double on one end of Hoste’s line. Even so he would probably have been beaten. When the English had turned, two French vessels assailed the Amphion, Hoste’s frigate, which was now the rear ship of his line. But the English officer shot from between them, and crossed the bows of the vessel on his lee quarter. Superior mobility and quality more than counterbalanced advantages of number and position or ingenuity of plan of attack.
This is the lesson which Lissa teaches, and which had been taught by every encounter in the war, great or small. But patent as it was, England might have overlooked it but for a series of actions with a new enemy which occurred at the close of the twenty-three years of war. It is not my intention to depart from my rule of not describing small ship actions or operations on lakes. Therefore I do not tell in detail the events of the war of 1812 with the United States. The single ship actions and encounters between flotillas on the American lakes, of which it was composed, have been affectionately studied by the patriotism of a great people. To us they are, but for one consequence they had, only minor events in a long and varied history. To describe how the vast numerical superiority of the English navy enabled it in the end to drive the American flag from the sea and to cover invasion of the territory of the United States, would be to tell a story which has little intrinsic interest. The consequence of the early actions of the war were, however, of extreme importance.
There was a serious risk that England would come to the end of the war in the complacent belief that she was endowed with a privilege to be superior on the sea. Her superiority was the fair reward of foresight and preparation. When looked at properly, her victories over the French and Spanish Navies afforded no guarantee that she would not be beaten if she forgot that:—
The same arts that did gain
A power must it maintain.
The rapid loss of a handful of vessels to a single opponent in the course of a few months drove that lesson home by a spasm of pain to our pride and self-confidence. The United States were not at that time able to maintain a great fleet. The rulers of the Republic very wisely decided that since they could not possess many ships, they would take care that such ships as they had should be of excellent quality and excellently handled. They won the just reward of sound judgment and timely preparation. Nor was that reward a slight one. The victories of the United States frigates and sloops taught England that there was on the other side of the Atlantic a growing power which must one day be numerous and wealthy, which would be able to maintain great fleets, and had shown that her seamen could defeat all but the best of the English Navy. Idle attempts were made to belittle these successes by insisting on the size and armament of the American frigates. The navy knew their size and armament before it fought them. It learnt only from experience that the Americans could make full use of these advantages, which they had for the rest procured for themselves and not by accident. The good sense of the navy and the country would not be blinded. Englishmen drew the very sane deduction that they could be beaten at sea if they allowed other people to surpass them in the quality of their armaments and in skill. Nothing is more striking than the sense of insecurity, the doubts about the future, the painful consciousness that there was something misleading and hollow in all our naval successes, which can be traced in the writings of seamen from the end of the great war. They all insist that we must not rest on our successes, but prepare for yet harder struggles in the future. A great work of reform and instruction began in the years immediately after the close of the war, and it began under the impulse given by the successes of the American ships. The fortune of England has been wonderful, and it never served her better than when it gave her that warning. The Americans had beaten her because they were prepared and capable, and what the Americans had done others could do if we allowed ourselves to be surpassed.
That what we needs must call fortune has had a great share in the victories of England on the sea cannot be denied by any sound-minded man who looks at the history of her navy as a whole. Fortune, and not England, has provided that from the day when Hubert de Burgh and the men of the Cinque Ports defeated Eustace the Monk, till the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1815, she has never had to meet an enemy at once strong in numbers and good in quality on the sea, except during the second half of the seventeenth century when she fought the Dutch. They, a small people occupying a little corner of land, compelled to fight on shore for very existence, were necessarily surpassed. The Spaniard was always inept at sea. The French navy, the creation of Louis XIV., has been valiant, ingenious, not seldom successful, but it was neglected, starved, misused by the monarchy, and so torn to pieces by the Revolution that it could never recover. The sound national instinct, the healthy social order, the innate love of good work which have shaped our Navy, are just subjects for pride. But they are also a lesson and a warning. Great navies are forming now, which have thoroughly learned all we have taught. We must not rely on possessing the same superiority we had in the eighteenth century without strenuous effort. And we must not forget what that superiority was. It did not lie in numbers nor in armament, nor in methods of attack, however valuable these elements of strength may be. It lay in that skill of the men who handled the weapons, in that loyalty to the service, in that readiness of resource, promptitude to decide, and firmness to act, without which, numbers, arms, and ingenious tactics are of no avail.