Types of Naval Officers | Page 9

became doctrinaires in the worst sense.
It would seem, however, that a necessary antecedent to deliverance
from a false conception,--as from any injurious condition,--is a
practical illustration of its fallacy. Working consequences must receive
demonstration, concrete in some striking disastrous event, before
improvement is undertaken. Such experience is painful to undergo; but
with most men, even in their private capacity, and in nearly all
governmental action where mere public interests are at stake, remedy is
rarely sought until suffering is not only felt, but signalized in a
conspicuous incident. It is needless to say that the military professions
in peace times are peculiarly liable to this apathy; like some sleepers,
they can be awakened only by shaking. For them, war alone can subject
accepted ideas to the extreme test of practice. It is doubtless perfectly
true that acquaintance with military and naval history, mastery of their
teachings, will go far to anticipate the penalty attaching to truth's last
argument--chastisement; but imagination is fondly impatient of
warning by the past, and easily avails itself of fancied or superficial
differences in contemporary conditions, to justify measures which

ignore, or even directly contravene, ascertained and fundamental
principles of universal application.
Even immediate practical experience is misinterpreted when incidents
are thus viewed through the medium of a precedent bias. The Transvaal
War, for instance, has afforded some striking lessons of needed
modifications, consequent upon particular local factors, or upon
developments in the material of war; but does any thoughtful military
man doubt that imagination has been actively at work, exaggerating or
distorting, hastily waiving aside permanent truth in favor of temporary
prepossessions or accidental circumstance? It is at least equally likely
that the naval world at the present time is hugging some fond delusions
in the excessive size and speed to which battle-ships are tending, and in
the disproportionate weight assigned to the defensive as compared to
the offensive factors in a given aggregate tonnage. Imagination, theory,
a priori reasoning, is here at variance with rational historical precedent,
which has established the necessity of numbers as well as of individual
power in battle-ships, and demonstrated the superiority of offensive
over defensive strength in military systems. These--and
other--counterbalancing considerations have in past wars enforced the
adoption of a medium homogeneous type, as conducive both to
adequate numbers,--which permit the division of the fleet when
required for strategic or tactical purposes,--and also directly to
offensive fleet strength by the greater facility of manoeuvring
possessed by such vessels; for the strength of a fleet lies not chiefly in
the single units, but in their mutual support in elastic and rapid
movement. Well tested precedent--experience--has here gone to the
wall in favor of an untried forecast of supposed fundamental change in
conditions. But experience is uncommonly disagreeable when she
revenges herself after her own fashion.
The British Navy of the eighteenth century in this way received an
unpleasant proof of the faultiness of its then accepted conclusions, in
the miscarriages of Mathews off Toulon, in 1744, and of Byng off
Minorca, in 1756. So fixed were men's habits of thought that the
lessons were not at once understood. As evidenced by the distribution
of censure, the results were attributed by contemporary judges to

particular incidents of each battle, not to the erroneous underlying
general plans, contravening all sound military precedent, which from
the first made success improbable, indeed impossible, except by an
inefficiency of the enemy which was not to be presumed. These battles
therefore are important, militarily, in a sense not at all dependent upon
their consequences, which were ephemeral. They are significant as
extreme illustrations of incompetent action, deriving from faulty
traditions; and they have the further value of showing the starting point,
the zero of the scale, from which the progress of the century is to be
measured. In describing them, therefore, attention will be given chiefly
to those circumstances which exhibit the shackles under which fleet
movements then labored, not only from the difficulties inherent to the
sea and sailing ships, but from the ideas and methods of the times.
Those incidents also will be selected which show how false standards
affected particular individuals, according to their personal
characteristics.
In Admiral Mathews' action, in February, 1744, an allied fleet
composed of sixteen French ships-of-the-line and twelve Spanish lay in
Toulon, waiting to sail for a Spanish port. The British, in force
numerically equal, were at anchor under the Hyères Islands, a few
miles to the eastward. They got underway when the allied movement
began on February 20th; but anchored again for the night, because the
enemy that day came no farther than the outer road of Toulon. The next
morning the French and Spaniards put to sea with a wind at first
westerly, and stretched to the southward in long, single column, the
sixteen French leading.