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CHAMPIONS OF THE FLEET

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

• FAMOUS FIGHTERS OF THE FLEET.
• THE ENEMY AT TRAFALGAR.
• THE ROMANCE OF THE KING’S NAVY.
• ETC. ETC.

CHAMPIONS THEN AND NOW: THE VICTORY AND THE DREADNOUGHT

Both ships, and the submarine alongside the “Victory,” are shown on the same scale. The picture is reproduced by kind permission of the Proprietors of the “Illustrated London News.” Photos by Stephen Cribb, Southsea.

CHAMPIONS
OF THE FLEET

CAPTAINS AND MEN-OF-WAR
AND DAYS THAT HELPED TO
MAKE THE EMPIRE

BY EDWARD FRASER

WITH 19 ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMVIII

WM. BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

PREFACE

These tales of the navy of the fighting days of old are to some extent, it may seem, cruises in rather out-of-the-way waters. At the same time, they may claim present-day associations that should render them not out of place just now. How and why, for instance, the world-famous name Dreadnought came into the Royal Navy is a story of interest on its own account that ought to be timely. With that also is told something of what our Dreadnoughts of old did under fire in the fighting days of history: with Drake; against the Armada; with Sir Walter Raleigh; against De Ruyter and the Dutchmen; at La Hogue; how one gave the sobriquet “Old Dreadnought” to the famous Boscawen; how Nelson’s uncle and patron Maurice Suckling captained the same ship in battle; of Collingwood in the Dreadnought; and of the Dreadnought at Trafalgar. We get, too, a passing glance at certain of the “points” of our mighty battleship the Dreadnought of the present hour. Again, in the year that has seen the name of Clive recalled to the memory of his countrymen by an ex-Viceroy of India in connection with the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Plassey, what the navy did for Clive at the most critical moment of his fortunes, how without its active support on the field of battle Clive would have been powerless, the forgotten, or certainly little appreciated, part that the navy took in the founding of our Indian empire—should be of interest to English readers. This year again sees a new Téméraire, one of our “improved Dreadnoughts,” added to the Royal Navy. The fine story of how the never-to-be-forgotten name Téméraire—immortalized alike by Turner and by Trafalgar—first came to appear on the roll of the British fleet is told here. And it should be of interest to recall certain incidental matters concerning the old Victory herself: among others the circumstances in which she came to be built and was safely sent afloat in spite of expected incendiarism; where too those who fought on board at Trafalgar came from, and how many representatives each of our counties had with Nelson in his last fight. Such are some of the matters dealt with in these pages, which of themselves should afford entertainment and help also to make this book useful.

E. F.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAMPIONS
OF THE FLEET

To the fame of your name

When the storm has ceased to blow;

When the fiery fight is heard no more,

And the storm has ceased to blow.

I
OUR DREADNOUGHTS:—
THEIR NAME AND BATTLE RECORD

A name through all the world renown’d,

A name that rouses as a trumpet sound.

The “Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day”—on the 24th of August, 1572—was directly the cause of the coming into existence of our first Dreadnought.

Startled and horrified at the terrible news, as the details of the ghastly story crossed the channel, Queen Elizabeth replied by instantly calling the forces of England to arms. John Hawkins, at the head of twenty ships of war, was sent to cruise off the Azores. The rest of the fleet was ordered to mobilize and be ready to concentrate in the Downs. Instructions were issued for the beacons to be watched. The militia were ordered to muster and march to the coast. A subsidy was sent over to the Protestants in Holland, and a rush of volunteers followed to join those from England already in the field. Huguenot refugees in this country were given leave to fit out vessels to help their co-religionists at La Rochelle. Four men-of-war for the Royal Navy were ordered to be laid down forthwith. They comprised the most important effort in shipbuilding that England had made for ten years.

To facilitate rapidity of building, the work on the four vessels was divided between the two chief master-shipwrights—or, as we should say, naval constructors—of the day: two ships to Matthew Baker, two ships to Peter Pett. Both men were at the top of their profession. Peter Pett was a distinguished member of the great family of naval shipwrights, whose fame has come down to our own times. Baker, who was also of a family of naval shipwrights of repute, was considered by many of the naval officers of the day as the better man. “Mr. Baker,” wrote one, “for his skill and surpassing grounded knowledge in the building of the ships advantageable to all purposes hath not in any nation his equal.” Pett and Baker were keen business rivals, and their rivalry came into play on the present occasion.

The names of the new ships were announced in due course, and represented Her Majesty’s mood on the occasion. She herself selected and appointed them with intention. It was Queen Elizabeth’s way to give her ships “telling” names. “The choice of energetic names for the ships of her Royal Navy,” it has been said, “was one of the means employed by the heroic and politic Elizabeth to infuse her own dauntless spirit into the hearts of her subjects, and to show to Europe at large how little she dreaded the mightiest armaments of her enemies.” More than that, however, needs to be said. As a rule, in the cases of her bigger ships, the Queen chose names that carried, in addition, an underlying meaning, that bore direct allusion to some national event of the hour. According to one who lived at the time, writing about the first ship launched by the Queen, to which, in accordance with old custom, the sovereign’s name was given: “The great Shipp called the Elizabeth Jonas was so named by Her Grace in remembrance of her owne delyverance from the furye of her Enemys, from which in one respect she was no less myraculously preserved than was the prophet Jonas from the Belly of the whale.” In like manner our first Victory and our first Triumph were given those ever famous names, in the first place, of set intention to commemorate the historic double-event of the year in which they both joined the Queen’s fleet. The Aid, or Ayde, another Elizabethan man-of-war, was so called to commemorate Elizabeth’s first expedition to help the Huguenots of Normandy in their forlorn hope struggle for liberty of conscience, which was just setting out when the Aid went off the stocks. Our first Revenge, of immortal renown, did not receive that name at haphazard in the year of Don John of Austria’s insolent threat to invade England and depose Elizabeth by force of arms. Our first Repulse was appointed that name—extant to this day in the Royal Navy for one of our older battleships—in memory of the defeat of the Spanish Armada:—Dieu Repulse was the earlier form of the name as the Queen gave it. And to take at random two other names from the list, it was to commemorate the same overthrow of the arch-enemy of England in those times that Queen Elizabeth chose the names Defiance and Warspite—in curious reference, this latter name, to an incident during the fighting with the Armada—for two others of her men-of-war.

It was of set purpose that Queen Elizabeth, in the year of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, chose the name Dreadnought for one of her ships of war. The intentions of the Catholic League towards England were an open secret in every council chamber of Europe. The papal Bull, excommunicating and deposing Elizabeth, had been nailed on the doors of Lambeth Palace. It was at their disposal. Alva’s butcheries in the Netherlands were fresh in the recollection of the world, and the memory of other dark doings came still more closely home to our own people; how Englishmen had been “seized in Spain and the New World to linger amidst the tortures of the Inquisition or to die by its fires.” Burghley and Walsingham, and others as well, had fully understood the menace for England and the warning of Lepanto only two years before. Their secret agents had supplied them with a copy of De Spes’ confidential report to Alva and King Philip to the effect that the ports of England were poorly fortified, and that only eleven at most of Queen Elizabeth’s twenty ships of war were worth taking into account. They had not forgotten what had happened three years before, when, under the guise of an escort for the new Queen of Spain from Flanders to the Tagus, an extremely formidable Spanish fleet, fully equipped for war, had come north and lain for some weeks in the Scheldt, acting throughout in a very suspicious way. That was a twelvemonth before Lepanto. Now the situation seemed even more menacing for England. The Queen’s so-called Agreement with Spain, lately come to, for practical purposes was hardly worth the paper it was drafted on. There was Mary Stuart and her partizans to be reckoned with also; the restless intriguing of the Roman Catholics all over England; open rebellion in Ireland. What might not the consequences of the Paris massacre involve in the near future? It was at such a moment that the name Dreadnought was first appointed to an English man-of-war, and the Queen’s choice in the circumstances partook of the nature almost of an Act of State, specially designed to express the temper of the nation. In the same spirit of exalted patriotism in which, at a later day, Elizabeth, from Tilbury camp, with proud scorn bade King Philip and the Prince of Parma and all other enemies of the realm do their worst, the great Queen, of her own royal will and pleasure, named for the Royal Navy its first Dreadnought.

Swiftsure was the name given to the second ship of the set. “Swift-suer” was the way the Queen Elizabeth spelled it—“Swift-pursuer,” that is—not an inappropriate name for the sister ship of a Dreadnought. The pair were intended as ships of the line, to use a later day term. The other two ships of the group were smaller vessels of the light cruiser class of the period, intended for service as scouts, as the “eyes and ears of the fleet” at sea. Their names were the Achates and the Handmaid, expressive names both in their way.

Matthew Baker’s men had the Dreadnought and Handmaid to build; Pett’s men the Swiftsure and the Achates. They all started work within three weeks, and Pett’s men won the race by just a month. The Swiftsure and the Achates were both sent afloat on the 11th of October, 1573; the Dreadnought and the Handmaid on the 10th of the following month.

An Arctic explorer of those times, whose name lives on our maps—the man, indeed, who named the North Cape for us, Captain Stephen Borough (or Borogh, as he himself usually wrote it), one of “ye foure Principall Masters in Ordinarye of ye Queene’s Maᵗⁱᵉˢ Navye Royall,” by special appointment also the Master of the Victory, and a son of North Devon in her proudest day—had naval charge and supervision over the building of the Dreadnought and the other ships at Deptford. He lodged meanwhile at Ratcliffe, across the river, and his “traveylinge chardges,” with the waterman’s receipt for rowing him to and fro on his weekly visits of inspection, signed “Richard Williams of Ratcliff, Whyrryman,” is still in existence.

The marshmen and labourers at the dockyard began their digging, “working upon ye opening of ye dockhedde for ye launchynge,” during the first days of November. That was the first of the preliminaries, necessitated by the primitive arrangements of those times. The dock at Deptford in which the timbers of the Dreadnought were put together was of the crudest type: practically an oblong excavation in the river bank, the sides and inner end of which were shored up and kept from falling in by wooden planks. The outer end, or river end, was closed and sealed when a ship was inside by a water-tight dam of brushwood-faggots, clay, and stones filled in and rammed down between the overlapping double gates of the dock. An “ingyn to drawe water owte of ye dokke,” worked by relays of labourers, pumped out the water inside the dock after it was closed. Before the dock could be re-opened the stones, faggots, etc. of the “tamping” or stopping had to be dug up and removed. Then at low water the gates would be swung back, and the water from the river flow in as the tide rose for the launch or float-out of the ship into the river.

On board the Dreadnought, meanwhile, the finishing touches were being put by the contractors’ workmen—Thomas Hodges, of “Parris Garden,” and Thomas Wells, of Chatham, and their men seeing to the ironwork fittings, “ye workmanshipp and making of lockes and boltes, keyes and haidges [sic] for ij newe cabbons, as also for hookes, and stockelockes, porthaidges [sic], revetts and countre-revetts, shuttynges with rings, greate dufftayles and divers other necessaries”; joiners sent by “Jullyan Richards of London, widdow,” who had a contract for certain other fittings; other joiners from Lewys Stocker, also of London, seeing to “ye sellynges [sic] and formysling ye cabbins and makyng casements for windows, seelings, awmeryes [sic], cupboards, settes, bedsteddes, formes, stools, trisstelles, tables,” etc. “for her Grace’s newe shippe ye Dreadnaughte.” Hard by, alongside Deptford creek, were lying the masts for the ship, ready to be put in place after she was afloat; with “toppes greate and small, mayne-tops, ffore-toppe, mizzen-toppe, and toppe-galantes;” besides barge loads from Richard Pope, of “Ereth,” of “gravaille for ye ballistynge of hur highness Shipe called ye Dreadnaughte at iiijᵈ every time.” Prest-master Thomas Woodcot was meanwhile hard at work elsewhere, “travailling about the presting of marynnars within the River of Theames for ye Launchynge and Rigging of Hur highnes’ ij newe shippes at Deptfordstraund [sic] by the space of viii daies at iijs iiijd per diem.”

The future “nucleus crew” of the Dreadnought, who were to act as ship-keepers on board when the ship went round to moor with the rest of the fleet laid up in the Medway, had been warned to be at Deptford by the morning of the 10th of November. They were drawn apparently from the ships lying off Gillingham, just below Chatham, or “Jillingham Ordinarie”—the “Fleet Reserve,” as we say nowadays—and numbered, all told, ten men and a boy. These were the names of our original “Dreadnoughts” of three hundred and thirty-three years ago, and their quarterly pay, according to “The Accompte as well Ordinarie as Extraordinarie of Benjamin Gonson, Treasurer of ye Quene’s Majestie’s Maryn cawses,” 1574, a quaint, bulky, ponderous, parchment covered volume, of massive proportions, laced with faded green silk, and bound with leather straps, now well worn and in parts frayed nearly away:

THE “DREADNAUGHTE.”

This is what the Dreadnought looked like as she lay in the dock on the Tuesday morning that saw the ship take the water. Imagine a solid-looking heavily-timbered hull, round bowed, with long, raking forward prow or beak, reaching out some ten or twelve yards ahead of the actual vessel, and with at the after-end a lofty towering poop with shallow overhanging balustraded gallery. Amidships the vessel is of a width equal to nearly a third of her length. From the “greate beaste,” the figure-head—a dragon—“gilded and laid with fine gold,” representing one of the supporters of the Queen’s arms, set up on the tip of the beak, away aft to the stern gallery is a distance of, over all, about a hundred and twenty feet. The body of the hull itself has a keel length of some eighty feet—from rudder post to fore-foot. Along the water-line the bends are all tarred over, with varnished side planking above, tough oak timber from the Crown lands of the Sussex Weald by Horsham. The topsides above are varnished to the bulwarks, where a touch of colour shows; ornamental carved and painted work in royal Tudor green and white, laid on in “colours of oil” and garnished with Her Majesty’s family badges in gold, and with here and there, on the balustrades of the quarter-rails and stern gallery, an additional touch of red. On the stern, “painted in oils,” are the arms of England, with the Lion and the Dragon, the Queen’s royal supporters, and below, on a scroll, Her Majesty’s motto, Semper Eadem.

OUR FIRST DREADNOUGHT

From a Contemporary Print kindly lent by Mr. Wentworth Huyshe. (The “Dreadnought” is shown as she appeared when serving in the “Ship Money” Fleet of Charles the First:—circ. 1637).

These are other things about the ship that would strike the Deptford visitor of that day. The square-headed forecastle is low and squat in appearance, compared with the piled-up, narrow poop right aft, looking over from which a foreign visitor to the Queen’s fleet once declared that “it made one shudder to look downwards.” The bottom of the ship is coated with “tallow and rosin mingled with pitch.” The square-cut, wide portholes, out of which the guns will point when they are on board—the Tower lighters will bring them down for mounting in a week or two—were the idea, they say in the yard, of Master Shipwright Baker’s father, old James Baker, many years ago King Harry’s shipwright, improving on the original French style. It was old Baker too, they say, who “first adapted English ships to carry heavy guns.” The Reformers wanted to send the old man to the stake for “being in the possession of some forbidden books”; but King Harry could not afford to let them burn England’s best naval architect even for the benefit of Protestantism.

The Dreadnought’s gun-ports should open some four feet clear of the water. People have not forgotten the horror of the Mary Rose; what happened to her; how she came to go down one summer’s day at Spithead. The waist bulwarks of the Dreadnought, if she swims as she ought, will be some twenty feet above the water-line. Nearly four hundred tons in burden is our new man-of-war—five tons heavier than the Swiftsure, than which ship too she is six feet longer, though the pair reckon as sister ships. Upwards of six thousand pounds out of Queen Elizabeth’s treasury (about £30,000 at present day value) will have been the cost of the Dreadnought when she leaves Deptford dockyard.

We will go on board for a brief look round the Dreadnought within. As we enter the ship we note how both the half-deck and the fore and aft castles are loopholed for both arrow-fire and musketry, so as to sweep the waist should an enemy board and get a footing amidships. Some of the lighter guns would be able to help. The heavier guns are mostly on the broadside, and are mounted on the decks below in a double tier. The Dreadnought altogether carries forty-two guns. Sixteen of them are heavy guns: two “cannon-periers” of six-inch bore, hard hitters, firing twenty-four pounder stone shot; four “culverins,” seventeen and a half pounders, twelve feet long and five and half inches in the bore, firing iron shot, and able to throw a ball upwards of three miles—“random shot.” There are also ten “demi-culverins,” nine-pounders, firing four and a half inch iron shot. The lighter guns are six “sakers,” pieces nine feet long (five-pounders, of three and a half inch bore) and two “fawcons” (three-pounders). The heavier guns are all muzzle-loaders. Distributed over the upper decks are eighteen breech-loading guns, for fighting at close quarters and rapid firing: “port-pieces,” “fowlers,” and “bases,” as they are called. They are on swivel mountings, and fire stone and iron shot.

All told, the Dreadnought’s armament weighs thirty-two tons. The guns are from Master Ralphe Hogge, “the Queen’s gunstone maker, and gunfounder to the Council.” They are of Sussex iron, from Master Hogge’s own foundry at Buxted. At this moment they are waiting at the Tower, together with the Dreadnought’s supplies of iron shot and cannon balls of Kentish ragstone from Her Majesty’s quarries at Maidstone, stacked “in ye Bynns upon ye Tower Wharfe each side Traitor’s Gate.” When the Dreadnought goes into battle she will carry some two hundred officers and men all told: a hundred and thirty “maryners”—“Able men for topyard, helme and lead,” and “gromets,” or boys and “Fresh men”; with twenty gunners and fifty soldiers. To keep her at sea will cost the Queen £303. 6s. 8d. a month for sea-wages and victualling. Three weeks provisions and water is the most that the ship can stow, owing to the space wanted for the ballast, the cables for the four anchors, and the ammunition and sea stores. That is why victualling ships have to attend Her Majesty’s fleets on service outside the Narrow Seas. The “cook room,” of bricks and iron and paving stones, is in the hold over the ballast. Two more notes may be made as we return on deck and quit the ship. The captain’s cabin, opening on the gallery aft, is neatly wainscoted and garnished with green and white chintz, and with curtains of darnix hung at the latticed cabin windows. There are three boats for the Dreadnought: the “great boat,” which tows astern at all times, the cock-boat and the skiff, both of which stow inboard. John Clerk, “of Redryffe, Shipwrighte,” built the “great boat,” being paid £24, in the terms of his bill, “For the Workmanshipp and makeinge of a new Boate for her Highness’ Shipp, the Dreadnought; conteyninge xi foote Di. in lengthe; ix foote Di. in Breadthe; and iij foote ij inches in Depthe.—By agrement.”

A brave show should our gallant Dreadnought make when she goes forth to war, with her varnished sides and rows of frowning guns and painted top-armours (the handiwork, according to his bill, of Master Coteley, of Deptford), and all her wide spreading sails set (“John Hawkins, Esquire, of London,” supplied these), and at the masthead, high above all, her flag of St. George of white Dowlas canvas with a blood-red cross of cloth sewn on.

The appointed day has come, and the time for the sending afloat and formal naming of the Dreadnought: Tuesday afternoon, the 10th of November, 1573.

The ship lies ready for launching at the appointed moment, having been duly “struck” upon the launching ways a day or two before, under the supervision of Master Baker himself, in the dock where she has been building; shored up on either side, and with the lifting screws and “crabs” prepared to heave her off. The dockhead has been dug out and finally cleared at low tide on Monday, leaving the double gates free and in order, ready to be swung back and opened as soon as the tide begins to make on Tuesday morning.

We will imagine ourselves on the spot at the time and looking on at what took place. It is possible to do so, thanks to a manuscript left by Phineas Pett, Peter’s son and successor at Deptford royal yard.

All is ready for the day’s proceedings by a little after noon, when the important personages taking part at the launch, “by commandement of ye officers of Her Grace’s Maryn Causys,” and the invited guests and superior officials of the dockyard assemble for a light refection of cake and wine in the Master Shipwright’s “lodging,” preliminary to the ceremony.

Who named the Dreadnought on that day? Unfortunately that one detail is not mentioned in any existing record, and the Navy Office book for the year, where the name would certainly have been found, together with the honorarium or fee, paid according to custom, is missing. Most probably it was Captain Stephen Borough himself, and we may imagine him there, apparelled for the day in crimson velvet and gold lace, in the full uniform of one entitled to wear “Her Maᵗⁱᵉˢ cote of ordinarie.” His rank and standing as one of the “Principall Masters of the Queen’s Maᵗⁱᵉˢ Navie in Ordinarie” qualified him for performance of so dignified a duty. The Principal Masters were often deputed by the Lord High Admiral to preside on his behalf at the launches of men-of-war and perform the name-giving ceremony.

While the high officers are having their refreshments in Master Shipwright Baker’s lodging, Boatswain Baxster and the assistant shipwrights are stationing the men on board and at the launching tackles. The customary “musicke” then makes its appearance, “a noyse of trumpetts and drums,” who post themselves on the poop and the forecastle of the ship. Next, a “standing cup” of silver-gilt, filled to the brim with Malmsey of the best, is set up on a pedestal fixed prominently on the poop, and the Queen’s colours are hoisted on board, together with the flag of St. George. At the same time pennons and streamers of Tudor green and white, and decorated with royal emblems and badges, are ranged here and there along the ship’s sides and on the forecastle.

All is ready ere long, and then, forthwith, word is sent to Master Shipwright Baker and the gentlemen of the company. Forthwith the procession forms itself and sets out in stately fashion to go on board.

With his grey hair unbonneted

The old sea-captain comes;

Behind him march the halberdiers,

Before him sound the drums.

So escorted and attended the personage of the hour paces his way forth and proceeds on board the new ship, passing along the decks and ascending to the poop where the company group themselves according to precedence, near by the glittering silver-gilt wine cup. Master Shipwright Baker then gives the signal, and Boatswain Baxster’s whistle shrills out. At once the gangs of men standing ready at the crabs and windlasses heave taut, and a moment later, as the ship begins her first movement outwards, the trumpets and drums sound forth. So, at a leisurely rate at the outset, gliding off foot by foot into deeper water, the new man-of-war hauls gradually out and clears past the dock gates till well into the stream. The anchor is then let go and she brings up. Now it is for Captain Borough—allowing it to have been he—to do his part.

Stans procul in prorâ, pateram tenet extaque salsos

Porricit in fluctus ac vina liquentia fundit.

The trumpets and drums cease as the “Principall Master” steps forward and takes up his position beside the standing cup. He raises the gleaming cup on high so that all around may see. Then, amid universal silence, he proclaims, in a clear resonant voice that every one may hear: “By commandment of Her Grace, whom God preserve, I name this ship the Dreadnought! God save the Queen!” As the Lord High Admiral’s representative utters the last word, he drinks from the cup, and a moment after ceremoniously pours out a portion of the wine upon the deck. The next moment, with a wide sweep of the arm, he heaves the standing cup, with a little wine left in it, into the river—a sacrifice, as it were, on behalf of the bride newly-wedded to the sea, or that the Queen’s cup might never be put to base uses—perhaps, indeed, as a sort of propitiatory act. So it was done, says Master Phineas Pett, “according to the ancient custom and ceremony performed at such times.” Again there is a blare of trumpets and a ruffle from the drums, with cheers afloat and ashore for Her Grace, and hearty congratulations to Master Matthew Baker on the occasion. After that the Dreadnought is formally inspected between decks and below, and the crew’s health is drunk by the high officers in ship’s beer—sure to be of a good brew on a launching day.

By the time that all is over the ship has been warped back alongside the shore again, and the company adjourn thereupon to wind up the day’s proceedings with a good old English dinner, given to the Master Shipwright and the officials of the yard at the Lord High Admiral’s expense.

Such is a passing glimpse of the memorable scene—as far as one may venture to reconstruct it—on “Dreadnought Day” at Deptford Royal Dockyard, that Tuesday afternoon, in Tudor times, three hundred and thirty-three years ago. It is hard to fancy such doings, at Deptford of all places, now. Oxen and sheep for the London meat market nowadays stand penned in lairs on the site of the filled-in dock whence the Dreadnought was floated out—the same dock whence the Armada Victory had preceded her, whence Grenville’s Revenge followed her. Master Shipwright Baker’s lodging is nowadays a cattle drovers’ drinking bar. The old-time navy buildings—their origin even now easily recognisable, at any rate externally—serve as slaughterhouses, and so forth, among which rough butcher lads, reeking of the shambles, jostle daily to and fro. On every side is bustle and clatter and hustling, the rumbling of Smithfield meat vans over the old-time cobble stones, the jargon of Yankee bullock-men, the bleating of sheep under sentence of death. Strange and hard is the fate that in these material times of ours has overtaken what was once the premier Royal Dockyard of England, this former temple, so to speak, of the guardian deity of our sea-girt realm:

This ruined shrine

Whence worship ne’er shall rise again:—

The owl and bat inhabit here

The snake nests in the altar stone,

The sacred vessels moulder near—

The image of the god is gone!

Fallen indeed from its high estate of former days is the ancient royal establishment of “Navy-building town.” Where bluff King Hal used to walk and talk with Matthew Baker’s father, “old honest Jem”; where our sixth Edward paid a long-remembered visit, to be “banketted” (as the royal spelling has it) and see two men-of-war go off the ways; where Elizabeth knighted Francis Drake, and James and Charles rode down in state on many a gala day; where Cromwell paid his second naval visit—his “grandees” attending him, and escort of clanking Ironsides—to see the vindictively named Naseby take the water; where our second Charles liked to saunter on occasion with Rupert at his side, and chattering Pepys and John Evelyn in his train; where James the Second, dull and morose of mood, for the sands of his monarchy were already running out, paid his last historic visit one gloomy autumn afternoon of 1688; where brave old Benbow liked best to spend the mornings of his half-pay life on shore, and Captain Cook set out on his last voyage; where George the Third drove down with Queen Charlotte to do honour to the naming of a Prince of Wales man-of-war; where, too, Royalty of our own time has more than once visited—is now “a market for the landing, sale, and slaughtering of foreign cattle.” The glory has departed—the image of the god is gone!

The Dreadnought and Swiftsure and the two smaller ships were masted and rigged and completed for service during November and the early days of December, after which, with the help of a hundred and fifty extra hands, “prested in ye river of Theames for ye transportyngs about,” they set off on the twentieth of the month to join the fleet lying “in ordinary” in the Medway—an eight days’ voyage as it proved, owing to squally weather and an east wind. The Queen was to have seen the Dreadnought and her squadron pass the palace at Greenwich and salute the royal standard with cannon and a display of masthead flags, as was the Tudor naval usage when the sovereign was in residence, but there had been a domestic misadventure at Placentia just a few days before. While talking with her maids of honour one afternoon, one of the Queen’s ladies—“the Mother of the Maids”—had suddenly dropped dead in the royal presence, and the Court had hastily removed to Whitehall. So the Dreadnought had no royal standard to salute. Three days after Christmas the Deptford squadron took up their moorings in “Jillingham water.”

“Powerful vessels ... with little tophamper and very light, which is a great advantage for close quarters and with much artillery, the heavy pieces being close to the water,” reported, in a confidential letter now in the royal archives at Simancas, one of the King of Spain’s agents in England who saw the Dreadnought and Swiftsure not long after they had joined the Medway fleet. So too, indeed, some of King Philip’s sailors were destined to find out for themselves.

The Dons, indeed, were destined to taste something of the Dreadnought’s quality more than once; beginning with the memorable event of the “Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard.” There, Drake’s right-hand man on many a battle day, commanded the Dreadnought, Captain Thomas Fenner, a sturdy son of Sussex and a seaman who knew his business.

How thoroughly Drake—“fiend incarnate; his name Tartarean, unfit for Christian lips; Draco—a dragon, a serpent, emblem of Diabolus; Satanas himself”—did his work among the Spaniards at Cadiz, burning eighteen of their finest royal galleons, and carrying off six more in spite of fireships and all the shooting of the Spanish batteries, is history. The Dreadnought, after experiencing a narrow escape from shipwreck off Cape Finisterre at the outset of her cruise, took her full share of what fighting there was. She was present, too, at the second act of the drama, which took place off the Tagus with so fatal a sequel for the hapless Commander-in-Chief designate of the Armada, the Marquis de Santa Cruz—the “Iron Marquis,” “Thunderbolt of War,” the real Hero of Lepanto, by reputation the ablest sea-officer the world had yet seen. First, the news that his flagship and the finest fighting galleons of his own picked squadron—all named, too, after the most helpful among the Blessed Saints of the Calendar—together with his best transports and victuallers, had been boarded and taken and sacrilegiously set ablaze to, burned to the water’s edge, one after the other, by those “accursed English Lutheran dogs.” Worse still. To be then defied to his face, he, Spain’s “Captain-General of the Ocean”; to be audaciously challenged to come out and fight and have his revenge then and there—Drake and the Dreadnought and the rest openly waiting for him—in the offing. The shame of the disaster was enough to kill the haughty Hidalgo, to make him fall sick and turn his face to the wall and die, without Philip’s espionage and unworthy insults goading him to the grave. The Dreadnought had a hand in shaping the destinies of England, for, in the words of the Spanish popular saying, “to the Iron Marquis succeeded the Golden Duke,” whose hopeless incompetence gave England every chance in the next year’s fighting.

In the opening encounter with the Spanish Armada that July Sunday afternoon of 1588, no ship of all the Queen’s fleet bore herself better than did the Dreadnought. Captain George Beeston, of an ancient Surrey family, held command on board the Dreadnought. He was a veteran officer of the Queen’s fleet—more than twenty-five years had gone by since he first trod the quarter-deck as a captain. Leading in among the enemy, after the first hour of long-range firing between the English van and the Spanish rear had brought both sides to closer quarters, the Dreadnought with the ships that followed Drake’s flagship the Revenge, for nearly three hours fought first with one and then with another of the most powerful of the Spanish rear-guard ships. After that, forcing their way among the Spaniards as they gave back and began to crowd on their main body, she had a sharp set-to with the big galleons, led by Juan Martinez de Recalde, perhaps the best seaman in all King Philip’s navy, commander of the rear-division of the Armada. On the Santa Ana and her consorts the Revenge and Dreadnought and the rest made a spirited attack, pushing Recalde so hard that eventually Medina Sidonia himself, the Spanish Admiral, had to turn back and come to the rescue with every ship at his disposal. It was enough; Drake and his men had played their part. Before Medina Sidonia’s advance in force, the Revenge and Dreadnought left the Santa Ana, and with the rest of the attacking English van drew off. They had done an excellent day’s work.

There was harder work for the Dreadnought in the great battle of Tuesday off Portland Bill. First came the fierce brush in the morning, when Drake and Lord Howard and the leaders of the English fleet, after a daring attempt to work in between the Spanish fleet and the Dorset coast, had to tack at the last moment, baffled for want of sea room, and were closed with by the enemy in the act of going about. On came the galleons exultantly, their crews shouting and cheering, amid a blare of trumpets and ruffle of drums, in full confidence to run down and sink the lighter built English vessels. It was a moment of extreme peril:—but at the very last, suddenly, the fortune of the day changed. As the Spaniards seemed to be upon them the wind shifted, the English sails filled, ship by ship and all together, and then stretching out with bowsprits pointing seaward, the Revenge, Victory, Ark Royal, Dreadnought, and the others safely cleared the enemy, pouring in so fierce a fire as they passed that the Spanish ships had to sheer off. This was the first fight of the day. Later, when the wind, going round with the sun, shifted again and gave Drake and Howard the weather gage, came on the most desperate encounter with the Armada that our ships had yet seen. Lord Howard in the Ark Royal and Drake in the Revenge, with the Dreadnought, the Lion, the Victory, and the Mary Rose near at hand, driving ahead before the wind, pushed into the thick of the Spanish main body, and attacked the enemy, in a long and furious battle that lasted until the afternoon sun was nearing the horizon.

A third day of battle was yet to come—Thursday’s hot fight off the back of the Isle Wight, and here again the Dreadnought took her full share of what was done, until the long summer day drew to its close and the Armada “gathered in a roundel,” sullenly stood off eastward, proposing to fight no more until the coast of Flanders had been made.

Next morning the Dreadnought’s captain was summoned on board Lord Howard’s flagship, the Ark Royal. He returned “Sir George,” knighted by the Lord High Admiral on the quarter-deck, in the presence of the enemy.

Sunday night saw the fireship attack, so disastrous to the Armada, and next morning followed the crowning victory of the week’s campaign, the great fight off Gravelines of Monday, the 29th of July, “the great battle which, more distinctly perhaps than any battle of modern times, has moulded the history of Europe—the battle which curbed the gigantic power of Spain, which shattered the Spanish prestige and established the basis of England’s empire.” Here the Dreadnought distinguished herself again, fighting in the thick of the fray from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, within pistol-shot of the enemy most of the time.

From six till nearly eight the ships of Drake’s squadron had to bear the brunt of the fight, with, for antagonists, Medina Sidonia himself and his chief captains, who had gathered to stand by their admiral. Trying to rally the Armada after the panic of the night, this gallant band had at first, from before daybreak, anchored in a group, to act as rear-guard to the Spanish fleet, firing signal guns to stop their flying consorts, and sending pinnaces to order the fugitives back. Then Hawkins in the Victory, with the Dreadnought, the Mary Rose, and Swallow, and other ships unnamed, came up and struck in. Now moving ahead through her own smoke to plunge into the mêlée and come to the rescue of some hard-pressed consort, now working tack for tack parallel with and firing salvo after salvo at short range into some towering galleon or huge water-centipede-like galleass—so the hours of that eventful forenoon wore through on the Dreadnought’s powder-begrimed decks. “Sir George Beeston behaved himself valiantly,” records the official Relation of Proceedings, drawn up for the Lord High Admiral. In vain did the most formidable of the Spanish galleons try to close and board. Ship after ship was forced back with shattered bulwarks and splintered sides, and with their scuppers spouting blood, after each English broadside, as the round shot crashed in among the masses of Spanish soldiery, packed on board the galleons as closely almost as they could stand.

More Spaniards joined their admiral as Sidonia passed north, the Spanish rear and centre squadrons forming together a long straggling array, among the ships of which, from nine to after one o’clock, the Revenge, Victory, Dreadnought, Triumph, Ark Royal, and the rest charged through and through fighting both broadsides. Shortly after two o’clock, the English ships passed on, pressing forward to overtake the Spanish van group of galleons. By four o’clock the battle was won, but firing went on till nearly six, “when every man was weary with labour, and our cartridges spent and our ammunition wasted” (i.e. used up).

Once more the Dreadnought followed the fortunes of Drake’s flag to battle; again, too, as Captain Fenner’s ship. In the year after the Armada she had her part in escorting the Corunna expedition, the “counter-Armada,” designed to beat up the quarters of the enemy at home and attempt the wresting of Portugal from the Spanish yoke. A landing party of “Dreadnoughts” fought ashore. Led by Drake and the general of the soldiers, Sir John Norris, they drove the Spaniards before them. “Unto every volly flying round their ears,” says old Stow, “the generall, turning his face towards the enemie would bow and vale his bonnet, saying ‘I thank you, Sir! I thank you, Sir!’ to the great admiration of all his campe and of Generall Drake.” The wine vaults of Corunna, however, interposed on behalf of Spain. Soldiers and sailors alike broke in and got drunk, and all that could be done after that was to reship the men and write the campaign down a failure.

In the attack on Brest in 1594, when Sir Martin Frobisher met his death, the Dreadnought had her share. Two years after that she fought with Essex and Raleigh in the grand attack on Cadiz—this time as one of the picked ships of Sir Walter Raleigh’s own “inshore squadron.” She sailed with Sir Walter again after that in the celebrated “Islands Voyage”; and then the curtain rings down on the memorable days of the story of the Dreadnought of the Great Queen’s fleet. The old ship lasted afloat (after an expensive rebuild in James the First’s reign) until the time of the Civil War. She figured in the interim in the Rochelle Expedition and also in one of Charles the First’s Ship-money fleets. The Dreadnought of St. Bartholomew’s Day and Matthew Baker made her last cruise of all in the year of Marston Moor.

Six Dreadnoughts in all have flown the pennant since England’s Armada Dreadnought passed away.

“OLD DREADNOUGHT’S” DREADNOUGHT

From the original drawing made in 1740 for the official dockyard model. Now in the Author’s Collection.

Charles the Second’s Dreadnought was our second man-of-war of the name. Originally the Torrington, one of Cromwell’s frigates, and named, after the Puritan usage, to commemorate a Roundhead victory over the hapless Cavaliers, Restoration Year saw the ship renamed Dreadnought, under which style she rendered the State good service for many a long year to come. In that time the Dreadnought fought, always with credit, in no fewer than seven fleet battles. She was with the Duke of York when he beat Opdam off Lowestoft in 1665; with Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and Prince Rupert in the “Four Days’ Fight” of 1666; at the defeat of De Ruyter in the St. James’s Day Fight of the same year. Solebay, in the Third Dutch War, was another of our second Dreadnought’s notable days, and also Prince Rupert’s three drawn battles with De Ruyter off the Banks of Flanders in 1673. Worn out with thirty-six years’ service (reckoning from the day that the Torrington first took the water), the Dreadnought had set forth to meet the famous French corsair, Jean Bart, in the North Sea, when, one stormy October night of 1690, she foundered off the South Foreland. Happily, the boats of her squadron had time to rescue those on board.

Our fourth Dreadnought, William the Third’s ship, fought the French at Barfleur and La Hogue, and after that did good service down to the Peace of Ryswick as a Channel cruiser and in charge of convoys. She served all through “Queen Anne’s War,” by chance only missing Benbow’s last fight. Later, the Dreadnought was with the elder Byng—Lord Torrington—at the battle off Cape Passaro, in the Straits of Messina, in 1718, where one, if not two, Spaniards lowered their colours to her. The Dreadnought on that occasion formed one of Captain Walton’s detached squadron, whose exploit history has kept on record, thanks to Captain Walton’s dispatch to the admiral, as set forth in the popular version of it: “Sir, we have taken all the ships on the coast, the number as per margin.” Of that dispatch more will be said elsewhere.[1] The Dreadnought ended her days in George the Second’s reign, at the close of the war sometimes spoken of as “The War of Jenkins’ Ear.”

Two Dreadnought officers, Sir Edward Spragge, who captained our second Dreadnought in the “Four Days’ Fight,” and Sir Charles Wager, a very famous admiral in his day, First Lieutenant of our third Dreadnought in the year before La Hogue, have monuments in Westminster Abbey.

Boscawen’s Dreadnought comes next, a sixty-gun ship built in the year 1742. She was the first ship of the line that Boscawen had the command of, and she gave him his sobriquet in the Navy, “Old Dreadnought,” the name of his ship just hitting off the tough old salt’s chief characteristic—absolute fearlessness. An incident that occurred on board the Dreadnought while Boscawen commanded the ship gave the sobriquet vogue. It is, too, a fine sample of what Carlyle calls “two o’clock in the morning courage.”

It was in the year 1744, when we were at war with both France and Spain, one night when the Dreadnought was cruising in the channel. The officer of the watch, the story goes, came down after midnight to Captain Boscawen’s cabin and awoke him, saying, “Sir, there are two large ships which look like Frenchmen bearing down on us; what are we to do?” “Do?” answered Boscawen, turning out of his cot and going on deck in his nightshirt, “Do? why, d⸺ ’em; fight ’em!” The fight did not come off, however, as the suspicious strangers disappeared.

On board Boscawen’s Dreadnought it was that, fourteen years later, Nelson’s uncle, Maurice Suckling, who got Nelson his first appointment in the Royal Navy, and under whose command the boy Nelson first went to sea, made his mark as a post-captain. It was in the West Indies in 1757, the year in which Byng was shot, and the day was the 21st of October.

The Dreadnought with two consorts met seven French men-of-war, four of them individually bigger and more heavily gunned ships than ours, and the other three powerful frigates, and gave them a sound thrashing.

The news was received in England with exceptional gratification as the first sign of the turn of the tide since Byng’s defeat off Minorca. That was one thing about it that stamped the event in popular memory. A second memorable thing was the incident, according to the popular story, of the “Half Minute Council of War” that preceded the fight.

The three British ships were the Augusta, Captain Forrest; the Dreadnought, Captain Maurice Suckling; and the Edinburgh, Captain Langdon. The three had been sent by the admiral at Jamaica to cruise off Cape François, in order to intercept a large French homeward merchant convoy reported to be weakly guarded. The available French naval force on the station was believed to be too weak to face our little squadron. But, unknown to Admiral Cotes at Port Royal, fresh men-of-war had just arrived from France purposely to see the convoy home. In the result, when our three ships arrived off Cape François, seven French ships stood out to meet them. In spite of the odds the British three held on their course.

These were the forces on either side, in ships and men:—

Directly the French came in sight the senior officer, Captain Forrest of the Augusta, signalled to the other two captains to come on board for a council of war. They came, and, the story goes, arrived alongside the Augusta together and mounted the ship’s side together. As they stepped on to the Augusta’s gangway, Captain Forrest, it is related, addressed the two officers in these terms: “Gentlemen, you see the enemy are out; shall we engage them?” “By all means,” said Captain Suckling. “It would be a pity to disappoint them,” said Captain Langdon. “Very well, then,” replied Forrest; “will you gentlemen go back to your ships and clear for action?” The two captains bowed, and turned and withdrew without having, as it was said, actually set foot on the senior officer’s quarter-deck.

Within three-quarters of an hour they were in action, the Dreadnought leading in and attacking the French headmost ship as the squadrons closed. Captain Suckling opened the fight by throwing the Dreadnought right across the bows of the Intrépide, a 74, and much the bigger ship, forcing her to sheer off to port to avoid being raked.

Backed up by the Augusta and the Edinburgh, the Dreadnought was able to overwhelm the French commodore with her fire, and force the crippled Intrépide back on the next ship, the Opiniâtre. That vessel in turn backed into the fourth French ship, and she into another, the Sceptre. The four big ships of the enemy were accounted for. Our three ships seized the opportunity. Well in hand themselves, they pounded away, broadside after broadside, into the hapless Frenchmen, who were too much occupied in trying to disentangle themselves to do more than make a feeble and ineffective reply. By the time that they got clear the British squadron had so far got the upper hand that the French drew off, leaving the British squadron masters of the field. All of our three ships suffered severely, the Dreadnought most of all.

In Nelson’s lifetime the day was always observed by the family at Burnham Thorpe with special festivities, and Nelson himself often called it, it is on record, “the happiest day of the year.” More than that too, Nelson himself more than once half playfully expressed his conviction that he too might some time fight a battle on another 21st of October, and make the day for the family even more of a red-letter day. As a fact, during the last three weeks of his life on board the Victory off Cadiz, in October, 1805, Nelson, with a prescience that the event justified, used these words both to Captain Hardy and to Dr. Beatty the surgeon of the flagship: “The 21st of October will be our day!”

Captain Maurice Suckling’s “Dreadnought” sword was bequeathed to Nelson and was ever kept by him as his most treasured possession. He always wore it in battle, it is said; notably at St. Vincent, when he boarded and took the two great Spanish ships the San Nicolas and the San Josef; and his right hand was grasping it when the grape shot shattered his arm at Teneriffe.

The Dreadnought of Boscawen and Maurice Suckling ended her days at perhaps England’s darkest hour of national trial—at the time of the American War. She was doing harbour duty at Portsmouth at the time, as a guard and receiving ship.

At no period, perhaps in all our history did the future and the prospects of the British Empire seem so absolutely hopeless. We were fighting for existence against France and Spain, the two chief maritime Powers of Europe; and at the same time the vitality of the nation was being sapped by the never-ceasing struggle with the American colonists, now in its seventh year. Holland had added herself to our foes; Russia and the Baltic Powers were banded together in a league of “armed neutrality,” and stood by sullen and menacing. That, however, was not the worst. The price of naval impotence had to be paid. Great Britain was no longer mistress of the sea. She had lost command of the sea, and was drinking the bitter cup of consequent humiliation to the dregs.

THE RED-LETTER DAY OF NELSON’S CALENDAR. HOW THE DREADNOUGHT LED THE ATTACK ON THE 21st OF OCTOBER, 1757

Painted by Swaine. Engraved and Published in 1760.

It was the direct outcome of party politics and short sighted naval retrenchments in time of peace, pandering to the clamour of ministerial supporters in the House of Commons. The printed Debates and Journals of the House between 1773 and 1781 are extant, as are also the summaries of the Gentleman’s Magazine, for those who care to learn what passed.

Out-matched and out-classed at every point, the British fleet found itself held in check all the world over. Colony after colony was wrested from us, or had to be let go, while our squadrons in distant seas had not strength enough to do better than fight drawn battles.[2] Gibraltar, closely beset by sea and land, was still holding out, but no man dared prophesy what news of the great fortress might not arrive next. Minorca, England’s other Mediterranean possession, had to surrender. The enemy were masters of the island, after driving the garrison into their last defences at St. Philip’s Castle. Nearer home, Ireland, in the enjoyment of Home Rule, was using the hour of Great Britain’s difficulty as her opportunity for demanding practical independence, with eighty thousand Irish volunteers under arms to back up the threats of the Dublin Parliament.

The Channel Fleet, though reinforced with every ship it was possible to find crews for, held the Channel practically on sufferance. Once it had to retreat before the enemy and seek refuge at Spithead. On another occasion the enemy were on the point of attacking it in Torbay with such preponderance of force that overwhelming disaster must have befallen it. Fortunately for England the French and Spanish admirals disagreed at the last moment and turned back.

Hanging in a frame on the walls of the Musée de Marine at the Louvre the English visitor to Paris to-day may see a draft original “State,” giving the official details of the divisions and brigades and the ships to escort them, of one of the French armies which was to be thrown across into England. It was no empty menace, and for three years the beacons along our south and east coasts had to be watched nightly; while camps of soldiers, horse and foot and artillery—the few regulars that had not been sent off to America—with all the militia regiments in the kingdom, extended all the way round, at points, from Caithness to Cornwall. To safeguard London there were camps of from eight to ten battalions each, mostly militia, at Coxheath, near Maidstone, at Dartford, at Warley, at Danbury in Essex, and at Tiptree Heath. To secure the colliery shipping of the Tyne two militia battalions were under canvas near Gateshead. A camp at Dunbar and Haddington watched over Edinburgh. The West Country was guarded by a big camp of fifteen militia battalions at Roborough, near Plymouth, with an outlying camp on Buckland Down, near Tavistock. To prevent the enemy making use of Torbay, Berry Head was fortified, the ruins of the old Roman camp of Vespasian’s legionaries there being utilized to build two twenty-four pounder batteries overlooking the passage into the bay. Every town almost throughout England had its “Armed Association” or “Fencibles,” volunteers, the men of which, by special permission from the Archbishop of Canterbury, drilled after church time every Sunday.

The effect on the oversea commerce of the country, penalized by excessive insurance rates, was calamitous. From 25 to 30 per cent premium was paid at Lloyds on cargoes from Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow to New York (still in British hands); and 20 per cent to the West Indies. As to the reality of the risk. On one occasion the enemy captured an Indiaman fleet bodily off Madeira, only eight vessels out of sixty-three escaping, with a loss to Great Britain of a million and a half sterling, including £300,000 in specie. We have, indeed, at this moment a daily reminder of the disaster. One of the unfortunate underwriters was a Mr. John Walter. His whole fortune swept away, he took to journalism, and the Times newspaper was the result. Home waters were hardly more secure. Rather than pay the excessive extra premium demanded for the voyage up Channel, London merchants had their goods unladen at Bristol, and carried in light flat-bottomed craft called “runners,” built specially for the traffic, up the Severn to Gloucester, thence to be carted across to Lechlade for conveyance to their destination by barge down the Thames. At the same time the North Sea packets from Edinburgh (Grangemouth) to London refused all passengers who would not undertake to assist in the defence of the vessel in emergency. Printed notices were pasted up at the wharves announcing that no Quakers would be carried.

To such a pass had the loss of her supremacy at sea reduced Great Britain in the closing year of our fourth Dreadnought’s career.

Our fifth Dreadnought fought at Trafalgar. She was a 98-gun ship, one of the same set as the famous “fighting” Téméraire. The newspapers of the day made a good deal of her launch, which took place at Portsmouth Dockyard, on Saturday, the 13th of June, 1801. Here is an extract from one account:—

“At about twelve o’clock this fine ship, which has been thirteen years upon the stocks, was launched from the dockyard with all the naval splendour that could possibly be given to aid the grandeur and interest of the spectacle. She was decorated with an Ensign, Jack, Union, and the Imperial Standard, and had the marine band playing the distinguished martial pieces of ‘God save the King,’ ‘Rule Britannia,’ etc. etc. A prodigious concourse of persons, to the amount, as is supposed, of at least 10,000, assembled, and were highly delighted by the magnificence of the ship and the beautiful manner in which she entered the watery element. But what afforded great satisfaction was, that, in the passage of this immense fabric from the stocks, not a single accident happened. She was christened by Commissioner Sir Charles Saxton, who, as usual, broke a bottle of wine over her stem. Her complement of guns is to be 98, and she has the following significant emblem at her head; viz.—a lion couchant on a scroll containing the imperial arms as emblazoned on the Standard. This is remarkably well timed and adapted to her as being the first man-of-war launched since the Union of the British Isles.”

WHEN GEORGE THE THIRD WAS KING. OFFICERS AT AFTERNOON TEA ASHORE.

Thomas Rowlandson. 1786.

MANNING THE FLEET IN 1779. A WARM CORNER FOR THE PRESS GANG.

James Gillray. Oct. 15, 1779.

For twelve months before Trafalgar, the Dreadnought was Collingwood’s flagship in the Channel Fleet. Collingwood passed most of the time cruising on blockade duty in the Bay of Biscay, where he used to spend his nights pacing on deck to and fro restlessly, expecting the enemy at any moment, and snatching intervals of sleep lying down on a gun-carriage on the quarter-deck. Collingwood only changed from her into the bigger Royal Sovereign ten days before the battle. Under the eye of the former captain of our first Excellent man-of-war, the Dreadnought’s men had been trained to fire three broadsides in one minute and a half—a gunnery record for that day.

At Trafalgar the Dreadnought fought as one of the ships in Collingwood’s line, and did the best with what opportunity came her way.

“This quiet old Dreadnought” wrote Dickens of his visit to the ship in her last years, “whose fighting days are all over—sans guns, sans shot, sans shells, sans everything—did fight at Trafalgar under Captain Conn—did figure as one of the hindmost ships in the column which Collingwood led—went into action about two in the afternoon, and captured the San Juan in fifteen minutes.”

While fighting the San Juan—the San Juan Nepomuceno, a Spanish seventy-four—the Dreadnought had to keep off two other Spaniards and a Frenchman at the same time; Admiral Gravina’s flagship, the Principe de Asturias, of 112 guns, and the San Justo and Indomptable, two seventy-fours. The San Juan in the end proved an easy prize, for she had been already severely mauled by some of Collingwood’s leading ships. On being run alongside of she gave in quickly. Without staying to take possession, the Dreadnought pushed on to close with the big Principe de Asturias, and gave her several broadsides, one shot from which mortally wounded Admiral Gravina. The Spanish three-decker, however, managed to disengage, and made off, to lead the escaping ships in their flight for Cadiz. Thus the Dreadnought was baulked of her big prize.

It was the Trafalgar Dreadnought that gave the name to that great international institution, the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital, at Greenwich. This, of course, was long after Trafalgar, for the “wooden whopper of the Thames,” as Dickens called the old three-decker in her old age, did not make her appearance off Greenwich until a quarter of a century later. The fine old veteran of “Eighteen Hundred and War Time,” lasted until 1857, and to the end they preserved on board as the special relic of interest, “a piece of glass from a cabin skylight scrawled over, with somebody’s diamond ring, with the names of those officers who were in her at Trafalgar.” Another old three-decker replaced the Trafalgar ship until 1870, when the institution was removed on shore. At Chatham to-day, in the dockyard museum, visitors may see the Dreadnought’s bell which was on board the old ship during the battle, and was removed from her when the Dreadnought was broken up. Yet another memento of the Trafalgar Dreadnought exists in the Eton eight-oar Dreadnought, one of the “Lower Boats,” and so-called originally, together with the boat that bears the name Victory, in honour of Nelson and Trafalgar.

Our sixth Dreadnought is a still existing ironclad turret-ship, mounting four 38-ton muzzle loaders, launched in 1875. She is a ship of 10,820 tons, and cost to complete for sea £619,739. She served for ten years—from 1884 to 1894—in the Mediterranean, and after that as a coast-guard ship in Bantry Bay. Paid off finally in 1905, the Dreadnought now lies at her last moorings in the Kyles of Bute, awaiting the final day of all for her naval career, and the auctioneer’s hammer.

To conclude with a flying glance at our mighty battleship, the Dreadnought of to-day, the seventh bearer of the name until now, and as all the world knows by far the most powerful man-of-war that has ever sailed the seas. She is the biggest and the heaviest and the fastest and the hardest-hitting vessel that any navy as yet has seen afloat. And more than that. The Dreadnought has been so built as to be practically unsinkable by mine or torpedo; while at the same time her tremendous battery of ten 12-in. guns—huge cannon, each forty-five feet long—makes her absolutely irresistible in battle against all comers; a match for any two—probably any three—of the biggest battleships in foreign navies afloat at the present hour.

These are some of the “points”—some of the leading features—of this grim mastodonte de mer of ours, His Majesty’s battleship, the Dreadnought. With her coal, ammunition, and sea stores on board, the Dreadnought weighs—or displaces in equivalent bulk of sea water, according to the present-day method of reckoning the size of men-of-war—17,800 tons.

Put the Dreadnought bodily inside St. Paul’s and she would fill the whole nave and chancel of the Cathedral from reredos to the Western doors. Her length would take up the whole of one side of Trafalgar Square. Her width would exactly fill Northumberland Avenue, leaving only some half-dozen inches between the house fronts on either side and the outside of the hull. Two Victorys and a frigate of Nelson’s day, fully manned and rigged, could be packed away within the Dreadnought’s hull.

[Our Dreadnought of to-day: deck-plan to scale; showing the disposition of the 12-in. 58-ton turret-guns and their arcs of training. (Bows to the right.)][3]

Measured from end to end, from bows to stern, the ship’s hull extends 490 feet. From forecastle to keel, measuring vertically, is a matter of some 60 feet down, equivalent to about the normal height of a church tower.

What, however, above everything else, specially distinguishes the Dreadnought from all other warships afloat, is her terrific battery. Hitherto four 12-inch guns have formed the standard main armament for all battleships. The Dreadnought carries ten 12-inch guns of a new and more powerful type than any heretofore in existence. They are mounted in pairs in “redoubts,” armoured with Krupp steel eleven inches thick, and are so grouped on board that when fighting broadside-on with an enemy, eight of the ten guns will bear on the enemy and be in action throughout. In chase, or fighting end-on, six of the guns are available at all times. The firing charge per gun of “modified” cordite weighs by itself 2 cwt.—the weight of a sack of coals on a street coal-cart. In the hour of battle each discharge from the Dreadnought’s broadside will hurl into the enemy three tons of “metal”—bursting shells—each shell being from three to four feet long, and weighing singly 7½ cwt. With each shot also, bang goes £80, the cost of the cartridge and its projectile. Twelve thousand yards will be the Dreadnought’s chosen range for engaging—six miles—about as far as clear vision is possible above the horizon.

[Curve of flight, or trajectory, of 850 lb. projectile from a Dreadnought 12-in. turret-gun fired with full service charge.]

[The 12-in. gun is about the same weight as an ordinary railway passenger train engine.]

“Mark X” is the official style for the Dreadnought class of 12-inch gun. It is the most powerful piece of ordnance in the world. It weighs upwards of fifty-eight tons, about the weight of a larger “tank” railway engine of the kind that brings the suburban bread-winner up to London every morning. Its muzzle velocity—the speed at which the shot flashes forth from the gun—is 2900 feet (966⅔ yards, or well over half a mile) in a second. The force with which the shot starts off is enough to send it through a solid slab of wrought iron set close up in front of the muzzle of the gun 4¼ feet thick. When fired with full charges, each gun develops a force able to lift the Dreadnought herself bodily nearly a yard up, exerting a force equivalent to 47,697 “foot-tons,” in gunnery language. The entire broadside of eight 12-inch guns, fired simultaneously, as at the gun trial off the Isle of Wight, develops a force sufficient to heave the huge vessel herself, 21 feet up—nearly out of the water, in fact.

[Extreme range of the Dreadnought’s turret-guns:—Fired from in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral.]

As an instance of the tremendous range of the Dreadnought’s guns: mounted on one of the Dover forts, they could easily drop shells on the deck of a Channel packet in the act of leaving Calais harbour. Imagine one of them mounted in front of St. Paul’s and firing with full charges in any direction. Its shells would burst over Slough in one direction and over Gravesend in the other. Hertford, St. Albans, Chertsey, Sevenoaks, would all be within range. Twenty-five miles is the extreme estimated range of a shot fired with a full service charge, and the trajectory of the projectile would, at its culminating point, attain a height in the air of nearly six miles, twice the height of Mont Blanc.

They are “wire guns,” as the term goes, constructed in each case by winding coil on coil of steel ribbon or “tape” (a quarter of an inch wide and ·06 of an inch thick), round and round on an inner steel tube, the barrel of the piece; just as the string is wound round the handle of a cricket bat. The tape or “wire” is then covered by outer “jackets,” or tubes of steel. Upwards of 228,800 yards of wire—a length of 130 miles—weighing some 15 tons, are required for each of the Dreadnought’s 12-inch guns, and it takes from three to four weeks to wind on the wire. The rifling of the barrel comprises forty-eight grooves, varying in depth from ·08 of an inch at the muzzle to ·1 at the breech. Each of the Dreadnought’s guns, separately, employs in its manufacture from first to last upwards of five hundred men in various capacities, and costs, as turned out ready to send on board, but without sighting and other vital appliances, between £10,000 and £11,000.

The Dreadnought carries eleven inches of Krupp steel armour on her sides, turrets, and conning tower, and rather thinner armour at the bows and stern. Her speed of twenty-one knots makes her a full two knots faster than any existing battleship. She is the first battleship in any navy to be propelled by the Parsons turbine, to which her speed is due. Lastly, the cost of the Dreadnought is officially stated at £1,797,497.

Exceptional in themselves, and of exceptional historic interest as well, are the honours that have fallen to the Dreadnought’s lot within the few months that our great naval masterpiece has been in existence.

At the outset the Dreadnought had the good fortune to be named and sent afloat by His Majesty King Edward personally. That in itself was an exceptional honour, and one that has fallen to the lot of very few ships of the Royal Navy—to be named and sent afloat by the reigning sovereign. There have been just six instances in all, from the earliest times to the present day. Queen Victoria launched four men-of-war during her long reign; but no King of England ever launched a ship in the four hundred years between King Edward and Henry the Eighth: King Edward with the Dreadnought and Henry the Eighth with the Great Harry are the two historic instances. Many of our sovereigns, of course—practically all of them: Edward the Sixth, Queen Elizabeth, the Stuart kings, Cromwell also, George the Third, and William the Fourth—attended in state on various occasions to witness the launch of some notable man-of-war, but they were present only as spectators, and took no part in the actual proceedings. Charles the First was to have personally named the famous Sovereign of the Seas, with the same ceremonial used at the launch of our first Dreadnought, and rode down with his Court to Woolwich to do so; but they could not get the ship out of dock, and the King rode back to Whitehall disappointed, deputing the Lord High Admiral to name the ship when she did get clear—not till between eight and nine in the evening. Charles the Second, in like manner, was to have personally named our first Britannia, but His Majesty was taken ill on the day before. Again too, as it also happened, there was a hitch at the launch. The Britannia stuck fast for twelve hours, and then went off at midnight to the flare of torches and cressets, after which a courier was hurried off at gallop to Whitehall, to acquaint the King, “lest certain base reports (i.e. that the Britannia had fallen over in dock) may have reached your Majesty.”

Yet another exceptional honour that befel the Dreadnought was after the great review of the Home Fleet off Cowes, on the first Monday of August this year, when King Edward, with Queen Alexandra, the Prince of Wales, and Prince Edward of Wales, with Sir John Fisher and members of the Royal suite, went out on board the Dreadnought to beyond Spithead to witness target-practice with the Dreadnought’s turret-guns; the memorable occasion on which, at 2640 yards’ range, the four 12-in. guns that fired, scored within two and a half minutes nine bull’s-eyes and two “outers” out of twelve rounds discharged. Never to be forgotten was the scene as the Dreadnought passed down the double lines of the Home Fleet in the brilliant sunshine; the ships all dressed with flags, and with decks manned, and cheering, and firing salutes—the giant ship herself flying the Royal Standard at the masthead and at either yard-arm the Union Flag, symbol of His Majesty’s rank as Admiral of the Fleet, and the Admiralty Anchor Flag, a combination not seen on board a British man-of-war of the fighting-line, even in those historic waters, for over a century—not, indeed, since that summer’s morning of 1794, when the three flags flew together at the mastheads of the famous Queen Charlotte, denoting King George the Third’s presence on board, with his Queen, on his visit to present a diamond-hilted sword of honour to Lord Howe, then just arrived with the prizes taken on the Glorious First of June. That also was the last occasion, until the other day, on which a King and Queen of England were together on board a British man-of-war at sea.

The guns fired before the King and Queen were those in the two after-turrets, and the targets used were the usual service ones, 16 ft. by 20 ft., with a central bull’s-eye 14 ft. square. The range was about a mile and a half, and six rounds were fired from each turret. Of the three shots placed outside the bull’s-eye, two went through the target, whilst the third, which missed, cut away the rope fastening the canvas of the target to the framework. Two of the shots in the bull’s-eye went through the very centre, through a small circle, about thirty inches in diameter, marked in the middle of the target.

We will conclude this outline of our Dreadnoughts’ story with a brief tabular statement of certain points in detail of comparison and contrast between the Dreadnought of to-day and the historic Victory.

THE DREADNOUGHT AND VICTORY COMPARED

II
“KENT CLAIMS THE FIRST BLOW!”

“The Kentishe Menne in Front!”

“Kent claims for itself the first blow in battle against alien enemies.” The hand that penned these words has lain in the grave for over seven centuries; but old William Fitz-Stephen of Canterbury knew what he meant, and meant what he wrote. They are words that our fine “county cruiser” the Kent of to-day—to which the ladies of Kent have presented a silken battle flag and the Men of Kent a silver shield and other gifts, to incite the Kent’s bluejackets to shoot straight—might well adopt and make the ship’s motto. It was from the County of Kent that the initiative came in the movement which has had such excellent results in inducing the county people in other counties all over Great Britain and Ireland to display a practical interest in the warships that bear the county names; and the idea has since spread in other cases throughout the Empire.

The county “Association of Men of Kent and Kentish Men” of their own accord took the initial step in the spring of 1899 by approaching the late Lord Goschen, then First Lord of the Admiralty, with a request that one of four cruisers of a new type, to be built under the supplemental programme of the previous August, might be named after the County of Kent. The request was heartily received, and in response the name Kent was announced for the first of the new ships. A little later the Men of Kent made a second proposal. They asked permission to establish among themselves a “county memorial for the new county-cruiser Kent,” expressing their “desire and intention to do something to keep up a continual connection between the county and the good ship, and to cause a sustained interest to be taken in her fortunes and the welfare of those on board.” Lord Goschen acceded to that request, and a county subscription was immediately set on foot by Lord Harris, the president of the Association for the year, to form a Kent county trophy fund for the cruiser Kent. It was proposed to present the ship, on commissioning, with a challenge trophy in silver, to be competed for annually among the gun crews of the ship, the champion gun team for each year to have their names inscribed on the trophy and receive a special monetary reward from a county fund established with the trophy. The trophy itself was to be kept on board and to be displayed on special and festive occasions in the mess of the winning team. Whenever the Kent was out of commission the trophy would be cared for by the Captain of the Royal Naval Barracks, Chatham, or at Greenwich Naval College.[4] The movement received cordial support from Lord Selborne, Lord Goschen’s successor at the Admiralty, and from the late Earl Stanhope, the then Lord Lieutenant of Kent, and the late Lord Salisbury, then Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. More than that, indeed. Interested by the patriotic action taken by the County of Kent on behalf of its cruiser namesake, His Majesty the King was himself graciously pleased to command that in the cases of future ships bearing the names of counties the Lords Lieutenant of the counties concerned were to be requested by the Admiralty to nominate in each case some lady connected with the county to perform the naming and launching ceremony.

THE COUNTY AND ITS SHIP. THE KENT TROPHY CHALLENGE SHIELD

From a photograph kindly lent by the Designers and Manufacturers of the Trophy, Messrs. George Kenning & Son, Goldsmiths, Little Britain and Aldersgate Street, London.

The trophy-shield subscribed for by the Men of Kent, together with an album for the names and scores of its winners from time to time, was formally handed over to the captain and ship’s company of the Kent at Sheerness by representatives of the County Association, the gift being received with every mark of regard and genuine welcome. Following on that, a deputation of county ladies, headed by the Countess Stanhope, the wife of the Lord Lieutenant, presented the favoured ship with two flags, a beautiful silken ensign and a silken Union Jack, subscribed for by the County Association of “Maids of Kent and Kentish Maids.” The flags were brought on board in the beautiful box of Kentish Heart of Oak in which they are now kept under the sentry before the captain’s cabin. The ensign was bent on the halyards and ceremoniously hoisted to the peak by Countess Stanhope in the presence of the assembled officers and crew of the Kent, and the Jack was hoisted by the Hon. Secretary of the Ladies’ Committee, Mrs. Bills, the proceedings winding up with a luncheon to the ladies on the after-deck by Captain Gamble and his officers, and an afternoon dance on board.

That the name of the ancient maritime county of England should be borne in the fleet to-day by a modern British warship is in itself a matter of historic interest. There are, indeed, very excellent reasons why the County of Kent should receive distinguished treatment from the Admiralty, why its name deserves to be honourably commemorated in the British fleet of to-day.

Kent has a place of its own in regard to the naval annals of England, old-time associations with the oversea defence of England and the national navy, that stand quite by themselves. The associations indeed go back across fifteen centuries, to the earliest days of our “rough island story”; so far back, indeed, as the old old times of the “Counts of the Saxon Shore.”

Dover and Reculver, the two principal Kentish ports of the days when Britain was a Roman province, were central stations in the widespread line of outposts along the coast whence watch and ward were kept for the coming of the Norseland raiders oversea in the springtime year by year.

Bared to the sun and soft, warm air,

Streams back the Norseman’s yellow hair,

I see the gleam of axe and spear,

The sound of smitten shields I hear,

Keeping a harsh, barbaric time

To Saga’s chant and Runic rhyme.

From the pharos on the Foreland in those strenuous times of long ago keen-sighted men of Kent kept look-out daily, scanning the horizon from sunrise to sunset; ever on the alert to start the alarm and pass it on to where the Roman coast defence galleys lay at their moorings off the mouth of the Wantsum Channel by Richborough Castle.

Alike on land and sea theirs was the post of honour. At Hastings, led by the stout Earl Leofwine, as we know—

A standard made of sylke and jewells rare

Was borne near Harold at the Kenters Head.

And centuries after that, whenever the King of England was in the field, they claimed the right to lead the van—“The Kentishe Menne in front!”

The Kentish contingent—the “Eastern Ports” contingent—formed the bulk and the backbone of the Cinque Ports fleets of the Middle Ages, both in ships and men. Four of the five “Head Ports” in the famous confederation were Kentish ports—Sandwich, Dover, Romney, and Hythe. The “Eastern Ports” counted twenty-one limbs, “Members”; the “Western Ports”—Hastings with the two “Ancient Towns” attached—ten “Members.” The old Cinque Ports Navy, in these times of ours it may be, is little more than a name, a faded memory of a dim and distant past, a perished institution of a dead old time; yet it was once an actual fact, a living hot-blooded reality, the chief guarantee of our national existence, a very real bulwark, the foremost defence of England from foreign invasion. “The courage of those sailors who manned the rude barks of the Cinque Ports first made the flag of England terrible on the seas.” For all that we have to thank, in the first place, the Men of Kent, that Kent of which old twelfth-century Fitz-Stephen, monk of Canterbury and historian of his own times, was thinking when he wrote, “Kent claims for itself the first blow in battle against alien enemies.”

The Kentish ships of the Cinque Ports, “Ships of Kent” they are explicitly called, took a leading part with the Crusaders’ fleet which on its way to the Holy Land for the Second Crusade, in the year 1147, captured Lisbon from the Moors. Kentish men fought with that fine leader, William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, “Warden of the Cinque,” when he fell on the French King’s fleet at Damme—just three years before King John put his mark to Magna Charta.

It was a squadron of the Kentish ships of the Ports’ federation that, in the year after Magna Charta, under one of England’s finest heroes and greatest men, that grand fellow, stout-hearted Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, Chief Justiciar of England and Constable of Dover Castle, Cœur de Lion’s favourite pupil in arms, saved England from invasion by rounding up the fleet with which the renegade leader Eustace the Monk—“pirata nequissimus” one old chronicler calls him—was making for the Thames, and dealing the French the first of the series of knock-down blows of which Nelson struck the last at Trafalgar. The story of the “Battle of Bartholomew’s Day,” the 24th of August, 1217, is one we ought not willingly to let die. There is hardly a finer tale in all our history than that which tells how De Burgh’s sixteen Cinque Port warships from Dover, with nineteen or twenty small craft, stood out to meet the Monk’s hundred and odd ships—eighty of them the largest vessels of the time—off the North Foreland; swept round them astern, weathered them and closed, grappled them fast, under cover of a stinging fire of archery and crossbow bolts, cut down their sails, and then, flinging up in the air handfuls of quicklime to blow into the faces of the Frenchmen, boarded and overpowered the enemy in hand-to-hand fight with falchion and pike and battle-axe. They fought it out from early morning until the afternoon was spent, when fifty-five ships of the Monk’s fleet had been taken, and the rest, except fifteen ships that ran away, all sent to the bottom.

Again, in the tremendous Midsummer Day’s battle in the harbour of Sluys, the “Trafalgar of the Middle Ages,” although to most people the event is barely a schoolbook memory—the great naval victory that made Creçy possible—once more the Ship-and-Lion flag at the masthead of vessels from the four Kent ports was to the fore, well up in the van of King Edward’s attacking fleet and in the thickest of the fighting. And at the battle of “Espagnols-sur-Mer,” off Winchelsea, where again Edward the Third fought in person, together with the Black Prince; off St. Mahé; and at Harfleur, covering Henry the Fifth’s landing for the march that ended at Agincourt, and in many another hard-fought action in the Narrow Seas after that, Kentish men in the Kentish ships of the Ports’ Navy full well played their part.

It was oak from the Weald of Kent for the most part that built the men-of-war of Queen Elizabeth’s fleet which drove the Spanish Armada through the Channel and North Sea to its doom on the reefs of Stornaway and the quicksands of Connemara—ships timbered and planked with oak from the Kentish Weald, and shaped and framed and clamped together in the Kentish Dockyards of Deptford and Woolwich. Phineas Pett, a Kentish man by birth, designed and built the famous Sovereign of the Seas; and his grandson, Sir Phineas Pett, designed and built our first Britannia. The Great Harry was mostly built of Kentish oak; as was, at a later day, Sir Richard Grenville’s “little” Revenge, and, at a still later day, Nelson’s Victory, launched at Chatham.

It was a Man of Kent who, as admiral in chief command, planned and gave the order for the capture of Gibraltar. It was another Man of Kent who, as admiral second in command, carried that order out. Sir George Rooke, one of the Rookes of Monk’s Horton, Kent—by far the ablest sea-officer in the British service in the hundred years between Blake and Hawke—was the Commander-in-Chief before Gibraltar. Byng, Sir George Byng, was the second in command—the elder of the two Byngs known to naval history, “Mediterranean Byng,” as he was called in the Navy in connection with a later exploit of his, and remembered nowadays as the Byng who beat the enemy and was not shot. He became Lord Viscount Torrington, and may, in like manner, be distinguished from the other Lord Torrington of naval history (Arthur Herbert) as the Torrington who beat the enemy and was not court-martialled and broke.

A famous family of old-time Kent were the Byngs, seated at Wrotham ever since the fifteenth century, more than one member of which came to the front in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and the Stuart kings. Such as, for instance, the fine old Kentish cavalier of Browning’s rousing song:

Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King,

Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing,

And, pressing a troop unable to stoop

And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop,

Marched them along,

Fifty score strong,

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song!

Fifty score strong! Fifty score strong!

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song!

Other Kentish men of note associated directly with the Old Navy were Sir Thomas Spert, founder of Trinity House, and captain of the Harry Grace à Dieu when Henry the Eighth crossed the Straits of Dover in her to the Field of the Cloth of Gold; Sir William Hervey, of Kidbrooke, “who greatly distinguished himself in boarding one of the vessels composing the Spanish Armada,” and was raised to the peerage as Lord Hervey; old Captain Dick Fogg, of Repton, near Ashford, captain under Charles the First of the tenth whelp and the Victory and of other men-of-war of note; Kit Fogg, his son, who fought for England in half a score of sea-fights under Charles the Second and down to the time of Queen Anne; Christopher Gunman, a bold fireship and frigate captain in the Dutch wars, captain of the Duke of York’s flagship at Solebay, who later on nearly drowned the future James the Second; George Legge, afterwards the Earl of Dartmouth, whose valour in battle at Solebay made his fortune, a member of a Kent county family of long descent; two notable Commodores, two St. Lo’s of Northfleet; Commodore Boys of the Luxborough galley; Sir Piercey Brett, who as a lieutenant went round the world with Anson, and lived to be one of the most distinguished officers of his day; Sir Thomas Boulden Thompson, who fought under Nelson at Teneriffe, at the Nile, and at Copenhagen. These are a few names taken at random.

Sir Sidney Smith, the “Hero of Acre,” the man who made Bonaparte, as the Emperor himself put it, “miss his destiny,” was of Kentish birth and family, and learned his “three R’s” at Tunbridge School; and it was to Lord Barham, as First Lord of the Admiralty, that Nelson reported himself in September, 1805, when he volunteered to shorten his leave at home and go out at once to fight the enemy at Trafalgar.

It was Kent, too, that gave England Captain John Harvey—one of the Harveys of Eastrey, a family that for generations had sent its sons into the Navy—captain of the Brunswick on Lord Howe’s famous day, the “Glorious First of June,” 1794, who fell mortally wounded in close action with the French Vengeur. When the two ships first collided, the master of the Brunswick proposed to cut the Vengeur clear. “No,” answered Captain Harvey; “we’ve got her, and we’ll keep her!” After he received his mortal wound he refused to let himself be carried off the quarter-deck. He dragged himself down to the cockpit, saying as he went off the deck, “Remember my last words: the colours of the Brunswick must never be struck!” A brother, Henry Harvey, was the admiral whose name is still to be met with on old tavern signboards here and there in East Kent. Henry Harvey, captain of the Ramillies, came to his brother’s aid on the 1st of June, and with three terrific broadsides finished off the Vengeur for the Brunswick, amid resounding cheers from the Brunswick’s men, and giving occasion to an officer in another ship who was looking on to improvise on King David: “Behold how good and joyful a thing it is for brethren to fight together in unity!”

It was this same Henry Harvey who, as a rear-admiral, later in the Great War (in 1797), took Trinidad. That the conquest proved an easy business was not his fault. The Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish squadron at Trinidad, Admiral Apodoca, when he saw Admiral Harvey coming, without clearing for action or firing a shot set fire to his ships and escaped ashore. He took horse and galloped off, and presented himself, excited and panting with his exertions, before the Governor of the island, General Chacon. “I have burnt my ships, sir,” he burst in with, “in case they should fall into the power of the English.” “Burnt them?” exclaimed the astonished Governor; “destroyed them! Have you saved nothing?” “Oh, yes I have!” Apodoca replied. “Yes I have! I have! I have saved”—drawing a carved and painted wooden image, some fifteen inches long, from under his cloak as he spoke—“my flagship’s patron saint—I have saved San Juan de Compostella!” That Apodoca’s flagship was the San Vincente, and that there was no San Juan de Compostella on the Spanish Navy List at the time, are details the story does not concern itself with.

Yet another interesting connection between Kent and the sea service of bygone times is this. H.M.S. Kent’s name is not the only man-of-war name associated with the county that has figured in the fighting days of old. No fewer than eighteen other man-of-war names connected with the county of Kent have from time to time been borne on the roll of the British fleet. It was on board a Canterbury that a notable naval officer of the earlier part of the eighteenth century, Captain George Walton, penned words which have been quoted over and over again as a masterpiece of conciseness. He had been in pursuit of a Spanish squadron, and on his return, as most of us have read, reported as follows:—

“To Admiral Sir George Byng, Commander-in-Chief.

“Sir,

“We have taken and destroyed all the Spanish ships and vessels which were upon the coast, as per margin.

“I am, etc.,

“George Walton.

“Canterbury, off Syracusa, August 16, 1718.

“One of 60 guns, one of 54, one of 40, one of 24—taken; one of 54, two of 40, one of 30 guns, with a fireship and two bomb vessels—burnt.”

As a fact, unfortunately, Captain Walton’s “dispatch” was written in quite another way. The captain of the Canterbury really sent the admiral a letter of two pages. What is passed off as his whole “dispatch,” is actually only the concluding sentence of the letter, excerpted and dressed up. An unscrupulous admiralty official, for the purposes of a book on the campaign, manipulated the letter and printed its last paragraph by itself as the entire despatch. Historians following one another have since then simply copied Secretary Corbett.

Our first Sandwich broke the French line at the battle of La Hogue, and lost her gallant captain in doing it. Another bore Rodney’s flag in five battles—two with the Spaniards and three with the French—and was at the first relief of Gibraltar during the Great Siege. Our first Dover was present at the taking of Jamaica. Another won fame as Captain Cloudesley Shovell’s ship. Commodore Trunnion served on board another Dover, if Smollett spoke by the card in making him express a wish to be buried “in the red jacket which I wore when I boarded the Renummy.” Apart from the taking of Louis the Fifteenth’s frigate Renommée, if we count in other French and Spanish frigates and privateers taken, our various Dovers, in their time, must have brought home captured flags enough to deck the town out from end to end. All, of course, have long since rotted out of existence. People in old times set little store by such trophies. “What are you going to do with all these flags?” a friend once asked of a frigate captain who, in his barge, gaily decorated from bows to stern with the colours of ships taken during the commission, was being pulled in from Spithead to land at the old Sally Port, Portsmouth. “Do with them?” came the reply. “Why, take ’em home and hang ’em on the trees round father’s garden.”

It was a Chatham whose twenty-four pounders, one May morning, just a hundred and forty-eight years ago, gave the Royal Navy our first, and the original, “Saucy” Arethusa. One Maidstone fought with Blake at Santa Cruz de Teneriffe. Another, acting as “guide of the fleet,” led Hawke to victory on that stormy November afternoon among the reefs of Quiberon Bay, which the French Navy, pillorying the memory of its unfortunate admiral, has ever since called “la journée de M. Conflans.”

A Greenwich fought at La Hogue, and was one of Benbow’s squadron in his last fight. One Deptford was also at La Hogue, and another with Byng off Minorca, where the Deptford, at any rate, did her duty. A Romney, in Queen Anne’s war, after a career of distinction, went down with all on board to westward of St. Agnes, Scilly, on the night of the catastrophe to Sir Cloudesley Shovell. Rochester, and Medway, and Sheerness, are also man-of-war names that have attaching to them interesting memories of the fighting days of old, as have too, in one way or other, in differing degrees, the remaining names of the group, Woolwich and Faversham, Eltham and Deal Castle, Margate, Queenborough, and Folkestone.

Our modern-day cruiser the Kent has her own story also as a man-of-war, a notable and interesting historic reputation of her own, to uphold. This summary will give its points, the “battle honours” which the Kent would be entitled to bear on her ship’s flag were our ships authorized to follow the practice of the army in regard to regimental flags.

H.M.S. KENT.

A peculiarly interesting memento of the Kent in connection with one of these battles is in existence. It refers to the part played by the Kent of Charles the Second’s navy just before the battle of June, 1666, “The Four Days’ Fight,” in which Monk, Duke of Albemarle, during Prince Rupert’s temporary absence with a third of the fleet in the Channel, without waiting for Rupert to rejoin, rashly flung his weaker force on De Ruyter with the whole of the Dutch fleet at hand and brought about a general engagement.

The Kent had been sent off on the 27th of May on a scouting cruise between “Blackness” (the old name for Cape Grisnez) and Ostend. Late in the evening of the 30th of May the following letter was handed to the Duke of Albemarle from the captain of the Kent, sent across by a Dutch ketch that the Kent had taken:—

“May it please yr Grace,

“This morning being off Gravelines in chase of a small ship and a ketch belonging to Newport, as they pretend, whom I have sent into the Downs to your Grace, I mett with a Swede who came from Amsterdam on Sunday last in his ballast, bound for Bordeaux, who relates that 75 sayle of the Flemish Fleet sett sayle out of the Texel the 21st present, and 28 more from Zealand, leaving 6 ships behind them, whose men they tooke out to man the rest of the Fleet, & stoode away to the Northwest, which as my duty binds me I have thought fit to acquaint yr Grace with: & humbly kissing your hands I remain

“Yr Grace’s most humble servant to be commanded,

“Thos. Ewens.

“From aboard his Matⁱᵉˢ shipp Kent:
this 30th May, 1666.”

The captain of the Kent’s letter was considered so important that Albemarle at once sent it off by express to the Admiralty. It is still in existence; a stained sheet of yellowish paper with the writing crabbed and not easily decipherable, and brown with age and faded. The letter, with Albemarle’s covering note, was found many years afterwards among some correspondence that had belonged to King James the Second, just as the letter had been filed on its receipt at the Admiralty in 1666, when James, Duke of York, was Lord High Admiral. It is endorsed:—

“For his Grace the Duke of Albemarle, aboard the Royall Charles this ⸺ d.dd. In the Downes.”

Albemarle’s covering letter to the Admiralty bears the curiously scrawled endorsements of the various postmasters on the Dover Road as they passed the courier along on his hurried journey up to London:—“Received ye packett at Canterbury, att past 5 in ye Morneing, by Mee, Edw Wheiston”; “Sittingborne, past 8 in ye morning, by mee Wm Webb”; “Rochester, past ten Before noon, Wm Brooker”; “Gravesend at nowne, Hen White.”

Albemarle was roughly handled and had to beat a retreat for the mouth of the Thames—fighting a rear-guard action, skilfully conducted and gallantly contested. Rupert joined him just in time to avert disaster, but one of the English flagships, the Prince, grounded at the last moment on the Galloper Shoal, and was taken by the Dutch and burned as she lay. This was just as the Kent rejoined the flag, in time for the last day’s battle.

Cromwell, it is curious to note, first gave the name Kent to the navy for a man-of-war; one November day of the year 1652. On that day—Saturday, the 6th of November—an application from the Admiralty Committee as to the names for four frigates, two of which were to be launched in the following week, was laid before the Lord General Cromwell and the Commonwealth Council of State. The reply was that the following would be the names: Kentish, Essex, Hampshire, and Sussex. So a State Paper, now among the national archives in the Record Office, explicitly states. In their selection the Council made thereby a new departure, and introduced a set of man-of-war names entirely different from any before known at sea. The little group of four ships named in November, 1652, leads the way at the head of the long series of British men-of-war which have borne the names of our counties in battle on the sea with distinction on so many historic days.

Why the form “Kentish” was preferred to “Kent” for the first of the four ships, is a matter that is not quite obvious. The name, of course, may have been appointed for no particular reason. The four names chosen were names of four seaboard counties, locally interested in maritime affairs, and it may well have been thought that to call one of the ships the “Kentish” was much the same thing as calling her the “Kent.” On the other hand, there may have been in addition something behind, in regard to the name appointed. Everybody knows, teste Lord Macaulay, why the Puritan authorities put down bull-baiting; not because it hurt the bull, but because it pleased the people. The Puritans rather liked, it is to be feared, making themselves deliberately offensive to those who saw otherwise to them. It is certainly curious, if not significant, that at the Restoration the name “Kentish” disappears forthwith from off the official Navy List, and “Kent” appears instead. This was just at the time, too, that certain distinctly obnoxious names, bestowed on men-of-war by the Puritan authorities, as, for instance, Naseby, Marston Moor, Worcester, Torrington, Newbury, Dunbar, Tredagh (the vernacular for Drogheda), were replaced by names such as Royal Charles, York, Dunkirk, Dreadnought, Revenge, Henry, and Resolution.

Was any reference intended in the form “Kentish,” as originally appointed for the new ship of 1652, to the “Kentish Rising” of 1648, and its hard fate under the sword blades of Fairfax’s troopers? Was the name designed as a reminder to the Royalists of South-Eastern England? Was it meant as a memento of the penalty that had been paid by so many who, only four years before, had buckled on sword and ridden forth so blithely to the county marching song:—

Kentish men, keep your King,

Long swords and brave hearts bring,

Down with the rebels, and slit their crop ears!

Hell now is wanting rogues,

Send there the canting dogges,

Ride to the scurry, my Kent cavaliers!

God and our King for grace,

Leave now your wives’ embrace,

Up and avenge all their insults for years!

Ironsides! Who’s afear?

Pack ’em to Lucifer,

Ride to the scurry, my Kent cavaliers!

The name “Kentish,” if introduced with such intention, would help in serving to recall in the stately mansions of the squires of Kent, and in many a humble yeoman’s home as well, why there were vacant places round the family board.

A brief comparison between Cromwell’s Kentish and her lineal successor of our own day, His Majesty’s ship the Kent, may be of interest in conclusion.

The Kentish was of 601 tons burthen, 187 feet in length of hull, 32½ feet beam, and 15 feet draught. Our modern Kent is 440 feet between perpendiculars (463½ feet over all), 66 feet beam, and 24½ feet depth. The first Kent, under full sail, might perhaps do nine knots at her best speed; the present Kent, with her engines of 22,000 horse power, has done twenty-three knots an hour. The first Kent’s guns, forty in number, were identical with the guns that Queen Elizabeth’s fleet carried when it fought the Spanish Armada; the same kind of guns, practically, that Henry the Eighth’s Mary Rose had on board when she capsized at Spithead. The same quaint old mediæval style of nomenclature, indeed, was still in vogue for the Kentish’s guns. They were called culverins (18-pounders), demi-culverins (9-pounders), and sakers (6-pounders). The heaviest of them, the culverins, weighed 48 cwt. each, and were 5½ inches in calibre. The Kentish’s guns also were of brass, specially cast for her; refounded, for the most part, according to an existing Ordnance order, out of condemned pieces and captured Royalist cannon. According to a curious manuscript list of the ship’s equipment, the Kentish when ready for sea had on board as her establishment of war stores—908 round shot, 468 double-headed shot, 100 barrels of powder, 60 muskets; and for close-quarter fighting, 7 blunderbusses, 60 pikes, and 40 hatchets. The modern Kent carries as her main armament 6-inch quick-firing steel guns, each firing 100-pounder shot and shell, and able to discharge, each piece in half a minute, heavier metal than the whole broadside (270 lb.) of the original Kentish. The old ship, of course, was built of wood, oak timber; most of which, as a curious fact, seems to have been cut on the confiscated estates of delinquent Royalists in the County of Kent. The new Kent, built of steel, and with 4-inch Krupp armour along her water line, cost to complete for sea upwards of three-quarters of a million sterling; the Kentish frigate, guns and all, cost £5000, or in present-day money from £20,000 to £25,000.

That the gallant “Kents” of His Majesty’s navy at the present hour are quite ready to give a satisfactory account of themselves before the enemy, should occasion arise, may be judged from their firing record in the “gunlayers competition” for 1907. With the 12-pounder, the average per gun for the whole ship was 11·18 hits a minute. Petty Officer Nash achieved fourteen hits in fourteen rounds, the run, during which the score was made, being only of fifty-five seconds duration. In his fifty-five seconds Able Seaman Ramsden fired fifteen rounds, the time taken to load and fire each time being just over three and a half seconds, and he hit the target thirteen times. During the light quick-firing gunlayers’ test, the Kent fired, in the short space of fifty-five seconds, 107 rounds, scoring 83 hits, from her 12-pounders; and 42 rounds, scoring 35 hits, from her 3-pounders. Some of the guns hit the target with every shot they fired, and the loading was wonderfully smart, averaging 15 rounds per gun for the fifty-five seconds.

The Kent of King Edward’s fleet was laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on the 12th of February, 1900, as a first-class armoured cruiser, and launched on Wednesday, the 6th of March, 1901, Lady Hotham, the wife of the Admiral Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, naming the ship in the orthodox way, with wine grown and produced within the British Empire, and specially presented for the ceremony by the Agent General of South Australia. The Kent was the first to be launched of our modern set of County Cruisers. She was also the first to hoist the pennant and join the fleet at sea.

The Scene of the Operations under Admiral Watson and Clive

[From Major James Rennell’s “Bengal Atlas,” published in 1781. Reproduced by the courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society.]

III
THE AVENGERS OF THE BLACK HOLE:—
WHAT THE NAVY DID FOR CLIVE

The fathers in glory do sleep

That gathered with him to the fight,

But the sons shall eternally keep

The tablet of gratitude bright.

This year, 1907, has witnessed the coming round of the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of British rule in India. It has recalled to memory too, among some of us at any rate, the name of one of the great Englishmen of history, Clive, and how he set his hand to the work which, in its ultimate outcome, placed the realms of the Great Mogul beneath the sovereignty of the British flag. The part that the Royal Navy took side by side with Clive and his soldiers is perhaps hardly as fully recognized as it should be, considering all that it meant. For that reason, among others, the fine story of what took place, of the help that our bluejackets of that time gave when the situation was most critical, finds its place here. The navy had its own rôle to take in the stirring drama, and it fulfilled it—completely, faultlessly, resistlessly. Without the navy—the squadron then on duty in Indian waters—Clive would have been powerless, and the golden hour for England, with its opportunities, would have had to be let go by.

In the summer of 1757 the British East Indies Squadron had not long arrived in the Bay of Bengal. It had come out from England four or five months previously in anticipation of the outbreak of a war with France. After carrying out operations against the pirate strongholds of the Malabar coast, it had gone round to take post off Madras, at that time the most important of the British settlements in the East. It was in the neighbourhood of Fort St. George when, absolutely as a bolt from the blue, came the news of the catastrophe at Calcutta, which led to the tragedy of the Black Hole.

At that moment news was expected by every ship from England that war had been declared with France, and part of the British squadron was on the watch down the coast, off St. David’s. It seemed quite possible, indeed, that the first intelligence of war might be the appearance on the scene of a French squadron from Mauritius, cleared for action. All were keenly on the alert, almost from the first arrival of the British force on the coast. There was no means of knowing whether the French were not already on their way, and every precaution was taken against surprise. A daily masthead look-out was kept for six weeks, the ships being maintained in readiness every night to clear for action at short notice.

So little was trouble from the north expected, that month of July, 1757, that an expeditionary force under Clive to assist the Subahdar of Hyderabad in his quarrel with M. Bussy was on the point of setting out.

To help the Subahdar a force of three hundred European soldiers and fifteen hundred Sepoys of the Madras army was told off, and to counteract the consequent weakening of the garrison of Madras, Admiral Watson, the Commander-in-Chief of the East Indies Squadron, was requested to bring his squadron higher up the coast so as to keep guard in the immediate vicinity of Fort St. George.

The Admiral did as he was asked, after which, just as the Hyderabad column was on the point of marching off, the blow from Bengal fell.

In the second week of July a letter came from Governor Drake at Calcutta with the news that the new Nawab-Vizier of Bengal, Suraj-u-daulah, had seized the Honourable East India Company’s factory at Cossimbazar and made the officials there prisoners. There was great anxiety at Madras, and Major Kilpatrick, of the East India Company’s service, with three companies of European troops, was at once sent north, on board a Company’s ship, to render what assistance he could. The Bengal military establishment at that time comprised only five hundred men—two hundred Europeans and three hundred Sepoys. The dispatch of the soldiers for Calcutta delayed the start of the expedition for Hyderabad; and then, just as marching orders were about to be given for the second time, on the 5th of August, a second letter from Bengal arrived.

To the amazement and consternation of all, they learnt that Calcutta had fallen. Suraj-u-daulah had swooped down on the settlement with seventy thousand men, with cannon and four hundred elephants, and had captured Fort William. Governor Drake sent the message from a place called Fulta, a riverside village in the Sunderbunds, some forty miles below Calcutta. The garrison of Fort William, he said, had made a defence for five days, after which, ammunition failing, he and the higher officials had taken refuge on board what ships there were in the Hooghly and retreated with them to Fulta. The women were safe on board the ships, said the Governor, but all were in the utmost distress and great danger. They appealed for help at the earliest possible moment. Not a word was said of any one being left behind in Fort William; not a syllable about the tragedy of the Black Hole. News of that apparently had not yet reached Fulta. But without the crowning tragedy, the news, as it reached Madras, was bad enough. It came with stunning effect: “A blow as filled us all with inexpressible consternation,” to use the words of Dr. Ives, the surgeon of Admiral Watson’s flagship, the Kent.

To recover Calcutta and take vengeance on the Nawab were the thoughts uppermost in every one’s mind at Madras. A sloop-of-war, the Kingfisher, was hastily dispatched northward on the day after the receipt of the news to render assistance to the ships with the refugees on board, which would probably be found lying weather-bound in the Hooghly. The troops for Hyderabad were ordered to stand fast. An urgent message was sent to Fort St. David to summon Clive to the Presidency. Clive hurried to Madras, and with Governor Pigott and the Council discussed the situation.

Discussion, however, soon disclosed a difference of opinion as to what should be done. Some of the leading people at Madras were nervous for themselves. Certain members of the Council objected to any weakening of the garrison. War with France, they said, was imminent. It was quite possible indeed, according to late advices from Hyderabad, that the Subahdar and M. Bussy might settle their quarrel and combine against Madras. With that possibility before them, was it wise to strip Madras entirely of its garrison, now that the worst had already happened in Bengal? The Council met day after day, and adjourned without coming to any decision. Fortunately in the end the bolder spirits prevailed. By a majority the Council decided to equip an expedition and send help to Bengal as soon as the weather—it was the monsoon season—would let the expedition start.

It was agreed, after a consultation with Admiral Watson, that Colonel Adlercron’s regiment (39th Foot) and 1500 Sepoys should be shipped on board the men-of-war and some Indiamen then in the Roads, and proceed to Balasore, at the mouth of the Hooghly. There the vessels then housing the Calcutta refugees would transfer them on board the three larger men-of-war, the flagship Kent, the Cumberland, and the Tyger, which ships, it was held, drew too much water to cross the shoals at the mouth of the Hooghly. The Indiamen and the Calcutta ships would then transport the soldiers up the river and recapture Calcutta, escorted and assisted by three smaller men-of-war, the Salisbury, the Bridgewater, and the Kingfisher.

These arrangements had all been completed when something totally unexpected happened. A Bombay runner arrived with dispatches from the Admiralty, sent overland, recalling the whole of Admiral Watson’s squadron to England at once. “It was,” as Dr. Ives describes, “a terrible blow.” But the Admiral proved equal to the situation. He held an informal consultation in his cabin with his second in command, Rear-Admiral Pocock, and Flag-Captain Speke. Taking all responsibility on himself, the Admiral decided to postpone his departure until after the expedition to Bengal had been successfully carried through. An emergency had arisen, he wrote in his reply to England, which the Admiralty could not have foreseen, which imperatively required the continued presence of the squadron on the station. Then Admiral Watson went ashore to communicate his dispatches to the Governor in Council. His opening intimation that the men-of-war had been recalled created, in the words of Dr. Ives, “blank consternation.” It would mean, as the Council formally resolved, “the total ruin of the Company’s affairs in the Indies.” They expressed themselves as helpless without the Navy, and were overwhelmingly grateful when they learned that the Admiral had decided, on his own responsibility, to disobey his orders.

At the last moment, though, there was further delay; it was over a question of military etiquette. Who should command the expedition—Colonel Adlercron, a King’s officer, or Lieutenant-Colonel Clive, a Company’s officer, who had local rank as colonel? There was further wrangling over this matter, and valuable time was lost, until it was finally settled that the supreme command of both sea and land forces should be vested in Vice-Admiral Watson as senior commissioned officer in the East, with Clive in charge of the troops—both King’s and Company’s.

The expedition finally set sail on the 16th of October, two months and ten days after the news of the Black Hole first reached Madras. It comprised five men-of-war—the Kent, Cumberland, Tyger, Salisbury, Bridgewater, and the Blaze, a fireship; three Company’s Indiamen, and two country ships. All the ships carried soldiers and army stores.

Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, the Commander-in-Chief in the East Indies, was a capable and zealous leader. He was a naval officer of the very best type, and in addition, it was admitted on all hands, a noble-hearted, considerate English gentleman. He had been very seriously ill while on the way out from England—so ill indeed that, on learning soon after his first arrival at Bombay that there was a possibility of the expected war with the French not breaking out for some time, he had applied to go home again at once on sick leave. When he reached Madras he learnt officially that war was imminent, and he wrote off at once cancelling his application. If that were so there was no going home now for Admiral Watson. Ill as he was, he would stay out to fight the French once more. It was characteristic of the man—of the captain of the Dragon in 1743—who, as the Navy of those days well remembered, when detached by Admiral Mathews from off Toulon, as a special favour to a smart officer, to cruise off Cadiz just when the treasure galleons from the Spanish Main were expected to arrive, with additional instructions to go on afterwards to Lisbon and carry the merchants’ treasure thence to England—the most lucrative employment a naval man could possibly look for—deliberately, on hearing at Gibraltar that a battle was likely to take place off Toulon, turned his back on a sum of prize-money that would have made him wealthy for life, saying, “He thought his ship would be wanted with the fleet.” The old heroic spirit of a captain who had been specially mentioned in dispatches for gallantry in every battle that he fought in—by Mathews off Toulon, and in 1747 by both Anson and Hawke—overcame the bodily weakness of an invalid.

It took six weeks to reach Balasore Roads, a distance of only seven hundred miles on a direct course. Owing to the delay at Madras they had, as the phrase went, “lost the passage.” With the south-west monsoon, which held from May to the middle of September, it took ordinarily from ten days to a fortnight to sail from Madras to Calcutta. Now they had the north-east monsoon to face—head winds all the way. It was not until the first week of December that the leading ships of the squadron were able to reach Balasore. They had sailed, with the wind, according to the flagship’s log, at west-north-west. Next day the wind shifted to north-east, dead against them. The strong current in the Bay of Bengal, which at that time of year sets down the Coromandel coast at one to five knots an hour, swept the squadron down until they came within sight of Point San Pedro, in Ceylon, thirteen leagues east of Trincomalee. On some days there were dead calms, when they barely made from three to five miles’ progress in twenty-four hours. Between the 28th of October and the 5th of November only six leagues’ advance was made altogether. Rough weather set in, during which the Salisbury sprang a dangerous leak, and the whole squadron had to shorten sail and stand by for a whole day until the leak had been found and stopped. Finally, a storm scattered the squadron far and wide. The Kent and Tyger, the two leading ships, arrived at Balasore Roads on the 3rd of December by themselves. The rest of the squadron were at that time miles astern, trying to weather Palmyras Point. Two of the ships, indeed, never got to Balasore at all; they had to bear away until they drifted right round Ceylon and anchored at Bombay.

At Balasore Admiral Watson got fresh news about what had been happening in Bengal. He now heard, for the first time, details of the taking of Fort William and of the grim tragedy of the Black Hole. Two English pilots who boarded the flagship told the story. The attack, said the men, opened on June 15th, Tuesday, and after a vain attempt to hold the gaol and Court House and a small redoubt in front of the city, the garrison had been driven into the fort. There it was found they had only ammunition for three days’ fighting. The women and children were thereupon sent on board the ships in the river, lying off the Maidan, and in the confusion that followed their departure, Governor Drake and most of the leading civilians—according to the pilots—deserted their posts, and stole off on board ship to join the women, after which they induced the skippers to weigh anchor and drop down the river, leaving the garrison cut off and without means of escape. These under Mr. Holwell, a member of the Council, had fought on gallantly, keeping the enemy off until the afternoon of Sunday the 20th, when, being at their last cartridge, they beat a parley. While they were talking from the walls, the enemy by treachery got possession of one of the fort gates (that in the rear), rushed the guard, and compelled the garrison to surrender at discretion. That night the prisoners, a hundred and seventy-five in number, were crammed all together into the Black Hole, whence next morning only sixteen were left alive. Of the sixteen, Mr. Holwell and Mr. Burdett, a writer, with two others, had been heavily ironed and sent to the Nawab’s camp. Such was the tale told to Admiral Watson.

The refugees at Fulta, added the pilots, were in a deplorable state; fever-stricken and short of food; in terror of their lives; living, some in tents on shore, some on board the ships in the river. The Nawab, it was reported, had withdrawn to Moorshedabad, but his general, Manikchand, was at Calcutta with nearly four thousand men. He was busy throwing up batteries at various points along the river bank to bar any approach by ships.

Admiral Watson, on hearing that, made up his mind to try and get up the Hooghly to Fulta with the Kent at once, without waiting for the rest of the squadron or the troops.

The pilots, however, made objection to carrying the flagship into the river. It was impossible, they said, to get so big a ship over the Braces, the belt of shoals across the mouth of the Hooghly on the Balasore side, with the tides as they were. They doubted, indeed, if it could be done at all, even at spring tides. On the usual “crossing track” over the Western Brace, the deepest channel, they said, was only three fathoms. But Admiral Watson had made up his mind to try. On the pilots finally declining to assist in taking the flagship into the river Captain Speke, the captain of the Kent, volunteered to make the attempt. He had been up the Hooghly once before, and he could, he believed, find a channel deep enough to carry the Kent over the Braces. The Tyger was to remain behind to bring on the rest of the squadron on their arrival.

The flagship set out, after a week’s further detention at Balasore owing to strong north easterly winds, her boats towing her. Captain Speke navigated the ship, and with such success that a channel was found through the Western Brace that gave four fathoms of water at half-tide. It proved sufficient to float the ship over safely. On the 12th of December, they were at anchor off Kedgeree (Khichri), sixty-seven miles from Fort William by water. After this the wind changed to westerly and the Kent was able to work up the estuary under sail.

Fulta was reached on the 15th, and the rescue of the fugitives from Calcutta effected. Major Kilpatrick and his men were found there, and the Kingfisher. The flagship herself had on board two hundred and fifty men of the 39th Foot under Captain Eyre Coote, afterwards the celebrated General Sir Eyre Coote. There was also a detachment of Sepoys, who had arrived two days before by the Protector, a Bombay cruiser, which had touched at Madras just after the squadron left there, and had since got ahead of them. At Fulta Governor Drake, the ex-Governor of Calcutta, came on board to see the Admiral.

The Tyger reached Fulta on the 16th, and the Salisbury and the rest of the men-of-war and the Indiamen with the troops on board, between then and the 26th. The Cumberland and the Marlborough Indiaman were still missing.

The tides, meanwhile, were too low to allow any of the ships to cross the sand-bar above Fulta and proceed further up the Hooghly until after the 27th.

Admiral Watson used the interval to send a letter to Suraj-u-daulah. He wrote courteously, but firmly, demanding the immediate restoration of Calcutta and compensation for property looted and destroyed. The letter was sent off on the 18th of December, but no reply came. None had arrived ten days later, when the forward movement up the river began. The Kent, Tyger, Salisbury, Bridgewater, and Kingfisher comprised the ships told off for the recovery of Calcutta. They carried up with them eight hundred soldiers and twelve hundred Sepoys—all that were available in the absence of the detachments on board the belated ships.