The phrase “The Command of the Sea” may be so used as to be rhetorical and misleading. It is so used when it is meant to assert or imply that the power exercising the command can exclude an opponent from access to the sea, or can be secured against all loss and defeat on the water. If “command” means solitary possession, then it was never enjoyed by England throughout the whole of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Her navy suffered more small defeats, and her trade was more harassed in 1813 than in any year of the war. In 1810, six years after Trafalgar, three French frigates sailed to the Indian Ocean. Two of them were lost in action, but the third, the Clorinde, made her way home, and, though she was chased by a line-of-battle ship, got safe into Brest. In that year four English frigates were destroyed at a blow at Grand Port in Mauritius. When “command” is used with exaggeration it has not much more meaning than the figurative expression which speaks of the ocean as covered by the sails of a naval power. There have been men who took these words as intended to state a fact. General Lauriston, who accompanied Villeneuve to the West Indies, says in one of his letters that they had all heard of the English ships as covering the ocean, and yet they had only seen two at anchor in the Antilles. If, however, we are content to employ the words as meaning the power to send fleets to and fro, to conduct trade, to effect conquests, and carry on wars oversea—then England had the command from the beginning, and had it because she fought an enemy crippled by revolutionary anarchy. The use she made of her superiority was often governed by considerations wholly unconnected with the strength of the navy. If she did not conquer Java till 1811 it was not for want of naval strength. It was because a large army could not be sent from India while Mysore was unconquered and the Mahrattas were not subdued. But if we are to discuss all these aspects of a multiform war, a short history of the Royal Navy would be lost in a long history of more than twenty years of warfare on land, of diplomacy, and of finance. We must be content to keep to the forces with which England exercised the command of the sea, the purposes for which she used them, and the methods which she employed. The forces were the material strength and quality of the navy. Her purposes were the protection of trade, and the prosecution of wars over sea. The methods were, first, the destruction of the enemies’ main fleets, which I have already endeavoured to deal with, and then blockades, patrol by vessels cruising on the ocean routes, the transport of, and co-operation with, the armies.

When the war began in 1793 the Royal Navy had in commission for sea-service:—26 ships of the line from 60 guns and upwards, 7 of 50, and 3 of 44 guns, and 199 vessels, from 38-gun frigates down to the cutter of 4 guns. In commission for harbour duty were 3 ships of the line and 11 of other classes. She had 169 vessels, including 87 of the line, 5 of 50 and 15 of 44 guns; “in ordinary,” that is to say, not in commission but fit, when repaired, for active service; 72, of which 25 were of the line, 7 were of 50, and 3 of 44 guns, only fit for harbour duty but not in commission; 21, of which 12 were of the line, were building or ordered to be built—in all, 411 vessels. The officers on the active list were 2378 in number, and 45,000 men were voted by Parliament.

The strength of the navy at the beginning of the succeeding years of the war was as given in the table on the preceding page.

In 1800, 120,000 men were voted for the first two months of the year, and 110,000 for the rest of the year. In 1801, 120,000 were voted for the first three months, and 135,000 for the rest of the year. In 1802, the year of the peace, 130,000, 88,000, and 70,000 were successively voted. In 1803, the year of the renewal of the war, the votes were for 50,000, 60,000, 100,000 men successively. In 1807 the numbers were 120,000 for the first month, and then 135,000. In 1814 they were 140,000 for seven, and 90,000 for six months. The vote was by the month of twenty-eight days and thirteen to the year.

During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars the use of the carronade in the navy was considerably extended. This piece, invented by General Melville, and first cast in the Carron foundry in Scotland, was introduced into the navy in 1779. It was a short piece with a large bore, and a powder chamber, light, easily handled and destructive to timber when fired at short range. The shot was large in proportion to the size of the piece, and because of its destructive effect on wood it was to have been named the “Smasher.” At first the carronades were only placed where there was no room for long guns. But its effect at close quarters proved so tempting that in some cases the long guns were replaced by carronades. In 1782 the Rainbow, 44, was so rearmed. The change made in the weight of her broadside added—or seemed to add—immensely to her strength. Her forty-four long guns gave a broadside weight of 318 lbs. The forty-eight carronades she received in lieu of long guns, gave her a broadside of 1238 lbs. The Rainbow made an easy capture of a beautiful French frigate, the Hébé. But then she was able to come close to the French ship before opening fire. When this advantage could not be secured the carronade was of no value, for it had only a short range. Its weakness was fully demonstrated in the action between the Phœbe and the American frigate Essex. The American ship was armed with carronades on her gun deck. The Phœbe was to windward, and her captain, Hillyar, who knew the inferiority of his opponent’s armament, kept his distance, and battered the American into ruin. As the carronade was never counted officially in the armament of a ship, its introduction led to confusion, and some dishonesty in estimating the strength of our ships and our enemies. We counted all the pieces of ordnance of our opponent but only our own “guns.” The carronade was adopted by foreign navies after 1783. During the wars which began in 1793 the navy had the benefit of a much improved system of signalling. The old system was one by which particular combinations of flags, or the place of flags in the rigging, conveyed a certain order. The new or numerary system was elaborated by Lord Howe in combination with Kempenfelt, and was largely developed by Sir Home Popham.

It will be seen from this list that the navy attained to its maximum of numbers of ship’s officers and men in the years following Trafalgar. The increase was most marked after 1808, the year of the beginning of the war in Spain, and the largest numbers were reached from 1810 to 1814. There is a very general agreement among the best authority that the augmented size of the fleet was not accompanied by a growth in real power. It is maintained that, on the contrary, the efficiency of the fleet fell off. Its gunnery was neglected for mere “polish,” and the crews deteriorated in quality. Many explanations of the decline have been given. The disappearance of French fleets from the sea is said to have rendered our officers somewhat careless of their gunnery. The unwillingness of the Admiralty to authorise expenditure of powder in practice has been rendered responsible for the decline of skill. The hardships of life in the navy aggravated by the brutality of some officers are held to have deterred men from entering the service, and to have made them eager to desert when they were in it. The large proportion of foreigners employed is given as another cause of the loss of efficiency. There are elements of truth in all this criticism and apology. When seven hundred vessels more or less were in commission, only a small minority had an opportunity to see service. Some officers of known zeal and capacity passed years without once being under fire. If the heart of a captain was intent on seamanship and smartness he might be tempted, by the small chance of meeting a foe, to neglect the gun drill of his crew. If he feared to be blamed by the Admiralty for expending too much powder, he would not venture to avail himself of the device employed by some of his colleagues, who obtained practice for their men by pretending to see suspicious strangers, and who did not hesitate to make fictitious entries in their logs. After the loss of several English vessels, captured in rapid succession by the Americans in the war of 1812, the decline of our gunnery became a commonplace. So did the cruelty of certain captains of “crack” ships, who sacrificed everything, including humanity, to “overpolish.” We hear of crews driven to mutinous explosions by officers who would send their men aloft ten or twelve times to finish off some mere detail of the set or stowing of sails. Such men enforced attention to their pedantry and foppery by the lash. Mere declamation can be neglected, but we cannot reject the testimony of Codrington given in the very midst of the American war, in a private letter written from the station, and supported by examples. “I have heard,” he said, “many shocking stories of cruelty and misconduct witnessed by the relators, officers now in this ship.” If there is any truth in the statement that the number of floggings inflicted in English ships diminished by a half when the Admiralty ordered quarterly returns of punishments to be made, it is manifest that there must have been a gross abuse of the power to flog. It is certain that we employed many foreigners, and one of the English vessels lost in the war of 1812, the Epervier, had foreigners in her crew.

Yet it is doubtful whether these explanations of the decline of our discipline and skill are satisfactory. No vessel lost to the Americans was so scandalously lost as the Ambuscade, taken by the French Bayonnaise in 1798. She was outmanœuvred by a smaller ship, and carried by boarding. In the American war the Phœbe, which took the Essex in the South Seas, and the Shannon, which took the Chesapeake, were nowise inferior to their opponents in gunnery. Nor were we always beaten in that war by gunnery or by American seamen. The Decatur, which took the Dominica by boarding, was commanded by a French privateer, Captain Diron, and manned by a French crew. The discipline of the navy was as severe for the marine as for other men. Yet there never was any difficulty in recruiting for the marines. If our navy sank below the level of 1805, the reason must be sought in its size. One hundred and forty-five thousand men was an immense number to take from the population of Great Britain when it was less than half what it is to-day. And they had to be found just when increased numbers of soldiers were needed, when our merchant shipping had doubled, and when there was a great development of manufacturing industry and of agriculture. If we had been forced to rely on our own population we could not have found the men. We succeeded because multitudes of foreign seamen were driven to seek service in England by the ruin of commerce in their native countries. Even with their help the Admiralty was unable to supply crews of good quality to all the ships. If the Epervier was largely manned by negroes and foreigners, she had many feeble, undersized Englishmen who were taken because no better could be obtained. The physical strength of the men was a consideration of the first importance in the warships of the old navy. All the work at the guns had to be done by downright pulling and hauling. The proportion of one man to every 500 pounds of metal was just sufficient to work the gun, and could not be maintained when the crew was short-handed, or when it was necessary to fight both broadsides. The effort required to run out a 32-pounder, which weighed 55 cwt. 2 lb. on the weather broadside when the ship was leaning over, was severe even for a full crew of twelve men. The demand for good men had far outrun the supply. The existence of the United States added materially to our difficulties, for it supplied our sailors with an English-speaking country to which they could escape. During the later stages of the war the navy was compelled to form its crews with ever-increasing difficulty. It found marines who, when they enlisted, had a security for permanent employment and a pension. The sailors did not form a permanent corps and were sent adrift when their ship was paid off. The regular bred seamen preferred the good wages and freedom of the merchant service, or emigrated to America. The miscellaneous landsmen, who formed a large part of our crews, were obtained by bounties and the press. The press did indeed take time-expired apprentices from the merchant ships at sea, and they constituted a valuable part of our crews. On land it was of little value. During 1811, 1812, and 1813, 29,405 men were impressed, 27,300 of them deserted, and as 3000 trustworthy men were employed in the gangs which seized them, the navy was in fact the loser to the amount of 1000 men. The naval rendezvous, placed in “the vilest sort of public house, with a something that had once been a Union Jack suspended from a pole, but from filth and dirt wearing the appearance of a black flag,” was not only a scandal, but a useless expense. Pressgang midshipman was a byword for a ruffian. The practice of incorporating criminals and vagabonds in the navy, which was as old as the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was continued throughout the great war. Captain Anselm Griffiths, whose description of a naval rendezvous has been quoted above, is emphatic about the criminal element in the navy. “What,” he says, “was the mass of discontent and impatience generated by a forced association with the refuse of our jails, convicts, vagabonds, thieves not brought to justice from lenity, smugglers, White Boys, suspected Irish during the rebellion, all who from loss of character could not procure employment, the idle and the worthless,—all was fish that came to the net.”

Such accounts of the crews of the navy as this might be quoted in numbers. We are tempted to wonder how the work was done with such men, and whether there can be any foundation for the praise given to the seamanship and gunnery of the navy. But Captain Griffiths, and other authorities who support him, spoke of the bad elements. With them were others of a very different order—the marines and the pressed men of good character. The great length of the war allowed time for the formation of a class of men who were trained wholly in the navy and were attached to it by habit and affection. When Broke commissioned the Shannon, he left England with a crew composed of drafts from the guardships of very mixed quality, and of a majority of boys provided by the Patriotic Society and the workhouses. If the Shannon had met a well-appointed American frigate within three months she would have fared no better than the Epervier or the Java. But she was six years in commission before her famous action. Broke had time to weed out the bad characters. The boys grew to manhood under his wise training. The same process was going on in other ships. If we could have limited the establishment of the navy to 80,000 or even 100,000 men, every ship might have been as well manned as the Shannon. It is even possible that the weaknesses of the navy were made to appear greater than they really were by the fact that the Admiralty, which naturally looked first to fleets Napoleon was building in European ports, kept its best men for the European stations, and compelled captains, whose ships were commissioned for distant seas, to put up with the worst. The increase in the staff of officers from over two to over five thousand, brought with it the necessity for not being too exacting as to their quality. Something must be allowed for the jobbery of the time. There were men in the navy who owed their positions to no merit of their own, but to the fact that some one of influence had spoken for them. We must, again, allow for the fact that there was as yet no uniform standard of discipline. The captains had wide discretion, and the bad ones were unchecked.

Whatever evils the overgrowth of the navy brought with it, the increase was unavoidable. In the years following Trafalgar, the English Navy was in something not unlike the position of the French armies in Spain after 1809. They were far more numerous than the army of Wellington in Portugal. Yet they were frequently unable to collect a force to oppose him, because they were compelled to spread themselves over the whole of Spain. We have recently learned how rapidly an army, which is powerful on a field of battle, can be frittered into small detachments when it has to guard long lines of communication, and to occupy a wide expanse of territory. The English Government was, from the year 1793, under a peremptory obligation to guard trade routes extending from Canton to the St. Lawrence. The task did not become lighter after Trafalgar. Napoleon adopted a definite policy. He began to build line of battleships on a great scale. As his power spread he increased their numbers till he had upwards of one hundred and fifty in ports extending from Venice to Hamburg. They were rarely sent to sea. Many of them, built hastily of green timber, began to rot so soon as they were launched. But it was impossible to neglect them. Squadrons must be employed to watch them. The bulk of our navy was necessarily employed in that work. While our squadrons were watching hostile ports, our commerce was subject to a double form of attack. Light squadrons and single ships sailed from French ports on commerce destroying cruises. Privateers sailed not only from French ports, but from colonial harbours, Martinique and Guadaloupe, Bourbon and Mauritius, and the Dutch islands of Java and Sumatra. These attacks had to be guarded against by blockade, by convoy, by patrol, and by the conquest of the ports from which the privateers sailed.

The history of blockade cannot be told. It is a long monotonous roll of sailings from one point to another and back again, of periodical returns to port to refit or for provisions, of ships driven away by gales from the land, or forced to work to sea that they might not be driven on a lee shore. The daily fulfilment of a routine, isolation from family life and all society other than that of messmates, exposure to cold, to heat, to wet, make up the lot of the officers and men of a blockading fleet. And this was the work on which the majority of the navy was employed. The brief intervals spent in a home port when food and water had to be renewed, were hardly less painful than the time spent on the cruising-ground, for the rule that neither officer nor man might sleep on shore rendered the promise of more leave, given in 1797, almost nugatory. Indeed an increase of pay was the most solid advantage the seamen gained in that year. In 1808, when the need for more men became very urgent the pay of the sailor was raised to £1, 12s. for the lunar month. The secluded unnatural life of the blockading squadrons was terrible for all ranks. Some of the consequences it produced cannot be named. Not a few of the men went mad under the strain, multitudes were hardened in heart and distorted in character.

The blockades did the work assigned them. When, in 1809, Napoleon endeavoured to send a strong squadron, drawn partly from the Brest fleet and partly from ships at Rochefort, to the West Indies, his plan was ruined by the Channel fleet. The bulk of his force did get away from Brest, but only to be sighted by the British forces and driven into the Basque roads. There they were attacked by fireships under the immediate command of Lord Cochrane (Dundonald) and the superior direction of Lord Gambier. The operation was not so completely successful as it might have been. Cochrane was so dissatisfied by the interference of his commander-in-chief that he forced the Admiralty to bring Gambier to a court martial. Even so, the attack ruined the French squadron, and the reinforcements never reached the French islands. Here we see the normal working of the blockade, which left the French fleet no chance of getting to sea, except by the help of good fortune in evading the watch of the British ships.

No great French fleet ventured to sea, and only once did a considerable French squadron incur the risk of trusting itself far from port among the English forces. Napoleon would not hazard the great fleet he was building up till he had vanquished all enemies on the Continent, and could make a final attack with all the forces of Europe. But though the main purpose was achieved the duty became continually more severe till after the Russian campaign, when the destruction of the Grand Army compelled the Emperor to take the crews of his ships and make regiments of them. As his power spread up to 1812, more and ever more ports had to be watched, and it became constantly less possible to block them all effectually. The vast works he carried out at Cherbourg made the harbour capable of holding line-of-battle ships and imposed more blockading duty on the navy. After the fall of Prussia in 1807 he brought the coast of the Baltic under his control, and more ships were needed to counteract his plans. The coast-line to be watched was so long that though the English Government strained its resources to the utmost, though the navy was increased by desperate measures, it was impossible to prevent cruisers and small squadrons from escaping to sea. In 1812 when 621 vessels were in commission, and the establishment of the navy was 145,000 men, Admiral Allemand sailed from Rochefort. He eluded the blockading squadron. He almost succeeded in cutting off the Pompée, 74, which was compelled to start eighty tons of water to lighten herself for flight. He cruised in the Atlantic for the destruction of commerce, and, though he had little fortune in meeting English trading vessels, he got safe back to Brest. Allemand’s raid shows that the new fleet Napoleon was forming was not so incapable of keeping the sea as it has often been supposed to have been. An action fought in this same year must have been a warning to the English Government, if any were needed, that it dare not fail to maintain its naval forces at the highest attainable level of strength. On the 21st February the Victorious, 74, Captain Talbot, which was watching the growing Franco-Venetian squadron at Venice, fought an action with one of the vessels belonging to it, the Rivoli, 74, Captain Barré. The Victorious had been detached from the Toulon blockade, the Rivoli was at sea for the first time, yet the action lasted for four hours, and though the Rivoli was finally compelled to surrender, she inflicted a loss of 27 killed and 99 wounded on the Victorious.

At the beginning of 1808, the year in which the great increase began, the need for numbers had been even more effectually taught. English troops were then engaged in somewhat fretful operations on the coast of Calabria. The French had recovered Corfu and held Venice. The calls on our fleet in the Mediterranean were many. Collingwood was co-operating with the troops, in southern Italy, leaving frigates to watch Toulon. The French Government decided to reinforce its squadron at Toulon by bringing round six ships—the Majestueux, 120, the Ajax, Jemmappes, Lion, Magnanime, and Suffren, 74’s, from Rochefort. They were commanded by the same Admiral Allemand who was throughout his career very successful in avoiding the many squadrons sent against him. Rochefort was blockaded by Sir Richard Strachan with seven sail of the line. Sir Richard generally kept his squadron at anchor in the Basque Roads, but at the close of November 1807 he was compelled, by the lack of provisions, to go to the rendezvous he had assigned to the victuallers which were coming to join him—a point thirty miles or so south of Roche Bonne. A frigate and a brig were left to keep watch. North-easterly gales forced Strachan to the south. The victuallers did not keep touch punctually. The work of transferring cargo at sea in rough weather was tedious. Allemand, seeing that he had only a frigate and a brig before him, put to sea on the 17th January and steered for the Mediterranean. He had a good start, and as the wind turned to the west and rose to a storm he got clear away with five of his ships. The Majestueux was injured in the gale and compelled to return to Toulon. Allemand passed the Straits of Gibraltar and reached Toulon, unseen by any English cruiser, on the 6th February. Strachan, who was fighting his way back to his station against the north-easterly wind when he heard of Allemand’s escape, followed him to the Mediterranean. But he was embayed by the westerly gale. He did not pass the Straits till the 10th, and he joined Thornborough, Collingwood’s second in command, at Palermo on the 21st. Ganteaume, who commanded at Toulon, put to sea with Allemand’s ships on the 7th February, made his way round to Corfu to revictual the garrison, drove off the Standard, which he found there, discharged his mission, and was safe back at Toulon by the 10th April. Collingwood, who concentrated his ships and pursued him, failed to meet him. In the meantime, two French frigates, the Pénélope and Thémis, which sailed from Bordeaux on the 21st January, had cruised near Madeira, had destroyed English property to the value of a quarter of a million, had entered the Mediterranean, and had reached Toulon before the end of March. Criticism after the event could show that if this or the other officer had done something he did not do, Allemand, Ganteaume, and the frigates would have been cut short somewhere. But the palpable fact was that our forces had not prevented the cruises of the Frenchmen. When Strachan followed Allemand he necessarily left Rochefort free for the privateers to enter or leave. With all our superiority over the French fleets we still could not have too many men, too many ships, and an increase was not to be avoided, be the evils it entailed what they might.

The blockading fleets composed the screen covering all the other operations of our ships. They were not able to protect completely, but without such protection as they did afford other duties could not have been performed. The most exacting and most constant of these was convoy. The whole British Navy was engaged in the protection of trade, but the task was peculiarly imposed on the ships which sailed with the fleets of merchant vessels. It had always been counted one of the most pressing of an admiral’s duties to protect “the trade.” Hood took a crowd of merchant crafts with him when he sailed to reinforce Rodney in the West Indies in 1780. Rodney brought the trade with him when he returned home in ill-health. Howe was called upon to see a hundred trading ships well clear of the Channel when he sailed in 1794. But after that year the main fleets were relieved of the duty. They were left free to pursue the enemy’s fleets, and the protection of the traders against privateers, and single man-of-war cruisers was left to detachments. It was a tedious and thankless duty. The rate of sailing of the merchant ships was very slow. The need for vigilance was unceasing, and peculiarly great, while just leaving or approaching the land, for it was then that the prowling privateer was most active. As the trading fleet neared its destination the skippers were tempted to push ahead to reach their market first, and they frequently fell into the hands of the hostile commerce destroyers. The naval officers, who were liable to be accused of neglecting their duty by the owners of the captured ships, had long complained of their inability to control the merchant skippers. When the war was renewed in 1803 the Government took measures to reduce the loss inflicted on our shipping to the lowest attainable level, by compelling all vessels not specially exempted to sail in convoy. It passed “An Act for the better Protection of the Trade of the United Kingdom during the present Hostilities with France” (anno 43^d Geo. III. cap. 57). By this Act merchant ships were required to sail in convoys, to obey the naval officer commanding, and not to separate wilfully under a penalty of £1000, if the cargo belonged to a private owner, and of £1500 if it was composed of naval or military stores. If a vessel did leave the convoy, and was captured, the owner forfeited all right to recover his insurances. Vessels might be licensed to sail without convoy, and the vessels of the East India Company, and of the Hudson’s Bay Company were expressly exempted.

An event which occurred on the 14th and 15th February 1804 would seem to indicate that the East India Company could well dispense with convoy. The French admiral, Linois, the victor of Algeciras, had been sent to the east with General Decaen. He obtained early news of the outbreak of hostilities when at or near Pondicherry and went off at once to Java in such a hurry, that he did not wait for an English naval officer whom he had invited to breakfast. On his way he captured a number of valuable English ships, and then he sailed from Batavia to intercept the Company’s vessels on their way from Canton to Europe. This very valuable trading fleet consisted of sixteen vessels of the nominal burden of 1200 tons, but a real tonnage of from 1300 to 1500. They were armed with from 30 to 36 guns, and carried crews of 60 white seamen, and 120 Lascars. Their guns were as a rule of no great value, and in real force they were far inferior not only to a frigate but to a heavy corvette. Linois had with him the Marengo, 74, the Belle Poule, 40-gun frigate, the Semillante, 36, the Berceau, 22, and the Aventurier, 16. On the 14th February he sighted the Company’s ships to the E.N.E. of Pulo Aor, an island near the east side of the southern extremity of the Malay Peninsula. They were on their way to the Straits of Malacca—sixteen of them in all—the Earl Camden, the ship of the Company’s commodore, Nathaniel Dance; the Warley, Henry Wilson; Alfred, James Farquharson; Royal George, John Fam Timmins; Coutts, Robert Torin; Wexford, W. Stanley Clarke; Ganges, William Moffat; Exeter, Henry Meriton; Earl of Abergavenny, John Wordsworth; Henry Addington, John Kirkpatrick; Bombay Castle, Arch. Hamilton; Cumberland, W. Ward Farrer; Hope, Jas. Prendergass; Dorsetshire, Rob. Hunter Brown; Warren Hastings, Thomas Larkins; Ocean, J. Christ. Lochner. The size of the 1200-ton ships, the fact that they were painted to represent two tiers of guns, the craft of Commodore Dance, who hoisted the man-of-war pennant on three of them, and the bold bearing they all assumed, cowed Linois. He hesitated to attack till the Indiamen saw his hesitation, bore down on him and drove him to flight. The Company’s skippers richly deserved all the praise and rewards they received. The knighthood given to Dance was handsomely earned. Yet it would be a great mistake to conclude from the affair of Pulo Aor that the Company’s ships could rely on their own strength. Linois was singularly disappointing to his friends whenever he attempted to attack, though he could fight manfully with his back to the wall. Indiamen did on several occasions make gallant and successful fights. On the other hand they were frequently taken by frigates and privateers. When Sir E. Pellew came to take the command in the East Indies in 1804 the shipping had been well-nigh ruined in the Bay of Bengal by French and Dutch privateers. It was only by submitting to accept convoy that the Company was able to revive its trade.

There were, however, limits to what the navy could do to protect trade by convoy. Vessels might be captured while on their way from their port of departure to the rendezvous. Gales might scatter them when collected. Fog and mist might afford cover to the assailant. By far the most effectual of all ways of protecting trade was to capture the ports from which the assailants sailed. Therefore from 1793 to 1811, when the Dutch island of Java was taken, the navy was engaged in a series of colonial expeditions. They began with the seizure of St. Pierre and Miquelon, the two little islands belonging to France on the south coast of Newfoundland, and of Pondicherry—three ports always occupied at the beginning of a war, and restored at the close. St. Pierre and Miquelon were taken in May, and Pondicherry was occupied August of 1793. In the same year Tobago was taken from the French, and Martinique was attacked without success. The royalists of the island called the English forces in, but Rochambeau, the general in command, held his ground. The planters of the French half of San Domingo also appealed to England for protection against their insurgent slaves. It was so freely given that Jamaica was for a time left without a garrison. The spectacle of a triumphant servile revolt was dreadful to all the slave owners of the West Indies. The operations on the coast of this island were disastrous to the troops. They dared not carry negroes with them from our own islands lest they should be infected in the rebellious spirit of the French slaves. No use could be made of the negroes of San Domingo. Therefore the soldiers had to engage in work which is fatal to the white man in the tropics. Whole battalions were swept away by fevers. The part of the navy in this case and in most colonial expeditions was to carry the troops, to land them, to supply naval brigades. These services were necessarily unvarying in character. The occupation of a Dutch island in the Moluccas differs only in the names of the men and ships from the occupation of a French island in the West Indies. In these cases, too, the navy though an indispensable, was a subordinate, part of the forces engaged. It carried the soldiers and it helped them, but the army effected the conquest. Nothing could well be more idle than to speculate as to which of the two, the sailor or the soldier, was the more essential to the victory. The soldiers could not reach the place to be taken unless they were carried in ships, and the sailors could not occupy the land without the soldiers. To speak of these conquests as the gift of the Sea Power is inaccurate if not absurd. The Sea Power of itself could never have taken the Cape, or Mauritius. Many of them were not taken to be kept. The permanent occupation of Martinique or Guadaloupe would have been offensive to the West Indian interest, since their produce would have competed with that of our own islands in the home market. These islands were taken primarily because they were the headquarters of the privateers who preyed on our commerce, and secondarily because they were useful pledges to have in hand when peace was to be arranged.

A list of these expeditions given without monotonous detail will show by what steps England applied and completed her command of the sea.

In January 1794 Sir John Jervis arrived at Jamaica with four sail of the line, escorting 7000 troops under the command of Sir C. Grey. They made an easy conquest of Martinique, which had a garrison of only 700 men in March, and in April occupied St. Lucia and Guadaloupe. In June, Victor Hugues, by birth a mean white of the last-named island, and a Jacobin of the most brutal character, but of energy and capacity, arrived from Europe with nine vessels, and troops. He landed in Guadaloupe. An attack made on his ships at Pointe à Pitre by Jervis was repulsed. He drove the British garrison from pillar to post, and reconquered the island by December. Reinforcements reached him in September. Others sailed from Brest in November, and, though attacked by English ships near Désirade, reached Guadaloupe in January 1795. Hugues rapidly took or retook Santa Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, and Dominica. Our naval forces were not numerous enough to watch everywhere. Nor were our troops, who were rapidly diminished by disease, able to occupy in sufficient force.

In August of 1795 Rear-Admiral Keith Elphinstone (Lord Keith) landed the troops which occupied the Cape. In July and August of the year the ships on the East India station and troops from India occupied the Dutch posts on the east side of Ceylon, in Molucca, and Cochin.

In April 1796 Rear-Admiral Christian came to take the command in the West Indies in succession to Jervis, bringing troops under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby. Santa Lucia was retaken at once, St. Vincent and Grenada in June. In the East Indies the Dutch posts at Colombo, Amboyna, Banda, etc., were occupied. In August a half-manned Dutch squadron of three line-of-battle ships and four frigates fell into the hands of Keith at Saldanha Bay.

In February 1797 Spain having declared war, Rear-Admiral Harvey and Abercromby, with 5 sail of the line and troops, seized Trinidad. The Spanish admiral, Ruiz de Apodaca, whose ships were half-manned, burnt his squadron, and the small garrison could offer no resistance. An attack on Porto Rico in April was beaten off.

In 1799 Surinam was occupied.

In September 1800 Curaçao was surrendered by the inhabitants, who were terrorised by a mob of piratical adventurers calling themselves republicans.

In 1801, on the formation of the Northern Coalition, the Danish and Swedish islands in the West Indies, St. Martin, Saba, St. Thomas, St. John, Santa Cruz, St. Bartholomew, were occupied. The Dutch island, St. Eustatius, was occupied. In the East Indies, Ternate was taken. Portugal having been driven by the threats of France and Spain to exclude other trade, we took possession of Madeira.

By the terms of the Peace of Amiens, England made a wholesale restoration of her conquests. Trinidad, which was of value as a depôt for the smuggling trade with the Spanish colonies in South America, was retained. In the East we kept Ceylon. On the renewal of the war the work of the previous years had to be done over again.

In 1803 the Dutch islands in the West Indies were reoccupied, and the negroes of San Domingo were helped to destroy the remnants of the French troops among them.

In 1804, at the close of the year, an unsuccessful attack was made on Curaçao. Surinam was occupied in April and May.

In 1806 the Cape was reoccupied.

In 1807 Curaçao was taken at a rush by Captain Brisbane.

In 1808 Marigalante fell into our hands, but an attempt to seize St. Martin ended in the death or capture of all the men landed.

In 1809 Senegal was taken for the express purpose of rooting out the privateers who made it their headquarters. In the West Indies a powerful expedition, carrying 10,000 troops under General Beckwith, escorted by Admiral Cochrane, took Martinique. Cayenne was occupied by a naval brigade, and our old enemy, Victor Hugues, the Governor, became our prisoner.

In 1810 Cochrane and Beckwith took Guadaloupe. In the East, Mauritius was taken, and Amboyna and the Moluccas fell into our hands.

In 1811 the work was completed by the occupation of Java by a large army from India.

These expeditions, which sailed to occupy islands from which attacks could be made on our trade, were not the only tasks imposed on the navy in the interest of commerce. As Napoleon fixed his yoke on Europe, and endeavoured to compel all its peoples to join him in excluding English trade, it became necessary to force an entry to new markets, and to find the means of getting access to the old. It was in order to obtain fresh markets that the expeditions to the river Plate were undertaken in 1806 and 1807. Few passages in history are better fitted to show what is the rigid limit of the power of a fleet than these adventures. The first was promoted by the admiral on the Cape Station, Sir Home Popham. He saw that new markets were becoming necessary, and he knew that the Spanish colonists were discontented. From these sound premises he drew the illegitimate deduction that the people of Buenos Ayres would welcome English rule. He persuaded the authorities at the Cape to despatch troops to Buenos Ayres. The navy carried them there, but it could not save General Beresford and his men from being compelled to capitulate when the townsmen rose on them. The commercial classes in England forced the Government to continue the enterprise begun by Sir Home. Monte Video was occupied, and Buenos Ayres was again attacked in 1807. But our troops, ill-commanded by General Whitelocke, were again forced to surrender. England was on the verge of finding herself committed to a war of conquest in South America, which would have employed her whole disposable army, when the rising of Spain against Napoleon in 1808 gave her an honourable excuse for withdrawing from a compromising adventure.

The eager disposition of the trading classes in England to follow the lead given by Sir Home Popham, was immediately stimulated by Napoleon’s Berlin decree of the 27th October 1806. It was the beginning of a furious rivalry between himself and the British Government, in which each endeavoured to prevent the other from obtaining any benefit from neutral trade. The emperor strove to exclude our commerce, and we to prevent any goods from reaching Europe except through English ports. The neutral was ground between the upper and the nether millstone. The navy was employed in covering a vast contraband trade, which arose inevitably from the natural desire of the inhabitants of Europe to obtain goods they needed, and England’s equally natural desire to sell. There was an element of hypocrisy on both sides, and in practice each undid much of its public policy by an underhand use of a licensed trade. Napoleon undoubtedly employed this device to obtain the very things he pretended to exclude. But he attempted to confine the right to disregard his decrees to himself. Therefore the smuggling trade could not be dispensed with, and it became one of the duties of the navy to shepherd the smugglers. The great field of this peculiar commerce was the Baltic. The Peace of Tilsit, between France and Russia in July 1807, threatened England with a renewal of the Northern Coalition. Her Government, whether informed of the secret articles of the treaty directed against it, or acting, as it was entitled to act, on the certainty that the Emperor of the French would lay hands on any weapon he could reach to be used against England, took prompt measures to diminish the danger. In September it despatched a powerful combined expedition to occupy Copenhagen and seize the Danish fleet. If this vigorous measure requires any justification, one can be found in the paroxysm of rage which it provoked in Napoleon.

The seizure of the Danish fleet entailed a war with Denmark, and during the ensuing years the navy had to fight many sharp actions in order to cover the merchant vessels on their way into and out of the Baltic. When in that sea the trading vessels were frequently compelled to cruise to and fro till they could co-operate with the smugglers on shore, or till the Governments found a way of admitting their goods out of sight of Napoleon’s agents. As Russia was compelled to make believe to go to war with England, and was very seriously engaged in depriving the Swedes of Finland, a brush took place in August 1808. The English fleet co-operated with the inefficient fleet of the Swedes, and escorted the 200 transports carrying English troops, under Sir John Moore, to their assistance. The Russian fleet would not be drawn into a battle, but one of their liners, the Sewolod, 74, was cut off and taken. The Russian crew showed solid courage, but their gunnery was not above the Spanish level. The British fleets remained in the Baltic till the downfall of Napoleon began. The service was trying, and the loss from shipwreck was at times severe. But the work was mainly political, apart from the obligation to protect the traders from privateers sailing from ports under French control. Among the political duties discharged was one which demonstrated the scope of the navy’s power. Napoleon had compelled the Spanish Government to supply him with a body of troops for use in Germany—for he was as hard put to it to find men for the vast armies his victories compelled him to maintain, as the British Government was to keep up the establishment of its navy. He had stationed the Spaniards in Denmark, and they were there when their country rose against the French in 1808. The British Government found means to inform the Spanish general, Romana, of what had taken place. He concentrated the greater part of his men, by forced marches in August, at Nyborg in Fünen, and embarked them on board an English squadron commanded by Sir R. Keats. They were sent on to Spain.

It cannot well be said that the power of the navy was shown in the discharge of another piece of political duty it had been called upon to perform at the other extremity of Europe from the Baltic. In 1806 Napoleon was instigating the Turks to attack Russia, who was still in arms against him. The English Government desired to help the enemy of our enemy, and Sir Thomas Duckworth was sent with a squadron to coerce the Turks into keeping the peace. He forced the passage of the Dardanelles in February 1807, and placed his squadron opposite Constantinople. But he unfortunately allowed himself to be played upon by the diplomacy of the Turks, and the French ambassador, General Sebastiani. He delayed action till the Turks had thrown up batteries which made the position of his squadron dangerous, and he was compelled to retreat. On his return his squadron was roughly handled by the Turkish batteries.

With the beginning of the war in the Peninsula the navy was provided with a field on which it could perform, profitably and with a definite aim, duties which it had too often been called upon to discharge to no purpose. From the beginning of the war it had escorted troops to be landed for conquest or co-operation with allies. Many of these undertakings were of the most futile character. If it took Abercromby to success in Egypt, it also took General Fraser to disaster. It carried Sir John Moore to the fiasco of the Swedish expedition, and General Stuart to that barren victory at Maida in Calabria, which was followed by re-embarkation, and served no other purpose than to aggravate the sufferings of the very people we came to help. After Sir Sidney Smith covered the escape of the Portuguese royal family in November 1807 and escorted them to Brazil, the work of our army was to be done on a great scale, nobly, and with triumphant results in Spain and Portugal. It would be pleasant to dwell on the incidents of the story; on the feats of the Impérieuse, and the untiring activity of English cruisers which intercepted the coast roads, and helped to keep the war alive all along the coast of the Bay of Biscay. The navy helped to take coast forts, or defend them. It embarked the Spanish irregular bands when hard pressed, and disembarked them to begin again. It contributed marines to hold the lines of Torres Vedras. It kept the sea routes clear for the food and reinforcements sent to Wellington’s army. But a service made up of scores of small actions cannot be shown by a few examples, or told fully except at great length.

The same work was being done on a smaller scale on the coasts of Sicily and Calabria, to guard the island against the attacks of the two successive French rulers in Naples—the emperor’s brother Joseph, and his brother-in-law Murat—and to keep resistance to them alive on the mainland. When Napoleon had extorted Venice and Dalmatia from Austria, English ships entered the Adriatic to carry on there the work of blockade and harassment which others were doing elsewhere. But in this sea the little war of skirmishes, single combats, and affairs in boats, was varied by an action too considerable and too significant to be allowed to pass among minor operations.

On the 13th March 1811 a Franco-Venetian squadron of four heavy frigates, two lighter frigates, and some small craft, commanded by Captain Dubourdieu, attacked an English squadron of three frigates and a 22-gun corvette, under Captain Hoste, near Lissa. The French officer was to windward, and he attacked in two divisions, a weather and a lee line, heading to cut through the English and surround the rear ships. If Hoste had been forced to remain passive with an awkward fleet, Dubourdieu would no doubt have succeeded. But a good breeze was blowing, and the English squadron was thoroughly alert. Hoste closed his line till the bowsprit of one ship was over the taffrail of the ship ahead of her, and he stood on. As he was moving ahead the Franco-Venetians were compelled to advance on slanting lines, and the lee ships masked part of the weather line. Hoste knew that a sunk rock lay across his course. He stood on in hot action with the leader of the Franco-Venetian weather line and of the lee line, which came behind, till he could not safely go any further. He then wore his line together. The leading Franco-Venetian ship, the Favorite, ran on the rocks, and the others wore to escape her fate. Their division into two lines became a cause of confusion. The single unhampered English line cut them to pieces, and they were beaten with the loss of three frigates. Dubourdieu would have done better if he had formed his squadron in a single line, had engaged the four English vessels to windward with four of his frigates, and had left the two others to double on one end of Hoste’s line. Even so he would probably have been beaten. When the English had turned, two French vessels assailed the Amphion, Hoste’s frigate, which was now the rear ship of his line. But the English officer shot from between them, and crossed the bows of the vessel on his lee quarter. Superior mobility and quality more than counterbalanced advantages of number and position or ingenuity of plan of attack.

This is the lesson which Lissa teaches, and which had been taught by every encounter in the war, great or small. But patent as it was, England might have overlooked it but for a series of actions with a new enemy which occurred at the close of the twenty-three years of war. It is not my intention to depart from my rule of not describing small ship actions or operations on lakes. Therefore I do not tell in detail the events of the war of 1812 with the United States. The single ship actions and encounters between flotillas on the American lakes, of which it was composed, have been affectionately studied by the patriotism of a great people. To us they are, but for one consequence they had, only minor events in a long and varied history. To describe how the vast numerical superiority of the English navy enabled it in the end to drive the American flag from the sea and to cover invasion of the territory of the United States, would be to tell a story which has little intrinsic interest. The consequence of the early actions of the war were, however, of extreme importance.

There was a serious risk that England would come to the end of the war in the complacent belief that she was endowed with a privilege to be superior on the sea. Her superiority was the fair reward of foresight and preparation. When looked at properly, her victories over the French and Spanish Navies afforded no guarantee that she would not be beaten if she forgot that:—