We have not been through the Sailing Age without learning something about the "Handy Man" of the Royal Navy, whether he is a ship's boy or a veteran boatswain (bo's'n), a cadet or a commander-in-chief, a blue-jacket or a Royal Marine ("soldier and sailor too"). But we must not enter the Age of Steam and Steel without taking another look at him, if only to see what a great part he plays in our lives and liberties by keeping the seaways open to friends and closed to enemies. Without the Handy Man of the Royal Navy the Merchant Service could not live a day, the Canadian Army could not have joined the other British armies at the front, and the Empire itself would be all parts and no whole, because divided, not united, by the Seven Seas. United we stand: divided we fall.
The sea is three times bigger than the land, but three hundred times less known. Yet even our everyday language is full of sea terms; because so much of it, like so much of our blood, comes from the Hardy Norsemen, and because so much of the very life of all the English-speaking peoples depends upon the handy man at sea. Peoples who have Norse blood, like French and Germans, but who have never lived by sea-power, and peoples who, like the Russians and Chinese, have neither sea-power nor a sea-folk's blood, never use sea terms in their ordinary talk. They may dress up a landsman and put him on the stage to talk the same sort of twaddle that our own stage sailors talk—all about "shiver my timbers," "hitching his breeches," and "belaying the slack of your jaw." But they do not talk the real sea sense we have learnt from the handy man of whose strange life we know so little.
When we say "that slacker's not pulling his weight" we use a term that has come down from the old Rowing Age, when a man who was not helping the boat along more with his oar than he was keeping her back with his weight really was the worst kind of "slacker." But most of the sea terms we use in our land talk come from the Sailing Age of Drake and Nelson. To be "A1" is to be like the best class of merchant ships that are rated A1 for insurance. "First-rate," on the other hand, comes from the Navy, and means ships of the largest size and strongest build, like the super-dreadnoughts of to-day. If you make a mess of things people say you are "on the wrong tack," may "get taken aback," and find yourself "on your beam ends" or, worse still, "on the rocks." So you had better remember that "if you won't be ruled by the rudder you are sure to be ruled by the rock." If you do not "know the ropes" you will not "keep on an even keel" when it's "blowing great guns." If you take to drink you will soon "have three sheets in the wind," because you will not have the sense to "steer a straight course," but, getting "half seas over," perhaps "go by the board" or be "thrown overboard" by friends who might have "brought you up with a round turn" before it was too late. Remember three other bits of handy man's advice: "you'd better not sail so close to the wind" (do not go so near to doing something wrong), "don't speak to the man at the wheel" (because the ship may get off her course while you are bothering him), and, when a storm is brewing, mind you "shorten sail" and "take in a reef," instead of being such a fool as to "carry on till all is blue." When you are in for a fight then "clear the decks for action," by putting aside everything that might get in your way. The list could be made very much longer if we took the whole subject "by and large" and "trimmed our sails to every breeze" when we were "all aboard." But here we must "stow it," "make everything ship-shape," trust to the "sheet-anchor," and, leaving the age of mast and sail, go "full steam ahead" into our own.
"Full steam ahead" might well have been the motto of Nelson's flag-captain, Hardy, when he was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty; because, twenty years before the first steam armoured ship was launched, he wrote this opinion: "Science will alter the whole Navy. Depend on it, steam and gunnery are in their infancy." There were just a hundred years between Trafalgar and laying the keel of the first modern Dreadnought in 1905. But Hardy foresaw the sort of change that was bound to come; and so helped on toward Jellicoe and Jutland. That is one reason why foreigners cannot catch the British Navy napping.
Another is because the British "handy man" can "turn his hand to anything"; though even his worst enemies can never accuse him of being "jack of all trades and master of none." He is the master of the sea. But he knows the ropes of many other things as well; and none of the strange things he is called upon to do ever seem to find him wanting. When a British joint expedition attacked St. Helena the Dutch never dreamt of guarding the huge sheer cliffs behind the town. But up went a handy man with a long cord by which he pulled up a rope, which, in its turn, was used to haul up a ladder that the soldiers climbed at night. Next morning the astounded Dutchmen found themselves attacked by land as well as by sea and had to give in.
One day the admiral (Sir William Kennedy) commanding in the Indian Ocean a few years ago heard that two Englishwomen had been left on a desert island by a mail steamer from which they had landed for a picnic. The steamer was bound to go on. The women were not missed till too late. So the captain telegraphed to the Admiral from the next port. The Admiral at once went to the island in his flagship, found the women with their dresses all torn to ribbons on the rocks, measured them for sailor suits himself, and had them properly rigged out by the ship's tailor, just like the bluejackets, except for the skirts—white jerseys, navy blue serge uniforms, with blue jean collars and white trimmings, straw hats with H.M.S. Boadicea on the ribbon in gold, knife and lanyard, all complete.
To beat this admiral in turning his hand to anything at a moment's notice we must take the bluejacket whom Captain Wonham saw escaping from a horde of savages on the West Coast of Africa during the Ashanti War of 1874. This man knew the natives well, as he had been the Governor's servant there for several years before the niggers swarmed out of the bush to kill off the whites. Every one seemed to be safe in the boats, when Captain Wonham suddenly spied Jack running for his life on top of a long spit of high rocks that jutted out like a wharf. The natives, brandishing their spears and climbing the rocks, were just going to cut Jack off when he, knowing their craze for the white man's clothes, threw his cap at them. Immediately there was a scramble which held up their advance. As they came on again he threw them his serge, and so on, taking a spurt after each throw. At last he took off his trousers, which set all the niggers fighting like mad round two big chiefs, each of whom was hanging on to one leg. Then he took a neat header and swam off to the boats, which had meanwhile pulled in to his rescue.
When the battleship Majestic was sunk in the Dardanelles a bluejacket ran along her upper side as she rolled over, then along her keel as she turned bottom upwards. Finally, seeing that she was sinking by the stern, and knowing both her own length and the depth of the water, he climbed right up on the tip-top end of her stem, from which he was taken off as dry as a bone. Meanwhile a very different kind of rescue was being made by Captain Talbot, who, having gone down with the ship, rose to the surface and was rescued by a launch. He had barely recovered his breath when he saw two of his bluejackets struggling for their lives. He at once dived in and rescued both at the very great risk of his own.
From East to West, from the Tropics to the Poles, the Navy has gone everywhere and done nearly everything that mortal man can do. Think of the Admiralty "rating" Newfoundland, a country bigger than Scotland and Wales put together, as one of His Majesty's Ships and putting a captain in command! Yet that was done in the early days; and it worked very well. Think of the naval brigades (that is, men landed for service ashore) which have fought alone or with the Army, or with many foreign armies and navies, all over the world for hundreds of years. Drake, as we have seen, always used naval brigades, and they have always been the same keen "first-class fighting men" wherever they went. The only trouble was in holding them back. At the siege of Tangier in North Africa in the seventeenth century Admiral Herbert "checked" Captain Barclay "for suffering too forward and furious an advance, lest they might fall into an ambush"; whereupon Barclay said, "Sir, I can lead them on, but the Furies can't call them back." A naval brigade man-handled the guns on the Plains of Abraham the day of Wolfe's victory, and took forty-seven up the cliff and into position before the army had dug itself in for the night. Nelson lost his right arm when leading a naval brigade at Teneriffe in 1797. Peel's naval brigade in the Indian Mutiny (1857-9) man-handled two big guns right up against the wall that kept Lord Clyde's army from joining hands with the British besieged in Lucknow, blew a hole in it, though it was swarming with rebels, and so let the Marines and the Highlanders through.
In Egypt (1882) Lord Fisher, of whom we shall soon hear more, rigged up a train like an ironclad and kept Arabi Pasha at arm's length from Alexandria, which Lord Alcester's fleet had bombarded and taken. Lieutenant Rawson literally "steered" Lord Wolseley's army across the desert by the stars during the night march that ended in the perfect victory of Tel-el-Kebir. Mortally wounded he simply asked: "Did I lead them straight, Sir?"