Rodney’s first active duty was at Newfoundland, from where he was promoted to Lieutenant and transferred to the Mediterranean and given command by Admiral Mathews of the Plymouth, a ship of the line of 64 guns—“ of the line” referred to the largest class of warships, of 64 guns or more, powerful enough in construction and in armament to fight in the single file of ships bearing down on the enemy and firing broadside as they passed, which was the conventional and only tactical formation used in the combat of fighting sail in the 18th century. The largest ships of the line, mounting 100 guns in three tiers, were 200 feet long, built of oak at a cost of £100,000. The largest, Nelson’s H.M.S. Victory built in 1776–77, was crewed by 875 men, and lesser ships by crews of 490–720. Victory, at 220 feet, required for construction 2,500 major trees, equal to sixty acres of forest. It carried a mainmast of fir standing 205 feet above waterline and three feet thick at its base. Constructed in three sections, the three mainmasts of a ship of the line could suspend 36 sails, amounting to four acres of fabric, and make a speed of ten knots. When masts were bent by a strong wind, the strain on floorboards caused the leaks that required constant pumping. Frigates used as commerce raiders were ships of 130–150 feet, usually manned by volunteer crews seeking the prize money.
Guns, measured by the weight of their cannonballs, were 12–42 pounders (frigates carried 4–6 pounders), with a maximum range of one mile when fired by 400 pounds of gunpowder. They fired not only cannonballs but all kinds and shapes of missiles—pails of nails or sharpened pieces of scrap iron—heated red hot to burn sails. Guns were mounted on wheeled gun carriages, secured by rope tackles used to run the guns in and out of the gunports and take up the recoil. Each firing required a succession of nine or ten orders to the gun crew: “Cast loose your guns”—the ropes removed and coiled; “Level your guns”—to make them parallel to the deck; “Take out your tompions”—to remove stoppers from the muzzles; “Load cartridge”—the cartridge of black powder in a cloth bag is rammed down the muzzle; “Shot your guns”—the cannonball or other shot is rammed down; “Run out your guns”—guns placed for muzzles to protrude through gunports; “Prime”—gunpowder from the powder horn is inserted in the touchhole; “Point your guns”—the slow match is brought to the breech while the cannoneer keeps it alight by careful blowing and the gun is adjusted on its base; “Elevate”—a bead is drawn on the target through the sights; “Fire!”—when the roll of the ship brings the top sights on the target, the lighted match is applied to the touchhole; firing is followed by the order “Sponge your guns”—a sponge fixed to a length of stiffened rope and dipped in a tub of water is thrust down the muzzle to extinguish any scraps of the powder bag that might be burning. Guns were then repositioned and the loading process repeated. In Nelson’s time a perfectly trained crew could complete this process at a rate of once every two minutes.
Management of sail in order to tack—that is, to shift direction or sail into the wind or to bear down on the enemy or to seize the weather gauge or to chase or fall back in any other maneuver requiring adjustment to the wind—demanded another precise set of orders governing braces, sheets, halyards set, bowlines at every edge of the square sails to keep them taut and flat, mainsails, top mainsails, topgallant mainsails, staysails, jib sheets, backstays and an infinite number of extras, whose names will offer no comprehension to the landlubber. A crew with officers or boatswain stands by each mast to haul or let go the sails while the captain, besides calling his orders, keeps in communication with the helmsman. To bring a ship about—that is, reverse or change direction—is an action keyed to a pitch of precision and excitement at the operative moment when the mainsail flaps over with a loud bang to catch the wind from the opposite side. As described by Admiral Morison—using as example a southeast wind for a turn to the southwest—it involves different orders for different sails and yardarms (the wooden poles suspended from the mast to which the sails are attached).
First, the seamen trim the yards as close as possible to the axis of the hull, and haul in taut the sheet of the fore-and-aft driver or spanker on the mizzenmast so as to kick her stern around. The officer of the deck shouts “Ready, about!” and the boatswains pass the word by piping. The man at the wheel turns it hard—all the way—to starboard, which puts the helm that connects with the rudderhead to leeward, and when he has done so, he sings out, “Helm’s hard a-lee, sir!” The jib and staysail sheets, which trim the headsails, are let go. As the rudder brings the ship up into the SE wind, the yards point directly into it, the sails shiver, and the lines, with tension released, dance about wildly. As soon as the ship’s head has passed through the eye of the wind and is heading about, SE by S, the port jib and staysail sheets are hauled taut; and their action, added to that of the foresail, fore topsail and fore-topgallant sail, which are now back-winded—that is, blown against the mast—act as levers to throw the ship’s bow away from the wind onto the desired new course. As soon as the wind catches the starboard leach (edge) of the square mainsail or maintopsail, the officer of the deck cries, “Mainsail haul!” This is the great moment in coming about.… All hands not otherwise employed then lay ahold of the lee braces on the main and mizzen yards and haul them around an arc of about seventy degrees until the sails catch the wind from the port side. If done at just the right moment, the wind helps whip them around. By this time, unless the ship is very sharp and smart and the sea smooth, her headway has been lost.…
The next important order is “Let Go and Haul!” This means let go fore braces and sheets, and haul the foreyards, whose sails have been flat aback all this time, until the wind catches them on their after surfaces. The weather jib and staysail sheets are let go and the lee ones hauled taut, and all other sails are trimmed so that she gathers headway and shoots ahead on her new course.… In a warship with a big crew this process would take at least ten minutes, probably more.…
This laborious process for every change of direction, called tacking, while it made for tense and exciting moments, cannot be called an efficient form of locomotion. To tack a big ship with its billowing mass of sail might be done in good weather with a trained crew in ten minutes, but otherwise could take several hours, and in rough weather as long as half a day or in a really bad blow might become impossible. To arrive at any place not lying in the direction of the wind meant tacking zigzag the whole way, exhausting ship and crew, so that it is hardly to be wondered why both were frequently weak and unfit for service.
In the renewed strife for supremacy of the sea that filled the mid-century, the opening clash of navies took place in the Battle of Toulon in 1744. It was not a heroic combat, like John Paul Jones’s against the Serapis, but a messed-up composite of all the troubles and defects that were to beset naval warfare in this period, and it evoked from a French minister, M. Maurepas, a disgusted dimissal of warfare with its waste of lives for some inconclusive result: “I don’t think much of these naval combats. C’est piff poff on one side and the other, and leaves the sea afterwards as salty as before.” At Toulon, England was engaged against France and Spain, allies in the Bourbon Family Compact, which suffered from the strains of most family efforts at union. Apart from colonial hostilities in America and India, which were the true source of conflict, the secondary struggle lay as usual in the complex of continental quarrels, this time known as the War of the Austrian Succession, in which remote and irrelevant Silesia was again in contention. It would be wasted effort to try to follow the twisted trails leading to this war, other than to say that in 1740 Frederick the Great had gained the throne of Prussia just as the Emperor of Austria, Charles VI, died, leaving the disputed sovereignty of his jigsaw of dominions to his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, whose succession the European powers had guaranteed. For his own purposes, Frederick II was trying to dispossess her, and when he seized Silesia, among other inimical acts, Prussia and Austria went to war, with the several powers taking sides.
Out of this muddle, the three major sea powers, Spain, France and
Britain, came to a focus at Toulon, the chief French naval base on the Mediterranean coast, located halfway between Nice and Marseilles. The Battle of Toulon in 1744 ensued, when Spain as an enemy of Austria moved to take over Italian territories ruled by Austria. The Spanish fleet entered Toulon, where it remained shut in for four months by an English blockade. When Spain applied to France for an escort to conduct her ships home, France complied, but, distrusting Spanish fighting efficiency, the French Admiral requested that the Spanish ships be scattered among his own, a proposal that the Spanish Admiral Navarro naturally refused. In a compromise, the Spanish ships kept their own group upon entering the line of warships, which was always formed in sections designated van, center and rear. With nine French in the van, six French and three Spanish in the center and nine Spanish in the rear, the Allies’ line of 27 warships sailed out of port to face the British line of 29, commanded by Admiral Mathews of the Mediterranean fleet squadron. He was seconded by a man he despised, Admiral Lestock, who fully returned his commanding officer’s sentiments. Their quarrel was personal and petty, not political, stemming from Lestock’s failure to send a frigate to meet Mathews on his arrival from England to take over his command. Described as an illiterate, ill-mannered and domineering officer, Mathews vented his displeasure in “coarse insults” to his subordinate, causing Admiral Mahan, as historian, rather timidly to suggest that a “possible taint of ill will” between the two played a part in the “fiasco” off Toulon.
Sighting the sails coming out of Toulon toward evening, Mathews, having the weather (or windward) gauge, raised the signal for a “general chase,” but when his van came up with the enemy next morning, his rear, under Lestock, was too far—some five miles—astern to join him and make the English squadron’s superior numbers tell. During the previous night, Lestock had already been out of position. When Mathews signaled for the fleet to “lie-to”—that is, stay put for the night—he also signaled for “close order,” which to a willing instead of a resentful subordinate would clearly suggest coming up during the night to take his position in the line. By morning Lestock was still several hours’ sailing time behind. Lestock chose to obey the stationary signal to lie- to rather than to close up.
Bursting with impatience for the laggard Lestock and fearing that his prey would sail away to escape their planned destruction, Mathews struck out for independence and left the line to attack the enemy by himself, in the belief or hope that he could overwhelm the Spanish rear and the French center before the French in the van could double back to rescue them. Whether by error or in the excitement of his dare, he raised the signal to engage while keeping the signal for the line flying, thoroughly confusing his captains, who could find no guide to his intentions in the signal books or in the ruling manual called Fighting Instructions. They knew only that the signal for “line ahead” supersedes all others. Some of his squadron followed Mathews with or without signals, but others hung back, leaving their Admiral unsupported and their fire at ineffective range. In the disorder, the enemy escaped; only one was taken, in a spirited action by a captain of later renown, the future Admiral Hawke. By nightfall Mathews had to withdraw and regroup with nothing to show for all his audacity except the satisfaction of having Lestock put under arrest and sent home.
This sorry tale was roughly debated in the House of Commons and, following severe criticism of the Admiralty, in a series of courts-martial which, with the irreproachable logic of men in uniform, punished Mathews, the man who fought, but acquitted Lestock, the man who did not. Mathews was condemned and dismissed from the service (on the ground of his having signaled for “line of battle” while by his own action making preservation of the line impossible), whereas Lestock, on his claim of obedience to signals, was held blameless.
At this point we must meet the paralyzing dragon known as Fighting Instructions, a tyrannical document that required each ship of the line to follow each other at a cable’s length (200 yards) and to engage its opposite number of the enemy’s line, van for van, center for center and rear for rear, and never to leave the line to do otherwise. The rule, called “line ahead,” was intended to prevent the confusion called a měleé, in which individual ships might come under the fire of their fellows, and to give a section of the line, if closely supported by the one next astern, a chance of destroying the enemy’s section opposite. Fighting Instructions was issued during the first Dutch wars under the regime of Oliver Cromwell, whose autocratic mentality it certainly reflected, although the instructions have also been attributed to that poor creature James I, who would not seem to have had the character to conceive a document of such intransigence. Because individual captains of the time had formerly used their own tactics, often resulting in unmanageable confusion, the Admiralty issued the Fighting Instructions to give a fleet greater effect by requiring its ships to act in concert under signaled orders of the commanding officer and prohibiting action on personal initiative. In general, the result did make for greater efficiency in combat, though in particular instances—as in Admiral Graves’s action in the crucial Battle of Chesapeake Bay preceding Yorktown—it could cause disaster by persuading a too submissive captain to stick by the rule when crisis in a situation could better have been met by a course determined by the particular circumstances. As deviations from the rule were always reported by some disgruntled officer and tried by a court-martial, the Instructions naturally reduced, if not destroyed, initiative except when a captain of strong self-confidence would act to take advantage of the unexpected. Action of this kind was not infrequent, even though no people so much as the British preferred to stay wedded to the way things had always been done before. In allowing no room for the unexpected that lies in wait in the waywardness of men, not to mention the waywardness of winds and ocean, Fighting Instructions was a concept of military rigidity that must forever amaze the layman.
Whether Lestock at Toulon held back from the rear of the battle line out of malice toward his commander, or whether, as he claimed at the subsequent court-martial, he had put on all possible sail but could not make up the distance, was not adjudicated. To the charge that he failed to attack later when he might have done so, he used the technicalities of the Fighting Instructions as a defense, saying that the signal for line ahead was flying at the same time as the signal to engage and that he could not leave the line to fight without disobeying the signal to form line.
As the core of naval battle, line ahead was conditioned by the structure of the ships themselves, whose main armament necessarily fired broadside. The line was necessary because it was the only formation that allowed all ships of a squadron to turn with beam facing the enemy and at the same time ensure that no one of its own would come between gun and target. The law of line ahead conditioned a battle of formal movements as of some massive minuet played upon the sea to the music of gunfire. The warships advanced, bowed and retreated while drums beat a tattoo summoning gun crews to their posts and explosives burst from the cannons’ mouths. The line advanced along the length of the enemy line drawn up opposite, each ship firing as it came into position. The English aimed at the hulls, the French at masts and rigging, loading their guns with chains and grapeshot and scraps of metal to tear the sails. Flames leapt, wood splinters flew causing nasty wounds, decks strewn with dead bodies and slippery with blood grew hazardous, the wounded lay helpless, fearful of being rolled overboard among the corpses to where sharks swarmed around the ship, their open jaws to be the sailors’ unmarked graves. The destructive violence wrought upon the empty sea was loud and satisfying, if not always of strategic value. Observing the performance, the proverbial visitor from another planet would have admired the beauty of the sailing maneuvers in their white-winged saraband but would have wondered, to what purpose?
Which side was the victor in the unfixed territory of a sea battle was usually decided, even by historians, on the basis of the relative number of killed and wounded suffered by either combatant. The numbers, often 700 or 800 killed in some pointless “piff
poff,” were large. The only person to express any concern that appears in the records was curiously enough the King of France, Louis XVI, not known for his popular sympathies. In a speech to his Council he asked, “But who shall restore the brave sailors who have sacrificed their lives in my service?” This was a greater degree of interest than expressed by any official who received the count of losses or by any admiral who saw the bodies pile up on his decks.
The ultimate objective of any war is the gaining of political and material power, which at this period was considered to depend on colonies and commerce. Since these in turn depended upon free communication through control of the sea with bases for supply along the way—but not too many, as Mahan cautiously advises—and since holding the bases depended on their protection by the navy, therefore the objective of sea war was to prevail over the enemy’s navy and find occasion to meet and destroy his fleets. To take this argument to its logical end meant that the best result would be had by staying out of battle altogether. The French, being a logical people, had reached this conclusion and followed it when they could.