Types of Naval Officers | Page 3

independent of the other, but all contributive to the body's
welfare. Hence, while the effort has been made to present each in his
full individuality, with copious recourse to anecdote and illustrative
incident as far as available, both as a matter of general interest and for
accurate portrayal, special care has been added to bring out occurrences
and actions which convey the impression of that natural character
which led the man to take the place he did in the naval body, to develop
the professional function with which he is more particularly identified;
for personality underlies official character.
In this sense of the word, types are permanent; for such are not the
exclusive possession of any age or of any service, but are found and are
essential in every period and to every nation. Their functions are part of
the bed-rock of naval organization and of naval strategy, throughout all
time; and the particular instances here selected owe their special
cogency mainly to the fact that they are drawn from a naval era,
1739-1815, of exceptional activity and brilliancy.
There is, however, another sense in which an officer, or a man, may be
accurately called a type; a sense no less significant, but of more limited
and transient application. The tendency of a period,--especially when
one of marked transition,--its activities and its results, not infrequently
find expression in one or more historical characters. Such types may
perhaps more accurately be called personifications; the man or men
embodying, and in action realizing, ideas and processes of thought, the
progress of which is at the time united, but is afterwards recognized as
a general characteristic of the period. Between the beginning and the
end a great change is found to have been effected, which naturally and
conveniently is associated with the names of the most conspicuous
actors; although they are not the sole agents, but simply the most

eminent.
It is in this sense more particularly that Hawke and Rodney are
presented as types. It might even be said that they complement each
other and constitute together a single type; for, while both were men of
unusually strong personality, private as well as professional, and with
very marked traits of character, their great relation to naval advance is
that of men who by natural faculty detect and seize upon incipient ideas,
for which the time is ripe, and upon the practical realization of which
the healthful development of the profession depends. With these two,
and with them not so much contemporaneously as in close historical
sequence, is associated the distinctive evolution of naval warfare in the
eighteenth century; in their combined names is summed up the
improvement of system to which Nelson and his contemporaries fell
heirs, and to which Nelson, under the peculiar and exceptional
circumstances which made his opportunity, gave an extension that
immortalized him. Of Hawke and Rodney, therefore, it may be said that
they are in their profession types of that element of change, in virtue of
which the profession grows; whereas the other four, eminent as they
were, exemplify rather the conservative forces, the permanent features,
in the strength of which it exists, and in the absence of any one of
which it droops or succumbs. It does not, however, follow that the one
of these great men is the simple continuator of the other's work; rather
it is true that each contributed, in due succession of orderly
development, the factor of progress which his day demanded, and his
personality embodied.
It was not in the forecast of the writer, but in the process of treatment
he came to recognize that, like Hawke and Rodney, the four others also
by natural characteristics range themselves in pairs,--presenting points
of contrast, in deficiencies and in excellencies, which group them
together, not by similarity chiefly, but as complementary. Howe and
Jervis were both admirable general officers; but the strength of the one
lay in his tactical acquirements, that of the other in strategic insight and
breadth of outlook. The one was easy-going and indulgent as a superior;
the other conspicuous for severity, and for the searchingness with
which he carried the exactions of discipline into the minute details of

daily naval life. Saumarez and Pellew, less fortunate, did not reach high
command until the great days of naval warfare in their period had
yielded to the comparatively uneventful occupation of girdling the
enemy's coast with a system of blockades, aimed primarily at the
restriction of his commerce, and incidentally at the repression of his
navy, which made no effort to take the sea on a large scale. Under these
circumstances the functions of an admiral were mainly administrative;
and if Saumarez and Pellew possessed eminent capacity as general
officers on the battle-field, they had not opportunity to prove it. The
distinction of