Types of Naval Officers, Drawn from the History of the British Navy. A. T. Mahan
of England under Charles I.; and this co-operated with the mere weariness of war, occasioned by prolonged strife, to give both the country and the navy a temporary distaste to further military activity. The man of the occasion, who became the exponent and maintainer of this national inclination, was Sir Robert Walpole; to whom, during his ministry of over twenty years, can fairly be applied Jefferson's phrase concerning himself, that his "passion was peace." But, whatever the necessity to the country of such a policy, it too often results, as it did in both these cases, in neglect of the military services, allowing the equipment to decay, and tending to sap the professional interest and competency of the officers.
From this last evil the United States Navy in Jefferson's day was saved by the simple fact that the officers were young men, or at the most in the early prime of life—the Navy itself, in 1812, being less than twenty years old as a corporate organization. The British Navy of 1739 was in very different case. For a quarter of a century the only important military occurrence had been the Battle of Cape Passaro, in 1718, where the British fleet in a running fight destroyed a much inferior Spanish force; and the occasion then was not one of existent war, but of casual hostilities, which, precipitated by political conditions, began and ended with the particular incident, as far as the sea was concerned. Back of this lay only Malaga, in 1704; for the remaining years of war, up to 1713, had been unmarked by fleet battles. The tendency of this want of experience, followed by the long period—not of peace only, but—of professional depression resultant upon inactivity and national neglect, was to stagnation, to obviate which no provision existed or was attempted. Self-improvement was not a note of the service, nor of the times. The stimulus of occupation and the corrective of experience being removed, average men stuck where they were, and grew old in a routine of service, or, what was perhaps worse, out of the service in all but name. In naval warfare, the Battle of Malaga, the last point of performance, remained the example, and the Fighting Instructions the passively accepted authority. The men at the head of the Navy, to whom the country naturally looked, either had no record—no proof of fitness—because but youths in the last war, or else, in simple consequence of having then had a chance to show themselves, were now superannuated. This very fact, however, had the singular and unfortunate result that, because the officers of reputation were old, men argued, by a curious perversion of thought, that none but the old should be trusted.
Of this two significant cases will tell more than many words. Mathews, who commanded at Toulon in 1744, was then sixty-seven years old, and had not been at sea between 1724 and 1742. Hawke, in 1747, when he had already established an excellent reputation as a captain, and for enterprise in recent battle, was thought young to be entrusted with a squadron of a dozen ships-of-the-line, although he was forty-two—two years older than Nelson at the Nile, but four years younger than Napoleon and Wellington at Waterloo, and one year less in age than Grant at the close of the American Civil War. Such instances are not of merely curious interest; they are symptoms of professional states of mind, of a perplexity and perversion of standards which work disastrously whenever war succeeds to a prolonged period of peace, until experience has done its work by sorting out the unsound from among the fair-seeming, and has shown also that men may be too old as well as too young for unaccustomed responsibility. The later prevalence of juster views was exemplified in the choice of Wolfe, who was but thirty-two when he fell before Quebec in 1759, charged with one of the most difficult enterprises that had then been entrusted to a British general.
It is these two factors, therefore, an erroneous standard and a lethargic peace, which principally caused the weakness of the British official staff for battle service at the period of lowest descent, which was reached in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, but was prolonged and intensified by a protracted interval of professional apathy. Other grievous evils doubtless existed, serious defects in administration, involving indifferent equipment, bad and scanty provisions, inferior physique in the ships' companies, and wretched sanitary arrangements; but while all these unquestionably gravely affected general efficiency for war, they belonged rather to the civil than the military side of the profession. In the hour of battle it was not these, but the tone and efficiency of the officers, that chiefly told. A false pattern of action had been accepted at a moment favorable to its perpetuation, when naval warfare on the grand scale had ceased, owing to the decline of the principal enemy, the navy of France; while the average competency of naval officers had been much lowered through want of professional incentive, and the absence of any sifting process by which the unfit could be surely eliminated. That plenty of good material existed, was sufficiently shown by the number of names, afterwards distinguished, which soon began to appear. Weeding went on apace; but before its work was done, there had to be traversed a painful period, fruitful of evidences of unfitness, of personal weakness, of low or false professional ideas.
It is with this period that we have first had to do as our point of departure, by which not only to estimate the nature and degree of the subsequent advance, but to illustrate also the part specifically contributed to it by Hawke and Rodney, through their personal and professional characteristics. While types, they are more than mere exponents of the change as a whole, and will be found to bear to it particular relations—its leaders in fact, as well as in name. It is not merely fanciful to say that Hawke stands for and embodies the spirit of the new age, while Rodney rather exemplifies and develops the form in which that spirit needed ultimately to cloth itself in order to perfect its working. The one is a protest in act against the professional faintheartedness, exaggerated into the semblance of personal timidity, shown by the captains off Toulon in 1774; the other, in the simple but skilful methods and combinations adopted by him, both represents and gives effect to a reaction against the extravagant pedantry, which it fell to Byng, in all the honesty of a thoroughly commonplace man, to exhibit in unintentional caricature.
In thus ascribing to these great men complementary parts in leading and shaping the general movement, it is not meant that either is deficient on the side attributed to the other. Hawke showed by his actions that he was by no means indifferent to tactical combinations, which is another way of saying that he appreciated the advantage of form in warfare; while Rodney, though a careful organizer and driller of fleets, and patient in effort to obtain advantage before attacking, exhibited on occasion headlong, though not inconsiderate, audacity, and also tenacious endurance in fight. Still, it will probably be admitted by the student of naval biography that to him Hawke suggests primarily the unhesitating sudden rush—the swoop—upon the prey, while Rodney resembles rather the patient astute watcher, carefully keeping his own powers in hand, and waiting for the unguarded moment when the adversary may be taken suddenly at unawares. Certain it is that, with opportunities much more numerous than were permitted to Hawke, his successes would have been far greater but for an excess of methodical caution. There was a third, who combined in due proportion, and possessed to an extraordinary degree, the special qualities here assigned to each. It is one of the ironies of history that the first Sir Samuel Hood should have had just opportunity enough to show how great were his powers, and yet have been denied the chance to exhibit them under conditions to arrest the attention of the world; nay, have been more than once compelled to stand by hopelessly, and see occasions lost which he would unquestionably have converted into signal triumphs. In him, as far as the record goes, was consummated the advance of the eighteenth century. He was the greatest of the sowers. It fell to Nelson, his pupil—in part at least—to reap the harvest.
Before closing this part of our subject, the necessary preliminary to understanding the progress of naval warfare in the eighteenth century, it is pertinent to note the respect in which advance there differs from that of the nineteenth, and in some degree, though less, from that of the seventeenth centuries. The period was not one of marked material development. Improvements there were, but they were slow, small in ultimate extent, and in no sense revolutionary. Ships and guns, masts and sails, grew better, as did also administrative processes; it may indeed be asserted, as an axiom of professional experience, that as the military tone of the sea-officers rises, the effect will be transmitted to those civil functions upon which efficiency for war antecedently depends. Still, substantially, the weapons of war were in principle, and consequently in general methods of handling, the same at the end of the period as at the beginning. They were intrinsically more efficient; but the great gain was not in them, but in the spirit and intellectual grasp of the men who wielded them. There was no change in the least analogous to that from oars to sails, or from sails to steam.
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