While the stormy winds do blow!
While the battle rages loud and long
And the stormy winds do blow.
It was a British admiral, Sir Lewis Bayly, who told the officers of the American destroyers operating out of Queenstown, “To work with you is a pleasure, to know you is to know the best traits of the Anglo-Saxon race.” In the same spirit it is generous to recall the enduring traditions of the English Navy, which were welded through many centuries of courageous conflict with the sea and the enemy. The wooden frigates and the towering ships of the line gave place to the steel-walled cruiser and the grim, squat dreadnought, but for the men behind the guns the salty lineage was unbroken. As Beatty and his squadrons kept watch and ward in the misty Orkneys, so had Nelson maintained his uneasy vigil off Toulon.
Among the annals of the vanished days of the old navies, of the tarry, pigtailed seamen with hearts of oak, the story of a shipwreck has been preserved in a letter written to his mother by a lieutenant of the frigate Phoenix in the year 1780. He tells her about the tragic episode as though he had actually enjoyed it, scribbling the details with a boyish gusto which conveys to us, in a manner exceedingly vivid, how ships and men lived and toiled in the age of boarding-pikes, hammock-nettings, and single topsails. Few young men write such long letters to their mothers nowadays, and even in that era of leisurely and literary correspondence a friend who was permitted to read the narrative was moved to comment:
“Every circumstance is detailed with feeling and powerful appeals are continually made to the heart. It must likewise afford considerable pleasure to observe the devout heart of a seaman frequently bursting forth and imparting sublimity to the relation.”
This stilted admiration must not frighten the modern reader away, for Lieutenant Archer held his old-fashioned piety well under control, and was as brisk, slangy, and engaging a young officer as you could find afloat in a skittish destroyer of the present day. The forty-four-gun frigate Phoenix was commanded by Captain Sir Hyde Parker, who later became an admiral, and under whose orders Nelson served for a time. His name has a flavor of interest for Americans because he took part in the British naval attack on New York in 1776 and later joined in harassing Savannah. With almost no naval strength in the War of the Revolution, the United States had only its audacious privateers to molest the enemy’s commerce and was helpless to convoy or protect its merchant shipping, which was largely destroyed. The British squadron to which the Phoenix was attached, finding little American booty afloat in 1780, turned its attention to the Spanish foe and cruised in the waters of the Caribbean.
On August 2d the frigate sailed from Port Royal, Jamaica, escorting two store-ships to Pensacola, and then loafed about in the Gulf and off the Cuban coast for six weeks in quest of Spanish prizes. It was a hot, wretchedly uncomfortable business, this beating about in the tropics in a ship of a hundred and forty years ago. The bluejackets were frequently flogged by way of making them fond of the service, and many of them had been hauled into this kind of maritime slavery by the brutal press-gangs which raked the English ports. Somehow they managed to survive the chronic hardships of life at sea and to keep their ardor bright, so that in a gale of wind or against a hostile fleet they stubbornly did their duty as long as two planks held together. The bulldog strain made them heroic.
In the ward-room of the Phoenix, where the officers perspired and grumbled and cursed their luck, they kept an ingenious lottery going to vary the monotony of an empty sea. Every man put a Spanish dollar into a canvas bag and set down his guess of the date of sighting a sail. No two gamblers were to name the same date. Whenever a man lost, he dropped another dollar into the bag. It was growing heavy, for one week stretched into another without a gleam of royals or topgallant-sails from Vera Cruz to Havana. Like a good sportsman, Captain Sir Hyde Parker paid his stake into the dollar bag and squinted through his long brass spy-glass as he grumpily trudged the quarterdeck.
It was off Cape San Antonio, at the western end of Cuba, that the man at the masthead shouted down: