s,
entitled 'Instructions made by the Right Honourable Edward Russell,
admiral, in the year 1691, for the better ordering of the fleet in
sailing by day and night, and in fighting.' Besides the Fighting
Instructions we have a full set of signals both for day and night
properly indexed, instructions for sailing in a fog, instructions to
be observed by younger captains to the elder, instructions for
masters, pilots, ketches, hoys, and smacks attending the fleet, and
the usual instructions for the encouragement of captains and companies
of fireships, small frigates and ketches. Now this is the precise form
in which all fleet instructions were issued, with scarcely any
alteration, up to the conclusion of the War of American
Independence,[1] and the peculiar importance of this set of articles
therefore is, that in them we have the first known example of those
stereotyped Fighting Instructions to which, as all modern writers seem
agreed, was due the alleged decadence of naval tactics in the
eighteenth century.

This being so, they clearly demand the most careful
consideration. 'The English,' says Captain Mahan in his latest
discussion of the subject, 'in the period of reaction which succeeded
the Dutch Wars produced their own caricature of systematised
tactics,[2] and this may be taken as well representing the current
judgment. But when we come to study minutely these orders of Russell,
and to study them in the light of the last of the Duke of York's and
the observations thereon in the _Admiralty Manuscript_, as well
as of the views of the great French admirals of the time, we may well
doubt whether the judgment does not require modification. We may
doubt, that is, whether Russell's orders, so far from being a
caricature of what had gone before, were not rather a sagacious
attempt to secure that increase of manoeuvring power and squadronal
control which had been found essential to any real advance in tactics.

In the first place, after noting that these instructions begin
logically with two articles for the formation of line ahead and
abreast, we are struck by this disappearance of the Duke of York's
article relating to 'dividing the enemy's fleet.' It is certainly to
this disappearance that is mainly due the belief that the new
instructions were retrograde. The somewhat hasty conclusion is
generally drawn that the manoeuvre of 'breaking the line' had been
introduced during the Dutch Wars, and forgotten immediately
afterw