Meanwhile, saved by the shift of the wind, the main body of the Armada was speeding into the North Sea, led by Medina-Sidonia in the leaky "San Martin." Howard and the English fleet held a parallel course, shepherding the enemy without closing in to fire a single shot. Howard was again, to use the phrase of the time, "putting on a brag countenance," for he was in no condition for serious fighting, even against such crippled opponents. The magazines of the English fleet were all but empty, its "cannon, demi-cannon, sakers, and falconets" doomed to useless silence, food and water short in supply, and much sickness among the tired crews, who were complaining that they were badly fed and that the beer was undrinkable.

In the evening Medina-Sidonia held a council of war on board the "San Martin." Soldiers and sailors, veterans of many wars, and the chief pilots of the fleet sat round his cabin table, and there was anxious debate. No one could say how long it would be before Parma's army was ready; ammunition and provisions were short, men falling sick, ships badly damaged, though only a dozen had been actually lost. The wind was increasing from the south-south-west, and the pilots urged that the best course was to run up the North Sea, round the north of Scotland, reach the open Atlantic, and so return to Spain without further fighting.

Some of the best of the officers, men who had been throughout in the thick of the fighting, protested against this course, to which their admiral was evidently inclined. Recalde, Oquendo, and Leyva spoke for the brave minority. Most of the great fleet was still safe, and Recalde begged the Duke to lie off and on till the wind blew fair for the Channel again, and then risk another fight. Leyva supported him, and said that though his own ship, the "Rata Coronada," had been sorely battered, was leaking like a sieve, and had only thirty cartridges in her magazine, he would rather take her into action again and sink fighting than see the Armada run away northward like a pack of cowards. But what seemed the easiest course prevailed. Medina-Sidonia saved his conscience as a soldier by summing up the resolution of the council as a decision to sail northward, but turn back and fight if the wind and weather became favourable.

So in the following days the Armada sped northward before the south-west wind, which sometimes blew hard and raised a sea that increased the distress of the Spaniards. Howard followed with the English fleet, just keeping the Armada in sight. If the Spanish admiral shortened sail to collect his rearward stragglers, Howard followed his example, making no attempt even to close and cut off the nearest ships. He was still reluctantly compelled by empty magazines and half-empty lockers to be content merely "to put on a brag countenance." His shortness of supplies forced him at last to lose touch of the enemy. Off the Firth of Forth he abandoned the pursuit.

When the English ships returned to their ports the captains were not at all sure what had become of the Armada. Some thought it might have gone to the harbours of Norway and Denmark to winter and refit there, and renew the attempt next spring. One sees in the letters of Secretary Walsingham the uncertainty that prevailed among the Queen's counsellors, and some disappointment that the victory was not more complete, though this was the result of himself and his colleagues leaving Howard so ill supplied. On the same day (8 August, Old Style) Walsingham writes to Lord Burghley: "It is hard now to resolve what advice to give Her Majesty for disarming, until it shall be known what is become of the Spanish fleet"; and to the Lord Chancellor: "I am sorry the Lord Admiral was forced to leave the prosecution of the enemy through the wants he sustained. Our half-doings doth breed dishonour and leaveth the disease uncured."

Meanwhile, the Armada had held its course to the northward, sometimes sighted far off from a Scottish headland. On 20 August (10th, Old Style), twelve days after the battle off Gravelines, it was passing between the Orkneys and Shetlands, heading for the Atlantic, helped by a change of wind which now blew from the east, filling the great sails, but chilling the southern sailors and soldiers to the bone. Though it was summer, the cold was like that of winter, and the bitter weather grew even worse as the galleons sailed on into the North Atlantic. The great ships straggled for miles over grey foam-flecked seas, under dull cloud-packed skies that sent down showers of sleety rain. Men huddled below in the crowded gundecks, and in fore and stern castles, and there were days when only the pilots kept the deck, while gangs of men took their turn at the never-resting pumps. There were semi-starvation and fever in every ship. The chaplains were busy giving the last consolations of religion to dying men, and each day read the burial service over a row of canvas-shrouded dead, and "committed them to the deep."

The Armada no longer held together. Small groups formed haphazard squadrons, keeping each other company, but many ships were isolated and ploughed their way alone over the dreary sea. Many, despite hard work at the pumps, settled lower and lower in the water each day, and at last sank in the ocean, their fate unknown and unrecorded till, as the months went by and there was no news of them, they were counted as hopelessly lost. Of others the fate is known.

In his sailing instructions Medina-Sidonia had been warned that he should take "great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland for fear of the harm that may happen to you on that coast," where, as a sixteenth-century sailor wrote, "the ocean sea raiseth such a billow as can hardly be endured by the greatest ships." There was heavy weather in the "ocean sea" that August and September, but even so the galleons that steered well to the westward before shaping their course for Spain, and kept plenty of sea-room by never sighting the "island of Ireland," succeeded in getting home, except where they were already so badly damaged and so leaky that they could not keep afloat. But along the coasts of Scotland and Ireland there was a succession of disasters for those who clung to, or were driven into, the landward waters.

The first mishap occurred when the Armada was rounding the north of Scotland. The "Gran Grifon," the flagship of Juan Lopez de Medina, admiral of the urcas or storeships, drove on the rocks of Fair Isle, the solitary cliff-bound island in the channel between the Orkneys and Shetlands. Here such few as escaped the waves lived for some six weeks in "great hunger and cold." Then a fishing-boat took them to Anstruther in Fifeshire, where they surrendered to the bailies. Lopez de Medina was among this handful of survivors. Melville, the Presbyterian minister of Anstruther, describes him as "a very reverend man of big stature and grave and stout countenance, grey haired and very humble like," as he asked quarter for himself and his comrades in misfortune.[13]

[13] In some histories of the Armada and in more than one standard book of reference Lopez de Medina is confused with Medina-Sidonia, and it is stated that it was the flagship of the whole Armada that was lost on Fair Isle.

Other distressed ships fled from the Atlantic storms for shelter inside the Hebrides. Three entered the Sound of Mull, where one was wrecked near Lochaline, and a second off Salen. The third, the great galleass "Florencia," went down in Tobermory Bay. The local fishermen still tell the traditional story of her arrival and shipwreck. She lies in deep water, half-buried in the sand of the bottom, and enterprising divers are now busy with modern scientific appliances trying to recover the "pieces of eight" in her war-chest, and the silver plate which, according to a dispatch of Walsingham's, was the dinner-service of the "Grandee of Spain" who commanded her.

But it was on the shores of the "island of Ireland" that the most tragic disasters of the Armada took place. Its wrecks strewed the north and west coasts. Fitzwilliam, the "Deputy" or the Viceroy, in Dublin, and Bingham, the Governor of Connaught, had taken precautions to prevent the Spaniards finding shelter, water, and food in the ports by reinforcing the western garrisons. Bingham feared the Irish might be friendly to the Spaniards, and industriously spread among the coast population tales that if they landed the foreigners would massacre the old and carry the young away into slavery. The people of the ports, who had long traded with Spain, knew better, but some of the rude fisher-folk of the west coast perhaps believed the slander. Where shipwrecked crews fell into the hands of Bingham's men no mercy was shown them. He marched four hundred prisoners into Galway, and his troops massacred them in cold blood, and then he reported that, "having made a clean despatch of them both within the town, and in the country abroad, he rested Sunday all day, giving praise and thanks to God for Her Majesty's most happy success in that action, and our deliverance from such dangerous enemies."

One of the urcas came into Tralee Bay in an almost sinking condition, with her crew reduced to twenty-three men, ill and half starved and unable to work the ship. Sir Edward Denny, the Governor of Tralee Castle, was absent. The Spaniards surrendered to Lady Denny and her garrison. The men begged for their lives, and some said they had friends in Waterford who would pay ransom for them; but the lady had them all put to the sword, because "there was no safe keeping for them."

In all, some twenty-five galleons were dashed to pieces under the giant cliff walls of the Irish coast, or on outlying skerries and rocky headlands. In a few cases the Irish coast folk helped the survivors, but too often they were as cruel as the English, and killed and plundered them. Sir George Carew wrote to the Queen, rejoicing that there was now "blood between the Irish and the King of Spain." The Government troops marched along the coasts hunting for Spaniards. The Lord-Deputy Fitzwilliam accompanied one of these parties, and told how in Sligo Bay he saw miles of wreckage, "timber enough to build five of the greatest ships that ever I saw, besides mighty great boats, cables, and other cordage, and some such masts for bigness and length, as I never saw any two could make the like." Fitzwilliam fairly revelled in the destruction of the Spaniards. He wrote to Secretary Walsingham: "Since it hath pleased God by His hand upon the rocks to drown the greater and better sort of them, I will, with His favour, be His soldier for the despatching of those rags which yet remain." At last he got tired of this miserable kind of "soldiering," and proclaimed mercy for all Spaniards in Ireland who surrendered before 15 January, 1589. Numbers of ragged and starving men surrendered. Others had already been smuggled over to Scotland, still an independent country, where they were well treated and given transport to Spain.

The gallant Alonso de Leyva, after escaping from the wreck of his good ship the "Rata Coronada" in Blacksod Bay, was steering for Scotland in one of the galleasses that had rescued him and his comrades, when the ship was driven by a storm against the wild cliffs of Dunluce Castle, near the Giant's Causeway. The galleass was shattered to matchwood, and Leyva perished with all on board save five who swam ashore.

In the last days of September the surviving ships of the Armada came straggling into the northern ports of Spain with starving, fever-stricken crews. Medina-Sidonia had kept some fifty sail together till 18 September. He had resigned all active duties of command to his lieutenants, Flores and Bobadilla, for he was ill and broken in spirit. His hair had whitened, and he looked like an old man, as he sat all day in the "great cabin" of the "San Martin," with his head in his hands. A Biscay gale scattered the remnant of the Armada, and on 21 September the "San Martin" appeared alone off Santander. The wind had fallen; her sails hung loose from the yards, and the long swell that followed the gale was driving the ship towards the rocks outside the port. Some boats went out and towed her in. Most of the crew were sick. Nearly two hundred had been buried at sea.

Recalde and Oquendo brought their ships home, but landed broken with the hardships of the terrible voyage, and only survived it a few weeks. Every ship that arrived told of the many buried at sea, and landed scores of dying and fever and scurvy-stricken men, so that all the northern ports were like great hospitals. When the last galleon had struggled into harbour, fifty-five great ships were still missing. The best of the leaders were dead. Not more than a third of the sailors and soldiers survived. It was a disaster from which Spain as a naval power never really recovered. For fifty years to come the Spanish infantry still upheld their claim to be invincible on the battlefield, but the tall galleon had ceased to be the mistress of the seas.

The campaign of the Armada is remarkable not only for inaugurating the modern period of naval war, the era of the sail and the gun, but also because, though it ended in disaster for one side and success for the other, there was from first to last in the long series of engagements in the narrow seas no battle "fought to a finish." In all the fighting the English showed that they had grasped the essential ideas of the new warfare, and proved themselves better sailors and better gunners, but the number of the ships they took or destroyed was insignificant. Howard was so crippled by parsimonious mismanagement on the part of his Government that he had to be content with "half-doings," instead of decisive results. But there was worse mismanagement on the Spanish side, and this led first to failure, then to disaster.

The story of the Armada is full of useful lessons, but for England its message for all time is that her true defence against invasion lies not in armies, but upon the sea. The Elizabethan captains knew well that if once Parma's veterans landed in Kent or Essex, the half-trained levies gathered by the beacon fires could do little to stop their onward march. So they took care to make the narrow seas an impassable barrier to the enemy by harrying the covering fleet and making it hopeless for Parma even to think of sending his transports to sea. The lesson is worth remembering even now.



CHAPTER VII

THE BATTLE OFF THE GUNFLEET

1666

The decline of Spain as a great power was largely due to the unsuccessful attempt to coerce the Dutch people. Out of the struggle arose the Republic of the United Provinces, and Holland, won from the sea, and almost an amphibious state, became in a few years a great naval power. A hardy race of sailors was trained in the fisheries of the North Sea. Settlements were established in the Far East, and fleets of Dutch East Indiamen broke the Spanish monopoly of Asiatic trade. It was to obtain a depot and watering-place for their East Indiamen that the Dutch founded Cape Town, with far-reaching results on the future development of South Africa.

A Dutch fleet had assisted in defeating the Armada, but the rise of this naval power on the eastern shores of the narrow seas made rivalry with England on the waters inevitable. In the seventeenth century there was a series of hard-fought naval wars between England and the United Provinces.

Under the two first Stuart Kings of England there were quarrels with the Dutch that nearly led to war. The Dutch colonists and traders in the Far Eastern seas had used high-handed measures to prevent English competition. Nearer home there were disputes as to the right claimed by the King's ships to make any foreign ship lower her flag and salute the English ensign. But it was not till the days of the Commonwealth that the first war broke out. It was a conflict between two republics. Its immediate cause was Cromwell's Navigation Act, which deprived the Dutch of a considerable part of their carrying trade. The first fight took place before the formal declaration of war, and was the result of a Dutch captain refusing the customary salute to a Commonwealth ship.

In this, as in the later conflicts with Holland, while England was still able to live on its own products, the Dutch were in the position in which we are now, for the command of the sea was vital to their daily life. Their whole wealth depended on their great fishing fleets in the North Sea; their Indiamen which brought the produce of the East to Northern Europe through the Straits of Dover; and the carrying trade, in which they were the carriers of the goods of all Central Europe, which the Rhine and their canals brought into their ports. The mere prolongation of a naval war meant endless loss to the merchants and shipowners of Holland.

The development of ocean-borne commerce had led to great improvements in shipbuilding in the three-quarters of a century since the days of the Armada, and the fleets that met in the Channel and the North Sea during Cromwell's Dutch war were far more powerful than those of Medina-Sidonia and Howard. The nucleus of the English fleet had been formed by the permanent establishment created by Charles I, but the ships for which he had levied the "Ship Money" were used against him in the Civil War, for the seafaring population and the people of the ports mostly sided with the Parliament. The operations against Rupert in the Mediterranean, the war with the Algerines, and the expeditions to the West Indies had helped to form for the Commonwealth a body of experienced officers and seamen, and in Blake, Cromwell had at least one admiral of the first rank. The fleets on both sides sometimes numbered as many as a hundred sail. The guns mounted in broadside tiers had come to be recognized as the weapons that must decide a sea-fight, and in this first Dutch war we see on both sides attempts to use tactical formations that would give the best scope to gun power.

Though a battle was always likely to develop into an irregular melee, in which the boldest exchanged broadsides and the shirkers hung back, there were attempts to fight in regular lines, the ships giving each other mutual support. Want of traditional experience, marked differences in the speed and manoeuvring power of ships, and the rudimentary character of the signalling, made it difficult to keep the line, but it was early recognized as an ideal to be aimed at.

The old oar-driven galleys, with their heavy batteries in the bows and all the guns pointing ahead, went into battle, as at Lepanto, in line abreast. The broadside battleship would thus have her guns pointed at her consorts. The line abreast was used only to bear down on the enemy. The fighting formation was the line ahead. This was adopted at first as a fleet running down from windward closed upon its enemy. Unless they were actually running away, the other side would be sailing in line ahead with the wind abeam. It was soon realized that in this formation an admiral had his fleet under better control, and gradually the normal formation for fleets became line ahead, and hostile fleets either fought running on parallel courses on the same tack, or passed and repassed each other on opposite tacks. But this was the result of a long evolution, and the typically formal battles fought out by rule in the "close-hauled line ahead" belong to the eighteenth century.

The first Dutch war ended with Blake's victory off the Kentish Knock. The second war, in the days of Charles II, is best remembered in England in connection with a national disgrace, the Dutch raid on Chatham and the blockade of the Thames. This disaster was the result of a piece of almost incomprehensible folly on the part of the King and his advisers. But it came shortly after a great naval victory, the story of which is by most forgotten. It is worth telling again, if only to show that the disaster in the Thames was not the fault of the British navy, and that even under Charles II there were glorious days for our fleet. It is also interesting as a typical naval battle of the seventeenth century.



Hostilities began in 1664 without a formal declaration of war, the conflict opening with aggressions and reprisals in the colonial sphere of action. English fleets seized Dutch trading ships on the African coast and Dutch islands in the West Indies. In North America the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Hudson, was occupied, annexed, and renamed New York in honour of His Highness the Duke of York, the brother of the King. England drifted into the war as the result of conflicts in the colonies, and was in a state of dangerous unreadiness for the struggle on the sea. "God knows how little fit we are for it," wrote Pepys, who as Secretary of the Navy knew the whole position. There was the utmost difficulty in obtaining men for the ships that were being got ready for sea. The pressgangs brought in poor creatures whom the captains described as a useless rabble. There were hundreds of desertions. Happily the Dutch preparations were also backward, and England had thus some breathing time.

In June the two fleets, under the Duke of York and the Dutch Admiral Opdam, each numbering nearly a hundred sail, were in the North Sea, and on the 3rd they met in battle, some thirty-five miles south-east of Lowestoft. Opdam was driven back to the Texel with the loss of several ships. The Duke of York had behaved with courage and spirit during the fight, and was covered with splashes of the blood of officers killed beside him on the quarter-deck, where he himself was slightly wounded. But he showed slackness and irresolution in the pursuit, and failed to reap the full results of his victory.

During the rest of the summer there were more or less successful enterprises against Dutch trade; but the plague in London, in the ports and dockyards, and even in the fleet itself, seriously interfered with the prosecution of the war. As usual at that time, the winter months were practically a time of truce. In the spring of 1666 both parties were ready for another North Sea campaign.

The Dutch had fitted out more than eighty ships under Admiral De Ruyter, and the English fleet was put under the command of Monk, Duke of Albemarle, with Prince Rupert, the fiery cavalry leader of the Civil War, as his right-hand man. Both were soldiers who had had some sea experience. It was still the time when it was an ordinary event for a courtier to command a battleship, with a sailor to translate his orders into sea language and look after the navigation for him. Pepys tells how he heard Monk's wife, the Duchess of Albemarle (perhaps echoing what her husband had said in private), "cry mightily out against the having of gentlemen captains, with feathers and ribbons, and wish the King would send her husband to sea with the old plain sea-captains that he served with formerly."

Monk and Rupert went to join the fleet that was assembling at the Nore on 23 April. It was not ready for sea till near the end of May. On 1 June, when part of the fleet was detached under Rupert to watch the Straits of Dover, Monk met De Ruyter (who was in superior force) off the Essex coast and began a battle that lasted for four days. The news of the first day's fighting set London rejoicing, but soon there came disappointing reports of failure.

The four days' battle had ended in defeat. Outnumbered as he was, Monk had made a splendid fight on the first two days, hoping from hour to hour for Rupert's arrival. On the third day, the Sunday, he had to retire towards the Thames, covering his retreat with a rearguard of sixteen of his best ships. Several of these touched on the Galloper Sand, and Ascue's ship, the "Prince," ran hard aground on the bank. Ascue struck his flag, and the Dutch burned his ship, abandoning an effort to carry her off because at last Rupert's squadron was in sight. On the fourth day a confused melee of hard fighting off the Thames mouth ended in Monk retiring into the river. He had lost twenty ships and some three thousand men; but he had fought so well that the Dutch bought their victory dearly, and, after attempting for a few days to blockade the Thames, had to return to Holland to refit and make good their losses.

Amid the general discouragement at the failure of the fleet there was an outburst of mutual accusations of misconduct among the captains, and even some bitter attacks on Monk, the "General at Sea." Fault was found with the dividing of the fleet on a false report; with Monk's haste to attack the Dutch when he was short of ships; and, finally, with his retreat before the enemy into the Thames. Monk, however, did not bear himself like a beaten man. He spoke of the long battle as, at the worst, an indecisive engagement, and said he had given the Dutch as many hard knocks as he had taken, and now knew how to defeat them. He had sufficient influence at Court to be able to retain his command, and so could look forward to trying his fortune again before long.

The work of refitting the fleet was taken in hand. At any cost, the danger of a blockade of the Thames must be averted, so the merchants of the City combined to help with money, and even some of the rich men of the Court loosed their purse-strings. A fine three-decker launched at Chatham was named the "Loyal London," in compliment to the exertions of the City, and work was pushed on so rapidly that she was soon ready for commission. Many of the ships had been shorthanded in the four days' battle. The pressgangs were now set vigorously to work, and, though there was a constant drain of desertions to contend with, the numbers on board the ships at Chatham and in the lower Thames rose day by day.

At the end of June a new impetus was given to the preparations by the reappearance of De Ruyter's fleet. He had repaired damages more quickly than his opponents, and put to sea to blockade the Thames. It was on 29 June that the fishermen of Margate and Broadstairs saw a great crowd of strange sail off the North Foreland. It was the Dutch fleet of over a hundred ships, great and small, and commanded by De Ruyter, Van Tromp, and Jan Evertszoon. Some of the ships stood in close to Margate. The militia of the county was called out, and the alarm spread along the southern coast, for the rumour ran that the Dutch had come to cover a French invasion. But no Frenchmen came, and the Hollanders themselves did not send even a boat's crew ashore. They were quite satisfied with stopping all the trade of London by their mere presence off the Thames, and they had the chance too of picking up homecoming ships that had not been duly warned. So, favoured by fine summer weather, the Dutch admirals cruised backwards and forwards in leisurely fashion between the North Foreland and the outer end of the Gunfleet Sand. They watched with their light craft all the channels that traverse the tangle of sandbanks and shallows in the estuary of the river; but their main fleet was generally somewhere off the Essex coast, for on that side of the estuary lay the channels then best known and most used, the Swin and the Black Deep.

The fleet which thus for some three weeks held possession of the very gateway to the Thames numbered seventy-three line-of-battle ships, twenty-six frigates, and some twenty light craft fitted to be used as fireships. By great exertions Monk and Rupert had got together in the lower Thames eighty-seven fighting-ships and a squadron of fireships. Some fifteen more frigates might have been added to the fleet, but it was thought better to leave them unmanned, and use their crews for strengthening those of the larger ships. The fleet assembled at the Nore had full complements this time. The men were eager to meet the enemy, and numbers of young gallants from the Court had volunteered for service as supernumeraries. The "Loyal London," fresh from the builders' hands at Chatham yard, with her crew of eight hundred men, was said to be "the best ship in the world, large or small." Pepys noted that it was the talk of competent men that this was "much the best fleet, for force of guns, greatness and number of ships, that ever England did see." England had certainly need of a good fleet, for she never met on the sea a more capable and determined enemy than the Dutch. In fact, the republic of the United Provinces was perhaps the only state that ever contended on anything like equal terms against England for the command of the sea.

When at last Monk and Rupert were ready to sail they had to wait for a favourable wind and tide, and, with the help of their pilots, solve a somewhat delicate problem. This problem was something like that which a general on land has to solve when it is a question of moving a large force through defiles of which the other end is watched by the enemy's main army. But it had special complications that the soldier would not have to take into account.

Monk's fleet sailing in line ahead, the only order in which it could traverse the narrow channels, would cover about nine miles from van to rear. There were then no accurate charts of the Thames estuary such as we now possess, and the pilots of the time believed the possible ways out for large ships to be fewer and more restricted than we know them to be at present. They advised Monk to take his fleet out from the Nore through the Warp and the West Swin, which form a continuous, fairly deep channel on the Essex side of the estuary along the outer edge of the Maplin Sands. At the outer end of the Maplins a long, narrow sandbank, known as the Middle Ground, with only a few feet of water over it at low tide, divides the channel into two parallel branches, the East Swin and the Middle Deep. At the end of the Middle Ground these two channels and a third (known as the Barrow Deep) unite to form the broad King's Channel (also known as the East Swin), where there is plenty of sea room, and presently this again expands into the open sea.

In those old days of sailing-ships a fleet working its way out of the narrower channels inside the Middle Deep in presence of an enemy would court destruction if the whole of its fighting strength could not be brought out into the wide waters of the King's Channel on a single tide. If only part of it got out before the tide turned, the van might be destroyed during the long hours of waiting for the rearward ships to get out and join in.

On 19 July Monk brought his ships out to the Middle Ground, beside which they remained anchored in a long line till the 21st, waiting for a favourable wind and a full tide. The ebb flows fast through the narrows from west to east, and weighing shortly before high water on the 22nd, the fleet spread all sail to a fair wind, and led by the "Royal Charles" with Monk and Rupert on her quarter-deck, the long procession of heavy battleships worked out into King's Channel, soon helped by a racing ebb. Those who saw the sight said that no finer spectacle had ever been witnessed on the seas, and certainly England had never till then challenged battle with a more powerful fleet. Officers and men were in high spirits and confident of victory, Rupert as eager as when in his younger days he led his wild charges of cavaliers, Monk impatient with prudent counsels urged by timid pilots, and using sharp, strong language to encourage them to take risks which he as a landsman did not appreciate. Not a ship touched ground. Some Dutch ships were sighted on the look-out off the edge of the Gunfleet, but they drew off when Captain Elliot, in the "Revenge," led a squadron of nine ships-of-the-line and some fireships to attack them. De Ruyter, who had been waiting with his main fleet off the Naze, stood out to sea, having no intention of beginning a battle till there were long hours of daylight before him. As the sun went down the English fleet anchored in the seaward opening of the King's Channel, with the "Royal Charles" near the buoy that marked the outer end of the Gunfleet Sands, and on both sides men turned in with the expectation of hard fighting next morning.

At daybreak the English fleet weighed anchor. The Dutch fleet was seen some miles to seaward and more to the south, sailing in three divisions in line ahead. Evertszoon was in command of the van; De Ruyter of the centre; Van Tromp of the rear. There were more than a hundred sail. Monk stood towards them before a light breeze, challenging battle in the fashion of the time with much sounding of trumpets and beating of drums. But De Ruyter kept his distance, working to the southward outside the tangle of shallows in the Thames estuary. All day the fleets drifted slowly, keeping out of gunshot range. Towards evening the wind fell to a sullen calm with a cloudy sky, and Monk and De Ruyter both anchored outside the Long Sand. After sunset there came a summer storm, vivid flashes of lightning, heavy thunder-peals, and wild, tempestuous gusts of wind. The anchors held, but Monk lost one of his best ships, the "Jersey." She was struck by lightning, which brought down a mass of spars and rigging on her decks, and so crippled her that she had to leave the fleet at dawn.

The Dutch fleet had disappeared. De Ruyter had weighed anchor during the storm and run out to sea. Monk suspected that he had gone back to his old cruising ground off the Naze, and when the wind fell and the weather cleared up in the afternoon of the 24th he weighed and sailed for the end of the Gunfleet to look for the enemy in that neighbourhood. He found no trace of him, and anchored again off the Gunfleet that evening, getting under way again at two in the morning of the 25th.

De Ruyter's light craft had kept him informed of Monk's movements. The Dutch admiral had avoided battle, when it was first offered, because he hoped to manoeuvre for the weather gage, but the failing wind before the storm had made it hopeless to attempt to work to windward of the English. At a council of war held on board De Ruyter's flagship on the evening of the 24th it was decided to accept battle next day, even if the Dutch had to fight to leeward. When the sun rose the two fleets were in sight, "eight leagues off the Naze," De Ruyter in his old position to seaward and southward of Monk.

The English "general at sea" had ninety-two battleships and seventeen fireships at his disposal. Following the custom of the time, the English was, like the Dutch fleet, organized in three divisions. The van, distinguished by white ensigns, was commanded by Sir Thomas Allen; the centre, or red division, flew the red ensign (now the flag of our merchant marine), and was under the personal command of Monk and Rupert; the rear, under Sir Jeremy Smith, flew the blue ensign. Battles at sea were now beginning to be fought under formal rules which soon developed into a system of pedantic rigidity. It was a point of honour that van should encounter van; centre, centre; and rear, rear. The Dutch were moving slowly under shortened sail in line ahead to the south-east of the English. Monk formed his fleet in line abreast on the port tack. The orders were that as they closed with the enemy the ships were to bear up on to a course parallel to that of the Dutch and engage in line ahead, division to division and broadside to broadside. Training cruises and fleet manoeuvres were still things of a far-off future, and the ships of Monk's three divisions were all unequal in speed and handiness, so the manoeuvre was not executed with the machine-like regularity of a modern fleet. The van and centre came into action fairly together, but the rearward ships straggled into position, and Tromp was able to give some of the first comers a severe hammering before their consorts came into action and relieved them of some of the brunt of his fire.

The first shots had been fired between nine and ten a.m. Till after two in the afternoon there was a close engagement, a steady, well-sustained cannonade, with no attempt at manoeuvring on either side, the fleets drifting slowly before the light wind, wrapped in powder smoke, in the midst of which both sides made attempts to use their fireships against each other. The only success was secured by the Dutch, who set the "Resolution" ablaze. She drifted out of the line and burned to the water's edge after her crew had abandoned her. There was heavy loss of life in both fleets.

For want of anything but the most rudimentary system of signalling, admirals had little control of a fight once it was begun. Monk, in the "Royal Charles," had to content himself with marking out De Ruyter's flagship, the "Seven Provinces," as his immediate opponent, and fighting a prolonged duel with her. He walked his quarter-deck chewing tobacco, a habit he had acquired as a precaution against infection during the London plague. He spoke at the outset with undeserved contempt of his opponent. "Now," he said, "you shall see this fellow come and give me two broadsides and then run." But De Ruyter's broadsides thundered for hour after hour. However, the dogged persistency of the Dutch was met with persistent courage as steady as their own.

London listened anxiously to the far-off rumbling of the cannonade on the North Sea waters. Mr. Pepys went to Whitehall and found the Court "gone to chapel, it being St. James's Day." Then he tells how—

"by and by, while they are at chapel and we waiting chapel being done, come people out of the park, telling us that the guns are heard plainly. And so everybody to the park, and by and by the chapel done, the King and Duke into the bowling-green and upon the leads, whither I went, and there the guns were plain to be heard; though it was pretty to hear how confident some would be in the loudness of the guns, which it was as much as ever I could do to hear them."

All the Eastern counties must have heard the cannon-thunder droning and rumbling like a far-off summer storm through the anxious hours of that July day. As the afternoon went on even Dutch endurance found it hard to stand up against the steadily sustained cannonade of Monk's centre and van divisions, and De Ruyter and Evertszoon began to make sail and work further out to sea, as if anxious to break off the fight. Monk, Rupert, and Allen, with the White and Red Divisions, followed them up closely, making, however, no attempt to board, but keeping up the fire of their batteries, and waiting for a chance to capture any crippled ship that might fall astern. Four of the enemy were thus taken. So the main bodies of both fleets worked out into the North Sea on parallel courses, making no great way, for the wind was falling.

The rear divisions, Tromp's and Jeremy Smith's ships, did not follow the general movement, for Tromp had never quite lost the advantage he had gained in the opening stage of the battle. He kept his ships under shortened sail, and hammered away doggedly at the Blue Division. This was the moment when Monk might well have either reinforced Smith, or turned with all his force on Tromp, and overwhelmed and destroyed his squadron. It was made up of twenty-five line-of-battle ships and six frigates, and its loss would have been a heavy blow to Holland. But on sea as on land there was still little of the spirit of ordered combination. Just as Rupert at Marston Moor had destroyed the opposing wing of the Roundheads with a fierce charge of his cavaliers, and then pursued, without a thought of using his advantage to fall upon the outnumbered and exposed centre of the enemy, so now Monk and Rupert pressed upon De Ruyter and Evertszoon, though Tromp was at their mercy, and Smith was in serious peril. Thus the engagement broke into two separate battles as the summer evening drew on.

Darkness ended the fight, and in the night the wind fell almost to a calm. Sunrise on the 26th showed the fleets drifting in disorder on a smooth sea, with their heavy sails hanging loose from the yards, only filled now and then by disappointing flaws of wind. The crews were busy repairing damages and transferring the wounded to the lighter craft. All day the only shots fired were discharged by a couple of brass toy cannon mounted on a pleasure yacht which Rupert had brought with him. Taking advantage of a mere ruffle of wind, so light that it could not move the big ships, the Cavalier Prince ran his yacht under the stern of the huge flagship of De Ruyter, and fired into him. The Dutchman had no guns bearing dead aft, and the Prince was able to worry him for a while, till there came one of those stronger gusts of wind that filled the sails of the "Seven Provinces," and she swung round, showing a broadside that could blow the yacht out of the water. But before a gun could be fired the yacht, with all sails spread, was racing back to the English fleet, and Rupert returned to the "Royal Charles" as pleased as a schoolboy with his frolic.

During the night of the 26th the wind rose, and De Ruyter steered for the Scheldt, followed up by Monk's two divisions. The Dutch admiral covered his retreat with his best ships, and a running fight began at dawn. Even before the sun rose the sounds of a heavy cannonade had come through the darkness, telling that Tromp and Smith were hard at it again in their detached battle. Early in the day Monk abandoned the chase of the Dutch, and steered towards the sound of the cannonade. Soon the fleet came in distant sight of the battle. Tromp with the "Zealand squadron" was making a dogged retreat, working to the south-east, close-hauled on the wind from the north-east. Monk tacked and made more than one attempt to place himself across the course of the Dutchmen, hoping to catch them between his fleet and Smith's Blue Division as between hammer and anvil. But Tromp slipped between his enemies and was before long in full sail for Holland, with the three English divisions combined in a stern chase. Monk said that if Smith had pressed Tromp closer early in the day, his retreat would have certainly been cut off. Smith and his friends protested that if the "general at sea" had laid his fleet on a better course, Tromp would have been taken. The honours of this last move in the game were with the Dutchman.

A substantial victory had been gained, though there were few trophies to show for it. The enemy had been met and forced by sheer hard knocks to abandon his station off the mouth of the Thames, and take refuge in his own ports. Monk was on the Dutch coast, picking up returning merchantmen as prizes, blockading the outgoing trade, and keeping the great fishing fleet in ruinous idleness. With the help of information supplied by a Dutch traitor, Monk reaped further advantage from his victory and inflicted heavy additional loss on the enemy. On 8 August the fleet sailed into the roadstead behind the long island of Terschelling, one of the chain of islands at the mouth of the Zuyder Zee, and burned at their anchors a hundred and sixty Dutch merchantmen that had taken shelter there, including several great East Indiamen. Next day landing-parties burned and plundered the ranges of warehouses on the island, and destroyed the town of Terschelling. The loss to the Dutch traders was estimated at over a million sterling.

The victorious battle off the Thames in July, 1666, is practically forgotten, so far as the popular tradition of our naval successes goes. It has not even a name by which it might live in the memory of our people. But it practically broke the power of Holland and brought the war to an end. What men do remember, and what has banished from their minds the living tradition of the great North Sea battle, is the ugly fact that in the following year De Ruyter sailed unopposed into the Thames, and captured and burned in the Medway dismantled ships that had fought victoriously against him in the North Sea battle—the "Royal Charles" being among his prizes.

The fleets had, as usual at the time, been laid up for the winter. The money available for fitting them out in the following spring was diverted to other purposes and squandered by the King and the Court. Charles counted on having no need to commission a great fleet in the summer. He knew the Dutch were feeling the strain of the war and the destruction of their trade, and would soon have to patch up a peace, and he opened preliminary negotiations. Such negotiations must be prudently backed by an effective force on the war footing. The King had practically disarmed as soon as there was a prospect of peace. But the Dutch had fitted out the fleet in view of possible contingencies, and De Witt and De Ruyter could not resist the temptation of revenging the defeat of 1666 and the sack of Terschelling by a raid on the Thames and Medway. It was the dishonesty and incapacity of the King and his parasite Court that laid England open to the shameful disaster that dimmed for all time the glory of Monk and Rupert's victory. But even after De Ruyter's exploits at Chatham the Dutch had no hope of continuing the war, and within a few weeks of the disaster peace was signed at Breda. The story of the Dutch raid is a lasting lesson on the necessity of an island power never for a moment relaxing the armed guard of the sea.



CHAPTER VIII

THE BATTLE OF THE SAINTS' PASSAGE

1782

In the days when fleets in action relied upon the oar, all fighting was at close quarters, and, as we have seen in our study of typical battles of this period, naval engagements fought out at close quarters gave very definite results, the fleet that was defeated being practically destroyed.

When battles began to be fought under sail, with the gun as the chief weapon, a new method had to be evolved. The more the fire of broadside batteries was relied upon, the greater was the tendency to fight at short artillery range, without closing to hand-to-hand distance, and when the sailors and sea-fighters of the seventeenth century adopted line ahead as the normal formation for making the most of broadside fire, battles had a marked tendency to degenerate into inconclusive artillery duels.

In both the English and the French navies—the two powers that after the naval decline of Spain and Holland disputed the command of the sea—the tactics of the battle in line ahead soon crystallized into a pedantic system. For a hundred years the methods of English admirals were kept in rigid uniformity by a code of "Fighting Instructions for the Navy," drawn up under the direction of the Duke of York (afterwards James II), when he was still Lord High Admiral of England in his brother's reign. These instructions were a well-meant attempt to provide a "sealed pattern" for naval engagements. They contemplated set, formal battles with both fleets in line ahead, sailing on parallel courses, or passing and repassing each other on opposite tacks, exchanging broadsides as the guns bore. The French adopted similar methods. If the English had any advantage in their tactics, it was in their ideas of gunnery. The French aimed at masts and rigging, in the hope of crippling an adversary in her sail power and forcing her to fall out of the moving line. The English believed in making the hull their target, aiming "between wind and water" to start dangerous leaks, or sending their shot into the crowded gun-decks to put the enemy's batteries out of action.



Under such methods battles became formal duels, in which, as often as not, there was no great result, and both sides claimed the victory. The story of many of the naval campaigns of the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century is weary reading. It was in the last quarter of the century that English admirals learned to fight again at close quarters, and to strike crushing blows at an enemy. The new period of energetic, decisive fighting began with a famous battle in West Indian waters in 1782, and culminated in the world-renowned victories of Nelson, who was a young captain on the North American station "when Rodney beat the Comte de Grasse" in the battle of the Saints' Passage.

Born when George I was King, Rodney was a veteran of many wars when he won his West Indian triumph. He had fought the French under Hawke, and was with Boscawen at the taking of Louisburg. In 1759 he bombarded Havre, and burned the transport flotilla collected at the mouth of the Seine for a raid on England. Three years later, as commander-in-chief on the Leeward Islands station, he captured Martinique, St. Lucia, and Grenada, and learned the ways of the West Indian seas. Then came years of political disfavour, half-pay and financial embarrassment, until in an hour of darkness for England, with the American colonies in successful revolt and Frenchman and Spaniard besieging Gibraltar by land and sea, the veteran admiral was recalled to active service, and found and seized the great opportunities of his life. Sailing south with a relieving fleet, he fell in with and captured a Spanish convoy off Finisterre, and then surprised and destroyed Lungara's Spanish squadron, taking seven ships out of eleven, and chasing the rest into Cadiz. The appearance of his fleet before Gibraltar saved the fortress, and then in February, 1780, he sailed across the Atlantic to try conclusions with De Guichen, whose powerful fleet based on Martinique was threatening all the English possessions in the West Indies. So far numbers and opportunity had been on his side. He had now to depend more on skill than fortune, and meet a more equal opponent.

At his head-quarters at St. Lucia in April, 1780, Rodney heard that the French fleet under De Guichen had sailed from Martinique. On the 17th he fought an indecisive action with the enemy, an action notable for what Rodney attempted, not for what he accomplished. Twice again on later days Rodney met De Guichen, but none of the three battles did more than inflict mutual loss on the combatants, without producing any decisive result. The campaign was, like so many others in the West Indies, a struggle for the temporary possession of this or that port or island, De Guichen's whole strategy being based on the idea of avoiding the risks of a close engagement that might imperil his fleet, and trying to snatch local advantages when he could elude his enemy.

In 1781 Rodney was compelled by ill-health temporarily to give up the West Indian command and return to England. In the spring of 1782 he was again sent to the West Indies, at a moment when the situation of affairs was most menacing for British power beyond the Atlantic. Cornwallis had been forced to surrender at Yorktown, and the success of the revolted American colonies was now assured. The French fleet in the West Indies had been joined by reinforcements under the Comte de Grasse, who had gone out as commander-in-chief, taking with him a considerable military force that was to combine with an expedition from the Spanish American colonies, not for the capture of some small islands in the Antilles, but for the conquest of Jamaica, the centre of British power and British trade in the West Indian seas.

Kempenfeldt, a good sailor (now remembered chiefly as the admiral who "went down with twice three hundred men," when the "Royal George" sank at Spithead), dispersed and destroyed at the mouth of the Channel a large French convoy of supplies for De Grasse, and drove the squadron that protected it into Brest. With his task thus lightened, Rodney put to sea with four ships of the line, and after a stormy passage reached Barbadoes on 19 February, 1782. Sailing thence to Antigua, he formed a junction with and took command of the West Indian fleet, which Hood had commanded during his absence in England. From Antigua he took the fleet to St. Lucia, where he established his head-quarters in Gros Islet Bay. St. Lucia was the favourite base of operations of our West Indian fleets in the old wars, and the scene of much desperate fighting by land and sea. The year before De Grasse had failed in an attempt to seize it.

The fleet of the Comte de Grasse was only some forty miles away to the northward. It lay at Martinique, in the bay of Fort Royal (now Fort de France). Though it has nothing to do with the fortunes of Rodney and De Grasse, it is interesting to note that in a convent school looking out on the bay there was just then a little schoolgirl named Josephine de la Pagerie, daughter of an artillery lieutenant in the garrison, who was to live to be Empress of the French, when France was the mistress of Europe.

During the month of March both fleets were busy preparing for sea. Rodney was reinforced from England, and a small squadron from Brest joined De Grasse. The reinforcements received during March had given Rodney the advantage of numbers. He had thirty-six sail of the line to oppose the thirty that were with De Grasse at Martinique. In the English fleet there were five great three-deckers, three of them carrying 98 and two of them 90 guns. There were twenty-one 74's, a 70-gun ship, and nine 64's. In the French fleet there was one of the largest war vessels then afloat, De Grasse's flagship, the "Ville de Paris," of 104 guns. There were five ships of 80 guns, twenty of 74, one of 70, and three of 64. This enumeration gives Rodney an advantage of six ships and more than two hundred guns. It is quite true that the ships of the same rating in the French service were generally larger than the English, but even apart from numbers, the latter had advantages in armament that were more important than any trifling difference in size. The English guns were mostly mounted on an improved system that gave a larger arc of training fore and aft, the practical result being that as ships passed each other the Frenchman was kept longer under fire than the Englishman. Further, the English ships mounted, besides the guns counted in their armament, a number of carronades, mounted on the upper decks, short guns of large calibre, throwing a heavy shot when the fighting was carried on at close quarters, a weapon not yet introduced in the French navy. Thanks to these improvements in the armament of his ships, Rodney had an advantage in gun-power beyond the mere superiority in numbers of ships and guns. He had a further advantage in the fact that a larger number of his ships were copper-sheathed. This meant less fouling while the ships were waiting at their anchorage, and therefore better speed for the English when they put to sea.

De Grasse was encumbered with a large convoy of merchantmen and storeships, and many of his ships were overcrowded with the troops destined for the descent on Jamaica. It was expected that when he sailed it would be to form, in the first instance, a junction with the Spanish part of the expedition off San Domingo. Rodney kept his fleet at St. Lucia, ready to weigh anchor on the shortest notice, and a smart frigate, the "Andromache" (commanded by Captain Byron, grandfather of the poet), cruised off Martinique, watching the Frenchman.

At dawn on 8 April Byron saw that the French were coming out, and he hastened to St. Lucia under press of sail with the news. Off the port he flew the signal that told Rodney that De Grasse was at sea. Anchors came up and sails were shaken out, and Rodney set off in pursuit, knowing that De Grasse had a very few hours' start of him.

The few hours did not count for much, provided the English admiral could once get on the Frenchman's track. The danger of missing him could only arise from making at the outset a wrong judgment as to the course on which the enemy would sail. It was De Grasse's business to avoid a battle until he had safely taken his huge convoy to San Domingo and joined hands with his Spanish allies. Rodney judged that he would most likely follow the long curve of the chain of islands that fringe the Caribbean Sea, steering by Puerto Rico for San Domingo. In the night of the 8th the English fleet passed Martinique. Next morning it was off the west coast of Dominica, making good speed, and away to the northward a far-spreading crowd of sails showed that Rodney had guessed rightly. The French fleet and convoy were in sight.

Dominica is a mass of volcanic ridges, falling to the seaward in precipitous cliffs, rising landward tier above tier and shooting up into rocky spires that culminate in the towering peak of the Morne Diablotin, five thousand feet high. Under the shelter of this rugged island, while the prevailing trade wind blows steadily from the eastward, there are sudden calms, or irregular flaws of wind blowing now from one point, now from another, diverted by the irregular ridges of the high land. This April morning the sun had hardly risen when the wind fell, and the two fleets drifted slowly, with loose-hanging sails. Near the north end of the island lay the convoy. A little to the southward De Grasse's thirty battleships straggled in a long line over some six miles of sunlit sea. Off the centre and south of the island Rodney's larger fleet was stretched out in line ahead. It was formed in three divisions. Hood, in the 90-gun "Barfleur," commanded the van. Rodney, with his flag flying in a tall three-decker, the "Formidable," of 98 guns, was in the centre. The rear was commanded by Rear-Admiral Samuel Drake, a namesake and descendant of that other Drake whose name had been the terror of the West Indian seas in Elizabethan days.

Suddenly there came a flaw of wind sweeping from the south round the end of the island, so narrow that most of the English fleet hardly felt it. It filled the sails of Hood's ships in the van, and they steered for two French battleships that dropped astern of their consorts. One of the Frenchmen passed close under the tiers of guns in the leading English ship, but not a shot was fired at her as she swept by and rejoined her consorts. Rodney had not yet flown the signal for battle, and these were still the days when personal enterprise and decision were not encouraged among the captains of a fleet.

As the breeze filled the sails of the Frenchmen, Grasse signalled to the convoy to bear away before it to the north-westward, while he with his fighting-ships set his course for the channel between Dominica and Guadeloupe. He rightly judged that Rodney would follow the warships, and thus the convoy would have a good start. The channel towards which the French fleet was heading is known as the Saints' Passage, "not on the surmise that it leads to Heaven,"[14] but because along its northern waters stretches a line of rocky islets known to the French as "les Iles des Saintes." The nine ships of Hood forming the English van had gone far ahead of the rest of the fleet. If De Grasse had not had his mind so centred on the idea of avoiding a battle, there is little doubt that he might have brought an overwhelming force to bear on them. Luckily for Rodney, he contented himself with sending his second in command, Vaudreuil, to skirmish with them, passing and repassing Hood's division at long range and firing at masts and rigging in the hope of disabling them for further pursuit. Hood returned the fire, doing as much damage as he suffered, and towards midday the rest of the English had worked up to him by taking advantage of every breath of wind that blew over the ridges of Dominica. Then the wind fell again, and all through the night and the following day (10 April) the fleets lay in sight of each other beyond even distant cannon shot, Vaudreuil's and Hood's crews busying themselves with repairing rigging and replacing damaged spars.

[14] Treves, "Cradle of the Deep," p. 175.

During the 11th De Grasse tried to get his fleet through the Saints' Passage, working by short tacks to windward, and baffled and delayed by sudden calms. In the afternoon several of his ships were still to the westward of the strait, and Rodney, who had been getting gradually to the northward, despite the frequent failure of the wind under the lee of Dominica, was at last near enough seriously to threaten these laggards. In order to save them from being overwhelmed by the whole English fleet, De Grasse gave up the advantage of weary hours of hard work and came back before the wind out of the strait. At sunset the two fleets lay to the westward of the Saints' Passage, and there was no probability that De Grasse would attempt to tack through it during the hours of darkness. In the night Rodney manoeuvred to get to windward of the enemy, and at daylight on the 12th the two fleets were within striking distance, De Grasse to the leeward, his fleet in a straggling line over some nine miles of sea. Rodney had his opportunity of forcing on a decisive battle at last.

At some distance from the French line a partly dismasted line-of-battle ship, the "Zele," was seen in tow of a frigate. She had been in collision with the flagship during the night, and had been so badly damaged that De Grasse was sending her away to Guadeloupe. Rodney's ships had lost their order of battle somewhat in the darkness, and while he was reforming his line he detached a couple of ships to threaten the disabled "Zele." This had the effect he intended. It removed De Grasse's last hesitation about fighting. The French line was soon seen bearing down on the port tack, the rearward ships crowding sail to close up. Rodney's battle line, in reversed order, led by Drake and the rear division, was already on a course that would bring the two fleets sweeping past each other, and the leading ship, the "Marlborough," was steered so as to make the passage a close one. Rodney had hoisted the signal to engage the enemy to leeward. While the fleets were closing he sat in an arm-chair on his quarterdeck, for he was older than his sixty-four years, broken by long illness and only sustained by his dogged spirit. One of his captains, Savage of the "Hercules," also went into battle seated in an arm-chair beside the bulwarks of his ship. He was lame with gout and unable to stand or walk without help. When the firing began, and the ships were passing each other amid a thunder of broadsides and a hail of shot and bullets, Captain Savage gravely raised his cocked hat to salute each enemy as she ranged up abreast of the "Hercules." What would those old sailors have thought of the naval commander of to-day peeping through the slits in the steel walls of a conning tower? But it is only fair to ask also what they would have thought of shells weighing half a ton bursting in fiery destruction.

The "Marlborough," approaching on a converging course, came to close quarters with the "Brave," the sixth ship in De Grasse's line, and then, shifting her helm to bring her course parallel to that of the enemy, exchanged broadsides with the Frenchman. Ship after ship came into action in the same way. The speed was nearer three than four knots, and the lines some six miles long, so it was more than an hour before the leading English battleship was abreast of and engaged with the rearmost Frenchman. As ship passed ship there was a thunder of artillery, a rattle of small arms. Then a brief lull till the guns of two more opponents bore on each other. But in this cannonade the English had the advantage of the heavy blows struck by their large-bore carronades at close range, and the fact that their gun-mountings enabled them to keep a passing ship longer under fire than was possible for the French gunners. In De Grasse's ships, crowded with troops, the slaughter was terrible. As the fight went on and the French ships came under the crushing fire of adversary after adversary, it was seen that it was only with difficulty the officers kept the men at the guns. In this first hour of the fight the French began to throw the dead overboard to clear their encumbered decks, and a strange horror was added to the scene, for shoals of sharks that had followed the fleets to pick up anything thrown overboard now swarmed around them, lashing the water into foam as they struggled for their human prey.

At length the leading English ship was abeam of the rearmost of De Grasse's fleet. Over some six miles of sea the two battle lines extended, every ship ablaze with fire-flashes from her guns and with the dense smoke-clouds drifting around the English vessels and wrapping them in the fog of war. If the battle was now to be fought out on the old traditional method, the fleets would clear each other, wear and tack and repass each other in opposite directions with a second exchange of fire. But now came the event that made the battle of the Saints' Passage epoch-making in naval history.

What precisely happened is wrapped in a fog of controversy as dense as the smoke-fog that enveloped Rodney's fleet at the decisive moment. One thing is certain. The old admiral suddenly changed all his plans, and executed a new manoeuvre with the signal he himself was disobeying—the order to engage to leeward—still flying from his flagship. The act was the sudden seizing of an unexpected opportunity. But some of the merit of the new departure was due to Rodney's right-hand man, his "Captain of the Fleet," Sir Charles Douglas. Douglas was one of those whose minds had been influenced by new theories on naval war, which were just then in the air. In Britain a Scotch country gentleman, John Clerk, of Eldin, had been arguing for some time in pamphlets and manuscripts circulated among naval officers against the formal methods that led to indecisive results. His paper plans for destroying an enemy were no doubt open to the criticism that they would work out beautifully if the enemy stuck to the old-fashioned ways and attempted no counter-stroke. But the essence of Clerk's theories was that parallel orders of battle meant only indecisive cannonading; that to crush an enemy one must break into his line, bring parts of it under a close fire, not on one side, but on both, and decide the fate of the ships thus cut off by superior numbers and superior gun power before the rest could come to their help. His plans might not work out with the mechanical exactitude described in his writings, but they would tend to produce the close melee, where the best men and the steadiest fire would win, and after such an encounter there would not be merely a few masts and spars shot away, and a few holes to be plugged, but the beaten side would be minus a number of ships sunk, burned, or taken, and condemned to hopeless inferiority for the rest of the campaign. Clerk was not the only man who put forward these ideas. A French Jesuit professor of mathematics had worked out plans for securing local advantage of numbers in a sea-fight at close quarters; but while French naval officers laughed at naval battles worked out with a piece of chalk and a blackboard, British sailors were either themselves thinking out similar schemes or were beginning to think there might be something in the Scotch laird's diagrams.

It was at the critical moment when the two fleets lay side by side in parallel lines on opposite courses, wrapped in the battle-smoke, that Douglas, looking out through a gap in the war-cloud, saw that a sudden flaw of wind blowing steadily from the south-east was flattening the French sails against the masts and checking their speed. The same sudden change of wind was filling the English sails, and the masters were squaring the yards to it, while the Frenchmen to keep any way on their ships had to bring their bows partly round towards the English line. Between the "Glorieux," the ship immediately opposed to Rodney's flagship, the "Formidable," and the next Frenchman in the line, the "Diademe," a wide gap was opening up. Douglas saw the chance offered to his admiral. Half the English fleet was ahead of the "Formidable," engaged with the rearward French ships. If the "Formidable" pushed through the gap, leading the rest of the line after her, the French rear would be cut off from the van and brought under a double fire at close quarters, and there would be a fair prospect of destroying it before De Grasse could come back to its support. He rushed to Rodney's side. Moments were precious. He urged his plan in the briefest words. At first the old admiral rejected it. "No," he said, "I will not break my line."[15] Douglas insisted, and the two officers stepped to the opening in the bulwarks at the gangway and looked out. The "Formidable" was opposite the tempting gap in the French line. Rodney in a moment changed his mind, and told Douglas that he accepted his plan.

[15] Rodney in at first refusing was upholding the strict letter of the "Fighting Instructions," which forbade breaking the line or changing the order of battle during an action. Instruction XVI laid it down that:—

"In all cases of fight with the enemy the commanders of His Majesty's ships are to keep the fleet in one line, and (as much as may be) to preserve that order of battle, which they have been directed to keep before the time of fight."

In the haste to carry it out the signal to fight to leeward of the French was forgotten and left flying. The "Formidable" turned her high bows into the gap, and swept through it with all her hundred guns and her carronades in action, pouring broadside after broadside right and left into the "Glorieux" and the "Diademe." Six ships in succession swung round and followed in the wake of the flagship, which was now engaged with the French on the windward side. Shattered by successive blasts of well-directed fire, the "Diademe" was drifting a helpless wreck, and the rearward ships, with their way checked, were huddling in confusion behind her, English ships firing into them on both sides. Through another gap in the French line, ahead of De Grasse's giant "Ville de Paris," other English ships made their way in the dense cloud of smoke, some of the captains hardly aware of what they were doing. The French van had meanwhile forged ahead, and then, as the wind suddenly fell to a dead calm, it was seen that De Grasse's fleet was broken into three isolated fragments.

To the southward lay the van ships under De Bougainville becalmed, with no enemy in range of them. The "Ville de Paris," with several of her consorts of the French centre, formed another group, with the whole of the rearward English division exchanging fire with them at long range. The rear of the French, under Vaudreuil, and the ships of the centre cut off by Rodney's manoeuvre were huddled together, with Hood's division and the ships that had followed the "Formidable" through the line shepherding them. The loss of the wind had made it difficult or impossible to keep the broadsides bearing, and for an hour the action died down into a desultory cannonade. When the breeze came again over the ridges of Dominica, De Bougainville's division, now far to leeward, made no attempt to succour De Grasse. Only one of his ships slowly beat up to the main battle. The French admiral tried to get away to the westward, but Hood clung doggedly to him, while Rodney and Drake completed the defeat of Vaudreuil and the French rear. The "Diademe" soon struck her colours. A frigate tried to tow the dismasted "Glorieux" out of the melee, but the captain of the "Glorieux," De Kerlessi, saw that the effort would only end in the friendly frigate being also captured, and with his own hand he cut the tow-rope and hauled down his flag. Then the "Cesar" struck her colours, and while the rearward ships were being thus disposed of, in the broken Centre the "Hector" and the "Ardent" surrendered to Hood's division.

The English attack was now concentrated on the centre, and the battle raged fiercely round the French flagship, distinguished by her huge bulk and her towering masts. One by one these came down, trailing in a tangle of spars, sails, and rigging over her sides. Her crowded decks were a shambles of dead and dying, but still De Grasse fought on—for honour, not for victory. His van held aloof, his broken rear was in flight. Five of his ships had struck. Still he kept his guns in action till Hood in his flagship, the "Princesse," ranged close up alongside of him and poured in a series of destructive broadsides. Then the French flag came down at last, and De Grasse went on board the "Princesse" and gave up his sword to the vice-admiral.

The sun was going down when the French flagship surrendered. The captured "Cesar," set on fire by her crew, was blazing from stem to stern. The other prizes had been secured. Rodney attempted no pursuit of the scattered French ships that were sailing away to the southward and the north-westward. Enough had been done, he said. It was now his business to refit his fleet and take it to Jamaica. He had shattered the French power in the West Indian seas and made himself the master of the field of operations. A younger and more vigorous man would have perhaps marked down Vaudreuil's or Bougainville's fugitive divisions for utter destruction. But Rodney was content with the solid success he had obtained.

The losses of the French fleet had been very heavy. In their crowded decks the English fire had effected something like a massacre. On board the "Ville de Paris" more men had been killed and wounded than in the whole English fleet. Very few officers and men had escaped some kind of wound. Many of the ships that had got away were now very shorthanded, with leaking hulls, and spars and rigging badly cut up.

The effect of the victory was to enable England to obtain much better terms in the treaty that was signed next year. A disastrous war was closed by a brilliant success. But England owed to it more than this temporary advantage. It was a new beginning, the opening event of the period of splendid triumphs on the sea on the reputation of which we are still living. To quote the words of Rodney's latest biographer,[16] "it marked the beginning of that fierce and headlong yet well-calculated style of sea-fighting which led to Trafalgar, and made England undisputed mistress of the sea."

[16] David Hannay, "Rodney" (English Men of Action), p. 213.





CHAPTER IX

TRAFALGAR

1805

The closing years of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the nineteenth represent the most splendid period in the annals of the British Navy. Howe destroyed the French fleet in the Atlantic on "the glorious First of June, 1794," Nelson died in the midst of his greatest victory off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October, 1805. Little more than eleven years separated the two dates, and this brief period was crowded with triumphs for Britain on the sea. The "First of June," St. Vincent, Camperdown, the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar are the great names in the roll of victory; but "the meteor flag of England" flew victorious in a hundred fights on all the seas of the world.

Men who were officers young in the service on the day when Rodney broke at once the formal traditions of a century and the battle-line of the Comte de Grasse lived through and shared in the glories of this decade of victory. A new spirit had come into the navy. An English admiral would no longer think he had done his duty in merely bringing his well-ordered line into cannon-shot of an enemy's array and exchanging broadsides with him at half-cannon range. Nor was the occupation of a port or an island recognized as an adequate result for a naval campaign. The enemy's fighting-fleet was now the object aimed at. It was not merely to be brought to action, and more or less damaged by distant cannonading. The ideal battle was the close fight amid the enemy's broken line, and victory meant his destruction.

The spirit of the time was personified in its greatest sailor. Nelson's battles were fought in grim earnest, taking risks boldly in order to secure great results. Trafalgar—the last of his battles, and the last great battle of the days of the sail—was also the final episode in the long struggle of Republican and Imperial France to snatch from England even for a while the command of the sea.

When Napoleon assembled the Grand Army at Boulogne, gave it the official title of the "Armee d'Angleterre," and crowded every creek from Dunkirk to Havre with flat-bottomed boats for its transport across the Channel, he quite realized that the first condition of success for the scheme was that a French fleet should be in possession of the Channel at the moment his veterans embarked for their short voyage. He had twenty sail of the line, under Admiral Ganteaume, at Brest; twelve under Villeneuve at Toulon; a squadron of five at Rochefort under Admiral Missiessy; five more at Ferrol; and in this last port and at Cadiz and Cartagena there were other ships belonging to his Spanish allies. But every port was watched by English battleships and cruisers. The vigilant blockade had been kept up for two years, during which Nelson, who was watching Toulon, had hardly been an hour absent from his flagship, the "Victory"; and Collingwood, in the "Royal Sovereign," did not anchor once in twenty-two months of alternate cruising and lying to.

Napoleon's mind was ceaselessly busy with plans for moving his fleets on the sea as he moved army corps on land, so as to elude, mislead, and out-manoeuvre the English squadrons, and suddenly bring a concentrated French force of overwhelming strength into the narrow seas. The first move in these plans was usually assigned to the Toulon fleet. According to one project it was to give Nelson the slip, make for the Straits of Gibraltar, combine with the Cadiz fleet in driving off or crushing the blockading squadron before that port, sail north with the liberated vessels, fall on the blockading ships before Rochefort and Brest, and then sweep the Channel with the united squadrons. In other projects French fleets were to run the blockades simultaneously or in succession, raid the West Indies, draw off a part of the naval forces of England to the other side of the Atlantic, and then come swooping back upon the Channel.

In the plan finally adopted the first move was to be the escape of the Toulon fleet; the second, the threat against the West Indies. Its execution was entrusted to Villeneuve, because Napoleon, ever since the escape of his squadron from the disaster in Aboukir Bay, had regarded him as "a lucky man," and luck and chance must play a great part in such a project.

Nelson did not keep up a close and continuous blockade of Toulon with his fighting-fleet of battleships. He used Sardinia as his base of supplies, and there were times when all the heavier ships were in Sardinian waters, while his frigates watched Toulon. His previous experiences had led him to believe that if the French Mediterranean fleet came out it would be for another raid on Egypt, and this idea was confirmed by reports that Villeneuve was embarking not only troops, but large quantities of saddlery and muskets. The story of the saddles seemed to indicate an expedition to a country where plenty of horses could be obtained to mount a body of cavalry—horses, too, that when they were bought or requisitioned would not have saddles that a European trooper was used to. Nelson did not want to keep the French shut up in Toulon. He was anxious to catch them in the open sea, and with his fleet on the coast of Sardinia and his frigates spread out in a fan to the northwards he counted on bringing Villeneuve to action if he attempted to reach the Levant.

In January, 1805, the frigates brought news that the French were out, and Nelson at once disposed his fleet to intercept their expected voyage to Egypt. He found no trace of them in the direction he expected, and he was greatly relieved on returning from a hurried rush eastward to learn that bad weather had driven Villeneuve back to his port. "These gentlemen," he said, "are not accustomed to the Gulf of Lyons gales, but we have buffeted them for twenty-one months without carrying away a spar."

On 30 March Villeneuve came out of Toulon again with eleven ships of the line. This time, thanks to Nelson's fixed idea about Egypt, he got a good start for the Atlantic. As soon as his frigates brought the news that the French were out, Nelson strung out his ships from the south point of Sardinia to Sicily and the African coast. He thus watched every possible avenue to the Eastern Mediterranean, ready to concentrate and attack the enemy as soon as he got touch of them anywhere. But not a French sail was sighted.

Villeneuve had run down past the Balearic Islands to Cartagena, where Admiral Salcedo was in command of a Spanish squadron. But the Spaniards were not ready for sea, and Villeneuve was anxious to be west of the Straits of Gibraltar as soon as possible, and could not wait for his dilatory allies. On 8 April he passed through the Straits. Then he steered for Cadiz, drove off Sir John Orde's blockading squadron of six sail, and entered the harbour on the 9th.

At Cadiz there were Admiral Gravina's Spanish fleet and a French battleship, the "Aigle." Again the Spaniards were mostly unready for sea, but six of them and the "Aigle" joined Villeneuve when he sailed out into the Atlantic steering for the West Indies, now at the head of eighteen battleships and seven frigates.

Information was difficult to obtain and travelled slowly a hundred years ago. It was not till 11 April that Nelson learned that Villeneuve had passed through the Straits of Gibraltar eight days before. Then, while the French were running down into the trade wind that was to carry them westward, Nelson, still ignorant whether they were raiding the West Indies or Ireland, but anxious in either case to be in the Atlantic as soon as might be, had to work his way slowly towards the Straits against stormy head winds, and then wait wearily at anchor on the Moorish coast for a change of wind that would carry him into the ocean. He was suffering from disappointment, depression, and ill-health. It was not till 7 May that he passed the Straits. He had made up his mind that the French were probably bound for the West Indies, and he followed them. They had a long start, but he trusted to find them among the islands and make the West Indian seas once more famous for a great British victory.

On 4 June he reached Barbadoes, and began his search, only to miss the French, thanks to false information, and learn too late that they were returning to Europe. Villeneuve had paid only a flying visit to the West Indies, leaving Martinique on 5 June, the day after Nelson arrived at Barbadoes, and steering first north, then eastwards across the Atlantic. Nelson followed on 13 June, and reached Gibraltar without once sighting his enemy.

He had, however, taken the precaution of dispatching a fast sailing brig to England with the news that the French fleet was returning to Europe. This ship, the "Curieux," actually got a glimpse of the enemy far off in mid ocean, and outsailed him to such good purpose that the Admiralty was able to order the squadrons blockading Brest and Rochefort to unite under the command of Sir Robert Calder and try to intercept Villeneuve on his way back. Though inferior in numbers to the allied fleet, Calder brought it to action in thick, foggy weather on 22 July, some ninety miles off the Spanish Cape Finisterre. The battle, fought in semi-darkness, was a desultory, indecisive encounter, and though Calder cut off and took two Spanish ships of the line, the feeling in England, when the news arrived, was not one of satisfaction at his partial success, but of undeserved indignation at his having failed to force the fighting and destroy the enemy's fleet.

Villeneuve took his fleet into Vigo Bay. According to the plan of campaign, now that he had shaken off Nelson's pursuit, he should have sailed for the Channel, picking up the Brest and Rochefort squadrons on his way. Napoleon, at Boulogne, was ceaselessly drilling the Grand Army in rapid embarkation and disembarkation, and hoping each day for news of his admiral's dash into the Channel. But Villeneuve, who knew Keith had a squadron in the Channel, and had a vague dread of Nelson suddenly making his appearance, had a better appreciation of the small chance of the scheme giving any result than the imperious soldier-Emperor, who had come to believe that what he ordered must succeed. From Vigo, Villeneuve wrote to the Minister of Marine, Decres, that his fleet was hardly in condition for any active enterprise. It had met with trying weather in the Atlantic. His flagship, the "Bucentaure," had been struck and damaged by lightning. All the ships needed a dockyard overhaul. There was sickness among the crews. He had to land hundreds of men and send them to hospital. He wanted recruits badly, and Vigo afforded only the scantiest resources for the refitting of the ships. He was already thinking of going back to Cadiz. He moved his fleet to Corunna, but there he found things in such a condition that he reported that he could not even find hospital room for the sick.

From Napoleon came pressing orders to push on to the Channel at all risks. On 11 August Villeneuve put to sea, picking up a combined French and Spanish squadron from the neighbouring port of Ferrol. He meant to sail to Brest, bring out the squadron there, and call up the ships at Rochefort by sending on a frigate in advance with orders for that port. (The frigate was captured on the way by a British cruiser.) He sent a dispatch overland to Napoleon to say that at last he was coming.

In the Bay of Biscay, two days out from Corunna, he was told by a Danish merchant-ship that there was a great fleet of British battleships close at hand to the northward. The news was false. A few hours before the captain of a British cruiser had stopped the Dane and purposely given him this false information, in the hope that it would reach the French and mislead them. Except a few scattered cruisers, there was nothing between Villeneuve and the ports of Brest and Rochefort—nothing that could stop his projected concentration. Nelson had waited a few days at Gibraltar, where the news of Calder's fight had not arrived. He communicated with Collingwood, who was watching Cadiz with six ships, and then, conjecturing that the object of the French expedition might be Ireland, he sailed north and was off the Irish coast on 12 August, the day after Villeneuve left Corunna. Finding no trace of the enemy, he joined the squadron of Cornwallis off Ushant on 15 August, and then, broken in health and depressed at what seemed a huge failure, he went back to England to spend some time with Lady Hamilton at Merton.

Villeneuve had hardly heard of the imaginary fleet when the wind, which had so far been fair, went round to the north. This decided the irresolute admiral. To the dismay of his captains he suddenly altered his course and ran before the wind southward to Cadiz, where he arrived on 22 August, contenting himself with watching the retirement of Collingwood's six ships and making no effort to envelop and cut them off with his enormously superior force. Collingwood promptly resumed the blockade when the French and Spanish anchored, and deluded Villeneuve into the belief that the blockade was in touch with a supporting fleet by keeping one of his ships well out in the offing, and frequently signalling through her to imaginary consorts below the horizon.

On the very day that Villeneuve anchored at Cadiz, Napoleon sent off from Boulogne this pressing dispatch to him at Brest:—

"Admiral, I trust you have arrived at Brest. Start at once. Do not lose a moment. Come into the Channel with our united squadrons, and England is ours. We are all ready. Everything is embarked. Come here for twenty-four hours and all is ended, and six centuries of shame and insult will be avenged."

When he heard that the admiral had lost heart and turned back he was furious. But he had already formed plans for an alternative enterprise. The English ministry had succeeded in forming a new coalition with Austria and Russia as a means of keeping the Emperor occupied on the Continent. On 27 August Napoleon issued his orders for the march of the Grand Army to the Danube, and on 1 September he started on the career of victory, the stages of which were to be Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, and Friedland.

To Villeneuve he sent, through Decres, bitter reproaches and new orders for a naval campaign in the Mediterranean. Decres, writing to his old comrade, transmitted the new plan of campaign and softened down the Emperor's angry words. Villeneuve reported that he could not leave Cadiz for some time. He was doing all that was possible to refit his fleet and find full crews for the French and Spanish ships. For the latter men were provided by pressing landsmen into the service. "It is pitiful," wrote a French officer, "to see such fine ships manned with a handful of seamen and a crowd of beggars and herdsmen." In the councils of war held at Cadiz there were fierce disputes between the French and Spanish officers, the latter accusing their allies of having abandoned to their fate the two ships lost in Calder's action. The jealousy between the two nations rose so high that several French sailors were stabbed at night in the streets.

The English Government knew nothing of the inefficient state and the endless difficulties of the great fleet concentrated at Cadiz, and regarded its presence there as a standing danger. Collingwood was reinforced, and it was decided to send Nelson out to join him, take over the command, blockade the enemy closely, and bring him to action if he ventured out.

Nelson sailed from Spithead on 15 September in his old flagship the "Victory," accompanied by the "Euryalus," Captain Blackwood, one of the swiftest and smartest frigates in the navy. Picking up the battleships "Thunderer" and "Ajax" on the way, he joined the fleet off Cadiz on 28 September.

Villeneuve had written to Decres that none of the ships were in really good order, and that the Spanish vessels were "quite incapable of meeting the enemy." Only a portion of his fleet had had the slight training afforded by the Atlantic voyage. The rest had lain for years in harbour, and many of them had crews chiefly made up of recently enrolled landsmen. Many of the captains held that if there was to be a fight it would be useless to manoeuvre or to attempt an artillery duel, and that the only chance of success lay in a hand-to-hand fight by boarding. But, then, to produce the position for boarding meant being able to manoeuvre. Villeneuve was supported by most of the superior officers of the fleet in the opinion that he had better stay at Cadiz; but from Napoleon there came reiterated orders for the fleet to enter the Mediterranean.

The last hesitation of the unfortunate admiral was ended by the news that Admiral Rosilly was coming from Paris to supersede him. If he did not attempt something, his career would end in disgrace. He held a final council of war, gave his last instructions to his officers, and then wrote to Decres that he would obey the Emperor's orders, though he foresaw that they would probably lead to disaster.

Contrary winds from the westward delayed his sailing for some days after this decision. Reefs and local currents made it difficult to work a large fleet out of Cadiz without a fair wind. A smaller but better-trained fleet than that of Villeneuve had once taken three days to get out, and a portion of the fleet at sea and unsupported would be in deadly peril. On 17 October the wind began to work round to the eastward. Next day it fell almost to a calm, but it increased towards evening, and Villeneuve, after a conference with his Spanish colleague, Admiral Gravina, signalled that the ships were to weigh anchor at sunrise on the 19th.

Nelson had been watching Cadiz for three weeks, keeping his fleet well out at sea, with his frigates close in to the port, and a chain of ships acting as connecting links with them to pass on information by signalling with flags by day and lanterns by night. The system of signalling had been lately so improved that it was fairly rapid and reliable, and Nelson kept his fleet out of sight, and requested that the names of ships sent to reinforce him should not appear in the papers, as he hoped to delude Villeneuve into a false idea that he had a very inferior force before Cadiz. He feared that if the whole array of his fleet were visible from the look-out stations of the port the allies would remain safe at anchor. During this period of waiting he had had more than one conference with his captains, and had read and explained to them a manuscript memorandum, dated 9 October, setting forth his plans for the expected battle. His plan of battle excited an enthusiasm among them, to which more than one of them afterwards bore testimony. They said that "the Nelson touch" was in it, and it is generally taken for granted that they saw in it something like a stroke of genius and a new departure in tactics. I hope it is not presumption on my part to suggest that their enthusiasm was partly the result of their seeing that their trusted leader was thoroughly himself again and, to use a familiar phrase, meant business, and they had a further motive for satisfaction in seeing how thoroughly he relied on them and how ready he was to give them a free hand in carrying out his general ideas.

The "Nelson touch" memorandum of 9 October and the whole plan of the battle have been, and still are, the subject of acute controversy, the various phases of which it would be far too long to discuss. It is strange that after the lapse of a hundred years and the publication of a vast mass of detailed evidence—British, French, and Spanish—there are still wide differences of opinion as to how the most famous naval battle in history was actually fought out. There is even much uncertainty as to the order in which the British ships came into action.

The memorandum shows that Nelson originally contemplated a formation in three lines, an advanced division to windward, a main division under his personal command, and a lee division under his second-in-command, Collingwood. The final grouping of the ships in the battle was in two divisions. In the following list of the British fleet the names of ships are arranged in the same order in which they appear in Collingwood's dispatch, written after the action:—

WINDWARD LINE.

Ships. Guns. Commanders.

Victory 100 {Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson. {Captain Hardy. Temeraire 98 " Harvey. Neptune 98 " Fremantle. Leviathan 74 " Bayntun. Conqueror 74 " Pellew. Britannia 100 {Rear-Admiral Lord Northesk. {Captain Bullen. Agamemnon 64 " Sir E. Berry. Ajax 64 Lieutenant Pilfold. Orion 74 Captain Codrington. Minotaur 74 " Mansfield. Spartiate 74 " Sir F. Laforey. Africa 64 " Digby.