The flags of the manuscript are as follows:
Union Flag.
The Standard.
Red Ensign.
Blue Ensign.
White Ensign.
Dutch Ensign (red, white, and blue in three horizontal stripes).
A flag striped red and yellow from corner to corner.
Red flag.
Blue flag.
White flag.
A "Jack coloured with colours." (This was a "Union Jack," or small Union flag.)
A pendant.
A flag striped red and white horizontally.
A flag striped red and white from corner to corner.
White with red diagonal cross.
In other copies of the 1673 Instructions the last four are omitted, but a flag striped yellow and white from corner to corner is mentioned as a signal for fireships.
The Instructions of 1673 formed the basis of the instructions for the next hundred years. They were issued in a revised form by Admiral Russell in 1691 when the following signal flags were added:
Yellow.
Striped yellow and white horizontally.
Red and white.
Genoese Ensign (similar to an elongated St. George's flag).
Russell's instructions were adopted by Rooke in 1703 with but slight modification of the articles and with no change in the flags.
The year 1714 saw the issue of the first printed "Signal Book." This was a private venture of one Jonathan Greenwood. The author justifiably boasts that he has "disposed matters in such a manner that any instruction may be found out in half a minute," and that he has "made it a pocket volume that it may be at hand upon all occasions." No doubt this duodecimo book was much more convenient than the folio size Instructions. Each signal is represented by a drawing of a ship flying the flag or flags of the signal at the proper place, the purport being added underneath, a method which appears to have been in use in the French navy at least 20 years earlier, for a Signal Book of 1693, containing De Tourville's signals arranged on this plan, was exhibited at the Franco-British Exhibition in 1908. Although the instructions were regarded as confidential the signals apparently were not, as the work is described as "designed to supply the Inferior Officers who cannot have recourse to the Printed Instructions."
The next "Signal Book" proper was again a private venture and was published by John Millan in 1746, "price 2s. 6d. plain and 4s. coloured." In this book the flags are set out along the tops of the pages, and the signals made with them are classified below, according to the different positions of the flags, with references to the numbers of the articles of the various Instructions—"Sailing," "Fighting," and "Additional"—in which the signals are laid down. The only new flags appearing here are the following:
White cross on red ground.
Red cross on blue ground.
Blue and white in two horizontal stripes.
Red and white in two horizontal stripes.
In a manuscript signal book of ten years later, in the Library of the Royal United Service Institution, we have the earliest representation of a "chequered" flag. This book is interesting. It contains Hawke's autograph, and is possibly the one in use by him when he "came sweeping from the West" at Quiberon. The following are the flags then first appearing: