The whole idea of naval warfare in those days was defense of your own commerce and attack upon your enemy’s; and at that time any one you met under another flag was likely to be your “enemy” if either party promised spoils worth a fight. Hence not only did privateering flourish,—often degenerating into piracy,—not only did all merchant vessels go heavily armed, but the royal ships were intended principally for convoying or guarding merchantmen. This theory, which was only a part of the generally unsettled condition of that formative period, kept up a continual state of fighting on the sea, even between peoples nominally at peace, and of course led again and again to open wars. These were almost always popular, especially among the bold sailors but poor traders of England, on account of the chances for prizes and plunder that often more than repaid the expenses and losses of the conflict; thus the war with the Dutch in 1652-54, in which William Penn was a captain, brought in more than £6,000,000 worth of captures—more than the financial cost of the war.
At this time—the first half of the sixteenth century—Holland was the leading commercial nation of the world. Not only had her merchants large interests of their own in both the East and West Indies, very extensive fisheries in northern waters, and trading stations in the African and American coasts, but a large part of the commerce of other nations was conducted in Dutch ships, including much of England itself. It was the unrighteous but determined effort to break this up by any and every means that brought on the second war with Holland, one incident of which was the capture of New Amsterdam (New York); for fleets no longer stayed close at home, acting mainly as defenders of coasts, as in the previous century, but now cruised and fought on the high seas, as the Spanish had learned in many a hard struggle to protect their trading and treasure-ships homeward bound.
ATTACKING SPANISH GALLEONS OFF THE AZORES.
DRAWN BY WARREN SHEPPARD.
SPANISH AND FRENCH SHIPS OF THE LINE TAKING POSITION FOR THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR.
This new practice, however, had required a change in ships and their equipment. The English learned this quicker than any one else. They cut down the lofty cabins, increased the height, while reducing the weight, of masts by inventing jointed topmasts, and replaced the unwieldy lateens by an arrangement of lofty, quickly handled square sails. By the middle of the seventeenth century ocean-going ships had much the same appearance as at present,—although far more elaborately ornamented and bulging aft with stern-galleries,—the massive, high-pooped Spanish galleon surviving longest as a relic of the old type. These changes allowed the armament to be taken from the front and rear of the ship, where it had formerly been mainly placed, there being no room in the waist, and allowed it to be distributed equally up and down the ship, which now began to deliver the “broadsides” that formed such a feature in sea-gunnery before the days of turreted ironclads, and this, with the constant improvement in the range and power of the artillery, soon brought about ideas of battle formation. The early plan was to provide a large number of ships,—eighty or one hundred on each side in a single action were not uncommon,—because each was weak, and also because a great number of fighting-men was thought necessary, and then to advance from the windward in a compact mass, and endeavor to close with the enemy and capture or destroy him by hand-to-hand promiscuous fighting. Our word squadron means a square, and, as applied to ships, is a survival from those antiquated methods.
But when the practice of using fire-ships became common and effective, and trimmer, more active ships superseded the cumbrous galleasses, it was seen that this close formation only exposed a fleet to destruction, and an open order had to be adopted, with a consequent change of tactics. Another lesson was, that a sea-fight was a sailor’s battle, where soldiers were out of place, and that to take a great number of weak ships into action, crowded with men, was only to risk life unnecessarily. Hence, larger and more heavily armed ships, but fewer of them, appear in later engagements; and in place of a bunch of vessels, “huddled together like a flock of sheep,” at which to shoot, the open order gave the gunners small and single targets.
All these changes combined to enforce the wisdom of meeting an enemy in a widely spaced line, where the strongest fighting-ships were put forward, and smaller vessels came up in the rear. Those ahead met the battle-ships at the head of the enemy’s column, and the lesser ones, as they came up, were paired off against those of their own size, so that the battle became a series of equalized duels. Such was the theory of naval tactics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and so arose the term line-of-battle ship, descriptive of such national craft as are shown on the opposite page.