CHAPTER VIWAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES

CHAPTER VIWAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES

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Navalwarfare, properly speaking, begins with the battle of Salamis, 480B. C., when the Greek fleet, under the guidance of Themistocles, destroyed or put to flight a horde of twelve hundred Persian vessels, and saved Athens, to become the foundation of a strong nation.

Of these ships at Salamis we know very little, except that they were large, open, or partly open, rowboats, having platforms at the stern and prow, and perhaps amidships in some cases, where soldiers might stand and discharge their arrows out of the way of the rowers beneath them, or leap aboard the enemy’s boats whenever they could be reached. They were, in short, early types of the galleys which subsequently became vessels of war as powerful and serviceable, under the conditions they were intended to meet, as are our battle-ships to-day, and probably safer as a fighting-place for their crews.

That from rowboats rather than from sail-boats should have been developed the highest type of Mediterranean war-vessel of ancient times is not surprising when one remembers the light and variable winds of that region, the usually smooth seas, the abundance of harbors, and, above all, the need of having the vessels under complete control when all fighting had to be done at short range—chiefly by ramming and boarding, in fact. It must be remembered, too, that labor was cheap; and it was considered that the most proper and economical—not to say humane—use to which prisoners of war could be put was to make them rowers in public ships, while enough remained to be sold as slaves to the owners of private yachts and privateering galleys. One may imagine a worse fate than this.

The earliest war-vessels of the eastern Mediterranean—those of Homer’s time, for instance—seem to have been long and rather narrow rowboats, the best of which had two tiers of oars, one above the other, the lower, shorter tier working through oval holes in the side, and the upper in notches or thole-pins on the gunwale. This left the upper rowers exposed, and hence such vessels were calledaphract, or “unfenced”; and it was not until the Greeks began to become prominent that the bulwarks were raised high enough to protect all the rowers, and war-vessels generally becamecataphract, or “fenced.”

It appears that in very early times war-ships (biremes) with not only two tiers or banks of oars, but even those (triremes) with three banks, were used; and the trireme became the type of the most numerous and effective vessels of the Greek and Roman navies in their prime. And as weight and power gradually increased, the crushing power of collision began to be utilized, and ramming came in as a more and more important feature in naval tactics. As the Greeks seem to have first applied these new ideas, it is quite likely that their success at Salamis was due to these improvements. The arrangement was this:

From the side of the vessel (inside) projected three rows of benches, a yard apart, horizontally supported at their inner ends by timbers that slanted toward the stern at such an angle that the top seat of each row was exactly above the bottom seat of the row behind it. The oars of the top tier (thranite) were about fourteen feet long, those of the middle tier (zygite) about ten and one half feet, and the lowermost one (thalamite) seven and one half feet. Each oar was so nearly balanced in its oar-port as to work in the easiest manner, tied there by a thong and surrounded by a loose sleeve of leather which kept out the water. Each one of the lowermost oars was worked by a single man, the middle ones by two, and those of the third tier by three or four, as they were of great length.

In later times larger vessels were invented for special purposes—four-banked (quadriremes), five-banked (quinquiremes), and so on, even up to one of forty banks; but as we are unable to understand how it was possible for more than five or six tiers of oars to be operated, we may leave these extraordinary galleys to special students.4

The structure of these vessels gave them the greatest strength combined with lightness. They had very strong keels and stems, the latter peculiarly braced; and along their sides ran waling-pieces, or fore-and-aft bracing timbers, the lowermost curving inward forward, until they met in front of the stem at the water-line, where they were braced by massive timbers,and prolonged into a sharp three-toothed spur, of which the middle tooth was the longest, reaching out perhaps ten feet. This was covered with metal, usually bronze, and formed thebeak.

“Above it, but projecting less beyond the stem-post, was theprocmbolion, or second beak, in which the prolongation of the upper set of waling-pieces met. This was generally fashioned into the figure of a ram’s head, also covered with metal.... These bosses, when a vessel was rammed, completed the work of destruction begun by the sharp beak at the water-level, giving a racking blow which caused it to heel over and so eased it off the beak, releasing the latter before the weight of the sinking vessel could come upon it.”

HAMILCAR’S “STAIRWAY OF THE GALLEYS,” AT CARTHAGE.

HAMILCAR’S “STAIRWAY OF THE GALLEYS,” AT CARTHAGE.

The stem was often carried up into a curving ornament called theacrostolion, beneath which was a stout-walled deck-space for sailors or the fighting-men to do their work; and the stern-post similarly supported a lofty, richly ornamented structure (aplustron), arching over the officers’ quarters.

Platforms extended up and down the center of the ship between the rowers; and over their heads was a deck having walls or bulwarks where the fighting-men and their various “engines” stood. In addition to this an external defended gallery for soldiers and boarders usually ran along the outside of the bulwarks above the oars; and awnings of rawhide were stretched over all to ward off grappling-irons.

It must not be forgotten, however, that these galleys also had three pole-masts, and certain sails—probably a huge split lug, with possibly a square topsail on the mainmast, while the fore- and mizzenmasts carried lateens. At the top of each stick was a round, protected cage filled with archers and slingers—the prototype of our “military mast.”

Nor are the size and force of these Greek and Roman men-of-war to be despised. The ordinary trireme had a crew of 200 to 225 men in all, 174 of whom were rowers. The space for cabins and stowage must have been little, but this was of small account, since the war-galleys rarely undertook long cruises, their tactics being a rush and a sharp fight, and then a quick return to harbor, where it was the practice to draw the lighter galleys up on shore each night. The transportation of the ships across the isthmus of Corinth was not, then, so astonishing a feat as it is sometimes called.

Rome’s experience, however, gained in war and in suppressing the Levantine pirates, taught her to abandon the heavy, many-banked, unwieldy vessels she had at first developed from Greek and Carthaginian models, and to trust to a much lighter, swifter, and more manageable style, with far less upper structure and rigging, and having only two banks of oars. These were called Liburnian galleys. With this change came naturally one of tactics, capture by chase and boarding taking the place of the earlier attempt to crush by ramming and overriding the antagonist.

The armament comprised not only as many soldiers with bows and javelins as could find room in action, but various machines of offense and defense, such as catapults hurling huge stones or marble grape-shot, spearheaded rams or huge knives that could be run out against an enemy’s hull or rigging, arrangements for smashing the enemy’s decks, caldrons swung at yard-arms, holding burning pitch or oil to be poured upon the foe, and often cranes (corvi), provided with grapples that, if one could be made fast, would lift an adversary out of water, and turn him upside down. No more vivid picture of the life in cruise and battle of a Roman man-of-war’s man is known to me than that penned by General Lew Wallace in “Ben Hur,” but I cannot, of course, transfer all of it to my pages, as I should like to do, and an extract here and there would only spoil the pleasure in store for you in re-reading it all.

Of medieval naval warfare in the Mediterranean, the struggles between the weak “principalities and powers” that followed the decay of Rome and lasted for a dozen centuries, we know very little. There is more obscurity here than even elsewhere in the dim history of the dark ages. It is evident, however, that not much change took place in naval architecture. The Byzantine empire succeeded to Rome as mistress of the seas, and we know that in the ninth century the Byzantine emperors were still building biremes (then calleddromones) armed with tubes for spouting Greek fire. It should be noted that boats having only a single bank of oars came now to be called galleys; and this is the first and proper use of the word, though popularly it is now (or until recently was) applied to any large many-oared boat.

A COMBAT OF ROMAN GALLEYS (BIREMES).

A COMBAT OF ROMAN GALLEYS (BIREMES).

With the introduction of gunpowder and cannon into naval vessels, the ornamental top-works—a picturesque relic of which remains in the Venetian gondola of to-day—disappeared, as we see when the clear light of history begins to shine on the fleets of Venice and Genoa, when these cities were leaders of the world in navigation. Turkey—the successor of the old Byzantine empire and of the Greek power—was then, as now, the great enemy of the west, but in those days it was aggressive. Its fleets were strong and well manned, and they threatened to cross the Adriatic and fasten the baneful grasp of the Moslem upon Italy in revenge for the persecution of the Moors in Spain. Perhaps they would have done so had not John of Austria, admiral of the allied navies of Spain, Venice, and Rome, won that great victory in the harbor of Lepanto, near the isthmus of Corinth, which destroyed nearly the whole Turkish fleet, and released fifteen thousand Christian galley-slaves. This was in October, 1571, and it saved the West from being overrun by the barbarous East, as exactly fifteen and a half centuries before it had been saved near Actium, a famous promontory on the northwestern coast of Greece, where Octavius defeated the forces of Antony and Cleopatra.

It is doubtful whether the ships that fought in the later battle were much different in either build or rig from those of the earlier conflict, buttheir decks no more gleamed with men in armor, and in place of catapult, crane, and caldron were cannonades and falconets, arquebuses and hand-grenades. Perhaps, however, they had already taken on more of that long, low shape characterizing later the French and Italian galleys, common enough in Mediterranean ports up to about one hundred years ago, which differed mainly from the ancient ones in their use of much longer oars or sweeps, balanced upon a sort of extended outrigger or shelf projecting from the vessel’s side. The galleass of which we hear in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was a large war-ship of this style, which foreshadowed the Atlantic ships, to be spoken of presently, in having castellated structures fore and aft, in which were mounted sometimes twenty guns; besides its two or three lateen-rigged masts, it often had thirty-two sweeps on each side, each about forty-five feet long, and handled with a long, slow stroke by five or six men—in France mainly convicts “condemned to the galleys.”5

Such vessels continued to be used by the Spaniards, Maltese, Italians, and Turks long after they had been abandoned by the French navy, but latterly, after the suppression of piracy, in which they were of especial service, for the conveyance of important personages and occasions of ceremony rather than for practical service; and in the state barge of the Doge of Venice, brought out annually to this day at the ceremony of re-wedding Venice to the Adriatic, we have a magnificent relic of these stately craft.

TYPE OF VENETIAN GALLEY.

TYPE OF VENETIAN GALLEY.

But such boats were adapted only to the comparatively calm and simple navigation of the Mediterranean; and although imitated in the similar waters of the eastern Baltic, they never flourished north of Spain. When they gradually disappeared, their successor inside the gates of Gibraltar was the xebec, which began to appear under Arab or Spanish control in the seventeenth century; this was supposed to be able to withstand any weather, and carried from fourteen to twenty-two guns on deck, with small ports for oars between the guns. A picturesque relative was the Portuguese muleta.

The English liked this kind of vessel on account of its strong sailingqualities, but when they took it into their own stormy waters they found it necessary to raise its sides to fit them for breasting the high seas that roll in the open Atlantic or are tossed by the contending tides of the English Channel, and developed out of it a style of swift and handy vessel called a frigate.

During all these “middle” ages the northern nations had been sailing and fighting on the sea as well as the southerners. Stories of sturdy battles have come down in tradition and in such chronicles as those of Froissart; but those old conflicts seem to have produced little change in ship-building or armament until the experience and wisdom brought back by the Crusaders began to spread abroad even in the half-savage North, and to produce that revival of learning which by and by was to make such striking changes in western Europe; and here the leaders are Englishmen.

FORECASTLE OF THE “GREAT HARRY”(“GRÂCE DE DIEU”).

FORECASTLE OF THE “GREAT HARRY”(“GRÂCE DE DIEU”).

In those days no national navies, properly speaking, existed in England, France, or northward. When a monarch wished to transport troops by water to some other land, or make a naval expedition or campaign, he fitted out the ships that belonged to the crown as the king’s personal property, and compelled his subjects to furnish the rest, just as his feudal provinces and cities and lords were expected to equip and bring to his standard any land forces required. It was to systematize this method somewhat in England that William the Conqueror “established the Cinque Ports, and gave them certain privileges on condition of their furnishing 52 ships, with 24 men in each, for 15 days, in cases of emergency.” Now and then, at first, Englishmen were disposed to resist the “arrest” of ships, which might easily mean the ruin of their business; and special laws had to be made to quell this reluctance. Another quaint and significant feature of that practice was this: In every fleet one or more ships were set apart as “royal,” and either the king or his representatives occupied them with court ceremony to carry out the fiction of royal dominion over the sea as well as upon the land. It naturally followed in England that after her navy had shown its power, and signalized it especially by a brilliant victory over Spain in 1380, Edward III should have assumed as an additional title “King of the Seas”—an act which had far-reaching consequences.

During the fifteenth century something like an established navy was foreshadowed; but it was not until the reign of Henry VII, when, at theend of the fifteenth century, the whole world was exploring the oceans and awakening to the importance of sea power, that the first vessel, properly called a national war-ship, was built, equipped, manned, and sustained at government expense by England. This was theGreat Harry—a floating fortress rather than a ship; for, with her towering, overweighted “castles” fore and aft, she was unseaworthy, and came near being sunk by a slight rolling which poured the water into her lower ports.

But a better known “Great Harry” was theHenri Grâce de Dieu, built by Henry VIII. This king was the real founder of the British navy, providing for it many good ships, dock-yards, trained officers, and regularly enlisted crews. The advantage of this organization and the superiority of English seamanship were demonstrated in the next reign by the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

England was then at war with Spain, and Philip II thought to end the matter by means of the greatest expedition ever heard of. It began to be prepared in 1587 under the title of the Most Fortunate Armada,6but an English squadron under Drake attacked the rendezvous at Cadiz, destroyed over one hundred vessels and huge quantities of stores, and then so ravaged the neighboring coasts as to delay Spain’s project for a whole season.

In midsummer of 1588, however, after an unlucky start, in which it was driven back by storms, the dreaded Armada appeared in the English Channel, like a close flock of huge birds drifting along the British coast. It consisted of about 130 ships, seven of which exceeded 1000 tons burden, and numerous small craft, and was armed with nearly 3000 cannon. Its commander was the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was a most incompetent man for the post, and it bore, besides nearly 10,000 sailors and galley-slaves, over 10,000 soldiers; but this naval force was not intended to attack England until after it had ferried over from Belgium the Spanish army of the Duke of Parma.

To such a force as this England opposed a miserably small fleet—only 34 vessels that could be called ships; but she hastily armed as many more smaller ones as she could, amid great fright and excitement, until finally Admiral Howard commanded 80 or 90 ships and boats. There was no deficiency in his men, however,—the pick of English “sea-dogs” was at his call; and among the leaders of the pack were men we have already met elsewhere—Francis Drake, John Hawkins, Martin Frobisher, and others.

What a sight it must have been on that August day as these ships, flying the huge banners of Castile, standing high out of the water, with lofty “castles” forward and aft, gaudy with carving and color, the light rippling here from silken pennants and flashing there from shining cannon or hugepoop-lanterns, moved past the southern headlands of England, watched by half-raging, half-fearful crowds! And how mystified and indignant must these watching country people have been when Admiral Howard, their only defender, calmly let the Armada sail by Plymouth, where the English fleet lay hid in the Solent, and Captain Drake coolly insisted upon finishing a game of bowls before he would go down to his waiting frigate.

STYLE OF SHIPS IN THE TIME OF THE ARMADA.

STYLE OF SHIPS IN THE TIME OF THE ARMADA.

But these captains knew what they were about. In those days, as now, in fighting with sailing-vessels the advantage is usually with the one who attacks from the windward side; for then he can manœuver his vessel, whereas his enemy, heading toward the wind, can do so only with difficulty if at all, and hence cannot easily take a good position or escape from a bad one. Howard, therefore, waited until the closely crowded squadrons of Spain had passed beyond him up the Channel, when he issued from Plymouth harbor, bore down upon their rear from the windward, and proceeded, as one of the reports expressed it, to “pluck their feathers.”

Then began some wonderful days of sea history and naval schooling.The Spanish vessels were floating castles armed with heavy guns and crowded with soldiers armed with muskets and “harquebuses of crock,”—that is, great blunderbusses supported upon a portable rest. They kept in a close crowd, like a phalanx of old Swiss infantry, and supposed that the English would move against them in another dense raft, and that they would fight from deck to deck of grappled ships as if they were on land.

But the English knew better. They had few ships as large—theTriumph, 1100 tons, was the biggest—or guns as heavy as the Spaniards’. Instead of attacking in a solid mass, therefore, they spread out, hovered on the flanks, darted a ship here and there, fired as they saw opportunity, and kept their own vessels out of danger as much as possible. In the light and variable winds that prevailed, the great galleons of the Armada were almost immovable, while the English for the most part had smaller, lighter vessels, whose nimbleness and ready obedience to the helm astonished the Spanish. Standing low in the water, these would drive their shot right through the enemy’s hulls, and make off before the Spaniard could depress his guns enough to do any damage in return; while the army of musketeers upon whom he had relied so strongly had little chance to do anything at all.

Thus for a week the English frigates and armed fishing-boats harassed the Armada on its way up the Channel, capturing and sinking many of the ships, while losing some of its own, of course, until at last the worried and baffled squadron managed to gain the roadstead of Calais, where the army of the Duke of Parma lay. To carry this army across and begin a campaign against London seemed now not only out of the question, but the safety of the fleet itself was a question; for a few days later, when a favorable wind arose, several fire-ships came sailing down upon them from the blockading Englishmen outside. These fire-ships—an important part of every fleet for two or three centuries—were old vessels intended to set fire to an enemy’s ships. Their yard-arms were set with great iron hooks, their hulls and riggings were saturated with oil, their decks loaded with tar-barrels, and their old guns overloaded, so as to spread destruction in every direction by bursting. Then bold crews sailed these grappling monsters as near the enemy as they dared,—and it must have been a service dear to the heart of the daring,—set fire to them, lashed their helms, and got away in their boats as best they could.

To escape these dreadful things the Spaniards were obliged to up-anchor and put to sea, losing many ships and lives by fire or the wildly flying cannon-balls, or by going ashore in the effort; and then the Englishmen followed them again, like wolves after a herd of buffalo in winter. The Spaniards dared not go back down the Channel, and nothing remained tothem but the hazardous voyage around the north of Scotland—a venture for which the towering, unwieldy galleons were ill-fitted. Storms overtook them in the North Sea and on the Atlantic, and so many were cast away on the Irish coast, where those who reached the shore were slain, that hardly half of the proud Armada crept back to Lisbon and Cadiz.

A SEA-FIGHT OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

A SEA-FIGHT OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

This incident was one of the most notable in European history for two reasons: First, historically, it no doubt saved England and her colonies from the Inquisition, and all the other depressing and horrible burdens that long afterward weighted the papal countries of southern Europe and their American possessions; and, second, it reformed naval warfare not only byconfirming the value of a regularly organized national navy, but by showing that the old-fashioned, dense fleet formation, carrying soldiers to fight as they would do on land, was wrong and ineffective.

But though Spain had been humbled she was by no means crushed, and sea-fighting went on a long time before either she, the French, or the Dutch—and the last were the hardest foes—would fully admit England’s claim to be sovereign of all the seas around Britain, and strike their flags whenever they met one of her “king’s ships” in acknowledgment of it. England asserted that the domain of her crown covered not only the lands of England (and much of France), but also “the narrow seas”; and she defined this domain to include all the Channel waters north of Cape Finisterre and thence in a square area westward to the middle of the Atlantic. This was not an assertion: “I can beat the world in sea-fighting,” but was a legal claim to rule—a declaration that her laws extended over that much sea in the same manner that it is now agreed that the laws of all nations extend to a distance of three miles from their coasts.

The whole idea of naval warfare in those days was defense of your own commerce and attack upon your enemy’s; and at that time any one you met under another flag was likely to be your “enemy” if either party promised spoils worth a fight. Hence not only did privateering flourish,—often degenerating into piracy,—not only did all merchant vessels go heavily armed, but the royal ships were intended principally for convoying or guarding merchantmen. This theory, which was only a part of the generally unsettled condition of that formative period, kept up a continual state of fighting on the sea, even between peoples nominally at peace, and of course led again and again to open wars. These were almost always popular, especially among the bold sailors but poor traders of England, on account of the chances for prizes and plunder that often more than repaid the expenses and losses of the conflict; thus the war with the Dutch in 1652-54, in which William Penn was a captain, brought in more than£6,000,000 worth of captures—more than the financial cost of the war.

At this time—the first half of the sixteenth century—Holland was the leading commercial nation of the world. Not only had her merchants large interests of their own in both the East and West Indies, very extensive fisheries in northern waters, and trading stations in the African and American coasts, but a large part of the commerce of other nations was conducted in Dutch ships, including much of England itself. It was the unrighteous but determined effort to break this up by any and every means that brought on the second war with Holland, one incident of which was the capture of New Amsterdam (New York); for fleets no longer stayed close at home, actingmainly as defenders of coasts, as in the previous century, but now cruised and fought on the high seas, as the Spanish had learned in many a hard struggle to protect their trading and treasure-ships homeward bound.

ATTACKING SPANISH GALLEONS OFF THE AZORES.

ATTACKING SPANISH GALLEONS OFF THE AZORES.

DRAWN BY WARREN SHEPPARD.SPANISH AND FRENCH SHIPS OF THE LINE TAKING POSITION FOR THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR.

DRAWN BY WARREN SHEPPARD.

SPANISH AND FRENCH SHIPS OF THE LINE TAKING POSITION FOR THE BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR.

This new practice, however, had required a change in ships and their equipment. The English learned this quicker than any one else. They cut down the lofty cabins, increased the height, while reducing the weight, of masts by inventing jointed topmasts, and replaced the unwieldy lateens by an arrangement of lofty, quickly handled square sails. By the middle of the seventeenth century ocean-going ships had much the same appearance as at present,—although far more elaborately ornamented and bulging aft with stern-galleries,—the massive, high-pooped Spanish galleon surviving longest as a relic of the old type. These changes allowed the armament to be taken from the front and rear of the ship, where it had formerly been mainly placed, there being no room in the waist, and allowed it to be distributed equally up and down the ship, which now began to deliver the “broadsides” that formed such a feature in sea-gunnery before the days of turreted ironclads, and this, with the constant improvement in the range and power of the artillery, soon brought about ideas of battle formation. The early plan was to provide a large number of ships,—eighty or one hundred on each side in a single action were not uncommon,—because each was weak, and also because a great number of fighting-men was thought necessary, and then to advance from the windward in a compact mass, andendeavor to close with the enemy and capture or destroy him by hand-to-hand promiscuous fighting. Our wordsquadronmeans a square, and, as applied to ships, is a survival from those antiquated methods.

But when the practice of using fire-ships became common and effective, and trimmer, more active ships superseded the cumbrous galleasses, it was seen that this close formation only exposed a fleet to destruction, and an open order had to be adopted, with a consequent change of tactics. Another lesson was, that a sea-fight was a sailor’s battle, where soldiers were out of place, and that to take a great number of weak ships into action, crowded with men, was only to risk life unnecessarily. Hence, larger and more heavily armed ships, but fewer of them, appear in later engagements; and in place of a bunch of vessels, “huddled together like a flock of sheep,” at which to shoot, the open order gave the gunners small and single targets.

All these changes combined to enforce the wisdom of meeting an enemy in a widely spaced line, where the strongest fighting-ships were put forward, and smaller vessels came up in the rear. Those ahead met the battle-ships at the head of the enemy’s column, and the lesser ones, as they came up, were paired off against those of their own size, so that the battle became a series of equalized duels. Such was the theory of naval tactics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and so arose the term line-of-battle ship, descriptive of such national craft as are shown on the opposite page.

These fine old line-of-battle ships were large and powerful before the seventeenth century ended. Thus in the British navy when 1700 came in there were eight which had from ninety-six to one hundred and ten guns each—fifty-three others carrying more than seventy guns, and twenty-three more with more than fifty guns—all at that time regarded as fit for the line of battle, though a hundred years later nothing less than a “seventy-four” was so considered. Such were the grandly picturesque old vessels that won the day at Gibraltar, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, and at many another spot where the whole horizon echoed to their thunderous broadsides; but of them all there now remain only a few honored hulks in harbors, or a few grand figureheads preserved in docks and museums.

Each navy, however, had a greater number of smaller, more active vessels, known as frigates, corvettes, sloops-of-war, gun-brigs, etc., which carried from twenty to forty-four guns, and were the “eyes of the fleet,” as one old strategist styled them. They answered to what we should now call cruisers, and often went on duty in distant parts of the world, or in war were scouting about and supporting the main fleet. This class was especially cultivated by the United States, as soon as it began to make a regular navy, at the close of the Revolutionary War, and six frigates werebuilt at our six navy-yards during the last years of the last century, which were intended and proved to be separately “superior to any single European frigate of the usual dimensions” in speed, manœuvering, and fighting power, in proportion to their weight of ordnance. Three of them (Constellation,Congress, andChesapeake) mounted thirty-six guns, and three (United States,President, andConstitution) forty-four guns each—mainly 24-pounders; and all gave so good an account of themselves, as ships, that the high compliment was paid us of their being carefully imitated by foreign naval constructors.

This is not a naval history, so that I am not concerned to tell of all the glorious or inglorious work of the navies of Europe in obtaining and holding, or failing to get and keep, trade routes open and territorial possessions intact in various parts of the world. During the seventeenth and eighteenth and far into the nineteenth century, there was no time when some nations were not fighting on the sea if not on land; and much of the timeallthe maritime nations were hard at it, turning their guns to-day on the allies of yesterday, and fighting shoulder to shoulder with them the next season against some friend of the year before.

A few of the most famous battles ought to be spoken of, however, as illustrating the methods and development of naval warfare, and because we now recognize that their consequences were far-reaching.

In the wars which broke out toward the close of the eighteenth century due to Napoleon’s ambition to rule the world, Great Britain found herself engaged in a struggle not only with France, but really with the whole world, for the command of the seas that washed the western coast of Europe. The only sign of friendship to England from the Baltic to Gibraltar was in the doubtful neutrality of Portugal. England had to abandon the Mediterranean, and devote herself to facing the allied powers against her outside the Gates of Hercules as best she could. In 1797 she made a beginning by crushing a fleet of Dutch ships off Camperdown (Holland), and a Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent; but, though both were great battles, neither had any lasting effect; and in spite of them Napoleon planned his celebrated invasion of England for the following year, supposing that by his expedition to Egypt, threatening England’s East Indian possessions, he would draw away so much of the British navy that he and his allies could put an army across the English Channel unhindered. I need not say that his invasion of England never was even attempted; but for a time his fleet did hold command of the Mediterranean—a state of things to which an end was put by England’s most famous naval hero, Horatio Nelson.

A long series of brilliant exploits had given Nelson fame, and the vigorousaccounts of them he used to send home helped his great popularity. A large part of his service had been in American waters.

In 1798 Nelson was a rear-admiral, and was sent to the Mediterranean after the French fleet, which, having convoyed Napoleon’s army to its landing at Alexandria, was ready for new operations. It is characteristic of the slow and almost useless methods of gaining intelligence in those days, that from early June to the end of July Nelson searched for this flotilla, and was unable to get more news of it than an occasional rumor that it had been at some place or other days or weeks before. The French knew no more as to the movements of their pursuers, yet the fleets were twice within a few miles of each other. This was Nelson’s first independent command, and his patience and nerves were nearly worn out by anxiety.

WHEN DECATUR WAS A MIDSHIPMAN.

WHEN DECATUR WAS A MIDSHIPMAN.

At last, on the first day of August, the English almost stumbled on the French at anchor in the Bay of Aboukir, among the mouths of the Nile,between Alexandria and Rosetta—a shallow roadstead full of shoals and rocks, for which Nelson had neither chart nor pilot.

In the interior of this bay lay the Napoleonic squadron, under Admiral Brueys, in such fancied security that a large part of the crews was ashore, and some of the ships unprepared for a battle when the British appeared. It was anchored in line of battle, however, and consisted of thirteen ships of the line, the central one being the flagshipOrient, having 120 guns, and probably the largest and most complete war-ship then afloat. On each side of her were theFranklinand theTonnant, of 80 guns each, and none of the others were greatly inferior.

The British had also thirteen ships, but none was the equal of the best French, and one of them did not engage in the attack at all. Knowing nothing of the harbor, and aware that all his ships drew much water,—perhaps thirty feet,—Nelson had to make a long and very cautious detour, throwing the lead every moment and feeling his way in. It was then late in the afternoon, and half-past six before theGoliath, leading the column, got near enough to attract the French fire. Replying, but not halting, theGoliath, followed closely by theZealousandOrion, made for the head of the line, and then with a daring unrivaled, for there was barely enough water to float their keels, these ships slowly turned around the foremost French vessel and dropped their anchors in the rear of the enemy’s line. The other ships, as they came up, ranged alongside the front of the French, and the deepening twilight resounded with such a roar of broadsides as never will be heard again.

In the darkness and smoke an English seventy-four, theBellerophon, had engaged the monstrousOrient, and in a short time had been crushed; all her masts were swept out of her, two hundred of her people were killed and wounded, and she drifted out of action. But nearly the same fate had by that time overtaken the FrenchGuerrière, for theTheseushad coolly placed herself where she could rake the anchored ship and tear her to pieces. The moment theBellerophondrifted off, however, her place was taken by two newly arrived frigates, and theOrientpresently found herself the target of three ships which slowly but surely were cutting her to pieces in spite of her tremendous resistance. Her admiral had been killed on her deck, where half her officers and men lay dead or wounded, when it was suddenly seen that she was on fire, and the whole battle was instinctively suspended to watch the magnificent spectacle, save where some still poured in shot and shell to prevent the French crew from extinguishing the flames.

Powerless either to save their ship or launch their boats, the remnant of theOrient’screw could only fling themselves into the water and trustto the mingled boats of friends and foes to pick them up. The ships nearest slipped their cables, and tried to edge away out of danger as the flames enveloped the towering masts, burning with amazing fierceness in the tarred rigging and lighting up the desert for miles inland, while the hull became a furnace. Suddenly, at a quarter before ten, a volcano-like explosion tore the glowing old battle-ship asunder, a torrent of burning fragments was hurled aloft,—with how many dead heroes, no one knows,—and double darkness closed over the appalling scene. Then the black waves were lighted anew by the flash of cannon and musketry, and the battle went on until daylight before the last of the French vessels had been conquered, while two of them had managed to steal away. Of the other eleven one had been burned and sunk, three had gone ashore, where one burned, and the remainder had been crushed into surrendering. The English did not lose a single vessel, for even the dismantledBellerophoncould float, and their loss in men was far less than that of the French.

DRAWN BY WARREN SHEPPARD.THE “THESEUS” ATTACKING THE “GUERRIÈRE.”

DRAWN BY WARREN SHEPPARD.

THE “THESEUS” ATTACKING THE “GUERRIÈRE.”

Historians tell us that this victory was the grandest naval success on record. Nelson himself said that victory was too weak a term—it was a catastrophe. It put an end at once to Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, and to all his designs against India. It gave the command of the Mediterranean to England, emboldened Turkey and Russia to recover the Ionian Islands,gave Naples a chance to assert herself, and aroused Austria and Russia to resist by armies Napoleon’s aggressions, so that from this battle dates his downfall. Its influence soon reached the United States, and caused it to break through its neutrality and begin upon the sea that naval war with France of which we hear very little nowadays, but which gave to our own naval record such glorious incidents as Truxton’s battles in theConstellationwithL’InsurgenteandLa Vengeance, and Captain Little’s capture, in the corvetteBoston, of the French sloop-of-warLe Berceau.

Nelson remained in the Mediterranean for some years, by no means idle, and then did service of extraordinary value elsewhere, as at the battle of Copenhagen, which in a single remarkable conflict put an end to a northern conspiracy against England, and saved her a vast deal of trouble; but his final service was the most momentous of all, at any rate for the fortunes of Great Britain alone, and this was the winning of the battle of Trafalgar.

In 1805 Napoleon had prepared for another grand invasion of England, and with great skill had gathered a fleet of allied French and Spanish vessels, which was to protect and coöperate with the strong army he proposed to land along the Kentish shores. This fleet was commanded by Admiral Villeneuve, and assembled at Cadiz, where, in October, 1805, it was being watched by an English fleet, commanded by Nelson and Collingwood, consisting of thirty-three ships of the line; twenty-seven of these were present when, on the morning of the 21st, the allies, twenty-nine battle-ships strong, came sailing out, hoping to avoid battle if possible. This, Nelson was resolved, should not happen; and dividing his forces into two columns, he made at them in such a way as to strike their line (then off Cape Trafalgar) in the middle of its crescent. The wind was very light, and an hour or more elapsed before even the heads of the line struck the enemy, so that there was plenty of time to make every preparation, and there was constant instruction by signaling from Nelson’s flagshipVictory. Then at the last moment, when the first gun was ready to be fired, there rose upon the signal halyards of theVictorythe message that, received with ringing cheers, has been an inspiration to patriots the world around ever since since—

England expects every man will do his duty.

A few moments later Collingwood in theRoyal Sovereign, and Nelson in theVictory, were in the thick of the foreign fleet, which awaited them in disorderly array, but closed about these two, bent upon destroying them if possible before any others could come up. The fury of the duels that ensued, where ships were mixed in disorder, and sometimes three or four against one, passes adequate description. None, perhaps, fared worse thantheBelle Isle, a large English two-decker that was the first to reach the scene after theRoyal Sovereign, and to draw off some of the fire that threatened to pulverize Collingwood’s ship.

England expects every man will do his D U T YDRAWN FROM THE MODEL IN THE GREENWICH MUSEUM.NELSON’S SIGNAL.

DRAWN FROM THE MODEL IN THE GREENWICH MUSEUM.

NELSON’S SIGNAL.

The wreckage and suffering on other ships were almost as great. The very first broadside of theRoyal Sovereign, taking theSanta Ana, struck down 400 out of the 1000 persons aboard; and theSovereignherself soon lost every mast. TheSantissima Trinidada, a Spanish four-decker, and the largest ship then afloat, was reduced to a wreck, and a dozen others lost a part or all of their masts. As for theVictory, she was always in the thick of it, receiving at one time the concentrated fire of seven hostile battle-ships, yet was not too much disabled to be manœuvered. Her captain’s aim was to engage directly with the French flagshipBucentaure, but she was closely attended by three other large ships, and difficult to reach. Nevertheless, theVictoryfinally got across her stern, and from a few yards distance poured in a broadside which, sweeping the whole length of her interior, dismounted twenty guns, and killed and wounded 400 men. As she passed on, returning the fire of the other vessels near by, she was closely followed by theTemeraire, the second English ship, which had already become almost unmanageable; and a lifting of the smoke showed her smashing a little French frigate, theRedoubtable, which, by and by, was captured after almost every man had been killed, and she was in a sinking condition. The astonishing resistance of this little vessel, and the damage she did by soldiers with muskets crowded in her tops and firing down upon the decks of the English ships, form one of the most noteworthy incidents of naval history; and it is not too much to say that she inflicted upon Great Britain as great harm as all the rest of the allies put together, for it was a musket-ball from the mizzentop of theRedoubtablethat struck down, early in the action, the great Nelson himself. He seemed to have had a feeling, even before leaving England, that he would not survive this campaign, andknew his wound was mortal the instant it was received. He was carried below, and remained alive and conscious about three hours, eagerly listening to reports of the progress of the fight, and rejoicing at last in a knowledge of victory. His last words, murmured again and again, with his failing breath, seemed an answer to his signaled injunction, for they were: “Thank God I have done my duty.”

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