The Victorian Age, the Pax Britannica, Splendid Isolation, the Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets, existed because Britannia Ruled the Waves. Essentially, she ruled unchallenged. Her former antagonists, the Spanish and the Dutch, had no navies to speak of; Russia and the United States were deeply engaged in consolidating control over their own continental landmasses; the German Empire did not exist. Despite its shattering defeat by Nelson, the French Navy remained throughout the century the world’s second-largest. But France, after Bonaparte, faced decades of political instability and institutional change: empire, monarchy, republic, empire again, then, following crushing military defeat, another republic. Only briefly, at the height of the Second Empire, did France build ships which caused alarm in England. Even then, Great Britain’s naval supremacy remained unshaken.
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British Navy shrank. The number of ships fell drastically. In 1815, when the Emperor was dispatched to St. Helena, the British Fleet possessed 214 ships-of-the-line and 792 other vessels of all types. By 1817, there were 80 ships-of-the-line active and in reserve; in 1828 there were 68; in 1835, 50. The reduction in manpower was even more drastic. Of 145,000 sailors and marines in the wartime fleet, only 19,000 remained in 1820. Moments still came when the Fleet was summoned. In 1827, against the Turks at Navarino, a Royal Navy squadron fought its last battle in Nelsonian style: oak-hulled sailing ships forming a line of battle and British broadsides rolling out from gunports lining three-tiered decks. In 1855, the Queen went to war against the Tsar, but the Russian Navy remained in harbor, so the British Fleet was needed only to bombard fortresses and convoy troopships.
Unable to fight other major warships, British captains and seamen took on new duties. The Royal Navy became the policeman of the oceans. Pirates were attacked and exterminated along the Barbary Coast of North Africa, in the Aegean, the Red Sea, the Caribbean, the East Indies, and the coastal waters of China. British warships attempted to suppress the slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa, intercepting slave ships, and freeing their suffering cargo. To fulfill these duties, the distribution of the British Fleet dramatically changed. Once consisting primarily of ships-of-the-line concentrated in home waters and the Mediterranean, the Fleet had broken up into squadrons of smaller ships scattered around the globe. In 1848, twenty-five ships were assigned to the East India and China Station, twenty-seven served against the slavers off West Africa, fourteen patrolled the east coast of South America, ten were in the West Indies, and only thirty-five remained in home waters.
Manning these far-flung ships were dozens of captains, hundreds of officers, thousands of seamen, many of whom spent an entire career at sea without ever being in a battle. Individual ships saw action, and individual officers and seamen won medals—but often for heroism on land, as participants in one of the naval brigades landed on unfriendly coasts throughout the century. Most of the admirals who were to lead the Royal Navy into the twentieth century and the First World War were baptized by fire in colonial wars. Several were wounded or decorated: Lord Charles Beresford, speared in the hand in the Sudan; Arthur Wilson, fighting with his sword hilt and then with his fists, also in the Sudan, winning the Victoria Cross; John Jellicoe, shot in the chest and feared lost in the failure of the naval-brigade relief column during the siege of the Peking Legations. These men stepped out of the Victorian Royal Navy, when sea power exercised a wider influence on history than ever before or since. Going from ship to ship as they progressed in age and rank, they experienced the sea and learned to command. The ultimate lesson was constant: in the British Navy it was not ships but men who won.
A ship of war is an entity, a city, a kingdom. In the nineteenth-century Royal Navy, ruling despotically over each of these far-flung floating kingdoms, wielding power benevolently or otherwise as was his nature, stood a Royal Navy captain. No longer could he hang a man for mutiny, but he could do almost anything else. As Her Majesty’s ships went about their duties in the distant reaches of the globe—patrolling Oriental rivers, anchored in sleepy South Pacific harbors, steaming off sunbaked African coastlines—peculiarities appeared and eccentricities blossomed in the behavior of some of Her Majesty’s captains. Many were entirely harmless. Captain Houston Stewart of the three-decker Marlborough, flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet in the early 1860s, enjoyed fishing from the window of his stern cabin when the ship was at anchor. Required occasionally to leave his line, he tied it to a rail but returned eagerly every few minutes to see whether he had a catch. Admiral Kingcome, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Station during the same decade, delighted in beating the drum for night quarters himself. He strapped on the drum and away he went down the lower decks, bending double beneath the hammocks of the sleeping seamen.
On board ship, especially when far from the spyglass and signal flag of his admiral, the captain of a British warship had virtually unlimited authority. One captain, commanding a ship in West African waters, always took off his uniform to read his Bible and removed his cap and jacket when conducting divine service on deck for his crew. A British captain, he believed, could recognize no higher authority than himself. Another captain advanced Christmas Day to December 18 because the pork brought on board for Christmas dinner was “feeling the tropical heat.”1 The same captain once appointed one of his officers a bishop so that the new prelate could consecrate a patch of ground in which the captain wanted to bury a seaman. After performing this service, the new bishop was returned to the laity. Still another British captain, invited by the governor of the nearest British colony to dine on the Queen’s birthday fourteen days hence, declined on the ground that he would have a headache. Reported by the angry governor to his admiral, the captain blandly explained that “he had had a headache2 every day for six months and he did not see why he should be spared one on Her Majesty’s birthday.”
Captains assumed wide latitude in matters of dress. If the captain liked gold braid, he wore gold braid and all his officers wore gold braid. If the officers next went to a ship whose captain thought gold braid pretentious, all the embroidery came off. There was great variety in hats. One admiral wore a tall white top hat, another a white billycock hat. Eventually, these eccentric sartorial proclivities confronted a powerful opposing force. The Prince of Wales cared deeply about uniforms and he liked them properly worn. In 1880, even on home stations, naval officers were wearing practically whatever they liked. Under the prodding of the Prince, a committee was formed to meet three days a week in London until standards were set. The Prince, declaring that he could understand pictures better than words, demanded drawings. Drawings were made, choices discussed, and decisions reached. Thereafter, on and near the shores of England at least, officers wore uniforms which were, by the Prince’s pleasure, uniform.
Another perquisite of rank was the right to bring animals on board ship, either for nourishment or for companionship. One admiral who liked fresh milk brought two cows to sea. Officers frequently brought sheep and chickens. Some captains kept parrots, dogs, or cats in their cabins and some harbored larger and more exotic pets. Captain Marryat of the corvette Larne, in Burmese waters, owned a pet baboon named Jacko, who bit the crew and tore off buttons.
One of the most tolerant officers in Her Majesty’s Navy was Her Majesty’s second son, H.R.H. Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, a career officer. In 1870, when Prince Alfred commanded the wooden frigate Galatea, he permitted one of his officers, twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Lord Charles Beresford, to bring an elephant on board the ship in India. The elephant lived in a house built on the afterdeck and fed on branches of trees, bran, biscuits, and anything else that came his way. Lord Charles trained him to clew the mainsail by picking up a line and walking along the deck. The elephant avoided seasickness by balancing himself carefully, rolling to and fro with the motion of the ship. When the Galatea returned to England, the elephant was sent to the London Zoological Gardens, but not without difficulty; only Lord Charles could persuade the happy pachyderm to abandon his seagoing home.
Nine years later, when Prince Alfred had advanced in rank to admiral and was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, he agreed to a brown bear named Bruin as a pet for the midshipmen aboard his flagship. At sea, Bruin liked wrestling on the quarterdeck with the boys after supper, and when the ship moored in the Grand Harbor at Malta, Bruin swam ashore and walked down the main street, the Strada Reale. Bruin’s favorite trick, however, was to slip into the water when the fleet lay at anchor and swim up to the boats of another warship. Approaching stealthily, Bruin would reach out and lay one paw on the gunwale and another on the shoulder of the unsuspecting boatman. Bruin and his young masters, watching with binoculars and telescopes, enjoyed the reaction.
Bruin’s fate was a watery one. His berth was in one of the ship’s boats, hung above the edge of the deck out over the water. One evening, Bruin, disoriented, climbed out the wrong side of the boat and fell into the sea. The cry of “Bear overboard” was raised and the midshipmen were frantic. But neither Prince Alfred nor the captain could bring themselves to stop one of Her Majesty’s battleships to pick up a mere bear, and Bruin was left behind.
When peculiar behavior in a naval officer fermented into madness, the most common cause was isolation. After years on a foreign station, crowded into a tiny wardroom, officers often ate without speaking to each other. Drink, permitted on British warships to break down tensions and mitigate the effects of isolation, sometimes made things worse. A visitor once came aboard a ship in Bermuda and found every officer drunk in the wardroom. Two were suffering from delirium tremens; one was picking the bodies of imaginary rats from the floor with a stick. Aboard another ship, an engineer officer was confined in his cabin because he believed himself to be the ship’s boiler. All day long, he lay on his back, puffing vigorously, shouting that if he stopped he would burst. Still another case involved a gentle, retiring officer who went berserk. The ship’s chart house was padded and he was locked inside, but somehow the ship’s cat strayed within his reach and was torn limb from limb.
Captains, of course, were the most isolated of all. After years of being part of an Officers’ Mess, a man on becoming a captain was suddenly condemned to live and dine alone. He could modify his predicament by inviting his officers to dine with him or by speaking to them on deck, but it was expected on both sides that distance would be maintained.
One captain of a ship lost in the immensity of the South Pacific appeared one morning on the poop of his ship with his salmon rod in hand. To the horror of the crew, he began casting long and accurately at the first lieutenant standing below him on the quarterdeck. Another captain suddenly turned and shouted at the ship’s quartermaster to bring him a bucket because the commander, his second in command, made him sick. Officers afflicted by disagreeable captains had means of retaliation providing they proceeded with caution. If invited to dinner, they were free to decline. One captain, faced with refusals from his entire company of officers, countered by giving each a written order to come to dinner. The officers could not disobey this command and they came to his table, but refused to look at the captain, or to speak, or to eat the food which was placed before them.
Not all British captains were demented or foolish, of course. Most were respected, many were admired, and some learned to rule their floating kingdoms with near-Solomonic wisdom. There was, for example, the captain of a troopship engaged in ferrying soldiers, officers, and sometimes officers’ wives between England and India. On one voyage a dispute broke out among the ladies as to who should have the privilege of bathing first. The ship’s captain pondered and then solemnly declared that the oldest lady should have precedence. Thereafter, it is said, the younger ladies splashed happily while the more elderly female passengers gave up bathing for the remainder of the voyage.
Officers gave their orders to boatswain’s mates, whereupon these grizzled noncommissioned officers, themselves promoted up from the ranks, used a blend of shouts, curses, coaxings, and explanations to pass the orders to the men. Their usual tone was exasperation. “You’re a bloomin’ Portuguese army,3 you are,” one boatswain’s mate complained to his men. “I say to one of you beggars, go, and he comes, and to another, do this, and he sees me damned first.” Sir Percy Scott once overheard a boatswain’s mate explaining to a group of seamen how they were to behave when Queen Victoria presented them with medals at Windsor Castle. “Now do you ’ear there,”4 said the boatswain’s mate, “when you come opposite ’er Majesty you don’t go down on your knee. You stand up, take your ’at off, hold your ’and out, and ’er Majesty puts the medal in the palm. When you get it, don’t go examining it to see if it ’as got the proper name on it; walk on; if it’s not the right one, it will be put square afterwards.”
Years at sea taught most boatswain’s mates exactly how far they could go in dealing with the ship’s officers. One captain who took to sea a coop filled with chickens excoriated his boatswain’s mate in public because the birds and their pen were dirty. Whereupon the mate cleaned the pen, whitewashed the chickens, and blacked their legs and beaks. The chickens died and the captain fumed, but he was helpless.
For ordinary seamen, it was a harsh life in a Darwinian world; those who were not fit did not survive. Everything was done at the run to the insistent clamor of hoarse shouts. There was no privacy and little rest. Men stood four-hour watches, four on and four off. Seamen off duty slept, as in Nelson’s day, in hammocks slung over the guns. At night, flickering candles, hung in lanterns, threw shadows across the sleeping, swaying men and the polished, gleaming guns. In peacetime, there was far too little to do to occupy the time of the huge crews which had to be maintained on board in case of war. Idleness was dangerous and thus, over the centuries, evolved the practice of daily holystoning of the decks, the entire crew in rows on their knees rubbing the deck with a kind of sandstone until it shone like the floor of a London ballroom—until flying salt spray covered it again with gumminess which would be removed by holystoning again the following day.
The food, too, was cheerless; this had changed little since Trafalgar. Lime juice, a preventive against the dreaded scurvy, was served once a week, not to please the men but to keep them healthy. Water was drawn from casks where it had stood for months; what came out was often a foul-smelling, syrupy brew. The ration of rum, served on British ships since the days of Francis Drake, was halved in 1825 and then halved again in 1853. Salt beef and salt pork, preserved in brine, were drawn out in stiff slabs which had to be soaked for hours in fresh water before they could be cooked and eaten. As the century progressed, beef was preserved in tins; the sailors called it “bully beef” or “Fanny Adams”5 after an English girl who had mysteriously disappeared near a tinning factory. Biscuits, hard as stones and the abode of weevils, were a staple. On sailing ships, British seamen ate with their fingers; later, when knives and forks were issued, old admirals grumbled that the Navy was pandering to luxury which would undermine discipline.
Disciphne in the Royal Navy had always been stern. The great eighteenth-century admiral John Jervis, Earl St. Vincent, had decreed that shipboard discipline must rest on fear. In the Napoleonic era, harsh discipline was essential to harness and coerce seamen dragged aboard ships, cursing and kicking. The operation of the press gang, less conscription than kidnapping authorized by Parliament, was simple and violent: when a ship needed men, the captain sent a press gang ashore. They overpowered and captured as many civilians as were needed and carried them, subdued by violence or drink, back to the ship. Once aboard, there would be no escape for many years. They were kept in subjugation by the cat-o’-nine-tails, wielded by boatswain’s mates, a collection of “brutes who rejoiced6 in their muscular arms and were charmed with the sound of the heavy, dense blows which they dealt in sheer wantonness.”
The ultimate reaction to this ill-treatment, desertion, was perilous: a seaman caught in an attempt to desert was condemned to the dreaded penalty of “flogging around the fleet.” This meant that he would be tied to a capstan in a small boat which would proceed in stages between the anchored vessels of the fleet. Alongside each ship, the victim would receive twenty-five lashes of the cat-o’-nine-tails on his bare back, the time between ships being used to revive him by pouring wine down his throat. This ended before mid-century, and by the 1870s a captain’s right to order flogging was severely restricted by law, although floggings continued on more distant stations. It was not until 1879 that flogging was finally abolished in the Royal Navy and the last cat-o’-nine-tails permanently put away in a boatswain’s mate’s locker.
The cat was silenced, but leave was rare or granted grudgingly, and the impulse to desert remained strong. In 1865, when H.M.S. Sutlej, flagship of the British Pacific Squadron, put into San Francisco, a third of the crew deserted, taking the ship’s boats with them. Safely immune from British authority, these former sailors enjoyed insulting their former officers when they came on shore. Seamen given liberty who did return to their ships usually came back drunk and penniless. Conditions improved with the passage of time but even in 1890, the men of the cruiser Hawke were allowed on shore only once a month, and men with bad records only once in three months. There was a solution, found by captains willing to defy St. Vincent’s decree. One captain, following this course, had to deal with an excellent seaman who habitually returned late from leave. Summoning the man, the captain told him how valuable he was and instructed him to come to him personally and ask for forty-eight hours’ leave whenever he wanted it. The seaman was never late again.
A sailing ship’s most valuable men were those who went aloft. Three huge pine masts thrust up from the deck and were crossed at different levels by wooden yards from which as many as twenty canvas sails were hung and stretched. By changing the alignment of the yards and thus the angle of the sails to the wind, the ship could be made to sail in almost any direction. For the men who worked there, this interlocking web of wood, canvas, and rope made an extraordinary gymnasium in the sky. Men scampered through the rigging, sometimes running along the yards without holding on even though the ship was rolling wildly. Sometimes they fell, usually catching the yard or a line to save themselves. When a ship changed course, falling off before the wind, the heavy rolling caused the great yards to strain and shudder; the sails went slack and the huge sheets of canvas rolled and crackled like thunder. If a line parted, the violent backlash could kill anyone in the way. Topmen developed arms and hands as strong as a gorilla’s. Everyone who went aloft went barefoot, not only because the grip of the toes was essential, but so that shoes would not hurt the hands or heads of men below or alongside. Feet thus exposed became horny and callused, and most topmen could not wear boots without discomfort; indeed, they went ashore barefoot, with their boots slung around their necks for the sake of propriety. When winter came and Her Majesty’s ships remained at sea, men worked aloft in icy wind, sleet, and snow, dressed only in flannel vests and trousers with their heads, arms, ankles, and feet bare. When their work was done, they would swing down the lines, land on deck with catlike spring, and go below—to find a freezing gundeck awash in water, the galley fire out, and nothing but cold water and hard biscuits.
And yet despite flogging, poor food, no leave, and constant danger, the average seaman had immense pride in himself and the navy. One had only to see a competitive sail drill among the ships of the Mediterranean Fleet moored in Malta’s Grand Harbor to understand the spirit of the fleet. General sail drill was carried out every Monday morning. Crowds gathered along the yellow stone ramparts to watch the ships compete in making sail, shifting topsails, striking topgallant masts and upper yards, all against the clock.
The men who worked aloft had been picked for their quickness, agility, and courage and they had a fierce pride in their ability and their ship’s standing. The elite were the upper yard men, who attracted the eyes of the entire fleet; to be known as the smartest Royal Yard Man in the fleet was to reach a pinnacle of fame.
At one moment, the fleet would be silent and immobile, the men frozen on each deck. At the flagship’s signal, the fleet erupted into life. Men swarmed aloft, darting along the yards, shifting lines and moving sails with astonishing speed. Time was at stake, not life, and with the ship’s reputation to make, men took extraordinary risks so that for a while it was necessary after each drill to make the signal “Report number of killed7 and injured.” At fault were not the officers but the men themselves, who cared passionately about winning at these perilous but thrilling games. It was this same spirit which maintained the tradition that when a ship sailed for home from the Grand Harbor in Malta, a man would be standing erect on the top of each mast—main, mizzen, and fore. “Many a time8 have I seen these men, balanced more than 200 feet in the air, strip off their shirts and wave them,” recalled Lord Charles Beresford. In 1909, one of these old topmen wrote to Lord Charles about the sailing-ship navy of fifty and sixty years before: “I am doubtful9 if there are many men in the Navy today who would stand bolt upright upon the royal truck of a line-of-battle ship. I was one of those who did so. Perhaps a foolish practice. But in those days fear never came our way.”
Along with her officers, boatswain’s mates, and ordinary seamen, a great Royal Navy man-of-war in the nineteenth century was home to a small group of adolescent boys, the midshipmen. Until the great reforms of Jacky Fisher, these future officers were almost exclusively the sons of gentlemen. Not necessarily aristocrats—the dashing young earls and viscounts tended to go into the Brigade of Guards or the elite cavalry regiments of the army. The navy, with its long stretches of sea duty and service on foreign stations, seemed too far away from the attractions of living in England. When a boy bearing a title did go into the navy, he was likely to be a younger son. Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, became a career officer, eventually rising to the rank of admiral and command of the Mediterranean Fleet. King Edward VII’s second son, Prince George, was a career navy man until his elder brother died and he stepped forward as Prince of Wales and eventually became King George V. Most midshipmen, however, were of neither royal nor noble blood, but the offspring of the solid, conservative gentry of rural England. It was essential that a boy’s parents possess sufficient connections to have their son nominated by the First Lord of the Admiralty and sufficient money to pay the expenses of his schooling and training until he received an officer’s commission.
A prospective cadet had to be nominated by the First Lord before his thirteenth birthday. This achieved, he traveled to Portsmouth for a written and physical examination. Neither exam was onerous, particularly if the boy had some education. A little English, some French or Latin, a “satisfactory knowledge10 of the leading facts of Holy Scripture and English history, a certain amount of geography, and an elementary knowledge of arithmatic, algebra and geometry” were what was required. Lord Charles Beresford, second son of the Marquess of Waterford, signed his application and was asked if he always signed his middle name, “William,” with a single “1.”
Beresford paused only a second. “Only sometimes, sir,”11 he said. He passed.
Prince Louis of Battenberg, entering the Royal Navy at twelve, survived his physical by a different application of wit. Bothered by shortsightedness and knowing that his vision would be tested by being asked to read the time on the Naval Dockyard Tower clock, Battenberg carefully set his watch by the clock before going in to be examined. Just before the question was asked, he managed a furtive peek at his watch.
Not all candidates survived the hurdles. In a typical mid- to late-nineteenth-century year, of one hundred boys presenting themselves for examination at Portsmouth, sixty-four would pass and become Royal Naval Cadets. They were dispatched to H.M.S. Britannia, an old three-deck ship-of-the-line brought into the river Dart and permanently moored in 1863 just above the town of Dartmouth. The following year, the two-decker Hindustan was moored upstream of Britannia. Most of the masts and rigging were removed from both ships, a walkway connected them, and together they became a floating school for future officers of the Royal Navy.
New cadets joined the Britannia twice each year and settled in for two years of courses which included seamanship, navigation, mathamatics, and French (France remained the likely foe). It was a Spartan life of exercise and discipline. Britannia’s upper deck had been enclosed and converted into classrooms and officers’ quarters. Belowdecks, all the guns had been removed and the gundecks transformed into dormitories and messrooms for the cadets. The boys slept like ordinary seamen in hammocks slung close beneath the low-beamed ceilings. Each kept all his belongings in his sea chest, fitted with a mirror on the inside of the lid and a small washbasin which nestled among his clothing. The day began with a cold saltwater bath on deck and progressed through dressing, prayers, inspection, meals, classes, and exercise.
A single mast had been left in place on Britannia. Towering 120 feet above the deck, with safety nets stretched beneath, it was used to train cadets in sail drill; the boys could also climb it for fun whenever they liked. Before the end of his second term, each cadet was required to touch the truck, the round piece of wood at the top of the mast. This could only be done by shinnying up the last fifteen feet of bare pole. Every term, a few boys, dizzied by the height, fell into the nets; some were so badly injured that they had to be sent home for good.
Officially, discipline rested with the officers and consisted of confinement on bread and water or caning with trousers lowered. In fact, the older boys kept the younger in line. As late as 1893, Cadet (later Vice Admiral) K.G.B. Dewar considered himself “comparatively lucky12 in receiving only two really severe beatings whereas some of my contemporaries were kept in a state of constant terror by frequent thrashings.” This kind of bullying and beating of thirteen-year-old boys by fifteen-year-olds tended, Admiral Dewar noted dryly, to “suppress independence13 and initiative in our future naval officers.”
After two years, cadets who survived their courses, Britannia’s foremast, and the older boys left the school and went to sea as midshipmen. Here their home was the Gunroom, a tiny cabin on the lower gundeck next to the ordinary seamens’ quarters. They slung their hammocks just as they had done on the Britannia. Each boy got a pint of water every morning for washing. He opened his sea chest and put the water in his basin inside. In a heavy sea, water slopped over onto his clothing, but this was infinitely preferable to having it spill onto the spotless deck, an infraction which brought swift punishment. The midshipmen ate simply and sparingly, salt pork one day, salt beef the next, and many of them carried memories of pangs of hunger through the rest of their lives.
Discipline remained strict. Midshipmen could not be flogged; it was thought too degrading for one of Her Majesty’s future officers to bear the stripes of the cat. They could be ordered to the top of the mast as punishment (“Masthead for the midshipmen,14 the cat for the men” was a navy saying). Cadet John Jellicoe, future Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, did not mind; he enjoyed the view, and once that grew boring he pulled out a book. Harsher discipline lay in the hands of the older midshipmen. Younger midshipmen who misbehaved or somehow displeased their seniors were subject to Gunroom trials. If found guilty, they could be bent over the Gunroom table and beaten with a dirk scabbard. On occasion, midshipmen, bullied or beaten beyond endurance, rose in revolt. In 1905, on board the cruiser Kent, a desperate young midshipman fired a revolver at the senior midshipman. The tormentor must have opened his mouth very wide in surprise at this behavior, because the bullet passed through both of his cheeks without touching his teeth.
The midshipmen’s purpose at sea was learning to sail and fight a ship. Boys soon discovered that climbing the mast of a ship at sea was quite different from climbing the mast of the stationary Britannia. High in the rigging, a midshipman looked down between his feet at the deck pitching and rolling, the sea hissing and seething. There were no safety nets. Sir Percy Scott, who survived to become an admiral, vividly recalled this part of a midshipman’s training: “On a dark night,15 with the ship rolling, [a midshipman] was awakened from his slumbers by a scream, ‘Topmen of the watch in royals!’ In a pouring rain squall, he had to feel his way aloft to a yard 130 feet above the deck.... There the sail was aback, wet and stiff as a board, the clewlines fouled. But the sail had to be furled.... Fine training for a boy,” said Scott, placidly adding: “although it cost a good many lives.”
Down from the yards, during the long nights at sea, midshipmen made up their own games. Cockroaches were trapped, a spot of melted candle wax was dripped on their backs, and a piece of spun yarn planted in the wax. The yarn was lighted and the insects released; if they could be made to go in the same direction, it became a race. (On one ship, the cockroach escaped, its yarn still burning, and set the ship on fire.) Maggots, coaxed from bad meat, were saved for maggot derbies. The course was the Gunroom table, lined with books to define the track. Each maggot owner was allowed to touch his entry on the tail with a pencil to spur it on or to prevent it from climbing the books or reversing course. Sometimes, when two maggots collided, one climbed on the back of the other and rode piggyback, confusing the outcome.
It was a mixture of danger, excitement, fear, and boredom, and in later life most midshipmen looked back with fond memories on their early years aboard sailing ships. Part of the reason was the ship and the sea, and part was the friendship they felt for each other and the companionship they found among the older men. On a sailing ship, the young midshipmen lived close to the ordinary seamen, working side by side aloft in the rigging, barefooted as the men had taught them. When they were hungry, they chewed tobacco because the men advised that this would dull the pangs. This juxtaposition of ordinary seamen and future officers bred respect on both sides: the men were quicker to obey an officer who knew what it was to reef a sail in the teeth of the wind; the officers were more effective in command because they understood and admired the stuff of which British seamen were made.
Sir Percy Scott, the gunnery Jeremiah of the Royal Navy, looked back warmly on “those old sailing days16 in fine weather” and on the soft nights on the warm trade winds when “in the evening17 the men always sang and it was fine to hear a chorus of eight hundred men and boys. We midshipmen knew all the men’s songs...”
Before 1851, the British ship-of-the-line was built as she had been for centuries: a three-deck, wooden sailing vessel propelled by the wind, armed with tiers of smoothbore cannon firing solid round cannonballs. In that year, the first major change in this traditional construction occurred. A British three-decker was equipped with a steam engine deep inside her oaken hull. A funnel was raised above her decks, a propeller shaft protruded through her stern, and H.M.S. Sans Pareil could go where she wished, with or without the wind. By 1858, the British Navy had built or converted thirty-two steam-fitted ships-of-the-line. The French Navy, spurred by the ambitious Emperor Napoleon III, followed the same course and by the end of that year also possessed thirty-two propeller ships-of-the-line. It was not this temporary equality, however, that brought momentary jeopardy to Britain’s otherwise serene domination of the oceans.
On March 4, 1858, in Toulon, the French Navy laid the keel of the frigate La Gloire, the world’s first oceangoing ironclad. La Gloire was not truly an iron ship; rather, she was a wooden-hulled frigate with iron plates bolted to her timber sides above the waterline. The plates were a response to new rifled guns which, tests had proved, could hurl a solid shot through the oaken sides of wooden ships. Convinced that his ironclad, protected by her heavy metal shielding, would be able to overwhelm any number of conventional ships, Dupuy de Lôme, her designer, proclaimed that La Gloire amidst a fleet of wooden vessels would be like a lion amidst a flock of sheep.
Britain refused to believe that her wooden walls were crumbling. With splendid British disdain, the Lords of the Admiralty reacted to this French impertinence by ordering another, bigger three-decker of 131 guns. H.M.S. Victoria, launched in 1859, was a larger edition of Nelson’s Victory, built exactly a century before. Like Victory, Victoria had a solid hull of oak, and dumpy, muzzle-loading cannon, poking out through gunports as British warships had been designed since the time of Sir Francis Drake.
Two years after learning the details of La Gloire, the Lords of the Admiralty thought better. Tradition was important, but the new French warship must not be allowed to threaten British naval supremacy. They concluded that British counterparts were necessary and in December 1860, H.M.S. Warrior, Britain’s first seagoing ironclad, was launched. She was a hybrid vessel. Forty of her guns were old-fashioned muzzle-loaders, fourteen were new breech-loaders. Her hull was made of oak, but iron plates four and a half inches thick were bolted to her sides. She was a full-rigged sailing ship, but the enormous extra weight of her iron plates made her slow and cumbersome under sail, so she was equipped with a powerful steam engine which could drive her at fourteen knots.
Within a year of Warrior’s launching, confirmation of De Lôme’s metaphor of the lion among the sheep came from across the Atlantic. Since the outbreak of the American Civil War, the superior Union Navy had blockaded Confederate ports. Squadrons of wooden sailing ships cruised in Chesapeake Bay and off Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans, blocking all trade. Southern cotton could not reach Europe, and crucial war materials, paid for by the cotton, could not return. Desperate to break the blockade and failing to persuade Britain or France to sell an ironclad, the Confederate Navy decided to make one for itself. When the Norfolk Navy Yard fell to the South upon Virginia’s secession from the Union, the 4,636-ton frigate Merrimack had been captured. Her masts and upper decks were stripped down to the lowest deck on the waterline. Here a casement of heavy armor was installed to protect a battery of ten guns, four nine-inchers on each side and a pivoting seven-inch gun on the bow and the stern. Jutting from her bow was a twenty-four-foot ram. The vessel was rechristened C.S.S. Virginia; her mission was to attack the Union frigates blockading Norfolk.
This unusual vessel had only a single day of glory. On the morning of March 8, 1862, the Merrimack/Virginia steamed out of Norfolk into Hampton Roads, her single smokestack belching black smoke. With Union shells bouncing off her armor, she made straight for the Union sloop Cumberland, her own bow gun mowing down the men on the Cumberland’s deck. Merrimack rammed Cumberland in her starboard bow, wrenching off her own ram but opening a giant hole in the Union ship. Cumberland listed and, as she began to fill, the angle permitted her to fire three broadsides at point-blank range at her oddly shaped assailant. Merrimack was unharmed. As the Cumberland sank, Merrimack turned and made for the steam frigate Congress. Her guns set the Union ship ablaze. Two other Union frigates, maneuvering to engage the Confederate vessel, went aground. At the end of the day, the Merrimack withdrew, preparing to return and complete the slaughter the following day.
That evening, another, equally strange vessel appeared in Hampton Roads. The U.S.S. Monitor had been built in response to the Merrimack; over the winter, the North, aware of the work on the Merrimack, had created a smaller ironclad to engage her. Monitor was 987 tons and had only two guns, but they were eleven-inch cannon set in a revolving turret on the middle of her deck. Laid down in New York City in October 1861, she was launched at the end of January and towed to Chesapeake Bay. Few had much faith in her. When she was launched, her officers refused to stand on her deck, believing that she might go straight to the bottom. Only her designer, John Ericsson, remained on board, waving his hat triumphantly as she floated on the New York tide.
On the morning of March 9, when Merrimack reappeared, Monitor was waiting. The ships fought for two hours, Monitor enjoying the advantage of her revolving turret, not needing to maneuver to bring her guns to bear. Neither ship seriously damaged the other, but after two hours Monitor ran out of ammunition and withdrew to replenish. Merrimack then turned her attention to the wooden Union frigate Minnesota. In desperation, the Minnesota loosed a broadside from two ten-inch guns, fourteen nine-inch, and seven eight-inch. The shells hit Merrimack and bounced off. Merrimack then set Minnesota on fire. At this point, the Monitor returned. The Merrimack aimed at her opponent’s armored pilot house, hit the small shelter with a shell, and wounded Monitor’s captain by driving iron splinters into his eyes. Both ships retreated and the engagement was not renewed. The battle was a draw: Merrimack had routed the Union squadron off Norfolk but she could not steam up the bay to the Potomac to bombard Washington as long as Monitor was there. Neither was she sufficiently seaworthy to go out and attack other blockading Union flotillas in the open ocean.
In fact, both ships were of limited use. Neither had the ability to go to sea or remain there for weeks. In the rough waters of the open sea, Monitor would have become a floating coffin. She had come close to sinking twice under tow from New York to Hampton Roads; she did eventually sink under tow off Cape Hatteras. But the battle between these two awkward ships did have one far-reaching result: it proved beyond doubt the advantage of an iron hull over a wooden one.
The Royal Navy’s response was measured. More ironclads were ordered, but until 1866 wooden hulls were laid down as well. In 1861 and 1862, the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet was the old three-decker wooden line-of-battle ship Marlborough, carrying 121 guns. A decade later, Midshipman John Jellicoe joined Newcastle, a full-rigged, four-thousand-ton wooden-hulled frigate. As part of the Royal Navy’s Flying Squadron, available for rapid deployment to troubled areas, she sailed in company with four similar wooden frigates and one frigate whose wooden hull was covered with iron plates. A number of older wooden ships underwent conversions: they were brought into the yard to have armor plates bolted to their sides. The older ships often took less than kindly to this tampering; the hull of the converted wooden battleship Orion was so abused that her seams often cracked open and squirted jets of water in heavy weather.
The trend was to iron, and with it from sail to steam. As wooden hulls were sheathed in iron plates, vessels became heavier and the ratio of sail area to the weight of the ship declined. At first, in an effort to push these ponderous hulls through the water, designers added more and taller masts; the ten-thousand-ton ironclads Agincourt, Minotaur, and Northumberland, laid down in 1861, each had five towering masts. This design had limits; one was tragically exceeded in September 1870 when H.M.S. Captain, a full-rigged armored ship with colossal masts and clouds of sail, heeled over in a Channel storm. Unable to right herself because of her top-heavy construction, she capsized and went down, taking with her all but eighteen of her five-hundred-man crew.
The lesson of the Captain—that iron ships required steam propulsion—was one that most British captains were reluctant to grasp. Sailing ships had been fitted with steam engines since well before the Crimean War. The majestic Marlborough and the more modern Victoria both had steam engines tucked away on a lower gundeck; when the engines were put in use, slender funnels were raised between the masts. To their captains, however, the use of an engine for entering and leaving harbor or even in an emergency seemed disgraceful. Marlborough was famous throughout the fleet for her elegance and efficiency; this meant the smartness and precision with which her seamen could manage her sails. In 1859, when the ironclad Warrior was being constructed, Captain Alston’s Manual of Seamanship, published for midshipmen, assigned steam propulsion its proper subordinate place: “Although we are living18 in what may be termed the steam era and our Navy is a steam navy, I have in this work wholly excluded the consideration of steam power, as, owing to the great cost of coal and the impossibility of providing stowage for it except to a limited extent, the application of steam power for ordinary purposes must be strictly auxiliary and subordinate and its employment on general service the exception rather than the rule.”
It was not, of course, the price of coal that kept the engines silent. In those days a man-of-war under sail looked like a gigantic yacht, scrupulously clean, with no sounds other than the creak of timbers, the sighing of the wind in the rigging, and the shouts of the boatswain’s mates. The eye caught the curve of the sails against the blue sky.
In 1865 young Lord Charles Beresford went aboard the frigate Tribune, commanded by Captain Lord Gillford. Lord Gillford prided himself on the speed of his ship under sail, and nothing could persuade him to employ his steam engine. Indeed, Lord Gillford refused to shorten sail in heavy weather and ordered that no sail should ever be taken in without his personal permission. One night in a storm, Beresford went down to the captain’s cabin to ask permission to take in one topsail. The ship was heeling over at an alarming angle. The captain stuck one bare foot out of his bed and put it against the side of the ship. “I don’t feel any water19 here yet,” he declared and sent Beresford back on deck. The next minute the sail blew away.
Lord Gillford’s passion was shared by most of his colleagues. As late as 1874, the Royal Navy Flying Squadron proceeded everywhere under sail. Newcastle, Jellicoe’s ship, was fitted with an engine, but the whole emphasis of training on the ship was placed on sail drill. Occasionally, an elderly captain simply forgot about his ship’s engine. One such veteran, entering a harbor under sail and steam, ordered the sails struck and the anchor dropped. To his amazement, the ship continued forward, snapping the anchor cable. Moments before the ship ran aground, the captain was reminded that he had forgotten to order the engines stopped. “Bless me, I forgot20 we had engines,” he replied.
Well into the 1880s, British warships continued to be rigged with masts and sails. Inflexible, Captain John Fisher’s first command, had many features of a modern warship. She was made of solid iron and she carried massive eighty-ton guns in twin turrets. But she also boasted tall masts, yards, and sails. Officially, the reason was that steam engines might break down and that ships of war must always have an alternative means of locomotion. But the real reason was that officers and men alike hated engines and loved sails. “I did not like the Defence.21 I thought her a dreadful ship. After the immaculate decks, the glittering perfection, the spirit and fire and pride of the Marlborough, I was condemned to a slovenly, unhandy tin kettle.” Thus did Lord Charles Beresford react to his transfer from the proud three-decker to a new steam-driven ironclad. Everyone hated the black smoke pouring out of the funnels, dirtying the masts and yards and sooting the white, holystoned decks. Even worse was the process of coaling. As sacks of coal were brought on board and stowed below, a fine black dust spread everywhere, covering sails and decks, officers and men.
Nevertheless, by the end of the eighties, sails were mostly gone. In 1887, Captain Penrose Fitzgerald, himself a splendid sailing-ship captain, called on his colleagues to face facts: “The retention of masts and sails22 in men of war diverts so much attention and energy and resources of both officers and men from the real work of their profession and from the study of modern naval warfare.... Evolutions aloft are so attractive and so showy and there is so much swagger about them... that we seem to have lost sight of the fact that... [they] have nothing to do with the fighting efficiency of a ship in the present day.” In 1886, Colossus, the first battleship built of steel instead of iron, was commissioned at Portsmouth. Colossus was also the first British battleship to have electric lights throughout. Soon the hybrid battleships with their eccentric distributions of modern guns, their low freeboard, side-by-side funnels, and bulky, pagodalike structure were gone. When the Naval Defence Act of 1889 passed Parliament, the navy was authorized to build eight modern steel battleships, weighing over fourteen thousand tons and capable of more than sixteen knots. With these ships of the Royal Sovereign class came the announcement of the Two Power Standard. The “cardinal... policy of this country23 is that our Fleet should be equal to the combination of the next two strongest navies in Europe,” declared the First Lord in March 1889. The transformation was extraordinarily rapid. Every captain commanding a great steel battleship at the beginning of the twentieth century had trained in the Old Navy of masts and sails. None would dispute the retired sailor who looked back on those days and said, “No doubt the present fleet24 far excels the old wooden walls, but those old wooden walls made sailors.”
In spite of its traditions of gallantry and seamanship, the nineteenth-century Royal Navy was unready for war. Responsibility for this lay at the top. Weapons and tactics in naval warfare were changing rapidly, but many senior officers preferred not to notice. They were assigned to ships, they served in them, eventually they commanded them, without ever giving a serious thought to the design of their vessels, their fighting efficiency, or their tactical employment in battle. Anything new was suspicious and potentially dangerous. By getting out of step, one might make a mistake; by remaining in step, one eventually reached the top. Midshipmen became lieutenants, lieutenants became commanders, then captains, then admirals, all in stately procession, no one making a fuss, each waiting placidly in line for his seniors to retire so that he could succeed.
One problem was the Nelsonian tradition. Nelson had achieved absolute victory, Nelson was a naval legend. Therefore, Nelson’s way was the only way. Nelson had ordered his captains to lay alongside the enemy; therefore, even though modern guns could reach out to far greater distances, British captains still dreamed of closing to point-blank range. No matter that Nelson throughout his career had been a practitioner of boldness and innovation. His words had been graven in stone, his tactics hardened into glorious tradition. To make matters worse, officers who had fought under Nelson were still around. Any junior innovator thinking of proposing change had to deal not simply with hoary tradition, but with the bleak eye of the old admiral pacing the quarterdeck.
Another problem was the human material. The brightest boys in England did not instinctively become navy midshipmen. Nepotism was the rule as fathers steered their sons, and uncles their nephews, into the navy; the result was a “self-perpetuating...25 semi-aristocratic yacht club.” This tradition ensured good breeding and solid courage, but not necessarily vision. As noted, even among the aristocracy and the gentry, the Royal Navy did not often attract the most intellectually gifted; there were many ways to spend one’s life more appealing than months on a rolling deck. As the peacetime years stretched on, there was little incentive to weed out dullards and incompetents, most of whom had friends at the Admiralty, or in Parliament, or even at Court.
When bright young men did come into the navy, they had few opportunities to learn and nowhere to take their ideas. There was neither a naval college to instruct and stimulate nor a naval staff to filter and promote new suggestions and theories. The only school was the sea. Once in a while, a cry of protest was heard from the ranks. In 1878, Macmillan’s magazine published an accusing article by a serving junior officer: “I call the whole system26 of our naval education utterly faulty.... I say that we, the Navy’s youth, are in some professional matters most deplorably ignorant, and the day will come when we, and England, will wake up to the fact with a start. It sounds impossible, inconceivable, that it is only a privileged few who are allowed to make a study of gunnery... only a privileged few who are initiated into the mysteries of torpedos; only a privileged few who are taught... surveying and navigation; not even a privileged few who are taught the science of steam; and yet all this is so!”
The article was signed “A Naval Nobody.” Had it not been published under a cloak of anonymity, it might have ruined the career of its author, Lieutenant John Jellicoe, future Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet in the First World War.
The Admiralty and most senior officers looked upon any expression of ideas from junior officers as impertinence. On one occasion when a good idea had been forwarded to the Admiralty, a Sea Lord scribbled across the paper: “On what authority27 does this lieutenant put forward such a proposal?” This, as many young officers saw it, was the crux: the old sea dogs saw any questioning of the old ways as a challenge to authority. It flew in the face of the oldest law of the sea: absolute obedience to orders. From a boy’s first day on the Britannia the first principle had been obedience. This was true not only in the 1860s but in the 1890s. “As a midshipman,28 I was often told that it was not my duty to think but only to obey,” wrote Vice Admiral K.G.B. Dewar of his years as a cadet and midshipman in the middle nineties. No matter that Nelson himself had repeatedly disobeyed orders, that one of the most glorious moments in British naval history had been when Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye at Copenhagen and claimed that he did not see the signal to withdraw. Rigid obedience stifled initiative and even obliterated common sense. When in the spring of 1893, junior officers were compelled blindly to obey a superior even though it was clear that disaster would follow, H.M.S. Camperdown rammed H.M.S. Victoria.
Vice Admiral Sir George Tyron, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, was regarded as a man who one day would be First Sea Lord. A brilliant officer and an outstanding seaman, Tyron also possessed a mathematical mind which he applied in devising ever more intricate and daring maneuvers for his ships to perform. He delighted in changing formations from column in line to column abreast and back again, setting his ships on seemingly irretrievable courses, then saving them from collision with a signal from his flagship at the last possible minute. If these novel and spectacular maneuvers, intricate as a quadrille, astonished and frightened his captains, so much the better. It was Tyron’s worry that Royal Navy captains would lose their edge in peacetime; his complicated naval ballets were designed to keep them on their mettle. Nor did Tyron’s officers dare to question his orders. The Admiral was an overbearing man and an iron disciplinarian; besides, he had always been right. No matter how baffled his captains were by Tyron’s mysterious orders, everything always seemed to come out splendidly. Even Tyron’s second in command, Rear Admiral A. H. Markham, admitted that he rarely comprehended Tyron’s ingenious evolutions.
In June 1893, Tyron took the fleet, consisting of eight battleships and five cruisers, to the eastern Mediterranean. Tyron flew his flag in H.M.S. Victoria and Markham flew his in H.M.S. Camper-down. On June 23 the fleet, which was anchored off Beirut, weighed anchor and went to sea for exercises. It was a bright sunny day, with clear visibility and a calm sea. By mid-afternoon, the ships were steaming in two columns, 1,200 yards apart. At two-twenty P.M. Tyron hoisted a signal for the next maneuver: the vessels were to change formation, passing through each other’s columns by turning inward towards each other. Immediately, there were questions throughout the fleet. With the ships steaming at nine knots only 1,200 yards apart and the turning radius of some of the ships at that speed as much as 1,600 yards, the margin of safety seemed nonexistent. Captain Gerard Noel of the battleship Nile, immediately astern of Tyron, said: “I thought we had taken it29 [the signal] wrong.” He asked for a repeat, which was given. “I still thought there was something wrong,” he said later.
At three thirty-seven P.M., Tyron signaled that his command was to be executed: “Second division alter course30 in succession 16 points to starboard” and “First division alter course in succession 16 points to port.” Captain Arthur Moore of the battleship Dreadnought, immediately behind Victoria and Nile, told his officers: “Now we shall see something31 interesting.” He meant that although the situation seemed perilous and he couldn’t understand it, he assumed that the audacious Tyron had some trick up his sleeve. On board the flagship Victoria her captain, Maurice Bourke, standing next to the Admiral, was uneasy. He knew that the maneuver would take his ship very close to Camperdown. To indicate his fears, he had already loudly asked a midshipman on the bridge to sing out the distance to the Camperdown. But when his own second in command, Victoria’s commander, urged him to speak to the Admiral, Bourke angrily told him to be silent. To question Tyron, one needed a braver man than Bourke.
On Camperdown, Admiral Markham could have issued orders which would have saved the situation. Markham was a competent officer and later behaved heroically on an expedition to the Arctic. But he was outweighed not only in rank, but in experience of seamanship. His first reaction when Tyron’s original signal was reported to him was “It’s impossible. It’s an impossible maneuver.” He asked the admiral to confirm the order. Instead, Victoria signaled impatiently, “What are you waiting for?” This was a public rebuke, witnessed by the entire fleet, which Markham could not ignore. Along with Victoria, Camperdown put her helm over and the two ships headed for each other, their heavy rams gliding beneath the water like giant knife blades.
It became obvious what was going to happen. “We shall be very close32 to that ship, sir,” Bourke forced himself to say. Tyron stood frozen in silence, his eyes on the approaching Camperdown. “May I go astern33 with the port engine?” asked Bourke. Tyron remained silent and turned to look at the ships behind him. “May I go astern full speed with the port screw?” appealed Bourke. Tyron turned to look again at the Camperdown, now only 450 yards away. “Yes,” he finally said. Bourke then cried, “Full astern both engines!” and followed immediately with “Close all water-tight doors!” Both orders had already been given on the Camperdown.
Tyron was as convinced of his own infallibility as his officers were; perhaps he simply thought that his ships could not collide. As Camperdown’s ram struck Victoria on her starboard bow, the Admiral was heard to murmur, “It’s all my fault.”34 Both ships were still making five or six knots, and the impact of the blow forced Victoria seventy feet sideways in the water. She was mortally wounded: Camperdown’s ram, twelve feet beneath the water, had penetrated nine feet into Victoria’s innards. With both ships still moving, Camperdown’s ram, like a giant can opener, tore a wider gap as it wrenched free. When the ships came apart, the flagship had a hole nearly thirty feet across below the waterline through which water rushed into the ship. Most of the watertight doors were open on that hot Mediterranean afternoon and the command to close them had come too late. Victoria began to sink by the bow and heel over to starboard. Soon, the foredeck was awash and the fore turret rose like a steel island from the sea. Twelve minutes after the collision, the battleship rolled over and went down, bow first. Of a crew of almost seven hundred officers and men, 358 went down with the ship. Tyron went with them. One survivor was the Victoria’s second in command, Commander John Jellicoe, who had spent the day in bed with a fever of 103 degrees. On feeling the impact, Jellicoe had gone to the bridge and from there, down the side into the water.
Twenty-two of the ship’s fifty-one officers were drowned along with the admiral. The other twenty-nine were court-martialed, along with Rear Admiral Markham. All were acquitted, although Markham’s career ceased to prosper. The grounds of his acquittal were that “it would be fatal35 to the best interests of the service to say that he was to blame for carrying out the orders of the Commander-in-Chief present in person.”
In the years before the turn of the century, the Mediterranean Fleet, the cream of the navy, reached a peak of Victorian splendor. From its base in the Grand Harbor at Valletta, Malta, the fleet made seasonal cruises to the different shores of the inland sea. On the coast of Spain and the Riveria, in the ports of Italy and Greece and the exotic harbors of the Near East and North Africa, the great ships would silently appear from over the horizon to manifest the majesty and power of England. Anchored in rows, hulls black, superstructures a dazzling white, funnels buff yellow, flags flying stiffly in harbor breezes, boats plying back and forth, they made a colorful sight. Gold-encrusted admirals came ashore to call on local potentates and dignitaries, officers to attend balls, play polo, or hunt snipe and woodcock. Fierce competition in sail drill gave way to equally passionate competition between ships in boat races at fleet regattas or timed coaling contests. In 1880, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Frederick Beauchamp Seymour, led his officers through such a hectic round of balls, teas, receptions, polo, and other sports that he was known as “The Swell of the Ocean.”36
The fiercest competition of all was in polishing the ships. Every metal surface in the Mediterranean Fleet blazed like the sun. Battleship and cruiser crews devoted enormous energy to burnishing the great guns. Massive armored watertight doors were taken off their hinges and filed and rubbed until they gleamed—and, incidentally, were no longer watertight. On some ships, even the little ring bolts on deck were polished and fitted with little flannel nightcaps to protect them from salt air between inspections.
This cult of brightwork originated in the need to keep the men busy. When sails gave way to steam, the time given to tending the rigging, furling and mending sails, straightening and coiling ropes was given instead to polishing. Like holystoning, which continued on the wooden decks of steel ships, it was absurd; the process made men’s hands and clothes filthy with metal polish and as soon as salt spray hit the gleaming metal, copper turned green again and brass blue. In the early nineties, as the last sailing ironclads were replaced by modern battleships without masts, the paint-and-brightwork cult reached a peak. A sparkling ship reflected well on the captain and his second in command, the commander, and commanders spent large sums out of their private pockets, often far more than they could afford. “It was customary,”37 wrote Sir Percy Scott, “for a Commander to spend half his pay in buying paint to adorn Her Majesty’s ships as it was the only road to promotion.”
Appearances were often deceiving. “When I went to sea38 in 1895,” wrote Vice Admiral K.G.B. Dewar, “snowy, white decks, enamel paint, shining brasswork, and an air of spic and span smartness became the criteria by which ships were judged. In my first ship [the cruiser] Hawke, scrubbing, painting, and polishing absorbed an enormous amount of time and energy.... The basins on the Gunroom bathroom had to be polished till they shone like mirrors, the doors being locked to prevent them being used.... Thus, on a sunny Mediterranean day, the Hawke glistened and sparkled on the waters of that ancient sea, but she was infested with rats which contaminated the food... ran over the hammocks and swarmed into the Gunroom at night. No attempt was made to get rid of them, beyond the dirks of the midshipmen accurately employed.”
One aspect of shipboard life which no one worried much about was gunnery; the few officers who did worry were ridiculed as fanatics. As one former officer explained: “Had anyone suggested39 that fighting efficiency lay in knowing how to shoot the guns and not polishing them, he would have been looked at as a lunatic and treated accordingly.” The most persuasive reason was that firing the guns, like using the steam engine on sailing ships, spread dirt and grime. “It was no wonder40 the guns were not fired if it could be avoided,” wrote Sir Percy Scott, acidly, “for the powder then used had a most deleterious effect on the paintwork and one Commander who had his whole ship enameled told me that it cost him £100 to repaint her after target practice.”
Gunnery could not be wholly avoided as Admiralty orders decreed that target practice be held at least once every three months. “No one except the Gunnery Lieutenant41 took much interest in the results,” recalled Admiral Sir Reginald Tyrwhitt. “Polo and pony racing were much more important than gun drill.” Nevertheless, the ammunition had to be disposed of. On the designated day, the flagship hoisted the signal: “Spread for target practice,42 expend a quarter’s ammunition and rejoin the fleet.” Ships then steamed off in all directions and did what they liked. Many simply loaded the guns and pumped three months’ allowance of ammunition at the horizon. A few ships quietly dumped the shells overboard. There was little risk; admirals understood the nasty way that gun smoke dirtied a ship. Indeed, when flagships engaged in target practice, their admirals often remained ashore to escape the din.
The fleet’s attitude towards gunnery and the range at which ships fired both were legacies of Nelson’s day. On board H.M.S. Marlborough, the Mediterranean Fleet flagship of the 1860s, “it was considered43 that anyone could fire a gun and that the whole credit of successful gunnery depended upon the seamanship of the sailors who brought the ship into the requisite position,” reported Lord Charles Beresford, who had been a Marlborough midshipman. The optimum position was close range; if possible, alongside. “We used to practice44 firing at a cliff in Malta Harbor at a range of a hundred yards,” Beresford recalled. After practice, he would be sent ashore to collect the used cannonballs and bring them back to the ship.
A decade later, Midshipman John Jellicoe, on board the frigate Newcastle, found that practice ranges still had not risen to much over a thousand yards. “Gunners looked along the barrels45 of their guns and fired at what they saw in a way which had not changed since Nelson’s day,” he said. Technically, the gunners did not have a choice, as no system of controlling long-range firing had been developed. In fact, it seemed, no such system was really desired in the British Navy. Ships were expected to fight at close range; close action was more decisive and better suited to British pluck. Once British captains had brought their ships within close range, their gun crews would pour shell into their enemies with such élan that they would either surrender or be destroyed. Long-range firing would ignore these traditional and successful tactics.
There were, of course, objections to this revered naval dogma, some based on historical fact. In the War of 1812, only eight years after the death of the great Nelson, British pluck had not been enough to win in the face of superior gunnery emanating from a supposedly negligible foe, the Americans. Within a few months of the outbreak of war, three veteran British frigates were humiliatingly defeated by hard-hitting American ships in single-ship actions. The defeats were not hard to explain: the American ships were newer, bigger, and better manned than the weather-beaten, foul-bottomed Royal Navy ships. More important, the American crews served their guns more efficiently. These actions, which in America created a new public interest and pride in the young United States Navy, horrified the British Admiralty and public. Powerful British flotillas sailed across the Atlantic and stifled the upstart Americans by weight of numbers.
Beyond facts, there was logic: suppose an enemy admiral irritatingly refused to oblige the British naval tradition of close action. Suppose he perversely trained his own gunners to shoot accurately at six thousand or seven thousand yards. Then the British fleet might all be sunk and British sailors could exercise their pluck only by swimming about in the sea. This was the nightmare of one British naval officer who crusaded all of his life for accurate long-range gunnery. Percy Scott was a short, round-faced boy who entered the navy in 1866 and two years later arrived as a midshipman on board the fifty-gun frigate Forte. The Forte’s commander was a jolly soul, kind to his midshipmen and deeply concerned about appearances. “He gave us midshipmen46 plenty of boat sailing, took us on shore to play cricket, and encouraged sport of every kind,” Scott recalled. “He made us dress properly and in appearance set us a fine example. He took a long time over his toilet, but when he did emerge from his cabin it was a beautiful sight, though he might have worn a few less rings on his fingers.” The commander’s ship was to be as beautiful as his person. The Forte was “absolutely transformed.47 All the blacking was scraped off the masts and spars and canary yellow was substituted. The quarter deck was adorned with carving and gilt, the coamings of the hatchways were all faced with satin wood, the gun carriages were French-polished, and the shot were painted blue with a gold band around them and white top. Of course, we could not have got these shot into the guns had we wanted to fight, but that was nothing....”
In 1881, the British Navy was called upon to fight. Scott was present at the bombardment of Alexandria and he was appalled by what happened: “[The Egyptians] had forty-two modern heavy guns48 varying from 10 inch to 7 inch.” They were bombarded by “eight battleships carrying eighty guns from 16 inch to 7 inch,” not counting lighter calibers. “The fleet fired in all 3,000 rounds at the forts and... made ten hits. One would have thought that this deplorable shooting would have brought home to the Admiralty the necessity of some alteration in our training for shooting, but it did not. They were quite satisfied in that it was better than the Egyptian gunners’ shooting.”
In 1886, Scott was promoted to commander and sent as second in command to Edinburgh, the most modern turret ship of the day. He seized the opportunity to institute regular gunnery practice. “But the innovation was not liked,”49 he said; “we were twenty years ahead of the times, and in the end we had to do as others were doing. So we gave up instruction in gunnery, spent money on enamel paint, burnished up every bit of steel on board and soon got the reputation of being a very smart ship. She was certainly very nice in appearance. The nuts of all the aft bolts on the aft deck were gilded, the magazine keys were electroplated and statues of Mercury surmounted the revolver racks.”
Ten years later Scott was given command of his own ship, the 3,400-ton cruiser Scylla of the Mediterranean Fleet. He came on board, hoping that fleet gunnery had progressed during the time he had been away. Instead, he found that nothing had changed; paintwork was still what counted. And with paintwork, cleanliness. Admirals, writing reports after the all-important annual inspections which could promote—or fail to promote—ships’ captains and commanders, stressed cleanliness: “Ship’s company of good physique,50 remarkably clean and well-dressed; state of bedding exceptionally satisfactory. The stoker division formed a fine body of clean and well-dressed men.... The ship looks well inside and out and is very clean throughout....” This report on H.M.S. Astraea, Scott noted bitterly, “contained no reference51 to the fact that Astraea was one of the best shooting ships in the Navy, nor did her captain and gunnery lieutenant get one word of praise for all the trouble they had taken to make the ship efficient as a fighting unit of the fleet.”
Percy Scott was a practical sailor, not a visionary. What he wanted was a navy trained to use the more powerful guns with which technology was providing it. He wanted British gunners trained to hit the target, and to hit it often, at ever greater ranges, in all kinds of weather and sea conditions. To him, it was ludicrous and dangerous that in 1896 the crew of the modern steel battleship Resolution was still being mustered on deck for cutlass drill, training to parry and thrust, for the moment their ship would grind alongside an enemy and they would swarm over the side in boarding parties.
Alone, Percy Scott would have made no difference. He would have been shunted aside as a fanatic who disturbed the tranquillity of the peacetime navy. But Scott was not alone, and he was promoted to stations where his obsession could benefit the Fleet. He became commanding officer of H.M.S. Excellent, the navy gunnery school at Portsmouth; later he was assigned to a role in which he could exercise his talents: Inspector of Target Practice for the Fleet. The man who promoted Scott was a naval visionary, a man obsessed not just with gunnery, but also with naval strategy, tactics, ship design, and organization of personnel. Throughout his fifty years of service, from cadet to Admiral of the Fleet, he pressed for change. As First Sea Lord before the First World War, he revolutionized the British Navy.