Famous Sea Fights Part 10

At a council of war held on board De Ruyter's flagship on the evening of the 24th it was decided to accept battle next day, even if the Dutch had to fight to leeward. When the sun rose the two fleets were in sight, "eight leagues off the Naze," De Ruyter in his old position to seaward and southward of Monk.

The English "general at sea" had ninety-two battleships and seventeen fireships at his disposal. Following the custom of the time, the English was, like the Dutch fleet, organized in three divisions. The van, distinguished by white ensigns, was commanded by Sir Thomas Allen; the centre, or red division, flew the red ensign (now the flag of our merchant marine), and was under the personal command of Monk and Rupert; the rear, under Sir Jeremy Smith, flew the blue ensign. Battles at sea were now beginning to be fought under formal rules which soon developed into a system of pedantic rigidity. It was a point of honour that van should encounter van; centre, centre; and rear, rear. The Dutch were moving slowly under shortened sail in line ahead to the south-east of the English. Monk formed his fleet in line abreast on the port tack. The orders were that as they closed with the enemy the ships were to bear up on to a course parallel to that of the Dutch and engage in line ahead, division to division and broadside to broadside. Training cruises and fleet manoeuvres were still things of a far-off future, and the ships of Monk's three divisions were all unequal in speed and handiness, so the manoeuvre was not executed with the machine-like regularity of a modern fleet. The van and centre came into action fairly together, but the rearward ships straggled into position, and Tromp was able to give some of the first comers a severe hammering before their consorts came into action and relieved them of some of the brunt of his fire.

The first shots had been fired between nine and ten a.m. Till after two in the afternoon there was a close engagement, a steady, well-sustained cannonade, with no attempt at manoeuvring on either side, the fleets drifting slowly before the light wind, wrapped in powder smoke, in the midst of which both sides made attempts to use their fireships against each other. The only success was secured by the Dutch, who set the "Resolution"

ablaze. She drifted out of the line and burned to the water's edge after her crew had abandoned her. There was heavy loss of life in both fleets.

For want of anything but the most rudimentary system of signalling, admirals had little control of a fight once it was begun. Monk, in the "Royal Charles," had to content himself with marking out De Ruyter's flagship, the "Seven Provinces," as his immediate opponent, and fighting a prolonged duel with her. He walked his quarter-deck chewing tobacco, a habit he had acquired as a precaution against infection during the London plague. He spoke at the outset with undeserved contempt of his opponent.

"Now," he said, "you shall see this fellow come and give me two broadsides and then run." But De Ruyter's broadsides thundered for hour after hour.

However, the dogged persistency of the Dutch was met with persistent courage as steady as their own.

London listened anxiously to the far-off rumbling of the cannonade on the North Sea waters. Mr. Pepys went to Whitehall and found the Court "gone to chapel, it being St. James's Day." Then he tells how--

"by and by, while they are at chapel and we waiting chapel being done, come people out of the park, telling us that the guns are heard plainly. And so everybody to the park, and by and by the chapel done, the King and Duke into the bowling-green and upon the leads, whither I went, and there the guns were plain to be heard; though it was pretty to hear how confident some would be in the loudness of the guns, which it was as much as ever I could do to hear them."

All the Eastern counties must have heard the cannon-thunder droning and rumbling like a far-off summer storm through the anxious hours of that July day. As the afternoon went on even Dutch endurance found it hard to stand up against the steadily sustained cannonade of Monk's centre and van divisions, and De Ruyter and Evertszoon began to make sail and work further out to sea, as if anxious to break off the fight. Monk, Rupert, and Allen, with the White and Red Divisions, followed them up closely, making, however, no attempt to board, but keeping up the fire of their batteries, and waiting for a chance to capture any crippled ship that might fall astern. Four of the enemy were thus taken. So the main bodies of both fleets worked out into the North Sea on parallel courses, making no great way, for the wind was falling.

The rear divisions, Tromp's and Jeremy Smith's ships, did not follow the general movement, for Tromp had never quite lost the advantage he had gained in the opening stage of the battle. He kept his ships under shortened sail, and hammered away doggedly at the Blue Division. This was the moment when Monk might well have either reinforced Smith, or turned with all his force on Tromp, and overwhelmed and destroyed his squadron. It was made up of twenty-five line-of-battle ships and six frigates, and its loss would have been a heavy blow to Holland. But on sea as on land there was still little of the spirit of ordered combination. Just as Rupert at Marston Moor had destroyed the opposing wing of the Roundheads with a fierce charge of his cavaliers, and then pursued, without a thought of using his advantage to fall upon the outnumbered and exposed centre of the enemy, so now Monk and Rupert pressed upon De Ruyter and Evertszoon, though Tromp was at their mercy, and Smith was in serious peril. Thus the engagement broke into two separate battles as the summer evening drew on.

Darkness ended the fight, and in the night the wind fell almost to a calm.

Sunrise on the 26th showed the fleets drifting in disorder on a smooth sea, with their heavy sails hanging loose from the yards, only filled now and then by disappointing flaws of wind. The crews were busy repairing damages and transferring the wounded to the lighter craft. All day the only shots fired were discharged by a couple of bra.s.s toy cannon mounted on a pleasure yacht which Rupert had brought with him. Taking advantage of a mere ruffle of wind, so light that it could not move the big ships, the Cavalier Prince ran his yacht under the stern of the huge flagship of De Ruyter, and fired into him. The Dutchman had no guns bearing dead aft, and the Prince was able to worry him for a while, till there came one of those stronger gusts of wind that filled the sails of the "Seven Provinces," and she swung round, showing a broadside that could blow the yacht out of the water. But before a gun could be fired the yacht, with all sails spread, was racing back to the English fleet, and Rupert returned to the "Royal Charles" as pleased as a schoolboy with his frolic.

During the night of the 26th the wind rose, and De Ruyter steered for the Scheldt, followed up by Monk's two divisions. The Dutch admiral covered his retreat with his best ships, and a running fight began at dawn. Even before the sun rose the sounds of a heavy cannonade had come through the darkness, telling that Tromp and Smith were hard at it again in their detached battle. Early in the day Monk abandoned the chase of the Dutch, and steered towards the sound of the cannonade. Soon the fleet came in distant sight of the battle. Tromp with the "Zealand squadron" was making a dogged retreat, working to the south-east, close-hauled on the wind from the north-east.

Monk tacked and made more than one attempt to place himself across the course of the Dutchmen, hoping to catch them between his fleet and Smith's Blue Division as between hammer and anvil. But Tromp slipped between his enemies and was before long in full sail for Holland, with the three English divisions combined in a stern chase. Monk said that if Smith had pressed Tromp closer early in the day, his retreat would have certainly been cut off. Smith and his friends protested that if the "general at sea"

had laid his fleet on a better course, Tromp would have been taken. The honours of this last move in the game were with the Dutchman.

A substantial victory had been gained, though there were few trophies to show for it. The enemy had been met and forced by sheer hard knocks to abandon his station off the mouth of the Thames, and take refuge in his own ports. Monk was on the Dutch coast, picking up returning merchantmen as prizes, blockading the outgoing trade, and keeping the great fishing fleet in ruinous idleness. With the help of information supplied by a Dutch traitor, Monk reaped further advantage from his victory and inflicted heavy additional loss on the enemy. On 8 August the fleet sailed into the roadstead behind the long island of Tersch.e.l.ling, one of the chain of islands at the mouth of the Zuyder Zee, and burned at their anchors a hundred and sixty Dutch merchantmen that had taken shelter there, including several great East Indiamen. Next day landing-parties burned and plundered the ranges of warehouses on the island, and destroyed the town of Tersch.e.l.ling. The loss to the Dutch traders was estimated at over a million sterling.

The victorious battle off the Thames in July, 1666, is practically forgotten, so far as the popular tradition of our naval successes goes. It has not even a name by which it might live in the memory of our people. But it practically broke the power of Holland and brought the war to an end.

What men do remember, and what has banished from their minds the living tradition of the great North Sea battle, is the ugly fact that in the following year De Ruyter sailed unopposed into the Thames, and captured and burned in the Medway dismantled ships that had fought victoriously against him in the North Sea battle--the "Royal Charles" being among his prizes.

The fleets had, as usual at the time, been laid up for the winter. The money available for fitting them out in the following spring was diverted to other purposes and squandered by the King and the Court. Charles counted on having no need to commission a great fleet in the summer. He knew the Dutch were feeling the strain of the war and the destruction of their trade, and would soon have to patch up a peace, and he opened preliminary negotiations. Such negotiations must be prudently backed by an effective force on the war footing. The King had practically disarmed as soon as there was a prospect of peace. But the Dutch had fitted out the fleet in view of possible contingencies, and De Witt and De Ruyter could not resist the temptation of revenging the defeat of 1666 and the sack of Tersch.e.l.ling by a raid on the Thames and Medway. It was the dishonesty and incapacity of the King and his parasite Court that laid England open to the shameful disaster that dimmed for all time the glory of Monk and Rupert's victory.

But even after De Ruyter's exploits at Chatham the Dutch had no hope of continuing the war, and within a few weeks of the disaster peace was signed at Breda. The story of the Dutch raid is a lasting lesson on the necessity of an island power never for a moment relaxing the armed guard of the sea.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BATTLE OF THE SAINTS' Pa.s.sAGE

1782

In the days when fleets in action relied upon the oar, all fighting was at close quarters, and, as we have seen in our study of typical battles of this period, naval engagements fought out at close quarters gave very definite results, the fleet that was defeated being practically destroyed.

When battles began to be fought under sail, with the gun as the chief weapon, a new method had to be evolved. The more the fire of broadside batteries was relied upon, the greater was the tendency to fight at short artillery range, without closing to hand-to-hand distance, and when the sailors and sea-fighters of the seventeenth century adopted line ahead as the normal formation for making the most of broadside fire, battles had a marked tendency to degenerate into inconclusive artillery duels.

In both the English and the French navies--the two powers that after the naval decline of Spain and Holland disputed the command of the sea--the tactics of the battle in line ahead soon crystallized into a pedantic system. For a hundred years the methods of English admirals were kept in rigid uniformity by a code of "Fighting Instructions for the Navy," drawn up under the direction of the Duke of York (afterwards James II), when he was still Lord High Admiral of England in his brother's reign. These instructions were a well-meant attempt to provide a "sealed pattern" for naval engagements. They contemplated set, formal battles with both fleets in line ahead, sailing on parallel courses, or pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing each other on opposite tacks, exchanging broadsides as the guns bore. The French adopted similar methods. If the English had any advantage in their tactics, it was in their ideas of gunnery. The French aimed at masts and rigging, in the hope of crippling an adversary in her sail power and forcing her to fall out of the moving line. The English believed in making the hull their target, aiming "between wind and water" to start dangerous leaks, or sending their shot into the crowded gun-decks to put the enemy's batteries out of action.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GUNS AND CARRONADES IN USE IN THE BRITISH NAVY IN THE LATTER PART OF THE 18TH CENTURY]

Under such methods battles became formal duels, in which, as often as not, there was no great result, and both sides claimed the victory. The story of many of the naval campaigns of the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century is weary reading. It was in the last quarter of the century that English admirals learned to fight again at close quarters, and to strike crushing blows at an enemy. The new period of energetic, decisive fighting began with a famous battle in West Indian waters in 1782, and culminated in the world-renowned victories of Nelson, who was a young captain on the North American station "when Rodney beat the Comte de Gra.s.se" in the battle of the Saints' Pa.s.sage.

Born when George I was King, Rodney was a veteran of many wars when he won his West Indian triumph. He had fought the French under Hawke, and was with Boscawen at the taking of Louisburg. In 1759 he bombarded Havre, and burned the transport flotilla collected at the mouth of the Seine for a raid on England. Three years later, as commander-in-chief on the Leeward Islands station, he captured Martinique, St. Lucia, and Grenada, and learned the ways of the West Indian seas. Then came years of political disfavour, half-pay and financial embarra.s.sment, until in an hour of darkness for England, with the American colonies in successful revolt and Frenchman and Spaniard besieging Gibraltar by land and sea, the veteran admiral was recalled to active service, and found and seized the great opportunities of his life. Sailing south with a relieving fleet, he fell in with and captured a Spanish convoy off Finisterre, and then surprised and destroyed Lungara's Spanish squadron, taking seven ships out of eleven, and chasing the rest into Cadiz. The appearance of his fleet before Gibraltar saved the fortress, and then in February, 1780, he sailed across the Atlantic to try conclusions with De Guichen, whose powerful fleet based on Martinique was threatening all the English possessions in the West Indies. So far numbers and opportunity had been on his side. He had now to depend more on skill than fortune, and meet a more equal opponent.

At his head-quarters at St. Lucia in April, 1780, Rodney heard that the French fleet under De Guichen had sailed from Martinique. On the 17th he fought an indecisive action with the enemy, an action notable for what Rodney attempted, not for what he accomplished. Twice again on later days Rodney met De Guichen, but none of the three battles did more than inflict mutual loss on the combatants, without producing any decisive result. The campaign was, like so many others in the West Indies, a struggle for the temporary possession of this or that port or island, De Guichen's whole strategy being based on the idea of avoiding the risks of a close engagement that might imperil his fleet, and trying to s.n.a.t.c.h local advantages when he could elude his enemy.

In 1781 Rodney was compelled by ill-health temporarily to give up the West Indian command and return to England. In the spring of 1782 he was again sent to the West Indies, at a moment when the situation of affairs was most menacing for British power beyond the Atlantic. Cornwallis had been forced to surrender at Yorktown, and the success of the revolted American colonies was now a.s.sured. The French fleet in the West Indies had been joined by reinforcements under the Comte de Gra.s.se, who had gone out as commander-in-chief, taking with him a considerable military force that was to combine with an expedition from the Spanish American colonies, not for the capture of some small islands in the Antilles, but for the conquest of Jamaica, the centre of British power and British trade in the West Indian seas.

Kempenfeldt, a good sailor (now remembered chiefly as the admiral who "went down with twice three hundred men," when the "Royal George" sank at Spithead), dispersed and destroyed at the mouth of the Channel a large French convoy of supplies for De Gra.s.se, and drove the squadron that protected it into Brest. With his task thus lightened, Rodney put to sea with four ships of the line, and after a stormy pa.s.sage reached Barbadoes on 19 February, 1782. Sailing thence to Antigua, he formed a junction with and took command of the West Indian fleet, which Hood had commanded during his absence in England. From Antigua he took the fleet to St. Lucia, where he established his head-quarters in Gros Islet Bay. St. Lucia was the favourite base of operations of our West Indian fleets in the old wars, and the scene of much desperate fighting by land and sea. The year before De Gra.s.se had failed in an attempt to seize it.

The fleet of the Comte de Gra.s.se was only some forty miles away to the northward. It lay at Martinique, in the bay of Fort Royal (now Fort de France). Though it has nothing to do with the fortunes of Rodney and De Gra.s.se, it is interesting to note that in a convent school looking out on the bay there was just then a little schoolgirl named Josephine de la Pagerie, daughter of an artillery lieutenant in the garrison, who was to live to be Empress of the French, when France was the mistress of Europe.

During the month of March both fleets were busy preparing for sea. Rodney was reinforced from England, and a small squadron from Brest joined De Gra.s.se. The reinforcements received during March had given Rodney the advantage of numbers. He had thirty-six sail of the line to oppose the thirty that were with De Gra.s.se at Martinique. In the English fleet there were five great three-deckers, three of them carrying 98 and two of them 90 guns. There were twenty-one 74's, a 70-gun ship, and nine 64's. In the French fleet there was one of the largest war vessels then afloat, De Gra.s.se's flagship, the "Ville de Paris," of 104 guns. There were five ships of 80 guns, twenty of 74, one of 70, and three of 64. This enumeration gives Rodney an advantage of six ships and more than two hundred guns. It is quite true that the ships of the same rating in the French service were generally larger than the English, but even apart from numbers, the latter had advantages in armament that were more important than any trifling difference in size. The English guns were mostly mounted on an improved system that gave a larger arc of training fore and aft, the practical result being that as ships pa.s.sed each other the Frenchman was kept longer under fire than the Englishman. Further, the English ships mounted, besides the guns counted in their armament, a number of carronades, mounted on the upper decks, short guns of large calibre, throwing a heavy shot when the fighting was carried on at close quarters, a weapon not yet introduced in the French navy. Thanks to these improvements in the armament of his ships, Rodney had an advantage in gun-power beyond the mere superiority in numbers of ships and guns. He had a further advantage in the fact that a larger number of his ships were copper-sheathed. This meant less fouling while the ships were waiting at their anchorage, and therefore better speed for the English when they put to sea.

De Gra.s.se was enc.u.mbered with a large convoy of merchantmen and storeships, and many of his ships were overcrowded with the troops destined for the descent on Jamaica. It was expected that when he sailed it would be to form, in the first instance, a junction with the Spanish part of the expedition off San Domingo. Rodney kept his fleet at St. Lucia, ready to weigh anchor on the shortest notice, and a smart frigate, the "Andromache"

(commanded by Captain Byron, grandfather of the poet), cruised off Martinique, watching the Frenchman.

At dawn on 8 April Byron saw that the French were coming out, and he hastened to St. Lucia under press of sail with the news. Off the port he flew the signal that told Rodney that De Gra.s.se was at sea. Anchors came up and sails were shaken out, and Rodney set off in pursuit, knowing that De Gra.s.se had a very few hours' start of him.

The few hours did not count for much, provided the English admiral could once get on the Frenchman's track. The danger of missing him could only arise from making at the outset a wrong judgment as to the course on which the enemy would sail. It was De Gra.s.se's business to avoid a battle until he had safely taken his huge convoy to San Domingo and joined hands with his Spanish allies. Rodney judged that he would most likely follow the long curve of the chain of islands that fringe the Caribbean Sea, steering by Puerto Rico for San Domingo. In the night of the 8th the English fleet pa.s.sed Martinique. Next morning it was off the west coast of Dominica, making good speed, and away to the northward a far-spreading crowd of sails showed that Rodney had guessed rightly. The French fleet and convoy were in sight.

Dominica is a ma.s.s of volcanic ridges, falling to the seaward in precipitous cliffs, rising landward tier above tier and shooting up into rocky spires that culminate in the towering peak of the Morne Diablotin, five thousand feet high. Under the shelter of this rugged island, while the prevailing trade wind blows steadily from the eastward, there are sudden calms, or irregular flaws of wind blowing now from one point, now from another, diverted by the irregular ridges of the high land. This April morning the sun had hardly risen when the wind fell, and the two fleets drifted slowly, with loose-hanging sails. Near the north end of the island lay the convoy. A little to the southward De Gra.s.se's thirty battleships straggled in a long line over some six miles of sunlit sea. Off the centre and south of the island Rodney's larger fleet was stretched out in line ahead. It was formed in three divisions. Hood, in the 90-gun "Barfleur,"

commanded the van. Rodney, with his flag flying in a tall three-decker, the "Formidable," of 98 guns, was in the centre. The rear was commanded by Rear-Admiral Samuel Drake, a namesake and descendant of that other Drake whose name had been the terror of the West Indian seas in Elizabethan days.

Suddenly there came a flaw of wind sweeping from the south round the end of the island, so narrow that most of the English fleet hardly felt it. It filled the sails of Hood's ships in the van, and they steered for two French battleships that dropped astern of their consorts. One of the Frenchmen pa.s.sed close under the tiers of guns in the leading English ship, but not a shot was fired at her as she swept by and rejoined her consorts.

Rodney had not yet flown the signal for battle, and these were still the days when personal enterprise and decision were not encouraged among the captains of a fleet.

As the breeze filled the sails of the Frenchmen, Gra.s.se signalled to the convoy to bear away before it to the north-westward, while he with his fighting-ships set his course for the channel between Dominica and Guadeloupe. He rightly judged that Rodney would follow the warships, and thus the convoy would have a good start. The channel towards which the French fleet was heading is known as the Saints' Pa.s.sage, "not on the surmise that it leads to Heaven,"[14] but because along its northern waters stretches a line of rocky islets known to the French as "_les Iles des Saintes_." The nine ships of Hood forming the English van had gone far ahead of the rest of the fleet. If De Gra.s.se had not had his mind so centred on the idea of avoiding a battle, there is little doubt that he might have brought an overwhelming force to bear on them. Luckily for Rodney, he contented himself with sending his second in command, Vaudreuil, to skirmish with them, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing Hood's division at long range and firing at masts and rigging in the hope of disabling them for further pursuit. Hood returned the fire, doing as much damage as he suffered, and towards midday the rest of the English had worked up to him by taking advantage of every breath of wind that blew over the ridges of Dominica. Then the wind fell again, and all through the night and the following day (10 April) the fleets lay in sight of each other beyond even distant cannon shot, Vaudreuil's and Hood's crews busying themselves with repairing rigging and replacing damaged spars.

[14] Treves, "Cradle of the Deep," p. 175.

During the 11th De Gra.s.se tried to get his fleet through the Saints'

Pa.s.sage, working by short tacks to windward, and baffled and delayed by sudden calms. In the afternoon several of his ships were still to the westward of the strait, and Rodney, who had been getting gradually to the northward, despite the frequent failure of the wind under the lee of Dominica, was at last near enough seriously to threaten these laggards. In order to save them from being overwhelmed by the whole English fleet, De Gra.s.se gave up the advantage of weary hours of hard work and came back before the wind out of the strait. At sunset the two fleets lay to the westward of the Saints' Pa.s.sage, and there was no probability that De Gra.s.se would attempt to tack through it during the hours of darkness. In the night Rodney manoeuvred to get to windward of the enemy, and at daylight on the 12th the two fleets were within striking distance, De Gra.s.se to the leeward, his fleet in a straggling line over some nine miles of sea. Rodney had his opportunity of forcing on a decisive battle at last.

At some distance from the French line a partly dismasted line-of-battle ship, the "Zele," was seen in tow of a frigate. She had been in collision with the flagship during the night, and had been so badly damaged that De Gra.s.se was sending her away to Guadeloupe. Rodney's ships had lost their order of battle somewhat in the darkness, and while he was reforming his line he detached a couple of ships to threaten the disabled "Zele." This had the effect he intended. It removed De Gra.s.se's last hesitation about fighting. The French line was soon seen bearing down on the port tack, the rearward ships crowding sail to close up. Rodney's battle line, in reversed order, led by Drake and the rear division, was already on a course that would bring the two fleets sweeping past each other, and the leading ship, the "Marlborough," was steered so as to make the pa.s.sage a close one.

Rodney had hoisted the signal to engage the enemy to leeward. While the fleets were closing he sat in an arm-chair on his quarterdeck, for he was older than his sixty-four years, broken by long illness and only sustained by his dogged spirit. One of his captains, Savage of the "Hercules," also went into battle seated in an arm-chair beside the bulwarks of his ship. He was lame with gout and unable to stand or walk without help. When the firing began, and the ships were pa.s.sing each other amid a thunder of broadsides and a hail of shot and bullets, Captain Savage gravely raised his c.o.c.ked hat to salute each enemy as she ranged up abreast of the "Hercules." What would those old sailors have thought of the naval commander of to-day peeping through the slits in the steel walls of a conning tower? But it is only fair to ask also what they would have thought of sh.e.l.ls weighing half a ton bursting in fiery destruction.

The "Marlborough," approaching on a converging course, came to close quarters with the "Brave," the sixth ship in De Gra.s.se's line, and then, shifting her helm to bring her course parallel to that of the enemy, exchanged broadsides with the Frenchman. Ship after ship came into action in the same way. The speed was nearer three than four knots, and the lines some six miles long, so it was more than an hour before the leading English battleship was abreast of and engaged with the rearmost Frenchman. As ship pa.s.sed ship there was a thunder of artillery, a rattle of small arms. Then a brief lull till the guns of two more opponents bore on each other. But in this cannonade the English had the advantage of the heavy blows struck by their large-bore carronades at close range, and the fact that their gun-mountings enabled them to keep a pa.s.sing ship longer under fire than was possible for the French gunners. In De Gra.s.se's ships, crowded with troops, the slaughter was terrible. As the fight went on and the French ships came under the crushing fire of adversary after adversary, it was seen that it was only with difficulty the officers kept the men at the guns. In this first hour of the fight the French began to throw the dead overboard to clear their enc.u.mbered decks, and a strange horror was added to the scene, for shoals of sharks that had followed the fleets to pick up anything thrown overboard now swarmed around them, lashing the water into foam as they struggled for their human prey.

At length the leading English ship was abeam of the rearmost of De Gra.s.se's fleet. Over some six miles of sea the two battle lines extended, every ship ablaze with fire-flashes from her guns and with the dense smoke-clouds drifting around the English vessels and wrapping them in the fog of war. If the battle was now to be fought out on the old traditional method, the fleets would clear each other, wear and tack and repa.s.s each other in opposite directions with a second exchange of fire. But now came the event that made the battle of the Saints' Pa.s.sage epoch-making in naval history.

What precisely happened is wrapped in a fog of controversy as dense as the smoke-fog that enveloped Rodney's fleet at the decisive moment. One thing is certain. The old admiral suddenly changed all his plans, and executed a new manoeuvre with the signal he himself was disobeying--the order to engage to leeward--still flying from his flagship. The act was the sudden seizing of an unexpected opportunity. But some of the merit of the new departure was due to Rodney's right-hand man, his "Captain of the Fleet,"

Sir Charles Douglas. Douglas was one of those whose minds had been influenced by new theories on naval war, which were just then in the air.

In Britain a Scotch country gentleman, John Clerk, of Eldin, had been arguing for some time in pamphlets and ma.n.u.scripts circulated among naval officers against the formal methods that led to indecisive results. His paper plans for destroying an enemy were no doubt open to the criticism that they would work out beautifully if the enemy stuck to the old-fashioned ways and attempted no counter-stroke. But the essence of Clerk's theories was that parallel orders of battle meant only indecisive cannonading; that to crush an enemy one must break into his line, bring parts of it under a close fire, not on one side, but on both, and decide the fate of the ships thus cut off by superior numbers and superior gun power before the rest could come to their help. His plans might not work out with the mechanical exact.i.tude described in his writings, but they would tend to produce the close melee, where the best men and the steadiest fire would win, and after such an encounter there would not be merely a few masts and spars shot away, and a few holes to be plugged, but the beaten side would be minus a number of ships sunk, burned, or taken, and condemned to hopeless inferiority for the rest of the campaign. Clerk was not the only man who put forward these ideas. A French Jesuit professor of mathematics had worked out plans for securing local advantage of numbers in a sea-fight at close quarters; but while French naval officers laughed at naval battles worked out with a piece of chalk and a blackboard, British sailors were either themselves thinking out similar schemes or were beginning to think there might be something in the Scotch laird's diagrams.

It was at the critical moment when the two fleets lay side by side in parallel lines on opposite courses, wrapped in the battle-smoke, that Douglas, looking out through a gap in the war-cloud, saw that a sudden flaw of wind blowing steadily from the south-east was flattening the French sails against the masts and checking their speed. The same sudden change of wind was filling the English sails, and the masters were squaring the yards to it, while the Frenchmen to keep any way on their ships had to bring their bows partly round towards the English line. Between the "Glorieux,"

the ship immediately opposed to Rodney's flagship, the "Formidable," and the next Frenchman in the line, the "Diademe," a wide gap was opening up.

Douglas saw the chance offered to his admiral. Half the English fleet was ahead of the "Formidable," engaged with the rearward French ships. If the "Formidable" pushed through the gap, leading the rest of the line after her, the French rear would be cut off from the van and brought under a double fire at close quarters, and there would be a fair prospect of destroying it before De Gra.s.se could come back to its support. He rushed to Rodney's side. Moments were precious. He urged his plan in the briefest words. At first the old admiral rejected it. "No," he said, "I will not break my line."[15] Douglas insisted, and the two officers stepped to the opening in the bulwarks at the gangway and looked out. The "Formidable" was opposite the tempting gap in the French line. Rodney in a moment changed his mind, and told Douglas that he accepted his plan.