ts ships were rotten; its
captains had lost the fighting tradition; its fleets were paralysed by
a childish system of tactics which made a decisive battle almost
impossible. Hawke describes the _Portland_, a ship of which he was in
command, as "iron-sick"; the wood was too rotten, that is, to hold the
iron bolts, so that "not a man in the ship had a dry place to sleep
in." His men were "tumbling down with scurvy"; his mainmast was so
pulverised by dry rot that a walking-stick could be thrust into it. Of
another ship, the _Ramilies_--his favourite ship, too--he says, "It
became water-logged whenever it blowed hard." The ships' bottoms grew
a rank crop of grass, slime, shells, barnacles, &c., till the sluggish
vessels needed almost a gale to move them. Marines were not yet
invented; the navy had no uniform. The French ships of that day were
better built, better armed, and sometimes better fought than British
ships. A British 70-gun ship in armament and weight of fire was only
equal to a French ship of 52 guns. Every considerable fight was
promptly followed by a crop of court-martials, in which captains were
tried for misconduct before the enemy, such as to-day is unthinkable.
Admiral Matthews was broken by court-martial for having, with an excess
of daring, pierced the French line off Toulon, and thus sacrificed
pedantic tactics to victory. But the list of court-martials held
during the second quarter of the eighteenth century on British captains
for beginning to fight too late, or for leaving off too soon, would, if
published, astonish this generation. After the fight off Toulon in
1744, two admirals and six post-captains were court-martialled.
Admiral Byng was shot on his own deck, not exactly as Voltaire's _mot_
describes it, _pour encourager les autres_, and not quite for
cowardice, for Byng was no coward. But he had no gleam of unselfish
patriotic fire, and nothing of the gallant fighting impulse we have
learned to believe is characteristic of the British sailor. He lost
Minorca, and disgraced the British flag because he was too dainty to
face the stern discomforts of a fight. The corrupt and ignoble temper
of English politics--the legacy of Walpole's evil regime--poisoned the
blood of the navy. No one can have forgotten Macaulay's picture of
Newcastle, at that moment Prime Minister of England; the sly, greedy,
fawning politician, as corrupt as Walpole, without his genius; without
honour, without truth,