, 1808-1810

VI. SIR ALEXANDER COCHRANE'S INSTRUCTIONS

VII. THE SIGNAL BOOK OF 1816

THE NEW SIGNAL BOOK INSTRUCTIONS

INTRODUCTORY

The time-worn Fighting Instructions of Russell and Rooke with their
accretion of Additional Instructions did not survive the American War.
Some time in that fruitful decade of naval reform which elapsed
between the peace of 1783 and the outbreak of the Great War they were
superseded. It was the indefatigable hand of Lord Howe that dealt
them the long-needed blow, and when the change came it was
sweeping. It was no mere substitution of a new set of Instructions,
but a complete revolution of method. The basis of the new tactical
code was no longer the Fighting Instructions, but the Signal
Book. Signals were no longer included in the Instructions, and the
Instructions sank to the secondary place of being 'explanatory' to the
Signal Book.[1]

The earliest form in which these new 'Explanatory Instructions' are
known is a printed volume in the Admiralty Library containing a
complete set of Fleet Instructions, and entitled 'Instructions for the
conduct of ships of war explanatory of and relative to the Signals
contained in the Signal Book herewith delivered.' The Signal Book is
with it.[2] Neither volume bears any date, but both are in the old
folio form which had been traditional since the seventeenth
century. They are therefore presumably earlier than 1790 when the
well-known quarto form first came into use, and as we shall see from
internal evidence they cannot have been earlier than 1782. Nor is
there any direct evidence that they are the work of Lord Howe, but the
'significations' of the signals bear unmistakable marks of his
involved and cumbrous style, and the code itself closely resembles
that he used during the Great War. With these indications to guide us
there is little difficulty in fixing with practical certainty both
date and authorship from external sources.[3]

In a pamphlet published by Admiral Sir Charles Henry Knowles in 1830,
when he was a very old man, he claims to have invented the new code of
numerical signals which Howe adopted. The pamphlet is entitled
'Observations on Naval Tactics and on the Claims of Clerk of Eldin,'
and in the course of it he says that about 1777 he devised this new
system of signals, and gave it to Howe on his arrival in the summer of
that year at Newport, in Rhode Island, 'and his lordship,' he says,
'afterwards introduced them int