From a Contemporary Print
Beyond the St. George lies another “Mediterranean ship,” just returned home—the Revenge, one of the ships in Byng’s battle. It was the damning evidence of the Revenge’s captain—Frederick Cornwall, now at home on half-pay—as they all say in the fleet, that settled Byng’s fate. “If I cannot disprove what you have said, Captain Cornwall,” exclaimed Byng, as the one-armed captain of the Revenge turned to leave the cabin, after a futile attempt at cross-examination on the part of the Admiral, “may the Lord have mercy on me.” There is no need to go further.
If you could look round to Spithead from the Hard, you would see the old Royal Sovereign on duty as the port flagship. On board her it was that, on the morning of the execution, Admiral Boscawen put his signature to Byng’s death warrant, and the order for the firing party. She is the oldest ship in the King’s Navy, in which connection the Sovereign has other memories of her own. The great Duke of Marlborough named her at her launch in the year that William the Third died, and it was in her great-cabin, during the Sovereign’s first cruise, that Rooke’s council of war planned the swoop on the Vigo treasure galleons, which Vigo Street, in London, serves to commemorate. Some of the old ship’s timbers, it is the fact, formed part of the frame of Charles the First’s world-renowned Sovereign of the Seas, and were salved, by special Admiralty order, out of the débris when the Sovereign of the Seas was burned at Chatham in January, 1696, by the carelessness of a sleepy bos’un’s mate.
Out yonder at Spithead, too, at this moment, rides at anchor yet another veteran of our old-time navy, the Royal Anne. They have a really marvellous continuity of service, some of these ancient men-of-war. The Anne carries us back to the time of the Dutch raid up the Medway. She was launched as the Royal Charles to fill the place of the Royal Charles that the Dutchmen carried off. William the Third renamed her the Queen, in honour of his consort, and the ship kept that name until George the First came over. King George, having at that time his legal consort under lock and key in Germany, promptly renamed the ship. He called her after himself, Royal George—the first of the series. Three kings, indeed, have been present at this ship’s various “christenings.” Charles the Second was present at her first naming as the Royal Charles; William the Third saw her renamed the Queen. George the First paid a special visit to Woolwich when she received the name Royal George, and gave £300 to be divided among the dockyard men employed at the float-out, in honour of the occasion. The name Royal Anne was given to the ship only two years ago, when the present Royal George, Hawke’s flagship in the Channel Fleet, was launched. She exchanged the name for that borne on the stocks by the Royal George.
Within sight from the Hard is an 80-gun three-decker, the Royal William, just back from the capture of Louisbourg, Cape Breton. She, too, was launched as long ago as Charles the Second’s reign, under the name Royal Prince, and she fought her first battle at Solebay, eighty-six years ago. She carried James Duke of York’s flag during part of the battle, and Prince Rupert in turn had his flag in her in a later battle. William the Third gave the ship her present name, and under it she fought at La Hogue as Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s flagship, not without distinction.
If one might dip into the future and witness events just one year later, the visitor to Portsmouth would then see the Royal William there again, and again just arrived from across the Atlantic. This time she would be in other guise—a ship “in mourning,” all over funereal black, with yards set to point in all directions—“a-cockbill,” as the old term went—and colours at half-mast, firing minute guns, and with a funeral procession of boats putting off from alongside to bear to the shore the body of General Wolfe.
Off the dockyard, on this October afternoon of 1758, awaiting their turn for repair, are two jury-rigged ships. One is a small, old-fashioned sixty-four, firing a broadside of some 540 lb. weight of metal. The other is a giant 80-gun ship of French build, and brand new. She is bigger than the finest first-rate in King George’s service, a fair match for the new Royal George, and fires the tremendous broadside of 1136 lb. weight of metal. Yet the little ship took the big one in a midnight battle last February. It was as fine a feat of arms as the Navy has seen. The two are the Monmouth and the Foudroyant. They have just come into port, and both show plenty of marks by way of battle scars. If you were to row round the Foudroyant you would find her, on her larboard side, where the Monmouth made her attack, battered almost to splinters. The fight lasted four and a half hours, from eight till after midnight, and went on for most of the time within pistol-shot. The Monmouth in that time used up four tons of powder and about ten tons of cannon-balls. At Gibraltar, where they repaired the Foudroyant to bring her to England, they had to plug over seventy shot-holes at the water-line—and two or three cannon-balls had gone through some of the holes.
One more word of the Foudroyant. It would seem as though, in the Portsmouth of these times, we cannot lay the shade of Admiral Byng. The Foudroyant was flagship of the fleet that Byng failed to beat, and Arthur Gardiner, who later commanded the Monmouth when she took the Foudroyant, was Byng’s flag-captain. Captain Gardiner, after Byng’s battle, it is said, swore that if ever he got another ship, however small, and met the Foudroyant, he would attack her and take her, or sink alongside. He got the Monmouth and met the Foudroyant and kept his word; meeting himself a heroic death on his own quarter-deck in the heat of the battle.
A second French man-of-war, taken on the same occasion and also badly mauled—the Orphèe, a smart 70-gun ship, prize to the Revenge—lies near the Foudroyant; also recently brought to England from up the Straits.[8]
All the day long there keeps on a continuous passing up and down the harbour of small war-vessels and dockyard craft of every sort. Here a fireship goes by, a small two-masted vessel, readily distinguishable by the heavy iron double hooks and grapnels that tip the yard-arms; and that little boat towing astern. The hooks are meant to grip and hold fast the fireship’s destined prey as she sheers alongside. The fireship’s crew set the quick match-train leading to the stacks of pitch-barrels and other combustibles all over the vessel, ablaze at several points just as they are closing the enemy, and the little boat is for them to escape in at the last moment. Now a bomb-ketch passes, a clumsy craft with masts set well aft and two heavy 13-inch mortars, trained for firing over the bows right ahead, set side by side in the fore part of the ship, where the foremast would stand in an ordinary vessel. A rakish-looking Portsmouth privateer, it may be, now comes by, towing a prize astern of her—some captured French “sugar ship” from Martinique, snapped up off Ushant. Then there passes, on the way to one of the guardships or “receiving” ships, a press-gang tender, coming in from a run along the South Coast. She has been out for some days to pick up hands for the fleet, and some of those on board could tell more than one ugly story of high-handed doings among the villages and farmsteads on the coast, within a night’s march from the sea. In confinement under hatches on board, it is quite possible, is also the unfortunate crew of some homeward-bound merchantman, waylaid and boarded almost within sight of home, off the back of the Isle of Wight. It is very sad, but this is war time, and the fleet must be manned.