The spirit of an English sailor of the old school, with his bluff, outspoken, uncompromising detestation of change, and his unfaltering belief that all that has been was right, is something to wonder at and even admire, if we should not care to imitate it, in these days of perpetual motion. He has observed, as we all have, with shame and misgiving, that while the cost of our vast ironclad vessels of war is growing yearly greater, the officers of the new generation who are to be intrusted with the handling of these expensive monsters are not comparable for practical skill and shiftiness with those of Admiral Rouse’s contemporaries who dominated the seas in sailing frigates in the days before either steam or ship-armor was devised. In his perception of the defects of our present system the Admiral does not stand alone; it is condemned by the ablest officers who are now in command of our fleets, by the eminent engineers who construct them—unfortunately, with still more eloquent urgency by the voice of our recent naval annals. The misadventures of the Captain, the Psyche, and the Agincourt, not to mention less serious mishaps, have startled us all, and the seamanship of the British Navy has come to be gravely questioned.
Let us compare Admiral Rouse’s remedy with Mr. Reed’s.
The latter is dwelling on the custom of sending young boys to sea with necessarily imperfect training, and of promoting them to the higher grades, though in the meantime they have had no opportunities of scientific instruction. He asserts the consequence is that very few of the officers who command our costly iron-clads at the present day know any thing of the construction or the qualities of those gigantic boating masses. Admiral Rouse admits this fully, but he superadds a charge at least as serious; he alleges that few or none of our modern naval officers who spend the years of their apprenticeship to the sea on board a steamer, and who “worship the boiler whenever they are in a scrape,” do know or can know any thing of real seamanship. Mr. Reed says that the study of the principles of shipbuilding is unknown among the officers of our Navy, and that accordingly, few of them can handle an iron-clad. Admiral Rouse says that the study of the winds and waves is neglected by them, and that not many of them can sail a frigate. Mr. Reed demands a Naval University to teach officers the theory of navigation as applied to the vast masses of iron now afloat under our flag. Admiral Rouse would get rid of these “useless monsters” altogether, would, during peace, commission small “ships with auxiliary screws,” and “never burn a coal except in case of necessity.” Here we have the ancient and the modern spirit in contrast and juxtaposition. The former, obstinate and often illogical, but with a certain rude and not unjustified faith in practice, deserves our respect, for it was this spirit which won us, in old times, our naval supremacy. The latter may be over-bold and presumptuously contemptuous of the past and all its belongings; but it is the spirit of progress, and on its guidance we have to depend for the maintenance of the renown we achieved in the earlier and darker time.
On the 20th of March, 1871, Capt. James G. Goodenough, R. N., read a paper before the Royal United Service Institute, on the Preliminary Education of Naval Officers, from which we make extracts.
I should be guilty of an absurd and forced indifference to what is passing around me if I were not to say that an impression now exists very generally in the service, that the views which finds most favor with regard to the training of the officers of Her Majesty’s Navy is, that the naval officer should be taught young; that he should be made to devote himself to the details, and nothing but details of his profession from boyhood to youth, and from youth to middle age, and that somewhere behind middle age and old age, he should be deemed to be warrant, and be thrown away a pensioner on the country’s gratitude, unfit even to have a voice in the guidance of the affairs of the service to which he may have been an ornament. This impression is doing much harm in all directions.
It is weakening the desire for knowledge and self-improvement in naval officers; it is tending to narrow and circumscribe the idea of responsibility of a naval commander for all things coming within his ken, and to lower his conception of his own position from that of a representative of his country in all parts of the world, an agent of her policy, and a guardian of her commerce, to that of being a mere executing tool, whose only argument is force.
The warning which I should give, and it contains the whole case, is this,—that while all other circumstances of life at sea have changed considerably in the last thirty years, the preliminary training of our officers has not changed in its main features. It is not merely that our material, whether in ships or guns, steamships or canvas, has changed. It is not only that our material has become far more complicated than of yore. If that alone were the case, the system of a former age might supplant the wants of the day. No! the change whose bearing we have failed to acknowledge, even though we may have perceived it, is this, that while formerly the conduct of ships at sea, their discipline, and the handling of their material generally, was based on the experience obtained in the practical individual lives from early years, and on an acquaintance with external phenomena and internal details, which were not reduced to laws or elevated into systems; now, we do possess rules and laws, which greatly reduce the value, if they do not quite supersede, the practical experience of a single life. In every one of the varied practical duties of a sea officer, this is the case, whether in navigation or in discipline, in artillery or in manœuvring; and I say that this constitutes the great change in a sea life to which we have made no corresponding advance. I say that although those laws and systems exist, we still continue to let the details which they include be painfully and only practically acquired by experience, instead of methodically teaching the principles on which they are based.
The principles on which I consider that that education should rest are these: First, that a distinction should be made between the period of education and that of special training. Second, that special training should be the business of the Government, while education should be left to the care of the parents, at the ordinary schools of the country. Third, that the handling of ships’ sails and boats, and the principles of command should be methodically taught, instead of, as at present, being left to chance observations and the accidents of service. Fourth, that the young officers under training in schoolships should have no command, except over each other, and should count no sea time; and that on entering the service afloat in sea-going ships, they should become at once, in some measure, responsible officers, though liable to future examinations, and to produce evidence of having done work after leaving the training-ships. Fifth, that in order to discourage cramming, all entrance examinations should be confined, as far as possible, to the subject of study at advanced public schools, and that every candidate should be required to bring with him certificates of a year’s good conduct from his last school.
I wish to see a distinction made between the education and the special training of naval officers. I do not pretend to give the precise age at which this distinction should be made. It will necessarily differ with different boys, and I would therefore have a two years’ limit to the age of entry instead of one. My opinion is, that special training should begin at from 14 to 16, and that it should be continued from that age for three years; that is, from an average of 15 to an average of 18 in the college and sea-going training ships.
I should wish young officers to proceed thence to the ordinary service afloat, and after two years’ service in a sea-going ship to be admitted to pass an examination for lieutenants.