These fine old line-of-battle ships were large and powerful before the seventeenth century ended. Thus in the British navy when 1700 came in there were eight which had from ninety-six to one hundred and ten guns each—fifty-three others carrying more than seventy guns, and twenty-three more with more than fifty guns—all at that time regarded as fit for the line of battle, though a hundred years later nothing less than a “seventy-four” was so considered. Such were the grandly picturesque old vessels that won the day at Gibraltar, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, and at many another spot where the whole horizon echoed to their thunderous broadsides; but of them all there now remain only a few honored hulks in harbors, or a few grand figureheads preserved in docks and museums.
Each navy, however, had a greater number of smaller, more active vessels, known as frigates, corvettes, sloops-of-war, gun-brigs, etc., which carried from twenty to forty-four guns, and were the “eyes of the fleet,” as one old strategist styled them. They answered to what we should now call cruisers, and often went on duty in distant parts of the world, or in war were scouting about and supporting the main fleet. This class was especially cultivated by the United States, as soon as it began to make a regular navy, at the close of the Revolutionary War, and six frigates were built at our six navy-yards during the last years of the last century, which were intended and proved to be separately “superior to any single European frigate of the usual dimensions” in speed, manœuvering, and fighting power, in proportion to their weight of ordnance. Three of them (Constellation, Congress, and Chesapeake) mounted thirty-six guns, and three (United States, President, and Constitution) forty-four guns each—mainly 24-pounders; and all gave so good an account of themselves, as ships, that the high compliment was paid us of their being carefully imitated by foreign naval constructors.
This is not a naval history, so that I am not concerned to tell of all the glorious or inglorious work of the navies of Europe in obtaining and holding, or failing to get and keep, trade routes open and territorial possessions intact in various parts of the world. During the seventeenth and eighteenth and far into the nineteenth century, there was no time when some nations were not fighting on the sea if not on land; and much of the time all the maritime nations were hard at it, turning their guns to-day on the allies of yesterday, and fighting shoulder to shoulder with them the next season against some friend of the year before.
A few of the most famous battles ought to be spoken of, however, as illustrating the methods and development of naval warfare, and because we now recognize that their consequences were far-reaching.
In the wars which broke out toward the close of the eighteenth century due to Napoleon’s ambition to rule the world, Great Britain found herself engaged in a struggle not only with France, but really with the whole world, for the command of the seas that washed the western coast of Europe. The only sign of friendship to England from the Baltic to Gibraltar was in the doubtful neutrality of Portugal. England had to abandon the Mediterranean, and devote herself to facing the allied powers against her outside the Gates of Hercules as best she could. In 1797 she made a beginning by crushing a fleet of Dutch ships off Camperdown (Holland), and a Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent; but, though both were great battles, neither had any lasting effect; and in spite of them Napoleon planned his celebrated invasion of England for the following year, supposing that by his expedition to Egypt, threatening England’s East Indian possessions, he would draw away so much of the British navy that he and his allies could put an army across the English Channel unhindered. I need not say that his invasion of England never was even attempted; but for a time his fleet did hold command of the Mediterranean—a state of things to which an end was put by England’s most famous naval hero, Horatio Nelson.
A long series of brilliant exploits had given Nelson fame, and the vigorous accounts of them he used to send home helped his great popularity. A large part of his service had been in American waters.
In 1798 Nelson was a rear-admiral, and was sent to the Mediterranean after the French fleet, which, having convoyed Napoleon’s army to its landing at Alexandria, was ready for new operations. It is characteristic of the slow and almost useless methods of gaining intelligence in those days, that from early June to the end of July Nelson searched for this flotilla, and was unable to get more news of it than an occasional rumor that it had been at some place or other days or weeks before. The French knew no more as to the movements of their pursuers, yet the fleets were twice within a few miles of each other. This was Nelson’s first independent command, and his patience and nerves were nearly worn out by anxiety.
WHEN DECATUR WAS A MIDSHIPMAN.
At last, on the first day of August, the English almost stumbled on the French at anchor in the Bay of Aboukir, among the mouths of the Nile, between Alexandria and Rosetta—a shallow roadstead full of shoals and rocks, for which Nelson had neither chart nor pilot.