Types of Naval Officers | Page 5

they were contemporaries and actors, though
to no large extent associates, during the extensive wars that occupied
the middle of the century--the War of the Austrian Succession,
1739-1748, and the Seven Years War, 1756-1763. These two conflicts
are practically one; the same characteristic jealousies and motives being
common to both, as they were also to the period of nominal peace, but
scarcely veiled contention, by which they were separated. The
difference of age between the two admirals contributed not only to
obviate rivalry, by throwing their distinctive activities into different
generations, but had, as it were, the effect of prolonging their influence
beyond that possible to a single lifetime, thus constituting it into a
continuous and fruitful development.
They were both successful men, in the ordinary acceptation of the word
success. They were great, not only in professional character, but in the
results which do not always attend professional desert; they were great
in achievement. Each name is indissolubly linked with a brilliant
victory, as well as with other less known but equally meritorious
actions; in all of which the personal factor of the principal agent, the
distinctive qualities of the commander-in-chief, powerfully contributed
and were conspicuously illustrated. These were, so to say, the examples,
that enforced upon the men of their day the professional ideas by which
the two admirals were themselves dominated, and upon which was
forming a school, with professional standards of action and
achievement destined to produce great effects.

Yet, while this is so, and while such emphatic demonstrations by deeds
undoubtedly does more than any other teaching to influence
contemporaries, and so to promote professional development, it is
probably true that, as a matter of historical illustration, the advance of
the eighteenth century in naval warfare is more clearly shown by two
great failures, for neither of which were these officers responsible, and
in one only of which in fact did either appear, even in a subordinate
capacity. The now nearly forgotten miscarriage of Admiral Mathews
off Toulon, in 1744, and the miserable incompetency of Byng, at
Minorca, in 1756, remembered chiefly because of the consequent
execution of the admiral, serve at least, historically, to mark the low
extreme to which had then sunk professional theory and practice--for
both were there involved. It is, however, not only as a point of
departure from which to estimate progress that these battles--if they
deserve the name--are historically useful. Considered as the plane to
which exertion, once well directed and virile, had gradually declined
through the prevalence of false ideals, they link the seventeenth century
to the eighteenth, even as the thought and action--the theory and
practice--of Hawke and Rodney uplifted the navy from the inefficiency
of Mathews and Byng to the crowning glories of the Nile and Trafalgar,
with which the nineteenth century opened. It is thus, as the very bottom
of the wave, that those singular and signal failures have their own
distinctive significance in the undulations of the onward movement. On
the one hand they are not unaccountable, as though they, any more than
the Nile and Trafalgar, were without antecedent of cause; and on the
other they serve, as a background at least, to bring out the figures of the
two admirals now before us, and to define their true historical import,
as agents and as exponents, in the changes of their day.
It is, therefore, important to the comprehension of the changes effected
in that period of transition, for which Hawke and Rodney stand, to
recognize the distinctive lesson of each of these two abortive actions,
which together may be said to fix the zero of the scale by which the
progress of the eighteenth century is denoted. They have a relation to
the past as well as to the future, standing far below the level of the one
and of the other, through causes that can be assigned. Naval warfare in
the past, in its origin and through long ages, had been waged with

vessels moved by oars, which consequently, when conditions permitted
engaging at all, could be handled with a scope and freedom not
securable with the uncertain factor of the wind. The motive power of
the sea, therefore, then resembled essentially that of the land,--being
human muscle and staying power, in the legs on shore and in the arms
at sea. Hence, movements by masses, by squadrons, and in any desired
direction corresponding to a fixed plan, in order to concentrate, or to
outflank,--all these could be attempted with a probability of success not
predicable of the sailing ship. Nelson's remarkable order at Trafalgar,
which may almost be said to have closed and sealed the record of the
sail era, began by assuming the extreme improbability of being able at
any given moment to move forty ships of his day in a