DUTIES OF THE FRIGATE
The truth of this statement will be evident from a brief mention of the duties frigates actually used to perform. While attending the fleet, not merely a part of it, the frigates were thrown out far in advance and on each side, as cavalry on land scours the country towards or through which the army advances. The distance to which they would be thus detached would sometimes amount to one hundred or two hundred miles, and the absence to days, rejoining being assured by the assignment of a rendezvous, or by an adequate knowledge of the admiral’s intended movements. It will be recognized that when thus alone frigates might meet equal or superior forces, to resist or to escape from which both strength and speed were needed. An extreme and particular case of such service was the watching of an enemy’s port by one or more frigates, when they had to keep close to the entrance, although a fleet might be within. Again, frigates were placed in certain central positions, rendezvous known only to the superior officers, where they cruised steadily, having information as to the whereabouts of the fleet, or instructions for expected vessels. They were there centres of intelligence, round which the movements of the whole body revolved.
When the fleet was actually in touch with a hostile fleet, in pursuit, or when expecting battle, the frigates were placed between their own force and the enemy; nearer, however, to the latter, as the essential point was to keep knowledge of his whereabouts and probable intentions. Such a position was at times extremely exposed. The frigates had to avoid equally capture and being driven and shaken off; they must keep close, yet not be caught. When engagement ensued they passed through to the off side of their own fleet, where they were dispersed at intervals abreast the main line, like the file closers of a military line ashore. Here they fulfilled one special purpose, besides others. As the fleet fought with broadsides only, its ships were ranged one ahead of the other. Consequently signals made on the masts of the admiral could not be seen always by those ahead or astern of him; but the frigates in the other line made the same signals, “repeated,” as it was said, where they could be read more certainly. But frigates did also more hazardous work. They went to crippled ships of the line and towed them into other positions, into or out of fire, and at times the admiral summoned a frigate alongside to carry a message to some part of the battle. “I noticed,” says Marryatt, in one of his novels, “the look of pride on the faces of our officers when it appeared that the loss on board our frigate was greater than that of some of the ships in the line.”
For such offices it is evident there were wanted a strength and a weight which the corvette did not have. A corvette would make poor work of towing a heavy ship, and could not carry as surely the sail needed to maintain a position. At the same time it should be observed that excess of size above the requirements stated should be exceptional. In the opinion of the writer the forty-four-gun frigate in her day possessed a fighting force and a weight of body in excess of that required by the ordinary functions of her nominal class. For exceptional reasons, a few of the type were permissible in a large navy. On the other hand, it may be inferred from the long experience of the British navy, and the resultant practice, that ships of twenty-eight, twenty-four, and twenty guns, though often styled frigates, were not found satisfactory as such. In the distribution of tonnage between size and numbers, a mean must be found; and it must be added that a just mean is a very different thing from a compromise. These considerations also apply to present-day problems.
EARLY SHIPS OF THE LINE
In the fleet-ship, likewise the ship of the line, as the opening century styled the class of vessel known in the closing days as the battle-ship, our predecessors had reached a mean conclusion. The line-of-battle ship, or the ship of the line, as more usually called, differed from the frigate generically, in that it had two or more covered decks. There were one or two cases of ships with four decks, but, as a rule, three were the extreme; and ships of the line were roughly classed as two or three deckers. Under these heads two-deckers carried in their two centuries of history from fifty to eighty-four guns; three-deckers from ninety to one hundred and twenty. The increase in number of guns, resulting, as it did, from increase of size, was not the sole gain of ships of the line. The bigger ships got, the heavier were their timbers, the thicker their planking, the more impenetrable, therefore, their sides. There was a gain, in short, of defensive as well as offensive strength, analogous to the protection given by armor. “As the enemy’s ships were big,” wrote a renowned British admiral, “they took a great deal of drubbing.”
Between the great extremes of strength indicated by fifty and one hundred and twenty guns—whose existence at one and the same time was the evidence of blind historical development, rather than of intelligent relative processes—the navy of a century ago had settled upon a mean, to appreciate which the main idea and purport of the ship of the line must be grasped. The essential function of the ship “of the line” was, as the name implies, to act in combination with other ships in a line of battle. To do this was needed not only fighting power, but manœuvring ability—speed and handiness—and in order that these qualities might approach homogeneousness throughout the fleet, and so promote action in concert, the acceptance of a mean type was essential. To carry three decks of guns, a ship had to expose above water a side disproportionately high relatively to her length, her depth, and her hold upon the water. She consequently drifted rapidly when her side was turned to the wind; while, if her length was increased, and so her hold on the water, she needed more time and room to tack and to wear—that is, to turn around. Ships of this class also were generally—though not necessarily—slow.
ADVANTAGES OF THE SEVENTY-FOURS
The two-decked ship was superior in speed and in handiness, and for that reason, even when acting singly, she could put forth such power as she possessed more quickly and more certainly. But these qualities were most conspicuously valuable when ship had to act with ship. The great secret of military success, concerted action in masses, was in the hands of the two-decked ship, because in her were united to the highest point individual power and facility for combined action. And this was true not only of two-deckers in general, but of the particular species known as the seventy-four-gun ship. Ships below that rate lacked individual fighting power. Ships above it, the eighty and eighty-four, lost manœuvring power because of their greater length and weight. Under the conditions of sail a fleet of seventy-fours could get out the whole power of the force more surely and more rapidly than the equivalent number of guns in ships of any other kind. Thus offensive power dictated its survival. To our own day it reads the lesson that offensive power, the sine quâ non of a military organization, lies not merely in the greatest strength of the single ships, but in the uniformity of their action and rapidity of their movements, as conducive to the quick putting forth of the strength of the whole body at once and in mutual support.
It may be asked naturally, why, then, were there any ships bigger or smaller than this favored type? For smaller, the answer is that short ships of lighter draught are best suited for shoal or intricate navigation. The shoals of Holland forbade heavy ships to the Dutch navy, materially reducing its fighting strength. Before France entered our Revolutionary struggle the British sent only sixty-fours to operate upon our comparatively shallow coasts and bars. As regards bigger ships, they were useful exceptionally, as were forty-four-gun frigates, and for the following reason: Every line of battle has three particularly dangerous points—the centre, because there the line, if pierced, divides into the two smaller fragments; and the flanks, or ends, because the extremities are supported less easily by the rest of the force than the centre is, one extremity being farther from the other than the centre is from either. Such local weakness could not be remedied by the use of two ships, for, if the line were properly closed, one of them could fire at the enemy only through or over the other. The sole way of giving the strength there required was by concentrating it into individual ships, either by putting on the additional battery, which gives a three-decker, or by making the seventy-four heavier, resulting in an eighty-gun ship on two decks. These stronger vessels were, therefore, stationed in the centre or on the flanks of a line of battle. The particular functions, the raison d’être, of the three leading classes of ships of war—the sloop, the frigate, and the ship of the line—have now been stated. It remains to give an account of the chief features of the armament carried on their broadsides, as described.