'The sickness,' says Professor Laughton, 'was primarily and chiefly due to infection from the shore and ignorance or neglect of what we now know as sanitary laws…. Similar infections continued occasionally to scourge our ships' companies, and still more frequently French and Spanish ships' companies, till near the close of the eighteenth century.' It is not likely that any evidence would suffice to divert from their object writers eager to hurl calumny at a great sovereign; but a little knowledge of naval and of military history also would have saved their readers from a belief in their accusations. In 1727 the fleet in the West Indies commanded by Admiral Hosier, commemorated in Glover's ballad, lost ten flag officers and captains, fifty lieutenants, and 4000 seamen. In the Seven Years' war the total number belonging to the fleet killed in action was 1512; whilst the number that died of disease and were missing was 133,708. From 1778 to 1783, out of 515,000 men voted by Parliament for the navy, 132,623 were 'sent sick.' In the summer, 1779, the French fleet cruising at the mouth of the English Channel, after landing 500, had still about 2000 men sick. At the beginning of autumn the number of sick had become so great that many ships had not enough men to work them. The _Ville_de_Paris_ had 560 sick, and lost 61. The Auguste had 500 sick, and lost 44. On board the Intrépide 70 died out of 529 sick. These were the worst cases; but other ships also suffered heavily.
It is, perhaps, not generally remembered till what a very late date armies and navies were more than decimated by disease. In 1810 the House of Commons affirmed by a resolution, concerning the Walcheren Expedition: 'That on the 19th of August a malignant disorder showed itself amongst H.M. troops; and that on the 8th of September the number of sick amounted to upwards of 10,948 men. That of the army which embarked for service in the Scheldt sixty officers and 3900 men, exclusive of those killed by the enemy, had died before the 1st of February last.'
In a volume of 'Military, Medical, and Surgical Essays'[73] prepared for the United States' Sanitary Commission, and edited by Dr. Wm. A. Hammond, Surgeon-General of the U.S. Army, it is stated that, in our Peninsular army, averaging a strength of 64,227 officers and men, the annual rate of mortality from the 25th of December 1810 to the 25th of May 1813 was 10 per cent. of the officers and 16 per cent. of the men. We may calculate from this that some 25,000 officers and men died. There were 22-1/2 per cent., or over 14,000, 'constantly sick.' Out of 309,268 French soldiers sent to the Crimea in 1855-6, the number of killed and those who died of wounds was 7500, the number who died of disease was 61,700. At the same date navies also suffered. Dr. Stilon Mends, in his life of his father,[74] Admiral Sir William Mends, prints a letter in which the Admiral, speaking of the cholera in the fleets at Varna, says: 'The mortality on board the Montebello, _Ville_de_Paris_, Valmy (French ships), and Britannia (British) has been terrible; the first lost 152 in three days, the second 120 in three days, the third 80 in ten days, but the last lost 50 in one night and 10 the subsequent day.' Kinglake tells us that in the end the Britannia's loss went up to 105. With the above facts before us, we are compelled to adopt one of two alternatives. We must either maintain that sanitary science made no advance between 1588 and 1855, or admit that the mortality in Elizabeth's fleet became what it was owing to ignorance of sanitary laws and not to intentional bad management. As regards care of the sick, it is to be remembered that the establishment of naval and military hospitals for the reception of sick soldiers and sailors is of recent date. For instance, the two great English military hospitals, Netley and the Herbert, are only about sixty years old.
[Footnote 73: Philadelphia, 1864.]
[Footnote 74: London, 1899.]
So far from our fleet in 1588 having been ill-supplied with ammunition, it was in reality astonishingly well equipped, considering the age. We learn from Mr. Julian Corbett,[75] that 'during the few years immediately preceding the outbreak of the war, the Queen's navy had been entirely re-armed with brass guns, and in the process of re-armament a great advance in simplicity had been secured.' Froude, without seeing where the admission would land him, admits that our fleet was more plentifully supplied than the Armada, in which, he says, 'the supply of cartridges was singularly small. The King [Philip the Second] probably considered that a single action would decide the struggle; and it amounted to but fifty rounds for each gun.' Our own supply therefore exceeded fifty rounds. In his life of Vice-Admiral Lord Lyons,[76] Sir S. Eardley Wilmot tells us that the British ships which attacked the Sebastopol forts in October 1854 'could only afford to expend seventy rounds per gun.' At the close of the nineteenth century, the regulated allowance for guns mounted on the broadside was eighty-five rounds each. Consequently, the Elizabethan allowance was nearly, if not quite, as much as that which our authorities, after an experience of naval warfare during three centuries, thought sufficient. 'The full explanation,' says Professor Laughton, 'of the want [of ammunition] seems to lie in the rapidity of fire which has already been mentioned. The ships had the usual quantity on board; but the expenditure was more, very many times more, than anyone could have conceived.' Mr. Julian Corbett considers it doubtful if the ammunition, in at least one division of the fleet, was nearly exhausted.
[Footnote 75: _The_Spanish_War_, 1585-87 (Navy Records Society), 1898, p. 323.]
[Footnote 76: London, 1898, p. 236.]
Exhaustion of the supply of ammunition in a single action is a common naval occurrence. The not very decisive character of the battle of Malaga between Sir George Rooke and the Count of Toulouse in 1704 was attributed to insufficiency of ammunition, the supply in our ships having been depleted by what 'Mediterranean' Byng, afterwards Lord Torrington, calls the 'furious fire' opened on Gibraltar. The Rev. Thomas Pocock, Chaplain of the Ranelagh, Byng's flag-ship at Malaga, says:[77] 'Many of our ships went out of the line for want of ammunition.' Byng's own opinion, as stated by the compiler of his memoirs, was, that 'it may without great vanity be said that the English had gained a greater victory if they had been supplied with ammunition as they ought to have been.' I myself heard the late Lord Alcester speak of the anxiety that had been caused him by the state of his ships' magazines after the attack on the Alexandria forts in 1882. At a still later date, Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay interrupted his attack on the Spanish squadron to ascertain how much ammunition his ships had left. The carrying capacity of ships being limited, rapid gun-fire in battle invariably brings with it the risk of running short of ammunition. It did this in the nineteenth century just as much as, probably even more than, it did in the sixteenth.
[Footnote 77: In his journal (p. 197), printed as an Appendix to _Memoirs_relating_to_the_Lord_Torrington_, edited by J. K. Laughton for the Camden Society, 1889.]